The Barker Street Regulars

by Susan Conant

  It seemed to me that with investments bought and held, daily help, and more than enough room for Althea in this palatial house, Ceci damned well ought to feel selfish. Not that Althea complained about the Gateway. But has anyone ever really wanted to move to a nursing home?

  “And what did Simon say?” I felt ridiculous.

  “Well, it’s really quite obvious, but Ellis needed him, you see, because he was having difficulty in adjusting to the Great Transition.” She sipped her tea and remarked lightly, “Ellis always did hate to travel. After he passed on, everyone kept telling me I ought to fly off to Europe, now that I could, but I didn’t want to leave Simon, and I was very busy, very active in the church, and Althea and I were always going places in those days, symphony, out to lunch, and there’s a very pleasant group of people who get their dogs together at one of the parks near here, and I took Simon there to play with his friends, and I had no desire to go dashing off to some foreign country all by myself. And then after I lost Simon, before I found Irene, I could barely … There were weeks when I never left this house. I let myself go completely. I could think of nothing, you see, except all my departed ones, my baby, Willie, who lived only two days, and my Nancy, who was such a beautiful girl—she’s been gone thirty years now—and all my beautiful dogs, and then my Simon. I was in a terrible state, you see. There didn’t seem to be any point to anything anymore, with everyone gone.”

  “Yes.”

  “So one of the very first things I asked Simon was, what was I to do?”

  “And?”

  Ceci deftly placed her cup in its saucer. “Simon quite simply ordered me to pull myself together. He was distressed and Ellis was distressed at the way I’d let myself go. It made them feel rejected and unloved, you see, that I’d stopped caring about my appearance. So, straight away I got my hair done, and I bought a new suit and a few other odds and ends, and not in black, either! Simon does not like to see me in black. On a Newfoundland, it’s one thing, of course, but on me, he finds it very depressing.”

  “How often do you, uh, hear from Simon?”

  “Well, at first, it was only once or twice a week, when I had to go all the way into Cambridge to Irene’s office, but then Simon communicated his wish to come home here to Norwood Hill, and Irene was very obliging.”

  I’ll bet she was, I thought. “And now?” I asked.

  “Simon is always with me,” Ceci replied, “just as your dear what’s-her-name is always with you.”

  “Vinnie,” I said.

  “But for several months now, I’ve arranged to communicate with him almost daily.”

  At Irene’s fee? Plus, I guessed, a premium for at-home consultation.

  As if reading my thoughts, Ceci continued, “That’s what irritated Jonathan, of course. He was very, very annoyed with me, and unpardonably rude to Irene, well, not unpardonably, after all, forgiveness is forgiveness, but really very rude.”

  “In his, uh, recent communications?” I was surprised. I’d always imagined the dead as more courteous than the living, why I’m not sure. Did the Book of Judgment have an appendix devoted to etiquette?

  “No, no, no. All is forgiven now. Jonathan simply did not understand, and Irene naturally has extensive experience in coping very tactfully with the ignorance and hostility of skeptical materialists.”

  “So Jonathan actually met Irene? Before, uh, his—”

  “Before he died. Once one comprehends the word in its true sense, Holly, there is no longer any need to avoid it. All events have their place in the great hierarchy of the cosmos. Death, too. Of course, passing on does express the literal truth. But death, you see, is not death as the agnostic understands it. It is but a trance state. Or as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle so beautifully phrased it, the door is not shut, but merely ajar.”

  I was astounded. “The Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?”

  “Spiritualism was the great passion of his existence in this sphere. Those silly detective stories were simply a diversion. Once he made the Great Discovery, he devoted himself to spreading the joyful news.”

  “The same Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?”

  Put out, Ceci said, “From the moment he departed this life, he has communicated very generously with those who listen. I certainly don’t find anything so surprising about it. After all, When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

  “I suppose so,” I said.

  “Would you care to see Simon’s footprints?” Ceci asked.

