Cat Striking Back

17

“I AM TANSY. YOU are Sage’s friend,” the scruffy cat said smartly. “Oh, my. You would have been his mate but you wouldn’t have him. You jilted him!”

“Where did you learn that word?” Kit said, amused. “Jilt” was not a word she’d ever heard among the clowder. The stranger was the color of bleached straw, her inch-long coat standing out every which way and tangled with seeds and streaks of mud from the ditches.

“I learned that from humans, when I was a kitten, and later when I ran away from the clowder and came back to live in the village.”

“You ran away from the clowder?” Kit knew no other speaking feral besides herself who had abandoned the rule of the clowder and gone to live among humans.

“I wanted music,” said the scruffy cat. “I wanted humans to talk to me-though I never talked back. I wanted to curl up before a nice warm fire. I miss that life, I want catnip mice and kind hands, soft blankets and magical stories…”

Kit laughed at her but she knew too well that longing, and she could feel a purr bubbling up.

“I was a kitten in the village until a man put me in a box and dumped me in the hills and left me there to die. I nearly starved. Even after I clawed my way out, I was too little to hunt much. But then Willow found me and she washed me and caught mice for me, and I went to live with the clowder. But when winter was over and I got bigger and spring came, I longed for human places, I…” Tansy looked at Kit helplessly, as if she didn’t know how to describe her dreams.

Kit raised a paw, and looked away toward the village. “Come on,” she said softly. And she turned and trotted away.

The scrawny cat followed and was soon trotting beside her. As they passed the stone wall, the old couple remained very still so as not to frighten her. The last Lucinda and Pedric saw of them, the scrawny little cat was sharply silhouetted against Kit’s dark, black-and-brown elegance. Lucinda and Pedric looked at each other, and smiled, and the Greenlaws understood perfectly Kit’s flick of the ear and lashing of her tail, her silent, See you later! Don’t wait up!

But then Lucinda frowned, trying not to worry. Living with tattercoat Kit, worry was a given, they never knew what trouble she’d have her paws into. The elderly couple remained sitting on the wall, watching the two cats disappear down the hill to vanish at last among the cottage gardens as they headed into the village. What adventures the two would find, and what dangers, they didn’t want to consider. They tried to just fill up on the wonder of the moment and not let themselves think any further.

IN THE VILLAGE, Kit led the young cat along her own secret routes through narrow alleyways flanked with little shops, and then up a trellis to the rooftops. They trotted across jagged, shingled peaks and down into the dark crevices among a forest of chimneys. They stood with their paws in the roof gutters looking down at the tourists, then raced across leaning oak branches above a narrow street. They spent nearly an hour peering in through penthouse windows at couples eating supper, at ladies undressing, at children already sleeping in their beds. Tansy couldn’t get enough of the exotic world of humans that she had so missed.

As night drew down, they raced up the tiled steps of the courthouse tower to perch high above the world on its narrow balcony. If anyone were to look up and see the two little shapes crouched there, they’d wonder what kind of birds those were that had come to roost for the night. Below them, fog shrouded the cottage rooftops, so the shop lights were blurred into smeared colors along the busy streets. Through the mist, villagers and tourists headed for the little restaurants, and from the restaurants a miasma of smells was rising up: boiled shrimp, charbroiled steaks, and intriguing pasta sauces that made them lick their whiskers and that brought them down from the tower, racing down the long stairs to make their rounds of the restaurant patios. Winding among table legs and people’s feet, they paused frequently to fawn on the diners as only a cat can, smiling prettily up into the faces of strangers until they were treated to buttered lobster, rare steak, or roast chicken; and now Kit watched Tansy with increasing amusement. This waif, shy and frightened one minute, was bold as brass the next, employing spry and teasing ways until she got exactly what she wanted-Tansy was not at all as frightened and helpless as she seemed. The flip side of her nature showed Kit a skilled little freeloader. And as they left the center of the village, full of delicious treats, Tansy took the lead, scrambling to the roofs again and heading jauntily to where the village cottages climbed up into the hills.

“What?” Kit said. “Where are you going?”

