Chapter 3
Patty had dozens of empty cardboard boxes in her SUV in addition to a Costco sized portion of cleaning supplies. The boys hauled the boxes inside and set to work loading them. They started in the living room, while Patty continued to scrub in the kitchen.
Jack simply stacked books in the boxes. He preferred to load up as quickly as he could, and then go through things slowly back at the store. Cable, on the other hand, sifted through piles and flipped through books and tried to put subjects and sizes together in pre-sorted boxes. It was Cable, therefore, who began to get a sense of the collection they were working with. By the overstuffed chair near the fireplace there were books on law, paperbacks on the definitions of crimes and guidelines for sentencing and international law. Cable didn’t have very high hopes for them in terms of resale value, but he packed them all together and sealed the box.
Next he worked his way through a pile beside one of the work tables. There were back issues of National Geographic and Smithsonian magazine and some oversized books with nature pictures, the sort people get in the mail when they contribute to the Sierra Club. There were three full boxes of that sort of thing. Cable muttered to himself that up close, taken one book at a time, this was not looking very promising.
“Hey Jack,” he said, “I’m going to go start packing up in the other room, if that’s OK with you.”
“Sure, go ahead,” said Jack, without looking up. He had already filled six boxes and was busy building four more and taping their bottoms.
Cable took two of Jack’s new boxes into the dining room and went straight to the breakfront cabinets. He opened the dusty glass door and eagerly began to pull books from inside. These were much more exciting. Old books on gardening and natural history. Cable flipped through a little leather bound volume on hunting from 1815, with nice illustrations. The next book that caught his eye was one on the anatomy of small mammals. It too had lots of nice illustrations, including some in color, though the book was more than 100 years old. It showed skeletons and fossilized bones of mice and rabbits and extinct animals. He placed it with care in the ‘better books’ box that he was making. There was a glass case on the top shelf with the stuffed frog in it. Cable took it out. The frog, if it was a real one – Cable couldn’t tell if it was a statue or a real, stuffed frog – sat on the mirrored bottom of the display box like a green Buddha in meditation. It was very lifelike, as the owl out front had been. He put it on the table next to his box and went back into the other room.
“Hey,” he said quietly to Jack, “what about the stuffed animals? Can we take them? Are they for sale?”’
“I put a hamster or something on one of my boxes,” said Jack. “It scared the spit out of me. It was in a cigar box and I opened it up and I swear I thought the thing was going to jump out at me.”
Cable snickered. “That’s twice in one morning,” he said.
“She said we could take anything we wanted,” said Jack.
“Find out if it’s OK,” said Cable, “there is a stuffed frog in the other room that I want. And the squirrel too.”
“Just ask her,” said Jack.
“She doesn’t like me,” said Cable, “besides, she thinks that you’re the boss.”
“Alright,” said Jack, “she went out on the screen porch. I’ll ask her when she gets back.”
Cable went back to the dining room. Jack, working quickly, filled another box. This one was mostly crossword puzzle books and logic puzzles. They were stacked haphazardly on a shelf near the kitchen counter, and Jack couldn’t resist the temptation to look inside. If they were blank, they’d probably sell pretty well. But they weren’t blank. All the crossword puzzles were done. Not only that, the person who did them had written the start time and stop time for each one. It looked like whoever it was was finishing the crosswords in eight and nine minutes each. Jack filled the box and folded the top shut. Before he moved on to the next shelf though, he paused. The puzzle books has been so randomly jammed on the shelf, some upside down some right side up, some sideways that it struck him as odd. Wouldn’t someone who worked through thirty volumes of crossword puzzles be the sort of person who would keep their books neat and tidy on the shelves? Come to think of it, wouldn’t a person who planted a garden and kept it weeded and organized also keep their house in order? Jack surveyed the room again. It was a wreck, to be sure, but was it a wreck because that’s how this guy lived? Or had someone wrecked it? His sleuthing was interrupted when Patty came back into the room, still wearing her yellow rubber gloves but now smelling of cigarette smoke.
“I had to get some fresh air,” she said, “all the dust in my lungs was starting to get to me.”
“It’s a big job,” said Jack, “what do you know about the guy who used to live here?
“I know he hasn’t paid rent this month or last month’s and there’s no way he’s getting his security deposit back,” she said.
“Who was he? Where’d he go? What’s the deal with all this stuff?”
“Lordy,” she said, “I have no idea. His name was foreign. Greek or Italian. Souvlaki or something. He was quiet. Lived alone. That’s always how it is, you know. People live alone and this is what happens, the clutter just pens them in.”
“Where’d he go?”
“Wish I knew,” she said, “he hasn’t answered phone calls or late notices for seven weeks.”
“So you’re just kicking him out?” asked Jack, “Is that normal? Maybe he’s on vacation or something.”
Patty shrugged. “It’s not my call. I’m just the property manager. Owner told me they can’t afford to let it sit vacant. I’m showing it tomorrow. Hopefully I can rent it by the end of the week and have someone in here for the first.”
“So you didn’t know the tenant?” asked Jack.
“I met him once or twice. He was a little man. My height or shorter. All skin and bones, like one of the skeletons he worked on.”
“Excuse me?” asked Jack.
“Oh you haven’t been out on the porch yet, have you sweetie?” she said. “He was some kind of whaddyacallit. Who puts the deer heads and the big stuffed fishes on the wall.”
“Taxidermist?” said Jack.
