Cat Telling Tales (17 page)

“One way to find out,” Joe said softly. “Why don't you slip on up to the roofs and keep an eye on him?”

Dulcie smiled and vanished, scrambling up to the shingles, as Joe streaked down through the tangled yards for the Damens' cottage, to find a phone. He was headed for the open front door when he saw Clyde in the backyard and veered in that direction, leaping to Clyde's shoulder.

It took only a minute, Joe clinging to Clyde's jacket, his whiskers tickling Clyde's ear as Clyde made the call. They listened to Mabel pass his message on as, out in front, McFarland answered her call. At once, the two officers stopped loading the van and moved away to vanish among the wooded yards. Listening to their soft, fast footfalls as they ran, then a dry scraping and sliding as if their quarry was climbing a fence, Joe leaped from Clyde's shoulder to the roof, to see better. Yes, there went Dulcie racing across the roofs, looking down, watching them. He sped to join her, but soon she lost the runner between the houses.

Together they watched Crowley circle through the trees to the left while McFarland disappeared to the right. Ahead, a branch snapped. McFarland shouted, dove in among the trees behind the brown cottage; they heard a scuffle, then McFarland's sharp command.

The young officer came out marching the erstwhile gardener ahead of him, hands cuffed behind him. Crowley joined him, moving close to the man, carrying the tool belt. Behind them in the cottage the curtain twitched aside and a figure appeared, watching them, watching the prisoner. McFarland had his back to the window, he didn't see Emmylou—until some inexplicable cop instinct made him turn, and look back.

They halted their prisoner, and moved him away from the window. Crowley took a frowning look at her, and moved up the three cement steps. Standing to the side of the door, he knocked.

There was a long pause. When he knocked again, Emmylou eased the door open, stood looking at the officers, looking at the handcuffed prisoner, at his pale, angry face; and she took a step back. Crowley towered over her, made tall Emmylou Warren look as petite as a doll by comparison.

“Do you live here?”

She nodded, then shook her head.

“Could you tell us your name?” By the look on his face, he knew who she was. When she didn't reply, he said, “You're Emmylou Warren?”

She stood with her veined hands loose at her sides, her wrinkled face impassive but her jaw set tight, a little muscle twitching. “It isn't my house, it belongs to a friend. She's . . . I don't know where she is. You can see the mail's piled up.” She nodded toward the mailbox at the curb, its door open, the mail so jammed inside that half of it stuck out. She glanced toward the soggy newspapers littering the porch. “I've been up here several times. When I saw she was gone, I started coming to feed her cats, but now they've disappeared, too. I'm worried about her, and I'm worried for them. She always leaves the key, tells me if she's going away. But it isn't there, and at last, today, I broke in.” She looked at Crowley pleadingly. “I'm afraid something's happened to her. Someone's been in here, they've made a terrible mess.”

“Does she have any family near? Have you tried calling them?”

Emmylou shook her head. “No one. No one I can call, no one who'd come. Only her brother, and he never comes up here, he's . . . He calls himself a vagabond.”

“Homeless?” Crowley said.

She nodded.

“Where does he hang out?”

“Up and down the coast.

“With bad weather on the way,” Crowley said, “might he have come here, wanted a place to crash? Found her gone, and broke in?”

She shook her head. “It doesn't look like that, Birely wouldn't make that mess, he wouldn't trash the place. He shows up in the village a couple times a year. When she worked bagging groceries, he'd meet her out in front of the market, she'd give him money, buy him some food. When he's in town, he camps down by the river with the other homeless, or, in cold weather like this, under the Valley Road bridge. Bridge is just behind the market where we both worked, they'd meet there, she'd see him a few times then he'd be gone again.”

“Do you think she'd have gone off with him?”

“She'd never do that, she hated the way he lived. Sammie's a homebody, she loves her home. I don't understand where she's gone.”

“Would he have harmed her?”

She looked intently at Crowley. “No, not Birely. He's stable enough, he's not a nutcase, he just likes that life, no responsibility. I've met him a couple of times, and the way she talks about him . . . He calls himself a vagabond, a hobo, a wanderer. He's a happy man, and gentle. No,” she said, “he would never hurt her, he loves his sister.” She frowned. “It isn't like her to leave the village without telling me, so I could feed the cats. She didn't know I'd been evicted but she knows my old car; if she'd wanted me, she'd have found me.”

“You want to file a missing persons report? You can do that when you come in for fingerprinting.” At her uncertain look, he said, “You'll have to come in, Ms. Warren. We need your prints in the investigation of the fire and of Hesmerra Young's death. When you delay, you're holding up a murder investigation.”