  Chapter Thirteen

  BUNDLING HERSELF IN HER winter dog-walking outfit and arming herself with a flashlight, Ceci implored me in hushed tones to use common sense, as she phrased it, by keeping mum about what she’d just told me. “The unenlightened,” she confided, “readily misinterpret the experiences of those who truly see.” She continued, in an apparent non sequitur, “Take this Baker Street Irregulars nonsense. When you think about it, it’s childish, isn’t it? Pretending those imaginary people are real? These people are, after all, adults, and there they are giving themselves these silly nicknames—the Science Master, that’s Robert—and playing all those games about trivial Not that Althea is brainless, far from it, and neither was Ellis, who has, of course, come to view all that foolishness in perspective now, naturally, but a woman beyond the blush of first youth”—she pulled on the tam-o’-shanter—“is terribly vulnerable to misinterpretation and can be robbed far too easily of the opportunity to communicate with those who have passed beyond.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And stripped of her right to control her own life. And finances. Not that a guardian or whatever isn’t necessary for someone in Althea’s condition. Fortunately, Jonathan had her power of attorney, not that she has anything, really, but she’s as blind as a bat, you know, and if she fell into the clutches of some unscrupulous person, she’d sign any sort of document that was put in front of her, speaking of which, for goodness’ sake, who is going to manage Althea’s affairs now? There can’t be much more to it than writing checks to the nursing home, I suppose, but I really cannot be expected to deal with her affairs as well as my own. Where was I? Oh, in any event, it’s dreadful enough to have Althea locked up in that place, but there was no choice, really, and my own competence is perfectly evident, but one never knows what misunderstanding may arise, and I’m sure you’ll agree that one shudders to contemplate ending up in an institution merely because one has passed through the doors closed to, well, closed to closed minds.”

  With that, Ceci opened not the sort of door she was discussing, but one of the French doors to the terrace. “The path leads straight down,” she remarked. This time, the reference was not metaphysical. Ceci briskly marched down the steps from the terrace to a bluestone walk that did, indeed, run straight down the sloping yard toward an area on which Robert and Hugh were now concentrating. The camera flashed.

  “Now, watch that you don’t trip the way Jonathan did!” Ceci called out. To me, she said, “We’ll have to go beyond the gate.”

  Of the pearly variety? But as we approached Hugh and Robert, I pulled out my flashlight and trained it directly ahead. I saw, framed by an evergreen hedge, a black chain-link fence with an earthly wrought-iron gate. To the right of the path, a few yards from the hedge, stood a granite sundial. Robert and Hugh were busily examining an area a few feet from its base. Adding the beam of my flashlight to the light from their lanterns, I saw a roughly dug hole that suggested someone’s premature and abandoned attempt to plant a small shrub in the frozen lawn.

  “That,” said Ceci, pointing to the shallow hole, “is where poor Jonathan caught his foot.”

  Robert cleared his throat. Hugh grunted.

  “And,” Ceci continued, “he reached out for the sundial to catch his balance, you see, but missed it. His hand slipped, and he fell and injured his head.”

  The scenario Ceci proposed was outright impossible. The hole, in which someone really might have tripped, was so close to the sundial tha
t if Jonathan had caught his foot, lost his balance, and fallen in the direction of the sundial, he’d have bruised his upper thigh, perhaps; to have hit his head, he’d have had to be the height of a small child.

  “Jonathan sensed Simon’s presence, you see,” Ceci explained, “and felt suitably ashamed of himself for saying those cruel things to Irene. I have never been so humiliated in all my life! As I told Jonathan when I shared my joy about Simon, all transactions are exchanges of energy, you see, and Irene’s time, as well as her gifts, of course, are her energy, and she is perfectly entitled to receive energy in exchange. It’s only fair.”

  I said, “But Jonathan didn’t see it that way.”

  “I should never, ever have told him about Simon,” Ceci agreed. “It was just that when Jonathan happened to call—he was really very good about staying in touch—I simply couldn’t keep the news to myself. Simon had just made his first material appearance, just the evening before, and I was so absolutely thrilled! And, of course, I couldn’t tell Althea, of all people. Althea does not understand at all.”

  “When was this?” I asked.

  “Well, Simon first came back on Monday. So, it was Tuesday that Jonathan called.”

