The Cat Who Went Into the Closet

-5-

WHEN JUNIOR MENTIONED his reincarnation theory as a motive for Euphonia's suicide, the chattering under the kitchen table had a negative, even hostile sound.

"You didn't care for the idea," Qwilleran said to Koko after Junior had left for the office. "Neither did I. I don't know what it is, but there's something we don't know about the lady."

Three doughnuts and two cups of coffee had only whetted Qwilleran's appetite, and he walked to Lois's for buckwheat pancakes with Canadian bacon, maple syrup, and double butter. Lois herself was waiting on tables, and when she brought his order, he thought the pancakes looked unusual. He tasted them cautiously.

"Lois," he called out, "what's wrong with these pancakes?"

She stared briefly at the plate before snatching it away. "You got Mrs. Toodle's oat bran pancakes!" She took the plate to another table and returned with the right one. "Do these look better? She put margarine and honey on 'em, but she hadn't started to eat."

That's the way it was in that restaurant - informal. Lois was a hard-working woman who owned her own business, labored long hours, enjoyed every aspect of her job, and jollied or insulted the customers with impunity. She had been feeding downtown Pickax for thirty years, and her devoted clientele regularly took up collections to finance building repairs, since the "stingy old woman" who owned the place would do nothing about maintenance. Twice Qwilleran had dropped a twenty-dollar bill into the pickle jar.

"So you lost one of your good customers!" he said to Lois when he paid his check. "Who?"

"Euphonia Gage."

"That old witch? You gotta be kidding! She was too hoity-toity to come in here," Lois said with lofty disdain. "She sent her housekeeper to collect the rent. When her husband was alive, he came in himself, and I fixed him a thick roast beef sandwich with horseradish. Nice man! If I was short of cash, he didn't mind coming back the next day."

"For another sandwich?" Qwilleran inquired.

"You men!" Lois snapped with a grimace that was half rebuke and half fondness.

Walking home, Qwilleran began to formulate his profile of Junior's grandmother. He would call it "The Several Hats of Mrs. Gage." She was dancer, snob, health nut, and "purplist," a word he had coined. She was generous, stingy, elegant, aloof, witty, unpredictable, gracious, and hoity-toity.

Later, he was sitting at his desk, making notes for the profile, when Koko trudged past the library door with something in his mouth. The plodding gait, lowered head, and horizontal tail suggested serious business. Kao K'o Kung was not a mouser - he left that occupation to Yum Yum - but his behavior was suspiciously predatory, and Qwilleran followed him stealthily. When within tackling distance, he grabbed Koko around the middle and commanded, "Drop that filthy thing!"

Koko, who never took orders gladly, squirmed and clamped his jaws on the prey, shaking his head to prevent the forcible opening of his mouth. Realizing it was no mouse, Qwilleran coaxed in a gentler voice, "Let go, Koko. Good boy! Good boy!" And he massaged the furry throat until Koko was induced to lick his nose and lose his grip.

"What next!" Qwilleran said aloud, snatching the trophy. It was a partial denture - left and right molars connected by a silver bridge - and it was destined for the collection site under the kitchen table.

The objects that Yum Yum charmingly pilfered from pockets and wastebaskets were toys, to be hidden behind seat cushions for future reference. Koko was the serious treasure hunter, however. Qwilleran thought of his excavations as an archaeological dig for fragments that might be pieced together to reconstruct a social history of the Gage dynasty. In fact, he had started written inventory. Now he confiscated the denture and carried it to the library, while Koko followed in high dudgeon, scolding and jumping at his hand.

"It's only an old set of false teeth," Qwilleran remonstrated as he dropped it into the desk drawer. "Why dont you dig up a Cartier watch?" He added "partial denture" to the other recent acquisitions on the inventory: leather bookmark, recipe for clam chowder, purple satin bedroom slipper, man's argyle sock, 1951 steeplechase ticket, wine label (Bernkasteler Doktor und Graben Hochfeinst '59).

On Friday afternoon Qwilleran drove to the Black Bear Caf‚, wearing his new multicolor sweater. Although his prime purpose was to inspect the staging area for "The Big Burning," he was also slated to meet a young farm woman who needed advice, and the sweater made him look ten years younger - or so he had been told.

