Claw & Disorder Read online

  Near the chamois-colored armchair/recliner, his guitar from his college years stood on a stand, the case closed as usual. Mark sometimes complained that his work schedule didn’t allow him to keep up with his old hobby of learning to play jazz. On past visits I’d sometimes even noticed a thin layer of dust on the case; at least tonight it seemed like he’d recently wiped it down.

  These days, the dark, contemporary coffee and side tables displayed one flattering head shot of me, taken by Mark, and a photo of us both, in work clothes, snapped by a friend during a local cat expo that spring. The dark wood entertainment center held a Christmas photo of his Philadelphia-based family, including his sister, his two brothers and his mother . . . but not his dad, from whom she was divorced.

  When Mark finally emerged from the kitchen, I shifted over on the sofa so he could join me. Instead, he chose to sit in the recliner, several feet away.

  Oh, dear, I thought, this can’t be good. Worried as I was that he might propose, there could always be worse things!

  I remembered Dawn’s wild speculations. Mark might be an upstanding, ethical guy, but judging from our romantic history over the past year and a half, I doubted he had the makings of a priest. But what the heck did he plan to spring on me?

  He hunched forward nervously, hands clasped on his knees, and his intense blue eyes met mine. “I know you’ve had trouble reaching me after hours lately, and I never gave you much of an explanation. Sorry to be so secretive, but I didn’t want to say anything too soon . . . not until I had a better idea of how things were going to turn out.”

  He’s been recruited by some big veterinary clinic in the Midwest and the money’s too good to turn down. Or his mother has developed a serious health problem, and he’s moving back to Philly to help take care of her.

  “I wanted to be sure I wouldn’t be making a complete fool of myself . . .”

  Yow, maybe it is a ring, after all! What can I say? Do?

  I was almost hyperventilating by the time he unsnapped the nearby guitar case and lifted out the instrument. I had seen it only once before, when he hadn’t even bothered to take it out, and the full view impressed me. Wood grain with a cherry finish, it seemed a kind of cross between acoustic and electric; it had two pickups at the base of the fretboard and four control knobs, but also an elongated S-shaped cutout on either side. Mark had told me at the time that it was a “semi-hollowbody” and could be played with or without an amplifier.

  He drew it onto his lap tonight with a new air of confidence. I exhaled, finally reassured that his surprise was more likely to be pleasant than scary.

  Unless, of course, he was terrible!

  But as he’d already suggested, Dr. Coccia would never have tortured my ears with any clumsy fumbling on the frets. Without any misstep that I could hear, he rendered a very credible version of “’Round Midnight,” an old, minor-key jazz standard we both loved. Occasionally he added an unexpected note or strum, but mainly it was his phrasing that gave the number just the right cool, melancholy tone. I stopped feeling anxious for him and was able to sit back and enjoy his performance.

  With the last note still hanging in the air, Mark kept his eyes on the guitar for a beat. Then he sneaked a glance at me, as if half-prepared for a scathing review.

  “That was amazing!” I told him. “And I’m so glad your surprise didn’t involve taking a new job, somewhere like Michigan.”

  “What?” He reddened a little. “You thought that? Hey, I didn’t mean to actually worry you.”

  “Let’s just say, this was much better than some of the possible alternatives.” I got up and hugged him. “But not long ago you told me you hadn’t touched this baby in many years, because you had no time. You said you were so out of practice, it hurt your fingers to push down the strings.”

  “All that was true,” Mark admitted. “But when we went to that Eddie Broom concert in January—my Christmas gift from you, so thanks again—I remembered how I used to listen to his CDs in college and try to imitate his style. I realized I was becoming ‘all work and no play,’ and maybe I needed that creative outlet again.”

  “I know you’ve hired more help lately, since the clinic’s been doing so well,” I filled in.

  “Yeah, I’m not quite as harried anymore. So I found a local guy who’s played with a combo for years and gives lessons. That’s where I’ve been going, Mondays and Thursdays after work. He helped me get my chops back . . . or start to, anyway.”

  “Sounds to me like you’ve gotten them back all the way,” I told him.

