The Death of Perry Many Paws (5 page)

One thing I can say about my mother-in-law is that she is way too classy to flinch when someone spews diet soda across the table and into her coffee. She merely moved the cup away, took a napkin and wiped off her hands.

“I don’t really want to go back over there, ever …” I protested.

“It really is asking a lot of Tamsen,” Sybil agreed. “Why not let me do it. I don’t mind at all.”

“Nonsense, Tamsen. You did such an adequate job that summer when you organized our library and there is so much less involved in cleaning out Franklin’s place. You and Cam can have any books that might be valuable or of interest. Most of the stuff in there can be donated to Goodwill. But I think it’s important to have someone in the family sort through it all. Cam is much too busy. And I can’t bear to be without Sybil right now.”

By the time they left, I had traded not baking a pie and manning a refreshment booth for clearing out the house of a murdered man.

am not a brave person. The last brave thing I did was to give birth. And let’s face it, I really didn’t have a choice. For my latest foray into the world of the courageous, I decided to ramp up my fortifications and take Grace, Diane and Syra with me. I would have brought Bing, too, but he was semi-agoraphobic and would only venture out across the street to my house. Straight back and forth across the street and nothing more. So Syra left him at home to bake us something as a reward for what we were about to do and we took off, armed with garbage bags, water bottles, cookies and cleaning supplies.

Syra sensed my dread of returning to the crime scene and tried to distract me by asking about my ongoing battle with my editor over Perry Many Paws and his friends.

“He’s rejected two of my opening chapters so far. He won’t let Perry find any new friends. He won’t let me temporarily lose Squeaky and Friendly. He won’t let me move Perry to some exotic location and he won’t let me involve Perry Many Paws in anything that even whiffs of mischievousness. Oh, and Grace, he did not like your name change suggestions. Promiscuous Pig and Horny Owl are definitely out. My hands are tied.”

Grace tramped behind us, struggling to keep up and balance her water bottle and box of garbage bags. “I need a walking stick. Isn’t there a way to drive to this cottage?”

“Actually, there is,” I yelled back, holding aside a tree bough until Syra caught up with me. “But you still have to walk in from where you park the car, and that trail is grown over because it’s never used.”

“It’s got to be shorter than this,” Grace swatted at some imaginary bit of nature that she felt touching her face.

“It’s shorter but you’d need a machete to get through. We’re almost there.”

“Will there be anything, you know, disgusting?” Diane asked, stepping gingerly over a fallen branch, flicking away bits of leaves that fell onto her white twin set sweaters.

“Don’t worry. It won’t be like an episode of “CSI”. The police gave us the okay to have professional cleaners come in to get all the, uh, traces of disgusting stuff. We just need to sort through Franklin’s personal stuff. Most of it we’ll probably throw away, but there might be something we can salvage for Goodwill.”

We came to the clearing by the cottage and I stopped dead in my tracks. Like dutiful attendants, Syra and Diane smacked into my back. Grace was able to stop before adding to the domino effect. Syra gave me a gentle shove. “Nothing to be afraid of. There are no ghosts,” she reassured me. This elicited an indignant sniff from Grace, who firmly believed that not only were there ghosts, or spirits as she called them, but she could see and communicate with them under the right circumstances.

From the outside, the cottage looked better than when I had last been here. It was as if the removal of the scowling old man and the subsequent cleaning up inside had affected the whole aura of the place. Maybe this task wouldn’t be so bad after all.

“My sneakers are all dirty,” Diane said, apropos of nothing. We all ignored her and made our way to the front door. Just as my hand touched the knob, Diane’s phone began to purr and we all screamed and clutched at each other, stumbling off the porch and moving back towards the woods.

“Hi Kara, what’s going on? (pause) No, I can’t bring you another pair of gym shorts. What’s wrong with the ones you took this morning? (longer pause) Well that’s what happens if you take them out of the dryer before they’re dry. (longest pause) Then you’ll just have to take them to the locker room and hold them under the hand dryer.” Diane snapped her phone shut and starred at us. “Why am I the only one on the porch? Aren’t we going inside?” She opened up the cottage door and marched in.

Light was flooding through the windows and the place smelled strongly of lemon. While the others set their bags on the kitchen table, I went ahead and peeked in the study, trying not to recall the last time I’d looked in there. The rug was gone. The floor was clean. It wasn’t scary at all.

“It’s all cleaned up. It’s fine,” I said to my reinforcements.

“Okay,” Syra replied. “Tell us what you want us to do.”

Grace had flopped in the kitchen chair and was already into her water bottle. It was the same chair Franklin sat in to eat his meals, but I didn’t mention it. Maybe she would get a spiritual vibe from it.

Diane volunteered to do the kitchen. “I love poking through kitchen stuff and there may be some pots or bowls or things the boys could use, if you don’t mind.” Her twin sons, Kevin and Keith, were juniors at Clarkson University and had moved off campus this fall to their own apartment.

I nodded. “Take anything you think they might want. It will save them a trip to Goodwill. Syra, do you mind going through
the bedroom? Most of Franklin’s clothes probably aren’t in good enough shape for Goodwill, but you might find something that is. You can dump the rest in the garbage bags. Same with bed linens and towels. Just throw them out.”

Syra saluted, grabbed a box of garbage bags and headed to the bedroom. Grace joined me in the study and for about five minutes we just circled it and stared, not knowing where to start. The shelves were jammed with books; some left open for what may have been years. The floor was stacked with newspapers and magazines, toppling over and encrusted with spider webs and who knows what else. There were stains on the hardwood floor that were probably spilled juice or beer or whiskey that had never been wiped up but had been left to become part of the patina of the wood. Not a look I recommend.

