Cat Laughing Last

13

The tall Tudor mansion that housed Molena Point Little Theater thrust above the smaller cottages like a solemn matriarch, its old shingles gray with time. But its high windows shone clean, reflecting the midmorning sky in a deep, clear azure. Sixty years earlier, the residence had been headquarters for Hidalgo Farms, an upscale cattle and sheep operation. When, in the seventies, the outbuildings and carriage house and barns had been turned into Hidalgo Plaza, wide paseos and promenades had been added, brick-paved, and roofed with trellises to join one building to the next.

The house itself had been gutted, its inner walls torn out and replaced by heavy beams, to form the vast and high-ceilinged theater. The stage occupied what had once been the large parlor. The old formal dining room and morning room and study, now flowing together, were fitted with comfortable rows of theater seats upholstered in mauve velvet.

Three large ground-level bedrooms had become the cluttered backstage with its dressing rooms, two small baths, and the vast costume room. Other workrooms and the prop room had taken over the kitchen and butler's pantry and carriage house.

The upstairs bedrooms supplied office space and a balcony looking down on the audience, a long, narrow gallery that accommodated the control panel for the house lights and stage lighting, an area strung so densely with conduit and thick wires that it looked like a den for families of sociably oriented boa constrictors. The balcony was separated from the raftered ceiling space beyond, which yawned over the rows of seating, by a three-foot-high plastered rail. Beyond the balcony, beams and rafters stretched away in an open grid on which were hung banks of lights. The timbers, jutting across empty space, provided to the surefooted and arboreally inclined a fine series of catwalks above the heads of the audience.

Though it was midmorning, barely 10:00 A.M., the vast and empty theater was as dark as night, a sepulchral world woven of flattened shadows and inky and indecipherable vistas. No window opened into this part of the theater. The outer walls of the old mansion, where tall panes of glass had once lighted the living areas, were now blocked by inner barriers. The ten-foot space between these walls was broken into small offices, and storage and work rooms, all cheerfully brightened by those antique panels of mullioned glass. A sunny morning without, but the theater within so dark that only a cat could see her way. On a ten-by-twelve beam above the stage, the kit prowled impatiently, an agile tightrope walker, a swift black-and-brown smear of shadow within shadows, a small phantom personage alone in the empty building, waiting for Cora Lee to appear for work dressed in her painter's smock.

Usually Cora Lee arrived at the theater much earlier, unlocking the back door from the parking lot and turning on the lights so the stage shown cheerfully around her as she painted the sets for Thorns of Gold. This morning, the kit had waited a long time. She had been here from first light, impatient and hungry. Cora Lee always brought a snack to share with her. She waited, dreaming of far worlds peopled by cats like her and Dulcie and Joe Grey, worlds she half invented, and half knew from the tales of elder cats and from the old Celtic myths. But now, as morning wore on, even those stories paled. Her patience frayed at last. Painfully lonely in the empty silence, she gave up on Cora Lee.

Leaping down to the top of an open stepladder and then to the stage, and across the stage and down to the carpeted aisles before the seats, she went to explore the rest of the theater. Trotting into the outer rooms where the windows let in light, she made her way toward the prop room. She knew the theater office; she had walked on all the desks there, across stacks of playbills and papers, had rooted in the wastebaskets, prowled the cluttered shelves, and snatched cookies from a desk drawer. In the wardrobe room, she had wandered dreaming beneath the rows of hanging costumes, sniffing the old smells of lace and satin and leather and the metallic scent of tarnished necklaces. She had patted her paw carelessly into a jar of greasepaint that had been left open, then had printed her paw marks along the hall floors. She had, upstairs on the balcony, tapped at dozens of light switches on the control panel, an exercise that, if the main switch had been on, would have created a wonderland of flashing lights in the theater below. She had tasted the powdered cream in an open jar in the cluttered coffee room and had stuck her nose in the sugar bowl. But best of all she had wandered through the prop room exploring an amazing array of surprises.

It was there she headed now, purring to herself. She had no notion that she was not alone, she heard no sound but her own purring. Only when she stopped purring to nibble at an itch on her shoulder did she pause, suddenly wary.

She'd heard nothing, really. But she thought the air stirred differently, the spaces around her disturbed in some way, as if something was moving unheard and unseen through the theater's dark reaches.

It was not Joe Grey or Dulcie. They would have mewed a tiny sound asking if she was there, a faint murmur inaudible to human ears. And when they drew close, she would have smelled their scent. Now she smelled nothing different at all among the rich medley of theater scents. What was here in the dark with her that she couldn't see? Few humans could be so quiet. And why would a human come into the theater and not put on a light?

