Cat Laughing Last

by Shirley Rousseau Murphy

  All week she had been sneaking looks at Traynor's manuscript. Last Friday, reading his earlier pages, she had been shocked and deeply upset. She'd been so excited to have a look at his work, had told herself that after all, it was written for public consumption, and it was right there on the desk; she only wanted to see how he developed his prose, from the beginning. In school she had been interested in writing fiction-though far more fascinated, always, with drawing, with the visual images she wanted to create. But Traynor had always been a favorite; she had loved reading some of his passages over and over, simply for their poetry.

  She'd heard him tell someone on the phone that this new book was set in Marin County, above San Francisco, at the turn of the century. She liked the title, Twilight Silver. She had stood with the vacuum paused and roaring, reading the neatly printed pages.

  They'd been dreadful. The words stumbled, the paragraphs didn't make sense. She had started again, thinking her lack of comprehension was her fault. She had skipped ahead several pages, but had found no improvement. She'd decided this must be a first draft, a rough beginning. Surely a writer was allowed a flawed first draft.

  But why print it out so neatly? Why bother, until it was the way he wanted it-why print out these garbled pages, this lack of clarity with not a hint of his lucid style?

  Being an artist herself, with a duly accredited degree-for whatever that was worth, she thought wryly-she felt that she had some sense of how a work of art, a drawing or manuscript, grew to fruition. But those pages, despite the promise of an exciting plot, had been so clumsy they embarrassed her.

  Had the illness done this to Traynor? Was it slowly taking his mind as well as his body? The thought deeply distressed her.

  Well, she didn't know much about how writers worked. Maybe from this draft he would construct the smooth prose that she so loved. Still, she'd thought that writers edited on screen, didn't print until they felt they had something of value. But maybe not. Surely they didn't all work the same.

  That morning, aligning the pages as she had found them, she had felt a deep disappointment, almost a loss.

  But now, this morning, maybe these pages would be better. Watching the driveway through the study window, she picked up the current chapter. She read hopefully, but only for a moment. His words were just as inept, just as off-putting. She read two pages, then tried again, but it was no better. She stopped when she heard a car pulling in, and laid the chapter on the desk.

  But the car appeared in the next drive, parking before the house next door. Aligning the pages, she glanced up into the bookshelves-and caught her breath.

  Joe Grey stepped out from behind the row of books, his yellow eyes wide with amusement. "I'm surprised at you, Charlie. I didn't dream you'd take the Traynor's money as a trustworthy professional, then pry into their personal business."

  "What are you doing here? What are you up to?"

  Joe smiled. "Does he always lock the drawers?"

  Charlie grinned. "Why would you snoop on the Traynors?"

  The tomcat shrugged, a tilt of his handsome head, a twitch of his muscled gray shoulders.

  "Where's Dulcie? And what," she said, fixing Joe with a deep scowl, "did you have to do with that mess in the pantry?"

  "You think I shot those beasts? That I've learned to use a pistol? Come on, Charlie."

  "What did you have to do with those raccoons getting in the house?"

  His gaze was innocent.

  "Besides the raccoons-besides that gruesome mess that I had to clean up, what are you up to? There's not enough crime in the village? You've been reduced to idle snooping?"

  "And what about you?" He lifted a white-tipped gray paw. "You sound so much like Clyde it's scary. No wonder you stopped dating him-before you turned into his clone."

  "That is really very rude." She reached up to stroke Joe's gleaming gray shoulder. "Come on down. Were you looking for Traynor's research about Catalina's letters?"

  Joe twitched an ear.

  "I saw how interested you were, that night at Lupe's Playa. So, did you find it?"

  He smiled. "It was right here in this stack. I pulled it behind the books, to read it while you vacuumed-while you snooped."

  "And?"

  "Catalina's letters to Marcos Romano are worth something. Two of them sold recently at Butterfield's for over ten thousand apiece."

  "You're kidding me."

  He pawed the sheaf of research from behind the books. "Between pages six and seven."

