Gone With the Woof

by Laurien Berenson

  “I’m coming,” I said, laughing at her antics.

  Robin lowered her front end and raised her hindquarters. Her tail was wagging madly now, high in the air above her body. Her hind feet danced in anticipation. Clearly, I was being invited to race.

  “Really?” I asked. I leaned down, scooped up some snow, rounded it into a ball, and tossed it to her. “You want a piece of this?”

  Robin opened her mouth and snagged the snowball out of the air. When she snapped her jaw shut and the snowball disintegrated on her tongue, the expression on her face was truly comical. She bounced up, sent me a fleeting glance, then ran around the back of the house again.

  By the time I rounded the corner, Robin was already standing at the back door. She hopped impatiently from paw to paw on the stoop. I stepped up beside her, shaded my eyes against the glare, and looked through the window that formed the door’s upper half. Just inside was a mudroom; the kitchen lay beyond.

  Nobody was visible. I gave a hearty knock on the door, anyway. Still no answer.

  So I took off my glove and tried the knob. It turned easily. So easily, in fact, that standing as I was, with my weight braced forward, the door pushed open before I even had a chance to think about whether or not I really wanted to go in. Immediately, Robin slithered through the narrow opening and dashed inside.

  So now I was standing on the stoop by myself. You know, doing the breaking-and-entering thing.

  I opened the door wider and stuck my head in. “Hello? Anybody home? Charlotte?”

  I know. It sounds stupid. If they hadn’t answered the doorbell or the knocking or the telephone, what was I expecting would happen? And, of course, there was only silence.

  So I paused for a moment and thought about what to do. I’d already accomplished my original mission. Robin was now safe inside the house. I could return to my car and leave, guilt-free.

  Like that was ever going to happen.

  Instead, I let myself in and closed the door behind me. The house was utterly quiet. I had no idea where Robin had disappeared to. I couldn’t even hear the sound of her nails clicking on the floor.

  Carefully, I wiped the snow off my boots on the mat inside the door. It was bad enough that I’d let myself in. I wasn’t about to leave a trail of cold water across the floor.

  The kitchen was spacious and looked too modern to have been original to the house. There was a Sub-Zero refrigerator and a restaurant-quality stove. The granite countertops, empty save for a bowl of fruit and a small television set, were gleaming.

  I guessed that this was Charlotte’s domain, and a desk tucked away in one corner confirmed that thought. A laptop sat open there, along with a purse and a pile of library books. A quick peek inside the wallet revealed Charlotte’s ID.

  Curiouser and curiouser, I thought.

  So I kept going. I could see through an open doorway on the far side of the room that it led to the front hall. I’d been there before. Nearer to where I stood was a set of closed double doors. Dining room, most likely.

  I grasped the nearest knob and pulled the door open. Then gasped softly. The room was large and semi-dark, the curtains drawn against the sunlight outside. It was also filled with junk.

  Really, there was no other way to describe it. Everywhere I looked was a jumble of miscellaneous debris. The only thing that belonged was the dining-room furniture, but even that was barely visible due to the sheer multitude of things piled haphazardly around and on top of it.

  I saw bedding and clothing and toys, all pushed up against several tall stacks of newspaper. There were shopping bags stuffed with a random assortment of items and two dog crates, one of which was missing its top. A pair of skis leaned against the wall. A giant candelabra balanced precariously on top of a crumbling cardboard box. Listing drunkenly to one side, it was a wonder that it didn’t fall.

  “Wow,” I said aloud. Too bad Robin wasn’t there to comment.

  The look of the room was bad enough. The smell was worse. I didn’t even want to stop and consider what was causing that. Instead, I drew the door shut and moved on.

  I passed through the kitchen and out into the center hallway, which led from the front of the house to the back. The staircase leading up to the second floor was on my left. Other than that, I could see three closed doors. One, I knew, led to the library. Another appeared to be a second access to the dining room. The third, across the hall from the other two, I was guessing led to the living room.

  Just to make myself feel better, I stood at the foot of the stairs and tried announcing my presence again. Like that was going to excuse my behavior. By this point, I’d moved well beyond doing a good deed; now I was trespassing. All the calling around in the world wasn’t about to mitigate that.

  The living-room door stuck, but when I put my shoulder against it and pushed hard, it gave way grudgingly. As soon as I stuck my head through the opening, I could see the problem. Just as in the dining room, this room’s contents resembled those of a flea market gone berserk.

  Where had this incredible accumulation of junk come from? I wondered. And why would anyone have ever wanted to save it?

  Slowly, I withdrew my head and closed the door behind me. It seemed that I had my answer as to why no one had wanted me to go walking around the house by myself. There wasn’t a crazy relative hidden in the attic. Instead, the lunacy was taking place right inside the front door.

  It was definitely time for me to leave.

  I turned to retrace my steps to the kitchen, then jumped and gave a small squeak of surprise. My breath caught as I inhaled sharply. Charlotte was standing three feet away at the foot of the stairs. She’d appeared so silently that I hadn’t even heard her descent.

  Her eyes looked huge and dark against the pallor of her face. Charlotte’s hands were clasped in front of her, fingers twisting together in agitation.

