Cat Striking Back

20

FRANCES AND ED Becker’s house was a two-story, cream-colored stucco with dark brown window trim and a black slate roof that was always slippery in wet weather. The cats didn’t need daylight to know that the lawn was neatly mowed, the bushes trimmed to perfect spheres that they, personally, thought ugly and unnatural-how could one hide or take shelter under a bush trimmed like a bowling ball? Tansy led them straight through the cat door into the garage where dishes of kibble and a bowl of water were laid out beside two cat beds. The Beckers had two orange-and-white cats, and though neither was present, their scent was heavy and fresh. There was no cat door from the garage into the house.

“They don’t want mouse trophies under the furniture,” Tansy said. “ Frances can’t stand the thought of mouse guts on her imported rugs.” She looked up at the pedestrian door that led into the house. “We can try this, sometimes she leaves it unlocked because the garage is locked.”

Leaping up, Joe swung from the knob and pawed at the dead bolt, but at last he dropped down again, shaking his bruised paw.

“Come on then,” Tansy said, “there’s another way.” She led them outside and around the house to the front. In the daytime, the front door would be seen from the street, but at night the soft yard lights left it in shadow. There was no one about nor could they see anyone standing at a nearby lighted window.

The front door was flanked by two tall, narrow panels of glass, each covered by a decorative wrought-iron panel. The pale cat, leaping up and clinging to the iron curlicues, reached a deft paw through and pressed at the sliding window until she had pushed it open.

“They used to leave it open for me. She did. He wouldn’t bother.”

Slipping inside, the cats paused in a large entry hall, their paws sinking into a thick oriental rug. A tall, lush schefflera plant in a blue pot filled one corner. A narrow teak table stood against the opposite wall beside a rosewood bookcase holding small, carved boxes. A large, intricate basket stood on the floor before it, in an artful arrangement. The dining room was to their left past the schefflera plant, a formal room with deep blue walls and a pale, carved dining set. Beyond it they could glimpse the kitchen. The living room was straight ahead, blue walls, a high, raftered ceiling, and a bank of tall windows. To their right, past an open stairway that led to the second floor, was a hall and, Tansy said, two more bedrooms. Between these was the door of a locked closet; they could see the dead bolt running through the slit between the door and molding. But Frances had left the key in the lock.

“For the cleaning crew,” Tansy said. “She always did that, she wants it dusted. A huge closet, stacked with sealed boxes and long packages wrapped in brown paper. I used to play and hide in there-until once I got locked in. I was so scared. I cried for hours before Frances found me and let me out.” She padded into the living room, onto another deep Persian rug.

“Handmade,” Dulcie said, flipping up one corner with careful claws and examining the weave. “No machine made these.”

“How do you know such things?” Tansy said.

Dulcie showed her the uneven weave. “From library books,” she said. “Late at night when the library’s closed and no one’s there. And my housemate, Wilma, knows about antiques.” She admired the sofa and easy chairs, upholstered in tiny, intricate patterns with a primitive flavor. She examined the small carved tables. “Old and handmade,” she said, sniffing them. “And expensive.”

To Joe, the furnishings seemed nice enough but it was just a handsome room, large and comfortable. Beside him, Kit seemed nervous, peering out the windows, scanning the trees and bushes that flanked the dim patio. Tansy prowled among the furniture, sniffing longingly the scents she remembered. They prowled all the rooms looking for anything that seemed disturbed, for any space conspicuously empty, or for small indentations in a rug where some piece of furniture had been removed, looking for anything that Charlie might have missed. A photograph of Ed and Frances Becker stood on the dining room buffet, Ed tall and darkly handsome and smiling, Frances nearly as tall, a slim, gentle-looking woman with brown hair wound in a French twist. Frances was an accountant, and Ed worked for the California Department of Children’s Services.

“He doesn’t seem the type to be a children’s caseworker,” Dulcie said disapprovingly. “Not with those movie-star looks and that too charming smile-and his eye for other women.”

“Are all humans like that?” Tansy said.

“Like what?” said Joe, turning to look at her.

“Catting around,” said Tansy smartly. “Ed Becker and Theresa Chapman,” she said knowingly. “And Ed Becker and Rita Waterman, too, with her fancy jewelry. Do all humans do that?”

“Where did you get that expression?” said Joe sharply.

“I guess from humans,” Tansy said contritely.

