Ink, Red, Dead

by Joanna Campbell Slan

  “I bet she hasn’t had visitors over to the house in ages. How come her A/C stopped today? When she expected us? I could tell she didn’t want us to come, but she didn’t flat out say, ‘No.’ She did tell me she was nervous about getting her lawn mowed. But she didn’t say anything about having no air conditioning, and we talked only yesterday. A busted A/C unit would have been first problem on anyone’s list. Especially considering this heat wave and how closed up her place was. And the smell. It was bound to be bad under any circumstances, but without A/C it was stifling.”

  “Remember, we’re dealing with a whack-job here. Hoarders are delusional. She probably thinks she’s the next Martha Stewart,” Hadcho said.

  “But she was nervous about your visit, right?” Detweiler asked me. “Maybe she was nervous about someone reporting her to Animal Control.”

  “I don’t think that was it. We all knew she had cats. Lots of them. She brought photos to the store to scrapbook, that’s how we met her. There were pictures of her kids, young, and after they’d grown. Mainly pictures of cats. I think for her, the large number of pets was, well, normal. She never mentioned a specific number,” I said. “What’s the pathology of this? Of animal hoarding?”

  “There are all sorts of theories,” Detweiler said. “Some psychologists think it’s OCD. Others say it has aspects of borderline personality disorder and addiction. A new theory suggests it’s an attachment disorder. There seems to be a lot of support for hoarding being a delusional disorder. Think about it: those cats were dead and she was hanging on to their bodies. I bet she put them in the pet beds herself. Animal hoarders rationalize away reality. She might have told herself they were only sleeping.”

  “But the timing. That’s what gets me. Why’d this have to happen when we were planning to visit?”

  “Because you’re lucky,” Hadcho said with a grin. “Lucky, lucky, Kiki Lowenstein.”

  Chapter 11

  “Are you in?” Mert Chambers, woman of few words.

  “You bet. I can use the money. Rebekkah slashed my hours.” As I held the phone to my ear, I rinsed out Gracie’s dish, scalded the sink and started cleaning my counters. Our company had left. Anya had showered and gone to bed. I was alone in the kitchen, and free to talk to my BFF candidly.

  “That’s ‘cause you tick her off.”

  “The feeling is mutual. I used to really, really like that kid, but a little bit of power has gone to her head. When I do go in, she dumps all the grunt work on me. The stuff she doesn’t like to do.”

  Mert chuckled. “What is it that she likes doing?”

  “As soon as I figure that out, I’ll let you know.”

  “You do realize this will be an ugly job. But you’ll get extra pay.”

  “Because it’s ugly?”

  “No, because we have to wear biohazard suits.”

  “You are kidding me.”

  “Nope. With all that cat ca-ca spread all around, we might pick up something nasty. Don’t want us breathing that stuff, neither.” She paused. “You know how much it’s going to cost ‘em to get that house cleaned out?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Forty grand.”

  I coughed. “Wha-what?”

  “Yes, ma’am. This is the second time they’ve had to take the place down to the bare nubbins. You shoulda heard her daughter pitching a fit about it.”

  “Why not just bulldoze the house?”

  “Because Marla Lever owns it, not her kids. If it were up to them, that’d be Ladue’s newest teardown.”

  “But they have neighborhood ordinances, don’t they? I mean, most neighborhoods do.”

  “Yep, but they’d have a go ‘round with Marla, she’d get stuff up to snuff, and then she’d let it slide again. At least that’s what the daughter said.”

  “Who’s paying for the clean up?”

  “Marla took a second mortgage out on her house a while back. Her daughter has signing privileges. Get this, Marla’s got a quarter of a million bucks in the bank. Her kid said Marla used to have more, through an inheritance, but most of the dough has gone to lawyers. I guess old Marla keeps fighting to keep her animals.”

  “What’s her daughter like?”

