Oglethorpe is famous. He has a dedicated camera trained on the window he clambers into every night. He has his own Facebook page. He has Likes, hundreds of them. He has fans all over the world. The Dutch, especially, seem to favor him. I’m not sure why.
He’s much more popular than I am. Admittedly, I don’t have long white whiskers and soft brindle-and-white fur. I just don’t. I’m a human, and other than the hank of reddish-brown hair the color of garden mulch on the top of my head, I’m pretty much naked under my clothes. I know Oglethorpe thinks I’m ugly, but he is a very tolerant cat.
And giving. He is a most giving cat. In he comes nightly, through the upstairs bedroom window left just ajar. He comes bearing posters, slippers, lottery tickets, box tops, leaves, advertising circulars, candy boxes. Camellia blossoms, socks, Starbucks cups. I am awakened by their soft click or muted thud as each item is deposited on my hardwood floor from the height of the window. Small paper bags, mittens, Styrofoam plates. Flags on sticks. A ketchup packet, slightly punctured. Business cards, sandpaper. More leaves. Lots of leaves. Parking tickets. A hand-printed essay on blue-lined paper. “B-. Very interesting, Tanika, but please learn to proofread!” A Jehovah’s Witnesses pamphlet. “Is Hell hot?” A drooping rosebud. A knit cap soaked in blood.
I shriek from my bed. Oglethorpe, lit in the electronic glow of my alarm clock, looks up from between hunched shoulders.
I can tell he is rather miffed by my reaction. Oglethorpe selects carefully and conveys his items, sometimes for blocks, in his mouth and then must leap from car hood to fence to wisteria loggia to reach the window, never losing his grip on his treasure. It’s a lot of work, it requires doggedness—excuse the expression—and discrimination. All Oglethorpe asks in return is appreciation of a positive nature.
Shrieking, screaming, flinching away, and expressions of horror are not, in his book, positive.
I switch on my lamp. My feet find my pink slippers. I extract a Kleenex from my bedside box. I advance on the horrid thing, over which Oglethorpe crouches.
“Oglethorpe,” I say. “Let me see it.”
Oglethorpe does not stand down. I must reach under his chin with the tissue to pull the knit cap away from him. Squatting, I examine it.
Blood. A lot of blood. The thing is saturated. Could one sustain that amount of blood loss and survive? Especially if the blood loss was from the head? Perhaps, though, the blood loss was not from a head. Perhaps the hapless victim had been carrying the cap and used it to staunch a flesh wound.
Tentatively, I lift the cap, using the tissue to protect my fingers. It feels heavy with its gruesome cargo. With it dangling from my fingertips, I turn it around to view the other side. A hole around which there is blood turned almost black. Bits of white slivers. Other stuff. I shudder and drop the thing. There can be no doubt. The wearer of this hat has been murdered.
Oglethorpe eyes me balefully, then creeps forward to extend his chin over the stiffening cap again.
“Oglethorpe,” I say. “Where did you find this?”
He fails to respond. His expression deepens to real annoyance. I imagine this is one of the heavier items he has had to convey, and this is the appreciation he gets? I stifle the urge to grab him and wash his mouth out.
I carry the tissue to the bathroom and toss it into the toilet. I wash my hands about a million times. All the while, I am thinking. Could this have occurred tonight? It must have. The blood was stiffening on the ribbed wool but had not completely dried. Yet, I had heard no sirens. Does that mean…? I grab the bowl of my pedestal sink. Does that mean someone is lying out in the dark streets right now?
I emerge from the bathroom, leaving the light on, and sit on my bed, staring at Oglethorpe and…that thing. What can I do? Call the police and say my cat brought home a bloody cap? Go out into the night, when there is a murderer on the loose, and try to locate the body? Not likely. I wonder how far Oglethorpe ranges in a night, anyway.
I stare at my cat and he at me; both, I imagine, wondering how much we really know about the other’s secret lives.
