The Alienist - Caleb Carr [219]
“Cats,” Mrs. Piedmont said merrily as she sat down in a high-armed chair. “Wonderful companions, but they will run off. Quite disappear, without so much as a word!”
“Mrs. Piedmont,” Sara said indulgently, “we really are most anxious to find Mr. Beecham. We’re—old friends of his, you see—”
“Oh, but you can’t be,” Mrs. Piedmont said, her face scowling a bit. “Mr. Beecham had no friends. He said so. He always said so. ‘He travels swiftest who travels alone, Mrs. Piedmont,’ he would tell me in the morning, and then it was off to the shipping office.”
“Shipping office?” I said. “But surely—”
Sara touched my hand to silence me, then smiled as several cats wandered into the room from the hallway. “Of course,” she said. “The shipping office. A very enterprising man.”
“Indeed,” Mrs. Piedmont answered. “Oh, and there’s Lysander,” she went on, pointing to one of the cats, who was mewing profusely. “I haven’t seen him since Saturday. Cats! They do disappear…”
“Mrs. Piedmont,” Sara said, still showing remarkable patience, “how long did Mr. Beecham live with you?”
“How long?” The old girl began to chew at a finger as she cogitated. “Why, nearly three years, all in all. Never a complaint, always on time with his rent.” She frowned. “But a somber sort of a man, really. And he never ate! Never ate that I saw, that is. Always working, day and night—though I suppose he must’ve eaten sometime, mustn’t he?”
Sara smiled again and nodded. “And do you know why he left?”
“Well,” Mrs. Piedmont said simply. “The failure.”
“Failure?” I said, hoping for a clue.
“His shipping line,” came the reply. “The great tempest off the China coast. Oh, those poor seamen. Mr. Beecham gave all the money he had left to their families, you know.” A bony hand went up confidentially. “If you see a small calico lady come through, Miss Howard, do tell me. She didn’t come down for breakfast, and they will disappear.”
Mean as it may sound, I was about ready to wring Mrs. Piedmont’s neck, along with those of her blasted cats; but Sara stayed the course, inquiring congenially, “Did you ask Mr. Beecham to leave, then?”
“I should say not,” Mrs. Piedmont answered. “He went of his own accord. He told me he had no money to pay his rent, and he didn’t intend to stay where he couldn’t pay his way. I offered to give him a few weeks’ grace, but he wouldn’t have it. I remember that day very well—a week before Christmas. It was about the time that little Jib disappeared.”
I groaned quietly as Sara asked, “Jib? A cat?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Piedmont answered dreamily. “Just—disappeared. Never a word. They have their own affairs to attend to, cats.”
As my eyes wandered to the floor, I noticed that several more of Mrs. Piedmont’s charges had noiselessly entered the room, and that one of them was attending to its own affairs in a shadowy corner. I nudged Sara, indicating the upstairs impatiently.
“Do you think we might have a look at the room?” Sara asked.
Mrs. Piedmont came back from her daydream with a smile, and looked at us as though we’d only just entered. “Then it’s the room you’re interested in?”
“We may be.”
That set off a new round of chatter as we headed out of the parlor and up the staircase, the ancient green wallpaper of which was peeling and torn. The room that Beecham had rented was on the third floor, which, climbing at Mrs. Piedmont’s pace, seemed to take an eternity to reach. By the time we finally did, all eight of the house cats had already collected around the door, and were mewing away. Mrs. Piedmont unlocked the room and then we entered.
The first thing that struck me was that the cats didn’t follow us in. As soon as the door opened their mewing stopped, and then they sat at the threshold, looking momentarily concerned before they shot off down the stairs. With their departure I turned to survey the chamber, and quickly caught a trace of something in the air: the smell of decay. It was nothing like the