Gary's bar and grill operation was located in the Hotel Booze in the town of Brrr, so named because it was the coldest spot in the county. The hotel had been a major landmark since the nineteenth century, when sailors, miners, and lumberjacks used to kill each other in the saloon on Saturday nights, after which the survivors each paid a quarter to sleep on the floor of the rooms upstairs. It was a boxy building perched on a hilltop overlooking the harbor, and ships in the lake were guided to port by the rooftop sign: BOOZE... ROOMS... FOOD.

When Gary Pratt took over the Hotel Booze from his ailing father, the bar was a popular eatery, but the upper floors violated every building regulation in the book. Yet, the banks refused to lend money to bring it up to code, possibly because of Gary's shaggy black beard and wild head of hair, or because he had been a troublesome student in high school. Qwilleran had a hunch about Gary's potential, however, and the Klingenschoen Foundation obliged with a low-interest economic development loan. With the addition of elevators, indoor plumbing, and beds in the sleeping rooms, the Hotel Booze became the flagship of Brrr's burgeoning tourist trade, and Gary became president of the chamber of commerce. Wisely he maintained the seedy atmosphere that appealed to sportsmen. The mirror over the backbar still had the radiating cracks where a bottle had been flung by a drunken patron during the 1913 mine strike.

When Qwilleran arrived on that Friday afternoon he slid cautiously onto a wobbly barstool, and Gary, behind the carved black walnut bar, asked, "Squunk water on the rocks?"

"Not this time. I'll take coffee if you have it. How's business?"

"It'll pick up when the hunting season opens. I hope we get some snow. The hunters like a little snow for tracking."

"They say we're in for a lot of it this winter." It was one of the trite remarks Qwilleran had learned to make; local etiquette called for three minutes of weatherspeak before any purposeful conversation.

"I like snow," said Gary. "I've been dog-sledding the last couple of winters."

"Sounds like an interesting sport," Qwilleran said, although the idea of being transported by dogpower had no appeal for him.

"You should try it! Come out with me some Sunday!"

"That's an idea," was Qwilleran's carefully ambiguous response.

"Say, I've been meaning to ask you about the different characters in your show. It must have been hard to change your voice like that. I sure couldn't do it."

"I've always had a fairly good ear for different kinds of speech," Qwilleran said with a humble shrug. "The big problem was recording the voices. When I played them back, the tape was punctuated with the yowling of cats. So I locked them out of the room and tried again. This time the mike picked up a trash impactor and the sheriff's helicopter. I finally recorded at three o'clock in the morning and hoped no one in my neighborhood would require an ambulance."

"Well, it sure was impressive. Where did you get all your information? Or did you make some of it up?"

"Every statement is documented," Qwilleran said. "Do you know anything about the Gage family? One of them was an amateur historian."

"All I know is that this woman who just died - her husband used to hang around the bar when my father was running it. Dad said he was quite a boozer. Liked to swap stories with the hunters and fishermen. Never put on airs. Just one of the guys."

"Did you ever meet him?"

"No, he died before I took over-struck by lightning. He was horseback riding when a storm broke, and he made the mistake of sheltering under a tree. Killed instantly!"

"What about the horse?" Qwilleran asked.

"Funny, nobody ever mentioned the horse... Another cup of coffee?"

"No, thanks. Let's go and see where we're going to present our show."

"Okay. Just a sec." Gary picked up the bar telephone and called a number. "Nancy, he's here," he said in a low voice. "Okay, Qwill, let's go. The meeting room's across the lobby." He led the way to a large room that was barren except for a low platform and helter-skelter rows of folding chairs. "Here it is! What do you need? We can get you anything you want."

Qwilleran stepped up on the platform and found it solid. "We need a couple of small tables, preferably noncollapsible, and a couple of plain chairs... I see you have plenty of electric outlets... What's behind that door?"

"Just a hall leading to the restrooms and the emergency exit."

"Good! I'll use it for entrances and exits. Hixie says there'll be families attending, so I suggest seating the kids in the front rows. They'll have better sight lines and be less fidgety, I hope... And now I'll take that second cup of coffee."

