Cat Coming Home (6 page)

T
HAT MORNING AS
Joe Grey eavesdropped in plain sight from Maudie Toola’s stairway, forty miles southeast of the village at the California State Prison at Soledad, the warden picked up the phone to dial an inmate’s family. This was a mission Walter Deaver seldom had to perform, and one he didn’t look forward to, particularly in this case. Jack Reed didn’t have any family to notify except his little girl, who was only maybe thirteen. Lori’s mother had died of cancer several years before, and Jack was all the child had. At thirteen, a little girl badly needed her father—in Lori’s case, even a father in prison was better than no father at all.

Jack Reed wasn’t a troublemaker, a long way from it. This was his first offense and, Deaver would be willing to bet, would be his last scrape with the law once he was out. In Deaver’s view, Reed shouldn’t be in prison at all but should get a medal for what he’d done. But then, he didn’t make the laws.

Reluctantly he picked up the phone, not wanting to relay this news. Hoping, in the days to come, not to have to bear worse news, although Reed’s condition was critical. If Jack Reed died, the child would have no one.

Except, of course, her guardian, Cora Lee French. Lori was lucky in that respect; Jack had chosen well when he chose the woman who, in his absence, was helping to shape the child’s life. He knew that Lori was in a private school, and that she spent much of her free time in an apprentice program working for a local building contractor, a woman who was close friends both with Cora Lee and with Chief Harper.

Deaver generally didn’t take this kind of interest in the personal lives of his prisoners; he couldn’t, with a population double what the prison had been built to accommodate. Nor did he care to, when most of them were members of prison gangs, vicious, high-maintenance dregs on society. Men so seduced by the criminal culture they were too far gone for anything to be done other than keep them off the streets, keep them from killing anyone else. But because of Harper’s special interest in this case, he’d learned a good deal about Jack Reed and his daughter—he just wished the parole board, instead of releasing dangerous prisoners, would release the few men like Jack. But what the hell, who could figure what was in the minds of some state-appointed officials?

It was two hours since Reed had been stabbed in the prison yard outside the mess hall. The shank was a knife made from a length of water pipe that had been removed from the sink in the cell of the would-be killer. The prison was on lockdown, and all cells had been searched for further
weapons. Reed had been tended briefly by the prison doctors before a helicopter transported him to Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital where, in the civilian ICU, he would remain under guard, hooked up to life support, closer to death than to life.

The phone rang five times. When a woman answered, Deaver asked for Lori’s guardian.

“This is Cora Lee.”

Deaver had seen the woman and child on visiting days. Cora Lee was striking, a tall, slim woman with short-clipped, curly black hair streaked with silver. He thought she might be Creole, from her café au lait complexion and her faint accent, as if maybe she’d grown up in New Orleans. Her manner was quiet, self-contained, and she seemed truly fond of Lori.

You got a lot of scum among the visiting crowds, grossly fat women in low-cut T-shirts, women in skintight jeans and flip-flops. As if it made no difference, as if no one cared how they looked when they entered the institution, as if his prison were some fourth-rate bordello. But Lori and Cora Lee always arrived well groomed, as neatly dressed and appealing as if they were headed for Sunday church, where they might indeed be judged—by the congregation or the Almighty—for their grooming and cleanliness.

He identified himself to Ms. French, told her as gently as he could that Jack had been stabbed and was in the ICU in Salinas, and that she had his permission to take Lori to visit him. There was a long silence at the other end of the line. Waiting, he wondered idly whether, if Reed died, the guardian would adopt the child. It was none of his
business, but he sure didn’t like to see any child become a ward of the state. Lori Reed appeared to be a serious and sensible girl, and she’d need that steadiness now, if Reed didn’t make it. When these things happened to a prisoner like Reed, someone who wasn’t part of a gang, who tried to keep to himself and stay out of trouble, just trying to make it to the end of his sentence, the situation sickened Deaver. At the other end of the line Cora Lee French finally spoke; her voice, which had been light and cheerful, was low and subdued. “How bad is he?”

