by Mary Bowers
It being a Saturday, there would be a volunteer or two floating around. Usually they hung out near the check-out counter, shooting the breeze with Florence, but with all the work to be done in the back room, I went looking for somebody there and found Bob Norton, an elderly gentleman who was a pretty good worker for his age. I brought him out to the sales floor to take over on the register and shooed Florence into the back room.
She took her usual seat and I bent over her, touching my hands to her forearms, saying, “Flo, honey, what’s up?”
At first she wouldn’t look at me. Then I could see her soft brown eyes filling with tears. I went onto my knees and waited, tilting my head. Finally, tragically, in a hoarse whisper, she said, “The Huntingtons fired Myrtle. It was Diana,” she spat. Then, finally, she looked at me and said, “They drove her into town this morning with a couple of suitcases and dropped her off at the house just as I was leaving. She’s moving in with me, and there’s nothing I can do to stop her. It’s her house too. Oh, Taylor, I’m going to have to live in the same house with Myrtle for the rest of my life!”
I sat down flat on the floor and stared at her in horror.
Chapter 15
The next day, Sunday, we didn’t have any events scheduled for Orphans, and I took a lazy day, actually falling asleep in a chaise longue on my lanai. In the depths of my sleep I came awake enough to decide I didn’t want to wake up, then I heard a voice that echoed away before I could catch it. I opened my eyes to an emerald world.
“Oh, no,” I murmured, still half-asleep, and popped out of the chaise, rocking on my bare feet. Turning, I saw the cat in my living room window, gazing at me coolly. As I looked, she stood up on the windowsill and tilted her head, staring. Only then did I hear my land-line ringing inside the house.
I must have awakened before the first ring, because the answering machine takes the call after the fourth, and I managed to catch it in time. The Caller I.D. came up “Girlfriend’s.” I had a very bad feeling. Girlfriend’s is closed on Sundays, and it was nine o’clock in the evening. Nobody should’ve been there at any time of the day, but especially not this late.
“Taylor, come quick!” It was Florence, and she didn’t sound right. She sounded weak – breathless.
“Florence, what’s wrong?” I said, gripping the phone. “Why are you in the shop?”
“Wicked saved me, but it was awful! That man! Just get here.”
“What man?”
She’d hung up. I did what Florence should’ve done. I dialed 911.
The dispatcher told me that Jack Peterson was on patrol not far from Girlfriend’s and he’d meet me there.
I grabbed my purse and was heading for the garage, when I was struck by a black streak. Basket. She wasn’t being left behind.
“Oh, all right,” I said, “but you jump into your crate without a fuss or I’m leaving you.”
She stepped into her transport disdainfully, but didn’t waste any of my time. Once we had pulled up in the alley behind Girlfriend’s, she hissed at me as a reminder that she was going in too, and I took the time to whip around and grab the crate.
When I got inside, I saw Florence draped in one of the Queen Anne chairs with Jack standing over her and Wicked sitting on a table beside her, looking smug.
I set the crate down on the floor and opened its door, then went across to Florence and knelt in front of her. I nearly burst into tears, which wouldn’t have helped anybody, but it hit me like a ton of bricks how much the frail little lady in front of me meant to all of us at Orphans – humans and critters alike.
“She’s all right,” Jack said. “Just a scare. Since the shop was closed, some guy thought nobody’d be here and decided to come in and help himself. Miss Florence surprised him –“
“He surprised me!” Florence said.
“Yes, ma’am. Anyhow, it’s the burglar who probably needs bandaging, thanks to that cat over there. It attacked him before he could, you know, do anything.” Jack looked at me significantly over the top of Florence’s head and I cringed.
