Cat Telling Tales

11

When John Firetti left the veterinary clinic at midmorning, crossing the garden to his own small cottage to retrieve some paperwork, he stepped through the doorway into the empty house and paused. He listened, puzzled, to the faint echo of voices coming from his study.

Mary’s car was gone; he knew she’d left early to work with the cat rescue group setting up another shelter. No one else lived with them, and this wasn’t cleaning day, the housekeeper’s car wasn’t in the drive. He could hear nothing that sounded like burglars, no stealthy sliding of drawers or wrenching open of locks, just soft voices, one of them female, and John smiled. Was Misto entertaining guests? Pausing beside the fireplace, he listened.

Sunlight shone in through the big living room windows onto the two flowered couches and glinted across the coffee table that was littered with flyers and veterinary magazines and decorated with paw prints etched into a faint coat of dust. Beyond the fireplace, through the door to his study, he could see the pale, cool light of his computer screen. Silently he approached, looking in.

Three furry backs were silhouetted against the screen’s glow. Three pairs of upright ears, one pair orange, one pair tortoiseshell, and Dulcie’s dark tabby ears. Three tails hanging over, swishing in unison like metronomes for an unheard symphony. The attention of all three cats was fixed on the picture of a red tabby tomcat. But as John approached, they started, looked around at him like children caught at a forbidden prank—and Misto’s yellow eyes reflected such a strange mix of excitement and pain that John leaned down for a better look.

The cat on the screen was younger than Misto, but with a broad head and with Misto’s same long, bony face. The same wide-set ears, the same wide, curving stripes, but in shades of rusty red. The swirl mark on his left shoulder was startlingly like Misto’s own. Sitting down in the desk chair, John peered around the cats to read the accompanying article.

Did Nursing Home Cat Die in Fire?

The remarkable red tabby cat who began, on his own, to visit infirm patients at Green Meadows Nursing Home nearly a year ago has not been seen since a midnight fire burned the complex to the ground. “We’re terribly afraid he died in the fire,” said nursing supervisor Jamey Small. “We haven’t seen him since three hours before the fire broke out, since the alarms went off and we began to evacuate the patients. He came to us as a stray, but he was a most unusual cat. He not only spent nearly every waking moment with the patients, he always favored the most depressed and lonely among them, or the sickest. He would stay with a very ill patient for hours, snuggled close. He would leave for only a few minutes, to eat or drink or visit one of the sandboxes we provided, then he’d hop back on the bed again, purring and rolling over. He gave affection, and enjoyed whatever affection the patient was able to give back. Many of his charges began to sit up in their beds, to smile and talk with the nurses for the first time in months, even to enjoy their meals again.”

Even after all the patients were evacuated to safety, to temporary quarters in nearby motels, no one had found Buddy. The night of the fire, which was caused by a faulty furnace in the basement of the building, off-duty personnel searched the rest of the night and into the next morning, searched all over the grounds and in the surrounding neighborhoods, but they found no sign of him.

“If he’s been taken in by a nearby family,” Small said, “we would very much like to know that he’s safe. The nursing staff and the attending doctors have raised a reward of two thousand dollars for information leading to Buddy’s return. If he was injured in the fire, we will be happy to repay all his veterinary bills, in order to have him back safe. Buddy is part of our family, he’s a remarkable cat, our patients miss him and we miss him, we all pray that he is alive and has not been harmed.”

“This is Pan?” John said, stroking Misto. “Your son, Pan?”

The old cat twitched an ear, and touched the picture with a soft paw. “He’s too quick to get trapped in a fire—maybe it was Pan who set off the alarm, alerted them at the first smell of smoke, but then he would have beat it out of there.” Misto’s eyes were filled with a stubborn hope, and John, watching him, prayed that he was right.

When Dulcie scrolled down the screen, two more pictures of Pan appeared, sharing the beds of other patients. In one shot he was curled up against a woman’s shoulder, in the other an old man sat up in bed, his arm around the red tomcat, both looking into the camera, the cat’s amber eyes bright, his smile laced with humor. Kit, too, lifted a paw to the screen, to touch the young tom’s nose. She looked at the picture a long time, her fluffy tail twitching—as it did when she was deep in thought or was deeply enchanted.

