Charlaine Harris - A Bone To Pick

Madeleine completed her house tour and came and sat in front of me, her front paws neatly covered by her plumy tail. She looked up at me expectantly. Her eyes were round and gold and had a kind of stare that reminded me of Arthur Smith’s.

That stare said, “I am the toughest and the baddest, don’t mess with me.” I found myself giving a halfhearted chuckle at Madeleine’s machisma. Suddenly she crouched, and in one fluid movement shifted her bulk from the floor to the table- where Jane ate! I thought, horrified.

She could stare at me more effectively there. Growing impatient at my stupidity, Madeleine butted her golden head against my hand. I patted her uncertainly. She still seemed to be waiting for something. I tried to picture Jane with the cat, and I seemed to recall she’d scratched the animal behind the ears. I tried that. A deep rumble percolated somewhere in Madeleine’s insides. The cat’s eyes half-closed with pleasure. Encouraged by this response, I kept scratching her gently behind the ears, then switched to the area under her chin. This, too, was popular.

I grew tired of this after a while and stopped. Madeleine stretched, yawned, and jumped heavily down from the table. She walked over to one of the cabinets, and sat in front of it, casting a significant look over her shoulder at me. Fool that I am, it took me a few minutes to get the message. Madeleine gave a soprano yowl. I opened the bottom cabinet, and saw only the pots and pans I’d reloaded the day before. Madeleine kept her stare steady. She seemed to feel I was a slow learner. I looked in the cabinets above the counter and found some canned cat food. I looked down at Madeleine and said brightly, “This what you wanted?” She yowled again and began to pace back and forth, her eyes never leaving the black and green can. I hunted down the electric can opener, plugged it in, and used it. With a flourish, I set the can down on the floor. After a moment’s dubious pause-she clearly wasn’t used to eating from a can-Madeleine dived in. After a little more searching, I filled a plastic bowl with water and put it down by the can. This, too, met with the cat’s approval.

I went to the phone to call Parnell, my feet dragging reluctantly. But of course I hadn’t had the phone hooked up. I reminded myself again I’d have to do something about that, and looked at the cat, now grooming herself with great concentration. “What am I going to do with you?” I muttered. I decided I’d leave her here for the night and call Parnell from my place. He could come get her in the morning. Somehow I hated to put her outside; she was an inside cat for the most part, I seemed to remember Jane telling me… though frankly I’d often tuned out when Jane chatted about the cat. Pet owners could be such bores. Madeleine would need a litter box; Jane had had one tucked away beside the refrigerator. It wasn’t there now. Maybe it had been taken to the vet’s where Madeleine had been boarded during Jane’s illness. It was probably sitting uselessly at the Engles’ house now.

I poked around in the trash left in Jane’s room from my cleaning out the closet. Sure enough, there was a box of the appropriate size and shape. I put it in the corner by the refrigerator in the kitchen, and as Madeleine watched with keen attention I opened cabinets until I found a half-full bag of cat litter.

I felt rather proud of myself at handling the little problem the cat presented so quickly; though, when I considered, it seemed Madeleine had done all the handling. She had gotten back to her old home, gained entrance, been fed and watered, and had a toilet provided her, and now she jumped up on Jane’s armchair in the living room, curled into a striped orange ball, and went to sleep. I watched her for a moment enviously, then I sighed and began sorting papers again.

In the fourth box I found what I wanted. The carpet had been installed three years ago. So the skull had become a skull sometime before that. Suddenly I realized what should have been obvious. Of course Jane had not killed someone and put his head in the window seat fresh, so to speak. The skull had already been a skull, not a head, before Jane had sealed it up. I was willing to concede that Jane obviously had a side unknown to me, or to anyone, though whoever had searched the house must at least suspect it. But I could not believe that Jane would live in a house with a decomposing head in the window seat. Jane had not been a monster.

What had Jane been? I pulled up my knees and wrapped my arms around them. Behind me, Madeleine, who had observed Jane longer than anyone, yawned and rearranged herself.

Jane had been a woman in her late seventies with silver hair almost always done up in a regal chignon. She had never worn slacks, always dresses. She had had a lively mind-an intelligent mind- and good manners. She had been interested in true crime, at a safe distance; her favorite cases were all Victorian or earlier. She had had a mother who was wealthy and who had held a prominent, place in Lawrenceton society, and Jane had behaved as though she herself had neither. She had inherited from somewhere, though, a strong sense of property. But as far as the liberation of women went- well, Jane and I had had some discussions on that. Jane was a traditionalist, and though as a working woman she had believed in equal pay for equal work, some of the other tenets of the women’s movement were lost on her. “Women don’t have to confront men, honey,” she’d told me one time.

“Women can always think their way around them.” Jane had not been a forgiving person, either; if she got really angry and did not receive an adequate apology, she held a grudge a good long while. She was not even aware of grudge holding, I’d observed; if she had been, she would have fought it, like she’d fought other traits in herself she didn’t think were Christian. What else had Jane been? Conventionally moral, dependable, and she’d had an unexpectedly sly sense of humor.

In fact, wherever Jane was now, I was willing to bet she was looking at me and laughing. Me, with Jane’s money and Jane’s house and Jane’s cat and Jane’s skull.

After sorting more papers (I might as well finish what I’ve begun, I thought), I got up to stretch. It was raining outside, I discovered to my surprise. As I sat on the window seat and looked out the blinds, the rain got heavier and heavier and the thunder started to boom. The lights came on across the street in the little white house with yellow shutters, and through the front window I could see Lynn unpacking boxes, moving slowly and awkwardly. I wondered how having a baby felt, wondered if I would ever know. Finally, for no reason that I could discern, my feeling for Arthur ended, and the pain drained away. Tired of poring over receipts left from a life that was over, I thought about my own life. Living by myself was sometimes fun, but I didn’t want to do it forever, as Jane had. I thought of Robin Crusoe, the mystery writer, who had left town when my romance with Arthur had heated up. I thought of Aubrey Scott. I was tired of being alone with my bizarre problem. I was tired of being alone, period.

I told myself to switch mental tracks in a hurry. There was something undeniably pleasant about being in my own house watching the rain come down outside, knowing I didn’t have to go anywhere if I didn’t want to. I was surrounded by books in a pretty room, I could occupy myself however I chose. Come on, I asked myself bravely, what do you choose to do? I almost chose to start crying, but instead I jumped up, found Jane’s Soft Scrub, and cleaned the bathroom. A place isn’t really yours until you clean it. Jane’s place became mine, however temporarily, that afternoon. I cleaned and sorted and threw away and inventoried. I opened a can of soup and heated it in my saucepan on my stove. I ate it with my spoon. Madeleine came into the kitchen when she heard me bustling around and jumped up to watch me eat. This time I was not horrified. I looked over the book I’d pulled from Jane’s shelves and addressed a few remarks to Madeleine while I ate.