Ink, Red, Dead

by Joanna Campbell Slan

  “Marla?”

  I paused to listen.

  Then I saw it: Marla’s purse. The keys dangled half-in and half-out.

  She wouldn’t have left without it.

  Couldn’t have.

  “Marla? Marla!” I stumbled over furry bodies, moving as fast as I could, keeping on the narrow pathway. I wandered through a rabbit warren of flattened and stacked cardboard boxes. I found myself surrounded by tall metal shelves, each crammed with stuff: cans, broken toys, clothing, broken appliances, and old paperback books. The smell of must and mold intensified the stink of cat pee. I gagged but kept moving. “Marla? Marla, are you in here?”

  I couldn’t tell if I heard a noise or not. The cats’ cries crescendoed to a loud cacophony of complaints.

  A crowd of cats, lean and hungry, kept pace with me. There were so many, I couldn’t count them.

  I came upon a once-beautiful round oak pedestal table marred by the scratch marks of dozens of claws. On the table top sat a dirty pet bed. Three cats slept there. Except that they weren’t sleeping. They were moving, but not their muscles, movement came from under the skin. The motion caused by maggots.

  I swallowed hard, tried not to heave, and retraced my steps.

  “Mar-la!” I yelled at the top of my voice. I couldn’t take much more of this.

  A moan beckoned me deeper into the dark house, a place where junk blocked all the light from the windows and fixtures.

  “Marla!” I yelled again, coughing some as the fumes snatched the air from my lungs. The tightness in my chest cut off my wind, like a band tightening across my ribs. An asthma attack. Coming soon to a pair of lungs near you.

  “Uhhh.” The noise came from the back of the house. It was human and it was in distress.

  Chapter 4

  Sweat poured down my face and dripped into my eyes. I kept wiping it with the back of my sleeve so I could keep going.

  I found a door, pushed it open, spotted a pair of legs hanging off the end of a bed.

  “Marla?”

  She whimpered.

  Pushing cats aside, I ran to her and switched on a bedside lamp. Her skin felt clammy to my touch. I could see her heartbeat through the thin skin in her temple. She didn’t appear to be bleeding. I was afraid to encourage her to sit up. There was a half a glass of water on a low dresser nearby. I thought about offering it to her, but I was scared that she might choke or drown. Instead, I dipped my fingers into it and applied it to her lips. She responded by licking the water off.

  “Hang on, I’ll get help.” I raced out the way I’d come, hopping over cats as best I could. I threw the front door open and bumped Clancy on the backside.

  “Oh,” she moaned. She hung over the wrought iron railing and wiped her mouth.

  “Marla’s in there.”

  “She okay?” Clancy burped quietly. “Excuse me. I’ve been sick.”

  “I’m calling in the Calvary.” I fished in my purse for my phone. I also needed my inhaler. I could feel my lungs starting to react.

  “That’s cavalry.” Clancy said before heaving.

  I dialed nine-one-one. After giving the dispatcher our address and requesting an ambulance, I hit the speed dial button for my boyfriend, Detective Chad Detweiler.

  “Hey, I’m okay, but we’ve got a situation here.” In gasps and blurts, I told him where I was, why I was there, and how many cats were in the house.

  He promised to call Animal Control and his old partner, Detective Stan Hadcho. “Hadcho is in your area. He’s on that missing woman case. I’ll send him to you. Hey, you and Clancy need to stay out of that house. Remember those brothers in New York? Go sit in the car and wait for help. Seriously. The responders don’t need to worry about the two of you as well as Mrs. Lever.”

  I told him goodbye and thought about his suggestion. Clancy straightened up long enough to look at me and ask, “So?”

  “Detweiler said we should stay away while help comes, but I can’t go sit in the car. Someone has to check on Marla.” Of course, that’s what I tried to say. The truth is my asthma now rendered talking nearly impossible. I wheezed like a bad church organ.

  “I can’t do it, Kiki. I can’t go in there.” Clancy clung to the railing like a seasick passenger. “You can’t either. You can barely breathe!”

