Authors: Rebecca M. Hale

How to Wash a Cat (9 page)

BOOK: How to Wash a Cat

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I gripped the armrests tightly as Monty passed behind my chair. He glided over to the cashier counter next to Ivan and hopped up on it, crossing his legs in front of him. “That’s when I heard Oscar tell Miranda that he’d found it.” He paused, a jubilant expression on his face.

“Found what?” Ivan and I asked in unison.

Monty cleared his throat. “Well, Oscar didn’t spell it out, exactly. But,” he paused, raising his forefinger in the air. “I have a theory,” he said smugly.

I sighed loudly.

“The tunnel,” Monty said proudly. “I think Oscar found the entrance to the tunnel.”

“Tunnel?” I asked, confused.

Ivan explained. “There’ve been rumors around here for years about a tunnel running underneath one of these old buildings—something dug out back in the Gold Rush days. If it exists, it’s probably just an entrance to the sewer system.” Ivan tilted his head in Monty’s direction. “
Some
people are obsessed with the idea, but no one’s ever found any trace of it.”

Monty nodded furiously up and down, his top leg swinging wildly back and forth off the edge of the counter. “Oscar told Miranda he couldn’t believe it had been right under his nose all this time.”

Ivan shook his head in disbelief. “You think Oscar found the entrance here? In the Green Vase?”

Monty leapt down from the counter, raced to the back of the room, and hopped up and down on the closed hatch. “The Green Vase has a basement! I never knew it had a basement. It’s not on any of the planning maps for Jackson Square. I checked this morning!”

Ivan raised a skeptical eyebrow at the bouncing Monty.

“Okay,” Monty spluttered defensively. “Oscar didn’t specifically say the word ‘tunnel,’ but what else could it be?”

Monty flounced his way back to the front of the room. “That’s not all—while Oscar and Miranda were talking, he took something out of his pocket. It was a gold metal piece, about four or five inches long.”

I eased myself up onto the edge of the chair. “Did it look like a key?” I asked softly.

Monty’s eyes bulged affirmatively. “Yes. Yes, now that you mention it, I’m almost certain it was a key!” he exclaimed, nodding his head up and down. He whispered excitedly, “Probably the key that opens the entrance to the tunnel!”

I tensed in my chair, wondering if there was any truth to Monty’s ridiculous story. His tale seemed as over the top as the rest of him.

Ivan looked perplexed. “What did Oscar do with the key?”

Monty’s voice dropped to a more solemn tone. “Oscar took out a small, white envelope, dropped the key into it, and sealed it.”

Monty’s watery, green eyes stared into my bespectacled ones as he gulped and pointed at me. “The envelope had
your
name on it. Oscar told Miranda to give it to you . . . in case something happened to him.”

Chapter 9

EVERYTHING WAS QUIET as the room swayed around me. Oscar’s envelope burned in my pocket, the heavy, metal key weighing me down like a stone.

“Happened to him?” Ivan repeated Monty’s last phrase. “What did Oscar think was going to happen to him?”

“Well,” Monty stammered. “I didn’t
quite
get to find out. You see, there was a disturbance . . . and then Oscar and Miranda left the building.” His eyes shifted downward, studying his left cufflink.

“What kind of disturbance?” I probed sharply.

A telltale blush rose up on Monty’s face. “Oh—well,” he shrugged in an unconvincingly offhanded manner. “Someone may have fallen off a mop bucket . . .” he said, his voice trailing off.

Ivan chuckled, the sound puncturing the stifling vacuum that had clamped down on the room. He held up his square of butcher paper. “I don’t understand what all of this has to do with my sketches.”

Monty shuffled around the cashier counter, avoiding eye contact with both of us. “I haven’t
completely
finished my story. You see, the last bit happened two days after the board meeting.”

Monty flopped dejectedly onto the stool and sighed. “I was working in my studio that night when I saw Oscar leave for his dominoes game. He used to play every other Thursday.”

