The Cat Who Sang For The Birds

-5-

Half an hour after Polly left Qwilleran’s barn with the Rikers, she phoned him, and her first words were, “I’m thrilled about having my portrait painted, Qwill! Thank you so much.”

“Let me remind you,” he said, “that I had to twist your arm before you’d agree. Apparently you approve of Skumble’s work.”

“Yes, and I like him, although I don’t care for the goatish beard. But he’s friendly and has a wry sense of humor. The question arose: whether to paint at the Art Center, which has a rather clinical atmosphere, or at my condo. He’d rather work in my own environment.”

“I didn’t know he made house calls.”

“Well, in fact, he’s coming out tomorrow evening to check the situation.”

“I see,” Qwilleran said, stroking his moustache. “How many sittings will he require?”

“It’s hard to say, until he starts the actual work. He does a preliminary sketch in charcoal and then the underpainting in grisaille, in the classic tradition. Tomorrow night he’ll look at my wardrobe, and we’ll decide what I should wear.”

“How about your new dress?” he said with a show of enthusiasm. He had helped her choose it at Aurora’s Boutique.

“That would be nice, but… you see, it’s fuchsia, and Paul was thinking of something blue to accentuate my eye color.”

“I hope you can wear your opals.”

“I’d love to - you know I would - but he says that pearls bring a certain luminosity to a woman’s portrait.”

“Good! I’m all in favor of luminosity,” he said dryly.

“I’ll call you again tomorrow evening, dear, as soon as Paul has left… Isn’t this exciting?”

When the conversation ended, Qwilleran patted his moustache nervously, and Koko, who had been sitting on the telephone desk listening to every word, put in an ambiguous “Yow!”

“Well, old boy, what do you think of that bucket of fish?” Qwilleran asked.

The cat rolled back on the base of his spine and scratched his ear with his hind leg.

Immediately the phone rang again, and the caller was a woman who sounded like Beverly Forfar. She asked to speak to Ronald Frobnitz.

“One moment, please,” he said, covering the mouthpiece while he experimented with a Frobnitzian voice.

After a suitable interval he said with an adenoidal twang, “Frobnitz speaking.”

“Mr. Frobnitz, we have wonderful news for you! This is the Art Center calling, and you’re the lucky winner of that magnificent intaglio by W. C. Wyckoff. Congratulations!”

“This is too good to be true,” he said nasally. “I’ve never won anything in my life. Are you sure there isn’t some mistake?”

“Oh, I assure you it’s a fact! And you’ll be happy to know it’s valued at a thousand dollars. That’s something you’ll need to know for insurance purposes. Are you a local resident? I don’t believe we’ve met.”

Her voice was ingratiating, and it was difficult to connect it with her forbidding row of bangs, but Qwilleran was not in the least confounded. A master of glib prevarication, he replied with less than a second’s hesitation. “I’m from San Francisco, visiting relatives here, and I just happened to attend your celebration. I recognized the intaglio as a superlative piece of work, never imagining I’d have the good fortune to own it.”

“How will you get it safely to San Francisco? Would you like us to crate it for you?”

“An excellent idea! You’ve been most kind, Ms… .

Ms “

“Forfar. Beverly Forfar. I’m the manager.”

“You have a splendid facility for the appreciation of art, and I’m sure much of the credit goes to you personally.”

“Oh, thank you, Mr. Frobnitz, but - “

“Now, let us see … my sister-in- law will have to pick it up and ship it to me, since I’m leaving first thing in the morning. When will it be ready? I don’t want to rush you.”

“Just give us till Wednesday. It’s been so nice talking to you, Mr. Frobnitz!”

“My pleasure, Ms. Forfar.”

Qwilleran hung up, chuckling. The conversation had reminded him of improvisation exercises in the college drama department, before he switched to journalism.

The Siamese were not amused, however. They had been listening to a person they knew, speaking in a voice they did not know.

“Sorry, you guys,” he said. He picked up Yum Yum and carried her around and around the main floor, speaking in soothing tones and massaging the scruff of her neck. Koko tagged along at his heels, twitching his ears this way and that.

The Frobnitz caper had done what such exercises were supposed to do - loosen one up - and Qwilleran went to his studio in a playful mood to write his coverage of the museum fiasco.

With that job finished, he phoned his neighbor in the Klingenschoen carriage house at the head of the lane. It was after eleven, but he knew she would be awake, reading spy fiction or baking cookies or talking to her grandson Down Below at late-night rates. Celia Robinson had found her way to Pickax through her acquaintance with the late Euphonia Gage, and she had found her way into local hearts through her volunteer work and cheerful disposition. Although Celia had the gray hair of age, she had the laughter of youth.

