The Cat Who Blew the Whistle

by Lilian Jackson Braun

  “A major undertaking, if you ask me,” said Dwight.

  “But worth it.”

  “What about the Domino Inn and the other bed-and-breakfasts?”

  “The plan is to have them function as youth hostels, elder hostels, and a summer campus for the new college. The islanders will continue to live in their secluded village, and the exclusive summer estates will have their taxes raised. . . . Now tell me about the theatre club, Dwight. What happened at the board meeting tonight?”

  “We decided to go out on a limb and do a summer production for the first time. I'm recording secretary and always tape the minutes. Want to hear it?”

  Dwight took a small recorder from his pocket and placed it on the coffee table. After a few seconds of fast-forwarding, familiar voices could be heard. Though distorted by the limitations of the device, they were recognizable: Larry Lanspeak, owner of the department store . . . Fran Brodie, interior designer . . . Scott Gippel, car dealer, who served as treasurer of the club . . . Dwight's own voice . . . and Junior Goodwinter, young managing editor of the newspaper.

  LARRY: Now for new business. Considering the influx of tourists, should we do a summer play?

  JUNIOR: The campers and fishermen and boaters have no place to go in the evening, except bars. Not even a movie house.

  GIPPEL: I'm for giving it a shot. Let's grab some of those tourist dollars. Let's do a Broadway comedy with lots of belly laughs.

  JUNIOR: Or a good mystery.

  DWIGHT: Or a campy melodrama, like Billy the Kid, that'll get the audience booing the villain.

  LARRY: Or a musical with a small cast, like The Fantasticks.

  FRAN: I'd like to see us do Midsummer Night's Dream.

  GIPPEL: You're nuts! That's Shakespeare!

  LARRY: Yes, but it has comedy, romantic love, glamorous court scenes, and magic. What more can you ask?

  JUNIOR: You can have a lot of fun with Dream. I played Puck in college.

  LARRY: All the costumes for Henry VIII are in the basement. We could use them for the court scenes.

  DWIGHT: Thrift, thrift, Horatio!

  FRAN: How about using students for extras, as we did in Henry?

  GIPPEL: Now you're talkin' turkey! All their friends and relatives will buy tickets. I say: Go for it. How many kids can we use?

  FRAN: There's no limit to walk-ons. High-schoolers can play the lords and ladies, and junior high kids can do the fairies.

  GIPPEL: Fairies? Are you kidding? You'd better make them little green men. Kids don't go for fairies. I've got three at home, and I know.

  DWIGHT: Three little green men? Or three kids?

  (Laughter)

  FRAN: I like the idea of little green men! Let's do it! I'd love to direct.

  Dwight turned off the recorder. “What do you think of it, Qwill?”

  “Sounds okay to me, but Polly will have a fit if you convert Shakespeare's fairies into extraterrestrials. She's a purist.”

  “That detail isn't finalized, but we're going ahead with auditions. Off the record, we're precasting Junior as Puck and the Lanspeaks as the duke and his bride. They'll also double as Oberon and Titania. They've done the roles before, and we've got to take a few shortcuts if we want the show on the boards before Labor Day.”

  It was eleven o'clock, and the Siamese had come stalking back into the room. They stared pointedly at the visitor.

  Suddenly he said, “Well, I'd better head for the hills. Thanks for everything.”

  “Glad your career has taken a propitious turn, Dwight.”

  “And that's not the only good news. I had a date with Hixie last night, and everything's coming up roses.”

  “You're lucky! She's great fun.” It was an appropriate match. Hixie Rice was another transplant from Down Below, and she was in charge of public relations for the newspaper. Qwilleran put on a yellow baseball cap hanging near the kitchen door and accompanied his guest to his car. “We have an owl in the woods,” he explained, “and if he sees a good head of hair, he might think it's a rabbit. I'm quoting Polly, the ornithology expert.”

  “Well, I'm safe,” Dwight said, passing a hand over his thinning hair. He cocked his head to listen. “I can hear him hooting. Sounds like Morse code—long and short hoots.”

