A Curious Affair

WATCHED

“I agree,” Sheriff Tyler said evenly. “If this is about money, though, I can think of others around Irv who had even greater need. What I can’t figure out is just why you’ve always been so certain it is murder. If we hadn’t sent the body out for an autopsy with a genuine forensic pathologist, old Doc Harmon would have signed off on this as an accident and we would never know that murder had been done.”

I looked him in the eye. “So, it is murder.”

“Yes, blunt force trauma. One killing blow to the head. Probably from a fireplace poker, which is still missing. You were right about that, too.”

I nodded, not surprised. “That was quick work.”

“It’s the only suspicious death in the county. Irv got moved to the head of the line.” Those probing eyes were back on my face. Those beautiful, probing blue eyes.

“I feel like you’ve been watching me, Sheriff. Constantly. Why? Do you think it likely that I killed Irv and am trying to blame someone else for my wicked deeds?” I asked bluntly, and watched with satisfaction when Tyler blinked.

“Hadn’t crossed my mind.” But he was lying.

“It better have,” I said, “or you’re in the wrong line of work.”

For my husband, who almost wasn’t here.
And also for the many wonderful employees and volunteers
who make the animal shelter a home for the dogs and cats
until they can find new families of their own
.

My name isn’t Jillian Marsh. I don’t live in Irish Camp. I don’t have a friend named Crystal, a lover called Tyler, or a cat named Atherton.

But that doesn’t mean that this story isn’t true. The details have been changed to protect the innocent, because I have to live with my neighbors. And a few laws were broken. But the gist of the story is true. Cross my heart and hope to die.

It was raining. This isn’t unusual for March in the Sierras, but it had rained without let-up for the last seventeen days. That wasn’t the only reason that I was on my third Seconal and fourth Drambuie, but it sure had something to do with it.

Suicide wasn’t my goal that night, but I hadn’t ruled it out either. The TMJ—temporomandibular joint disorder, if you want the full medical term—wasn’t getting better and I was tired of sucking on soup and mumbling at my concerned neighbors through clenched teeth. I also felt guilty, and without means of making reparation to the one I’d wronged. After all, how do you apologize to the dead?

Winter had rushed the calendar and arrived weeks ahead of schedule, in early November. It was the kind of season where the cold actually leans on you until you’re ready to buckle under the weight, your frozen bones snapping when you hit the unforgiving ground. We’d set new records for cold and snow for the first six weeks of
the season, and then it warmed up marginally and started raining. I didn’t think it was an improvement.

It wasn’t the dark or cold that was bothering me, though. The fact was, I was more alone than I had ever been in my life. Calvin was barely a memory to everyone else, but not to me. In spite of the usual assurances of time healing all wounds, my heart was still a space filled with dull aching, and there was no one to talk to about it. We’d spent eleven years together—pretty happy ones. And then he’d gotten this nasty cough. He was a smoker, and the surgeon general had been proven right; the carcinogens had caught up with him. I couldn’t face what was happening, so we never spoke about it. It seemed to me that he hadn’t lived long enough to be dying, but it turns out he had, and our silent avoidance of the subject and two rounds of chemotherapy didn’t keep Death away. How I regretted that silence now when there was so much of it! I should have let him talk, admit his fears, allowed him to say anything he needed to say. But I hadn’t let him talk to me. I had never told him how much I would miss him, either, and regret was my constant companion. That was three autumns ago. And that morning I had finally cleaned out his bedroom closet, erasing yet another part of him. Cal was an orphan who had no siblings or other relatives that we knew of. When he was gone from my life, he would be gone from everywhere.

I don’t know why I chose that morning to erase him. The sad odor of loss hadn’t yet begun to eddy about his clothes. The closet wasn’t stale or musty. But it didn’t smell like him anymore, either, and in a moment of bravery I had decided to clean it out. I did it, too—cleaned it down to its damned dust bunnies cowering behind the cowboy boots. All the His and Hers things went into boxes as well: the champagne flutes from our wedding
etched with our names, the Himself and Herself towels, the twin sets of luggage monogrammed with our initials. They all seemed to mock my loneliness.
I am
Grief—I am Legion
, they sneered from every room in the house. And every time I thought I was done I found something else, some fresh cruelty: unused season tickets to the opera; the new gas grill still sitting in its box in the garage because, by the time warm weather had rolled back around, Cal had felt too ill to use it.

My intention was to have a yard sale on the first clear weekend, but with the rivers of mud and downed limbs from the ancient oak trees, the front yard looked more like a beach after a shipwreck than a formal garden. I knew I’d have to hire a cleaning crew before I let anyone on the property or risk a personal injury lawsuit. It was all too much. I gave up on the plan. My loneliness had been honed to surgical sharpness on the strop of guilt and grief, and now it was slicing at my heart—a heart that already, in the days after Cal’s death, had gained an incision as long and deep as itself. I didn’t understand why it went on beating then, and I didn’t know why it was beating now. All those midnight hours I’d put between me and his death hadn’t been enough. No matter how many things I boxed or bagged, the mercy of forgetfulness was denied me.

