Notoriously Neat (7 page)

“Stop.”

“You’ll love it, Sky. I call my version Pigeon Cove Pigeon Casserole. Get it? You pluck ’n’ gut two old pigeons like the ones you can catch on the docks—or like those Beauford sisters from Plum Street, haw! Then you cook ’em in butter with maybe half a pound ’a bacon—”

I was struggling not to blow my cool. Or the contents of my stomach. Though I’m a pretty controlled person, it wasn’t easy in either case. Not that Bill noticed, which further annoyed me.

I sat there speechless.

“Awright,” he said after a few seconds. “I figured my offer would leave ya overwhelmed, but when it comes to generosity, I don’t play beat the buzzer. Why don’tcha sleep on it? Have a slice ’a my quiche for breakfast an’ get back to me later on tomorrow?”

I stared at him. There were five or ten responses that would have made a jailbird blush trying to escape my gritted teeth. I reminded myself that the Cove wasn’t the Big Apple, and that Chloe would have preferred I keep it clean.

Fortunately she jumped in before any choice vocabulary could slip out.

“You’re right to give Sky overnight,” she said. “I’m sure a single bite of your delightful baking will make her decision a cinch.”

Bill hawed. “If you didn’t know me better, you’d probably figure I brought the quiche as a bribe, huh?”

“Why, Bill, you’re reading my mind.”

He stretched and pushed himself up from his chair, pie cutter in hand. “Well, gotta hotfoot it outta here—those quiches are waitin’ for me.”

“Best be on your way, then,” Chloe said with a bright smile. “Thank you again for dropping by.”

Bill gave an exaggerated wink. “Don’t mention it,” he said. “I still owe Sky a cup ’a Drecksel’s Special Blend from maybe a year ago. You two va-vooms come into the diner together, I got ya both covered, no charge.”

And with that, Chloe came around the table and walked him to the door. Still smiling, she furtively wiggled her fingers behind her back so I’d stay put. When Bill had left, she returned to the kitchen and sat back down opposite me. Her eyes were serious and the smile had fled her face.

“Now that we’re alone, you can tell me what’s wrong,” she said.

I frowned soberly. “Am I that much of an open book?”

“No,” she said. “At least not to Bill, you weren’t. Nor to most other people.”

“But you aren’t most people.”

“We’ve shared too much for you to fool me. I saw your face when I asked about the police sirens. And I knew something serious was on your mind.”

I sat looking at Chloe a moment and finally nodded. “It’s about as serious as anything gets,” I began, and then told her.

At around ten o’clock I said good night to Chloe and went upstairs to my apartment. Though she’d been stunned to hear about Dr. Pilsner, she took it better than I could have hoped, staying pretty composed as I gave her the distressful news. Maybe, I thought with a weird little twinge, because it was the third murder in town since I’d moved up from New York. The idea Hibbard and Hornby planted in my mind had firmly lodged there—irrational as it was. Could it somehow be my fault the murder rate was rising in the Cove? Was I a Sky full of dark, big-city rain clouds?

I frowned.
Okay, lousy pun.

It was too early in the tourist season for Chloe to have guests, and the hall was quiet as I strode to my apartment. Well, not totally quiet. But the kind of quiet that seemed to amplify the everyday sort of old-house noises that normally might have slipped my notice. The creak of wooden floorboards underfoot, the groan of rusty plumbing in the walls, the lisp of a breeze through a window sash.

About halfway up the hall, I realized that one familiar sound I didn’t hear was Skiball pawing at the inner part of my door. Skiball paws at lots of different things when she’s excited, going at the door once my footsteps come close . . . especially when I’ve been away for any length of time.

Ski also saves a large repertoire of greetings for after I’m actually
through
the door. There’s a narrow oak bench to the right of it just inside my apartment—a guy named Moser Valentine made it for me, carving it from a small oak tree in his yard that was downed in a nor’easter—and Ski generally moves her pawing routine over to it when I sit down to take off my shoes. Or if she’s in a subdued mood, she’ll do a welcome walk with one forepaw stiffly out in front of her and a hind leg stuck straight out in back. The only way to describe that goofy walk is to say it kind of looks like she’s swimming without water. She’ll take a few steps, rub up against me, and then tip over flat on her side and start purring.