Did she smell Gabrielle's lavender scent? The tall blond lady was, after all, the wardrobe mistress; she came and went quite a lot.

Or perhaps she caught a whiff of candy? But, trying to identify the smell, her nose was too filled with the harsh aromas of dust and paint, of turpentine, floor wax, and the body smells of humans. She stood sniffing, more curious than wary, trying to understand the mysterious movement she could detect among the black and angled shadows.

She had heard no door close. Had someone been in here all along, even before she herself came through the narrow attic window beneath the big duct pipes and black ropes of electrical cords? Before she squeezed down through the hole from the attic, past the round silver heat duct, and dropped to the balcony among the huge snakes of wire that always gave her the shivers?

Well, whatever was in here, she was safe. No human would see her in the darkness, and anyway, she could dodge any human.

Happily she padded on again toward the prop room, to play her solitary games among that richness of crazy human possessions that no yard or garage sale could match, among the baby crib and beer signs and bicycles, the wrought iron gates and painted china bowls and metal shields and stuffed horse's head and the front end of an ancient car. Everything in the world was there- beaded floor lamps, rocking chair, ten green glass bottles each as big as a doghouse, a set of elk horns, pieces of machinery so strange that not even Joe Grey, who had named these things for her, could identify them. The saddest objects were a ship's lantern and anchor smelling of dust and not of the sea, as if these nautical wonders had forgotten where they belonged.

The game was to see if she could roll and walk and tag among the shelves without knocking anything off. When she tired of that she liked to lie on the pink satin fainting couch that stood wedged between the unicycle and a woodstove with a red paper fire burning in it-not warm, but pretty to look at. She liked to nap on the pink couch imagining what the play would be like all in costume and Cora Lee singing under the lights, and she, Kit, lying on a rafter above the stage, enjoying the best seat in the house. But now, crouched beside the horse's moldering head, she heard a footstep.

Well, a footstep was better than hearing nothing when she knew someone was there. As the door swung open, the kit slid beneath the old car, tucking her long, fluffy tail under too.

A light blazed, a harsh flashlight beam striking the shelves and moving along them, stopping now and then, a great eye of light searching and peering.

The woman who held the light was small and thin, dressed in dark tights, her black hair pulled back under a cap. Vivi Traynor smelled of cherries. Her full attention was on the crowded shelves, her movements as wary as a thieving dog's.

But what would the theater's junk room offer that a famous author's wife couldn't buy? Whatever she was looking for, it wasn't small; she wasn't poking into the narrow niches. The kit thought of the white chest that man, Casselrod, had snatched and that Vivi wanted badly enough to follow him-but that chest was in his store, already torn apart.

Working her way along the shelves, pushing and pulling and rearranging, Vivi turned at last to fetch the dusty ladder from the corner. Climbing to investigate the topmost shelves, again she moved only large items. She investigated a closed cardboard box, a leather suitcase, a lidded roasting pan big enough to cook a St. Bernard. Vivi opened each, looking in, then closed it again and shoved it back. When she had finished with pulling things apart, looking in and under, and didn't find what she wanted, she gave a huff of anger, backed down leaving the ladder standing open, and went out again.

The kit followed her, slipping through the door before she closed it, silent and unseen, then padding along behind. She had never seen a human who could be so quiet.

She had never seen a human she disliked in quite this way.

When the raccoons were shot and that smell filled the house, she had blamed that all on Vivi. If Vivi Traynor had been a black lizard the kit would have chomped her, and spit her out dead, then chewed leaves to get the taste out. Following Vivi through the theater, she slipped ahead, stopping under the front row of seats, peering out at the darkly clad woman.

Vivi passed by, inches from her, moving silently to the exit door. There was not a creak when she opened and closed it, and then she was gone, no squall of hinge or snap of the latch. The kit made a flehmening face of disgust. What had she been after? Another chest like the white one? Were there letters worth a lot of money, like Joe Grey said? She hoped, if there were such letters, that Vivi Traynor wouldn't find them. Or Richard Casselrod either. She hoped her own friends would find them and sell them for a lot of money and buy a nice big house with a nice cozy kitchen and room for a cat to visit. She would like a little bed in a sunny window or by a fireplace. Meantime, she wanted to know what Vivi Traynor was up to with her snooping and prying, and she wished that Cora Lee was there close to her because she suddenly felt very lonely. Her paws were cold with fear.