“Hey, gorgeous,” Rich Stanmore said cheerfully. He leaned into the car, reaching back to pet Snowy. “And how’s my Snowy girl?”
“She’s good,” Sidney answered. “What are you doing here? I thought you went back to Boston.”
“I did, but I’m back,” he said. He was holding a coffee from Sunny Side Up and took a swig. “My folks left during the week. Dad had to head back for some meetings, so they asked me to come this weekend to close the place up.” He had some more coffee.
“Just in time for the storm.”
“Mmmm,” he hummed, swallowing his sip. “Which makes you the perfect person to see.”
“Oh yeah, why’s that?”
“Not only am I closing up the house, but I’ve got to take care of the sailboat,” he said.
“Yeah . . . ,” she said, still unsure what he was getting at.
“Well, I need to get it out of the water, especially if there’s a storm on the way, and Dad has the truck . . .” He waited for her to catch on, but it still hadn’t sunk in yet. “I was wondering if Cody could . . .”
She felt her stomach plummet at the mention of her ex-boyfriend’s name. She had no desire to go again through the fact that she and Cody had broken up, and even less to answer the inevitable follow-up questions as to why, and how she was holding up, and blah, blah, blah. . . .
She just couldn’t do it right then.
“I don’t know; I guess I could ask him,” she said, having no idea why she would even suggest such a thing since they hadn’t spoken since the breakup, and the fact that Cody hated Rich, having always suspected that the older boy had harbored a secret crush for her.
“Yes!” Rich said, pumping his fist in the air. “If you could do that for me, I would love you forever—seriously.”
“Let me see what I can do,” she told him, regretting each and every word. “But I’ve got to get to work.”
“Call me later?” he asked.
“Will do.”
“Okay,” Rich said, stepping back from the car.
She said good-bye, rolling up her window as she pulled out of the parking spot. Rich’s reflection waved to her in the rearview as she headed down Charter, where she would take a left onto Lafayette.
The day just kept on getting better.
And Sidney seriously began to consider if it was too late to call in sick.
CHAPTER FOUR
Caroline Moss could not bear the thought of anyone in her home touching her things.
The woman sat in her favorite recliner, surrounded by the accumulation of years: stacks of newspapers and magazines, piles of junk mail, receipts, empty cat food cans and take-out containers. Furniture once covered in plastic to keep it clean had been swallowed up by mounds of stuffed animals, baby dolls, record albums, VCRs and VHS tapes, CDs, milk cartons, and clothing—piles and piles of clothing. To anyone else it would have looked like the town dump, but to Caroline, everything was something of value.
But now somebody was threatening to come and take her treasures away.
As she sat in the comforting nest of her things, Caroline quivered with anger, remembering the unexpected visit from her daughter, Barbara. Caroline managed to hold back another bout of tears, of which there had been many of late, all brought on because Barbara chose to stick her nose into business that didn’t concern her. Caroline sneered with the memory of her daughter’s overwrought emotional response, pleading with her mother to seek help, if not for her own sake, then for the sake of her brother, Caroline’s son, Isaac.
Caroline had argued a blue streak, telling Barbara that everything was perfectly fine, that she and Isaac were getting along very well and didn’t need her involvement in their lives. But Barbara was always a stubborn thing, and when she got an idea into her fat head, there was nothing that was going to change it.
As if sensing their owner’s distress, Caroline’s cats—her fur babies—emerged from various places of concealment about the room, meowing and chirping as they approached. Some leaped up onto her lap, while others walked across precariously piled stacks of equal parts books and rubbish.
She’d lost count of how many there were now. All she knew was that they were her friends, her furry children. This was as much their home as hers, and she wasn’t about to let anyone take it away from them.
But she’d agreed to her daughter’s demands, agreed to let a television program about filthy people and their filthy, cluttered houses come see her home. It was the only way to shut Barbara up, to get her to agree not to call Adult Protective Services on her and Isaac.
