How to Wash a Cat (30 page)

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Authors: Rebecca M. Hale

BOOK: How to Wash a Cat
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“What have you got here, Oscar?” I asked, bemused.
Oscar grunted from his skillet. “Found them in the alley this afternoon. They must have been abandoned. Figure I’ll drop ’em off at the pound on Monday.”
I circled the table and knelt down at the box. The cats matched each other in coloring—white coats with peachy-orange highlights—but they were opposites in physique.
The female of the pair was slender and sleek with long, gangly legs. Her sharp, blue eyes looked up at me expectantly as she stood up on her hind legs, reaching for the top edge of the box. She pushed her head against my hand when I reached in to pet her.
The second one, a male, sat back on his wide, fluffy rump and gazed up at me curiously. I reached over to scratch his head, but he flopped over onto his back, exposing his plump, round belly.
“They’re awfully cute, Oscar,” I called out, still rubbing the offered belly. “Don’t you need a couple of cats around the store?”
I could hardly hear his mussitating grumble over the sizzling skillet. “Scraggly, flea bitten creatures . . . look like overgrown rats . . .”
“They’re awfully clean for having been in the alley,” I said, holding the female in my arms.
She purred appreciatively as Oscar muttered, “I never would have thought it’d be that hard to wash a cat.”
Monty tapped me on the shoulder with the gold-headed cane. “Where do you go when you enter these trances?” he asked.
“I got the cats from Oscar,” I said, the implication dawning on me for the first time.
Chapter 35
THE JARRING
BLEEP-BLEEP
of my alarm clock woke me early the next morning. I leapt out of the bed and into the wee hours of Wednesday. Rupert cracked open a condemning eye before dropping his head back down into the heap of blankets.
Isabella followed as I shrugged on a sweatshirt and slipped down to the kitchen. Her sharp eyes interrogated me as I grabbed the wide beam flashlight and descended the next flight to the showroom.
“Wrao,” she admonished.
“Don’t worry. I’ll be careful,” I replied.
I creaked open the iron-framed door and peeked out into a dark, pre-dawn Jackson Square. The windows on the opposite side of the street were dark—ensuring, I hoped, that Monty wouldn’t be following me this time.
I rounded the corner past Frank Napis’s glass-fronted store and stepped into the narrow alley that angled behind it. My bleary eyes blinked in the darkness as I flicked on the flashlight and started down the narrow passage, flanked on either side by steep, brick walls.
A couple of steps into the alley, I raised the flashlight’s beam to a historical marker. It was set into the wall of the building that housed the store belonging to Frank Napis’s next door neighbor.
The plaque commemorated the liquor store that had occupied the premises during the Gold Rush era.
Built in 1866 and occupied by A.P. Hotaling & Co., this building housed the largest liquor repository on the West Coast. It survived the 1906 earthquake and fire due to a mile long fire hose laid from Fisherman’s Wharf over Telegraph Hill by the U.S. Navy. This prompted the famous doggerel by Charles Field:
If, as they say, God spanked the town
for being over frisky,
Why did he burn the churches down
and save Hotaling’s whisky?
All of the whisky had been drunk up long ago. The barrels had been replaced by a collection of fine Persian rugs, mahogany tea tables, and puffy, poodle-impersonating lamp fixtures.
I panned the light down the alley to a fork that branched off behind Frank Napis’s store. Treading softly through the early morning darkness, I turned the corner leading to the back side of the Green Vase.
It was easy to see why Frank had blamed the leak on Oscar’s gutters. Oscar had applied the same approach to maintenance of the outside of his building as he had to the inside. White plastic elbow joints connected an odd collection of metal piping materials that were pinned precariously to the side of the building.
Next door, strong, solid iron neatly lined the edge of the roof. Frank’s gutters were aligned with flawless precision to the windows and eaves. Every inch of the building stood in stern rebuke to the crumbling exterior of the Green Vase. Even the small dumpster outside was parked in perfect parallel with the back stoop.
Yawning, I turned to face the opposite side of the alley and the lot that Frank had suggested I check out as a potential source of the infamous water leak.
The scavenged building was still in the deconstruction stage of its renovation process. Large swaths of thick plastic and blue tarp covered its empty window slots. A breeze wheezed through the cracks, gently pushing the coverings in and out, as if the building were breathing on a ventilator, recovering from the trauma of its recent surgery.
“The work’s been stopped for several weeks now,” Monty had told me, speaking in his authoritative, renovation-expert voice. “I think they’re hung up on some sort of permit issue.”
Halfway around the far side of the building, I found a loose tarp and pulled it back, revealing the gutted interior. The building had been stripped to its framing. The flooring was carved out down to the concrete basement. A hollow shell was all that remained—a shadow of the previous self, patiently waiting to be remade.
The first edges of daylight were beginning to lift up the corners of the surrounding darkness. I glanced furtively up and down the alley; then I pulled the tarp back to its widest position and stepped gingerly inside.
Coilings of ripped out electrical wire and shards of broken pipe were strewn across the concrete floor. Rusted nails jutted out of splintery beams. I puzzled at the fresh bird droppings that seemed to spot every surface before craning my neck up to the scalped rafters. A ten-foot square opening gaped in the center of the roof.
This location seemed a much more likely spot for Oscar to have found a Leidesdorff-related relic than the construction site Ivan had taken me to across town. The landfill under this stretch of Jackson Square had been filled in soon after the Gold Rush started, in the years immediately following Leidesdorff’s alleged death.
I walked across the concrete floor, hopping over shovels, jackhammers, and an empty lunchbox, and made my way towards the corner that ran parallel to Frank Napis’s store.
The concrete basement in this section of the building had been torn up. Huge chunks of pummelled stone were piled next to a gaping hole, which was at least ten feet wide. I leaned over the gap, peering down into the damp dirt.
