A Curious Affair

by Melanie Jackson

  “Okay, how about this? Irv and Wilkes didn’t know each other well enough for it to be a crime of hot blood,” I said at last. “From what Molly told me, until last month Irv hadn’t seen his nephew since the sister died ten years ago. And before that, he’d only seen the kid twice. I like profit as a motive better in this case. Neither Irv nor the nephew are the type for a crime of passion.”

  “I agree. If this is about money, though, I can think of others around Irv who had even greater need than Peter Wilkes,” Tyler said evenly. I sympathized with his point, but knew he was wrong to suspect Molly and Dell. “What I can’t figure out is just why you’ve always been so certain it is murder. If we hadn’t sent the body out for an autopsy with a genuine forensic pathologist, old Doc Harmon would have signed off on this as an accident and we would never know that murder had been done.”

  I looked the sheriff in the eye.

  “So it is murder.”

  “Yes, blunt force trauma. One killing blow to the head. Probably from the fireplace poker, which is still missing. You were right about that, too.”

  I nodded, not surprised. When I questioned him in detail, Atherton had said the man used the old poker by the potbellied stove to kill Irv and had it when he ran away. “That was quick work.”

  “It’s the only suspicious death in the county. Irv got moved to the head of the line.” Those probing eyes were back on my face.

  “I feel like you’ve been watching me, Sheriff. Constantly. Why? Do you think it likely that I killed Irv and am trying to blame someone else for my wicked deeds?” I asked bluntly, and watched with satisfaction when Tyler blinked.

  “Hadn’t crossed my mind.” He lied—I could see it in his deep blue eyes.

  “It better have crossed your mind, or you’re in the wrong line of work.” I looked away, smiling grimly. Molly and Dell had cornered Josh, and all three were staring at me and the sheriff. They looked like prisoners, huddling together as they waited to see what the warden would do. They were as pallid and undernourished as junkies, and bowed down either by the grief of their friend’s passing or the weights of their unkind lives. I thought it was the latter, and though that burden was mostly self-inflicted it did nothing to make them easier to look at. Would this be me in five years if I didn’t get my act together?

  “Okay, for maybe half a second the notion flitted through my brain. But why the hell would you drag me into this if you were guilty?” Tyler asked. We were being logical, trying to dress up our gut emotion in respectable reason. We weren’t succeeding, though. At least, I wasn’t. And Tyler was feeling my anger at Peter Wilkes and it was making his sheriff’s antennae twitch.

  “Maybe I’m just crazy. Or psychic. Or haunted. Maybe I hear voices from beyond telling me this was murder,” I said, gazing at the church as though it was the most fascinating thing in the world. My stomach clenched. Too close, it warned me. You’re getting too close to the truth.

  “Maybe,” Tyler agreed. I watched as his shadow drew closer and touched mine, mingling our pale shades. I allowed it for a moment and then stepped away. Even that was too much intimacy when I was standing in the cemetery where Cal rested. He added quietly: “But I don’t think your madness would have these particular symptoms. From what I hear, writers tend to be quietly eccentric. They wear large hats and have cats and forget to eat. They don’t go around bashing their neighbors’ heads in because they hear voices. Certainly they don’t go to the police afterwards and insist on it being murder.”

  Cats. I had those, alright—in numbers great enough to make anyone question my sanity. In fact, I’d left the largest one closed up in my bedroom when I came down the hill. I hoped Atherton wasn’t too annoyed about that.

  I nodded. “Eccentric is fine. I wouldn’t want the town’s new sheriff thinking I was a homicidal maniac or anything.”

  Tyler grunted. He was watching as Molly, Dell and Josh put out their cigarettes and went into the church. Josh lagged behind the other two, sending a last glance up at us. I thought he looked guilty, and was betting Tyler thought that, too.

  “Well, we’d best go down. People are heading inside. I wouldn’t normally go to this funeral but since you’re so suspicious of him, I want to keep an eye on the nephew for the next few days. Also, maybe there will be some thaw in the Fremont Creek crowd if I pay my respects. If there is anything to know about Irv, they’re the ones who’ll know it.”

