Probable Claws

by Clea Simon

  A puddle loomed and I leaped it with only a slight splash. Nothing was set in stone. Maybe we were meant to move on—a new season, a new life. “I know we can, I know we can…” The next puddle was smaller, and I cleared it with ease. “Cause better days are very near.” Maybe my life was changing like the season, but as I turned the corner and headed down Putnam, I began to see the other side of that metaphor. “Spread your love for a brighter day…” Maybe things were getting brighter. Maybe it was time for me to commit. Maybe Bill and I would work it out. Maybe Violet was wrong and the cats had been sickened by a mistake. Rachel wasn’t sure what the contaminant was. It could have been something accidentally spilled on a batch of food—or on the porous bag itself.

  By the time I finished a circuit of the neighborhood, the combination of sweat and fresh air had pulled me out of my own personal brand of funk. “Mighty people of the sun,” indeed! Even if I had to stand bent over, hands on my knees, to catch my breath, I felt better than I had a half an hour ago, maybe better than I had in days. Older didn’t mean old, not yet. Buoyed by my freshly pumping blood, I was only a little disappointed to hear Bunny, rather than Bill, on my answering machine.

  “Didn’t get much, which is good I guess. What I did find, I’ve sent.” Bunny could be cryptic at work. “And I’ve been meaning to ask you, do you know anything about pet psychics?”

  I looked over at Musetta, who looked back. I’d often suspected her of being able to read my thoughts, but if she had an answer she wasn’t transmitting it, and I went off to shower, unenlightened.

  Twenty minutes later, I was no closer to solving any of my mysteries. The few clips Bunny had emailed didn’t seem related to Violet’s cats: a dog in Spain had gotten drunk on fermented fruit, a Brooklyn cat had to have its system flushed out after eating a poisoned rodent, and one case on the South Shore of multiple pets that had gotten food poisoning from an overzealous home chef with refrigeration issues. I thought about calling Bunny—she should take note of that last item. But I didn’t need Musetta’s paranormal powers to tell me that what really needed my attention was my column. Luckily, the break had indeed cleared my head. Reading my rough draft through again, I saw the problem: too many quotes and not enough description. Like so many of my colleagues, I loved the interviews—nearly always found myself drawn to the interviewee—but words on a page don’t have the zing of a real human voice. Better to paraphrase, to describe, to suggest. Save the quotes for spice. And that realization let me trim the piece down to size, too. One spell check and a final read-through and with the push of a key it was gone. Time to tackle bigger problems.

  Chapter Four

  If I’d thought that I’d be rescuing Violet, the scene that greeted me at Helmhold House proved me wrong. While my friend still didn’t look as if she’d gotten any sleep, she was on top of her game, managing a cleaning crew of four, most of whom I recognized from the clubs. Back in the pantry, another volunteer—Tess’ friend Francesca—was wiping down shelves with what smelled like ammonia. Even more of the stored food was gone.

  “Hey, Theda.” One of the cleaners looked up at me. Mona? Mina? I smiled and gave back a generic “hey.”

  “Guess you don’t really need any more help.” Maybe I should have gone for a longer run, hit the river.

  “Not so quick, cowboy.” Violet waved me over to the old house’s curving staircase and I followed her up to a small office. “You offered to track that food down, right?” A stack of paper was piled on a desk by the window. A solidly built chocolate-point Siamese was luxuriating on top, a regal feline paperweight.

  “Come on, Simon.” Violet clapped her hands. Two blue eyes blinked in disbelief at the effrontery. I walked over and lifted the muscular body to the floor. “This is it. Our official correspondence. I guess we’re lucky. Simon’s litter mate Sushi would’ve eaten three or four pages by now.”

  I began to leaf through the pile. Most of it looked like letters, some handwritten, obviously by children. On a pad nearby Violet had started making some notes, but I couldn’t discern any order in the stack. “All of these are about food donations?” I hadn’t realized how large a task I’d taken on.

  Violet shook her head as she collapsed into the desk chair and the air seemed to go out of her. “Nope, this is the paperwork on everything donated. We’re just too vulnerable. I’ve been thinking about it all day. We take everything. You know.”

