Tea Cups & Tiger Claws

by Timothy Patrick

  “What’s down there, Mr. Horrick?”

  “It’s the old sewer system. That’s all it is.” He took a step toward Ernest. With his back to the wall, Ernest had no place to go, so he stepped to the right, toward the stairway, which he saw out of the corner of his eye.

  “But it ain’t a bad place to hide a body ‘cause nobody knows about it but me,” said Horrick. A little smile crept across his scarred mouth and he again moved closer. When Ernest tried to slide to the right, Horrick Jammed the metal rod into the wall and blocked his way. Ernest eyed the gargoyle with one eye and the path to the stairs with the other.

  “And that’s where I’m gonna throw your dead body if you breathe a word of what you seen down here.”

  Ernest knocked away the rod and made a dash for the stairs.

  “You remember that, boy, and keep your mouth shut, ‘cause nobody will miss you when I throw you down the sewer, not the boss lady, not nobody!”

  Chapter 13

  Sarah liked everything about Sunny Slope Manor. She liked the private ballet lessons in the ballroom from Madame Toussaint, a real live ballerina, and the private tennis and swimming lessons. She liked the way Mr. Perkins, the butler, made the dining room table look perfect, like a painting. And the way Nanny Sally, Veronica’s nanny, said funny Irish words under her breath. She liked the way Aunt Judith turned everything into a party and the way Uncle Bill said, “And how’s my little Sarah today?” And she liked the freedom. Freedom from rules, from chores, from bedtime, from sadness. Freedom from Mother.

  When Sarah had a problem or a hurt of any kind, nobody beat Mom. A single downcast gaze, and she came to the rescue. That’s what she lived for, but she lived too much for it. Instead of taking the bad with the good, like a normal person, she took the bad like a soldier in the Lord’s army and looked suspiciously at the good, certain that it had to be bad also. Aunt Judith didn’t act like that. She liked good times. And when bad times came along she just told someone to make them go away. And then she had a cocktail. Sometimes Sarah wondered why the two sisters couldn’t be just a little bit more alike and then they’d have been practically perfect. Until that happened, Sarah naturally chose the most fun possible. That meant spending as much time at the manor as she and Aunt Judith could finagle, and Aunt Judith knew all about finagling.

  Of all the nice things at Sunny Slope Manor, the thing Sarah liked most, more than the lessons or fancy dinners, even more than the horses, or the collection of stray dogs that Aunt Judith let her keep at the stable, was her cousin Veronica. With Veronica, it felt like Sarah had a real sister instead of just the picture of a dead one on the wall.

  Dead sisters have clothes hanging in closets, including red velvet dresses they got for their third birthday but never got to wear. They have toys in toy chests and pretty tricycles hanging in garages. They have bronzed baby shoes displayed in cabinets and snipped locks of silky brown hair wrapped in pink ribbon. They have bedrooms that get vacuumed and dusted and locked up tight until their sad mothers come back a week later to do it all over again. But dead sisters don’t ever play with you or tell you secrets or hold your hand. Sarah knew all about it, she had one named Katherine, and the most Sarah ever got was a place on the couch next to her mother, giant photo album draped across their laps, where she looked at pictures of Katherine and listened to stories about her sad little life. And waited for Mom to start crying. In her own small way, Sarah had experienced all the pain of losing a sister but very little of the joy of actually knowing her.

  Then came Veronica and that changed.

  Before Veronica turned two weeks old, Sarah had made herself official babysitter-in-training, even though she hadn’t yet turned five years old herself. Maybe she wouldn’t have dreamed of such a lofty position if Aunt Judith had hired someone to take care of Veronica on Nanny Sally’s days off. But she hadn’t. Instead, when that first day off rolled around, Aunt Judith called Mom and told her she had to come up to the manor that instant because Veronica wouldn’t stop crying. When Mom asked if she’d fed the baby or changed her diaper, Aunt Judith started yelling and screaming over the phone. Of course Mom went to the rescue, and so did Sarah. Then Aunt Judith talked Mom into babysitting two days a week at the manor and that’s how it all started.

