Cat Raise The Dead

27

Max Harper left the police station at mid-morning, heading up the hills to have another look around the Prior estate. He didn't intend to pull into the Prior drive in his police unit. He thought he'd stop by his place, saddle Buck, and take a ride. He'd been using Buck all week to quarter the hills above the residential areas, looking for human bones or a shallow grave. And he could do with a break this morning, get out of the station for a few hours. The morning had not started out well, everything he'd touched seeming as murky and vague as the fog itself. Driving slowly uphill through the thick mist, he went over this morning's and last night's phone calls, looking for some detail he might have missed.

He had come in just before eight, parking in his reserved slot in the lot behind the station. He was pouring his first cup of coffee when his phone buzzed. The caller was a woman; she wouldn't give her name. She told him that Elaine Garver had lied about the Goya etching, said there was no etching. He couldn't dismiss the call; the woman gave him a detailed list of stolen items, information that only the Garvers or the burglar herself could know-or one of his own people, and that wasn't likely. If he prided himself on anything, it was on the quality and honesty of his officers, in a world where that wasn't always the case. Nothing made him as deeply angry as hearing some report about a bad cop, about someone's inner departmental decay.

When the anonymous caller hung up, too quickly to trace, Wilma Getz was on another line. She wanted to come in with the little Thurwell girl, see him for a few minutes. She said just enough to make him uneasy, make him think the problem might be tied in with Susan Dorriss's phone call late last night.

He would never peg Susan Dorriss as one to pass on wild stories, any more than he would think of Wilma that way. Yet the story Susan gave him was the same wild tale he'd heard weeks ago from that Casa Capri patient, little Mrs. Mae Rose.

Last night, Susan had called from her daughter's car phone, sitting in the parking lot of Casa Capri. Said she didn't want to use a phone inside Casa Capri. She had called her daughter at about ten, and Bonnie came on down and wheeled her out to the car.

Susan had called Bonnie just after Mae Rose came to her with the note she had supposedly found inside an old doll, a note from the woman Mae thought was missing, from Jane Hubble. Susan said the note and the doll smelled musty from being closed up in a locked closet. His immediate reaction was, what was he supposed to do about a note some old lady found inside a doll? And maybe he'd been short with Susan. When she read the note to him, his temper flared. He'd wanted to say, maybe it was something in the water up at Casa Capri that made everyone nuts, that he'd rather deal with any kind of straightforward crime than some groundless mystery that had just enough truth to turn him edgy. And when Susan told him about seeing Teddy Prior get out of his wheelchair and walk, that set him back. Everyone knew Teddy was incurably crippled-everyone thought they knew that.

And then this morning when Wilma brought the kid in, little Dillon Thurwell, to tell him about the doll, neither Wilma nor the kid knew that Susan had called him with the same story. Neither Wilma nor the kid knew about the note; Mae Rose had found that hours after the two of them left Casa Capri yesterday afternoon, and Mae Rose had taken the note to Susan.

He'd never known Wilma Getz to go off on a tangent. She'd worked her whole life in corrections and wasn't the kind to buy into some nut story. Unless Wilma herself was getting senile. On the phone, she'd said, "I guess it's all nonsense, Max. I know it sounds crazy-but you know that little niggling feeling? That ring of truth that's so hard to shake?"

"Go on."

"I saw Dillon take the doll from the closet, I could see clearly across the patio, from where I stood in the glass doors of the social room. I watched her slip inside, remove the lap desk, open it, and take out the doll. She shoved the desk back, hid the doll in her shirt, and made a dash out the door just as it started to rain. The cats…" She'd paused, stopped talking.

"The cats? You started to say, what?"

"Oh, that the cats were out in the rain, too. You know, the Pet-a-Pet cats."

"So?"

"I don't know-so they got wet. What time can I come in?"

"Come on in," he had said, sighing. "I can give you a few minutes." He had hung up, poured another cup of coffee, and gotten some paperwork done. Not twenty minutes later, there was Wilma coming into the station with the kid. Threading their way back through the crowded squad room, Wilma herded the kid along, her hand on the little girl's shoulder, the child looking fascinated by all the uniforms, and looking scared.

He'd poured coffee for Wilma and got the kid a Coke. Dillon was real silent for a while, but when she saw the picture of Buck on his desk she brightened right up. He told her about Buck, and they'd talked about horses. She started talking about Jane Hubble's horse, and the next thing she launched right in, telling him that Jane was missing, that she'd tried three times to see Jane and every time had been run off from Casa Capri. Told him how yesterday afternoon she'd found Jane's lap desk with the doll inside.

