The kitchen opened up into a large room with a high cathedral ceiling and picture windows that faced to the south. Because the house was set into the hillside, from upstairs the panoramic view of the forest outside made it feel like a kid’s tree house. Kat stood at the window and gazed at the branches of a cedar that swayed as a puff of wind passed by the massive tree. The squirrels here obviously enjoyed some rather stellar vistas.
Kat turned around and faced the kitchen again. She yelped at the same time, as a large orange cat leaped up and squalled because she had stepped on its tail. Her gaze locked with the cat’s for a moment, then the cat stalked off under the table.
“That’s Louie,” Louise said. “He’s one of the house cats. Dolly Mae and Tripod are probably here somewhere.”
“Tripod?” Kate asked.
“Yes, the poor little fellow only has three legs. He’s a very sweet cat—extremely affectionate. Abigail just adored him. She called him her lap buddy.”
A crashing noise came from downstairs and Larry said from below, “It’s okay. I think I found Dolly Mae. She’s down here.”
Kat leaned over the wall that surrounded the stairwell and peered down the stairs into the dark basement below. “Are you okay?”
“Yes, I just tripped on Dolly. She’s fine, too.”
Kat turned on the light and ventured down the stairs. At the bottom, Larry was sitting in the hallway on the gray concrete floor with his legs splayed out in front of him. A long-haired brown tabby cat milled around his black loafers. He looked up at Kat. “Hi. Meet Dolly Mae.”
As she bent down to pet Dolly, Kat felt something wet caress her ear. She leaped sideways, turned her head, and found herself nose-to-nose with a furry black-and-white dog panting in her face.
Kat stood up straight, wiped the dog slobber off her ear, and said, “That’s the first time I’ve gotten a wet willy from a dog. Ewww! That’s disgusting.”
“That’s Lori. She is probably part retriever and part border collie. So that means she’s smart and loves everybody,” Larry said as he stood and brushed dust, hair, and other debris from his suit.
The hallway in the basement had several closed doors that presumably went off to other rooms. Kat remembered sleeping in one of the bedrooms down here long ago, but if the hall was any indication, Kat wasn’t sure she wanted to find out what lurked behind those doors.
As Kat was taking in the dark, dusty ambiance, Lori ambled over to Dolly Mae and gave the cat a good solid nose poke in the butt. In response, Dolly Mae sat back on her haunches and waved her paw at the dog as if to swat her.
Kat looked over at Larry. “So do they get along?”
“I think so. Most of the time, anyway. Abigail never really said anything about it,” Larry replied.
“What are you guys doing down there?” Louise called from the top of the stairs. “If you two are canoodling, please do it later. I need to finish showing you around, so I can get home and take my pills!” She then punctuated her statement with a loud sneeze.
“Canoodling?” Kat whispered as she felt a slight flush rise on her cheeks. She raised her eyebrows and gave Larry a conspiratorial look. “Really? Do people even say that anymore?”
“Apparently so.” Larry replied with a grin. He turned and Kat watched him go upstairs. When the lawyer smiled, it completely transformed his face. Maybe he was better-looking than she’d thought.
Louise proceeded to hurriedly walk them through the rest of the upstairs, which consisted of a sparsely furnished bedroom and a small bathroom. On a decorating show, they might refer to the decor as “country kitchen,” but the style might be better described as vintage yard-sale rejects with a fine patina of dog hair.
Louise said, “You both have already seen the basement, so I’ll take my leave now. Please call if you need anything.” She rushed down out the door, down the front stairs, and hopped into her big yellow Buick station wagon. Gunning the motor to encourage it, she then rumbled off down the driveway.
Kat turned to Larry, “I need to get out of here. The smell is getting to me.”
“Let’s go outside. I can show you the outbuildings.”
Kat stepped out onto the front stair landing and felt the platform wobble. “So, why is there carpet on the stairs?”
“Well, they are made of plain old plywood and it’s probably pretty slippery when it rains or gets icy, I’d guess.”
Kat shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.”