The morning’s sun continued to roll up into the sky, but this back corner of the building was still darkened in shadow. Circling my flashlight around the dug-up opening in the concrete, something in the dirt below caught my eye. I crawled over the edge and eased myself down into the hole to get a better look.
As my feet sank into the soggy bottom of the small pit, I saw the likely cause of the seepage into Frank Napis’s basement. A broken water main poked out of a small bubbling pool of water and mud. It looked as if the diggers of this hole had hit the pipe. They had been distracted, I suspected, by the sudden appearance of a ship’s bow in the bottom of the pit.
I crouched down on my knees, running my hand along the three feet of exposed planking. The boards were rough and splintered—frangible from the years of underground decay.
I scanned back and forth along the stretch of planking, confused by the angle of the structure. The boat, I finally realized, was upside down. It must have capsized and sunk here back when this lot of land was still under water.
I slid my fingertips around the bulging edge of one of the boards and pulled gently upward. The board gave easily, falling away from the boat and into my hands. It was as if it had been previously removed and simply reinserted into the open seam. The boards on either side of it came up just as easily.
I piled the removed planking on the floor of the pit and crept up to the opening in the boat. The missing boards provided about a foot and a half wide gap along the exposed portion of the bow.
Someone had scraped away much of the dirt—now a wet, pasty mud—that had been packed in around the upended interior of the boat. I stared into the inky blackness, trying to make out the faint outline of the object that had been unearthed inside. Trembling, I raised my flashlight towards the opening.
The pale, nacreous gleam of a human skull leered up at me.
I jumped away from the boat, stifling a scream. My feet slid on the slippery mud, and I found myself sitting on the dark bottom of the hole, staring at the boat’s hull and its long, rectangular opening.
I shook my head, trying to clear the terrifying image from my panicked vision. After several thirsting gulps of damp, earthy air, I steeled myself to take another look. Had
this
been the construction site that had lured Oscar’s interest? Had the hull of this boat shielded the last vital clue that Oscar had unearthed prior to his death?
A tight clenching in my heart, I crept back towards the boat. Wincing, I aimed the flashlight down into the hole and willed myself to look inside.
Enough of the mud had been scraped away from the corpse so that I could tell that it lay on its back, stretched out along the length of the bow.
I’d never seen a human body in that state of decay before—the flesh rotted away leaving nothing but bone. I was amazed at how much expression could still be communicated by the skeletal form. The corpse conveyed a frantic, terrified expression. The jaws of the mouth gaped open as if struggling for air. The arms were thrown outward, pounding helplessly against the walls of the upended boat.
Shreds of a faded leather coat draped from the bones. At the neck, the frayed edge of a cloth shirt peeked out from underneath the deteriorated leather collar. I panned the flashlight over to the nearest bony wrist.
The slightest sliver of the cloth shirt lined the sleeve of the leather coat.
Biting down on my lip almost to the point of drawing blood, I slid my hand into the hole and reached towards the skeletal wrist. The fabric of the rotted leather coat rolled like felt in my fingers as I cautiously slid it back.
The cufflink that had been pinned into the shirt was missing—someone had removed it. But its imprint was still visible from the years of underground decay spent laying against the fabric.
The cufflink had stained a clearly visible watermark on the cloth—in the shape of a three-petaled tulip.
Chapter 36
ISABELLA CURLED PROTECTIVELY around my legs as I stepped inside the Green Vase, my mind swirling from the morning’s excursion down the alley.
Something in the Leidesdorff story circulating Jackson Square was not adding up. If the corpse under the boat was Leidesdorff, he had not lived long past the fake funeral procession to the Mission Dolores chapel. The Jackson Square neighborhood sat on top of one of the first sections of the bay to be reclaimed by landfill. That pushed Leidesdorff’s date of death back to the 1848-49 time frame.
I searched through my memory of Mr. Wang’s comments from the night I traveled through the tunnel and found him smoking in his flower shop. There had been rumors and speculations about Leidesdorff for years, but what had convinced Oscar of the story?
I heard Mr. Wang’s thin, reedy voice scratching through his cigarette smoke. Leidesdorff’s grave had turned up empty during the restoration work on the Mission Dolores chapel—but that was almost a hundred years ago. Oscar’s more recent research had focused in on the matching handwriting samples from Leidesdorff’s accounts and the ledger at the Tehama Hotel.
I sat down on the dental chair, contemplating the image of the burly Leidesdorff in his warehouse, overseeing the transfer of raw materials and finished goods. It would have taken a diligent accountant to keep track of all of those in-kind exchanges.
Nothing in the materials I had read indicated that Leidesdorff had received a formal education. He had grown up on St. Croix, a Dutch colony populated by thousands of slaves who worked on the island’s sugar cane plantations. Despite having a white Dutch father, Leidesdorff’s educational opportunities on the island would have been limited by his mother’s black skin. He’d left home at an early age, penniless, with only the shirt on his back. It seemed unlikely that he would have had the opportunity to learn how to read or write.
The handwriting on Leidesdorff’s accounts—and on the Tehama ledger—must belong to someone else.
My fingers drummed the cashier counter as the image in the warehouse expanded. A shadow of a figure stood beside Leidesdorff. The ever present assistant, the only person he would have trusted with his finances, the silent maid—the writer must have been Hortense.
I strummed my fingers more and more rapidly on the counter. Maybe Hortense had stayed on in San Francisco after Leidesdorff’s death. Could
she
have been the one who made Ralston’s acquaintance at the Tehama Hotel? Was
she
the one responsible for the continued digging on the tunnel?

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