Probable Claws

37

February 13, 2017

Monday

Pirate, his handsome head on his two huge forepaws, watched at the back entrance to Tazio’s studio, formerly Gary’s. Beginning to feel part of the group, he played with Tucker, sometimes with Mrs. Murphy, but gave Pewter a wide berth. Observing her he, young though he was, knew this was the right decision. The gray cat, immobile, stayed at the small opening under the baseboard.

“Give it up.” Mrs. Murphy sighed.

“No. I’m keeping her at bay.”

“She might not even be in there.” Tucker lay next to Pirate.

“I’m not taking chances.” Pewter sounded tough.

“If she were in there you’d see eight eyes, red from the reflected light,” Mrs. Murphy told her.

“I don’t know how big her nest is. It could run the entire way along the baseboard. She’s a monster. A prehistoric spider.”

“Really?” The puppy was impressed.

“Oh, yes. She probably scared dinosaurs. Her kind has been dangerous forever. She is so big she covers a saucer. Big.”

Tucker whispered, “Demitasse.”

“What’s demitasse?” the puppy wondered.

This brought immediate response from the gray cat. “Don’t listen to Bubblebutt. She undermines me all the time.”

“Bubblebutt? Parts of you are so fat they’re in the next zip code,” Tucker fired back.

“I ought to come over there and bloody your nose, but I can’t abandon my duty.” This was uttered with a superior air of responsibility.

As Pewter grumbled about everyone, Harry sat on the floor, notebook in her lap, one of Gary’s file boxes open.

“Harry, how many times are you going to be in here fooling around with those boxes?” Tazio good-naturedly asked.

“Almost done.”

“I’m in no hurry for you to leave. In fact, it’s good to have company.”

“How can you work with someone around?”

“If I’m trying to solve a problem, make preliminary drawings, I can’t. But if I’m beyond that, I can.”

“You’re beyond that?”

“Am.” The gorgeous young woman smiled.

“What’s this project?”

“Mark and Karen Catron want a large dome over the center aisle of their barn, as well as skylights over every stall and even for the tack room. They’re on a natural light kick and they’re quite right.”

“I didn’t know you designed animal habitat.”

“Didn’t. But Mark can talk a dog off a meat wagon and I started thinking about it; it’s interesting. So I asked Paul, he walked me through Big Mim’s stables, built in 1882, explained everything. Then he told me to double seal every skylight and the dome, underside and weatherside.”

“Done?”

“Close. I’m trying to talk them into partial hay storage overhead with a quarter inch spacing between floorboards to keep air flowing. They don’t want to do it because of the ceiling being lowered. It won’t be much, but it will seem like it, and then that mitigates the big dome.”

“They’re right.”

“I know it but they need better hay storage. If I suggest a separate hay shed, covered walkway, then it will look as though I’m drumming up business.”

Harry considered this. “Well, I understand that, but if you don’t suggest it then you aren’t giving them the benefit of your expertise, as well as Big Mim’s. She has hay barns all over that farm.”

“I don’t want them to think I’m churning, you know, what stockbrokers do.”

“No one is going to think that. And they’re a hundred percent right about bringing in all the natural light. Of course, if they do it and other people see the result, then everyone will want that. Saves on the electric bill.”

“Those bills never go down,” Tazio ruefully remarked as her yellow Lab, Brinkley, dreamed at her feet.

Brinkley, a loving fellow, could only take so much of Pewter, especially now that she was obsessed with the spider, who, granted, was large.

“May I see the plans?”

“Of course.”

Harry put her legs under her, pushed herself up without using her hands.

“How do you do that?”

“You have to use both legs equally. My mother taught me how.” Harry leaned over Tazio at the drafting table. “Wow.”

“The wash stall has a bit of heat so it can be used in the winter. Tack room, too. Baseboard heat, but with all this natural light that ought to be most of the bill, that and the light in the tack room and the wash stall.”

“What about turn-of-the-century lanterns on the outside of the barn?”

“Be lovely but they haven’t asked for touches like that.”

“Don’t you love the old fixtures?”

“For the most part. Depends on the structure.” Tazio put down her soft lead pencil. “What are you doing over there? And why a notebook? You’ve been through those file boxes and so has the sheriff’s department. All it is are building codes. So what’s the draw?”

