Raining Cats & Dogs (A Melanie Travis Mystery) (16 page)

Moi?
I thought. Perish the thought.

“A pessimist might think he had five cats. Or maybe ten.”

Aunt Peg sighed. “I don’t know what it is with you these days. You seem to have cats on the brain.”

Life, I thought. That’s what it was.

W
onder of wonders, Michael Livingston actually was expecting my call. Not only that, but he wanted to talk to me.

I’d barely even started to explain who I was when he broke in and said, “Let’s meet somewhere. Where are you now?”

“At work,” I replied, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. “I can be done by four.” These days, with Sam in residence, I didn’t have to run straight home to meet Davey’s bus.

“Are you in Greenwich or somewhere else?”

“Greenwich,” I said. “Just north of downtown. And you’re in Byram?”

Michael mumbled an assent. Byram wasn’t the best address in the area, but rents were cheaper there, and spur-of-the-moment lodging was easier to come by. It was a bit of a come-down, though, for someone who had grown up on Clapboard Ridge.

“We can meet in the middle,” he said, naming a little bar on the Post Road. “Do you know where that is?”

I’d driven past the small, dark building but never ventured inside. I always thought it looked like the kind of place one might meet for an illicit assignation. Or maybe to buy drugs.

“Sure. I can find it.”

“Four o’clock then,” he said and hung up.

I snapped my own phone shut as Brittany Baxter sauntered into the room. She walked over to greet the Poodles, casting a sidelong glance at me out of the corner of her eye. Wanting to make sure I noticed, no doubt.

“I might as well just stay right here on the floor and play with your dogs,” the seventh grader said when I looked up. “Because we don’t have any work to do. I’m all caught up on my reading. Even Ed says I’m doing great.”

“Ed?”

“You know. Mr. Weinstein.”

“Yes, I know Mr. Weinstein.” I got up and came out from behind my desk. Faith and Eve were lying on their big cedar bed in the corner. I walked over to stand beside Brittany, who was crouching down in front of them. “I just wasn’t aware that his students had started calling him Ed.”

“Not all the students.” Brittany’s lashes fluttered. A becoming pink blush rose on her cheeks.

“Just you?”

“Just me.” She smiled. I felt the pit of my stomach go hollow.

“And you’ve caught up on all your reading?”

“Yeah, sure. Ed scheduled a couple of special catch-up sessions for me, and we went over the stuff together. Now I’m not behind anymore.”

I sat down on the floor next to her. “I thought that was my job.”

“Is that why you’re looking so grim?” Brittany giggled, and for a moment, she looked every bit like the twelve-year-old child she was. Close up, I could see the dark liner she’d smudged around her eyes and the stain she’d applied to her lips. “Are you afraid I won’t need you anymore?”

I resisted the impulse to reach out and smooth back the bangs that brushed low over her forehead. Beneath that wispy fringe, her eyes were a startling shade of blue. When I was twelve, I’d still been playing with dolls. Brittany, I suspected, was playing with fire.

“No,” I said softly, “that’s not what scares me at all.”

Promptly at four o’clock, I was standing outside a squat, dark brown box of a building. The bar had been plopped between two strip malls on Route One and was surrounded on all four sides by asphalt. Neon advertisements for various beers filled the small front windows. The sign over the door read Bubble Bubble. I wondered if that was a Shakespearean reference and, if so, whether those who had named the bar realized that the line after that was “toil and trouble.”

From the looks of the place, I suspected they might have.

Cars zipped by on the four-lane road behind me. Having come straight from school, I had the Poodles in the Volvo. Being April, it wasn’t really hot yet; but still the day was warm enough that I didn’t want to leave them parked in the sun. Finally, I found an area around the side that was shaded by the building itself. I cracked all four windows, locked the doors, and left Faith and Eve with explicit instructions not to talk to any strangers.

It looked like that kind of neighborhood.

I walked into the bar and stood for a moment in the doorway, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness within. When they did, I saw that the place was mostly empty. The lunch crowd had departed; the after-work drinkers had yet to arrive. Two pool tables took up half the room; a row of booths lined a side wall. A big TV, bracketed to the ceiling, was tuned to ESPN. On a weekday afternoon, there didn’t seem to be much sports action going on.