She looked at him blankly.

“Hesmerra was your friend?”

“Yes, she was.”

“There's a possibility she didn't die naturally.” Emmylou was silent, looking at him, gripping the door frame. He said, “You could help her by giving us your prints. You want to ride down to the station with us? I can bring you back to your car.”

From the roof, the cats watched the exchange, Dulcie's ears sharply forward, the tip of her tail twitching as Emmylou backed away from the two officers. The cats looked at each other, puzzled. Surely Emmylou hadn't poisoned Hesmerra, they didn't like to think that, though they had no real cause to believe otherwise. “I'll come to the station on my own,” she said stiffly. She seemed not to know the prisoner, he might have been a tree standing there in handcuffs for all the attention she paid him. The officers didn't question her about him, nor question him about Emmylou. Maybe they were leaving that up to one of the detectives, who would want to do the questioning in their own way.

Emmylou said, “I'm parked down the block, around the corner.” She stepped on out, carefully pulled the door closed, latched it as best she could despite the way she'd pried the lock loose. It looked, Joe thought, much like the jimmied lock on Hanni's garage door. Coming down the three steps, she walked past the officers and their prisoner with her head high, and moved on down the street. She was just approaching Hanni's cottage when Billy looked up from the garden, saw her, and the two officers just behind her with their cuffed prisoner. The boy went still, looking, then he raced to Emmylou and threw his arms around her.

19

“T
hey can't put you in jail,” Billy said indignantly, clinging to Emmylou, watching the officers and their prisoner. “What did
you
do?
You
didn't do anything.”

“They only want my fingerprints,” she said, “they say it's routine. Didn't they take yours?” Billy nodded. She said, “Sammie's house is trashed inside, I don't know what happened. While I'm at the station I'll report her missing, maybe they can find out where she's gone. First the fire, and Hesmerra, and now . . . seems like everything's gone wrong.” She saw the hurt in his eyes at mention of his gran, and hugged him hard. “I'm sorry, I don't mean to upset you. I'm just a foolish old woman.”

“Have you been staying at Sammie's?” he said so softly the cats could barely hear.

Emmylou shook her head. “She didn't leave the key, I can't find the key. But I did break in, just now, to look inside for the cats. She always comes to tell me if she's going away, she always leaves the key.” She looked at Billy, frowning. “She said more than once that someone was watching her, maybe following her. She's been gone since before the fire, and not a word. She could have found me, found my car. And now, where are the poor cats? Muddy raccoon prints all over the back porch, too, and in the house, so maybe it wasn't a person at all, but those beasts . . . Oh, the poor cats.”

The raccoons of Molena Point seemed singularly wicked, they killed unwary cats, attacked small dogs in their own fenced yards, attacked the owners when they intervened. Several villagers had been so badly bitten they were taken to emergency for shots and stitches. Twice an angry mother raccoon, apparently rearing her kittens in the bushes of a downtown cottage, attacked small dogs as their owners took them for an evening stroll. It did no good to trap and move the beasts, they either came back or, wherever they were released, became someone else's problem. And the village's no-kill policy regarding predatory wild animals meant the raccoons increased in numbers at their own pleasure. One's only choice was to stay out of their way.

As Emmylou headed away for her car, on the roof above, Dulcie said, “Didn't Chichi Barbi trap a black-and-white cat last week? Was that one of Sammie's cats?”

“Don't know,” Joe said, distracted. Below them, the prisoner either couldn't speak English, or pretended he couldn't. Juana had joined them and was having a go in Spanish. When the guy wouldn't talk to her, either, pretending not to understand her, Crowley helped him into the backseat of the squad car, holding the guy's head down so he wouldn't crack his skull, and took him away. McFarland followed in the SUV, hauling the meth supplies from Hanni's garage, and the cats headed for the Damen cottage, where they could hear Debbie inside, complaining.

“That old linoleum's filthy, I can't live in this mess.” Ignoring the cleaning rags and scrub brushes, she said, “I'd better get down to the police, for fingerprints, Captain Harper
did
seem in a hurry,” and she fled the house, calling the kids, moving away toward her car. The cats, with both Debbie and Emmylou headed for MPPD, raced away across the roofs, eager to see how this came down, amused that Debbie hated scrubbing the floor even more than facing Harper again.

R
unning through the cold rain across the wet shingles and the slippery limbs of oak and cypress, Joe and Dulcie hit the courthouse roof soaked nearly to the skin, galloped its length, and dropped down through the branches to MPPD's glass door. Any sensible cat would be curled up on a deep couch before a warming fire. But what the hell, Joe thought, pawing at the door.

