Cat Telling Tales

20

The three visitors to Max Harper’s office sat lined up on the leather couch as rigid as three schoolkids facing an unsmiling principal. Square and pudgy Norine Sutherland and her matching daughter. And the small, tight-looking man of the house. Their uncertainty out at the front desk seemed to have vanished. Norine had told Mabel, “We weren’t sure where to come, where to report a possible missing person. To the police? To the county sheriff? Or to some welfare agency? Well, if there is anything to report, if Alain really is missing. Officially, you know. Do you take missing person reports? Someone we think is missing?”

But now that they had an audience with the chief, as they’d been angling for, the two women were bolder. Now they sat sizing Max up, seeming to assume that he would take immediate action.

Delbert, on the other hand, still looked apologetic, uncertain whether they should be there at all, bothering the police with their family dilemma. Perhaps only Joe and Dulcie, crouched out of sight beneath the credenza, caught the sharpening of Max’s attention at the mention of Alain Bent, a tightening of his jaw that the cats knew well.

“Alain doesn’t answer her phone nor our messages,” Norine said, “we haven’t spoken with her for months, she never answers her calls. She used to have an answering machine. Maybe it’s full. We’ve been up to her house three times since we arrived in town, but no one is ever there. We thought we had a key for emergencies, but it doesn’t work. We drove down from Redding because we didn’t know what else to do, we’re worried about her. The house looks cared for, the walks have been swept, we’ve found no mail in the box, no newspapers on the drive, but still the place seems deserted. We looked in the windows. No magazines or mail left about, the beds are neatly made, no clothes thrown across a chair the way Alain leaves them. You can’t see into the kitchen from the ground but you can glimpse her desk through the bedroom slider, and it looks so neat. Usually there are stacks of papers, flyers, files. The computer’s there, at least the monitor is, but not her laptop. Well, wherever she is, I guess she has that with her.” The woman was rambling, but the picture she painted was familiar enough to the cats. The house, when they’d prowled there, had indeed looked neat and deserted. Now, in their shadowed lair beneath the credenza, both Joe and Dulcie wondered if they had missed something, some clue to Alain’s supposed disappearance. Maybe, Dulcie thought, if Alain was Erik’s lover, she was off in the Bahamas waiting for him, planning on a romantic vacation they didn’t care to advertise.

“You’ve had no contact with Alain at all?” Max said. “Since what date?”

“That’s the strange part, that’s what makes us so uncertain,” Norine said. “She has been in touch, we’ve e-mailed back and forth, and that’s what we don’t understand. We told her we need to talk with her by phone. There’s some family business we need to discuss, and I’m never sure how private these electronic messages are. We asked her to please call or give us a number where we can reach her, but she keeps making excuses. At first she said she was on the East Coast, that she’ll be back soon and will call us then. Then she said she’d been delayed, that some business had come up, but she’ll call soon. She could call from the East Coast, what’s the problem with that? This has gone on and on. We can’t understand why she’s so evasive. We’re beginning to wonder if those messages are from Alain at all.

“Anyone,” Norine said, “could be sending them, if they had her password. I know it sounds paranoid, but this has gone on too long. A month ago when we called her office, they said she’d moved away. But she didn’t tell us that, she didn’t say anything like that to us. If she’s moved, why on earth wouldn’t she say so?

“When we identified ourselves as family, and asked for her new address, they gave us my parents’ address. Well, she’s not there. They say they haven’t heard from her at all, and one of the owners of Kraft Realty, Mr. Perry Fowler, said since she moved months ago they’re directing what personal mail they get to a post office box in our own town. He said it hadn’t been returned, so she must be getting it, but that doesn’t make sense. He was very short with us, as if he really didn’t have time for our silly questions.”

Betty Rails said, “The post office won’t tell us anything. They won’t say whether there’s any mail in her box, won’t even say whether she has a box, won’t tell us whether she’s picked up any mail. We went to our local police but they wouldn’t help us. They said we’d have to come here, because she lived here.” The two women looked helplessly at Max, all their early confrontation gone, only uncertainty remaining. They looked up when Detective Davis appeared in the doorway.

Max nodded to Davis. She stepped in and laid a piece of paper on his desk, glancing briefly at the trio, a quick assessment, like the flash of a fast camera. The cats noticed she was limping again, her bad knee giving her trouble. She’d talked about surgery, but kept putting it off, said she didn’t have time. Max read what appeared to be a short note, and a little smile touched his face. “Go ahead and interview her, Juana. She find a place to live?”

Juana shook her head. “Still on the streets. She said she was arranging to stay with a friend.” She shrugged, gestured dismissively, and moved away up the hall toward the front desk to fetch Emmylou, to take her on back to her office. Beneath the credenza, Dulcie gave Joe a questioning look. When he twitched an ear, she bellied out under the side rail and melted into the hall behind Juana, vanishing beneath Max’s line of vision. It was little indiscretions such as Max seeing them suddenly veer off to follow a witness that could prompt the chief to study them with undue attention. Joe heard the faintest sliding of paws on the hard floor as his lady streaked into Juana’s office.