I go into the bathroom and remove the plastic bag lining my wastebasket. There are only a few tissues in the bottom. These I throw into the toilet. I find the glove I wear when dyeing my hair and put it on my right hand. In my left, I carry the bag. I advance upon my cat.
He stiffens and hunkers lower over his prize.
“Oglethorpe,” I say in a firm but reasonable voice, that of parent to loved child, boss to respected employee. “I am going to take that cap.”
Oglethorpe slits his eyes.
I grab for it. Oglethorpe’s claw slashes out. I feel a sting on my arm above the rubber sleeve of the glove. “Ow!” He makes a low, yowling, vibrating sound. His tail switches. His eyes look mad. But the thing is in the bag.
After secreting the bag with its cargo in the antique cabinet where I keep my soaps, I grab cleanser and tissues and attack the place on the hardwood floor where the thing had lain. Oglethorpe has retreated to the windowsill where he sits with that flat, wild look in his eyes, twitching his tail, watching me. I flush the tissues down the toilet, scrub my hand with soap, first in the glove then bereft of it, and finally return to sit on the edge of the bed.
Cold air comes in through the open window. I shiver. Oglethorpe glares, seeming, somehow, to no longer be my cat, as if a wildness, even a murderousness, has invaded him. I wish he would go out the window and find me a nice camellia, something to erase this bad blood between us. But he does not go. He stares, as if remembering some past life when he was a hundred times bigger than he is now and ate my ancestor.
After a while, I fall over on my side onto the pillow. A while after that, my eyes close in that drifting reverie that precedes sleep.
The first thing I do this morning is to check to see if the bloody knit cap is still there. Absurd. Where would it have got to? Oglethorpe, skilled as he is, can’t open securely closed cabinets. By the way, where is Oglethorpe?
He does not come home for breakfast. I get ready for work, drink my morning smoothie, and call Jen. Jen is my friend who set up the whole camera/Facebook thing documenting Oglethorpe’s nighttime raids. I am a bit of a Luddite—well, a lot of a Luddite. She gets the raw footage from the window camera sent to her computer, where she edits the images so it looks like Oglethorpe is coming through the window with a new find every two seconds or so, raising his chin in that characteristic way so his found object clears the windowsill. Sometimes she adds commentary. Sometimes, when I am over there when she’s doing the edits, I do the commentary, which consists of wry statements regarding the objects, such as “Woo! That completes the pair,” if he brings in the second sock, et cetera. Not that witty, but Oglethorpe’s fans, as mentioned above, are international and legion.
Incidentally, yes, there is a way to turn the camera off when I (or we, if the situation warrants, rare as that eventuality is lately) desire privacy. After all, it is mounted in my bedroom window, but pointed at the aperture itself, not toward the bed or where I dress or anything. In case you are wondering what kind of person I am.
“Jen,” I say, gulping pulverized kale. “I need you to edit something out of Oglethorpe’s feed.”
“What?” she says. She sounds sulky this morning, not usual for her. She is the crisply competent type.
I explain in rather gruesome detail about the bloody stocking cap Oglethorpe brought home. I tend to repeat myself when I am excited so when I launch into “I mean…he just dragged this thing in, right over the sill, ew, I better clean that sill, I did clean the floor—”
She interrupts me. “I’m still finishing the website for my client from hell. I don’t have time to be dealing with frivolous stuff like this.”
“Jen,” I say, slightly wounded. “You know I can’t do this myself, or I would. It was your idea to do the Facebook page—”
“I do this as a favor, you know, Blaire?” she breaks in. “On my own very valuable time. I do it because you are so nuts about Oglethorpe, and I use that word in both senses. Admittedly, Oglethorpe is an outstanding cat, but maybe if you had given Hugh a fraction of the attention you pay that demon fur ball, you and he would still have a thing going, and I wouldn’t have to listen to you whining about your love life or lack thereof.”
“Jen!” I feel betrayed. Her portrayal of me shocks. I fancied we were exchanging female confidences and all along she’s been thinking I am crazy, whiny, and a lousy love partner.
