Cat Telling Tales

18

Earlier, while the three cats were busy tossing Alain Bent’s house, down the hill among the smaller cottages Ryan’s sister Hanni had pulled her van into the drive of her own remodel. Billy Young sat in the cab beside her, feeling shy of the beautiful woman. Even in frayed jeans and a faded T-shirt she was elegant, her short white hair curling carelessly around the perfect oval of her smooth, tanned face, her dark lashes and brows making her hazel eyes look huge, her hands long and elegant, busy with a clanging of jade and silver bracelets.

Hanni glanced over because he was looking at her, and gave him a wink. Now, with her construction work nearly finished, she’d brought over a load of plants, and had picked Billy up at the ranch knowing he’d be glad of the work. She’d chosen pink and red tea trees, two mock orange bushes, and a dozen breath of heaven plants; their common names pleased her more than the Latin ones, which she never bothered to remember. All of these were showy, but so hardy they lent themselves well to a rental. She had wanted oleander with its bright red or pink blooms but the bush was poisonous, and that would rule out renting to a family with little, leaf-eating children.

The sky was low and threatening, and the wind chill. Getting out of the van, she pulled a warm cap over her short white hair, pulled on a ragged jacket to keep out the wind. Preoccupied with planning the garden, she was unaware she’d had a visitor during the night. While Billy unloaded the plants, trying to shelter them from the wind, she opened the garage—and stopped.

The back door was ajar, swinging back and forth in the wind, wasn’t locked as she’d left it. She remembered distinctly pushing in the simple thumb lock before she turned out the light. When she crossed the garage and stepped outside, she could see where the faceplate was bent and pried half off, fresh tool marks on the newly painted door and on the frame. She touched nothing. Stepping back inside, she stood quietly assessing the rest of the single-car garage to see what building supplies and tools might be missing.

The boxes of hardware she’d left stacked on the worktable were still there, and the cartons of new lighting fixtures that stood on the floor against the wall. Nothing seemed to be missing, but, in fact, there appeared to be more boxes than she’d left there, the pile was half again as large.

Examining the cartons, still not touching, she found seven that were unlabeled, no brand insignia or bar codes or shipping instructions. Reaching for a screwdriver, she chose the largest blank carton, pulled on her gloves, and pried the lid open—maybe that was dumb, she knew she should have handled it differently but she was too curious.

There were cleaning materials jumbled inside, a collection of solvents, ammonia, drain cleaner and, strangely, several drugstore bags containing cold medications: a combination that made chills creep up her back. She stood looking for only a minute, then closed the box and used her cell phone to call the department.

Coming up the hill she had seen the police stakeout still in place, two officers she knew, wearing water company uniforms, kneeling at the curb tinkering with a water meter, watching the meth cottage that had been raided. Now, as she talked with dispatcher Mabel Farthy, she returned to the driveway; she didn’t want to move around in the garage and maybe scuff through someone’s faint footprints, didn’t want to destroy anything more than she already had.

When she’d hung up she stood by her van looking in the side mirror, pretending to adjust her cap, watching the uphill reflection. She saw Officer Blake answer his phone, glance briefly down at her and then away again. The two officers didn’t leave their post, she assumed they’d been told to stay put.

But it wasn’t five minutes until a car appeared answering her call, not a black-and-white, but Detective Juana Davis’s pearl-colored Toyota slipping up the hill to pull into the drive behind her van. A black-and-white appeared behind Juana, pulling to the curb. As the detective stepped out, Hanni had to hide a little smile. Juana always looked so serious, her square face so forthright and no-nonsense, the severity of her dark uniform and black stockings and hard black shoes, black cap pulled down over her smooth hair, dark Latino eyes that could look as flat as a wall. Or could, with her friends or with an unfortunate victim, turn deeply kind and caring. Now, most likely, Juana would make Hanni’s cottage part of the crime scene, locking it into their investigation of the meth operation.

That was fine with her, if they rooted out this scum. At least four men had been seen by neighbors coming and going from the meth house, two Caucasians, one Asian, and the Latino man who was now taking his meals courtesy of Molena Point Jail. She joined Juana, pulled on the cotton booties Juana gave her, and followed the detective into the garage, where Juana first used an electronic device to scan for footprints. Behind them, a white police van slid to the curb, a vehicle big enough to haul away the cartons. Officers McFarland and Crowley got out, young McFarland with his clean good looks, Crowley towering over him, his big-boned body maybe six foot five, broad shoulders, the broad hands of a farmer.

