Cat Fear No Evil

15

Kate Osborne didn't learn about Lucinda and Pedric's deaths until Sunday evening as she waited for the elderly couple to arrive for their visit. Lucinda had called two nights before, to say they'd be there by late afternoon, that they would be driving down from somewhere near Russian River, some little out-of-the way campground. And Kate had to smile. She was sure Lucinda hadn't had this much fun in all her adult life before she married Pedric. Her earlier marriage to Shamus, while busy with social functions and exciting for the first few years, had deteriorated as Lucinda aged, Lucinda staying home ignoring the truth while Shamus played fast and loose.

"I thought we'd eat in," Kate had told her. "That you might be tired, so I'd planned a little something at home. I make a mean creole, if you'd like that."

"That sounds like heaven," Lucinda had said. "A hot shower and a good hot creole supper. Couldn't be better. We'll plan to take you out the next night." Kate thought that maybe, with Lucinda and Pedric there, she could get her head on straight, maybe could look at her own problems more objectively. This last week had been so strange and unsettling.

She had actually grown reluctant to go out at all after dark, and that was so stupid. But of course she'd have to work late, if she were to finish with her present clients in a timely manner. The work week would have been satisfying if she hadn't kept watching nervously for the man who had followed her to reappear.

At least she had found her extra keys in the drawer where she sometimes kept them; they had fallen down between the folds of her sweaters. That had eased her mind; and nothing in the apartment had, again, been disturbed. The windows had remained locked, and she saw no one lingering down in the street.

But still she was nervous. And then on Thursday evening, leaving work, she saw him. When she started out of the building, a man stood across the street, tucked into the darkness of an unlit doorway. She had stepped back inside her building.

She couldn't tell if he was watching her, couldn't tell if it was the same man. She had remained inside the glass door until he left the mosaic of shadows, ambling on down the street in plain view, a perfectly ordinary man wearing nondescript jeans and a brown windbreaker-but his face had been turned away. She wanted to see his face. And in spite of common sense, her fear escalated. The next day, did she imagine a shadow slipping away behind a building? Imagine that the man on the crowded sidewalk in broad daylight was keeping pace with her?

Then late last night she'd heard a series of thuds, either in the apartment or on the roof.

Taking her flashlight and her vial of pepper spray, she had made the rounds of her familiar rooms. Nothing had been amiss. But then this morning she'd noticed two desk drawers protruding, not pushed in all the way. And the couch and chair cushions were awry, and a kitchen cabinet door ajar. This had occurred after she had prowled at midnight. Then she found a wad of short black hair on the kitchen counter.

She had flushed it down the toilet and Cloroxed the countertop. She had no idea how the cat was getting in. No lock had been disturbed, and she had found her lost keys, though she supposed they could have been copied then returned to her. But what was the purpose? Consuela knew by now that the jewels were not here; she must have learned that the first time she searched the apartment.

Kate was not afraid of Consuela. And she should not be afraid of the black tomcat. On Sunday, with Lucinda and Pedric due to arrive, she hurried home from finishing a stack of orders at the office, showered, and dressed comfortably in a velour jogging suit and scuffs. She wanted dinner preparations finished early, as they would be there before dark. She boiled the shrimp and made the creole sauce and measured the rice to be cooked. She set the table in the little dining room with her new paisley place mats, and put together a salad with all but the two ripe avocados she'd selected from her hoard on the windowsill. She set an amaretto cheesecake out to thaw. The scent of the freshly boiled shrimp and of the creole sauce filled the apartment, stirring her hunger. She filled the coffeepot, using a specially ground decaf, and curled up on the couch near the phone with a book, waiting for Lucinda's call that they were about to cross the Golden Gate. From the bridge, it was only ten minutes.

She read for some time Loren Eiseley's keen observations of the world. Strange that they were so late; it was growing dusky. Traffic must be heavy; not a good time to come into the city, with people returning from the weekend. When it was nearly dark, she rose to pull the draperies. Before closing those on the east, she stood a moment looking out toward East Bay, watching the lights of Berkeley and Oakland smear and fade in the gathering fog. She hoped Lucinda and Pedric arrived before the fog grew thick. Making a weak drink, she returned to her book. Only belatedly did she pick up the phone to see if they had left a message on the service before she ever got home.

She no longer used an answering machine; three power outages with the resultant failure of the machine had prompted her to subscribe to the phone company's uninterrupted reception even when the phones were out.

There was no beeping message signal. There was no sound at all from the receiver, no dial tone.

How long had the system been out? This happened every now and then, particularly in bad weather. As her apartment had not been disturbed, she didn't think anyone had tampered with the line.

Lucinda didn't have the number of her cell phone. Anyway, she realized suddenly, she'd left that phone in the car, plugged into the dash, the battery removed to keep it from turning to jelly She had meant to bring it up with her; now she did not want to go out in the night to get it. She was disgusted that she had forgotten it when all this last week she had carried the phone even when she walked.