  I did. All my old towels went to Violet’s shelter, and after Bunny’s neighbor lost her cat, we’d help her pack up the twenty-year-old tabby’s remaining low-ash and special diet cans as a donation.

  “Well, I’ll get started here.” I waited for Violet to give me the desk chair. “Maybe you could let yourself take the rest of the day off? Take a nap?” I snuck a look at her notes and saw a list of numbers. Numbers and dollar signs.

  “There’s no time.” She stayed slumped in the chair, looking beat. Even her spiky locks were listless. “It’s too dangerous. We’re too open. From now on, we’ve got to buy everything, and let people know that any donations have got to be in cash.”

  “Not even towels?” With kittens, sick cats, and injured animals in need of emergency swaddling, the shelter went through terrycloth as fast as litter. She shot me a glance. I’d hoped for a smile, but her pale face was too sad and tired.

  “I don’t know, Theda. It’s just all too much.” She dropped her pencil on the pad in front of her. “Or too little.”

  “Well, what if that one bag was an isolated incident?” I was winging it, but my bout of exercise had boosted my optimism. “What if it was just an accidental contamination, a sack of food that got stored in someone’s pantry. I don’t know, and someone spilled some hot chocolate, or something, just by mistake, and you can trace it to its source? Won’t that be the end of it?” She looked up, those green eyes small and sunken inside heavy, blue-purple rings.

  “I can’t take any chances. Theda.”

  I pulled my own yellow legal pad out of my bag and motioned for her to get up. “You may not have to. I’ll go through these and see if I can spot anything. I’ll figure out where that bag came from and why it was contaminated. Keep in mind, it may still have been an accident.”

  “Better to know than not know, I guess. Speaking of which,” she pulled a blue file folder from a drawer and tossed it on top of the pile, “here’s our lovely ‘hate mail’ file. At least, the ones Caro made me keep. But you’ll see, they’re too flakey to take seriously. What worries me are the ones who act instead of writing.” And with that, Violet finally surrendered her chair, leaving me alone with the towering stack.

  ***

  An hour later, I’d made some headway. Of course, I’d dived into the blue file first, but I’d come to the conclusion that Violet was right. Of the seven handwritten letters, three were typical homophobic rants, complaining about Violet and Caro cohabiting in what had been a “perfectly decent” neighborhood. One of these accused my friends of engineering the state’s gay marriage law, though, as far as I knew, they hadn’t tied the knot. Three were anti-cat. Two called cats “pests,” saying they spread disease and shouldn’t be allowed to run around. From the theme and the handwriting, these looked like repeats. Someone had too much time on his hands. The other complained about the noise, as if any of Violet’s cats would have been left unneutered to caterwaul in the night. The final letter confounded me. In big, loopy letters, it seemed to accuse Violet of witchcraft, but also seemed to confuse her with the shelter’s previous owner, a nice older woman named Lillian. Maybe the writer had thought that Lillian had used her powers to transform herself into a young purple-haired punk? These were nasty, no doubt. But compared to the specifically violent ones that had been addressed to Rachel, they seemed silly. Jerks and kooks, maybe, but not capable of actually doing anything.

  In a way, that was a relief. I was still pushing for the accident theory. But I agreed that tracking down the source of the contaminated food was key. With the blue file tucked away, I ma
de myself start on the more mundane pile, with the idea of making order out of chaos. I’m not the neatest person by far, but over the next hour I managed to clip together the related correspondence—the letters asking for receipts and the little shelter’s copies of the receipts—and sort it out by year. After that, I pulled all notices of food donations, working backward in time. Violet of necessity stockpiled food; donations came in waves. But it seemed reasonable to assume that the contaminated sack had been dropped off sometime within the last few months.

