by Lyle Howard
The northern column was a bell tower that Oscar would climb during his annual New Year’s bash to ring in the upcoming year. That tradition only lasted until 1980, when Oscar no longer had the strength to make the strenuous trek up the 104 stairs of the spiral staircase.
The southernmost column was an observation tower. From a pair of opposing windows on the top floor, one could look east as far as the eye could see out over the vast expanse of the Atlantic, or perhaps west at the ever changing skyline of Fort Lauderdale off in the distance. It was a place where one could be alone with their thoughts, or in Oscar’s case, a place where clandestine interludes could be held without his sister’s constant criticism of his sexual partiality.
The estate was noted on local maps and charts as Le Maison d’Paloma, named after the sibling’s mother who never lived long enough to see her son’s good fortune. The mansion had been photographed for postcards, tourist posters and had even been used as a set during the filming of a few motion pictures back in the early fifties. In one film, it doubled for Al Capone’s winter home in Miami.
As the Rolls pulled to a stop in front of the ornately carved archway, which led out into a garden courtyard, Parsons checked in his rearview mirror to appraise his employer’s condition. Gretchen’s eyes had returned to normal, and she was sitting with all the balance and grace of a woman half her age. Mitchell wondered if he should call the doctor to check her out, but after being threatened with termination the last time he tried, he decided that the episode had passed, and that her lucidity had returned … at least temporarily.
“How long do I have to sit back here, Mitchell?” Gretchen crowed.
Ah, the sweet song of normalcy, the bodyguard thought to himself. “I’m getting the door right away, ma’am.”
Parsons hurried around the side of the car and helped Gretchen out. “Where’s my umbrella, Mitchell?” she said, teetering out of the back seat. “The sun is burning my scalp, I can feel it!”
Mitchell looked up at the rain clouds that had blown in from the ocean and were now obscuring the sun. Gretchen’s head couldn’t have burned if he were holding a magnifying glass over it. “It’s only a few yards until you’re inside, ma’am. I’m sure you’ll be fine.”
Gretchen shook loose the bodyguard’s helping hand and stood toe to toe with the gentle giant. Her finger trembled violently as she shook it in his face. “Don’t question my judgment ever again, Mitchell. Whenever you pick me up, I always want you to have an umbrella ready. Day or night.”
Parsons looked confused. “At night, ma’am?”
When Gretchen spoke, the bodyguard could see that her front teeth were stained with bright red lipstick where she had missed her lips. “What? It doesn’t rain at night?”
Mitchell sighed with relief. “Oh, I thought you meant for sun protection, ma’am.”
Gretchen shook her head in frustration as she moved under the elaborate stone archway. “Sometimes I worry about your common sense, Mitchell. Sometimes, I really do.”
Parsons beamed at being outwitted by the crafty old woman. “Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am. I’ll have an umbrella handy for you next time.”
“Make sure you do, or else you’ll be pumping a jackhammer instead of iron,” Gretchen called back as she entered the house.
Parsons chuckled to himself because it was the same threat that she always used. He wasn’t even sure that Gretchen knew what the hell a jackhammer was. He shrugged off the comment and made a mental note to throw an umbrella in the trunk as he pulled the Rolls around to the garage.
Inside the cavernous interior of the mansion, Gretchen wandered aimlessly past the plate glass windows which overlooked the turbulent Atlantic. A storm system was moving in from the east and whipping the waves into a frothing frenzy. A flock of feeding seagulls swooped down out of the darkening sky, harvesting tiny, disoriented bait fish out of the foaming water like skilled professionals. A lone brown pelican glided over the seawall, perched himself on the embankment, monitoring their actions with aloof interest in any tasty morsels that the gulls may have the misfortune of discarding in his vicinity. As soon as the lazy bird realized that these gulls were too proficient to leave him any scraps, he opened his wings to the sky and fought the escalating headwind to move onto what he hoped would be a more successful location.
