Greywalker - Kat Richardson [57]
It was a pleasant Victorian, the kind in which families raised generations. Mrs. Ingstrom answered the door herself at my knock. She asked me in and I requested the use of her bathroom.
“Oh, the one down here is a mess. Go to the top of the stairs and turn right. It’s at the end of the hall. Watch out for all the boxes and don’t mind the cat, he likes to sleep on the heat register there,” she explained.
I shot up the stairs past a row of packing boxes and into the large bathroom, where I was greeted by the beady glare of a single yellow eye.
“ ’Scuse me,” I said to the three-foot mound of white fur. It huffed and tucked away its eye for a few more winks of catnap.
The bathroom was clean and depersonalized. Only a small bottle of aspirin and a cardboard box of adhesive bandages still sat in the open medicine cabinet. Rust marks on the metal shelves showed where other things had been not long ago. The room was silent on the matter of the lives which had passed through it.
I was leaving when the cat rose like a thunderhead and stretched with a head-splitting pink yawn. I looked back toward it as, with no apparent acceleration, the cat sailed out of the room past me, waving its plume of a tail. A cat-shaped shadow, fluttering Grey, remained lurking on the heat register. I shook myself and went back downstairs.
Mrs. Ingstrom was in the kitchen at the rear, making coffee in an old drip Melitta. She glanced at me as she picked up the pot and a couple of thick-sided white mugs and started out of the kitchen. “We’ll have our coffee in the front room. I’ve got all the other things out there. Everything else is packed or tagged for the auction this weekend.”
I regretted the lunchtime coffee more than ever. I’d be vibrating by the time I got back to the office, at this rate of consumption.
I followed her out to the living room—“the parlor” when the house was new, I supposed. She waved me to a seat in front of the unlit fireplace. All the knickknacks and personal bits were either gone or sported prominent lot tags. Most of the furniture had been shoved to one side.
She started pouring coffee. “Help yourself to the shortbread.”
I picked up a small piece and I could smell the butter at arm’s length. I could gain weight just breathing near it. I nibbled.
Mrs. Ingstrom put a mug of coffee down in front of me and pushed forward a sugar bowl and matching creamer. She gave me a small, strained smile. “It’s a good thing I hadn’t packed up the sugar, yet.”
Sneaking up on the scalding coffee, I asked her about the organ.
“I was surprised at how easy it was to find,” she said. “Chet had quite a few papers on his desk and I had to sort through them first. I thank God he was such an organized record keeper. But I just . . . If I had to go through every piece of paper, I’d never make it. It’s been awful, just . . . awful,” she quavered, and then began to cry. “Oh, why? Why, why?” She buried her face in her hands and sobbed.
I froze and sat there a moment. Self-conscious, I scootched along the sofa next to her and put my arm around her shoulders.
I patted her arm and murmured automatically, “Please don’t cry. It’s all right.”
She sniffled and wiped her eyes with the hem of her skirt and hiccuped, “No, it’s not.”
I handed her a napkin from among the coffee things. She blew her nose and dabbed at her eyes again, talking while she covered her discomfort with pats of the napkin.
“It’s just terrible, is what it is. The company always seemed to be doing so well, and we’re not extravagant people. We never lived above our income. Chet was always frugal. It ran in the family, I suppose. And then so many things went wrong all at once and, somehow, the company just couldn’t stay afloat. All the bills and the creditors and the contractors with their lawyers and lawsuits, and then the tax men. It was a nightmare. It’s still a nightmare—it’s worse! If Chet had just died, then the company would have been sold