Nevertheless, the bartender was reclining back, his elbows propped against the lip of the bar, and his eyes fastened on the brightly lit screen as if it were the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen. After a minute, he reluctantly straightened. His gaze shifted my way. “Help you?”

I didn’t particularly want a beer, and this didn’t look like the kind of place where you’d want to ask for a glass of water. “Coke, please,” I said.

As I spoke, a man slid out of one of the booths. He was tall, broad shouldered, and not particularly handsome. The hair at his temples had begun to go gray, and his eyes looked tired. His pullover sweater was cashmere, but his jeans and loafers looked old and worn.

As he came toward me, he was already extending a hand. “Are you Melanie?”

“I am.”

“Thanks for taking the time to see me. Booth okay?”

I hadn’t even had time to nod before he walked over to the bar, picked up my drink, slid the bartender a bill, and then carried the glass back to where he’d been sitting. Having little choice in the matter, I simply followed.

I had thought this was going to be my meeting. But since Michael seemed to think he was in charge, I opted instead to hang back and let him dictate the pace. It didn’t take him long to find his stride.

“I imagine you’ve probably heard all sorts of terrible things about me,” he said when I slid in across from him. Michael pushed my glass toward me. As I took it, our fingers brushed briefly; then we both retreated to our own sides of the table.

“Actually, no. I don’t know much about you at all.”

“Really? I’d have expected Sylvia to fill your head with lots of nonsense. It’s the kind of thing she likes to do.”

“I’ve only met your cousin once,” I said. Aunt Peg had introduced us when the memorial service ended. “It was at the service on Saturday. Your name didn’t come up.”

Michael nodded. “I remember seeing you there. You were a friend of my mother’s then?”

I hesitated for a moment before answering. I didn’t want to admit that I’d only met his mother one time, too. “I liked your mother a great deal,” I said finally. “She seemed like a wonderful woman. I was at Winston Pumpernill with a therapy dog group. That’s how Mary and I became acquainted.”

“Paul’s group.”

“Yes.” I lifted my drink and took a sip. The soda was extra sweet, as though the syrup to seltzer ratio was off. It tasted great. “I gather you don’t get along very well with most of the family.”

“That would be an understatement. As you might imagine, that’s why I left.”

“How many years have you been away?”

“Too many.” The answer came quickly and without thought, as though Michael had heard the charge leveled at himself so many times that he’d adopted the accusation as his own. “Twenty, I guess, maybe more. My father died shortly after I graduated from college. That seemed like a good time to leave and strike out on my own.”

“Nothing unusual about that.”

“You wouldn’t think so, but that wasn’t the way the family felt. Tight-knit bunch, the Livingstons.”

“You didn’t want to keep in touch?” I tried to keep my tone neutral. The last thing I wanted to do was sound accusatory and put Michael on the defensive. But lots of people went off and made their own way after college; few totally lost contact with their families as a result.

Michael shrugged and sipped his drink. Amber liquid in a highball glass. Scotch, I was guessing.

“Do you come from a big family?” he asked, after a minute.

“No. Although sometimes it feels as though there are more of them than there really are. I have a brother. There were just two of us when we were growing up. Our parents died about a decade ago. No grandparents still living, but I have a couple of aunts that I see frequently.”

“In a big family like mine—a family that sees itself as an important entity—it’s easy to get smothered by people’s expectations. From the time I was a very young child, I knew I was being groomed to go into the family business. I was supposed to follow my father’s career path and to be just as successful at it as he had been.”

“And you weren’t happy about that?”

“Not entirely.” His words were clipped. “No.”

“Lots of people just starting out wouldn’t mind having that kind of opportunity handed to them.”

“I might not have minded, either, if I’d ever had even the slightest choice in the matter. Suppose from the time you were a child you were told that when you grew up you were going to manufacture widgets?”

“Is that what your family does?” I smiled. “Makes widgets?”

“We’re talking hypothetical here.” He tried to sound stern, then gave up and smiled, too. The lines around his eyes softened. “Actually, I don’t think it would matter to them what they did, as long as it pulled in a boatload of money.”

