Cat Deck The Halls

15

J OE GREY DIDN’T learn about the Greenlaws’ intruder until Clyde got home late that night. When Clyde ’s car pulled in, the tomcat was asleep in his tower, among the cushions, lying on his back with his four paws in the air. The reflection of moving car lights flashing across the tower’s conical ceiling woke him. He blinked and flipped over among the pillows, his nose to the glass, looking down to the drive to make sure that it was really Clyde pulling in.

Joe’s private, cat-size tower, rising four feet above the roof of the second floor, with its unique hexagonal shape and operable, full-length windows, was a masterpiece of luxury and, Dulcie said, ostentation. Joe disagreed about that-the tower was, in his mind, simply a utilitarian source of comfort, unimpeded view, weather control, and fast and easy access to the rooftops. To hell with ostentation.

As he listened to the purr of Clyde ’s antique roadster, wild barking erupted from the back patio, where Ryan’s big Weimaraner had spent the evening. Joe rose and stretched, then lay down again, listening as Clyde and Ryan let Rock in the house, laughing and greeting him. He listened to kitchen noises as they made coffee and fixed a snack, and soon the smell of coffee rose up to him. Outside his tower, the night wind increased, fitfully shaking the glass and hustling the oaks and pines against the shingles, and smelling sharply of rain. He didn’t head downstairs-as lonely as he felt at that moment and as fond as he was of Ryan, he could not talk in front of her. If he went down, as out of sorts as he was, the enforced silence would leave him even more irritable.

He’d gone to sleep thinking about the little frightened child, so alone and terrified at Christmastime. He’d chided himself for growing sentimental, but he’d waked hurting for her, and badly needing company. Now, irritated by his own shaky and sentimental mood, he wondered if he was sickening for something.

He listened to the buzz of conversation from below, waiting and dozing until he heard Ryan’s truck pull away and he could go on down and talk freely. Could dump some of his misery on Clyde.

Slipping quickly through his cat door onto the rafter above Clyde ’s desk, he dropped down onto a mess of paperwork, most likely orders for engine parts, and then to the floor. He was crouched to race downstairs when he heard Clyde slamming things into the refrigerator and rattling ice: quick, angry noises that clearly telegraphed a fight, or at best a lovers’ quarrel. Oh, hell. Not a fight with Ryan, not at Christmas! The two seldom argued, even mildly, though they unmercifully teased each other. Trotting reluctantly down the stairs, knowing that Clyde might need a sympathetic friend, too, he pushed in through the kitchen door, leaped to the table, and silently watched his housemate irritably mixing a bourbon and water.

Clyde turned, his scowl deep, his dark eyes worried. “What the hell do you want?”

“Milk and gingerbread?” Joe asked meekly.

“I suppose you want it warmed!”

“Yes, please.” Joe studied his housemate’s dark scowl as Clyde poured a bowl of milk, broke a thick slice of gingerbread into it, and put the bowl in the microwave. In a moment Clyde set the warm bowl, and his own drink, on the table. The tomcat looked sternly at him. “You and Ryan had a fight?”

“We didn’t fight. We were having a discussion. We had a very nice evening. I don’t need you to spoil it.”

“Then why all the slamming around? Why the scowl?” Joe’s yellow eyes burned at Clyde. “What happened up at the Greenlaws’?”

Clyde glared, and didn’t answer.

“What?” Joe said.

“Just for tonight, Joe, could you just eat and come to bed, like a normal, ordinary house cat?”

“What? What happened, up there?”

Wind buffeted the kitchen windows, then eased off. From the living room the fresh pine scent of the Christmas tree drifted through the house, mingling with the smell of the gingerbread that Clyde had made as part of an early dinner before he and Ryan headed for the ballet.

Ordinarily, Clyde would have taken Ryan out to dinner, but neither one had been in the mood for the incredibly crowded restaurants on a theater night. Instead, he’d fixed a simple supper that they’d eaten in the living room before the fire, enjoying the Christmas tree that they’d decorated together. I am, Clyde thought, amused, getting to be a regular homebody.

This Christmas, in fact, he found himself entertaining thoughts of marriage; the theme played so repeatedly that he was glad the gray tomcat couldn’t read his mind. Joe couldn’t keep one damned opinion to himself, he’d have way too much to say on the matter.

“So, what happened?” Joe said, patiently licking milk from his whiskers.

Clyde sighed. He really had no choice. The damned cat would just keep on pushing, as nosy as a case-hardened cop. No one who’d ever lived with Joe Grey, when the tomcat felt left out of the loop, would deliberately withhold information and incur his verbal abuse, as sharp as his threatening claws.