“My neighborhood,” Tansy said. “I want to go there to my own street, where I lived. I want to roll in the gardens and smell the flowers. I want…That was my home once, and I want to go there.” And the small ragged cat raced away across the shingles. Kit followed, silent with amazement. They had nearly reached Tansy’s old neighborhood when Joe Grey and Dulcie appeared on a high peak and came streaking toward them. Kit stopped to wait for them. Tansy stopped, too, but she dropped into a wary crouch.

EARLIER THAT EVENING, Joe had left Dulcie on the rooftops, planning to meet again when night fell, planning on an evening of break-and-enter in the vacationers’ empty houses. Parting from his tabby lady, Joe had stood for a moment watching her trot home to her warm supper and to reassure Wilma that she was all right, that she was safe and well. One of the curses of being a speaking cat was the burden of truly understanding how their human housemates worried about them, and the resultant desire to ease their friends’ stress. This was a big responsibility for a cat, and one that Joe, in particular, found burdensome. He liked being an active part of the human world, but he also liked his freedom.

Turning for home, thinking that Clyde and Ryan were still house hunting, he expected to find an empty house where he’d have to raid the refrigerator for his own cold meal. There’d be kibble down for Snowball, he thought with disdain. He’d have to be in the last throes of starvation before he filled up on what he considered the equivalent of discarded sawdust.

But when he hit his home roof, he caught the heady aroma of browned pot roast. And when he glanced over the edge to the driveway, there stood the yellow roadster clicking away as its motor cooled. Okay, so they were home from the great house hunt. But how had they had time to cook supper when they’d been gone all day?

Then he remembered the packages of homemade pot roast that Ryan had put in the freezer. Two weeks ago, she had an amazing bout of domesticity. She’d tied on an apron and, with the same efficient dispatch as when she was building a house, she had filled their freezer with enough home-cooked pot roast, spaghetti sauce, tamale pie, lamb stew, and more of Joe’s favorites, to last at least until Christmas. The big freezer, a wedding present from Ryan’s dad, stood in the laundry room beside the bunk bed where the family pets used to sleep. Clyde ’s two dogs were gone now, as well as the two elderly cats. Only Snowball was still with them, and now Rock, of course. Both slept on a soft comforter on the couch in Clyde ’s study, leaving the laundry-room bunk as a handy place to store empty boxes and unsorted laundry.

Padding across the roof and in through the window of his rooftop tower, Joe pushed into the house through his cat door and onto a rafter, and with a long leap, he hit the desk below. He could hear their voices in some deep discussion, and hear the scrape of forks on their plates. Dropping to the floor he raced down the stairs breathing in the meaty aroma of pot roast, hoping they’d left him some. Only as he approached the kitchen did he slow. Were they arguing? Listening, he paused in the doorway.

But no, you couldn’t call it arguing. Just a heated discussion about the faults and merits of one of the houses they’d looked at-sounded like a decrepit heap that wasn’t worth firewood but that Clyde was convinced they could turn into a mansion. Lucky thing Ryan knew what she was doing, that she wouldn’t waste their money on a wreck.

Or would she? Hoping Clyde ’s wild enthusiasm hadn’t warped Ryan’s common sense, Joe padded in trying not to drool from the good smell of supper.

The Damen kitchen was large and bright with its handsome new tile work and new lighting, yet satisfyingly cozy with cushioned dining chairs and, in the far corner, crowded bookcases flanking a pair of flowered easy chairs. Long before Ryan and Clyde were married or even dating seriously, Ryan had done an extensive remodel. Besides adding the new upstairs, she had torn out the wall be tween the kitchen and the seldom-used dining room, had replastered the walls of the opened-up room and painted them a soft peach, installed Mexican-tile floors and new tile counters with hand-decorated borders. As Joe entered, Rock was snoozing in one of the easy chairs, probably worn out after a long day at the beach with Ryan’s dad.

The Weimaraner looked on enviously as Joe leaped onto his usual chair at the table. Rock wasn’t allowed to beg at the dinner table, only outside at the picnic table. It was hard for the big dog to bear, that Joe could do what he couldn’t. But then, for Rock, the whole concept of a speaking cat was hard to get used to. Life was not as simple as the young Weimaraner had, as a puppy, first imagined it to be. A speaking cat who gave him orders and was quick with the claws if he didn’t obey, and yet was a pal to cuddle up with at night, and who had taught him to track a killer, had turned out to be a special kind of friend. Rock tolerated Joe’s household privileges with a rare patience and good humor.

