Cat Chase The Moon

9

It was Kit who found Courtney, who came bolting down the sidewalk and in through the door of MPPD dodging two cops coming out. Ignoring EvaJean, she fled into Max’s office following Joe’s scent, so excited she could hardly help but shout out the whole story.

She had, searching for the calico, coming along the alley behind Seaver’s Antiques, stopped suddenly and sniffed at the garbage truck that was idling there as two men dumped the week’s collection. The back of the building had carved molding, and the front of the two-story structure facing the street was even more ornate: fancily decorated framing all along the windows and above the shop’s wide glass door. Maybe the building was Victorian or maybe a mix of styles, but it seemed to fit the village. Kit stood inhaling the violent stink of garbage—but then sharply above that odor she caught the sweet scent of Courtney. Every cat has his own aroma, there was no doubt the calico was here, or had been. Staring into the truck’s open tailgate, she was gripped by fear. Was Courtney in there among the trash, and hurt? Had she been picked up by accident, too injured to leap away or cry out?

Kit climbed up to look in, feeling sick at the thoughts that filled her. She turned to look for Dulcie who was down the alley behind her. She mewed, calling her, asking for help, she felt sicker as the men continued emptying trash cans and Courtney’s scent came stronger.

Yes, it was from one of the cans. She dodged the empty bin as they tossed it down. It bounced twice and nearly hit her, rolled across the alley and hit the brick wall of the building on the other side. She approached the can warily, stuck her head in and sniffed again.

She could see kitty litter clinging to the can’s sides where someone had emptied Courtney’s cat box. She whirled around and meowed again. Dulcie had paused to scent at a garage door; she looked up at Kit, raced to the truck, and now she got a full whiff of Courtney. At the same moment they heard a noise from above, a sound like claws on glass.

The men were getting back in the truck.

Before they could drive away Dulcie shouldered Kit aside and leaped to the truck’s hot hood, scorching her paws: the scratching from above came louder. Dulcie jumped from the hood to the top of the closed cab, Kit right behind her, as the truck began to move.

“Damn cats,” said the driver, “cats all over this town.”

Above, through the apartment window, the flash of white and orange was still wildly clawing.

Hearts pounding, they flew from the truck across space to the wide, decorative ledge that ran beneath the second-floor windows, its concrete curlicues embellished with pigeon droppings. Courtney peered out at them, her busy paws raking glass, her amber eyes flashing. The iron frames that bound the windows looked as solid as an iron safe.

“We need Joe,”Kit said, “we need help.”

Dulcie rubbed her face against the glass, loving her child, as Kit raced away across the rooftops for where she’d last seen Joe Grey. There she dropped down the twisted oak and in through the glass door behind a pair of cops, ignoring EvaJean, praying Joe was there. Yes, she followed Joe’s fresh scent, ignoring EvaJean’s tirade. When she burst into Max’s office, the tomcat knew by her expression that she’d found Courtney. He leaped down from the desk and they fled the station—glass door, oak tree, courthouse roof—and raced six blocks of jagged peaks headed for the antiques shop, Joe Grey hissing, “Where is she? Where is Courtney, and where is Dulcie?”

“Dulcie’s with her. I don’t know where Pan is, hunting for her somewhere.” That was all she had the breath to say.

By the time Kit and Joe reached Seaver’s Antiques, Courtney had moved along the inside of the upstairs windows to the front of the building. On the outside, on the ledge, Dulcie followed, the two together trying every window. Maybe Courtney had already tried them, alone, while Seaver was downstairs in the shop; Joe could hear customers down there. Joe was so glad to see Courtney he almost yowled. But as he tried to help them loosen a slider, the attempt seemed useless, those windows looked like they didn’t open at all, looked like they’d been installed to stay forever. They tried another and another, but nothing gave.

Pressing their ears to the glass, and whispering, the three cats could just hear each other. Courtney said, “This is not the same man as in the library. This one’s bald, no beard or mustache—bald all over. I think this man is Ulrich Seaver.”

“But why did he capture you?” Dulcie said. “He’s . . .”

“Did he hurt you?” Joe said. “What does he want? Why . . . ?”

“So far, he’s been kind to me, nice salmon, a soft blanket.”

“But after that, what?” Joe said crossly.

