Probable Claws

by Rita Mae Brown

  Catherine turned to face her husband. “Come by me, John.”

  He did. “I should fetch a doctor. The new fellow. The one who put Jeffrey and Yancy back together. He’ll know what to do.”

  “The weather isn’t good. Wait until it clears.”

  Rachel looked to Father Gabe, then the two women.

  Bettina spoke up. “Fever. We got to watch for fever.”

  “I don’t feel hot.”

  “No, but it might come on,” Bettina wisely said.

  “Let me sleep. Go tomorrow.” She fought to stay awake.

  Catherine, always healthy and strong, had never felt pain like what seized her on the steps. Weakness and drowsiness overtook her.

  Bettina sat with her, as did Rachel, as she fell into a deep sleep. Under the circumstances, the sleep was a blessing.

  Father Gabe and Ruth motioned for John and Charles to go into the hall.

  The older man put his hand under John’s elbow. “She’s lost the baby.”

  John sagged, then straightened. “Does she know?”

  “Not yet,” Ruth answered. “She may suspect. We can tell her when she’s stronger. We’ll see how she is tomorrow morning. If there’s no fever, we can tell her.”

  “I want to be with her.” John couldn’t help the silent tears.

  Charles, feeling helpless, touched John on the shoulder. “We’ll take JohnJohn. You keep close.”

  John nodded his head in agreement.

  Father Gabe motioned for Ruth and Charles to withdraw.

  When they did, he counseled John. “It may be some time before, before you can be physically close to her.”

  “Yes,” John whispered. “Father Gabe, I will gladly sacrifice anything for her, to keep her healthy. I will do anything. Anything.”

  Father Gabe nodded. “Love her.”

  24

  January 27, 2017

  Friday

  “A baby brontosaurus.” Harry lifted up a small rubber dinosaur as she sat on the floor of Gary’s, now Tazio’s, office, which she had opened Monday, January 23rd.

  “I thought you came in here to go over your plans?” Tazio, perched on a stool at the drafting table, reminded her.

  “Well, I did. I want to, but Fair downloaded all the building codes for me going back to 1980.”

  “The sheriff’s department combed through every file box.”

  “I know.” Harry held up her right forefinger since Pewter wanted the brontosaurus. “This doesn’t belong to you.”

  “It doesn’t belong to you, either.” The gray cat sniffed. “Since Gary’s dead the toy should be given away. He liked me so give me the dinosaur.”

  “You’ve been rifling through 1983 for an hour now. All you’ve found is one rubber toy. If it were important the department would have kept it.”

  Harry scrambled to her feet, lifted up the file box, walked over to the traditional desk, not the drafting table, placing it on the top. “Come here for a minute.”

  “I will if you’ll come to go over these plans with me.”

  “All right but look at this.”

  Brinkley nudged his human. “Indulge her.”

  “Here I am.” Tazio pulled up another chair on rolling casters to sit beside Harry, who was just burning to show her the files.

  Carefully lifting out the papers that she had dog-eared, she pointed. “Okay. Here’s a job on West Broad Street. Big car dealership. Look at the note in the margin.”

  “ ‘Replace steel I-beam on northwest corner.’ ” Tazio read aloud then said, “So?”

  “I have 1983 downloaded, remember. On the page regarding steel qualifications, stress, elasticity, that stuff, there’s no such memo.”

  “Harry, why would there be? The code is just the code. There isn’t feedback.”

  “I know, but did he report this, or did the construction company find the problem and simply replace it?”

  “You’d need to go through Rankin Construction’s files.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m going to tell Coop. And this little toy. Look on this sheet. More jobs. More notes.”

  Tazio peered at a paper for an office building, very modern, right on the Henrico/Goochland county line. “Little dinosaur footprints. Harry, he obviously was wrapped up with dinosaurs. This is a doodle, not a note.”

  “A doodle with a rubber dinosaur in the box. He put his dinosaurs on the shelf. Put them in the box. I need to go through every file box to see what’s in the margins and what toys are there.”

