Cat Bearing Gifts

by Shirley Rousseau Murphy

  The windows of the Greenlaw house were all dark, with Lucinda and Pedric and Kit still in the city. There should be no one about, certainly there should be no creature prowling Kit’s tree house among the oak branches, but there against the starry sky moved the silhouette of a cat pacing fretfully back and forth across the high platform, an impatient figure, an interloper prowling Kit’s territory where no strange animal was welcome. Joe sniffed the air for scent but the sea wind was to his back, heavy with iodine and the smell of a rotting fish somewhere. Heading across the interceding rooftops, he slipped silently down to the Greenlaws’ garden and then up again, up the oak tree to Kit’s high, roofed platform, his fur prickling with challenge.

  LIGHTS WERE ON at the Damens’ house, upstairs in the master suite, lights silhouetting hurrying shadows against the shades, the commotion stirred by Kit’s phone call as Ryan and Clyde hastily pulled on jeans, sweatshirts, and jackets, grabbed up backpacks, stuffing in flashlights, cat food and water, and the first-aid kit. Rock, the big silver Weimaraner, was off the love seat and pacing; he knew they were going on a mission and he couldn’t be still.

  The upstairs lights went off again, the stair light came on, then the porch light blazed as the three of them headed out for the king cab, Ryan locking the door behind them. Rock bounded past Clyde into the backseat, lunging from one side window to the other with such enthusiasm he rocked the heavy vehicle like a rowboat, staring out into the night looking hopefully for the first hint of his quarry and then poking his nose in Ryan’s ear or against Clyde’s cheek, urging them to hurry, demanding to be out on the trail tracking the bad guys. The sleek silver dog had no clue that tonight his target would not be an escaped convict armed and dangerous, but one small cat, frightened and alone, a quarry who, if at last he found her, would snuggle up to him purring mightily.

  But even to find one small cat, a tracking dog needs a sample of his mark’s scent, a clear and identifiable smell to follow among the millions of odors he’d encounter along the high cliff. “Pillows,” Ryan said. “Stop by the Greenlaws.”

  “Pillows?” Clyde looked over at her, frowning.

  “Kit’s tree house. Her pillows. I brought a clean plastic bag.”

  “You’re going to climb the oak tree?”

  “Ladder,” she said, glancing up at the cab roof where, above it, her long construction ladder rode securely tethered on the overhead rack. “Just take a minute, we’ll have a nice, fur-matted pillow for Rock to sniff.”

  “If we had Joe, he’d put Rock on the trail. Where the hell—”

  “Even with Joe,” she said, “I’d want a scent article, as you’re supposed to have, so as not to spoil Rock’s training.”

  “The one time Joe might be of help,” Clyde said, ignoring her logic, “he’s off hunting. Or off with Pan whispering in that little kid’s ear. Talk about an exercise in futility.”

  “If Pan can help that little girl, we ought to cheer him on. Scared of her mother, bullied by her sister. Besides, Joe might not even be with Pan. He and Dulcie have been hanging around Emmylou Warren’s all week, around that stone building up behind, whatever that’s about.”

  “I don’t want to know what that’s about. More trouble, one way or another.”

  Ryan just looked at him.

  “Name one time Joe went off on some crazy round of surveillance that he didn’t stir a carload of trouble.”

  “Name one time Joe wasn’t leaps ahead of the cops,” she said. “That he didn’t drop valuable information in Max Harper’s lap, a lead that Max was grateful for, even if he didn’t know where it came from.” She sat scowling at him. “Don’t be so hard on Joe, we’re blessed to know him, and all you do is rag him.”

  Clyde grinned. “He loves it. Rags me right back.”

  “You don’t realize how lucky you are just to share bed and supper with Joe, just to know those five cats. But,” she said, “there is something strange going on at Emmylou’s that Joe doesn’t want to talk about. I guess, in time, he’ll tell us,” she said. “In his own good time.”

  JOE SLIPPED UP the oak tree and onto Kit’s tree house ready to fight the intruder, his ears and whiskers flat. Only when the pacing cat turned, startled, and approached him stiff-legged, did Joe laugh and relax. Pan paused, too, tail twitching, his ears going back and up, edgy and questioning.

