Cat Telling Tales (5 page)

Not twenty feet from the burn, the other two cabins stood untouched, their rough wood siding soaked from the beating water, the roofs dripping. As Charlie and Ryan moved toward the group of men, a sick smell reached them, the stink of meat singed too fast on a hot barbecue. The circle of men nearly hid the portable gurney beside the EMT van. They could see it held a stretcher, strewn with a heap of blackened rags.

But not only rags. Charlie made out a frail body tangled among burned blankets.

Max turned to look at her, his mouth and jaw drawn tight. “She never left her bed, Charlie. She was there under the blankets, dressed in her flannel nightgown.” Charlie pressed her fist to her mouth. Max said, “There was glass in her bed, shards of glass under the blanket, as if a bottle had exploded in the flames.”

Behind them, up the dirt road, the coroner's white van pulled in off the two-lane, and behind it came a kid on a bike, leaning over the handlebars pumping hard, kicking up dust as he skidded off the highway onto the dirt lane, following the van. Skidding to a stop beside it, dragging his foot in the dirt, Billy Young sat looking at his burned house and the group of silent men.

6

J
oe crouched on the dash of Ryan's truck looking out through the windshield, watching Billy. The boy sat on his bike looking at the black and smoking remains of his home: the heap of fallen timbers, steam rising up from the alligatored wood. His fists were clenched hard on the handlebars, his face gone white. He was so thin his protruding wrists looked like the bones someone would throw to a hungry dog. His face was long, his cheeks sculpted in close, his brown eyes huge with shock, a look that made Joe's belly twist, that made embarrassing cat tears start—this was as sad as watching an orphaned kitten whose mother had been hit by a car.

He was dressed in frayed jeans limply shaped to his legs, run-over boots, a ragged khaki jacket that might have come from a local charity. Brown hair clipped short and uneven as if Gran took a pair of dull shears to it once in a while. Joe had seen him out in the fields when he and Dulcie and Kit were hunting, they'd see him scrounging the mom-and-pop vegetable farms, picking up culls, dropping them in a black plastic bag: cabbages that had been accidentally cut and were left to rot, ears of corn that might have been wormy, tomatoes that had been missed or that the birds had pecked open.

Max stepped over, blocking Billy's view of the gurney, and put his arm around the boy, but Billy had already seen what was there. The firemen and medics had turned away, with their backs to him, so as not to stare at his grief. Joe watched Billy try to get his mind around what had happened, try to come to terms with the body on the stretcher.

Did the boy have anyone else, besides his gran?
What happens to an orphaned boy?
Joe wondered.
Will some county authority take him away, tell him where to live, put him in a foster home or institution? Tell him he can't work anymore, that he's too young to work? Confine him in a straitjacket of legal hierarchy? Is Billy Young nothing more than county property now?

Max walked the boy away from the stretcher, talking softly; they talked for some time, Billy hesitantly asking questions, Max's answers direct and brief. When Billy turned again toward the medics' van, Max shook his head, discouraging him from approaching the burned body, and guided him instead toward Ryan's truck. Watching them, Joe dropped to the seat and curled up, his chin on his paws, his eyes slitted closed.

“No one else has been around here?” the chief was saying. “Anyone who might have accidentally started the fire?”

“No one ever comes here,” Billy said. “Except Mr. Zandler, to get the rent.” He didn't bother to wipe the wetness from his cheeks. Joe knew Zandler, he was the kind of scruffy and rude old man that a cat made a wide path around. A lanky and stooped man, shaggy black hair and bristly beard, old black three-piece suit, grubby white shirt, a necktie loose and crooked and dark enough to hide some of the grease stains. Billy said, “Sometimes my uncle comes, my aunt's husband. He likes Gran. But Aunt Esther never comes, neither of my aunts do. Gran's own daughters.”

“That would be Erik Kraft,” Max said.

Billy nodded. “I need to tell him. So he won't come, find the house burned.” Joe thought if he were to reach out a paw and touch Billy, he'd feel him shivering, the kind of tremor you didn't really see, that came from deep down inside.

“Did your uncle come often?” Max asked.

Billy shook his head. “Maybe three or four times a year. He'd give her spending money, fill up her whiskey stash. He said if her daughters wouldn't give her money, he would. Said it was no one's business what she did with it. He said her daughters didn't realize how hard it was on her, raising me alone. But I always worked,” Billy said, “ever since Mama died I worked to help out.”

“I know you have,” Max said. “The other two cabins, they're empty? Isn't there another tenant?”