“In your place,” I admitted, “I guess I might have found the prospect of all that widget making a little restricting.”

“Precisely. Just for the record, I never said that I wouldn’t join the company. Only that I wanted to see a bit of the world on my own terms first. It shouldn’t have been a big deal. And it wouldn’t have been if my father had still been alive.”

The bartender pulled his eyes away from the television set long enough to lean over the bar in our direction. “Need any refills?”

We both shook our heads, and he went back to his show. Customer service wasn’t a priority at the Bubble Bubble.

“Problem was,” said Michael, “when Dad died unexpectedly, it left a hole that needed to be filled. And the family looked to me to fill it. No matter that I wasn’t ready, that I had no experience in the business, that I’d planned to work my way up. It was just presented to me as a fait accompli. Here’s your office, here’s your secretary, see you on Monday.”

“So you bolted.”

“I ran like the dickens.” Michael shifted uncomfortably on the shiny vinyl cushion. “Sylvia and some of the others will tell you that I left like a thief in the night. That I never even stopped to explain or say good-bye, but that isn’t true. I spoke with my mother. She knew I was doing what I felt I had to do. At the time, I was sure she understood, maybe even supported me.”

“And later?”

Michael snorted derisively. “Later came along pretty damn quickly. The way I heard it, I hadn’t even been gone twenty-four hours before the shit hit the fan. And since I wasn’t there to protect her, my mother got the brunt of it. Recriminations from just about everyone else in the family about what a spoiled, ungrateful child she’d raised.”

“Did you think about returning at that point?”

“I might have, but I’d already left the country. It didn’t even occur to me that her own relatives would turn on her like that. While she was listening to their vitriol, I was on a plane to Paris, making plans to bum around Europe. I didn’t have a clue what was going on back home.”

“Mary never called and told you?”

“Don’t forget, we’re talking twenty years ago. No cell phones, no laptop computers. Everything wasn’t easy access like it is now. When I left, I told my mother I’d get in touch after a while and let her know how I was doing. In the meantime, she wouldn’t have had any way of finding me. I fired off a few postcards and went backpacking in Spain. Probably a month passed before I got around to calling home.”

“After all that time your mother must have been worried about you,” I commented.

Michael stared at me across the table. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re really thinking. That I took the coward’s way out and left my mother to pick up the pieces.”

“Well…”

“I was twenty-two, okay? Maybe I didn’t make the best decision at the time. But I had no idea that everything was going to blow up in both our faces. By the time I called home, the relatives had already had plenty of opportunity to work on her. They’d managed to convince her that I was the selfish, disloyal jerk they all wanted to believe I was.

“One thing I have to say for the Livingstons, when you’re a member of the family, they’ll do anything for you. But they view the world strictly from their own perspective, and they’re a pretty unforgiving bunch. Once they begin to see you as an outsider, you’re done as far as they’re concerned. They don’t want anything more to do with you.”

“So you only intended to be gone for a couple of months, but while you were away, the family ostracized you.”

“That’s about it.” Michael frowned, whether at the memory or his near-empty glass, it was hard to tell. He tipped back his head and drained the last of the drink.

“Be right back,” he said. He got up and carried his glass to the bar for a refill.

Before meeting him, I’d thought of Michael as the villain. His story portrayed him as the victim. Of course, I was only hearing one side. Too bad, I thought, that I’d never be able to find out how Mary had felt about all this. She was the linchpin around whom the entire episode had revolved. And now, she was the one who was dead.

I tried to imagine a circumstance in which Davey might do something so unforgivable that I could be convinced to disown him. I couldn’t make it happen. No matter what, he would always be my son. I’d find a way to bring him back, and if that wasn’t possible, I’d go to him.

Michael slipped back into the seat opposite me. His glass was full, and he’d swiped a bowl of unshelled peanuts from the bar. “Protein,” he said, pushing it toward me.

“And lots of fat.” I scooped out a couple anyway.

“Live it up.” He stopped and sighed. “That was one of my mother’s favorite sayings. She was a big believer in getting the most out of every day, so that you wouldn’t be left with any regrets later on. And now the irony is that I was so busy living my life that I’m left with the biggest regret of all. That I never got to see her again before she died.”