He trots purposefully down the street, using the sidewalk, which is convenient for me. He trots several blocks, in the direction of Hugh’s house, actually. Suddenly, he cuts left into a yard. I follow but see his white butt disappearing over a tall fence I could never scale. Damn! I’ve lost him. I dash to the fence, which is smooth wood, and boost myself with trembling arms just so I can see over. Again, I see that familiar white butt, tail aloft. He has jumped over the fence leading into the front yard as well.
I let myself down and dash back to Delaware Street, running hard now and not caring how much noise I make. I make a left and tear down the side street to the street parallel to Delaware, Hearst Street, hang a left and thud up the sidewalk to the third house up from the corner—at least I had the good sense to count—and stop suddenly. Jen’s house, and Oglethorpe scampering up the porch steps.
I drop behind a tree. I hear Oglethorpe meow. He paces the porch prettily, tail high. The door cracks open. Jen, speaking in a high, cutesy voice. “Hi, Oglethorpe. Look what I have for you! First, your treat. Yum! Your favorite! Now here’s this. You take this back to your mommy. Okay? That’s a good boy.”
And here comes Oglethorpe trotting down the steps, with what looks like a square of paper in his mouth. I retreat up the street and hide behind a tree. I see him go to the neighbor’s, bounty still between his teeth, and scale the tall fence.
I walk home, thinking. What was Jen up to?
The streetlights make the halo of shattered glass around George’s MINI Cooper sparkle. I shake my head and enter my house. I walk upstairs. Oglethorpe is grooming himself on my bed. The square of paper is on the floor. I pick it up. An instruction manual for a Sig Sauer P226 pistol. I leaf through it. I find it’s a 9mm. I sink down on the bed, next to Oglethorpe. It’s only then that I realize that the lens of the new camera Jen has installed is not faced outward, where Oglethorpe hops through the window, but right at me.
* * *
—
It takes me about forty-five minutes to work it out that night, sitting on the bed. I get on the web, too, and find a manual for the camera. I find a diagram of parts, which shows me that the button I had been pushing to “turn off the camera” when I had, ahem, nighttime visitors, did nothing of the sort. It was a “quick-zoom” function. Thanks, Jen. While I thought I was ensuring my privacy, in fact I was giving Jen, monitoring the feed the next day, a close-up.
And monitoring brought up another point. Luddite that I am, I am able to figure out that this camera has remote-control capabilities. Jen could spy on me at will.
And she had, that night I told Hugh what a bitch she was. I didn’t think she was a bitch, or hadn’t! It was just a way to tell Hugh to shut up! Could Jen be that obsessive and hateful to commit murder just to set me up? For one remark?
I remember now Jen’s sensitiveness, the way you have to kind of flatter and nurture her while she can be abrasive and get away with it. I remember when we’d taken a magazine test about narcissism, and how Jen got the blue ribbon. We had laughed together. We had laughed.
At first Detective Lanke doesn’t believe it, until he gets a search warrant for Jen’s house. It’s all still on her computer, all the unedited feeds and a lot more. The kind of ravings of someone who sits at home and stews over perceived slights. They also find a Sig Sauer P226.
* * *
—
It turns out Steve is pretty good at technical stuff. Oglethorpe’s fans were getting rabid over the fact that there had been no reports on his nightly doings for almost a month. Steve installs a camera that even I can turn off, and catches Oglethorpe’s fans up on the exciting news, which serves to increase his Likes and FB friends a thousandfold.
Oglethorpe still goes out nightly and brings back…stuff. The latest is George Dodd’s insurance bill. Poor George. I return it to him with apologies.
Steve is more or less a permanent resident, and so is Antigone. Oglethorpe has taken to sparring with Antigone, bapping her with fast paws—a right, a left, a hook. Antigone can move like Floyd Mayweather though. Just a little head wiggle and the paw sails by with millimeters to spare.
We catch that on camera, too. The Dutch love it.
The Last Game
ROBERT DUGONI
Eric Applebaum awoke with a start and quickly looked about. Disoriented and confused, he felt a tight pressure low across his lap. A hand touched his shoulder. Applebaum startled a second time. The woman stood with a sympathetic smile on her pleasant face. She wore a plain blue dress—perhaps a uniform of some type, from the looks of it.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.” She bent down and Applebaum considered her warm and inviting expression. Did he know her? “I saw you wake,” she said. “I just wanted to tell you there’s nothing to worry about. Everything is fine.”
He sat in what looked to be the aisle seat of an airplane, a pillow behind his head. It was late at night, judging from the darkness of the cabin interior. Applebaum’s seat was illuminated in a white circle of light, the only light in the entire plane. He gave the woman an understanding nod, though he understood nothing. He was more embarrassed than startled, but he never liked admitting the problem with his memory. Made him out to be a doddering old fool. It wasn’t that he couldn’t recall having fallen asleep; he couldn’t recall getting on the airplane, and he had no idea where he was going.
“Can I get you anything?” the woman asked. “Another pillow or a blanket?”
It took Applebaum a moment to find his voice. “No, thank you,” he said. “No, I’m fine.”