“Oh, Wicked!” I cried, letting my emotion pour out. “You good, good kitty! You’re getting catnip every day for the rest of your life! Florence, what were you doing here in the first place?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Well, yes I do. Myrtle is making herself comfortable in the house and finding places for all her things, and naturally, she needs some space to do that. It seemed like a good time, with the shop quiet, to come in and really dig into the new inventory and get some work done.” She wouldn’t look at me while she said that, and I could just imagine how the installation of Myrtle and her things was going over on Palmetto Street. Thus Florence’s sudden burning need to do inventory on a Sunday.
“I came in at about five o’clock, but all Vesta’s things are so nice and I wanted to keep looking at them, and I guess I didn’t really get much done. I just kept picking up the next thing and thinking how interesting her life had been. And time was going by, so I had just decided I’d better stop and go home when I heard something behind me, and – “
I waited. “And?”
“Before I could turn around and see what it was, Wicked was on his head. All over his head. Biting and scratching and giving him what for. I never saw Wicked act like that before,” she said, looking earnestly at Officer Jack. “Honest, Jackie, he’d never hurt anybody. Anybody good, that is.” Florence had once babysat for Jack Peterson.
“That’s all right, Miss Florence,” he told her. “This department’s too small for a police dog, but maybe we got ourselves an attack cat in town, huh?”
She smiled at that, and seemed to recover a little.
I looked down at Wicked, and saw that Basket had come up to him and seemed to be examining him. She actually looked as if she were interrogating him. He was allowing her to get close and sniff all over him, then stare into his eyes for a while. He sat there mesmerized, then pulled away, shook his head, and jumped into Florence’s lap.
I gasped. Wicked has never been a lap cat.
“And that’s another thing,” said a grating voice from behind us. I turned to see Myrtle, standing like the prophet of doom in the back door of the shop. “I’m allergic to cats.”
Florence, that pink-and-white spinster with the kind brown eyes, became a warrior. “Wicked is my friend and companion, and he stays.”
Myrtle sniffed thickly and lifted an eyebrow. I could see that the battle had just begun, and for once, in a battle of wills, my money was on Florence.
“I came to see if you were all right,” Myrtle said, reclaiming her elegant little Queen Anne chair, “and I see that you are not.”
I got up from the floor and sat on a box. “There was a break-in,” I said briefly. “Once he saw somebody was here, he took off. Your sister is fine.”
“Wicked saved me,” Florence declared, scratching his head and issuing the second salvo of the ground war.
Myrtle merely lifted eyebrows and looked skeptically at Wicked, who ignored her.
I decided that was appropriate and ignored Myrtle myself. I turned back to Florence and said, “Did you recognize whoever it was that Wicked attacked?”
“He attacked Wicked!” she declared, with a wary glance at the policeman.
Jack waved a hand dismissively and sat down on a steamer trunk. “I’m not gonna take the cat away from you, Miss Florence. He’s a hero. Just tell us what happened.”
“Well,” she said, now that we were all settled and ready to listen, “that’s really it. It was a man. Not a woman. I know that for sure.”
“What was he wearing?” I asked.
“Jeans. I think.”
“What else?” I glanced at Jack and saw him give me the eye, so I decided to sit back and let him take over.
“Oh, nothing.”
“No shirt?” Jack asked.
“Oh, I’m sure he had a shirt on. But I don’t remember what it looked like. I just remember Wicked being all over his head, like a big black wig.”
Jack gave it everything he had learned in the police academy, and a little extra charm with the crystal blue eyes, but it was hopeless. Florence is absent-minded and highly suggestible in the best of times. If I’d said she’d been mugged by Stumpy the Swamp Monster she’d have agreed with me, which is probably why Jack wanted me to butt out.
He gave up after about twenty minutes, when she rebelled at being asked to go over things one more time, and Myrtle growled, “Is this really necessary?”
“I don’t want to go over it again,” Florence said, exhausted and cranky. “I want to go home.”
“I’ll walk you home,” I said. Her house is a block and a half from Girlfriend’s, right in town.
Myrtle stood up commandingly. “That’s not necessary. I’ll take her.”
“I think I’d like to,” I said firmly.
