Cat's Eyewitness

by Rita Mae Brown

  “A flu shot isn’t going to do you in.”

  “Not the flu shot I’m worried about.”

  “I know. We’re all worried.”

  Brother Handle leaned forward in the chair. “At what temperature does blood freeze?”

  “30.99 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s why blood is separated from plasma; the water and minerals freeze earlier than the actual blood.”

  “Who would steal blood?” Brother Handle asked.

  “No one. It breaks down quickly. It would be worthless in medical applications.” Brother John opened his hands, palms upward. “Unless the thief were a doctor or trained nurse, the blood would be useless rapidly. I can’t see any reason for someone to steal blood.”

  “Do you count the blood packets each day?” Brother Handle’s eyes bored into Brother John.

  “No. Brother Andrew and I did count them but not every day.”

  “Did you ever lose any?”

  “No.” Brother John shut the refrigerator door. “Wait. Yes. September.”

  “What happened?”

  “Brother Thomas and Brother Andrew picked up a container—you know those big blue containers with dry ice—of blood. They parked the car up here and then couldn’t find the blood.”

  “Container.”

  “The container was in the car.”

  “I see.”

  “This is December. What does that have to do with the terrible situation—I know Brother Andrew is under suspicion but I don’t see what blood has to do with it nor do I think Brother Andrew would kill Brother Thomas. It’s absurd.” Brother John’s jaw set hard.

  “I don’t know, anymore. But I do know it took a crane to put Mary back on her boulder, and that was mid-September.” Brother Handle raised his voice. “Who? If not Brother Andrew? Who?”

  Brother John walked over to the Prior. “We live close together here, Brother Handle, yet we don’t know about one another on many levels. A man could live his entire adult life here and others would only know of his temperament and his habits. Who is to say what or why?”

  “You’re certainly sanguine about it, forgive the pun.”

  “I’m a scientist. A doctor is a scientist. If I remain dispassionate I can help you more readily than if I’m emotionally involved.” Brother John noted to himself that Brother Handle did not know about the laws involving the storage of blood by private physicians. He wondered how long before the Prior would begin making queries to outside doctors and learn about what Brother John considered a necessary irregularity.

  Brother Mark ran into the infirmary. “Brother Handle!” he called out.

  “Speaking of emotions,” Brother Handle sourly said. “I’m in the supply room.”

  Brother Mark hurried to the open door. “Brother Handle, the main boiler broke down.”

  “Well, fix it.”

  “I don’t know if I can.”

  “You spent all that time assisting Brother Thomas and you can’t fix the boiler?” Brother Handle’s hands flew up in the air in disgust.

  “I lack his gift,” Brother Mark pleaded.

  “You’d better find it, because I am not calling j. g. cohen.”

  “That’s an electrical company, Brother,” Brother John quietly corrected him.

  “All right, then,” Brother Handle fumed, “I am not calling a plumbing company. Bunch of damned thieves. The type that set upon St. Paul.”

  “Setting that aside, it’s nineteen degrees outside,” Brother John flatly remarked.

  To Brother Mark, the Prior sputtered, “Isn’t there anyone else in this place who knows some plumbing?”

  “Brother Prescott knows a little bit about the boiler. He was with us this summer when we drained the boiler, drained all the radiators, and then restored the pressure.”

  “Get him, then!” Brother Handle bellowed.

  “Yes, sir, but,” Brother Mark’s voice trembled, “if I can’t fix it, you really will have to call a plumber right away, because if the radiators freeze they will blow apart. A big chunk of metal could kill someone.”

  This stopped Brother Handle. “Let’s all go down into the bowels of this place. You, too, Brother John.”

  Once in the cavernous underground, they stepped down another four feet to the enormous cast-iron furnace built in 1914, installed that same year. It was still heated with coal, the huge pile of dense anthracite, shovel next to it, near the open door of the furnace.

  A water gauge—a clear tube one foot tall on iron hinges—was attached to the side of the furnace but far enough away from the metal itself so one would not be burned when reading it. The pressure gauge, face as large as a railroad clock, sat atop a pipe emerging from the box of the furnace itself.