“He’s critical.”

“I’ll tell Lori. When can we see him?” She was direct, straightforward, but she sounded sick at having to tell the child. They talked for only a few minutes, he gave her instructions for their arrival at the hospital, told her who to ask for, told her how long they would be able to stay. She thanked him in a naked voice that left him feeling like hell.

H
ALF AN HOUR
after the warden’s call, Lori and Cora Lee were headed inland to the Salinas hospital. Cora Lee drove in silence, her right hand holding Lori’s small, cold hand, offering what comfort she could. Lori huddled down in the seat like a hurt little animal, her school uniform, white shirt and navy skirt, rumpled from the playground where Cora Lee had picked her up, her dark hair tangled, her face pale with fear as she tried to understand how Pa, her pa, could suddenly be so injured that he was fighting for his life. Pa wasn’t a bully, he wasn’t into prison
gangs, he wasn’t mean, he had never hurt anyone—no one that didn’t need hurting, Lori thought. She couldn’t imagine that Pa would die, she wouldn’t let herself believe that could happen.

But Ma had died. There was nothing Lori had been able to do, to make her well, to stop her from dying. Certainly her little-girl prayers hadn’t turned away the cancer. She’d stood by her mother’s bed in that faraway North Carolina town praying and praying, and watched her mother’s life drain away.

This hour of the morning, the traffic was heavy with commuters and with trucks: huge, loud, diesel-stinking trucks crowding them, and moving in the other direction, too, along the two-lane, their closed sides marked with bakery and beer logos, or their railed sides penning in cattle headed for some slaughter yard, Lori thought, feeling sad for them. Cora Lee didn’t talk, she left Lori to her own thoughts, and for that Lori was grateful. Cora Lee’s silence soothed her, she was there for her, but not intrusive. Not since before Mama died, when Lori was little, had anyone understood so well what she was thinking, and known, just by being there, how to make her feel better. In the year and a half since Pa was sent to prison, she and Cora Lee had visited him seven times. Sometimes, at first, she hadn’t wanted to go, hadn’t wanted to see Pa behind bars. But Cora Lee had urged her.

And then later, she hadn’t wanted to go because the other prisoners stared at her. You had to wait in line for hours outside the prison, sitting in a camp chair if you’d brought one, and it seemed like everyone in line stared at you. Then when they finally got inside to see Pa, in the
big visiting room at the long table, she and Pa couldn’t be alone. Visitors sat lined up along one side of the long table, prisoners on the other, and there was that heavy glass barrier between her and Pa. How could she and Pa even try to be natural, crowded among all those strangers, and talking through a telephone? Each time, as they drove down to Soledad, she’d felt torn between her excitement to see Pa and her disgust at going into the prison.

And then she’d start thinking about the years when she and Pa were together after Mama died, when Pa had locked her in the house and boarded up the windows, and didn’t tell her why. She hadn’t understood, then, that it was to keep her safe, to save her life. She guessed Pa wasn’t comfortable enough with
her
to tell her. If she started thinking about that while they were driving down to see him, by the time they reached the prison she didn’t want to go in, she’d want to turn around and go home again.

But now they weren’t going to the prison. They were headed for a hospital where she’d see Pa lying helpless in one of those narrow beds with iron sides, like another kind of prison. Pa, so lean and tall, lying limp in a hospital bed hooked up to machines like Ma had been, bandages around his chest where he’d been stabbed. And even with the machines, the oxygen, the IV, maybe Pa wouldn’t live, maybe he’d die in the hospital. Die this morning before they ever got there. Or die after she went away again leaving him alone in a strange place. She didn’t realize she was squeezing Cora Lee’s arm hard until Cora Lee flinched.

“I’m sorry,” she said, easing up her grip. The wind through the open windows smelled of onions from the fields, of freshly turned earth and commercial fertilizers,
and the early sun slanted sharply into their eyes. She sat nervously telling herself Pa wasn’t going to die; she wanted to kill the man who had stabbed him, she thought he should be the one in ICU or in the morgue, not Pa.

