How to Wash a Cat (12 page)
Authors: Rebecca M. Hale
“Thank you,” I replied gratefully. There was an oddly comforting, grandfatherly way about him, despite the sweaty tobacco aroma exuding from his clothes. A well-used pipe poked out of his shirt pocket.
“Your uncle wanted you to have this,” he said, pulling a flat, rectangular package out of his back pocket and handing it to me.
I turned the package over in my hands. It was less than an inch thick and covered with a brown paper wrapping. My name was written on one side in a cramped scrawl I recognized immediately as Oscar’s.
“Oscar gave it to me a couple of weeks ago,” Mr. Wang said. “Not long before he died.”
I turned the package over in my hands, my eyes instinctively looking for yet another three-petaled tulip.
“He asked me to deliver it to you.” Mr. Wang looked at me with deep, solemn eyes. “In case something happened to him.”
“Happened to him?” I repeated the words, hearing the ominous phrase for the second time in as many days.
Chapter 13
MR. WANG’S FRAIL
figure teetered off down the street as I excused myself from Monty’s tea service. I climbed the stairs to the kitchen, laid the package on the table, and collapsed into one of the worn seats.
figure teetered off down the street as I excused myself from Monty’s tea service. I climbed the stairs to the kitchen, laid the package on the table, and collapsed into one of the worn seats.
The resilience I’d built up in the days since the funeral melted away. The package sat on the table like a bomb, waiting to explode. I hunched in my chair, biting my lower lip, my eyes trying to penetrate the layers of brown packing paper.
Sighing resignedly, I slipped the edge of a pair of scissors underneath a fold and began to cut through the layers of tape. In typical Oscar fashion, the package was virtually waterproof from his wrapping. Not an inch of the paper remained uncovered by strapping tape.
At long last, I’d cut through enough of the outer shell to access the inside. I reached in and pulled out a weathered parchment that was folded up like a street map. The worn and beaten document cracked as I opened its accordion-like pages. Unfolded, it spanned about two feet by three feet. The printed side contained streets and a shoreline from an earlier time that I recognized immediately—it was San Francisco during the first blazing days of the Gold Rush.
I’d come across several old city maps in the Green Vase showroom, but this was one of the earliest versions I’d seen. In this depiction, the shoreline had not quite reached our block in Jackson Square. The land that the Green Vase would soon occupy was still under water. The kitchen table where I was sitting looked to be about forty to fifty feet into the bay, near the mouth of a small inlet cove. A short bridge had been built over the narrow opening of the cove to allow foot traffic to the other side.
I sat back in the chair and rubbed my eyes. Why would Oscar have asked Mr. Wang to deliver this to me? What calamitous event had he been preparing for? Had Oscar sensed his imminent stroke or was there a more sinister explanation?
I heard a noise outside and walked through the living room to the window overlooking the street. Monty and Ivan were carrying the table and chairs back to Monty’s studio. I carefully refolded the map, slid it between two cookbooks on a shelf in the kitchen, and headed back downstairs.
Monty and Ivan walked through the front door as I reached the showroom. From Monty’s expression, I could tell he was about to bombard me with questions about the package.
“Ouch!” I cried out as I stubbed my toe on the still unopened crate that had covered the trap door to the basement.
“Hey, can one of you help me open this crate?” I called out. Given Monty’s pathological penchant for disseminating information, I wasn’t ready to share this latest development with him. I needed a quick change of subject.
“I’ve got it,” Monty said as he trotted towards the back of the room where I stood next to the crate. He leaned over the box and tried to read the water-stained shipping label.
“Australia?” he called out curiously. “What would Oscar have ordered from Australia?”
I shrugged my shoulders—puzzled, but relieved. His interest piqued, Monty dove into the task, momentarily forgetting about my package from Mr. Wang.
“We’re going to need a crowbar on this,” he advised, looking at me with an air of crate-opening expertise.
I fetched one from Oscar’s toolbox in a closet off the kitchen. “Here you go.”
“Right, then,” he said, grabbing the handle. He approached the box awkwardly, holding the crowbar in his hands like a pickax. He laid the box down on one of its oblong sides and slid the slanted end of the crowbar into a grooved crack between two of the planked panels.
I squinted at the box. Bracketed hinges appeared to line the edge of the panel Monty had chosen to attack with the crowbar.
“I think you’ve inserted it into the hinged side of the lid,” I offered.
“Yes.” He stood up, his voice tetchy. “Yes, it appears that I have.”
Monty crouched down and tried to remove the crowbar, but it was now tightly wedged. He threw a leg over the crate, trying to improve his leverage. As I watched him straddling the crate, wrestling with the crowbar, I realized Ivan would have been a much better candidate for this task. So skillful with a sketch pad, Monty was a disaster with any device that might be stored in a toolbox.
“Haven’t you done this before?” I asked. “Don’t the frames for your art studio come in this type of container?”
“No, not really,” he sniped, throwing his weight against the crowbar. “Most of my pieces are done locally. I just go pick them up in the van.” He studied the thick shipping bands wrapped around the obstinate crate. “Even when they do come through the mail, they’ve never been cinched up quite like this.”
Ivan heard the commotion and wandered towards the back of the showroom. Monty had rotated the box and was lying parallel to it on the floor, still trying to release the crowbar. Ivan’s face twisted as he tried not to laugh.
“Need some help?” Ivan asked in response to my pleading look.
