I rose to my feet.
“Mr. Dryden, I don’t mean to be rude,” though I suppose I really did, “but I assume you have better things to do than this. And I know I do. All we did was be absolutely random witnesses to this terrible thing.”
Dryden, his mouth flattened in anger-at least, I thought it was anger-was putting away his pencil and notebook.
“I hope it won’t be necessary to disturb you again,” he said, quite calmly. He looked over my shoulder, through the archway to the dining room. “Pretty flowers,” he said, still without inflection.
“Thanks for coming,” I said, with, I hoped, firm civility.
Angel looked down at me, shaking her head, when he’d left.
“What?” I asked indignantly.
“When you do that, it’s just like being bitten by a dachshund,” she said, and drifted to the kitchen door. “Don’t forget to set the alarm after me,” she called over her shoulder. I watched her through the kitchen window, loping across the covered sidewalk to the garage, bounding up the wooden steps and unlocking her door. I obediently punched in the right numbers on the panel set in the wall, and I prayed for her and Shelby and the baby.
That evening I got another one of those annoying phone calls. I’d been getting quite a few lately, the wrong numbers that don’t say anything when an unfamiliar voice answers the phone. The least the caller could do is say, “Excuse me, wrong number,” or “I’m sorry to bother you.” Finally I let it ring until the answering machine picked up. So of course, my next caller was Martin. I just let him assume I’d been too far from the phone to pick it up on the first three rings; no point in telling him about the hang-ups. He’d just worry, maybe call the Youngbloods and get them to worry, too.
I didn’t tell him about the flowers, either.
I didn’t tell him about Angel’s pregnancy.
I did tell him about my interview with Dryden. When Martin realized Dryden had come alone, he did one of the things that made me love him; he didn’t say one word about his foresight in insisting Angel be present. But I could hear the difference in his voice as we talked; there was the steel there, the hardness and the edge, that I seldom heard. Maybe that was how he was at work all day, and didn’t bring it home; or maybe only danger brought it out, some perceived threat to him and those people or things he held dear.
And you couldn’t accuse him of paranoia, of being too cautious; not with the things I heard on the news every day, not with the horrors he’d seen in Vietnam and Central America. It would be insane egocentrism for me to believe none of these horrors could happen to me.
From far away in Chicago, a city I’d never visited, Martin told me to use my common sense, and for God’s sake to remember to set the security system.
Chapter Four
Madeleine had jumped on the bed in the middle of the night. She was there, curled in a large golden ball, when I woke up. Madeleine was an older cat now; she’d been at least six when I’d inherited her, and Jane Engle, her first owner, had now been dead for about three years. Madeleine still managed to catch the occasional mouse or bird, but she sometimes missed her jumps, and her facial fur seemed whiter to me. The vet gave her high marks on her annual checkups, and since everyone at his office would have loved to find an excuse to put Madeleine to sleep, I had to accept his verdict.
Now she purred in a rusty way as I scratched behind her ears. Martin hated Madeleine getting on the bed, so she only got to stay there when he was gone; I vacuumed or washed the bedspread before he came home. As my fingers tickled lower on her neck, they encountered something unfamiliar.
I sat up and really looked at Madeleine for the first time. In addition to her brown leather collar to which were attached her rabies disc and her name-and-address tag, something else had been tied around the cat’s neck. It was a ribbon, a fresh-looking pink satin ribbon, tied in a precise, perky bow.
I tried to come up with a reasonable explanation for the bow. It was ludicrous that something as pretty as a pink bow could frighten me.
I looked at the clock. The Youngbloods would be up. I punched in their number on the bed-table phone.
“Yep,” said Shelby flatly.
“I’m sorry to call you this early in the morning. But unless you or Angel did this, and frankly I can’t see how or why you would, someone caught Madeleine and got her to hold still while he tied a ribbon around her neck.”
“Run that by again.”
“A man or woman. Got hold of Madeleine the cat. And tied a pink ribbon. Around Madeleine’s neck.”
“Why the hell would anyone do that? That cat would as soon dismember you as look at you.”
“Did Angel tell you about the flowers?”
“No.”
Then I remembered they’d had more important things to talk about the night before.
“Someone ordered flowers delivered to this address yesterday. The card was unsigned.” I told Shelby what the card had said. “Either your wife or I have an unknown admirer. This is unsettling.”
“I’ll be over there soon.”
“To do what? Look at the ribbon? What good would that do?”
Shelby was silent for a minute.
“I’ll take the cat to the vet this morning,” he said.
“He needs to draw some blood to find out if she was drugged. And I do want a look at the ribbon. We need to keep it, in case we have to call the police.”
“Okay. I’ll cut it off with scissors.”
“Then I’ll come to get her in about ten minutes.”
Very casually, so as not to alert Madeleine, I got my fingernail scissors from my vanity table. I began scratching her gently behind the ears again, and she stretched her neck and purred. Then I scratched her forehead, so she’d shut her eyes. Gently, gently, I slid the thin blade of the scissors under the pink band, and just as gently I closed the blades together. Of course, the little snick of the scissors and the feeling of release brought Madeleine’s head up with a snap and she bit the hell out of me. I’d expected it; Madeleine had never been a cat who’d known tolerance or temperance, and most often she was a sorry pet indeed.
After I’d sworn a little and put antiseptic on my wound, I wrapped my robe around me and retrieved the cat carrier from its storage in a downstairs closet. Right on time, Shelby knocked on the kitchen door.
I punched in the code to deactivate the alarm and let Shelby in. Shelby, so tall and pockmarked and grim, can be intimidating. I had come to be at ease with Angel, but Shelby still made me a little anxious.
This morning was different.
“Roe, you got time to talk?” he asked quietly.
I glanced at the clock. I didn’t have to be at the library for an hour.
“Sure,” I said. “Want some coffee?”
He shook his head. “Roe,” he said directly while I poured a cup of my own, “have you ever seen anyone out here when I was gone?”
I set my coffee down with a thunk, walked over to Shelby Youngblood, and slapped the tar out of him. I was so mad I couldn’t talk for a second.
“Don’t you ever ever imply that your wife has been unfaithful to you!” I told him. “If you had been there in that doctor’s office yesterday and seen how upset she was, if you had seen how scared she was you wouldn’t believe her, you would never say a stupid thing like that.”
And then I realized Shelby wasn’t the only one saying and doing stupid things. I had just slapped someone who could snap my neck quicker than I could picture him doing it.
“So you believe what this doctor says?” Shelby asked in a controlled, reasonable voice.
“Sure I do. You know Angel. You and she are just like male and female halves of the same thing.”
“But that female half is pregnant and that male half had a vasectomy.”
“So go get tested,” I challenged him. “Would you rather go”-and here I was stuck for a moment over how to put it-“put a specimen in a jar at the doctor’s, or would you rather believe your wife cheated on you?”