  “I see you’ve discovered our little secret,” she said.

  Chapter 8

  “I’m sorry,” I sputtered, feeling every bit the interloper

  I was. “I rang the doorbell. I knocked. . . .”

  The excuses sounded weak, even to me.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I . . . we . . . Mr. March and I had an appointment for this morning. Eleven o’clock?” I pushed back the sleeve of my jacket and showed her my watch. Like that was going to help. “But nobody answered the door. And then Robin was outside, and she was cold, so I thought I should let her back in. . . .”

  Charlotte nodded. Whether it was because the explanation made sense or because she appreciated the effort, I wasn’t quite sure.

  “Eleven o’clock,” she repeated. “I totally forgot. You’re right. We should have been expecting you. I’m sorry. I should have called and told you that there won’t be any work today. Mr. March is indisposed.”

  Somehow in the span of only a few seconds I’d gone from being the person in the wrong to being the one wronged. I had no idea how that had happened. But no one looking at Charlotte would presume that she was thinking clearly.

  She was there beside me, and yet not there. She formed the words and spoke them, but looked as though they had no meaning for her. Her gaze remained vague and unfocused.

  I thought of the policemen outside on the road, erecting their barriers. There’d been an accident that morning, they’d said.

  “Is everything all right?” I asked.

  “No.” Charlotte’s voice was small. “No, it isn’t.”

  I reached out and took her hand. Her fingers were like ice. “Let’s go sit down.”

  The library was March’s domain, and the other downstairs rooms were unusable, so we headed back to the kitchen. Bright sunlight slanted in through the tall windows. It gave the room a warm, cheery glow.

  Charlotte didn’t seem to notice. She simply walked over to the butcher-block table, pulled out a chair, and sank down into it, as if her body was a burden and she was relieved not to have to support it anymore.

  “Tell
me what happened,” I said.

  “Andrew . . . Mr. March’s son . . . he’s dead.”

  The words hit me like a blow. All at once I could picture Andrew clearly: striding around my house and poking his nose into everything with his “professional curiosity.” I hadn’t liked March’s son, but I certainly hadn’t wished him this. I walked across the kitchen and sat down beside Charlotte.

  “There was an accident on the road out front,” she said softly. “Andrew was jogging. He does two miles every morning, even in the winter. A car hit him from behind and didn’t stop.”

  “How awful,” I said.

  “There’s more. It’s worse.” Charlotte’s fingers tangled into a knot in her lap. “The police think maybe it wasn’t an accident. They said that there were no tire marks on the road. Whoever hit him never even tried to stop.”

  “Maybe the driver skidded on the ice,” I said.

  “The officers who were here earlier didn’t think so. There wasn’t any ice near where they found him. I guess they can reconstruct the scene and figure out what happened?”

  She looked at me for confirmation, so I nodded. I watch as much TV as the next person.

  “Another driver saw him lying there and stopped. This isn’t a busy road.... He may have been there for some time. That driver called the police. They brought an ambulance, but it was too late.” Charlotte’s eyes looked haunted. “Andrew was out there in the snow beside the road, and we didn’t even know it.”

  “I am so sorry,” I said, the most inadequate words in the English language.

  Charlotte just nodded.

  “How did you find out what happened?”

  “The police came. They didn’t know who Andrew was. He wasn’t carrying any ID. I mean, why would he? He thought he’d be back home in twenty minutes, just like every other morning. Our driveway was the closest, so an officer came in and asked if we knew who he might be.”

  I swallowed heavily. It was all too easy to picture that terrible scene. “How is Mr. March holding up?”

  “Not well. He’s resting upstairs. He didn’t want to lie down, but I told him he had to. I couldn’t think what else to do. Once the officers found out that Andrew was Mr. March’s son, they asked us all kinds of questions. They said a detective would be back this afternoon to talk to us again.”

  Charlotte paused. Her lower lip began to quiver. She pinched it between her front teeth to hold it still.

  “I don’t even know how we’re going to manage that,” she said. “Mr. March doesn’t deal with unexpected visitors. You saw . . .” Her hand waved vaguely in the direction of the dining room. “Well, I imagine you can guess why.”

  I could. This was a house where people were rigidly controlled and things were wildly out of control. That was a bad combination at any time. Now, under the worst of circumstances, it was just one more thing to worry about.

  I leaned forward in my seat and waited until Charlotte looked up. “Mr. March is a hoarder, isn’t he?”

  She nodded. “I guess that’s what you’d call it. When I first started working here, I didn’t even know there was a name for that kind of behavior. I just thought he was really messy and needed someone to help him get organized. You know, an older man living by himself? I figured he probably had no idea how to pick things up and put them away.”

  I could see that. I know plenty of younger men who have never mastered the skill of cleaning up after themselves.

  “But it’s more than that. Mr. March never throws anything away. Ever. And eventually, there’s no place to put everything. So it just piles up all over.”

  “He hired you to help him,” I said. “Maybe he was hoping that you’d take charge.”

