Nine Lives Last Forever (2 page)

Rupert eased forward, the white fur of his stomach sweeping the floor as he snaked between a pair of bookcases and around a worn leather dentist recliner, cautiously approaching the intruder.

Even in the dim light at the back of the room, the moist sheen of the creature’s skin shimmered. A dank mustiness oozed out of its pores.

The flat bottom of Rupert’s chin hovered barely an inch over his front feet as his round back end rose upward, the plume of his feathery orange tail curving skyward into an intrigued S shape.

The creature inched toward Rupert, eyeing him warily. Its webbed feet suctioned against the floorboards as its bulging eyes squeezed shut and then reopened.

Rupert and the creature were now nearly nose to nose. They stared at each other for a long moment, the slight twitching of Rupert’s delicate white whiskers the only movement in the room.

Holding his breath, Rupert slid one paw forward, cupping it sideways. The long feathery hairs that stuck out between his toes neared the creature’s pulsing, elastic sides.

“Ribbit.”

Rupert jumped back, setting loose another explosion of hair. The frog closed its wide, lipless mouth and blinked once more.

Rupert hunched down again, his ample stomach carpeting the floor as he scooched back toward the frog. The frog stared anxiously at the advancing cat, its flat green face pinched with concern.

Rupert whirled around, his blue eyes chasing the springy form as it sailed up into the air, easily leaping over him.

The frog was wasting no time now. It hopped toward the front of the store, looking for an exit.

The frog eyed the iron-framed door leading to the street, searching for an opening in its glass panels. It could sense the crisp outside air on the opposite side of the glass; it could smell its freedom—but it saw no way to reach it. Looking up, the frog changed course and sprang up toward the top of the cashier counter.

Now in an uninhibited hot pursuit, Rupert scrambled wildly across the slick wood floor, his claws scraping into the surface as he accelerated. He fixed all of his concentration on the frog’s soaring figure, closely following its path through the air. With reckless abandon, Rupert hurled himself up after the frog, his front feet butterflying out as he tried to swat at the slippery little beast.

Another
plunk
sounded against the top of the cashier counter as Rupert caught its carved edge with his flailing front feet. The rest of Rupert’s heavy, round body slammed into the counter’s vertical front paneling. Undeterred, Rupert scrambled to pull himself up, the claws of his back feet digging tracks across the paneling’s decorative scroll-work.

Plunk.
The frog jumped halfway across the counter, heading toward the nearest bookcase.

Rupert dashed after it, his wide middle brushing against a slender green vase sitting on the edge of the counter. A bouquet of fresh violet-colored tulips poking out of the top of the vase swayed back and forth, rustling nervously. The rim of the vase’s round base began to roll precariously.

Rupert paid no attention to the wobbling vase. He perched himself on the edge of the counter, trying to size up the distance to where the frog now crouched on the upper shelf of the adjacent bookcase.

Secure in its position of vertical advantage, the frog peered down at Rupert and blinked mockingly.

“Ribbit.”

Rupert’s feathery tail swished against the teetering vase as he launched himself into the air.

The crashing sound of tumbling books and breaking glass echoed through the showroom to the apartment above.

A woman’s muffled holler issued from the bathroom as ancient water pipes screeched, and the shower’s faucet was wrenched off.

“Rupert!”

IT WAS AN
early Sunday morning in the middle of June, pseudo-summer on the tip of San Francisco’s peninsula. The arrival of the summer months signified more the end of the winter’s soggy, rainy spell than the beginning of a season’s warmth. Each afternoon, a crisp, cool, tourist-chilling wind buffeted off the Pacific, stealing the heat from the sun’s bright rays.

The mornings, however, were governed by a different beast entirely. In the wee hours of half darkness, the air stood still as a damp ghost of fog slid its oozing fingers through the streets, gripping the ready-made handles of the city’s steep hills. You could almost taste the dense, salty moisture that seeped in through San Francisco’s countless open windows—including the one on the third floor bedroom of the apartment above the Green Vase.