  “Hope ever, hope on,” I muttered. I didn’t think Molly or Dell would thaw for him even under a blowtorch. Tyler wouldn’t get anywhere with them.

  “Can’t hurt any to try,” Tyler said. “So, are you coming inside, or will you watch from the sidelines?”

  I sighed. I hated funerals and had avoided them since Cal died. There was little chance that I’d actually catch the nephew doing or saying anything incriminating there, especially with the sheriff hanging about. Still, I felt that I had to go. Just in case.

  Something stropped at my woolen-clad ankle and it was all I could do not to jump. As it was, I gave a small gasp.

  I’m here, the growl announced. We’re all here.

  Speaking of the symptoms of my madness, this was probably what the squirrel had been so upset about. I glanced around quickly. The cats were huddled at the base of the wrought-iron fence at the rear of the cemetery.

  “Hello, Atherton,” I said. I felt myself pale as I looked into the black cat’s enormous eyes. His gaze was hard, predatory, and I was—just a little bit—afraid of the anger I saw in him. “What a surprise. I thought you were having a nice nap in my bedroom.”

  It can’t be a surprise. Not really. Smelly-butt man is here. Is the sheep man going to take him away?

  It shouldn’t have been surprising after his showing up at the wake, but I was still taken aback to see the cat here. I had been careful this time. The only way he could have escaped was out the bedroom window, and then only if he had ripped my screen from the frame. And I hadn’t said anything to him about where and when the funeral was. That meant he had heard me talking on the phone with Molly. This may sound dumb, but I didn’t think the cat could understand my conversations unless I was talking to him. Apparently it didn’t work that way.

  I lifted my head slowly, breaking away from Atherton’s gaze without answering him aloud.

  “And here is proof of my growing eccentricity. Sheriff, have you met my cat, Atherton? He thinks Wilkes killed Irv, too.”

  Atherton stared at me.

  “I believe I’ve seen him about. Up at Irv’s place. I thought maybe I was being stalked by a panther.” I could feel Tyler’s puzzled gaze on me and I tried to pull myself together. It was difficult, though, because everywhere I looked now, there were strays ghosting through the shrubs on the churchyard and perching on tombstones. They moved like a restless school of fish—perhaps piranhas. Their eyes were intent, angry; a mob mentality ruled them. I wondered if they would actually attack Irv’s nephew if they found him alone.

  Then I wondered if I should let them. It could solve a lot of problems and would be just. Let the ones he had most wronged have their vengeance.

  Of course, the town would panic when they found the body covered in claw marks, and the stray cats would be rounded up and put down en masse. I couldn’t let that happen. There had to be some way to get sufficient proof of Wilkes’s wrongdoing.

  I turned to face Tyler. “Yes. I inherited him—without a will, even. I hope the nephew doesn’t contest ownership. I don’t think Atherton would go with him.” Talking was getting difficult. I could feel my jaw locking up again. It was partly the cold wind and the disappearing sun, but partly nerves and distraction. The sheriff hadn’t noticed the other cats, but he would if he turned around, and even the most rational and unimaginative of men would question what so many mean-looking strays were doing in the churchyard. Cats didn’t travel in packs like dogs. This was unnatural behavior.

  “You brought the cat to the funeral?” Tyler asked, unable to hide his surprise.

&nbs
p; “No, but Atherton tends to follow me around. I think he’s lonely.” I’m not a good liar, so I knelt down and picked Atherton up, hiding the lower half of my face in his coarse fur. Neither of us was comfortable with this, but he didn’t struggle while the sheriff was watching. He even let me check his paws for wounds from the screen. I wondered what we looked like to the others. Me, all in black, holding a dark cat—did we look like a witch and her familiar? “I don’t think Irv would mind the cat being here. We’ll sit in the back of the church,” I added. “No one will see him.”

