A Curious Affair (2 page)

“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.

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.

Part of the sheriff’s unofficial job is to see that visitors don’t blunder into danger, and if they do, that they are rescued right away. For this reason, I was given to understand, he had embraced the geological version of know-thy-enemy. Which is a long way of saying that he had already hiked some of Viper’s Hill and checked out some of the abandoned mineshafts located along what looked like a great cross-country ski trail.

But would his familiarity get me off the hook for a return trip to Irv’s cabin? No. Neither would my protest that I was cold, tired, scared and in pain. Any lawman would wrestle with my guilty conscience and easily overpower it. I was in for a long, painful night.

Sheriff Murphy is handsome enough to look at. He’s one of what my mother would have called the Black Irish. Some of my friends have even admitted to crossing the room to get a closer look at him. I stood there in the doorway that night and glared at him with eyes that failed to find anything to admire.

The sheriff looked up and smiled pleasantly, not put off by my glower.

“Was that you on the phone earlier, Miss Marsh? I thought maybe it was an obscene phone call. Livened up the still watches of the night.”

“Not tonight,” I said. My glower deepened, and so did his smile. A hint of a dimple appeared in his left cheek.

“Damn. Well, let me guess—you’ve seen a UFO, Miss Marsh. That’s what brings you in. Please pull up a chair and make yourself comfortable while I get the particulars.”

“Miss
us
,” I corrected. Actually I said
mithuth
. My jaw was loosening up in the heat of the station, but it was still far from functional. It’s a tribute to the sheriff’s ear that he could understand me. “And if I say yes and I’ve ridden in one, will you let me go home and sleep it off as soon as I’m done here?”

“Perhaps.” His gray eyes twinkled—they actually twinkled—and I thought of that G. K. Chesterton poem, “The Ballad of the White Horse”: 

He finally explained when I said nothing more. “Don’t get cranky. I just want to know if you’ve been seeing any of the strange lights folks have been calling in about this evening. I’m going to have to get onto PG&E and find out what’s up at the station. There’ll be hell to pay if folks lose power again. It’s been out three times this week already, and they seem to think that I am personally responsible for it.”

In a small town the sheriff was pretty much responsible for everything that couldn’t be handled by the priest, the doctor or the undertaker. I felt a moment of sympathy.

“Oh. No, I haven’t seen lights or green men or even downed power lines,” I said, less grumpily. “I’ve seen rain and a dead body, though. My friend, Irving Thibodaux, is dead. That’s what brings me in. And if you want a guide up the hill to Irv’s place then we need to go now. The road is mostly mud and getting worse by the minute—and we can’t take the car because the track’s barely graded, let alone graveled.”

“I see. Well, let me fetch my coat.” He reached for
the sheepskin jacket on the back of his chair. It was a large coat. Tyler Murphy isn’t a small man. “Are you quite certain that Irv is dead? Might he just be…extremely indisposed?”

He meant dead drunk.

“No, he’s really, really dead,” I said, echoing Atherton’s reply to me when I had asked the same question.

The sheriff finally lost his smile. He sighed. “Then we’d best be off at once, while there’s a break in the rain. Tell me, Missus Marsh, does it ever stop raining up here?”

“I heard tell that it happened one July.”

Murphy was a gentleman after that, holding open doors and taking my arm when the terrain got rough because I kept slipping in the worsening mud. But though he was polite, I couldn’t shake the feeling that he somehow didn’t believe me about Irv. Maybe it was the cloud of alcohol that clung to me in spite of the antacids I’d been sucking to calm my stomach. Or perhaps it was that I sounded like a ridiculous cross between Daffy Duck and Yosemite Sam. Maybe it was that I had called myself Irv’s friend—which I wasn’t. Not exactly. But I didn’t want Murphy thinking I was buying pot from Irv, and I’d had to have some reason for paying a social call on a dreadful night like this.

I ground my teeth. It was frustration, but it was also being out in the cold again. Why hadn’t I put in my bite plate when I could still get my jaws open? It made my lisp worse but it blunted the pain enough that I could think logically.

Tyler was right. The rain stopped during our walk up the hill, which was nice, but the cold and wind came down hard as soon as the clouds began to depart, and it froze our breath. Sheriff Murphy’s soft but steady profanity at the state of the road clotting his new boots with mud made miniscule crystals that gathered quickly
now that we were still. Moonlight punched a hole through the clouds with a silver fist, but I didn’t look up. I felt it would do violence to my eyes if I looked straight at it, and I’d seen enough brutality for one night. Irv’s lonely cabin was enough of a visual assault for the time being.

