A Curious Affair Read online

  The door stood ajar. Since I was wearing thick gloves, I didn’t hesitate to reach inside the room and flip on the lights. Or, I should say, light. The cabin was a one-room affair with one corner blocked off by a short wall to form a rudimentary bathroom. Being a thrifty soul—or perhaps fearing to overload the ancient wiring he’d rigged up on his own—Irv had a single, twenty-five-watt bulb screwed into the ceiling-mounted fixture in the center of the room.

  The light was dim but sufficient to show us Irv, who was lying sprawled on the floor with his head resting on the sandstone hearth he’d laid under the stove. It was too narrow to be a real hindrance to shooting sparks, and definitely not up to code, but then neither was the wiring, or the cabin itself—which I doubted was even on the county tax rolls—so this wasn’t a surprising violation.

  I viewed the floor with trepidation. Irv had joked once that the foundation consisted mainly of old car jacks and prayer, and since he wasn’t on the best of terms with The Lord, it paid to be a bit cautious when visiting. Fortunately, I didn’t need to get any closer. By leaning to my right I could see all of the body. It was apparent that Irv was, as Atherton insisted, really, really dead. The milky eyes were fixed and staring in two directions, one knocked out of place by the blow that had dented in the side of his head. More disturbing was the half-smile on his blue lips. It suggested a residue of unsuitable emotion, an inappropriate degree of humor from someone dead by misadventure.

  “Damn.”

  There is nothing so horrible as the moment when you realize that you will never see someone again. Not ever. They will always be gone, forever and ever. There is a then when you had them and a now when you don’t. The two are segregated, divided by an insurmountable barrier: death. And even when death brings an end to pain for someone who is suffering—and a horrible kind of relief to the ones who have had to watch the agony—it is still rather like having a vampire swoop down and give you a hateful, draining kiss. This is part of death’s—or life’s, I’ve never been clear which—ritual. As the old saying goes, life is a slow way of dying. From the moment we are born we are heading for the final demise.

  It’s true, we deny this vehemently. This is because it is impossible to live happily while in mortal dread of disintegration. And while the experience of loss doesn’t kill you outright, once the leech of fear and grief takes hold, you never know—or I never have—quite how much of your soul or will it will suck out before it moves on. One’s anguish at a loss is a sort of protection money that you have to pay for the privilege of going on living. Few of us die without first paying this tax of grief and failure. Most of us get charged a bit at a time; first a parent, perhaps a friend and then another, a spouse. God help us, a child. John Donne had it right—“Any man’s death diminishes me.” At least the death of anyone I ever cared about.

  Death, however, wasn’t going to be getting much out of me this time. I was anemic, down a quart on emotion since Cal died. The vampire had taken too much, and I hadn’t enough left to mourn Irv properly.

  That didn’t mean I was indifferent. Seeing him made my heart twist, and butterflies with razor-sharp wings began to flutter in my stomach. Irv was a hermit who lived alone…like me. Our cases were too similar for me not to have a brief moment of There but for the grace of God go I. How long might I lie dead on my kitchen floor before someone found me?

  I gave a sigh that was as much weariness as mourning, and looked at the rest of the room. Muddy tracks crisscrossed the sagging floor. I wasn’t a Girl Scout in good standing, but anyone could see that the top layer of prints came from a pair of what we used to call wafflestompers. Large ones, too. I looked at the worn soles of Irv’s smallish cowboy boots and felt my already foundering spirits sink. This definitely seemed to suggest that he wasn’t just dead; he had been murdered. Irv didn’t have visitors to the cabin, excepting his sometime girlfriend, Molly Gerran, who had petite feet. And, once in a while, me. The big-footed stranger hadn’t come because of some long-standing invitation.

  “Well, hell.” It came out more as ell-ell.

  I wasn’t drunk anymore, but I wasn’t in the best physical shape of my life either. My stomach felt like the aftermath of a tornado, and depth charges of my approaching hangover were beginning to go off behind my eyes. And—oh God—I was going to have to call the sheriff. The thought made me uncomfortable, because this situation presented me with a bit of a conundrum. First off, I had to hope that the relatively new sheriff would know who I was—a respectable writer—and who I was talking about—Irving—and where the cabin was located. Sheriff Hartford—of the Hartford Foundry, Hartford Quarry, Hartford Inn and the Hartford Shoes Hartfords—had retired in September and, in a move that was so revolutionary as to be thought damn near socialist, the town council had hired someone from Southern California to replace him. Someone who actually had a background in law enforcement.