But while John Firetti and the three cats browsed online searching for clues to the lost Pan, down at the Damen household Clyde had lit a fire on the hearth, and had left the living room to Max Harper and Debbie. The big room was no longer done in black and brown African patterns, which Hanni’s studio had created for Clyde in his bachelor days. That primitive mood had given way to sunny yellow walls, flowered linen covers on the couch and chairs and, over the couch, an arrangement of Charlie Harper’s drawings, portraits of Joe, Rock, Dulcie, Kit, and Snowball, all handsomely framed. Three tall schefflera plants softened the corners of the room, and over the mantel was a Charlie Harper etching of Dulcie and Joe and Kit hunting through the tall grass of the Molena Point hills. The white linen draperies were new and fresh, the wood floors gleaming. The only furnishing left over from earlier days was Joe Grey’s faded, claw-shredded, fur-matted easy chair, and even its fate was under negotiation. Joe said if his chair went to Goodwill, he went with it. Ryan had proposed a washable linen cover, which, with reservations, he was considering—he wasn’t fond of the smell of laundry soap.

Debbie sat at one end of the couch, Max across from her in Clyde’s reading chair. Joe, padding into the room, leaped into his own chair and curled up for a nap, as if he was quite alone in the room; he soon let himself snore a little, his head tucked under, his closed eyes slitted open just enough to watch Debbie’s reaction as Max questioned her. The chief started out friendly enough, and low-key; he told her how sorry he was about Hesmerra’s death, and asked gently when she had last seen her mother.

“I didn’t see her much,” Debbie said, pretending to wipe at a tear, a gesture Joe thought singularly unconvincing.

“A few months, would you say?”

Debbie shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Do you come down during the winter months, when Erik’s working down here?”

“I haven’t the last few years. Erik was . . . He’s always busy with work. I have the children to care for . . . Tessa’s so little, she takes up a lot of time. And Vinnie’s in school. I don’t like to pull her out, move her back and forth between schools, that’s very unsettling for a child.” My, Joe thought, the ever-caring mother. This, from a woman who patronizes her littlest child until she cries. “It’s bad enough,” Debbie said, “that she has to change schools now. But now, of course, I have no choice. We couldn’t stay in Eugene, I have no money at all.”

“The children are how old?” Max asked.

“Vinnie’s twelve, Tessa nearly five.” She looked uncomfortably away, causing Joe to wonder about the seven-year gap between the two little girls. Family planning? he wondered. Or long-standing marital troubles?

“If you didn’t come down with Erik,” Max said, “you must at least have talked with your mother on the phone, or written to her?”

“She didn’t have a phone. I wrote to her sometimes,” Debbie said evasively. “We weren’t . . . We had differences,” she said shortly. “I didn’t see her much.”

“You want to tell me what that was about?”

“She . . . We didn’t see eye to eye. I don’t understand why you’re asking me all this. Is this really necessary?”

Max said, “What, exactly, was the problem between you?”

Debbie sighed. “For one thing, that boy she’s raising. My dead sister’s child. My mother isn’t . . . wasn’t fit to raise a child, with her drinking. When the child was born, I told her she should take it to Child Welfare, where he could be adopted.”

“What about his father? Couldn’t he have taken Billy?”

“We have no idea who the father was. Some boy from her high school, too young and irresponsible anyway to take care of a family. Greta would never say who he was, only that his family refused to help.”

“And your other sister, Esther? She didn’t want Billy?”

“Esther didn’t want children,” she said shortly. Joe, listening to Max bait her, ask her questions to which he already knew the answers, wondered where this was going. Did he think Debbie was involved in Hesmerra’s death? Or was he, indeed, simply gathering background information?

“You were sixteen when you married Erik Kraft? Wasn’t that pretty young, too?”

“But we got married, we didn’t just . . .” Again she sighed, as if losing patience with his lack of insight. “I wanted out of there, I didn’t like living with my mother, I didn’t like her drinking. All right?”

“She was drinking then?”

“Not as much as now, I’ve heard. Not every day. She worked in an office then, some kind of clerk. Some weekends she’d go on a tear, then call in sick on Monday. We were living up in the hills above the village, renting a backyard guesthouse. My mother’s a loud, mean drunk. She yells and cries. I’m surprised they didn’t kick us out. Esther and Greta and I would get out of the house, go our separate ways. When I left to get married, she and Greta moved to that shack. Esther was already married and gone. What does this have to do with the fire and with my mother’s death?”