“A woman lived in one, Emmylou Warren. After Christmas she lost her job and couldn't pay, and Mr. Zandler made her leave. Gran . . . Gran wouldn't let her stay with us, she said we didn't have room. Well, there is . . . was only the one room. Emmylou's my friend, but I don't know where she went.”

“And the other cabin?”

“It's empty, half the roof's fallen in, the floor rotted. The back room, where it doesn't leak, I have some cat beds there, for my strays. I need to find them, they'll be so scared.”

Max nodded. “Go on, then,” as if he was relieved to see Billy distracted for a moment, or going off in private to get himself together. As Billy turned away, Max said, “If you can corral them, we can take them up to the ranch. You don't want to leave them here alone, the coyotes will take over now.”

Billy turned to look at him. “I'll still be here. I can sleep just fine in the room with the cats. Until Zandler kicks me out,” he added uncertainly.

“You can't stay here alone.”

“Why not?” Billy said defiantly. “You going to turn me in, Captain Harper? Send me to some home? What about my cats? No one can keep me in a home, I won't stay.”

“You can't stay here,” Max repeated. “The minute someone at Child Welfare hears about your grandmother's death, they'll come nosing around. Go find your cats, Billy. There's room for you at the ranch. You and Charlie can move the cats up the hill, shut them in a stall until they settle in.”

Billy looked at Max for a long time. He turned away at last, moving off toward the little stand of willow trees farther along the hill, wiping his sleeve across his face. The little wood was a natural shelter where the frightened cats would have fled from the fire and noise, from the trucks roaring in, from strange men shouting, from the flames and smoke and from the violent jets of water. Walking away, Billy avoided the burn. Circling away from the fire truck and the medics' and coroner's vans, his shoulders were slumped, grief clinging around him as he went to gather up his wild little cats. Maybe they were the only real family he had left, Joe thought. The only creatures in the world who cared about him were there, crouching hidden among the willow grove. But then, looking toward the grove, Joe suddenly felt the skin along his back twitch violently, and he was thinking no longer of the frightened cats, he was seeing his stormy nightmare, seeing the same grove, the same stand of willows; but in his dream they had been blowing wildly, whipped by the driving rain. The same cliff rising up behind, rising up to the Harpers' pasture; and the two shacks that the fire had left standing were surely a match for the rain-drenched hovel of his dream. He felt sick, he was shivering. What was this, what was he seeing? Or, what
had
he seen, in that midnight violence?

That dream had been Kit's kind of wild fancy, or could even be a product of Dulcie's imaginative vision. Such dreams were not a part of his own nature.

And yet this was not fancy, he
had
dreamed of this place, this cluster of derelict pickers' shacks that he must have seen dozens of times while hunting the field along the river but which, until that night, until now, had no special meaning for him.

Billy returned sooner than Joe would have thought, with a dark tabby tomcat wriggling in his arms. He shut him into the fallen-down shack and had turned back to find the others when Charlie and Ryan caught up with him. They talked with him a few minutes, then Charlie swung into her SUV and pulled away, turning up toward the ranch. Ryan headed for her truck and, opening the door, seemed relieved to see Joe safe inside. “Billy'll be all right for a little while,” she said, “rounding up his cats. We'll just run down to Firetti's, borrow some cat carriers. It'll take the most frightened ones a while to come to him.”

“Is he all alone?” Joe said. “Except for his aunts? What's that about, that they never see him? Where's his mother? His father?”

“His mother's dead. His father . . . no one knows,” Ryan said. Turning right onto the two-lane, she glanced over at him. “Why would his aunts leave a child to grow up in that falling-down shack with that drunken old woman? Everything I've heard, she started sucking up whiskey first thing in the morning, the minute she rolled out of bed. She did work, though. Worked nights, cleaning offices. I guess she drank and slept during the day, apparently held her liquor well enough to function on the job. Some drunks are like that. That was her old Volvo parked off against the hill.”

“When the fire started,” Joe said, “could she have been so drunk she didn't even know, never tried to get out? Those shacks aren't as big as a one-car garage; she could have rolled out of bed right into the yard. Was she so passed out drunk, she never knew?

“Or,” he said, “was she already dead when the fire started?”

Ryan gave him a sharp look. “You didn't hear the coroner? He said maybe she was dead. Said it was hard to tell, she was so burned. We'll know more once he gets her back to the lab and has a look.” She turned onto Ocean, heading for Clyde's shops, and reached for her cell phone; she hit the single digit not for Clyde's automotive shop itself, but for Clyde's cell. “You back from up the coast?”