Besides supplying prepared dishes for Qwilleran’ s freezer, she occasionally fronted for him in matters that required his anonymity. She called him Chief; he called her Secret Agent 0013. She laughed uproariously at his simplest quips; he found her absolutely trustworthy.

“Hope I’m not phoning too late,” he said in a chatty voice.

“You know me, Chief! I’m a night owl. I’m boiling potatoes for salad - just a little catering job I lined up for tomorrow night. I’ve been at Virginia’s ever since church.”

“Her daughter is a Handy Helper, I believe.”

“Yes, a wonderful girl! Always dashing off to help some poor soul.”

“Did she say anything about removing graffiti from a farmhouse?”

“No. That’s part of their motto: just help; don’t talk about it.”

“A commendable policy.”

“Is there anything I can do for you, Chief?” He changed his delivery from neighborly to official, speaking crisply and slowly. “Your brother-in-law, Ronald Frobnitz … left a message with me when he couldn’t reach you… He’s returning to San Francisco early tomorrow… and wishes you to pick up something and ship it to him.” He paused while she shifted gears from potatoes to intrigue.

Celia was quick to comprehend. “Did he … did Ronald say what it is I’m supposed to pick up?”

“A work of art that he apparently won in a raffle at the Art Center today. It will be ready any time after Wednesday.”

“I wonder how big it is.”

“About thirty inches square and very flat. He wants you to keep it until he sends you an address label.”

“Glad to help, Chief. Do you know my brother-in-law very well?” Then she added, “Just in case someone asks.”

“He has a wife and three beautiful children. He teaches psychology at some university in California. His hobby is

racing cars… Did I hear a bell ring?”

“That’s the potatoes!”

“Hang up! Talk to you later.”

Qwilleran had plans for Monday morning. He would walk downtown and have pancakes and sausage at Lois’s Luncheonette, then go to the newspaper office and throw his copy on Junior Goodwinter’s desk. If the young managing editor found it unfit to print, so be it! Let them run a couple of paragraphs of hype from the museum’s publicity release!

When Monday came, however, the situation demanded change. Koko was restless. After hardly touching his breakfast, he kept jumping at the door handle of the broom closet. That was a place of incarceration for the Siamese when they misbehaved, but it also housed harnesses and leashes. Obviously Koko wanted an outing. Did he sense the presence of a parrot in the neighborhood, a few tenths of a mile away? Given his remarkable long-range instincts, it was not unthinkable.

The sight of buckles and straps sent Yum Yum flying up the ramp to the roof, but Koko pranced with excitement. For the hike down the lane, he was propped on Qwilleran’s shoulder, and there was a firm hand on the leash. Though indifferent to flitting birds and scurrying squirrels, the cat tensed his body as they neared the Art Center and uttered guttural noises as they went through the private gate.

“Steady, old boy,” Qwilleran reassured him in a ca1m voice. “It’s only… “Then he saw the reason for Koko’s alarm. Although there was no vehicle around, the door of the building was open - wide open - and Koko sensed trouble. How did he know it should be closed? Because Koko always knew when something was not as it should be: a faucet running, the oven left on, a light burning in daylight. His catly perception was uncanny.

Qwilleran quickened his step and tightened his grip on the leash. Entering cautiously, he saw muddy footprints on the light vinyl floor and allowed Koko to jump down. Without hesitation, the cat tugged the man toward the studio wing, sniffing the floor like a hound, until he came to a dark red splotch on the floor between the manager’s office and the Butterfly Girl’s studio.

“Someone killed him!” Qwilleran said

aloud. “Someone killed Jasper!”

“Gimme a peanut!” came the croaking reply.

Jasper’s cage was uncovered, and he was rocking on his perch and blinking his large round eyes. His night blanket was on the floor, splashed with blood. The small table had been knocked over, scattering peanuts and the pieces of a smashed Oriental vase.

Someone, Qwilleran thought, had expected to steal the bird and had put a hand too close to the cage, only to have Jasper’s powerful hookbill grab a finger. In confusion the intruder had fled from the building.

But Koko had seen enough of Jasper and the blood spots; he was tugging again at the leash, tugging toward the studio with animal sketches lined up around the walls. Ignoring the dogs and horses, he went directly to the open bin where shrink-wrapped drawings were stored. He stood on his hind legs and peered at the contents. Qwilleran had a look, too. Only the large figure studies were there. The small ones - there had been a dozen or more - were gone!

Now it was clear: it was the nudes they were after, not the bird. They had loaded the drawings in a sack and stopped on the way out to hear Jasper say something insulting or obscene.