He didn't point out to Dillon that she had no business in that closet and that she was taking things that weren't hers. The kid knew that. She described the closet shelves as stuffed full of small boxes of folded clothes and purses and shoes, items which, she thought, must belong to several people. Maybe, she said, to the six people Mae Rose said were missing.

The irritating thing was, Dillon seemed like a sensible kid. He knew her folks; they were a decent family, no problems that he knew of. Helen Thurwell was one of the most reliable Realtors in the area. And Bob, for a literature professor, was all right-he seemed a no-nonsense sort. Dillon Thurwell did not seem the type to go off on wild fancies, any more than Wilma did.

And what disturbed him was, the kid's story dovetailed exactly with Susan Dorriss's phone call.

That made him smile in spite of himself, and made him know he'd better pay attention-better to be wrong than plain bullheaded, and miss a bet. He'd hate like hell to be outflanked by a team of juvenile and geriatric amateur sleuths.

Driving slowly up the hills through the thick fog, he topped out suddenly above the white vapor blanket into sunshine. The hills, above that dense layer, shone bright, the sky above him clear and blue. Maybe he was getting old and soft-headed, and he'd sure take a ribbing from the department if he followed up on this doll business, but it wasn't something he wanted to ignore.

Turning south, he soon swung into his own narrow drive and headed back between the pastures. Across the pasture he saw Buck lift his head, looking toward the car. The gelding stood a minute, ears sharp forward, then headed at a trot for the barn, knowing damn well if Harper was home in the middle of the day that they'd take a ride. Buck loved company, and he was rotten spoiled.

Harper parked by the little two-stall barn behind the house, wondering idly how Dillon Thurwell would get along with Buck, or maybe with one of the neighbor's horses.

No one knew better than he that kids could be skilled liars, that Dillon could be jiving him. The kid could have gone along with Mae Rose's fantasy just for the excitement, could have made up more details and embroidered on the story just for fun, could have put that note in the doll herself, sewn it up, hidden it in the cupboard- ragged stitches like a child's stitches.

He'd hate like hell to get scammed by a twelve-year-old con artist.

But he didn't think Dillon had done that.

His gut feeling, like Wilma's, was that the kid, though her imagination might have colored what she saw and was told, did not mean deliberately to mislead them.

In the house he changed into Levi's and boots and a soft shirt, and clipped his radio to his belt. Stepping out to the little barn again, he brushed Buck down, saddled him, and swung on. Buck ducked his chin playfully as they headed over the hills toward the Prior place.

Within half an hour he was crossing the hill above the old hacienda, looking down into the old, oak-shaded cemetery. The estate lay just above the fog, and as he studied the wooded cemetery and the ancient headstones, a mower started up near the stables. Buck snorted at the noise and wanted to shy. He watched the groundskeeper swing aboard the machine, and as he started to mow around the stable Buck bowed his neck and blew softly; but he was no longer looking at the mower, he was staring toward the old graves.

Scanning the grove, Harper saw a quick movement low to the ground as something small fled away into the shadows. Maybe a big bird had come down after some creature, maybe a crow. Or maybe it had been a rabbit or a squirrel, frightened by something. The breeze shifted, rustling the oak leaves; and as the light changed within the woods, he saw it again. Two cats streaking away.

He guessed if there were cats around, still alive, there wasn't any poison nearby. Or maybe cats were smarter than dogs about that stuff. He rode on down, pulling Buck up at the edge of the woods. And he saw the cats again, watched them disappear into the bushes near the main house. That gray cat looked like Clyde Damen's tomcat, but it wouldn't be way up here.

He was getting a fixation about that cat. Ever since that hot-car bust up at Beckwhite's last summer, when Damen's cat got mixed up in the action and almost got itself shot, ever since then he thought he saw the cat everywhere.

But he did see it more than he liked. Every poker night there it was on the table, watching him play his hand. Who, but Damen, would let a cat sit on the table. It gave him the creeps the way the cat watched him bet, those big yellow eyes looking almost like it understood what he was doing. He could swear that last night, every time he raked in a pot, the cat almost grinned at him.

Harper sighed. He was losing his perspective here.

Getting as dotty as the old folks at Casa Capri.

Yet no amount of chiding himself changed the fact that there was something strange about Damen's cat, something that stirred in him a jab of fear, or wonder, or some damned thing. He sensed about the cat something beyond the facts by which he lived, something beyond his reach, some element he should pay attention to, and would prefer not to consider.