  “Pressure’s falling fast,” Brother Prescott, summoned by Brother Mark, stated the obvious.

  “She’s full up on coal. I shoveled it in myself,” Brother Mark said, his grimy hands proving it.

  “You know,” Brother Prescott spoke to Brother Handle, “most people alive today have never seen a boiler like this, a furnace this huge. Brother Thomas worked on these kinds of things when he was a boy. If you call a plumber, chances are whoever walks in here will be over his head. All he’ll tell you to do is to replace it with a modern furnace or heat pumps.”

  “I know that!” Brother Handle snapped.

  “The only thing I can think of is that one of our water pipes is leaking or burst. Everything here is all right,” Brother Mark added.

  “You’re the smallest; you’ll have to get into the crawl space. It has to be down here,” Brother Prescott stated. “If a pipe had burst in the kitchen or the bathrooms, we’d know. There’d be water everywhere.”

  “Here.” Brother John handed the young man a powerful flashlight, then gave him a leg up to wiggle into the crawl space, a maze of pipes.

  Brother Mark slid along the cold underbelly of the monastery. Cobwebs festooned his robe. The robe itself was an impediment. The occasional rat stared at him, then scurried away. At last, he found the leak at a U-joint where the pipes turned toward the housing side of the building. He was belly-flat in water.

  He then had to back out, bumping his head in the process.

  Brother Prescott grabbed his feet when they dangled from the crawl space.

  A begrimed Brother Mark announced, “I found it. I need a new U-joint, a wrench, and grease. We need to turn off the main water valve. I can fix it in an hour, in less time if one of you will come in with me and hold the light, hand me the tools.”

  “I’ll shut off the water valve,” Brother John volunteered.

  “Brother Prescott, get in there with him,” Brother Handle commanded. “We’ve got to get this fixed as quickly as possible.”

  Wordlessly, Brother Prescott walked over to a corridor running from the big room at a right angle. Brother Thomas had kept everything necessary for the furnace there. “How big a U-joint?” he called out.

  “I’ll get it.” Brother Mark, dripping, dashed over to the room.

  “Brother John,” Brother Handle turned to the physician. “You’d better stay down here to give them a leg up and to pull them out. Also, if anyone should get hurt in there you’ll be on the spot. Better safe than sorry.”

  “Of course.”

  Then Brother Handle strode out to leave them to it. He reached his office, pulled on an overcloak, grabbed a small high-intensity flashlight from his desk. There was a pump in the forge, one behind the greenhouse, which also served the gardens, and another one in a small building behind the chandler’s cottage.

  While not a plumber or a particularly handy fellow, he knew the basics. He could spot a split pipe, a worn-out hose. He could read a pressure gauge as easily as the next man. He wanted to get outside despite the cold and he wanted to be alone. Double-checking everything would give him a reason to go out, not that he really needed one.

  The chandler’s shop was fine, as was the forge. His last stop and the one farthest from the monastery was the pumphouse behind the
greenhouse. He could hear, even though he was one hundred yards away and on the ridge, people praying, chanting.

  Grimacing, he ducked into the pumphouse, which was about eight feet by six feet, with a seven-foot ceiling. The pump in here, more modern than the one in the monastery, powered the sprinkler system in the greenhouse and the watering system outside. The brothers had long ago given up carrying buckets to the many plants and shrubs as the gardens expanded.

  The overhead naked lightbulb, 150 watts, afforded some light. A standing kerosene heater was lit to provide warmth, to keep the pipes from freezing. The kerosene odor made Brother Handle woozy. He clicked on the flashlight, checking the gauge, the dial, the pipes. Then he got down on his hands and knees, cursing, to check those pipes running out and under the ground. A narrow-gauge copper pipe behind the pump caught his eye. It was tucked behind a large pipe. The copper pipe had been freshly painted black. He scratched it with his thumbnail and was rewarded with the sight of gleaming new copper. A metal box, painted black to blend in with the pipes and the walls of the pumphouse, hung under this pipe.