  “What?” Joe said. “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know.” The big tom lowered his ears uncertainly. “Kit’s in trouble, I can feel her fear, she’s scared and alone somewhere out in the night.”

  Joe took a step back. “She’s miles away, up the coast. You can’t know what she’s feeling, what she’s doing.” This kind of talk made his paws sweat.

  Pan drew his lips back. “She’s in some kind of trouble.”

  “Nightmare,” Joe said. “You fell asleep and dreamed of trouble.” Generally the red tom was a steady fellow, macho and straightforward—until he got off on this perception nonsense beyond all logic and reason.

  But Pan’s amber eyes blazed, he growled deep in his throat and spun around and was gone along an oak branch and in through the dining room window, through the cat door. “The Greenlaws, their cell phone . . .” he said over his shoulder. “Help me find the number.”

  Joe sighed. He was crouched to follow, knowing they’d sound like fools to the Greenlaws with such a call, when car lights came down the street below. They slowed, and Ryan’s red king cab turned into the drive, headlights sweeping the front of the house and up through the oak branches, blazing in Joe’s face. Squinting, he peered over, breathing exhaust as the engine died.

  Ryan emerged from the passenger side, stepped around to the rear bumper and up onto it, reaching up to the overhead rack where the extension ladder was secured. He watched Clyde swing out the driver’s door and move to help her. Why did they need a ladder? They had a key to the house, all the Greenlaws’ close friends had keys. From the dining room, Pan shouted, “You picked up! Say something. Pedric? Is this Pedric?” Silence, then, “Pedric, are you all right? Where’s Lucinda?” Another silence, then, “Who is this? If this isn’t Pedric, who are you? Why do you have Pedric’s phone? Where’s Lucinda? Speak up or I call the cops, they’ll put a trace on you!”

  Joe smiled. He didn’t think MPPD was set up to trace the immediate location of a cell phone but it sounded good. He watched Ryan open the extension ladder, lean it against the edge of the tree house, and climb nimbly up. Joe waited until his housemate had swung up onto the platform and switched on her flashlight, then stepped out into its beam. The eerie nightglow of his eyes made her catch her breath.

  “Did you have to do that, sneak up like that?” she asked shakily.

  “I’m sneaking? What are you doing climbing up here in the middle of the night like some—”

  “Like some cat burglar?” she said, laughing. She knelt and grabbed him up and hugged him. Her hugs always embarrassed him, but they made him purr, too.

  Putting him down again, she fished a plastic bag from her pocket and reached across him to snag one of Kit’s well-used pillows from the untidy pile. He watched her drop it into the plastic bag and seal it up with a twisty. He looked over the edge at the king cab where Rock was hanging out the open window, whining softly. He looked toward the house where Pan was on the phone, and looked again at Ryan. Now there was silence from the house. Joe watched Pan emerge through the cat door, ears back, tail lashing, his tabby forehead creased with worry, unsettled by that distraught phone conversation.

  “Come on, Pan,” Ryan said, swinging onto the ladder and down, frowning up at Pan there above her. “Come on, we’re headed up the coast.” She looked worriedly at the red tom. “It’s Kit,” she said softly. “She . . . We’re going to look for Kit.”

  Pan leaped from the oak to the ground, sinking deep in the leafy mulch, fled to the king cab and up through the window past Rock. Joe followed, as Rya
n descended the ladder clutching Kit’s pillow. Inside the pickup, Pan was crouched on the back of the driver’s seat, tail lashing. Joe, unsettled by the red tom’s unnatural perception, hopped sedately up into the front seat beside Clyde, and snuggled close. Pan might indulge in these wild flights of fancy, but he could count on Clyde for a soothing dose of hardheaded commonsense.

  8

  VIC PULLED DOWN off the highway into the village, easing the Town Car away from the main street and through the darkest neighborhoods, the narrow lanes as black as the Lincoln itself. Molena Point streets were not lighted, and here among the crowded cottages only weak lampglow shone through a few curtained windows, vaguely illuminating the nearest tree trunks. Heading a roundabout way for the stone house, the big car slid through the inky streets nearly invisible except for its low beams picking out parked cars and an occasional cat racing across. In the passenger seat Birely huddled, his arms around himself, moaning at every bump and there were plenty of those on these backstreets, potholes, and warped blacktop where tree roots pushed up, jolting even the easy-riding Lincoln. The trip down Highway One had been tense, watching for cops. There hadn’t been much traffic and the Town Car stood out too clearly, making him jumpy as hell.