  I nodded and searched in earnest for my inhaler. I found it at the bottom of my purse. I took one puff, watched Clancy get the dry heaves, and took a second puff. I was exhaling slowly when Detective Stan Hadcho came around the corner on two wheels, gravel flying from behind his huge county-issued Impala. He threw the car into park, flipped open the driver’s side door and hopped out with the engine still running. “Chad called. You okay? What’s up?”

  “I didn’t want to go in. Scout’s honor I didn’t.” I held up two fingers in a mock salute. “But, I knew something was wrong. Tell me I did the right thing.”

  The YUGA-YUGA-YUGA blare of the ambulance siren interrupted us.

  Hadcho fisted his hands on his hips, looked around, and shook his head. “I have a bad feeling about this. A very bad feeling. Let me turn off the car.”

  Chapter 5

  That’s how he came to take our report, explaining how we happened to gain entrance to Marla Lever’s house and find her incapacitated while cats swarmed the premises like ants flock to a stray breadcrumb.

  We sat around Marla’s dining room table. All three of us stuffed tissues up in our noses to dull the smell. Not that it helped much.

  “Kiki wanted to turn around and go home. But Rebekkah Goldfader would have given us heck times three.” Despite the heat, Clancy shivered. She, too, had tissues sticking out of her nose. But somehow she managed to look elegant. I have NO idea how. I think she channeled Jackie Kennedy.

  Clancy paused, glanced over at the pet bed and the dead bodies. “Are those things…are they moving? That can’t be…” then she ran toward the front door.

  “Get that out of here.” Hadcho pointed to the offending object. An Animal Control officer carried away the pet bed and its occupants. Someone set up a couple of box fans. Hadcho snagged one. He pulled up a sash and stuck a box fan against the window screen. The outside air felt heavenly on my sweaty skin.

  Animal Control officers began rounding up kitties. On the hissing ones, they used a catchpole. At first, most of the cats ran away, and I worried that if the officers got too rambunctious with their duties, they might knock over some of the piles of newspapers. Hadcho must have come to the same conclusion.

  “Hey! You got find another way. You can’t be chasing these around. It’s not safe.”

  “They’re starving,” I said. “Got any cat food?”

  One of the officers opened a cat of Little Friskies and stuck it in a big carrier. In two seconds flat, she had a dozen cats fighting to climb aboard.

  “Those poor animals.” Clancy rejoined us, blotting her lips and watching in horror.

  “I bet they are dehydrated.” I reached over, lightly pulled up the scruff of the neck of a tabby passing by. The fur stayed in an upright, tented position. “Yep. Definitely dehydrated. I’ll just go into the kitchen and—”

  “You will do no such thing. Sit down.” Hadcho pointed to the seat opposite him. “This isn’t your first rodeo. You know the drill. I need a report from both of you.”

  A trickle of moisture inched its way between my boobs.

  “Heads up.” A couple of EMTs shuffled by, using their feet to sweep felines out of their way. They carried Marla on a stretcher, maneuvering their burden through the floor to ceiling stacks of newspapers. A third EMT followed with a bag of saline and a tank of oxygen attached to our ailing friend.

  I raced over to keep the animals from underfoot, but the cats were faster than I. More wily, too. Two of them made a beeline for the front door. I grabbed a piece of cardstock and used it as a makeshift gate to hold them back.

  I was partially successful. Only one cat escaped.

  One out of a hundred. My best guesstimate.
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  “That bites,” said Hadcho, watching the techs struggle. “Not even enough room to use the gurney. Good thing she doesn’t weigh much.”

  “Think she’ll make it?”

  “Who knows?” Hadcho shrugged. “She wouldn’t have a chance if you two hadn’t shown up. That’s one lucky scrapbooker.”

  “Or one unlucky scrapbooker.” The revolving red lights of the ambulance bounced off the glass of Marla’s front door.

  “Okay,” Hadcho grunted. “Tell me what happened. Take it from the top.”

  Chapter 6

  “How come you’re here?” Hadcho asked.

  “Rebekkah.” First word out of our collective mouths. Clancy and I spoke like a Greek chorus.

  “Pardon? She here?”

  “Nope. She’s back at the store.” I hitched my thumb in the general direction of Time in a Bottle. “See, she’s Dodie Goldfader’s daughter and she’s been running the business.”

