The Blessings of the Animals_A Novel

CHAPTER Fourteen

BY THE TIME HELEN AND I WERE IN MY TRUCK, THAT RAW, insistent rain of Ohio springtime had begun. “What is it about us?” I asked. “The day began beautifully. I watched the sun rise.”
From the initial drive-by, the house looked normal. We saw two cats on the porch. A cat in the window. The house, painted several different shades of green with purple Victorian gingerbreading, looked well cared for. “Doesn’t look too bad,” I said as I parked.
“The guy next door made the call.” Helen looked at the paper in her hand and said, “Stuart Duberstein. He said it was like something out of a Stephen King book.”
Stuart Duberstein. Hmm. The name conjured a crotchety old opinionated guy, the sort who wrote letters to the editor that began with, “How dare you?” Maybe he just didn’t like cats?
Two more cats appeared in the windows. Nothing abnormal yet.
But the unmistakable odor reached us as I began heading up the front walk. “Uh-oh,” I said.
I still hoped this was a case where we could humanely capture a few cats, take them to the spay and neuter program, and offer some education to a little old lady with good intentions.
As I put my striped Wellingtons on the bottom step of the porch, I had my first inkling that this was not to be. Cats poured forth as if someone had turned on a cat hose.
The front curtain moved and I glimpsed a human hand. “Someone’s home,” I said. The windows filled with more cats. I tried to count. Thirty? More?
“Oh, my God,” Helen said. “There’s just as many inside.”
I slid my feet without lifting them, dragging my legs through the river of cats to ring the old-fashioned turn bell. The sound seemed to summon even more cats to the windows and from under the porch. I suddenly had a new opinion of curmudgeonly Mr. Stuart Duberstein.
I rang four times and pounded on the glass.
“This is freaking me out,” Helen said. “Get off!” She edged her way to the steps, using her folded-closed umbrella as a deterrent. She reentered the pelting rain, her white-blond hair immediately plastered to her head. “If it’s not Stephen King, it’s Alfred Hitchcock for sure.”
I fled to the rain, too, where only ten or eleven cats followed. The rest stayed on the porch, crying and mewling at us.
“Oh. My. God,” Helen said. She opened her umbrella and shielded me while I took photographs of the porch and the crowded windows. We walked around the house, a few cats hop-trotting along, flicking their paws at the rain.
I waded through the cat sea again to knock on the back door. Since it had no curtains, I cupped my hands around my eyes and peered into the kitchen. The floor was solid with cats—they crawled on the counter, in the sink, on top of the stove. What struck me the most were the signs of normal life: a bowl of apples, funny magnets on the fridge, a nice espresso maker.
A gray tiger kitten succeeded in hooking itself to my jean-clad right thigh. While I tried to peel it off, another cat climbed up my back. I plucked the tiger kitten off me by the scruff of the neck and dropped it into the pillow of cat bodies below. The cat on my back had almost reached my shoulder. I dropped my umbrella and plunged back into the downpour. “Get it off me!” I shouted to Helen. She grabbed the cat, but it clung to my coat. I heard fabric rip.
Once she flung it to the ground, it turned and sprang on her, while more cats cascaded down the steps at us. I yanked the cat from her coat, dropped it, then grabbed her arm to run.
As we fled, the back door of the neighboring house opened and a man shouted, “In here!”
It wasn’t as if we were being chased by rabid wolves or movie zombies, but we ran for that door as if our lives depended on it. A tall, blond man let us into a warm kitchen, where we dripped on his black-and-white tiled floor. A handsome Australian cattle dog sat smiling at us.
“We’re from the Humane Society,” I said, catching my breath. “Thanks for the refuge.”
“Thank you for finally coming. I’m the one who called. I’m Doobie.”
I shook his hand, even though the image in my mind was now turning three hundred and sixty degrees. Doobie? So much for my grumpy old man. Now we had a hippie pothead.
As if he read my thoughts, the man said, “Not Doobie, like, you know”—he mimed taking a toke. “It’s D-U-B-E-Y. You know, from Duberstein? Stuck since childhood. No one calls me Stuart.” He dug around in a plastic tub and handed us each a towel. I dried my face, then looked around the kitchen. Several cardboard boxes stood in stacks, with more visible in the hall.