  Over the weeks and months that followed, Sarah eagerly watched her mother and learned how to take care of baby Veronica. She learned how to hold her when she took the bottle, how to hold her when she got fussy, and the secret way to hold her when she wouldn’t stop crying no matter what anybody tried. She learned how to test the heated milk on her wrist, and the bath water on her elbow. She wanted to learn how to pin the diaper but Mom said she wasn’t old enough for that. She said that about a lot of things but Sarah just kept bugging her. After a while she got to do most everything while mom watched nervously.

  And in return Veronica saved her best toothless smiles for Sarah. Maybe that was because Sarah did something for Veronica that the others didn’t: she played with her like a kid. Mom and Nanny Sally knew how to bathe a baby. Sarah knew how to do it like a five year old, splashy and fun. Mom and Nanny Sally put Veronica in the playpen and surrounded her with stuffed animals. Sarah climbed right in with her and made the animals dance and sing and sometimes go crazy. It didn’t take long for Veronica to choose her favorite person in the world. And Sarah felt the same right back.

  Almost from the beginning, when Sarah could barely see over the top of Veronica’s stroller, right up to the time when they started drifting apart, the two girls had a place they liked better than any other, a secret place that belonged only to them: the playhouses at Toomington Hall. Aunt Judith had turned Toomington Hall into Sunny Slope Manor’s guest house—after the duchess died—and had connected the two properties with a long driveway, and a beautiful garden path that ran along the stream and passed right by the playhouses. At first Sarah just liked pushing the stroller down the path, with her mother by her side of course, but when Veronica got a little older they started playing there for real. Eventually the stroller stopped carrying Veronica and started carrying dolls and tea sets and picnic baskets. And dozens of other items that the girls claimed for their houses, including Rufus, Aunt Judith’s Yorkshire terrier, whenever they could get away with sneaking him out of the house. Mom even relaxed a little and let the girls play there on their own—after Aunt Judith installed telephones in the playhouses so Mom could keep tabs on things.

  The signs above the front porches got new names painted on them. One playhouse had Sarah’s name, the other had Veronica’s, and the girls took turns hosting tea parties and luncheons and all manner of pretend soirees. The third playhouse didn’t have a name but Sarah told Veronica all about the name that used to be on it. That’s how Veronica first learned about Aunt Dorthea, only she wasn’t allowed to call her that in front of her mother, or to even talk about her.

  Sarah didn’t mind the age difference between her and Veronica. She had a sister, almost, and that’s all that mattered.

  Later on, after Veronica started getting jealous of the attention that her mother paid to Sarah, and after other sad things happened, Sarah often looked back on those days at the manor and wished she could have them back. For eight years, right up to her thirteenth birthday, it had been a perfect world spinning right there in the palm of her hand and she hadn’t even known it. The manor came into her own back then because in many ways the people came into their own. Uncle Bill, who didn’t act snobby or mean, rubbed off on Aunt Judith. He made her less lofty, like a real person, and sometimes even thoughtful. For a while she became more than just a rich lady in a mansion. And, for her part, Aunt Judith, who lived like a whirlwind more than ever in those days, rubbed off on Mom, sometimes catching her up, turning her perpetual rain cloud if not into rainbows and blue skies then at least into pleasant summer showers. And Mom, the one who took less so that others might have more, the one who chose lowliness so that others might feel elevated, rubbed off on everyone, though nobody ever both
ered to notice. Including Sarah.

  In some ways it seemed that the end of those wonderful days came about slowly, over months and years, marked by the increasing severity of Veronica’s jealous moods and bad behavior. In another way it seemed like the end came suddenly, in a second, on the day Uncle Bill died of a heart attack. In reality, it was a combination of both.

