Kiki Lowenstein Books 1-3 & Cara Mia Delgatto Books 1-3: The Perfect Series for Crafters, Pet Lovers, and Readers Who Like Upbeat Books!

by Joanna Campbell Slan

  We hadn’t rested in the shade for long when Mert said to Johnny, “Time for us to videotape our progress. You two ladies chug yourselves more water and rest up. We’re heading into the heat of the day.”

  Since we’d taken down all the window treatments, Trudy and I could watch the brother and sister walk from room to room, opening all the doors and drawers. Johnny videotaped the house, taking particular care to go through each room slowly, while Mert directed his movements and scribbled in a notepad, diligently referencing any item that might have value. There wasn’t much worth noting: a VCR, an old camera, a nice pair of binoculars, and a boom box.

  But Mert was upbeat when she rejoined us. “You never know what folks’ll think is important. Crazy stuff. I don’t wanna take no chances. Anything that halfway looks good, I’m locking up in the truck.”

  Trudy and I had enjoyed a thirty-minute rest while Mert and Johnny were taking their tour of the house. The break in the physical activity had done me a world of good. I felt like I could manage another couple of hours.

  “Here’s your assignments,” Mert said. “Kiki, go to the kitchen and see what you can do. Let’s have you clean out the refrigerator and cabinets. If we don’t get rid of any stored food soon, we’ll be back to square one with the bad smells. Trudy? You go upstairs. Start cleaning out the bedrooms. Johnny? I want you to tackle the garage.”

  I did as Mert asked. Marla’s kitchen trash can was only half-full. Her refrigerator held a dozen eggs, a package of lunch meat, a container of moldy cottage cheese, a half a package of Velveeta, and a stale loaf of bread. Her refrigerator freezer was packed with more plastic baggies of ground beef, but I had no desire to take any of it home with me. Instead, I dumped all of it into a black Hefty garbage bag. On my way to the Dumpster, I told Mert what I’d found.

  “More bags of ground beef. That’s about it.”

  “Thanks for letting me know.” Her gloves were off because she’d been fooling with the camera. She ran a shaking hand over her face. “I got to tell you, when we found that person in the freezer, it done freaked me out. I ain’t thinking straight. I shoulda cleaned the refrigerator out right then and there. That meat’ll smell something fierce if I don’t get that bag you’re holding out of here quick-like. I think I’ll take it home with me tonight. My garbage pickup is Friday. The rest of this mess can stay in the Dumpster, but this here’ll attract bugs.”

  “More bugs,” I corrected her gently.

  “More and more and more bugs.”

  In the pantry, I discovered cans of Campbell’s soup in two varieties: beef with vegetable and chicken vegetable. Behind the tins was a half-empty box of generic rice. How many times had I resorted to pouring hot condensed soup over cooked rice to make a meal? Too many to count. As I put the cans and the rice into a bag, I realized that Marla and I had that in common. We both knew how to stretch our food budget. After I retrieved a jar of instant tea from the back of a top shelf, the cupboard was bare.

  I opened all the other kitchen cabinets. Nothing there but Corelle dishes and glasses and cups in a pattern that suggested the set was decades old.

  Ten pet food bowls of different shapes and colors sat in the drying rack in the sink. They’d been neatly washed. An automatic pet watering system sat in the corner of the kitchen. There was still water inside. The tank bubbled noisily as I carried it to the sink.

  Five placemats decorated with “Meow!” and “This house guarded by an attack cat!” sat in a neat row in a drawer.

  Given the scant number of mats, obviously the cats were supposed to eat in shifts. I wasn’t sure how that worked, because I was fairly certain that cats would not appreciate the importance of standing in line and waiting their turns, but I could have been mistaken. Maybe Marla had them trained.

  I stepped back and lingered in the doorway to stare at the empty kitchen. What was wrong with this picture?

  I thought I knew, so I went to find Mert.

  29

  I interrupted Mert while she was in the process of folding linens and setting them into a big cardboard box. “Got a sec? I need to tell you something. Could we go outside?”

  She nodded impatiently and walked with me to the shady spot under the maple tree. Once there, she removed her hood and gloves. “Welcome to my office. Make it snappy. I got work to do. Ali Timmons stopped by again this morning to raise holy what-for. That there woman is sucking the energy right outta me. I mean, she shows up and cries and carries on and ever’thing comes to a screeching halt.”

  “Sorry about that. I’ll get here early tomorrow. I don’t have to work at the store. Took the day off.”

  Mert rubbed her eyes with a shaking hand. “It ain’t about you. I know you’re giving me whatever time you can. That Ali Timmons is dancing on my last nerve, that’s all. She can’t go more’n four hours at a stretch, calling me and talking up a storm.”

  “Why is she being such a pest?”

  Mert shook her head and stared at the house, then toward the hulking green Dumpster that was nearly full with trash. Three blue recycling bins sat with their lids half-open. We’d filled them to overflowing. “I think it’s about money.”

  “Isn’t it always?”

  “Pert near. Her hubby is outta work. Has been for some time. He’s on disability, or so she says. Her mom should be paying for this, but Mrs. Timmons will have to go through some sort of legal wrangling to make that happen. And she feels guilty. She knew her mother was hoarding animals again. Even though they weren’t speaking, a family friend had stopped by and seen all the kitties. But what could Ali do? If they’d list hoarding as a mental illness, maybe she coulda had power of attorney or something. The way it is, Ali Timmons and her mother’d go ‘round and ‘round with her mom saying there weren’t all that many cats—and the daughter tearing her hair out.”

  I sympathized. My mother lives in Arizona and I was grateful for the geographic distance between us. She and I didn’t see eye-to-eye about much. There comes a point where you quit trying to find common ground and accept that you’ll never agree. You revolve around each other like two magnets, kept at bay by a powerful force field. When you flipped those horseshoes around, an equally powerful attraction slammed the magnets together.

  I doubted that I would ever be “free” of my mother. Not until one of us was in the grave. Even then, I suspected her words would linger in my head, like a stain you can’t get out no matter how many times you bleached a garment.

  Mert gestured toward a lawn chair. Grabbing us both a bottle of water, she said, “What’s on your mind?”

  “Something’s wrong here.”

  Mert snickered so hard water squirted out of her nose. “You think? Let’s see. We got a prime lot in Ladue with a tear-down on it. Tons of junk everywhere. Piles of cat excrement everywhere. More stacks of newspaper than the St. Louis County Library has. A dead woman in the freezer. Other’n that, this is just your everyday, ordinary cleaning job.”

  “Ha, ha, ha. Stop it and listen. Have you come across any cat food cans?”

  “Nope.”

  “Or bags of food. Even any empty ones?”

  “Nope.”

  “What was Marla feeding all those cats?”

  Mert stared at me. “Who cares? That’s the point, ain’t it? She wasn’t feeding them. They was fending for themselves.”

  “Think about it, Mert. There’s not a can or a bag of chow in sight. In her notes for her scrapbook pages, she wrote that Devon was bringing her cat food. Sure, the cats were hungry and they were thin, but Marla didn’t throw anything away. If there’d been a can or bag in the last year, we would have seen it. Most of the cats weren’t that skinny. Not really. It wasn’t like you could see their ribs.”

  “Maybe she fed them that hamburger you found in the refrigerator.”

  “In an exercise for our scrapbook class, she wrote about mixing the ground beef with kibble. But where’s the kibble? Did you see any empty bags? I didn’t. Maybe she mixed the beef with the rice I
found in the pantry. But isn’t that an expensive way to feed so many cats?”

  “Beats me,” Mert said. “I cain’t afford beef more than twice a week. Who knows? Maybe it ain’t beef. Maybe it’s venison and a hunter supplies her with it. That way she don’t have to pay nothing. In fact, she’d be doing a public service. We got eighty deer per square mile in St. Louis County. That’s ridiculous. It’s four times the recommended number by wildlife specialists. Four times!”

  “Right.” I got comfortable in my chair and prepared myself for Mert’s rant. This was a soapbox she climbed on regularly.

  “Last year, a deer ran into a woman in a parking lot. I ain’t talking about the animal running into her car. He ran into her person! Knocked her six ways to Sunday. The folks in a nearby office thought there’d been an automobile accident, ‘cause the force of the impact was so hard.”

  “Uh-huh.” I didn’t need to say more, because she was off and running.

  “Last year there were 3,420 deer strikes, that’s cars hitting deer on our roads. Two people died from the collisions. And some of them so-called experts in the county think they oughta spend our hard-earned money for sterilization of them critters! Yeah, right. Drag some poor doe off into the bushes and do a major operation on her in the wild? Are they insane?”

  “Sort of,” I said. Mert was passionate about animals, but she also had tons of common sense. Too bad so many lawmakers seemed shortchanged in that department.

  “It ain’t fair to the deer! They cain’t survive in such numbers! They ain’t got nothin’ to eat, and they’re getting hurt by cars and dragging their sorry carcasses off the road to die in misery. I’d rather take a bullet to the head than to bleed to death slowly or be attacked by predators.”

  “Predators?”

  “Coyotes. Rats. Whatever.”

  Most people don’t realize it, but St. Louis has a small population of wild coyotes. Rats? Well, despite all the cats, Marla’s house was an example of a haven for the large rodents. They probably nested in the attic. Maybe they tunneled through crawl spaces. Whatever means they used to get around, they still managed to live, thrive, and multiply in Marla’s house.

  Mert was still talking. “Do you realize that one of them nearby municipalities actually tried to tag and relocate their deer population? Twenty percent of those poor critters died within a month of what they call ‘capture myopathy,’ which means they slowly wasted away until scavengers got ‘em.”

  She took a breath, but continued, “Meanwhile there’s an organization call Hunters Feeding the Hungry. They estimate that every carcass yields about forty pounds of ground venison. That’s a humane response to overpopulation, and a smart one, ‘cause hungry people can fill their bellies.”

  I wanted to change the subject. “Have you heard anything new about Marla? An update on her condition?”

  “No, and I ain’t hopeful, neither. When Ali Timmons talked to me right before you got here, she said that unless her mother makes a miraculous, saints-be-praised recovery—and I doubt that’ll happen—they’re expecting the worse. That girl seemed almost gleeful. Made my stomach turn.”

  Mine too. I couldn’t imagine Anya being eager for me to die.

  “On that cheerful note, ready to go back to work? I want this job over and the money in my pocket.” Mert tossed her empty water bottle into a low recycling bin. I did the same.

  We walked back to the house, wordlessly, lost in our thoughts about Marla Lever and her sad situation.

  30

  Around two, a silver Toyota SUV pulled up. A nicely dressed man wearing a blue sports coat and a striped silk tie hopped out of the Avalon and started toward us. As he walked, he straightened his tie self-consciously before adjusting his cuffs. There was an air of prissiness about him, a sense that he liked everything just so.

  We were finishing up our mandatory water break under the maple tree where the shade felt delicious. Dirt smudges marred our faces, and to put it kindly, we stunk to high heavens. The heat intensified the natural odor of our sweat, but that had combined with the stench of the garbage we hauled out to create a truly odiferous perfume of sorts.

  The man walked over to Mert, who had crossed the lawn to meet him halfway. He hoisted his pants in that manly (ha!) way some guys have. “I’m Devon Timmons.”

  “I’m Mert Chambers.” She extended her hand for a shake. “Your wife hired me to clean out her mother’s house. This is my crew.”

  Mert’s hand was clean. I know that because I saw her wash it. But Devon Timmons took two fingers of hers as though he were picking up a dead fish. His face broadcast his disgust. Mert’s shoulders sagged a little as she stepped away from him, accepting his distaste.

  My turn to rant: There are three kinds of male handshaking techniques. One is to squeeze your hand hard, driving your rings into your skin so that they hurt like crazy. The second is to touch you as if your flesh was packed with cooties, and that’s downright insulting. The third is the proper way, which is to grasp a hand with no more and no less pressure than one might use to pick up a glass of water.

  I knew that Mert often encountered derision because of her job. “Cleaning lady,” people would repeat with a look of superiority. They were always surprised to learn that she held a degree in history from Southern Missouri. Over the years, she has made a very good living from her cleaning business. As far as I know, she’s never been unemployed, whereas Devon Timmons didn’t have a job. At least, his wife had said he didn’t, claiming he was on disability. Maybe he was. To the casual observer (that would be me), he didn’t look like he had any physical problems, unless you count a bad attitude.

  Everything about him suggested he found Mert to be his inferior.

  If the situation had been different, even if he was the President of the United States of America, Devon Timmons should have treated Mert with respect. She deserved it. We all do.

  Johnny walked up behind his sister, in a gesture of solidarity. After years in prison, he had a way of sizing up a situation, a survival instinct. Noting the change in Mert’s posture, Johnny also changed his stance. I wouldn’t say he was threatening, a hair short of that, but he definitely gathered himself into a command posture that announced, “I don’t take any guff from anyone.”

  “Well.” Timmons looked us over, sniffed the air with a sneer of his lip, and found us wanting. “Good to have you here. Big job, huh? Nasty. I don’t envy you.”

  I bet he didn’t. I doubted that this man had worked a day of physical labor in his life.

  “How may I help you, Mr. Timmons?” Mert’s voice was cool, professional, and her enunciation clean and crisp. All her Missouri-isms disappeared.

  “You can’t help me.” The tone suggested he was fully aware of the double-meaning. “I dropped by to pick up my lawn mower and a few other tools.”

  Mert nodded. “I see. Unfortunately, I can’t allow that.”

  “Come again? What do you mean, you can’t allow that?”

  “Mrs. Timmons hired me. I am responsible to her for everything on this property. If she tells me you can take your tools, that’s fine, but otherwise, I can’t allow it.”

  “That’s…that’s…” and he cursed. “Look, I don’t have time to call Ali about every little thing I do. I’m a busy man.”

  “Busy” and “unemployed” usually don’t appear in the same sentence. Maybe he didn’t realize that.

  “I am sorry for the inconvenience.” Mert actually sounded regretful.

  “That’s the point, isn’t it? You shouldn’t cause me any inconvenience. You were hired to work for us, not cause problems.”

  Oh, doggies. The gloves had come off and the smacking around had begun.

  “I came to get my things,” Devon Timmons said, “and I plan to do exactly that. Marla told me I could have her father’s tools.”

  To punctuate his comment, he stamped his foot. It sure looks silly when a grown man does it.

  “Mr. Timmons, sir, I’d hate to have to press the point
. Honest I would. But I’ll call the authorities if you persist,” Mert said in an unnaturally calm voice.

  “You try that. You just try that.” Devon Timmons tried to push his way past Mert, but Trudy and I stepped into place right next to Johnny. The three of us made a protective wall with our bodies, effectively blocking Devon’s route up the sidewalk. We guessed, and he confirmed, that he was too much of a wuss to step into the tall grasses.

  I pulled out my cell phone and held it up to make it obvious.

  “Mert? You want me to make the call?”

  Devon Timmons cursed but took a step backwards and pointed at me. “What’s your name?”

  “Kiki Lowenstein.” I returned his stare. I was not about to back down.

  “You’re good at calling the authorities, aren’t you? You’re the busybody who called the cops originally. I recognize your name. Stuck your nose where it didn’t belong. Well, you haven’t heard the last of me.” Devon pointed a finger at me, mimicked holding a gun, and pretended to shoot me.

  “You are threatening Police Chief Robbie Holmes’ stepdaughter,” Johnny said, exaggerating my status a little since the police chief and my mother-in-law were only going steady, or whatever you call it when you’re both creeping up on sixty years of age.

  “Really? Color me scared.” Devon flipped a hand in the air.

  “Just saying.” Johnny added a shrug. “You ought to know who you’re dealing with.”

  “She’ll learn who she’s dealing with.” He pointed to me and then went down the line. “I’m not done with her or her or her or you, tough guy.”

  Devon hopped into his car and threw it in reverse with wheels spinning and tossing up grass and rocks. From my spot in the yard, I could clearly see that he’d lifted one side of his upper lip in an ugly snarl. His car was traveling backward far too fast to be safe. He was headed for Mert’s candy apple red Chevy S10. I closed my eyes in expectation of a loud crash. It never came.

  When I opened them, he was barreling down the street, going easily 30 mph over the speed limit.