The Cat That Wasn't There
Page 8
Donny brought Fay’s water and she took the opportunity to order a chicken mayo sandwich with salad.
“What were we saying?” said Mavis. “Oh, yes. The doctors. The captain of the Sinead was singing their praises this morning.”
“What does the captain say about what happened?”
“He’s being careful about who he speaks to. Donny says it’s because he could be facing disciplinary charges for running the boat onto the rocks like that. Isn’t that right, Donny?”
Donny grunted. He was as taciturn as Mavis was garrulous.
“But I overhead the captain talking to one of his crewmates,” Mavis went on. “He swore that they didn’t see a light coming from Bluff Lighthouse. He says he and his navigator were looking out for it but saw nothing.”
“I hear they were carrying a cargo of linen.”
“That’s right. The finest Irish linen. The boat was headed for Falmouth but was supposed to stop in at Bluebell Harbor to offload a crate. That explains why they were sailing so close to the island, see? They weren’t just passing by - they were heading for the docks.”
“Who on the island ordered a crate of linen?”
“I believe it was Agatha Rose. She ordered it wholesale and planned to sell individual pieces of linen at a profit to some of the local guesthouses and B&Bs. You’d probably have got a call from her yourself if that crate weren’t at the bottom of the sea right now.”
“Agatha Rose?” Fay knew the name sounded familiar. “Not Aggie who works on the Museums Committee?”
“That’s the one. Had she already contacted you?”
“No. I just happened to be speaking to her this morning. She didn’t look too upset for someone who had lost a crate of expensive linen.”
“Well, that’s the thing, see.” Mavis lowered her voice. “It was all insured. For a pretty penny too, I believe. Our Aggie must be laughing all the way to the bank.”
“And now she doesn’t have to go to the trouble of selling any of the linen.”
“That’s true.” Mavis looked thoughtful. “By the way, were you really the one who found Tabitha Trott’s body at the bottom of the Bluff Lighthouse the other day?”
“That’s right. She looked as peaceful as if she were sleeping. I didn’t tell the tourists I had with me of course. It would just have upset them.”
Fay saw Mavis storing this snippet away to be repeated at a later stage. When it came to village gossip, you couldn’t only take. You had to give a little too.
“Tabitha’s body wasn’t all I saw that night,” Fay continued. “I also saw a strange yellow cat in front of my car. And then it seemed to disappear. Tell me, Mavis. What do you know about the ghost of Bluff Lighthouse?”
Chapter 12
“Now that’s a story that deserves a cup of tea.” Mavis sat down next to Fay. “Donny! Bring me some tea. I’m taking five.”
“Are you sure you have time?” asked Fay.
Mavis looked around the empty dining room. “Do you see anyone else here? We have one customer so far and that’s you. I reckon the rest of them will start arriving in about twenty minutes. That’s more than enough time.”
Donny came back with Fay’s lunch and a mug of tea for Mavis.
Mavis settled herself more comfortably. “How much do you already know about it?”
“I bought an old book from the museum gift shop. I haven’t finished it yet, but all it says so far is that people have reported seeing a yellow cat near the lighthouse for decades now.”
“Longer than that. It all started more than two hundred years ago. Bluff Lighthouse was being cared for by a family called the Trescothicks.”
“Now there’s a good Cornish name.”
“Indeed. They were locals. Born and bred in the west country. There was the lighthouse keeper, and his wife, and their grown son. Legend has it that he was a bit of a wild one. They kept hoping he would get married and settle down, but he continued with his wild ways until the villagers predicted that his antics would be the death of his parents. Little did they know how right they were.”
“His parents died?”
“Ah - but listen to how it happened. One night, that lad took the family boat out to do a spot of evening fishing. They say his mother begged him on her knees not to go, for a big storm was blowing in from the east. But would he listen? No, he would not. There are those that say he was as drunk as a skunk when he set out.”
Fay munched on her sandwich. “Oh, dear.”
“The hours passed, and still the boy did not return. The wind howled at gale-force speeds. Rain lashed down in sheets and the sea was tossing fit to wreck the sturdiest craft. It was a wild, wild night. The boy’s mother was wailing for her lost son while the lighthouse keeper drowned his sorrows, drinking his way through a bottle of whiskey. Suddenly he sat up and declared that he was setting out to sea too. He wanted to find his son.”
“He must have been crazy. To set off on a night like that? Madness.”
“Of course. But that’s what happens when the demon drink has you in its grip.” Mavis winked at Fay.
“You’re not wrong. But keep going. What happened next?”
“When the lighthouse keeper’s wife saw that he was determined on this crazy course of action, she said that she would go with him. She would rather die with her family than live out the rest of her days as a lonely and childless widow with only the cat for company.”
Fay pricked up her ears. “The cat?”
“Legend has it that when they moved into the lighthouse, it was infested with rats and mice. The Trescothicks got themselves a cat – a yellow-haired animal with lamp-like eyes. It was a fantastic rodent-catcher that they called Hunter. The mum couldn’t see herself spending the rest of her life with just Hunter for company, so she set out to sea with her drunken husband to search for their drunken son.”
