Cat Bearing Gifts

by Shirley Rousseau Murphy

  Finally, passing a big, glassed-off garden right in the center of the building, he saw the cafeteria ahead, and knew where he was. He stopped off there, had himself another cup of coffee to steady his nerves, and another one of them cinnamon rolls. Jangled nerves always made him hungry. That garden he’d passed, big as a city lot, hospital rooms and glassed hallways facing it on all four sides, garden had a big rock formation with a waterfall, three stories of rooms looking out on it. Pretty damn fancy, he wished he had half the money it’d taken to build this place. What couldn’t he do with that kind of cash?

  Finishing his coffee and sticky roll, he headed back to the ICU. Moved on in past the nurses’ station and across to Birely’s room. He was about to step inside when he saw a nurse in there and another doctor. He moved on by, glancing around, and into the room next door. The patient was sleeping, snoring softly. Slipping past him to the connecting wall, he stood listening.

  The doctor’s voice was deep, it reached him easily, he must be standing right there on the other side. The glimpse Vic had had of him, he was a big man, his shoulders rolled forward as if maybe he had a weak back. He was talking about the IV, giving the nurse instructions. “Keep him on fourteen milligrams of Demerol every three to four hours, until his nose is less painful. I want him to lighten up a little now, not so deep under. I want only nurses in here, no trainees, I want him handled with care. I don’t want any pressure on the abdomen. None. Do you understand?”

  Vic couldn’t make out what the nurse said, her voice was too soft. He was so intent, listening, he almost missed seeing Emmylou pass by, he barely glimpsed her through the crack between the curtain and the wall as she turned into Birely’s room.

  Had she seen him out there, coming into the ICU? But hell, she didn’t know him, either. He was too edgy. Just because he recognized someone didn’t mean they knew him. If Emmylou’d ever seen them and knew they were living up there, she’d have called the cops long ago. And with his change in looks, his long hair gone, why would she recognize him now? The doctor was telling her that when Birely’s nose had healed some, he’d go back into surgery and they’d take out his spleen, same as that nurse had said.

  “If the spleen doesn’t rupture,” Emmylou said, “before you get him back into surgery?”

  “We’re taking the best care we can,” the doctor said coldly. “You have no idea what happened to this man?”

  “None,” she said. “I found him hurt like that, lying in a sleeping bag half-conscious and moaning.”

  “Found him where?”

  “In an old vacant house at the back of my property, no one was supposed to be in there.”

  “You reported it to the police?”

  “I called the ambulance. I don’t plan to file a complaint, so why call them?”

  There was a long silence. The doctor said no more. Emmylou said, “I’ll come back in a while, see if he’s awake. He . . . I’d like a word with him, when he wakes.”

  Vic watched through the crack as she left. Soon the doctor left, and then the nurse. He watched the nurses’ station as personnel moved back and forth, going about their business, all so damned organized. The ward grew quieter, some of the nurses disappeared into patients’ rooms, the pace seemed to slow. Vic moved out of the room past the sleeping patient, his rubber-gloved hand in his coat pocket, caressing the syringe. He was about to slip into Birely’s room when two nurses came around the corner wheeling a gurney, came straight toward him. He stepped away, looking with curiosity at the patient, his head all wrapped in white like a turban, his face white as death itself. They turned into a room two doors down, both nurses looking up at him. He smiled at them and nodded, annoyed that they looked right at him, that they could identify him in a damn minute entering Birely’s room. Angrily he moved on out of the ward, down the hall and out of sight. He’d wait a while and go back. Or come back tonight after another change of shift, when maybe the ward would be quieter?

  Right, and when every visitor would stand out all the more. Best to walk the halls a while and then go back again, get it over with, this time, before he lost his nerve altogether. Strolling the hall pretending to look at the pictures on the walls, he stopped at a picture of boats in a stormy harbor, the water wild with whitecaps that made him cold just looking at them. He walked on, feeling shaky, and at last headed back to the ICU. Passing the waiting room, he saw that carpenter woman was still in there, and Emmylou had joined her, she sat right there beside her, talking earnestly. Moving on beyond the open door past the big leafy plant beside it, he paused in the shadows to listen.

