“The four generations,” my guide explained. “Frederick’s son was named Charles. We call him Charles the Connoisseur. After the war, in which he fought heroically, he acquired the old masters you see in this room, and the Gobelin tapestries, and the signed French furniture. Also the rare reed organ. They’re all identified in our catalog, which sells for three dollars, but I’ll give you a copy . . . . Oh, dear! There’s blood all over this valuable Aubusson. Do you think the rug cleaners will be able to get it out? Marmalade has been licking his claws all morning. I think it was the taste of human blood that drove him out of his head.”
My efforts to interject a question or a comment went ignored as Ms. Finney led the way into the next room.
“Now we come to the third generation,” she said. “Theo was a world traveler and big-game hunter. Also a bit of a playboy like his grandfather, but don’t print that. Shot himself in India—not accidentally, they say. This is the gentlemen’s smoking room.”
On the tooled leather walls were mounted animal heads of every exotic species, as well as primitive hunting spears. The orange cat was still following us and was now smelling my shoes and making a disagreeable face.
“Kitty, stop that!” my guide scolded. “It’s not proper! Go and watch a mousehole . . . . To continue: the fourth generation established the fine library across the hall—thousands of rare books and first editions. Philip the Philanthropist, we named him. He and his charming wife, Margaret, deeded this house to the Historical Society when they disinherited their son. A tragic situation! He was their only child. Dennis the Disappointment, our custodian calls him. Dennis is in prison now, and we all feel more comfortable knowing he’s behind bars. Please don’t print that, however.”
I had given up trying to ask questions and was following the guide dumbly.
She was breathing normally now, and she went on with apparent relish: “Dennis was a student of mine when I was teaching elementary, and I knew he would never amount to anything. His father believed children should attend public school like anyone else, but things got so bad that they had to take him out. Later he was expelled from three colleges—not even good ones. He got into despicable kinds of trouble. Finally he was arrested in a . . . drug bust, I believe it’s called . . . . Marmalade! Leave the visitor alone!”
The cat was getting chummy now, rubbing against my ankles and taking friendly nips at my nylons.
“Dennis broke his mother’s heart,” Ms. Finney said. “Upstairs you’ll see her personal suite, all done in tones of peach. I’ll not go with you because my knees rebel at those twenty-two stairs, but you’ll find it well worth the climb. Be sure to see the glass cases with Margaret’s collection of Fabergé eggs. She also had priceless jewels that had been in the family for four generations. After they were stolen she went into a decline and died shortly after. Be sure to see her bathroom, all done in black onyx. Philip died quite recently in a plane crash in Europe. All very sad.”
We had reached the paneled dining room that could seat twenty-four, and my guide was extolling the boiserie, when Marmalade suddenly appeared with a dead mouse, which he dropped on my shoe. I shook it off ever so gently to avoid hurting his feelings or throwing him into a rage. He was a very peculiar animal.
“How very sweet!” Ms. Finney exclaimed. “He has brought you a present—to apologize for his rude behavior. Nice kitty!”
At this point there were sounds of activity in the rear of the house, and eventually a lanky old man approached us. He seemed vigorous for his age, but his arms and legs moved in a disjointed way, like a robot’s. Although it was summer he wore a dark business suit, rusty with age and dusty around the knees. Without preliminaries he announced in a high-pitched, reedy voice: “The fingerprint people are coming this afternoon, so we can’t open the museum—maybe not for several days. It depends how the investigation goes.”
Ms. Finney said: “This is Mr. Tibbitt, our beloved custodian. He was my principal when I was teaching elementary . . . . Now that you’re here, Mr. T, I’d like to run over to the hospital to see how Mrs. Sheffield is doing.”
“She’s all right. She’s in intensive care,” he said in his hooting voice. “But you never know. At her age she could go off like that.” He looked at Ms. Finney’s left hand. “Better tell them to put something on your scratches, Rhoda. How’s Marmalade? Is he feeling better?”
“He’s getting less antisocial,” I volunteered. “He brought me a mouse a few minutes ago.”