Monty rested his chin on the edge of the cash register, his hound dog eyes beseeching us for understanding. “The front door to the Green Vase—it called out to me from across the street. I tried to ignore it, but it kept on tempting me.”

Monty stood up from the stool, his gaze lost in the rafters. He sang out in a high, falsetto whisper, “Mon-tee, Mon-tee, the tunnel’s over
here
. Come and check it out.”

I rolled my eyes, but Monty seemed oblivious. He trotted around the dental chair, his voice pitching with excitement. “So, I walked across the street—just to take a look. I was only planning to peek in through the glass.”

Monty placed his hand horizontally across his eyebrows as his eyes narrowed into slits. “But, when I put my head up against the door, it creaked open. It must not have latched properly when Oscar pulled it shut.”

Monty pushed one of his long, bony fingers into the air as if prodding a pillow. “I poked it—gently—and it swung open!” His arms flung outward, nearly knocking the glasses off my face. “Well, then I
had
to go in to look for the entrance to the tunnel. Imagine what might be down there!”

“Rats,” Ivan answered, ticking off a list on his fingers. “All kinds of insects, spiders, probably a homeless person or two.”

Monty circled Ivan and hopped back on the stool behind the counter, the obsessive light in his eyes undiminished. “If you think about it, since I was looking for the entrance to the tunnel, I wasn’t really breaking and entering.” He raised a forefinger towards the ceiling. “More like, cutting through. That’s hardly a criminal offense.”

Monty propped his feet up on the counter, crossing one on top of the other. “I searched the entire ground floor here for a hidden door—for any possible way to get into a tunnel.” He sighed heavily. “But there was nothing.”

He pointed his finger at me. “You could have knocked me right over when I walked in the other day and saw that hatch wide open.” Monty crossed his arms in front of his chest. His pointy elbows jutted out on either side of his narrow frame.

My gaze pored into the floor, thinking of the dusty room beneath and wondering if this was the reason Oscar had hidden its existence.

“I went up and down the stairs at the back there,” Monty said, frustration in his voice. “Then, I headed up to the kitchen.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I thought—maybe you had to get to it from the second floor or something.”

Monty skewed his face up as if sucking on a lemon. “That place was a mess! Dirty dishes in the sink. And that refrigerator—I saw something move in there.”

Isabella chirped helpfully from her perch on top of the bookcase, her voice making a series of sharp clicks and trills.

“My mouse catcher is on the case,” I said, interpreting for the rest of the room.

“A mouse would be afraid of what’s living in there,” Monty shuddered. “I closed the door to the refrigerator,
firmly
.” He stretched out his right arm and waved it from right to left. “That’s when I saw the sketches on the table. I was studying them when Harold collared me from behind. That grungy little man is a lot stronger than he looks.”

This explained the bitter exchange I had overheard between Monty and Harold, I thought.

“I wonder what Harold was doing here?” Ivan asked, almost as if to himself.

“Beats me—he was supposed to have been at the dominoes game!” Monty shook his head ruefully. “The next thing I knew I was taking a ride in the backseat of a police car with one of their slobbering dogs. I ended up in a holding cell in the courthouse until Oscar came to get me out the next morning. He didn’t press charges, so they had to let me go.”

Monty twisted his right leg around to look at his foot. “I’ve still got some sort of goop stuck on the side of my shoe.”

“Why didn’t you tell me all of this before?” I asked, exasperated.

His face reddened again. “Well, it seemed a bit much for our first meeting. And then I just got carried away with the remodel project. When we started talking about potential ideas, it only seemed natural that you should consider Oscar’s.”

Ivan and I exchanged looks. Monty hopped off the stool and leaned over the counter towards me.

“Don’t you think it’s kind of karmic that you picked the same design that he was considering? It’s almost like Oscar was communicating with you from beyond the grave.”

I bit my lip, holding back my retort.