  27

  KIT WAS SO warm inside the backpack she couldn’t help but squirm, she had to poke her nose out for one breath of cool air. She ducked back when Emmylou appeared in the doorway. What was she doing here? “Come sit,” Ryan said, moving Kit’s leather pack off the love seat, setting it on the floor. “Have you come to see Pedric?”

  Emmylou crossed the room with a soft scuffing sound, and sat down. “Pedric Greenlaw’s here? Oh, my. What happened? What’s wrong?”

  By the time Ryan had explained about the wreck, Kit had crawled halfway out of the backpack again, listening. Ryan explained how Kit had run off from the wrecked Lincoln, which was the natural thing for a frightened cat to do, and how they had gone to search for her.

  “Poor little thing,” Emmylou said. “How lucky that you found her, up in those dark woods. She must have been terrified.”

  I was terrified. And ready to bloody those damned coyotes.

  “She came to us,” Ryan said. “She had the good sense to do that.”

  Well, of course I did.

  “And you spent the rest of the night at the hospital up there? You must be dead for sleep. And they’re here, now, in the hospital? Pedric and Lucinda?”

  “Pedric is,” Ryan said. “They brought him down in an ambulance. They’ll be moving him over to the other wing for a few days, but Lucinda’s at home. Our friend from San Francisco is staying with her. Lucinda’s happy to be home, and so is their little cat.”

  “I’m sure of that,” Emmylou said. “Cats don’t take well to that kind of stress. But now they’re both safe in their own place, and that will help to heal them.” Emmylou had a special fondness for the concept of home, for a safe haven of one’s own, having recently lived homeless in her old car, and before that in a wind-riddled, one-room shack from which she had been evicted. Her work on her snug house, as she remodeled, was thoughtful and loving. Was, in its own way, deeply restorative to the lone woman, a home at last that no one could take from her.

  But, Kit thought, we’re not all home, Pedric’s not home yet. And I feel like I’ve spent half my life in hospitals hiding under the covers having to be quiet and still and my very fur smells of hospital. Pedric has to feel just as trapped, all the bandages, the needles stuck in his arm, the nurses doing things to him he’d rather do for himself. We’re not all home yet, we’re not all three of us back together yet. The brush of a footstep in the hall, the silence as it paused startled her. She rose up out of the leather pack, to look.

  Beyond the open door a shadow shifted where someone stood listening, his shadow half hidden by the big floppy leaves of the schefflera plant that hid, as well, most of the hallway. Emmylou was saying, “. . . squatters. Two sleeping bags, empty cans of beans, beer cans, trash. They left a mess. Well, this man that I’ve come to visit, he was in there in his sleeping bag on the floor, and he was hurt real bad. I don’t know what happened but he was all alone, moaning and bleeding, the minute I saw him I hurried down to my place and called the ambulance.”

  Listening to Emmylou, trying to make sense of what she was saying, Kit watched the shadow shift again, and when she breathed deeply she picked up the sweet smell of sugar and cinnamon, and then . . . What? What was that she smelled?

  Pedric? The faintest scent of Pedric? But then even stronger, over Pedric’s scent and t
he smell of sugary cinnamon, came a familiar odor that made her swallow back a growl. It was all she could do not to bolt out of the bag and leap at him, slash him as she had up on the mountain when he’d hurt Lucinda. Why was that man here at the hospital? The same hospital where Pedric was. What did he want, what did he mean to do?

  “Well, to make a long story short,” Emmylou was saying, “the hurt man is Sammie’s little brother, Birely. Can you believe it? Her homeless brother who came around once or twice a year. Birely who never admitted to being among the homeless, who called himself a hobo. Whenever he showed up, she’d take him a sandwich or a hot supper from the deli. Sometimes I went with her, we’d sit under the Valley Road bridge, the three of us like homeless folks, having our picnic.”

  “Was Birely here for her funeral? I don’t . . .”

  “No,” Emmylou said. “He probably didn’t know she’d died, until now. Came back all these months later, after Sammie was buried, came up to the property but didn’t tell me he was here. Broke into that stone shack with one of his cronies. How long have they been there, and I didn’t have a clue? Not until I heard some noises up there last night, and went up to see and there was Birely, lying there only half alive.”