  “He has put my brethren far from me, and my acquaintances are wholly estranged from me. My kinsfolk and my close friends have failed me.” Brother Handle, heart sinking, quoted Job, Chapter 19, Verses 13 and 14.

  He touched the box, cold to his fingertips. The pipe, too, was cold but not freezing.

  He didn’t know how long he remained there, cramped under the larger pipe. He blinked and shook his head to clear it, then moved backward before standing up.

  He whispered to himself the lament of Job, “My brethren far from me.”

  37

  Staring into the silver bowl, three feet across, engraved with the details of a steeplechase victory by Mim’s grandfather, Angus Urquhart, Susan was mesmerized as she stood in the large center hallway, Persian carpets underfoot.

  “Ma’am.” The short gentleman in livery behind the bowl held up a silver cup, the long, graceful curving ladle in his right hand.

  “Hank, I can’t get used to seeing you in livery.”

  “Mizz Big”—he referred to Big Mim by the nickname her staff called her—“does everything tiptop. How do you like Gretchen in her do?”

  Gretchen, Big Mim’s right hand, the woman who truly ran Dalmally, wore a mobcap with a low-cut eighteenth-century gown in deep maroon. Over that she wore a starched bright white apron. During the mid-eighteenth century it wasn’t uncommon for women to be well dressed with an apron over their skirts. This protected the dress while they served or did anything messy. They removed the apron when dining or dancing. What set apart the lady of the house from the servants wasn’t so much the fabrics, because a rich household dressed the servants with great care and at great expense. The dividing line for women was jewelry.

  Mim, queen of Crozet, mourned the loss of elegance. She would quote Talleyrand: “He who did not live in the years before the Revolution cannot understand the sweetness of living.”

  Rev. Herb Jones would reply that it depended on one’s station. An aristocrat might live very well but then again could be impoverished. A merchant might live like a prince although not be allowed a coat-of-arms or any such distinction. A skilled laborer might also enjoy the fruits of his labors. And then there were the hundreds of thousands who toiled, who sowed but did not reap. What sweetness life held would be found under a woman’s petticoats, in the bottle, or perhaps one sunny day when the fellow found a gold coin on the road.

  To this Big Mim argued that the century is not that important when it comes to the suffering masses. There will always be millions on the bottom. No amount of social engineering has ever figured out how to truly distribute wealth without either punishing the enterprising, murdering the aristocrats, or burning up resources in wars.

  Perhaps she was right. The twenty-first century displayed no signs of a solution, although the leveling tendencies flared up regularly.

  When Susan beheld the gargantuan punch bowl, she was overwhelmed with its workmanship, including the perfection of the cursive engraving.

  Harry walked up next to her. “Every time I see this bowl, which Mim breaks out for her extravaganzas, I think the damned thing must be worth over a hundred thousand dollars. It’s lined in gold, for Christ’s sake.”

  Susan tipped back her head and laughed. “Harry, you are so predictable.”

  “What did I do now?”

  “Not one thing. You’re just you.” Susan accepted the filled silver cup from Hank with an appreciative nod.

  “Mizz Harry?”

  “Hank, I need a tonic water with lime. I’ll go to the bar for that. Can’t drink eggnog.”

  “Jim mixed it up himself. The first cup will taste ever so delicious.” His eyes sparkled. “The second cup will make you roar like a lion. If you drink a third, we’ll carry you out of here feetfirst.” His deep laugh rumbled.

  “Thanks for the warning.” Susan peered into her cup, a sprig of fresh mint floating on top along with a little sprinkle of nutmeg. The mint was Jim’s special touch when he gave instructions to Hank.

  “Now, you know, Mizz Big cooked up her orange blossoms. A little less lethal.” Hank winked.

  “Thanks. Merry Christmas, Hank.”

  “You, too, ladies.”

  As Susan accompanied Harry in her fight to reach the bar, she said, “Did you notice the color of the eggnog in the bowl?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Living room. I want that color in the living room.”

  “I thought you were only painting two rooms and that wasn’t one of them.” Harry snaked through two rotund guests whose stomachs nearly touched.

