Isha’s father just smiled and said, “Well, welcome to our kingdom, Princess Tandinajo the Brave,” and I felt welcome, as if the air in their home were so fresh and so sweet, I couldn’t get enough of it.
The name and the memory came back to me as I let myself into Iola Anne Poole’s house and made my way to the kitchen. “Tandinajo the Brave,” I whispered, chuckling at the echo off Iola’s high ceilings. It felt good to laugh after almost an hour of chasing the one-eared cat around the cottage. I now fully understood the saying about herding cats. That scabby old thing was not only wily and ugly, he was as mean as an acre of alligators.
There was a scent in Iola’s kitchen that reminded me of the temporary realm of Tandinajo the Brave. Cinnamon . . . or ginger. Maybe both. A pumpkin pie smell, like the sweet rolls Isha’s mother made. Despite the clutter of storage boxes and canned food around the edges of Iola’s kitchen, it smelled like she’d just been there, baking a pie.
The effect was unsettling. I had the urge to walk through the house, ensure that she was really gone. The place didn’t seem empty, and I felt like a houseguest who’d breezed in without taking time for all the proper niceties. It wasn’t a sense of being unwelcome exactly, more like I should be acknowledging something that I hadn’t yet, as if the house were one big question, and the answer had nothing to do with cleaning the food out of the kitchen. As if the place wanted something from me.
Silly, of course. Houses don’t want or think or wonder. They don’t bake pumpkin pies when no one’s home. They don’t love or hate or hope. They just are.
They don’t know anything.
Yet this house was telling a story, even now. Iola’s story. She’d eaten something on a blue-rimmed china luncheon plate for her last meal, washed the dish, and set it in the draining rack with a single fork and a stoneware coffee mug. The cup had a faded pink heart on the front, printed with the words Love is . . . knowing you love me! Next to the heart stood a sunbonneted Holly Hobbie girl in outdated shades of brown and harvest gold.
The companions to the blue-rimmed plate waited in a neat stack behind glass, their golden edges glinting in the morning light. The cabinet hinges complained as I opened the door and stood on my toes to run a finger across the shelf, parting the dust. When I lifted one of the matching teacups, a perfect circle of clean space appeared. No one had used these in a while.
Was that her routine every day —to drink her coffee in the faded Holly Hobbie mug, then wash it and leave it to drain? Was the mug her favorite? Had someone given it to her a long time ago, someone she loved?
Where was that someone now?
The buzzer on the oven sounded, and I jumped at least a foot before crossing the kitchen to turn the little white pointer firmly to the off position. My fingers were trembling when I pulled my hand away. So much for Tandinajo the Brave. I was shaking like a poodle being hauled in for annual vaccinations.
“Okay, listen, the food needs to be cleaned out of this kitchen because there’s nobody here to eat it.” I braced my hands on my hips and looked around the room. No one could hear me, but somehow it seemed right to acknowledge the fact that this house had an owner, and she hadn’t been gone very long. “Brother Guilbeau sent me. Someone’s got to sort out this mess before the mice take over. I know about mice, believe me. I lived in some ragtag places growing up. One cat isn’t going to cut it with all this food sitting around.”
The cat was as strange as everything else about this house —a puzzle I couldn’t put together, no matter how hard I tried. He had me ferhoodled, to put it in Pap-pap’s words. I could not, for the life of me, figure out how he came and went from the house, but he did.
At night I’d see him sitting in the turret window. Same black tomcat with eerie gold-colored eyes and half of one ear missing. Just sitting there, still as a stone, staring over the treetops toward the marina and Pamlico Sound, a faint glow casting out from behind him. Someone must have left a lamp on after they took Iola’s body away.
The next day, the cat would be sitting on the roof of the stable or prowling the irises in the flower bed or cautiously sniffing around our porch to see if J.T. had left anything.
There was definitely no cat door in this house. I’d looked more than once in the past week. How to explain an animal seemingly walking through walls, I had no idea.
Now the pumpkin pie smell was a mystery too.
I tried to put it out of my mind as I moved around the kitchen and the adjoining washroom, gathering up cleaning supplies, some of which were so ancient that the containers had rotted through.
Upstairs, something fell off a table or a shelf and hit the floor above the kitchen. I jumped again, slapping a hand over my collarbone. “I know that’s you up there!” After our run-in at the cottage, the cat was probably messing with me on purpose. “Stop knocking her things over. Iola wouldn’t like it, I’ll bet.”
Blood prickled into my cheeks, and the next thing I knew, I was laughing at myself. Talking to a cat. Really?
“Time to get to work.” I went looking for trash bags and came up with enough to get started for a while. There was an envelope on the counter with fifty dollars inside. I folded it and tucked it into my back pocket. I’d have to go get more bags soon, at least. Brother Guilbeau must have stopped back by the big house and left a few bucks for supplies while I was over in the cottage changing clothes and chasing the cat around. All the better, because I wasn’t nuts about the idea of charging expenses at Bink’s Market. Bink’s was information central around Fairhope, and I was trying hard to stay off the local grapevine.
A sliver of temptation needled me as I made a shopping list in my mind. You could add a few extra things to the supply list, then return them and get the money back. Nobody would know the difference. . . .
I shook the plan off as soon as it found a voice.
I’d been listening to Trammel’s form of logic too long. That kind of thinking oversaw the operation of dozens of medical and dental clinics that performed unnecessary procedures on Medicaid kids, then bilked the system for millions of dollars. I was married to Trammel by the time I’d started to really understand what paid for the massive house, the acres of white-fenced pastureland, the horse barns, the staff, the guard at the front gate, the upscale social engagements where women with the right pedigrees made snooty comments to let me know I was good enough to hire as a rider for horses worth hundreds of thousands, but not good enough to marry into their circle.
If they had any idea where Trammel’s money came from, they looked the other way. For far too long, I had also. You’ll make a lot of excuses for yourself while you’re letting your life tumble down a well. It’s not until you hit bottom that you see what a deep hole you’re in.
“Okay . . . trash.” I pulled a Hefty bag off the roll and snapped it open, but what I really needed was a flamethrower. What was Iola waiting for here? The apocalypse? An old woman living alone couldn’t possibly eat all this food. Not in ten years. And on top of that, there was a box of groceries on the counter that looked recent. A delivery from Bink’s Market, judging by the yellow ticket. Eighty dollars’ worth of groceries the day before she died.
I thought about the way I’d found her there in the bed —peaceful, as if she’d known her time was coming. Maybe she hadn’t. Why else would she have ordered groceries?
Still, as mercenary as it sounded, the food would be nice for the kids and me to have. There were even some mini MoonPies. J.T.’s favorite.
As I went back to work, bells jingled somewhere in the house, the sound high and light, barely audible, but it was there.
“Stop that, or I’ll haul you off to the pound. The dog pound!” If that cat didn’t quit, I was going to tell Ross to bring his live trap after all. Seriously.
Outside, the church chimes rang, adding bass to the melody. The music drowned out the cat, and I started sorting through the box of groceries on the counter, counting the church bells as they sounded and faded. Eleven. The old clock on the kitchen wall was fast. I stopped to adjust the hands. I wasn’t sure why.