  Tyler’s eyes grew compassionate as he watched me rub against Atherton. His sympathy wasn’t for the orphaned cat, though. He could sense my tension and probably thought that I was feeling fragile, perhaps remembering Cal’s funeral and wanting to hold something close so no one would see me cry. Normally I would have done something to banish this concern, which I found so hard to accept in strangers and even friends. But this time I let him believe this was why I held the cat so close and kept my face mostly hidden. It was almost true, anyway.

  “Come on,” Tyler said again. He reached for my arm, but a hiss from the cat made him step back. “That’s a large beastie you’ve got there. Biggest cat I’ve ever seen. Seems real…protective.”

  “Manners, Atherton,” I said softly. “The sheriff means no harm. He’s just trying to help us.”

  The cat began making a harsh noise that might have been purring. Then again, it might not. I lifted my head and forced a smile for Tyler. I hoped it was more convincing than Atherton’s purr.

  “He just doesn’t like strangers much. He and Irv were loners.” My jaw was definitely getting tighter.

  What I don’t like is the smelly-butt man, Atherton grumbled through his buzz-saw purr. Take me to him now.

  I didn’t like “smelly-butt man” either, but I didn’t say so out loud. Just in case the sheriff was serious about thinking I might be something more than eccentric for bringing a cat to a funeral.

  I glanced one more time at the shuddering shrubbery. So far, the cats had kept a prudent distance from the church itself. Whether out of piety or fear, I didn’t know. I didn’t know if it would work, but I sent out a stern mental message: Stay out of the church. Atherton and I will watch smelly-butt man.

  “That cat isn’t the only loner,” Tyler said mostly to himself. “Let’s get you out of this wind. I can tell your jaw is hurting.”

  I smiled fleetingly at Tyler and started down the hill, being careful not to step on anyone’s grave. Atherton was a bundle of tensed muscle and fur, but he must not have had any true demonic connections because he didn’t disappear in a puff of smoke when we entered the sanctuary and slid into the rear pew.

  I didn’t protest when Tyler slid in beside me. Atherton wasn’t thrilled, but he was too busy watching the nephew to pay the sheriff much attention. An asthmatic old organ began playing “Rock of Ages.” I bowed my head and tried to look like I belonged in church. I was confident that if Wilkes did anything interesting, Atherton would let me know.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A cat is more intelligent than people believe, and can be taught any crime.

  —Mark Twain Notebook, 1895

  Irv’s land is posted with no trespassing signs, but the neighbors have always treated them as a mere request for privacy. The whole trespassers will be shot thing didn’t make sense when Irv didn’t have a gun. None that we knew about, anyway. Perhaps if he’d had one, he’d still be alive.

  The next home on the hill was a step down from Irv’s place on a stony outcrop that jutted over Stockyard Road. The place was more of a temple than a house. It was called The Parthenon for obvious reasons. The current owners, Elena and Carl Malking, were avid gardeners and apt to be out in the yard at all hours tending to their massive container garden. It was a well-manicured property completely at odds with others on the hill that rather grew like Topsey. Unfortunately, the attentive Malkings were away for the month. The only two residents at The Parthenon were Elena’s mother, Miranda, and the day nurse, Justie Fillmore, who left The Parthenon promptly at six p.m. every afternoon. Miranda was an insomniac and might have been a hopeful witness to interview since there was a clear view of Irv’s driveway from her bedroom window. However, when God was handing out the afflictions of old age, he had been thorough with Miranda. The eyes may be the conventional windows of the soul, but curtains of cataract had been drawn over these panes years before, and she refused surgery so no one would be peeping in or out of them anymore. Asking her to recall and articulate her thoughts was not a viable option, either. Aside from the missing teeth that had mutinied and abandoned their gummy posts decades ago, her grasp of present-day reality was tenuous at best. Nor would she wear her hearing aid since arthritis had bound her to a walker. Miranda was waiting to die and stubbornly refused all succor.