  Three days later, on Friday morning, Althea had been excited about her grandnephew’s impending visit. The sequence made sense. On Monday, Irene stages Simon’s appearance. On Tuesday, Ceci can’t help telling Jonathan all about the wonderful psychic whose daily consultations have culminated in the material return of a dead dog. By Wednesday, Jonathan has made plans to come to Boston. He calls the sensible great-aunt, Althea. He arrives on Saturday and meets Irene. At his insistence? According to Ceci, he is unpardonably rude to Irene; in other words, he charges her with conning his elderly great-aunt. Soon thereafter, he dies a violent death. And my hypothesis about a drug deal? I tried and failed to work in the cocaine. White powder, the paper had said. Instead of doing the coke indoors, Jonathan goes outside? Where the wind might be blowing? All I could think of was the sneeze scene in Annie Hall

  “Jonathan had an officious streak,” Ceci told me. “In retrospect, I can see that it was most unwise of me to say a word to him. Not, of course, that my affairs were any of his business.”

  As Ceci talked, Robert and Hugh arranged numerous little evidence bags in a long, narrow box meant for index cards. As they worked, they exchanged cryptic Sherlockian references. I was proud to catch an allusion to “The Dancing Men.” In the story, mysterious little stick figures, the dancing men, had been drawn, among other places, on a sundial. And what clues had Hugh and Robert found? Blobs of ectoplasm? Wasn’t that what spirits came back as? Gelatinous matter, chilled and slippery, like flavorless Jell-O. Had psychic zealots had the guts to taste this glop? Not that I expected them to substitute it in a recipe for molded lime salad. I mean, to a spiritualist, ectoplasm is human remains, of a sort, and consuming it might accordingly be considered a form of cannibalism. But if intrepid psychic researchers had gone ahead and sampled this stuff, strictly for the sake of science, “flavorless” probably wasn’t how they described it. Rather, they probably gave the report you always hear about everything from frog legs to rabbit to human flesh: It tastes like chicken, only not quite.

  “Ceci,” Robert demanded, “what is this hole doing here?”

  “I was concerned,” she replied with dignity, “that Simon was repelled to find himself out here all cold and by himself. He lived in the house, of course. You remember, don’t you? He was my constant companion. He had the free run of the yard whenever he wanted to go out—the fence goes all the way around—and at the time I thought, well, he belongs, really, out here in the fresh air. That’s why I bought the sundial, you see. I simply couldn’t tolerate the prospect of a gravestone. It’s so depressing, so un-Simon, if you see what I mean, so …” Ceci continued to discourse on Simon’s warm, sanguine disposition and the unsuitability of cold ground. She then moved to the topic of Boatswain, who, as Hugh and Robert probably did not realize, was a Newfoundland dog and the subject of a poem written by his bereaved owner, Lord Byron, for inscription on the dog’s tomb.

  “‘Are deposited the remains,’” Ceci quoted, “‘of one who possessed Beauty without Vanity.’”

  “‘Strength without Indolence,’” I continued, “‘Courage without Ferocity, And all the virtues of Man, without his vices.’”

  “You do understand,” Ceci said.

  “So you buried Simon’s ashes here.” That’s in Byron’s poem: ashes. “And then?”

  “Then last week, we had that warm spell, you remember, which was deceptive. How was I to know? So I got out a shovel and started to remedy my error, but just below the surface, the ground was frozen, and the task was considerably more arduous than I ever expected. So”—she pointed to the hole—“that’s as far as I got.”

  “Simon’s remains are in an urn?” I asked.

  “Of course! I wouldn’t just—”

  “Ceci,” Robert interrupted, “what did you do with the shovel?”

  “I left it right here.”

  “Did the police take it?” Hugh asked.

  “No, no, it was gone. I’ve wondered if it might not have been stolen by those young people who found Jonathan. But never mind that! I was about to show Simon’s paw prints to Holly.” Making her way to the gate, Ceci explained, “They’re perfectly preserved, you see, because Simon was here every day last week during the warm spell, when it was so damp, and then, of course, it suddenly turned cold, so you can still see them where the mud froze.”

  With more seriousness of purpose than I’d have expected, Hugh and Robert followed Ceci and me through the gate, which led to the dead end of a dark street. Reaching the dead end, the joggers who’d discovered the body must have reversed direction, taken a breather, and succumbed to the temptation to peer through Ceci’s iron gate into the private precincts of the wealthy. I wondered whether the sight of the corpse had permanently cured the joggers of their snoopiness or whether, on the contrary, they would forever after feel compelled to sneak glances into hidden gardens on the chance of again uncovering one of the unexpected secrets of the rich.

