The Bengal Identity

by Eileen Watkins

  “I’ll get right on it, chief!”

  That was something of a fib. First, Sarah and I had to return a Burmese boarder to Ruth Lowenstein, an elegant brunette Realtor with a local firm. While she settled her bill, we chatted about The Reserve, a new condo development just outside of town that was selling out quickly. As I watched Ruth leave with her lovely, quiet pet, I told myself he’d probably sleep a lot better now, without Ayesha singing rock opera all night long.

  The first break I got, I searched Bengal catteries on my cell phone. I found only a few each in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but those were licensed breeders with Web sites. Probably, there were small, unlicensed places that might still run ads in cat magazines and online.

  Lord, they could even be advertising on sites like Craigslist! How in the world are we going to reach out to everyone who might have lost a female Bengal cat?

  I made a list of all the legitimate-looking breeders with their contact information and checked the classified sections of some recent magazines for more. For the heck of it, I included places in New York State, too. I ended up with roughly a dozen breeders who offered Bengals, either exclusively or along with one or two other types.

  “Cassie, you about ready to close up?” Sarah asked me.

  Surprised, I checked the time on my phone. Ten of five already! “Oops, you’re right. Let’s feed ’em all and then you can get going.”

  Just shows how involved I’d gotten in this mystery, that I’d let the time get away from me. Even though it was Saturday night, and I actually had a date with Mark—at his apartment! Time to get upstairs, shower, and pretty myself up.

  I’d been half expecting a last-minute cancellation due to another emergency at the clinic. But so far, my luck was holding.

  Chapter 6

  Mark lived in a 1980s condo complex in the next town over. I’d visited only once so far, because working in Chadwick, he found it easier to come to my place. Also, I had all of the cats to tend to, while he did not have any pets, so far.

  His building, one of several, made a stab at traditional architecture, combining pale gray vinyl siding with vertical shafts of fieldstone. Mark had purchased his second-floor unit about two and a half years ago, when he’d set up his practice in Chadwick. It came with no garage, but two parking spaces, so I pulled in next to his blue RAV4. I had to speak through an intercom for him to buzz me up. Then I climbed a flight of stairs with a small landing halfway, toting a bag of salad greens from Nature’s Way and my bottle of Chianti.

  He was cooking dinner tonight, he’d said, to make up for our lack of time together lately. More often, we’d either gone out, picked up Chinese, or ordered a pizza. I’d made dinner for us once, but it wasn’t fancy—I’d broiled a couple of salmon filets, nuked a packaged rice mix, and heated up some frozen vegetables. I expected about the same from Mark tonight, thought maybe with more of an Italian flavor.

  Now I stood outside the teal green lacquered door of his unit, and the aroma from within raised my expectations.

  He opened the door wearing jeans and a dark red T-shirt that I always liked on him. At the clinic Mark usually wore scrubs, which came in either dusty blue or dusty green. It was often a pleasant shock to see him in his own clothes, especially the shirts—usually in deep, rich colors that played up his olive skin, nearly black hair, and sapphire-blue eyes.

  He greeted me with a warm kiss that immediately improved my state of mind.

  “As per your recommendation.” I handed over the wine. “And the greens are courtesy of Dawn.”

  “Terrific,” Mark said, taking the bag from me. “I’ll add them to the mix.”

  Sniffing the air, I wandered into his small but efficient kitchen, which was still outfitted with the original Reagan-era oak cabinets. “If that dinner tastes as good as it smells, you may get stuck with all the cooking from now on.”

  He shrugged modestly. “It’s a fairly easy recipe. Linguini with chicken, spinach, and Parmesan. Only the second time I’ve tried it, but so far, so good.”

  He lifted the lid of a large pan to check on some bite-sized pieces of chicken that were browning. On the next burner, linguine and spinach simmered together in a pot. I felt like the ultimate liberated woman, having a man cook dinner for me.

  “All that can sit for a minute while we have some wine,” he said.