She knew when she saw Pa she’d have to be cheerful and positive, try to make him feel better, but she didn’t feel positive. She just felt scared. Pa was all she had; sometimes she missed him so bad, missed how he had been when she was just a little girl, before the bad things started to happen. When she’d run away from Pa and hidden for two weeks in the library basement, she hadn’t understood then why he’d locked her up. While she was sitting in the dark little concrete hole on the old mattress she’d dragged in, living on peanut butter and canned peaches, sometimes, not knowing why Pa had made a prisoner of her, she really had wanted him dead.

But then later when she’d understood that it was to save her life, then she’d been ashamed. When she’d learned about the children that Pa’s own brother, and that other man, had murdered, that Pa was trying to save her from them, she didn’t know what to say to him.

And now Pa’s own life needed saving. She prayed for him. She wanted to tell him she loved him, she hadn’t told him that in a long time. Right now, Cora Lee’s presence was the only thing that held her steady. As if, without Cora Lee, she’d fall into some endless dark space with nothing at all to hold on to.

J
OE WAS ALL
set to leave the kitchen and slip into the garage with Dulcie and Kit when Maudie set a few crumbs of coffee cake and a saucer of milk before him. Settling down on the step again to enjoy the little treat, he listened with interest as mother and son argued, both so hardheaded that Joe had to hide a smile. That careening truck had worried David far more than it seemed to worry Maudie; he didn’t want to leave her and Benny alone, and Maudie refused to go home with him. Nor did she want him to stay; and Joe could tell he really didn’t want to stay, that he was too worried about his wife, Alison.

“Think about it, Mama. Whoever killed Martin and Caroline might think you saw him that night. Maybe he followed us here, intending to hurt you, to silence you?”

“Well that’s melodramatic. It was dark, how could I have seen anyone?”

“There was a moon, you told me there was a thin
moon. The killer doesn’t know you didn’t see him.” David’s smooth face was stern with worry. “Between
whatever
that was this morning and these home invasions, I don’t want to leave you two. You’re half crippled with that lame shoulder, you can’t—”

“I
saw
the truck coming, I was ready to move.”

“You didn’t have a clue. Benny said you had your back to it, unloading packages.”

“I heard it, I heard the truck.”

“Come home with me, Mama, just until Alison’s through the surgery and on the mend, until I can get a live-in nurse for her, someone reliable. Then I’ll take a leave and come on back with you.”

“Benny’s had enough upset, he needs to be settled in one place, he doesn’t need to be shuttled around anymore. No one’s going to harm us. I want to get him started in school, maybe that private school where Ryan’s young friend Lori Reed goes. He’ll be—”

“He’ll be what?” David snapped.
“He’ll
be sideswiped by a truck on his way to school?”

“No one,” she said with certainty, “would want to harm Benny.”

“Someone already harmed him deeply when they killed his father.” Rising, David stepped to the sink, emptied his coffee cup, and headed for the stairs. “Please go pack, Mama. For the two of you. I’ll call and try to get us all on a flight.”

“No,” Maudie said. “We’re staying here. We’ll be in our own home for Christmas. And you will be where you belong, with Alison. And that’s the end of it.”

Apparently it was. David headed up the stairs shaking his head, but saying no more.

“Kids,” Maudie said to the tomcat. “Even when they’re grown they think their mothers are helpless.” Smiling a secret little smile, she sipped her cooling coffee.

“I wish someone could understand how much I dread Christmas,” she told Joe. “But Benny has to have Christmas, he’s hurting so bad. Benny’s daddy was the only stable thing in his life, until Caroline. That little boy idolized his daddy.

“When Allen was alive,” she said, “when we were raising the boys, Thanksgiving and Christmas were the most exciting times of the year.” She looked bleakly at Joe. “Is a tomcat the only one in the world I can talk to? The only one who won’t think me silly and who won’t argue with me?” Her blue eyes were flat with hurting. “I miss Martin the same way I missed his dad when he died. Like part of
me
is gone. They say that when a leg has been amputated, the pain in the missing part is still there, you can still feel it there, though there’s nothing but empty space.”