“He was mad as a hornet when I got here this morning,” Mr. Tibbitt said. “Growling and spitting and pacing the floor like a tiger in a cage. Too bad he can’t tell us what happened last night. I’ve just come from the police station. Gave them what information I could. This town used to have a one-man police force. All he had to do was help the children cross Main Street and drive the heavy tipplers home on Saturday night. Then the tourists started coming up here and we had to buy three police cars.”
The garrulous Rhoda Finney departed, leaving me with the garrulous Mr. Tibbitt. Now, I hoped, I could ask questions and receive answers. “Do you think the vandals were vacationers?”
“No, this is one thing we can’t blame on the tourists. There’s something I didn’t mention in front of Rhoda; didn’t want to have to call the ambulance again. Did you hear about the three convicts that escaped yesterday?”
I vaguely remembered an item on a radio newscast.
“One of them was a member of the Lockmaster family,” Mr. Tibbitt said.
“Dennis the Disappointment?”
“I see Rhoda has been telling family secrets. Yes, they caught the other two in a swamp, but Dennis is still at large. He won’t get far. He’s not smart enough.”
“Do you think it was Dennis who wrecked the drawing room?”
“No doubt about it. He knew how to get into the house—through the chute where they used to deliver coal in the old days.”
“Was it retaliation for being disinherited? Why did he concentrate on the drawing room? Why didn’t he just burn the house down?”
“Not smart enough to think of it. The police found a screwdriver on the floor, and they think he intended to mutilate his father’s portrait over the organ. He’s a sick boy. Whatever he was trying to do, the cat evidently stopped him. Those sharp fangs could tap a vein, you know. The way I figure it, Dennis was creeping into the dark room and stepped on Marmalade’s tail, and all of a sudden he’s attacked by seven wildcats, all screeching and biting and clawing.”
“So your official mouser doubles as a security guard?”
“Well, I have a theory,” Mr. Tibbitt said with a glint of excitement in his filmy eyes. “Marmalade spends most of his time watching the back corner of the organ when he isn’t sleeping, and I think there’s an important mousehole behind it. He always gets perturbed when I plug up one of his mouseholes, but I’ve never seen him so mad as he was this morning.”
“No wonder!” I said. “He thought someone was threatening his prime source of supply.”
“Let’s try an experiment to test my theory,” Mr. Tibbitt said, heading for the drawing room with a brisk but jerky gait.
I followed. The cat was there, watching the organ, with his body bunched up and his head thrust forward. He was the essence of concentration.
“Walk toward the organ,” Mr. Tibbitt instructed me, “and let’s see how he reacts.”
“Are you kidding?” I protested. The retired school principal was not kidding, and reluctantly I moved into the room, slowly and quietly. Marmalade’s ears swiveled. He was listening. I moved closer, and he turned his head. Seeing me, he jumped up and glared at me with threatening yellow eyes.
“Keep going,” said Mr. Tibbitt from his safe post in the entranceway.
The cat’s back arched and his tail ballooned and he bared his murderous-looking fangs. This was the animal that had rubbed my ankles affectionately and had brought me a gift! I took one more step, and he turned into a howling, snarling maniac. With a shriek
I ran back to safety, knocking over a Meissen plant stand in the process.
“See? I was right,” Mr. Tibbitt announced.
“Thanks a lot,” I said.
In the weeks following the Lockmaster experience I researched ten more small-town museums throughout the state. What they lacked in old masters, African spears, and Fabergé eggs, they made up in serenity. The attendants said only, “Please sign the book,” and “Thank you for coming.” There were no belligerent mousers or bloodied rugs.
In each town I perused local newspapers and listened to the obituaries and bowling scores on local radio; there were no follow-up stories on the Lockmaster break-in or the escaped convict. Only the evidence in the little black box convinced me I had not dreamed the entire episode.
At last I started for home, and on the freeway I came to an exit fifty miles from the Lockmaster Museum. I decided to take a detour. Reaching the museum during visiting hours, I found several cars parked at the curb and not a police car in sight. A sign in the door said: OPEN—WALK IN.