This is all when Skiball’s in a mellower groove. In her more typically hyper state, she’ll launch into a happy dance that consists of several minutes of skidding around the apartment to the accompaniment of her own shrill screams and warbling yells. It can be funny unless I happen to have a headache or it’s that time of month. In which case it makes me want to scream my lungs out like a maniac too.

I guess you could say my little tuxedo’s a study in feline extremes.

Since I couldn’t hear her through the door as I approached, I suspected she might be tucked into one of my sweaters on her favorite closet shelf. Not even a major explosion would make Ski lift her head when she’s having a deep REM catnap in her own version of a Getaway Groves condo.

The point being that it didn’t occur to me that anything might be wrong with her as I entered the apartment. In fact, I was thinking about Mose. I’d met him at City Hall while doing my office cleaning and found him an interesting local character. Besides being a member of the town forestry committee, he was an excellent woodworker and amateur meteorologist.

Mose didn’t seem to think I was some kind of (ouch again) stormy Sky, I told myself. Mose, who liked speaking in weather metaphors, had in fact once called me a fresh breeze in town
.
So why let those crabby emergency techs get under my skin? They couldn’t even recognize a monkey when they saw one—let alone a
male
monkey sans trousers.

With this in mind, I shrugged out of my coat, hung it on the rack, then sat down on the bench and leaned over to unzip my boots . . . which was when I saw Skiball crouched
under
the bench.

“Ski,” I said, surprised. “What’re you doing down there?”

She ignored me, staring straight ahead, all hunched up and silent.

Ski, silent? That caught my attention.

I reached a hand down to rub her nose. She didn’t respond. That struck me as odd. Ski loved when I rubbed her nose. When I rubbed her nose, she always purred and turned to mush.

Except she wasn’t purring and mushy now. She huddled under the bench, acting as if I were invisible.

“Hey,” I said, scratching the back of her neck. “You okay?”

Still no reaction.

A little concerned, I started to pick her up onto my lap. But it seemed to make her even tighter and tenser, and I decided to let her be.

I got up off the bench and went into my kitchen. I kept Ski’s food and water bowls in the pantry and wanted to see if she’d eaten.

The bowl of kibbles I’d poured for her before leaving the apartment looked untouched. I didn’t see any getting around it now—Ski’s behavior was more than a little strange. She always had a hearty appetite.

My brow crinkled. No sense getting worried yet, I thought. I would keep a close eye on her, see whether she seemed back to normal by morning. If she didn’t, I could start seriously considering a trip to the vet.

And then it hit me.
A trip to the vet.
Only Skiball didn’t have a veterinarian in town. Not anymore. I would have to find a new one. It was a sad thought for many reasons. Gail Pilsner had been gone just a few hours and life was already moving on without her.

I frowned. I didn’t want to dwell on that before going to bed, not unless I felt like tossing and turning all night. The best thing would be to take a nice, hot shower and then add some cleaning tips to my new Grime Solvers blog. I always found cleaning therapeutic, and thinking about cleaning worked nearly as well. I’d sit down to work on the blog entry till I tuckered out.

A half hour later I was at the little desk in my bedroom, a fluffy white terry-cloth bathrobe wrapped around my midnight blue New York Yankees pajamas. When I turned on my computer and checked my e-mail, I saw that I’d gotten one from Mike. I looked at the time stamp on the e-mail and saw that he’d sent it at midnight his time. If I was right about the time difference, that would have been about six o’clock in the evening my time.

I stared at my computer screen. The e-mail header read,
Missing You Tonight
.

My finger hovered over the mouse button as I did some more silent calculating. I can add and subtract as well as any second grader, math whiz that I am. In Paris, it was now about five o’clock in the morning. Almost wake-up time for Mike. Almost bedtime for me. It underscored that we were a wide world apart. Or at least half a wide world.

Half a world seemed far enough.