  Leaving the scene of the wreck and moving on down the winding two-lane, they’d barely hit the flats, the highway straight and flat along the shore, when they’d heard sirens ahead. He’d turned off into a clump of eucalyptus trees, onto a narrow road that led away to a distant farmhouse. Pasture fences, faint lights way off up the hill. Waiting there on the dark dirt road for the cops and ambulance to pass, he’d done what he could for Birely, had cleaned the blood off his face with bottled water and an old rag. Birely’s nose wouldn’t stop bleeding, and he couldn’t bear anything pressed against it. He couldn’t hardly breathe, as it was. And the way he was holding his belly, whimpering, he was hurt more than a bandage could fix. When they’d left the wrecked pickup Vic had cleared out the glove compartment, had left most of the junk from the previous owner that he’d stole it from, but had pocketed a beer opener, an old pocketknife, and an out-of-date bottle of codeine prescribed in the name of the truck’s owner. He’d given Birely two of those, had left the wreck trying to figure out what to do with him when they got back to Molena Point. He sure couldn’t show up at a hospital emergency room driving the Lincoln; by this time, there’d be a BOL out. First thing was to get the Town Car out of sight, then decide what to do.

  Waiting on the side road, he’d felt the inner pockets of his windbreaker, patting the one pack of bills he’d kept on him. Most of the money they’d found, that he’d been carrying, he’d stashed in the Lincoln itself. Rooting behind the stacked packages in the backseat, he’d pulled down the armrest and found a space lined with a plastic tray, the old folks had a couple of them little water bottles in there. Pulling the bottles out, he’d stuffed the packs of bills in, ten stacks of hundreds, all bound up in their little paper sleeves. One sleeve tore, spilling its contents, but he gathered it all, slipped the torn wrapper back on, and sandwiched it between the other packets. The hiding place, when it was covered up with packages again, would be easy enough to get to in a hurry. He still couldn’t figure out if the woman Sammie’d left the place to, that Emmylou Warren, knew about Sammie’s stash.

  Had to, he thought, with all that carpentry work she was doing down there. Sure as hell she was going to find the money. Sammie’d told Birely, long ago, that she’d split the cash up, that she hadn’t hid it all in one place. Sammie must have wanted Birely to have it, to tell him that—maybe wanted him to know about it, but not know too much, in case he turned greedy before she passed on, and came looking, nosing around maybe egged on by some “friend” he’d met on the road, Vic thought with a smile. Birely never was one to see he was being used. If she’d wanted Birely to have the money, but not while she was still around, she must’ve meant him to have the house, too. But something made her change her mind, and she wrote that will to the Warren woman instead. It didn’t make sense, but people seldom made sense. He was just pulling off the street onto the dirt lane that led back through the woods to the stone building when the cell phone rang, the phone he’d taken off that old guy. It began to gong like a church bell. Birely sat up rigid, groaning with pain, staring around him like he thought he was about to receive the last rites. He came fully awake and grabbed up the phone.

  “Don’t answer it,” Vic snapped. “Don’t answer the damn thing.” But Birely, groping, must have hit the speaker button.

  “I didn’t answer it,” he said. “I just . . .” A man’s voice came on, soft and quiet. “Pedric? Pedric, is that you?”

  “I told you not to answer.”

  “I didn’t, I only picked it up. What . . . ?”

  “You punched something. Hang up.” Vic grabbed the phone from him.

  “You picked up!” the caller shouted. “Say something. Pedric? Is this Pedric?”

  Vic stopped the car among the trees, couldn’t figure out how to turn the damn phone off.

  “Where’s Pedric?” the voice shouted. “Pedric, are you all right? If this isn’t Pedric, who are you? Where’s Lucinda?” Vic started punching buttons. The screen came to life rolling through all kinds of commands, but the voice kept on. “Who is this? Why do you have Pedric’s phone? Where’s Lucinda? Speak up or I call the cops, they’ll put a trace on you!”