The mild-mannered, white-haired attendants sat at the reception desk, discussing arthritis. “Please sign the guest book,” said one of them. “Catalogs are three dollars,” said the other.
The drawing room was now in perfect order, and visitors tiptoed through the rooms, speaking in whispers. In vain I looked for Rhoda Finney and Marmalade and Mr. Tibbitt . . . . It had been a dream; the little black box lied!
I wandered through the main floor, then climbed the twenty-two stairs to have another look at the black onyx bathroom and the Fabergé eggs. And there—among the peach velvet draperies and peach satin boudoir chairs—I found an old man in a dark business suit, down on his knees, plugging a mousehole. The work was being supervised by a sleek gray cat!
“Mr. Tibbitt!” I cried. “Remember me? Where’s Marmalade?”
He struggled to his feet, unlocking one joint at a time. “Marmalade took early retirement,” he said in the thin high-pitched voice I remembered. “The poor cat went off his rocker completely, harassing visitors and intimidating the volunteer guides. He never got over his bad experience. He lives with me now.”
“Does he miss his rich diet of mice?”
“No, no, no. He never ate mice. He was strictly a professional mouser. The guides always fed him regular catfood.”
“And what about Dennis the Disappointment? I haven’t heard a thing!”
“He’s back in prison, I’m glad to say,” said Mr. Tibbitt. “And they found the jewels.”
“What jewels?”
“Why, the priceless gems that had been in the family since 1850! It was Dennis who had stolen them. He was living here then, and he hid them in the house, thinking he’d retrieve them when the investigation cooled off. Jewelers all over the world were on the lookout for the stuff, and it was right here in the house all the time. When Dennis escaped, he came back to collect his loot. Of course, he didn’t succeed. Never succeeded at anything, that boy.”
“Who found the jewels? And how did they know they were on the premises?”
“Let me sit down and rest a minute. I’m getting old,” Mr. Tibbitt said, looking for a chair that was not peach satin or velvet. We found a black horsehair bench in the onyx bathroom, and he went on: “The detectives started noticing Marmalade’s behavior, and they got suspicious about the organ. They remembered the unsolved case of the stolen jewels.”
“But Marmalade was interested in mice, not music.”
“Anyway, they brought in an expert on reed organs, and they told him about the screwdriver. The police found a screwdriver near the organ, near the family portraits. Do you remember?”
I remembered.
“Well, that was the clue! This organ expert took the screws out of the wind-chest, raised it a bit, and there they were—diamonds and emeralds worth a fortune!”
I turned off the tape recorder and said goodbye to Mr. Tibbitt. As I walked down the twenty-two stairs he called after me: “Don’t say anything about this in your book!”
The Dark One
“The Dark One” was first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, July 1966.
Only Dakh Won knows the true reason for his action that night on the moonlit path. It is not a cat’s nature to be vengeful—or heroic. He merely does what is necessary to secure food, warmth, comfort, peace, and an occasional scratch behind the ears. But Dakh Won is a Siamese, a breed known for its intelligence and loyalty.
He has always been called “the dark one,” because his fur is an unusually deep shade of fawn. Between his seal brown ears and his seal brown tail, the silky back shades hardly at all. Only his soft underside is pale. He is a husky cat whose strength ripples under his sleek coat, and his slanted eyes are full of sapphire secrets.
During his early life at the cattery Dakh Won enjoyed food, warmth, comfort, attention, and—most of all—peace. Then one day after he was full-grown, he was handed over to strange arms and exposed for the first time to hostility and conflict.
Before he was placed in a basket and carried away, a gentle and familiar voice said: “Dakh Won is very special. I wouldn’t sell him to anyone but you, Hilda.”
“You know I’ll give him a good home, Elizabeth.”
“How about your husband? Does he like animals?”
“He prefers dogs, but I’m the one who needs a pet. Jack’s away from home most of the time. All his construction jobs seem to be halfway across the state.”