  “I’ve thought about that. Officially, I’m supposed to pay Mr. March’s bills and manage his appointments. I make sure that he gets two good meals a day and has clean sheets to sleep on. But aside from those things, I try to do whatever I can. You should have seen this place when I first got here. At least I managed to get the kitchen cleaned up right away. But then it took me another six months just to make the library mostly livable.”

  “You did a good job,” I told her.

  “Thanks.” Charlotte looked pleased by the compliment. I doubted that she’d heard many from her employer. “I work at it every day. But it’s always a struggle. What am I supposed to do? It’s not like I can force Mr. March to give up his memories, and it seems like he has a story to tell about every single piece of junk in here.

  “That’s why I was so happy when he said he wanted to write a book about his life. I thought if he wrote the stories down, maybe we’d be able to clean some of this stuff out. I was hoping things might become a little more normal around here. Now it looks like that’s never going to happen.”

  I could understand her frustration. In this house, anything approaching normal seemed like a stretch.

  “How long have you worked for Mr. March?” I asked.

  “Almost two years. After college I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, so I spent some time just bumming around, taking odd jobs. Then my mother told me about this. She and Mr. March are old friends.”

  “Does she know about his hoarding?” I asked curiously.

  “No way.”

  “You’ve been working here for two years, and you haven’t told her?”

  “It would mean my job if I did. Mr. March says it’s nobody else’s business how he chooses to live his life.”

  “That may have been true yesterday,” I told her. “But not necessarily anymore. Once the police start investigating Andrew’s death, they’re going to be asking lots and lots of questions.”

  “I should hope so,” said Edward March.

  Charlotte and I both spun around in our seats. March was standing in the kitchen doorway, leaning heavily on his cane. Robin was with him, her tall body pressed against his good leg, offering her support. Even with my back to the door, I should have heard the two of them coming.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked me.

  “Talking about you,” I told him. There was no point in lying, especially since I had no idea how long he’d been standing there. “I’m very sorry about what happened to your son.”

  “Me too.” He sighed deeply. “There were times I wanted to kill that boy myself, but I never imagined anything like this.”

  He walked slowly toward us. I started to get up and offer him a hand, but Charlotte kicked me under the table. She gave her head a slight shake.

  “Don’t,” she said under her breath. “He won’t like it.”

  March reached out and banged the back of my chair with his cane. “What are you two whispering about now? Me again, I suppose. Why isn’t somebody offering to pour me a stiff drink? Do I have to think of everything myself?”

  “I’m more likely to offer to escort you back upstairs,” Charlotte told him. Her employer’s gruff incivility didn’t faze her in the slightest. “You’re supposed to be resting.”

  “I already did that. At my age too much lying down just reminds you that you don’t have much time left. Now I’d rather be halfway to stinking drunk. There’s a bottle of twenty-year-old scotch in the pantry.” Leaning a hand on the tabletop, March lifted his cane and pointed it in my direction. “You’ll join me in a glass, won’t you?”

  I started to decline. If I started drinking scotch before noon, I’d be asleep by 2:00 p.m. Then I considered the circumstances and changed my mind. March’s son had just died. How could I refuse something that might make him feel better, even if it was only briefly?

  “Just a sip,” I said. “I have to drive home.”

  Charlotte got up to fetch the liquor. March sat down in her seat. Robin came over, touched her nose to my knee in greeting, then turned a small circle and lay down beneath the table, next to March’s chair.

  “I see you two have met,” he said approvingly.

  “Outside.”

  “Damn dog loves the snow. Her coat gets all balled up with it. Next thing
you know, there are puddles all over the house.”

  “You wouldn’t have it any other way.” Charlotte delivered a bottle of Glenfiddich and three tumblers to the table. She reached down and gave Robin’s head a pat before taking a seat opposite us.

  March unscrewed the cap and poured a generous amount of amber liquid into each glass. Then he set the bottle aside and nudged a tumbler toward each of us. Lifting his own, he held it aloft and said, “Here’s to Andrew.”

  “To Andrew,” Charlotte and I echoed.

  The three glasses clinked together in the air.

  I took a small sip. Charlotte did the same. March tipped back his head and downed the contents of his glass in one long swallow. He set his tumbler back down on the table with a firm thump and reached for the bottle again.

  Charlotte leaned over, extended her hand, and gently wrapped her fingers around the neck of the bottle, on top of his. March paused to look at her before refilling his glass.

  “The police are coming back,” she said. “The officers who were here earlier said that a detective would want to talk to us.”

  “When?”

  “Sometime this afternoon. They didn’t say when.”

  March grunted derisively and pulled the bottle to him. Charlotte hesitated briefly, then let it go.

  “I may be drunk when he gets here,” he said.

  I watched March down another finger of scotch without pausing for breath. The third time he filled the glass, his hand wasn’t as steady as it had been. A bit of the liquor sloshed out over the rim.

  March didn’t seem to notice. He was staring off into the distance.

  “I’ll have to go back to work,” he said. It wasn’t clear whether he was speaking to us or to himself.

  “You don’t want to think about that now,” Charlotte replied. She stood up, picked up the Glenfiddich bottle, recapped it, and put it away.

  March continued to gaze thoughtfully out the window. “If not now, when? It’s not like the company can run itself.”