  Working through the food-specific letters wasn’t easy. Some were illegible, many were undated. A few were smeared beyond recognition by some liquid, long dried, and I put some of them aside to look at again later. Had someone been using this pile as a litter box? Perhaps Simon wasn’t the gentleman he appeared? I lifted one yellowed page up for a quick sniff. It smelled clean. But the page below it caught my eye. It had stuck to the water-stained letter and it, too, was faded. Maybe Caro hadn’t gotten around to fixing all the leaky windows? I held the paper close, but the writing—brown now, and fuzzy at the edges—was no more legible than the page on top. Still, there was something. Up in the corner, was that a water mark? The stain of a drip that had dried? Or was it the profile of a cat, the logo of the city shelter? The letter referred to sixty dollars value and I thought I could make out the word “kibble.”

  “Hi, this is Theda Krakow, calling for Dr. Rachel?” I didn’t know if the tainted food had come from Rachel’s shelter, or if the contaminant—whatever it was—had been added before or after it came to Violet’s. But I’d promised Violet I’d try to trace the source of the food, and as I dialed, I realized I had other questions for the vet. Between my fatigue, her hectic schedule, not to mention the storm brewing between my two friends, I hadn’t followed through that morning. Rachel had been looking at the food, but we’d left the bag that it came in with her, too. At the time, I hadn’t thought about it. The brand wasn’t anything special. KittyLuv was just a fancy supermarket brand. But maybe the packaging had an expiration date on it, crimped on the end to indicate freshness. Maybe it had some code or stamp that would help us identify when it had been sold.

  “She’s busy?” When the volunteer came back to the phone, I realized I wasn’t going to get my answers today. It was past five already, and although the shelter stayed open into the evening, most of the office staff would be packing up. “Would you tell her that I called? No message.” The letterhead, some old notice that may have been tied in with a donation…it was too complicated to explain. “No, wait! Tell her not to throw out the cat food bag. Tell her I can trace it!” I’d explain later. As long as that bag didn’t get tossed, maybe I had a lead. In the meantime, I could show Violet the questionable letters.

  “Hey, Violet?” Three young women were still at work with rags and a mop, but the first floor of the shelter was as clean as I’d ever seen it. Even Sibley, Violet’s nearly constant companion, looked freshly brushed, his gray tail wrapped around his white paws to make a neat package. The Siamese, who had followed me down, stopped to sniff the floor. Murphy’s Oil soap: the faint memory of my own last housecleaning came to me.

  “She’s taking a nap,” a voice answered from the corner. Francesca, with her delicate build and long dark curls, could have been Tess’ younger sister. She even had a guitar out now, and was absently fingerpicking a chord for a soft, sad sound. “We told her we’d finish everything up here and she needed the sleep.”

  “I’m glad. The place looks great.” It did, and I automatically reached for Simon to walk us both around one damp spot on the floor, settling us both on the worn sofa. “Working on a song?”

  “Yeah, ‘Shiva’s Lament.’ But it’s for me. Not for a critic to hear.” Her smile softened her words. “Not yet. You’re Theda Krakow of ‘Clubland.’ Violet talks about you all the time. Bill, too.”

  My face must have registered shock, because she laughed gently. “In a good way, I mean.” She gestured at the guitar. “I’ve been talking to him about starting an acoustic night, I mean, now that the blues night is such a success.”

  I smiled back at her, but I could feel my cheeks ache with the strain. Such a success that Bill couldn’t tell me who was playing? It wasn’t this woman’s fault. “Good idea. Let me know if it happens, I’ll try to do something.” Not that I could write about Bill’s club. But I could drop a hint, and as long as Bill ran a bar tab for Ralph, our official pop music critic, he’d guarantee coverage. I ran over the possibilities as she continued to pick out notes, forming them into a familiar pattern and then taking it apart. I wanted to follow the tune. There was something interesting going on, something unresolved. But the cat on my lap began to purr and knead. The room was warm. I didn’t know how long had passed before my own nodding jerked me awake.

  “Oh!” The papers in my hand had fallen to the floor. Francesca reached to retrieve them.

  “Anything I can help you with?” She looked at the pages. “Taxes?”

  “No, I’m trying to figure out where the bad batch of food came from. I meant to ask Violet about a couple of the donations. Specifically, about this.” I showed her the waterlogged letterhead. “I could be wrong, but it looks like it came from the city shelter.” The cat jumped down as I grabbed my bag from the floor and tucked the papers inside. “I need to look at these again when I’m not half asleep, though, and I can ask her later. Are you done here?”