Swallowing hard, I started to open the e-mail, but my finger wouldn’t cooperate. I couldn’t click the mouse button.

I hadn’t missed Mike tonight. I’d thought of him, but I hadn’t missed him. About when he’d been writing the e-mail, I’d been getting ready for dinner with Alejandro Vega. Wondering how slinky I ought to dress. Wondering if I might go to bed and wake up in his arms, and knowing there wasn’t really much to wonder about. Because whenever I looked into his eyes, I wanted him to make love to me. And whenever we were together, I couldn’t stop looking into his eyes.

If our night had gone as I’d planned, it would not have ended with a kiss in his Range Rover. If it had gone as planned, I would have let Alejandro Vega’s kisses sweep me off to a world that was ours and ours alone.

Since it was pretty clear from
how
he kissed me that he’d been prepared to risk catching my cold, I thought.

I sat staring at the screen for another second or two, sighed, and closed the e-mail program with Mike’s message unread. Once, I’d have felt guilty about not feeling guilty. Maybe I still did, a little. But just a little.

I opened a new document file in my Grime Solvers folder and started typing away:

Three and a quarter sentences into my entry, I suddenly stopped clacking at the keyboard. I’d heard the sound of a car pulling up outside.

My bedroom window overlooks Carriage Lane, which runs along the north side of the house to cross Main Street. Chloe’s garage and one of the Fog Bell’s entrances (there are three) face the lane. My window’s almost directly above the entrance. The car sounded as if it had pulled up right in front.

I got up, went to the window, pulled back the edge of the blinds, and peeked out.

A black Lexus idled almost directly below me on the street, its passenger door facing the curb, the beams of its headlights lancing out toward the corner. As I watched, its door opened wide and the interior lamp went on to allow a glimpse of a man behind the wheel. He wore a dark overcoat and had a thick head of silvery hair and was reaching across the front seat for the door handle. I didn’t think I knew him, but it was hard to be sure. Between the darkness outside, the roof of the Lexus blocking my view, and my being three stories up, it was hard to get a decent look at his face.

I stood at the window, my curiosity piqued. It was past eleven o’clock. Nothing stirring outside except that car. What had I been thinking before about the late-night quiet in Pigeon Cove? At that hour, it let you hear sounds that didn’t seem to fit. Like the Lexus pulling up to the house. And like the side door of the inn suddenly opening now as somebody stepped out onto the porch.

Carefully easing the door shut, the shadowy figure hurried down the porch steps and then crossed the sidewalk to the waiting car.

My eyes widened. Chloe was one person I would’ve recognized anywhere. From any vantage, day or night. And just an hour earlier, she’d told me Oscar was already fast asleep. That she was going to join him in bed right after I went upstairs.

So much for that. Standing at my window, I watched her pause on the sidewalk for a quick glance back at the inn. Then she climbed into the Lexus, shut her door, and sat back as the car pulled away into the night.

Too stunned to move, I kept staring out the window at the empty street. Oscar Edwards was bald except for a sparse, messy fringe of white hair. I’d never seen him stalk around the house in anything besides a battered old peasant cap, a pair of plain brown work pants, and a goose-down vest on chillier days. On the rare occasions he
left
the house, Oscar wore a red barn coat with corduroy elbow patches and drove a decrepit Chevy station wagon with fake wood paneling on the sides.

I wondered who the Lexus’s driver could be. And then wondered where Chloe had gone with him at that late hour. One thing was clear—it wasn’t to bed with Oscar.

It was a while before I let go of the blinds and returned to the computer to work on my cleaning tips. I guess I finally went to bed around midnight, feeling tired and ready for some sleep.

Staring up at the darkened ceiling hours later, troubled thoughts swirling through my head, I conceded that I hadn’t been nearly ready enough.

Rough night tonight. Don’t ask how come, because I don’t want to think about it right now. My goal is to lull myself into sleepiness, and I’m sticking to the subject of cleaning since it relaxes me. And since I figure that’s mostly why we’ve all gathered together in this dirt-free corner of the blogosphere.