  There was also the matter of what I was going to say, and how I would say it. Clear speech was excruciating when I was cold, and right now I was pretty much stuck with locked jaws. I also reeked of booze. I’d have to talk, though, liquor-breath or no. This wasn’t a case where one could just write a note and slip it under the door, or send an e-mail.

  Understand, I’m not bug-eating crazy, so I look normal enough, but the termites in my mental attic had been eating away at the supports of reason for the last several months. I’d been hearing voices—ones that belonged to cats—at inconvenient moments, and that’s enough to draw the interest of any lawman or headshrinker. This kind of interest was something I wanted to avoid, especially with a murdered body at hand. Who better to blame for a death than the local psycho?

  “Damn it, Irv. Why me?” It actually sounded more like Tham-ith-Irvvvv-iiii-ee, but Atherton understood. He had no answer, though, beyond the obvious one. The cat told me: Because I was the only one who would understand.

  “Swell,” I responded. “But what are we going to do?”

  We must find smelly-butt man and punish him.

  I didn’t try to explain that this was only one of our problems. I figured the workings of the criminal justice system might be beyond kitty-cat comprehension. Certainly it was beyond me to explain when my face hurt so much.

  “Something is wrong here,” I said instead. I meant wrong beyond Irv lying dead on the floor.

  Poor food man. Atherton sounded sadder than I did, and perhaps he was.

  Irving was a friendly enough guy, but few of the newer people—mainly the Bay Area refugees, who were refurbishing the old craftsman bungalows and Victorians on our hill with an eye to living in them during their golden years—knew that. You see, Irv had a few off-putting habits, like spitting constantly and smiling broadly, showing uneven, chaw-stained teeth that belong only in the past, or in a postapocalyptic world where they have no dental care. Or, more to the point, where people do a lot of drugs and forget about oral hygiene. Yeah, drugs. We weren’t entirely stuck in the 1850s. Stills and moonshine had been partially replaced with backwoods pot patches, and at least one methamphetamine lab had been discovered last April by federal agents. Pot was a more reliable source of money than panning for gold—which Irv also did, in the summer. I knew about this because Irv had kept Cal supplied with marijuana while he was doing chemotherapy, and he had assured me that it was pesticide-free because he grew it himself.

  I exhaled slowly, looking at the black mold that was growing up the cabin walls, sensing the general air of filth and neglect, and found the place to be the most overall depressing home I’d ever been in. The air was worse than musty, worse than moldy. Thank heavens the stove wasn’t lit, the place would have smelled like the world’s most repulsive barbecue.

  The sheriff would probably recall Irv. Irving had had a habit of getting pinched on drunk-and-disorderlies at the road house in Charlestown or The Three-Legged Mule on any Saturday when the temperature got to be over ninety degrees and irritated his heat rash and his temper. Surely the new sheriff, Tyler Murphy, would have arrested him at
least once. Actually, I was sure he had. One of the brawls even made the local newspaper. There had been a small fire at The Three-Legged Mule early in October: stupidity in burning candles in unstable wine bottles, the fire chief ruled, not deliberate arson, and not bad enough to close the place for good. A coughing and smudged Irving had been there, front and center, with a set of busted knuckles and the bar’s gasping cat sitting at his feet. Irv had broken off the fight to go back in and save the cat when he’d realized it was trapped in the storeroom. The poor thing died three weeks later, in spite of Irv’s heroics. I recall Irv being more upset about the cat than having to pay the court-ordered fine for brawling.

  “Irv.” I shook my head. I was pissed off at being the one to find him, but I also felt sad. No one should die alone. Or with a murderer shuffling you off this mortal coil before you were ready.