  “I thought you were Dodie Goldfader’s ace scrapbooker. And you own a part of the business, don’t you? Then why is this Rebekkah running things?” Hadcho asked.

  “That’s exactly the problem. Rebekkah shouldn’t be running the shop. She doesn’t have any experience. But Dodie is majority owner. And Rebekkah is her pride and joy. We’re all dancing hava negila to her klezmer band.” Clancy’s face reflected her disapproval.

  “Anyway, Rebekkah came up with this idea to establish ‘community,’” I explained. “She decided we should sponsor this roving scrapbook crop. Go from one customer’s house to the next. I’ve been telling Dodie it’s a bad idea. It puts too much pressure on people.”

  “So this Mrs. Lever was of your customers, and you planned to have a party here? Aren’t your standards usually a little higher than this,” and with a sweep of his hand he indicated the overgrown yard and general rundown appearance of Marla’s house. “That would have been some picnic.”

  “Yep. Marla Lever is a very nice person. Very sweet. She sort of wandered in one day. Then she brought pictures of her cats and wanted to make an album. Next thing I know, Rebekkah says Marla should have the other scrapbookers come here. Marla panicked, but Rebekkah—”

  “We’ve been saying ‘but Rebekkah’ a lot lately,” Clancy interrupted.

  “But Rebekkah wouldn’t let it go. Even when Marla said it wouldn’t work for her. Rebekkah kept hounding the poor woman. I suggested that Clancy and I could come early. That way we could do quickie cleaning job or help get things ready. I talked to Marla yesterday. She said she was trying to get someone to mow her lawn. You can see that didn’t happen.”

  “Mowing won’t cut it.” He snickered at his own joke. “Someone needs to spray everything with RoundUp, kill it, and start over.”

  “As soon as I saw the place, my gut told me there was a problem,” I said.

  “No kidding?” Hadcho smirked. “What was your first clue, Sherlock?”

  I ignored him and kept on talking. “I called Rebekkah from Clancy’s car, and she told me she didn’t have time to listen to my whining.” I did not add that Rebekkah never listened to any of us, about anything. She pretty much did as she pleased.

  “Kiki’s been complaining—” Clancy started.

  “Not complaining. Just protesting. Want to make that perfectly clear,” I interrupted her.

  “Protesting, complaining, whatever. Kiki’s been telling our boss to re-think this. In fact, Kiki’s been worried about it for months.” Clancy ended her tirade with a tiny huff of disapproval.

  “No joke?” Detective Stan Hadcho pointed his pen at me. “Listen up, Kiki. Next time you get that ucky feeling, do not pass go. Turn around. Hop in the car. Drive off into the sunset. Got it?”

  I shrugged. “What difference does it make? Sooner or later somebody had to stumble in on this mess.”

  “Yeah, well, next time let someone else do the stumbling. You steer clear of messes.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Do you realize how lucky you were that she’s out of it? Mrs. Lever, I mean,” Hadcho said.

  “Excuse me?” I had no idea what he meant.

  “Look. She’s an animal hoarder. Emotionally disturbed. Might even have a touch of dementia.”

  An Animal Control officer dressed in dark brown pants and a neatly pressed khaki shirt waved to Hadcho. “This van’s full. We’re taking these to the shelter. Another van is on the way.”

  “Marla’s in trouble?” I didn’t want that. I was just trying to help.

  “The St. Louis County Ordinance allows homeowners to have five pets,” Hadcho said. “Four of any one species. These cats have to go. Once Animal Control gets them all in carriers, they’ll take every one of them to the animal shelter. We are lucky, in a way, that Mrs. Lever is out of it. Hoarders do not like seeing their pets taken away. They get militant. Your friend is likely to become unglued.” He laughed and elbowed me. “Get it? A scrapbooker coming unglued?”

  I frowned. That wasn’t funny. Not to me.

  “Sometimes they go from unglued to violent,” Hadcho said, snapping his fingers. “Like that.”

  “But they’ll take good care of the cats at the animal shelter. They’ll find them homes, right? It’s a no-kill shelter, so they have to.” Even as I said it, I knew better. I felt sick, not sick-at-my-stomach sick like Clancy had been. Sick-at-my-heart sick.

  “No, they’ll probably put a quarter of them down.”

  “Put them down? What? Why?”

