The Dead Cat Bounce

by Sarah Graves

  “And do you know why they cared?” she demanded, her gnarled fingers gripping the head of her cane. “I had great legs.”

  She did, too, although in the photos it was mostly her face, heavily caked with stage makeup, that you noticed—that, and her massively teased, bleached-blonde hair. For one brief, glorious season she had been a dancer in a chorus line patterned after the Rockettes. Some of the photos caught her in action, high-kicking, her smile vivacious and her eyes as wide as the ones you see when a deer appears suddenly in your headlights at night, only not a bit scared. That face, so painted as to look barely human, shone with manic energy and the thrill of being in the spotlight, smack at the center of attention. The world had been her oyster in those days and she’d gulped it down alive, just as she now devoured anyone unlucky enough to get near her.

  “But I came back. To my home and my family. I knew where I belonged,” she said to me, who so patently did not.

  In Hedda’s view, anyone who sold an old Eastport house to somebody from away, like me, might as well burn it down. Worse, the house I had bought once belonged to some of Hedda’s relatives, and from the way she carried on about it when I first came here, you’d think I was desecrating their graves.

  For my part, I thought there was more to the story behind her return to Eastport than she let on. Still, she had come back, married Alvin White, and produced Ellie, all in a single year, with the swift efficiency of a sharpshooter knocking down clay pigeons. For whatever reason, Hedda had known what she wanted.

  As she did now. Stomping her foot, which was encased in one of the flat, hard-soled slippers she insisted on wearing in order she said, to keep her step from getting sloppy, she yelled again to demand refreshment.

  “Coming, Mother,” Ellie called. “Jacobia, why don’t you come in here and help me?”

  I got up gratefully, Hedda’s querulous tones rising at my back. “Sure. Leave the old lady by herself. That’s typical of you young girls, today. No consideration.”

  Ellie shut the kitchen door on her mother’s voice and leaned against it. “Jacobia, what am I going to do about her?”

  There were no photographs of Hedda before New York in the house. Hedda had burned them, Ellie said, before Ellie was born. This is who I am, Hedda seemed to feel about her New York memorabilia, and god help anyone—or anything—daring to suggest otherwise.

  “Well,” I told Ellie, “I suppose you could have her stuffed and mounted. She’d have to be shot, first, but I don’t see that as a problem.”

  On one of the kitchen countertops, a radio scanner sputtered static and occasional bits of dispatchers’ voices. It was a common diversion here in town, listening to the radio traffic, and with the storm there was plenty of it.

  I went over and turned the volume all the way down. The Whites’ kitchen was the after picture to my old house’s before: smooth white cabinet fronts, Corian countertops, state-of-the-art appliances, all installed at the behest of Ellie’s father, Alvin, who from the day of his marriage to Hedda had decreed that Hedda should have the best.

  Not that Hedda cooked, washed dishes, or performed any of the other tasks essential to running a household. Hedda’s contribution consisted of emptying her highball glass. The icemaking machine in the pantry was big enough to supply a hotel bar, and from little hints Ellie had dropped here and there, I gathered that Hedda had kept it running steadily until her doctor delivered an ultimatum: one single cocktail, its size monitored by Ellie, per evening. Personally, I’d have doped her to the eyes and let her liver go hang. “Have you told her about last night?” I asked. “About confessing?”

  “No, I haven’t told her,” Ellie said, then sighed. “They both know about the murder, and I told Dad about what I said to the police. He understands, I think, what’s going to happen. She’s …”

  “A mean old bat,” I supplied, and Ellie shot me a look; the topic of Hedda was a perennial land mine in our friendship, and I insisted, perhaps too stubbornly, in stepping on it.

  “Jake, you know how I feel,” Ellie began.

  “I know.” Her patience made me even more rebellious. “But if she were my mother …”

  “Lucky for both of you, she’s not. Besides, I promised Dad a long time ago I’d never do anything to …”

  Her voice trailed off, but I knew. To get back at Hedda for her miserableness, Ellie meant, for her constant complaining and criticizing and demanding. And Ellie’s record of keeping promises, as Arnold had told the mainland cops, was sterling.

