Ah, Mallory. She had a humorous side, though it was the dark side of her. She knew this never-answered question would drive him crazy as long as he lived, and that would be her final punch line. He would not resolve this day’s mystery, but close upon the last hour of his life, he would get the joke—and laugh.
32
A thin odor of smoke mingled with a floral scent, though the only visible flowers were carved into the eaves, the shutters and the door to Iggy Conroy’s house.
The front wall was unharmed, but the lawn was marred by ruts of tire tracks, puddles of water and bushes trampled by the feet of firemen. Mallory followed this trail of damage around a corner of the house to see half a wall charred but still standing. Close to the blackened foundation, there was a rosebush—alive and not even wilted from the smoke and the heat of the fire.
She reduced this miracle to Nature’s parlor trick of windage.
The detective circled back to the front door, where she ignored a fire marshal’s posted warning not to trespass. After stripping away a seal of tape, she picked the first lock. Now the second one. She opened the door.
And heard the bells.
Jingle bells.
But the sound had not come from within. It came from above. She stepped well back from the house to coolly survey the rooftop. Nothing there. Turning toward the undamaged side of the house, she stared at a nearby oak tree. Something about it was—wrong. Her eye for perfect symmetry detected the off-kilter effect on half the branches, but this could not be the work of firemen.
Compelled all her life to examine every odd thing, Mallory crossed the lawn and the dirt driveway to stand before the tree. Nothing in the grass or foliage here had been disturbed by the crew of firefighters. No, some other agent, maybe a local storm, had caused a crack in the trunk’s first fork of a tree limb, and it was a recent injury judging by the run of sap. She looked up to see that a leafy branch had pierced a small eyelet window set just below the apex of the pitched roof. The sound of the bells must have come through that broken glass.
It was inside the house.
Mallory entered by the front door, gun in hand, for she had no faith in the spirit world; she only believed in what she could shoot. Once she was inside, the door shut itself, and she thought nothing of it. That was the way of old houses. Over time, they settled on an uneven keel, and the pull of gravity could swing a door on its hinge.
She stood in the wraparound smell of a wet ashtray. There were slicks of fire-hose water on the floor, and the walls were streaked with soot. Given only the poor light of smoke-grimed windowpanes, she made a cursory search and found no staircase to a second floor. The hallway leading to the burned-out bedroom was a blackened tunnel. She clicked on a penlight and found the entryway to the attic, a latched door in the scorched ceiling. Lying on the floor at her feet was a metal pole with a hook at one end. Dropped there in haste? Not by a fireman. Had Iggy Conroy also heard the sound of bells up there?
Raising the pole high, she fitted its hook into the overhead latch and pulled on it. The attic door opened downward, and down came a ladder, unfolding in the silence of well-greased joints. She climbed the wooden steps until she was head and shoulders above the attic floor, aiming her weapon at a heap of clothing in a tangle of hangers from a fallen wardrobe rack. Next the gun was turned on cardboard cartons and plastic ones, dusty suitcases—and one tree branch invading the house by several feet.
The air was thick with the scent of flowers carried on a breeze through the broken window glass. Was that why Iggy Conroy had dropped the latch pole? What had gotten to him first, the scent of roses where they did not grow or bells that could not ring themselves?
Stealthy, she climbed higher and caught a movement in the shadows. And then all was still as she stepped from the ladder to stand between the intruding tree branch—and the cat.
It stood over a mewling kitten nested in the heap of a moth-eaten coat. The mother cat’s eyes were wide, its body frozen in a moment of consideration: Fight for the baby or flight?
Self-interest triumphed, and then, in a run for the window, its collar jingled with small silver balls. Bells. The cat was quick. Not quick enough. Mallory had the animal in her hands, and it scratched her. Not a house cat. Too frantic to have ever been tame. Wild to get away from her. Definitely raised wild. Mallory bled from the scratch, but she did not fling the crazed animal into a wall. One hand flashed out to grab the hem of the coat, and she wrapped the cat tight, all but its head. It struggled more now, all panic and frenzy and fear, but Mallory needed that collar, hard evidence that Jonah could hold in his hand, bells he could ring. The cat tried to bite her. Its teeth tore her sleeve.