Mabel Farthy, behind the counter, rose at once to let them in. There was nothing quite as satisfying to a persistent cat as an obedient human, as to see his training pay off. “Oh, you poor things, you're soaking.” The grandmotherly woman fit snugly in her uniform, its dark color setting off her creamy complexion and blond-dyed white hair. She, and the office, smelled of cinnamon buns, testimony to the competence with which Mabel mothered the officers. From beneath the counter she produced a baker's box, which she set beside the in-box. Enticing Joe and Dulcie up, she broke a bun into small pieces, laid them out on a clean paper plate. By the time their rough tongues had snatched up the last sticky crumb, she'd dried them both off with paper towels, all the while scolding them for getting wet. They were washing the damp places she'd missed when they heard Vinnie Kraft's whining from beyond the glass door, looked up to see Debbie hurrying across the parking lot dragging Vinnie and Tessa.

Shoving in through the glass door, Debbie sailed past the bars of the holding cell, past the folding chairs that stood against the wall, bearing down on Mabel. “I'm here to see Captain Harper. At
his
request, so I don't expect to be kept waiting.” The eyes of both children were fixed on the cats, particularly on Joe, who sat center stage on Mabel's counter.

“That's Ryan and Clyde's cat,” Vinnie said sharply.

“Don't be silly.” Debbie stared at the cats as if something disgusting had been left in a public place. “What would their cat be doing in a police station? Sit down, Vinnie.” Moving away from the cats to the other end of the counter, she returned her scowl to Mabel. “
Is
Captain Harper here? He as much as demanded that I come in. I don't have time to
wait
.”

Mabel looked her over, her round face expressionless. “Captain Harper is busy. Would you like to take a seat?” Deftly she moved the tray of outgoing mail back from the edge as Vinnie reached a hand up. Dulcie and Joe backed away, too, watching the kid warily.

Debbie huffed and took a seat, pulling the children away with her. Mabel resumed sorting the mail, looking up only when the glass door opened again and two women and a thin little man stepped in. The women were dumpy and soft, faintly unkempt, their hair marceled into rigid waves, their dresses reminiscent of the flowered rayon frocks one saw in old '40s movies. The man was a precise little fellow decked out in a dark three-piece suit, his thin face clean shaven except for a carefully trimmed beard of the same salt-and-pepper gray as his neatly styled, short hair; the trio might have just stepped out of the photo the cats had found in Alain Bent's file cabinet. Their expressions were every bit as sour, though they approached Mabel's counter uncertainly. Behind them Debbie had turned away, leaning down over Tessa to adjust the little girl's hair bow.

Both women were squarely built, as sturdy as pit bulls, they had to be mother and daughter. The older woman's face was pale as milk, her skin thick with small scars as if she'd suffered endless little surgeries. “I'm not sure we've come to the right place,” she said, “to report a missing person? Or someone we think is missing? My cousin . . . I'm Norine Sutherland. This is my daughter, Betty, my husband, Delbert,” she said abruptly. “My cousin is Alain Bent. The Realtor?” She launched into a long and complicated explanation of why they thought Alain was missing—but the cats' attention was on Debbie. She watched the three warily, and when the older woman glanced idly at her, she leaned down again as if dusting lint from her shoe. She knew these people—but perhaps they didn't know her? Could she know them only from the same picture, which was tucked into Alain's file cabinet?

Yet if they didn't know her, why was she so wary? One more glance from the older woman and Debbie rose and left, hurrying the kids out, her expression hard to read. Behind her on Mabel's counter Joe and Dulcie sat washing their paws, highly entertained by the little drama. But across the village, another, subtler drama was unfolding.

O
n the cliff above the sea where the rainy wind swept cold, the big red tom stood still, looking. Something watched him, something hidden among the blowing grass; while beyond him, at the street, the lone woman still rummaged in her car, the rain blowing in on her backside as she looked for something or maybe tended to her vagabond housekeeping. Then suddenly among the shifting grasses the darker shadow moved again, staying downwind so he could get no scent at all.

He'd come a good way along the cliff, looking down at the shore below, searching for the little fishing dock. Maybe it had been torn down or perhaps swept away by a high sea, was no longer there, where Misto had remembered it from his youth? But now again Pan searched the grass, and again his skin rippled from the shadowy presence. Who would follow him, and why? No cat knew him here. This wasn't a dangerous predator, he didn't sense that at all, but still he crouched, ready to fight or run, whichever was expedient. Above him the dark clouds heaved lower, heralding an early dusk, and the drenched grass forest began to fill up with shadows—but there, where a tangle of blackberries wove dense and dark, something solid crouched, poised. A darkly mottled shadow, a pair of eyes bright as marigolds, holding steady on him. He eased forward, and caught the scent of her, mixed with the smell of sea and rain. He could see the tip of her fluffy tail twitching, her only movement as she watched him.

