Bond With Death

by Bill Crider

  He wondered if he would have acted differently with Larry if instead of calling the police last night, he’d gone out onto the lawn and joined in the fray. He didn’t think so. Calling the cops was the right thing to do, and it had kept anyone from getting hurt.

  The call had also irritated Weems, and Jack considered that a very good thing indeed. He had to give Weems credit, however, for coming right out. He hadn’t even objected when Jack had told him the reason for his call.

  One thing that still rankled Jack was that the Garden Gnome had actually thought Jack would be a good candidate for the Citizens for Fiscal Responsibility because Sally had dumped him.

  As Jack had told Larry, nobody had dumped anybody, unless of course Vera had dumped Jack because of the call. Jack hadn’t mentioned that possibility to Larry.

  Maybe he should have clobbered Larry when he made that crack about Jack’s energy. And it was a crack, no matter what Larry said. However, since Jack, if pressed, would have been forced to admit that Larry had a point, there was no need to push things or to say any more about it. Vera was certainly demanding, not that Jack minded. He was enjoying his new relationship, and he hoped it wasn’t over.

  And it wasn’t. Shortly before three o’clock, Vera came by Jack’s office. He was doing a little research, trying to verify something that he’d heard or read years before about George Jones and the Big Bopper singing the “oom-bah oom-bah” backup on Johnny Preston’s recording of “Running Bear.”

  “How would you like to take me somewhere and make up?” Vera said.

  She looked quite provocative to Jack, but then she nearly always looked quite provocative to him.

  “Sure,” he said, proud that his voice didn’t quaver. “Your place or mine.”

  “You’re the boss,” Vera said, without a trace of irony as far as Jack could tell.

  Jack started to put his books and papers away.

  “Yours,” he said.

  24

  When Sally got home around four, Lola was frisking around the house, so Sally gave her a kitty treat and got out the old piece of rope that Lola liked to attack.

  Sally dragged the rope along the rug, and Lola crouched down as close to the floor as she could get, her feet stretched in front of her, her tail switching from side to side.

  When the end of the rope was about to disappear around the end of the couch, Lola charged.

  For a cat of her weight and bulk, Lola was surprisingly quick and nimble. She covered a distance of seven or eight feet before Sally could twitch the end of the rope out of her reach.

  She grabbed the rope between her paws and got it into her mouth in one smooth motion, rolling on her back and scratching at the rest of the rope with her back paws at the same time.

  “If you were an outside cat,” Sally said, “you’d clear the neighborhood of birds in no time.”

  Lola rolled to a sitting position and said, “Meow.”

  “I know. And that’s one reason why you’re not an outside cat. We don’t want to decimate the bird population. The members of the Audubon Society wouldn’t approve.”

  “Meow,” Lola said.

  “Yes, I know you don’t care about the Audubon Society, but birds are our friends.”

  “Meow.”

  “Are you being sarcastic?”

  “Meow.”

  “Well, stop it.”

  I’m really losing it, Sally thought as she went to check Lola’s food and water. I’m having a conversation with a cat. I need to get out more. Maybe it was a mistake to let Mae get her hooks into Jorge so easily.

  Lola followed along after Sally as if to make sure the job was done right. Sally got the water bowl, washed it out, and put in fresh water. She had two faucets on the sink, one for washing and one with a filter for drinking water. She used the filtered water for Lola, who was winding herself around Sally’s ankles.

  “I hope you appreciated the special treatment,” Sally said.

  “Meow.”

  “Good. Now come drink some of the nice fresh water.”

  Sally put the bowl back and Lola dutifully drank from it. Sally wasn’t sure if Lola was thirsty or if she was drinking just to mollify Sally. After she finished lapping up the water, Lola went into the bedroom. After all the strenuous activity, she needed a nap.