  The auction notice lay there with Traynor's receipt. Joe showed her the notation at the bottom.

  She raised her eyes to his, their faces on a level. "How many letters were there? How many did she write?"

  "I don't know, Charlie. Maybe no one knows."

  "If they're that valuable, why did he write a play about them- or why is he letting it be produced? Already, apparently, people are looking for them."

  "Maybe he couldn't resist. Maybe, despite the wisdom of keeping them secret, the letters kept bugging him. The way you get bugged, wanting to draw something. The way you stare at a person, your fingers itching for a piece of charcoal."

  "Aren't you perceptive this morning."

  "My dear Charlie, cats invented perceptive. If some of Catalina's lost letters are still out there, and if Traynor thinks he can find them, maybe he figured he'd come on out to the coast and search for them while the play was still in rehearsal, before anyone saw the play, before anyone else thought of looking for them."

  "But…"

  "Maybe it was thinking and thinking of the letters that made him write the play in the first place. But now he's sick and dying, he's in a hurry. He wants the letters now. Once he's dead, he won't care who finds them."

  He looked at her steadily, his yellow eyes wide and appraising. "What do you think of his work in progress?"

  Charlie only looked at him.

  "I'm no literary critic," Joe said. "But in my humble feline opinion, that stuff stinks."

  Charlie laughed. She stepped to the window, to check the street, then sat down in Elliott's padded swivel chair.

  Dropping down from the bookshelf to the desk, Joe patted the new chapter. "Right now, there are more questions about the Traynors than answers. Why did Vivi want to avoid Ryan Flannery? And why did she come in here early this morning and print the pages?" Joe shrugged. "Maybe he didn't feel like it last night after all the excitement. Makes you wonder how he does feel, despite what she tells people about how well he's doing with the treatments."

  "She printed out his work this morning?"

  "She did. And don't you wonder," Joe said, "why he packs a gun? Why he brought a gun out here from New York? He must not have declared it, must have hidden it in his luggage, with New York so strict about gun ownership."

  Charlie sat frowning. "For a rotten-tempered tomcat, you come up with some interesting questions. What… Here they come."

  As the Traynors' car turned in, Charlie snatched Joe from the desk, tucking him under her arm like a bag of flour, forcing an indignant snarl from the tomcat.

  "Shut up, Joe. Hold still." Lifting the vacuum with her other hand, she watched the car pass the window, heading for the back.

  "Wait," Joe hissed. "The research. Put it in the stack, on the bottom."

  She dropped both Joe and the vacuum, hid the research, and they headed fast for the front door. "Where's Dulcie?" she whispered. "Where's the kit?"

  Dulcie and the kit flew out past her as she jerked the door open. Picking up the doormat, Charlie stepped down into the yard to shake it. Already the three cats were gone, vanished among the bushes.

  13

  The tall Tudor mansion that housed Molena Point Little Theater thrust above the smaller cottages like a solemn matriarch, its old shingles gray with time. But its high windows shone clean, reflecting the midmorning sky in a deep, clear azure. Sixty years earlier, the residence had been headquarters for Hidalgo Farms, an upscale cattle and sheep operation. When, in the seventies, the o
utbuildings and carriage house and barns had been turned into Hidalgo Plaza, wide paseos and promenades had been added, brick-paved, and roofed with trellises to join one building to the next.

  The house itself had been gutted, its inner walls torn out and replaced by heavy beams, to form the vast and high-ceilinged theater. The stage occupied what had once been the large parlor. The old formal dining room and morning room and study, now flowing together, were fitted with comfortable rows of theater seats upholstered in mauve velvet.

  Three large ground-level bedrooms had become the cluttered backstage with its dressing rooms, two small baths, and the vast costume room. Other workrooms and the prop room had taken over the kitchen and butler's pantry and carriage house.

