Authors: Rebecca M. Hale
How to Wash a Cat (5 page)
I refolded the piece of paper and slid it and the key back into the envelope. Memories of my uncle flooded over me.
Oscar had been in the army during WWII and had served as an ambulance driver during the campaign in Europe. He’d told me several hair-raising stories of the things he’d seen there. The experience had immutably shaped his philosophies and beliefs.
“When your time comes,” he’d say, “that’s it. There ain’t nothing you can do about it, so there’s no point in worrying on it.” He’d pause and look me straight in the eye. “You have to enjoy your life while you can.”
In the fog of that war he’d seen strong men cut down while weaker ones survived. There was no rational explanation for who lived and who died. He had understood the cruel randomness of fate, in a way that my accountant’s mind could never quite grasp hold of.
One event in particular had left its imprint on Oscar. Midway through the war, he’d come down sick with an unknown illness. The hospital had been overwhelmed with casualties, and the doctors hadn’t had the time or resources to try to diagnose what afflicted him. His fever raged for days until he finally lost consciousness. A nurse pulled a sheet over his head and marked his body to be carted away to the morgue.
“I was gone,” he said, mouthing his dentures contemplatively as he reflected. “But something told me to turn back. It just wasn’t my time.” He leaned across the table towards me and pulled out the misguided mortuary tag he always carried around in his wallet, waving it at me for emphasis. “I’ve tried to make the most out of every day since.”
I sighed heavily, feeling the loss of Oscar all over again like a swift punch to the stomach. The nausea was only exacerbated by my overwhelming confusion over what to do next.
Oscar had never accepted the merits of my accounting job. He’d been trying to convince me to quit for years. He’d seen through the façade of my career for what it really was.
Hidden away in my cubicle amid the impersonal piles of balance sheets and business plans, it was easy for me to avoid the uncomfortable complications of human interaction.
Numbers were so much more reliable, so much easier to handle than the fickle transience inherent to human nature. Numbers could always be called out on a lie or a manipulation. Numerical entanglements never lasted any longer than the summation line of their equation.
When I did emerge from the dark cave of my cubicle, I walked through the city cloaked in an invisible veil of self-isolation, maintaining a careful distance from the surrounding sea of people as I navigated my way through them.
I was a shell, living vicariously off the hum of the city’s ceaseless heartbeat. I could walk the constantly changing streets for hours, soaking up purpose from the lives that swirled around me.
I was a bystander, not a participant. My life was quiet and peaceful, like the deep, untroubled sleep of my cats. I had curled myself up into a ball, porcupined against the world.
I didn’t realize it at the time—sitting in the crowded coffee shop, staring down at Oscar’s handwriting on the crumpled white envelope—but I was slowly, subtly, being unwound from that complacent slumber.
“The right key,” I repeated his phrase to myself, pondering Oscar’s message.
I looked up from my table and out through the front window of the coffee shop. Misting droplets were smearing the glass, but I could just make out the street sign on the corner outside. I was only a couple of blocks over from the Green Vase.
I stuffed the envelope into my shoulder bag, squeezed myself through the maze of tables to the front door, and stepped onto the street outside.
Those people who hadn’t crammed their way into the coffee shop were rushing through the increasing drip to their buses, BARTs, and ferryboats. Despite my trepidation over the possibility of taking over the Green Vase, I couldn’t ignore the exuberant tingling in my toes as I turned my soggy shoes towards Jackson Square.
Somewhere in that evening’s soupy fog, lurking well beyond the reach of my subconscious, there was a faint clicking sound as a door pulled shut behind me.
Chapter 4
THE STREET WAS empty as I rounded the corner and turned up the block towards the Green Vase. What meager Friday afternoon traffic had trickled through Jackson Square was now long gone.
The dripping fog had thickened into a drenching rain, rendering my glasses useless. I stumbled along, brazenly myopic, until I reached the front steps to the shop.
Even in the downpour, my nose instinctively searched for a wisp of Oscar’s cooking, but only the looming ocean scent tinged the air. I stood on the sidewalk underneath the tightly shut upstairs window as cold drops of rain snuck down my collar and tried to steal the warmth from the small of my back.
The front door had been damaged by the paramedics in their efforts to reach Oscar, so the police had fashioned a temporary closure by winding several pieces of wire around the iron framing. I wrestled with the wire for several minutes before I finally disbanded it and pried open the door.
Despite its derelict condition, I had always admired the entrance to the Green Vase. Two steps led up from the street to a small, semicircular stone patio covered by a red brick archway. The door was made of thick, rectangular-shaped, glass panels mounted into a frame of curling wrought iron strips. Even before the attempted rescue, several sections of glass had split or cracked from years of use. Now, one of the panes had been smashed in and the lock hopelessly wrenched. Shards of glass were scattered on the floor inside.
I pushed open the door and stepped into the room where Oscar must have spent his last minutes. My heart dropped to the floor where a dark stain spread out like an oil slick from a sinking ship. The crimson-soaked floorboards emanated the burnt, rusting odor of Oscar’s defeated red blood cells, the ghosts of whom I imagined still hung in the dusty air of the Green Vase, searching for his spent, expired body.
Digging into my rain spotted lenses with the cuff of my sweater, I pushed further on into the store. The shadows of Oscar’s life floated all around me, in the cluttered piles of antiques, the loaded, leaning bookshelves, and the vintage cash register that sat on the counter near the door.
I took in a deep, steadying breath as I approached the stairs at the back of the showroom. Oscar had kept a drawer full of padlocks in the kitchen upstairs, and I was sure one of those would work on the front door until I could get it fixed.
The wooden crate that had snagged my sweater the night of our last dinner with Oscar still obstinately blocked the stairwell. It glowered at me with its bulky, bullying mass. Egged on by the turbulence of my emotions, I decided to move it to a less obnoxious location.
