The Dead Cat Bounce

by Sarah Graves

  “Huh.” She kept staring at it. “Funny. Anyway, it reminds me: Ellie gave me a message for you. She said to tell you she’s sorry about the portrait, and if you look in the attic, you’ll figure out who it is. That must be the one she meant, I guess.”

  Which was odd, Ellie’s mentioning it twice: once to Toby Alderman, and again to Clarissa. A flicker of disquiet nudged me.

  Clarissa looked at it again. “Boy, I feel like I’ve met that woman, somewhere. Or maybe my brain is playing tricks on me, I’m so tired.” She opened the door. “Message mean anything to you?”

  “No. I don’t know the half of what Ellie means, lately. But thanks for passing it along.”

  “Thanks for the coffee,” Clarissa said. “And, listen, I am sorry. I wish I could help.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “If you think of anything to do, my advice is, do it fast. Word is, they’re transferring her soon. That’s on the quiet, you understand, nothing official, but I don’t think this one is going to get to superior court.”

  She meant the Federal hammer was going to come down, and when it did, it would be all over. Ellie’s future would get sucked into a bureaucratic maelstrom of case numbers, court calendars, and big career ambitions: abandon hope, all ye et cetera.

  “Call me if you want,” Clarissa finished. “Arnold’s got my number.”

  I followed her onto the back porch, stopping as she continued down the Whites’ driveway. She reached the sidewalk, stepped into a patch of yellow under the streetlight, and stopped, turning her face up into the rain, which had resumed.

  “I must be crazy for what I’m thinking,” Clarissa said.

  45

  Back inside, the only sound was the hollow ticking of the mantel clock in the darkened dining room. Once I thought I heard something else, but when I went into the hall to listen it was just the water running in the upstairs commode, followed by the creak of Hedda’s wooden bedframe.

  The night seemed endless; it was four in the morning, but there was still plenty of dark left to get through. I went around checking window and door locks and made a last tour of the downstairs, switching off lamps and turning off the coffeemaker.

  Finally I checked on Alvin, left him in the parlor asleep with an afghan thrown over him, and climbed the stairs. Slow, even breathing from Hedda’s room said she was asleep again, too.

  Ellie’s things, neatly arranged in her room, made the place feel as if she would be back any minute: her silver dresser set with mirror, brush, and comb lined up like shining soldiers, shoes in her closet perched as if waiting on a shoe tree, a chenille bedspread smoothed over a pine single bed that I imagined she had been sleeping in since childhood.

  My own belongings lay in a heap where I had tossed them in my rush to get things under control downstairs. Fortunately, I’d brought a change of clothes; the jeans and sweater I was wearing felt as if I’d been in them for a year. I took a hot, soapy shower in Ellie’s bathroom, listening all the while for sounds from Alvin or Hedda, and put the fresh clothes on, unwilling to relax enough to get into bed. Tomorrow I would put Sam’s baby book back in the cedar chest and take the mysterious portrait back to my kitchen, exchanging these useless objects for practical items like more clean socks.

  On the bed was a balsam pillow embroidered with lupines in soft tones of lavender and blue. Lying down, I pressed my cheek against it, inhaling the sweet, woodsy fragrance of the evergreens inside and thinking that I would rest my eyes for a moment.

  Whatever Ellie had meant to do, it had all gone badly wrong. She couldn’t possibly have meant it to come to this.

  Still, it had. Maybe it was the lateness of the hour, or my fatigue, or the unpleasant strangeness of being in an unfamiliar house whose haunts, if any, were foreign to me.

  But I couldn’t help feeling that I had failed her.

  46

  When I woke, the sun was shining into my face through Ellie’s white lace curtains. The smell of coffee and the sound of the Calais radio station broadcasting the weather report rose from the kitchen, along with the clink of plates and cups.

  I got up and went to the window; the storm front had passed, taking the chilly rain and low sky with it. Across the bay, I could see the thunderheads vanishing behind the mounded hills of Nova Scotia.

