Cat Chase The Moon

7

Joe Grey was searching frantically for Courtney when he skidded to a halt before a newspaper stand, scanning the details of a bank-money theft and murder last evening that he’d known nothing about. It happened shortly after they sat down to supper. But there wasn’t much story there, it looked like Max had held out a lot. Joe got more details when he saw Clyde on the next corner—by now everyone, cat and human friends alike, was out looking for Courtney. Even a few cops were watching as they went about their patrols. When Joe and Clyde stepped into an alley behind some trash cans where they could talk, Clyde gave him a few more specifics: how fast the rough-voiced snitch clicked off, and his words exactly as Joe would have said them . . .

“But I didn’t make that call, I was . . .”

“Max knows it wasn’t his regular snitch, he said the voice was totally different, but the message was just as brief, as businesslike and curt. He kept as much out of the paper as he could, until he gets it sorted out.”

That was often Max’s way, when a crime looked dicey. Joe could understand that. In fact, he realized, the half-buried woman had been kept out of the papers and off the TV completely. Even the crime tape had vanished as soon as the detectives finished investigating the site and filling in the grave.

Earlier that predawn, when Courtney first went missing in the small hours, Joe had raced home in the dark and fog to wake Clyde and Ryan to tell them she had vanished, that they needed help, that they couldn’t find her anywhere; that she was there with Kit and Dulcie one minute, and gone the next. At his alarm his housemates had risen, scrambled into their clothes, and they were gone before daylight, the three of them looking for the little calico, as was Wilma, and soon the Greenlaws. All this, long before the morning paper came out.

Wilma had called Charlie on her cell, so not to wake Max. But Max was at the station. Charlie, in her pajamas, had gone to her studio, found a drawing she had done recently of Courtney. Putting heavy paper in the copier, she ran off two hundred posters with the words reward: one thousand dollars at the bottom, and with several phone numbers that could be called. She was dressed and half out the door headed for her SUV when Max got home. He raised an eyebrow at the stack of signs. She said, “Something’s happened to Courtney. Wilma called. The kitten’s gone. The posters . . . Everyone’s out looking.”

“I know. Someone called the station. Hell, Charlie, those cats wander the village all the time—and Courtney’s not a kitten, she’s nearly grown. What does Wilma mean, gone?”

“She said it was pitch-dark when all the cats woke her barging in through the cat door and into her bedroom. They were meowing and crying, very upset. And Courtney, she wasn’t with them. They kept crying and clawing at the skirt of her robe. ‘Courtney?’ she asked them, and they yowled louder.”

She looked up at Max. “You think dogs are smarter than cats, but I don’t think so. They were trying to tell her as best they could, that was the only way they could tell her. They were too shaken over Courtney’s disappearance for her to have just wandered off.” She could imagine what they were really crying out, a narrative no cop could believe.

“Wilma tried to calm them but they kept running back and forth between her and the door. She thought maybe Courtney had been hit by a car. She pulled on her clothes, grabbed her cell phone and followed them, they all piled in the car, heading for the village.

“It was then she got the call,” Charlie said. “Someone in the village, in an upstairs apartment just off Ocean—a Robby Arlen. He had gotten out of bed to close the window, he saw a young calico cat wandering the street below, he described the stripes on her leg. He knew Wilma had a kitten like that, he had seen it in the library when he took his granddaughter to story hour. He said she went on up the street and disappeared in the shadows. It was still dark, just the moonlit fog. He said that in a minute the other cats she hangs out with, he thought some of them were Wilma’s, they came up the street looking all around, meowing, excited, searching and nearly frantic. He was sure they were looking for the kitten, he said there was no other explanation, said it was the strangest thing he’d ever seen. He apologized for waking her, but he was worried—he’s one of the CatFriends group. He’s out helping look.”

Charlie wondered if she was talking too much.

Max looked at her for a long time. He said nothing.

“I’ve got to go,” she said. “Robby told Wilma some of them ran up the street as if maybe they’d caught her scent. Then in a while they came back, their tails and ears down, and started searching around the shops. He said he started back to bed, then grabbed up his phone and called her.”

“Is Wilma all right? Has she been having bouts of . . . ?”

