Don't Sit On My Alyssums

When my neighbor Bill died, the unraveling of this bachelor's mysterious life began. This occupied a significant part of my own time, as he had named me his estate executor.

In addition to the burden of deciphering his financial situation, Bill had given me the added vexation of becoming a reluctant pet owner. He had bequeathed to me his insufferable cat, Snuffy. The long unkempt, black and white ball of dense fur, it turned out, would become an invaluable ally in my battle with my dead neighbor's belligerent beneficiaries. This last I would not appreciate for some time.

Snuffy and his gray, bearded owner had developed a tight, mutually dependent relationship. I did not know this at first. For being one of Bill's closest human friends, I had acquired very little knowledge of his day-to-day life.

I knew the feline meant a lot to Bill. All the neighbors knew it. His vanity plates on his 78 Camaro read "KITYCAR". And Snuffy was Bill's perpetual driving companion. During most of Bill's frequent travels, The cat would perch on his right shoulder like a parrot on a pirate, with his tail wagging happily over the back of the seat. The leather passenger seat was shredded from Snuffy's personal attentiveness and there was a smelly sand box on the floorboards.

I am not a cat person. Understatement. At first I tried to bring Snuffy across the street to live at my house. This must have been too sudden for the grief stricken feline. The first chance it got, it ran back to the old stomping grounds across the street. I decided to continue feeding it there until we got to know each other better. At the same time I began to study Bill's voluminous files for clues of where he had his assets hidden or invested.

I was having a great deal of trouble locating Bill's money. He had small amounts scattered in bank accounts and the like. But there was no obvious record of what he had done with the larger part of his earnings. If he had spent it, beyond ordinary daily household expenses, there was no evidence of that.

I began to get menacing letters and phone calls from one of the beneficiaries. He wanted his money and was sure there was a lot of it. Per the will I had notified the listed persons of Bill's death and now I was sorry I had done that so soon. I first should have researched what Bill had to leave his heirs. The will was written many years ago and spoke only in general terms about Bill's wealth and gave few pointers as to where one would find it.

[Notes for the next writers: What did Bill do for a living? Why did he take his cat everywhere? Why was it thought that Bill left a lot of wealth? How did the narrator discover Snuffy's unusual knowledge? How did Snuffy help the narrator discover Bill's wealth or did he discover any? What ultimately became of Snuffy? - These are a few of the questions the next writers might choose to answer. - jd]

I never knew what Bill had done for a living in his younger days, but when I knew him he had been a real estate agent, specializing in rural properties. Our town, Farmdale, was surrounded by a lot of old farms and ranches, mostly gone to seed or used as pasturage. Many were owned by descendants of the original owners who preferred the town life and were just waiting for a good price to be offered on the old homestead. Bill would drive a prospective buyer out to a property, always accompanied by Snuffy, show them around, and then drive them back. He'd been doing this for four or five years before he died, but if he ever made much money at it, he never told me about it.

Little by little I managed to get Snuffy to eat his meals in my back yard. I started by switching the food he ate at Bill's place to ordinary catfood, and then bringing him over to my place once a day where I gave him gourmet stuff and cat treats. After awhile, as soon as I'd set out his plate at Bill's and walked toward the door, he'd follow after me and give me no peace until I laid out his plate in a corner of my patio.

However, he then took up an annoying habit. My back yard is bordered by flower beds, and I have the edges planted with alyssums. Soon after he started preferring my patio for meals, he started taking his after-dinner nap lying right in one of the patches of alyssum, usually one that was in the sun. I would chase him away, but an hour later I'd find him back again, maybe in a different part of the garden, but always right on top of the flowers.

Now, there are those, I know, who will wax enchanted at the picture of a fluffy, well-fed kitten nestling contentedly in a bed of lacy white flowers. I, on the other hand, when I find a neighbor's cat squatting fatly on my hard-won allyssums, move immediately in my mind to the designing of boldly original plunger-activated remedies for the condition. Thus it was that I repaired one day to Radio Shack for wire and batteries, and could be seen soon thereafter down on hands and knees in the back yard, carefully stringing a network of tiny power lines through the clouds of allyssum. I dubbed it Kiss, the KItty Surprise System. Snuffy looked on as I worked. This is the lovely thing about pets. They have no clue. "Look on my works, ye Snuffy, and despair," I told the cat. He stared at me dumbly. I grinned broadly back at him, as, in my mind's eye, I activated the power grid, and the Snufster, airborne, claws flailing, performed pioneering feats of feline flight. I was beginning to like having a cat.