The woman gave his shoulder another gentle squeeze, stood, and started up the aisle. Applebaum thought of a way to ask without looking like one of those old men who’d completely lost his mind. “Excuse me, miss.”
The woman returned. “You have a question?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m sorry, but how long before we arrive…” He let the end of the sentence trail off, giving her space to fill in the blank. It was an old salesman’s trick. When in doubt, let the customer finish the sentence.
“It won’t be long now.” The woman smiled. “We’ll be there soon.”
He watched her walk up the aisle, until the cabin’s darkness enveloped her. Then he quickly patted the breast pockets of his jacket, where he usually kept his boarding pass, but didn’t hear the crinkle of paper in either pocket. He reached inside and confirmed his pass was not there. He looked to the seat in front of him, but didn’t see that he’d slid the boarding pass into the seat pocket either.
Applebaum sighed and wondered if he’d left his pass in the terminal, though he didn’t recall being in a terminal. No, that couldn’t be right. How could he have gotten on the plane without a pass?
He didn’t want to admit it, but at seventy-seven, he was more prone to having these spells of confusion—not that his mind wasn’t sound. He took great care of his mind. Always had. He finished the New York Times crossword puzzle each day, including Sundays, which were the most difficult. Weekdays took him about forty-five minutes, sometimes an hour. Sundays were more challenging, and usually took an hour and a half, but he finished them. Sandy, his wife, used to say he was OCD about finishing, but he didn’t see it that way, not at all. It was just the way he’d been raised. His father taught him to finish what he started. That included things like the New York Times crossword and food on his plate. “Waste not, want not,” his parents always used to say. They had both been children of the Depression who knew what real hunger felt like. Applebaum had taught his children the same way. It wasn’t OCD, not at all. It was personal responsibility.
“If you start a project, you finish it,” he’d told his kids, and they’d turned out okay, hadn’t they?
Sadly, however, it appeared that completing the daily crossword puzzle wasn’t going to stave off his bouts of confusion—not if the current circumstances were any
indication. He’d forget things like turning on the stove and people’s names…people he knew—sometimes even his own children, and of course the grandchildren.
“Sandy,” he whispered, so as not to look like he was talking to himself. “Sandy was my wife’s name. Thank you very much. And I have three children. Eric Junior, Rose Marie, and Denny. And eight grandchildren…Nine.” Rose Marie had just had another child. Had it been six months? He tried to recall his grandchildren’s names, but couldn’t at the moment—but that was to be expected, wasn’t it? Nine names?
He focused instead on a more pressing concern—where the heck was he going?
He’d spent a large portion of his life on airplanes. He’d been a salesman and traveling had been part of his job—up and down the West Coast every week, and occasionally to Arizona. He’d had to travel if he wanted to keep his job and support his family. Sandy and the kids wanted to live in Seattle. The company agreed to keep him on because he was their top salesman, had been for each of his forty years with the company. So he could live where he wanted, but that meant traveling a lot.
After he’d retired, he didn’t like to travel. And who could blame him? The novelty wears off quickly when you’ve traveled more than 300,000 miles every year for work, even if you could fly first class, though he hadn’t. Didn’t see the point of that, using up all those miles he’d accumulated just to go down to San Francisco, or Los Angeles, or to Phoenix. Those were miles he was saving for his retirement. So he could take Sandy to all those places she wanted to go, though it didn’t turn out that way.
Sandy had wanted him to retire five years earlier, when he’d turned sixty-eight. He’d told her he wasn’t ready to retire then, wasn’t ready to be “old.” Old people retired. Then they spent their waning years in white sneakers, standing on the decks of cruise ships with other old people. He was certainly more productive than that. He had a good mind, and his body was in good shape. So he’d told her he wanted five more years. He promised her. He told her that in five more years his pension would be almost $300 more a month. They’d have more money to travel—not like kings, certainly, but with all the frequent flier miles he’d accumulated, not like paupers either. They could see everything she wanted to see.
But it wasn’t meant to be.
Sandy got pancreatic cancer a year before he was set to retire. The doctors gave her a year. She lasted just six months, and spent most of that time too frail to travel. After he’d lost her, he’d decided to clean out the cabinets, and found the travel brochures she’d been accumulating. He spread them out from one end of the dining room table to the other. She had a brochure for a trip to the Mediterranean with stops in Greece, Italy, and Turkey. He found another for India to see the Taj Mahal, and another for a safari in Africa, a fourth for a trip to China to walk the Great Wall. She’d kept brochures for cruises, too. And she’d waited patiently for Applebaum to retire, never complaining, never pushing him. Never happened.
Applebaum sighed.
He’d disappointed her. And he’d disappointed his children. Rose Marie had never forgiven him for not taking Sandy on the trips she deserved. She’d said that her mother had been a fool to wait for him, that she should have traveled without him. Then she’d stormed out of the house. That had been how long ago? Applebaum couldn’t recall. They’d never reconciled, he and Rose Marie. They were both too stubborn. Besides, it was too late to apologize to Sandy. That was the worst part. He’d let her down.
After Sandy’s funeral, Applebaum didn’t feel like traveling anymore. He’d traveled enough. But now here he was, traveling somewhere. But where? And why?