Refreshing his drink, then settling again at the kitchen table, reluctantly Clyde filled Joe in on the Greenlaws’ female intruder, the backpack and camera, and the two envelopes of pictures. He’d barely finished when Joe’s ears twitched toward the living room, and he crouched ready to spring away through his cat door. Clyde rose fast, shut the kitchen door, and stood in front of it. Like a flash Joe leaped for the big doggy door that led out to the back patio, not looking carefully in his haste.

He hit the locked plywood cover, bouncing back, as off balance as a flailing cartoon cat.

Clyde restrained a belly laugh. He had set the cover in place after Ryan and Rock left. He had, in fact, locked the dog door every night since old Rube died, since the black Lab was no longer sleeping right there, near the two-foot-high opening, to ward off potential burglars. Even Clyde himself, in an emergency, could squeeze through that dog door. Though it was unlikely an intruder would take the trouble to breach their patio walls, in these days of weird crimes, who knew what a thief might do.

With Joe trapped unceremoniously in the kitchen, Clyde picked him up. Joe growled and bared his teeth. Clyde set him down on the table again, and held him by the nape of his neck in a way that enraged the tomcat.

“Just listen, Joe. Just listen for one minute. Then, if you insist on heading for the Greenlaws’, okay.”

Joe glanced toward the closed kitchen door. Clyde squeezed the fold of skin more firmly. “Harper’s up there. Lucinda was calling him when we left. By this time, he’s going through the apartment, maybe with Dallas, maybe the two of them already fingerprinting and taking photographs. Don’t you think it would seem strange if you came waltzing in, quite by accident, in the middle of the night? How many times in the past have you appeared precipitously at a crime scene and made Max Harper wonder? How many times has Dallas Garza looked at you strangely? How many times have those guys watched you so closely you began to squirm?”

“Don’t squeeze so hard. That hurts!”

“How many times, before even those hard-nosed cops are forced to guess the truth?” Clyde leaned down, his face inches from Joe’s face. “Max Harper isn’t stupid. Dallas Garza isn’t stupid. Neither would want to believe in talking cats. But you keep pushing it, Joe, and they may no longer be able to avoid the truth.”

Joe sighed.

“Do you really want to hasten the arrival of that cataclysmic day?”

Joe just looked at him.

“You don’t think Harper gets uneasy, with you three cats showing up every time they’re working a case? You don’t think he wonders about all the times evidence has appeared ‘mysteriously’ at the back door of the station? You don’t think he gets goose bumps every time an anonymous snitch calls in a new tip-and that tip brings in the goods? You don’t think that makes a cop edgy?”

Clyde let go of his neck and propped a chair against the kitchen door. “Have you thought about would happen if Max Harper ever takes the time to really think about this! To put aside all his more immediate concerns, put aside his natural skepticism, and really examine this phenomenon?”

“Of course I’ve thought about it. How could I not think about it? Don’t be such a nag!” Joe had thought about the matter more than he wanted to admit-and about the possible repercussions.

From a purely selfish aspect, if he and Dulcie and Kit blew their cover with the law, life would change dramatically for them. But their human families would suffer far more. Clyde, Wilma, and the Greenlaws-and Charlie Harper, the chief’s own wife-would be the ones in the hot seat. Their silence would render them far more guilty, in Max’s eyes, than the cats themselves.

There was no way, if Max ever did suspect the truth, that Charlie could convince him of her own ignorance. Not when, in her forthcoming book, both her drawings and her story revealed such a keen knowledge of feline nature that Max marveled at her perception, at her amazing intimacy with feline secrets. Max was already impressed to the point where he sometimes looked at Charlie in the same way that he studied the cats, puzzled and just a bit uncomfortable.

The bottom line was, instead of heading for the Greenlaws’ and making Harper wonder, Joe padded docilely up the stairs beside Clyde and crawled into bed-making sure to hog both pillows. Drifting off, he thought he’d catch just a few winks and then, in the small hours after Harper had left the Greenlaws’, he’d slip on up there and get the scoop from Kit.

Maybe they’d toss the downstairs rooms, too, to see what the law might have missed. Then they’d go get Dulcie, and hit the station-innocent, hungry, freeloading little cats. Get a look at Harper’s report and at the photos. And the tomcat fell asleep wondering about those pictures of the children.

But when he was deep under, his dreams of the orphan children and the break-ins at the school and at the Greenlaws’, and of the body under the Christmas tree and that little girl huddled in the pump house all tangled together in confusion badly frightening him.

He woke worn-out, hissing and angry. He felt better only when, trotting downstairs to the kitchen, he found Clyde in a cheerful mood again, an omelet already waiting for him on his side of the breakfast table and the morning paper opened neatly beside it. He did not, tucking in to his breakfast, question the change in Clyde ’s demeanor, from grouchy to sunny. Clyde seemed almost as if he’d settled some personal quandary, made some decision. But maybe it was only that he had finally decided, at the last minute, what to get Ryan for Christmas.