His Purrfect Mate

by Georgette St. Clair

  Kenneth nodded at a phone on the kitchen counter. “Oh,” she said. “I forgot about landlines.” She grabbed the receiver and held it up to her ear.

  “No dial tone. The intruders must have cut the phone line,” she said with a shudder, imagining the lions creeping through the grass and slashing the lines.

  She was glad Kenneth and his chauffer were still there. The house felt lonely and haunted. She wished she could turn to Kenneth for comfort, to let him wrap his arms around her – not, of course, because she wanted him, as much as she wanted to feel his warmth and strength wrap around her.

  If they found Sophronia alive somewhere, she thought, she would insist that she seek professional help. It was horrifying that Sophronia had lived like this for as long as she had.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said, heading for the front door and glancing askance at the pool of blood. Kenneth and the chauffer followed her. “I’ll follow you into town to make sure that you’re all right,” Kenneth said. “Then we can-“

  “There is no ‘we’,” she cut him off quickly. She had to stop him talking because she felt weak and scared and she wanted his help more than anything, and she didn’t dare to depend on him or trust him. How had he known to follow her? Was he really there just to help, or was Alfonse right – did he have his own secret agenda? The last time a woman from her family had depended on a Chamberlin, things hadn’t ended well at all. “Right now my only concern is the safety of my grandmother and my mother. .”

  * * *

  “Mother, you need to tell me the truth about Sophronia.”

  The day after her grandmother’s disappearance, Chloe had done research all morning and then driven to Syracuse, to her mother’s antique shop. They sat in the store at a Victorian drop-leaf table made of black walnut, which had a “for sale” sign dangling from it. Hilary had brewed tea for both of them, carefully setting it on placemats on the table. She lived in the former servant’s quarters behind the store.

  The store was a sprawling old Victorian home which was crammed with a beautiful explosion of clutter, mostly European, 18th century to the present, but there was one entire section dedicated, rather incongruously, to middle Eastern art. Chloe had never questioned it before; now she found herself wondering if that was Sophronia’s influence. Sophronia had given the shop to her mother.

  There were circles under her mother’s eyes, and her mother was twisting a cloth handkerchief and untwisting it.

  Sophronia was still missing.

  She’d spent hours at the police station the day before, and they’d come up with nothing useful. The blood in the kitchen was definitely that of a panther shifter, the police had informed her. The police hadn’t found any sign of Sophronia. No ransom note or telephoned demand for reward money had been received. She hadn’t checked in to any hospitals, anywhere in New York. The house was in such a state of disorder that it was difficult to tell if anything had been stolen.

  “”What makes you think I haven’t been?”Her mother wasn’t meeting her eyes.

  “Because things just aren’t adding up. All those things that grandmother told you about Barrett Chamberlin and what he did to her…how closely did you investigate what she said?”

  “Well, I…I didn’t,” Hilary said hesitantly. “Why would I? I didn’t have any reason to question her.”

  Her mother was staring at the table.

  “Mother, there is still something that you’re not telling me. I’ve never pushed you on this, because it’s painful for you to talk about, but grandmother is missing, and somebody is breaking into Kenneth Chamberlin’s houses and stealing artwork that sounds very much like the artwork that Sophronia has been seeking. And furthermore, grandmother lied to you about quite a few things.”

  At her mother’s startled look, she said “I have spoken to Kenneth Chamberlin. Don’t give me that look! He told me that Barrett didn’t get married for five years after he and Sophronia broke it off. I went through old newspapers this morning to see if I could verify that, and it’s true. He announced his engagement to Sophronia in 1960. He announced his engagement to Elizabeth in 1965 and married her that year. Also, according to public records, in 1961 Sophronia broke into his house on multiple occasions, and went to jail for it. And she was working for Barrett, not the other way around. Why would she tell so many lies?”

  Her mother grimaced, but didn’t look surprised. “I’m not surprised she lied. I was hoping to never have to tell you about this,” she said. “It’s the curse. Or at least, Sophronia believed there was a curse.”