Joe Grey had such a powerful desire to speak, to answer the poor woman, that he leaped off the stairs with alarm and trotted away into the garage. What was he, a feline shrink? A four-legged therapist for the lonely and grieving? Winding his way among mover’s cartons and stacks of banker’s boxes, he sniffed a dozen lingering aromas transported three hundred miles from L.A., invisible artifacts boxed and preserved like elusive archeological treasures. The labels were written in a beautiful round cursive, the kind of handwriting Joe saw only among his older human friends:
PERSONAL LETTERS, FAMILY PHOTOS, TAX RECEIPTS, OLD SWEATERS.
Somewhere ahead among
the mountains of cartons, little Benny was talking in a soft monotone, apparently to Dulcie and Kit—unburdening himself to feline sympathy just as Maudie had. What was it about being a cat that made folks so eager to confide, to bare their very souls?

When, ahead in the gloom, he couldn’t see the two cats or the child, he leaped to the top of a four-foot carton and reared up for a better look. Nothing. Only when he gave a low hunting cry in his throat did Dulcie rise up out of an open carton, ears and whiskers at half-mast, her green eyes amused. Beside her, Benny peered over, too, but when the child realized the strange sound had come from Joe Grey, he disappeared again, down inside the box.

Leaping across the stacked boxes, Joe looked down into their hideaway. The carton was filled with packets of bright cloth: neatly cut squares of cotton print tied in bundles with hanks of bright yarn. Benny had piled them around the sides, to clear the middle into a little nest. He sat cross-legged, clutching an album open on his lap. The female cats snuggled beside him again, watching the pages as he slowly turned them. His little-boy scent wafted up, as distinctive as the scent of a puppy. Looking innocently up at Joe, Benny clearly expected the tomcat to join them. Quietly Joe dropped down among the little bales of quilting squares and settled beside Dulcie.

There is something sleep-making to a cat about looking at old photographs; the slowly turning pages create a rhythm that makes one give way to jaw-cracking yawns. But these pictures were of Benny’s family, each a little window into the child’s short past, and the tomcat remained
alert. Pictures of Benny and Maudie, of Benny and a boy and girl about his age, who must be Caroline’s two children. Of Benny and a tall man resembling David and a pretty woman with tousled hair the color of butterscotch. These were the pictures Benny reached for, stroking their faces. “That’s my daddy and that’s Caroline, my new mother.” He looked seriously and sadly at the cats. “They’re in heaven now.”

Dulcie rubbed her face against the child, trying to cheer him. Kit nuzzled him, but the tortoiseshell was edgy, too, the tip of her tail twitching with the need to speak, to tell Joe and Dulcie something urgent. What? Joe wondered. What might she have seen, this morning, that was so important?

Well, she’d held her silence this long, and they’d be outside again soon enough—Kit had never been big on patience. Benny was saying, “This is my mother Caroline, she made real sit-down dinners every night, for all of us together. That’s Caroline and me and Daddy, and that’s …” The dry hush of turning pages and the child’s droning voice soon had Joe Grey sleepy despite his interest in the dead couple, and despite his curiosity over Kit’s unease. He came alert when Benny hugged him too hard and a salty wetness splashed on his nose. “And then we were going to Grandma’s cabin and it was dark and the gun was shooting, so loud and bright and Grandma threw us on the floor and I couldn’t see anything.” He squeezed Joe so hard the tomcat nearly yowled; he was hugging all three of them, gathering them to him like teddy bears, weeping into their fur.

Joe tolerated the child’s grief as long as he could, then leaped out of Benny’s arms and out of the carton to the top of a wooden crate. Sometimes the burden of understanding humans was more than a cat cared to handle. Looking around him at the mountain of Maudie’s possessions, he wondered where she was going to put all this stuff, in the limited space of the four-room Tudor house.