  Because she’d skipped lunch, Sally thought she’d treat herself to something special for dinner, which meant a hamburger, followed by a Klondike Heath Bar Crunch. Keeping the Klondike bars in the house was a severe temptation, but Sally was able to resist them for the most part. She ate them only when she cooked a hamburger for herself, and she didn’t cook hamburgers often. She didn’t cook anything often.

  She checked first to be sure that she had an onion in the refrigerator. As far as she was concerned, hamburger without onion was no hamburger at all, and she was happy to see that she had half a 1015 onion in the vegetable drawer.

  She heated her big iron skillet on the stove and when it was ready, she put a frozen meat patty in it. The sound of the sizzle brought Lola back to the kitchen.

  “I thought you were taking a nap,” Sally said.

  Lola didn’t answer. She sat near the stove, looking up at Sally.

  “You’re not getting a hamburger,” Sally told her. “Go on back to sleep.”

  Lola gave her a low-level hiss and left the kitchen. Sally hissed back at Lola’s retreating tail, then opened the pantry and got out the potato chips, feeling virtuous that they were baked, not fried. She wasn’t having French fries, and the hamburger patty was made from extra-lean beef. Why, she was preparing what amounted to a low-fat meal. That is, if she didn’t count the Klondike bar, which she wasn’t.

  When the patty was done, Sally scooped it out of the pan with a spatula and put it on a paper towel to drain. She turned off the heat and put a bun in the pan to let it warm in the little bit of grease that was left behind. She flattened it with the spatula. Then she sliced the onion. No one was coming by, as far as she knew, so she cut a generous slice. There was a tomato in the refrigerator, too, so she cut a slice of that as well. She put the bun on a plate, spread some mustard on it, and put the patty on top of that. Then she added the onion, the tomato, some pickles, and some lettuce. She poured herself a glass of Diet Pepsi to go with it.

  Chips, an old-fashioned hamburger, Diet Pepsi, and an ice cream bar afterward. Life was good.

  She was getting the Klondike bar from the freezer when she thought about the note from Ellen Baldree. Maybe reading it with ice cream in hand would help.

  It didn’t. There were still parts of it that were simply impossible to read, no matter how much skill Sally had developed in her years of grading papers.

  Sally decided she was going to have to do what she hadn’t even wanted to consider. She was going to have to call Ellen.

  She could go by and see how Ellen was doing, but she didn’t like that idea at all. She thought that Larry Lawrence might still be there. She didn’t want to talk to Larry again.

  She was sure that Ellen, if she was awake, wasn’t going to be feeling well, anyway, but maybe she could function well enough to discuss the note. Sally just hoped she could remember having written it.

  Larry answered the phone.

  I should have known, Sally thought. She asked how Ellen was, and Larry said she was feeling about as well as could be expected.

  “Has she eaten anything?”

  “I fixed some soup,” Larry said, revealing a nurturing side that Sally hadn’t suspected.

  “I was hoping I could talk to her.”

  “I don’t think she wants to talk to you,” Larry said.

  Sally could hear Ellen in the background. She was telling Larry something, but Sally couldn’t make it out.

  “Just a second,” Larry said, and he must have covered the receiver with his hand as Sally couldn’t hear anything for a while.

  When she did hear something again, it was Ellen’s voice.

  “Sally, are you still there?”


  “I’m here. How are you feeling?”

  “Not good. My head must be the size of a basketball. I’m sorry I let my classes down today. I promise you that won’t happen again.”

  Sally found herself feeling sorry for Ellen. The e-mail had been a malicious trick, but Sally was sure that Ellen regretted having played it.

  “Don’t worry about your classes,” she said. “They don’t have to know why you weren’t there. Do you feel like talking about that note you were writing me?”

  “You found the note?”

  “Yes. I took it with me when I left.”

  “Larry didn’t mention that,” Ellen said.

  There was silence for a few seconds, and once again Sally had the impression that the receiver was covered.

  “Sally?” Ellen said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not sure I like it that you took the note. I don’t know that I’d have sent it to you.”