  I raised the window, and let the clean breeze rush in. Even the sight of my ex-husband’s little yellow sports car parked in the street below—no doubt so that he could survey the extent of the fire, and think about how incapable I was—failed to faze me. He didn’t know where I was now, or Sam either, and with any luck he would simply go away.

  Standing there letting a wash of chilly sunshine pour over me, I looked upward to the windows of my own attic. In it I had found nothing helpful, and Clarissa’s report of Ellie’s message the night before had meant nothing to me, at the time.

  But now, with the advantage of perspective and a few hours’ sleep, not to mention the salutary effect of a rising barometer, what Clarissa had said took on new clarity.

  Wrong attic, of course.

  47

  The stairs to the Whites’ attic were in better repair than mine, but I still had to step carefully to avoid creaks. At the top, a big hook held the attic door shut; I pushed it open, slipped inside, and shut it behind me. A chain switch turned the overhead light on.

  At first glance, it seemed as if finding something up here would be easy; the attic’s contents were neatly arranged in labeled cartons. Clothes in zippered bags hung from closet rails; golf clubs, tennis rackets, a croquet set, and some old badminton equipment stood together in their own well-organized area.

  Taking care not to step on any loose floorboards, I crossed to a set of filing cabinets—tax records, bank statements, all the stuff that people tend to store up against the dreaded day when the audit notice arrives.

  Next to them lay stacks of photograph albums: more pictures of Hedda in her flaming youth, each photo captioned with a note of the date and place, many of the later ones professional shots of her, costumed and dancing onstage. Like the rest of the attic’s contents, they were well organized; someone had even taken care to arrange them in chronological order.

  From the yellowed newspaper clippings that accompanied them it appeared as if Hedda really had been on her way to a career. A break of about six months seemed to indicate a spot of trouble; no photos or clippings from this period. But then things appeared to take off again for the budding dancer: from an anonymous location in the chorus line at something called the Hawthorne Theatre, she had moved swiftly to a featured spot right up front.

  One of the captions from this period identified a Hollywood talent scout, watching from the wings. A couple of mentions in the tabloid gossip columns—Hedda linked with gentlemen whose names appeared in bold type, to denote that they were social Somebodies—wouldn’t have hurt her career, either.

  And then, suddenly, it all came crashing down. The sight of those long legs high-kicking reminded me painfully of the scars I’d seen on her ankles the night before. The mugging had ended her career with the brutality of a sledgehammer. The newspaper reports gave the details: unknown assailants, motive robbery, apparent rage of the attackers, probably because Hedda resisted.

  And something I hadn’t known: that there had been another young dancer attacked in the same incident. The other young woman had died of her injuries.

  A stray breeze rattled a window sash in the corner; getting up, I felt tired twinges in my bones, like the ache of a lingering illness. Maybe there was something else instructive in one of the cartons, or folded among the neatly stowed summer clothes, but I would have to stay up here all morning to find it.

  If it was here at all. Impatience washed over me; why couldn’t Ellie just tell me what she wanted me to know? Reaching for the light switch I took a clumsy half-step sideways and to the right, to avoid walking into the attic door which swung inward, the reverse of the way the door swung in my attic at home.

  My foot tou
ched a loose board outside the normal traffic pattern, alongside the wall. It was a short board, about a foot long, and it gave as I put my weight on it. Curiously, I lifted the board, and it came up as neatly as a puzzle piece.

  Underneath it lay a small, towel-wrapped bundle; inside the towel was a box, the size and shape of a small safety-deposit box, but without any lock.

  I carried the box to the window and opened it. Inside lay a New York birth certificate. Under that was what remained of the portrait of the woman from my kitchen, torn into small pieces—not the same photograph, but another print of it, hidden here. Finally there was another copy of the newspaper clipping detailing the attack on Hedda, and the death of her young woman companion.

  Leaving the box, I carried the birth certificate, the newspaper clipping, and the pieces of the portrait downstairs. Alvin and Hedda were still in the kitchen, having breakfast. I would confront them, I decided, and demand an explanation.

