The Death of Perry Many Paws (26 page)

Why did someone break into our house? Why didn’t they take anything? What were they looking for in the library? Mycroft had known someone was here. Mycroft must have seen them because they would have interrupted his evening sleep when they came in the library. I wondered how many times animals are the only witnesses to the truth. Maybe that would make a good book, animal witnesses. I closed my eyes and started thinking about my new book ideas.

I woke to Mycroft’s wet, cold nose pressed against my cheek. I reached over and gave his ears some good loving and he returned to his spot in front of the fireplace. I had lost all my enthusiasm for starting my book. The handkerchief was my muse for my new book idea and I was hopelessly unmotivated without it. I struggled to a sitting position, the fleece all entangled in my legs. Mycroft looked at me expectantly, like I was about to do something brilliant. We enjoyed a staring contest for a few long seconds and then he got up and began pacing around the room. He needed to go outside. I decided I could use some fresh air to clear my sleep-groggy brain, so I put on my jacket and headed into the back yard with Mycroft at my heels.

It was overcast and a heavy mist hung in the air, as if the clouds overhead couldn’t be bothered to let loose with a decent rain. I pushed my bangs off my forehead, lifted my face to the sky and decided to get a moisturizing treatment. We don’t leash Mycroft because everyone in our family, including Claudia, can outrun him. He took care of
his important business and then began to amble in the direction of Franklin’s cottage. Being in the midst of a serious beauty treatment, I followed after him picturing my skin sucking in all the dew-heavy air and being so much more youthful for it. Keeping my face raised and my eyes closed is not the best way to wander through the woods, and I tripped several times over roots and twigs in my path. I probably looked like I’d had a two-martini lunch, which reminded me that I hadn’t eaten a decent lunch at all. I’d be really starving by the time Cam got home with the Chinese, which made me anticipate it even more. I love being extra hungry when I eat a favorite meal. This doesn’t happen very often because I’m a dedicated snacker, but being out of the house should help, unless I decided to start eating twigs and dried-up leaves. How filling could they be, anyway? I was thinking about how nutritious insects were supposed to be and remembered when my brother Graham had given me chocolates for my birthday one year and, after I had eaten them all, told me they were chocolate-covered ants. My mom had tried to calm me down by explaining that people in other cultures ate insects and that there was a lot of protein and other valuable vitamins in them. And she had grounded Graham. I had always planned to pay him back sometime but had never found the right culinary vehicle. Another item to add to my list of things I would like to spend time researching if I had the time.

We eventually reached Franklin’s cottage and I stood and stared at it while Mycroft sniffed around. It looked really awful. Cam and I had to do something about it, maybe in the spring. It needed paint and some landscaping and probably a new roof. Franklin wouldn’t let us make any repairs or improvements while he was living there but now we should take care of these things or the cottage would fall into such a state of disrepair that it would crumble to the ground. If it was fixed up it could be a very pretty little house. Maybe we could rent it out to a college student, one who didn’t have wild parties.

I had no intention of going into the cottage but a sudden need to use the bathroom hit and I knew I couldn’t make it back to the house. I had no choice but to use the bathroom in the cottage. I went in the side door, into the kitchen. Mycroft ambled in after me and immediately went into Franklin’s study and curled up on the rug for a nap. I made a dash for the bathroom. There was no toilet paper left. I fished around in my jacket pockets until I found a napkin that I had jammed in there the last time we went to the movies. It would have to do. The old plumbing in the cottage might not like being attacked by a napkin but I had no choice and didn’t really care.

Mycroft was sound asleep. Lacking the heart to wake him, I sat at Franklin’s desk and looked out the window at the misty woods. It was the kind of view that let the imagination run and would be a good place for writing. At least Franklin got to see one last fall season through this window where the trees were aflame with color so close to his view that he didn’t really miss much by not leaving his house. I knew the deer came right up to his window, never sensing the presence of a human, and there were always squirrels running around for entertainment. This window would be like a rotating art exhibit that changed with the seasons. The only things missing were Dickensian carolers at Christmas. I laughed out loud at the vision of Franklin’s reaction if carolers had dared appear on his doorstep. Bah, Humbug!

From among those trees, quickly losing their color and waiting for the first snow to make them pretty again, Ryan and his two friends had spied on Franklin. A seemingly harmless activity but such a violation of a reclusive man’s privacy. Ryan had said he had watched Franklin reading and writing every night. I didn’t remember ever seeing him writing anything in all the years I’d known him. We hadn’t found a journal when we looked through his books. But Ryan hadn’t mentioned a journal, just that Franklin was writing at his desk. Interesting. I’d been through these drawers before but I looked inside in case I had missed
something, like a ream of paper with instructions on what to do if he were found murdered. There were pens and a pile of blank paper but nothing with any writing on it. Had he been pretending to write? That made no sense. Had he used invisible ink? Dubious. I had been writing children’s books for too long. Although invisible ink actually wasn’t a bad idea for a future Perry Many Paws book should I decide to continue the series. I have a notebook that I carry with me wherever I go so that if I get a good book idea I can jot it down. Of course, I didn’t have it with me now. I pulled out a piece of paper and a pen out of the drawer to jot down my idea. The sheet of paper under the one I picked up looked dingy and as I stared at it, I realized there was something written on the other side that was barely showing through. I pulled it out of the drawer and turned it over. Bingo! The page was covered with small, tight handwriting. I pulled out the rest of the pile of paper from the drawer and rifled through it. Empty. There was just this one page. I put the rest of the paper back in the drawer and huddled over the writing, trying to make it out. Why did he have to write so small? He had plenty of paper.

