“That would only be strange if Baby actually liked anyone.”
“Good point.” Staring down at Professor Jackson’s signature, Claire traced the loop of the “J” with one finger. Unless he was one of those rare nonpoliticians who believed their own lies, it was his real name and occupation. “I can’t help thinking he’s dangerous.”
“How?”
“You’re the cat you tell me.”
Austin thoughtfully washed his shoulder. “He looks like he’s in his late fifties.”
“So?”
“Ten years younger than Mrs. Abrams.”
“Your point?”
“Do I have to spell it out? He’s ten years younger than she is. He’s younger. She’s older. They’re…”
Claire’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t care.”
“Do you want to be a lonely old recluse?” Austin demanded, tail tip flipping back and forth.
“All right. Let’s just get this settled once and for all.” She drummed her fingernails against the counter. “I like Dean. He’s a nice man and he’s very attractive. Under normal circumstances, where I’d be moving in then moving out when the job was done, I might consider, were he willing, a short physical dalliance.”
“Dalliance?”
Ignoring feline amusement, Claire went on. “However, I’m not going anywhere, and he’s barely twenty. He’s not going to be content staying here as chief cook and bottle washer forever.”
“So you’re going to give up now because you can’t have forever?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“So you’d be willing to sleep with him and then move on, but you’re not willing to extend the same courtesy to him?”
“I really didn’t say that.”
“So the problem is, you really want the one you can’t have.”
Claire stared at the cat for a long moment. Twice, she opened her mouth to say something, anything, but the words wouldn’t come. Finally, she turned and walked away.
As the door to her sitting room closed behind her, Austin stretched out on the counter. “What would she do without me?”
“We lock the front door at ten-thirty.”
“Why?”
“Pardon?”
Professor Jackson fixed Claire with an interrogative stare. “Why do you lock the front door at ten-thirty? Why not at ten? Or at eleven? Or at ten-forty-five? You don’t know, do you? You’ve just always done it that way. Most people go through life without noticing what’s going on around them. If I could show you the world beyond your pitiful little daily routines, well, you’d be amazed.”
“Would I?”
“Amazed,” he repeated. “I’ll be back before ten-thirty.”
“I can’t help wondering,” Claire said as the front door closed behind him, “just what exactly he’s a professor of.”
“Some kind of philosophy,” Dean answered, coming into the lobby as she finished speaking. “He holds an appointment from an eminent Swiss university.”
“That explains the accent.”
Dean looked confused. “What accent?”
“Exactly. He’s probably never been closer to Switzerland than a box of instant hot chocolate. I’m curious; how did you find this out?”
No closer to understanding than he had been, Dean shrugged and moved on. “Mrs. Abrams stopped me on my way up the driveway to make sure the professor got in okay.”
“On your way up the driveway?”
He nodded. “She leaned out her window. I had to stop or the cab of the truck would’ve taken her head off. She was, um…” He paused, uncertain of how to describe the bouffant vision, her hair oranger and higher than he’d ever seen it.
“She was what?” Claire demanded. “Irritating?”
“No. Well, yes. But also, dressed up.”
“Is that all.”
Dean nodded. It was a weak description, but it would have to do. If she’d been dressed any more up, she could’ve rested her chin on them. Shuddering slightly, he tried his best to forget.
Conscious of Austin apparently asleep on the other end of the counter and Jacques watching bull riding in her sitting room, she tried not to sound stilted as she asked, “Did you have a good afternoon?”
“Sure.” When she seemed to be waiting for further information, he added. “I went over to my friend Ted’s. We gapped the plugs and points and changed to a winter-grade oil.”
Since she had no idea what that meant it seemed safest to make a noncommittal kind of sound.
“Did you want me for anything, then?”
“No.” When he turned to go, she jumped into the pause. “That is, unless, if you like, we could maybe order a pizza and all three of us could watch a movie together this evening?”
“All three of us?”
“Four if you count Austin, but he’ll lose interest if no one feeds him.”
“Pizza and a movie?”
“Well, Jacques won’t be eating. It’s just I saw this ad, in the paper, and there’s a pizza place on Johnson that rents videos, too, so you can have them both delivered. Together.” She knew she was overexplaining, but she couldn’t seem to stop. “I just thought that instead of cooking you might want to, uh, join us.”
Chaperone us, decoded the little voice in her head. It wasn’t coming from Hell, but then, it didn’t have to.
“Sure.”
Except this time sure meant, if I have to. Claire had begun to learn the dialect. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. It’s just, there’s a game on…”
“No problem.” Briefly, she wondered what sport, then dismissed the question as one of little importance. “We can watch the game.”
His smiled blazed. “Great. Double cheese, pepperoni, mushrooms, and tomatoes?”
“That would be fine.”
“I’ll just go hang my jacket up and then I’ll call.”
On the way down the stairs, he checked the business card.
Aunt Claire, Keeper
Your Accident is my Opportunity
(and your guess is as good as mine)
Stretched out on his back, all four paws in the air, Austin opened one eye as Claire drummed her nails against the counter-top. “You’re not fooling anyone, you know.”
“Get stuffed.”
As the first period careened toward the end of its allotted twenty minutes, Claire gnawed on a length of pizza crust and wondered just exactly what she thought she was doing. While Jacques had originally resented Dean’s intrusion into their evening, an involved discussion of how hockey had changed since his death had considerably mollified him. After an unsuccessful attempt to understand the fundamentals of icing, Claire gave up and tuned out.
If she didn’t want to be alone with Jacques, all she had to do was remove his anchor from her sitting room; a simple solution that hadn’t even occurred to her. Why not?
“Why not, what, cherie?”
“Did I say that out loud?”
“Oui.”
She glanced over at Dean, who nodded. This was not good. In a working Keeper, the line between the conscious and subconscious had to be kept clearly defined. Fortunately, Montreal chose that moment to score, and by the end of the period the conversation had been forgotten by everyone but Claire. And Austin.
“Looks like things are coming to a head,” he muttered under the cover of yet another beer commercial. “Going to have to be resolved sooner or later.”
“They’ve been resolved. Too young and too nice, and too dead.”
“Dead’s relative.”
“It is not.”
“Then can I have some pizza?”
“No.”
“No, what, Boss?”
Before she could answer, they heard the front door open. Austin reached out and pressed the mute on the TV remote. “What?” he demanded, tucking the paw back under his ruff. “You trying to tell me that you guys don’t want to know if he’s alone?”
He wasn’t.
“Mind the legs now, Professor. They’re good quality, I only have good quality things, but they’re not as young as they once were, you know, and I don’t want to try and use them someday and find them warped.”