  “You’re obsessed. Number one. Number two. The sheriff’s department had to cite whatever they found in these file boxes. I’m sure the dinosaurs will be noted. It can’t be that important or questions would have been asked of all of us close to Gary. Okay, I’ve looked. Now come and look at the drawings.”

  Harry left the box on the desk, trudged to the drafting table to go over the plans.

  “I’m going to slay the dragon,” Pewter grandly announced. “Besides, we can’t sit on the drafting table. It’s on a slant.”

  Mrs. Murphy, Tucker, and Brinkley followed to the back room, door to the bathroom shut. Mostly they tagged along because they, too, were somewhat interested in the spider. However, the two dogs and the cat did not aspire to murder. For one thing, she was so big the squish would be too gross. For another thing, it was live and let live.

  Pewter slunk to the little hole in the baseboard.

  “I know you’re in there.”

  Nothing.

  “You can’t fool me.”

  That fast the large spider blasted out of the hole, shot through Pewter’s legs to disappear under the slight space under the bathroom door.

  “She attacked me!” Pewter screamed.

  Harry appeared quickly. “What is going on?”

  “A spider. She’s as big as a crab. She attacked me!” Pewter’s pupils looked like big black marbles.

  “Let’s all go into the workroom. Pewter, you look like a porcupine.”

  “You know, it was scary,” Brinkley admitted.

  “Huge!” Pewter meowed.

  “It was,” Mrs. Murphy agreed. “But you’re being a Drama Queen.”

  “The spider knows that.” Tucker tormented Pewter. “She wants to hear you scream.”

  “You’d scream, too, if she came after you. The world’s biggest spider.”

  Tazio glanced up from the papers. “And?”

  “I have no idea.” Harry joined her again. “They did find a triangular stud in a crack when Cooper and I came back here after Gary’s murder. I thought it might be important. Apparently not. Who knows how long it was in that crack?”

  “The spider took it. Probably tore it off a jacket or someone’s purse. I bet she knows more than she’s telling.”

  “Pewter, spiders don’t talk.” Mrs. Murphy sat by Harry’s chair.

  “You don’t know that. I bet they talk to one another.”

  “How can they talk when their mouths move like pincers?” Tucker asked.

  “Our jaws are long and we can talk,” Brinkley offered.

  “We also have tongues. Spiders don’t.” Tucker would have none of it.

  “That doesn’t mean they can’t hum. They can communicate. I just know that giant spider has told all her friends about me.” Pewter’s ego, inflated again, irritated the others.

  “I’m sure,” Mrs. Murphy dryly said.

  Tazio, her left hand resting on Brinkley’s head, pointed to the loft with a pencil. “Do you want planed but unfinished oak or something else?”

  “It’s just storage.” Harry shrugged.

  “So it is, but it does give you an opportunity to make another work space or even a bedroom. Why don’t you put in planed oak and stain it, put drop cloths over it, and then put whatever you want up there? This gives you more options if your needs change, and Harry, you know as well as I do, building never gets cheaper. Do it now.”

  That struck home. “Well…maybe.”

  “This isn’t much square
footage. An upgrade won’t be expensive. Maybe you’d like something other than oak.”

  “No. Oak. I need hardwood. Need hardwood in the downstairs, too. Even though there won’t be much traffic. And even though the uneven-width heart pine in my kitchen is beautiful, it scratches up all the time and I’m rubbing it all the time.”

  “Right.” Tazio smiled, knowing she’d swung Harry to a more versatile decision.

  The two worked for another hour, going over everything. The little Napoleon clock struck five.

  “Where’d the time go?” Harry exclaimed.

  Tazio looked up at the graceful hands. “Somewhere we can never retrieve it. Do you know I read about air? I thought the article was going to be about pollution, but it wasn’t. Air doesn’t disappear, and the article said that every two thousand breaths we inhale air that Julius Caesar inhaled.”

  “No kidding.” Harry, impressed, then tidied up her pile of notes. “Let me put back the file box and head home. Dark already. I actually like winter but dark at five, not so much.”

  “Me, too.”

