A Curious Affair (12 page)

“You brought the cat to the funeral?” Tyler asked, unable to hide his surprise.

“No, but Atherton tends to follow me around. I think he’s lonely.” I’m not a good liar, so I knelt down and picked Atherton up, hiding the lower half of my face in his coarse fur. Neither of us was comfortable with this, but he didn’t struggle while the sheriff was watching. He even let me check his paws for wounds from the screen. I wondered what we looked like to the others. Me, all in black, holding a dark cat—did we look like a witch and her familiar? “I don’t think Irv would mind the cat being here. We’ll sit in the back of the church,” I added. “No one will see him.”

Tyler’s eyes grew compassionate as he watched me rub against Atherton. His sympathy wasn’t for the orphaned cat, though. He could sense my tension and probably thought that I was feeling fragile, perhaps remembering Cal’s funeral and wanting to hold something close so no one would see me cry. Normally I would have done something to banish this concern, which I found so hard to accept in strangers and even friends. But this time I let him believe this was why I held the cat so close and kept my face mostly hidden. It was almost true, anyway.

“Come on,” Tyler said again. He reached for my arm, but a hiss from the cat made him step back. “That’s a large beastie you’ve got there. Biggest cat I’ve ever seen. Seems real…protective.”

“Manners, Atherton,” I said softly. “The sheriff means no harm. He’s just trying to help us.”

The cat began making a harsh noise that might have been purring. Then again, it might not. I lifted my head and forced a smile for Tyler. I hoped it was more convincing than Atherton’s purr.

“He just doesn’t like strangers much. He and Irv were loners.” My jaw was definitely getting tighter.

What I don’t like is the smelly-
butt man
, Atherton grumbled through his buzz-saw purr.
Take me to him now
.

I didn’t like “smelly-butt man” either, but I didn’t say so out loud. Just in case the sheriff was serious about thinking I might be something more than eccentric for bringing a cat to a funeral.

I glanced one more time at the shuddering shrubbery. So far, the cats had kept a prudent distance from the church itself. Whether out of piety or fear, I didn’t know. I didn’t know if it would work, but I sent out a stern mental message:
Stay out of the church. Atherton and
I will watch smelly-
butt man
.

“That cat isn’t the only loner,” Tyler said mostly to himself. “Let’s get you out of this wind. I can tell your jaw is hurting.”

I smiled fleetingly at Tyler and started down the hill, being careful not to step on anyone’s grave. Atherton was a bundle of tensed muscle and fur, but he must not have had any true demonic connections because he didn’t disappear in a puff of smoke when we entered the sanctuary and slid into the rear pew.

I didn’t protest when Tyler slid in beside me. Atherton wasn’t thrilled, but he was too busy watching the nephew to pay the sheriff much attention. An asthmatic old organ began playing “Rock of Ages.” I bowed my head and tried to look like I belonged in church. I was confident that if Wilkes did anything interesting, Atherton would let me know.

Irv’s land is posted with no trespassing signs, but the neighbors have always treated them as a mere request for privacy. The whole
trespassers will be shot
thing didn’t make sense when Irv didn’t have a gun. None that we knew about, anyway. Perhaps if he’d had one, he’d still be alive.

The next home on the hill was a step down from Irv’s place on a stony outcrop that jutted over Stockyard Road. The place was more of a temple than a house. It was called The Parthenon for obvious reasons. The current owners, Elena and Carl Malking, were avid gardeners and apt to be out in the yard at all hours tending to their massive container garden. It was a well-manicured property completely at odds with others on the hill that rather grew like Topsey. Unfortunately, the attentive Malkings were away for the month. The only two residents at The Parthenon were Elena’s mother, Miranda, and the day nurse, Justie Fillmore, who left The Parthenon promptly at six p.m. every afternoon. Miranda was an insomniac and might have been a hopeful witness to interview since
there was a clear view of Irv’s driveway from her bedroom window. However, when God was handing out the afflictions of old age, he had been thorough with Miranda. The eyes may be the conventional windows of the soul, but curtains of cataract had been drawn over these panes years before, and she refused surgery so no one would be peeping in or out of them anymore. Asking her to recall and articulate her thoughts was not a viable option, either. Aside from the missing teeth that had mutinied and abandoned their gummy posts decades ago, her grasp of present-day reality was tenuous at best. Nor would she wear her hearing aid since arthritis had bound her to a walker. Miranda was waiting to die and stubbornly refused all succor.