The rest of Jackson Square still snoozed in languid silence as I crawled out of bed, stumbled into the bathroom, and turned on the shower. The first trickle of water spat violently from the faucet, gradually increasing into a steady stream as air pockets hiccupped out of the pipes.

I stood sleepily outside the shower stall, waiting for the water to heat up, while Rupert trotted into a shiny red igloo-shaped litter box to begin his early morning ritual. Within seconds, the box began to rock spastically back and forth, propelled by the efforts of the energetic digger inside. In a triumph to his well-honed technique, an occasional clump of litter gained sufficient height and spin to breach the interior rim and spray out the front of the box onto the bathroom floor.

Isabella hopped up onto the counter by the sink, yawning as she kept watch over the bathroom. With sharp blue eyes, a shiny white coat, and an orange-tipped pipelike tail, she was a sleek, slender mirror of her plump brother. She glanced down at the litter box as his fluffy white blur burst out of its opening and galloped down the stairs toward the kitchen.

With a sigh, I climbed into the shower and let the warming water soak my head and shoulders. Still half asleep, my thoughts drifted down to the Green Vase showroom, two floors below. I had inherited the shop, along with the living quarters above it, from my Uncle Oscar a few months earlier.

Oscar had run the Green Vase as an antique shop, or at least that’s how it had appeared to everyone on the outside—including me. Few customers had visited the Green Vase during Oscar’s tenure; those who had dared to enter were quickly shooed away. As one of my Jackson Square neighbors put it, Oscar “wasn’t much into customers.”

In the weeks following Oscar’s death, I had learned that his fascination with the historical figures from San Francisco’s past had been more than just an extracurricular pastime. He’d been searching for the hidden treasures those figures might have left behind.

The traditional antique storefront of the Green Vase had provided an easy cover for Oscar’s treasure hunting activities. The relics and artifacts that filled the showroom were all clues he’d collected to the location of much more valuable items, many of which were still hidden throughout the city. Unfortunately, Oscar had kept most of the details regarding his historical research in his head, so the underlying significance of the seemingly random articles within Oscar’s vast collection had died with him.

After Oscar’s death, my two cats and I moved into his old apartment above the antique store. At that time, the showroom was crammed with dusty, decaying boxes, cracked display cases, and piles of what could only be described as junk. Two months into the arduous task of sorting through the scattered remnants of Oscar’s investigative efforts, I had only processed a fraction of the heap.

Most of the items related in some way to the Gold Rush, Oscar’s favorite period of San Francisco history. It was no coincidence that Oscar’s treasure hunting headquarters was located in the heart of Jackson Square, a neighborhood known during the Gold Rush years as the Barbary Coast.

The brick buildings that line these streets are some of the few in San Francisco to have survived the massive 1906 earthquake and subsequent city-sweeping fire. The area’s historical significance is further enhanced by the central role it played during the Gold Rush’s massive population influx.

From 1849 onward, millions of desperate would-be miners rushed past the building that now houses the Green Vase on their way to the Sierra gold fields. Little of the precious mountain dust the gold-seekers collected stayed in their pockets. Most of it ended up back here in Jackson Square, in the hands of saloonkeepers, thrift shop owners, and a cunning swarm of freewheeling swindlers, pick-pockets, and thieves.

The Green Vase had seen a lot of history over the years, but Jackson Square’s rough and rowdy Gold Rush days ended long ago. The historic brick structures up and down the street are now occupied by high-end antique stores with highly polished merchandise displayed behind expansive glass windows. The line of fancy cars parallel-parked along the street gives notice of the sophisticated clientele who shop here.

Uncle Oscar had been the lone holdout to this high-brow trend. With the help of his vampy but effective lawyer, Miranda Richards, he’d managed to fend off the neighborhood’s attempts to force him to clean up or sell the Green Vase—its cracked, glass windows and crumbling, brick exterior had matched the dusty piles within. By the time I took over the place, the residents of Jackson Square were so relieved at my willingness to renovate that I met little resistance obtaining permits for the necessary construction work.

