Murder at the Foul Line

by Otto Penzler

  And it did simply appear, on the road ahead of her, as if it had been dropped from the cloudless blue sky—or more probably, she realized much later, launched from the bowels of the plumber’s truck two vehicles ahead of her. The truck was big and red and bristling with cranes, nozzles, storage tanks, and various fixtures whose purpose Lauren couldn’t begin to guess. For one cat, however, one dark, bedraggled, desperately bewildered feline, the truck had been a place of refuge against the chill of the previous night, its nooks and crannies welcome shelter.

  Until the truck reached sixty on the freeway and started to bounce and rattle.

  The animal hit the ground running, or trying its damnedest to run, all four feet skittering across the concrete at sixty miles an hour, its paws working automatically to find some kind of traction that would enable it to lunge for safety. It was not tumbling head over heels; its head was bolt upright, revealing eyes popped and staring with astonishment, fur spiked awry with wet or grease. Every fiber of the creature’s being was fighting to make sense of the impossible concrete and steel maelstrom into which it had been ejected, every sinew and cell in its body battling valiantly to stay upright, to find the safe haven that it knew had to be there somewhere in the hell bearing down on it, to gather itself up from the loud/fast/huge confusion and leap in haven’s direction, to survive, to live.

  All this—its attitude and its youth, the wide-staring eyes and the state of its dark fur and the way its delicate paws were trying for something they could comprehend—printed itself on Lauren’s mind in about two seconds. The cat simply materialized—it hadn’t wandered out across two lanes of traffic from the shoulder, that would have been impossible—it just appeared, having passed miraculously without harm under the rattletrap old Chevy that separated Lauren from the plumber’s truck, skating down the roadway between that oblivious car’s four tires and shooting out from under the back bumper like some macabre version of Bambi on ice. It had not been afraid, she decided on the tenth or hundredth time those two seconds replayed themselves in her mind’s eye: it wasn’t fear that had bugged those eyes and given such desperate strength to its fragile muscles. Somehow she knew that there had been no time for fear in the moments allotted to it, just astonishment wedded to a frantic and determined hunt for solution. She also knew, queasily, that had there been a vehicle in the next lane, half a dozen cars and a girl’s basketball team would have come to wrenching, steel-tearing grief on top of the cat. Fortunately there had been no car to meet her unthinking yank on the wheel.

  The girls hadn’t seen the cat, just shrieked in reaction to the abrupt swerve and started gabbling questions at her. Lauren did not answer. She clenched the steering wheel with white-knuckled hands, slowing so dramatically the car behind her blared its horn in protest, and she kept her eyes glued to the rust-speckled bumper of the rapidly retreating Chevy. She did not look into the rearview mirror; she did not have to. She knew what her eyes would see there if she did look, knew that the only possible ending to the cat’s story had borne down on it with metal teeth bared and rubber wheels pounding, to give the animal’s valiant efforts a casual, two-ton swat and drive on. Lauren kept her own wide-staring eyes fixed on the road ahead of her and turned deaf ears on the demands of the girls, moving with infinite caution into the exit lane, off the freeway, and into the first convenient parking lot.

  Her four girls were gibbering frantically; in a moment the minivan carrying the rest of the team swerved behind them into the lot. All the occupants of both vehicles went abruptly quiet when Lauren flung open her door, stumbled over to the ivy strip bordering the lot, and vomited up her breakfast.

  The girls subsided and let the other adult take over. Gwen jumped out of the minivan and trotted over to Lauren’s side, where she stood with one hand on the coach’s sweating back until she was sure the spasms were finished. Then she went back to the van, dug a bottle of water from the cooler, and came back to hand it to Lauren.

  “Thanks, Gwen,” Lauren managed when the icy clean water had reduced the awful taste to a burning in the back of her throat.

  “Are you coming down with something?”

  “You didn’t see it?”

  “See what?”

  “The cat. It just… appeared in front of me on the road.” As soon as the words left her mouth, Lauren realized how pitiful they were: for this she had endangered the lives of four students? But Gwen seemed inclined to be sympathetic rather than disapproving; after all, nothing had happened.

