The cat’s first bound took him onto the coffee table; his second, up onto the back of the couch. Before Sam could grab him, the big cat jumped again; this time he scaled a pair of nearby drapes like a mountain climber flying up the sheer face of a cliff.
Reaching the top, Felix swung up onto the curtain rod and balanced there, a feline high wire act. Yet again, I thought, my house had turned into a circus.
I could have gotten up off the floor, but really, what was the point? It was just as easy to lie where I was and survey the chaos from down below.
Five big Poodles pretty much filled up the living room. Especially when they were chasing around in utter confusion, bouncing on and off the furniture, and threatening—if I’d read their canine language correctly—to disembowel the feline interloper who’d awakened them so unexpectedly from their nap.
Felix, mostly safe and crouched just below the ceiling, was still hissing. Every so often, he reached down and gave a low swipe with one of his paws. Those meager attempts at a defense passed at least several feet above the head of his nearest attacker, but they seemed to make him feel better.
Davey was yelling, I wasn’t entirely sure why. He’s eight, after all. Maybe he simply liked the idea of adding to the noise.
Sam, bless his heart, was laughing—doubled over, body shaking, totally beyond redemption, laughing.
I might have been tempted to laugh with him, but, unfortunately, I was too busy sneezing.
“That cat,” I sputtered when I finally managed to catch my breath, “has got to go.”
“Consider it done.” Sam was eyeing the distance between Felix and the floor. And possibly debating whether he’d need a ladder to make the rescue. “Davey, take the dogs and put them out back.”
My son complied, whistling to the Poodles, who followed him through the dining room, into the kitchen, and out the back door. As soon as the dogs disappeared, Felix relaxed visibly. His tail stopped swishing back and forth like a pendulum. He crouched low on the curtain rod and gazed around, appearing to consider his options.
“Good cat,” Sam crooned. “Come back down the way you went up.”
I levered myself up off the floor. “I don’t think cats are very good at taking orders.”
“No, but they’re great at looking out for their own self-interest. After he thinks about it for a minute, I bet Felix will realize he’s much better off down here than up there.”
Sam was right. And it didn’t even take a minute. Within thirty seconds, the big orange cat was nestled in Sam’s arms. The drapes, unfortunately, were looking somewhat the worse for wear. And I was still sneezing, damn it.
“You know,” I said, “I’ve never been around cats before. I think I must be allergic.”
“You can get shots for that.”
Sam was striding toward the front door. He opened it, leaned down, and deposited Felix on the step. Slowly, disdainfully, the cat sauntered off into the night.
“Or I could stop being around cats.”
“Yeah.” Sam grinned. “You could try.”
He shut the door, and I turned the dead bolt for good measure. Like that was going to do any good. My gaze slid up the stairs. I hoped Davey didn’t have any other surprises tucked away in his bedroom.
“How come my Poodles have to be confined or on leashes and her cats can go wherever they want?”
“They’re cats,” Sam said with a shrug. “It’s the way of the world.”
It was as good an answer as any.
The next day at school, I called Aunt Peg during my lunch hour.
“I have a job for you,” I said.
“You have a job for me?” I could just picture her brows rising up into her forehead. “That’s different.”
It certainly was. Aunt Peg loves to delegate. And, unfortunately, the person most likely to be delegated to was me.
“I want you to call your old friend, Sylvia Lennox, and find out where Mary’s son, Michael, is staying. Maybe get a phone number where I can reach him.”
“Oh, good,” said Peg.
“Oh, good…what?”
Call me suspicious. Or maybe just pragmatic. But Aunt Peg sounding smug was not necessarily a good thing.
“It’s about time you asked.”
“I only learned of the man’s existence on Saturday.”
“Two whole days.” She made it sound like an eternity. “I all but handed you a prime suspect, and it’s taken you forty-eight hours to show any interest in him.”
“Maybe you should have gone and talked to him,” I said mildly.
“Me? I’m not the one who signed up for an obedience class in New Canaan when there was a perfectly good agility group meeting in Greenwich.”
“And of course murders only happen around people who do obedience, never agility.”
I was being facetious, but Aunt Peg took me seriously. “So far, so good,” she said.
“Will you help me?” I asked.
“I already have. I’ve got Michael’s phone number right here. He’s probably expecting your call.”
“Why would he be doing that?”
“Because I told Sylvia all about you, of course. She was only too happy to give me his contact information. I gather the family wouldn’t mind a bit if he was subjected to a little harassment.”
“That’s what you told her I was?” I asked, incredulous. “A source of harassment?”
“Now, Melanie, I got you the phone number, didn’t I?”
“Yes, but—”
“Here it is. Are you ready?”
I sighed and picked up a pen. “Ready.”
Aunt Peg read off the information, then asked what else I’d been up to.
I told her about my visit to Winston Pumpernill the day before. I related the conversation I’d had with Harry Beamish and Sandy Sandstrum. And, saving the best for last, I repeated everything I could remember about what Minnie Lloyd had told me about her past.