I’m not ready to sell Cal’s things anyway
, I thought, tossing back the last of the Drambuie. Why had I emptied the closet? I could have just as easily sawed my wounded heart out with the rusty blade from Cal’s abandoned toolbox. It would have been less painful than packing my love away in black garbage bags.

But none of this was the worst. The worst of all my tribulations—hands down—was that getting hit by lightning thing. It had happened last October, on Halloween in fact, and ever since then the cats had been talking to me.

How sweet!
you’re thinking.
She talks to cats
. But that isn’t it at all. I wasn’t talking to the cats. The cats talked to
me
.

And this isn’t something sweet. Not at all—not even now that I’m more used to it. The implications are rather horrifying. Think about it. First, there was the little matter of this peculiarity making me question my sanity, especially when I was out in public and no one else seemed to hear what I was hearing. Leaving questions of my rationality aside, it wasn’t like the cats and I were discussing Descartes, politics or fashion. Why would we? We didn’t even have species in common. They crap in bushes and eat carrion and wash themselves with their tongues. They’re not…well, human. Personally, I wouldn’t dream of relieving myself in a bush, and am a very picky eater. Conversations with felines tend to run to demands for food and observations about how I smell. They follow me around, whining in voices that grate the nerves, repeating themselves incessantly. And by that night I was sick of it—the sly feline voices pouncing on me every time I went outside; the cold, the rain, the pain. Sick enough to take way too many pills and chase them down with the last of Cal’s favorite liqueur. It was sink-or-swim time, and I still didn’t know which I wanted to do; so I thought I’d let the pills decide. If I lived to see morning, then I would start swimming again.

Anyhow, that’s what I was doing the night Atherton arrived. I didn’t know his name was Atherton then. At first I didn’t even know he was a cat. He was just a shadow hovering in my window, slightly more solid than the wet night behind him and the phantoms in my brain. It took him a few minutes and lots of name-calling to finally get my attention, but once he did get it, I was all ears. This cat actually had something interesting to say.

Admittedly my impressions of our first meeting are
confused, being filtered through a river of amber liqueur and floating on the rafts of my little red pills. It took me a while to understand what he wanted—and to throw up the last of the drugs and alcohol in my abused stomach—while Atherton perched on the edge of the bathtub and looked on like Virtue reproving Vice. As hard as it was to imagine, death had come calling in our small mountain town. The agent of death had been male, worn a sodden denim jacket, and smelled like butt—as in, unhygienic ass; not cigarette ends. And as soon as I could get my head out of the toilet, Atherton would take me to see his handiwork for myself.

It shows you how bad I was feeling that, when I stopped vomiting, I actually pulled on my boots and a parka and followed that talking cat into the rainy night. But I had to see if Irving Thibodaux was, in point of fact, dead.

The night was cold and wet, just as I expected it to be. I must admit to having been a little frightened by Atherton’s grim summons, so I armed myself with a knife, which I don’t normally do when I go for an evening perambulation. I was unnerved, and not because I was following a talking cat, though I’m betting that’s the part of the story that most bothers you, since I assume you’re sensible and sane. I don’t blame you, either. It strains the credulity. But, no, I was nervous because cats didn’t play practical jokes in my recent experience, and I truly believed that someone had killed my neighbor. And since the most likely person to have done that was a junkie looking for the stash from Irv’s marijuana patch, they might still be out there looking around for it.

Not for the first time, I found myself reconsidering my stance on firearms in the home. Sometimes there is just no substitute for what my brother calls “a fistful of boom-stick.”

Atherton tried to lead me straight up the hill, over the fallen log that had lain there rotting on the deer path
for the last five years and past the stand of cedars whose whispering branches were scabbed with graying lichen and sagging as though they carried the weight of the world. I wouldn’t have minded a scramble in daylight, but the mountain was also thick with poison oak and I’m quite allergic. So I called to the cat and insisted we take the road, even if the water and gravel flowing down the mountain made it more of a stream than a street.

I ended up carrying Atherton, who didn’t want to get his paws any wetter. It could have been a comforting experience, but he was heavy—the cat is really more of a puma than a domestic feline—and he was too tense to trust me not to drop him. We did a sort of push-pull isometric exercise all the way up the hill with both of us squinting against the greasy rain that filtered through the oaks and arrived in fat drops that felt as bitter as tears. Wind sang in the power lines beside us and the remorseless, wounded sound in the wires set my jaw to sympathetic thrumming. Ever since I was hit by lightning, my jaws lock when I get cold. I wished I’d thought to grab my hunting cap with its long fur earflaps before leaving the house.

