The wind has kicked up a notch and is pushing his rocker to and fro. The sky is on its way to going deep gray and I can hear thunder trumpeting from the other side of Elephant Mountain. A storm is moving in.
“Hey, boy,” I say to Ivory as I come up the porch steps, holding out my hand so he can get a whiff of me. Even though I told Papa that the dog was starving to death to try and elicit some sympathy from him, I’d told E. J. that it would make his wife-to-be happy if he’d go over to the Minnow place once a day and feed the poor thing. That’s why there’s clean water in a dish and a bowl half full with the food Clive kept in a garbage can out back. Just like I thought, the dog smells worse than wet wool and brambles have worked themselves into his chocolatey fur. Below his eyes, there’s fudgey trails. “Remember me? I was the one that used to play checkers every Wednesday afternoon with your master.”
I peer through one of the front windows of the house. Clive wasn’t the best housekeeper, but this is the worst I’ve ever seen his place. The parlor looks like General Sherman marched through. Sofa cushions are split open and lying catawampus on the floor. The oak mantel above his river rock fireplace has been swept clean. Maybe some burglars got in here, knocked him on his head, drug him to the creek, and rifled through his stuff. If that’s what happened, they weren’t real professional. The pipe rack is still on the end table next to his favorite chair. Clive told me a bunch of times, “Keep your germy hands off my white pipes. They’re from Germany. They’re worth something.”
Or maybe it wasn’t burglars at all.
Sheriff Nash told Papa out on the porch this afternoon that he thought our neighbor might’ve been murdered. It was probably the sheriff and his deputy, Homer Willis, who messed up the place looking for clues. But who’d want to kill Mr. Minnow? He was practically an antique. Doesn’t seem like anybody’d go to the trouble to do away with someone who the Grim Reaper already had on his folks-to-visit-next list. Clive didn’t have any family that I know of, (except for Ivory) or a lady friend (no one but Jesus of Nazareth could be that charitable), so his death could not have been the result of what is known in legal circles as a “crime of passion,” which means that you’ve got to love somebody a whole lot in order to murder them.
Ivory hasn’t moved from his post. He’s watching me in that same distrustful way Clive did.
“Quit lookin’ at me like that,” I say. “He told me I could have the ring. You heard him.”
The front door has a handwritten KEEP OUT BY ORDER OF THE ROCKBRIDGE COUNTY SHERIFF sign posted, but it’s unlocked, and my curiosity is getting the better of me.
Stepping over the threshold and into his parlor, I think, This is a dead man’s house. It feels different from just empty. It’s like all his belongings know that Clive is never coming back and they’re in mourning, too. The plants he had near the front window are limp. Everything that should be standing upright isn’t. The floor lamp is living up to its name. Lightbulb bits are scattered around its crushed shade. Clive liked to read science fiction books and they’ve been pulled out of the bookcase. The screen of his fancy colored television set has been smashed in with a fireplace poker that’s still stuck inside.
Last summer, Clive must’ve found something real rare because he got flamboyant. Ordered this nineteen-inch colored television set out of the Sears Roebuck catalog and a fancier camera with a long lens to take better sky pictures with. I was over here the day his new and improved detector and camera got delivered.
“All the bells and whistles,” he said, thrilled.
Of course, I was happy for him, but also concerned. I knew before Mama vanished that she’d been slipping him some of her household money because he was having a hard time paying his bills. So I pointed down to the empty delivery boxes and told Clive, “Don’t you think ya might’ve gone a bit overboard?” which, in hindsight, might’ve been a poor choice of words, considering his Coast Guard experience.
He got very wound up and told me back, “Don’t worry about me, little girl. I got what you’d call a long-term investment,” and then he ran off into the woods hither-nither and I didn’t see him for a few days after that.
I hop over the mess of pictures carpeting his living room floor. Whoever was in here has also upended the old sea chest where Clive kept his photo collection. There must be a thousand or more pictures. Mostly of the sky, but there are ones of Ivory and some of his metal-detecting finds and trees and dirt.
What I’ve come for, besides Ivory, is in the starfish box that’s lying untouched next to his special chair where he smoked his pipes. Clive got the box from the Far East on his travels. “The Chinese are very tricky and inscrutable. They love puzzles and hidden drawers,” he told me. He’d always turn his back to keep me from seeing how the box secretly opened, but there’s a mirror above his fireplace and I could see him just fine.
I fell deeply in love with the ring the morning Clive discovered it under a birch tree with his metal-detecting device. I begged him for it and kept asking every time we played checkers, “Please?” but each and every time he told me, “The day you get the ring will be over my dead body.”
So there you go.
The drawer on the side of the box that you can’t see unless you know it’s there pops open to reveal the mother-of-pearl sitting prettily on red velvet like it’s been waiting for me. Just for a second I have the most fanciful thought. What if the reason Clive was so adamant about me not having this ring was because he was intending to give it to Gramma Ruth Love? Wouldn’t that be something? I think he had a fat crush on her. He gave himself a spit and polish on the days he knew she was coming for a pie visit.
When Clive was alive, being suspicious like he was, he wasn’t that big on letting me see too much of the house. I want to look around now that I got the chance. I leave the parlor and go around the corner to the bathroom door, which is shut. The doorknob sticks, but when I finally jiggle it loose, I’m knocked backwards by the odor.
From the look of things, the sheriff is wrong (big surprise) about Clive getting murdered. He’d been complaining about stomachaches off and on, but I didn’t take that hypochondriacting seriously. I guess I should’ve because it looks like a real sickness is what did him in. Probably influenza. There’s a bad one going around. Old upchuck covers the toilet, the sink, and the green tiled walls. This room also doubled as Clive’s darkroom and his expensive developing equipment is right where he left it, untouched by his retching. The last photographs he took are hanging from the crooked shower rod, held in place by red plastic clothespins. There’s one of me and that’s the most upsetting part of all. Clive really did like me. Sometimes he called me “Peaches.” And he gave me the Lost in Space lunch box after he found it in a ditch by the road.
“Mercy,” I say, moving into the kitchen. The cupboard doors are flung open and what was inside is now on the outside. Dented cans of Campbell’s pork and beans, Clive’s absolute favorite, and a couple of jars of Kraft pimento cheese because sometimes he’d make me a sandwich when we’d play checkers, are lying on the tile next to a bunch of other food items and a whole family of dead mice. Their rotting bodies are part of the real bad stink. The rest of the putrid smell is coming from the overflowing trash can.
The house shutters have begun rattling. The windows, too. It usually takes time for a storm to climb over the mountains and settle into the valley, but every once in a while, one can surprise you like this. I get jumpy around lightning, so I hurry back out to the porch, shut the door of the house, and get Ivory by the collar. “C’mon, ol’ boy. We gotta get home. Something nasty is comin’ our way.”