Barking Up the Wrong Tree

by Jenn McKinlay

  Zach clapped his hands over his ears. There it was, that hideous noise again, only louder.

  “Oh, no, he’s getting upset!” The taller girl hurried off his porch and back down his walkway. She stopped a few feet away and stared up at his roof. “It’s okay, boy, it’s okay. We’re getting help.”

  What the . . . ? Zach shoved his feet into the Timberland boots he’d discarded by his front door and strode across his porch, down the steps, and onto the walk. The icy cold air of January in Maine felt like a closed-fist punch in the face, making him wince, but at least it was a new pain and distracted him from the ache in his back.

  He stood beside the girl in the purple coat and glanced up. Peering at him over the lip of the narrow porch roof was a tiny orange tabby not much bigger than his fist.

  The smaller girl in a blue coat joined them. She glanced up and looked exasperated. Then she wagged her pointer finger at the feline and said, “You are a naughty kitty.”

  “Can you get him down for us, sir, please?” the girl in purple asked. “He’s just a baby. He might freeze to death.”

  “Yeoooooow!”

  For a little guy, he sure had decent lung capacity. For a wide variety of reasons, not the least of which was to end the cat’s howling, Zach knew there was no way he was getting out of this without getting the kitten down.

  “What’s his name? Kitty?” he asked.

  “No.” The younger one shook her head. She gave him an exasperated look. “We call him Chaos.”

  Zach looked at her droll little face and laughed.

  “Of course you do,” he said. “Good name.”

  The frigid temperatures of Maine in January started to seep into his underdressed hide and he shivered. Flannel pajama bottoms and a thermal shirt were no match for temperatures in the twenties.

  “Wait here and keep an eye on him,” he said. “I’m going to get my ladder.”

  The girls looked so relieved he almost felt heroic. Glancing up at the kitten who continued yowling, he figured he’d better save the self-congratulations until after he got the little furball down.

  As he strode back into the house, Rufus passed him, looking fierce. He barked, low and deep, and Zach shook his head at him.

  “Too little too late, my friend,” he said.

  Rufus ignored him and bounded for the girls. The older one looked nervous and backed up, but the young girl opened her arms wide.

  “You have a dog?” she cried as if this was the greatest news ever.

  “Sort of,” he said. “I’m temporarily dog sitting him. Don’t worry, he loves kids.”

  As if to prove Zach right, Rufus dropped onto his back in the snow at the girls’ feet, offering his belly for rubs. Both girls laughed and Zach hurried inside, grabbed a thick chambray shirt off the back of a chair, and drew it on without bothering to button it. He then took the shortcut through the small house to the garage door.

  He lifted the ladder off its wall brackets and opened the side door, which let him back out into his front yard. He didn’t want to raise the garage door for fear of scaring the kitten into doing something stupid, although one could argue that climbing onto his roof was pretty dumb to begin with, especially on a day when the high temperature was twenty-seven degrees and the ground still had a few feet of snow on it from the icy dumping they’d gotten yesterday. How had the little scrapper gotten up there anyway?

  He set the base of the ladder on the ground and propped the top against the roof. It took some adjusting, but when it felt steady, he began to climb. Not a fan of heights, Zach wasn’t surprised when the world did one swift revolution, forcing him to grip the sides of the ladder. He closed his eyes for a second, allowing the vertigo to pass before he attempted to continue on.

  “Hurry, mister, he’s stopped crying. I think his voice is frozen,” the little one ordered.

  “Please, hurry,” the older one added.

  Zach opened his eyes and kept going. He was almost at the roof when a shriek sounded from next door. Dang, this had to be the loudest Sunday in the neighborhood’s history.

  “Maddie! Gracie! Where are you?” a woman’s voice cried.

  “Over here, Mommy,” the younger one answered. She waved as if her mother needed the visual to notice the man on the ladder just twenty yards from where she stood, looking bug-eyed and frantic.