  I followed him into the living room, which also suited my comfort level. Mark had left the walls a standard off-white, but otherwise had furnished the space nicely. A navy blue sofa formed a right angle with a modern, chamois-colored recliner on a blue and brown rug with a modern tribal design. A cubist-style print of a jazz combo hung over the sofa. The side and coffee tables and the TV cabinet were all dark-stained wood. Everything looked easy to care for and in contemporary good taste.

  Wineglass in hand, I took a seat on the sofa and nudged aside a couple of the throw pillows—in coordinating patterns of tan, navy, and red. They reminded me that Mark had decorated this place with help from his last girlfriend, a travel photographer named Diane. They hadn’t quite been living together, but I knew she’d spent a lot of time here. I suspected that a small photo on a side table, showing Mark and three friends by a waterfall in some exotic setting, also represented Diane’s work. They’d broken up because she’d cheated on him, but I could never be sure how much of a torch he still carried for her. I knew he’d started dating me on the rebound.

  As Mark sat beside me and slipped his arm around my shoulders, I observed, “Ah, just the two of us! Lately, that doesn’t happen very often.”

  “I know. We’re usually at the clinic or your shop or a restaurant . . . someplace out in public.”

  “Why do you think that is? Are we still taking it slow?”

  He sipped his wine before answering. “Fair question. If we are, I guess it wouldn’t be surprising. We’ve both just come out of some intense situations, with exes who treated us pretty badly. I guess it takes time to get past stuff like that.”

  I supposed so, too. It had taken some time for me even to tell Mark about my scary experiences with my last boyfriend. Andy had been one of the reasons I’d moved to semirural Chadwick in the first place, and he’d kept trying to lure me back—albeit in a creepy way—for months afterward. Mark, closing in on thirty, had been ready to propose to Diane when she’d told him she wanted to see other guys; in fact, she already had started doing so.

  Leaning against him now, I searched for a lighter topic. “Well, at least it’s just the two of us until you make up your mind about a pet. Any progress along that line?”

  “Haven’t had much time to think about it lately,” he admitted. “Condo rules say I can have a cat that stays indoors or a small dog that’s kept on a leash.”

  A bulb lit up in my head. “How about a cat that walks on a leash? Ayesha’s trained to do that.”

  “Whoa! I’m not sure I want to bring that Bengal into a one-bedroom condo.”

  I laughed. “You probably don’t. Anyway, she’d get you evicted. She howls like a banshee, she marks outside the box, and she’d probably climb and destroy your window blinds. Seriously, if we don’t find her real owner, I’m not sure who’ll take her.”

  “A breeder.” Mark sounded confident. “They’re used to that kind of stuff, and she looks like a very high-class animal.”

  “Speaking of high-class . . .” I made a show of sniffing the air. “That gourmet meal of yours smells as if it’s reached perfection.”

  He smiled and stood up. “Yeah, I’m hungry, too. Shall we bring our wine to the table and try the salad?”

  I matched the formality of his invitation. “But of course!”

  In a large, Tuscan-patterned bowl, Mark tossed all of the greens together with a vinaigrette dressing, then meted out our portions on salad plates. The escarole and red leaf lettuce that I contributed were as fresh and flavorful as all of the other produce Dawn had provided to me that week. While we ate, I told Mark a little more about the organic farm that she was tr
ying out as a new supplier, omitting any mention of the renegade leaf I’d found among the tomatoes.

  Finally, we tucked into the chicken, linguini, and wilted spinach, which Mark had topped with minced garlic, grated Parmesan cheese, salt and pepper, and a little olive oil. He wielded all of those ingredients like a pro, and predictably, the result was delicious.

  “Did you get this recipe from your mom?” I asked Mark as we ate.

  “Ha, and I thought you were a feminist! So happens, my dad is an excellent cook. He put himself through medical school by working part-time at a restaurant.”