“Just pulled in,” Clyde said.

“Can you have lunch?”

“Sure, what's up?”

“We're just pulling up outside. It's about Billy Young, about his grandmother.”

Joe thought maybe it was Hesmerra who had once worked with the night crew that cleaned Clyde's shops and the Beckwhite dealership that occupied the other half of the sprawling, Spanish-style building. Some old woman Clyde had complained about, had said she'd better not be drinking when she cleaned his shop. But in a strange way, Joe thought Clyde must have been fond of the old woman. He said once, she held her liquor well—no brawling street fights, Joe guessed. No vicious cussing matches.

Ryan ended the call, made a left across traffic, and pulled onto the red tile paving of Clyde's wide, commercial driveway. The automotive shop occupied the north half of the Beckwhite building. The white, one-story structure, with its red tile roofs, was brightened by climbing red bougainvillea and stone pines alternating against its pale stucco walls. Clyde came out through his garage-sized entrance, removing the white lab coat that he wore around the shop, revealing a red polo shirt and jeans, and brown leather Rockports. The satisfied look on his face told Joe he'd probably repaired the Rolls-Royce just fine and wouldn't have to haul it down the coast to work on it. “What about Hesmerra?” he asked, getting in, giving Joe a nudge to the shoulder by way of greeting.

Ryan filled him in. “Why was Billy living with that old woman? I know his mother's dead, but what about his father? Doesn't anyone know where he is?” Ryan had been in the village only a few years, so she was not the rich source of gossip that Clyde was, having lived in Molena Point off and on for most of his life

Clyde said, “I don't think anyone knows
who
Billy's father is. Maybe even his mother didn't know. One of the boys at the high school, most likely. Greta had something of a reputation. She was still in school when Billy was born—she was the youngest of the three sisters. She and the baby lived with Hesmerra. Billy was eight when Greta was killed in that car accident. Both Debbie and Esther were married and settled by then, but neither aunt wanted Billy. I guess, from the time he was born, neither would have anything more to do with Gran.”

“What was that about?”

“Maybe because she let Greta run around and get pregnant,” Clyde said. “Like it was Hesmerra's fault. What made those two so righteous? I'm not sure they were any better, in high school. Max was chief when Greta was killed, he'll know more.”

“Don't you think it strange,” Ryan said, “that Erik Kraft was such a close friend to the old woman? Big-time Realtor, new Jaguar every year, but he goes regularly to visit that drunken old woman?” She turned to look at him. “And isn't it strange that just now, right after the fire that killed Hesmerra, Erik Kraft's wife is back in the village and moving herself into our house? Or, she thinks she is. What is this? What's going on?”

Clyde just looked at her.

“What?” Ryan said, making a right off Ocean, pulling to the curb in front of Jolly's Deli. “What?” she said again.

“Debbie Kraft is Billy's aunt,” Clyde said. “Hesmerra's middle daughter. Somehow, I thought you knew Debbie's mother was that old recluse. Debbie said in her letter she didn't want to have contact with her mother, that they didn't speak.”

Ryan looked at him, frowning. “She only told me she grew up in the village. I never cared enough to ask anything more.” She sat a moment, taking that in. Ryan had lived in the village only three years; she'd done a lot in that time, shaken off the baggage of a painful separation and then widowhood, established and run a profitable construction business, fallen in love with Clyde and begun a new life with him. But there were still a lot of things about the community she didn't know, connections Clyde often expected her to understand because they were part of the fabric of his own life. Getting out of the truck, she gave him a shrug and a grin, and headed for the deli, the bell jingling as she slipped inside.

Drinking in the heady smells from the deli, Joe felt a sharp urge to nip around to the alley, see what leftovers George Jolly had offered today outside the back door. But, considering the purchases Ryan was making, he stayed put, watching through the big window as she picked out a selection of cheeses and meats, coleslaw, and three kinds of potato salad. “She'd better get crab salad,” he said, peering up over the dash.

“You can make life so difficult.”

“What's difficult about crab salad? You're so cheap. A couple of bucks for a little carton of something special, to cheer up your poor beleaguered cat.”

Ryan returned, sliding a white deli bag into the backseat of the king cab. Joe could smell the crab salad mixed with the aroma of ham and other delicacies. Winking at him, she headed for the veterinary clinic. “What I don't understand,” she said, making a left onto Ocean, “is why Billy was living with Hesmerra, when she drank so heavily, why Children's Services hadn't stepped in, if his own aunts refused to take him. Was she his legal guardian?”