Kiki Lowenstein Books 1-3 & Cara Mia Delgatto Books 1-3: The Perfect Series for Crafters, Pet Lovers, and Readers Who Like Upbeat Books!

by Joanna Campbell Slan

  All those nightmares had come to pass. But not a no-show. Not yet. But I knew it might.

  We were bound to wind up at someone’s house and discover she had the wrong date on her calendar. I warned Dodie of impending doom, while her daughter Rebekkah glowered at me.

  Don’t get me wrong. I love Rebekkah. But she’s totally unsuited for the job of being our store manager. She’s not detail oriented, she’s not mature enough to manage people, and she’s not willing to listen. Furthermore, her new title totally went to her head. Rather than hearing me out, Rebekkah dug in her heels. (Whatever that means.) The off-site events were her idea and she was not about to listen to reason.

  Of course, Bama sided with Rebekkah. That woman is such a brown-noser that she had the nerve to say, “I think going to people’s houses is a wonderful idea. Very ingenious.”

  That was rich, considering how she always managed to get out of being the person who handled the off-site, at-home crops.

  I wasn’t about to give in easily even if Bama’s comment did make me look like a chump. “I don’t think this is a good idea. We have customers with mega-bucks and customers who shoot bucks for food. There’s too much of an economic disparity in our clientele to pull this off. Someone is bound to feel bad. Or feel slighted. Get embarrassed.”

  “Thanks for the warning, Sunshine,” Dodie gave me a smile that wasn’t a smile. Not really. “I think Rebekkah came up with a good idea. I’m supporting her with it. In the immortal words of Jean Luc Piccard, ‘Make it so.’”

  To that Rebekkah added a self-satisfied smirk. Not her best look. Bama gave Dodie a high five. I tried not to sulk.

  Boy, was I eager to get back to the store and tell them how this “super” idea had backfired.

  3

  With less than an hour to go before the crop started, Clancy and I were starting to get desperate – and wilted. Our clothing was damp with stinky sweat.

  “Maybe Marla’s in the bathroom.” Clancy sounded optimistic. “That happens when people get nervous.”

  “Right. A bathroom in Boliva. I bet she left the country.”

  “Kiki Lowenstein, you are such a goof.”

  “No, I’m being honest. You know, and I know, Marla didn’t want to host this. I could tell she wanted out of this…but Rebekkah…”

  “Yes, exactly. ‘But Rebekkah.’ We’ve been saying that a lot lately, haven’t we?”

  “Rebekkah refused to take no for an answer. Marla tried to get out of it, but Rebekkah pushed her. So, how could Marla save face? She could run away.” Sounded reasonable to me. I wanted to run away. Right now.

  “Without her car?”

  “She could run far away. Very, very far away.” A dreamy series of tropical scenes danced through my head. “You don’t need your car if you cross the ocean. Do you know that if you MapQuest directions from Los Angeles to Honolulu it says, ‘Kayak across Pacific Ocean – 2756 miles?’ If you go from Japan to China on MapQuest, the directions say ‘jet ski across the Pacific Ocean – 762 km?’”

  Clancy stared at me from under her thick black lashes. “Kiki Lowenstein, you have entirely too much time on your hands.”

  “No, really! It’s all true. Maybe she decided to try it. Whatcha think? Jet ski or kayak? Hmm? Could we just leave? Put a note on the door and try to contact the others?”

  “Sounds good to me.” Clancy, clearly wilting, reached inside her leather handbag. As she hauled out her keys, we looked at each other in silence, both of us feeling guilty.

  That’s when it hit me. “Wait a minute! Do you hear anything?”

  “Other than the happy hum of mosquitoes as they make withdrawals from my blood bank? No. I don’t hear a thing. Why?”

  I turned in a small circle, listening carefully. There was no noise. Not a whirl or a humming or a clank. The air conditioner was suspiciously quiet. Given the heat, that didn’t make sense.

  “What?” Clancy jingled the keys at me. “Can we go?”

  “There’s no noise. How come the air conditioning isn’t going? Huh? What if she’s here? Inside? What if her A/C went out, and she’s sick? Or…worse?”

