The Koala of Death (24 page)
“Endangered. Have you forgotten that I oversee the zoo, endangered rhinos and all? And therefore I can tell you exactly how many rhinos remain at which sanctuary or zoo, and which of them are pregnant?”
“I didn’t forget.”
“Of course you didn’t. You were just warming up for your sales pitch.”
Despite the library’s lone stained-glass window, I detected a slight smile on Aster Edwina’s face. She had always enjoyed seeing people squirm, but since the result of my humiliation would be a big donation for Bowling for Rhinos, I didn’t mind.
“How well you know me, ma’am. Now about that contribution…”
A thin shaft of sunlight struggled through the stained glass and illuminated the portrait above the fireplace mantle. Painted when Aster Edwina was in her early forties, it portrayed her with a handsome elegance that made mere beauty seem irrelevant. With her gray eyes, hawk nose, and hair just beginning to gray, she looked like an aging Valkyrie.
But there was something…something…
Oh, my god
.
“What is it, Theodora? You look rather foolish with your mouth hanging open like that.”
“It’s just that I…that I…Hey, how come you never married?”
She drew herself back as if she’d just confronted a leper. “My personal life is of no concern to you.”
Remembering the rhinos, I forced myself to calm down. “Um, um, I’m sorry and all that, Aster Edwina. I, um, I don’t know what came over me. Maybe this past couple of weeks has been more of a strain that I believed.”
Her eyes grew hard. “I would have believed you’d be well-acquainted with murder by now.”
“You never get…” Better not go there. This conversation was tanking fast, and I had to turn it around. “The rhinos, Aster Edwina. They’re in desperate shape and we need to do something to help them, that’s why I’m here, not to reopen old wounds. Bowling for Rhinos is day after tomorrow, and we’re having trouble selling raffle tickets, but even worse, we’re abysmally behind in our donations, so I was hoping…”
“Your mother didn’t contribute?”
“Of course she did, but…”
“Her portfolio took a big hit, right?” A thin smile. “Excellent. A little humility will be good for her. So how much do you want from me, Theodora, to make up for your mother’s lack of economic foresight?”
I took a deep breath. “Ten thousand.”
“Pardon me while I laugh.” She forced out a raspy sound that might have been a chuckle. “Try again, you foolish girl.”
“But Aster Edwina…”
“I said,
try again
.”
The old harridan was enjoying herself, all right. “Nine thousand.”
“Keep going, Theodora, in a downward direction.”
“Eight?”
“Five. Not a penny more.”
“Oh, come on. Even Caro gave me five.”
She raised her eyebrows. “I suppose you believe that I’m obliged to trump her, am I correct?”
“You always did before.”
She nodded. “And I will again, because that gold-digging social upstart needs to be taught her place. But I won’t do it with more money. I have something even better. A seed that can grow into a rather large plant if your finance committee handles it correctly.”
Remembering the rhinos again, I swallowed the insult to my mother.
“Late last year I purchased something that for business reasons I am now unable to use. So I’ve decided to offer it as the grand prize at the Bowling for Rhinos raffle. Thus, I’ll see your mother’s five thousand, but I’ll raise her an all-inclusive, two-week safari to Africa. For two. All land and air expenses paid.”
“Africa?” I squeaked.
“It’s that big continent on the other side of the Atlantic, dear. The one with rhinos.”
“Holy shit!”
“Language, Theodora.”
“I meant to say, wow, that’s very generous of you, Aster Edwina.”
“It most certainly is. Now, in order to get the most financial mileage out of the prize—and the Africa trip is worth quite a bit, you understand, bringing my total contributions to Bowling for Rhinos to around twenty-five thousand dollars, which leaves your mother’s paltry five thousand in the dust. And it should, as that appalling television chef says, kick raffle ticket sales up a notch. Now, will you call the media or shall I? Folks up in San Francisco or down in Monterey will need at least a day’s warning to participate in the raffle, and we don’t want my generosity to go to waste, do we?”
We most certainly didn’t.