  “The part I can read didn’t come as a surprise. I’d already figured out you sent the e-mail. You were seen in my office several times.”

  “I did it to hurt you. It seems stupid now, and I wish I’d used better judgment.”

  Sally thought that Ellen was having a hard time saying she was sorry. Maybe she couldn’t say it, and that’s why writing the note had been so difficult for her.

  “You don’t have to apologize,” she said. “I’m not going to hold the e-mail incident against you. All I want you to do is write another e-mail to everyone you sent the first one to and explain that the first one was a hoax. Will you do that?”

  After a pause Ellen said she might be able to bring herself to do that.

  “Good,” Sally said. “Now let’s get back to that note you were writing to me.”

  “I don’t think I want to talk about it.”

  Sally pretended that she hadn’t heard. “The part about blood. I’m not sure what you were trying to say.”

  “I’m not sure either. Did I mention blood?”

  “You know you did.” Sally barely kept the exasperation out of her voice. “I’m almost certain that Harold Curtin’s name was there, too.”

  More silence. This time it went on for a while.

  “Sally?”

  “I’m still here.”

  “You shouldn’t have taken that note. Larry should have stopped you.”

  “But he didn’t. And it had my name on it, after all. I had a perfect right to take it. Now tell me what you were trying to say.”

  “I don’t think I will.”

  This time it was Sally’s turn to be quiet. She wasn’t consulting with anyone. She was just considering her options. When she’d made up her mind, she said, “All right. Here’s the deal. I might be able to read the letter without your help. If I can, that’s fine. If I can’t, I’m turning it over to Lieutenant Weems of the Hughes Police Department, just in case it has something to do with Curtin’s murder. I have a feeling that if he can’t read it, he’ll find someone who can.”

  Ellen was shocked. “You wouldn’t do that!”

  “I’ve been your supervisor for a few years now. I think you know that I would.”

  “You shouldn’t be my supervisor,” Ellen said. “I should have had that job.”

  “But you don’t have it. I do. Get over it, Ellen. And tell me what you wanted to say in that note.”

  “I should never have started writing it in the first place. If Harold hadn’t died, I wouldn’t have.”

  “Maybe the note does implicate you in his death. I suppose I’ll have to hand it over to the police.”

  “Damn you,” Ellen said. “You’re blackmailing me.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m just trying to get you to do the right thing. So tell me what you wrote.”

  Ellen whined and carried on for another full minute, saying that she had nothing at all to do with Harold Curtin’s death; that the note was her personal property, stolen by Sally; that Sally was a cruel and conniving blackmailer; and that Sally might not be a witch, but change the w to a b and the description in the e-mail was perfectly accurate.

  Sally listened to it all and then said, “Fine. Now I’ve heard you out, and I’m tired of listening. Tell me what was in the note, or I’m hanging up and calling Weems.”

  So Ellen told her.

  From Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World

  The witches do say, that they form themselves much after the manner of congregational churches; and that they have a baptism and a supper, and officers among them, abominably resembling those of our Lord.

  25

  Seepy Benton didn’t have a cat. He had four. They had turned up one day in his garage, just kittens at the time, and they seemed to like the place. They had adopted Seepy within minutes, and he was happy that they’d come to live with him. But since they were all black and all looked alike, he could hardly tell them apart.

  Each cat had a name: Emily, Leon Trotsky, Sam, and Ralph. The trouble was that he didn’t know when he was talking to one or the other of them, except for Emily, who, being female, had not only a slightly different look but a distinctly different personality from the others.

  As far as Seepy was concerned, the cats were wonderful, most of the time. But there was a problem: they hated his singing. It was bad enough that no one would listen to his songs at the college, except for Molly, and she listened only because she couldn’t escape gracefully. But he found it pretty insulting that even his own cats wouldn’t listen. All he had to do was start to tune the guitar, and they would run out of the room and hide somewhere they hoped that he couldn’t find them.