  “I know. I’m getting carried away. But I’ll pay you.”

  “Don’t be silly. I actually like painting. But what I’ll do is get a large batch mixed up; I don’t want to go back and have a second mix. Never quite matches up, I swear it. Anyway, I’ll get enough for my living room, too. That can be your Christmas present to me.”

  “I’m still getting the better deal.”

  “Actually, I am, because I’ve got you for my best friend.” Harry smiled, her teeth exceptionally white.

  After getting a large tonic water with a slice of lime, the two friends pushed through to the living room, a festival of white, red, and gold. Red and gold were Big Mim’s stable colors, as well.

  In this part of the world, even if a person had one acre with a run-in shed on it, they displayed stable colors, often in a small square on their truck on the driver’s side, certainly on the sign to their place. It added color to country already steeped in nature’s colorful wardrobe. Even winter greeted the eye with white, all shades of gray, mauve, purple, and brilliant red holly berries set against dark, glossy green. The sky gleamed intense robin’s egg blue or true turquoise, at night giving way to pink, salmon, every shade of scarlet to purple.

  The living room, indeed every room but those upstairs, bulged with friends, acquaintances, a smattering of nonfriends and a few enemies. The ages ranged from a few months old to Aunt Tally, closing in on one hundred. The net worth spanned less than twenty thousand dollars a year to over seven billion dollars. And there wasn’t only one billionaire in the room. There were folks who could neither read nor write and those who made their living with language. The mix, heady, even combustible, represented a true Virginia party, and it was perfect.

  Most everything Big Mim did was perfect. She didn’t cotton to not being the richest person at the party, but she made certain she was the most charming, elegant, and hospitable. Her legendary aesthetic abilities were much in evidence, and in this department she had hot competition. Again, it was Virginia. Colors had to be subtle, furniture had to be hand-built from exquisite woods, floors, often hundreds of years old, had to glow with the patina of time. If your house looked as though you’d spent a fortune decorating it, you were already off the board. This, of course, made the competition for beautiful homes and inviting interiors much, much harder. Big Mim ran first, although Alicia ran
a close second and BoomBoom wasn’t far behind: win, place, show.

  Then there was Harry, valiantly bringing up the rear. But she was cherished because she knew what was good and because she didn’t violate the integrity of her old farmhouse. Then, too, everyone knew she didn’t have the money to do it right.

  Tazio Chappars, from a wealthy African-American and Italian family in St. Louis, endured an adjustment period when she first moved to Albemarle County. Being an architect, she had definite ideas about design and she loved interior decorating even though it wasn’t her profession. Defiantly, she decorated her attractive clapboard house in a minimalist style. After two years she found that bored her. She began to be seduced by Wedgwood blues, putty grays, seaweed greens. The soft curve of the back of a Sheraton sofa sang a siren song. When her two brothers visited her, they teased her but they had to admit, a softness, a welcome comfort, was part of her home and life.

  Also part of her life was Paul de Silva, Big Mim’s steeplechase trainer. They couldn’t keep from touching each other’s hands as they spoke to others. BoomBoom, Alicia, Fair, and Ned chatted with them as Harry and Susan joined in.

  “Where have you been?” Ned asked.

  “Took me forever to get my eggnog.”

  Ned peeked into the silver cup. “Doesn’t look like it took forever to finish it.”

  “I’m sticking to one. Hank gave me fair warning.”

  “Every year Jim makes that concoction more potent.” Fair laughed.

  “Well, Harry, when are your mares due?” Paul asked.

  “Mid-February.”

  “Fair, you’d better party now, because once January is upon us you’ll be a busy man.” Tazio smiled.

  “Every foal is a gift. I never get tired of helping a new life.” Fair meant it, too.

  “I know all of you have bets on my mare. Did she get covered by Peggy Augustus’s stallion or did she behave like a slut with that donkey down the road?” BoomBoom giggled.

  “Girl’s gotta have a good time.” Harry giggled, too.

  “If she gives me a mule I’ll make it and ride it in the hunt field.”