I looked down at the floor to where Basket was blandly watching us. “You stay here. I’ll come back for you.”
She blinked, turned, and disappeared into the shop. In the light of the naked 60-watt bulb dangling overhead, a filmy green tint washed down the room before my eyes, like a curtain floating down. I was being hijacked.
Resentment welled up in me, but this time, for the first time, it was followed by a curious sense of release. A sparkling flood of tension flowed away from me and left me cool and light and peaceful.
Why was I resisting?
I was doing this for Vesta, and Vesta had called the goddess. If being used by a goddess meant surrender to something unknown, then unless her control veered into something sinister, I should make an effort to learn a new skill: Letting somebody else take charge. It didn’t come naturally to me, but I suddenly knew that I should try. It was the right thing to do.
“Pretty cat,” Jack Peterson said, indicating the direction Basket had gone. “Funny thing. It has exactly the same color eyes as you have.”
“Does she?” I said, startled. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“Okay, ladies, shall we go?”
Not only did he walk us all to the Purdy sisters’ house, he went in and took a good look around before he let them go inside. When he and I were back on the porch, he called, “Lock the door now,” to the women inside, and waited until he heard the click. Then he walked me back to Girlfriend’s, where our cars – and my new cat – were.
It turned out he had ulterior motives. As we were nearing the shop, he got to the point.
“I didn’t want to mention this in front of Miss Florence, but we’ve had a few break-ins around town, especially in the outlying areas. Like out where you live.”
He said it nonchalantly enough, but it wasn’t good news.
“What kind of break-ins?”
He shrugged. “Things taken from unlocked cars and houses. One locked car got its side window smashed out. Nothing strong-arm or anything. Still, it’s worrying.”
“It worries me!” I said.
“You do have a security system at that place of yours, right?”
“Yes. It’s only gone off when I’ve forgotten I had it activated and opened a door, but still, it gives me peace of mind.”
He smiled. “It’s better than nothing. Make sure you keep it activated. So many people have alarm systems and never bother to set them. I had to lecture Diana Huntington just this morning, and look at the place they have! Out in the middle of nowhere, and them being rich as anything.”
“They had a break-in at Cadbury House?”
He shrugged again, the seen-it-all cop. “Maybe. Miz Huntington was pretty upset, but nobody could find anything missing. She found a door open, and there are some signs that somebody had been in the old barn. I told them to set their alarm, and they probably will. For about a week.”
“Well, don’t worry about me. I’m a very good girl about setting my alarm. Remember – I come from Chicago.”
He smiled. “I know. Big city girl, all paranoid. Probably got mace in your purse right now.”
I smiled mysteriously. “Probably.” Actually, I didn’t.
“Something else I wanted to talk to you about: There’s been a lot of talk around town about that stuff you got from the Huntingtons. People know the wife and Miss Vesta didn’t get along. She threw all her stuff out the minute she passed away, and why Mr. Huntington would let his mother’s things go so easy I don’t know, but that’s none of my business. But I do think it’d be a good idea to go through all that stuff as soon as you can and let it be known that there’s nothing from some pharaoh’s tomb in there.”
“You think that’s why somebody broke into the shop?”
“I do.”
“You’d have to be an idiot to think that.”
“Nobody ever said criminals were geniuses.”
I turned to face him. “Even back at the turn of the last century, Egyptian authorities had figured out that they were being robbed by so-called archaeologists. By the time Kingsley Cadbury was going on expeditions, you couldn’t get your own toupee out of the country without some Egyptian bureaucrat giving it a thorough inspection and maybe letting you keep it on your head. Vesta’s grandfather gave her a few worthless mementoes and that’s all.”
He’d been nodding patiently while I lectured him, then quietly said, “I repeat: Nobody ever said they were geniuses. If there’s nothing but junk in there, you be sure to let everybody know it, and do it as quick as you can.”
He was right, of course.