I sidled up to the side of the crate and gave it a nudge. It didn’t budge.
I stepped back for a moment to size up my opponent—a squatty, solid, rectangular cube that just topped my forehead in height. I leaned against it and gave a more substantial shove.
Still no movement—just a rude smirk that I imagined forming in the rough grains of one of the exterior planks.
My temper rising, I crouched down and propped one foot up against the nearby wall, trying to leverage my weight against the splintery surface of the crate. Straining, I devoted all of my resources into gaining horizontal motion. The bottom edge tilted up slightly—then, suddenly, the both of us slipped backwards.
I lost my balance and hit the ground with a thud, landing painfully on a flat, metal rod that dug up into my thigh.
I eased up onto my knees and leaned over to study it more closely. A metal handle, about four inches long, poked up from an oval recess cut out of the wooden floor. My fingers worked a small lever on the inside of the opening, and the handle retracted down into the hole.
An oval-shaped cover had been propped up against a nearby wall; its surface matched that of the carved out floorboard. I positioned the cover over the hole and snapped it into place. A small, pinky-sized opening was the only evidence of its location. In the dusky light of this corner of the store, the finger hole mimicked an innocuous knot in the wood.
“A handle to what?” I wondered aloud, pulling off the cover and extending the handle.
I stood up on one side and tried to pull, but nothing happened. I walked around to position myself on the other side of the handle, realizing that the floorboards I’d been standing on were subtly more springy than the rest.
I pulled up again, and this time it yielded. There was a puff of dust and the grinding of gears as a trap door emerged from the floorboards. The door was roughly square, but the surface had been modified to fit into the grooves and striations of the planks in the flooring. Sitting back on my heels, I ran my fingers along the large, buck teeth of the open edge and peered into the dark hole. An unseen mechanism had triggered rickety stairs to unwind down into the hatch.
Cool, damp air seeped up at me as I leaned over the opening, puzzled. The stairs quickly disappeared into a pitch-black darkness.
It wasn’t surprising that the building would have a basement, but it seemed odd that Oscar had never mentioned it.
I left the gaping hole unattended and sprinted up the stairs to fetch Oscar’s flashlight from the top of the refrigerator. My uncle had been exceptionally proud of this heavy-duty implement. Made of a sturdy, camouflage-colored plastic, its high-powered LED issued a wide cone of darkness-obliterating rays. Gripping it confidently, I raced back down to the hatch.
I pushed a button on the handle and pointed the beam into the dark abyss.
The stairs appeared even less stable under illumination. The structure shuddered violently as I put my weight onto the top step, and I grabbed onto the trap door, nearly losing my balance. After the shaking subsided, I slowly eased my way down into the hole.
Something tickled my nose as my feet struck the concrete floor in the room below. I flashed my light up at the ceiling. It was so low I could almost touch it with the flat of my hand—an action which brought down a tangle of cobwebs that nested in my hair and glasses.
After fighting off the cobwebs, I glanced back up at the ceiling to see a single bare light bulb mounted over my head. A thin, rotting string swung back and forth beneath the bulb. I caught it with my free hand and pulled.
There was a tiny clinking sound; then the string rebounded and the light bulb came on. I dimmed my flashlight to test the bulb’s wattage. It emitted a thin halo of light that barely managed to illuminate the top of my shoes. I returned my flashlight to full force and trained it into the cave-like basement.
The light carved through a dusty, black haze, revealing a room similar in size to the Green Vase showroom above. The walls were made of the same red bricks as the exterior of the building, and the floor was a cracked, grimy concrete. Several crates like the one I’d wrestled with upstairs were stacked haphazardly up against the walls.
I continued on towards the back of the basement, shining the flashlight around in an arc. As I got farther away from the stairs, the dim light that had been contributed by the light bulb faded away. Even the broad beam of the flashlight failed to ease my growing feeling of claustrophobic panic.
As I reached the far end of the basement, there was a bump in the ceiling above my head. Startled, my knees collapsed beneath me, and I fell onto the hard floor, dropping the flashlight. It rolled away from me in a semi-circle, its light bouncing wildly around the room.
A man’s voice called out from above. “Hello? Is anyone there?”
Groaning, I struggled to my feet and grabbed the light.
“Hallow,” the greeting echoed above me.
“Yes, yes, hello. I’m down in the basement,” I called up. “Just a minute.”
I began scrambling back towards the stairs. A curly-haired head dipped upside down to look at me through the hatch.
“Oh, hello there,” the head shouted in my direction. “I’m Montgomery Carmichael. I run the gallery across the street. You’re Oscar’s niece, aren’t you?”
I stumbled halfway up the stairs and shook his hand, which had followed his head over the edge. The strong, citrus smell of recently applied aftershave cut through the stale, moldy aroma of the basement.
“Nice to meet you, Montgomery,” I said to the upside-down torso, my nose twitching as I tried to fight off the second sneeze of the day. I was unsuccessful.
“Bless you,” he laughed as my high-pitched blast echoed off the walls of the basement. “You can call me Monty. Everyone else does.”
I climbed up the rest of the stairs and back into the showroom. Blinking through my watering eyes, I tried to get a better look at my visitor.
He was a tall, skinny, stork-like man. He ambled about awkwardly on disproportionately long legs as he poked around the store. His pale green eyes stared out from under thick, curly brown hair, still damp from the rain smattering down outside. It was styled short on each side, longer in the middle, with frizzing curls that bounced wildly off the top.
A tightly wound bow tie garroted his long, stringy neck, topping off his light-colored suit and suspenders. A pair of whimsical, carrot-shaped cufflinks accented his crisply starched, button-down shirt.
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