  “Lower Norwood Road,” Robert informed me.

  Here, a few gaslights were spaced at wide intervals. The one near the rear of Ceci’s yard was out. Her property, as I hope I’m making clear, ran all the way from Upper Norwood Road, where her house was, to Lower Norwood, as did the lot next to hers. On the side of Lower Norwood opposite her back gate loomed a dark mass.

  “Vacant house,” Hugh remarked.

  Robert was quick to correct him. “Empty house! Empty.” That’s the title of one of the adventures: “The Empty House.”

  With undiminished pleasure, Hugh said, “He is everywhere,” meaning, as Holmesians mean, Sherlock Holmes.

  The house next to the empty one was a brick Tudor with bright windows, a light over the front door, and carriage lamps set on pillars on either side of the front walk. “The Franklins must be home from Florida,” Ceci remarked. Then she trained her flashlight on her own side of the street, where a wide strip of rough grass and dirt took the place of a sidewalk. “Right over here, near these bushes. There! You see? All along here! The best ones are just to the right of the gate.”

  Shining my own flashlight on the area, I saw what were unmistakably the paw prints of a very large dog. How large? Rowdy weighs close to ninety pounds. He’s a heavy-boned boy with big snowshoe paws. But these prints were longer, wider, and deeper than any I’d ever seen in the mud of my own backyard. For an unnerving moment, I wondered whether everything I understood about death was wrong. Had Simon really come back? Then I realized that Lower Norwood Road must be on the route of some local dog walker who owned …? A Newfoundland? A living one, that is, or a mastiff, a Great Dane, or maybe one of those so-called giant malamutes that get sold through ads in the dog magazines for staggering sums of … well, energy exchange. Caveat emptor. Just my humble opinion, of course, backed by a lifetime in dogs and by the offi
cial standard for the Alaskan malamute. Have I digressed? Not really.

  Anyway, if I couldn’t identify the breed that had left the prints, Ceci couldn’t be sure that they belonged to a particular Newfoundland who’d been dead for two years. But she felt certain, and the feeling satisfied her, as did Robert and Hugh’s close examination of her evidence. On his knees, Hugh was going over the prints with his Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass. Ceci was triumphant. “There! You see? Now, am I letting my imagination run away with me? Am I seeing things? I know my Simon when I see him. Holly, wouldn’t you know your Rowdy or your Kimi anywhere?”

  “Yes, I would,” I said truthfully.

  “Well, you see? And I know my Simon. I’ve seen him just as clearly as I see his paw prints.”

  “Ceci,” Robert demanded, “what color was Simon?”

  I replied for her. “Black. His portrait is over the fireplace.”

  “Embedded here,” said Hugh, “and observable in small quantities in the lower portion of the yard are hairs that, pending further research, we have tentatively identified as coming from a dog.”

  Ceci clapped her mittens together in delight.

  “The hairs,” Hugh continued, “are not black. On the contrary, without exception, these hairs are uniformly white.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  WITH HUGH AND ROBERT’S permission, I finally got Kimi and her tracking gear from the car. Kimi “got dressed,” as Ceci phrased it, in the house. I should mention that Kimi’s dark facial markings make her look intimidating. In particular, the goggles around her eyes create a permanent Lone Ranger mask. Ceci wasn’t put off. To a Newf person, a seventy-five-pound malamute was practically an oversize Pomeranian. “Isn’t she just the sweetest little girl?” Ceci cooed. “Isn’t she a darling? Isn’t she a love?”

  I sometimes wonder: If you talk like this to an Alaskan malamute, what do you have left to say to a parakeet? Not that Kimi isn’t sweet; she is. One of my most profound glimpses into her character, however, occurred when I watched her tackle and pin a male Great Pyrenees twice her size. As far as I could tell, she did it just on the off chance that he was wondering who was top dog. She didn’t hurt him, and he obviously understood that she didn’t mean to. In other words, Kimi is not everyone’s idea of the ideal house pet. But then the average person’s idea of the ideal house pet is a stuffed animal. In any case, I’m not the average person: My only absolute requirement of my dogs is that when I look into their eyes, I see God. I felt that in that sense, Ceci and I were kindred spirits.