The majority of Oscar’s Gold Rush antiques were now packed up, or at least haphazardly stacked, down in the basement. I had selected what I hoped were the most marketable items from the collection and cleaned them up for a more flattering display.

To be honest, I had no idea what I was doing, trying to run an antique shop. Prior to Oscar’s death, I had worked as an accountant in San Francisco’s nearby financial district. I’d spent my days hunched down in an office cubicle, drearily crunching numbers and plotting them out onto spreadsheets. It was a dull but comfortably predictable existence, one that I had wholeheartedly immersed myself in. Few vestiges of that previous life survived the aftermath of Oscar’s death.

Oscar had been buried less than a week when I was dismissed from my job at the accounting firm—thanks to the misguided interventions of my new neighbor, Montgomery Carmichael. To be frank, I was fired. Finding myself suddenly unemployed, I consolidated my meager savings with the proceeds from Oscar’s estate and moved into the apartment above the Green Vase.

Despite pressure from Oscar’s attorney to sell the antique store, I decided to hold on to it. A part of me, I think, couldn’t bear to let it go. Oscar had been a gruff, grumpy old man, but he’d been my last remaining family tie, the only relative with whom I still had any relationship.

Almost every Saturday night in the years before his death, Oscar would fix dinner for the cats and me in the apartment above the Green Vase. His signature dish was a skillet full of crispy, pan-fried chicken paired with a heaping bowl of creamy mashed potatoes. The succulent smell still oozed out of the cracks and corners of the upstairs kitchen. If I stood in just the right spot in front of the stove, I could soak in enough of the scent to trick my taste buds into thinking that a hunk of that delicious chicken was passing through my lips. Those Saturday night meals at Oscar’s had been the highlight of every week.

So, for reasons more sentimental than practical, I’d decided to try my hand as a Jackson Square antique dealer. The store had reopened a couple of weeks ago, but I’d had little luck, thus far, reversing the negative flow of traffic into the showroom. Even with its new red brick exterior flanked by bright green, freshly painted iron columns, the Green Vase just didn’t have the reputation, the cachet, of its competitors up and down the street. I was going to have to come up with another source of income—and soon.

There was one potential recourse to save me from bankruptcy: a substantial, if illiquid, asset that Oscar had tucked away for me in one of the building’s many hiding places. Two months after its discovery, I still hadn’t come up with a way to leverage the item’s value. Nevertheless, it was comforting to know that I had something, however tenuous, to fall back on should my efforts to run the antique store result in a complete failure.

But as the hot shower pulsed down on me that morning, my thoughts wandered away from the gloomy financial prospects of the Green Vase. I began to puzzle, instead, on the strange events of the previous couple of days.

Whispered rumors and speculations of the potential gold mines mapped out in Oscar’s legendary collection of antiques had begun to circulate through Jackson Square. Oscar had not been the only one in this neighborhood, it seemed, with an interest in hidden fortunes, and I had been unwittingly drawn into the hunt. So far, the search had unearthed nothing but questions about my mysterious uncle and his life prior to becoming the caretaker of the Green Vase.

It was as the last suds of shampoo were slipping down the drain that this second train of thought was interrupted by a series of sharp, thudding bangs that echoed up from the first floor. Concerned, I wrenched off the faucet and reached for a bath towel. I peeked nervously out through the shower curtain and looked around for Isabella. She was nowhere to be seen.

“Oh, good grief,” I muttered, anticipating the source of the sound. My cats had been up to some strange behavior lately.

Another loud bump echoed up from the ground floor as I struggled into a sweatshirt and jeans—a troupe of elephants appeared to be rampaging through the Green Vase showroom. I made my way across the bathroom, gingerly stepping around the red igloo and its surrounding sprinkling of litter.

“You two better not have broken anything else,” I called out as I descended to the second floor, crossed the kitchen, and headed down the wooden staircase leading to the back of the showroom. In the past couple of days, I’d lost several pieces of pottery, including a green vase, to the recent outbreak of feline mayhem.