Cat Bearing Gifts

9

MISTO GLANCED UP twice toward the woods as he followed Emmylou up the back stairs and inside. He was quite aware of the black car that had pulled in among the trees high above the stone house, though Emmylou was not. He could smell the fumes of its exhaust drifting down, cutting through the scent of the pines, and on the riffling breath of the night he caught a whiff of blood that tweaked his curiosity. Accompanying Emmylou inside, he leaped to the sill where he could look back up the hill, studying the denser blackness among the night woods where the big car stood. Pretty nice car to be jammed in among the trees that way. He’d like to tell Emmylou to turn the porch light off so he could see better but he never spoke to her, she didn’t share his secret, she was not among the few who knew the truth about the speaking cats, she was simply a kind and comfortable friend. Misto had, in fact, a number of secrets he didn’t share with Emmylou Warren—though it was she who had, unwittingly, opened a new door to Misto. Had, by accident or by strange circumstance, pulled aside a curtain into the tomcat’s ancient memory, had let cracks of light into a life he’d lived long before this present existence.

Maybe the memories began with the smell of the mildewed money there in Emmylou’s house, often it was a smell of some sort that stirred a lost vision. The sour stink of those three packets of old bills she’d found had nudged him as if a hand had reached up from his past, poking at him, bringing back scenes from a life nearly forgotten. Or maybe it was the grainy photograph in a tin frame that had awakened those long-ago moments, the picture of a child who had, by now, already grown up, grown old, and died. Maybe that little girl’s eager smile had stirred alive that lost time.

Back in February, when the cops found Sammie’s body, Misto had no idea who the dead woman was but he knew her name, it stuck in his thoughts and wouldn’t go away. He hadn’t put it together until later, that this Sammie was the little child from his own past, from a life lived many cat generations before this one.

Emmylou usually left the back door open while she was working inside, replacing Sheetrock and sawing and hammering. Hearing her at work, he’d slip in for a visit with the stringy, leathery woman. With his own humans away for the week, Dr. John Firetti and his wife, Mary, off at a veterinarian conference, he’d been up here every day. He was staying with Joe Grey and the Damens, which suited him just fine: sleeping on the love seat with the big Weimaraner and little Snowball, or up in the tower with Joe. But Ryan and Clyde were busy folks, Clyde with his upscale automotive business and Ryan with her construction firm. And Joe was off at all hours with his tabby lady, following their lust for crime, hanging out with the cops at MPPD, waiting eagerly for some scuzzy human to be nailed and jailed. Sometimes, then, Misto would slip up to visit this homey and comfortable woman, to stretch out on her windowsill as she went about her work. He liked to watch her tear out cabinets and finish the walls with new Sheetrock, and Emmylou was good company. That was how he came on the picture of the child, she had moved it back onto the dresser after shifting the furniture around. He’d hopped up there to be petted, and there it was, the picture of a child that so shocked him he let out a strange, gargling mewl.

“That’s Sammie,” Emmylou had said, looking down at him. “Sammie when she was little, so many years ago. My goodness, cat, you look frightened. How could an old picture scare you?”

The photo was sepia toned, and grainy. The child was dressed in an old-fashioned pinafore, crisply ironed, and little patent-leather shoes with a strap across the instep, over short white socks. He had known this child, he remembered her running through the grass beside a white picket fence, he could see her bouncing on her little bed with the pink ruffled spread, he could hear her laughing. Those moments from another life crowded in at him in much the same way he remembered fragments from a long-ago medieval village, scenes so clear and sudden he could smell offal in the streets and the stink of boiled cabbage and the rain-sodden rot of thatched rooftops.

Here in Emmylou’s house, the time of Sammie’s childhood grew so real he could smell the bruised grass on her little shoes, could feel her warmth when he curled up close to her, the softness of her baby skin, the smell of little girl and hot cocoa and peppermints, the sticky feel of peanut butter on her small fingers. How strange to think about that lost time. How clearly he remembered the humid Southern summers, the buzz of cicadas at night, the days as hot as hell itself, and so muggy your fur was never really dry. How had he been drawn here to this place where, so many long years later, the grown-up Sammie had lived and died?

Soon he wasn’t going off with Joe Grey at all, or even with his son, Pan, but heading up alone to see Emmylou and revisit those memories that so stirred him, to sit on the dresser looking at little Sammie while Emmylou hammered and sawed and talked away, and all the while it was Sammie’s young voice he wished he could hear.

He wasn’t sure how many of his nine cat lives he had spent, and he wasn’t sure what came after. Some of his lives were only vague sparks, bright moments or ugly, a scene, a few words spoken, and then gone again. Only his life with Sammie was so insistent. As each new memory nudged him, another piece of that life fell into place, toward whatever revelation he was meant to see, another moment teasing his sharp curiosity.

But tonight, crouched on Emmylou’s windowsill, a different kind of curiosity gripped Misto, too. He waited patiently until he saw the black car move on again down through the woods, following the lane that led to the old, narrow shed beneath the stone house. Misto guessed, with its wide, hinged doors, it was a kind of garage, maybe built for farm tractors or a Model A. Did the driver expect to fit that big car in there? Not likely, not that long, sleek vehicle. Though in the reflection of light from Emmylou’s back porch he could see dents and scrapes in the fenders, too, and a loose front bumper. The driver stepped out, left the motor running, the taller of the two men he’d seen coming up there before, shaggy brown ponytail hanging down the back of his dark windbreaker.

He opened the heavy swinging doors, got back in and, amazingly, he pulled the car on inside. It was a tight fit, barely enough room for him to help his companion out, the shorter man stumbling, and that’s where the smell of blood came from. Blood smeared down his face, soaking into the rag he held to his nose. Moving up the stone steps to the room above, he bore much of his weight on the wooden rail. The taller man closed the shed doors, replaced the padlock, and followed him up. Watched him struggle into the house but didn’t help him. The door closed behind them. Misto heard the lock snap home.

No lights came on inside, except the faintest glow as if they had an electric lantern up there. Wanting to see more, Misto dropped from Emmylou’s windowsill to the floor and trotted out through the old cat door that was cut in the back door. Emmylou’s own three cats used it, wild creatures he thought might have been feral, who came and went as they chose. Galloping up the hill and up the stone stairs, through the men’s scent, he leaped to the stone sill beside the door, peered in through the dirty glass.