Claw & Disorder

by Eileen Watkins

  As instructed, Robert had placed the two brown stoneware vases at each end of the dining table and filled them with dried grasses and flowers, artistically arranged. As we entered that space, a nice-looking man with brown hair graying at the temples, and a full, trimmed beard, rose from one of the caned chairs and took a plate and a coffee mug to the sink. He wore a striped dress shirt and dark slacks, so I presumed this was Mr. Foster, even before Whitney made the introductions.

  “Thought you were going to blow off work today!” she teased him, with a glint in her eye.

  “Well, as you can see, I’m getting a late start,” he answered, in the same light vein. “But I might as well go in. I can do more good there than here.” About to leave, Donald Foster noticed something above his head and frowned. “Uh-oh. This cabinet door still doesn’t shut right.”

  “Sshh!” Whitney warned him. “Let’s all get out of here, before—”

  “Oh Lord, is that door still out of line?” Too late. Gillian had joined us and spotted the flaw.

  Which was more than I’d been able to do. Shifting my angle, I finally could see that one of the upper cabinets hung open by maybe a quarter inch, instead of closing completely. I had a couple like that in my apartment; I’d fixed them with stick-on patches of Velcro tape.

  Donald inched toward the back door, his body language deliberately calm—the way you’d move around an unpredictable wild animal. “Better get the contractor back here.” His mild tone indicated that he couldn’t care less, but knew that until the error was repaired there would be no peace.

  “I can’t! I already called him about that wobble in the porch railing, and he said the earliest he can come back is next week. That won’t do—everything’s got to be perfect for the reception.”

  Her mention of a wobbly railing touched off a memory in my brain, about a similar problem I’d had repaired not long ago. Should I open my mouth?

  “Actually, I know someone who might be able to help,” I said. “Nick Janos, my handyman. He’s right here in town.”

  Gillian’s cool glance conveyed her skepticism about anyone I might suggest, especially a mere handyman. But Donald and Whitney looked willing to hear me out.

  “Carpentry is his main thing,” I went on. “He built all of those cat condos at my shop, and repaired and stabilized my back steps last year. And he usually can come on short notice—at least, he does for me.”

  “Sounds perfect!” said Donald, obviously eager to give his wife one less issue to complain about. Finally, she also gave me the nod.

  I checked my phone and read off Nick’s number, while Gillian wrote it with a ballpoint pen on a scrap of paper. Meanwhile, I hoped I wasn’t condemning my friend and favorite handyman to the Job from Hell.

  “Thank you, Cassie,” Gillian deigned to say.

  “You’re very welcome. Now I’d better get Leya back to my shop so she can settle in. Good luck with the decorating!”

  Gillian just rolled her eyes—not at me, I sensed, but at the monumental task that lay before her. Then her phone rang, and she started an equally urgent conversation with someone named Michael. The three of us, counting Leya, took the opportunity to slip out the back door.

  “The contractor?” I asked Donald, hopefully.

  “Nope, that’s the caterer. At least he hasn’t quit on us yet.”

  “He might, when he hears about that awful porridge thing she wants them to serve.” Whitney grimaced. “Who cares if the people ate that stuff back in colonial days? They had to, they were poor. They didn’t even have, like, grocery stores.”

  I couldn’t help smiling, and Donald noticed. “Anyway, thanks for recommending the handyman, Cassie,” he said. “If he works out, that will be one more ‘crisis’ averted.”

  He slid behind the wheel of his silver BMW sedan and backed down the long driveway. Whitney detoured up to the front porch to get her bicycle. Meanwhile, Linda stepped out the front door, and as Donald drove past her van, they waved to each other.

  Still toting the cat carrier, I stopped to say goodbye to the harried designer.

  Linda’s eyes still followed the departing BMW. “There goes a very patient man.”

  “He sure seems to be,” I agreed. “I guess he knows how to handle her by now. Are all of your clients so demanding?”

  “Most are fussy about one thing or another, but Gillian’s in a class by herself. She can’t bear the slightest flaw—everything has to be perfect! And in this house, that means exactly right for the period, too.”