I sighed. It figured that the one person who might have seen anything on the night Irv died was blind, deaf and dumb. It was the way the luck was running on this very amateurish investigation. It was probably partly my fault that I was making no progress, but it was also par for the course on anything involving Irv. Way down deep, most likely buried in his DNA, Irv was burdened with a kind of ironic bad luck. It had haunted all the males of his family for as far back as he could recall. When Irv had inherited the family farm in Fresno—a piece of land that had been fertile and profitable until Irv’s father, a refugee from the Dust Bowl, got hold of it—Irv immediately lost the water rights and found that he couldn’t afford the taxes on the place anyway. He’d had to sell at once, and the land hadn’t brought in enough to cover the family debts. His parents were dead by then and his sister, sensing there was no future in agriculture or in sticking with her brother, took up with a crop duster and sometimes stunt pi lot named Dukie Wilkes. They’d left for the bright lights of Hollywood seeking fame and fortune, or at least regular work. The sister came back alone two years later with a snot-nosed
brat in tow. Dukie had moved on to bigger and better—and younger—things.

All alone in the world and unable to find work in Fresno, Irv retreated to the family mining shack in Irish Camp that had been cobbled together at the very end of the nineteenth century. There he decided to fall back on a crop that was always in demand and that he knew how to grow. He planted his first patch of marijuana in the Stanislaus National Forest in a grove where a harsh winter had struck down a number of trees and left a promising sunny glade. From what he’d told me, it would have been a bumper crop, but two days before he planned to harvest, a forest fire swept through that part and he lost everything. Only slightly daunted by this loss, Irv tried again that next spring. Year two had looked to be a little better until there had been an invasion of some kind of hemp-eating beetle from Japan. He’d lost most of that crop, too, and what he salvaged had an odd piquancy that he suspected was beetle dung. Year three, he’d lost more than half of his crop to a mudslide caused by record-breaking summer rainfall that washed out the scarred land now left naked and unprotected by the forest fire.

And so it went on, year after year. He made enough to live on—barely—but like his father, his green thumb was overshadowed by natural disasters.

Then, in the spring of ’86, when he was struck by lightning, he had taken up gold panning. Irv wasn’t exactly prosperous, but he found the odd nugget here and there and managed to provide himself with slightly better cuisine and clothing, if not a fancier roof over his head.

And now, after twenty-two years, when he’d finally hit the mother lode and was looking at spending his final years in some degree of comfort, if not actual
middle-class affluence, his greedy nephew had probably killed him for his find.

I shook my head at Irv’s profound bad luck and mentally walked past the Malkings’ without stopping until I reached the next house on the map.

On the other side and down the south face of the hill was Crystal, but I already knew that she had no details of the nephew’s visit to share with me. And no one else could have seen anything. So, Atherton was still the only witness and he couldn’t exactly give a statement to the police. Nor could I come forward at this late date and say, oops, I just recalled that I
did
see everything that night, and Peter Wilkes is a murderer.

So, there we were. I didn’t have any witnesses—at least none that could go to the police—but I did have a possible motive that I could investigate if I could figure out how to go about it.

Gold. I kept coming back to it. If the nephew had been after drugs, he would have taken them that night and hightailed it back to Lodi. He would not have stuck around and produced a will naming himself as heir to Irv’s squalid little cabin that would be torn down shortly anyway.

It followed that if Irv had found a cache of gold, he either would have sold it or hidden it somewhere safe. Selling it would be wise only if he’d found a stray nugget and there was no hope of discovering more in the same location. No gossip spreads as fast in our town as news of a gold strike. One whiff of fresh gold-bearing ore or cache of nuggets and every Tom, Dick and Peter Wilkes with a gold pan starts following the lucky finder around. There hadn’t been any word of a new gold find, so I didn’t think Irv had gone to any of the local jewelers he usually sold to. That in turn meant Irv believed he had hit upon a rich vein and wanted time
to mine or pan it before others got wind of the sweet spot. That he might have talked to Molly, Dell and Josh about going in with him on a business venture suggested that this could be a mining operation, something underground and dangerous and not just casual surface panning. But then again, it might just be that he had found something along the river—on someone else’s property—and he needed a lot of bodies to cover the territory before they were found by the rightful owners and booted out.

This was a whole lot of supposition, but it hung together. For me.

Yes, I figured that the gold was secreted away somewhere on Irv’s property. Irv could have hidden it anyplace, but it seemed to me that he would want it someplace both safe and where he could get to it anytime he wanted. That probably meant somewhere in or near the cabin. Which, I thought for the tenth time, would be torn down soon because it was an illegal structure and no one wanted vagrants moving into it.

There was also the matter of the nephew who would be looking for the gold. And he was still looking, of that I was sure. It was like with the pot: If he’d seen the stash of nuggets, he’d have taken what he found and skipped town.

Unless the source of the gold was on Irv’s land and the nephew knew there was enough ore to make mining it worthwhile. I hadn’t found out for sure, but he likely would have mineral rights if he’d inherited Irv’s land—almost all property comes with those rights up here.

Regardless of whether it was drugs or gold, what all this meant was that I needed to make my move, investigate the crime now or forever hold my peace. Even though Tyler had specifically warned me against doing it.

I exhaled slowly and gave myself a count of five to
change my mind about being impulsive and imprudent. When I got to six I went to the garage to fetch a hammer and screwdriver, as well as a strong flashlight. Irv might have hidden his hoard in a cookie jar or spare boots beneath his bed, but I’d read a lot of Nancy Drew, and I was betting it was under the floorboards.