Max was saying, “If you want to sign a missing persons report, we’ll talk with Kraft Realty. It’s possible, if she’s moved, that the house is on the market, and that they have a current key. If so, we might get a court order and have a look.”

“We couldn’t find an ad in the paper that it’s for sale,” Norine said, “and there’s no sign in the yard.”

“Sometimes a sale isn’t advertised,” Max said, “a silent sale, handled strictly within the office, for any number of reasons.”

But Joe was thinking, Maybe she doesn’t like these relatives, maybe she doesn’t want to be in touch. Except he thought there was more to Alain’s disappearance than that, there were too many disappearances all at once. Was Erik Kraft down in southern California, soon to head off on vacation? Where was Alain, and, for that matter, where was Emmylou’s friend Sammie, who lived not a block down the hill from Alain? Three absences, was that a coincidence? More like the first odd pieces of a puzzle just short of making sense, just short of forming a coherent picture.

High on the cliff above the shore Kit sat alone, a small tortoiseshell silhouette against the gathering evening, her fur damp and cold, her ears down in the icy gusts. Below her on the shore, despite the cold drizzle, the two tomcats strolled side by side looking deeply content at their sudden reunion. Their voices were drowned by the breakers and the wind, their pawprints quickly filled with water behind them as the tide crept in. Kit, watching them, felt as happy and proprietary as if she’d arranged their meeting all by herself, as if it was all her doing that had brought father and son together.

Well, she had guided Pan the last quarter mile of his vast journey, had escorted him along the cliff top until he’d seen, below, the feral band gathered around the little dock at their supper dishes. She had watched Pan race down the cliff in three long leaps, a red blur plowing in among the startled strays, scattering the shy ones, alarming the bold ones into hisses and raised claws. He had plunged at Misto, nearly knocking him down—and hadn’t the old yellow tomcat exploded into kittenish cavorting at the sight of his grown son. The two had erupted into a wild race that sent them streaking up the cliff again and down beneath the dock, scattering the ferals, and both of them talking up a storm, Where did you come from, how did you get here, how long was your journey, how did you know where to find me . . . ? On and on until Kit had rolled over, laughing.

Kit knew Mary Firetti watched them from the cliff above, silent and entranced. She had come tonight instead of John, loaded down with a bag of kibble and water bottles. She had fed the ferals, was leaving when she caught sight of Pan. She froze to see a new cat trotting beside Kit, had sat down at the edge of the cliff nearly hidden in the tall grass. She’d remained as still as a stone, watching the meeting of father and son. Now, as the two toms raced to the end of the dock, their voices drowned by the waves and by the fitful gusts, Kit and Mary watched them, filled with a giddy joy at their atartling reunion.

When Kit had first met Misto some two months earlier, the old yellow cat had told her he’d longed for three things. Three wishes, like a fairy tale, Kit thought. Misto had arrived in Molena Point just before Christmas, traveling all alone, paw weary from a journey that had taken many months, traveling down the Oregon coast and then the California coast hoping to find his kittenhood home. That was the first wish, to return where he was born, to find a safe haven there. That wish had been granted when John and Mary Firetti begged Misto to live with them.

The next wish had gone unfulfilled until this very moment, was answered when Pan appeared, as if by magic, right out of the old cat’s dreams.

Now only the third wish remained. But this last desire would remain a dream, a longing as ephemeral as the wind itself. No cat could return to his past lives, no cat could go back to times and places he might indeed remember, to lives long since gone to dust. Misto could not step back again into some fabulous past, he could only bring those times alive by painting the stories for others.

Now as dusk pushed in more willfully, Mary rose from the grass, brushing off her jeans. When Misto led Pan up the cliff to greet her, Kit hung back, feeling suddenly out of place. Watching father and son so happy, watching Mary’s quiet joy in them, she felt shy and uncertain, and she turned away. She was headed away for home and her own family, was trotting away through the blowing grass when Pan came racing after her, “Come with us, Kit.” And Misto behind him, “Come with us.”

Kit fidgeted. “Lucinda and Pedric are waiting. Lucinda said—”

Mary caught up with them. She didn’t argue, she picked Kit up, cuddling her over her shoulder. “I’ll call her, maybe they’ll come to supper.” And, carrying Kit, she headed for the van. Oh, my, Kit thought, glancing at Pan shyly now as they all crowded onto the front seat together. Mary said, “John will be home soon, he’ll be so excited. I have steaks to cook. Shall I open the smoked salmon appetizer, and maybe some artichoke hearts?”

Kit and Misto licked their whiskers, but Pan laughed aloud with pleasure. “I didn’t eat like that in Eugene. Debbie favored the cheapest cat food. And nursing home leftovers—they run to strained squash and instant potatoes.”

“Tonight,” Mary said, “you will dine royally. And you will sleep on feather pillows, not on the bare, hard roadside.”