  “Oh, how awful,” she said. “I ran over a dog once, I know how you feel.”

  “Just the shock of it,” Lauren said. Gwen thought she was saying that she’d run over the thing herself. Let it be, Lauren thought: her extreme reaction might be more easily understood if guilt were thought to be the culprit, not the weird, almost anthropomorphic link of empathy she’d felt for the animal during those two terrible seconds.

  “You going to be okay?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Lauren said heartily, standing straight to add assurance.

  “I could run my load up and come back for yours; it’s only about twenty minutes away.”

  “No, I’m fine. Really.”

  And she was. She downplayed the death of a stray cat for the girls and turned the conversation to the game ahead, she drove at a normal speed the rest of the way, she greeted the other coach (a high school acquaintance) with the right balance of friendliness and good-humored threat, and she worked her girls up into enough of a lather that they bounced out onto the court with that attitude she loved. And if she hugged her jacket around her in the warm auditorium to stifle the shivers running up and down her arms all that day, no one commented.

  Her girls didn’t win, but the final score was by no means humiliating, and they sure as hell learned a lot from the others. They even loved the funky pizza parlor the two teams had taken over for the afternoon, and left town with a dozen new best friends and an exchange of phone numbers and e-mail addresses.

  In the excitement of the day, the cat was forgotten. Lauren drove her quartet of tired players back over the hills, dropped each at the correct front door, and wearily steered herself home. She let herself in, gathered up old Timson, and buried her face into his fur for a minute until he mewed his bones’ protest, then walked into her kitchen, dug through the cupboards for the dusty bottle of brandy, and poured a generous two fingers into a glass and down her throat.

  After a while the trembling sensation under her skin subsided.

  You’re such a wimp, she told herself. Cats die all the time, sad but true.

  Except that she wasn’t a wimp. She’d done hard things when necessary: she’d once beheaded and buried an agonized, broken-back garter snake that some kid had run over on the sidewalk, and she had no particular squeamishness when it came to trapping mice or performing first aid to the goriest of cuts.

  Low blood sugar, she decided. She slopped a couple of eggs around in a frying pan and ate them on toast, and felt better. She took another jolt of the brandy to the television and fed an old favorite movie into the VCR; that, too, helped. Pleasantly woozy from the unaccustomed booze, she scrubbed the day away beneath a hot shower, towel-dried her short hair, and fell blithely into bed before the clock’s hands rested on ten.

  Only to find the cat waiting for her, riding the undulating concrete on four outstretched paws like a water strider riding the surface of a fast, deep river. Under something it flew—car bumper? tree limb?—with a look of startled, outraged confusion on its near-human features. One front paw came up in a gesture of supplication, and then a sharp noise somewhere in the reaches of the house jerked Lauren out of the nightmare to stare into the dark room, feeling all the cat’s panic on her own face.

  Cat: noise. Timson must be—but no, Timson was asleep against her feet. She sat frozen among the tangled sheets, the threat of vomit raw in the back of her throat, straining her thudding ears for the sound to repeat itself. After a minute she got up, took her old hockey stick out of its corner, an
d crept through the house to see what had invaded. She found nothing, and when she got back to her bedroom again, she saw that the ever-nervous Timson was still fast asleep, which he would not be if there was a stranger anywhere in the house. She propped the stick back in the corner of the room, went back to bed and eventually to sleep.

  The doomed cat came through her dreaming mind twice more before dawn, and Lauren spent the next day in a thick-limbed daze, alternating between empty-minded half-sleep over the Sunday paper and unnecessarily vigorous housecleaning. By evening she had barely enough energy to perform her always-on-Sunday task of the phone call to her mother.

  She did so at the kitchen table, knowing that if she listened to her mother’s endless monologue from a comfortable chair, she’d soon be snoring. As it was, she drifted in and out of awareness with her chin resting on her hand, grunting responses into the pauses provided and wondering how long this creepy cat thing would take to fade.