Back in the bar Gary said, "Hey, there's Nancy, the girl I want you to meet."

Seated on one of the tilt-top barstools was a young woman in jeans, farm jacket, and field boots. She was slightly built, and her delicate features were half hidden by a cascade of dark, wavy hair. In dress and stature she might have been a seventh grader on the way home from school, but her large brown eyes were those of a grown woman with problems. She turned her eyes beseechingly on Qwilleran's moustache.

"Nancy, this is Mr. Q," Gary said. "Nancy's a good customer of ours. Burgers, not beer, eh, Nancy?"

She nodded shyly, clutching her bottle of cola.

"How do you do," Qwilleran said with a degree of reserve.

"Nice to meet you. I've seen your column in the paper."

"Good!" he said coolly. Had she read it? Did she like it? Or had she just seen it?

Gary served Qwilleran a fresh cup of coffee. "Well, I'll leave you two guys to talk." He ambled to the other end of the bar to visit with a couple of boaters.

The awkward silence that followed was broken by Qwilleran's uninspired question. "Are you a member of the Outdoor Club?"

"Yes," she said. "I'm going to see your show Monday night."

He huffed into his moustache. Had she heard good things about it? Was she looking forward to it? Or was she simply going to see it? Again it was his turn to serve in this slow-motion game of Ping-Pong. "Do you think we'll have snow next week?"

"I think so," she said. "The dogs are getting excited."

"Dogs? Do you have dogs?"

"Siberian huskies."

"Is that so?" he remarked with a glimmer of interest. "How many do you have?"

"Twenty-seven. I breed sled dogs."

"Are you a musher?"

"I do a little racing," she said, blushing self-consciously.

"Gary tells me it's becoming quite a popular sport. Do you breed dogs as a hobby or a vocation?"

"Both, I guess. I work part-time at the animal clinic in Brrr. I'm a dog-handler."

"Do you live in Brrr?"

"Just outside. In Brrr Township."

How long, Qwilleran wondered, can this painful dialogue continue? He was determined not to inquire about her problem. If she had a problem, let her state it! They both wriggled on the ancient barstools that clicked noisily. He tried to catch Gary's eye, but the barkeeper was arguing heatedly with the boaters about the new breakwall.

"Nancy, I'm afraid I don't know your last name," Qwilleran said.

"Fincher," she said simply.

"How do you spell it?" He knew how to spell it, but it was an attempt to fill the silence.

"F-i-n-c-h-e-r.

Fortunately Gary glanced in their direction, and Qwilleran pointed to his empty cup and Nancy's half-empty bottle. Gary approached with his bearish, lumbering gait. "Did you tell him about your problem?" he asked Nancy.

"No," she said, looking away. Gary poured coffee and produced another bottle of cola. "The thing of it is, Qwill, her dad disappeared." Then he went back to the boaters.

Qwilleran looked inquiringly at the embarrassed daughter. "When did that happen?"

"I haven't been able to find him since Sunday." She looked genuinely worried.

"Do you live in the same house?"

"No, he lives on his farm. I have a mobile home."

"What kind of farm?"

"Potatoes."

"Where did you see him on Sunday?"

"I went over to cook Sunday dinner for him, the way I always do. Then he watched football on TV, and I went home to my dogs."

"And when did you first realize he was missing?"

"Wednesday." There was a long, exasperating pause. Qwilleran waited for her to go on.

"The mail carrier stopped and told me that Pop's mailbox was filling up, and his dog was barking in the house, and there was no truck in the yard. So I drove over there, and Corky was so starved, he almost took my arm off. He'd wrecked the house, looking for something to eat. And the place smelled terrible!"

"Did you notify the police?"

Nancy looked at her clenched hands. They were small hands, but they looked strong. "Well, I talked to a deputy I know, and he said Pop was most likely off on a binge somewhere."

"Is your father a heavy drinker?"

"Well... he's been drinking more since Mom died."

"Did you do anything further?"

"Well, I cleaned up the mess and took Corky home with me, and on the way I stopped at the Crossroads Tavern. That's where Pop goes to have a beer with the other farmers and chew the rag. They said he hadn't been around since Saturday night. They figured he was working in the fields."