Slowly she emerged from among a tangle of blackberry vines into the grass, and shyly she slipped closer. Her long, wind-rumpled fur was a mix of black and brown, her face mottled black and brown, her yellow eyes keen with curiosity. Very close to him she stopped. She looked deep into his eyes, studied his face, and then again she moved closer. She looked him all over. She tasted his scent on the wind. She looked closely at the circular mark on his shoulder.

“Pan?” she said, startling him. “You
can't
be
Pan
?”

“I'm Pan,” he said warily. “How could you know me?”

“Where did you come from? How did you come here?”

“How do you know my name?”

“Who is your father?”

“My father is Misto,” he said. “Do you know him?”

“He's here,” she said, twitching her wind-tangled tail. “Misto's here, he talks about you. How did you know to come here, how did you know where to find him?” Beyond them at the street the old woman had backed out of the car with a paper bag in her hand. Closing the door, she turned and headed straight toward them, wading through the blowing grass soaking her jeans, carrying a bundled-up brown blanket. Immediately the two cats hunkered down, made themselves small, peered up side by side through the blowing stalks. Both felt a rippling urge to run, an inborn alarm that she might throw the blanket over them—yet they remained still. Had she even seen them?

Unaware, she moved past them to the cliff's edge. At the very brink, she began to trample the grass, pressing it down in a circle. Spreading out the old blanket, she sat down in the center, ignoring the fitful rain.

The tortoiseshell relaxed, laughing softly as the old woman took a strip of paper towel from the bag, smoothed it down on the blanket, and laid out her thermos, an apple, and a cellophane-wrapped sandwich.

“Suppertime,” she whispered. She looked Pan over again, her yellow eyes so clear and bold they quite unsettled him. “My name is Kit. You've come to find Misto. But how . . . ?”

“Is
he here?” he said with excitement, lashing his red-striped tail.

“Yes, but how did you find him? Oh,” she said, “from his tales? You found this place from his stories?”

“Yes, but how do you know that? Then I saw pictures of the village, exactly the way he described. There are lots of villages all along the coast, but none quite like this one, not the same cluster of cottages so cozy beneath the spreading trees.” He looked at her intently. “Is there a fishing dock farther along the shore? Do ferals live there?”

“They live there. And Misto comes every morning and evening, he'll be there soon, now,” she said, laughing at the light that blazed in his russet eyes. “You came all this way, because of a picture?”

“Lots of pictures, color pictures in magazines in the house where I lived, and then photographs, and I knew this was the right village.” Pan wiped at his ear with a front paw, where the grass seeds tickled. “I saw this place and thought about Pa, I knew he was growing old and would miss his kittenhood home, and I guessed he might come here.

“Once I lived in a nursing home,” he said. “I listened to those old folks, how they longed for the places of their childhood, and I thought Pa would be longing, too, wanting to return to where he was a kitten. After the nursing home burned down I set out to follow him. Do you know what it's like not to have any notion where your pa is, or even if he's still alive?”

“I never knew
who
my father was,” Kit said. “I never knew him at all. My mother . . .” She went silent as a police car came up the narrow street cruising slowly, nosing to the curb in front of Emmylou's car as if to block its departure. Officer Brennan sat a moment talking on the radio, glancing at the empty car and then scanning the cliff. His bulk completely filled the driver's seat; and the cats could hear the faint, tinny reply of the dispatcher—but so could Emmylou. She ducked down below the tall grass, cowed there as still as a cat, herself.

But not still enough. Brennan, seeing movement, stepped out of the black-and-white, moving lightly considering his weight, and approached through the rustling grass asking her to come out. The weight of his equipment belt made him look all the heftier, his holstered gun, the radio and phone and nightstick, the holstered pepper spray and Taser. The third time he spoke, Emmylou rose up out of the grass like a windblown scarecrow, scowling at him, clutching her thermos and lunch bag to her as if for protection.

Brennan said, “The chief's looking for you to come in, Emmylou, for fingerprinting, right?”

Emmylou said nothing, she just looked at him, clutching her lunch bag closer.

“Why don't you come on in with me? It won't take long, and I'll bring you back.” He nodded toward her old Chevy. “You can leave your car, I'll see it isn't ticketed.”