The Recycled Citizen (9 page)

It was probably a stupid thing to do, but instead of heading for the safe exit, Sarah picked her way around the trucks and trash toward the scene of battle. This was the first time she’d ever heard Tigger utter more than a surly yes or no, and at first she thought Aunt Appie’s unlovely protégée must be speaking some foreign language. Then she realized Tigger was merely using words Sarah herself had never run across except in Restoration comedies.

Before she could make any sense of the fight, the man who must be Ted Ashe caught sight of her, broke off in mid-epithet and hurried off. Tigger glanced back over her shoulder, saw Sarah approaching and stayed where she was.

Sarah had no earthly use for Tigger. To turn around now and go back the other way, however, would be to give her a direct snub. Sarah hadn’t the heart to do that. Moreover, she thought the stationery shop where she meant to buy her envelopes was in this direction. She kept walking and Tigger kept on standing. At last it became impossible not to. speak.

“Hello, Tigger. What was the fuss all about?”

Instead of the stony glare Sarah normally would have expected, Tigger actually answered her question. “Bastard tried to rape me.”

“No! He couldn’t possibly.”

That was hardly tactful of Sarah. Rapists didn’t pick victims for their sex appeal. On the other hand, if Ted Ashe’s appearance reflected his personal tastes, Tigger might have looked to him like the girl of his dreams. “At least you managed to fend him off,” she temporized.

Tigger merely gave, her a look and changed the subject. “Where you going?”

“To buy envelopes. I’ve just had some invitations printed back there”—Sarah waggled her box—“and now I have to send them out.”

“What for?”

“An organization my cousin Dolph and his wife are interested in.”

“The SCRC.”

“How did you know that?” Sarah asked in some surprise.

But Tigger had run out of conversation. When she didn’t answer, Sarah moved on. Tigger stayed with her. That was another surprise, and not a welcome one. The only explanation seemed to be that she felt genuinely threatened by whatever Ted Ashe had said to her and was afraid to go on alone. That meant Sarah could not in decency do anything except tolerate Tigger’s company and get on with her own errands.

The stationery shop either was no longer where Sarah remembered it or never had been, but she did find one of those cut-rate places that carry all sorts of odds and ends. They had the long white envelopes she wanted but only in boxes of fifty apiece. Ten of these made a fairly awkward bagful. To Sarah’s further surprise, Tigger insisted on taking the bag from her.

“Really, you needn’t,” she expostulated. “I can manage. Besides, now I have to go all the way over to North Station to pick up the list of addresses.”

It didn’t work. When Sarah went down into the subway, Tigger was at her heels, still clutching the bag of envelopes. When she bought her token for the turnstile, she could hardly avoid buying a second one for her unwanted companion. When at last she entered the Senior Citizens’ Recycling Center, Tigger was still one step behind.

The front room was empty except for Osmond Loveday, seated in his glassed-off cubicle, playing with one of his rubber stamps. Everyone else must still be at Chet Arthur’s funeral. The coffee urns were plugged in, though; Sarah could see their little red “on” lights gleaming at the back of the room. A faint aroma of pastry suggested full trays already arranged in the kitchen, ready to be set out when the hungry mourners got back.

Somehow or other, Tigger was now ahead of Sarah. When Osmond Loveday looked up and saw her with her poncho and plastic bag, he came scurrying out of his cubicle.

“I’m sorry, young lady, but this recycling facility is open to senior citizens only.”

“I’m with her,” Tigger growled.

“What?” Loveday stopped, stared, stammered. “S-Sarah, do you know—er—”

“We’ve met at my Aunt Apollonia’s,” Sarah hedged. “I’m sorry, Tigger, but I don’t believe I’ve ever heard your proper name.”

Tigger probably wouldn’t have noticed a hint unless it came wrapped around a thrown brick. She only jerked her head at the sixtyish man in the neat brown suit. “Who’s he?”

“This is Mr. Osmond Loveday, who was assistant to Great-uncle Frederick for many years and is now coordinator here at the center,” Sarah explained. She wasn’t at all sure what Mr. Loveday’s title actually was these days, but he’d called himself a coordinator at various times in the past and didn’t appear to mind being one now.

“Yes, indeed.” Mr. Loveday was warming up to coordinate Tigger, Sarah could see. Any connection of the scatty but filthy rich Mrs. Apollonia Kelling might well be another eccentric philanthropist. If there was one thing Osmond Loveday adored, it was an eccentric philanthropist. “Perhaps—er—Tigger, you had some thought of doing a little volunteer work?” he ventured.