“Honestly, Hilda, I don’t know how you stand it in the country. You were so active when you were a city gal.”
“It’s lonely, but I have my piano. I’d love to give lessons to the farm children in my community.”
“Why don’t you? It would be good for you.”
“Jack doesn’t like the idea.”
“Why on earth should he object?”
Hilda looked uncomfortable. “Oh, he’s funny about some things . . . . I hope Dakh Won likes music. Do cats like music?”
Elizabeth studied the face of her old friend. “Hilda, is everything all right with you and Jack? I’m worried about you.”
“Of course everything’s all right . . . . Now, I’d better leave if I’m going to catch that bus. I hope the cat won’t mind the ride.” Dakh Won was sniffing the strange pair of shoes and nibbling the tantalizing shoelaces; he had never seen laces with little tassels. Hilda said: “Isn’t that adorable, Elizabeth? He’s untying my shoelaces.”
“Let me tie them for you.”
“Thank you.” There was a sigh. “Aren’t these shoes horrible? The doctor says I’ll never wear pretty shoes again.”
“That was a terrible accident, Hilda—in more ways than one. You’re lucky to be alive.”
“It wasn’t really Jack’s fault, you know.”
“Yes, you’ve told me that before. Do you still have pain?”
“Not too much, but I’ll always have this ugly limp. That’s one reason I don’t mind hiding away in the country.”
Then Dakh Won was handed over, making a small verbal protest and spreading his toes in apprehension, but when he found himself in a covered basket, he settled down and was quiet throughout the long journey. Occasionally he felt reassured by strong fingers that reached into the basket, and he amiably allowed his ears to be flattened and his fur gently ruffled.
Dakh Won’s adopted home was a small house in the country, overlooking a ravine—a fascinating new world of fringed rugs, cozy heat registers, wide windowsills, soft chairs, and a grand piano.
He soon discovered the joys of sitting in this elevated box with half-opened lid, but it proved to be off-limits to cats. After lights were turned out for the night he was welcome, however, to share a soft bed with a warm armpit and reassuring heartbeat. That was where he slept—except on weekends.
“Hilda, I’m telling you for the last time: Get that animal out of this bed!”
“He isn’t bothering you, Jack. He’s over on my side.”
“I don’t want him in this bedroo
m! Lock him up in the basement.”
“It’s damp down there. He’ll howl all night.”
“Okay, if that cat’s more important than me, I’ll go down and bunk on the sofa.”
“Don’t bother. I’ll sleep on the sofa myself.”
“Thanks.”
“I knew you’d like the idea.”
“Don’t slam the door.”
Dakh Won jumped out of the warm bed and followed the bedroom slippers as they moved slowly down the stairs, one careful step at a time. His ears were laid back, and his fur was sharply ridged. He disliked loud voices, and the tension that he sensed made him vaguely uncomfortable.
Quarreling was not the only discomfort on weekends. There was the onslaught of feet. Nowhere on the floor could Dakh Won feel safe. He liked to sprawl full length in any patch of sun that warmed the rug. The floor was his domain, and feet were expected to detour. But on weekends his rights were ignored.
One Saturday he waked with a snarl of anguish when a crushing weight came down on the tip of his tail, and the next day he received a cruel blow to his soft underside when he was stretched trustingly in the middle of the hallway.
“Damn that cat! I tripped over him! I could have broke my leg. Hilda, do you hear me?”
“You should look where you’re going. Have you been drinking again?”
“You think more of that stinking beast than you do of me.”
“He smells better than that cigar you’re smoking.”
“It’s my house, and I’ll smoke what I like and walk where I like, and if that flea bait don’t keep out of my way—”
“You’re beginning to talk like those trashy people you associate with.”
“If he don’t keep out of my way, I’ll drown him!”
“He doesn’t have fleas, and you’re not going to touch him. He’s mine. I’m not going to die of loneliness in this godforsaken place. You don’t know what it’s like to be isolated all week—”
The Cat Who Had 14 Tales Page 5