She nodded. “When the owner found out about that he just about had a cow. Wanted to throw him out right then, but there’s no rules against it in the lease, so he couldn’t.”
“What happens if he comes back?” asked Jack, “isn’t he going to want all this stuff?”
“We’ve got all the eviction papers,” said Patty. “It ain’t necessarily pretty, but this is what we do.”
“Should we sit on these books for a while before we sell them?” asked Jack, “In case he does come looking for them?”
“Whatever you want to do,” said Patty. “I won’t give him your name if you don’t want me to, so he’d never know you had ‘em.”
Jack shook his head, “I’m not suggesting – it’s not that I want this to be a secret. You can tell him we’ve got the books. I was just thinking maybe we’d give him some more time before we scatter it all.”
“Like I said, suit yourself,” she said. “Gimme your card and I’ll let him know, if he ever shows up. If you ask me, we’re doing him a favor, getting rid of all this for him, though. He’ll be better off without it.”
“Maybe,” said Jack, “it’s just that, you know, people get attached to their books.”
Patty shrugged again and turned back to her work with the scrub brush on the splashguard and sink.
“What are you planning to do with the stuffed animals?” asked Jack, “Cable told me there’s a frog in the other room. And that squirrel on the cabinet…”
“The Salvation Army said they’d take anything that was here at the end of the week,” she said.
“Could we make you an offer on some of them?” asked Jack.
Patty stopped what she was doing and turned around. She leaned on the counter that separated the two rooms.
“That’s the eighth time you’ve started talking about money,” she said, “I’m not going to tell you again. I don’t need money. I need an empty house. Anything you take, you’re doing me a favor. Understand?”
“Yes Ma’am,” said Jack. He felt a little sheepish. Up until then, he’d felt like they’d been interacting like peers. She with her makeup and her oversized car. He in his clean shirt and tie with keys to the bookstore. Now though, she suddenly seemed much older, more like his parents age, and he felt like a kid again. Uncomfortably so. He went quietly back to loading boxes, and she to her cleaning.
In the other room, Cable was getting more and more excited about the books he was packing. He’d found old books on dissecting and preserving animal skins, several old science books bound in very unusual looking leathers – one that looked like it might be snakeskin, even. There were three large scarab beetles pinned and framed under glass. He put them on the table with the frog. In the middle of the last shelf, he came to a large book on its side that looked like a dictionary. But when he picked it up, it rattled. He flipped it open, and his eyes went wide when he saw the contents.
“Jack,” he called, “Come in here a second.”
Jack came right in, the knees of his pants stained gray from kneeling on the dirty floor.
“Look at this,” said Cable. He closed the book and handed it to Jack. Jack noticed the rattling immediately. He opened it. Inside, the pages were cut away to make a secret compartment, and in the compartment glittered handfuls of shiny marbled and rocks. They were every size from a pea to a grape, and every color.
“Are those what I think they are?” asked Cable.
Jack picked up a couple of them and held them up to the light. One was a yellowish stone with black streak through the middle. Another has a black center and a orange rim. Jack sifted through the box and looked at a couple more before answering.
“It depends,” said Jack finally, “do you think they’re glass eyes for taxidermy?”
“What?” said Cable.
“You said, ‘are those what I think they are,’” said Jack, “what did you think they were?”
“Let me see them again,” asked Cable.
Jack handed him the book-box.
“Patty said the guy was a taxidermist,” said Jack, “these are eyes. Look, a cat’s eye. And this one looks like one of Mr. Squirrel’s, see.”
Cable looked at the glass eyes in the box and felt the adrenaline drain out of him. “His name is Berkeley,” he said glumly.
“Who is?” asked Jack.
“Mr. Squirrel. His name is Berkeley. There’s a label on the base,” Cable pointed.
Jack picked it up and looked. Then he put the squirrel in the top of Cable’s open box. “Cool.” He said. “Patty said to take whatever we want. So pack the eyes if you want them.”
“Thanks,” said Cable. He held up a clear one and looked at it in the light. “What do you think he does? Do you paint the pupil onto them and then pop them in the skull, or what?”
The boys filled nearly thirty boxes before lunch. Jack emptied the contents of the little desk into one of his boxes and Cable found another book-box with talons and claws inside. There wasn’t room for huge piles of magazine, but they moved them off the dining room chairs and onto the newly emptied shelves. When they were done, the two rooms looked neat and tidy. Relatively so, anyway. It was the maximum load for the old Honda. Books were piled right up to the ceiling and the car rode low on the wheels.
“Are you sure you don’t want to make another trip,” asked Patty, “I’ll be here all afternoon.”
“No,” said Jack, “there’s really nothing left in our department. We’ve got all the books and a bunch of papers and some stuffed animals. All we really left were magazines.”
“You looked on the second floor?”
“I did. I think whatever was up there had been brought downstairs. There was hardly anything on the shelves.”
“Thank you,” said Patty.
“Thank you,” said Jack. “you’ve got our phone number, right? In case Mr. Souvlaki comes back?”
“It’s in my phone. But don’t hold your breath.”
The boys backed slowly out of the driveway. At the point where the driveway crossed the sidewalk, the car bottomed out and the boys heard a terrible scratching sound from beneath the car. Cable grimaced.
As they drove away, still sweaty with the exertion of loading everything up, the boys enjoyed the giddy anticipation of a full carload. It would take them all week to sort everything out, but if they worked fast, they might get all of it organized and priced before Paul and Emily and Ellie got back. If they got lucky, they might even score a couple quick sales and have something to brag about for a while.
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