Braun, Lilian Jackson - The Cat Who 009

Opening the cabinet door beneath the sink, he found the interior flooded and heard a faint splash. He groaned and reached for the telephone once more.

“Ha ha ha! A drip!” exclaimed the cheerful Mrs. Glinko. “Allrighty, we’ll dispatch somebody PDQ.”

In fifteen minutes an old-model van with more rust than paint pulled into the clearing-the same plumber’s van as before-and Joanna swung out of the driver’s seat.

“Got a leak?” she asked in her somber monotone as she plunged her head under the sink. “These pipes are old!”

“The cabin was built seventy-five years ago,” Qwilleran informed her.

“There’s no shutoff under the sink. How do I get down under?”

He showed her the trap door, and she pulled open the heavy slab with ease and lowered herself into the hole. Koko was extremely interested and had to be shooed away three times. When she emerged with cobwebs on her doming, she did some professional puttering beneath the sink, went down under the floor again to reopen the valve, and presented her bill. Qwilleran paid thirty-five dollars again and signed a voucher for twenty-five. It made him an accomplice in a minor swindle, but he felt more sympathy for Joanna than for Glinko. He rationalized that the ten-dollar discrepancy might be considered a tip.

“What’s under the floor?” he asked her.

“The crawl space. Just sand and pipes and tanks and lots of spiders. It’s dusty.”

“It can’t be very pleasant.”

“I ran into a snake once in a crawl space. My daddy ran into a skunk.” She glanced about the cabin, her bland face showing little reaction until she spotted Koko and Yum Yum sitting on the sofa. “Pretty cats.”

“They’re strictly indoor pets and never go out of the house,” Qwilleran explained firmly. “If you ever have occasion to come in here when I’m not at home, don’t let them run outside! There’s a vicious dog in the neighborhood.”

“I like animals,” she said. “Once I had a porcupine and a woodchuck.”

“What are those yellow birds that fly around here?”

“Wild canaries. You have a lot of chipmunks, too. I have some pet chipmunks-and a fox.”

“Unusual pets,” he commented, wondering if vermin from the wildlife might be tracked into the cabin on her boots.

“I rescued two bear cubs once. Some hunter shot their mother.”

“Are you allowed to keep wild animals in captivity?”

“I don’t tell anybody,” she said with a shrug. “The woodchuck was almost dead when I found him. I fed him with a medicine dropper.”

“Where do you keep them?”

“Behind where I live. The cubs died.”

“Very interesting,” Qwilleran mused. Eventually he might write a column on Joanna the Plumber, but he would avoid mentioning Joanna the Illegal Zookeeper.

“Thanks for the prompt service,” he said in a tone of farewell.

When she had clomped out of the cabin in her heavy boots, he recalled something different about her appearance. The boots, the jeans, the faded plaid shirt and the feed cap were the same as before, but she was wearing lipstick, and her hair looked clean; it was tied back in a ponytail.

He settled down to work on his column for the midweek edition-about Old Sam, the gravedigger, who had been digging graves with a shovel for sixty years. He had plenty of notes on Old Sam as well as a catchy lead, but there was no adequate place to write. For a desk the cabin offered only the dining table, which was round. Papers had a way of sliding off the curved edges and landing on the floor, where the cats played toboggan on them, skidding across the oiled floorboards in high glee. They also liked to sit on his notes and catch their tails in the carriage of his electric typewriter.

“What I need,” Qwilleran said to Yum Yum, who was trying to steal a felt-tip pen, “is a private study.” Even reading was difficult when one had a lapful of cat, and the little female’s possessiveness about his person put an end to comfort and concentration. Nevertheless, he made the best of an awkward situation until the column was finished and it was time to dress for the beach party.

As the festive hour approached, the intense sun of an early evening was slanting across the lake, and Qwilleran wore his dark glasses for the walk down the beach to Mildred’s cottage. He found her looking radiant in a gauzy cherry-colored shift that floated about her ample figure flatteringly and bared her shoulders, which were plump and enticingly smooth.

“Ooooh!” she cried. “With those sunglasses and that moustache, Qwill, you look so sexy!”

He paid her a guarded compliment in return, but smoothed his moustache smugly.