The pair went over to an old barn and found a medium-sized golden retriever in a chain-link enclosure. The dog was obviously extremely happy to have some company and was barking furiously. The animal seemed almost to be levitating, and its ears shot straight up in the air with each bound. “Should we let him out?” Kat asked through the din.
“Better wait for the dog walker to do it. I don’t know much about this dog, actually.” Larry shouted back.
As they walked around the rest of property, Kat clenched her fists, digging her fingernails into her palms. It was just so much to take in; at this point she just wanted to leave and go someplace quiet and think. Somewhere without giant dogs, barking, and bad smells.
“So, what do you think? Have you made a decision?” Larry asked.
Kat said, “I need to get back home. I have a proposal I have to edit or everyone at my company is going to lose their jobs. I’m really far behind as it is because of coming out here. I’ll probably be up all night.”
The lawyer looked down at the ground. “That’s fine, but I do need to know what your plans are.”
“I know. But honestly, I just can’t spend any time here with that smell. Can you do something about it? Then I can come back and look around again. I need to think about all this. And I really need to drive back to the city now.”
“Okay. I’ll call an acquaintance of mine to see if he can do something about the smell. He’s a bit of an all-around handyman person. I think he may have experience with this type of situation. I’ll give you a call on Monday and let you know.”
Kat shook hands with Larry and walked over to her car. Linus was lying near the driver’s side door in the shade, looking relaxed. He gazed up at her with a questioning look on his face. As Kat reached down to pet his huge head, she looked into his deep-brown eyes. “I’m sorry big guy, but I have to go now.” Linus looked at her for a second, stood up, and padded toward the house. He stopped and looked over his shoulder.
“It’s okay. Go on home, now.”
Kat felt like she should tell him that she’d be back, but she wasn’t sure. He was just a dog, anyway. He didn’t know that part of her wanted to run away from this complicated, stinky disaster area and never, ever come back. But as she looked up into the canopy of trees and listened to the birds twittering, another part of her felt an oddly comforting connection to this place.
Chapter 2
Wine & Whine
As Kat pulled the car into her parking space in her apartment complex, she looked up at the door of her comfortable little apartment. Everything here was so easy. One hungry but otherwise not terribly demanding cat. Functional appliances. No mysterious smells.
After greeting and feeding Murphee, Kat settled into her favorite blue chair and picked up the phone.
“Hi Maria. Are you still up for the Wine and Whine?” she asked.
“Hey girlfriend! I may have to cancel that hot date I have with Richard Gere. But that officer and gentleman is just going to have to wait to enjoy the fabulousness of me.”
Kat laughed and said, “Great. Come on over. I’ve got stories to tell you.”
“Coolio! See ya in a few.”
After Maria arrived at her apartment, Kat poured the wine and related the events of her day out in Alpine Grove. In the retelling, the whole experience seemed surreal.
“It’s cool that I have an inheritance,” Kat said. “But I don’t think I’m really the live-out-on-the-farm country-girl type. I’m a tech writer.”
“Let me see if I’m getting this straight,” Ma
ria said. “If you live at this place that smells like a sewer, you get the property and gobs and gobs of money. But if you find homes for the dogs and cats, you only get the place that stinks.” Maria raised one eyebrow, a move she called her Mr. Spock look.
“Yes. I get Chez Stinky either way. But what my aunt really wanted was for me to take over her life and take care of her dogs and cats. It’s weird because the last time she saw me I was eight. How did she even know that I like animals at all? I could be some creepy fuzzy-bunny-hater for all she knew.”
“Chez Stinky? Oh yeah, baby, you know I’m not gonna forget that. Your new homestead is forever etched in my little brain as Chez Stinky. I wanna make a big sign for you as a housewarming gift. You can put it over the door!”
Kat giggled and took a sip of her wine. “The lawyer knows a guy who can get rid of the stink. Or I hope so anyway. I’m not sure I want to know what he needs to do.”