  “I wouldn’t cross a street to say hi to Ali Timmons. She ain’t the nicest person I’ve ever met. She thinks her you-know-what don’t stink. Maybe ‘cause she’s got her nose stuck up in the air.” Mert chuckled. “But, hey, she’s under a lot of stress. Her mama keeps collecting animals and junk. Ali keeps getting dragged into the middle. She’s the one authorities call and complain to, ‘cause her momma won’t listen. The time before this it was birds. Parrots, finches, crows, canaries, wild birds that shouldn’t have been kept in cages. They was flying all over and pooping wherever they wished. Before that, old Marla collected fish. But they all died when the power went out. Stunk to high heavens. Can you imagine?”

  I started to feel sympathy for Ali Lever Timmons. “Gee, I don’t want to imagine it. There’s nothing she can do?”

  “What? Commit her mother? For what? For hoarding? I don’t think that goose would fly.”

  I got off the phone feeling raw and unsettled. Marla seemed nice enough to me. She wandered into the store one day about closing time. Stood in the middle and looked around. Went to the displays and gawped at the pages I’d made. We were in the midst of taking registrations for a class called “My Life Highlights.” I suggested to Marla that if she was interested in learning to scrapbook the class might be a good place to start.

  “You think I can do this?” she gestured to the rows of pages we displayed on our walls.

  “Absolutely,” I said. “I’ll teach you how.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  A few days later she returned and pulled a wad of photos from a dingy cloth purse. “I want to sign up for your class,” she said, so I added her to the roster.

  We looked over her photos together. Viewing other people’s pictures is definitely one of the best parts of my job. Marla pointed out her children, talked about them briefly, then pushed those photos aside quickly. She grew animated when she came to the pictures of her cats, telling me their names and describing their personalities in great detail. At long last, we came to two older Polaroids of a little boy. These she touched with a sort of reverence.

  “That’s my Tommy. He died when he was seven. Fell off a swing. He was messing around. Showing off. Like kids do. I took him to the playground and I…my back was turned.” Her voice cracked a little. “I should have protected my baby.”

  Thinking back on that moment made me so sad that I had to check on my own baby, who was quickly growing into a lovely young woman. I went into Anya’s room. She was sleeping, curled on one side, with Seymour snuggled in the nook of her legs. His eyes glowed green as he stared up at me, curiously. Satisfied I was not going to move him, he nestled down and went back to sleep. I stood there a long time, watching her, saying prayers of protection.

  If only I could keep her from every pain and heartache that life would send her way.

  If only.

  Chapter 12

  Rebekkah was in rare form the next day. She showed up late, as usual. Because she was supposed to stop by the bank, but hadn’t, we opened with two ten dollar bills and a roll of pennies.

  “Oops.” That was all she said when I pointed out how hard it would be to make change. I had awakened with a bad headache, egged on by the discovery that we’d drunk all my coffee the night before. While getting dressed, I discovered a rip in my favorite blouse. Seymour choked up a hairball as I munched my Grapenuts. Anya wouldn’t get out of the shower. Gracie and Petunia decided to sniff every inch of grass between the house and my car.

  I like to get to work at least an hour before the store opens, but this particular morning I slipped in with five minutes to spare. That’s when I discovered no one had prepped for the evening’s crop.

  Consequently, I was not in the mood for Rebekkah’s foolishness.

  “W
ant your body, love your boody,” she sang to herself as she hip-hopped into the back room, opened the office door, and turned up “her tunes” full blast. She wasn’t there twenty minutes before the phone rang. I recognized Dodie and Horace’s home number, so I didn’t pick up. The music volume lowered. Rebekkah could be heard yelling, “Oh, yeah? Well, it’s not my fault! Talk to Kiki! She’s the one who called it off! Kiki!”

  I sighed and picked up the extension at the front counter.

  “Lottie Feister called.” Dodie sounded irked.

  “I just bet she did.” I was pretty irritated myself.

  “She wasn’t happy.”

  “No, I imagine not.”

  “Why did you cancel the crop? You know that means lost income. We’ll have a hoard of angry scrapbookers wanting refunds and discounts. You have no authority to cancel crops!”

  “Excuse me? I’m a minority owner of this place. I think that gives me some say!”

  “Rebekkah is the store manager. It should have been her decision.”