  Some of his clients would miss him, and maybe his ex-girlfriend, Barfly Molly, though she had once told me in a fit of drunken honesty that Irving was the worst possible result of a one-night stand between the town floozy and an itinerant gold prospector, so maybe not. Mostly his passing would be mourned by the town’s feral and stray cats. Irving was the patron saint of strays, which he used to say he liked a whole lot better than people. He’d spent a lot of time talking to those cats ever since his accident. Oddly enough, Irv had also been hit by lightning and survived. We had that in common. Now, given my recent experiences, I had to wonder if they ever talked back to him.

  Atherton patted my leg above the ankle. He was careful to keep his claws sheathed.

  “Yeah. I know. Give me a minute,” I mumbled, but the cat had no trouble understanding my slurred diction. “Something just isn’t…Something is…”

  Not right.

  Something was wrong, but I wasn’t able to figure out what and time was ticking by. I should either go in and close Irv’s staring eyes, which were unnerving me, or else I should shut off the light and head back down the hill and make the call to the sheriff. Instead, I just stood there, freezing water running down my neck, this time really looking hard and feeling uncomfortable in a way I’d rather not have experienced.

  Irv’s cabin looked like I felt. And the more I saw, the more disheartened I was. First of all, because Irv was dead and staring off at nothing, but also because the cabin itself was so utterly forlorn. Molly had left a year ago, but she also seemed to be hanging around the place as a gingham ghost. Her style of decorating had always made me claustrophobic. The new owners of Molly’s Eats hadn’t bothered to redecorate when they bought her diner, so it remained as a testimonial and warning of what happened when domesticity ran amok. Irv’s place looked like a smaller, dirtier—much dirtier—facsimile of Molly’s Eats. Dusty checked curtains with too many rows of eyelet ruffles hid the only two windows in the cabin. A small, claw-footed table was smothered under a filthy tablecloth sewn out of red and blue bandanas, also trimmed in eyelet, and buried under mounds of dirty cups and dishes. There was a vase of flowers on the sill that was too old and cobwebbed to be poignant. I’d had some bad days after Cal died—who cared about dishes or laundry when your insides had been emotionally gutted?—but this wasn’t something recent, some momentary domestic despair. It looked like the work of someone who was certain that his shack would never be visited and therefore would never need to know cleanliness again.

  I felt a sharp pang of guilt. I hadn’t come to visit Irv in weeks. The cold and wet—and yes, my own despair—had kept me indoors.

  I looked left. Tacked to the walls were dozens of Polaroids of cats. Some people take pictures of their family, Irv took pictures of his obsession: felines. Or maybe the cats were his family. I didn’t know of anyone else who would claim him as kin, though it was likely he had some, and the old-timers at The Mule would know who and where they were. The upside of small-town life is the intimacy you share with your neighbors. The downside is the inbreeding and nepotism that created mini-dynasties like the aforementioned Hartfords and Andersens (of Andersen Insurance, Andersen Automotive, and Andersen Lumber). And the inability to keep any secret for long.

  A gust of wind blew by me, stirring the skirt of the dirty tablecloth and making dust and ash from the cold hearth dance in the air. Atherton sneezed. I shook my head and stepped back, hoping it was laziness and not soul-shattering despair at losing Molly that had kept Irv from changing things when she broke it off between them.

  Atherton patted me again and looked pointedly at the empty pie tins. As I stared out into the wet night, I became aware that we were no longer alone. A number of thin felines had crowded in around the base of the stairs and were staring at me with fixed gazes.

  “I can’t feed you, guys. Not here. If Atherton is right, then this is a crime scene. I can’t go in and get the food.”

  The cats mewled. Hungry. It was a Greek chorus that grew steadily louder, making my head echo with painful sound. Food man hasn’t fed us since morning. Cold! We need food.

  “Stop!” It was more plea than order. Like Atherton, the cats seemed to understand me even though my diction was terrible.

  I looked back into the cabin and the telltale prints on the floor. The giant sack of cat food that Irv bought—or maybe stole—from the feed store was right where it always was, sitting on the floor right next to the door. Knowing I shouldn’t, I picked it up and started pouring kibble into the dented tins. A dozen lean shadows crowded in, purring thanks as I put the sack back in its place and then closed the door.

  I told myself that it wouldn’t matter. The food would likely be gone before the sheriff got here, and no one would be the wiser. Surely no one would notice the raindrops that had collected on the glossy face of the purebred Persian that adorned the bag.