  The shadow had moved closer, pressing against the door, Kit could see the flap of his jacket now, through the crack between the wall and the open door. His smell came stronger again, hiding Pedric’s scent. Emmylou said, “Days earlier, I had wondered, when Misto started watching the place, sitting in the yard, looking up there. And then when I saw your Joe Grey and little tabby Dulcie up there, saw them come down off the windowsill as if they’d been inside. I thought, then, there were rats up there, there are wood rats all over these hills. I decided they were hunting in there, and I thought no more about it.”

  In the shadow of the love seat, when Ryan turned away, Kit slipped on out of the backpack, to the floor. Ryan said, “When he learned Sammie had died, why didn’t he come to you? Was he too shy, did he move in there out of loneliness but was too shy to let you know he was there? But then,” she said, “what happened? How did he get hurt?” Behind her Kit fled belly down across the dark tile floor and into the shadows of the potted schefflera tree. “Last night,” Ryan said, “when you called the ambulance, why didn’t you ask for the police, too?”

  “Those two hadn’t hurt anything,” Emmylou said. “They were trespassing, but nothing more. My concern was all for Birely.”

  “Emmylou, you don’t know anything about the other man, or, in fact, about Birely . . .”

  “Oh, Birely isn’t mean, just irresponsible. Maybe a little dim. Sammie always tried to take care of him. She was nine when Birely was born. She said he was always shy and rather slow, that the other kids teased and harried him. Their parents did their best to see he wasn’t bullied and to teach him to fend for himself, but then their father was killed. Birely was seven, Sammie sixteen. After that, I guess they all had a hard time.

  “When Sammie died she left me everything she had, the house and the money. She asked me to take care of him if I could, so of course I feel responsible for him, I couldn’t betray Sammie, I have to help Birely.”

  “She left you money? I hope enough to pay the taxes and insurance.”

  Emmylou smiled. “Oh, my, yes. She . . .” She glanced down the room at the three women, but they were still talking all at once, as frantically energized as sparrows on a pile of bread crumbs. “She left money hidden in the house,” Emmylou said softly. “Quite a lot of money.”

  “I’m glad of that,” Ryan said. “That helps with the refurbishing, too. I hope you have it safe in the bank, now. But, Emmylou, if Birely’s friend knew he was hurt, why didn’t he get Birely to the ER? He just went off and left him? Doesn’t that tell you something?”

  Kit, hidden among the leaves of the schefflera, wasn’t six inches from the man who’d hurt Pedric and Lucinda, who’d gone into their empty house and trashed it. He looked different now, smooth shaven, with short, neater hair—having left his pigtail scattered across their bathroom floor, she thought, twitching a whisker. He was wearing Pedric’s sport coat, the missing tweed sport coat, and Pedric’s missing Rockports that, when she sniffed them through the crack, still smelled of the Molena Point hills, of bruised grass and damp leaves. He had used Lucinda and Pedric’s house key to steal Pedric’s clothes, and now he was here at the hospital. Come to visit his hurt partner? Or to nose around Pedric’s room? For what reason?

  Emmylou said, “Maybe Birely’s partner didn’t have any money to take him to the hospital, maybe he left Birely to go for medicine, to help him the only way he could, maybe—”

  “You know better than that, Emmylou. Medicine, for a smashed nose? Everyone knows you can check yourself into the ER with no money, that, by law, they can’t refuse to treat you. Where is this friend, who couldn’t bother to bring Birely here?”

  The man beyond the door had turned away, moved silently, heading down the hall toward the ICU. Silently Kit followed him. Bellying out from under the schefflera and out the door, she hoped no doctor or nurse came along the hall and made a fuss, called security to chase that cat out of the hospital. Behind her the voices faded as Kit streaked across an intersecting hallway close behind the man’s heels. The floors were no longer dark so he blended in; the linoleum was white now, against her black-and-brown coat as she followed him into the big, open expanse of the Intensive Care Unit.