  Aunt Judith liked to spoil her daughter and her daughter liked to throw temper tantrums. That’s just the way things worked. The sun shined, the grass grew, and spoiled Veronica threw tantrums. Uncle Bill pleaded with Aunt Judith about it all the time, but she just waved her hand and laughed, or blamed Nanny Sally. Nobody believed that for a second. If anything, Nanny Sally deserved a medal. With flaming red hair fallen around her blotchy face and a white hanky always at hand to dab the perspiration from her forehead, Nanny Sally chased Veronica all over kingdom come. She had the legs of an athlete to prove it. Besides, if Nanny Sally so much as slapped a wrist, Veronica went crying to Aunt Judith and Nanny Sally got in trouble. Mom helped, as best she could, by trying to talk sense with Aunt Judith and by trying to be firm with Veronica, but she was no match for them. That left Sarah. Veronica looked up to Sarah, like any little sister looks up to a big sister, and that helped a little. Sarah also knew how to reason with Veronica better than anyone, and how to distract her. And when those things didn’t work, Sarah picked up her toys and said she didn’t want to play anymore. That simple threat worked for the longest time, until Veronica started school and got a glimpse of the power of her name. When she saw how the other kids, and even the grownups, at Tisdale Academy all but bowed down to her, she didn’t see why everyone shouldn’t do the same, including Cousin Sarah. But Cousin Sarah, almost a teenager by then, didn’t feel like bowing down to anyone.

  That brought eight year old Veronica back to Uncle Bill, her father, the only person left who cared enough, and had strength enough, to pull back the reins when they needed to be pulled back. And he did too. Sarah often saw Veronica stomping around with a red face and bloodshot eyes after one of her failed tantrums. And when Sarah didn’t see the results of Uncle Bill’s firm hand, she heard them—and so did everyone else—as Veronica’s powerful lungs filled the manor with shrieks and screams that sounded like the worst kind of monkey fight. Uncle Bill stood up to Veronica while Sarah and her mom and Nanny Sally secretly cheered in the background. It did everybody good, especially Veronica, whether she knew it or not.

  If Uncle Bill had lived just a few years longer, long enough to see Veronica through the worst part of being Veronica, Sarah knew that things could’ve turned out so much better. But he didn’t. He died just before Veronica’s eleventh birthday. Aunt Judith then began a slow and steady retreat to the liquor cabinet in the first floor sitting room. This left Veronica free to run through Nanny Sally’s flimsy boundaries and, eventually, into the exciting world that lay beyond the stale air of Sunny Slope Manor and the boring ways of Prospect Park.

  Chapter 14

  One afternoon, a few months after Uncle Bill had died, Mr. Perkins, the butler, came into the sitting room while Sarah visited with her aunt. He said, “Ma’am, there’s a young man at the front gate who is looking for work.”

  “And why are you telling me this, Perkins? We don’t need anybody. Send him away.”

  “He’s a cowboy, ma’am. He works with horses.”

  Aunt Judith studied Mr. Perkins’ face, even though it rarely changed from one moment to the next. “Did you put out an advertisement without consulting me, Perkins?”

  “No, ma’am. I only mentioned something in passing to the delivery man from the feed store.”

  Aunt Judith put down her cocktail. “And what exactly did you mention?”

  “That the stable hands seem to be lost and that I’m more lost than anyone when it comes to telling them what to do. I said we need a manager down there.”

  “You did, did you?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Aunt Judith stared at Perkins, who maintained his steady, dignified gaze over the top of her head. Sarah had never seen Perkins in a standoff like this with her aunt. After a few seconds he said, “From what I understand, the young man has quite an impressive reputation.”

  “Alright Perkins, you win. I like cowboys today after all. Open the gate and let him in.”

  Sarah had always been fond of Mr. Perkins. He didn’t smile much, but he didn’t frown either. She’d never heard him tell a joke, but she’d also never heard him raise his voice, not when she and Veronica broke things, not even when Nanny Sally bickered with him all day long. He spoke calmly, walked quietly, and stayed the same—always old, with furry eyebrows, gray hair, and sagging chin, but somehow never getting any older. And he’d always been kind, inventing special drinks for the kids and slipping candy into their pockets.