The presence of her feline friends calmed her. She stroked them as they walked upon her or passed by on their way to some other area of the house also bursting at the seams with stuff.
Just the idea of somebody coming into her home, to judge her . . .
Caroline seethed, an anger that she worked so hard to control over the years bubbling to the surface. It was the kind of anger that could get her into trouble . . . the kind of anger that made her do things she always regretted later.
Sitting there in her chair, surrounded by her cats and by years of accumulation, she imagined how easy it would be to set it on fire. She bet that would make Barbara happy. It would certainly take away all her concerns.
Caroline saw herself burning with all her things and almost convinced herself that this was what she should do, but then she thought of her cats, her babies, and how they would suffer.
And then there was poor Isaac.
He was her other baby, her special boy. Hit by a car when he was only four and developmentally challenged as a result of extensive head injuries, he had brought her nothing but joy these sixteen years.
No, she could not do that to him.
But what to do?
A Maine Coon cat called Mrs. Livingstone got right in her face, meowing questioningly, before head-butting her.
“I don’t know, pretty kitty,” Caroline said, running her hands down the length of the enormous cat, right down to the end of her fluffy tail. “Perhaps you could tell me?”
The cat abruptly turned around, sticking her furry behind in Caroline’s face, making her laugh. “I’m not sure that would be effective,” she told the animal, who suddenly snarled and sprang from Caroline’s lap with a hiss, angrily attacking the other cats meandering around the chair.
“Is that what you’ll do to those horrible people coming to our house?” she asked the big cat. A full-fledged fight had now erupted, with Mrs. Livingstone spitting and swatting at the other cats.
“Maybe you’ve got a point,” Caroline said to her furry friends, deciding that there might be another option besides burning her house down or giving in completely to her daughter’s whims.
Mrs. Livingstone leaped upon the back of an equally large male tabby called Manx, biting down into his shoulder blades and sending him scurrying away with a shrieking wail, books and stacks of paper falling from where they’d been precariously perched in his wake.
Maybe she could make it so difficult for them that they wouldn’t want anything to do with her or her house.
Maybe she could fight them at every turn.
Maybe.
* * *
The cats were fighting again.
Isaac quickly reached up to both his ears, playing with the volume of his hearing aids so he would not hear them. He hated the sound of their fighting. The screeches, hisses, whines, and wails gave him scary thoughts and put horrible pictures inside his head.
He did not like that, not one little bit.
The young man played with the tiny controls. There was a sharp crackling followed by some low hums that tickled his throat, but it seemed to cancel out the noise of the battling felines.
He wasn’t supposed to play with his hearing aids, but no matter how many times he promised his mother he wouldn’t, he would still find his sneaky hands reaching up to play with the tiny knobs of the plastic devices. Without them he could barely hear at all, one ear almost completely us
eless. He called that one Steve, after his father whom he barely knew, but his mother always told him that the man was no good and completely useless.
Today Steve was ringing oddly, and it kind of hurt. Isaac’s hands again went up to the hearing devices, fiddling with the controls, hoping to stop the strange sound in his Steve ear. He was tempted to pluck them both out, to surrender to the silence, but he could never do that. What if his mother needed him?
Isaac decided that he would rather deal with the cats, and was about to try and adjust the volume in his ears again, when Steve suddenly went quiet, the disquieting, unfamiliar sound now gone. The young man cocked his head to one side and then the other, listening for anything out of the ordinary, but things seemed to be back to relative normal. Even the cats had stopped, and he could just about hear the sound of the television from outside his room. The Price Is Right was on. That was his mother’s favorite show.
He considered going to join her for the Showcase Showdown, but first he had to make sure that his room was in order. Turning very slowly where he stood, Isaac took in the details of his space. It was the exact opposite of the rooms outside his—very sparsely furnished with only his bed, a bedside table with a lamp on it, and a chest of drawers with a mirror. Everything that he owned was in a very specific place. He did not care for the messiness of the rest of the house and often tried to get his mother to clean it up, but he was finally getting to realize after all these years that it was just too hard for her.