  Seepy’s house contained plenty of places to hide, as he wasn’t the best of housekeepers. In fact, when it came to keeping house, he was the anti-Mae Wilkins.

  Dusting? Couldn’t be bothered.

  Newspapers and magazines? Let them accumulate.

  Books? Stack them wherever there was a place.

  Dishes? Wash them when there were no more clean ones or when the stack in the sink got so high that it was likely to fall over and cause damage.

  Clothes? Hang ’em on a chair or whatever was handy.

  The clutter didn’t bother Seepy in the least. In fact, he hardly noticed it. He was too busy writing songs, working on his Web page, meditating in his flotation tank, taking photographs of fractals on his computer, studying the Talmud or Kabbalah, or working out an astrological chart.

  What he was not busy with was his love life, mainly because at the moment he didn’t have one. He knew that it was his own fault. He was so absorbed in his many interests that he didn’t have time to think about a love life. And, to tell the truth, until recently there wasn’t really anyone at the college who’d interested him, except Vera Vaughn, and she had always seemed somewhat intimidating to Seepy, who’d been more than a little surprised when she and Jack Neville got together. Jack had never struck Seepy as being manly enough for someone like Vera, certainly no more manly that C. P. Benton, Ph.D. If they had Olympic competition for sexual athletes, Seepy Benton would be a contender every four years. Well, that might be a slight exaggeration, but still, Jack must have hidden depths that could be plumbed only by someone like Vera.

  Lately, however, Seepy had found himself thinking more and more about Sally Good. She was tough but not intimidating, and she had a wry sense of humor. Seepy was sure that anyone he got involved with would need a sense of humor.

  Not to mention an ear for music. Seepy sat in a chair in his kitchen and plucked the strings of his guitar, trying to find a tune to go with his latest composition, which he had entitled “Gandhi Wore a Loincloth.”

  The cats had all disappeared, but he thought he’d seen one peeking out from behind a stack of newspapers.

  Seepy wasn’t having much luck with the tune, so he put the guitar aside, standing it in another of the chairs at the table, and got up to see if he had anything to eat.

  The inside of his refrigerator depressed him, as there seemed to be a mossy surface on the
cheese and an even more interesting growth on top of a bowl of something or other. He couldn’t recall what had been in the bowl to begin with, as it had been there for a while. Now, whatever it had once been, it had been transformed into something else entirely. And he didn’t think he wanted to eat it.

  “Pizza again,” he said aloud and went to the telephone to place his order. It would be a vegetarian pizza, naturally, as Seepy had entered a vegetarian phase about a month earlier. Not vegan, so he could have plenty of cheese.

  While he was waiting for the pizza to arrive, Seepy thought some more about Sally Good. He wondered what she would think if he dropped by her house. He could play a song or two for her, even though she hadn’t expressed an interest in hearing him play when she came by his office. Probably she’d been in a hurry then, and in a more leisurely setting she’d enjoy a tune crafted by a budding songsmith.

  He was still thinking it over when the pizza arrived.

  Sally wished she hadn’t already eaten the Klondike bar. Chocolate would have helped her deal with what Ellen had told her.

  It seemed that Ellen knew that Harold had become a witch, and that’s what she’d been trying to write about in the illegible part of her note.

  Except that Curtin hadn’t really joined the coven. He had attended a few of their meetings, which had been disappointingly bland, according to Ellen.

  “He was expecting a Black Mass,” she told Sally. “Something really satanic, with black robes and hoods, a stone altar with blood in the baptismal font. You know, something right out of ‘Young Goodman Brown.’”

  Leave it to someone who taught American literature to associate a witches’ sabbath with Hawthorne, Sally thought, trying to imagine Curtin in the dream-haunted forest of Hawthorne’s mind. It wasn’t easy to picture, but she supposed there was a place in there for a garden gnome.