Bran New Death(102)

He had my stuff . . . yay! It was here, out of storage, at long last! I gave a little hop of happiness, overjoyed at the prospect of unwrapping treasures that I hadn’t seen in years. Zeke and Gordy helped him offload, which only took an hour or so; I directed and Becket oversaw the whole affair from a place of honor, the round table in the center of the great hall. Everything labeled “Teacups” or “Teapots” was to go into the dining room, where the box with the Italian teapot still sat, unopened, on the huge dining room table. Everything labeled “Kitchen” went into the kitchen. Every other box should be piled in the great hall, I told them, so I could unpack and disseminate the contents.

I then declared I was serving a big meal in the kitchen for Zeke, Gordy, and the sweaty driver, who proved to be more human once he was given a towel and washcloth and offered a place to cool off. They all accepted my invitation. We were having a spurt of indecently hot weather in upstate; it was enough to make anyone a little tetchy, as locals called it.

But I still had made soup and sandwiches, as well as a batch of corn muffins. After a long lunch, the truck driver gave the two fellows a ride back into town—neither had a car, but that hadn’t been a big problem while they used Gordy’s uncle’s tractor, which had now been returned—and I was left alone in my beautiful castle.

My insanely beautiful, despicably impractical, infinitely precious, huge castle.

I wandered through, admiring the furniture. Once Shilo and I had taken all the Holland covers off, we found there was a theme to the furnishings, in the largest part of the castle. Eastlake was the most common style, but Pish told me that it was all part of a Gothic neo-medievalist–style revolution of the late Victoria, era. I’m glad he knew that, because I didn’t have a clue. It was all big, garish, and yet strangely magnificent, scaled to fit thirty-foot ceilings and forty-foot rooms.

I made my way into the dining room, where the boxes labeled “Teacups” and “Teapots” had been piled. I hadn’t opened the box Binny had brought yet, but I pulled it toward me across the oak table and used my fingernail to cut through the tape, which held down the lid. I opened the flap and took out the gorgeous Italian teapot, a Capodimonte piece with a raised relief pattern of a girl and donkey. It was in beautiful condition. I took the lid off and examined it carefully, but there were absolutely no chips.

But there was something inside. A piece of paper. Maybe Dinah had left a little note for Binny. I plucked it out and opened it, smoothing it on the tabletop. No, it was a snatch of poetry.

For some are sane and some are mad



And some are good and some are bad



And some are better, some are worse—



But all may be described in verse.





What the . . . ? I recognized the piece; who was it by? It was . . . I searched my brain, sure I had heard those same words before. Aha! T. S. Eliot. From “Old Possum.”

Becket leaped up on the table and nosed the box, causing it to fall on the floor.

“Stop it, Becks!” I hollered, pushing him away. He came right back and nosed at the teapot, then at the note in my hand. “Becks, don’t . . .” I paused as my hand brushed against his collar, which I had put back on him. The tag on it that gave his name and that was all, was plastic, and had survived the almost-year he had spent in the wild since his master was killed. But the tag was oddly thick.

Why hadn’t I noticed that before?

My attention was pulled back to the note. The quote was in different handwriting, a nice, cursive script, than some of the other scribbles on it. And there were underlined words in the verse. It all seemed gibberish, and there was a string of exclamation marks, and a faint penciled phrase. I held the paper up to the light. “What the hell does this mean?” was scribbled in a slanting hand different from the poem.

I wished I knew.

I couldn’t shake the sense that there was some significance to it all, something I was missing. I retired to the kitchen, made a pot of tea, and sat in the chair by the empty fireplace, where, for the first time, Becket leaped up onto my lap. I toyed with his collar, and the tag. The plastic disc covering his name fell out, and out of the opening came a thin packet of paper, which folded out like a paper doll, maybe twenty discs long.

Just then Shilo came into the kitchen with Pish, both of them overheated but excited from their day. I couldn’t attend to what they were saying, though, because I was still puzzling over the paper disks. On each disc was a Latin word or phrase, beginning with Quercus macrocarpa, and on through Acer pseudoplatanus, Tilia Americana, and so on. On the back of the last disk was the name “Kilmer.”