Chapter 22 At Cyndi’s
At Cyndi’s
The afternoon I go to Cyndi’s condo is the first day it feels like fall. October is a deceptive bitch that way, smiling at
you with her lazy warmth, then parting her skirts and blasting you with cold. When I leave my hotel in the morning, there’s
frost on my windshield, and there’s suddenly credence to the pumpkin everything I’ve seen for a month: coffee, candles, hand
soap, bread. Orange leaves on all the bookstore sidewalk signs, and the new big books of autumn replacing summer blockbusters
on the front tables. Though thankfully All the Lambent Souls remains. If the trend continues, according to the numbers my editor Jayne forwards me every week, my latest novel will remain
on the bestseller list well into the holiday season. Huzzah! No humbug here.
Still, I am inching ever closer to that second-book deadline, and that means I am ready to be home. The road is wonderful,
and it is tiring: all those accolades, all that smiling up at readers from the signing table and making small talk about their
lives while trying to spell their names right; all the unknown female bodies and unfamiliar beds. Plus all the harrowing drama
with Simone. I’m not Father Time, but I’m not twenty anymore, either, and I do best churning out pages when I’m back in my
study, in sweatpants and Harrington T-shirt, getting up from the desk only to feed the fire. It’s physical, this yearning for my house, the only sound the occasional coyote or crack of ice on the lake. There’s just one thing I have to do first.
Cyndi’s home is a triple-decker in Witchcraft Heights, squeezed in among a row of others, their lawns cluttered with toys
and cordoned by chain-link fences. Cyndi’s Victorian is painted those lugubrious historically correct colors; Look for the purple house, she told me, and indeed it is, lavender with mustard, maroon, and forest-green trim. It looks exactly as you’d expect a
house to look if the woman who owned it believed herself to be the descendent of witches, with a mansard roof and dormer windows
from which harpies might fly on brooms. Although Cyndi lives on just the top floor, she told me, and rents out the others.
It makes sense. No writer can survive on savings alone.
Cyndi is late answering the door. Her tardiness is habitual, then, not an aberration. This is a problem. We’ll need to have
words about it, how she left me shivering on the porch with a bag of catnip. I press the buzzer again, counting to thirty
before I release it, and canvass the street as I wait. There’s a yellow Jeep at the end of the block. Simone? Is that you? I squint, but I can’t see the driver. Get a grip, man, I tell myself. Ever since I severed communication, I’ve been seeing
Simone everywhere. It’s like when I had an infestation of mice at my home in Maine, how constantly in my peripheral vision
there was scrambling movement. Until I put down poison.
But this is not real. Do you know how many yellow Jeeps there are in the world?
Not many, actually. But why would Simone be following me?
Because she can’t let me go. Because she’s desperate.
There are women for whom the love of William Corwyn was not a good
thing. If Simone is tailing me, all the more reason to cut her off. Simone, the Rabbit, the others: How many of these deranged
stalker women is a man supposed to take?
I’m striding down the steps to confront her when the door opens behind me. “Oh, no,” Cyndi groans, putting her hands to her
cheeks and making an Edvard Munch face. “I’m so sorry! The bell is broken.”
Nice of you to tell me, I think. “No worries at all,” I say.
“Your hands are freezing,” she laments. “You must have been waiting forever!”
“Only about a hundred years,” I say, smiling.
“I was writing and I totally lost track of time,” she says, ushering me up a dark stairwell. “Thank goodness I set my phone
alarm to check the porch!”
“That was smart,” I agree. “But I’m so glad the writing was flowing; that’s more important than my comfort.” This is true.
Almost. The smell of pumpkin spice candle and cat litter grows stronger as we approach her door. I thought Cyndi was exaggerating
about the number of cats she had, but I’m starting to get a bad feeling.
“Do you really have nineteen cats?” I ask, as we enter a foyer that seethes with sinuous shadows, coiling, twining, leaping
from high places. My eyes burn. Is this even legal? If I were allergic, I’d be dead.
“I do!” Cyndi says. “One for each of the murdered accused. Every time one cat crosses over, I get another from the shelter.”
“That makes sense,” I say, concealing my dismay. I’m not against animals per se; it’s more that I was not raised with them as pets. They were in service to science, and never allowed inside
the house.