Juana pulled off her booties and stepped out to talk with them, then the two men began to walk the perimeter of the house, moving with care, scanning for anything dropped, and for footprints. Hanni watched them, thinking about the drug dealers hiding their supplies in her garage. Had they thought that because she was Detective Garza’s niece, the cops wouldn’t search here? Maybe they thought she wouldn’t notice the extra boxes right away? Maybe they’d meant to haul them out again in a day or two, maybe they were setting up a new operation somewhere else. She didn’t like that some of these guys were still around, she’d made an investment in this neighborhood, and so had Ryan and Clyde, they wanted to see this area turned back again into the charming neighborhood it had once been.

She’d bought the house eight months ago, before the surrounding houses began to stand empty, and before that enterprising parolee, who was now in jail, had started his mom-and-pop meth business, before the neighbors began to wonder about the many different cars suddenly parked on that street, and so many strangers going in and out, and called in a report. Early on, though, she’d begun to see stray cats slipping around the empty houses, wary and hungry, and she’d put out food in unset traps, luring them in, getting them used to the open wire cages. So far, she’d trapped five, who were now in a temporary shelter, but she was still seeing strays.

This morning when she’d told Billy about the trapping operation, driving down from the ranch, he’d asked a lot of questions about how the trapping was done, about the people who were sheltering the cats. He was an animal-oriented kid, good with horses and dogs as well as the cats he’d taken in. Before they’d left the ranch, he’d shown her their new home—he was touchingly proud of his little brood and really happy with their cozy new accommodations.

But then when he’d gotten in the truck and they were headed down the hills, he was quiet again, and looked so sad. She knew he was grieving for his gran, but thought there was something more. “What is it?” she’d said softly.

He’d looked at her helplessly. He didn’t say anything for a long time, then, “I just hung up from talking with my aunt Esther. Why would she call me? How did she know I was there at the Harpers’?” He went silent, looking down at his hands, then looked up at her, his dark brown eyes questioning. “I don’t want to live with her,” he said angrily.

“She asked you to live with her?”

“No, she didn’t ask me. But what else could it be? She said she wanted to come up and see me. Why would she want to see me, she never has before. She never came to see Gran, even right after Mama died. She never came when Mama was alive, either, not that I know of.”

“You must see her around the village?”

He nodded. “She acts like she doesn’t know me, never speaks to me or looks at me.”

“This morning, did she say anything else?”

“No, but she had something on her mind. She asked about the fire, asked if everything was gone, if we’d saved anything.” He was quiet, then, “She sounded real caring and friendly. She said twice that she’d be coming up to see me.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I couldn’t talk any more, I had to go to work, that my ride was waiting, and I hung up,” Billy said, his cheeks coloring.

Hanni laughed.

Billy looked at her, frowning. “Can she make me live with her? She is my aunt. Does she have some kind of . . . claim? Some legal way to make me live there? Why would she want me? Except to work, maybe, like in the old days when kids were adopted out to do farm work. But people don’t do that anymore.”

Hanni reached over, took his hand. “You see that on TV?”

“We don’t have TV. I read it.”

She smiled. “Esther won’t do that, this isn’t the eighteen hundreds. Max Harper wouldn’t let her do that.”

“If I don’t go there, will I have to go to a foster home?”

“What do you want to do?”

“I can take care of myself.” But then he looked at her shyly. “What I really want?”

She nodded.

“I want to stay with the Harpers.”

“And they want you there,” she said. “They both do. Max knows a few people,” she said lightly, “he has a little pull.” She smiled wickedly, gave him a wink that made him blush. “I know enough dirt myself about some of the folks working in Children’s Services, enough to pull a few strings.”

Billy looked at her, surprised, and then laughed. “Can you do that?”

“Try me.”

He looked as if he wanted to hug her, and then as if he wanted ask something more. Instead he looked away, out at the dropping hills and the village roofs below. And that was where they left it, with Billy’s worries eased, but Hanni wondering just what Esther Fowler had wanted.

The three cats were crowded together on the roof of the house across the street from Hanni’s, shivering in the cold; the wet wind was dying now, giving way to colder, misty rain. They were watching Officers McFarland and Crowley load seven large cartons from Hanni’s garage into the back of the police van, when Dulcie let out a low hunting cry and took off across the roofs where a thin figure was slipping away behind a sagging fence. Joe and Kit saw little more than a shadow, an impression of jeans and faded T-shirt. Emmylou? Dulcie meant not to lose her again; she’d followed her, lost her twice, seen her trying to get into Alain Bent’s house, and then lost her yet again. Now there she was appearing suddenly out of nowhere, but then gone again. She glanced back to see Joe following, pushed along by a last gust of wind, but behind him, Kit had paused.

