Game of Cages

Regina was much older in these. Every picture showed her crouching beside an empty Plexiglas cage similar to the one in the wrecked truck, only much larger. Flood lamps lit the interior, and the cage was spiderwebbed with electrical wiring.

But all I could see inside the cage was a blurry blue smear. Whatever it was, I couldn’t make it out.

I looked at the other pictures. There were at least a dozen, all showing Regina posing with the empty cage. Her hair was longer in some pictures than in others, but she had the same creepy, ecstatic smile in each. Something about them bothered me, though. The smile was the same, but the expression was not. It seemed that the longer her hair was, the more ferocious her eyes became.

I studied the background of the images. They had been taken indoors; there was a couch, a ski jacket, and skis against the wall in one photo, a tiny stove in another. The space looked pretty cramped, and I guessed it was the guesthouse out back.

One picture showed a different woman who didn’t smile at all, but her face glowed with smug contentment. She was younger than Regina—maybe in her early fifties—with a pale, stolid look about her. Her eyes had the same fierce glint as Regina’s.

“I can’t see Armand. Was he in the cage when this was taken?”

“We didn’t cage him,” she snapped, forgetting that she’d already told me she kept his cage clean. “We kept him safe. But yes, he was there when we took those. He doesn’t turn up on film. He isn’t a regular animal, you know. He’s special.”

Now we were getting to it. “How is he special?”

“He is beautiful!” she cried. “He’s the most beautiful thing on God’s green earth. His eyes are like the stars of the Milky Way, and he’s as delicate as thistledown. He’s the only dog of his kind in the world. A sapphire dog, Stroud called him. He’s as beautiful as a dream at twilight. Like holding the sky in your arms.”

I wondered how she could hold the sky in her arms while it was inside a plastic cage, but it didn’t seem polite to argue. “That’s a pretty way to describe him.”

She waved my comment away. “I didn’t write it. Some college professor did. I held a poetry contest years back to find someone to capture Armand’s essence, if you know what I mean. The winner had retired up here from some southern university to start a winery, and he won the cash prize hands down. Then I invited him to the house.

“He didn’t think much of writing a poem about some rich broad’s dog until he met Armand, of course. Then he fell in love, just like anyone would. He spent six months here, sleeping on a cot, watching Armand—staring at him. What I said before is all I remember of the poem he wrote. You’d think it was sap if you’d never seen.”

Her tone had changed. Something told me I should probe further. “What happened?”

“He refused to leave,” she answered, her mouth twisting with anger. “He even told me that he loved Armand more than I did. That I wasn’t ‘sensitive’ enough to appreciate him. Ursula had to taser him to keep him from breaching the cage. Hah! I appreciated Armand enough to take care of that old fool.”

The way she said that gave me a chill. “What did you do?”

She bared her teeth. “I …” Then she stopped. It was pretty clear that she’d been about to confess to a crime. “Well, I paid him off,” she said, in the least convincing way possible. “Also, I had the sheriff run him out of town. Out of the country, actually. He’d committed a crime against me, stolen books out of my library, if you have to pry. I warned him that I was going to call the police the next day, and he was gone before morning. To Canada, maybe. Or Fiji. That’s all and nothing more.”

She lifted her nose and looked away from me. Most people are terrible liars, but she was the worst I’d ever met. She could contradict herself all in one breath. “I’m not a cop,” I said. “I’m not going to arrest you. You killed him, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” she said, smiling at me with open contempt. “Yes, of course I did. I knifed him and pulled him out into the woods on a big old sled all by myself.” She looked at me as if she might like to cut me open and gulp down my heart. “And I’ll do the same to anyone who tries to come between me and my Armand.”

“Is that right?”

“It is. It’s very right. And don’t lie to me—I’m not fooled by that big silver tray and that tiny jacket. I know you’re one of the people that bitch brought here to buy him. Stephanie doesn’t understand. She’s never been close enough to really see, to really feel it. But if I thought you had my Armand, I’d cut your pathetic little johnny off and stuff it down your throat until you choked on it!”

I nodded. I had gotten the message. Of course, if she found out what I really wanted to do to her pet, she’d come apart at the seams. The bidders only wanted to buy him.

The urge to throttle the miserable life out of her made my hands shake. I went into the hall, closed the door, and walked away. It wasn’t my place to put people out of their misery or dish out punishment for old crimes. I wasn’t pure as snow myself. Besides, no matter what she’d done, I didn’t want to see the expression she’d made when the nurse had pinched her.

I went back to the stairs. Voices echoed up from the bottom floor, so I went farther down the hall to a narrow set of steps at the end. I paused at the top, but the only sound I could hear was a TV announcer droning away. I crept down.

There was a short hallway at the bottom of the stairs that led to an exterior door. There were also three interior doors, one of which was open. The announcer’s voice and a flickering TV light came from there.

I looked around, wondering how I was going to pass that open door without alerting whoever was inside.

An old woman in a maid’s uniform stepped into the doorway and stared at me. She glanced at my white jacket with contempt; she wasn’t fooled for a second.

While I considered what I should do, she rolled her eyes and shut the door. Apparently, she wasn’t being paid to be security.

I walked to the exterior door. There was a dead-bolt key on a hook by the door, but I left it. As long as I had