Just then I noticed a flaw in the gold; where a small part had flaked up and shone silver beneath, right below the cat’s chin.
“No thank you,” I said, trying to keep my voice from sounding prim. I handed the ring back and walked away.
No wonder she and Roxanne got along so well. This vendor lady was a rip-off artist too.
Chapter Forty Four
Wesley Taft
Sunday
SuMe still hadn’t come out. I knew we were going to have to wait until the show was over, and then pull those cursed bleachers out.
I was through making excuses for Max. He hadn’t even bothered to stop by and see if I needed anything. The more hours dragged by, the more angry I was getting. How could he be so petty and uncaring? If he wasn’t worried about me, he could at least have shown some concern for SuMe. I was getting frightened, too. What if he had disappeared? Why hadn’t he at least called the show management and left a message telling me where he was? I had suffered through the loss of a beloved cat. I wouldn’t be able to take losing my partner as well.
The show just went on as if nothing had happened. A few of the gnome-like exhibitors had stopped by on Saturday to ask me why I was stationed here, but the word got around quickly and now none of them seemed to care. They just went on with their frantic brushing and fluffing, immersed in their trivial search for points, and their ringside gossip, behaving as if I wasn’t even there. That didn’t surprise me a bit. I’d just as soon they all left me alone anyway.
I had gone through different scenarios in my head, of what I would do when I saw Max again. First I’d tell him off. Give him both barrels. