A Curious Affair (17 page)

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Jillian.”

“Good night.” I didn’t look up and didn’t wave as he pulled away.

I waited until the sound of his Jeep had faded and then went in through the garage, since I had forgotten to leave the porch light on. Cal’s possessions piled in the corner by the paint locker looked dispossessed and forlorn. I looked at the dusty mound of plaques and honors that I had taken off the walls earlier that week: Rotary, Kiwanis, Elks, Lions, Chamber of Commerce—and city council. If it was civic and you could join, Cal had. Me? I wasn’t so gregarious. I maybe managed to send out Christmas cards in years ending in even numbers. Maybe that was, in part, why these tokens of Cal’s life had bothered me enough to take them down. It was yet another reminder that without him I was isolated, not only by chance but by my nature.

I have to admit that my evening with Tyler had made me feel and want things that weren’t purely emotional and that guilt couldn’t entirely quell. I went upstairs, shut myself in the bathroom, and stood in the hot
shower, soaping myself both slowly and then quickly. But I wasn’t able to touch myself the way I needed. My hands did not worship. There were no eyes to gaze into, telling that I was lusted after if not adored. My release was enjoyable, but it wasn’t enough. Not anymore. My body was ready to be alive again even if my heart was not. And it wanted Tyler’s touch.

Bed was warm but I didn’t sleep at once. The possibility of Tyler in my life in some meaningful way needed some dwelling on. Why was he attracted to me? I would like to think that to know me was to love me, but there are limits to my self-deception. I’m liked well enough but rarely loved at first sight. And even less rarely lusted after. I’m too quiet and reserved. That’s why Tyler’s instant attraction confused me. Some men lust with little provocation, but Tyler didn’t seem one of them. Yes, I’m cute, but no Helen of Troy—not even in my gold dress. Hell’s bells, I thought, I was even too long in the tooth to make a decent Nancy Drew, if my amateur crime-solving was what appealed to him. And let’s not forget that I was weird, too—
wyrd
weird. Though he didn’t know that for sure yet, there had to be inklings.

Still, Cal had liked me at once. And he was a good judge of character and female attractiveness. That Tyler perhaps saw the same things in me that Cal had was a good thing, wasn’t it? It might mean there was some hope of a future, if I could ever find the courage to reach for it.

Finally tired of wrestling with unanswerable questions, I rolled over and sought some respite for the body, if not for the mind, which was bound to nibble at this conundrum even while I slept. That’s what happens to a closet sensualist who has been on an emotionally anorexic diet. I knew the urge to binge on new feeling would be very appealing to my subconscious. That was okay in moderation and in the privacy of my bedroom.
I had to watch myself, though. I was in danger of acting like a complete ditz during my waking hours.

I closed my eyes. Then I opened my eyes. Then I rolled over. And over.

Pow. Pow
. I slugged the bolster. If pillows could talk, mine would complain about the tears and bad dreams that had spilled into it these last months. Of course pillows didn’t talk—at least not yet, thank God. Nevertheless, investing in new bedding seemed like a good idea. Obviously I needed something better than this lumpy old pillow.

Eventually I slept, and I dreamed uneasily that night, but no bitter and dank nightmare came up from the basement of my mind to chastise me. Cal did not appear. Perhaps because Atherton was with me and chased away the incubus who might have come to suck out my peace of mind while I was undefended.

I will never again underestimate the comfort of a warm body, however small. I do recall waking once and feeling Atherton walking the length of my torso, planting his feet carefully as he came. Concern radiated from every hair and whisker. It seemed that my dreams had disturbed him.

Jillian?

“It’s okay. Just a bad dream.”

Hm…I think I would rather be treed by hounds than have your dreams
, the cat grumbled, trying to punch down my lumpy pillow and having as little success as I.

For some reason that cracked me up. Satisfied that I was no longer unhappy, Atherton curled up beside me, pressing his warm body into my jaw, and we both went back to sleep. I was glad to know that I had a guardian watching over my dreams, and no demons disturbed me that night.

I cracked an eye at the clock. It said that it was seven, but the room was still dark. Then I recalled the weather report from three days earlier. Dawn was at hand but probably being held under duress by a swift-moving storm that could dump another half foot of snow in the high Sierras and another one or two inches of rain on us in the lower elevations. I dreaded feeling the falling barometer in my jaw, but did not let the coming event depress me into total inaction as it would have in weeks past. I was used to being drenched and I had things to do, I told myself. Like, get ready for Tyler to pick up Sleepy. That involved washing my hair and putting on a bit of makeup, a spritz of scent and my new red sweater.

I came out of the bathroom half an hour later and found the sun shining through a crack in the blinds. I went to them quickly and peeked out. The weather boffins had gotten it wrong. We were going to have a nice day after all. I could feel my mood begin to climb along with the barometer. I began to hum “Golden Slippers.”

Atherton and I had boiled eggs for breakfast. Mine came with a side of mandarin oranges and his one of wheatgrass, which he sampled along with some chives out of my window-box herb garden. Or herb
jungle
. The plants had gotten overgrown, being one of the few things that thrived during my time of neglect.

I dumped the dishes in the sink—Atherton didn’t care if I did the dishes immediately, which made him an ideal roommate—and then went to open the drapes. It was only then that I looked out the living room window and saw the full glory of the day that had been given to us in spite of the weatherman’s predictions.

“Wow.” I blinked two or three times. The horizon was full of pink, green, blue and yellow balloons. Easter balloons. Some had bunny ears and some were striped like Easter eggs, but all were the pearly color of the tiles in my Grandma Hinde’s bathroom. The spheres bobbed along at about the height of my deck, and children gathered in the open parking lot of the bank to watch. I could hear laughter, and I smiled as I touched the glass. The window, thin as it was, was still a barrier between the day and me, and I wanted it gone. I felt—almost—like I could actually fly, myself.

Of course, my senses had been so dulled by winter and by the constant worry that perpetual insecurity brings that I found these bright colors to be almost painful after the season of shadows. They were from my world at the time before I had known loss. But in an odd way, the pain in my eyes felt a bit like the return of faith, and perhaps even like serenity.

Balloons. That meant March was gone and it was April now; Good Friday, in fact. To underline this point, one church bell and then another began to toll, calling the faithful to worship.

On Good Friday many people go to church to recall that Christ died for our sins so that we might have
eternal life. Everyone else in town goes to Hilderbrandt’s Hardware for free helium balloons to recall…well, I’m not sure what. Maybe that Christ rose? Or that we should be high on life because it was spring? In any event, it was tradition and made the town festive.

“If this is Good Friday, then Easter is Sunday,” I said to Atherton, who had hopped up onto the sill and was watching the balloons intently. “Maybe I should ask Tyler over. I could cook a ham or lamb….”

I trailed off as I thought about the last Easter dinner I had cooked—four years ago. The meal had been cataclysmic. Too distracted by Cal—he was having a bad day and resisting taking the morphine, which made him sleepy and stupid—I had burned everything and set off the smoke alarm. The baking dish with the
au gratin
potatoes had gone straight into the trash. I’m not sure what happened to the supposedly tempered glass that could withstand anything an oven could throw at it, but it had turned a bright topaz yellow. Cal had actually laughed as I stood there sniffling over my blackened meal and said he was really more in the mood for ice cream anyway. Toward the end, ice cream was about all he could keep down, but in those early days it had seemed amusing.

My unhappy memory was interrupted when I saw Nolan across the street wearing a pink-and-white-checked sports coat. Of course the mayor would be there with the crowds, pressing the flesh.

You don’t like that man
.

“No, I don’t.”

I noticed with a certain amount of satisfaction that Nolan was not aging gracefully. There was a certain unhealthy pallor to his skin that apparently no one else could see. His face was lineless and tanned, thanks to a plastic surgeon in Sacramento and weekly trips to the tanning salon, and that was enough to fool others into thinking he was healthy. I felt my mouth begin to turn
down at the sight of his familiar swagger. But then I deliberately looked away and concentrated on one of the few sights that always made me smile.

Irish Camp has its share of Victorian-era architectural jewels bordering our main street. Extravagance was the order of the day for those who struck it rich in the gold rush and wanted to show off to their neighbors. Most of the houses have managed to stay on the side of good taste, but there was one place—The Stenholms’s—that had thrown all taste and caution to the wind and embraced some form of Italian
loco Rocco
. The house was a wedding cake in white and pink, designed by a mad Bavarian pastry chef who married a lucky gold miner. It had cherubs and swags and cornucopias of gilded fruit and flowers dripping off of every eave, wall, lintel and turret. It had Tiffany glass windows and a marble entryway, and a gilded doorway that I think of as hysterics in stone. It was an abortion of bad taste and I loved it. Today they had an arbor of pink and lavender balloons arching over the garden gate. I didn’t know the owners well, but they had a cat called Revlon because of her exotic though natural eyeliner that would have done Cleopatra proud.

Thinking of Revlon reminded me that I needed to talk to Sleepy and clarify his new assignment to him. I didn’t think he’d protest too much once I explained that he would be at the police station, where he could watch the inn where Wilkes was staying. I had already run this plan by Atherton, who agreed that it was a good idea. The cats were getting restless.

They had been watching Wilkes all along, of course, and I think Wilkes was enough of an animal to sense it, though he couldn’t have guessed why. He knew that someone was watching; of that I was sure, because he came and went from the hotel only at night, spending his daylight hours holed up inside, or sunning himself
briefly on the rooftop garden. What he did at night, I hadn’t yet discovered. He hadn’t been back to Irv’s cabin, though, not since the meth dealer was arrested. There was always at least one feline sentry in place after the sun went down and they never reported seeing him.

The cats were getting frustrated with waiting for something to happen and so was I. I reminded myself that the mill of the gods—and police work—might grind infinitely slowly, but they ground infinitely fine. We needed to be patient while they progressed, even if I hated—
hated
—waiting.

As though hearing my impatient thoughts, Tyler called and asked if he could get Sleepy that afternoon instead of as previously planned. And could he have another cat as well? The staff had taken a vote and thought maybe Sleepy would be lonely on his own. Boy! They really didn’t understand cats. But I said, yes, of course he could have two. Sleepy had a great friend called Hula Girl who liked to bathe him and generally boss him around.

“Hula Girl?” he asked.

“Wait ’til you see her walk.”

What I didn’t tell Tyler was that Hula had an operatic voice that would fill a large space in very short order. It had tremendous range as well, growling at a basso profundo but caterwauling beyond the reach of the highest soprano. Nor did her oddities end there. Hula Girl looked like two different animals sewn together at the waist. The front half was mostly white and short-haired. The back half was long and mainly straw-colored, but also, stuffed in at random around her belly, there were tufts of every color of fur allowed in the feline kingdom. Her wiggling gait made the hip end shimmy like a belly dancer. Marilyn Monroe hadn’t used that much hip action in
Some Like It Hot
.

Hula’s feminine traits ended there, though. She
gulped her food with the gusto of a full-grown wolverine, and would probably love donuts. She would do fine in an all-male sheriff’s office.

I asked Tyler if everything was okay, hoping he had some hot lead about Irv’s death that required immediate follow-up I could perhaps help with, but it wasn’t anything so exciting keeping him away. He was needed to assist crowd control downtown, since the high school marching band had decided to give an impromptu concert in “the park.” I knew what he meant. “Park” is a sort of euphemism for a bit of space that has never been developed because of what I can only call bad karma. We have a hangman’s tree in town where rough justice was meted out on three occasions: the first in the autumn of 1850, and then twice more in the spring of ’51. The men hanged were triple-dyed villains, murderers many times over, and deserved what they got after a fair if speedy trial of their peers, though technically no judge or formal jury was part of the prosecution. No one is truly ashamed of this historic happening. Things were different then. Justice was rougher because life was rougher.

Perhaps what bothered us was that the men were buried, uncoffined, outside the old cemetery, but no one in town knew exactly where. No markers were set up for any kin who might be grieving. No one wanted, or would allow, those men to be in any way commemorated. These days, informed opinion is that the bodies had become one with the wild blackberry patch that has grown to the size of a tennis court, and that they have more than one cedar tree mounting their bones as the roots feed on them—which is probably the most useful thing they have ever done.

But then again, maybe it wasn’t. And shouldn’t we at least remember their names? These men had been some mothers’ sons, maybe others’ fathers. Wouldn’t their families have wanted to know their fate?

Anyhow, the upshot of this old tragedy is, though we are big on historic markers and commemorate every place that Mark Twain ever slept or ate or shat, there is no plaque marking the spot of these executions, and it isn’t mentioned in any of the tour guides handed out at the Visitors Center. Herman’s Ground isn’t an eerie spot, and no one has ever seen a ghost there, but I still feel strange when I pass by it. Most of the locals avoid it too. The picnickers one sees on the sparse lawn beneath the widespread branches of the ancient oak are all tourists or defiant high schoolers bucking town tradition.

There was some talk of cutting the tree down back when Cal was on the city council, now that I think of it, but nothing came of that. The consensus was that the tree had already been injured by the hard use it was put to, and that it should be compensated, not punished further. So, money was allocated for yearly spraying and pruning, though the land wasn’t zoned as a park. I’m glad they didn’t kill the old oak. Nevertheless, I don’t walk by Herman’s Ground unless I have to, because it makes me sad.

Tyler could have sent one of the deputies to handle crowd control, but he wouldn’t. I was coming to know him and believed that he had a great sense of fairness and accountability. He was not above dealing with small annoyances himself, and thereby setting a good example for his staff.

Before I could chicken out, I asked Tyler if he would like to come to Easter dinner. I know I surprised him after my deaf and dumb per for mance the night before, but he said yes immediately, as though sensing I was on the verge of taking the offer back. A little stunned at my temerity, I said I’d see him around two and hung up the phone.

“Well,” I said to Atherton. “It looks like I’m making Easter dinner.”

This is good?

“Um…” I looked over at my stove and glared at it. The thing was cantankerous and disinclined to hold a consistent temperature. It was the number one home-improvement headache on my to-do list. The burnt offerings of that last Easter meal weren’t all my fault. I hadn’t actually told the oven to go into self-clean cycle while dinner was still in it. There wasn’t time to order a new one now, though. I would just have to muddle through.

“I think we’ll be having ham.”

What is ham? Do they live in our woods? Shall I hunt it
for you?
Atherton was enthusiastic. Perhaps being domestic was getting boring.

“It’s pink meat—from pigs. I’ll get it at the store. You might not like it, but don’t worry. There will be tuna too. Or maybe shrimp.”

I like shrimp. Irv gave me some once
.

I made a note of this. The bud get was tight but I was sure I could spring for a bit of fresh shrimp if it would make Atherton happy.

I went outside to explain their new assignments to Hula and Sleepy. Sleepy was good-natured about it. Hula made a show of listening agreeably, but the back half had its tail whipping about in annoyance. The other cats were getting first crack at the food dishes while I held them aside for a conference. Finally I put out a dish just for Sleepy and Hula. Her tail calmed, and I finally felt that I had their attention, at least enough of it to make them understand what they would be doing. They both agreed to play spy for me.

“Atherton,” I asked as I came back inside, “why are you so much smarter than the other cats?”

I don’t know. Irv said that he thought I was a kind of
familiar
.

“A familiar? Like, for a witch?”

Yes
.

Witchcraft and Irv? I felt a bit bemused, but that explanation made as much sense as any. And Atherton was probably like most people. We learn what we live, and, good or bad, we pay it back to the wide world with interest that is compounded daily. He’d been spending a lot of time with me. We practiced talking a lot. It made sense that we would communicate well. It also made sense—if you accepted that he was actually talking—that he would share many of my feelings about Irv and life in general.