  So far in our relationship, Mark hadn’t talked very much about his family. His parents had divorced a few years back, and his mother still lived outside of Philadelphia, while his orthopedic surgeon father now was on staff at a hospital in San Francisco. I knew Mark also had a sister with an advertising firm in Manhattan and a brother who had just graduated from U of Penn and was job-hunting. As yet, I’d never met any of them, but since they were so widely separated from each other, I didn’t give too much weight to that.

  This was the first I’d heard, though, about his father’s culinary experience. “No kidding! That’s so lucky, because . . . well, you’ve had my cooking.”

  Mark smiled kindly. “It’s not so bad. Just a little basic.”

  As I’d feared, the meal set a new standard to which I might have to aspire. Mark confided that the secret was using fresh linguine, which he’d found at a reasonable price at his local Italian deli.

  We went on to discuss light stuff, such as the upcoming Chadwick Day celebration and my attempts to prepare for it.

  “Our clinic had a table out in the park the first couple of years,” he told me. “It definitely helped make people aware of us and the services we offer. Now we’re so busy that I don’t really think we need the promotion. And the way things have been going, I don’t really like to take my eye off the ball for that long.”

  I sensed we were getting down to the main topic of the evening—why he didn’t have more time for me these days—and tried to draw him out. “You told me a little about the problems with your staff, but what exactly is going on?”

  “Don’t I wish I knew! First, I found out that Elena, who’s been our office manager since we opened, has been sneaking in maybe fifteen minutes late some days and leaving early on other days. When I questioned her, she denied it, and the one time I saw her head out early, she claimed she was just going to get something from her car.”

  “Hmm. And you only saw her do that once?”

  “Yes, but Jennifer had been noticing it for a while and even asked me if Elena worked part-time. Another day, Jen was putting away some files and saw one of our vet techs handling a cat very roughly, even though it had a broken leg. And she said last week, when Dr. Reed told a client his dog had been diagnosed with lymphoma, she acted very cold and brusque about it, even though the man seemed on the verge of tears.”

  I laid my fork cross my empty plate, patted my lips with a napkin, then spoke in a neutral tone. “Sounds like a troubling pattern, all right.”

  “Also, you remember the situation with that terrier the other night, when I had to cut our date short? I’d put one of those Elizabethan collars on him—those cones that keep an animal from licking or biting himself. I know I fastened it securely, but somehow he got out of it. By the time I got back to the clinic, he’d ripped half of the stitches out of his side, so I had to sedate him, disinfect the area, and stitch him up again.”

  I winced. “That’s pretty serious.”

  “The last person to look in on him was a tech named Jim Brunner, who’s always been on top of things before. When I questioned him, he swore he even opened the cage to check the collar.” Mark took another swallow of his wine before continuing. “I told Jim he must’ve accidentally loosened it, and to be more careful from now on. He said he always was careful, and I should take his word for it. He sounded so annoyed that I backed off, because I thought he might quit on me. But damn, that Yorkie didn’t open the collar by himself!”

  I commiserated as best I could. “Well, I guess no matter how careful you are, sometimes things just go wrong.”

  “I’ve always thought I had the best team in the world! It wouldn’t be a shock if one or two of them lost focus or started to burn out, but I can’t believe so many are falling down on the job.” Mark noticed I was done with my pasta, stood up, and took our plates to the kitchen. “Got room for dessert? I bought cannoli.”

  “I’ll make room,” I assured him. “You really went with the whole Italian theme tonight, huh?”

  He laughed. “Thought it might be fun.”

  As he passed my chair on the way to the kitchen, I grabbed him playfully around the waist. “Maybe for Christmas, I’ll buy you an apron. A tailored, manly one, of course.”

  Struggling to balance the empty dishes, he looked down at me with a mock frown. “Sounds like I’d better put the coffee on.”

  I released him with a giggle, something I don’t utter very often. “Are you implying I’ve had too much wine?”

  Truly, I didn’t have much of a capacity for booze. I probably should take it easy if I’m going to drive home tonight. Or am I? It’s Saturday, and neither of us has to work tomorrow.... Calculating vixen that I was, I’d made sure to leave extra dry food and water for all the cats.