  Aunt Judith ruled the roost, but Mr. Perkins ran the show at Sunny Slope Manor, including supervision of the entire household staff, both inside and out. It didn’t, however, include anything to do with the horses, until the last two months.

  The horses had been Uncle Bill’s baby, his hobby. He used to ride some, on Peruva, his beautiful Peruvian Paso mare that he rode in all the parades, but mostly he sat on the front porch of the little stable office talking with vets and trainers and friends from the hill who boarded their horses at the manor. He smoked his cigar and kept an eye on things. Now, for the last two months, the creaky rocking chair on the porch had sat empty and the place had started to slip. That’s why Aunt Judith gave in and decided she liked cowboys.

  And that’s also why Sarah most decidedly did not. She wanted to run things. After all, she’d be seventeen in a few months and nobody in the family loved horses like she did. She’d been one of those little girls who spent her allowance on saddle pads and currycombs and pretty halters well before she ever even owned a horse. That’s how much she loved them. Not like some cowboy who wore spurs and drooled tobacco juice onto the withers and mane. And she knew what to do, too. She’d been watching and helping Uncle Bill for years.

  Aunt Judith snubbed out her cigarette, drank the last of the cocktail, and went to the front door to meet the cowboy. Sarah followed right behind, ready and willing to protect her territory. She never got the chance. When she peeked over Aunt Judith’s shoulder and saw the baby face and blue eyes that stood on the front porch, she decided that there are cowboys and then there are cowboys, and this one definitely belonged in the second category, the handsome category, of the downy blond hair and honest looking face variety. And young, too, maybe only a few years older than herself. She especially liked that part, but Aunt Judith didn’t seem too excited about it.

  “How old are you?” she said, completely skipping “hello” and “nice to meet you.”

  “Twenty, ma’am.”

  “Twenty? That won’t do much for me. I’ve got two twenty-one year-olds down there now.”

  “Do they know how to shoe?”

  “No. But my farrier does and he’s been doing it since before you we’re born. You can leave your name and phone number if you like, but I don’t think I have anything for you.”

  “I’m good at doctoring too, ma’am. I know how to float teeth and fix abscesses and deliver foals.”

  “Yes, and that’s why we have a very good vet.”

  “But I can do it at midnight when the vet’s not here.”

  “Are you an arguer young man?”

  “No, not usually ma’am, but I’m the right person for the job and can’t think of a good reason not to argue about it.”

  Aunt Judith stood up straight and didn’t seem to know what to say. Sarah hid her face and tried not to laugh.

  “You can put me to a test if you like,” continued the young cowboy. “The man at the feed store said you’ve got a six year old gelding that won’t take a saddle. If you give me forty-five minutes, I’ll have a saddle on him and a rider too. And you can watch the whole thing. Do we have a deal?”

  “You’re a cocky thing aren’
t you?”

  “No, ma’am, not usually.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Mack. Mack Brimwahl.”

  “Mack?”

  “McKinley, ma’am, but I go by Mack.”

  “I see. Alright Mack Brimwahl, you’ve got forty-five minutes,” Then she looked back at Sarah and smiled. Aunt Judith liked cockiness.

  “And this is my niece,” said Aunt Judith, out of the blue, stepping aside. “Her name is Sarah.”

  “Nice to meet you,” said Mack.

  Sarah knew all the customary responses. At any other time in her life she could’ve come up with five or ten of them, could’ve said them in Spanish, French, and pig Latin, but not on this day. Her brain froze and her mouth went into lockdown. Aunt Judith stared. The cowboy smiled—nice teeth, not a hint of chewing tobacco—and then jammed a black cowboy hat onto his head and bounced down the porch steps to an old blue pickup truck that looked like it had died in the driveway. Sarah wanted to die too…but not for forty-five minutes.

  He leaned over the side of the truck bed, rummaged through a green duffel bag, and pulled out a rolled up white rope. Sarah had expected him to load up with mean looking hobbles, and tie-downs, and probably a whip too, not a flimsy rope that looked like it couldn’t hold a goat, much less a bad-mannered and unbroken horse.