With her mind still fighting off the lingering traces of her relapse, Gretchen meandered about the elegant villa like she was a stranger to the grounds. As she strolled through the impeccably furnished dining salon and into the estate’s extensive library, what little sunlight lingered outside filtered in through a set of four elaborate stained-glass windows on the room’s eastern exposure. The room, and its voluminous collection of rare first editions, was bathed in the subtle glow of yellow, blue and rose shades. Gretchen’s hand brushed across the keyboard of the centerpiece of her brother’s library … his Steinway baby grand piano. The disjointed chords sounded by her errant contact with the keys, caused a hair-raising chill run to up her spine. Even though the clatter was nothing more than the haphazard striking of the piano’s hammers, it was the first music Gretchen had heard echoing in the unoccupied room for over ten years. She could almost visualize her brother during his younger years, sitting rigidly at the keyboard, entertaining his homosexual guests with a classical composition after one of his infamous ten-course dinners. The mere thought that his effeminate soul might still be haunting the room made Gretchen’s liver-spotted skin crawl.
A deafening clap of thunder shook the very foundation of the building as Mitchell fastened the car keys to a peg on the west wall of the industrial-sized kitchen. The copper pots and pans that hung by their handles from a rack over the oven rattled in an ear-numbing crescendo that made the bodyguard cover his ears. Mitchell’s first instinct was to dive for cover; ever since he was a child, lightning petrified him, but he wasn’t being paid to cower. Before the storm got any worse, he needed to check on Gretchen. He washed his hands off in the sink and carried the dishtowel with him as he walked into the dining salon.
The sky had turned black and cast very little light into the immense house. While it was no problem for Mitchell to find his way around, he was worried that Gretchen might be having a hard time.
He cupped his hands around his mouth and called out to her. “Ms. Peters-Smythe?” he shouted.
No answer. “Gretchen?” Nothing. Only the incessant ticking of a pendulum breached the insufferable silence, as it swayed perpetually inside of an old grandfather clock in the corner of the room.
This was not a good sign. She could be anywhere. He envisioned her crumpled body lying at the base of one of the staircases, battered and bruised from losing her balance when the house shook. He had to stop thinking of the worst.
The rain started. Slowly at first, but then with ever-increasing intensity. Like a million darts tapping at the glass, the rain smeared the window until it seemed to Mitchell that he was staring out at the courtyard through an opaque sheet of Vaseline.
His first priority was to check all of the staircases; there were six of them. With his heart caught up in his throat, he ran as fast as his feet would carry him, sliding around corners as his shoes lost their traction on the terra cotta tiles. Lightning flashed across the stucco walls as Mitchell dashed from room to room. From the study to the card room, there was no sign of Gretchen. Mitchell climbed each staircase and searched each of the upstairs bedrooms for any sign of his employer. There were seventeen bedrooms and eight separate bathrooms that he had to investigate.
Out of breath and dizzy from taking the stairs two at a time, Mitchell stood on one of the second-story landings and leaned against the handrail. His mighty chest heaved in staccato gasps, punctuated by his tongue wetting his thirsty lips. He had left no stone unturned, he thought to himself. She couldn’t have just disappeared!
Then it dawned on him … there was one place that he hadn’t checked yet, but she never went in there.
At the base of the southern towe
r there was a secret bedroom that had been strictly off-limits while Oscar was alive. Mitchell had forgotten all about the room. It was where Oscar did his … entertaining.
When Mitchell reached the tower, the door to Oscar’s special place was ajar. A distinctively curved sliding window had been designed into the tower so that Oscar and his guest, or guests, could view the ocean from bed. It was constructed out of high-tempered, one-way glass so that Oscar could see out, but no one could see in. The bleak, depressing light that filled the cylindrical-shaped room cast somber shadows on the coral walls.
Mitchell didn’t know how long it had been since anyone had stepped foot in the room, but it smelled damp and felt stuffy to him. Closing the door behind him, Mitchell found Gretchen sitting with her back against the baroque headboard, her white trench coat draped across the foot of the four-poster bed. In front of her on the flowered bedspread was what appeared to be, from Mitchell’s vantage point, a pet carrier.