“I wonder why the cleaning people didn’t dust off the bookshelves or the piles on the floor.” Grace kicked at the newspapers and leaped back as a cloud of dirt ascended into the air.

“They were only hired to clean up the, um, mess from the crime scene. They weren’t supposed to thoroughly clean the cottage.”

“Oh well, I wish these newspapers weren’t so dirty. I’d really like to look at them.” Grace owned a bookstore, so any reading material was fascinating to her.

“Help yourself,” I offered, “but you may want to put something over your mouth and nose. I’m going to attack the bookshelves and see if there’s anything I can rescue. Some of these books look really old and intriguing.”

We pulled our hair back with rubber bands. We found moderately clean dish towels in the kitchen and tied them around our faces to keep out the dust. We looked like the James brothers pulling a bank job.

“It’s good to see you back to normal,” Grace commented as she tentatively poked and kicked at the stacks of magazines. “Weird things have been happening and I missed having you to talk to.”

“Yeah, I’ve been in a daze since finding Uncle Franklin. Shock, I guess. I hardly remember anything from the past week. That’s probably a good thing.” I pulled a beautiful leather-bound Dickens,
Pickwick Papers
, from the shelves and dusted it off with my shirt. “Look at this!! It’s gorgeous.” Grace reached out for the book and lovingly opened it and looked through the pages.

“Real leather. This is how all books should be made. Of course most people wouldn’t be able to afford them and I certainly couldn’t afford to stock them in my shop, but it’s perfect.”

“It’s like a work of art.” I took the book back and laid it gently on the table. “This definitely goes back to the house.” My hands lingered on the leather a while longer. “Grace, you said weird things have been happening. What weird things?”

Grace sat down in the chair next to the table and pushed her cloth off her face. “I’m not sure what it means but I know I’m not imagining things …”

“What things?”

“Diane has been flirting with that policeman investigating the murder.”

“Huh?”

“Not only is she all coy and flirty around him, she talks about him incessantly. She’s even called him a couple of times, supposedly about something stupid she forgot to tell him in her interview. Tamsen, she’s obsessed with this guy. It’s like a teenage crush.”

“Does her husband know?”

“I assume Scott doesn’t. I mean, you don’t go home and tell your husband you have a crush on some other guy who, on top of everything, has to be at least fifteen years younger than you.”

I was mystified. “This is so unlike Diane. I can’t picture her flirting with anyone— including Scott.” By now I had lost interest in the promise of treasures in the bookcase and sat down close
to Grace so we could talk quietly. “Have you said anything to her about it?”

“I did mention, jokingly, that she seemed to be flirting with the guy, but she brushed me off and said I was imagining things. I pointed out that she talked about him a lot and she actually got angry with me. She implied that because things were shaky for me at home, I was imagining romantic intrigue where there wasn’t any.”

“It’s not like her to snap at you, or at anyone. She’s always so calm and …”

“I
know
. That’s what’s so scary. She’s like another person. One I don’t much like, either.”

“Grace, she probably felt you had her cornered, so she lashed out. She’s not an unkind person.”

“I know, but still …”

“I wonder if she and Scott are having problems.”

“I have no idea but I’m starting to feel like we’re in some twilight zone world where nothing quite works anymore. It’s very unsettling.”

There wasn’t more to say so we got back to work. If you’re a reader and a lover of books, you’ll understand how even under less-than-hygienic conditions, a person can become totally absorbed in the process of opening and perusing book after book after book, totally losing track of the time. Grace was in the same state of printed word euphoria as she sorted and read through newspapers and magazines. We were finally jolted out of our concentration by the announcement that cold water and cookies were being served in the kitchen. As I removed my ad hoc mask, I glimpsed a framed photo lying on the floor under Franklin’s desk. I grabbed it and joined the others in the kitchen.

Diane and Syra had obviously been hard at work. The bedroom had been stripped of curtains and bed clothes, and the closets, dresser drawers and kitchen cupboards had been cleaned out. The refrigerator was defrosting and all contents were in bags labeled “trash”
or “Goodwill”. All Grace and I had been doing was reading. Luckily, reading in the study had been a very dirty activity so at least we
looked
as if we’d been hard at work.

We sat at the kitchen table and ripped into the cookies like a pack of starving wolves. We polished them off and followed them up with candy bar chasers supplied by Grace, who was rumored to own stock in Hershey. Diane had found a set of Corelle Old Town Blue dishes that she thought would be perfect for Keith and Kevin’s new apartment. She had also salvaged a cheese grater that looked like it had never been used—probably true, because I couldn’t picture Franklin grating cheese any more than I could picture him changing his sheets.

Syra had found a couple of pairs of jeans that had hardly been worn and some underwear and socks still in their original packages. These had gone into the Goodwill bag. She hadn’t had time to finish clearing out the bedroom closet and announced there were still a few creepy-looking bags, old clothes on hangers and shoes in there.

My findings had been a bit more positive. “I found an annotated Sherlock Holmes that I’m definitely going to keep,” I announced. “And there’s a complete set of Edgar Allan Poe as well as Jack London’s
Call of the Wild
,
White Fang
and
Sea Wolf
. These are first editions, published between 1903 and 1906! I’m taking them up to the house to put in the library there, unless Claudia wants them.”