He sat back, trying to deduce from clues around him where he might be going, seeing his predicament as not unlike a crossword puzzle. There were tricks to solving crosswords. Get one clue right and it makes the next question a little easier. After a few more clues, the letters begin to fill themselves in, and soon the letters become words. So, what were his clues?
He considered his clothes. He was wearing his best suit, navy blue with subtle white pinstripes. And he was wearing his best tie, the one Sandy had bought for him at Macy’s. No problem with the long-term memory. The tie was gold with a blue diamond pattern that matched his suit perfectly, but the price had been more than he’d wanted to spend. Sandy kept saying, “Just buy it, Eric. You can’t take it with you.”
But Applebaum hadn’t been raised that way. You didn’t just spend money on something because you wanted it. He’d told her if that type of reasoning made any sense, then he might as well buy a forty-foot yacht and cruise the Mediterranean—not that he could have afforded such a luxury. He had responsibilities—to Sandy and to his kids. It was his job to provide them a home and educations. He couldn’t just spend money willy-nilly. So he’d put the tie down and walked out of the store.
Sandy, however, had other ideas. She’d gone back and bought the tie and gave it to him as a Christmas present. Well, he had to take it then, didn’t he? He didn’t want to look like one of those ingrates.
He wore the tie on special occasions, and even then he took great care not to spill on it. He’d worn it to each of his three children’s weddings, and to his fortieth wedding anniversary, and to the funerals of friends—and to Sandy’s funeral, of course. He had to wear it then, didn’t he? After all, she’d bought it for him. He’d told Sandy that, when the day came, he wanted to be buried in his blue suit and gold tie, so he could be presentable when he faced his maker. But she’d gone before him and now that responsibility fell to his children, to Eric Junior, his oldest.
And that’s when Applebaum had filled in enough clues in the crossword puzzle for his brain to remember the purpose for his trip. A funeral. That was it, wasn’t it? Has to be, he decided. He smiled as if he’d just finished the final clue to the Sunday New York Times crossword. All it took was a few clues.
He was flying back to San Francisco for the funeral of his grammar school baseball coach. What was his name again? Chuck. Yes, Chuck McGuigan. Yes, that was it. The first adult he’d ever called by his first name. His parents didn’t like it. They’d taught him to use Mr. and Mrs., but Chuck had been different. “You can call me Chuck, coach, or skipper,” he’d said, gathering the team for that first practice. “Mr. McGuigan is my father.”
But now Chuck had died, and that was the reason for the suit and tie and the reason for being on the plane, the reason for going home. Applebaum wanted to look his best, to pay his respects.
The plane jolted again, enough to shake him from his reverie. He looked around and noticed the light across the aisle shining down on the cherubic face of a young boy, staring up at him. Applebaum didn’t recall the light being on before…but he couldn’t be sure. Not with him forgetting things.
If the boy was embarrassed to have been caught staring, he didn’t show it. His parents had probably never taught him that it was impolite to stare at others. He just sat there with a vague expression on that innocent face, as if he and Applebaum knew each other. Applebaum might have just ignored the boy but, well, they’d made eye contact, hadn’t they? He had no choice but to say something at that point, didn’t he? It would be rude not to.
So he nodded and said, “Hello.”
The boy gave a half-hearted grin.
“Are your parents sleeping?” Applebaum said. The two seats beside the young boy were pitch black.
The boy squinted in thought. Then he slowly shrugged.
“You don’t know?”
Another shrug.
Seems perplexing, to say the least, Applebaum thought. “Are you traveling alone?”
This time the boy nodded.
“By yourself?” Applebaum asked, his voice rising in surprise. Good Lord. “How old are you?”
The boy held up the four fingers of his right hand.
“Four?” Applebaum said, now dismayed. “And you’re flying alone?”
Another nod.
Applebaum looked up and down the aisle, but he no longer saw the flight attendant. He assumed she was in the darkened front of the plane. This was outrageous—a child of four flying alone? What kind of parents allowed such a thing?
“Are you scared?” Applebaum asked.
The child shook his head.
“No?” Remarkable, Applebaum thought. But then again, the child was probably used to flying alone. His parents were likely divorced and living in different states. They shuttled the poor kid back and forth probably to comply with some court order.
“Are you meeting someone when we land?”
This time the child nodded.
“Well, that’s at least something,” Applebaum said. “Is it a parent? Are you meeting a parent?”
The boy smiled.
“A father?”
The boy nodded and smiled.
Applebaum was appalled—parents shipping kids back and forth like they were cargo. This seemed a bit extreme, though: a child barely old enough to talk, and who maybe didn’t at all from the gist of their conversation so far. What would happen if the father was delayed and couldn’t make it to the gate? Surely they wouldn’t leave the child alone there, would they?
And that sparked another memory and completed another clue in the crossword puzzle. Applebaum hadn’t thought of the incident in years. He’d been left alone once—at the baseball field. His mother had simply forgotten him. Everyone else had gone home. He’d been offered rides, but Applebaum had assured everyone that his mother was coming for him. She had always come for him.
Odd Partners Page 17
