Cat Chase The Moon

14

If those hours at the Harpers’ ranch were terrifying to Nevin Luther, those same hours for Mindy, with Grandpa Zeb at the hospital, were nearly as frightening—as X-rays were done, and tests in strange machines, as some of the kinder technicians let her watch the scans; and later as diagnoses were pronounced by an array of doctors. Max Harper had given permission for her to stay through it all; Ryan sat with her, holding her close.

Kit and Pan had not, as they had planned, been allowed inside to watch the amazing details of hospital procedures that they could only imagine. Earlier, riding in the backseat of the Jaguar, Kit had said, “We’re going in the hospital, too,” thinking of the patients in their beds hooked up to all the fancy equipment, looking ahead as they approached the handsome white building. “We can go in the patients’ rooms and look all around and see the huge waterfall like Joe did, we can beg bites in the cafeteria, we can stay with Zebulon all night, snuggle with him and keep him warm.”

“I don’t think so,” Ryan had said, pushing back her short, dark hair as she suppressed a smile. “The nurses are more alert for a cat slipping around, since the time Joe Grey prowled the rooms and offices and upset half the staff, since he enraged the doctors—and the nurses thought he was trying to smother a patient. Since then, hospital policy has probably been changed to throw any cat they see out on its furry behind. I’m taking you two home.”

Long before the sun came up, Kit and Pan were at home, asleep in their tree house; and long before the sun came up, Zebulon was pronounced out of immediate danger and was moved to Intensive Care. Mindy and Ryan were allowed to stay with him—in a room the size of a storage closet. The two had had little sleep; Ryan dozed on a cot crowded against Zebulon’s bed, Mindy napped on pillows on the floor, the room so crowded that the nurses could hardly tend to Zebulon; some were amused, some highly annoyed. A nurse came in frequently, stepping around Mindy to wake Zeb. He accepted water and his medications willingly, he ate lightly. Each time he woke he reached down to take Mindy’s hand, then soon he slept again.

In the dim environs of Seaver’s Antiques, low moonlight shone soft through the west windows where Dulcie and Courtney dozed on a brocade settee after a long night of telling each other ancient tales, Courtney telling her own half-remembered stories of palaces, and repeating tales of the Netherworld that Kit and Pan had told her and Dulcie wished they hadn’t. But now suddenly Courtney woke, she stood up on the settee, one paw in Dulcie’s face. “Something’s happening! Wake up! Oh, my!”

What woke her was a sense of her daddy and of danger and of men fighting, it was at the Luthers’ place; but then she saw the Harper ranch, she felt a man’s fear, and Charlie’s anger and the hard wariness of cops; she saw a wild horse rearing up screaming and striking out, and it was the worst nightmare she’d ever imagined.

At nearly the same moment the upstairs door of the antiques shop opened. Footsteps were coming down, Seaver’s steps. Dulcie ducked deep under the pillows out of sight while Courtney stretched out languidly on top as if she were sound asleep.

But Seaver barely looked their way. He went out the first back door, through the workroom, through the second door to the garage. They heard its door slide up, and in a minute heard his car start, heard it back out. Where was he going this time of night?

When the garage door had gone down again Courtney said, “He goes out late sometimes. If his wife is dead, maybe there are other women.”

Dulcie, squirming out from under the pillows, said, “Maybe there are other women anyway.” Her daughter was growing up, she needed to know how humans led their lives. They were not the same as cats—as speaking cats. She crawled out from under, and licked Courtney’s ears and face as if the calico were still a small kitten, and she cuddled Courtney as they settled down. “Come now, sleep. You can do nothing about Seaver—not just now. And your dream . . . It was only a dream, Courtney, and soon it will vanish,” and she could only hope the source of the dream was like that, like steam from a kettle, that it would hang in her memory for a few moments, then dissolve into nothing and go away.

But Courtney’s dream had been so real. She snuggled against Dulcie, trying to cling only to her mama’s comforting ministrations; and at last, under Dulcie’s mothering, the terror did begin to fade, the fear and the screaming horse to slide away, until she began to feel safe again, and she knew that her daddy was safe, that he was with Charlie, and safe; and she began to feel sleepy and soft once more. Dulcie watched her child until all the fear was gone, until she slept.

Earlier, when the medics had come for Nevin, he still lay hunched up, his leather jacket twisted around him—and Joe Grey slipped in through the open stall door for a look. Atop Nevin’s earlier wounds, received in his father’s kitchen, a bloody tattoo of hoofprints marked his neck, and his left cheek was already swelling. There was a long wound on his chest where the horse’s shoe had torn down his shirt. His leather coat had a ripped side pocket with a pale cream envelope spilled out, hundred-dollar bills scattered thick across the straw bedding. Joe Grey’s idea to trap Nevin had proceeded on its own, without his help; yet a sudden shame held the tomcat as his belated conscience kicked in: this might be the result he’d hoped for, but he hadn’t planned on Nevin being hurt this bad—Joe really didn’t care so much about Nevin’s condition, he looked like he’d live to stand trial. But the way things had turned out could have gotten Charlie hurt, bad, and that did give the tomcat a guilt trip.

When the medics entered, the two big dogs dropped down at Charlie’s command, and were quiet. They felt certain that it was their barking that had saved the day. At the far end of the paddock, the stud was nibbling grass. He’d worked off his rage, for the moment. But when he saw McFarland and Crowley enter the stall to photograph Nevin and collect evidence, his ears went flat and he headed fast for the closed paddock doors. When Charlie spoke to him, he quieted. She walked into the paddock carrying a small bucket of oats; a halter with a stud chain hung over her arm. The black horse put his ears up listening to the rattle of grain in the bucket, he gave Charlie a more kindly look and came right to her. Greedily he ate the oats, gave her a friendly nudge, and settled down again.

“That’s better,” she said. She shut the door to the paddock, locking him out of the stall as two of the same young medics who had rescued Zebulon hurried in, ragging Charlie for making a busy night; in fact it was nearly morning, the moon almost gone, its last gleam dull and fading to nothing out across the face of the sea.

Moonlight gleamed on the locked glass doors of Seaver’s Antiques where Courtney had settled down, putting her fear away, feeling now that her daddy was safe; and her mama was right there cuddling and calming her. Dulcie did not say, For a great big, grown kitten, you are as spooky as a wildcat. Dulcie had no idea whether Courtney’s sudden alarm had sprung from some keen feline telepathy—another wonder of the kitten’s amazing nature; or only from too much storytelling. But all in all, good and bad, the sun would soon rise, and wherever Seaver had gone was his own business.

And if, Dulcie thought, the weeks to follow were filled with more puzzling situations than a cat wanted to deal with, if no two events seemed to fit together—and then if all of a sudden they all did fit, smooth as a paw in a mitten, wouldn’t that be fine.

But who, she thought, would be responsible for that? The skill of the cats themselves and of the cops? Or, she wondered, a power greater than theirs?