  “Pretty much. They’re just finishing up.” She motioned with her chin to the three remaining cleaners. “I’m supervising.”

  The three cleaners are all wearing earbuds, but I wasn’t going to question her. She must have seen something on my face.

  “Really I’m just trying to work out a plan,” she went on. “Violet has said she doesn’t want to take any more donations of food or anything else, if she can help it, which is great. I want to get her into the healthier stuff anyway. And we were talking about the shelter endowment. I know it’s good, but she’s going to need a quick influx of cash to replace her stores. So, I was thinking of a benefit. I mean, hey, we all love Violet and most of us on the scene love cats, too.”

  I nodded in agreement. A fund-raiser for the Helmhold House made perfect sense. What didn’t was that this newcomer was now Violet’s confidante in running the shelter. Was the pretty musician a romantic possibility? I couldn’t see Violet and Caro breaking up, but then again, I hadn’t been around much recently. What else, I wondered as I grabbed my bag and looked around for my coat, and who else, had I been missing?

  Chapter Five

  “Wow!”

  “Hang on!” Even before I could unlock the door, Musetta was making her demands known. With reason: I was late, I knew it. But all those papers had made me hungry, and the pizza had worn off hours ago. The Central Square diner didn’t make tuna rollups as well as the lifers in the Mail cafeteria—something about the pickles—but the counter man had only raised his eyebrows a bit when I asked him to chop the dill slices and layer them in. I’d thought briefly about getting the sandwich to go, but it was a two-hander, not the kind of meal you could eat while driving, and I was too hungry to wait.

  “Wow! Woo-wow!” Someone else had a thing about waiting. As I stepped in, the purring little linebacker threw herself against my shins. Clearly she’d been wanting to play. I was looking down at the pile of toys, considering my options, when she decided for me, pushing her head into my hand, her nose wet against my palm. I hoisted her in my arms, her dense middle stretching out as I lifted her like a Slinky.

  “Oof, kitty, you’re getting chubby.” Rachel had warned me of this, of course. She’d even marked Musetta as “overweight” at her latest checkup, three months before.

  “What do you mean, overweight?” Rachel had been writing up her bill when I had noticed the word on my pet’s chart. “You didn’t say anything!” Yes, I was a little oversensitive. As I progressed into my own thirties, I was finding it increasingly difficult to fit into my own jeans. But this was my pet she w
as talking about.

  “For a pampered Cambridge housecat, she’s well within the normal range.” Rachel didn’t even look up. Obviously, she’d had this conversation before. “But you’ve got to start watching her intake. No more free feeding, no more cans on demand. Do you know how many cases of feline diabetes we’re seeing these days?”

  “A lot?” My voice had gone soft. I’d thought of Musetta’s weight as a vanity issue. A soft cat is a thing of joy, an obese one a joke. “She’s not—” I couldn’t even say it.

  “No, her blood tests have been fine.” Rachel looked up, handing me the bill, but also reassuring me. “But she’s an adult cat, now. The only growing she’ll be doing is sideways.”

  ***

  I thought of that now as I hefted my pet up. “Musetta, do I have to start measuring your food?” Bunny, I knew, scooped out a careful cup each morning for her two cats. But since one was a glutton, the other as finicky as that famous commercial feline, her care didn’t pay off. Pangur Ban looked like an orange ottoman with ears these days, while Astarte remained an Audrey Hepburn gamine. “Kitty?”

  In response, she turned her sweet round face to me, reaching her nose to touch mine and giving me another dose of that foul breath.

  “Okay, kitty, that’s it. We’re making that appointment.” In response, Musetta blinked her green eyes. The more I talked to cats, the more I became convinced that they do understand. The placid cat still in my arms, I made my way to the phone, edging around a coffee table covered with papers, CD cases, and, yes, yesterday’s coffee mug. I should clean. I should also call Bill again. But first things first: My pet probably just needed a cleaning, but I knew that bad breath could be a sign of other health problems, too.