“Just trying to get a picture of her situation,” Max said quietly. “Did your mother try to get financial help from the state or county to raise the child?”

“I don’t know. Probably not. Who would give her help when she lived in that shack, and the way she drank? They’d just take the kid away from her. No, she would never apply for help, she didn’t like government do-gooders.”

“Did Hesmerra drink after the baby came?”

“I don’t know, I wasn’t there. Once in a while, I talked with my sister Esther. She said Mother was about the same.”

“You didn’t talk with Esther often.”

“She and I had a blowup. These questions have nothing to do with my mother.”

“They help to give me a picture of your mother’s life,” Max said, “to understand what might have happened.”

“What’s to understand? She got drunk and burned the house down. How did the fire start?”

“Fire investigators determined she left a skillet on the stove, with the burner on high. The grease in the pan got too hot, flamed up. Flames ignited the wall and then the ceiling. The house went up like tinder.”

Debbie’s face drained of color. But, strangely, her hands lay relaxed in her lap. Joe watched Tessa creep in and slip behind the couch. Vinnie appeared behind her, as if not to be left out. She found a place on the floor beneath a schefflera plant, sat there silent for once. Was Vinnie, too, intimidated by the law? Joe wondered, amused.

“It was about twelve years ago that you and Erik first separated?” Max asked. “That you left the village and moved up to your uncle’s, in Eugene?”

“Yes, but first I took what little money Erik gave me, and some I’d stashed, and enrolled for a summer semester at San Francisco Art Institute. Moved into the cheapest room I could find. I hardly had enough for food and for paper and paint. I don’t know, I thought it would lead somewhere, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I just knew I had to get away.

“Halfway through the semester, I found out I was pregnant,” she said bitterly. “When school was out, I moved up to my uncle’s—just before Vinnie was born.”

“And then some five years later you and Erik got back together?”

“Yes, but what does—”

“That’s when you left your uncle’s farm, and Erik rented the house in Eugene?”

She shifted her position on the couch, glancing impatiently toward the door. “I still don’t see what this has to do with my mother.”

“Just trying to get the whole picture,” Max repeated. “There’s some question about the cause of her death. In the investigation of a murder, we need to have some sense of the victim’s family as well as of her own life.”

Debbie stared at him. “A murder? Someone killed her? Someone set that fire and . . .” Her hands went to her face. “Someone burned . . . ?”

“She was dead before the fire started,” Max said. “But possibly not from natural causes.”

Debbie’s brown eyes remained fixed on Max. Joe tried to read her, as Max was reading her, but the chief was more skilled at this stuff. At first she had been too calm, too cool. Now, was her shock and distress genuine, or a good act?

Max said, “We don’t have many answers yet. I’m sorry to press you, but can we go back in time again, for a moment? Try to bring me up to speed?”

Debbie nodded, mute and still.

“When you and Erik moved into the Eugene house, he worked in that office during the summer months, came down to the Molena Point office for the winter, while you and the children remained in Eugene?”

“Yes. Tessa was only a baby.”

“And that is still the arrangement?”

“Until last fall, when he filed for divorce,” she said. “September. He sent child support money until just after Christmas, then the checks stopped. A month ago he stopped paying the rent, too. The landlord said we had to get out. I told him we had nowhere to go, and no money. I told him Erik took everything, but he didn’t care, all he wanted was money. I had to close out my household account, it was down to nothing. We have nothing.”

Nothing, Joe thought, but the two thousand bucks tucked away in your suitcase.

“Since you arrived in the village,” Max said, “have you been in touch with Erik? Or with Esther and Perry Fowler? Have you asked them for help in getting resettled?”

Joe knew Perry Fowler, the older of the two partners. You’d see him around the village dressed in tennis clothes, sometimes Fowler and Erik together. He was tall and slim like Erik but strangely pale despite the fact that he must be outdoors a lot. Pale hair, whitish skin, pale blue eyes, a hesitant way of moving. Joe had never seen Fowler’s wife headed for the tennis courts; he guessed Esther wasn’t interested in the game. He wondered what kind of tennis player Fowler was, as uncertain as he seemed.