I think that Irv did have a hole in the floor,
Atherton said.
I heard him taking up boards sometimes
.

“Then you can come with me,” I said, reaching for a jacket. “I’m going to try my hand at cat burglary. You can give me pointers,” I joked.

Atherton wasn’t enthusiastic about a trip to Irv’s, but was still agreeable about coming and acting as lookout while I dismantled the place.

I told myself that I needed to find something concrete to give Tyler so he could make an arrest. Without dope or gold, Irv’s death looked like a senseless, random killing by druggies looking for a fix. Of course, it wasn’t senseless. People always kill for a reason—a host of reasons sometimes—even if they are ones we don’t understand. But Tyler needed something tangible he could take to the DA. And so did I. Because if the law couldn’t take care of Irv’s nephew, I would have to. Or let the cats do it.

Looking at these words now, I feel queasy. Revenge. That’s what I was talking about. I know that’s a very Old Testament way to think, but I was only a few days away from having almost killed myself because I couldn’t think of any reason to go on living. Getting rid of a cold-blooded murderer didn’t seem like such a bad a thing to do, comparatively speaking, supposing I could get over my general squeamishness about breaking the law and fear of blood.

How does cat burglary differ from other kinds of robbery?
Atherton asked, after giving the matter a ponder.

“Well, you need to very secretive and stealthy.” Atherton winced as I stepped on an acorn cap and it crunched noisily. “I’m better at the secretive part,” I admitted. “Mostly cat burglary is about finesse rather than brute force. And it usually involves taking gold or jewelry.”

Ah. I didn’t think it was about food
.

We walked on. I made an effort to be more careful about where I placed my feet. I was a bit nervous, but not actually afraid. Irv’s nephew—even should I run into him, which wasn’t likely—had no reason to think that I was anything other than a helpful neighbor, stopping by to put out cat food for the strays who were living under his cabin. Of course, Tyler would be annoyed if he found me at Irv’s, but he rather owed me for the meth dealer and would probably cut me some slack. So, there was no reason for fear. None.

Still, the woods were very dark and very cold with the sun down, and the trees were filled with stealthy noises. Though the trek up the hill had gotten easier with practice, it was still not enjoyable and I arrived at Irv’s winded, my heart shuddering in my chest.

Time hadn’t improved the view of Irv’s place. The cabin was still so lonely and sparse that even a Spartan would have disdained the accommodations. The mold was getting bad enough, too, that even a coal miner might have moved due to caution for his lungs. I wished that I had brought a dust mask.

Atherton and I crossed the threshold anyway. Clearly I had abdicated all caution and regard for the law. There was no crime-scene tape in evidence, but I certainly could never claim that I was unaware that this was the site where a crime had been committed. And I knew that when Tyler had mentioned expecting a degree of eccentricity in me because I was a writer, he hadn’t meant that to include trespass and tampering
with evidence. Perhaps he would believe me if I told him I thought I had heard one of the cats trapped under the house.

I flipped on the overhead light, which drove back the dark to a limited degree but did nothing to banish the stealthy shadows where spiders watched with too many eyes. I looked around carefully, but saw no obviously loose or ill-fitting boards near the door. Clearly my disrespect of property was progressing from trespass to vandalism. I decided, after a moment’s cogitation, that the most likely spot for a cubbyhole was under the mislaid hearth that Irv had only recently installed.

Atherton jumped up on the table to watch my deconstruction. I pulled my limited tool supply out of my pocket and laid the screwdriver beside him. Reversing the hammer so it was claw-side down, I began pulling up the small sheets of sandstone that had been jigsawed together with loose sand instead of mortar.

Unfortunately for my hands, the most likely spot was not
the
spot. I dropped the last abrasive stone back into place, not being particularly careful of where I let it fall. The nephew might notice that someone had pried up the stones, but that information wouldn’t help him any. Wearing a fine and probably not terribly attractive sheen of perspiration flecked with white sand, I started testing the floorboards next, searching for one that was loose.

Again, the view of Irv’s cabin did not improve from my position on hands and knees. Down there it was easy to see that not only did the floor sag, but the walls and tired old beams overhead did too. I was hoping that the worst bowing was just an optical illusion brought on because there wasn’t one thing in that room that was square or level, but I knew it was just as likely that the inadequate supports were actually buckling under the combined cruelties of old age and termites, whose small
piles of sawdust on the floor and furniture were a dead giveaway that they had taken up residence along with the spiders.

You’ll need another bath
, Atherton said.

I laid the hammer aside and sank back onto my butt. My knees were beginning to holler about all the crawling and squatting.

“I’ve been over the whole floor and haven’t found anything. Are you sure you heard him taking up the floor?”

Atherton considered.

I heard him shifting wood. It might have been low down on
one of the walls
.