  We took time to enjoy our dessert, and Mark waited until we were sipping our coffees to ask, “So, Cassie. You were a psychology major in college, and you read all those murder mysteries. What do you think is going on?”

  “With the folks in your office?” I proceeded with caution. “If I were you, I’d look for the common link among all these incidents.”

  “There are a few, I guess. These people all have worked for me for at least a year, and all their mistakes seem to come from inattention, carelessness, or just a bad attitude.”

  “There’s one more. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you found out about all of these mistakes from Jennifer?”

  “Yeah, but . . . that’s just because she’s new and keeps her eyes open. She’s more likely to notice anything not being done like she was taught to do it. Probably, also, she isn’t as inclined to give somebody a pass because he’s a friend or has worked there a long time.”

  “You said Elena and Jim both denied doing anything wrong. Did you confront any of the others, and did they admit to their mistakes?”

  Mark wrinkled his brow. “I didn’t want to question Dr. Reed—she’s my senior and has more experience than I do. Sam, the tech who made an error on a prescription, said he didn’t remember doing it but admitted he might have been distracted. The guy Jennifer saw roughing up the cat insisted he’d never do a thing like that. He demanded to know who accused him, but of course, I wouldn’t tell him.”

  “So you really have no proof. You’re just taking Jennifer’s word for all of it.”

  “But why would she lie? It’s not even as if it’s just one person that she doesn’t like and wants to get into trouble. If she’s making all these stories up, she’d have to be psycho, and I can’t believe that.”

  Even very smart guys, like Mark, could be naïve about women, I thought. “Not necessarily. She could have a very clear goal: to get your attention.”

  “My attention?” he echoed, in a skeptical voice.

  “You said she comes in earlier than the others and stays later. That would give her time to alter a prescription or tamper with other things. And by reporting negative stories about the rest of the staff, she sets herself up as the only one you can really trust.”

  To my relief, Mark seemed to consider this. “But even if that were true, why would she do that? Does she think she’ll get a promotion, more money, or—”

  “Maybe she thinks she’ll get you. In case I haven’t mentioned it lately, you’re pretty hot.”

  He actually blushed. “Ah, c’mon. She’s got to be aware that I’m dating you. We’ve been low-key about it, but everybody at the clinic kno
ws.”

  “Don’t you see? That’s why she isn’t coming right out and putting the moves on you. She may not be psycho, but she could be . . . devious.”

  Mark didn’t like hearing this, I could tell. Not that he wasn’t flattered, but I was chipping away at his image of sweet, wholesome Jennifer, who only wanted to help him maintain high standards at the clinic. “No, I’m sure you’re wrong. She’s not like that.”

  “Then just ask yourself one thing. Would you find my theory more credible if she were middle-aged and homely, instead of twenty-two and gorgeous?”

  He flung a hand into the air. “Oh, now we’re getting to the bottom of this. You’re just upset because she happens to be attractive. I never would have expected this of you, Cassie! To accuse the poor girl of—”

  Muffled music interrupted our argument—the sauntering guitar intro of “Stray Cat Strut.” It drifted from a coat stand by the front door, where I’d hung my purse. I would have ignored it, but Mark waved me away, as if he welcomed the break.

  “Go on, answer it.”

  I crossed to the stand, pulled out the phone, and checked the caller ID. Home’n’Safe, the security firm that had sold me the alarm system for my shop.

  What the heck?

  No reason why they’d call me at almost nine o’clock at night. Unless. . .

  Chapter 7

  “You’re receiving this call because a breach has been detected in your system and the alarm triggered,” a well-modulated female voice informed me. “We’re checking to see if you are on the premises and might have set it off by mistake.”

  “No, I’m at a friend’s,” I told her, heart thudding high in my throat. “There shouldn’t be anyone in the shop or the house.”

  “Then we’ll report it to your local police department,” the woman said. “The motion detectors haven’t registered any movement inside the building, so if it was an intruder, the alarm may have scared him away. You’ll want to wait until the police investigate, though, before you go inside.”