***
After a quick dash back to the
Merilee
to pick up Kennedy and Rockefeller, I barreled down the dirt road that led to the DiGiorno property. Located at the far eastern edge of the old Bentley cattle ranch, Speaks-to-Souls’ stone cottage was tucked into a shallow valley. Although it was partially hidden by a large stand of live oaks, I could see the warm glow of lights peeping through the trees.
From the outside, the cottage looked little different than the one I remembered from my childhood. There could have been new paint on the window sashes, and the front door might have been new, but in the growing dusk, I couldn’t be certain. Behind the house stood a series of shaded, roomy corrals that held a collection of animals ranging from burros to llamas to some very big dogs of indeterminate breeding. Chickens, ducks, geese, and even peacocks strolled free on the grounds. One small gray rooster—I think it was a speckled Hamburg—strutted up to me as if expecting to be fed.
Nudging him away with my foot, I hauled the cat carriers out of the pickup and approached the door. It opened before I had time to knock.
“Welcome to Casa de Castaway,” Speaks-to-Souls said, her face shadowed by the light behind her. She cradled a cat in her arms while several others swirled around her feet. Further on in the house, I saw at least four small dogs and a few more cats. This was a woman who not only talked the talk, but walked the walk.
“Thank you, Speaks-to…”
“Call me Josie, but never in public. It’s short for Josephina.”
“Okay, Josie, where shall I put Kennedy and Rockefeller?”
“God only knows, but if you come in, we can start working on the problem.”
The house’s brightly lit interior wasn’t too bad. Decorated much like the zoo’s employees’ lounge with a collection of mismatched furniture and animal posters, it made its own original design statement with the small reptile aquariums that lined the walls, the largest of which was the size of a casket and contained a green iguana easily two feet long.
At my quizzical look, she said, “I found her in a San Sebastian Dumpster, cage and all. Some people have no conscience.”
No, they didn’t. For all their reptileness, iguanas were friendly animals that grew deeply attached to their keepers. Not being literate, they couldn’t write or speak about the heartbreak they experienced when discarded like trash, but there was little doubt they suffered.
I set the cat carriers down by the sofa, then plopped myself into its own pillowy softness. Within seconds, a small Pekingese mix jumped onto the sofa to keep me company. He turned a few times, then rested his head on my thigh.
Patting him, I said to Josie, “Green iguanas can grow to more than four feet in length. What are you going to do then?”
She carefully lowered herself and the black cat onto a recliner. “I have a call out to several zoos, the Gunn included.”
“Good luck with that.” People were always trying to foist their animals on zoos, unaware that the zoos were already full up.
“If I can’t find a zoo to take her—I’ve named her Eve, by the way—I’ll soon have to move her out back. Alyse is building several more pens, and it won’t be too much trouble to outfit one for her.” She smiled. “For Eve, not Alyse.”
I smiled back. “Where is your daughter, by the way?”
“At the library. She’s a volunteer and helps them shelve books twice a week. The rest of the time, when she’s not working with me, she’s running around trying to raise money for the San Sebastian No-Kill Animal Shelter. She’s even going to take part in that television marathon next week, answering the phones, I think. So am I, for that matter.”
Not knowing how much or how little her daughter knew, it was a relief to be able to speak freely.
By now, every one of the room’s felines had approached the cat carriers to inspect Kennedy and Rockefeller. Other than a hiss or two, the introductions were peaceful. After all, every cat in the room was used to being part of a menagerie.
“Looks like it’s going to work out,” I said.
Another smile. “It always does.”
With the light from a corner lamp shining her full on the face, I could see that she was older than she’d appeared at her dimly-lit shop, as much as forty, even forty-five.
Old enough.
“What are your plans?” I asked.
She feigned puzzlement. “Plans for the cats?”
I shook my head.
“My, aren’t you being the Sphinx.”
The Peke-mix in my lap stood up, wagged his tail, and gnawed gently at my hand in an invitation to play. When I told him no, he settled himself back down. I patted him and told him what a good dog he was. He wagged his tail again, but this time kept his teeth to himself.
“You have a way with animals,” Josie said, admiration in her voice.
“I like to think so.”
“You were asking about plans?” She looked rather Sphinx-like, herself.