  I rolled my eyes even though Dodie couldn’t see me. “Your daughter knows why I did it. I’m surprised she didn’t tell you. Clancy called her from the Lever house. We found Marla unconscious in her bedroom. The temp inside the house was in the mid-90s, and guess what? Marla’s a hoarder, so there were stacks and stacks of newspaper in the place. Just an itty bitty path to walk on. There were also nearly a hundred cats. And no litter boxes. Instead, they used every available surface. You can guess how the place stunk.”

  “What?” Dodie choked out the word.

  “Yep. It gets better. Did you hear about the three dead cats in the middle of Marla’s dining room table? We’re talking maggots on the move. Personally, I think THAT was a good-enough reason for calling off the event. Yes, I stopped the crop. And you should thank me—because I sent everyone packing BEFORE the police found the dead HUMAN. A corpse with a bashed in face isn’t something I particularly want to put on a scrapbook page. But hey, what do I know? Rebekkah’s our hotshot expert. Maybe she’ll want to schedule our next outing at the morgue!”

  With that I banged down the phone.

  Rebekkah turned up her music full blast.

  I finished tidying the shelves and restocking merchandise, before starting on the prep for the evening’s event. Of course, the first person to walk through our door was Lottie Feister.

  “Lottie, I want to apologize for any inconvenience that we caused you yesterday. Here, let me give you a gift certificate. It’s not much, but it’s our way of saying we feel bad for your trouble.” I didn’t look up as I wrote out the certificate.

  A hand grabbed the pen. “Nonsense. I heard about it on the late-late news. A dead body? In the freezer? All my friends called me and wanted to hear what I saw. I have three lunch dates and one invitation to dinner this week alone. I guess they’re banking on me telling them more about that house—and the horrible conditions inside.” Lottie patted her hair into place, an unnecessary gesture since it was sprayed stiff and hard as a beetle’s shell. “You’ll tell me all the details, won’t you, Kiki? I mean, you owe me that much. Were there really nearly a hundred cats? And the newspapers. Were they stacked to the ceiling?”

  I shouldn’t have been surprised. Now that Animal Planet showed segments featuring animal hoarders, the syndrome had become “sexy.” Lottie always struck me as a lonely woman. Her excitement about being asked out to eat confirmed my suspicions. But it wasn’t fair to Marla to make matters worse.

  “Lottie, you know nearly as much as I do. You saw the condition of the property.”

  “Yes, but you went inside! What did it look like?”

  “Lots of cats and lots of newspaper.”

  “About the dead body. Did you see that?”

  “No,” I answered truthfully. “No, I didn’t.”

  She tried a couple more times to get me to elaborate. Finally, I said, “Hey, Lottie, why don’t I show you the new paper we got in from K & Co.? We haven’t even put it on the floor yet. You’ll be the first to play with it. Oh, and I’m teaching a class in Zentangle®. Can I show some of my tangles to you?”

  “Okay, but can you talk up? I can hardly hear you over that racket.”

  Rebekkah’s music. That was the racket. I stuck my head in Dodie’s office and asked Rebekkah to dial it down a notch. “A customer says she can’t hear me.”

  Rebekkah grumped, but did as I requested.

  “Zen-what?” asked Lottie as I took a spot next to her on the work table.

  “Zentangle. It’s an art form relying on repetitive patterns. Let me show you.”

  There’s nothing scrapbookers like better than new techniques. Although they don’t strictly qualify as a scrapbook technique, Zentangle designs can be used to decorate scrapbook pages. As an additional benefit, doing a Zentangle pattern calms the mind. There’s something distinctly meditative about the repetitive motion.

  I was teaching Lottie a complicated tangle, or Zentangle design, when Dodie walked in.

  Kiki Lowenstein’s Ideas for Using Zentangle Inspired Designs

  The folks at Zentangle say, “Anything is possible…one stroke at a time.” ™

  Visit their website at http://www.zentangle.com to learn more about how to create “tangles.” Once you learn a few basic patterns, you’ll be off in a zen-like state before you can say, “Oy, I’m stressed to the max.”

  What can you do with Zentangle inspired designs after you create them?

  Notebooks--Adhere a large one to the front of a simple composition notebook to class it up.

  Greeting cards--Make your design slightly smaller than the front of a blank greeting card. (You can buy “blank” or plain greeting cards in bulk from most craft stores, along with their matching envelopes.) Adhere the tangle to the card front to make an instant note card suitable for any occasion.