  When she had fumbled and nearly dropped the phone twice, she cut into her mother’s epic narrative of the retirement center’s inefficient postman, told her she’d call again Wednesday, and went to bed.

  The cat was waiting for her.

  In the morning she felt so utterly wretched at the idea of the new week that she thought about calling in sick. Except that she was not sick, she was haunted, by an idiotic feline who hadn’t had enough sense to know an unsafe resting spot when it found one. For some ungodly reason, those vivid moments had been seared onto Lauren’s mind as if it had been her own life passing before her eyes. She groaned, held an ice-filled cloth to her inflamed eyelids while the coffee brewed, and went to work.

  Monday afternoon: a bleary and out-of-control practice session; Monday night: a third set of sessions with the unknown cat. Three nights of broken sleep that reduced her to a nervous wreck—or maybe her nervous state had reduced her to sleeplessness, she could not be sure. She could not, in fact, be too sure of her own sanity. The next night was the same; following that, she knew something had to be done. During Wednesday’s prep period, Lauren picked up the phone to call for help.

  Unfortunately, the only psychotherapist she knew, the woman she’d seen a decade before when she’d been an insomniac college student, couldn’t see her before Friday. Lauren’s desperation did, however, make an impression on the receptionist, because Dr. Minerva Henry herself called back twenty minutes later. Greetings, a brief catch-up, Lauren’s halting and by now embarrassed description of the cat episode and its consequences, and Min’s regrets that she had no free time until Friday.

  “That’s all right, I understand,” Lauren told her. “I’m sure I’ll be okay until then. It’s just so… silly.”

  “It doesn’t sound at all silly.”

  “I mean, to be so upset by such an inconsequential event. I really am a very stable kind of a person. Or I was until Saturday.”

  “This episode has clearly driven a wedge under some firmly shut door in your mind. You may remember, I recommended ten years ago that you remain in therapy. I take it you did not.”

  “But I was fine,” Lauren protested.

  “You were functioning well,” the doctor corrected her gently. “Now you’re not. We’ll sort it out beginning Friday.”

  “Two more nights like I’ve been having, you might want to book me a padded cell,” Lauren remarked. As an attempt at dry humor, it fell completely flat, leaving Min Henry to take it as a cry for help. In truth, it was.

  “Avoid caffeine,” the good doctor recommended. “And no alcohol, either. Eat well, get some nice healthy outdoor exercise, and drink a glass of warm milk before bed. You might also take a pen and paper to bed with you, to write down any words or images that come to mind when you wake up. We’ll talk about those on Friday.”

  The mere suggestion that the problem might be sorted out was a comfort, and helped Lauren make it through the day and the practice session. She ate a balanced dinner, corrected the stack of exam papers, and phoned her mother to listen to the endless trickle of gentle complaints about the workers and neighbors in her quite comfortable retirement home.

  “Mother,” she said at one point, interrupting a detailed description of the tragedy inflicted by the cook on a poor, unsuspecting piece of beef. “Did anything ever happen to me as a child that involved a cat?”

  “A cat, dear?”

  “Yes. The other day I saw a cat get… hurt, and it’s given me nightmares. I just wondered if maybe something similar happened when I was small, that I forgot about.”

  “Oh, dear, how terrible for you. One of the ladies down the hall has bad dreams, she talks in her sleep so you can hear every—”

  “Mother? The cat?”

  “We never had cats, dear. Your father didn’t like them.”

  “But did I—oh, never mind. How is Mrs. Peasley’s leg doing?”

  She hung up twenty minutes later, knowing more than she cared to about the pernicious results of circulatory problems but little the wiser about cats. However, mention of her father, an uncomfortable topic at the best of times, seemed to drive another section of wedge into the gap opened by the cat. That night’s dream found her sitting not behind the wheel of her car as the frantic man-faced cat spun around and around on the surface of the roadway, but rather on a hard bench of a seat beside her long-estranged father. He seemed enormous in her dream, as he had not been in life, bristling with the self-importance she had believed in until college freed her of illusions, the father of her youth.

