Cat Chase The Moon

1

The sea crashed behind Joe Grey, the tomcat standing tall on a heap of broken branches; the night’s heavy fog admitted only a smear of light from the low moon, just enough to brighten the hushing waves. The sound of digging had drawn the gray tomcat up the beach to the little sandy park, to the oak tree that had long ago fallen, a dry and twisted relic from last spring’s storms. The shoveling noise stopped abruptly when Joe Grey inadvertently stepped on a twig: a sudden silence cut the night, then the sound of running through the sand and dry grass among the scattered trees.

He couldn’t see much of the runner in the heavy mist and tangled branches but he could tell it was a man, heavy footfalls among the dead branches. He could see dark clothes, a dark floppy hat, brim pulled down. Joe heard him hit the sidewalk, hard rubber-soled shoes, heard a car door open. Heard an engine start and the car pull away, a dark, long shadow in the mist. Joe leaped to the highest branch of the fallen tree, looked down where the man had been digging.

A body lay beside the dead tree where dirt had been scooped out. A half-dug grave in which a woman lay nearly buried, bruised and bloodied, fresh earth thrown over her lower body and legs—but she couldn’t be dead, blood still flowed, her heart would still be beating.

At the edge of the grave, in the damp, heavy sand, he could see the shovel marks, small, sharp curves in the shape of those spades people carried in their cars for an emergency.

She was slim and tall, her long black hair was tangled but, except for the blood, clean and shining. She would be beautiful under the purple bruises across her face and what looked like purple finger marks circling her throat. Her right earring was missing, the lobe torn sharply in two: the two ragged flaps bleeding down her white shirt. Her left ear was red and bloody, swollen around a lump of smashed gold, as if the side of her head had been pounded against a log. Flecks of bark clung to her face.

Dropping down from one fallen branch to the next, Joe Grey stepped into the half-dug grave and put his nose to her mouth. Yes, the faintest breath.

He pushed his mouth to hers, feeling weird at the contact; he breathed in and out, forcing air into her lungs until her gasping came stronger. Her right hand moved faintly. The tomcat, even after the dead bodies he had confronted at so many crime scenes, felt sick that the grave digger had meant, apparently, to bury her alive.

A patrol car passed slowly, making its rounds. The fog was so thick the officer didn’t see a thing among the tangled tree branches nor would he have heard any strangled cry, over the static of his radio. As the unit passed, Joe considered yelling out for help.

Right, and have the guy’s strobe light catch him, a tomcat, yelling “Help!” and then running. Worse, Joe knew most of the officers and they knew him, dark gray tomcat, white paws and thin white strip down his gray face. He was in and out of the station all the time, was practically the station cat. For a cop to see him here on what would turn out to be a crime scene wasn’t smart. One more puzzle for the department, Joe Grey nosing around a crime scene at just about the time the “phantom snitch” called in the report—if he could find a phone. His presence here would be one more coincidence he didn’t need. He prayed that Haley would pull over, get out of the car, find the half-buried victim himself and call the dispatcher—while Joe fled among the rubble of the wild little park and vanished.

When the officer had noticed nothing suspicious among the fallen and tangled trees, when the car had passed and turned back toward the village, when Joe was convinced the woman would keep breathing on her own, he raced for a ramshackle cottage at the edge of the shore. Leaping to a sill, he clawed his way through the rusty screen and slid open the rickety window. This house was the only relic in the long line of seafront homes, the rest all restored to elegance or replaced by new dwellings. This old place smelled of cats but he didn’t see any.

Slipping through the dim kitchen he found a phone in the hall. He called 911 and relayed his message, then beat it out of there, the torn screen clawing at his fur. Racing back across the dead-end street, crossing the narrow lane where it ended at the sea, he kicked away pawprints in the drifted sand—but there were cats in the village. Why would he be suspected of being the phantom caller? He had been faced with this dilemma before and never been caught. Slipping out of sight among the fallen branches just as the first siren screamed, he searched hastily for the woman’s purse, for a billfold or ID, but found nothing. She was still breathing but the oozing blood had slowed, not a good sign. He was looking for the shovel her attacker might have buried when the medics screeched to a halt, cop cars behind them; Joe Grey dove into the tall grass and bushes and was gone.

He watched from across the street as the medics worked on her: oxygen, all kinds of tubes, then loaded her into the ambulance. He would know little more until the information was on Captain Harper’s desk, until he could saunter into the chief’s office and have a look at the report.

Ordinarily Joe would stay after the medics left, would watch from the bushes to see if the cops found any clues he’d missed. But this was Saturday morning and he was already late. His tabby lady would be waiting with her striped ears back, her striped tail switching, sitting rigid among the small children on the library window seat, her green eyes flashing at his tardiness.