  “What kind of curse? Why would she be cursed?”

  “It happened after Sophronia and Barrett went to Turak together. Sophronia purchased a collection of artwork, statues, vases, ceramic shards, ceremonial vessels, all of which turned out to have been looted from the tomb of an ancient priest, and she and Barrett brought them back here, and immediately afterwards, that’s when everything in her life fell apart.”

  “Mother. I think it’s very likely that Barrett was the one who purchased the artwork, and I don’t think he actually stole it from her,” Chloe said, gently but firmly. “Sophronia worked for him, not the other way around. She was an adjunct professor, living on an academic’s salary. She wasn’t wealthy. He was. I looked through old newspaper clippings; he was a renowned art collector and adventurer from a young age, before he met her.”

  Her mother shrugged unhappily. “I have no way of knowing if that’s true or not. I do know this much. I talked to colleagues of hers at the university. I wanted to know what my mother was like when she was younger, if she…if she’d always hated children, or it was just me, something about me…”

  Suddenly her mother was blinking away tears.

  Chloe winced in sympathy and grabbed her mother’s hand. She pitied her grandmother for her obviously disturbed mental state, but she also hated what she’d done to Hilary. Hilary had always been such a strong, constant, presence in Chloe’s life (sometimes too present, in fact), that she couldn’t begin to imagine the pain of being abandoned by one’s own mother at birth. “Good heavens, mother. Of course it’s not you. You are a wonderful person who takes in stray animals and volunteers at soup kitchens. You have friends. You have me. You had daddy, until he died. You have like a million friends on Facebook.”

  “Well, that’s true,” her mother managed a pained smile.

  “Everybody loves you. Whatever reason she had for abandoning you, it’s a defect in her, not you. If you saw the inside of her house, you’d realize how crazy she is. When I went to her house there were sheets taped up over the mirrors, and the house is falling to pieces, it’s sinking into a jungle of weeds, and the dishes in the stink are more mold than dish, and…anyone with a house like that needs to be committed.”

  “But here’s the thing, Chloe. All her former friends say that when they knew her, she was happy, she was popular, she was normal, she was very much in love with Barrett Chamberlin, and he appeared to be very much in love with her – and after they returned from that expedition to Turak, everything in her life began falling apart. She stopped showing up at her classes, she cut off contact with all of her friends and colleagues, she lost her job at the university.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a curse,” Chloe said, shaking her head. “All of what you’re describing was caused by her own behavior.”

  “There was more, though. Her parents died of carbon monoxide poisoning shortly after she returned from Turak. Barrett threw her out of their house. All of her husbands died of various causes, heart attack, cancer, carbon monoxide poisoning. My own father only lived until I was fifteen. Two of her former close friends died, one drowned and one had an aneurysm; her colleagues told me that people actually started avoiding her, they were afraid to even talk to her. It was like a black cloud followed her everywhere she went.”

  Chloe took a sip of her rapidly cooling tea and set it carefully back on its saucer. “So tell me more about this curse. She believes it’s somehow conn
ected to the artwork?”

  “Yes. Around 3000 B.C., in the Tigris and Euphrates area. There were seven statues; two small ones, five large ones. She’d sketched pictures of them for me. Apparently, after all these terrible things started happening to her, she did research and found out that the statues were the guardian of a powerful priest’s tomb, and they were never to be separated. She and Barrett didn’t buy the entire collection, because they couldn’t afford it. She helped to split up these statues, and that’s why she was cursed, according to her.”

  She looked at Chloe. “And according to her, that is why, as soon as I was born, she left me with my father. She would speak to me by phone as I grew older, sometimes she would meet us for very short periods of time, but she would never spend any time with us. I’ve never been to her house. She thought I would die if she did. When my father died, she arranged for me to go to boarding school. That was when she told me about the curse.”