  As the happy young man drove away, Qwilleran watched the taillights bouncing through the ruts of the Black Forest and wondered what had happened to Hixie's previous heartthrob. He was a doctor. He owned a cabin cruiser. He had a beard. Qwilleran walked around the barn a few times before going indoors; it was pleasantly warm, with a soft breeze. He listened and counted.

  “Whoo-o-o hoo hoo . . . hoo hoo hoo . . . whoo-o-o.”

  Qwilleran decided to call him Marconi and write a “Qwill Pen” column about owls. Fresh topics were in short supply in the summer. Sometimes the newspaper had to rerun his more popular columns, like the one on baseball and the one on cats.

  When he went indoors, all was quiet. That was not normal. The Siamese should have been parading and demanding their nightly treat with ear-piercing yowls. Instead, they were assiduously washing their paws, whiskers, and ears, and the bowl on the coffee table was empty. Stuffed with Kabibbles, they staggered up the ramp to their apartment on the top balcony. Qwilleran, before he called it a day, wrote a thank-you note to a woman named Celia Robinson.

  TWO

  When Qwilleran wrote his thank-you note for the Kabibbles, he sat at his writing table in the library area—one side of the fireplace cube that was lined with bookshelves. For serious work there was a writing studio on the balcony, off-limits to the Siamese, but the bookish, friendly atmosphere of the library was more comfortable for writing notes and taking phone calls. For this brief letter to Celia Robinson he used a facetiously bombastic style that would send her into torrents of laughter. She laughed easily; it took very little to set the dear woman off.

  Dear Celia,

  I find it appropriate to pen an effusive expression of gratitude for the succulent delights that arrived today to tantalize my taste buds and heighten my spirit. Your Kabibbles are receiving rave reviews from connoisseurs in this northern bastion of gastronomy. I suggest you copyright the name and market them. You could become the Betty Crocker of the twenty-first century! Perhaps you would grant me the distribution franchise for Moose and Lockmaster counties. Let me know your new address so I can order Kabibbles in ten-pound sacks or twenty-gallon barrels.

  Gratefully,

  Q

  No one in Pickax knew about Qwilleran's whimsical acquaintance with Celia Robinson, not even Polly Duncan—especially not Polly, who was inclined to resent the slightest intrusion on her territory. The cross-country acquaintance had begun when Junior Goodwinter's grandmother died suddenly in Florida. Through long-distance conversations with her next-door neighbor, Qwilleran conducted an investigation into the death, and he and Celia developed a chummy rapport. He called her his secret agent, and she called him Chief. He sent her boxes of chocolate-covered cherries and the paperback spy novels that she liked; she sent him homemade brownies. They had never met.

  The case was closed now, but Qwilleran had an ulterior motive for continuing the connection: She enjoyed cooking. Fondly he envisioned her relocating in Pickax and catering meals for himself and the cats. It was not an improbability; she wanted to leave the retirement village in Florida. “Too many old people” was her complaint. Celia was only sixty-nine.

  Qwilleran posted the letter in his rural mailbox the next morning, walking down the orchard wagon trail to the highway, Trevelyan Road. The trail was the length of a city block. It ran past the skeletons of neglected apple trees, between other trees planted by squirrels and birds in the last hundred years, alongside the remains of the old Trevelyan farmhouse that had burned down, and past the two acres where Polly would build her new house. After raising the red flag on the oversized mailbox, he took a few minutes to consider the construction site. The fieldstone foundation of the old house was barely visible in a field of waist-high wee
ds. An abandoned lilac bush was doing nicely on its own, having grown to the size of a two-story, three-bedroom house, and it still bloomed in season. When the wind direction was right, its fragrance wafted as far as the apple barn.

  Polly wanted to preserve the old stone foundation—for what purpose she had not decided. She kept asking, “Shall I build in front of it, or behind it, or beyond it? I can't build on top of it.”

  Qwilleran had tried to make suggestions, but her questions were merely rhetorical; she was an independent person and had to make her own decisions. As head librarian she had a brilliant reputation. She was efficient and briskly decisive. She charmed the members of the library board, improved the collection, controlled the budget, coped with the quirks of an old library building, staged events, and solved the personal problems of her young assistants with kindness and common sense. In facing her own dilemmas, however, she melted into a puddle of bewilderment.