“Erik doesn’t know I’m here. I don’t want him to know, so of course I haven’t contacted Perry, either. He’d be sure to tell Erik.” She looked at Harper pleadingly. “Erik would knock me around for coming here where he works. He doesn’t want people to know he left me. He won’t think I’d come here, this is the last place he’ll look. He’ll think I headed north, away from California. Maybe just keep going until I found a job.”

“How long did it take you to drive down from Eugene?” The chief knew she’d moved out of the rented house ten days ago; he’d called Eugene just after the autopsy, Charlie had told Ryan that. Apparently, while Debbie had left the landlord’s furniture intact, she’d taken everything else, down to the curtain rods, the towel racks, and the lightbulbs. Joe wondered if she’d left that little lightbulb in the refrigerator. He watched her fidgeting in her chair, her hands busy now, moving nervously, and then going rigid as she tried to keep them still. Max said, again, “The trip down from Eugene took you how long?”

“I . . . about a week and a half, I guess. We camped along the way. I needed time to think, I didn’t know what I was going to do, I needed time to work out a plan. I didn’t think he’d look for me in the campgrounds. I wouldn’t normally camp, I don’t like the dirt and the inconvenience.”

“It takes money, even to camp.”

“We brought what food we had in the cupboards, canned food, crackers. Ryan and her sister Hanni are the only friends I have, we had enough to get here, to them. I need to think of some way to make a living, some kind of job where I can take care of the kids, I don’t want to impose on Ryan any longer than I have to.”

Joe rolled over in his chair, hiding a silent cat laugh.

Max said, “If he left you, Debbie, why would he look for you at all? Why would he care where you went?”

Debbie sighed again. “He might think I’d make trouble. He . . . he was into some real estate scams, some deals he made in Eugene. If he found out I knew about them, he’d want to hush me up, he’d come looking for me.” She pulled up the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “The purple is faded now, there were always bruises. That scar . . . he cut me with a paring knife, just before he left.” The scar on her inner forearm was maybe four inches long. “That wasn’t the first time. When he was in Eugene, and even when he wasn’t, I was afraid to run away, I knew he’d come after me. I was glad when he left. Maybe he doesn’t suspect what I know. But,” she said tremulously, “I can’t be sure of that.”

“You want to tell me about the scams?”

“I . . . would really rather talk about it later,” she said, glancing at Vinnie. “That can’t have anything to do with my mother.”

“Did Erik get along well with your mother? Did he ever visit her?”

“I don’t know why he would. They’d get along all right, I guess, if he ever saw her. But why would he bother with her?”

“Could Hesmerra have known about his real estate deals?”

“How could she possibly know something like that? Why would she care?”

“How did you know about the deals?” Max said. “Did you see contracts, sales agreements?”

“That would take a while to explain. Ryan’s waiting for me,” she said, “to take me up to her cottage.”

Max rose. “We can talk about this another time,” he said easily. “Meanwhile, we’d like you to stop by the station, get your fingerprints on file.”

“What for? I’m not being investigated. Why would you need my fingerprints?”

“We need family prints to eliminate from others we might find at the scene.”

“It’s years since I went there, before Greta’s child was born. Whatever prints I might have left wouldn’t still be there.”

“You’re family,” Max said. “It’s customary. We’ll need Billy’s prints, of course, and Esther’s, as well as yours.”

When Debbie rose, Vinnie leaped up and grabbed her around the legs. Max looked at the child a moment, then let himself out the front door. Debbie stared after him, then turned away toward the guest room, dragging Vinnie. The child acted as if Debbie was private property, to push and pull as she chose. Just as, Joe thought, Debbie seemed to view those people around her, who might be useful.

Alone in the living room, except for little Tessa, behind the couch, a number of questions nudged Joe. The more he saw of Debbie Kraft, the less he liked her. He wondered what had happened to the family cat. Had Pan, the night of the fire, tried to return to the Krafts’ rented house? If he’d shown up there, maybe injured from the fire, would Debbie have chased him away? Run him off, even if he needed help? She’d already dismissed the young tom as no more than a discarded toy: a cat her little girl loved, a cat who was quite possibly smarter, and surely more decent, than the woman he had come to for shelter.