  As it turned out, it was Father who took up most of the Friday session with Min Henry, not the list of words and images she had jotted down in the still of the night (wet fur and fast current; also mouth “O” in surprise and too fast for fear and thunk!). Her ambiguous feelings toward her parent, his peculiar combination of the ineffectual and the quick to anger, her jumble of respect and love and fear that must, it occurred to her, be very like the feelings her mother still bore for the man who had abandoned her with two small children and a mountain of debts.

  What did all that have to do with a cat? she asked the therapist at the close of the session.

  Patience, the woman said. And maybe we should meet twice a week.

  The nightmare retreated a fraction, in frequency if not intensity. Once or twice a night instead of every couple of hours: cat/panic/bench, father/thud/wake.

  The following Wednesday, Lauren forced herself to ask her mother again about what might lie in the past.

  “The cat again, dear?”

  “When I was with Daddy.” Daddy? she thought; I haven’t called him that since I was eight.

  “Oh, sweetie, I wouldn’t know. I mean, your father often took you and your brother off for a while so I could go to the hairdressers’ or some such thing. You’d go to the beach or the country club. He liked to show you off. But I’d have thought that if something happened during one of those outings, he’d have mentioned it. Then again I suppose he could have told me and I’ve forgotten it, I do forget so much. But not usually from the past—isn’t it funny how I can forget where I put my book down but I can remember what dress you wore to your fifth-birthday party? No, I think I’d remember if something happened to a cat while you were out with him. There was the time your brother cut his hand at the racetrack, I remember that. And you were frightened once when you got separated from your father for a few minutes at the county fair; you clung to my skirts for a week after that. I suppose you could have seen a cat get hurt during that time, although what a cat would be doing wandering around a crowded fairground I can’t think.” (Dropping out of a shiny red tractor, maybe?) “And there was the time, when was that? Just after your brother was born, that’s right, when your father took you for the day. You went fishing with him and, um, Arty. You remember Arty?” Lauren’s antennae pricked at the casual tone of her mother’s voice. Arty? But her mother was rushing on. “I wasn’t too keen on the idea of you in a boat, you were awfully young, but your father promised me he’d keep your life vest on you every second, a
nd with both of them to keep an eye on you, you’d be fine. Which you were.”

  “Arty? I don’t remember—wait a minute. Was he a man with a red face and a mustache?”

  “That’s right, fancy you remembering that! And he was always smoking a cigar. It had a lovely smell, I thought, but your father wouldn’t let him smoke in the house. You loved the smell, always followed him around, even when he went outside to smoke. He called you his little shadow,” she said wistfully. “You missed him so when he left, moped around for days.” I missed him, Lauren heard in her mother’s voice.

  “Where did he go?”

  “They told me he’d gone to Montana.”

  Lauren waited for more; when nothing more came, she found herself sitting forward, as if to pull information out of the telephone. Her mother’s uncharacteristically brief answer seemed to echo down the line.

  “Did he?” she prompted.

  “Oh, dear,” her mother replied with a sigh. “I don’t know. I suppose he must have, although at the time, well, I thought he’d maybe had an accident, out hiking somewhere. He was a great one for hiking.”

  “Didn’t anyone go looking for him?”

  “No, honey, that was only for a couple of days. And then he called your father to tell him he was quitting—a middle-aged crisis I guess they’d call it today. Anyway, he just quit, threw it all over of a sudden and left town. It must have been right after that fishing trip, come to think of it. That’s right—your brother was just born, you were moping around and having tantrums at the drop of a hat, your father was even more short-tempered than usual. We thought it really was very thoughtless of Arty, to leave him in the lurch like that, and at such a difficult time. Then a few weeks later the accountant found that Arty’d been siphoning off cash. He was your father’s manager, you remember. Young for the job, but capable. Later the police decided he’d panicked, thinking they were on to him, and that was why he left in such a hurry. He probably moved to Mexico or something—your father had a few phone conversations with him, asking him to take care of some things, but those stopped after a few months.”