Lifting her paw uncertainly, Kit watched Joe and Dulcie race away in pursuit of the hurrying shadow, then turned to watch the interesting activity around Hanni’s cottage, and she shivered with indecision. But she was caught even more powerfully in her own agenda. Leaving all the human excitement to play out below her, she spun around and streaked down the dropping rooftops for the center of the village, her head full of the medieval painting that so fit Misto’s stories, full of lost centuries and ancient dreams, and she raced away to tell the old tomcat about the wonderful mural.

It was too early for the ferals’ feeding time, but maybe he’d be there, the day was growing cold and dark and maybe John Firetti would feed early. She was only vaguely aware that something else, besides those ancient times, might be drawing her so powerfully; she raced down across the roofs like a wild thing, her own urgency startling and puzzling her.

Joe caught up with Dulcie two blocks above the Damens’ cottage, as she paused to look over the roof’s edge down into a scrappy yard: brown earth, bare beneath overhanging branches, the narrow house made of rough brown boards, an old house, dour and neglected. “Emmylou vanished in there,” Dulcie said. “Maybe she broke in, I heard glass break.”

He moved close to her, in the cold drizzle. “Could she mean to camp in there? Break into a stranger’s house to get out of the cold? Is that what she was doing, all along, poking around up here, looking for the best empty house to crash in?” The dark brown house was sheltered from its neighbors, jammed in between two huge cypress trees, their heavy branches sweeping the roof like the tails of giant beasts. A tentlike acacia stood at the back, hiding the house behind. The yard itself was thick with broken cypress branches fallen across the cracked cement walk. Backing down a rough trunk, they paused among the browning cypress fronds that were wet now in the mist. On the little cement porch, a stack of wet newspapers lay moldering. Lace curtains, limp and gray, hung crookedly over the windows. The cats could just detect Emmylou’s trail, overridden by the fresh scent of a man, a nervous smell and fearful.

“Was that a man I saw?” Dulcie whispered. “So thin and tall, so like Emmylou?” They followed his scent in silence, watching the shadows—and nearly plowed into him standing among the multiple trunks of a spreading cypress, his clothes as dark as the rough branches, his face in shadow; they leaped away, startled, then, gathering their wits, they crouched dumb and innocent, looking up at him.

He was dressed as a gardener, but he didn’t have a gardener’s tan, his face was pasty white. Slim, dark jeans, heavy shoes, faded brown T-shirt, and, slung low on his thin hips, a leather carpenter’s belt holding clippers and gardening tools, and who knew what else? When he turned to look at them, his eyes were so cold that the two cats slipped away again, frightened.

When they glanced back, he hadn’t moved. But he was paying no attention to them, he stood watching, down the hill, the activity around Hanni’s remodel, watching the cops and Detective Davis. “Could he be from the meth house?” Dulcie whispered. “One of the men they missed, who disappeared before they raided it?”

“One way to find out,” Joe said softly. “Why don’t you slip on up to the roofs and keep an eye on him?”

Dulcie smiled and vanished, scrambling up to the shingles, as Joe streaked down through the tangled yards for the Damens’ cottage, to find a phone. He was headed for the open front door when he saw Clyde in the backyard and veered in that direction, leaping to Clyde’s shoulder.

It took only a minute, Joe clinging to Clyde’s jacket, his whiskers tickling Clyde’s ear as Clyde made the call. They listened to Mabel pass his message on as, out in front, McFarland answered her call. At once, the two officers stopped loading the van and moved away to vanish among the wooded yards. Listening to their soft, fast footfalls as they ran, then a dry scraping and sliding as if their quarry was climbing a fence, Joe leaped from Clyde’s shoulder to the roof, to see better. Yes, there went Dulcie racing across the roofs, looking down, watching them. He sped to join her, but soon she lost the runner between the houses.

Together they watched Crowley circle through the trees to the left while McFarland disappeared to the right. Ahead, a branch snapped. McFarland shouted, dove in among the trees behind the brown cottage; they heard a scuffle, then McFarland’s sharp command.

The young officer came out marching the erstwhile gardener ahead of him, hands cuffed behind him. Crowley joined him, moving close to the man, carrying the tool belt. Behind them in the cottage the curtain twitched aside and a figure appeared, watching them, watching the prisoner. McFarland had his back to the window, he didn’t see Emmylou—until some inexplicable cop instinct made him turn, and look back.