“Right. Now, let’s see. To take possession of this property, you had to present a birth certificate proving that you were a DiGiorno by birth, which means your father would have been one of the DiGiorno boys. I’m guessing Giannino. From what I hear, he was a handsome devil. Very popular with the ladies.”
“Yes, Uncle Giannino was quite the Romeo. He’s married now and has a large brood of children, none of whom wanted to be bothered with this run-down place. I’m Delmazio’s daughter. And before you ask, he and his wife are getting up there in age, so he didn’t want to go through the trouble of moving back here. Especially not to this hovel.”
She said “his wife,” not “
my mother.”
“He didn’t want to move back here from where?”
“Mt. Pleasant, New York. He owns a restaurant there. Italian, of course. My two younger brothers manage it, but food’s never been my thing. Animals are.”
A township forty miles north of Manhattan, Mt. Pleasant was the seat of Pocantico Hills, the family home of the Rockefellers. I’d once spent a weekend on the estate as a guest of one of the Rockefeller girls, a friend of mine from Miss Pridewell’s Academy for Young Ladies. No wonder Josie had laughed when I told her the cats’ names.
“How did a DiGiorno wind up that far east?” As if I hadn’t already figured it out.
“The Gunn family wanted him as far away from here as possible.”
I decided to go for it. “They wanted
you
as far away as possible, am I correct?”
No smile now. With her thinned lips and straight spine, she was the twin of the portrait I’d just viewed in the library at Gunn Castle. “Oh, yes. The Gunns definitely wanted me out of sight.”
“So they paid your father off.”
“Yes.”
“How did your mother feel about that?”
“My mother?”
I softened my voice. “Yes, Josie. Aster Edwina. Your mother.”
If you drive fast enough you can reach Oakland, a neighboring city of San Francisco, in little over an hour, but with the engine in my Nissan pickup being little better than the
Merilee
’s engine, we crept along the slow lane for the entire distance. It gave me plenty of time to think about last night’s conversation with Aster Edwina’s long-lost daughter.
All Josie/Speaks-to-Souls knew was what her father had told her. When he and Aster Edwina were both in their forties, they’d had a brief affair that ended when Aster Edwina had left to visit relatives in England.
“But she wasn’t in England,” Josie had said. “She went somewhere to have the baby. My father, who was married to his first wife at the time, didn’t know anything about it. He thought Aster Edwina had grown tired of fooling around with the peons, so when old Edwin showed up on his doorstep one night with a big check and a baby, he was shocked. Dad didn’t want the money, but his wife talked him into using it to buy his uncle’s restaurant in New York, so we became New Yorkers and we all lived happily ever after. End of story.”
But it hadn’t been the end of the story. After repeated questioning, she explained that as a rider to the check, Josie’s father had to promise Edwin that he would never contact Aster Edwin again. She wanted nothing more to do with him, Edwin said.
Josie gave me a bitter smile. “To set Aster Edwina’s mind at ease, and also to placate his wife, Dad promised. Not that it did much good. Not long after we arrived in New York, his wife left him for another man, and he raised me alone.”
When I’d asked her about her plans, she refused to answer.
***
The Golden Rule Rest Home was on the western edge of town in an industrial area that hadn’t yet seen gentrification, but from the
FOR SALE
sign in front of the shabby building, its time would soon be up. Just like its residents’.
As the stoutly built manager, whose name tag announced her as
MRS. MORTHLAND
, ushered me down a dark hallway toward Tyler Everts’ room, I banished Aster Edwina and her daughter from my mind to concentrate on another parent and child. Judging from the shabbiness of Golden Rule Rest Home, Kate’s father must have lived a hand-to-mouth existence. At least he’d loved his daughter and she’d loved him. It was too bad neither of them had been able to afford a nicer place for him to end his days.
Not that the Golden Rule was a bad place; it wasn’t. The staff appeared compassionate, but the hallway carpet was threadbare, the ceiling water-stained, and the air musty with the smell of boiled vegetables and decaying flesh. When we reached Tyler’s room, I saw two narrow beds. In the far bed, an old man lay staring sightlessly at the ceiling. The other bed was empty.
“Looks like Mr. Everts is in the rec room watching TV,” Mrs. Morthland said.