  Once home Harry called Cooper, told her everything about the file box for 1983 and what she thought. She urged Cooper to call Rankin Construction.

  “I will but I want to go through the boxes myself before I do that. The research team mentioned marginal notes and rubber toys. No one thought it important, and I don’t know that it is, but I want to see for myself.”

  “Can’t hurt.”

  “Hold on one sec.” Cooper squinted at a message intruding on the computer screen.

  “Harry, when you get home turn on the news. Forensics in Richmond has retrieved the rest of the skeleton and are laying it out on the spot.” She read more, looked at photos. “Male. Middle-aged. A bullet lodged in his left front rib. I doubt the news will show you what we see.”

  “Front rib?”

  “Probably shot from behind with a light caliber bullet. Stuck in the bone. Murder.”

  “You were the one who told me amateurs spray bullets or fire too many.”

  “I did.”

  “Another marksman.” Harry’s heart was racing.

  “A good shot at any rate.” Cooper sighed. “I don’t know how you do it, but you turn up at critical moments.”

  “Dumb luck.”

  “Let’s hope it isn’t bad luck.”

  25

  January 28, 2017

  Saturday

  Using the date Harry had given her with the dinosaur footprints, Cooper tapped into the newspaper reports from the Richmond Times-Dispatch for Thursday, June 2, 1983. She liked to circle around a subject to people who were involved. In the case of a fresh murder, of course, she zoomed straight for suspects like Dawn Hulme, Gary’s ex-wife. The spouse or ex-spouse looms large in any murder, but Dawn was clear. Then again, the divorce, years ago, lost much of its venom, not that Dawn had much good to say about the late Gary Gardner.

  A column on the front page, “Accident on Broad,” caught her eye. The office building, the very one cited by Harry with notes in the margin made by Gary, had been the site where a worker died leaning next to his excavator. The victim, forty-three years old, Ali Asplundah, stepped down from the giant backhoe. No one saw him drop as he was on the other side of the large machine, other large pieces of equipment were running in the square space that would provide the foundation. When the machine, in neutral, continued to run for over an hour, one of the other heavy equipment men cut his motor, climbed down, walked over. He found Ali sitting on the dirt, slumped against the machine, dead. The medical examiner proclaimed it a heart attack.

  Cooper read about Ali, highly skilled, an early Muslim resident of the city. Muslims had come to Richmond in the eighteenth century but in tiny numbers. Little by little a small population gathered. Those interviewed concerning the deceased all testified he didn’t touch alcohol, had a sterling work record, got along with everyone, and loved soccer.

  She pulled up subsequent days, a few more reports, then months later the results of the investigation. Nothing was wrong with the backhoe. Mr. Asplundah had never evidenced any signs of heart trouble nor did his medical records indicate the same. It was a simple, unexpected heart attack.

  She then researched murder for 1984 in Richmond. Nothing on work sites. She checked the obituaries for the year. That took one and a half hours. Nothing there either. Finally she pulled up missing person reports.

  There was one for a construction worker, a welder. His wife reported he had not returned from work. He’d been welding a bent front fender for a friend. His day job was working on the Kushner Building.

  Cooper knew the Richmond Police Department already had done what she did, were probably recording right on the site.

  She had something. Just what, she wasn’t certain. She called Richmond’s department, identified herself, her search.

  A young man confirmed they were looking for the son of Edward Elkins, the welder reported missing in 1984. They needed DNA.

  She’d spent most of her workday in the office. Given the cold, it was better than cruising the streets, picking up drunks, examining bumper benders.

  Dark already, she drove home, thinking as she drove. Driving helped her think.

  She paid attention to Harry as much as Harry irritated her.

  Her neighbor—whom she did love—could insinuate herself into affairs that were none of her business. To make it worse, Harry had no training in law enforcement but she’d become obsessed with something. Gary’s murder would arouse a friend’s sympathy. Being there, Harry was galvanized. Much as Cooper tried to tell her not to get involved in her soft-soap way, she knew it would do no good. If she told her off, Harry would become more devious, and that would be even more dangerous.