It was nearly seven thirty when she poured herself another mild drink and decided to fix a plate of cheese and crackers to calm her rumbling stomach. Lucinda had said they'd been up around Fort Bragg, poking along the coast. They did love their rambling life. For a pair of eighty-year-olds, those two folks were remarkable. Slicing the cheese, she reached to turn on the little kitchen TV that had been a birthday present to herself. She didn't watch much TV, but she liked to have the news on while she was getting dinner. Shaking out the crackers, she caught something about an accident in Sonoma County. An RV and a tanker truck. She glimpsed a brief shot of the wreck, the vehicles so badly burned you couldn't tell what they had looked like. Fire trucks, police cars, and ambulances filled the screen. She stood at the kitchen counter unmoving.

When had this happened? This couldn't be…

She relaxed when the newscaster said the collision had happened late last night. This had happened while Lucinda and Pedric were safely asleep in their RV, or in some cozy inn up the coast-not at a time when the Greenlaws would have been on the highway.

She didn't like to look at the TV pictures. It was a terrible wreck, those poor people hadn't had a chance. She had reached for the remote, to turn to another channel, when a cut of the newscaster came on, interviewing the Sonoma County sheriff. She paused, curious in spite of herself.

"Now that the nearest relatives have been notified, we are able to release the names of the deceased. The tanker driver, Ken Doyle of Concord, is survived by a wife and two young children." There was a still shot of a dark-haired young woman holding a little boy and a fat baby. "The occupants of the RV were residents of Molena Point. Lucinda and Pedric Greenlaw had been…"

She couldn't move. Suddenly she couldn't breathe.

"… vacationing up the Northern California coast. The eighty-year-old newlyweds, who were married just last year in a Molena Point ceremony, were returning home to the central-coast village…"

She needed to sit down. She stood leaning against the counter, holding on to the counter, staring at the TV.

She had seen Lucinda and Pedric only a few weeks ago. She had spent the evening with them. She left the kitchen, making her way to the living room and the couch, which seemed miles.

Sat with her head down between her knees as she had been taught as a child, until the nausea passed.

Why would Lucinda and Pedric be on the road late at night?

A long time later she rose to put the shrimp and creole sauce and salad in the refrigerator. Standing in the kitchen with her back to the TV and the sound turned off, she made herself a double whiskey and took it into the living room.

But there, she couldn't help it, she turned on the larger TV mindlessly changing channels looking for more news, though she did not want to see any more. The wreck had happened Saturday night while she lay sleeping. Today she had gone about her pointless affairs while Lucinda and Pedric lay dead. She had stopped at the grocery, buying shrimp, flowers for the table, imagining the thin, wrinkled couple tooling along in their nice RV, stopping at antique shops, stopping to eat cracked crab… Staring at the TV, she didn't know what to do or what to think. She simply sat.

Did Wilma know? She ought to call Wilma. Should she call Clyde, ask Clyde to tell Wilma? Clyde was closer to Wilma than she was, they were like family. If they knew, why hadn't they called her?

And she couldn't call out; the line was dead.

She'd have to go down and get her cell phone. How stupid, to have left it in the car. Fetching her keys, she pulled on her coat, snatched up the pepper spray, locked the door behind her, and went down the stairs, hating this sense of fear. Reaching the garage she moved quickly, watching between other cars. Unlocking her Riviera she snatched up the phone, hit the lock, and slammed the door. She was up the stairs and in the apartment again before fear had immobilized her. This was crazy; she couldn't live like this. On a hunch, she tried the apartment phone again-and got the insistent beeping of the message service.

Sitting down on the couch with the now functioning phone, she started to play back her messages, then decided first to call Clyde. She needed, very much, to hear his gruff and reassuring voice.

The downstairs rooms of the Damen cottage were dark, but upstairs behind the closed shutters the bedroom and study were bright, the desk lamp lit, a warming fire burning in the study where Clyde sat at his desk filling out parts orders. Or trying to, working around the prone body of the sleeping gray tomcat where he lay sprawled across the catalogs. Far be it from Joe to move. Far be it from Clyde, who found the tomcat as amusing as he was exasperating, to ask him.

Ryan had left half an hour ago, after an early supper in the big new kitchen: takeout from their favorite Mexican cafe. Impatiently waiting for the building permit for the Harper place, she had gone home to her blueprints, anxious to finish putting together a design proposal for a remodel at the north end of the village. "I want to get that wrapped up, so I can concentrate on the Harper job."

"You are not," Clyde had said, "going to get so busy that you keep pulling men off one job to work on another, like most contractors? Delaying all the jobs?"