Maria said, “My uncle Bruno had a bad problem like that, and he said that if it’s a dead animal, you wanna get to it before it liquefies into the wall. If that happens, you might never get out the smell. The goo gets into the drywall and you have to do sawing and cutting and stuff.”
Kat lowered her head and put her hands over her ears. “That’s just too gross to even contemplate.”
“Yeah, you don’t want those liquid dead bodies, you know. Bruno is the type of guy who knew about dead bodies.”
Peering over her wine glass, Kat said, “So what does Uncle Bruno do anyway?”
“He’s never been exactly clear on that. But he has some pretty nice cars. When I was a kid, he let me ride around in his fine, fine convertible Corvette. I was looking hot in that ’Vette. Even if I was 10. I was still hot.”
Kat laughed. “Yeah, I bet you were.”
The next morning, Kat was sipping coffee and leafing through the Big Bad Proposal, as she’d come to think of it. The pounding in her skull suggested that perhaps the Wine and Whine last night may not have been a great idea. With the proposal binder laid open on her table and red pens strewn about, Kat attempted to concentrate and move into work mode. It was slow going and Kat had the sinking feeling that she wasn’t going to finish editing it before Monday morning rolled around.
The phone rang, jarring Kat from editorial tedium. She leaped out of her chair to answer it. “Hello?”
“Hello, Ms. Stevens, this is Larry Lowell. My apologies for calling so early. Do you have a moment to talk?”
“Sure. I’m awake, and I’ve had most of my coffee, anyway.”
The lawyer cleared his throat. “I talked to my friend about the odor at your property and we went to take a look yesterday afternoon. He thinks he can address that issue, but there may be other difficulties with the structure.”
Kat sighed. Maybe Larry had some kind of sinus problem. He spent a lot of time hemming, hawing, and clearing his throat. “Difficulties? What type of difficulties?”
“The main dwelling may not make it through another winter,” he replied. “The roof was not constructed the way most contractors would do it today. The roof metal was laid directly upon the roof stringers with just a layer of plastic between the metal and the insulation. That’s typically how you roof a barn, but not a home that is heated. For a house, generally you would have a layer of plywood sheeting and tar paper under the metal. The trusses also aren’t close enough together, so ideally you would remove the roof, add more trusses, tar paper, and the wood sheeting. As it is now, you have issues with condensation, and over the years the plastic has decomposed, so there are just little pieces left. There may be other issues as well, but going up into the attic revealed that the roof is definitely a problem now.”
“I don’t know what a stringer is, but it all certainly sounds expensive to fix. Is repairing the house something that the estate could pay for? If I sell the place, I can’t sell it if the roof is about to cave in. I think that’s the type of thing anyone buying a house would want you to disclose.”
“Stringers are the strips of wood that hold the trusses together. The roof metal is attached to them. And yes, the money is available for repairs if you opt to live at the property yourself. If you are going to sell the property, it may be more cost-effective to tear down the house and just sell the land.”
Tear down the house? That seemed extreme. And it felt wrong, like she was throwing away all that her aunt had worked to create her entire life. Plus, what about the animals? It was their home, too. But making Chez Stinky her home seemed like an extreme step. Kat liked her comfortable life. Sure, her job might not be the most interesting one in the world, but it paid the rent on her apartment.
“How soon can they get rid of the smell? I think I need to go back up there and talk to your friend myself,” she said.
“If I have your authorization, he can start today.”
“Will the smell be gone by next weekend? Right now, I have to work and I have a big deadline.”
“Yes, I’ll tell him your plans.”
Kat thanked the lawyer, hung up, and turned back to the dense text of the Big Bad Proposal. Some of her most vivid childhood memories centered around the house and the land surrounding it. She spent long summer days hiking with her aunt through the trees and helping Aunt Abigail in the gardens around the house. Kat figured she probably wasn’t much help, but her aunt spent hours patiently explaining what all the herbs, vegetables, and flowers were and why she had planted them. Kat had asked a million questions, but Abigail loved to talk about growing things. She had shown Kat how to plant seeds and cover them with soil. Once the seedlings took root, Abigail also showed her how to identify the bad weeds from the good plants.