  The parlor was bright with morning sun, shining on the tops of the tables and glinting off the glass-covered photographs of a youthful Hedda decked out in glamour-girl costumes, her glorious blonde hair heaped in intricate coiffures and her face a smooth, smiling composite of youthfulness and makeup.

  If you’d known her then, you wouldn’t recognize her now, I thought. Purposefully, I made for the kitchen—maybe I couldn’t find out who was guilty of Mcllwaine’s murder, but I’d had it to the eyes with the portrait business—then stopped as a familiar voice made me want to rush back upstairs again.

  Instead, I trudged dully forward. My ex-husband sat in the Whites’ kitchen, making himself comfortable at their butcher-block counter, drinking a cup of coffee and regaling them with a story of one of his most amusing operating-room triumphs.

  “And then,” he said, his voice lingering richly, “just as I was about to incise the dura mater …”

  He stopped when he saw me, holding the registration papers for Sam’s boat-school trip in his left hand. “Well, hello there, Jacobia. How’s my charming ex-wife and mother of my son, today?”

  His voice came down hard on “my son,” and his hand closed on the papers, crumpling them.

  “You went into my house,” I said, feeling as if the blood from the operating-room story was falling over my eyes in a thick veil of fury.

  “Yes.” His voice remained cordial; dangerously so. “I rattled the doorknob, and it opened. And I’m very glad I did, because what did I find there?”

  In the corner of the kitchen, Tiffany perched unhappily on a wooden stool, looking as if she’d been sent there to be punished.

  “This,” my ex-husband said, shoving the boat-school papers at me.

  “I saw you,” he went on, jerking his head upwards, “at the window upstairs. So I knew you were here. And I think we’d better have a little talk, you and Sam and me. Right now.”

  Just outside the kitchen window, Sam sat in the right-hand front bucket seat of the yellow sports car, his shoulders slumped in an attitude of misery. “What’s he doing out there?”

  “Waiting for me to take him back to New York, where he should have been all along. I saw him downtown, picked him up.”

  “He’s agreed to go?”

  My ex-husband looked long-suffering. “Despite your influence, Sam still does what I say.”

  He got up, flashing an apologetic smile at the Whites, who were glancing at one another uncertainly, “I’m so sorry you’ve had to hear all this,” he said. “Thanks for your time and the coffee.”

  Tiffany rinsed her cup at the sink and followed after him, her glance as she passed me unreadable. “Thank you,” she murmured to the Whites.

  “Come along, Jacobia,” my ex-husband said, his voice like a whip-flick. “Let’s not inflict your problems on these people.”

  With distant satisfaction I noticed that even Hedda didn’t know what to do about a person like my ex-husband, who has a way of barging cheerfully in on you, then leaving you feeling as if you’d been sprayed with insecticide.

  With anyone else, by now she’d have been ordering him out, raving about the pearl-handled revolver. But even when I slapped the clipping, the birth certificate, and the portrait pieces down in front of them, they just kept on staring after my ex-husband, looking as if they had been nerve-poisoned.

  Which was precisely what would happen to Sam, if I let his father take him back to New York.

  “Coming, Jacobia?” my ex-husband called with heavy patience.

  I turned and followed him.

  48

  My ex-husband’s name, appropriately, is Victor.

  “I’ll wait outside with Sam,” Tiffany said, “while you two talk.”

  “No,” Victor said irritably, “you come, too. I want you to understand what I go through.”

  Understanding what he went through was, by this time, the last thing on Tiffany’s wish list. Still, she squared her shoulders and followed him in, while Sam—who knew a hornet’s nest when he saw one—stayed in his father’s car.

  With Victor in it, the kitchen of my old house seemed to shrink back into its former cold, unlived-in incarnation—its scuffed wooden floor, chipped woodwork, and curtainless windows projecting a shabby, unfriendly version of its usual spare beauty.