“Are you moving in or out?” I asked. I’d move out if I lived next door to that nightmare.
“In. Unfortunately. Let me take your coats.” He gestured us to a red Formica table. I sat, still mopping my hair with the towel.
“What a great dog,” I said.
Dubey grinned. “Booker, would you like to meet the ladies?”
“I love Australian cattle dogs,” I said as Booker sniffed my hands and let me rub his large, fruit-bat ears. He was freckled white and tan, with an intelligent face and a stump of a tail.
“You know that breed? Lots of people don’t.”
“Cami’s a vet,” Helen said. We did introductions.
Dubey had been in the house for only a week. His coffeemaker was unpacked, so he started a fresh pot. While it dripped, he unpacked some mugs. “Cream or sugar?” he asked. He was tall, fit, with hair dark blond like antique gold; like the honey sold at a farmers’ market—real, fresh honey with the comb still in the jar—deep golden with a hint of red.
“Cami?” Helen asked.
I shook myself. “Oh! Cream, please.”
Helen grinned, raising one eyebrow. I rolled my eyes at her when Dubey’s back was turned.
Dubey handed us our mugs—Helen’s had a picture of Beethoven on it, mine had Mozart.
“Classical-music fan?” Helen asked.
He joined us at the table. “I teach piano and music theory at the University of Dayton.”
I took a sip. This was good coffee. I could be a bit of a coffee snob—no doubt influenced by Bobby—and I had been expecting only warmth, not quality.
“Well, welcome to Dayton,” Helen said.
“No, no—I’ve taught at UD seven years. I just moved—I’m only renting this, I don’t know how long—” He stumbled over this sentence three or four times before stating, “I’m getting divorced. My wife is in our old house. This is temporary, until I figure out what I’m doing.”
“I’ve been there,” Helen said. “Cami’s getting divorced, too.” I kicked her under the table.
Dubey nodded at me. “Sucks, doesn’t it?”
“Big-time.” I wondered whether he was the leaver or the one who was left. I gestured to the house next door. “My husband once told me that without him I’d become the crazy cat lady.”
“Oh, please,” Helen said. “Not a chance. Well . . . at least not that bad.”
Dubey shook his head. “My wife never said anything remotely that kind to me.”
We talked easily, Dubey refilling our coffee. We learned that Dubey’s wife, Susan, an opera singer, had cheated on him after having become convinced that he was cheating on her—which, he told us, he hadn’t been—and had taken a hatchet to his piano. Although she’d never wanted a dog in the first place, now she wanted possession of Booker in the divorce settlement.
Even my bone marrow chilled. “She’s fighting for custody of the dog?”
“I think it’s just because she knows he’s something I value,” he said. “When we started dividing stuff, I told her I didn’t care about anything but my piano and the dog, and, of course, those are the two top things on her list. She doesn’t even play piano.”
He filled us in on the house next door. “The woman’s name is Charisse Beaumont-Clay. She looks normal—leaves her house in a suit, has a job somewhere. You’d never know from looking at her that she’s . . . God, I don’t even know what you’d call it.”
I nodded. “It’s like a mental disorder. We mostly see it in women. It’s like they collect animals. Sometimes it’s all different kinds of animals, sometimes it’s just one kind, but most commonly it’s cats. It begins with good intentions, but then it crosses a line.”
“Booker killed a couple of her cats,” Dubey admitted, looking sheepish. “That’s how I discovered how bad it was over there.”
Booker looked up at me, fanning his enormous ears.
Dubey continued. “I let him out and saw him dash for something. He caught a cat, shook it, and that was that. The cat was dirty and didn’t have a collar, so I just assumed it was feral, but the next day he killed another one. And then, one evening, I saw Charisse back by the garages. She was calling the names Spike and Maxine over and over. I went out to talk to her, and she said she was missing two of her cats. She described them perfectly, and I felt horrible.”
“Wait a second,” Helen said. “She can’t possibly—”
“Right!” Dubey said, nodding. “But at the time, I had no idea. I was heading into her yard, gearing up to confess, when all these cats started coming from everywhere and following her. She has names for each and every one of them.”