Kat shook her head. “What am I doing? I have less than 24 hours to edit 350 pages.” She picked up her red pen and set to work.
On Monday morning, Kat was exhausted. For the first time since college, she had pulled an all-nighter. Back then, some of her classmates seemed to be able to thrive on less than eight hours of sleep, but Kat was not one of them. The process of dragging herself into the office felt like she was slowly swimming through molasses. But the good news was that after editing all night, the Big Bad Proposal was marked up. All she had to do today was put the changes into the computer. Kat yawned mightily and went to the office kitchen for another cup of coffee.
Maria walked up and did a hip bump against Kat. “You look like death, girl.”
“Why thank you. I feel lovely today as well,” Kat answered with a smirk. “I’m guessing your Sunday was better than mine.”
“Yeah baby. I got a new magazine, and I followed the instructions for one of those home spa days where you use up all the stuff in your refrigerator as natural beauty products. I made a mask out of mayonnaise and a hair gel out of honey.”
Kat looked at Maria’s hair more closely. Her normally bouncy curls were oddly stiff with a crystalline sheen as if her hair had been frozen in a sugar storm. “I’m not sure you’re supposed to leave that type of thing on your hair.”
“Well, I didn’t finish the article.”
Kat raised her eyebrows and said, “You might want to wash your hair when you get home.” She headed back to her cubicle and sat down just as the phone rang, making her jump and jarring her dulled senses. All the caffeine was making her twitchy, but it wasn’t doing its job to keep her awake.
“Hello, this is Kat.”
“Hiya. My name is Herbert Fowler. I’m a friend of Larry Lowell. But you can call me Bud. Everybody does.”
“Larry Lowell? Oh, are you the person looking at the house in Alpine Grove?”
“Yep, that’s me. And I gotta tell ya, that’s one bad smell you got there, lady,” he said with a snort.
“Yes. I noticed. Can you make it go away?”
“Yeah, but it’s gonna cost ya,” Bud said with a slurp. It sounded like he was shifting chewing tobacco around in his mouth. Finally, he spat out, “I gotta find the varmint and then cut out the wall and then dee-spoze of the thing in a sanitary way.”<
br />
Considering how disgusting she found chewing tobacco, Kat hated to think what Bud would regard as sanitary disposal. She didn’t exactly have a lot of options. “That sounds like a good plan, Mr. Fowler. Did you talk to Larry about this? I need to know the cost as well.”
“Yep. He said that I need to talk to you ‘cuz you gotta come up with the money for the dee-spoz-al.”
Kat said, “I think Larry is supposed to take care of it with the money from Abigail’s estate.”
“Nope,” Bud said with an emphatic slurp.
“I’d like to know how much this will cost. And can you take a credit card? I need to have the smell removed so I can spend some time there this weekend.”
“Nope. I deal in cash. I’ll know what it costs when I do it.”
Kat rolled her eyes. “All right, please call Larry with an estimate, so I have some idea. I’ll talk to him and he can get the money to you. But you promise to get rid of the smell, right?”
“Yep, no problem.”
Kat hung up the phone and laid her head down on her desk. How could getting an inheritance be so expensive? Just bulldozing the place and forgetting about it was looking appealing.
Kat awoke with a start and looked up. Chris was peering over her cubicle wall down at her. He thumped the top of the wall with his hand. “So, are you having tea with the tillerman or what?”
Kat blinked a few times at him trying to think of a suitably snotty retort to his latest musical reference, but she was too tired to come up with anything. How long had she been asleep? “No Chris. What do you want?”
“How’s my proposal? I need it, you know,” he said, tapping his index finger on the cubicle top again for emphasis.
“We already had this conversation Chris. I know. I’m working on it.”
Chris nodded and continued tapping the cubicles as he wandered off down the hallway. A quiet non-flattering expletive was uttered by the editor in the next cubicle as Chris walked by. Sharon loathed Chris with a fierce passion that was a little scary.
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