A phone buzzed.
“Yeah?” said a man, so near that the fur on the back of my neck stood straight up.
I heard, very faintly, the voice of the person calling on the other end. A woman? I thought so, but wasn’t sure. I knew the man, this very bad man who sometimes spoke as an old man, sometimes as a younger one, and sometimes—and those were the scariest—like one of my kind. Right now, he was speaking in the young man voice. Not a real young man, more like a man Big Fred’s age, for example. Oh, how wonderful if Big Fred came strolling in!
But he did not. Instead my enemy—because surely that was what he was—said, “When’s his flight? What? Not till then? Why?”
He listened. “The price? He’s dickering about the price? It was set!”
On the other end, the woman’s voice rose, but I still couldn’t make out the words.
The man’s voice rose, too. “Hasn’t he seen the photo? The tip of the tail doesn’t show? That’s crazy! I made sure—”
The woman’s voice rose some more. She was very angry. I thought I recognized her voice but couldn’t quite place it. Maybe if she’d been less angry, I would have. Most humans, in my experience, don’t sound like themselves when they’re angry.
The man spoke more quietly, like he was giving in. “Just let me know.”
No more talk after that. I heard him moving around, heard a bottle cap getting snapped off a bottle, even heard the fizzing of whatever was in the bottle. Then things grew silent again.
A ray of sunlight shone through the slats, dust motes swirling in it, dust motes that turned gold in the sunlight. Had there been mention of a tail in the phone conversation? My tail?
I didn’t know. But I felt the need for a little comforting, and what was more comforting than the sight of my golden-tipped tail? Just imagine how you’d feel if you had one.
I shifted my position slightly, bringing my tail into view. And oh, the shock! The horrific, dreadful, sickening shock! My golden tuft, the gorgeous glittering tip of my proud and lovely tail, was gone! I don’t mean the tuft itself was gone. Maybe I’m not describing this too well. Please forgive me. It’s the best I can do at the moment. What I’m trying to get across is that while my tuft was still there, it was no longer golden, but white, just like the rest of me.
And not even just like the rest of me. There was something off about this whiteness, something strange. My poor little heart began pounding in my chest, like … like it wanted to get out. To get out and find the real Queenie. Oh, what was happening to me? I had to do something, but what?
With a quick flick of my tail I got the tuft in my mouth. What was my plan? To bite it off? I really hope not. And in the end I merely nibbled a bit.
How odd. My tail tuft didn’t taste like me at all. Not only that, but it didn’t taste like cat or any other living thing. It tasted like … paint. A flake lodged on my tongue. I stuck my tongue out, uncurled it, and the flake dropped onto the wooden shelf beside me.
A tiny white fleck of white paint. I peered at my tuft. Almost all of it was this new strange white, except for one tiny patch of gold. My first thought: That was all that was left of Queenie, one tiny patch of gold you could hardly see. A very sad thought, but somehow I felt a little better.
BRO?” MOM CALLED. “BRO? WHERE are you?”
“In the garage,” Bro called back. And I was with him, although he didn’t mention that part, maybe because of how hard we were working. We’d taken the mountain bike completely apart, even though it was brand-new. There were pieces all over the place, and Bro had a grease smear on his nose. I’d had one, too, but Bro wiped it off on a rag.
“Let’s not shout from place to place,” Mom shouted.
“Okay.”
“That means come here.”
“In a bit.”
No answer from Mom. Bro got back to work, wrenching at things, a screwdriver held between his teeth. I love when Bro holds things in his mouth. I myself had the rag in my mouth, the same one he’d wiped my nose with. That’s how hard we were working. We’re buddies, me and Bro, no question.
Mom stepped into the garage, an empty wicker basket in her hand. “In a bit?” she said.
“Uh,” Bro said. “Argle urgle.”
“Take the screwdriver out of your mouth.”
Bro took the screwdriver out of his mouth. “I was on my way.”
Mom didn’t appear to be listening. She was looking at the mountain bike parts on the floor.
“What are you doing?”
“Customizing the bike.”
Mom nodded like that made sense. “But right now,” she said, “I need you to go pick a dozen ripe tomatoes. Bertha’s going to make us some gazpacho.”
“What’s that?”
“You know perfectly well.”
“That cold soup?”
“Exactly.”
“I like hot soup.”
“I’ll bear that in mind. Ándale!”
“What about Harmony?”
“She’s out tacking up those missing cat posters.”
Bro thought for a moment. “Is Queenie missing, Mom?”
“Of course. What kind of question is that?”
Bro shrugged. “It’s not like a normal missing cat thing.”
Mom gave Bro a long look. “No, it’s not.” She handed him the wicker basket.
Bro reached out for a tomato. “Too hard.” He tried another. “Too soft.” And another, this one big and fat. He plucked it off the vine and put it in the basket. “What’s the point of cold soup?” he said.
I didn’t know. My only soup experience involved hot broth. Was broth even soup? I didn’t know that, either. This particular broth was turkey broth, a specialty of Bertha’s for the day after Thanksgiving, left in a huge silver tureen in the small parlor for guests to serve themselves—all of which I learned after the fact, or never. The huge silver tureen sat on a table—not a very high table, more like one of those quite-low coffee tables. Maybe I’d better leave these little memories right there.