  “Sure it’s me,” Vic said. “Who did you expect?”

  There was a short silence. “This isn’t Pedric. I want to talk to Pedric.”

  Holding the phone, he wondered if the cops could use it to trace their location. Maybe some departments had the equipment to do that, he didn’t know. But this little burg? Not likely. He tried to recall the soft, raspy voice of the man he had hit with the tire iron. Uptight-looking old guy, neatly dressed, tan sport coat, white hair in a short, military cut, white shirt and proper tie. Lowering his voice, he tried to use proper English, like the old guy would. “Of course this is Pedric, who else would have my phone? Could you tell me who is calling? We seem to have a bad connection.”

  There was a long silence at the other end. The caller said no more. Vic heard him click off.

  The encounter left him nervous as hell, made his stomach churn. An unidentified call, coming over a stolen phone like the damn thing had ghosts in it. Birely had curled into himself again, as if the pain were worse. His smashed nose was bleeding harder, his breath sour, breathing through his mouth. Where his face wasn’t smeared with blood, he was white as milk. Vic knew, even if he stashed the Lincoln out of sight, got some other wheels and hauled Birely to an emergency room, they’d start asking questions and who knew what Birely’d say? The little wimp wasn’t too swift, at best, and in the hospital, drugged up for the pain, he might tell the cops any damned thing.

  It had started out as a lark, when they’d first headed over to the coast to find that wad of money that Birely swore Sammie’d stashed away, a simple trip to retrieve Birely’s own rightful legacy, and the whole damn thing had gone sour. It was that run up to the city that did it, their pickup totaled, and now the cops would be after them because they’d taken the damn Lincoln. But what else could he do? He didn’t have no other way to get Birely to a doctor, he’d tell them that, with Birely hurt so bad, and all. And that truck driver dead, which would sure as hell send the cops after them, too. They’d be all over him for that, claiming you weren’t supposed to leave an accident victim. Hell, the guy was dead, it wasn’t like he could have helped him none. With Birely bad hurt, what could he do but take the one working vehicle to go for help? He didn’t kill the truck driver, the rock slide killed him.

  But the old man and his skinny wife, that was another matter. If one of them died he’d sure be charged with murder even if he didn’t hit either of them very hard, not hard enough to kill them. If they died from shock or something, was that his fault? And there again he’d had no choice, had to get them of
f his back so he could help Birely. The law never took into account extenuating circumstances, they had no feel for a person when you were really up against it. Sure as hell those two people could identify him—and would swear he’d attacked them. And now, once he’d hidden the Lincoln, what was he going to do with Birely?

  It was after they’d turned back on the highway, after the cops and ambulance went by, that was when Birely had started to talk. Rambled on as they skirted the little cheap towns along the peninsula, when the codeine took hold and loosened up his tongue. Talked about how strange Sammie was when she was a child, rambled on about their old uncle, the old train robber who was close to Sammie when she was small. All so long ago that Birely wasn’t even born yet. He’d heard the stories from Sammie, how the old man had robbed some government office of big bucks, hid the money and got away clean, and the feds could never pin anything on him. Back to prison on other charges, and then a year later made a prison break and took off with the money, down into Mexico.

  And then, some years later, maybe with a guilty conscience, he’d shipped a big share of it back to Sammie. Birely’d grown up knowing only those parts of the story that Sammie chose to tell him, he wasn’t much good at filling in the spaces between.

  Easing the Lincoln on down through the woods, Vic was about to pull around to the front of the stone shed, hoping to hell he could squeeze the Lincoln into that little space that had probably been built for cows or farm machinery, when he saw a light in the yard down below, saw Emmylou Warren descending the hill, heading down from the stone house. He killed the engine, watched to see if she’d heard the car. She made no indication, didn’t pause or glance back. Had she been poking around inside there? Had she seen them before they left, knew they were staying in there? That would tear it. Was she looking for the rest of the money, maybe had found some down at her place, decided when she saw them that they were looking for it, too? Birely said the original theft was two hundred thousand, a big haul, back in those days.