“Oh, I’ll do it,” she says grouchily. “We don’t want people in the Lesser Antilles choking on their papayas when they see Oglethorpe’s feed. Done. Don’t worry. Bye.”
Jen painted the situation as if Hugh had broken up with me, but in fact I had initiated the breakup, tired of his blend of passivity and aggression. I had met him right here on Delaware Street in Berkeley. He was walking his dog and I was on my way to the BART train. He told me not to get near his dog as she was “very nervous,” though I had no intention of getting near his dog. As she passed, he tightly reined in the animal—a mild-looking, slightly confused black-and-tan shepherd mix—as if I might lunge at her.
He repeated this annoying act the next few times he saw me, while I tried a variety of countermeasures: First, veering way to the side of him onto a lawn when he came by and did the bunching up the leash trick. Next, brushing very close to Hugh as I passed. The third time, I squatted down and said, “Nice doggie,” ignoring the man’s babble about how he had found the poor beast, thin and scabby, tied to the fender of a car, how she flinched if anyone got near her. Once, the dog regarded me with eyes the color of caramels, then slowly wagged her tail.
The effect on Hugh was incredible. “She likes you!” he exclaimed. He immediately became a different person. He told me his name, a name his grandmother did not like, he explained, so she always called him Hug and gave him one when she said it, laughing at her joke. Wasn’t that cute?
It was not. There was very little about this man that was, so why I had agreed to accompany him and the dog, whose name was Antigone, for coffee outside at a nearby dog-friendly café, I could not really say.
I fell, not in love, but into a kind of desultory romance with Hugh Hug. This was the way he was about sex: He would come into the room and fix me with a stare that had everything stripped away but pure, animalistic urge. It was as if he didn’t speak English, as if he were some kind of primitive off an island, like the guy in that movie Swept Away. For some reason, this held a certain appeal for me. But after sex, he would always examine the uneven, white-rimmed flesh of his cuticles, which he didn’t seem to know how to push down like everybody else, and say something like “I had a fort when I was seven that I built myself and the goddamn contractor next door shoved it over with a bulldozer. He is the only person I ever wanted to murder.”
But what really made me break up with him was when, post-coitus, he started making a mental survey of my friends, one by one, and wondering aloud what it would be like to have sex with them. I told him to stop, I told him to leave, and, out of desperation, when he got to my best friend, Jen, I told him to go ahead, that she was a holy-terror bitch underneath that helpful façade, and the two of them having a relationship would be my greatest revenge for all the crap he’d put me through. I added that he should put his pants on, get out, and, not incidentally, never come back. My so-called obsession with Oglethorpe, despite Jen’s theories, thus had nothing to do with the breakup, though, just for the record, Oglethorpe had not liked Hugh or Antigone and seems quite content that I sleep alone now, though I can’t say that I am.
Whatever. I grab my coat and purse and head out the door.
Cops. All over the place. Sirens. A small crowd gathering around my neighbor’s oleander bushes. I see some dirty tennis shoes, sprawled, connected to corduroy-clad legs. Those tennis shoes. Orange. How I had hated them.
I push past a lady with a waist-length white ponytail. Knock into a kid toying with a skateboard, pushing it forward a few inches, back. “I need…” I gasp, elbowing him.
Oh no. It’s true. Hugh.
He is facedown, sprawled. The hair on the back of his head is dark, matted, and sticky-looking. I hunker down in a squat, my hands pressed to my lips, squashing them against my teeth. I feel silent, very silent, alone silent, but I hear little whimpering noises coming from my lips.
Something soft bumps against my chin. A black-and-tan dog, trying to crawl into a lap that isn’t there, trying to fit under my chin. “Oh, Antigone!” I moan and hug her.
The cop trying to keep the gathering crowd back looks at me sharply. “You know the deceased?”
I nod miserably.
He takes out his phone. “Name?”
“Hugh Connoley.”
“What’s your name?”
“Blaire Elliott.”
“What’s your relation to the deceased?”
“He…a friend. He was a friend.”
“Do you know his address?”