  “In this house? You mean, you’ve worked for her before?”

  “Ooooh, yes.” A rueful smile, as if she should have known better. “I did her last place, a midcentury modern ranch in Somerset County. Apparently, she also once had a Victorian over in Montclair. I’m sure she put that designer through the same routine.”

  “And her family, too?”

  “No doubt.”

  I glanced toward the house, to make sure the subject of our discussion was nowhere near. “Does Gillian work, at all?”

  “She does. Want to take a guess?” When I shrugged, Linda said, “She’s an independent efficiency consultant. Must be damned good at it, right?”

  The designer got back to work then, and I continued toward my car with cat carrier in hand. Whitney rolled her bicycle past me and I wished her a good ride on her horse.

  “I hope it will be.” She laughed. “Glory’s in season, so she’ll be skittish and cranky. But I’d still rather take my chances with her.”

  Chapter 5

  I parked in the lot behind my shop and brought Leya in the back door. I called out to Sarah to let her know I’d returned, but there was no answer. Finding the largest cat condo empty and already prepared, I settled the fluffy Himalayan inside and gave her a dish of her personal, expensive food. She ignored it, but that didn’t surprise me—many of our boarders were hesitant, at first, about eating in a strange environment.

  I’d just started through the playroom, toward the front of the shop, when Sarah met me halfway. My normally steady, stalwart assistant looked as if she’d been crying.

  “Oh, my God, what’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Bernice Tillman . . . she died last night. I just got off the phone with Robin.”

  I put my arm around Sarah’s shoulders. “I’m so sorry. She didn’t seem that badly off when we saw her on Sunday, did she? Was it her asthma?”

  “They don’t know. She died in her sleep, and the Dalton cops don’t seem concerned. But Robin and I still think it sounds suspicious.”

  With no customers requiring our immediate attention, we sat down on some of playroom’s sturdier, carpeted cat furniture. Might sound odd, but we’d gotten into the habit of doing that. I told myself I really should get some regular, human-size chairs for the space, one of these days.

  “Why do you think so?” I asked.

  Sarah fished a tissue out of her apron pocket to dab at the tears. “The M.E. found signs that she suffocated, and Robin says that’s not exactly what would happen, even with a bad asthma attack.”

  “Was Chester with her?”

  “They didn’t share a room anymore, not since her health got so bad. He sleeps across the hall, in what used to be his son’s room. He says he didn’t know she had passed until he checked on her this morning.”

  “So, how could she have suffocated?” I couldn’t help trying to unravel the mystery. “Maybe tangled in the bedclothes—?”

  Sarah sighed heavily. “She does sleep with all those cats. She had three on the bed when we visited her, and she’s told me one or two others often join them at night.”

  I felt sick. It was true that cats sometimes liked to sleep right next to their owners’ faces, even on top of their heads. I supposed it was possible that, in a crowd of four or five, one of them might have rolled onto Bernice’s face and blocked her breathing. A well person should have felt that happening and woken up, but she was ill and on medication. Maybe she even took sleeping pills.


  In all my training and experience with cats, though, I’d never heard of such a thing happening.

  “Robin said they’ll probably know more later today, after the autopsy,” Sarah continued. “Meanwhile, we’re both wondering where this leaves Chester. You saw how vague he is about things. He was physically in better shape than Bernice, except for his eyesight, but she took care of the household business. She kept track of their Social Security deposits and paid the bills. She always knew what time it was and what day of the week.”

  “Oh, dear.” I saw the problem. “So he may not be able to stay in that house by himself.”

  “Or else he’s going to need a full-time caregiver. We’ll have to see if his insurance would cover an arrangement like that.” Sarah attempted to ease off this gloomy topic and smiled. “So, did you pick up Her Highness’s cat, Princess Leya?”

  I laughed. “Come back and meet her. She’s in her condo, but still a little shaken up. Frankly, so am I.”

  While we checked on the newcomer, who finally had begun to nibble at her food, I summarized my experiences of that morning at the Foster house.