  IN THE WAITING room, Ryan knew she should be returning to the ICU, to see if Pedric was back in his bed. She imagined Kit sound asleep in her backpack, worn out from last night’s excitement. Emmylou was saying, “I read Sammie’s letter over and over. I kept it for only a few days and then I burned it. I was afraid someone might find it, and find the money. Sammie had invested some of it, and she did all right, enough to live on, and to work only when she wanted to. She kept most of the original money at home, she said her uncle’d taught her never to trust banks.

  “After he left the states, Sammie thought he was afraid to write or call, afraid that might put the Mexican Guardia on his trail, afraid of being extradited back to the U.S. He must have been a tough old guy; he was one of the last legendary train robbers, a man right out of the Old West, and he was a real hero to Sammie. She prayed he’d come back, but he didn’t, not until she was nearly thirty. Came back to California to die.

  “She was living up in the Salinas Valley then, working as a bookkeeper, when the uncle showed up again. He was real sick, lung disease. He was bone thin and weak, and could hardly breathe, she was surprised he had made it up from Mexico, came by train all the way. She got him into the hospital,” Emmylou said, “but he only lasted a week, lying there white and helpless, she said, and then he was gone. Dead from emphysema and pneumonia.

  “Her letter was with her will. I was surprised she had a lawyer, she lived such a simple life, was so reclusive.” Emmylou laughed. “Like me, I guess. Well, the lawyer gave me the sealed letter, and the newly recorded deed in my name, a check for what little she had in the bank, and the letter he’d sent her with the money some years before he died.”

  “That’s why you were tearing into the walls,” Ryan said, “that’s why you’re remodeling, looking for the money. Oh, my God, Emmylou. What if there’d been a fire?”

  “It was wrapped in sheets of asbestos,” Emmylou said, “some kind of insulation, maybe what they used to use in houses before the laws got so strict.”

  Ryan closed her eyes, imagining packets of old, frail treasury bills, wrapped in asbestos that probably wouldn’t help much if those ancient, dry studs went up in a hungry blaze. She wondered if, in those simpler days when every crime was more newsworthy, that robbery had been in the California papers. She wondered if the case was still open, perhaps, was still on the books after all these many years—and if the feds would still like to get their hands on those old bills? It was only after Emmylou had left, and Ryan reached down to pick up he
r backpack and head for the ICU, only when she felt the pack swing up too light, light and empty, that she panicked.

  28

  MAKING SURE HE had the rubber glove, Vic patted the syringe, safe in his pocket. At the door to the ICU he tried to look casual, walked on in past the chrome coffee machine, scanning the glass-fronted cubicles. His plan was to use patient Michael Emory as his cover, pretend to be visiting him. The nurse had said he was being moved over there from the ER. With luck he’d be there already and maybe asleep, sick people slept a lot. If the wife wasn’t in there he could sit in there himself, like a visitor, could watch Birely’s room from there until the coast was clear. It would take only a second to do Birely, bend the tube, inject the air, and get the hell out—and talk about luck! There she was, that Mrs. Emory, coming out of number 15, the same small dumpy woman with the round, wrinkled face and yellowed fuzzy hair. Congratulating himself on his perfect timing, he watched her leave Emory’s room pulling the canvas curtain halfway across as if maybe Emory was sleeping. As she passed the nurses’ station and moved on out the double doors he stepped over to the coffee urn, filled a white foam cup with coffee, added sugar and cream. Carrying this, he headed on around the nurses’ station to the other side. If anyone questioned him, he was here to visit with Michael Emory. He smiled and nodded when one or another of the nurses glanced up at him. They were all busy, no one paid much attention to him, busy doing their routine chores of one kind or another, oblivious to Vic’s purpose there.

  STALKING THE MAN was an exercise in fast judgment and heart-thumping panic. Kit made it down the hall and around the corner into the ICU having to dodge only twice into open doorways, where she barely missed being seen. Slipping behind his heels into the ICU, she was engulfed by the smell of alcohol, adhesive tape, disinfectants, and human urine. The ward was brightly lighted, and on the white linoleum she stood out like a raven on a white bedsheet. There was not one dim recess near her in which to hide, to camouflage her dark coat, not one shadow except, yards away, where the occasional cart or wheeled cupboard was parked against the open nurses’ counter. Twice she dodged behind rolling electrical equipment that looked like it could shock her straight into cat heaven.