"No fear." She had grinned at him, flipping back her short dark hair. "I can manage my work better than that." She had given him a warm, green-eyed smile and laid her hand over his; her closeness led him, more and more lately, to imagine her always there with him. He sat at his desk now thinking about Ryan sharing the house, comfortable and warm and exciting.

Clyde's view of women had changed dramatically since the time, a few years back, when every conquest was exciting, when every new looker was a challenge even if he couldn't stand her as a person. Joe Grey had chided him more than once about bringing home some airhead. Well, that life was not for him anymore; the idea of bringing home some bimbo now disgusted him.

The change had started when Kate left her husband and came to him for help. He had been so smitten with her, and for so long, but after that night when he had hidden her from Jimmie, he had been so confused by her bizarre nature.

He had mooned over Kate for a long time after that, but she had distanced herself. She had known better than he that with the difference between them a relationship would never work; she had seen too clearly his fear of her impossible talents.

The night she left Jimmie and came running here to him, he would not believe what she told him about her alternate self, although her feline nature was part of the reason Jimmie wanted to kill her. In order to prove to him what she could do, she had done it. Standing before him, whispering some unlikely spell, she had taken the form of a cat. A cream-colored cat, sleek and beautiful, with golden eyes like Kate's and marmalade markings.

His fear had been considerable. He had charged into the bedroom and slammed the door and wouldn't open it. He did not want to see her again in either form. The next day he'd been better, although the concept still shook him. He became civil once more; but he would never get over it.

And yet even after that shattering incident, he had longed for her, had tried every way to get her to come home again after she moved to San Francisco.

Neither Joe nor Dulcie could take human form. Nor did Joe Grey want to; the tomcat said he liked his life as it was, that the talents he had were plenty. Well, the upshot for Clyde was that he had begun to look at a woman as a person. To want to know who she was and what she thought about life.

While pining over Kate, he had dated Charlie, a woman as honest and real as anyone he'd ever known. It was then he had let himself realize, as he had known deeply all along, what the real values were. It was then he put away his shallow philosophy and turned, as Max had done years before, to look at what a woman believed deep down, what she cared about in life.

Joe Grey would say, big sea change. The tomcat had ragged him plenty about his earlier lifestyle. Clyde stared down at Joe now. The tomcat seemed to make himself twice as big when he sprawled across a desk where a person was working. "You wouldn't consider rolling over, so I can finish this order?"

Joe stared up at him, his yellow eyes wide and innocent. "You think you should try Kate again? The phone has to be out, it wouldn't be busy all this time, even Kate can't talk that long- but she has to be home, she's expecting Lucinda and Pedric, she'll be worried."

They had been trying all evening to get her, calling both the house and her cell phone. Clyde wished he had started calling that morning. Both he and Wilma had been waiting for more information, for the sheriff to find the bodies, for some assurance the old couple had indeed been killed. Then when he tried to get Kate this evening, busy signal. "I left a dozen messages on her cell phone. Why the hell doesn't she check her messages!"

Joe said, "Maybe by now she's had the TV on. If it's been on the news, she…"

Again Clyde hit the redial. If she had seen the news, if she knew, maybe she was talking with Wilma.

He got another busy. Five minutes passed as he tried to work, patiently lifting Joe's gray paw to check a price, peering under a gray ear to retrieve a parts number.

"Try again," Joe said. "I'm worried about her."

Clyde tried three more times before Kate's phone rang. Just one ring, and she picked up. Clyde left the speaker on so Joe wouldn't crowd him pressing against the phone. "Kate? You okay?"

"No, I'm not okay. Did you…"

"You heard the news."

"This can't have happened. It's impossible to believe. What were they doing out on the highway in the middle of the night? If they'd had some emergency, say one of them got sick, they'd have called the medics. Or the sheriff. Or a cab. They'd been staying in a campground, they could have called the manager. Have you talked with anyone up there? The highway patrol? The Sonoma County sheriff? What have they found? Couldn't it be some kind of mistake? The wrong RV. Or maybe they-"

Clyde said, "Wilma talked with the sheriff. They've had a crew there all day going through the wreckage."

"And?"

"They- So far, no bodies. Nothing much at all left." He glanced at Joe. "It was a terrible fire, Kate. Ashes, rubble. The truck driver… they did find his body, in his crashed truck. The truck wasn't burned as badly as the RV."

Kate was silent for a long time. When she spoke again, her voice was very small. "They were so happy together. Their late marriage was like a fairy tale, like one of their Old-World folktales. It isn't fair. They were having such a good time traveling. And planning to build their dream house…"

Clyde stared at the phone.

"It's all wrong," Kate said. "Their campsite hadn't been vacated, they left canvas chairs, a folding table set up under the pines. The late news said some towels were left hanging on a portable line, an expensive bear-proof garbage can."