Cyndi ushers me into a living room dominated by a magnificent mausoleum of a fireplace. It’s hard for me to stand up straight
in this garret under the eaves. I have to hunch unless we’re in the center of the room. It’s a mess, a hoarder’s nest of books
and melted candles and charred clumps of sage and bundles of yarn and discarded sweaters. The windows are tiny, the walls
painted eggplant. God save us from creative paint colors, plum and saffron and sage and yolk. A home should offer respite from the world outside, including visually, and in mine the walls are white, or bookshelves,
or windows. Of course, every inch of this room is infested with cats. If I lived here, I’d be mad too.
Above the mantel is an oil painting of a dour bonneted woman whose eyes would follow me around the room if I could move. “Goodwife
Scott, I presume,” I say.
“Yes, that’s Margaret! My relative.”
“Please tell her to turn away,” I say, “so I can do this,” and I’m bending to kiss Cyndi when something sinks hot needles
into my calf. “What the fuck!” I say, lashing out with my foot.
“Oh, Reverend!” Cyndi says. She detaches a large gray cat from my pants, leaving tufted holes. It inflates and hisses at me.
“That’s Reverend Burroughs. He’s usually better behaved.”
“Perhaps he senses my impure thoughts,” I say.
“Cats are psychic.” Cyndi looks around in distress. “I meant to tidy up before you got here.”
“It’s fine,” I say. “Cozy. A perfect aerie for writing.” But Cyndi dashes around ferrying detritus from one side of the room
to the other. I watch her curiously. There’s a motor running in her that wasn’t turned on when we last met, nor during any
of our FaceTime calls this week. She’s as disheveled as her house, hair mussed as though she’s been yanking it all morning,
long mirrored skirt crooked, feet bare.
“There,” she says finally, putting her hands on her narrow hips and foofing out air, although the room looks just like it did before. She goes to a portholed swinging door that I suspect leads to
the kitchen, fording a river of cats with her feet. “Can I get you anything? Coffee or tea? I have a special brew I make for
when I’m writing . . .”
What I really want is a hazmat suit and a flamethrower. “Is the tea hallucinogenic?” I ask.
Cyndi giggles. “No. It’s mint.”
“C’est la guerre. Well, I’ll have that.”
“Be right back,” she says. “Make yourself comfortable.”
This is obviously impossible, but I blow her a kiss and, the moment the door swings shut behind her, start my investigation.
The only thing I can’t find in this room is the most important, which is the legal pad Cyndi says she writes on. I shoo a
fat orange creature from a knitting nest on the coffee table.
A pill bottle rolls from beneath it: Lorazepam, its label says.
Ah. Antianxiety. There’s another, Lithobid, which I believe is lithium, and a third, Risperidone.
I don’t know that one, but I quickly look it up on my phone.
It’s an antipsychotic. This explains much, including why Cyndi would have left a legal career to take dictation from an apparition.
Poor girl. Poor sweet fragile girl—deceitful, too; she mentioned none of this during our chats this week.
I feel a stab of anger and the usual disappointment.
Is no woman trustworthy? But I’ll give Cyndi the benefit of the doubt; she did open up to me about her time in what she called
the system, which I thought meant libraries and then learned meant foster care, to which she was relinquished after her gram died. At
least I now know what Cyndi’s vulnerabilities are. I tuck the bottles beneath the yarn as Cyndi backs through the door, carrying
a tray.
“Allow me,” I say, and take it off her hands. I persuade a pair of cats off the couch with my foot and set down the tray,
upon which is a pretty Japanese tea set and a fan of orange cake slices.
“Did you make this, kitten?” I ask. “Is there nothing you can’t do?”
Cyndi flushes. “It’s nothing. Just a family recipe. Do you like pumpkin spice?”
“Who doesn’t? I wish it could be Halloween all year.”
“So do I,” she breathes as we sit.
I fill the small earthenware cups and hand her one, putting mine to my lips and pretending to sip as if I’m at a child’s tea
party. “Do you know what a group of cats is called?”
“A coven?” Cyndi guesses hopefully.
“A clutter,” I say, which certainly seems appropriate. “Or more historically, a clowder.”
“Ooooo, a clowder,” she breathes. “I love that! It’s so Salem-y.”
“I thought you might,” I say.
I lean over to kiss her, deeply this time. Dry lips, eager pointy little tongue. I try not to think of Simone’s luscious slippery
mouth and playful sensibilities. I come up for air first and pull Cyndi’s feet into my lap. They’re dusty-bottomed, with fat
piggies and blue nails.
“Oh,” she groans, as I begin kneading her soles. “That feels amazing.”