“Gosh.”
“Of course, the family only had one sailboat. Their other boat was a little wooden thing with oars, and it was in this, if you can believe it, that the lighthouse keeper and his wife went to sea on their suicide mission.”
“I guess they didn’t come back.”
“They did not. Not one member of the family was ever seen again, but bits of their sailboat and rowboat continued to wash up on the island for years afterwards.”
“What happened to the cat?”
“No light burned in the lighthouse that night or for several nights afterwards as storms lashed the island. Several ships went off course without the guidance of the great northern light, but there were no wrecks. A new family moved into the lighthouse as soon as could be arranged and reported seeing the cat in the vicinity for some years afterwards.”
“If it was such a good hunter, I guess it lived off field mice and so forth.”
“That’s what people said. But the years went by, and still people saw the cat with the yellow body and the lamp-like eyes. Twenty years, and thirty years, and forty years passed and still the cat appeared. There were those that said these were the descendants of the original yellow cat, but there were others who claimed it was still the original cat. They noticed, you see, that the cat appeared whenever there was trouble around the lighthouse.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“A storm blowing in. A lighthouse keeper getting drunk and beating his wife. An illness in the family. That cat came to be seen as a sign of trouble – an ill omen.”
Mavis sipped her tea and smiled.
“You don’t really believe all that, do you?” asked Fay.
Mavis leaned forward. “Tell me this. Why are you asking about the yellow cat of Bluff Lighthouse?”
“Well … I kind of saw it.”
“Aha!” Mavis gave a satisfied nod. “I knew it. Them that comes in here asking about the yellow cat has always seen it for themselves. And would you say that this has been a troubled time for the lighthouse?”
“It sure has. I saw the cat on the day I found Tabitha’s body. But it wasn’t just
me. All the guests in my car saw it too.”
“And the very next night there was a shipwreck at sea and a captain who says that the light didn’t shine. An ill omen – that’s what that cat is.”
“A stray - that’s what that cat is,” said Fay. “And I’m going to prove it.”
Fay didn’t believe in ghosts. Not for one millisecond.
She believed in stray cats that needed to be reunited with their owners, and feral cats that needed to be neutered and provided with a reliable food source. These were the issues that were on her mind as she went about the day-to-day business of running the B&B that afternoon.
She would have to look through her grandmother’s notes for the safest and least traumatic way to trap a cat. Some cat-traps set out near Bluff Lighthouse would soon lay the ghost to rest.
Sure, Mavis’s story had been compelling. If there was one thing Fay had learnt during her months on the island, it was that this place abounded in fantastical stories. The islanders were natural storytellers too, with an in-built sense of pacing and plot. You couldn’t help but be gripped by whatever tall story they were telling you.
But Fay was determined not to be swayed. She would have a talk with the new vet about the best way to deal with it.
“Which reminds me …” She glanced at her watch. It was time to get the kittens into their carrier and take them down to the village for their vaccinations.
She opened the top of the carrier and went around the room trying to gather them up. But every time she got close, they scampered away as fast as their legs would carry them.
“Oh, come on!” Fay found herself clutching at air for the tenth time. “You can’t possibly know what a vet is yet. Did the older cats tell you? It was Smudge and Olive, wasn’t it?”
Fay’s two female rescue cats had been devoted surrogate mothers to the kittens since they were one day old. They still had a special bond with them, although they treated them more like fellow adults these days.
She forced herself to stop chasing the kittens before this turned into a rodeo. She sat on the floor in the middle of her bedroom and pretended to be absorbed in her phone. As soon as a kitten ventured near, she picked it up unhurriedly and popped it into the carrier. She made sure to close the lid firmly in between kittens because they were more than capable of escaping out the top.
When they were all inside, she carried them downstairs to the car.
“Vaccination time?” Morwen was at reception checking the room allocations for the next day.
“Yup. I’ll be glad when it’s over.”
“I can’t believe they’ll be leaving us soon. I’m going to miss the little things.”
“Only two of them are spoken for so far. I still need homes for Zorro and Tigger.”
“Doc Dyer has his eye on them.”
“That’s what I hear. But David has never shown the slightest interest in having pets.”
“Maybe not as an adult, but I remember a time when the surgery had dogs, cats, hamsters, and even a goldfish at reception. That was before David’s mother passed away. Those animals were never replaced when they died, and the surgery became a sad and sterile place.”
“Maybe David doesn’t like animals.”
“Then he’s changed a lot from the boy I remember. He was only five years younger than me, but I remember how sweet he was with his pets. He adored them. When his mum died, it seemed to break something inside him. But that loving, warm-hearted boy is still in there somewhere. I’m convinced of it.”
“Hmm.”
Fay put the cats in the car in a thoughtful mood.
Her appointment was for five-thirty and she arrived at the vet a few minutes early.
A woman of about Morwen’s age showed Fay into the consulting room. She introduced herself as Dr. Tina Eliot and invited Fay to call her Tina.