Dragging Koko away from the scene and temporarily locking him in the restroom, Qwilleran called 911 from the manager’s office across from the bloody field of action. He reported a breakin and possible burglary. Next he phoned the city desk at the Something. Finally he phoned the manager’s home. Beverly Forfar lived on Pleasant Street and she arrived shortly after the sheriff’s deputy.

“What’s that noise?” were her first words as she walked in.

Koko was howling his protest, which was amplified by the tile walls of his prison.

Beverly inspected all the rooms, and Qwilleran drew her attention to the missing figure studies.

“Daphne might’ve taken them home,” she said. “I’ll call her.”

Roger MacGillivray was arriving with his camera, and Qwilleran gathered up the cat and made a stealthy exit via the side door. He wanted no photographs of Koko in the paper, no headlines about a feline bloodhound.

He was intensely protective of Koko’s privacy. The cat’s psychic aptitudes were known only to two other persons, both of them in law enforcement. Even Polly and Arch were ignorant of Koko’s detective instincts; neither of them would take the notion seriously. Qwilleran himself was hard put for an explanation, except that normal cats had forty-eight whiskers, eyebrows included, and Koko had sixty.

When the news item appeared in that day’s paper, it was said that the sheriff had responded to a call from “a neighbor,” who had seen the front door open. Some “works of art” were missing. The intruder had been “pecked and chased away” by a pet parrot on the premises.

The item appeared on page three, because page one had already been made up. It featured Roger’s glowing account of the Art Center opening and announced the names of the two raffle winners: Ronald Frobnitz and Thornton Haggis. (Hah! Qwilleran thought; the other guy used an alias, too.) Also on page one was his own tongue-in-cheek report on the dedication ceremony at the Farmhouse Museum:

On Saturday afternoon at the Goodwinter Museum in North Middle Hummock a throng of 310 visitors drank 450 cups of tea and viewed a collection of 417 historic artifacts in the 1,800-square- foot steel barn, where 83 volunteers have spent a total of 2,110 hours cataloguing and storing items donated by 291 residents of Moose County.

“This is the first and last time this storage facility is being shown to the public,” stated a museum spokesperson. “As items are needed for changing exhibits in the farmhouse, the new system will tell us what we have available and exactly where it is stored.”

The computerized catalogue is made possible by public contributions and a matching grant from the Klingenschoen Foundation. Printouts of the inventory are available for a small donation to cover copying and handling. For a similar donation the donors of artifacts in storage may have access to them for photographing. All donations are tax-deductible.

At Qwilleran’s request there was no by-line for the three paragraphs or the photos; which included shots of the museum manager, the steel barn, and visitors at the refreshment table. Accompanying the museum story was an anonymous poem of sorts in a decorative border:

NOSTALGIA

Twenty-four chairs with legs, Ten chairs with one leg missing, Gramophone with Caruso records, Seven flags with 48 stars, Doctor’s folding operating table. And four white enamel bedpans. Thirty-seven pieces of china, cracked, Five handmade quilts, stained, Two wooden washboards, mildewed, Woman’s hat with ostrich plumes, molted, Nurse’s uniform, circa 1910. And three bedpans in gray graniteware. Two pearl-handled buttonhooks, Box of 207 handwritten postcards, Five school desks carved with initials, Six-and-a-half pairs of high-buttoned shoes, Hot-water bottle without a stopper. And two bedpans in blue spatterware. Box of 145 photographs, unidentified, Three straight razors, Pair of men’s gray suede spats, Fur-lined sleighcoat, moth-eaten, Set of surgical saws and scalpels. And one genuine Bennington bedpan.

Although Qwilleran avoided the newspaper office Monday afternoon, the chaos was reported to him. Readers calling with raves and rebukes jammed the phone lines, and the local telephone company curtailed service to the paper rather than jeopardize the entire county-wide system. The manager of the museum, a

newcomer in Pickax, demanded the dismissal of the perpetrator of the outrage, unaware that the Something owed its existence to the Klingenschoen Foundation. An editorial meeting was called to consider the ruckus, but the executives and editors around the table gave a standing ovation to the coverage, and the meeting broke up in laughter.

In late afternoon, Qwilleran was sitting in the gazebo with the Siamese and a stack of magazines, when a sudden change in the cats’ attitude attracted his attention. Their necks stretched and ears pointed forward as they stared down the lane toward the Art Center. A few minutes later, the crunch of footsteps on gravel sent Qwilleran out to see who was trespassing. The prowler who rounded the last bend in the lane was a chubby young boy.

Qwilleran was not fond of preteens. “Looking for something?” he asked sharply, standing with his fists on his hips.