The fur along Joe Grey's spine felt rigid. His paws were cold as he sorted through the facts-Lucinda and Pedric heading for San Francisco to stay with Kate, Lucinda with the same kind of jewelry that Consuela had gone to steal from Kate and that the appraiser had tried to buy.

Moving closer to the phone, Joe placed a paw on Clyde's hand, staring at the speaker.

Clyde scowled and shoved the phone at him.

"In spite of this mess," Joe said into the speaker, "one seemingly unrelated question. Did you get there in time?"

"I did," she said sadly. "I moved it all, thanks to you. I wanted to call but I… Joe, that cat has been here. Inside my apartment."

"The cat can't hurt you, Kate." He paused. He wasn't sure of that. "But Consuela could," he said staring at the phone. This whole gig made him edgy; this stuff was happening too far away, and there were too many loose pieces, events that didn't add up. "Come home, Kate. Come back to the village now." He glanced at Clyde. "You can stay with us."

Clyde looked surprised, then nodded.

"And I've been followed," Kate said.

"Followed where? When was this? Consuela? Who?"

"A man. I…"

Clyde nudged Joe away from the speaker. "Did you report it to the police? Do you know him?"

"I… No. And I didn't report it, not yet."

"Why not?" Clyde snapped. "Never mind. Kate, get a second appraisal on the jewelry. This is all too weird."

"Emerson Bristol has an excellent reputation, Clyde. He's a big name in the city."

"You researched the subject," Clyde said. "You know that such unusual work, made by a master craftsman, ought to be cataloged somewhere. Even if it is paste. You said you've been through all the catalogs, the books in San Francisco Public and in the museums. Don't you think it's strange that there's absolutely no mention of it?"

"Yes," she said in a small voice.

"I don't like this. Joe's right. Come home, Kate. Bring that stuff down here to someone in the village-someone Harper recommends."

"I have so much work, installations…"

"Come home, Kate. Come now."

"I… After tonight, I feel all in pieces. Will you call me when you know more about Lucinda and Pedric? More about what happened?"

Clyde sighed. "I'll call you."

"And… there's something else," she said. "I almost forgot. Likely it's nothing, but… I threw out some newspapers when I was cleaning up, but I saved one. It was dated three days before Charlie's gallery opening. There was a jewel robbery here, on Market Street. A cheap, touristy kind of place. It happened around six in the evening, just before the shop closed. The police got there before the three men could get away. They arrested two, but the third man got a cop down and escaped. The paper said he took a hard blow to the forehead, the store owner hit him with a brick. It's probably coincidence," Kate said, "but I…"

"Harper is checking the police records for fights," Clyde said with interest. "For batterings, anything like that. He's sure to catch it, but I'll tell him. Save the paper, the date. And come home, Kate. Where it's safe. We all miss you."

"I'll think about it, Clyde. Good-night, you guys." Her voice was weepy. "Good-night," she whispered. "I guess I feel better."

When Clyde hung up, Joe dropped off the desk and leaped to Clyde's new leather easy chair that sat before the fire. Clyde had brought the Molena Point Gazette upstairs with him. The Greenlaw accident filled the upper half of the front page. Scanning the article, he saw with disappointment that it gave no more information than the TV news had supplied.

The lower half of the page was devoted to Saturday night's clothing store burglary. Alice's Mirror had been relieved of its highest-priced stock. There was no sign of forced entry. The theft hadn't been discovered until this morning when the owner opened the store for the usual Sunday tourists.

Joe sat staring into the fire, wondering how much he should tell Clyde. It was just this morning, the morning after the Greenlaw accident, that Kit had told Joe himself, and Dulcie, about the missing key.

After their night on Hellhag Hill, Joe had awakened very late, alone in the rumpled bed. The bedside clock said 8:15, half the day gone, from any cat's point of view. Clyde would long ago have gone to work. Joe was crawling out from among the tangled sheets when the phone rang. He didn't knock the bedside phone from its cradle, but trotted through to the study. Leaping to the desk, he listened as the machine answered.

Only one word was spoken. "Joe?" Dulcie hissed.

He hit the speaker. "Damen residence."

"Jolly's," she said softly and immediately hung up.

He hit the erase button and was out of there, leaping to the rafter above the desk and up through his rooftop cat door.

Pausing in his private tower for a drink of water, he raced out across the shingles, then along an oak branch, across slanting and angled roofs until he was forced to descend to the sidewalk, at the divided lanes and grassy median of Ocean Avenue. Crossing Ocean among the feet of a group of tourists, he shied away from their reaching hands. What a smart cat, crossing the street with us… Cute kitty … Do you think he's lost? We could… Dodging away, he headed for Jolly's alley. Dulcie's voice had sounded desperate. All manner of disasters, most of them involving the kit, had raced through his tomcat mind as he swerved along the sidewalks and at last into Jolly's alley.