Ryan reached across the table, setting a plate before Joe. The big, round table was so heaped with real estate fliers and newspaper ads, and with Ryan’s scattered sketches and her notebook filled with figures, that there was barely room for the couple’s dinner plates and for the steaming casserole of pot roast and vegetables.

“What’s with the fast service?” the tomcat said.

“We heard you hit the roof,” Ryan told him.

“And charge down the stairs like a herd of buffalo,” Clyde added.

Before tucking into his supper, Joe studied the scattered papers. In his opinion, this new venture into real es tate did not bode well for the Damen household, but what did he know? He watched Clyde dig the plate of French bread out from under some fliers and pass it to Ryan, then Joe licked up his supper. He was not only starved, he was eager to meet Dulcie, half his mind on the Chapman house and the other empty houses of their neighbors.

But the minute he’d licked his plate clean, Ryan leaned over to refill it, and how could he resist? How he’d survived without this woman was hard to remember. She’d even left out the onion from her pot roast recipe, for fear that, as with ordinary cats, the onion would make him anemic. She’d told him she used, instead, red bell pepper, a combination of herbs, and a touch of bourbon.

“Delicious,” Joe said, eating with single-minded dispatch. When again he looked up, they were both staring at him. “What?” he said with his mouth full.

“You’re in a hell of a hurry,” Clyde said.

“Just hungry,” Joe said, and bent his head fastidiously to finish his second helping. Trying to look relaxed, he took his time licking gravy from his whiskers and, to humor them, he stepped up on the table and pawed the fliers apart so he could see them better.

There was the vacant ranch they’d talked about, its fences and outbuildings sprawled raggedly across the side of the hill, below a heavy stand of cypress trees. He couldn’t imagine they’d want to remodel that whole complex. There were seven other houses, three in the heart of the village and four tucked among the hills. All of them needed paint, a complete yard makeover, new roofs, and undoubtedly expensive interior repairs: new wiring, new plumbing, who knew what else to keep them marketable. He hoped none of them had drainage problems like the job Ryan was working on at present. At least that wasn’t her house, it belonged to a client who wanted it saved despite the cost.

Studying their prospective purchases, one of which looked like a real teardown, Joe didn’t know whether to laugh or to succumb to serious concern. A teardown, in Molena Point, could go for half a million or more. Half a mil to rip down a house and replace it with a dwelling that might hopefully sell well up in the seven figures. But with Ryan at the helm, what looked like a teardown might, in fact, turn into a real gem-and people were making money saving those old houses.

When Joe first learned he could speak, and was trying to understand the human world, the concept of work for money had meant nothing to him. But as he began to think more like a human, he’d easily absorbed the rudiments. Folks worked at what they liked to do, received promissory dollars for the quality of their skilled or creative efforts, and traded those for whatever goods they chose. To a cat, the concept had been a revelation.

Why, a cat could hunt mice all day, stack them up like cordwood, and trade them for caviar-if one could find a market for the mice. That was the rub, considering that the human appetite didn’t really run to dead mice. He glanced out the kitchen window at the night and knew it was time to meet Dulcie.

Clyde caught his look. “You’re going out to poke around the Parker house, aren’t you? What do you think you’re going to find after Dallas and Juana worked the area?”

It wasn’t the Parker house he was headed for, but he didn’t tell Clyde that. “You’re so incredibly nosy.”

“You think that guy will come back?” Clyde said. “If the guy watching us was the killer-if there ever was a killer-after we followed him, why would he come back? He’ll be long gone.”

Joe just looked at him.

Ryan watched them with amusement. She’d learned early on to stay out of these discussions. When Clyde glanced away, she winked at Joe. Joe twitched a whisker at her, and rubbed his face against her arm by way of thanking her for dinner. Then, dropping to the floor, he headed up the stairs to his tower and out to hit the roofs.