How many tough tomcats spent their Saturday mornings in the library among a bunch of snively little kids listening to story hour? How many patrons smiled with amusement at Joe and the other four cats snuggled among the children: Joe’s lady, Dulcie. Their grown kitten, Courtney. (Courtney’s two brothers were otherwise occupied.) Tortoiseshell Kit and her mate, red tabby Pan, as macho a tomcat as Joe Grey himself, all curled up among warm and cuddling children listening to a tale of magic.

But the cats were there for more than the story. Intently they watched for the mysterious man who had appeared these last few Saturdays prowling among the books, striking their curiosity and sometimes their concern.

Ever since Dulcie, who was Molena Point’s official library cat, first saw the shadowy figure slip behind the book stacks and stand watching the children, the cats’ curiosity had drawn them. Browsing among the books, he kept his eyes on one lone child, then another.

Public libraries were not the welcome retreats they had once been, peaceful and safe. These days, even small libraries had guards on the premises. Plainclothes officers walked through the paneled, silent rooms, sometimes arresting a stoned man, taking him away to sleep it off in jail. All across the country, addicts were frequenting the book rooms, hiding their stashes among the shelved volumes or concluding their sales in the towns’ most innocent refuges. It was not uncommon, at closing hour, for a librarian to find a drugged man asleep in a soft chair, a newspaper spread over his face.

Molena Point Library was a handsome building with pale stone walls, mullioned windows, and carpeted floors, a peaceful retreat set back from the sidewalk by a deep garden graced with flowers, small ornamental trees, and stone benches. This morning when Joe Grey had entered, trotting among the blooms and up four stone steps, crossing the stone porch to the carved oak door and pushing inside, he knew he was laughed at, but in a friendly way. Most of the patrons knew him. Padding down six steps to the big reading room, sauntering across in plain sight of half a dozen elderly men sitting in comfortable chairs reading, he had leaped onto the wide, cushioned window seat and settled down beside his tabby lady in the lap of a blond little girl who smelled of peppermint. Two women at a reading table watched the five cats among the children and laughed and whispered to each other. Three old men smiled, and one laughed softly. Smile if you want, Joe thought, half amused himself. Better than a couple of drug dealers settling in, waiting for their contacts.

He heard from across the village the short blast of a police siren that made him want to leap away and follow, racing across the rooftops as he usually did. But Dulcie gave him a look that settled him down. Every siren wasn’t a major crime; this one could be anything: traffic violation, fender bender. Or a domestic argument. They’d had plenty of those since Zeb Luther’s family all moved out, leaving the old man alone. Moved in across the street from Joe, shouting altercations in the middle of the night that woke Joe and his housemates and left them all cranky, to say nothing of enraging the neighbors.

He was wondering if the adults in the library were listening to the story, too, only pretending to read the papers. And, speak of the devil, here came his quarrelsome new neighbor Thelma in the front door dragging her little girl. At once Mindy broke away and ran to the window seat, crowding in at the end. But when she spotted Joe and started to scramble to him, the librarian Wilma Getz, Dulcie’s silver-haired housemate, told her kindly to sit down where she was. The tale Wilma was reading was one of the Narnia books; the boys and girls were already entranced, as were the cats, drawn to the war-refugee children and the secret world they found at the back of a closet—but soon again the cats’ attention was drawn away to the open balcony, to the second-floor bookshelves that looked down on the reading room. Even as the world of Narnia unfolded in snow and ice, a figure appeared on the balcony among the deepest row of bookshelves. In the shadows he was hardly visible. As on every other Saturday morning, he was watching the children. The same man, the shadow of his close-clipped, pointed beard, dark cap pulled down over shaggy, dark hair. Why was he watching the children? Or was he watching the cats, was he some kind of mentally obsessed cat fancier?

Not liking to be stared at, and quick-tempered, Joe wanted to race across the room, leap up through the rail, knock the man down and question him until he knew what the guy wanted.

Oh, right! And tell the whole world I can talk.

The man stood still for a while, looking, watching brown-haired Mindy, Joe’s new neighbor. But then he turned away, faded into the shadows of the back row of bookshelves, and glided toward the stairs that led down to the main floor. Joe knew that Wilma Getz watched him, too, as she read aloud the tale of Narnia.

The next the cats saw of the man he was at the nonfiction shelves just across the room, flipping through bright, oversized books. He was wearing thin pigskin gloves, expensive ones, new and pale. He carried half a dozen books to a table, spread them out, and began to make long, careful notes from the front and back pages of each. While he recorded his references he would glance up now and then around the room or at their little group. Joe wanted to wander over, hop casually on the table and see what subjects he was recording from the title pages and index, what pictures he was lingering over. The tomcat was about to slide down and pad across to take an innocent look when a nailed paw stopped him and Dulcie’s green eyes pulled him back. She could see he was warming up for trouble, she could sense his rising challenge.