She stared at him. “Dementia? My aunt Wilma?” That made her furious. “Of course not. She’s sound as a rock. Something happened to that kitten. Maybe someone stole her.”

“Cats don’t get stolen, Charlie. Why would someone . . . ?” But there were reasons to steal a cat, ones Max didn’t like to mention.

As Charlie left, he started a pot of coffee, frowning. He had wanted to make breakfast for her but she wouldn’t wait even for a sip of coffee; carrying the stack of posters, she was already headed for town.

It seemed like something weird happened with those cats every week or two. You could have dogs, and no problem, but cats . . . Though he knew that wasn’t true, dogs could get into almost as much trouble; except these cats always seemed too closely involved with some village crime.

And still, as he puzzled over the cats and the calico kitten, most of his mind was on the snitch’s call last evening, that gravelly old man’s voice; and on the crushed body. Though that guy hadn’t been his regular snitch, not with that rusty voice, he had had the same brief way of passing on information; he had given Max the same kind of short, curt facts as his own snitch would—describing the robbery, describing the murder that Kathleen and the coroner were now investigating.

It was amazing that someone as delicate and beautiful as Kathleen Ray could deal with the gory coroner’s job with no trouble, no pallor and shakes, no throwing up on the job. That was why Dr. Bern liked working with her.

Charlie, on her way to hang posters, found Joe and Wilma on Ocean Avenue searching between the shops; she pulled over and parked. She could see others, cat and human, looking for the calico and softly calling her. Wilma, Charlie’s tall, gray-haired aunt, picked Joe up and slipped into the passenger seat of Charlie’s car. They sat for a few moments, Charlie combing out her short, tangled red hair, she and Wilma getting their stories straight on what they had told Max, or what they would tell him.

Charlie had wanted to leave out the part about a man stealing Courtney. She didn’t know what kind of city council brouhaha that would cause, what kind of position that would put Max in if his officers went pounding on doors and searching the shops for a cat; though she didn’t think Max would ever suggest that. All she wanted was a story that Max would believe, and that might encourage his men to keep an eye out for Courtney without puzzling questions. Courtney had been stolen, in Charlie’s mind the pictures and tapestries of her had prompted the theft, there was no other way to look at the kidnapping.

As full daylight crept into the village, the cats’ human friends were all out nailing or taping up Charlie’s posters, and of course still searching for Courtney, walking the little courtyards between buildings, peering under porches, under and over fences, among huge pots of flowering trees and bushes, looking down occasional alleys that held only grubby garbage cans. Had the small calico escaped from her captor, or did she lie somewhere hurt, or worse?

And while everyone looked for her, Courtney was just as fiercely searching for a way out. In the chill morning, when Seaver went downstairs to ready the shop for opening, she prowled the apartment once again from window to window, seeking a loose latch, for a way to freedom. She had awakened on the couch edgy and frightened, and knowing she was done with dreaming of Seaver’s bright and impossible future—she was cold and frightened one moment, excited the next; and she began again to wonder where his missing wife had gone. Perhaps she wasn’t the woman in the grave? Maybe he hadn’t tried to kill her? Whatever he’d done with her, and whatever plans he had for Courtney herself, she wanted only to be out of there.

Putting aside thoughts of grand gallery exhibits and the TV shows he’d promised featuring her, still she prowled the apartment pawing at the locks, her ears down, her calico tail lashing. Peering out the tall glass windows she could see her mama and daddy and the other cats down on the streets with her human friends, all looking for her. She wanted to wrap her paws around every one of them, she wanted to be held, wanted to be loved by those she trusted, she wanted to be safe.

The way the windows were set into deep stone sills, though she could see down, it would be hard for anyone below to get a glimpse of her up here. She watched Joe Grey scramble to the roofs searching the windows of other apartments, but even when she stood up tall, looking across, and scratching down the glass, there were too many reflections, slants of first sunlight bouncing off other buildings so he must not see her at all. His ears flat, he backed down the oak tree again, she watched him pause beside another newsstand and rear up to read the front page of the Gazette that had just been put in the rack. Could that be about her? But soon he went racing away once more, heading for the courthouse, for MPPD.