  “Anyway, that’s not why I called you.” Ellie got the spoons out, setting each one on the tray with a meaningful clink!

  “Well, why did you, then?” I asked, but she didn’t reply.

  According to Ellie, Hedda’s vicious temperament dated from a mugging in Manhattan, thirty years earlier. A pair of young thugs, a robbery and beating, her ankles broken. Hedda never danced again.

  Ellie used the story to explain why she made such allowances, but I was not nearly so inclined to forgive Hedda’s chronic abuse of my friend, which was almost as wearing to witness as it must have been to endure. In fact, if her hands hadn’t been too arthritic to wield an ice pick, I might have wondered whether Hedda killed Mcllwaine herself. She was mean enough, and with her, no obvious motive for wickedness was required.

  In the pantry, the ice machine hummed quietly. Hanging beside it was a metal scoop for getting ice out. No ice pick was anywhere in evidence; probably one of the officers from away had taken it.

  “Jacobia,” Ellie began again; the silences between us never lasted. “The thing is, I’ll be going to jail.”

  “Don’t be silly. Of course you won’t.” I filled the creamer. “You’ll say you didn’t mean it, you were in a state of shock. Or something.” I tried to think of what.

  “Jake.” Her voice was gently amused, probably at the idea of her ever being in shock. Despite her ethereal looks, Ellie was as tough as an old boot.

  And stubborn. Dear god, but she was stubborn. “Listen, could you keep an eye on my folks while I’m gone? You won’t have to stay here or anything,” she hurried on, “they’re fine at night and I’ve got someone to come in, daytimes. Just… watch out for them.”

  I set the sugar bowl on the tea tray. “So you’re sticking to your story. I can’t believe this. Ellie, why?”

  “You told me not to talk to you about it. That was good advice.” She lifted the top of the teapot, sniffed the contents, and set the teapot on the tray with the rest of the things.

  “Anyway, I will be going. Bob Arnold’s coming over in a little while to tell me what to expect. But he thinks it’s pretty certain I’ll be charged with murder.”

  She made it sound like a parking ticket. “So what I want to know is, can I count on you?” She lifted the tea tray.

  “Ellie, I … yes.” I faced her helplessly. “Of course. With Hedda. Keeping an eye out, and so forth.”

  She turned to me and for a moment I had the feeling she was about to ask something more. But all she said was, “Good. I knew I could. Do you think I should pack?”

  Already I felt bereft. “What? No. I’m sure they supply your clothes.”

  Prison greens, I thought, the memory of Can Man flickering and vanishing, or blues; dear god. But Ellie’s composure bolstered me, as it was meant to do.

  “You’d better bring change for the pay phone, though. Soap, shampoo. And your toothbrush. Personal items,” I added sorrowfully. “I don’t know how much they’ll let you keep.”

  A lump rose in my throat at the thought of Ellie’s dressing table upstairs, its silver-backed mirror and hairbrush, her jars of scented creams. She was clean as a cat, and as particular about her things. “Ellie, why are you—”

  Her look stopped me: clear-eyed, resolute. “I’m depending on you, Jake,” she said, and I thought she meant with Hedda.

  Which of course in a way she did. When Hedda could get around better, she got a ladder and put rat poison into the bird feeders Alvin had hung in
the yard, so pigeons wouldn’t mess up the lawn.

  When Hedda first met me she was sweet and amusing to my face, then told anyone who would listen that Sam was not really my son at all, but a teenaged lover whom I had kidnapped out of a reform school.

  When Ellie began spending time at my house, Hedda summoned me one day to inform me that Ellie was a seriously disturbed young woman who had been known to become violent without provocation.

  I thought that if I had a provocation like Hedda, I might get violent, too, possibly even enough to start murdering old ladies in their beds. And that, I supposed, would be my main challenge while Ellie was gone: not killing Hedda.

  “Anyway,” Ellie said, “Janet Fox will be coming to help out during the day. I’ve been having her in a few mornings a week, and it seems to be working all right. Mother treats her badly, but Janet doesn’t seem to mind. I suppose she got used to it with her father. I spoke with her early this morning.”