         
My brother Alden died December 7, 1941, at Pearl Harbor. My life had been spiraling out of control since April 1, 1938, but Alden’s death was my death, too. It hadn’t mattered so much that I was damaged because Alden was there to be the Behrends heir, the successful son, the one who would take over when father was gone. He was a buffer for me and made me feel that my failure didn’t matter as much because he was there. I was just an extra son. I was safe. I was the understudy and Alden was the star. But all that safety ended when Alden died. The family looked to me to take his place and I was unable to do so. I knew that it would have been better for everyone if I had been the Behrends to die. It should have been me. No one needed me. I was a waste. Everyone needed Alden, most of all me. He should have been the one to live into an old age. I should have died in 1941.
Correction, I should have died in 1938. It would have been fair and just and right. But others are gone and I’m still here and it makes no sense and has been a waste of a life
.

I read the paragraph several times, then turned the paper over as if something additional might appear. I went back to the stack of paper in the drawer, piled it on the desk and went through it sheet by sheet, checking both the front and the back. Nothing. It appeared that Franklin was going to write some kind of biography but had never gotten the chance to get more than the introduction done. If only he had started this project last year. I couldn’t stand the idea that he had been willing to write it all down and he had died before he got more than a page done. My curiosity was burning a hole in my brain. It was like being in Bing’s kitchen and being allowed to smell the baking but never being offered anything to eat. Nothing was going right.

Bob Dylan began singing and for a minute I thought someone was telling me that the answer to Franklin’s murder was blowing in the wind. Phone call from Cam.

“Hey, how are you feeling?” he asked. “Did you take a nap?”

“Yes. Then Mycroft needed to go out so I took him and we ended up at the cottage. I just found a single sheet of paper that Franklin wrote about the death of his brother that hints at all kinds of answers to his life but never spells anything out …”

“… so things aren‘t going well?”

“Not especially. Why?”

“I just heard on the radio that the Chinese place is closed, seized by the state for not paying back taxes.”

“So no Chinese food for us tonight?”

“’Fraid not. I can bring something else …”

“… but I was looking forward to Chinese,” I whined like a five-year-old finding out the zoo was closed. “I really really wanted Chinese. I deserve Chinese.”

“I’m sure you do, sweetheart,” Cam reassured me, “but there’s nothing I can do unless I learn to make Chinese before I get home tonight. I’ll bring ribs and corn on the cob instead. And corn muffins. How’s that?”

I sighed. Headache. Late period. Cramps. Too much sugar. Missing handkerchiefs. No toilet paper. Only a single page of a tell-all journal. And now no Chinese. How much could one person be expected to endure in one day? “OK. Ribs will be good. Lots of corn muffins, though.”

“I promise. Bring that paper that Franklin wrote back to the house, will you? I’d like to see it.”

“Sure. Love you. Bye.”

I reached down and rubbed Mycroft’s ears, waking him up as gently as I could. The overcast sky made it seem later than it was and I was beginning to feel scared in the cottage alone when it looked like night was fast approaching. Mycroft seemed to agree that it was time to go and headed toward the door, his mid-section swaying back and forth. I really should cut down on his food or else make him exercise more. I really should do the same myself. I had almost reached the door when I remembered Franklin’s paper and went back in his study to grab it. In my haste I had failed to notice something, something very small yet very significant. In tiny writing at the top right corner of the paper it said, “Page 23.”

am is not as imaginative as I am. That is why he directs a foundation and I’m a writer. It’s also why he makes a lot more money than I do and why he wasn’t afraid to go back to the cottage after dinner, in the dark, to look for the rest of Franklin’s alleged autobiography. He wasn’t haunted by imaginary specters floating through the woods or the idea that being in the cottage at night was just asking for something horrible to happen. It’s also why he was the one who remembered to bring toilet paper while I was the one carrying the baseball bat.

Cam and I were both surprised when Mycroft indicated that he wanted to come with us. It was so unlike him to venture out at night. Oblivious to our haunted surroundings and the danger that waited us around every tree, Cam chatted on and on about Thanksgiving and Christmas plans and things we could do when Abbey was home. Her Thanksgiving break would be short and she would have her friends with her but she had a long break between semesters at Christmas and so there would be lots of family time. He and Abbey had taken skiing lessons when she was in high school so they were anxious to get in at least one good day of skiing. I liked skiing, too, as long as I could stay by the fireplace at the lodge, drink hot chocolate and read.

Cam held my hand and guided me over the fallen logs, probably the same ones I had stumbled over on my afternoon trip through the
woods. “Do you remember that Christmas when Abbey asked my mom for that red sweater that was in the window at Caroline’s Boutique?”

“Yes, your mom was so upset because she felt a redhead should not, under any conditions, ever wear red and didn’t want to buy it for her.”