Much as I complain about Aunt Peg’s interference, she listens well and often comes up with good ideas. It’s not unheard of for her to pull apart what I’ve said and ferret out some small piece of crucial information that I might have overlooked. Something I knew but hadn’t processed in the same way she did. Aunt Peg might make my life difficult at times, but I never discount what she has to say.
“That’s some group you’ve gotten yourself involved with,” she said when I was done. “I might have to come to class with you sometime just to meet them. Imagine already having a murderer in your midst. That’s quite impressive.”
“Don’t forget the control freak,” I said. “Not to mention the mysterious Julie.”
“What’s her breed?” Aunt Peg asked.
“Doberman. His name is Jack.”
“Black or red?”
“Black,” I said. “Why?”
“No particular reason. I’m just trying to form a picture.”
Dog people. It’s to be expected.
“You can often tell quite a lot about a person by his choice of dog,” Aunt Peg continued. “People who have Dobermans tend to be smart, low maintenance, punctual.”
That sounded like what I knew of Julie, at least so far. Or maybe it was just coincidence. I doubted that Aunt Peg’s hypothesis was grounded in scientific fact. Or even based on empirical evidence.
“I wonder if Michael has a dog?” she mused.
“The way my luck’s been running, he probably has a cat.”
“Now, now, don’t be such a pessimist.”
Moi? I thought. Perish the thought.
“A pessimist might think he had five cats. Or maybe ten.”
Aunt Peg sighed. “I don’t know what it is with you these days. You seem to have cats on the brain.”
Life, I thought. That’s what it was.
17
Wonder of wonders, Michael Livingston actually was expecting my call. Not only that, but he wanted to talk to me.
I’d barely even started to explain who I was when he broke in and
said, “Let’s meet somewhere. Where are you now?”
“At work,” I replied, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. “I can be done by four.” These days, with Sam in residence, I didn’t have to run straight home to meet Davey’s bus.
“Are you in Greenwich or somewhere else?”
“Greenwich,” I said. “Just north of downtown. And you’re in Byram?”
Michael mumbled an assent. Byram wasn’t the best address in the area, but rents were cheaper there, and spur-of-the-moment lodging was easier to come by. It was a bit of a come-down, though, for someone who had grown up on Clapboard Ridge.
“We can meet in the middle,” he said, naming a little bar on the Post Road. “Do you know where that is?”
I’d driven past the small, dark building but never ventured inside. I always thought it looked like the kind of place one might meet for an illicit assignation. Or maybe to buy drugs.
“Sure. I can find it.”
“Four o’clock then,” he said and hung up.
I snapped my own phone shut as Brittany Baxter sauntered into the room. She walked over to greet the Poodles, casting a sidelong glance at me out of the corner of her eye. Wanting to make sure I noticed, no doubt.
“I might as well just stay right here on the floor and play with your dogs,” the seventh grader said when I looked up. “Because we don’t have any work to do. I’m all caught up on my reading. Even Ed says I’m doing great.”
“Ed?”
“You know. Mr. Weinstein.”
“Yes, I know Mr. Weinstein.” I got up and came out from behind my desk. Faith and Eve were lying on their big cedar bed in the corner. I walked over to stand beside Brittany, who was crouching down in front of them. “I just wasn’t aware that his students had started calling him Ed.”
“Not all the students.” Brittany’s lashes fluttered. A becoming pink blush rose on her cheeks.
“Just you?”
“Just me.” She smiled. I felt the pit of my stomach go hollow.
“And you’ve caught up on all your reading?”
“Yeah, sure. Ed scheduled a couple of special catch-up sessions for me, and we went over the stuff together. Now I’m not behind anymore.”
I sat down on the floor next to her. “I thought that was my job.”
“Is that why you’re looking so grim?” Brittany giggled, and for a moment, she looked every bit like the twelve-year-old child she was. Close up, I could see the dark liner she’d smudged around her eyes and the stain she’d applied to her lips. “Are you afraid I won’t need you anymore?”
I resisted the impulse to reach out and smooth back the bangs that brushed low over her forehead. Beneath that wispy fringe, her eyes were a startling shade of blue. When I was twelve, I’d still been playing with dolls. Brittany, I suspected, was playing with fire.
“No,” I said softly, “that’s not what scares me at all.”
Promptly at four o’clock, I was standing outside a squat, dark brown box of a building. The bar had been plopped between two strip malls on Route One and was surrounded on all four sides by asphalt. Neon advertisements for various beers filled the small front windows. The sign over the door read Bubble Bubble. I wondered if that was a Shakespearean reference and, if so, whether those who had named the bar realized that the line after that was “toil and trouble.”
From the looks of the place, I suspected they might have.
Cars zipped by on the four-lane road behind me. Having come straight from school, I had the Poodles in the Volvo. Being April, it wasn’t really hot yet; but still the day was warm enough that I didn’t want to leave them parked in the sun. Finally, I found an area around the side that was shaded by the building itself. I cracked all four windows, locked the doors, and left Faith and Eve with explicit instructions not to talk to any strangers.
It looked like that kind of neighborhood.
I walked into the bar and stood for a moment in the doorway, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness within. When they did, I saw that the place was mostly empty. The lunch crowd had departed; the after-work drinkers had yet to arrive. Two pool tables took up half the room; a row of booths lined a side wall. A big TV, bracketed to the ceiling, was tuned to ESPN. On a weekday afternoon, there didn’t seem to be much sports action going on.