  The smoke smell and soot marks didn’t help any, either, nor did the water stains streaking the wallpaper. Victor glanced around with obvious disapproval, tossing the boat-school papers onto the kitchen table with a little moue of distaste for the hominess of the checked oilcloth.

  “I told you I didn’t want him pursuing that nonsense,” he said. “He could be using the time to study.”

  “Victor, he wants to go, and I don’t see what harm—”

  “That’s just the point. You don’t see. I do.”

  He marched around the kitchen importantly. “That’s why I’m taking him back to New York, where he can get the guidance he obviously isn’t getting here. With any luck, he can make up the time he’s lost and still get into a decent college.”

  “Have you forgotten I have custody?” Which, I wanted to say, you happily gave up when Sam’s problems got to be too much for you, but there was no point in antagonizing him further.

  “That can change, Jacobia. And it will, if Sam says he wants it to.”

  He went to the window, glanced out, and turned with a wince of dislike from the quiet serenity of the view: tall green-black fir trees, white clapboard houses, puffs of woodsmoke curling from the red brick chimneys.

  “Jacobia, can’t you see what a dead end this place is? Sam needs somebody to set goals and limits for him, and you’re just too deep in your small-town fantasy escape to understand that, but he does. I know if I ask him about it, he’ll agree.”

  Because he’ll do anything, say anything, to please you, I thought. It was a mental state I remembered sadly.

  “He needs,” said Victor, “some structure in his life, some discipline. Somebody to make him perform to his capabilities …”

  While he talked, Tiffany looked through some of Sam’s school papers, which he had left on the kitchen table for me to see. She paused over one, tipped her smooth, blonde head with a sharp look of enlightenment, and turned to the next.

  “As you can see,” Victor told her, “my son hasn’t been encouraged in any intellectual pursuits whatsoever. His mother is content to let him coast on mediocrity, or worse.”

  He turned to me. “But when you’re a parent,” he lectured me virtuously, “you can’t do things the easy way. You have to do what is best for the child.”

  I felt myself drifting into that dreamy, anything-is-possible condition, the one in which you smile and nod and meanwhile your hand, quietly and on its own account, balls itself up into a fist, getting ready to cold-cock somebody.

  Tiffany glanced from the papers with a grimace of annoyance, like someone who has gotten tired of the buzzing of a mosquito. “Has he been tested for dyslexia?”

  “Yes,” I said. “In New York, when Victor had him.”

&nb
sp; Victor stopped talking and frowned; he was not used to being interrupted. A flicker of something else seemed to cross his face, too.

  “Yes, of course,” he began, “I sent him to—”

  “No,” said Sam, who had come in unnoticed behind us. “What’s dyslexia?”

  A sudden, interesting quiet settled over the room. I looked at Victor, whose face now wore a cornered expression.

  And then I knew he hadn’t just lied about other women. He had lied about Sam, as well.

  “You told me,” I said, “that you’d had him tested. A whole battery of diagnostic testing, you said: physical, mental, and emotional, all the possible things. At the university school.”

  “Because,” Tiffany said gently, “I’m no expert, of course. But I’ve worked with an awful lot of dyslexic kids Sam’s age, and the thing is, quite a lot of them write this way.”

  She held up one of the papers, speaking directly to Sam, now, not to his parents. Sam moved beside her, peering with interest at something she was pointing out to him. Together, they looked like brother and sister; I lowered my mental estimate of her age.

  Victor noticed this, too. “Oh, great,” he said, “now my son’s getting learning advice from a member of the kindergarten set.”

  “If you wouldn’t keep choosing your girlfriends from the kindergarten set, maybe you wouldn’t have that problem,” I said nastily. “The point is, you told me you’d had him tested.”

  He folded his arms. “There’s nothing wrong with him. He needs to apply himself, that’s all. I’m taking him with me.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with having dyslexia,” Tiffany began.

  “Shut up,” Sam said quietly. “Please,” he added, with an apologetic glance at her, and she nodded minutely back at him. In that moment, I wished they really were brother and sister.

  Sam looked over at his father. “We could,” he said, “have found out about this. What to do about it.”