Meanwhile we were down at the tomato patch, between the old barn and the dirt-road shortcut into town, picking tomatoes and putting them in the wicker basket, Bro doing the actual physical work and me supervising. Supervising is the human term for when you sit around watching other dudes work.
It was a hot day and Bro was sweating a bit. I myself had found some shade at the far end of the tomato patch and had no complaints about the heat or anything else. Then it hit me. Had I been in the tomato patch fairly recently? If so, why? My mind kept niggling away, trying to come up with some memory or other. I was considering a short nap to make the niggling go away when I noticed that Bro was watching me. Was something wrong?
“Thanks for winning me that bike, Arthur,” he said.
No, nothing wrong. I loved Bro and promised myself to win him a bike every chance I got.
He got back to work. I wriggled around in the dirt, got super comfortable, and my eyes were beginning to close when I heard, right through the ground, a soft thump-thump-thumping. It’s hard to sleep with a thump-thump-thumping going on in your ears, so I rose and looked in the direction of the sound. A runner was coming up the road, not a particularly fast runner like … like me, for example, but steady. As she came closer, I recognized this runner, maybe from her long swinging braids. It was Magical Miranda.
I barked.
Bro turned and saw her. She saw him and waved, a graceful little motion. Bro made a sort of wave that was more like chopping air. Miranda left the road and came jogging over toward us. Her face was flushed. She wore shorts, T-shirt, sneaks, a bracelet with a silver heart locket, and seemed smaller than before, and not so magical, more like a normal kid.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” said Bro.
“Is Harmony around?”
Bro shook his head. “She’s putting up posters.”
“About Queenie?”
“Yeah.”
“My mom told me the whole story,” Miranda sa
id. “I just don’t understand.”
“Me either,” Bro said.
“Cuthbert’s not like this. Yes, he’s a clown, and he’s worked in carnivals for a long time, so he’s kind of unpredictable, like my mom says. But he’s not mean.”
“So you’re saying?” said Bro.
“The cats got switched. That was mean, so a mean person must have done it. And the only person who could have done it was Cuthbert. See the problem?”
“Maybe he’s mean after all,” Bro said.
“I’ve known him all my life,” Miranda said. “He’s gentle. He cries when he’s happy.”
“So he can’t be mean?”
Miranda gazed at Bro with her big dark eyes. She started looking more magical. “Don’t you get a feeling when people are mean?”
Bro shrugged.
“You must have met some mean people in your life,” Miranda said. “What about that friend of yours, the one with the rocks in his pockets?”
“Maxie? He’s not mean.”
“No?”
“He’s real smart.”
“So? Last night some of the crew guys caught him inside the fair after closing. He had one of those metal detector wands and he was wanding it all over the ground at my booth.”
“I don’t get it.”
“He was searching for some sort of secret underground scale,” Miranda said. “To prove I was cheating.”
“What did they do to him?”
“Just sent him home.”
“He must have been scared out of his mind,” Bro said.
“Actually not. They told me he gave them some lip. All about them being enemies of science.” She gave Bro a sidelong look. “Still think he’s not mean?”
“It’s more like he’s …” Bro fell silent. He stood still for a moment or two and then bent down and plucked another tomato from the vine.
Miranda gazed at it. “That looks good.”
“You want it?” said Bro.
“I don’t have anything to carry it in.”
“You could eat it here.”
“Yeah?” said Miranda. “Just out of my hand?”
“Why not?” Bro said.
“I’ve never eaten a tomato right off the vine.”
Their eyes met. Bro had a thought. He started to say something, stopped, then finally got it out. “I won’t tell,” he said.
Miranda laughed. He handed her the tomato. I expected she’d take just a small bite to test it out, but the bite she took was real big, almost half the tomato. Tomato juice ran down her chin.
“See?” said Bro.
“I do.” Miranda polished off the other half. “Mmm, mmm,” she said. Their eyes met. “Bro’s short for brother?”
“I guess.”
“So if I looked at your birth certificate it would say ‘Brother’?”
“I don’t know,” Bro said. “I’ve never seen my birth certificate.” He got this look on his face that sometimes comes when he’s having fun. But nothing fun was happening that I could see. “Does yours say ‘Magical Miranda’?”
Miranda laughed again, but this laugh didn’t sound particularly happy. “I’m starting to hate that magical part.”
“Yeah?”
She took a deep breath. “It was my dad’s idea, the whole magical thing. Fun at first, just like my dad.”
“Your mom and him own the carnival?” Bro said.
“Not anymore,” said Miranda. “Or maybe not. They’re fighting about it. Well, the lawyers are fighting. My dad’s gone away somewhere with some woman. My mom doesn’t even know who.” She rubbed her bracelet, the one with the silver heart locket. “They’re getting divorced.”
Bro nodded. I myself didn’t get it at all. We don’t have divorce among my kind.
“My mom knows who,” he said.
“Your mom knows who my dad went away with?” said Miranda.
“Huh?” Bro said. “No. She knows who my dad went away with.”