Monty muttered up from the ground near the crate. “No need—I’ve got it covered.” His voice pitched higher as he strained against the crate.
The hinges finally gave under the pressure from the crowbar. A loud crack of splitting wood ricocheted through the room as Monty’s head slammed backwards onto the floor with a thud. A snowstorm of tiny cedar shavings from the inside of the box showered the area.
Wincing, Monty righted himself, pulled off the loosened metal bands, and raised the lid open the rest of the way. Despite the dusting of cedar shavings all over the floor, the inside of the crate was still flush with packing materials.
“Shall we see what you’ve got then?” Monty asked, his hair and eyebrows covered with a dandruff of shavings. He waved his right hand in the air, wiggled his fingers, and plunged them down into the crate. A strange and somewhat horrified look came over his face as he grabbed hold of the item hidden under the cedar shavings.
“What in the name of Helen of Troy is this?” Monty cried as he pulled an enormous furry object out of the box.
Monty wrestled the beast to its feet and stepped back. We all stood there silently staring at it, rotating our heads one way, then another. Isabella hissed; her back arched. Rupert leaned forward, sniffing loudly.
We were looking at a stuffed kangaroo that appeared to have been the project of an amateur taxidermist. The animal was standing upright on its two back legs, with one arm crooked out resting on its hip. The body was slightly misshapen, and the head had been contorted so that the animal looked like it was smiling. It was a pose I couldn’t imagine a kangaroo striking naturally.
I was beginning to realize that there was a lot I didn’t know about my Uncle Oscar.
THE BOARD MEETING was held around the corner from the Green Vase in an empty room in a renovated, red brick building.
I followed Monty into the building and up a narrow flight of stairs. Monty clutched his ears instinctively as we rounded each turn of the staircase.
At the top, we stepped out into a bright, window-lined hallway. Double doors opened into a rectangular room, whose high ceiling was covered in a decoratively stamped, copper-colored tin.
I took a seat on the second row of chairs next to Ivan while Monty circled the room, mixing with the crowd.
Five chairs lined the far side of a table that ran horizontally across the front of the room. Ivan confirmed that they would be occupied by each of the board members.
Ivan began pointing out various people in the growing crowd. It seemed that he and Harold had done work for most of them. He nodded towards a lively looking woman with bouncing, brown hair and bright, peppery eyes.
“That lady over there is Etty Gabella. She runs a Spanish-themed antiques store on the corner. She hired us to rewire the place last year. You wouldn’t have believed the condition of some of the circuits we stripped out of her walls. It’s a wonder the place hadn’t caught fire.”
Next, Ivan indicated to a tall, well-dressed man with high cheekbones and smooth, espresso-brown skin.
“And there’s Essian Diarra. I rebuilt the chimney in his place. Found a diary from the 1850s hidden behind a couple of layers of brick.”
On the other side of the room, Monty was engaged in an animated conversation with Etty Gabella. Given the flailing arms gesticulating wildly around his head, I guessed that Monty was telling her his ear-biting spider story.
I shook my head. “What is
wrong
with that man?”
wrong
with that man?”
“Oh—he’s not so bad,” Ivan replied, chuckling. “He means well.”
I rolled my eyes in response.
Monty crossed the room, still stroking his ears, and leaned over our chairs. “I talked to the board secretary. We’re first on the agenda. He thinks we’ll go through without any problems.”
I looked over Monty’s shoulder, and a sinking feeling plunged through my stomach. A short-statured man had just entered the boardroom. He had the same hawkish eyes and balding head I’d seen a couple of months earlier as I stood on the sidewalk outside the Green Vase struggling to unlock Oscar’s front door. No mustache, I confirmed, wondering what Monty could have been going on about.
“I thought Frank Napis wasn’t going to be here?” I asked, perplexed.
Monty jumped like a frightened rabbit and whipped his head around in a full-circle contortion, his panicked eyes searching the room.
“What?” he splurted. “What do you mean? Frank’s here? Where?”
“Right there,” I indicated with my head, not wanting to point. The short, balding man strode through the room, his square middle advancing in front of him. He began greeting various attendees with a grand, effusive hand pump.
Monty noodled his head up and down like a serpent, his eyes frantically pacing the room. “I don’t see him. Are you sure?”
“He’s heading towards the back window,” I said in a hushed voice, trying not to draw attention to us. Monty’s anguished antics were spectacle enough.
“That’s not Napis,” Ivan intoned quietly. “That’s Gordon Bosco, the chairman of the board.”
Monty collapsed into the seat next to me, his hand on his chest. “Good grief woman, you nearly gave me a heart attack.”
AFTER THE MANY hours of preparation with Monty and all of my nervousness leading up to it, I don’t remember much about the actual board meeting. It was as if time moved on without me, leaving me frozen in my seat.
Afterwards, Ivan assured me that Monty had made the most thorough, in depth presentation in the history of the Jackson Square Historical Board. When Monty finally finished his presentation, our renovation project was approved unanimously—without comment or debate.
But it had been impossible for me to focus on Monty’s speech. Throughout the entire meeting, my eyes never left Gordon Bosco, sitting in the center chair at the front table.
I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t tear myself away from the gold, tulip-shaped cufflinks flickering on the sleeves of his starched, white shirt.
They were identical to the ones Oscar had shown me at his kitchen table during the Leidesdorff story—the same cufflinks that I had picked out for him to wear during his funeral—the cufflinks that had disappeared along with my uncle as his casket lowered into the earth.
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