But he could see that much of it was destined for the quilting studio, the long table against the opposite wall, the cartons marked
QUILTING FRAME,
the two sewing machines and the dozens of boxes stacked next to them. In the far corner, the half-dozen boxes marked
DESK
had been opened, the tape slit, the flaps standing up, the contents disarranged so that papers and folders stuck out. A box marked
CAROLINE
had been opened, revealing a woman’s clothes neatly folded, layers of sweaters and blouses and among them a half-dozen small, framed pictures. Leaping across the boxes to look, he saw that some were of the two children, some of the children with Caroline and a man in a Marine uniform. Caroline’s first husband? Tucked down beside the clothes was a small jewelry chest. When he clawed it open, he found a diary with a leather strap and a little lock. He was tempted to finesse this open, too, but with the child nearby, that might not be wise. Even a seven-year-old boy would have to wonder at a cat snooping into his mother’s diary.

The next open carton marked
CAROLINE
contained nine-by-twelve brown envelopes marked
TAXES, LETTERS, PAID BILLS, LEGAL PAPERS
. Beneath these, when he clawed
them aside, was a sealed, unmarked brown envelope, its flap tightly glued. Again, he was tempted, flexing his claws over the sealed flap, but then sensibly sheathing them again and turning away. The remaining boxes all seemed dull as mud, several were marked as kitchen things, and two boxes contained old tax receipts. Strange that he’d found nothing belonging to Benny’s real mother. Had Maudie kept nothing of Pearl’s, or had Pearl left nothing at all behind when she left Martin?

And, the tomcat thought, why did he care? Except that Benny’s daddy and Caroline had been murdered, the shooter had vanished, and so far neither the San Bernardino sheriff nor the LAPD had a shred of evidence. That was what Maudie had told Ryan, that neither agency had come up with any viable suspect, not enough evidence to hold anyone. Joe supposed the two agencies had done all they could. Killers vanished every day. He supposed, given the pressure in a big-city police department, such cases had to be set aside in deference to the emergencies of the moment.

But that hit-and-run this morning, and Maudie’s reaction to it, had prodded the tomcat into a frenzy of curiosity. He was slipping among the last stack of boxes, sniffing at them, when he found Martin’s name, written in Maudie’s hand. This was the first box he’d found of her son’s possessions, and quickly he ripped a claw along the tape until he’d freed the flaps.

Atop a stack of bills and papers lay another photograph album, with pictures of Benny, and Martin in his airline pilot’s uniform. There was no mistaking the resemblance
between father and son. In some, they were a threesome with a tall, black-haired woman. This must be Pearl. A thin, straight woman with very white skin and sharply carved features, high cheekbones over hollow cheeks, her black eyes keen and penetrating. A severe beauty, stark and cold, in contrast to Caroline’s warm features. In nearly every picture Pearl stood between father and son, with Benny shoved nearly out of camera range. In every shot she wore black, a black business suit with a knee-length skirt, black slacks and white blouse, a black dress with a V-neck and long sleeves. Nothing casual, nothing soft or whimsical. In the few pictures where she smiled, her “camera” smile looked patently fake. In only one picture she had pulled Benny against her side as if in sweet companionship, the child looking rigid and uncomfortable.

Joe looked up when Benny crawled out of the big carton and headed for the kitchen door with Dulcie and Kit close behind, Kit fidgeting as if wild to get outdoors where she could talk. With a last look at the open carton, Joe leaped after them, trotting through the kitchen and out to the studio. He paused when the phone rang behind them, looked back as Maudie rose to answer.

There was a long silence, then Maudie said, “Who is this?” Another, longer pause, then very softly she hung up. “No one,” she said, shrugging. “Maybe a wrong number.” As she turned away, was that a look of concern, perhaps of fear? But then as she sat down again at the table, the hint of a smile touched her soft face, some secret thought that she unknowingly telegraphed to Joe.
He was still staring when he saw Scotty watching him; quickly he slapped his paw at an invisible bug, then raced away as if chasing it, batting at the floor as he followed Dulcie and Kit out through an unglazed window; and the three cats vanished as swiftly as had Maudie’s strange little smile.