The wind died as we crested the hill, and the sudden quiet pressed against my ear drums. The silence of loneliness and death is different from the simple cessation of noise. This stillness of the heart and mind is a creature of near-substance, a dank shadow that hovers over my own house even on a sunny day, and now it hung over Irv’s. I rarely noticed it anymore, mostly because I’d been using enough pills to stupefy my brain—in part because of the physical pain, but also because I saw the vampire’s shadow far too often that reminded me I was alone. Love, I was infuriated to find, had limitations. It might move mountains, but it couldn’t stop death when he decided to call, and it couldn’t banish his shadow from my heart and mind when he’d decided to linger, feeding on my grief.

Winter. The dead season. I hated it. It didn’t care about me or anyone. The short days and long nights rolled by; gray, then black, then gray, then black—the sequence repeating itself for the last nine weeks and more. My eyes had forgotten what the sun looked like and my jaw could no longer recall what it was like to exist without the cold ice-pick pain as its companion. I knew that I had been depressed, but had failed to be sufficiently frightened by my degraded mental condition because I had accepted that this was my new steady state. It took Irv dying, and the sheriff’s skepticism at my story, to rouse me enough to feel alarm at my situation.

I realized in that moment I owed the sheriff for keeping me away from home and the pills and Drambuie on
the coffee table. Because there was still a part of me that found their easy solution an appealing alternative.

Shaken by the realization of what I was thinking, and wanting a distraction, I stood close to the sheriff, trying to see Irv’s cabin as he did. It didn’t help my mood much. I didn’t need anything else to remind me that we are helpless creatures, easily broken by our emotions.

The view wasn’t any more inviting, in spite of the new company and emerging moonlight that was kind to the building’s flaws. The front porch still sagged like the beer belly on an old drunk. The prolonged wet had made the shingles swell until the rusting nails had come unstuck. Damp had invaded the loosened joints and been held back only by the constant fire in the potbelly stove. But now that fire was out and the wet and cold had crept down the chimney and in through the rotting walls. It didn’t seem possible that things could have worsened in the short time I was gone, but somehow they had. This place was one step beyond desolate. It was dead, deserted. Even the cats were gone.

I had a weird and uncomfortable thought: What if the body was gone, too?

Then a much worse one: What if it had never been there at all?

Swallowing hard, I walked gingerly up the stairs, deciding to be nice and warn the sheriff about their possible instability. It wasn’t because I had warmed to him any, I told myself, but if he broke an ankle, I’d have to slog down the hill again to get help.

“Be careful. Some of the steps are rotten.”

“Some?” He pushed at one of the empty pie tins with a foot. Like Irv, he wore cowboy boots.

I shrugged.

“Irv fed the ferals?” Sheriff Murphy asked.

“Yes. And I know that officially this is discouraged because of the risk of disease. Unofficially, it is done in
almost every neighborhood. We have a terrible problem with wild cats. Too many assholes dump their animals when they don’t want them anymore—and that means when they’re pregnant.” My words were garbled but angry. I have always believed that there is a special ring in hell for people who abandon their pets.

“I know. It’s heartbreaking,” Tyler said, and I believed he meant it. That raised him in my estimation.

I stepped onto the porch and opened the door with my gloved hand, and then reached inside to turn on the light.

“Sorry about the doorknob,” I said without thinking as I clicked off my flashlight, “but I probably wiped out any fingerprints when I closed it before. It was open when I arrived. Maybe there are some prints on the inside.”

“Was it open?” Murphy repeated, coming up behind me. I stepped left so the sheriff could see into the room. A part of me was relieved that Irv was still there. It’s kind of sickening, I guess, that I felt better that Irv be dead than I be crazy. I mean, crazier.

Murphy didn’t step inside. Neither did I.

“You noticed the footprints too?” I asked hopefully when he hesitated in the doorway.

He didn’t answer, so I turned to look up at him. He was staring at me oddly.

“Are you suggesting that he was murdered?” the sheriff asked. “Why didn’t you mention this before?”

Was I? I mean, was I willing to admit out loud what I was thinking—that I actually believed a cat when it told me that Irv had been murdered?

“Well, it just occurred to me that he could have been,” I said. “He did sell…” I trailed off, not wanting to say what Irv sold, though I don’t think he was ever ashamed of the deals he made.

“Yes, he did, didn’t he?” Murphy said, and a frown
appeared on his face. He looked at the floor and noted the two sets of very different prints, some of which were scuffed and elongated.

“Not that anything like this has ever happened before,” I said, feeling the need to defend what Irv had done. “Irv was not a violent man.”

Even as I said this, I knew it sounded absurd. In his own way, Irv had been violent. Brawling was a favorite pastime. But he hadn’t associated with people who practiced organized violence—at least I didn’t think so. He wasn’t a drug kingpin.

“Hm…I don’t suppose those are yours?” he said, pointing at the waffle-stomper prints.