  Bookmarks--Draw a large tangle, slice it into 2 by 8 inch rectangles. Adhere one 2 x 8 inch rectangle to the back of another so you have a double-sided rectangle. Cover both sides with clear packing tape. (Tip: I use packing tape as instant “lamination” all the time. It’s cheap, easy, and works great!) Punch a hole in one end. Thread a ribbon through and tie it.

  Small personalized gifts—Add letter stickers to a Zentangle tile to spell out a name. (Tip: You can buy Zentangle tiles, square pieces of pre-cut high quality paper, here: http://www.zentangle.com/products-supplies.php Why not get several friends together to buy a bunch?) Now add your tangle around the name. Don’t forget to sign the finished product!

  Placemats and coasters—Create your Zentangle design to the appropriate size. Laminate the design.

  Scrapbook embellishments—A tangle makes a fabulous border or a perfect frame around a photo. You can also punch embellishments out of tangles! Or use the negative space left from a punch as a Zentangle “string” to get your art started.

  Chapter 13

  “Hello, Sunshine.” Dodie nodded to me as she walked over to where Lottie and I were working.

  I breathed the proverbial “sigh of relief.” I thought Dodie would be angry, but she didn’t seem at all upset. At least, not with me. She peered over Lottie’s shoulder and smiled with approval at the Zentangle our customer had created. “Lottie, you are good at that! That is beautiful!”

  Dodie knew how to make customers happy. That was one of her secrets of success. She also knew how to merchandise, how to get discounts from manufacturers, how to create customer loyalty, and to hire good people. But this adventure with her daughter, well, it wasn’t her finest moment.

  Lottie’s face, formerly pursed in concentration, held up her project for inspection and broke into a sunbeam grin. “I think I am good at this! I can’t wait to see how this will look on a page! Isn’t it just the cutest frame? I plan to put a photo inside it. I can keep the pen and the tiles in my purse. It’ll give me something to do while I’m at the doctor’s office. My hubby, Gene, has pancreatic cancer, you see. He’s been in the hospital all week. He’ll be out soon.
Then he’ll start chemo and radiation.”

  Dodie put a gentle hand on the other woman’s shoulder. “I’ve been through it. He’s going to do fine. Be back to his old self in not time.”

  “I didn’t know,” I stammered. “I’m sorry, Lottie. You must have a lot on your plate.”

  There it was, the bald truth. You could judge and judge someone, but you never knew what they were coping with. When you learned, you hated yourself for being so hasty. Lord knows, I try to be a better person, but each time I vow to improve, I stumble again. Poor Lottie, she only wanted a distraction—and Marla Lever provided it.

  “May I talk with you?” Dodie jerked her head toward the stockroom.

  “I’ll be right back, Lottie. Would you like a diet Dr Pepper or a Diet Coke?”

  “Love a regular Coke.”

  “I’ll get you one,” I said as I padded after Dodie. The minute the stockroom door closed behind us, we both realized we couldn’t talk over the loud music Rebekkah was playing. Without discussing it, we stepped out the back door.

  “I apolo--” I started, but Dodie interrupted me with, “Rebekkah is driving her dad and me meshugganah.”

  “She doesn’t want to be here,” I said.

  “I know,” the big woman sighed. Dodie had once been very hairy, but the treatment for her cancer caused most of her hair to fall out. The new growth sprouted as cute little tufts that she gelled into fashionable spikes. But the dark circles under her eyes had grown bigger since Rebekkah moved back in.

  “Let’s not worry about that now,” I suggested. “Back to Lottie. She’s fine, as you can see. She was put out yesterday, and I can’t blame her. But there was nothing we could do. Dodie, you have no idea how bad that house stunk or the mess we found.”

  She nodded. “I should have listened to you.”

  Blow me down, Popeye. That’s as close to an apology as I’ve ever heard from Dodie. She’s great about a lot of things, but apologizing? You might as well wait for the Sahara to freeze over. I blinked in surprise and started back to our customer, swinging by the refrigerator and grabbing two colas—one for Lottie and one for me—as I made my way through the stockroom.