  He blushed a bit again; I liked the way it warmed his pale-olive complexion. “I still have a lot to learn. Jazz uses different scales than other types of music, and that part’s still a challenge. I’ll have to understand all of that before I can really improvise. But at least now I can play a tune.”

  I egged him on. “What else you got?”

  Mark demonstrated that he could also do justice to an up-tempo number, with a lively version of “Sunny.” He then confessed those were the only two he’d practiced enough to show off. “I’ve only been back at it for a month.”

  “For only a month, I think that’s damned good,” I assured him. “When are you going to learn ‘Stray Cat Strut’?”

  Knowing it was the ringtone for my cell phone, he laughed. “I’ll make that next on my list. So, you don’t think by taking guitar lessons I’ll be ‘spreading myself too thin’?”

  “Not at all.” I smiled to myself—so that’s why his fortune cookie message had annoyed him!

  Mark put the guitar away and I took its place on his lap. “Gee, I thought I was lucky to be dating a hot veterinarian, but now I can also have a cool jazzman on the side.”

  After we’d necked for a minute, he asked, “Speaking of cats, are all of yours settled for the night?”

  I understood the coded message. “All on automatic feeders. They won’t miss me until tomorrow morning. I do have to get back fairly early, though, because I’m meeting Sarah in Dalton at eleven.”

  “Oh, right, the hoarders’ house.” He ruffled my hair at the nape, giving me chills. “Use bug repellent all over before you go. They might have fleas, and you don’t want to bring those back to your place.”

  “Ugh, I hadn’t thought of that. You think it’ll be bad?”

  Mark shrugged. “Ronnie said he’s been to some places where the ammonia was so thick in the air, everybody on his team wore respirators. I don’t suppose this house could be so far gone, though, or Sarah would have warned you. Let’s hope not, right?”

  I swallowed my apprehension. “Yeah, let’s hope not.”

  Chapter 3

  Thanks to my GPS, I didn’t have too much trouble finding the Tillman house on the outskirts of Dalton.

  That small, semirural town had not yet begun to attract first-time homebuyers looking for bargain properties, a trend that had benefitted Chadwick in recent years. And even if a young couple was seeking a modest place at a rock-bottom price, they might run through the realtors’ whole list before considering this sad-looking ranch home. Its beige aluminum siding not only screamed 1970s, it didn’t look as if it had even been power-washed since that era. From the road I could spot missing shingles on the roof, and the front bay window revealed a row of vertical blinds with several slats broken or twisted, like a mouth with long, crooked teeth. A black-and-white tuxedo cat sat on the inside sill and peered out through one of the gaps.

  The only sight that encouraged me was Sarah’s well-kept navy-blue Camry parked in the fissured blacktop driveway. I knew she and a friend from her Baptist church must already be inside, paying their weekly visit to check on the couple. When I peeked through the window of the closed garage door, I thought I could make out another vehicle in there. It was hard to tell, though, through the window grime . . . and the junk piled on all sides.

  I climbed the dingy cement steps to the small front porch, waking a scruffy ginger cat from his nap on the doormat. He hesitated only a second before s
lipping away through the wrought-iron railing and bounding off toward some nearby woods. Possibly the Tillmans fed him, but he still seemed semiferal.

  I rang the gilded plastic doorbell, chipped with age, and was relieved when it actually sounded inside. After a minute, Sarah opened the door and welcomed me with a broad smile.

  “Cassie, so glad you could make it. C’mon in . . . watch your step.”

  Though I’m pretty agile and have good eyesight, her advice was necessary. The home’s front corridor was stacked on both sides with magazines and newspapers, so that Sarah and I had to sidle our way in between.

  “Our church group is hauling this stuff to the recycling center next week,” she confided in a low voice. “Took us a month to convince Chester that he was never going to read any of these articles again, and that they’ve already started crumbling to dust. Terrible for his wife’s asthma, too.”

  The yellowing magazines probably weren’t the only thing contributing to the woman’s health issues. The air also carried the scent of multiple litter boxes, though not as bad as I would have expected. Maybe the First Baptist volunteers were also helping to keep those clean.