“What happens?”

This was more conversation in one hour than Sarah had heard from her in all the years of their acquaintance, if such it might be called. However, she wasn’t about to listen to any more.

“Right now,” she said firmly, “Mr. Loveday’s going to hand me that list of names I came for, so that I can address those envelopes you’ve been kind enough to carry for me. Then I’m going home and getting to work. I know you’d rather stay and learn about the SCRC, so I’ll leave you in Mr. Loveday’s capable hands. Thank you. Good-bye.”

It was a rotten thing to do, but Osmond Loveday was getting paid for working here and Sarah Bittersohn wasn’t. Throwing the Puritan ethic to the winds, she hailed a passing cab and made her getaway before Tigger could decide to follow her again.

Poor Max! If he went back to the center after the funeral, maybe Tigger would try to attach herself to him, now that she’d lost his wife. Tigger would know who Max was; she’d seen them together more than once. Sarah wasn’t much worried about her husband’s ability to dump an unwanted shadow—he’d had to do it often enough—but it would be a shame if he found himself having to bother. Whatever had possessed Tigger to get so chummy all of a sudden?

There was absolutely no way Sarah was going to believe Tigger’s rape story. It was possible, she supposed, that Ted Ashe had made some insulting remark to which Tigger had taken violent exception. She hadn’t sounded frightened back there in the alley, only furious.

And what had Ashe been doing over in that part of town, anyway? Why wasn’t he at the funeral with the other SCRC members? Attendance wasn’t obligatory, of course, and since Ashe was a newcomer, perhaps he’d felt he hadn’t known Chet Arthur well enough to bother. Still, the occasion offered a chance to socialize and get some free food of a sort the center didn’t often serve. People who spent their days picking up discarded trash usually welcomed any civilized diversion, according to Dolph and Mary.

Maybe he was an atheist and didn’t believe in funerals. Maybe he had more urgent business elsewhere. Maybe somebody had told him he’d have to get cleaned up for the occasion. Sarah paid the exorbitant cab fare, went upstairs and phoned Theonia.

Mr. Loveday’s list was a long one. The two women spent the better part of the afternoon addressing and stuffing the envelopes, writing “Mrs. Adolphus Kelling” and the Chestnut Hill address in the upper left-hand corner of each envelope. Loveday had clued them in that the Kelling name and address would stand them a better chance of catching the recipient’s attention. They’d dispatched Brooks to the post office with the bundles of envelopes, all stamped and sorted by zip code, and were easing their writers’ cramp with cups of hot tea when Max came home.

“How’s the mailing coming along?” he asked.

“All done and gone-,” Sarah told him. “Did the funeral go off all right?”

“Great. Everybody enjoyed it but the corpse. Maybe he did, too, for all I know. You’d never believe what happened afterward, though.”

“You went back to the center and found Tigger passing the cookies.”

Max stared at his wife. “How the hell did you know?”

“Theonia saw it in the teacups. Want some?”

“Sure. See if you can fish me out a leaf that has Chet Arthur’s old boss’s name on it.”

“Haven’t you had any luck on that?” Theonia asked him. “I’d rather thought you would, somehow.”

“Actually I did make some progress,” Max admitted. “I decided to follow up on that rumor that he’d worked at the South Boston Navy Yard, which he apparently didn’t. But anyway, I was over in the area and feeling hungry. I hadn’t stayed for refreshments at the center when I saw who was dishing them out. So I stopped in at a corner deli that looked pretty good. It was one of those neighborhood landmark-type places that must have been around for quite a while, so I showed the counterman a photograph of Chet Arthur.”

“Wherever did you get one?” Sarah asked him.

“I’d borrowed Dolph’s Polaroid camera and got the undertaker to let me take a couple of shots before they closed the casket. Your friend Annie said Chet didn’t look much different dead than alive. Anyway, the counterman took one quick glance and said hell yes, that was the guy who hit the lottery. It turns out the shop has sold only one ticket that paid anything like real money, and Chet Arthur was the man who bought it.”

“Did the man know him personally?”

“Only as Chet, but he’d been one of their regulars for years. The counterman thinks he must have worked close by, because he’d stop in there every noontime, five days a week, for a fried egg sandwich and a cup of coffee. The guy said as soon as he saw Chet coming through the door, he’d slap another egg on the grill so Chet wouldn’t have to order. He says Chet didn’t like to talk much because he was deaf.”