  Returning from the mailbox, Qwilleran became aware of two pairs of blue eyes staring at him from an upper-level window of the barn. He waved to them and kept on walking—through the Black Forest to the Park Circle, with its important buildings and multi-lane traffic. The proximity of town and country was one of the attractions of living in a small city (population 3,000). On the perimeter of the Park Circle were two churches, the courthouse, the K Theatre, and a building resembling a Greek temple: the public library.

  Qwilleran walked briskly up the stone steps of the library—steps rounded into gentle concavities by a century of feet. Now added to the feet of book-subscribers were the feet of video-borrowers, and Qwilleran doubted that the steps would last another half-century. In the main room he headed directly toward the stairs to the mezzanine, nodding pleasantly to the young clerks who greeted him as Mr. Q. They also glanced mischievously at each other, amused at the sight of the middle-aged friend of their middle-aged boss paying a call in broad daylight. The relationship between the head librarian and the richest man in the northeast-central United States was a subject of constant conjecture in Pickax.

  Qwilleran bounced up the stairs, noting the familiar sight of Homer Tibbitt at one of the reading tables, surrounded by books and pamphlets. Although well up in his nineties, the county historian spent every morning at the library, pursuing some esoteric research project. Or perhaps he was avoiding his overly attentive wife, as the giggling clerks surmised. In her eighties, Rhoda Tibbitt could still drive, and she chauffeured her husband to and from his life's work.

  Polly was seated in her glass-enclosed office in front of a deskful of paperwork. When she spoke, her serenely low-pitched voice gave Qwilleran a shudder of pleasure as it always did, no matter how often they met or how many hours they had spent together the evening before.

  “Morning,” he said with an intimate nuance. He never used terms of endearment, except to Yum Yum, but he could infuse a two-syllable greeting with warmth and affection. He slid into a hard, varnished oak chair, library-style circa 1910.

  Polly said, “You look especially vibrant this morning, dear.”

  “I'm a veritable fountain of news,” he announced as he launched into his report on Dwight's new job, the Party Train, and the theatre club's decision to do A Midsummer Night's Dream. He avoided mentioning that the fairies might be updated. He even revealed Dwight's date with Hixie Rice as a kind of romantic milestone on the social scene. Outsiders might call it gossip, but in Pickax this was legitimate sharing of information. Good news, rumors, bad news, scandal, and other data somehow reached the library first, and Polly's assistant, Virginia Alstock, was tuned in to the Moose County grapevine for its dissemination.

  Today Polly's reactions were subdued. She seemed preoccupied, glancing frequently at the stack of manuals on home building that occupied a corner of her desk.

  The title on top of the pile was How to Build a Better House for Less Money, and he asked, “Are you making any progress with your house plans?”

  “I don't know,” she said with a world-weary sigh. “It's all so confusing. In Oregon, Susan did sketches for a one-story house that would integrate with the terrain. No basement. Heating equipment in a utility room next to the laundry. . . . But these books say that a two-story house is more economical to build and to heat, and it would give Bootsie a chance to run up and down stairs for exercise.”

  “Build a one-story house with a basement and let him run up and down the basement stairs,” Qwilleran suggested with simple logic. Bootsie was the other male in Polly's life, a husky Siamese. He was grossly pampered, in Qwilleran's opinion.

  “I'm not fond of basements. I've seen too many that leak,” she objected. “I was thinking of a crawl space with good insulation. What do you think, Qwill?”

  “You're asking the wrong person. I'm only a journalist; I leave the house building to the house builders. Why not line up a professional firm like XYZ Enterprises?”

  “But it's so large and commercial, and I've lost respect for them since the fiasco on Breakfast Island. It's my belief that a small builder gives more personal attention to one's needs and ideas. Mrs. Alstock's in-laws in Black Creek hired a young man. He finished on schedule and very close to the estimated cost. We should encourage young people in the trades, don't you think? He works out of Sawdust City.”