  She parked near the side door. Often a walk outdoors cleared her mind. She opened the back door, picked up a box of dog treats and a small jar of corn oil. The temperature, according to the large outdoor thermometer, hung at 26º, Fahrenheit. Her face tingled. Walking into the shed, which doubled as a garage when she felt like parking there, she went over to a hole under the back wall. It opened on both sides of the wall and was not the only den opening. A tidy gray fox lived there. She broke up the treats, placing them in a pie tin saved for this purpose. Then she drenched them in corn oil. The fox would love it. Cold as it was in the shed, it provided protection from the elements, plus the little fellow had straw, rags, old towels to curl up in, along with his luxurious double coat.

  Leaving, she pushed through the snow to the Jones family graveyard. The Very Reverend Herbert Jones rented the farm to Cooper, as he lived in the lovely clapboard pastor’s house at St. Luke’s. With Harry’s help, Cooper kept everything tidy. The snow on the gravestones added to the silence and beauty of this spot, a large gum tree in the middle of the place, and sleeping Joneses who stretched back to 1810.

  Heading back to the kitchen warmth, she thought about how many Virginia farms cherished their dead. Gary had been cremated, spread over a pasture he had always admired. People’s last wishes ought to be carried out, but she liked reading headstones.

  * * *

  —

  Lisa Roudabush, leash secure in her heavy mittens, walked down Mt. Tabor Road. There were no cars on the road, which was good as the roads could still be slick. “How are you doing, Pirate?”

  “Okay.” The large puppy skipped through the cleared snow.

  He had learned to avoid the piled-up snow.

  “We’re almost home, buddy.”

  “Good.” He looked up at Lisa.

  “Stop.” She stopped.

  He did, too.

  “Good boy.”

  About five minutes later they reached the small brick house that Lisa rented. Once inside, she emailed Kylie Carter. They congratulated each other on the continuing saga at the excavation site in Richmond.

  “Now this will really cost Rankin Construction and Cloudcroft a fortune,” Kylie crowed.

  “Murder. We couldn’t have asked for more.” Li
sa was exuberant.

  Be careful what you ask for.

  26

  March 27, 1787

  Tuesday

  Reynaldo, Jeddie in the stirrups, trotted up and down the hill on the north side of Cloverfields. A true March wind cut through his heavy sweater and short leather jacket, cowhide. Catherine, arms wrapped around her body, stood in mud laced with silver streaks of ice, watching. A week had passed since her miscarriage. Though a bit weak, she felt fine. Working lifted her spirits.

  “Walk back down, make him walk.” Jeddie nodded, halted the powerful sleek horse, turned him. They walked. Reynaldo pinned his ears but he listened. Jeddie then trotted the horse back up the hill.

  “Don’t you want me to breeze him?”

  “No. Let’s walk back to the stable. Make him walk, Jeddie. If you aren’t the boss, he’ll be the boss. He’s strong-willed and very, very smart. Right now we’re working on balance. We’ll work on wind later.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.” Jeddie grinned.

  A handful he was, but Reynaldo possessed rare quality. He had lovely movement from the shoulder, powerful hindquarters, and an abnormally long stride. He was born to run. Catherine’s emphasis on his wonderful balance was as much for his mind as his body. Easily bored, which he would let you know, he was intelligent and very alert to his environment.

  Jeddie, quiet, supple in the saddle, walked Reynaldo on a loose rein, a vote of confidence in the horse, which Reynaldo liked. He loved Catherine and he loved Jeddie. He tolerated Tulli and Ralston, and thought Baxter O. was decent enough, but there was no way he was ever going to pull a carriage. Never. Reynaldo had a high opinion of himself. But then so did the carriage horses King David and Solomon.

  Once in the stable, Tulli ran up to hold the 16.2-hand horse while Jeddie easily swung out of the saddle.

  “Tulli, wipe him down. Rub some liniment in his muscles. He likes being rubbed. Put his blanket on him and turn him out,” Catherine ordered.

  “Yes, Ma’am.” Tulli nodded.

  “Where’s Ralston?”

  Tulli answered, “With Baxtor O. in the carriage barn.”