  “The news,” Clancy whispered and turned pale.

  Every broadcast of the evening news brought more and more reports of elderly people found dead at home. The culprit? The soaring temps. A nasty heat wave had wrestled the Midwest to the mat. The city and the county of St. Louis both were ready to cry, “Uncle!” Cooling shelters were filled to capacity. Neighbors had been asked to check on each other. Hazardous situations were to be reported to authorities.

  I had sighed then, giving up a gust of capitulation. “Come on. We can’t leave until we know she’s okay. Let’s try the front door again. After that, we call the cops.”

  That’s when I jiggled the handle harder and put my shoulder against it. To my shock, the door opened slightly. A fetid stink oozed out at me. The smell nearly bowled me over. It was sickly sweet, rotten, and pervasive with an undertone of ammonia. I turned my head, gasping for air, and gagged.

  “Ugh!” Clancy had put her hand over her mouth and coughed.

  “What is that smell? Cat pee?”

  A dozen kitty faces filled the open space between door and door jam.

  “I think so.” Using the tip of my Keds to keep the cats from getting caught in the door, I had eased it shut. I didn’t slam it, but I did close it enough that none of the kitties could race outside. The cats protested with loud meows, but there were no yelps of pain.

  “Marla has to be in there. Why else would the door be unlocked?” Clancy said. “And if she’s there. She’s in trouble.”

  “I’m going in, but I’ll need to move fast.” I had gulped fresh air. I used my toe to nudge the cats back inside, hopped over the top of them (as a crowd had now gathered), and I slowly closed the door behind me. My eyes watered like garden hoses. I found it hard to take a breath, but I was on a mission, so I stepped further into the house—even though I couldn’t see anything.

  “Marla? Marla, it’s Kiki! Remember? Clancy and I came early to help you get ready for the crop. Yoo-hoo? Anybody home?”

  The room had started moving, coming toward me. A carpet of living cats. Big and small. Striped, yellow, black, white, Siamese, long-haired, short-haired, and practically no haired.

  “Whoa.” I backed up against the entrance as they crawled toward me, wave after wave of feline faces. I scanned the room, I felt disoriented, dizzy even, standing in a narrow tunnel formed by a towering piles of newspapers. The room closed in on me.

  The heat in the house and the ammonia from the cat pee caused me to feel light-headed. My chest walls tightened, a prelude to an asthma attack. Between the smell and the heat, I couldn’t function. At least, not very well.

  “Marla? Marla!”

  And the cats kept coming.

  4

  Meowing and mewing and hissing, they pawed my legs. I plucked them off gently, and as soon as I untangled one, two more took its place. They reared back on their haunches and patted the air, trying to get my attention. They jumped over each other to get to me. They ran under each other. They rolled like the tumbleweeds you saw in Westerns.

  “Marla? Hello?”

  I thought I heard a noise, a human groan.

  Or was it a cat?

  I walked toward the sound, following a path of urine-soaked newspapers and nasty carpet samples. I tried not to step on paws or tails, but I didn’t dare touch the makeshift walls of newspaper for balance out of fear they would come down on me. Twelve feet in, the tunnel widened into an open space where a sagging sofa faced a quiet TV. The cats hopped down from the top of the old fashioned television console to greet me, yowling at my feet and rubbing against my legs.

  In the heart of the house, the heat became even more oppressive. I pulled up my shirt and held it over my face even though my tummy was exposed. I did my best to breathe through the fabric.

  “Marla?”

  I paused to listen.

  Then I saw it:
Marla’s purse. The keys dangled half-in and half-out.

  She wouldn’t have left without it.

  Couldn’t have.

  “Marla? Marla!” I stumbled over furry bodies, moving as fast as I could, keeping on the narrow pathway. I wandered through a rabbit warren of flattened and stacked cardboard boxes. I found myself surrounded by tall metal shelves, each crammed with stuff: cans, broken toys, clothing, broken appliances, and old paperback books. The smell of must and mold intensified the stink of cat pee.

  I gagged but kept moving. “Marla? Marla, are you in here?”