“From what I hear, you’re likely to be one of my best customers, so we might as well be on a first-name basis. You recently took over your grandmother’s cat rescue center?”
“That’s right. Luckily, there’s not much of a stray cat problem here on the island, but every now and then we get a difficult case. These kittens, for instance, were rejected by their mother at birth. The owner meant well, but she had no idea what to do with them. I’m just glad she brought them to me before they got too dehydrated. We managed to save all of them and now they’re ready for their shots so they can go to their permanent homes.”
Tina took the kittens out one by one and gave them a thorough examination. Fay liked the way she handled them. Her hands were gentle but confident, so the kittens relaxed at her touch. She dewormed them and gave them their shots so quickly that the babies hardly seemed to notice.
“You’ve done a great job with them. They are all in excellent health and absolutely on target with their weight and development. This one’s going to be a big fellow.” She tickled Tigger’s chin. “I believe you want to do a voucher system where you pay for the sterilization now and the new owners bring them in just before six months?”
“That’s right.”
“My receptionist will sort that out for you. If you give us the name and address of each new owner, we’ll send them a reminder when the sterilizations are due.”
Now that the kittens were back in the carrier, they had stopped fussing and settled down to take a nap. Fay took advantage of the lull to tell Tina about the cat she had seen near the lighthouse and to ask her advice on trapping it.
“As I recall, your grandmother had some humane traps that you can bait with food and put out in the area. If you can’t find the traps, I can lend you some. It usually takes the animal a while to feel confident enough to venture into the trap, but within a couple of days it should have worked. But if that’s the Bluff Lighthouse cat you’re trying to catch, you’re wasting your time. If nobody has caught it in two hundred years, I don’t have much hope for your traps.”
Chapter 13
“Not you too?” said Fay. “You’re a woman of science. Don’t tell me you believe in this ghost nonsense.”
“My grandparents retired to Bluebell Island years ago. I’ve been hearing stories about the yellow cat of Bluff Lighthouse for the last thirty years. So, when you tell me you are planning to trap it, I can’t help but feel skeptical.”
When she put it like that, Fay couldn’t help feeling skeptical either. But she decided to look for her grandmother’s traps anyway.
“This is the second time someone has mentioned Bluff Lighthouse to me in the last few days.” Tina entered the details of the consultation on her computer. “You know the lady who died there the other day? They’re not sure if she fell or jumped.”
“Sure. Tabitha Trott.”
“She came to see me the day before it happened. She thought her goldfish was looking peaky. She wanted me to give him a tonic or something. His friend had already died.”
“Her goldfish? Seriously? Were their names Misty and Momo, by any chance?”
“I believe they were. I treat fish quite frequently. Not always successfully, I must admit. They tend to die if you look at them sideways. Anyway, I figured out what was wrong with this one. The water temperature was too high. She was used to keeping Siamese fighting fish and they like a warm tank. Goldfish are cold-water animals. So, I told her just to turn off her heater and let the water in the tank return to room temperature. I never dreamed that would be the last time I saw the poor lady.”
“Did she seem depressed to you?”
“Not depressed. That’s not the right word. It was more that she seemed agitated. Like she had something weighing on her mind.”
“Did she give you any idea what that might have been?”
“She said she had to make a decision that she wasn’t happy about. She was trying to make up her mind about it. I said something about how she should let her conscience be her guide and she said that was the problem. She didn’t know what her conscience dictated.”
“I wonder what she was talking about.”
“People have said she was getting forgetful. How did she seem to you?”
“Fine. But I only spent fifteen minutes with her. People like that can have long intervals where they seem perfectly lucid. And then they’ll have a lapse. I think she was afraid of having a lapse and not being able to discharge her duty, whatever that was.”
“One of her duties was making sure that the clockwork mechanism of Bluff Lighthouse was properly wound on the days that she was working there.”
Tina’s eyebrows shot up. “The lighthouse. That’s a huge responsibility.”
“It certainly is.”
She frowned. “That shipwreck last night. The captain keeps saying that the lighthouse wasn’t working properly. You don’t think poor Miss Trott could have damaged the mechanism or not wound it properly?”
“I don’t know. If that’s what happened, it was most unfortunate. She worked hard her whole life and volunteered her time throughout retirement. It’s sad if this is going to be her legacy.”
Tina’s face fell as she thought about this.
It was at that moment that Fay realized this new vet was going to work out just fine. She cared about this community. She even cared about Tabitha whom she had only just met. That was the kind of attitude that would make her a good addition to the village.
“I just hope her goldfish is doing better now that it’s in cold water,” said Tina. “I suppose one of her children or other relatives will look after it now.”
Fay didn’t have the heart to tell her that Tabitha Trott had no children or close relatives – certainly not any that Bluebell Island knew about.
Unable to get the goldfish out of her mind, Fay decided to take action.
She drove the cats home and deposited them in her room with instructions to Morwen to check on them every half hour. They seemed bright enough, but Fay wanted to make sure they didn’t have a reaction to their shots. Then she headed out again to the police station.