  “Let me introduce you to Mr. Tillman,” said Sarah as cheerfully as if we were at a cocktail party, and led me into the living room.

  That space still wore brown ’70s paneling on its walls, and the sofa and two chairs all seemed to be upholstered in beige tweed or stripes—what I could see of them.

  A thin, elderly black man had found just enough space to sit on the couch, and appeared almost out of place with his neat attire of a short-sleeved, pale-yellow shirt and chino pants. He wore bedroom slippers, but the closed kind that looked like loafers. It was his dignified air that contrasted the most; he sat very erect, hands resting on his thighs, and looked straight ahead. He squinted in spite of his glasses, and I remembered Sarah telling me Chester had become very farsighted and badly needed a change of prescription.

  “Chester, this is my friend Cassie,” she told him.

  I held out my hand, and he grazed knuckles with me once before he found it to shake it. He said softly, “How d’you do? Are you from social services?”

  “No, no,” I told him. “Just a friend of Sarah’s.”

  “Cassie’s my boss, I told you about her,” she said. “We run the grooming place over in Chadwick. She’s a cat lover, like you and Bernice.”

  “Oh, that’s nice.” He finally smiled, then looked back over his shoulder at the window with the wrecked vertical blinds. “Did you meet Minnie-Mouse? She oughta be around here somewhere.”

  I guessed he meant the tuxedo cat who had watched me come up the front walk. “I saw her through the window. Maybe she just got scared when I rang the bell.”

  I cast around for a spot to sit near him. Plastic milk crates and open shoeboxes, overflowing with mail and other papers, occupied the sofa’s other cushion. Sarah urged me to shift some of them to the floor, though there was barely room for them there, either.

  I surveyed the rest of the room in disbelief. An old, boxy TV set rested on a console table opposite the sofa, and stacked next to it I saw plastic organizing drawers filled with videotapes and DVDs, mixed in with vintage video games. Just inside the room’s doorway, a pipe rack held coats and jackets in both men’s and women’s styles, probably the overflow from a jammed hall closet. Shelves on the wall sagged beneath the weight of countless sentimental knickknacks. Beyond that, there were items almost too abundant and diverse to categorize—cat scratching posts, family photos, old LP records, fleece throws, kids’ toys. Other stuff had been crammed into see-through trash bags, as if someone from the church group hoped to ease them out the door and into the garbage.

  A tall, slim woman of about forty entered, also carefully, from the nearby kitchen. She wore her hair in a short Afro, and her stretch pants and top would have looked stylish in an exercise class. But the empty black garbage bag she toted and her bright-pink rubber gloves told me that she’d come to the house that day to work.

  She smiled and took off her right glove to shake my hand. “Hi, I’m Robin. You must be the cat whisperer.”

  I laughed. “Is that what Sarah’s been calling me? She speaks highly of you, too. You work as a nurse at the same high school where she used to teach, right?”

  “I do. Luckily, that gives me summers off, so I’ve had a chance to help out the Tillmans. In addition to all of this”—she gestured with the full trash bag—“Chester and his wife both have some health problems that need looking after.”

  “Do you have family of your own?” I wondered if they would mind her spending so much time helping out the hoarders.

  “I’m divorced, but I have two sons, eighteen and twenty.” She smiled again. “They’re good boys, but the less I’m into their business these days, the better they like it!”

  Another feline—not Minnie, but a calico—sprang from somewhere in back of the sofa onto its arm, near Chester. I also saw a mostly white one scoot down the hall. With the ginger cat outside, that made four. I wondered how many more lurked in the other rooms.

  Chester reached out to absently stroke the calico, who purred loudly. She looked in decent condition, not too skinny and her coat fairly lush. I saw no sign of fleas, though I’d followed Mark’s advice and sprayed repellent on my clothes. Chester murmured to the cat and called her Candy.

  Robin pulled a semi-comic frown. “Sarah and I, and a couple of the other folks from First Baptist, have been taking turns getting things under control here. Not easy, though.”