  I couldn’t tell if I heard a noise or not. The cats’ cries crescendoed to a loud cacophony of complaints. A crowd of cats, lean and hungry, kept pace with me. There were so many, I couldn’t count them.

  I came upon a once-beautiful round oak pedestal table marred by the scratch marks of dozens of claws. On the table top sat a dirty pet bed. Three cats slept there. Except that not all of them were sleeping. One was dead.

  I had swallowed hard, tried not to heave, and retraced my steps.

  “Mar-la!” I had yelled at the top of my voice. I couldn’t take much more of this.

  A moan beckoned me deeper into the dark house, a place where junk blocked all the light from the windows and fixtures.

  “Marla!” I yelled again, coughing some as the fumes snatched the air from my lungs. The tightness in my chest cut off my wind, like a band tightening across my ribs.

  “Uhhh.” The noise came from the back of the house. It was human and it was in distress.

  5

  The noise beckoned me, even though I didn’t want to go farther inside. Following the faint moans, and instinct, I picked my way to what I assumed was a bedroom door. Summoning all my willpower, I pushed it open, only to spot a pair of legs hanging off the end of a bed.

  “Marla?”

  If she had not whimpered, I wouldn’t have known she was alive.

  Pushing cats out of the way, I ran to her and switched on a bedside lamp. Her skin felt clammy to my touch. I could see her heartbeat through the thin skin in her temple. She didn’t appear to be bleeding. I was afraid to encourage her to sit up in case that might do her more harm than good.

  There was a half a glass of water on a low dresser nearby. I dipped my fingers into it and applied it to her lips. She responded by licking the water off her mouth. I repeated the action until I’d gotten a quarter of the glass down her.

  “Hang on, I’ll get help.” I raced out the way I’d come, hopping over cats as best I could. I threw the front door open so wide that it bumped Clancy on the backside.

  “Oh,” she moaned as she wiped her mouth. A sour smell in the air told me she’d been sick.

  “Marla’s in there.”

  “She okay?” Clancy burped quietly. “Excuse me.”

  “I’m calling in the Calvary.” I fished in my purse for my phone. I also needed my inhaler. I could hear myself wheezing.

  “That’s cavalry, not Calvary.” Clancy bent over the railing and heaved.

  I dialed 911.

  “My friend and I are okay, but we’ve got a situation here.” I told the dispatcher our names, our address, and that we needed an ambulance immediately. The dispatcher asked me several questions about Marla’s condition, and then, “Are you with the woman right now?”

  “I’m not,” and in disjointed sentences I explained how many cats there were in the house. “There are also stacks and stacks of newspapers, so it’s like walking through a tunnel. A really, really narrow tunnel that might fall down at any time.”

  “We don’t want you to endanger yourself,” said the calm and collected voice on the other end. “Stay where you are. I have a detective in the area who’s on his way. I’ll also alert Animal Control.”

  “Good idea.”

  “Mrs. Lowenstein, is that you wheezing? If you are having trouble breathing, you need to get yourself into some place where there’s air conditioning.”

  “I can’t go sit in the car. Not when Marla’s in such bad shape.” Of course, that’s what I tried to say. The truth is my asthma now rendered talking nearly impossible. I wheezed like a bad church organ. I raised a quizzical eyebrow at Clancy. “Can you go see about her?”

  “Are you kidding?” My friend shook her head. “I can barely stand up. It’s not smart for either of us to go inside. Remember those brothers who died in New York? Buried under all the junk they’d collected? With so many papers piled up, they could fall down on you. Us. That wouldn’t do Marla any good, would it?”

  6

  I agreed and searched in earnest for my inhaler. I found it at the bottom of my purse. I took one puff and watched Clancy get the dry heaves. When they stopped, she picked her way down the front steps to lean against the front of Marla’s house. I took a second puff from my inhaler. I was exhaling slowly when a police cruiser came around the corner on two wheels.

  “Detective Stan Hadcho,” the driver said, as he flipped open his jacket to display a badge. He followed that by handing us both his card. “What’s up?”

  “There’s a woman inside in distress. She’s alive, but in a bad way—” I opened the door, but didn’t step inside because the loud yuga-yuga-yuga of a siren split the air.