“I’ve been looking all over for you Ms. Peters-Smythe. Didn’t you hear me calling you?”
Gretchen was sticking her bony finger in and out of the cage, playing with whatever was inside.
“Are you alright, Ms. Peters-Smythe?” The rain outside was blowing in from the ocean like Neptune himself had decided to unleash all of his fury on the mansion.
Gretchen looked up as though she was surprised to see Mitchell. She scrutinized her unfamiliar surroundings as though she had been brought there blindfolded and was seeing it for the first time. The sparsely decorated room sparked no memories in the dim void that had been her mind. “What is the meaning of this, Mitchell?”
Mitchell breathed out a heavy sigh of relief now that he knew she was okay. “What do you mean, ma’am?” he asked politely.
Gretchen’s head snapped to attention wherever she was going to reprimand him. He knew all of her body language by heart. “Did we, or did we not, decide that Oscar had to go?” she asked.
Mitchell didn’t want to let his jaw drop, but he knew it would have if he let it. “Oscar’s here, ma’am?”
Gretchen spun the pet carrier around until the cage door faced the foot of the bed. Mitchell bent over and looked inside. Sure enough, Oscar was back.
Oscar Peters-Smythe II was a purebred blue Persian cat that was allowed more liberties around the house than Mitchell was. No one was more surprised than Mitchell to see that the cat had returned. “I don’t understand how he’s here, ma’ am,” Mitchell said apologetically. “I followed your wishes and turned him in the day before yesterday.”
Gretchen pouted. “Now how is that possible? Do you think that Oscar drove himself here?”
Mitchell squinted inside the cage. He poked his finger through the bars and the cat spat at him. It was Oscar, all right. “Where did you find him, ma’am?”
Gretchen turned the cage back around and put her face up to the cage door. “I heard him crying all the way in the library. When I came in here, he was on the bed, just as you see him now.”
Mitchell looked down at his feet and saw traces of sand running from the sliding glass windows to the foot of the bed. He knelt down and rubbed a bit of the grit between his fingers. It was wet. “I don’t understand, ma’am. I know for a fact that I returned Oscar just as you instructed.”
Gretchen put her hands on her hips to emphasize her objections to having the animal in the house again. “Well, he doesn’t coordinate with all of the new furniture we’re expecting. He’s just not the right color anymore. Didn’t you tell them that?”
Mitchell was embarrassed to admit that he had. He wouldn’t have, but the clerk behind the counter had pressed him for an excuse. He was asked if the animal was sick, and he accidentally let the real reason slip out. “Yes ma’ am, I told them.”
“Then as soon as this downpour stops, I want him taken back again, is that clear?”
Mitchell only half-heard what Gretchen was saying. He had walked over to the window and was feeling the ground at the base of the glass. The wooden floor was soaked.
Gretchen opened the cage door and reached in for Oscar. The towel he was resting on was damp. Refusing to be removed, the cat balled itself up in the rear of the box.
Mitchell contemplated by the glass doors as he looked out through the driving rain at the ocean. The white capped swells were three to five feet above normal, but they hadn’t always been that way. With a sudden apprehension, his fingers slowly slid over the latch that secured the glass doors.
“Come on out, Oscar, you foolish little boy,” Mitchell heard Gretchen cooing to the cat behind his back, “Mommy won’t hurt you!”
Mitchell’s finger wrapped around the latch. “Come on, precious,” Gretchen pleaded.
“Let Mommy hold you one last time!”
The pounding rain flooded the small bedroom as the glass door glided open at Mitchell’s slightest influence. At that same instant, on the bed behind him, Gretchen Peters-Smythe and her precious Oscar were incinerated.
THREE
The mood in the downtown firehouse was one of total depletion. Paul Murdock, the driver of the last of the three engines to return, carefully backed the fluorescent yellow engine into the station while the station’s Lieutenant Manny Garcia stood out on the street and helped him guide it in.