Absurdly, I point, backward, down Delaware three blocks to his apartment.
The cop enters all this info into his phone, then speaks into his shoulder radio. “Stay here, ma’am, please,” he says when I stand up and grasp Antigone’s dangling leash.
I wait what seems a long time. Probably forty-five minutes. Hugh is covered with a white plastic sheet. One of the cops, poking in the foliage, picks something up, shows it to another, grunts “Nine millimeter.” The shell casing is bagged. More cops arrive and double-park, slowing workday traffic. There’s a coroner’s van and a crime unit truck.
Finally, a detective arrives, asks various questions. I am pointed out. He comes over to me and introduces himself. “I’m Kevin Lanke. I’m in the homicide unit of the Berkeley Police Department. I’d like you to come with me and give a statement at the station, if you would.” His tone implies that indeed, I would.
I look down at Antigone. He does, too. “Can you take your dog home, please? I’ll follow you there.”
I explain that it’s not my dog, it’s Hugh’s dog. His eyebrows raise. “I can put her in my house,” I offer, “temporarily.” I wonder what Oglethorpe will think of that.
The detective alerts on that. “Where do you live?”
“Right here.” I gesture backward one house.
The detective ponders this, tapping his phone against his leg. “Okay,” he says. “Let’s do that.”
The detective comes into my kitchen, where I enter through the back door. His eyes rove the house as I get Antigone a bowl of water and some dog biscuits I had bought for her when Hugh and I were an item.
“You have a dog yourself?” he asks.
“No,” I say.
We go downtown—well, a mile away—to police headquarters, in his unmarked car. He does a million things while he drives: looks around, fiddles with his onboard computer, checks his phone.
Once there, he puts me in one of those windowless rooms that always make me claustrophobic when I see them on TV programs. He leaves me there. I figure I am being filmed. I think of Oglethorpe and wonder, for the first time, if he objects to having a camera trained on him every night. When the detective finally returns, I am feeling a little asthmatic. He asks me if I need medical care. I say no and that I want to get out of here quickly. He smiles.
I am in there for an hour and a half, mostly because Detective Lanke evidently has a bad memory, ha-ha, and asks me to repeat everything a million times. I tell him how we met and about our relationship. I tell him about his grandmother hugging him. I tell him that Hugh was a techie but consumer-oriented. I tell him he has designed software that eliminates many of the bugs present in the most popular operating system, and was just trying to bring it to market, but…
The detective pounces. When he’s interested in something I am droning on about, he kind of smiles, I have noticed as the minutes tick by. It’s not a real smile, just a baring of teeth that seem uncommonly wet.
“But what?” he asks.
I don’t really want to get into this. “Well, his investor, his friend, was trying to get his money back, and Hugh didn’t want to because he was just about to launch, he said. Something like that. This information is two months old,” I added.
“Is that when you broke up?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you break up, again?”
I flap my hand sideways. “No real reason. Just got…tired of each other’s acts. You know.”
“No. I don’t know,” he said, smiling wetly.
“Well, you know. People get tired of one another.”
“What ‘acts’?” he pursues.
I am not going to tell him about his primitive islander routine. “I don’t know,” I said tiredly. “He seemed uptight all the time, and he thought I was too devoted to my cat.”
“Was this your only serious relationship, Miss Elliott?” Detective Lanke asks, abruptly exploring new ground.
“What do you mean?” I ask. “Of course not. I am thirty-seven and, though my cat does not think so, I’ve been told I’m reasonably attractive.”
“I meant recently. Just before or just after Hugh.”
“Well, my husband was just before Hugh. Our divorce came through about three weeks after I met Hugh, but we’d been separated for almost a year before that.”
“How did he feel about Hugh?”
“Oh!” Another hand flap. When had I developed this habit? “He—Joe, I mean—would come over to my house and tell me a million things wrong with me, then break into tears and beg me to come back to him. Yeah, he hated the whole idea of Hugh.”
“Joe…what?” Lanke’s hand is poised over a notebook.