They halted their prisoner, and moved him away from the window. Crowley took a frowning look at her, and moved up the three cement steps. Standing to the side of the door, he knocked.

There was a long pause. When he knocked again, Emmylou eased the door open, stood looking at the officers, looking at the handcuffed prisoner, at his pale, angry face; and she took a step back. Crowley towered over her, made tall Emmylou Warren look as petite as a doll by comparison.

“Do you live here?”

She nodded, then shook her head.

“Could you tell us your name?” By the look on his face, he knew who she was. When she didn’t reply, he said, “You’re Emmylou Warren?”

She stood with her veined hands loose at her sides, her wrinkled face impassive but her jaw set tight, a little muscle twitching. “It isn’t my house, it belongs to a friend. She’s . . . I don’t know where she is. You can see the mail’s piled up.” She nodded toward the mailbox at the curb, its door open, the mail so jammed inside that half of it stuck out. She glanced toward the soggy newspapers littering the porch. “I’ve been up here several times. When I saw she was gone, I started coming to feed her cats, but now they’ve disappeared, too. I’m worried about her, and I’m worried for them. She always leaves the key, tells me if she’s going away. But it isn’t there, and at last, today, I broke in.” She looked at Crowley pleadingly. “I’m afraid something’s happened to her. Someone’s been in here, they’ve made a terrible mess.”

“Does she have any family near? Have you tried calling them?”

Emmylou shook her head. “No one. No one I can call, no one who’d come. Only her brother, and he never comes up here, he’s . . . He calls himself a vagabond.”

“Homeless?” Crowley said.

She nodded.

“Where does he hang out?”

“Up and down the coast.

“With bad weather on the way,” Crowley said, “might he have come here, wanted a place to crash? Found her gone, and broke in?”

She shook her head. “It doesn’t look like that, Birely wouldn’t make that mess, he wouldn’t trash the place. He shows up in the village a couple times a year. When she worked bagging groceries, he’d meet her out in front of the market, she’d give him money, buy him some food. When he’s in town, he camps down by the river with the other homeless, or, in cold weather like this, under the Valley Road bridge. Bridge is just behind the market where we both worked, they’d meet there, she’d see him a few times then he’d be gone again.”

“Do you think she’d have gone off with him?”

“She’d never do that, she hated the way he lived. Sammie’s a homebody, she loves her home. I don’t understand where she’s gone.”

“Would he have harmed her?”

She looked intently at Crowley. “No, not Birely. He’s stable enough, he’s not a nutcase, he just likes that life, no responsibility. I’ve met him a couple of times, and the way she talks about him . . . He calls himself a vagabond, a hobo, a wanderer. He’s a happy man, and gentle. No,” she said, “he would never hurt her, he loves his sister.” She frowned. “It isn’t like her to leave the village without telling me, so I could feed the cats. She didn’t know I’d been evicted but she knows my old car; if she’d wanted me, she’d have found me.”

“You want to file a missing persons report? You can do that when you come in for fingerprinting.” At her uncertain look, he said, “You’ll have to come in, Ms. Warren. We need your prints in the investigation of the fire and of Hesmerra Young’s death. When you delay, you’re holding up a murder investigation.”

She looked at him blankly.

“Hesmerra was your friend?”

“Yes, she was.”

“There’s a possibility she didn’t die naturally.” Emmylou was silent, looking at him, gripping the door frame. He said, “You could help her by giving us your prints. You want to ride down to the station with us? I can bring you back to your car.”

From the roof, the cats watched the exchange, Dulcie’s ears sharply forward, the tip of her tail twitching as Emmylou backed away from the two officers. The cats looked at each other, puzzled. Surely Emmylou hadn’t poisoned Hesmerra, they didn’t like to think that, though they had no real cause to believe otherwise. “I’ll come to the station on my own,” she said stiffly. She seemed not to know the prisoner, he might have been a tree standing there in handcuffs for all the attention she paid him. The officers didn’t question her about him, nor question him about Emmylou. Maybe they were leaving that up to one of the detectives, who would want to do the questioning in their own way.

Emmylou said, “I’m parked down the block, around the corner.” She stepped on out, carefully pulled the door closed, latched it as best she could despite the way she’d pried the lock loose. It looked, Joe thought, much like the jimmied lock on Hanni’s garage door. Coming down the three steps, she walked past the officers and their prisoner with her head high, and moved on down the street. She was just approaching Hanni’s cottage when Billy looked up from the garden, saw her, and the two officers just behind her with their cuffed prisoner. The boy went still, looking, then he raced to Emmylou and threw his arms around her.