  The woman looked as disheveled as Zach felt as she raced across the two yards to grab her girls close.

  “What are you doing over here?” she cried. “Girls, you know the rules. You are never to leave the backyard without me. I went inside for a tissue and you were both gone!”

  She kissed one head and then the other, as if to reassure herself that they were fine.

  “Yeooooooow!” Clearly put out that he didn’t have everyone’s attention, Chaos let loose his loudest, most grating yowl yet.

  Zach was pretty sure his ears had started to bleed. He gritted his teeth and climbed to the top, determined to get this cat and his people away from his Sunday sanctuary of playoff football and naps.

  “We found Chaos, Mommy, he’s on this man’s roof,” the older one said.

  “Oh,” she said. She glanced up and when her gaze met his, her face turned bright red. “I’m sorry. You don’t have to do that. I can climb up there.”

  Well, well, well, Jessie Connelly. Zach had noticed her a few months ago when he’d brought his friend’s foul-mouthed parrot into the local veterinary office where Jessie worked. He’d made the mistake of calling her “sweetheart,” and she had let him have it. He was pretty sure he still had scars from the tongue-lashing she’d given him.

  After that introduction, he’d done his best to avoid his new neighbor. He must have done a heck of a job because up until now, he’d had no idea that she had two daughters. He wondered if she was feeling bad about their last meeting now that he was saving the girls’ kitten. Feeling mischievous, he almost called her “sweetheart” or “honey” or “baby girl” just to see if she’d rip into him again.

  “Yeeeoooow!”

  Luckily, the kitten was keeping him on task. He turned back to the cat, calling over his shoulder, “Don’t worry. I’ve got this.”

  He trudged up the ladder. When he was nose to nose with the cat, he paused to figure out the best way to grab it. The orange tabby looked cold and miserable and Zach realized if anyone was having a worse Sunday than him, it was this cat. He held out his hand, thinking the cat would be grateful to climb aboard. The cat took a swipe at him. Okay, then.

  “Really?” he asked it. “I’m trying to help you out here.”

  The cat hissed and his little back arched. The critter had spunk, Zach would give him that. He’d been out here awhile now and it was bone-achingly cold. How the little guy hadn’t been turned into a furry ice cube yet, Zach couldn’t fathom.

  He reached out again, trying to coax the feisty feline with reassuring words.

  “It’s okay, little fella,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m just going to get you off the roof so you can go home with your people.”

  He held his hand still and Chaos cautiously sniffed at his cold skin. Zach didn’t know how much longer he could stay out here without gloves and not lose his fingers. He silently willed the cat to trust him.

  Just when Chaos put a cautious paw on his hand and Zach reached out with his other hand to grab the kitten, Rufus let out a bark of encouragement. The cat jumped and hissed, causing Zach to jump and his ladder to wobble. Still, he managed to grab the cat by the scruff of the neck.

  He had just hauled the little furball into his chest when he felt the bottom of the ladder shift from all of the movement above. As if in slow motion, the ladder tipped away from the roof of the porch.

  “Oh, no, mister, look out!” one of the girls cried.

  It was too late. Zach couldn’t grab the roof without droppi
ng the cat. He couldn’t risk the little guy like that, so he tucked him into his chest and just relaxed his body into the fall. The ladder slid, wobbled, slid again, and the next thing Zach knew he was free-falling toward the ground.

  Having no idea what he was going to land on, Zach had to revise his earlier assessment. He was most definitely having a worse Sunday than the cat.

  Former librarian Jenn McKinlay is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of the Bluff Point Romances, including Barking Up the Wrong Tree and About a Dog, as well as the Library Lover’s Mysteries, the Cupcake Bakery Mysteries, and the Hat Shop Mysteries. Jenn lives in sunny Arizona in a house that is overrun with kids, pets, and her husband’s guitars. Visit her website at jennmckinlay.com.

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