The remainder of the twelve-man shift was already either in the showers, or stretched out in exhaustion on the freshly mowed lawn outside of the station. Fresh air was a pleasurable delicacy after spending nearly four-and-a-half hours with a bottled oxygen mask strapped to your face. Each of the five men and two women who were reclining on the grass beneath the listless American flag struggled to unwind and let nature take its course to revitalize their energy.
The early morning sun baked down on their ash-smeared faces as the sounds of the city, slowly coming to life, filled their ears. It was remarkable how one type of warmth could feel so healthy on your face while another brand of it could have you worried that your next breath might be your last.
This dawn had arrived like so many in the past, and like so many others would in the future. A grease fire in a local restaurant had spread unchecked to an adjacent costume store before the department had been notified. A faulty sprinkler system and a naive chef, who thought he could keep the fire under control by himself, contributed to the three-alarm inferno. In the end, it took six engines, forty men, and almost six hours to bring the blaze under control.
Julie Chapman, a five-year veteran to the department, lifted her nose to the breeze and let her mouth grin for the first time this morning. Her two-foot red ponytail was draped around her neck like a feather boa. “I think I smell eggs and ham cooking,” she said dreamily.
Felicia Ortiz let her head swivel toward the firehouse. She was the senior of the two women on the crew, and the least feminine. Growing up in a house full of older brothers, Felicia kept her dark hair short and her body rock hard. “Westlake must be making himself some breakfast. He’s always the first one out of the showers.”
Brandon Muller put his forearm over his eyes to shield his face from the rising sun. His complexion was fair and he tended to burn easily. “Fat chance he’ll cook anything for us.”
Ortiz never opened her eyes, but yanked out a blade of grass and slipped it between her lips like a cigarette. Having just kicked the habit, it was stressful situations like this past morning that made her want to smoke like a dragon. “Hey, Muller, it’s everyone for themselves here, remember? If you want something to eat, go and fix it yourself.”
Chapman was trying to conserve her strength, but she laughed anyway. Brandon Muller had a notorious reputation in the firehouse for being the laziest rookie, and worst cook, on the shift. “Yeah, Muller, how tough could it possibly be for you to toss a frozen breakfast into the microwave, anyway?”
Muller mumbled an obscenity under his breath in response, but as fatigued as he felt now, even the thought of lifting a frozen breakfast made his muscles tremble in protest.
Manny Garcia, after hav
ing made sure that the last engine was safely parked, found his way over to his fellow workers and stood over them shaking his head sarcastically. He was the patriarch of the shift, known for his practical jokes, and for being one of the best firefighters in the city. His hair was graying at the temples and his skin was weathered like cowhide, but he could still beat even the fastest rookie up a thirty-foot length of rope. “What a bunch of sad sacks you people look like! Anyone walking by would think you were lounging around here.”
Muller uncovered his face and squinted into the sun to look up at Garcia. “You have a problem, Lieutenant?” he said, showing no respect for his superior. “Come back later, we’re whipped.”
Garcia paced slowly in front of the group. With the exceptions of Chapman, Muller and Ortiz, all the rest of the men had dozed off. “I was only kidding, Muller,” Garcia assured, trying to keep his voice passive. “Chill out, for Pete’s sake! You all did an exceptional job this morning. The battalion chief said you should all be commended.”
Ortiz opened her mouth and let out a contagious yawn that was passed to Chapman and then on to Muller. “Tell him that if he really wants to thank us,” Ortiz said, smacking her lips, “he should get his big bottom over here and make us breakfast burritos!”
Garcia playfully kicked the bottom of Ortiz’s shoe. “You know you wouldn’t talk to the chief like that face to face.”
Static suddenly crackled over the walkie-talkie hanging from the lieutenant’s belt, making Muller wince at the aggravating noise. “Shut that damned thing off!” Muller whined.
Garcia immediately turned the knob lowering the volume. His crew had been to hell and back, and deserved the rest. “How did I happen to get one of the most disrespectful crews in the entire state?” Garcia asked.
Julie Chapman was the first to yawn this time. “You love us, Manny. You wouldn’t trade us for any other crew in the world.”