For a moment he wondered how other boys and girls dealt with their messy parents and felt a familiar frustration begin to arise over the fact that he seldom had the opportunity to interact with people his own age, his mother having decided to homeschool him due to his disabilities.
Isaac’s anger flared. He hated that word—hated to be reminded of the fact that he was different. As far as he was concerned, everybody had something that set them apart. Even Sidney, his neighbor across the way who he thought was the most perfect person in the whole wide world, had something that set her apart from everybody else at close inspection.
She never seemed to smile, Isaac mused, attempting to remember each and every time he and Sidney had seen each other. Sure, there had been attempts to smile, the corners of her pretty mouth going through the motions politely, but Isaac knew that it wasn’t real.
She’s just too darn serious, is what his mother said. And he had to agree.
He noticed that his hairbrush was askew ever so slightly and stepped over to the chest of drawers to align it perfectly. Happy that he had found the imperfection, Isaac stepped back to the room’s center, and checked his surroundings once again. He looked at his reflection in the mirror, standing perfectly still so that he could check how he looked. His eyes moved over his image; his button-down shirt was fine, his hair combed just right, his scar . . . Isaac reached up to the left side of his head where the scar was, where his head had been opened when he was only four, and ran a finger along its puffy length. He hated the scar and wished it wasn’t there, but it served as a reminder to him. He didn’t remember the car running him over and crushing his head, but the scar did. It told him to always be careful.
Things looked good at the moment, and he slowly backed up to his door, reaching behind him for the doorknob.
He kept his eyes on the room and all his belongings as he opened the door behind him and stepped out into the chaos of the hallway.
Taking a deep breath, he took it all in. The amount of stuff stacked and lying on the floor of the hall path nearly sent him into a panic, but it was always this way after leaving the ordered universe of his room. It would take him a little while to get used to it. To adjust.
But he always did.
As he stood and adapted to his surroundings, his mind wandered, and he thought of the strange sound he had heard in his Steve ear back in his room. Reflexively his hand shot up to the ear and the device there. He was tempted to play with it again, but—
“Isaac?” his mother called from the living room, though there was very little room for living there. They could barely even watch TV.
He quickly took his hand away.
“Yes?” he called out.
“Come watch Price Is Right with me,” she said. “The Showcase Showdown will be coming on.”
Feeling a bit more at ease, Isaac navigated the uneven surface of the hallway floor to join his mother, the disturbing sound he’d experienced in his bad ear forgotten.
For now.
CHAPTER FIVE
Sidney wasn’t sure she’d ever seen the parking lot of the Benediction Veterinary Hospital this crowded before.
She drove down to the back of the lot where the hospital staff was supposed to park and walked up with Snowy obediently by her side. The way the morning was going so far, she really didn’t know what to expect inside, and the tea had done very little for her headache.
Removing Snowy’s leash from her back pocket, she fastened the clip to the dog’s collar and reached for the door, opening it into chaos. It was as if everybody in Benediction had decided to bring their animals in at the same time. Not only were there barking dogs, held tightly on leashes against their owner’s legs, and crying cats inside the confines of pet carriers, but there were squawking birds and wire cages filled with guinea pigs, rats, hamsters, and what looked to be a chinchilla.
Pam, one of the front-desk workers, looked up from her computer, where she was finishing up checking out a woman client, comically widening her eyes and making a twisted face.
Sidney approached the counter and asked, “What’s going on?”
“I haven’t a clue,” Pam said, handing the woman her credit card and receipt. “It’s been like this since we unlocked the doors.”
Michelle, another of the front staffers, was busily checking folks and their pets in. “It’s appointments, but it’s also walk-ins, like everybody decided at the same time to pay us a visit today. It’s crazy.”