  I nearly dropped the plate of toast I was holding. Janet Fox was a terminally shy young woman with chewed fingernails, a tragic manner, and almost as much long-suffering patience as Ellie.

  She was also, as the Fortune magazine piece had reminded me, Threnody Mcllwaine’s adopted daughter.

  I stared at Ellie in disbelief. “Would you care to hazard a guess as to why the daughter of a murder victim wants to help out with the mother of his confessed killer?” I asked.

  “I’m sure I don’t know, but I didn’t feel I was in a position to quibble. Mother’s temper is pretty famous, so there weren’t a lot of candidates for the job.”

  “You could have asked me. I’d have done it.”

  A horrible thought, but still; she’d have done it for me, had our circumstances been reversed.

  Ellie managed a smile. “Thank you. But Janet gets along with my mother, and you don’t. Besides,” she added in a thoughtful tone that produced a quiver of apprehension in me, “I’ve got another chore in mind for you, Jacobia.”

  I was about to ask what, but just then Hedda’s voice rose from the parlor, accompanied by the thump of her cane. I wondered if the cane could be fitted with a hand buzzer, of the kind available from catalogs also offering whoopee cushions and exploding cigars, so that Hedda would receive a corrective little shock each time she thumped it.

  Ellie picked up the tray, then stopped me with a look as I moved past her to open the door.

  “Jacobia,” she said. “I need you to find out what happened.”

  At first I wasn’t sure I had heard her correctly. Feeling dazed, I gazed out the back windows of the kitchen at the little frame shed filled with Ellie’s gardening supplies—bags of peat moss, bark chips for edging, and sacks of lime—and at her neat rows of herbs and perennials covered for the winter with compost. In the summer, Ellie’s garden was a paradise.

  “What?” I asked, coming back to myself with an effort.

  “I need you,” she repeated patiently, “to find out. The way you’ve found out things for me, before.”

  “Ellie, I don’t understand—”

  “Tea! Tea! Tea!” A crash stopped my questions and sent us both running to the parlor, where the old woman sat smugly amidst the ruins of a lamp.

  “So, I got your attention, did I? That’ll teach you to leave your mother out of the conversation.”

  Greedily, she eyed the tea tray. “Give that here.”

  “Oh, Mother,” Ellie scolded sorrowfully, and went to get a dust pan.

  Setting that tray down and backing away from it took every ounce of self-control I had. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” I told her angrily, “the way you behave.”

  Unfazed, she lifted her cup with both half-crippled hands and slurped from it. “You girls are the ones who had better behave,” she retorted, “or I’ll shoot you with my pearl-handled revolver.”

  Ah, the famous pearl-handled revolver, yet another charming conversational gambit of Hedda’s, much threatened, never produced. “You ever pull a gun on me and I’ll brain you with it.”

  “Ellie wouldn’t let you,” she snapped back at me. “I want more toast.”

  “Do I look like I’m wearing the maid’s uniform?”

  She shot me a poisonous glare and got to her feet, then decided she didn’t need further nourishment after all and sank down again. That was the worst thing—when she wanted to, Hedda could do for herself. An ice pick or a fountain pen were too slender for her bent hands to grasp, but she had no trouble with a steering wheel, after wrapping it with layers of tape and gauze to make it thicker; driving the Whites’ Buick she was slow but no less safe than most people. She wasn’t even really old; I calculated sixty or so at the outside and probably much younger.

  Only her hair, which had whitened early—probably on account of systemic meanness—truly aged Hedda’s looks, and it was typical of her that she took endless trouble with it, keeping it rinsed to a really rather shocking shade of blue, then covering it with turbans and wigs suitable for a much older woman. An appearance of aging infirmity suited her purpose, which was to keep Ellie hopping.

  The telephone rang just as Ellie got the room set to rights. Hedda’s eyes snapped open.

  “Who’s that?” she demanded. “I want to talk. I’ve got to let someone know about the shabby way I’m being treated.”

  “Never mind, Mother, I’ll get it.” Ellie slid open one of the pocket doors between the parlor and the front room that served as her father’s office. But he had already answered.

  “Hey? Who’s there?” he shouted into the phone. “Damned fool won’t speak up.”