Nevertheless, the bartender was reclining back, his elbows propped against the lip of the bar, and his eyes fastened on the brightly lit screen as if it were the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen. After a minute, he reluctantly straightened. His gaze shifted my way. “Help you?”
I didn’t particularly want a beer, and this didn’t look like the kind of place where you’d want to ask for a glass of water. “Coke, please,” I said.
As I spoke, a man slid out of one of the booths. He was tall, broad shouldered, and not particularly handsome. The hair at his temples had begun to go gray, and his eyes looked tired. His pullover sweater was cashmere, but his jeans and loafers looked old and worn.
As he came toward me, he was already extending a hand. “Are you Melanie?”
“I am.”
“Thanks for taking the time to see me. Booth okay?”
I hadn’t even had time to nod before he walked over to the bar, picked up my drink, slid the bartender a bill, and then carried the glass back to where he’d been sitting. Having little choice in the matter, I simply followed.
I had thought this was going to be my meeting. But since Michael seemed to think he was in charge, I opted instead to hang back and let him dictate the pace. It didn’t take him long to find his stride.
“I imagine you’ve probably heard all sorts of terrible things about me,” he said when I slid in across from him. Michael pushed my glass toward me. As I took it, our fingers brushed briefly; then we both retreated to our own sides of the table.
“Actually, no. I don’t know much about you at all.”
“Really? I’d have expected Sylvia to fill your head with lots of nonsense. It’s the kind of thing she likes to do.”
“I’ve only met your cousin once,” I said. Aunt Peg had introduced us when the memorial service ended. “It was at the service on Saturday. Your name didn’t come up.”
Michael nodded. “I remember seeing you there. You were a friend of my mother’s then?”
I hesitated for a moment before answering. I didn’t want to admit that I’d only met his mother one time, too. “I liked your mother a great deal,” I said finally. “She seemed like a wonderful woman. I was at Winston Pumpernill with a therapy dog group. That’s how Mary and I became acquainted.”
“Paul’s group.”
“Yes.” I lifted my drink and took a sip. The soda was extra sweet, as though the syrup to seltzer ratio was off. It tasted great. “I gather you don’t get along very well with most of the family.”
“That would be an understatement. As you might imagine, that’s why I left.”
“How many years have you been away?”
“Too many.” The answer came quickly and without thought, as though Michael had heard the charge leveled at himself so many times that he’d adopted the accusation as his own. “Twenty, I guess, maybe more. My father died shortly after I graduated from college. That seemed like a good time to leave and strike out on my own.”
“Nothing unusual about that.”
“You wouldn’t think so, but that wasn’t the way the family felt. Tight-knit bunch, the Livingstons.”
“You didn’t want to keep in touch?” I tried to keep my tone neutral. The last thing I wanted to do was sound accusatory and put Michael on the defensive. But lots of people went off and made their own way after college; few totally lost contact with their families as a result.
Michael shrugged and sipped his drink. Amber liquid in a highball glass. Scotch, I was guessing.
“Do you come from a big family?” he asked, after a minute.
“No. Although sometimes it feels as though there are more of them than there really are. I have a brother. Ther
e were just two of us when we were growing up. Our parents died about a decade ago. No grandparents still living, but I have a couple of aunts that I see frequently.”
“In a big family like mine—a family that sees itself as an important entity—it’s easy to get smothered by people’s expectations. From the time I was a very young child, I knew I was being groomed to go into the family business. I was supposed to follow my father’s career path and to be just as successful at it as he had been.”
“And you weren’t happy about that?”
“Not entirely.” His words were clipped. “No.”
“Lots of people just starting out wouldn’t mind having that kind of opportunity handed to them.”
“I might not have minded, either, if I’d ever had even the slightest choice in the matter. Suppose from the time you were a child you were told that when you grew up you were going to manufacture widgets?”
“Is that what your family does?” I smiled. “Makes widgets?”
“We’re talking hypothetical here.” He tried to sound stern, then gave up and smiled, too. The lines around his eyes softened. “Actually, I don’t think it would matter to them what they did, as long as it pulled in a boatload of money.”
“In your place,” I admitted, “I guess I might have found the prospect of all that widget making a little restricting.”
“Precisely. Just for the record, I never said that I wouldn’t join the company. Only that I wanted to see a bit of the world on my own terms first. It shouldn’t have been a big deal. And it wouldn’t have been if my father had still been alive.”
The bartender pulled his eyes away from the television set long enough to lean over the bar in our direction. “Need any refills?”
We both shook our heads, and he went back to his show. Customer service wasn’t a priority at the Bubble Bubble.
“Problem was,” said Michael, “when Dad died unexpectedly, it left a hole that needed to be filled. And the family looked to me to fill it. No matter that I wasn’t ready, that I had no experience in the business, that I’d planned to work my way up. It was just presented to me as a fait accompli. Here’s your office, here’s your secretary, see you on Monday.”
Raining Cats & Dogs (A Melanie Travis Mystery) Page 15