“I had no idea that Ivan had done them,” Monty said defensively as he spun himself around the counter. “Of course, I knew
Harold
couldn’t have sketched them.”

He leaned towards Ivan in a loud aside. “That man’s got no talent—
none
.”

I picked up the page of sketches from the counter where Ivan had left them. The drawings were just like the ones Monty had sketched for me earlier in the week. The wide glass windows on the front of the store had been replaced with a matrix of one-foot squares. Inlays of a shaded vase repeated intermittently in the glass sections.

Still staring at the sketches, I asked, “Did you talk to Oscar about the tunnel?”

Monty shook his head. “Oscar wasn’t exactly chatty when he picked me up from the courthouse. I was afraid he might turn me back in to the police if I told him about the broom closet. . . .”

The afternoon sun hit the gold foil detailing on the antique cash register, and I blinked to avoid the blinding flash of light. When my eyes refocused on the paper, I noticed a penciled squiggle in the bottom right hand corner. “What’s this?” I asked, pointing.

Ivan took the paper from me and pulled it up close to his face. Then, he shrugged and handed it back to me. “Beats me. Oscar must have done that.”

I held the paper up to the window. Doodled in the bottom right hand corner was a three-petaled tulip—the same design as the handle to the key.

And suddenly it clicked.

Chapter 10

“WILLIAM LEIDESDORFF,” I murmured, staring at the tulip scrawled on the bottom of the paper.

“Leidesdorff? Is that what you said?” Monty repeated the name slowly, tasting it on his tongue. “That name sounds familiar.”

“Several months ago, Oscar told me a story about a William Leidesdorff,” I replied as I looked up from the page of sketches. “There’s a street a couple of blocks over named after him—in the financial area. It’s more of an alley, really. You’ve probably walked past it hundreds of times, but you wouldn’t realize it has a name unless you were looking for the street sign.”

I paused for a moment, remembering that Saturday night’s story telling session. Oscar and I had been sitting at the kitchen table above the Green Vase showroom. The remnants of that evening’s meal still littered its surface.

“Since the beginning,” Oscar had begun that night, “people have been coming here to start over—build a new life for themselves. San Francisco’s always been a beacon for second-, third-, and fourth-chancers. That’s who planted the seeds of this city—made her who she is today.” A far away look swept across his face. “That kind will always feel at home here.”

Oscar reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a pair of rod-shaped gold pieces, and set them on the table. “William Leidesdorff,” he said, signaling the start of that evening’s Gold Rush story.

One hand dropped near the floor and discreetly passed Rupert a last morsel of chicken. There was a gulping sound from underneath the table as Oscar launched into the tale.

“Leidesdorff left his home in the Virgin Islands when he was just a boy. He landed a job as a deckhand on a ship running the trade route between New York and New Orleans. That was in the early 1800s, before the railroads became king. Back then, everything moved on the water.”

Oscar pushed his chair back from the table, wiping the last crumbs of dinner from his mouth. I picked up his plate and carried it over to the sink to rinse it off.

“Leidesdorff slowly worked his way up in the shipping business, gradually acquiring boats, property. He set up his base in New Orleans, but his ships ran all the way up and down the East Coast.”

I returned to the table with a jug of water, refilled Oscar’s glass, and slid into my seat.

“He bought himself one of those big, antebellum mansions with the white columns across the front. It was the scene of some of the finest parties in New Orleans.” Oscar winked slyly at me. “Leidesdorff romanced the cream of the city’s crop of debutantes—wooing them with his guitar. He’d built up quite a playboy lifestyle for someone who started out penniless at sixteen.”

Oscar wrapped his hand around the glass of water, rotating it back and forth on the scratched surface of the table.

“Then, around 1840, at the height of his business success, Leidesdorff up and sold everything, packed it all in, and moved to California.”

“Chasing the gold?” I guessed.

BOOK: How to Wash a Cat

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