  “Wow, Gillian sounds like a real piece of work,” Sarah said. “You got lucky, being able to just grab the cat and skedaddle out of there. I feel sorry for that designer and her errand boy.”

  “I even feel sorry for Gillian’s husband and daughter, in spite of all their money,” I told her. “Can you imagine moving to one old house after another, then living with renovations most of the time? And it sounds like, in each of these places, everything had to follow a certain theme!”

  “Maybe she’s flipping the houses, to increase their value?” Sarah suggested.

  “That would make some sense, but you should see what she’s doing with this place. Except for the kitchen and the bathrooms, where you’d have to have modern conveniences, it really looks like this John Ramsford—whoever he was—could still be living there. Not something that would appeal to a lot of buyers.”

  We chuckled over that, and I was glad I’d been able to distract my assistant, a least for a while, from her sad news. While we turned out a pair of Devon Rex brothers in the playroom, she brought me up to speed about any calls the shop had received in my absence.

  During our lunch break, I nibbled at a sliced-turkey sandwich while I used my laptop to do a little nosy research on Gillian Foster. I soon found a website for her business, WORK SMARTER. The flattering, three-quarter headshot of Ms. Foster proved she could indeed smile, if necessary. The slogan for her services came as no surprise: Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.

  The copy below gave her impressive educational and corporate background, and stated that she specialized in “strategy consulting” and “business process reengineering.” I didn’t understand the jargon well enough to even speculate how Gillian might “improve processes” and “leverage innovation” at Cassie’s Comfy Cats. I suspected she’d be happy to give me loads of destructive criticism, but even if she offered it free of charge, I didn’t intend to request her help.

  After lunch, Sarah and I groomed the Devon Rexes, who were being picked up by their owner the next morning. These guys required special care, because their thin, curly coats were easily damaged. They also needed a bath every few weeks, so their owner had requested we give them one during their stay.

  Because of all this, Sarah and I spent a couple of hours sprucing up the feline brothers for their return home the next day. Toward the end of the session I heard my phone’s ringtone play, but I couldn’t answer it for about twenty minutes.

  It surprised me a bit to see Mark’s cell number and hear his voice.

  “I know this is really last-minute,” he said, “but are you free tonight? I thought about going to the Firehouse for dinner.”

  Now, I won’t say Mark is a creature of routine, but he wasn’t usually that spontaneous. Especially since the demands of his job often keep him at the clinic after hours. Once Sarah and I had returned the Rexes to their shared condo, I returned the call.

  “Sure, I don’t have anything going on,” I told Mark. “But dinner out on a Tuesday? What’s the occasion?”

  “Nothing too much, but there’s a combo playing that I’d like to hear.”

  Ah, that explained it. Mark and I dropped into the Firehouse from time to time to hear the jazz or rock bands; in fact, we’d had our first date there a little over two years ago. It sounded as if he was getting serious enough about his guitar lessons to want to check out the competition. “What’s the group?”

  “Quintessence,” he said, but offered no more details.

  I thought I’d seen an ad for them somewhere, maybe in the online version of the local paper, but otherwise I knew nothing about them. “Okay. You’re not planning another ‘surprise’ for me, are you?”

  He laughed. “Maybe just a little one. Pick you up at six thirty?”

  “Sounds fine. I’ll try to be ready for anything.”

  * * *

  The Firehouse had started out in about 1900 as just that, a brick two-story building with limestone trim. Its corner turret used to house the firemen’s pole. The three large front bays that once opened for hook-and-ladder trucks had become oak-trimmed double doors with deep windows. That night the weather was so mellow that they stood open to the street. The chalkboard sign on the sidewalk bore the announcement:

  TONITE—QUINTESSENCE

  Because it was a Tuesday and early in the evening, the restaurant was not too crowded, though a half-dozen working folks lined the bentwood stools at the bar. Hip, industrial-style fans spun slowly to cool the interior.