It was at that moment that Officer McFarland came in the front door, brown hair uncombed, dressed in badly worn jeans, wrinkled cotton shirt, a stubble of beard, looking more like a vagrant than the neatly groomed young cop he usually was.

He spotted the stranger, picked up a newspaper off the hanging rack and sat down across the room, half out of sight behind its pages. At the other end of the window seat, tortoiseshell Kit and red tabby Pan watched McFarland. And they keenly watched the intruder, who remained for some time working away at his notes, calm and preoccupied. His little beard was perfectly trimmed and neat compared to his shaggy hair and wrinkled cap. At last, apparently finished, he returned the books to the shelves and left the library.

The cats watched him through the big, curved window. He crossed the garden, moved around the corner, and disappeared up the side street. In a moment McFarland put down his paper and slipped away following him. Joe wanted to scramble up to the roof and track them, but Dulcie gave him another look, a look that said, He knows you’re watching him. He scowled back at her. After all, the man had really done nothing wrong.

Except that everything he did was off-key.

Was he planning to kidnap one of the children? It happened often enough, all over the country. Or had he been watching the cats? Maybe watching Courtney? But that was silly, there were calico cats all over the village, what would he want with this one? Joe looked at his beautiful daughter, the delicate black bracelets around her right front leg. He would kill anyone who touched her. So would Dulcie—and Courtney could land a few bloody strikes herself, the kitten having learned to fight early on, from her two teasing brothers.

When story hour was finished, when the children broke away talking and laughing, running, checking out books, meeting their mothers, Kit and Pan streaked out the front door belatedly following Officer McFarland. Dulcie and Courtney, thinking of a late breakfast, followed Wilma into her office; but Joe Grey never hesitated, he charged on past them through her office, through the cat door into the alley, up the bougainvillea vine onto the roof, and raced toward the side street, where Kit and Pan followed McFarland below. All three saw McFarland turn the corner then pull back as the shadowy man entered the Swiss Café. McFarland moved on up the street among a crowd of tourists and stepped into an old car parked at the curb. Slumping down, he used the newspaper guise. Jimmie had been in the library last Saturday, but had left before the snooping stranger did. Maybe he’d followed the man several times, maybe knew his habits. This wasn’t a case yet, it was a question, a quiet surveillance.

Joe Grey watched four little girls and two women crowd into the café—well, the snooper couldn’t snatch a child from that crowd.Growing restless, knowing McFarland would stay with the guy, knowing that if something ugly happened he’d hear sirens, Joe took off fast, hitting the roofs with determined paws, heading back to Dulcie and Courtney, who would be waiting in Wilma’s office.

Though he did wonder if by now the chief had returned from the hospital, should have gotten what information he could on the battered woman—if she could talk at all, with that black-and-blue throat. If her windpipe wasn’t torn or collapsed, the tomcat thought sickly; and his mind was on both cases, the nearly dead woman, a beautiful woman and not a sign of ID that he had found; and then the shadowy prowler. If the man was watching one of the children, if he meant to kidnap a child, this was the worst crime of all.

Or, at that moment, Joe Grey thought it was.

One Saturday, Joe had seen Jimmie McFarland photograph the guy’s footprints after he’d crossed the polished floor of the front entrance; and both Dulcie and Kit had seen Jimmie taking fingerprints one evening after the library had closed—and Joe couldn’t shake his unease, couldn’t forget the chill gleam in the man’s pale eyes.

What Joe Grey didn’t see, nor did Jimmie McFarland, was the prowler slip into a men’s shop, casually lift two shirts and several jackets off a rack, smile and nod at a salesman, and take them into a dressing room. No one saw him facing the mirror removing the mustache and his cap with the tangled hair attached to it. They didn’t see him take out a handkerchief and wipe his handsome bald head until it shone, didn’t see him fold the objects of disguise, wrap the handkerchief smoothly around them, and slip the package in his own jacket pocket. Departing the store, he left the new clothes neatly on their hangers in the dressing room. He thanked the nearest salesman, the first one was with a customer. He stopped at the front counter to buy two pairs of socks which he paid for with cash, and he was gone.

That was why, when Jimmie and his fellow officers kept a watch for the library prowler as they went about their routes, no one ever did see him—or didn’t know that they saw him.

But now, Joe slipped into Wilma’s office to snuggle down with his family—though he didn’t stay long.