  The upstairs bedrooms supplied office space and a balcony looking down on the audience, a long, narrow gallery that accommodated the control panel for the house lights and stage lighting, an area strung so densely with conduit and thick wires that it looked like a den for families of sociably oriented boa constrictors. The balcony was separated from the raftered ceiling space beyond, which yawned over the rows of seating, by a three-foot-high plastered rail. Beyond the balcony, beams and rafters stretched away in an open grid on which were hung banks of lights. The timbers, jutting across empty space, provided to the surefooted and arboreally inclined a fine series of catwalks above the heads of the audience.

  Though it was midmorning, barely 10:00 A.M., the vast and empty theater was as dark as night, a sepulchral world woven of flattened shadows and inky and indecipherable vistas. No window opened into this part of the theater. The outer walls of the old mansion, where tall panes of glass had once lighted the living areas, were now blocked by inner barriers. The ten-foot space between these walls was broken into small offices, and storage and work rooms, all cheerfully brightened by those antique panels of mullioned glass. A sunny morning without, but the theater within so dark that only a cat could see her way. On a ten-by-twelve beam above the stage, the kit prowled impatiently, an agile tightrope walker, a swift black-and-brown smear of shadow within shadows, a small phantom personage alone in the empty building, waiting for Cora Lee to appear for work dressed in her painter's smock.

  Usually Cora Lee arrived at the theater much earlier, unlocking the back door from the parking lot and turning on the lights so the stage shown cheerfully around her as she painted the sets for Thorns of Gold. This morning, the kit had waited a long time. She had been here from first light, impatient and hungry. Cora Lee always brought a snack to share with her. She waited, dreaming of far worlds peopled by cats like her and Dulcie and Joe Grey, worlds she half invented, and half knew from the tales of elder cats and from the old Celtic myths. But now, as morning wore on, even those stories paled. Her patience frayed at last. Painfully lonely in the empty silence, she gave up on Cora Lee.

  Leaping down to the top of an open stepladder and then to the stage, and across the stage and down to the carpeted aisles before the seats, she went to explore the rest of the theater. Trotting into the outer rooms where the windows let in light, she made her way toward the prop room. She knew the theater office; she had walked on all the desks there, across stacks of playbills and papers, had rooted in the wastebaskets, prowled the cluttered shelves, and snatched cookies from a desk drawer. In the wardrobe room, she had wandered dreaming beneath the rows of hanging costumes, sniffing the old smells of lace and satin and leather and the metallic scent of tarnished necklaces. She had patted her paw carelessly into a jar of greasepaint that had been left open, then had printed her paw marks along the hall floors. She had, upstairs on the balcony, tapped at dozens of light switches on the control panel, an exercise that, if the main switch had been on, would have created a wonderland of flashing lights in the theater below. She had tasted the powdered cream in an open jar in the cluttered coffee room and had stuck her nose in the sugar bowl. But best of all she had wandered through the prop room exploring an amazing array of surprises.

  It was there she headed now, purring to herself. She had no notion that she was not alone, she heard no sound but her own purring. Only when she stopped purring to nibble at an itch on her shoulder did she pause, suddenly wary.

  She'd heard nothing, really. But she thought the air stirred differently, the spaces around her disturbed in some way, as if something was moving unheard and unseen through the theater's dark reaches.

  It was not Joe Grey or Dulcie. They would have mewed a tiny sound asking if she was there, a faint murmur inaudible to human ears. And when they drew close, she would have smelled their scent. Now she smelled nothing different at all among the rich medley of theater scents. What was here in the dark with her that she couldn't see? Few humans could be so quiet. And why would a human come into the theater and not put on a light?

  Did she smell Gabrielle's lavender scent? The tall blond lady was, after all, the wardrobe mistress; she came and went quite a lot.

  Or perhaps she caught a whiff of candy? But, trying to identify the smell, her nose was too filled with the harsh aromas of dust and paint, of turpentine, floor wax, and the body smells of humans. She stood sniffing, more curious than wary, trying to understand the mysterious movement she could detect among the black and angled shadows.

