The Death of Perry Many Paws (27 page)

“I think my mom thought it was an unwritten law.”

“But Claudia told us she was going to get it for her so we crossed it off Abbey’s wish list. We should have known better.”

“Yeah, I’ll never forget how excited Abbey was when she opened the package from mom, saw the box was from Caroline’s, and pulled it open …”

“Only to see the exact sweater she wanted only in blue …”

“She was so disappointed …”

“I really wanted to slap your mother, Christmas or not.”

“Thank God for Sybil.”

“She jumped up and said it there must have been a mistake in labeling the packages and that the blue sweater was from her and the package labeled to Abbey from Sybil was really the one from Claudia.”

“And in that package was the red sweater. Sybil had bought the perfect gift and saved the day …”

“And covered Claudia’s ass, too.”

“That was the true meaning of Christmas, unselfish giving. I think of that every Christmas. And Abbey still has no idea …”

“Sybil asked us not to tell her. She still wears both those sweaters, too.”

We both agreed that Abbey was delightful in every way and reminisced about Christmases past. I couldn’t believe that I had thought today was such a “nothing go right” day. I was walking hand in hand with the man I loved and we were talking about how wonderful our daughter was. Sure, my mother-in-law was a clueless witch and my brother was a
pompous ass, but the family that really mattered, my husband and our daughter, was perfect for me. They were my anchor and if they were solid, I was solid.

The cottage came up way too soon. It was dark and foreboding and I would have been happy to turn around and go back home. We entered by the kitchen door. It seemed much colder than it had this afternoon and Cam went over to turn up the heat. Grace had told me that when spirits are around the room gets colder. I wondered if Franklin was here and if so, would he be kind enough to indicate where the rest of his autobiography was. At this point I would be happy if he wrote the name of his murderer on the wall in blood. It would only take me about a month of therapy to recover from that and at the rate we were going, there was no way this would be over in a month any other way. Mycroft went back to the rug in Franklin’s study and we followed him in. I showed Cam where I had found the paper and he methodically went through the pile of blank paper just the way I had done. He didn’t find anything, either. Cam continued to go through Franklin’s desk, even going so far as to get down on the floor and shimmy under the desk and thump around.

“Secret drawers?” I asked. “You know, if I lived alone and no one came to see me, ever, I wouldn’t feel like I had to hide whatever writing I was doing. I mean, who would he need to hide it from? Why not leave all 23 pages together in the drawer? Why just the most recent page?”

“
If
it was the most recent page. Maybe there are hundreds of pages,” Cam’s voice echoed from under the desk. “Although most recent makes sense. You’re a writer, you would know.”

“My books are rarely more than 23 pages, and that’s only if the illustrations are really large. But I agree, it seems that the most recent page would be the one in the desk. That would have been what he was working on.”

Cam pushed himself out from under the desk and clapped his hands together to clear off the dust. Then he wiped them on his pants. “There are no secret compartments or anything taped under the drawers or behind the desk. The other pages have to be someplace else.”

I closed the book I was looking at, a history text book from 1936.

“Do you think the killer took them? Maybe Franklin wrote an expose of the bombing of Pearl Harbor.”

“Yeah, his murder really looked like an FBI or CIA assassination. Plus, Franklin had only gotten to Pearl Harbor on
See Here
, which no one took. It’s what happened before Pearl Harbor that someone was interested in if, and that’s a big if, he was killed for what he was writing.”

“It’s the only motive we have so far. Maybe it was a Veterans of WWII assassination,” I suggested.

“Yeah. That must be a spritely set of geezers. All they would have to do is wait until Franklin took out his garbage and then run him down with their motorized scooters. A gang hit.”

“At least we know Ryan was telling the truth when he said he saw Franklin writing at his desk.”

“Let’s look in the bedroom.”

I hated going into the bedroom. Cam went through all the dresser drawers and looked under the bed. He lifted the mattress, checked behind the curtains and under the rug. He took the drawers out of the nightstand. He kneaded the pillows. He moved all the furniture away from the walls. He knocked on the walls and he got down on his hands and knees and thumped every inch of the floor. Meanwhile, I stood at the door of the closet and tentatively pulled at the arms of the remaining shirts with just the tips of my thumb and my index finger.

“I can’t find anything,” I reported.

“Did you look in the shoes? Did you check the back of the closet for a secret panel or the floors for an empty space? Did you run your hand all along the top shelf and check in that paper bag up there?
How about the closet door? Is it solid? Could one of the panels open up? Did you check the pockets of all the shirts and pants? Is that dirty laundry on the floor? You should go through that also.”

I didn’t want to do any of these things. I was a “look through the desk or check out the books” kind of searcher. I couldn’t very well complain, though, because now Cam was totally under the bed and poking at the box springs. At least going through the closet didn’t require getting on the floor and sticking my head in dark, dusty places.

“I’ll keep checking,” I assured him. I did wonder about that bag sitting on the shelf of the closet. I tentatively pushed it around and it didn’t feel heavy so I pulled it down and set it on the floor. I did my preventive kicking at it so as to give anyone living in there the opportunity to escape. No one took advantage, so I assumed that meant nobody was home and I could safely look inside. The top of the bag was rolled down so it would fit nicely on the shelf. I carefully unrolled it and looked inside.

