How to Moon a Cat Read Online Free Page B

eccentricities.
    I chuckled softly into my mask. It was no surprise that Oscar had resorted to his own methods for ensuring the safekeeping of his money. He had been deeply skeptical of modern banking and financial institutions. The highrise office towers of downtown San Francisco that shadowed Jackson Square had been the regular recipients of his scorn and derision.
    “Stiff-suited . . . moneygrubbing crooks . . . ” he would grumble under his breath with a dismissive shrug at the scrapered skyline that represented the physical embodiment of the city’s thriving financial industry. “ Bah! You can’t trust ’em.”
    That I used to work as an accountant in one of these frequently cursed buildings had caused Oscar no end of angst. He had, on more than one occasion, wondered aloud about the earthquake stability of the office building that housed my tiny cubicle.
    I shook my head ruefully. I couldn’t help but wonder what my uncle would have said about my current choice of occupation.
    In the days following Oscar’s death, I’d found myself unexpectedly unemployed, so the cats and I had moved into the apartment that occupied the two floors above the store. It had taken several months to clean up the place, but I was now the sole proprietor of the newly renovated Green Vase antiques shop.
    The store looked altogether different from when my uncle had run it. Oscar had taken a rather unorthodox approach to his operation of the business. During his tenure, the showroom had been stacked from floor to ceiling with dusty piles of boxes and crates.
    The containers had been filled with an odd assortment of my uncle’s collected trinkets. There were broken lamps, splintered walking canes, rusted-out mining pans, a wide variety of gold teeth, and, inexplicably, a full-sized stuffed kangaroo. The place had looked more like a pawnshop than an antique store.
    There had been, however, a method to Oscar’s madness. What had appeared to the casual observer—and to me, quite frankly—to be a horrendous don’t-touch-anything mess was actually a carefully organized outlay of historic relics that dated back to California’s Gold Rush.
    Oscar had been utterly obsessed with the time period. He had scoured the city searching for hidden remnants from that era, anything that might provide insight into the lives of those early residents. All of his findings, he’d brought back here to the Green Vase.
    This section of the city had been at the heart of the Gold Rush’s population influx, entertaining multitudes of hopeful miners in its numerous bars and brothels. Shadowed hints of that long-forgotten era could still be found in the neighborhood’s historic red brick buildings—especially for someone who knew how and where to look. Uncle Oscar had been known throughout Jackson Square as just that type of “someone.”
    Oscar’s fascination with the Gold Rush, however, had been more than just an intellectual curiosity. The decrepit appearance of the Green Vase showroom had dissuaded all but the most intrepid visitors, providing an effective cover for Oscar’s true occupation. The elusive old man hermit-ed behind the cracked glass door of the inhospitable-looking antiques shop had been, in fact, a treasure hunter extraordinaire.
    Rather than searching for high-end showpiece artifacts, Oscar had focused his efforts on discarded scraps and thrown-away remnants from the Gold Rush time period. In Oscar’s expert hands, these leftover bits and pieces of lives lived long ago had revealed precious information about their long-dead owners. By delving into the mundane details of wealthy and influential figures from San Francisco’s past, Oscar had uncovered lost treasures that no one even knew existed.
    Unfortunately, Oscar had been extremely secretive about his research, and I still had no idea what hidden significance might lie behind most of the items in his collection. I had sorted through a small portion of it, cleaned up what I could, and