“I’ll be right out to give you a hand,” Sidney told them, navigating the meandering crowds with her dog.
“Excuse me,” the woman Pam had been helping suddenly said. “Exactly how long am I expected to wait before you bring me my dog?”
Pam, who was already finishing paperwork for another client, spoke up. “I sent one of the techs to get him, Mrs. Berthold,” she said as pleasantly as she could. “He should be right out.”
Berthold, Sidney thought as she rounded the counter and approached the door that would take her to the back area of the animal hospital. Why is that name familiar?
Just as she and Snowy reached the door, it flew open from the other side. Sidney saw who was standing there, and it all became clear.
Berthold. She’d seen the name on paperwork that she’d worked on quite a few times.
Alfred Berthold.
Alfred Berthold was a large male, brindle French bulldog with some serious aggression issues, and he was standing just inside the door no more that three feet away from them.
Normally it wouldn’t have been a big deal, all the staff at Benediction Veterinary Hospital having been trained on how to handle aggressive breeds, but every once in a while a situation would arise. . . .
This was one of those situations.
Alfred saw Snowy, and Snowy saw Alfred. Although usually perfectly obedient, Snowy had no patience with outright nastiness. Sidney’s special girl had no problems defending herself or protecting Sidney if necessary.
The problem that Sidney could see in that split second was that Alfred was being brought out to his owner by Maynard. Maynard was a good kid, everybody liked his easygoing style, but he was a bit of a stoner, and sometimes, well . . . sometimes he just wasn’t paying enough attention. And she could instantly see the problem with Alfred’s leash.
One needed to be on guard 100 percent when dealing with Alfred because he could be tricky. One minute he was completely fine, and the next he was trying to chew off some other poor dog’s ear. Alfred was bad news, and now here he was, at the
end of a leash being given way too much play, with Snowy right in front of him.
Sidney knew that things were about to go from bad to worse when Maynard uttered the words “Oh shit.”
She couldn’t have agreed more.
It was as if somebody had fired a starter’s pistol.
She saw it all in slow motion. Alfred’s dark, beady eyes had locked onto Snowy, a stripe of brindled fur suddenly rising upon the Frenchie’s back telling her that he was going to strike. Snowy had stiffened protectively, her own white hackles lifting on her neck and back as she readied herself. Sidney yanked back on Snowy’s leash, trying to put herself between the two dogs and eliminate the challenging eye contact, but it was too late. Alfred lunged with a guttural snarl, striking her leg with his front paw and causing her to stumble back. Snowy reacted instinctively, moving around Sidney’s recovering form to let Alfred know that he had gone too far. The bulldog sprang to meet the shepherd’s attack, mouths filled with many teeth coming together in a snarling, ferocious mass.
“Pull him back!” Sidney screamed to Maynard, who seemed to be in a kind of surprised stupor.
Sidney was attempting to pull Snowy away, but she and Alfred were still entangled in their angry tussle. The animal hospital had erupted in sounds of panic, with all the pets voicing their concerns at once.
A human voice rose above the cacophony.
“Alfred!” it cried out in panic, and Sidney saw Mrs. Berthold reaching into the mass of snarling and snapping dogs to separate hers from the other.
Sidney knew what was about to happen. She pulled back on Snowy’s leash with all her might, dragging the dog away from Alfred, but it was too late. Alfred reacted as if Mrs. Berthold was part of the threat against him, and he snapped at her hand, his small, crooked teeth sinking into the tender flesh.
Mrs. Berthold’s scream was piercing and startled Alfred enough that he let go of her hand, his fleshy face frozen as he realized for the first time that she was there. Thick trails of slobber dripped from both sides of the bulldog’s jowls, and Sidney noticed that it was tinted pink with blood. A quick assessment of Snowy showed that she was fine, that there were no puncture wounds, the blood belonging to either Alfred or his owner.
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