“Forgive the pun.” Harry smiled at her. “Look at your shelves. You’ve kept a lot of Gary’s dinosaurs, a few of the globes, and the bone fragment, kind of clunky and heavy. So what do you see?”

“Rubber dinosaurs, some original snow globes, and a big, old bone that I kind of like and, really, so does Brinkley.”

“So that’s it.” Harry laughed as Brinkley, upon hearing his name, opened one eye.

“I see rubber toys. What do you see?” Tazio asked Harry.

“When I go through the file boxes, there are notes in some of the code margins. Just stuff about materials, weight-bearing capabilities, life span for some items. What you would expect, especially from a meticulous man who wanted to learn, to improve.”

“Right.” Tazio rested her chin in the cup of her hand.

“Some of the file boxes have little toy dinosaurs in them.” Harry held up her hand because Tazio knew that. “At first, I just figured he was stashing an abundance of prehistoric creatures. But then I started thinking about that and the fact that Lisa seemed obsessed or enchanted with dinosaurs. So I went back through just now. In every box that contains a dinosaur there is a date noted on an excavation code. And no two dinosaurs are alike, now that I know their names. Sometimes there are initials. Don’t know for what.”

“So?”

“Well, I think these codes related to jobs on which he was working.”

“I still don’t see what’s going on.”

“Tazio, give me a minute. I am beginning to see a pattern. Every code so noted deals with excavation. The notations about steel or joists, nothing. Well, somehow the dinosaurs mean something.”

“I dimly remember from one of my geology classes that from Baltimore to just below Richmond, plus a chunk of Pennsylvania, was for millions of years a vast primordial swamp.”

“I’ve been reading about that, too. The other oddity is both Gary and Lisa kept papers from magazines, National Geographic, the good ones. They had almost identical papers and I first saw that with an article on frogs. Then I found an article both cut out about mammoths. It had photos of the reconstructed mammoth from the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles.”

“In his file box?”

“No. That was in his long center desk drawer. When you moved in and I helped, I went through his drawers. I know the sheriff’s department did but I wanted to double-check. So I think there’s a pattern. The key is the 1984 file.”

“Ah.” Tazio’s brow wrinkled.

“We need to find that box.”

“My hunch, which I have said before, is if you find that box you find the killer.” She breathed out. “You’ll tell Cooper all this?”

“When I am more sure.”

“Harry, this isn’t a safe study.”

“I know. And I know I get in her way. But I can do things my way. They have to follow protocol, which can often slow things down. I’ll tell her, really.”

“Harry, he was gunned down in front of everyone in cold blood. If you get too close, whoever this is, whatever this is about, they aren’t going to pull back.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“ATTACK!”

Brinkley, wide awake, bounded to the back door.

Harry and Tazio hurried in, for the hissing and growling sounded awful.

Poor Pirate lay flat on the ground, ears down. Tucker stood on all fours, while Mrs. Murphy joined her cat friend.

“Attack. The giant spider attacked me,” Pewter, eyes wide, screamed.

Mrs. Murphy, calm, said to the humans, “The giant spider ran over her tail. Leapt right out of its cubbyhole and ran over her tail.”

“She weighed a ton!” Pewter, tail looking like a bottle brush, told them.

“All right. Let’s go into the next room, pick up our stuff, and head for home. Tomorrow’s Valentine’s Day. Stuff to do.”

“There is a dangerous monster in here,” Pewter, riveted to the spot, warned.

“It is big.” The puppy, feeling a little safer, offered his opinion.

“Big. It’s gigantic. It has long legs and too many eyes. It glares at me. I can see the hatred, and its terrible mouth works opposite ours. Oh, it’s a terrible sight.” Pewter slowly walked into the next room.

Once in the Volvo station wagon, heat turned on but still cold, the four animals sat in the backseat. The rear with the big window was still cold. This way they were closer to the heat.

“She has no idea how much danger she’s in. That spider will come out and bite. Poison!” Pewter dramatically predicted.

“How do you know she won’t bite you first?” the corgi slightly maliciously asked.

“I can run fast. Harry’s slow. Humans are slow. It’s amazing that they survive,” Pewter remarked.

“I noticed that.” Pirate’s bushy eyebrows rose up. “Do you think it’s because they only have two legs?”

“That’s some of it,” Mrs. Murphy answered.

Pewter, breathing deeply, intoned, “That spider will kill.”

“Right,” Tucker dryly replied.