“Oh, please. Joe didn’t kill Hugh. I don’t know if they ever met.”
“Joe what?”
I sigh. “Joseph Ardle Smythe.”
I give him the address, and he finally lets me go. He offers me a ride home, but I am sick of him. It’s only a mile. I walk.
Two days later, I am served with a search warrant. First come a team of crime scene types in white overalls with shower caps over their shoes. They spend a lot of time in the bedroom and the bathroom, emerging with three evidence bags: one containing the bloody cap, one my plastic gloves, and one my sink stopper. Uh-oh.
Next come detectives with big feet. They open every drawer and paw through my papers. Then comes a two-man tech team. They take Oglethorpe’s camera.
“Oh no!” I wail. I am given a receipt.
I slam the door on the last of them and go upstairs and climb on the bed. Oglethorpe appears in the window and looks at me, tail switching. He thumps down on the floor and disappears for a while. But within five minutes he is on the bed with me, pushing into my armpit with his nose, as he likes to do. I hug him. He purrs.
“I’m sorry, Oglethorpe,” I whisper. I think of his fan base.
I call Jen the next day and tell her that she better put something on Oglethorpe’s Facebook page telling his fans that he is on hiatus. Or something.
“Why?” she demands.
I tell her about the police taking the camera. “Hoo, boy!” she says, and chuckles.
“What’s so funny?’ I ask.
“Gotta go!” I can hear her laughing as she slams down the phone.
I never do this, but I go to a nearby bar, Chez Here, by myself. I sit at the bar and order a margarita. I need to think, and the atmosphere is not conducive in my own home, with the uneasy truce of Antigone and Oglethorpe and things still a mess from the police.
The first thought I have, after the agave and lime juice have engineered some rearrangement of my brain cells, is that I am a suspect. Duh. It seems so obvious now. Is that what Jen had meant by “Hoo, boy!”—that she had realized it right away? I take another swallow and lick salt off my lips. If so, best friend, why did you laugh?
Someone slides onto the stool next to me. He smiles. He has wet teeth like you-know-who.
“What’re you drinking?” he asks, signaling the bartendress.
“Go away,” I say.
He frowns. “I don’t know that one.” He points a finger at me. “Cointreau, pear juice, and muddled sinsemilla, am I right?”
I have to smile.
He holds out a hand. “Steve Lanke.”
“Lanke!”
“You say that like you know my brother.”
“Know and dislike,” I say.
“That makes two of us. Police work turns you cold.” He mock-shivers.
“You’re a spy,” I say. “You followed me here and are going to try to pump me for information because your horrible brother thinks I killed Hugh.”
“Who?”
“Hugh.”
“That’s what I asked!” It’s stupid, but we both laugh, he for the normal duration. But I go on giggling for almost a minute. Okay, I admit it. A little alcohol goes a long way with me. Especially when I’m stressed. After two more margaritas, I am convinced that Steve not only is not a spy, but that we are united in despising his cop brother, and furthermore that it would be a really good idea to brave Antigone and Oglethorpe and repair to my camera-less bedroom. We do so.
I live on orange juice and aspirin the next day at work, but after coming home and consuming most of a small cheese-and-olive pizza, I start to feel better and cognitive activity returns. I feed Antigone and Oglethorpe on opposite ends of the kitchen, then put on my coat and trudge over to Jen’s.
She’s not acting like a bitch tonight. She pours us two jumbo-sized glasses of zinfandel and we repair to her couch. I end up telling her about Steve. “Woo-hoo!” she says.
“I hope he’s not a spy,” I say, looking up at the ceiling.
“Think you’ll get first degree?” Jen asks.
I drop my eyes. “That is not funny, Jen.”
She smiles. Something evil in that smile. “Sorry.”
I see something beyond her, on a side table. “Hey, that’s not Oglethorpe’s camera, is it? I thought the cops had it.”
“Well, gee, Blaire, they made more than one, you know?”
“Yeah, but why do you have another one?”