  “Look at them. Most of them are beyond help. I doubt any of them are up to date on their vaccinations. See that one? He’s so lethargic? Doesn’t even notice his pals being all stirred up. I bet he has feline distemper virus. If one has it, they all probably do. These cats have been sick a long time. See how scrawny that one is? And that one? His eyes are matted shut? And that big black cat in the corner? Notice how dull his coat is? That’s a sign of feline leukemia. The vet at the shelter will check them over, but I can tell you from experience that a good number of them will be euthanized.” He watched me to see if that sunk in.

  “That’s…awful.”

  Hadcho sure knew a lot about cats. I wondered why.

  “Yeah. It is. She’ll probably go bonkers when she finds out. Like I said, you are lucky she was out like a light.”

  “Yeh,” I said. “That’s me. I’m really, really lucky.”

  Chapter 7

  “Rebekkah?” I held my phone to my ear as I stood on the curb and stared at the backyards of houses. Nice houses. Houses with normal numbers of pets, like two. Upper limit, three. “I need you to call everyone coming to Marla Lever’s house. Tell them the event has been cancelled. Hello? Rebekkah? You there? Could you turn down the music?”

  “Can’t hear you.”

  Of course she couldn’t. She regularly turned the store radio to the loudest hip-hop station on the dial. This was her little passive-aggressive way of protesting the forced change in her lifestyle. Rebekkah told her parents that she wasn’t sure about her major, accounting. In fact, she wasn’t sure she wanted to finish school, period. They said, “No problem. You can think it over in the comfort of our home.”

  I gather they went back and forth a couple of rounds before Horace drove a rented Penske van to Rebekkah’s shared apartment right off the campus of University of Missouri. From the loud conversations that erupted behind the closed door to Dodie’s office, I don’t think Rebekkah came home willingly. In fact, I know she didn’t.

  When her parents saw the tattoo of St. Francis on her backside—a “tramp stamp” is what they call it—the disagreement escalated into full-blown nuclear warfare.

  “You shall not make gashes in your flesh for the dead, or incise any marks on yourselves; I am the Lord,” Dodie moaned. That “thump, thump, thump” sound was her banging her head against her desk. “You’ve read Leviticus nineteen-twenty-eight! You can’t be buried in a Jewish cemetery! Oy!”

  “Maybe I don’t care!” Rebekkah shouted.

  “I’m calling your father. He�
��ll have a heart attack. How could you have ruined your flesh like that! What are you, meshuggah?” There followed a long, low moan. “Show me. Right now. What is that? Who is that? Moses Montefiore?”

  I pressed my ear against the door. Yes, I know that’s rude. I know it was uncalled for. I know it was bad. But I did it. In the interest of research and job security I needed to know what was going on.

  “Saint Francis of Assisi.”

  “Eekkk! You got a tattoo—and it’s not even Hebrew? Does it wash off?”

  “I hope not. I paid good money for it.”

  “Argh.” This was a combination moan and gurgle from Dodie.

  “Mommy, he was a good man. He loved animals!”

  More moaning.

  The door minder dinged and I went to wait on customers.

  Horace Goldfader arrived shortly thereafter. I saw his car pull into our parking lot. The one time I raced into the backroom to check on a special order I heard weeping and wailing coming from Dodie’s office, as if there was a funeral service being held.

  I don’t know how they left matters, but shortly thereafter, they printed up business cards identifying Rebekkah as the “Store Mangler” of Time in a Bottle. I tried not to sit in judgment of them. Being a parent is the hardest job I’ve ever had, and all of us hire on as amateurs. Had I been in the Goldfaders’ position, I might have done the same. Dodie was still weak from her chemo and radiation treatment. She couldn’t give the store the attention it needed and deserved. Horace worked sixty hours a week at his new job. College wasn’t cheap. Bringing Rebekkah home made more sense than paying for an education she wasn’t getting. We certainly needed help at the store. Maybe they reasoned that giving Rebekkah more responsibility would force her to up her game.

  I don’t know.

  “Gee, I’d have gotten a tattoo, too, if it meant a promotion,” said Clancy when I told her the story. We worked together companionably to trace circles on paper for an upcoming Zentangle® class. “She’s our boss?”