  In the doorway, Ellie turned. “I know what you think of me, Jacobia. It’s what this whole town thinks—that I’ve been brave and strong.”

  She glanced at Hedda. “And very foolish.”

  Hedda bridled at Ellie’s tone. “Why, what do you mean?” she demanded. But she knew, and for an instant she looked ashamed.

  “Only they’re wrong,” Ellie said, “and so are you. I’ve been a coward, and a foolish one at that. But I’m not,” she finished softly, “going to be a coward, anymore.”

  Turning, she took the telephone from her father, whose growing deafness made it a frustrating instrument. At the same time she placed her hand gently on his shoulder, and if a lifetime of devotion could be conveyed in a single gesture, that one did it.

  But it didn’t comfort Alvin, who glimpsed me through the narrowing gap of the pocket doors as Ellie closed them. I caught his look of appeal in the instant before they slid shut.

  “You’re the cause of it all,” Hedda told me sourly. “Before you came, everything was hunky-dory around here.”

  “I’m sure it was,” I said, knowing she would hate this. Hedda adored a battle.

  “You know, though,” I said, “if I were you I’d watch my step. Because,” I went on, hearing Ellie still murmuring into the phone, “you’re on thin ice.”

  She opened her mouth in outrage, ready to blast me.

  “Quiet,” I told her sharply, and she blinked in surprise. “That lamp, now, for instance. That’s a perfect example. Smashing things, violence toward caretakers.” I’d seen her swing at Ellie often enough, and suspected that sometimes she connected.

  “That’s not normal, Hedda. It’s the sort of thing health care professionals look at when they’re wondering whether a person can go on living at home, or whether they might be better off in some other setting. A more controlled,” I emphasized, “setting.”

  Her lip curled. “Ellie wouldn’t let them.” It was her mantra whenever unpleasantness threatened, and it always made me want to throttle her.

  But now was my chance to put her on notice that her reign of terror might be ending, and if it was, she had better watch out for me. “Ellie might not be able to stop it.”

  A flicker of alarm showed in Hedda’s malevolent eye. Just then the pocket door slid open again and Ellie reappeared.

  “You took long enough,” Hedda snarled, then glanced warily at me. “And I hope,”
she modulated, “it was a fine conversation.”

  Mission accomplished, I thought.

  “Not exactly,” Ellie said. “Jake, that was Mrs. Mcllwaine, and she says …”

  The tie pin; I’d forgotten it completely.

  “Bob Arnold told her you might be here,” Ellie went on, “and she’s worried about where her husband’s pin has gone. I guess,” she added uncomfortably, “she thought I’d be gone by now, too.”

  Of course the news about Ellie’s confession was already all over town. Arnold wouldn’t have talked about it, but the deputy and the state cop would, and in Eastport news travels fast. And although the weather had given us a brief reprieve, very soon now the story would be all over the country.

  “Gone where?” Hedda demanded. She was going to go ballistic when she found out. I felt torn between hoping not to be around when it happened, and wanting to be, for Ellie’s sake.

  “Who’s that?” Hedda’s look of anxiety ratcheted up to alarm as footsteps sounded on the porch, a man’s shape moved across the frosted glass of the panes at either side of the front door, and the brass knocker rattled as Bob Arnold let himself in.

  “Hello? Anybody home?”

  “Oh, the police!” Hedda struggled up theatrically. “Why is he here?”

  Ellie took three swift steps, put her hands on her mother’s shoulders, and replaced her in her chair.

  “Now, you sit there,” she said, in a low, fierce tone I had never heard from Ellie before.

  Hedda’s eyes filled with tears; her lip began trembling. It was a wonderful act, but this time Ellie was having none of it.

  “No shouting,” she instructed. “No getting up. And if you hit anything with that cane, I’ll take it away from you and burn it.”

  She turned to me, visibly composing herself. “Jake, will you please stay here with my mother for a little while? I need to talk to Arnold before the rest of them get here.”

  “The rest of who?” Hedda asked tensely, cranking up the drama—but without, I noticed, budging from her chair.

  “But… the tie pin.” All at once I badly wanted it out of my possession; it seemed such an evil little icon of everything that was happening.