Joe twitched a whisker and turned away to the hall. They had found nothing in the living room that seemed missing or out of place. He stood considering the door to the linen closet. Leaping up, he swung on the knob until he had turned it, and turned the key, and with a violent kick of his hind paws he swung the door open, revealing a deep space with shelves on three sides, all crowded with brown-paper packages and sealed boxes.

“What is all that?” Dulcie said.

“ Frances calls them accessories,” Tansy told her. “Rugs and vases and little tables. She loves to change the house all around, move all the furniture, lay out new rugs while she sends the others to the cleaners. Three times when I was here, she rearranged the whole place, even every vase, every book. He wouldn’t help her, he left the house until she was done.”

“But how did she…,” Dulcie began, then went silent, listening to a faraway sound from the hills, to the distant yodel of coyotes.

“You won’t go home tonight,” Kit told Tansy.

The scruffy little cat shrugged. “They’re far away, and the moon’s bright.”

Joe and Dulcie and Kit looked at the little mite, all thinking the same. If ever there was coyote bait, she was it. How could this small waif expect to escape a pack of hungry predators?

“They have pups,” Tansy said. “Can’t you hear them? The parents won’t wander when the pups are learning to hunt, they stand guard, I’ve watched them. Besides,” she said, “I won’t be alone, Sage will be waiting for me.” And she smiled that cocky smirk that seemed so out of place in the shy little cat.

“He’ll be mad, he was mad when I left him there by that house where they’re digging, where all the dirt is piled. But even so, he’ll wait for me,” she said with assurance.

Kit looked at her jealously. Did Tansy know Sage better than she did, even though she and Sage had grown up together? Pulling the closet door closed behind them, she followed Joe as he impatiently headed up the stairs to prowl the four upstairs bedrooms.

The cats found nothing on that floor that seemed out of order. They were thinking this was all a wild-goose chase when Joe caught that elusive scent again, that puzzling whiff that smelled like catmint.

He’d thought he smelled it in the Chapman house, but it was so faint he couldn’t be sure. And again in the Waterman house he wasn’t sure, with the lingering smell of the old dog and the scent of Rita’s perfume. They galloped back down the stairs and, having found nothing amiss, they left the Beckers’ house, slipping out into the night through the wrought-iron grid beside the front door. Sliding the glass closed, they headed for the Longley house.

“We can never get in there,” Tansy said. “I tried enough times, I even tried the attic.”

“But the Longleys have cats,” Dulcie said.

“Three,” said Tansy. “They’re kept inside when she’s gone. When she’s home, she opens a window, or sometimes the back slider for them. Then I could get in. But I was never sure when I could get out again.”

Eleen Longley taught at the local college. She was an attractive, lively woman, slim and with long, mousy, fine-textured hair that seemed to catch in every breeze. Earl was an architect; Ryan said his work was all right if he’d stick to the engineering aspects, if he didn’t try to design anything new and interesting. When Clyde suggested that her remark was sarcastic, she said, no, that was fact, that many architects weren’t talented at both creative design and engineering, and that was too bad.

“There has to be some way in,” Kit said stubbornly.

Tansy said, “If we can get in, we’ll know right away if something’s missing, I know where the treasures are. They have drawings by famous architects and books locked up in a big glass case and a whole cabinet of little glass domes with pictures inside. Pictures of humans doing things,” she said, turning her face away with embarrassment. “She calls it porn…porn…”

“Pornography?” Dulcie said. “A schoolteacher collects pornographic paperweights? Oh, my.”

“They talk about how much they’re worth. They talk a lot about money and what things are worth-when they’re not fighting. They fight a lot, and then the cats hide.”

“Come on,” Kit said, “I’ve seen a window at the back, once I watched a mockingbird pecking at the glass.” She took off around the side of the house, plunged into a bougainvillea vine, and clawed her way up between its swinging tendrils and sharp spikes. High up, she crawled out again onto a second-floor balcony that was not more than a foot wide. In the thin, shifting moonlight as clouds blew over, she was hardly visible among the balcony’s changing shadows. The others swarmed up behind her, under the decorative rail and onto the narrow ledge. Above them was a small bathroom window, maybe four feet wide but only a foot high, that made the cats smile. Joe and Dulcie and Kit had shimmied in through more than one small, high window, always feeling smug at discovering an entrance inaccessible to humans, which was innocently left unlocked.