  She had heard no door close. Had someone been in here all along, even before she herself came through the narrow attic window beneath the big duct pipes and black ropes of electrical cords? Before she squeezed down through the hole from the attic, past the round silver heat duct, and dropped to the balcony among the huge snakes of wire that always gave her the shivers?

  Well, whatever was in here, she was safe. No human would see her in the darkness, and anyway, she could dodge any human.

  Happily she padded on again toward the prop room, to play her solitary games among that richness of crazy human possessions that no yard or garage sale could match, among the baby crib and beer signs and bicycles, the wrought iron gates and painted china bowls and metal shields and stuffed horse's head and the front end of an ancient car. Everything in the world was there- beaded floor lamps, rocking chair, ten green glass bottles each as big as a doghouse, a set of elk horns, pieces of machinery so strange that not even Joe Grey, who had named these things for her, could identify them. The saddest objects were a ship's lantern and anchor smelling of dust and not of the sea, as if these nautical wonders had forgotten where they belonged.

  The game was to see if she could roll and walk and tag among the shelves without knocking anything off. When she tired of that she liked to lie on the pink satin fainting couch that stood wedged between the unicycle and a woodstove with a red paper fire burning in it-not warm, but pretty to look at. She liked to nap on the pink couch imagining what the play would be like all in costume and Cora Lee singing under the lights, and she, Kit, lying on a rafter above the stage, enjoying the best seat in the house. But now, crouched beside the horse's moldering head, she heard a footstep.

  Well, a footstep was better than hearing nothing when she knew someone was there. As the door swung open, the kit slid beneath the old car, tucking her long, fluffy tail under too.

  A light blazed, a harsh flashlight beam striking the shelves and moving along them, stopping now and then, a great eye of light searching and peering.

  The woman who held the light was small and thin, dressed in dark tights, her black hair pulled back under a cap. Vivi Traynor smelled of cherries. Her full attention was on the crowded shelves, her movements as wary as a thieving dog's.

  But what would the theater's junk room offer that a famous author's wife couldn't buy? Whatever she was looking for, it wasn't small; she wasn't poking into the narrow niches. The kit thought of the white chest that man, Casselrod, had snatched and that Vivi wanted badly enough to follow him-but that chest was in his store, already torn apart.

  Working her way along the shelves, pushing and pulling and rearranging, Vivi turned at last to fetch the dusty ladder from the corner. Climbing to investigate the topmost shelves, again she moved only
large items. She investigated a closed cardboard box, a leather suitcase, a lidded roasting pan big enough to cook a St. Bernard. Vivi opened each, looking in, then closed it again and shoved it back. When she had finished with pulling things apart, looking in and under, and didn't find what she wanted, she gave a huff of anger, backed down leaving the ladder standing open, and went out again.

  The kit followed her, slipping through the door before she closed it, silent and unseen, then padding along behind. She had never seen a human who could be so quiet.

  She had never seen a human she disliked in quite this way.

  When the raccoons were shot and that smell filled the house, she had blamed that all on Vivi. If Vivi Traynor had been a black lizard the kit would have chomped her, and spit her out dead, then chewed leaves to get the taste out. Following Vivi through the theater, she slipped ahead, stopping under the front row of seats, peering out at the darkly clad woman.

  Vivi passed by, inches from her, moving silently to the exit door. There was not a creak when she opened and closed it, and then she was gone, no squall of hinge or snap of the latch. The kit made a flehmening face of disgust. What had she been after? Another chest like the white one? Were there letters worth a lot of money, like Joe Grey said? She hoped, if there were such letters, that Vivi Traynor wouldn't find them. Or Richard Casselrod either. She hoped her own friends would find them and sell them for a lot of money and buy a nice big house with a nice cozy kitchen and room for a cat to visit. She would like a little bed in a sunny window or by a fireplace. Meantime, she wanted to know what Vivi Traynor was up to with her snooping and prying, and she wished that Cora Lee was there close to her because she suddenly felt very lonely. Her paws were cold with fear.

  14