Chapter 5: Forty-One

Magnus Aldahl had written the sentence forty times, and none of the forty was any good.

He sat at his dining table at one in the morning with a yellow legal pad and a mug gone cold.

A cat slept on the lid of a wicker basket.

The pad held forty lines in small square letters.

Some had been crossed out so hard the pen had gone through the paper.

"Your underwear is here."

"I found some of your laundry."

"The cat has a problem, and I have been managing it."

"Please come in. This is not what it looks like."

It was exactly what it looked like.

That was the trouble.

Magnus was a surgeon.

He could put a pin through a cat's shattered femur with a hand that did not shake.

He could tell a family their dog was not going to wake up, in plain words, with his face still.

He could not walk four feet across a balcony and say four words to the man next door.

On the first night, September fourteenth, he had found one pair of blue briefs in Admiral's bed.

He had carried them to the sink, because you do not leave something like that lying about.

He had washed them.

He had meant to give them back in the morning.

By morning the pair had been pressed, because he could not bear a crease, and the next night there were two.

He had stood on the porch three times with the stack in his hands.

Each time Teddy Dunleavy had opened the door, hair sticking up, mid-sentence to a plant.

He had looked at Magnus with the open, delighted face of a man who expected good news.

And every time Magnus's whole mind had gone white and blank.

Keep reading free with an account. Start His Cat Stole My Underwear, and He Kept Every Pair from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.