When the work was complete, I waited a few days to let Snuffy get used to the wiring. I reasoned that the aversion therapy would be effective only if he was zapped, not while gingerly poking about in the freshly tampered-with foliage, but while in full smug recumbency, so he'd be afraid to be unafraid in my flower beds ever again. I had other things to do anyway.

The seemingly endless search through Bill's files had borne no fruit -- up until the day after I installed my new alyssum protection system. It had started to rain that morning as I headed half-heartedly over to Bill's place.

"Clyde, old man," I said to myself, "this is pointless. Bill lived from paycheck to paycheck, and that's the end of it."

But I felt in duty bound to do the thing up right. In Bill's dining room, I settled down grimly to pore through yet another untidy drawer of his well-stuffed 4-drawer file cabinet, a steaming mug of coffee at my elbow to cosset me.

Snuffy meowed to be let in off the porch, and I moved absently to the sliding glass door, peering down through my bifocals at the latest paper I'd unearthed. "Insofar as the undersigned, Bill Whetherall, has hereby asserted that the testimony of the party of the second part, hereinafter to be known as..." No mention of money anywhere.

Sliding open the door, I glanced up from the legalese just in time to see Snuffy do something decidedly peculiar.

Up until today the cat's interest in my activities in Bill's house had been pretty much, well, non-existent. In fact, he downright ignored me except at meal times.

But now he dashed into the room, streaked across it, and leapt on top of the file cabinet, nearly upsetting my coffee in the process. He plopped onto the drawer I'd left hanging open and began to behave as if the green hanging folders were a bed of yummy catnip or something. He rolled, he purred, he dug his claws into the little manila tabs (that Bill had unhelpfully labeled with cryptic headings like "Set-Up For Standards -- C34"), for all the world like a cat in ecstasy.

"Snuffy -- what the hell!?" I yelled, and hurried over to haul him off the drawer. Just then, the crazy cat began to bury his nose deep into the paper contents of one particular file.

I had a bit of trouble extracting the file whilst avoiding pulling out Snuffy's whiskers. He unhelpfully flopped sideways on top of the files, head dangling into a file titled "43 Bulk 65". "Come on Snuffy, let me look!" I muttered as I tried to pull the file out sideways. Then Snuffy lifted his head and as he looked at me with those deep golden eyes the file came loose. Up it came, papers falling out as well as a puff of fine dried leaves. Catnip after all! I crushed a bit and smelled it. Hmm - maybe, maybe something more potent...

I turned and plunked the file down onto the dining room table, then gathered the renegade papers from the floor. I sat, sipped my coffee and looked at the first sheet. It was a diagram of the dining room and kitchen. The other papers, at a quick glance, were other drawings, sketches and notes about the house, arrows, dimensions and drawings of panels, sliding partitions and so on.

I lowered the papers and peered at the wall opposite me. All these years I'd thought that Bill was just bad with wall paper, pinching a penny and doing it himself and all. I tried to get up, but Snuffy was now rolling around my feet and rubbing my legs. I had pulled off my rain boots to reveal the knubby hand knit sock-slippers I was fond of wearing on rainy days. Plenty of the dried herb had fallen on top of them and snuffy was not getting enough of it.

"You know, Snuffy, I appreciate your help and all, but I am deep in the midst of an investigation here!" I pulled up one foot, then the other. Instantly both the white paw and the black paw sprouted claws and reached up at my beloved slippers. My foot came away bare, and a second later, so did my other foot. I let Snuffy be, rolling around, clutching my socks. I leaned in close to a wall now and ran my hand along it.

The walls were thick. Bill had always been a bit of a self-sustaining conservationist. I'd already found the old utility bills so I knew that he barely paid $40.00 per month - in the winter - to heat his place.

Now, I picked at a loose corner of the wallpaper and was surprised to find how easy it was to peel off. As I suspected, the paper hid a thin panel door. Two tiny half moon indents provided finger holds to slide the panel sideways. On the third tug, the panel slid aside. A yellowed newspaper, dated August 1st, 1961, slowly fell forward revealing the secret of Bill's energy conservation - paper money tied in neat bundles, lots of it.