“Jeez, Blaire, you’re so suspicious. Don’t you know cops keep things forever in a murder case? I was going to set up another camera for Oglethorpe. You know, a gift? And a gift of my time, too, which I don’t have much of left over.”
I sit forward drunkenly, set down my glass with a clink on the coffee table, and heave myself out of the too-soft low couch. I traverse the coffee table and lift the camera. “Will I be able to learn how to use it?”
“Sure. It’s just the same as the other one. Besides, you don’t have to do anything. I do everything.”
“I have to know how to shut it off.” I playfully look through the camera’s viewfinder at her. “There’s Steve now, you know.”
Jen spits wine down her sweatshirt in a half-cough, half-guffaw. “Don’t worry,” she says when she is able. “This camera works exactly the way the last one did.”
She installs it the next evening and that night, late, Steve comes over. I show him the camera and explain about Oglethorpe’s worldwide fame and ostentatiously flip the switch on the side. “There now, privacy.”
He feigns wide-eyed non-comprehension. “What do we need that for?”
I slip my robe off. “I’ll show you.”
I am sitting on Steve’s lap when I hear a thump and whirl around. Oglethorpe has deposited an old flip-flop, filthy, with crumbling rubber, on the floor. He gives me a look of pure contempt, scrabbles out the window and disappears.
I am not doing such a great job at work the next day. I’m an assistant property manager at a big commercial building in the Financial District in San Francisco, and I’m supposed to “sell” the square footage and know the amenities and how much reconstruction is allowed and so on for each unit, but a lot of that keeps getting obliterated by memories of last night with Steve.
I am happy to see his number light up my cellphone. “Hey,” I say.
“Got a call from Kevin today. He told me to knock off any relationship with you, that you were a murder suspect.”
I freeze. I mean, I know I am a suspect, but how the hell did Detective Lanke know about Steve and my relationship? I ask Steve this pressing question. “I don’t know,” he says. “I haven’t told a soul. Have you?”
“Well, just Jen. She’s my best friend. But she wouldn’t tell.”
“Well, I guess she did.”
My clients come back from a review of the toilets and I have to hang up. I show the rest of the space in a daze. Jen wouldn’t do that. I mean, who would? Call the detective and rat on her girlfriend that she was boffing his brother? It didn’t make sense, even if Jen didn’t like me. And Jen did like me. She was my best friend.
Steve has some lame excuse for not coming over tonight. I curl up on my bed with a cup of hot tea, trying to figure out another person besides Jen who would have told Detective Lanke about us. I give it up. It seems petty…unless the detective really thinks I killed Hugh. Ridiculous. It is merely coincidence that Oglethorpe selected the bloody cap, coincidence that I knew Hugh, coincidence that he was found dead near my house, and his bloody cap was found in my house. I clutch hunks of my hair. That confluence of events does sound really bad. But not to someone who knows Oglethorpe. And the cops had been given the URL for the cat’s Facebook page. Anybody who knows Oglethorpe’s nightly forays, and there are thousands of people who do, knows that he just selects items at random and brings them to me.
Or does he? I sit up and swing my legs off the bed. I remember that I had thought that I really don’t know what Oglethorpe does nights. Maybe it is time I find out.
Do cats have good senses of smell like dogs? I wonder, as I crouch in my own bushes in black sweats, if Oglethorpe will be able to detect me. I wait for what seems like an hour, freezing to death, my thigh muscles cramping as I squat, for the cat to return.
From my vantage point, I see someone in a hoodie across the street looking like he is casing George Dodd’s MINI Cooper. I hear a thwack and then the tinkle of glass. The thief reaches in, opens the door, rummages within. A black SUV screeches up, and the hoodie climbs in. Off they go. Geez! I didn’t know Delaware Street was such a hotbed of crime.
I change my position slightly and rub my fingers together, and then I hear it: that oh-so-familiar thump of small feet. Oglethorpe. I straighten up in time to just see his tail disappearing inside the window frame. A few minutes later, after depositing his find, presumably on my bedroom floor, he is out again, jumping from window frame to wisteria loggia to fence to car hood. He turns left on the sidewalk and disappears. I follow silently.