And that’s the way it was, dinner for seven, four humans, three cats. Seven chairs at the table, three fitted out with sturdy file boxes from John’s office, to raise the cats up so they could easily reach their plates. Kit’s tall, thin housemates came down from their hillside home, bringing a large tray of Kit’s favorite flan for dessert. Neither Lucinda nor Pedric Greenlaw, both in their eighties, a tanned, active couple, had lost their appetite for a good steak. The fillets were good, rare and tender, the artichoke hearts swam in butter, the caramel custard was so good it made a cat’s whiskers curl. And all evening, neither Lucinda nor Pedric could take their eyes from Pan. Their wonder at another speaking cat suddenly among them was overridden, perhaps, only by the suspicion that this red tomcat might have brought with him a heartbreaking change in their lives.

To see Kit and Pan together, see their looks at each other even this early on in their acquaintance, to see the sharp chemistry already sparking between the two, was to imagine a future in which Kit might draw away from them, or perhaps leave them altogether. The concept saddened the Greenlaws for selfish reasons, but it thrilled them for Kit’s sake. After all, they wouldn’t be around forever. Now at last, maybe Kit had found someone good enough, strong enough, wild but loving enough, to share the next stage of her life. Pedric gave Lucinda a smile and a wink that said all was well, all would be well. He looked down at Kit, sitting next to him, and he prayed that that was so.

When the table was cleared and they’d gathered before the fire, Pan’s russet eyes closed sometimes as he told of his travels, as he brought back the little, quirky moments, the rough fishermen in an Oregon harbor drinking a mix of wine and beer for breakfast, the story of Denise Woolsey in her U-Haul truck. But then his gaze would turn to watching Kit as she tried to imagine such feats: cadging rides from strangers, dodging fast trucks and then riding in them, nimbly sidestepping dangers that made her shiver clear down to her paws.

“One thing I wouldn’t have liked,” Kit said, “is living with the Kraft family all those months.”

Pan said, “I stayed because of Tessa. Vinnie could be mean, but she was afraid of me, I could make her back off from Tessa. Debbie never bothered. But,” he said, “it was Erik I was afraid of. I stayed out of his way. I was glad he was gone so much of the year, it was more peaceful then.” He gave her a sly smile. “Debbie liked it that way, too. When Erik was gone, or at work, she’d go through his desk, pull out files and make notes. I could never get a good look, she’d push me off the desk. I never saw her copy anything on his Xerox, I think she was afraid he’d find out. Maybe he kept track of the copy count on the machine. Sometimes she’d copy things in the files by hand, too. She sent them all to her mother, she wrote to her mother a lot. I’d jump up on the desk to look, and she’d shove me away. Letters about Erik, though, I saw that much. About his real estate transactions. When she finished a letter she’d seal it right away, drop it in her purse and be off to the post office. As if she was afraid to leave it even for a few minutes where he might come home and find it.”

Kit said, “Debbie’s nephew, Billy, told Max Harper that Debbie never wrote to Hesmerra, that Debbie would have nothing to do with her mother.” And Kit burned to tell Joe and Dulcie that there were letters, that either Billy had lied or he didn’t know about them. Between this new bit of intelligence, and the presence of Pan himself, Kit was so wired she could barely settle in Pedric’s arms, as Pan asked Misto for a tale. This was the story Misto told, of a deep cold winter such as Kit could hardly imagine.

“In a village five centuries before Dickens’s London, in the frozen cold of winter in a cottage as rude as a cow byre, a child huddled alone, chilled on the icy hearth, her father gone to fight the invaders. The cries beyond the sod walls and banks of frozen snow were the cries of pain and death. The child hugged herself with fear and cold; the only movement in the dim hut was that of a half-wild village cat, as he crept to the child and lay up against her, to share his meager warmth. She put her arms around him, and only when the shouts of the hordes drew close did the cat rouse the child, hissing and pawing; he led her out into the dark and snowbound streets, and quickly on beneath a hill of frozen snow that covered a village haymow. He led her deep into the heart of the hay, where the fermenting heap had made its own warmth. There they remained huddled as the night passed, until the screams of the dying, and the trample of hooves, at last grew faint.

“At dawn the Huns had vanished, and child and cat came out. Beside the hill of snow and hay lay a warrior, dead. The child’s own father lay there, the reins of his steed tethered among his armor. The child wept as the cat took the reins, freed the mount, and leaped into the saddle. When he pulled the child up before him, he was a cat no more, but a fine young knight dressed in catskins, with a lashing tail. And the child . . . Her cheeks grew rosy, her frail body bloomed stronger, until her beauty shone with the light of love, out over all the bodies of the dead.

“Together they left that place, knight and damsel. They rode away in the dawn to where the land grew warm and sweet and the crops lay untouched by fire. There they gathered around them strong warriors and kind, they gathered a fine army, and there among plenty they waited, armed and strong, to turn away the Goths or to slaughter them,” Misto ended, his golden eyes smiling at Kit.

The evening ended, too, with Kit still in Pedric’s arms, looking back over her shoulder where Pan and Misto stood together in the open doorway. The wind had died, but, strangely, the night air felt as cold as that medieval winter. As she looked back at the two tomcats, she could see the hearth fire blazing behind them, in a scene that seemed as magical to the tortoiseshell as Misto’s ancient tales. And then Pedric was slipping into the car, holding her, and home they went through the cold night to their own warm house, Kit carrying the tales with her, carrying dreams with her of times long past—and, perhaps, of amazing times yet to be known.