Man With a Squirrel by Nicholas Kilmer Page B

ring. At eleven-thirty, wearing a coat now, he walked over again; and again at one-fifteen.
    *   *   *
    The telephone woke him at four-thirty. He’d left a light burning on his desk, and wasn’t really sleeping so much as visiting with demons. He lifted the receiver, telling it, “Fred Taylor.”
    â€œPlease come.” The voice was hoarse and foreign, but not Oona’s. It was Oona’s voice the demons had been telling him to expect. The demons were wrong.
    Fred said, “Where shall I come?”
    â€œOona’s. Come to the shop door. I will admit you.” It was, Fred thought, a young man’s voice. Dismay trickled like sweat down his shoulders and chest. The voice had serious trouble in it. “I am Marek, Oona’s nephew,” the voice told him. The Hungarian color in his syllables was much stronger than in Oona’s. “Oona has been visited by a grave accident.”
    â€œI’ll come now. Should I telephone for help?”
    â€œNo, no, no, no, no,” Marek said, blurting the denial through the agony of a young man’s tears. “She is beyond help.”
    Fred was pulling on his socks as he talked, having gotten his khakis on one-handed already. “Three minutes,” Fred said.
    *   *   *
    Oona’s was still dark, but a darker shape moved toward him at his quiet knock. Dawn light, not visible in the cold, overcast sky, reflected up from the river that lay a long block behind the shop. It made a luminous fog eddy around Fred’s ankles while he watched the young man approach. He was dressed like a waiter, in modified tuxedo, but with white tie. Fred watched him through the door, fumbling with the locks. The bell chinged. Marek reached up to silence it, closing Fred inside with him.
    â€œOona is dead,” Marek said. He was the shockingly handsome young man Fred had noticed several times walking along Charles Street or drinking coffee at Chico’s, or, once, talking to Oona in Hungarian in the shop doorway. But Fred hadn’t known Oona had family. “Is she here?”
    Marek led Fred through the dark shop into the back room, where a lamp burned. He closed the door, sat on the table, and motioned Fred to take Oona’s leather chair.
    â€œI work late,” Marek said. He rubbed his hands together, warming them. His black hair was longer than a waiter’s needed to be. “You are Oona’s friend.”
    Fred nodded. He’d let the boy pace this as he must, within reason, but if a corpse lay upstairs in the bathroom, they shouldn’t delay the next step too long. Fred noticed a nice piece of silver on the desk, a cylindrical container with a hinged top. Tea caddy. Engraved shield on top.
    â€œI didn’t know what to do,” Marek said. His face, round and well formed, was wan. “This note was on her desk.”
    He held up the square of white paper on which Fred had written his number at Clayton Reed’s, in red ballpoint, with the message “Telephone. Fred Taylor.”
    â€œAs if she had a presentiment; because I will not believe she did this to herself,” Marek said.
    â€œMarek,” Fred said firmly. “What happened? Where is she?”
    Marek put his head in his hands, shook, and wept. “She is my mother and my lover,” he said. Fred reached and rested a large hand on the young man’s knee. Marek sobbed. Fred looked around the room. He saw no sign of disturbance, though the timbre of Marek’s grief was mingled with the shock that should accompany violence, for instance an armed robbery that went wrong. Fred put the note Marek had held out into his shirt pocket.
    â€œI live upstairs,” Marek said. “She gives me the third floor. When I came home after almost midnight, the police were calling.”
    â€œShe’s not here, then,” Fred said.
    â€œIn Cambridge. What must we do, Fred Taylor?” Marek took his hands