  I sighed. It figured that the one person who might have seen anything on the night Irv died was blind, deaf and dumb. It was the way the luck was running on this very amateurish investigation. It was probably partly my fault that I was making no progress, but it was also par for the course on anything involving Irv. Way down deep, most likely buried in his DNA, Irv was burdened with a kind of ironic bad luck. It had haunted all the males of his family for as far back as he could recall. When Irv had inherited the family farm in Fresno—a piece of land that had been fertile and profitable until Irv’s father, a refugee from the Dust Bowl, got hold of it—Irv immediately lost the water rights and found that he couldn’t afford the taxes on the place anyway. He’d had to sell at once, and the land hadn’t brought in enough to cover the family debts. His parents were dead by then and his sister, sensing there was no future in agriculture or in sticking with her brother, took up with a crop duster and sometimes stunt pi lot named Dukie Wilkes. They’d left for the bright lights of Hollywood seeking fame and fortune, or at least regular work. The sister came back alone two years later with a snot-nosed brat in tow. Dukie had moved on to bigger and better—and younger—things.

  All alone in the world and unable to find work in Fresno, Irv retreated to the family mining shack in Irish Camp that had been cobbled together at the very end of the nineteenth century. There he decided to fall back on a crop that was always in demand and that he knew how to grow. He planted his first patch of marijuana in the Stanislaus National Forest in a grove where a harsh winter had struck down a number of trees and left a promising sunny glade. From what he’d told me, it would have been a bumper crop, but two days before he planned to harvest, a forest fire swept through that part and he lost everything. Only slightly daunted by this loss, Irv tried again that next spring. Year two had looked to be a little better until there had been an invasion of some kind of hemp-eating beetle from Japan. He’d lost most of that crop, too, and what he salvaged had an odd piquancy that he suspected was beetle dung. Year three, he’d lost more than half of his crop to a mudslide caused by record-breaking summer rainfall that washed out the scarred land now left naked and unprotected by the forest fire.

  And so it went on, year after year. He made enough to live on—barely—but like his father, his green thumb was overshadowed by natural disasters.

  Then, in the spring of ’86, when he was struck by lightning, he had taken up gold panning. Irv wasn’t exactly prosperous, but he found the odd nugget here and there and managed to provide himself with slightly better cuisine and clothing, if not a fancier roof over his head.

  And now, after twenty-two years, when he’d finally hit the mother lode and was looking at spending his final years in some degree of comfort, if not actual middle-class affluence, his greedy nephew had probably killed him for his find.

  I shook my head at Irv’s profound bad luck and mentally walked past the Malkings’ without stopping until I reached the next house on the map.

  On the other side and down the south face of the hill was Crystal, but I already knew that she had no details of the nephew’s visit to share with me. And no one else could have seen anything. So, Athe
rton was still the only witness and he couldn’t exactly give a statement to the police. Nor could I come forward at this late date and say, oops, I just recalled that I did see everything that night, and Peter Wilkes is a murderer.

  So, there we were. I didn’t have any witnesses—at least none that could go to the police—but I did have a possible motive that I could investigate if I could figure out how to go about it.

  Gold. I kept coming back to it. If the nephew had been after drugs, he would have taken them that night and hightailed it back to Lodi. He would not have stuck around and produced a will naming himself as heir to Irv’s squalid little cabin that would be torn down shortly anyway.

  It followed that if Irv had found a cache of gold, he either would have sold it or hidden it somewhere safe. Selling it would be wise only if he’d found a stray nugget and there was no hope of discovering more in the same location. No gossip spreads as fast in our town as news of a gold strike. One whiff of fresh gold-bearing ore or cache of nuggets and every Tom, Dick and Peter Wilkes with a gold pan starts following the lucky finder around. There hadn’t been any word of a new gold find, so I didn’t think Irv had gone to any of the local jewelers he usually sold to. That in turn meant Irv believed he had hit upon a rich vein and wanted time to mine or pan it before others got wind of the sweet spot. That he might have talked to Molly, Dell and Josh about going in with him on a business venture suggested that this could be a mining operation, something underground and dangerous and not just casual surface panning. But then again, it might just be that he had found something along the river—on someone else’s property—and he needed a lot of bodies to cover the territory before they were found by the rightful owners and booted out.

  This was a whole lot of supposition, but it hung together. For me.