  Mark asked for a table close to the stage, confirming my suspicions that he wanted to watch as well as listen to the musicians. At least the jazz groups that played here tended not to amp it up as much as the rock bands. The original pressed-tin ceilings looked very cool but boosted the volume a bit, as did the exposed-brick wall behind the stage.

  Familiar with the spicy menu, we ordered watermelon salsa salads, and Mark went for the lemon chicken while I ordered the sweet-potato casserole. Neither of us is strictly vegetarian, but we both knew enough about the horrors of factory farming to bypass—most of the time—beef, lamb and pork, and to opt for either seafood or free-range poultry.

  While waiting for our dinners, we nursed a couple of glasses of white wine and caught up on each other’s news. Mark deals with a fair number of crises on his job, but was pleased to report that so far this week his clinic had seen no dogs recently hit by cars or cats wasting away from kidney disease. Maybe that was why he felt like celebrating? I both entertained and horrified him with my stories about the drama at the Foster house. (I don’t normally gossip about my clients, but with Mark, Sarah and Dawn, I know the information will go no further.)

  “Boy, I had a teacher in vet school like Gillian,” he reminisced. “Of course, perfectionism runs rampant in any type of medicine, because you’re under a lot of pressure to be precise and get things exactly right. But he was compulsive even about unimportant things. Surgical instruments had to be lined up in order of use and size, and all the medicine bottles in the cabinets had to be stored not only by type, alphabetically, and with the labels facing out, but by the size of the bottle! He also gave us strict rules about how to behave that didn’t allow for any flexibility or any adapting to the situation.”

  “Sounds tough,” I said. “Did he completely freak out if a cabinet door closed just a millimeter out of line?”

  Mark laughed. “I don’t remember that ever happening, but he might have—he was that hyper. Even in medicine, some things have to be done as perfectly as possible, and others not so much. If you don’t have a sense of priorities, you’ll make yourself a nervous wreck.”

  I sipped my wine. “From what I saw at the Foster house, Gillian’s already a wreck and won’t be satisfied until everyone around her is in the same condition. At the same time, I’m dealing with another situation that’s practically the opposite.”

&nb
sp; “Those hoarders you told me about?”

  I explained that, since my visit to the Tillmans on Sunday, Bernice had died under mysterious circumstances. Mark listened with a sober expression.

  “It should be easy enough for the M.E. to tell whether it was accidental or foul play,” he said. “If she did smother in her sleep, she would have gone fairly peacefully. But if she actually struggled with someone, there should be signs of that, such as hemorrhaging in the eyes.”

  The waiter picked this awkward time to set our dinners in front of us. Fortunately, because of our animal-related jobs and my tendency to get involved in murder investigations, we both have strong stomachs. We continued to speculate about the Tillmans’ hoarding habits when Mark came up with a keen insight.

  “It’s interesting,” he said. “Both of your situations involve people obsessed with stuff, but in different ways. Don’t they? Chester can’t let go of his possessions because he’s living in the past, when he was young and successful. And Gillian needs her house to be a perfect replica of the past, though who knows why?”

  “I can’t imagine,” I said, “especially since it sounds as if she’s done this kind of thing at least twice before. Maybe she just thinks she’d be happier living in another time? But meanwhile, she’s alienating her husband and her daughter in the process.”

  “Well, once you return her cat you never have to see her again,” Mark reminded me with a smile.

  At that point, Quintessence took the stage. Only a modest platform with a set of drums and a couple of microphone stands, it rose not very far above the audience. As often seemed to be the case with jazz combos, most of the guys looked a bit older. The keyboard man resembled an accountant, with a rapidly receding hairline and owlish round glasses; his black pants and short-sleeved black shirt struggled to counter this image. The guitarist also had specs, plus a head of bushy white hair, and camouflaged a thickening waist beneath a blue Hawaiian-flowered shirt. The tall double-bass player sported a vertically striped bowling shirt and a shadow of beard, his graying brown hair moussed high in front. The drummer looked youngest to me, his sleeves rolled up to show off his well-developed “guns” and his hair a helmet of tight cornrows.