“I’ll take her study,” Pogo said. “You take the bedroom. I wouldn’t feel right, looking through her lady things.”
Pax didn’t feel right looking through them, either, although not entirely for the same reason that Pogo would have found the task disconcerting. When he was eleven, a week after the sudden death of Sally May Colter—his much loved maternal grandmother—his mom had taken him to Sally’s house to pack the woman’s clothes in boxes to donate to a thrift shop. They also sorted through Sally’s books and jewelry and bibelots, deciding which items should be given to which friends and relatives as remembrances of her. That would have been a grim day, if his mom hadn’t told him numerous stories about Sally that he hadn’t known and that had kept her fresh in memory all these years. Going through the drawers in Bibi’s nightstands, highboy, and dresser, he repeatedly felt as if he were conducting a preliminary assessment to determine what would need to be disposed of upon her death.
In the walk-in closet, standing on a three-step stool, he found the metal lockbox on the highest shelf. It was about twenty inches square, ten inches deep.
He could not imagine anything more unBibi than this. She was practical, and the box was not. Fire-resistant but not fireproof, it would buckle in a vigorous blaze, and the lip of the lid would sneer open, inhaling flames. Portable, it was no obstacle to a burglar, but instead invited attention. And what was the point of having a lockbox for which you taped the key to the lid, as she had done?
Having finished searching the study, Pogo was looking through the kitchen cabinets when Pax entered and put his discovery on the dinette table. Against the red Formica, the metal box with its baked-on black finish looked ominous, as if they might be wise to call in a bomb-disposal specialist to deal with it.
“Something?” Pogo asked.
“Maybe.”
They sat at the table. Pax used the key. The piano hinge was a little stiff, but the lid opened all the way. Most of the contents lay under a rumpled chamois cloth, which held within its loose folds a worn and cracked and dirt-crusted dog collar.
Lifting that item with one finger, Pax said, “Have you seen this before?”
“No.”
“Why would she keep such a thing?”
Pogo took the collar, and as he examined it, dirt crumbled between his fingers. “Jasper,” he said, reading the name that had been neatly scored into the leather.
“Did she once have a dog named Jasper?”
“Kinda, sort of.” Frowning, Pogo pointed to another object in the document box, a spiral-bound notebook. “It’s full of stories about a dog named Jasper.”
The notebook measured perhaps six by nine inches and was almost an inch thick, containing well in excess of two hundred lined pages. On the cover, the name and logo of the stationery company had been painted over, creating a pale-beige background for a beautifully designed and rendered pen-and-ink Art Deco drawing of a leaping panther and a leaping gazelle, each on its hind legs and bounding away from the other.
“I drew that for her,” he said, “I drew special covers for most of her diaries and notebooks. She loved Art Deco even then.”
“I didn’t know you had such talent.”
Pogo shrugged.
“How old were you when you did this?”
“She was…ten when she wrote the Jasper stories, so I’d have been eight.”
“You had this technique at eight? Hell, you’re a prodigy.”
“I’m no Norman Rockwell. Drawing ability shows up early, that’s all. A sense of form. Perspective. People go to art school not to learn it, just to refine it. I could have. But there’s lots of things I could have done. Could-do only matters if it’s also want-to-do.”
Everyone, Pax believed, was more than she or he appeared to be, and one of the saddest things about the human condition was that most people never realized what talents, capacities, and depth they possessed. That Pogo had taken a full measure of himself must be one reason that Bibi so loved him.
“Why a panther and gazelle?”
“It’s just a cool design. If there was another reason, I don’t remember.”
Pax fanned through the pages of neat handwriting, much like Bibi’s cursive script twelve years later, but with girlish flourishes that she no longer employed. Sometimes she dotted an i with a tiny circle, sometimes not, apparently preferring the circle when the word was particularly colorful, and she always dotted j’s with asterisks.
“She wrote the first draft of each story in a tablet,” Pogo said. “Edited it a couple times. Then copied it into the notebook.”