  “Why did you never tell me this before?”

  “Because I don’t believe in curses, but I think that believing that you’ve been cursed can affect your thinking, make you start believing that any bad thing that happens to you in the normal course of your life was caused by the curse. It can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I didn’t want you to go through life thinking that our family was cursed.” Her mother sighed heavily. “Personally, I think she’s suffering from some kind of mental illness that wasn’t diagnosed when she was younger. Probably schizophrenia; frequently that isn’t diagnosed until a person is in their late teens or early twenties.”

  “Given that Barrett was the one who most likely paid for the statues, is there a possibility that he was the one who was cursed, not her? After all, he did die in a plane crash.”

  “Maybe the curse is real, and they both were cursed,” Hilary mused, frowning. “I don’t know what to believe any more.”

  “Who do you think kidnapped her?” Chloe wondered. “And why?”

  “I think it was the people that she associated with. Over the years, on a number of occasions, she hired criminals to try to find the statues on Barrett’s property and steal them.”

  At Chloe’s shocked look, she added hastily “She thought that if she could get all the statues together, and return them to where they’d been stolen from, the curse would be lifted and I would be safe, and we could be a family again. She told me that. But maybe associating with the criminal element came back to bite her. There’s no honor among thieves, as they say.”

  “It doesn’t explain how she vanished without a trace, andwhy the wolf shifters were there waiting for me.”

  “No, it doesn’t.” Hilary set her tea down in its saucer with a clink, looking troubled.

  Chloe glanced around the store. “Why do you have that room full of ancient Middle Eastern art? You don’t even like that style of art.”

  “That was there when I graduated from college and your grandmother gave me the store. She insisted that I keep an eye out for any art from the Middle East, especially Sumerian art, obviously. I needed to keep my hand in with dealers of Middle Eastern art, in case any of the statues ever came on the market.” She made a face. “You’re right, I never liked the Sumerian artwork. I just felt obligated to help her. I thought that maybe if she got all the statues together, it would somehow convince her that the curse had been lifted.”

  Chloe sat in silence, thinking. She’d grown up in that shop, run by her mother. Her earliest memories were of playing amid the statues and paintings, hiding under old furniture, thumbing through gilt-edged books from decades past. She’d absorbed her mother’s love of history and art until her chosen major seemed inevitable.

  It was disconcerting to realize that her career, her life’s work, was not entirely her own choice. She’d been subtly steered into it as a hand-me-down of her grandmother’s obsession.

  “We’ve had this shadow hanging over our heads for our entire lives,” she said to her mother. “We need to get to the bottom of this. We need answers.”

  “I know, but how? I don’t know what more to do at this point.”

  “We need to start at the beginning, with the artwork that Kenneth’s grandfather brought back from Turak, the collection that apparently started all of this drama and misery. Kenneth has made me an offer; if I help him catalogue the collection, he’ll make a very generous donation to the university. I’m going to do it.”

  “No! We don’t associate with Chamberlins! I simply forbid it!” Her mother protested. It had an automatic ring to it, as if she’d been listening to Sophronia’s party line for so long that when she heard the word “Chamberlin” her defenses automatically snapped into place.

  “Mother, I’m twenty-eight years old. You can’t forbid anything. This may be the only way to find Sophronia. And I’m not going to have this legacy of madness hanging over our heads forever. I may want to marry and have children some day.” Why did Kenneth’s face flash through her head when she thought that, and why did she suddenly imagine panther cubs racing up a tree? “If my grandmother was mentally ill, I need to know that, and if our family really is cursed, I need to know that too.”

  “You can not have anything to do with that man!” Hilary said, voice rising with alarm. “Look what associating with that family cost your grandmother!”

  “Mother, do you hear yourself? You admit that Sophronia’s been acting like a crazy woman since, basically, the 1960s. We don’t know what caused it. I’m not saying that I suddenly trust the Chamberlins; I’m saying that I have the opportunity to solve this mystery once and for all, and I’m going to take it. I will be fine. I’ll call you. No, even better, I’ll update my Facebook page!” And she pushed back her chair, got up, and walked out of the shop quickly.