  “Hmmm,” Qwilleran mused, having heard that the Sawdusters were all roughnecks who threw bottles through tavern windows on Saturday nights. “What is his name?”

  “He's a Trevelyan—another of those ‘hairy Welshmen,' as they're called, but I have no objection to long hair and a shaggy beard if he does a good job.”

  “Want me to check him out for you? The paper has a stringer in Sawdust City.”

  “Well . . . thank you, Qwill, but . . . Mrs. Alstock is taking me to see her in-laws' house tomorrow night, and Mr. Trevelyan will be there. I'll have my sketches with me, and if he impresses me favorably—”

  “Find out if he eyeballs the construction from the sketches,” Qwilleran suggested, remembering the underground builder he had encountered in Mooseville.

  “Oh, no! In Pickax the plans and specifications must be drawn up by an architect in order to obtain a building permit.”

  Changing the subject abruptly, Qwilleran said, “I'm keeping you from your work. How about dinner tonight at the Old Stone Mill?”

  “I'd love to, dear, but I've called a special meeting of the library board. We'll have dinner at the hotel, then come back here to discuss the paving of the parking lot. We've had it out for bids.”

  Teasingly he said, “I hope your literary ladies enjoy the inevitable chicken pot pie and lemon sherbet, spelled ‘sherbert' on the menu.”

  Polly smiled, recognizing his genial thrust at the hotel's cuisine and the library's frugal allowance for board members' meals. “You're welcome to join us,” she said coyly.

  “No thanks, but why don't you get the board to budget a few dollars for cushions for these chairs?”

  “Go away,” she said affectionately, waving him out of her office. She was wearing the ring he had given her for Christmas—a fiery black opal rimmed with tiny diamonds. He knew that she was wearing it to impress the “literary ladies.”

  Leaving Polly's office, Qwilleran stopped to say hello to Homer Tibbitt. The old man's eyes were glazed after poring over his books, and he blinked a few times before he could recognize the face.

  “Tell me, Homer. How can you sit on these hard chairs for so many hours?” Qwilleran asked.

  “I bring an inflated cushion,” said the historian. “Also a thermos of decaf, but don't tell Polly. The sign says: No food or beverages. I take my brown bag into the restroom every hour or so and have a swig.”

  Qwilleran nodded with understanding, knowing there was a shot of brandy in Homer's decaffeinated coffee. “How are you feeling these days?” The old man was wheezing audibly.

  “I suffer the usual tweaks and twinges of advancing age, plus a touch of bronchitis from these dusty, mildewed records.” He slapped his chest. “My tubes whistl
e. You can hear me all over the building. I'm trying to do a paper (whistle) on Moose County mines, 1850 to 1915.”

  “What do you know about the Trevelyan family?”

  “They go back six generations, all descended from two brothers who came from Wales (whistle) to supervise the mines. Second generation built sawmills and founded Sawdust City.” Mr. Tibbitt stopped for a coughing spell, and Qwilleran rushed to the water cooler for a cup of water. “Sorry about that,” the old man apologized when the coughing was relieved. “Now, where was I?”

  “Sawdust City,” Qwilleran reminded him. “The Trevelyans.”

  “Believe it or not, that ugly little town was the county seat originally, when Pickax was only a bump in the road. When they switched government functions to Pickax because of (whistle) its central location, the Sawdusters rose up in arms and tried to secede from Moose County. All they accomplished was an independent school system.”

  “Do you know a Floyd Trevelyan, Homer? He's president of the Lumbertown Credit Union in Sawdust City.”

  “Can't say that I do. We Pickaxians are unmitigated snobs, you know. Are you aware you're living (whistle) in the old Trevelyan orchard? No one would touch the property for generations until you came along—a greenhorn from Down Below, heh heh heh.”

  “Because of snobbery?” Qwilleran asked.

  “Because of the Trevelyan curse,” the historian corrected him. “The apple trees withered, the farmhouse was struck by lightning, and the farmer hanged himself.”

  “Who pronounced the curse?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “For your information, Homer, Polly is building a house where the farmhouse used to be.”

  “Well, don't tell her (whistle) what I said.”

  “That's all right. She's not superstitious.”