The Death of Perry Many Paws Read Free

garden, with the light and the windows giving the outside flowers the foggy and unfocused look of an Impressionistic painting. On various delicate antiquetables around the room are enormous vases of flowers from the garden, echoing the outdoor vista with an added dimension of color and fragrance. It is my spot of heaven on earth and I wish that its architect had been allowed to tackle the rest of the house.
    Cam’s mother, Claudia, inherited the house when her father died. Her brother Alden Jr., a Princeton graduate, had died at Pearl Harbor. Her brother Franklin, the imaginative and creative one, had also shown a great deal of promise. He had started getting “strange” during his mid-teens and eventually drifted into a hermit-like existence, never marrying and preferring to live in the old gardener’s cottage on the Behrends property. So Alden Sr. had left the house to Claudia along with money in trust for Franklin, enough to take care of him for the rest of his life. Perhaps by leaving the house to his only daughter, Alden Sr. felt he was making amends to his three sisters who were ignored in his father’s will. My guess is that wherever they were, they agreed it was way too little, much too late.
    I remember the first time I saw The Castle, as it was affectionately or derisively called, depending on your viewpoint. I had just graduated from college with a degree in English and had answered an ad for a summer job.
    Wanted for the summer: College graduate with good organizational skills, a sense of direction, no allergies and a love of books needed to catalog extensive family library. Ability to tell a first-edition Charles Dickens from a Harlequin Romance preferred
.
    They also offered room and board and a weekly salary that worked out to a dollar over minimum wage for a forty-hour week, more money than I had ever made in my life. I immediately sent a letter and resume to C. Mack, address The Castle in Birdsey Falls. I was hired, sight unseen.
    The day I arrived, a petite, well-dressed woman answered the door and introduced herself as Claudia Behrends Mack. I assumed she wasthe C. Mack of the ad and therefore would have a good sense of humor. I soon discovered that she wasn’t and she didn’t.
    “You must be the girl we hired from the advertisement.”
    I nodded my head and introduced myself as she looked me up and down, neither approving nor disapproving, just
looking
. Eventually she opened the front door all the way and I entered.
    “I don’t usually answer the door myself but it’s Beatrix’s day off. When Beatrix isn’t here my son answers the door but he appears to have gone off also.” She looked around the two-story foyer as if this son of hers might suddenly appear. I stared at the chandelier that hovered like a giant blimp over my head and moved a few feet to the left.
    “You may leave your luggage in the foyer and I’ll show you around after you tidy up.”
    I hoped that ‘tidy up’ was a euphemism for going to the bathroom because I really was about as tidy as I could get. I could tell I was already a huge disappointment to her and wondered what it was she was expecting. I was everything outlined in the ad, including having no allergies and a good sense of direction. “I had no problem finding the house,” I said, to drive this point home.
    Claudia proceeded to show me the first floor of the house. She informed me who all her relatives were, taking time with each portrait, staring at it like she had never seen it before, touching the faces affectionately and cocking her head and smiling.
    “This is my father, Alden Behrends, Sr.” She touched the frame of a stern-looking man who appeared to be a cross between a basset hound and a rabbit. “Wasn’t he handsome?”
    “Oh, definitely,” I said, crossing my toes, my fingers and my eyes.
    “And this is a family painting of my parents and my two brothers and me. I’m the one sitting on my mother’s lap in the lacy dress.” She lightly