“Hey! I’m doing you a damn favor!”
And that was true enough. She knew this animal’s story with only a glance at the collar that had no wear, that still had a price tag tied to it.
An idiot in the neighborhood, maybe a lover of chipmunks or birds, must have captured this feral cat when its belly was swollen with kittens, when it could not run so fast. Then it had been hobbled with bells so that, unlike Mallory, it could not sneak up on its prey. By the skin and bones of this animal, she knew it had starved. For what crime? Had it hunted too close to some bastard’s damn birdfeeder?
When the small catch was undone and the collar was in Mallory’s hand, the feline was set free to leap for the tree limb, to dance along the branch, out the window and into the wide world, free at last to creep up on the little birdies—and eat them alive.
Mallory looked down at the left-behind kitten. So much for motherlove. It was tiny, only days old, and that would fit the time frame for the haunted jingle bells. There was only one, though the cat would have dropped a litter here. The mother must have been scared off by fire engines, and today it had returned to move the litter, kitten by kitten, to some new shelter.
Mallory pocketed the collar, her proof for the boy that the world was not magical, and his aunt was no longer a part of it. She turned around to descend the ladder and heard a noise behind her—so like a footfall. There were no hiding places up here, and nothing larger than the cat could pass through the glass shards of the small window.
But she was not alone. She knew this by the warning rise of fine hairs. The prickle of flesh.
The cat. It had come back for the last of its young, making a drop from the branch to the floor. Nothing else would fit. Yet she would not turn around to face it, nor would she even turn her head for a backward glance, and there was integrity in that resolve. No evidence was needed to preserve the iron rules of Mallory’s planet, a bleak place and a cold one, where cats were the bell ringers, where the endgame of life was a corpse, then dust, then—nothing.
The detective returned to her car in the driveway. Out here, there was no longer any trace of smoke in the air, only the floral perfume—stronger now—though there was not one live flower in the front yard. She followed the scent along a flagstone walkway that led her around the garage and past the broken oak to the back of the house. There, she stood on a patio and looked out over a meadow ringed by woodland. Given the great beauty of it, Mallory could not help but do the dry math—averaging the number of blooms to a bush, even measuring time by old growth grading down, row by row, to small green shoots, and then factoring in the space allotted to each plant in this plot of at least a half acre—
Hundreds of thousands of red roses grew in the hit man’s garden.
If she could believe in the story told to a child, every one of them had come from seeds planted after a girl had deserted the gardener—all this backbreaking work, years of it, all done on just the slender chance that, one day, the girl would return.
—
BRIGHT DAY graded into dusk on the Upper West Side, and Kathy Mallory never noticed the dimming of the light, never thought to turn on the lamp next to her chair. With only the mind’s eye to see by, and with a vengeance, she worked on her ledge
r of debts and losses: what the world owed her for what had been torn away.
Unforgivable acts.
Till the end of her life, she so badly needed to get even.
She never did.
Rare visitors to her apartment found no sign of any such quest. They saw it as a stark place of too much empty space and no personality, as if uninhabited—as if her foster mother, Helen, did not live in all the spice jars. Lou Markowitz’s best pipe and a pouch of makings dwelled in a drawer, and whenever Mallory opened it to find the aroma gone stale, she bought a fresh pouch of tobacco. Other residents of this crowded apartment emanated from objects hidden away in cupboards and closets.
And the cat’s collar was in her hand.
She never saw the boy again.
Jonah was left to believe that his aunt had lived on in bells and roses. By Mallory’s cold reckoning of a tally sheet for love and the sudden death of it, there were endings that could not and should not be borne.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carol O’Connell is the author of eleven previous Mallory novels, most recently It Happens in the Dark, and two stand-alones, The Judas Child and Bone by Bone. She lives in New York City.
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