“Cam!”

I heard a loud clunk and a series of expletives as Cam smacked his head on the box springs and came rolling out from under the bed. “You scared the shit out of me. What?”

I picked up the bag and turned it over, shaking it vigorously. “I think I just found Franklin’s bank!”

Money came floating out of the bag and onto the floor. It wasn’t taped in nice little bundles but rather all loose and crumpled like it had spent a lot of time stuffed in a pocket. I began to smooth it out. Tens. Twenties. Fifties. We sat on the floor like a couple of kids playing a board game, smoothing out the money and placing it in piles. Once it was laid out it didn’t look like the fortune it had originally but it was still a lot of money to keep in a brown grocery bag in your closet with your dirty clothes.

“Rough count, about $850.00,” Cam pronounced. “I guess that’s not a lot when you consider that he never spent money on anything other than the groceries we brought him.”

“He never paid me in crinkled-up money like this. Maybe he ironed it first.”

“If this is what the murderer was looking for, he apparently didn’t think to look inside this bag.”

“Maybe there was more money and that is what the murderer took. You can’t expect an old man living out in the woods to have a fortune so he was probably pretty happy if he got half this much, if his motive was robbery.”

“Mmm.” Cam rocked back on his heels and looked around the room. “I wonder where he kept the money he gave us for groceries.” He stood up and opened the closet door all the way. “We need to take all these clothes and things out and have a look.”

Cam apparently didn’t believe in the thumb and index finger approach and grabbed everything on a hanger and dumped it on the bed. Then he pulled all the shoes and debris on the closet floor out into the middle of the room. He reached into all the shoes and gave me a nod, indicating that I was to do the same with the clothes on the bed. I wished I had my half-price gardening gloves. I sat down and methodically checked a couple of pockets. After nothing awful appeared I settled down and mindlessly checked them all. A big pile of nothing. Cam reported the same thing. I suppose one shouldn’t be disappointed in finding a bag full of money but we had hoped to find a murderer.

t’s amazing how little interest a paper bag filled with over $800 of crumbled bills can generate. As soon as we got home last night, Cam called the police. They were mildly interested and said they would be over this morning to pick it up. I hardly slept all night worrying that someone would find out we had a small fortune in our house and would break in, again. I kept the baseball bat next to my side of the bed all night, just in case.

Claudia had been very bored by the whole thing and told Cam that when the police were done looking at the money we could keep it, as she had no interest. As executor of Franklin’s will, Cam explained that the money had to go into his estate. Claudia countered that since she was her brother’s sole heir, she was giving the money to us and there was no need to give it to her first so she could just turn around and give it to us. We’ve had mice in our basement that were greeted with more enthusiasm than this bag of money.

Cam stayed home until the police picked up the money because he knew I was uncomfortable being in the house alone with it. Mycroft and I were the only ones who felt the house had been broken into a week ago Tuesday. Even Cam, who had participated in our catch-the-burglars adventure, had chalked it up to “house noises” and post-murder over-sensitivity on both our parts. He refused to discuss the
handkerchief, Sylvie’s handkerchief, especially now that we couldn’t find it. I think he was half-convinced we had imagined it.

It’s human nature to want things to be the way we expect them to be, to be the way we are comfortable with, the way we are used to dealing with. I was surprised with myself for being so unsettled over the mystery of Franklin’s death. I tend to be a fleer rather than a fighter and I like to keep my head at least a little buried in the sand to buffer life’s blows. But now it seemed like everyone else was being an ostrich and I was the only one who couldn’t get back to my normal life until I understood what had happened and why. It was as if a blanket of blasé had been thrown over everyone, the police included, and I had been left out. Grace was concerned but only to the point of clearing Ryan. Diane’s concerns seemed purely hormonal. Claudia didn’t want to be bothered. Syra and Bing were only mildly interested. Cam was involved off and on but didn’t seem to be as disturbed and unsettled as I was. I needed a partner to bounce ideas off, someone who was as enmeshed in this mystery as I was.

When I was a child and my friends weren’t available to play, I used to sit on my bed and write and draw in my journal. I have dozens of these journals, the first one started when I was six. During my dramatic junior high school years I sincerely believed that my journal was my only friend. During my awkward high school years I truly believed that I would never marry but would live my life through my writing, telling my journal the things I should be able to tell a husband, but knowing that there was no male who would ever listen to me like that leather-bound book.

The current issue was filled with my thoughts on Abbey’s departure to college and how my relationship with Cam had changed since she’d been gone. We were identifying with each other as a couple again rather than parents and that took some getting used to. Like an adolescent body, my middle-aged changing body took some getting
used to. Some themes carried from book to book—my relationship with and thoughts about my mother-in-law, my struggles with being a good mother, a good wife and good to myself, all at the same time, my concerns about my friends, and rants about my brother. I decided to turn to my journal to help me sort out the mystery of Franklin’s death. I had just started to outline the series of events, starting on October 2 when I’d found his body, when I had an overpowering and freakish urge to call Claudia. My friendship with Grace had alerted me to the possibilities of acting on overpowering and freakish urges and, not wanting to ignore the possibility of spiritual guidance, I followed through.