“This is weirder than we thought,” Helen whispered.
“I told her we ought to call Animal Control about all the strays, and she said they were hers. And I said, ‘Isn’t there a limit? Some kind of city ordinance about how many you can keep?’ and she changed in an instant. She got nasty about Booker and said she bet he’d harmed her cats, but at that point I was too freaked out to tell her the truth. By then I pictured her being crazy enough that I’d come home someday and find Book’s head in a boiling pot.”
“This is too big for us,” I said. “We have to call the police and Animal Control.”
We made the appropriate calls. Our description was horrifying enough, and the day quiet enough on the crime front, that within an hour we were in business. The police ordered Charisse Beaumont-Clay to open her door or they’d force entry. I’ll be damned if Dubey wasn’t right—she looked furious, yet totally normal. She wore stylish jeans, a pretty sweater, makeup. She was my age, perhaps younger, which tipped me off balance. How did someone end up this way? There was nothing to indicate why she shouldn’t have friends in her life who would intervene.
Once inside her house, I blinked against the ammonia sting of tomcat urine. Each room was full of cat beds, climbing platforms, and scratching posts. In the basement were five plastic kiddy wading pools acting as litter boxes, and I had to hand it to her—they were relatively clean. But there was no masking the accumulative stink, especially with so many unneutered toms.
Charisse was in tears, but not hysterics, as Helen and I tried to explain the health issues—similar to a refugee camp’s—in keeping so many animals together.
“There are pretty rampant fleas,” I said—they visibly peppered the coats of the white cats and speckled my boots. “With fleas come other health problems.”
Only when Animal Control began to remove cats did Charisse reveal signs of disorder. “My babies,” she cried. “Who do I keep? How can I choose? You can’t ask a mother to choose!” She picked up a beautiful calico and cried, “Gina? How could you forgive me?” but as she did, her sleeves fell down to mid-forearm, revealing an almost scabies pattern of flea bites.
We helped Animal Control put plastic collars on each cat and label them with permanent marker, and sure enough, just as Dubey had indicated, Charisse told us the names of each one of her cats.
“How will I know what happens to them?” she asked. “Will they kill them?”
I couldn’t make promises. “Not if they don’t have to. They’ll only euthanize them if there are health problems, like feline leukemia.”
Her eyes went wild. “That’s so unfair! They live a long time with leukemia before they get sick! The vets always want to kill them right away. Monsters!”
I murmured what kind words I could, then Helen and I went outside, where I told the Animal Control guys, “Don’t let the shelters put any of these cats in their general population. They need to be quarantined. There’s a whole slew with leukemia.”
They nodded, their eyes sad and pained. We hated this, all of us.
Animal Control loaded cats into carriers and humane traps and carted them away, a process that was still going on as we left and that would fill five county and two private animal shelters.
Dubey was leaving his house with Booker as we got in the truck. “You ladies need anything? More coffee? More towels?”
“You’re very kind,” I said, “but I think we need to burn our clothes.”
He grimaced. “That bad?”
I nodded. I looked down at Booker. “I hope you get to keep him.”
Helen leaned across me to hand him my clinic card. “If you do, Cami’s the best vet in town.”
He smiled and put the card in his shirt pocket. “Well, then, I want the best for Booker.”
By the time we made it out of Dubey’s neighborhood, the sun was shining, the fallen rain shimmering on the spring grass. A rainbow even flirted in the sky. “It is us,” I said. “The two of us on a rescue wreaks havoc with the weather.”
Helen didn’t answer, so I glanced at her. She grinned. As I wound my way back to the highway, she said, “He was sweet on you. And I’d venture to say you’re a little sweet on him. Here”—she handed me the note with his original message on it—“keep his number.”
My stomach tossed. I couldn’t call him. I didn’t know the rules anymore. It’d been too long. I’d make an ass of myself.
Helen put a hand on my upper arm. “You know what? You will never be a crazy cat lady, Cami. Bobby’s the one as sad and crazy as Ms. Beaumont-Clay, if you ask me.”
Did sad and crazy equal wrecked? I was not wrecked. I’d save Gabby from her marriage ban.