Chapter 16
Monday morning bright and early, I was back at Girlfriend’s. I was worried about Florence. The night before, she’d been more concerned that Wicked would be impounded for attacking somebody than she’d been about her own danger, but by now it would’ve sunken in. She might be having a delayed reaction. I needed to see her and know she was all right.
The goddess was with me.
She stepped into her cat carrier and allowed herself to be transported without complaining, but it was clear to me that she remembered days when she traveled in infinitely greater style. Maybe the connection wasn’t as one-way as Bastet intended, because since my decision to surrender to her control, I was having more and more impressions of another world, warm and scented and golden. I could close my eyes and smell incense, I could open my ears and hear music murmuring around me, I could feel the rhythm of the chants. Now that I had decided to let her take control, the partition grew thinner. As I let the cat out of her carrier in the back room of Girlfriend’s, she gave me her usual cool glance, then quickly looked again. Her eyes were suspicious, and in that moment I felt her probe my mind.
As an experiment, I thought (but did not say aloud), “I surrender, Bastet. I will do as you wish. Help me do my best.”
Her eyes widened. Her tail lashed. Her back arched. She turned away from me and walked stiffly into the shop.
“So,” I muttered to myself, “it’s going to be like that. Fine. No surprise that a goddess is a control freak.” I rubbed my eyes and realized that forcing the connection had drained me.
“Headache?” said a voice from just the other side of the curtains.
“Oh,” I said, letting my dismay show as Myrtle stepped into the back room with me. “Hi, Myrtle. No, I’m fine.”
I should have expected it. Myrtle needed to be needed. Of course she’d insist on helping her sister at the shop. It was the only thing left for her to do.
I went past her and entered the shop, and Florence gazed at me in silent agony. She had been half-heartedly shuffling vases around on some shelves. Wicked was lying all over the seat of a cane-bottomed chair in the kind of dead stupor that only he can achieve.
“Stop rubbing your forehead,” Myrtle said, going back behind the curtains. “You’ll give yourself wrinkles. Wait a minute and I’ll get an aspirin for you. Florence, are you ready for more vases?”
“Just a minute!” Florence said.
“I don’t need an aspirin.”
“Of course you do.”
Wicked lifted his head, recognized me, leered, then dropped back into
dreams, no doubt heroic ones involving burglars.
“Myrtle, don’t bother with the aspirin.”
She reappeared in the doorway. “As you like, child. But that headache is not going away by itself.” She let the curtains drop.
“I don’t have a – oh, never mind.” By then I was getting one, but I wasn’t taking an aspirin, dammit.
Poor Florence! She gazed soulfully out the front window of the shop, and my heart just about broke for her. Then, taking a closer look, I said, “Florence, is that the pendant that Tina bought on Saturday?” Involuntarily, I looked up at Basket, who was perched in her favorite spot on the picture rail, looking down upon the world. The steadiness of her gaze and the tilt of her whiskers made her seem smug.
Florence put a finger to her lips, shushing me, then nodded toward the back room where Myrtle lurked. She came closer and quietly told me of the strange journey the pendant had been on in just a couple of days.
“It came back to me. Tina gave it away almost immediately, and the uppity little snot she gave it to took it and passed it on to her tennis coach, who gave it to the girl in the pro shop over at the club, and that girl came in here and said it wasn’t her style, but she figured an old lady like me would love it, so did I want it back? She knew the story of Tina’s thousand-dollar check, and tried to get me to pay her for it. Fifty dollars, she wanted! She figured we’d still make a profit.”
“She wanted you to pay for it? Like this is a pawn shop?”
“Exactly. She said as soon as she put it on her boyfriend texted her and broke up with her, she went out to her car and somebody had put a big scratch all along the driver’s side, and when she got home she realized that the electricity had been off for hours and the food in her refrigerator had already spoiled. It had been nothing but bad luck since she got the pendant, and she wanted to get rid of it. Do you believe it?”