  Across the room from me, my assistant sat down on a stack of crates, packed so solidly that they could easily support her. “We’ve even been cooking meals in the church’s kitchen and bringing them over. Things Chester and Bernice can microwave, because their oven’s full of pots and pans.”

  Robin studied one of the plastic wall shelves, bowing under the weight of its burden, and shook open her trash bag. “Chester, one day this stuff is going to come down on somebody’s head. It’s just old video games, collecting dust. I’m going to get rid of them, okay?”

  “What?” He glanced around, as if agitated that he couldn’t clearly see what she was removing. “Naw, don’t do that. Those’re your brother Jimmy’s games. I promised I’d keep them for him.”

  I glanced at Robin in question, but she shook her head.

  Meanwhile, Sarah told him, “Chester, this isn’t your daughter. This is Robin, from the church, remember?”

  Possibly annoyed at the mistaken identity, Robin chided him further. “And Jimmy is how old now? In his forties? He doesn’t care about those games, Chester. Besides, you have to play them on a VCR.”

  “We got one,” he insisted.

  “Bernice said it doesn’t work anymore. Please, you’ve got to get rid of some of this.”

  Maybe to spare Chester an audience for his confusion, Sarah rose and beckoned to me. “Why don’t you come say hello to Bernice? She’s the real cat fanatic.”

  As we picked our way down another crowded corridor, she told me that a healthcare worker visited once a month to check on Bernice and give her an injection of a new antiasthma medication. “But she still uses an inhaler, once in a while, when it gets too bad,” Sarah added. “Her doctor says she won’t really improve until she either gets out of this house or they clean out all the junk, and at least some of the animals. But neither of them will listen.”

  Bernice Tillman sat propped up by pillows on her bed, watching a talk show on a small, portable TV that she’d parked on a folding table. In spite of the warm day, a colorful afghan lay over her lap. When she saw Sarah and me, she used her remote to mute the TV, and greeted us. Her wispy gray hair waved back from a strong-featured face, but the circles under her eyes testified to her health problems.

  Three cats kept her company—a mostly white one with a red spot on his hip, a longhaired tortoiseshell and a pale-gray tabby. Only the last of these looked up when Sarah and I entered; the other two dozed on, cuddled tight aga
inst Bernice’s hip on top of the afghan.

  The bedroom would have been a decent size, but numerous small pieces of furniture packed against the walls on all sides made it feel claustrophobic. The tops of the dresser and the chest of drawers were cluttered with costume jewelry, knickknacks and bottles of medications; a pile of paperback books teetered on the nightstand, and clothes from the half-open closet had spilled out onto a nearby chair. I spotted a covered litter box in one corner and wondered how often the cats even bothered to make their way through the trash to visit it. At least this room had an air conditioner, droning away in a window by the bed.

  Sarah told Bernice, “This is my boss, Cassie. She’s the cat expert I told you about.”

  “A cat expert?” She rumpled the fur on the head of the mostly white shorthair. “How about that, Sugarman? This lady studies you guys!”

  I laughed. “Well, in a way.” In case Sarah hadn’t done so before, I explained our business. Meanwhile, I stroked the tortoiseshell female cat and could tell that she hadn’t been adequately groomed in a while.

  “Her name is Autumn,” Bernice said in a fond voice.

  I told Autumn what a beautiful coat she had, and she ate up the praise, blinking at me happily. “You’ve got a few knots, though, don’t you? Want me to get them out for you, real quick?” A workaholic, I travel with a small pet brush. With Bernice’s permission, I gently worked some of the mats out of the tortie’s coat, as if it was just a casual demonstration of my service. “There, all pretty again.”

  “We called her Autumn because her color’s like the woods in the fall,” Bernice told me. “She belonged to a neighbor, and when he moved away ten years ago we took her in. Sugarman, he’s been with us so long, I don’t even remember how we got him. Winky, the gray one, is Minnie’s son from her last litter, about two years ago. He was crazy as a kitten, but he’s settled down now.” Bernice also went on to explain which of the other cats these three did and didn’t get along with, and their various idiosyncrasies.