If you’ve never lived in the country, then you’ll have no idea how dark a moonless night can be. We had a moon, but just barely, and the tiny lunar sliver at the corner of the sky wouldn’t have provided much light even if the heavens hadn’t upended themselves over the town in an impenetrable barrier of wet that would have blocked out the sun at high noon. As it was, the night that pressed in on us was as black as the color black can be. Perhaps Atherton could navigate it unaided, but the flashlight was necessary for me, since I had no desire to fall down the mountain, whose face sheered away from the ever-shrinking road now crumbling away under the rain’s relentless onslaught.

I looked back once and saw the lights of Lincoln
Street winking through the bare tree limbs. It looked beautiful, even in the rain, a watercolor in amber that reminded me of a painting by Avi Thaw. I could hear the faint strains of bass-heavy music riding the damp air. In my slightly nauseous state, I still found the scene magically charming, even though I knew the glow was due to smoke from the fireplaces that had been burning nonstop for weeks, probably causing acid rain.

My late husband Cal and I had always had a nostalgic—and mostly book-and television-manufactured—wistfulness for a life in the era that preceded the one we were born into. That was why we ended up living in the Gold Country of the Sierra Nevada foothills. It was sort of the land that time forgot. In the 1850s, it had somehow been encased, preserved, frozen at the apex of its charm. Some days, I thought Irish Camp the best of all possible worlds: straddling the line between my desire for life in another era, and being plain old boring or even dangerously third-world. This was a small town of few cell phones. Poor reception in the mountains kept them away, though if Nature hadn’t provided a deterrent, the town council might have passed an ordinance. We didn’t have strip malls downtown, but did have a few doctors and access to antibiotics and X-ray machines. Basic cable was available right in the town proper, if it didn’t have the mind-numbing number of stations obtainable in the Silicon Valley. Few kids owned iPods; instead most had bikes. The town wasn’t rich, but it wasn’t grindingly poor either—until you got to the very edges, where the forest and the secrets got thicker and older. That’s where the multigenerational families lived—usually all together in cabins that have never seen a building inspector, and where one could only dream of indoor plumbing.

As a rule, the higher up the mountain you go in Irish Camp, the rougher the pavement grows—assuming that the roads were ever paved in the first place, which is a
chancy hypothesis. In many places, the growing potholes are filled with gravel every spring when the winter’s vengeance becomes apparent and even the Jeeps can’t cope without taking some damage. After a few years of neglect, the macadam completely disappears. Some of us find this rustic and appealing. That’s because we have four-wheel drive and aren’t too particular about the state of our paint jobs.

The lack of paving also keeps out all but the most intrepid tourists.

Don’t get me wrong, our town loves tourism and thrives on the money it brings. But we want to keep our visitors on the picturesque main streets where the shops and restaurants are, and not have them falling into the many abandoned—and not so abandoned—mine shafts and coyote holes that litter the countryside. Which was yet another reason to travel by road on this dark night: our hill has more than its share of death traps.

In spite of the sky’s endless drooling, stinging rain, I slowed as we neared Irv’s shack, feeling reluctant to take the next step. The cabin was a shake-sided affair whose dessicated shingles were an invitation to the gods of fire. It had no insulation and its heating was provided solely by wood-burning stove. Because it was in a bower of trees, the constant smolder coming from the stovepipe chimney tended to keep the cabin in a constant haze. But not that night. The shack was dark and no fire was burning in the potbelly. More telling still, the four pie tins Irv filled with crunchies for the neighborhood’s stray cats were all empty.

I set Atherton down at the bottom of the three wooden steps that led to the shack’s only door. The cat immediately set about smoothing the fur I had ruffled.

“Are we alone?” I whispered, as best I could through clenched jaws. I have no idea if I actually need to speak
out loud for cats to hear me. If I don’t, they tend to ignore me unless I get their full attention.

Yes. Except for food man
. Atherton’s eyes were wide and unblinking.

“And he’s really dead?” I mumbled.

Really, really dead
. Atherton’s mewl sounded mournful, but his meaning was getting clearer.

“You saw Irv die?”

Yes
. Atherton hesitated.
Irv sent us away. He does when
humans come. But I didn’t leave. I stayed by the window.
Smelly-
butt man was wrong. He smelled
…
dangerous
.

“I don’t know what dangerous smells like.”

Bad. It smells bad
.

“But smelly-butt’s gone?” I wanted to be sure.

All gone. He ran away
.

I walked slowly up the stairs, testing them as I went. When I’d visited Irv last September, I’d had one break under me and scraped up an ankle pretty badly. He’d replaced that step—probably with lumber he’d salvaged from somewhere else on the property—and assured me it was now safe, but I still didn’t trust the stairs.

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.