  “Chloe! Chloe! This is a bad idea!” her mother shouted. She let the front door shut behind her with a jingle of little metal bells.

  As she walked outside, she had an uneasy feeling that somebody was watching her. She stopped and glanced up and down the street, and then at the big picture window of the coffee shop that faced her mother’s store.

  Alfonse was sitting there in the window, not even trying to hide the fact that he was watching her.

  Irritated, she stalked across the street and stomped into the shop. Alfonse calmly sipped his coffee. He was wearing a blazer and khakis, looking as handsome as ever. He was big and broad-shouldered; he definitely had an ex-military air about him, Chloe thought. He caught her eye and smiled when she walked in.

  “Now this is just getting creepy,” she snapped.

  “Nice to see you too. You never called.” He gestured at the seat across from him. “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”

  “I told you that I wouldn’t call. And no, I do not want to have coffee with you; this isn’t a social visit. Why are you here?”

  He set down his coffee and looked at her reprovingly. “Did I not warn you about Kenneth? I know what happened at your grandmother’s house – how you showed up and she was gone, how those wolf shifters were waiting for you.”

  “How do you know that?” she demanded suspiciously.

  “I have clients who have an interest in your grandmother, and in the stolen artwork. Do you think it’s a coincidence that Kenneth was there waiting for you, at just the right moment? Or do you think that he knew that the assault was going to take place – because he arranged it himself, and then showed up to make himself look like a hero and get you to trust him? That seems much more likely.”

  Now Chloe was thoroughly unnerved. “Here’s what I think. You’re following me, you’re freaking me out, and if it doesn’t stop I’ll report you to the police.”

  “I’m not the enemy here. Your grandmother didn’t disappear until Kenneth showed up on the scene, did she? Please, have a seat.”

  “Who are your clients?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say at this point, but they are very interested in arranging a meeting with you. We could make it worth your while. Word is out that Mr. Chamberlin has offe
red a large sum of money to the university, to secure your services. We can offer you double whatever he is paying, and give you the answers that you seek. We could go meet them right now.”

  Chloe fixed him with a cold stare. “Get in a car with a stalker who won’t take no for an answer, to meet mystery clients who won’t even identify themselves, assuming they even exist? I think not. I’m leaving now, and I better not see you in my rearview mirror.” She thought that she’d injected a suitable tone of menace in her voice, but when she turned to walked out, she tripped on the oval braided doormat, fell into the doorframe, and dropped her purse, spilling its contents on the ground.

  Red-faced, she frantically scooped her purse and makeup and tissues and pens and notepad back in, and slunk out of the shop.

  Someday, I will actually master the art of the dramatic exit, she promised herself as she pulled away.

  She was back in Russettville an hour later, and decided to head straight for Kenneth’s hotel rather than go home.

  Kenneth was staying at Russetville’s finest hotel, the Rosewood Inn. When she got there, she was surprised to find that his chauffer was waiting for her in the lobby. “Hello, Miss Novak. Mr. Chamberlin’s been expecting you,” he told her.

  “He has?” she was startled, and annoyed.

  The chauffer smiled politely, but she could swear she saw a glint of amusement in the man’s eyes.

  The arrogance of Kenneth, just assuming that she’d come crawling back! What made it even more annoying was that he was right.

  Well, she might be ready to help him catalogue his collection, but that was all that he was going to get from her. She still didn’t trust the man. If nothing else, anyone who could make her heart pound and her genitals light up the way Kenneth did was clearly dangerous.

  Irritated, she followed the chauffer to Kenneth’s suite.

  The suite, apparently, was an entire wing of the hotel. Kenneth was waiting for her in the penthouse suite’s living room, which was adorned with rich woods, fluffy rugs, and overstuffed antique furniture.