“Yes, but. As I said, Harry, you’re under no requirement to poke around, but if you’re curious? Well, you are rather good at ferreting things out. Usually things people would rather keep hidden.” She pushed herself up with both hands, struggled into her official Gloucester rain gear, grabbed her staff, and glared at me.
I helped her up the steps, walked her across the rain-slashed deck and down the stairs. She gave me a gimlet smile and, like Diogenes off to search for that mythical honest man, stalked out of the grove.
I put another log in the woodstove, slouched on the settee, and watched the flickering shadows dance around the cabin. Like the ending of an eclipse, the darkness, the deep, dusky fear, slowly seeped out of my soul and allowed me to smile. The grove was mine again. I was, at least for now, spared the dingy hotel room, that fifteen by twenty cell with a sink and the ABSOLUTELY NO PETS sign on the door. I hugged Cat and whispered, “We’ve been pardoned.”
Cat, her claws hooked in my sweatshirt, yowled at the thunder and kept drooling on me.
I woke up early for the first time in days. Hands behind my head, I stared at the ceiling and smiled. Cat, annoyed that the blanket had slipped down her body, lifted her small head off the pillow, put a paw on my arm, and went, “Yeow?”
As I usually did, I gave her a little physical therapy, gently massaging the jagged scars and atrophied muscle. Then we had a quick game of wrestle-the-hand, the first in weeks.
Later, sipping coffee, I watched the squirrels try to get into the birdfeeders. While watching the struggle outside the window I toyed with the key ring I’d left on the table last night. “The keys to your dream?” I muttered. With Cat stretched out and purring in the sling across my chest, I marched through wet, dead hay across the pasture to the barn.
With Annie’s connected house, the barn is almost a hundred yards of sagging, much-patched lumber that looms three stories over one’s head. The years of renovation into rooms and tiny apartments have turned the interior into a dark maze that only the residents can negotiate without a guide. More than once newcomers have been found sobbing in a narrow dark hallway, lost and wondering what brought them to this groaning, creaking, windblown dump out in the middle of nowhere.
The front half of the second floor of the barn is a multipurpose room. It’s a kitchen and dining hall, and the back part of the room is dotted with islands of cast-off furniture. That’s the place to linger if your desire is to listen to an unlikely version of who’s doing what to whom and why.
I was a little late, but breakfast was still being served and I walked the serving line, gathering eggs, toast, and coffee. As I stood at the end of the line scanning the tables, Mildred Beede, a seamed, white-haired existentialist and sometime drinking acquaintance, gripped my shoulder.
“Harry, if you need help, I can drive you and your things to that hotel.”
I gave her a grin that stretched my face. “I’ve been forgiven and pardoned.”
Mildred glanced at Annie, sitting nearby, gripped my shoulder again, and whispered, “That’s good, that’s very good. But I hope you won’t have to jump through too many hoops.”
I carried my tray to Annie’s table, put Cat on the floor, smiled at Annie, and asked, “What happened to your Chrysler?”
She raised her furry white eyebrows. “Chrysler?”
“Two of the keys belong to a Chrysler Corporation car. What kind and what happened to it?”
“We never owned a Chrysler Corporation car. Bob was devoted to GM, and we owned a long string of Buicks. When they stopped putting those little portholes on the hood, Bob fired off a nasty letter to the Buick people. They wrote back and in a polite way told him to face reality.”
“So what was he doing with a set of keys to a Chrysler?”
“I have no idea. I take it you’ve decided to research my puzzle?”
I shrugged. “Any ideas about the skeleton key?”
“None.” She picked up a sausage and bit into it. “The last skeleton key I had was to the attic door of the last house we owned.”
“Would you happen to know what Bob was doing the day he wore the jacket?”
“Besides having a massive stroke? He was at the store, taking inventory with Philip.”
“The furniture store he owned?”
“Half owned. Philip Kinch was the other half of the business. As I said, they were doing inventory. Philip heard a noise, like someone choking he said, and turned around in time to see Bob fall. Said it was like the left side of his face was melting.”
“And he was wearing that coat?”
“Yes, he was. Duncan had given it to him for his birthday two or three years before.”
“Who did you and Bob know who owned a Chrysler product?”
She picked up another sausage link and bared her teeth. She chewed, looked at me, and shook her head. “Damned if I can think of anyone.”
“Is Philip still around?”
“The last I heard, and this was some years ago — I never did like the man — he was living in town with his daughter. I believe her name is Ogden, Donna Ogden.”
I mentally braced myself. “How about Duncan? Did he ever own a Chrysler product?”
Her stare was deadly, but she finally exhaled and whispered, “He always drove Fords.”
I found Cat hunkered down in the middle of a rickety card table surrounded by four cooing matrons dressed for a day of spring gardening. A fair-sized chunk of Canadian bacon was firmly grasped in her mouth, and her purr was audible above the baby talk the ladies were emitting as they pelted her.
Cat saw me and limped to the edge of the table, and I eased her into the sling. Rose Waterhouse, a thick, white-haired woman with the eyes of an abused Bambi, gave me a lopsided smile. “Rumor has it the Dragon Lady has granted you a stay of execution.”
I patted Cat and said, “It’s my radiant personality. Tell me, Rose, in your younger days what did you use skeleton keys for?”
She raised her eyebrows, put a finger against her lips, and said, “As I remember, mostly to open doors. My mama’s two houses took skeleton keys on the doors as did my first two houses.”
“Inside and outside?”
She waved a finger in front of Cat’s nose. Cat withdrew into the depths of the sling. “Now that you mention it, mostly inside.”
Although cars are handy, they’re expensive. So I ride bicycles. My current model is a gray and black marbled mountain bike with twenty-one gears, click shifting, and a suspension system. Instead of panniers I have a yellow and red trailer, which is fortunate, as Cat would object to being stuffed in a pannier.
I put her in the trailer, wrapped her in the patchwork quilt that my ex-wife’s grandmother had labored over, and pedaled the seven miles of bad roads to town.
It was a classic spring day, the kind that induces an ardent desire to do nothing of consequence. I wanted to head for the small tree-filled park in the common, plant my aging back against a budding maple, and smile at the world while working my way down a bottle of Lancers. But curiosity prevailed, so I looked up Donna Ogden’s address in a graffiti-laden phone booth and headed for Taylor Street.
She lived in a long ranch house with yellow vinyl siding faded nearly white by the sun. On my fifth knock she pulled the door open and gave Cat and me the once-over with smiling brown eyes.
She was dressed in a burlap-colored sweat suit and wore oversized slippers that looked like bear feet, complete with claws that hung over the threshold like thick white worms. Her brown hair was streaked with kinky strings of gray; she was about thirty pounds overweight, and I doubted she gave a damn. She stepped back, grinned, and said, “A leaned-out man and his mangy cat. This should be interesting.”
I smiled and dipped my head. “Mrs. Ogden? My name is Harry Neal. Is your father in?”