Miranda nodded. “So we’re in the same boat, you and me.”
“Except I don’t have any magical powers.”
Miranda smiled. “You come out of nowhere, don’t you, Bro?”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing,” Miranda told him. “I never thought I had magical powers, either, but now I sort of do.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s the only explanation.”
“For what?”
“For how crazy good I am at guessing people’s weights. Cuthbert taught me how to do it originally, but now I’m way better than him. Here’s something you won’t believe.”
“What?”
“When I look at a person, I can sort of see the face of a scale inside them, the same kind of scale we’ve got in the booth. I just read off the number where the needle’s pointing.”
“Can you see the scale in me?” Bro said.
“I don’t want to do that,” said Miranda.
“Why not?”
“I just don’t.”
There was a silence. A bee buzzed around the vines. I kept an ear on it, if that makes any sense to you. Bees can be a problem. Once I came across one just sort of sitting on an apple core near the woodpile, an apple core that was actually mine, which was why I pawed at the bee, just letting him know what was what. There turn out to be many surprises in life, some bad.
“Cuthbert hates my dad,” Miranda said. “And now he’s done this thing with the cats and disappeared. On top of everything, he’s probably Mom’s most important employee. And he loves her! I just don’t understand.”
“He loves your mom?”
“Not like that, Bro.” She thought for a bit, then took off her bracelet. “Cuthbert and my dad worked together in a circus years ago. My dad was the lion tamer.”
“Yeah?”
“Here he is—my dad, Marlon Pruitt,” she said. She opened the silver heart. “Me, my mom, my dad, all smiles. Not even that long ago.” She snapped the heart closed.
“I … uh …”
“You don’t have to say anything,” Miranda said.
Bro gave his head a little shake. Was his brain getting tired? I know that one very well. “None of this has anything to do with Queenie,” he said. “Well, it does, I guess, but not about where she is now. She’s out there somewhere, trying to get home.” He looked all around.
“What’s that?” Miranda said.
“The old barn,” said Bro.
“Have you searched it?”
“Why would Queenie stop there if she was so close to the house?”
“Couldn’t tell you,” Miranda said. “Who knows how cats think?”
Bro nodded. “Okay,” he said.
We left the tomato patch, took the hard-packed narrow path through the meadow to the old barn. All the way there, and the whole time we searched the barn, finding no sign of Queenie, I couldn’t get Miranda’s question out of my mind, maybe the most important question I’d ever heard. Who knows how cats think? Wow! If only I was the one who knew how cats think! Arthur, cat expert of the world!
We left the barn.
“What’s over there?” said Miranda, pointing.
“The apple orchard.”
“And that thing beside it?”
“The old wishing well,” Bro said. “It’s from before we got here. The water’s no good.”
“Wishing well?”
“And no one wishes there, either.”
“I want to see,” Miranda said.
We walked over to the old wishing well. The opening was made of stone, but the little roof was gone, only a few rotted support beams still standing. Miranda peered in.
“I don’t see any water,” she said.
“It’s way down there,” Bro said.
That was true. I could smell it. And Bro was also right about the smell: not good, not good at all.
Miranda closed her eyes.
“Are you making a wish?” Bro said.
“If I tell it won’t come true,” Miranda said. “Yo
u must know that.”
“But you have to throw something away.” Bro took out a coin, the second smallest of the silver ones. “Here.”
Miranda opened her eyes and took the coin. “Don’t look,” she said.
Bro turned away. Miranda stuck the coin in her pocket, then held the bracelet with the silver heart over the well and dropped it in. Silence, silence, silence. And then a very faint little splash.
Not long after that, it was time for Miranda to go back to work at the fair. Bro and I headed to the tomato patch. We were almost there when for no particular reason I glanced back. And what was this? A person stepping out of the apple orchard and moving toward the old wishing well? I barked. The person, quite far away, but bigger than a stick figure, quickly turned my way and then ran back into the orchard, out of sight.
I barked again.
“Knock it off, Arthur.”
I barked louder.
“What? What?”
Bro stopped, looked all around. “I don’t see anything. Come on.”
I considered running back to the apple orchard, but it was a long way, the day was hot, and there’d been plenty of physical activity already. Besides, the person I’d seen had a very distinctive running style, where his elbows went way out from his body. There was only one person I knew who ran in such an elbowy way: Maxie Millipat. And of course Maxie was a friend of the family.
KNOCK KNOCK, NOT FAR AWAY. A door opened. My enemy spoke in his young man voice. “What are you doing here?”
“Is that how you’re saying hello?” said a woman.
Did I recognize her voice? Had she been on the other end of a phone call while I was in this … this bedding closet, if that’s what it was? A bedding closet I was still inside, by the way, with sunlight, not so strong now, still streaming through the louvers. Yes, possibly I knew this voice from … from what we might call happier times, but in those happier times did I pay close attention to every human voice that happened to come along? No, I did not, which was perhaps one of the reasons those times were happy! Ah. I seemed a little sharper now, more like myself, as though a strange and very un-Queenie-like fog was lifting in my mind. And in this state of sharpness I had a very un-Queenie-like thought: I’m in trouble.
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