"Has your father ever done this before?"

"Never!" Her eyes flashed for the first time. "He'd never do such a thing at harvest. The weather's been wet, and if he doesn't dig his potatoes before the first heavy frost, the whole crop will be ruined. It's not like him at all! He's a very good farmer, and he's got a lot invested in his crop."

"And this deputy you mentioned - does he know your father?"

"Yes," she said, shrinking into her burly jacket.

"What's his name?"

"Dan Fincher."

"Related to you?"

She turned away as she said, "We were married for a while."

"I see," said Qwilleran. "What's your father's name?"

"Gil Inchpot."

He nodded. "The Inchpot name goes back a long way in the farming community. The farm museum in West Middle Hummock has quite a few things from early Inchpot homesteads."

"I've never been there," Nancy said. "I never cared much for history."

"What kind of truck does your father drive?"

"Ford pickup. Blue."

"Do you know the license number?"

"No," she said, pathetically enough to arouse Qwilleran's sympathy.

"Let me think about this matter," he said, pushing a cocktail napkin and a ballpoint pen toward her. "Write down your address and telephone number, also the address of your father's farm."

"Thank you," she said simply, turning her expressive brown eyes toward him.

He thought, Beware of young women with beseeching brown eyes, especially when they look twelve years old. "If you learn anything further, ask Gary how to get in touch with me."

"Thank you," she said again. "Now I have to go back to work. I just ran over from the clinic."

She left, lugging a shoulder bag half her size. Qwilleran watched her go, smoothing his moustache like the villain in an old melodrama, but the gesture meant something else. It meant that he sensed an element of intrigue in this country tale. The reaction started with a tingle on his upper lip - in the roots of his moustache - and he had learned to respect the sensation.

Gary returned with the coffee server.

"Please! Not again! It's good coffee, but I'm driving."

"Nice little girl, isn't she?" the barkeeper remarked. "I don't visualize her racing with a pack of sled dogs. She looks too delicate."

"But she's light, like a jockey, and that makes a good racer. What do you think of her story?"

"It bears a closer look."

"Yeah, that ex-husband of hers is a jerk! Imagine brushing her off like that!"

"If she wants to talk to me, you dial the number for her, Gary."

"Sure, I understand. I'll bet you're pestered by all kinds of people."

Qwilleran threw a ten dollar bill across the bar. "Keep the change for a down payment on some new barstools. And I'll see you Monday night."

From the Hotel Booze he drove directly to the police station in downtown Pickax, where his friend Andrew Brodie was chief.

Brodie waved him away. "If you're looking for free coffee, you're too late. The pot's dry."

"False deduction," Qwilleran said. "My prime objective is to see if you're doing your work, issuing lots of parking tickets, and arresting leaf burners. Did you blow your leaves into the street, Andy? The vacuum truck will be on your side of town tomorrow."

The chief shot him a veiled look. "The wife takes care of that."

"Oh, hot Now I understand why you're always advocating matrimony! I knew there was some ulterior reasoning."

Brodie scowled. "What's on your mind, besides leaves?"

"Do you know a guy named Gil Inchpot?"

"Potato farmer. Brrr Township."

"Right. His daughter's worried about him. He's disappeared. His truck's gone. He abandoned his dog. And he decamped when the potatoes were ready to harvest."

"That's the sheriff's turf," Brodie pointed out. "Did she report it to the sheriff's department?"

"She talked to a deputy named Dan Fincher."

"That guy's a lunkhead! I used to work for the sheriff, and I have firsthand evidence."

"Well, the lunkhead laughed it off, said Inchpot was off on a binge somewhere."

"The daughter should notify the state police. They cover three counties. Do you know the license number of the missing vehicle?"

"No, but it's a blue Ford pickup, and I have Inchpot's address, in case you want to run a check on it - with that expensive computer the taxpayers bought for you."

"Seeing as how it's you," Brodie said, "I'll run down the number and turn it over to the state police post."

"That's decent of you, Andy. If you ever want to run for mayor, I'll campaign for you."

The chief scowled again. "It would do me good to give Dan Fincher a swift kick in the pants, that's all."