  The sheriff. My nagging feeling of unease returned, but this time I squarely faced the problem that awaited me. What was I going to say—or slur—to the sheriff? That Irv was dead certainly; but murdered? That he had been killed by a man in a denim coat and wafflestompers who “smelled like butt”? And I knew this because while drunk and considering ending my life, a stray cat had come to my window and told me so? Yeah, that would all go over real well.

  I shivered, feeling cold, wet and frightened. Just as I had since October.

  “Thit, thit, thit,” I said, but only because I was having trouble with my sh’s. Then I reached into my pocket, found the tube of Rolaids I always carried and forced one between my teeth and began tonguing it. It would be bad if I threw up because I wasn’t sure I could actually get my jaws open.

  “Okay, let’s go,” I thought and slurred.

  As I started down the hill, I could almost feel Atherton slinking after me like my shadow, a reminder that I had to do the right thing and not just go home to my warm bed. He needn’t have bothered. Seeing Irv lying up there dead and all alone had shaken me. I had to ask myself again: If I died, how long might I lie on my kitchen floor before someone found me? And when they did find me, would they care? Or would they just feel inconvenienced by the discovery of the hermit lady who seemed to spend her days talking to cats instead of humans?

  My eyes began to sting. I hate to admit that it was at least half self-pity that put the tears there.

  Again I thought, There but for the grace of God go I.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city.

  —Italo Calvino

  There were lights in town, but segments of the old streets near the sheriff’s department were still drenched in darkness that, for the first time to me, felt ominous. I spent a lot of that walk looking behind me for things that weren’t there. Perhaps I would have been braver if Atherton had come with me, but I was alone. Atherton had elected to stay at my place since it was wet and there was nothing he could tell the sheriff that he hadn’t told me. And bringing him along might seem downright weird. After all, it wasn’t like he was a dog who would want to go for a walk no matter what the weather.

  The sky’
s normal nighttime black-and-white color scheme was distorted by more than winter clouds. Small fires, though mostly neutered and contained inside tidy houses where they devoured only small bits of trees, remembered enough of what it was to conspire together and become a forest fire. They vomited smoke together, painting the air above town with smoldering ash until the sky was as darkened by this as it would be by a more terrifying, summertime conflagration. The suspended soot in the air had turned the town into a place as dank and dark as an old miner’s lung. The rain tried, but it couldn’t clean the air fast enough to outpace the chimneys’ steady output. It was worst in the narrow streets where the wind never ventured. Eventually, the town was going to have to give in and pass an ordinance forcing the use of clean-burning stoves. I thought about this as I pushed open the door to the sheriff’s office, eyes stinging and nose protesting the smoky assault.

  The door had a cowbell that rang out like the knell on doomsday. Lucky me, the man himself was on duty. I had been hoping that maybe I would catch one of the deputies who had been friendly with Cal.

  I’m not stupid or masochistic. I had tried phoning the sheriff’s office before walking into town through the mud river that used to be the road. But I had been so cold and the connection so bad that the sheriff or whoever answered hadn’t been able to understand me. My choices were to forget Irv until morning, or slog down the hill to the station.

  So I’d slogged. And grumbled, though I knew whoever was on duty would grumble more going back up the hill. We are a small county and the sheriff, along with his two deputies and a secretary/dispatcher, was responsible for all of it. In an emergency like a forest fire, the sheriff could ask for help from other agencies like the highway patrol, but for little things like homicide, he was on his own. I knew he’d be thrilled to hear he’d need to take a midnight stroll.

  In the Central Valley, the farmland has been tamed and even trained to do man’s bidding. The foothills and the Sierras themselves are less biddable; it’s the geography. Once the mountains were whole, but in some long ago cataclysm, the Sierras had shrugged during one of the great earthquakes and clefts appeared. Water, ever the opportunist, had done the rest. The land was fissured. Sure, it’s beautiful here, but hard, and the land does not suffer fools. Killing heat in summer, murderous cold in winter, rock slides, flash floods, avalanches—both seasons lay traps for unwary hikers and skiers who come from more moderate climes. The poor fools don’t even know to be afraid.