“Just moseying around,” the boy said amiably with an innocent expression on his rosy-cheeked face. He was one of Moose County’s well-fed blond youths who grew up to be giants. “What’s that?” he asked.

“What’s what?”

“The thing with screens all around.”

“It’s a gazebo.”

“Oh … How do you spell it?”

Qwilleran told him, and after the boy had studied the structure, he said, “It’s octagonal.”

“What did you say?”

“That means it has eight sides.”

Now Qwilleran was amused enough to relax his belligerence. “What’s your name?”

“Culvert.”

“Culvert? Is your father a highway engineer?”

“He’s a farmer. We live on Base Line.”

“What’s his name?”

“Rollo McBee.”

“I know him,” Qwilleran said. “I know your uncle Boyd, too. I see them at the coffee shop. What are you doing up here?”

“My mom sent me. I took some soup and rice pudding to Mrs. Coggin. She’s a nonagenarian.”

At this Qwilleran was sufficiently impressed to invite the boy into the gazebo to meet the cats.

“I never saw any like these,” Culvert said. “They’re Siamese.”

“You’ve got the biggest moustache I ever saw. Does it feel weird?”

“Not anymore. The first twenty-five years are the hardest. How old are you?”

“Ten, in July.”

“You have a good vocabulary for your age.”

“I have my own dictionary.”

“Good for you! Are you going to be an etymologist when you grow up?”

The boy shook his head soberly. “I’m going to be a photographer. I like to take pictures.”

“What kind of pictures?”

“People doing things. My dad milking the cows. My mom baking bread. Mrs. Coggin feeding the chickens… . Well, I gotta go home to supper. Can I take a picture of the cats sometime?”

Polly had promised to phone after Paul Skumble had left. It grew late, and Qwilleran was uneasy.

“I gave him a glass of wine and a simple supper,” she explained. “He likes my house. We decided I’ll wear my blue silk dress and pearls and sit in a highbacked Windsor in the library, with the leather-bound books from the Duncan family in the background - and a copy of Hamlet in my hand.”

“When will he start?”

“That’s what we need to discuss, Qwill. He wants to work in daylight, and since I’m busy at the library all week, it will have to be done on a series of weekends. You know, dear, how I love our uninterrupted time together, but… what else can we do?”

Qwilleran thought, Why did I ever suggest this fandango? “Don’t worry,” he said, feigning indifference. “There’ll be plenty of other weekends.”

In what remained of the evening, Qwilleran read aloud to the Siamese, one of their favorite pastimes, especially before bedtime. It was Koko’s responsibility to make the literary selection. They never read one title from cover to cover but sampled a chapter of this book or that. Qwilleran suspected they all sounded alike to his listeners, and he himself liked dipping into books he had read before. It was like running into an old friend on a street corner.

On this occasion Koko sensed new acquisitions from Eddington’s bookshop. After serious sniffing of the three World War II titles, he dislodged Fire Over London, and Qwilleran caught it before it landed on the floor. As usual he stretched out in his lounge chair with his feet on the ottoman and Yum Yum on his lap, while Koko sat attentively on the wide arm of the chair. It was a toss-up whether the familiarity of this ritual was more comforting to the cats or the man.

After the reading session the Siamese had their usual nightly snack and then went up the ramp to their room on the third balcony. Their door was left open, since the addition of the bird garden, to accommodate their early-morning bird-watching through the foyer windows. The door to his suite was closed to prevent furry bodies from crawling under his blankets.

It was a clear night. The weather was calm. The stars were bright. Sometime during the small hours Qwilleran was jolted awake by a thumping against his door, followed by unearthly howling. He jumped out of bed and yanked open the door.

“Oh, my God!” he yelled, dashing to the phone.

The large windows on the east side of the barn framed a horrifying sight: a night sky turned brilliant orange! He punched 911. “Building on fire - Trevelyan Road, quarter-mile north of Base Line - the new Art Center - surrounded by woods - forest fire a possibility.”

He pulled pants over his pajamas, whirled down the spiral staircase to the kitchen, grabbed the car keys and was gone.

Oh, God! he groaned to himself as he drove recklessly down the lane. All those hopes! All that work! All that art! All that turpentine! … Some artist working late - and smoking, against regulations… Mildred will have a heart attack! he thought.

He could hear the frantic chorus of emergency vehicles: the wailing and honking of firefighting equipment; the sirens of police cars. As he drew closer. the scene became brighter: leaping red and yellow flames licking the black sky. The flames had not reached the grove of ancient trees… had not reached his new gate… had not reached the Art Center! It was the Coggin farmhouse on fire!