He trots purposefully down the street, using the sidewalk, which is convenient for me. He trots several blocks, in the direction of Hugh’s house, actually. Suddenly, he cuts left into a yard. I follow but see his white butt disappearing over a tall fence I could never scale. Damn! I’ve lost him. I dash to the fence, which is smooth wood, and boost myself with trembling arms just so I can see over. Again, I see that familiar white butt, tail aloft. He has jumped over the fence leading into the front yard as well.
I let myself down and dash back to Delaware Street, running hard now and not caring how much noise I make. I make a left and tear down the side street to the street parallel to Delaware, Hearst Street, hang a left and thud up the sidewalk to the third house up from the corner—at least I had the good sense to count—and stop suddenly. Jen’s house, and Oglethorpe scampering up the porch steps.
I drop behind a tree. I hear Oglethorpe meow. He paces the porch prettily, tail high. The door cracks open. Jen, speaking in a high, cutesy voice. “Hi, Oglethorpe. Look what I have for you! First, your treat. Yum! Your favorite! Now here’s this. You take this back to your mommy. Okay? That’s a good boy.”
And here comes Oglethorpe trotting down the steps, with what looks like a square of paper in his mouth. I retreat up the street and hide behind a tree. I see him go to the neighbor’s, bounty still between his teeth, and scale the tall fence.
I walk home, thinking. What was Jen up to?
The streetlights make the halo of shattered glass around George’s MINI Cooper sparkle. I shake my head and enter my house. I walk upstairs. Oglethorpe is grooming himself on my bed. The square of paper is on the floor. I pick it up. An instruction manual for a Sig Sauer P226 pistol. I leaf through it. I find it’s a 9mm. I sink down on the bed, next to Oglethorpe. It’s only then that I realize that the lens of the new camera Jen has installed is not faced outward, where Oglethorpe hops through the window, but right at me.
It takes me about forty-five minutes to work it out that night, sitting on the bed. I get on the web, too, and find a manual for the camera. I find a diagram of parts, which shows me that the button I had been pushing to “turn off the camera” when I had, ahem, nighttime visitors, did nothing of the sort. It was a “quick-zoom” function. Thanks, Jen. While I thought I was ensuring my privacy, in fact I was giving Jen, monitoring the feed the next day, a close-up.
And monitoring brought up another point. Luddite that I am, I am able to figure out that this camera has remote-control capabilities. Jen could spy on me at will.
And she had, that night I told Hugh what a bitch she was. I didn’t think she was a bitch, or hadn’t! It was just a way to tell Hugh to shut up! Could Jen be that obsessive and hateful to commit murder just to set me up? For one remark?
I remember now Jen’s sensitiveness, the way you have to kind of flatter and nurture her while she can be abrasive and get away with it. I remember when we’d taken a magazine test about narcissism, and how Jen got the blue ribbon. We had laughed together. We had laughed.
At first Detective Lanke doesn’t believe it, until he gets a search warrant for Jen’s house. It’s all still on her computer, all the unedited feeds and a lot more. The kind of ravings of someone who sits at home and stews over perceived slights. They also find a Sig Sauer P226.
It turns out Steve is pretty good at technical stuff. Oglethorpe’s fans were getting rabid over the fact that there had been no reports on his nightly doings for almost a month. Steve installs a camera that even I can turn off, and catches Oglethorpe’s fans up on the exciting news, which serves to increase his Likes and FB friends a thousandfold.
Oglethorpe still goes out nightly and brings back…stuff. The latest is George Dodd’s insurance bill. Poor George. I return it to him with apologies.
Steve is more or less a permanent resident, and so is Antigone. Oglethorpe has taken to sparring with Antigone, bapping her with fast paws—a right, a left, a hook. Antigone can move like Floyd Mayweather though. Just a little head wiggle and the paw sails by with millimeters to spare.
We catch that on camera, too. The Dutch love it.