  “Step aside.” Hadcho bounded up the stairs and grabbed me by the arm. “Let the professionals do their jobs.”

  A bright yellow ambulance rolled to a stop behind Hadcho’s car. The doors flew open and EMTs barreled out.

  “Where?” The first one shouted at me.

  “Straight back and to the left. In a bedroom, but you need to be careful —”

  The first medic didn’t wait for me to finish. He opened the door, cats came tumbling out of the house. The smell hit all of us and sent us reeling. The EMTs stepped over the animals and made their way inside.

  Hadcho fisted his hands on his hips, watched as they disappeared, and shook his head. “I have a bad feeling about this.”

  7

  A cat got his tail caught in the door and let out an ear-splitting yowl. I helped Hadcho move the animal back into the house. In the process, we had to shoo away a herd of other felines, who were trying desperately to escape. I did everything I could to keep them from getting outside because I worried that they’d get hit by cars or whatever. I didn’t want to contemplate what awful fates might intervene. Using his foot, Hadcho helped me nudge the kitties back inside the house.

  “If he bites you, you’re in trouble,” said Clancy, when I chased after a big black cat. “I bet none of these have had rabies shots.”

  That worried me, but I wasn’t about to let an animal get hurt on my watch.

  After I corralled the big black cat—and he proved himself to be a lover, not a fighter—Hadcho said, “I need to take your statements. Let’s go inside.”

  “Really?” I asked in disbelief. I couldn’t believe he wanted to enter Marla’s mess. “Okay, after you.”

  Hadcho led us to Marla’s dining room. Clancy was pale as a sheet. She held a tissue over her nose. I tried to breathe through my mouth.

  “Fresh air will help.” Hadcho attacked one of the windows.

  With a lot of effort, he managed to raise the sash. There wasn’t much of a breeze, but we did get a smidgeon of relief from the outside air. At the detective’s direction, Clancy and I took seats at Marla’s dining room table. Hadcho shooed away the cats who were occupying the table top. Using the pet bed, he also picked up and removed the body of the cat that had crossed the rainbow bridge. Next Hadcho pulled a thin pack of wipes from an inside pocket and swept the table’s surface clean. The reassuring scent of Lysol filled the air, but even that was overcome by the down-deep stink of the place. All three of us stuffed tissues up in our noses to dull the smell. Not that it helped much.

  “What on earth convinced you to stick around?” he asked.

  “Kiki wanted to turn around and go home. But Rebekkah Goldfader would have given us heck times three.” Clancy shivered, despite the heat. Despite the t
issues sticking out of her nose, but she somehow managed to look elegant. I have no idea how. I think she channeled Jackie Kennedy.

  Clancy paused, glancing over at the pet bed and the dead body. “Why isn’t that cat moving? Is it…?”

  I looked more closely. “It’s dead.”

  “Animal Control is on the way.” Hadcho stared at his phone. He frowned and punched in a message to someone.

  While he was occupied, I grabbed the offending pet bed and rolled it up. My intent was to carry it into another room, but before I could, Clancy ran past me. Even after the front door slammed shut, you could hear the faint sounds of her retching. Hadcho was busy with his phone, so I started to follow Clancy with my odiferous bundle in tow.

  “Stop!” yelled Hadcho. “Ladies, both of you. Get back here. Now.”

  “I’ll just put this outside,” I said.

  “No way. This might be a crime scene. I can’t tell yet. Sit down and stay put.” Hadcho went and found Clancy. “Both of you need to be where I can keep an eye on you.”

  “Do we have to?” Clancy wobbled her way back to the dining room table. She patted her mouth with a tissue. “Couldn’t we wait outside?”

  “I have to take your statements,” said Hadcho. “It’ll go faster if I have a surface to write on.”

  A knock at the door interrupted us again. Hadcho excused himself and returned with two Animal Control officers, a man and a woman. I showed the man the pet bed and asked him to deal with the dead cat first. Hadcho explained to the officers that the medics were still working on Marla back in her bedroom.

  “This is ridiculous,” said Hadcho, dabbing at his forehead. “Even with the window open, there’s no air in here at all. Stay put.”