Curiosity Killed The Cat Sitter

She smiled at me with a new sparkle in her eyes. “Well, you’ll have plenty of time to figure out what to do with it when the time comes. And by that time, you might want it.”

“This doesn’t bother you?”

“Land no, it don’t bother me one bit. It tickles me, is what it does. You know, Marilee was a good girl. Lots of people might look at her with all the money she made and think she was something else, but she was a good girl, and her leaving all that to her cat just proves that she was. Now when I think of my baby, I won’t be thinking of how she ended her last minutes on this earth, I’ll be thinking that up to the very end, she was a little girl wanting to take care of all the cats in the world. A generous, loving little girl. That was my Marilee.”

I leaned over and patted her veined hand. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, Cora.”

“I guess that’s true. We never had much, but I always gave what I had.”

Carefully, I said, “For such a young woman, Marilee acquired quite a lot.”

She nodded proudly. “She did, that’s a fact. Marilee always had a head for figures. When she started getting the money from the Fraziers, she wasn’t old enough to take care of it herself, and Lord knows I didn’t know how to handle that much money. We wanted to get away from the Fraziers, so we moved here and she went all by herself to Ethan Crane and got herself declared a grown-up. I don’t remember what he called it, but I signed some papers and he had her something-or-other removed through the court.”

“Disabilities of nonage.”

“I guess so. Anyway, after that she could handle all that money by herself, and she did right well. She bought us a house first off, a nice little frame house in Bradenton, and then we went out and bought everything new. New refrigerator and new stove and new beds and mattresses. Oh my, we had a time doing that. First time either one of us had ever had a whole houseful of new things. She spent over half of the first money she got on the house and furniture and a new car for herself and one for me. But the money was going to keep coming in, every year, you know, so Marilee would sit up every night studying about how to invest it.”

I did a bit of fast calculation of what half of a quarter of a million dollars invested twenty years ago would be worth today at 10 percent compounded interest, and my head got swimmy. If the same amount was invested every year for twenty years, the total value would be more than I could count. Even accounting for Marilee’s expensive lifestyle, she had made herself an extremely wealthy woman.

Cora was watching me figure it out. “When I die,” she said, “all the money she made goes to help other poor girls get an education or start their own businesses. Ethan Crane set it up that way for her.”

“I never realized,” I said.

“Well, you wouldn’t, would you? Marilee never forgot where she came from, or how hard it was for us before the money. I kept working for a couple of years, but she wouldn’t hear of it, and so I finally quit. It was about time, too, my ankles were going real bad. I haven’t worked a lick since, and Marilee’s always taken good care of me. She was a good girl.”

Feeling chastened and slightly guilty, I got up and washed the supper dishes. I wondered if I would have been half as responsible as Marilee had been if I had started getting a quarter of a million dollars every year when I was sixteen. Marilee continued to surprise me.

On my way home, I turned on impulse and drove around the curve to Marilee’s house. A white Jaguar sat in her driveway, and I pulled up behind it and got out. When I rounded the corner of the garage, I saw Shuga Reasnor at the front door, trying to unlock it. She looked around at me with a dark expression of frustration and resentment.

“Have you had the damn locks changed?”

I shook my head, all innocence. “Doesn’t your key work?”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with it! You must have a key, let me in. I need to get some of my things.”

“I’m not authorized to let anybody in, Miss Reasnor.”

“Oh, bullshit! Who’s going to authorize you? Cora? The police? I have a right to go in and get my personal property before they send in some estate liquidator to haul everything off.”

“I’d have to make a list of everything you took and you’d have to sign a statement saying you took it. Otherwise, I can’t let you in.”

“Oh, for God’s sake! What difference does it make to you? It’s not your house.”

It didn’t seem the time to tell her the house now belonged to a cat.

I said, “I’m responsible for it, though, at least for the time being.”

She stretched her mouth into a semblance of a smile. “Look, it’s worth a couple of hundred dollars to me to get my things now. What do you say?”

“I say you’d better leave.”

“What’s the problem? You said Marilee left my name to call in an emergency.”

“An emergency involving her cat, not something you left in her house.”

“I’ll call Cora. She’ll let me in.”

“If Cora gives me permission to let you in, that’s fine. I just can’t do it on my own.”