“He wants to make a show cat of her,” Dulcie said with fury. “He has some of the old tapestries, the real ones all in frames, and he has a gallery in San Francisco and has a museum show booked in New York just of her . . .”

“And I’ll have my own Web site with colored pictures and maybe a movie and . . .”

Joe hissed and growled at his daughter. “What kind of damn foolishness has he been feeding you! You get your tail out of there, Courtney, and do it now! Before he skins and frames you!”

“I can’t get out,” she said demurely. “I’ve tried every window. But he told me, at night when he locks the big glass doors he’ll let me downstairs. All by myself,” she said, gloating.

She looked at Dulcie and Joe and Kit, her eyes sparkling. “He carried me all around the store when there were no customers, but he locked the glass doors first. Oh, it’s beautiful, he turns the lights real soft and there are damask couches and marble statues and gold screens and all kinds of ancient, carved furniture and cloisonné vases, I read the little signs. And things I don’t know what they are and can’t name them. At night I’ll have the whole store to myself, until he comes to get me in the morning and then I’ll have the upstairs and a breakfast of salmon before he opens the downstairs doors to let customers in.”

They all just looked at her.

“There is one thing,” Courtney whispered. “A woman. A woman lives here—but she isn’t here now. She must be elegant, she has tailored suits and expensive shoes, I looked in the closets. Is she his wife? They share a bedroom, lacy nightgowns and panties in the drawers, but no pictures of her and he didn’t mention her. He doesn’t seem to have any letters from her, I went through a stack of mail on the desk. How long has she been gone? There are two cars in the garage.” Courtney looked at her daddy. “Has she disappeared? Could she be the woman in the grave?”

Joe was amazed at how much the young cat already knew about the ways of the human world. He said, “She’s in the hospital. Max and the detectives were talking about it.” As he sat thinking, a flock of pigeons dove down at the sill; when one pecked at him, he struck and hissed at it, and they flew on.

“There was no ID on that battered woman, they got no make on her fingerprints, nothing in AFIS, nothing anywhere that the department can find. If that woman is Seaver’s wife she’d have some kind of identification, her prints would bring up a driver’s license or maybe city records.”

“But the woman is gone,” Courtney said. “No purse, no billfold or driver’s license, I looked all over the apartment. And she wears gold earrings, a whole drawer full of them, the kind with the little rings or buttons to hold them on.”

“For pierced ears,” Dulcie said. “When he lets you downstairs at night, can’t you open any of those windows?”

“They’re all like these. Except the powder room window. A tiny one, but even it has metal bars outside.”

“Piece of cake,” Joe said. “We can handle that small window and we can sure squeeze through the bars.”

Courtney flicked her bright tail.

Joe said, “We wait until afternoon when he’s busy with a customer, we slip in, hide under the couches, in dark places.” He looked at Courtney. “Tonight after he locks up, goes upstairs and lets you down into the store, we get to work. The five of us ought to be able to . . .”

“The latch is a metal tab,” Courtney said, “about four inches long. I think a person is supposed to squeeze it, then slide the glass open.” She looked uncertain. “Can we do that? I tried, but paws aren’t very good for squeezing. I guess the screen is on the outside but I can’t see it, the glass is that . . .”

“Obscure glass?” Joe said. “With a bumpy surface? We can take care of the screen earlier, from outside.” He went silent as footsteps came up from downstairs, then the turn of the doorknob.

When the apartment door opened Courtney was curled up on a blanket, on the big chair below the window. There was no other cat to be seen, the window ledge was blank, decorated only by pigeon droppings. A lone pigeon fluttered down to land on the carved rim: but it looked at the cats and it was gone again, in a flurry of wings. And as Courtney pretended to sleep on her blanket, she thought about Joe’s plan.

But then she wondered. Did she really want to get away yet?

What she wanted, before she escaped, was to find Seaver’s missing wife or find out who that woman was. Find out if it was she who had been beaten and nearly buried alive—find out if Seaver had done that. Sometimes he really did give her the shivers.

She wanted to stay until she found out if he was what he pretended to be.

Or did she? If he had beaten, nearly killed that woman, she wanted out of there now. Even as a little voice in the back of her head sang of glamour, of museums and bright magazine pictures, she saw too clearly the body that Joe had described and the bloody grave, and her own kitten blood filled with ice.

Shivering, she tucked deeper under the blanket thinking of ways she might force open that downstairs window.