“Was he really? Dolph and Mary haven’t said anything about that.”

“Maybe they never realized. He might have been able to lip-read enough to get by with. The counterman thought Chet’s deafness might have been work-connected. There used to be a boiler factory not far away, and it wasn’t unusual for the workmen to suffer a gradual loss of hearing from the noise, just as the kids today are ruining their ears with that god-awful hard rock.”

“Did you check with the boiler factory?”

“I couldn’t. It went out of business about ten years ago. After that the counterman says they didn’t see much of Chet. For a while he’d still drop in occasionally to eat his egg sandwich for auld lang syne, I guess, but he never showed up again since the day he walked in with his winning ticket. They assumed he must be off somewhere, living it up on his lucky money.”

“How much was his prize?” asked Theonia.

“Twenty-five thousand, less tax. Assuming he did work at the boiler factory or somewhere, as the regular lunch hours suggest, it’s not unreasonable to assume he might have saved up the rest of Mary’s inheritance or got it as a lump-sum pension payment when the factory shut down. I said something about his having been a foreman, and the counterman was surprised. He said Chet didn’t act like a foreman, whatever that’s supposed to mean.”

“Mr. Loveday says they all lie,” Sarah observed.

“That guy’s a real sweetheart,” Max snapped. “I wonder how he ever got into the charity business.”

“Attraction of opposites,” Sarah suggested.

“Snobbery,” said Cousin Theonia. “My own uncharitable opinion would be that Mr. Loveday is one of those ‘little people fed on great men’s crumbs’ who seize any chance to rub elbows with the rich and prestigious even though they themselves have little prospect of rising to such heights. Charitable organizations involve themselves with the up-and-coming as well as the down-and-out, as I don’t have to tell you, considering what we’ve been doing all day. And certainly not everyone had the opportunity to associate on a day-to-day basis as he did with the famous Mr. Frederick Kelling.”

“Not everyone would have wanted to,” said Sarah. “Most people shunned him like a case of measles. Tea, Theonia?”

“No more, thank you. I ought to be getting back. I mustn’t stick Mariposa with the cooking two nights in a row, after she’s been cleaning all day. No, Max, don’t bother to come down with me.”

S
HE KISSED THEM BOTH
and was gone in a waft of Arpège. Sarah took away the tea tray, came back to the sofa, put her feet up and leaned against Max’s shoulder.

“You say Tigger actually stayed and helped with the refreshments? I’m boggled. Did she comb her hair first?”

“Don’t ask me. Anyway, she wasn’t glaring out from under it like the last time we saw her. In fact she wasn’t glaring at all. I’d never have recognized her if she hadn’t been wearing her combat boots.”

“Did she speak to you?”

“She most likely didn’t notice me. I only saw her through the window. All I did was walk back from the church with Dolph and Mary and leave them at the door.

I hadn’t meant to go in, anyway. How did you know Tigger would be there?”

“Because I took her, in a manner of speaking.” Sarah told him about the episode in the alley and Tigger’s subsequent tenacity. “It was strange, Max. I can’t imagine what got into her, unless she was really frightened, which I find hard to believe, or unless she’s trying to worm her way back into the family’s good graces any way she can. Aunt Appie used to give her a lot of attention, you know, until she made herself persona non grata over that insane business with Vare.”

A while back Apollonia Kelling’s daughter-in-law, Vare, had abandoned Cousin Lionel and their four bloody-minded offspring for a brief exploration of alternative life-styles. Why she’d chosen to do her experimenting with Tigger was something nobody could fathom, but why Tigger had latched on to Vare was obvious enough. She’d goaded Vare into milking Lionel for money enough to support them both in grand style until Vare decided it was better to be a rich man’s wife than a hyena’s mate. Now that Appie had come into a great deal more money than she’d already had, Tigger could be hoping for another free ride on the gravy train.

“Then why doesn’t she simply go to your aunt and ask her?” said Max. “She must know what a soft touch Appie is.”

“Darling, there’s no earthly use in your asking me how Tigger’s mind operates,” Sarah protested. “She’s always struck me as being pretty crazy. I haven’t the foggiest notion whether she was actually working some dark and devious scheme today or merely going on blind instinct, the way a stray dog will trail after the first person who happens along. Mr. Loveday asked her if she was interested in volunteering, and I suppose she thought she might as well, since she was there.”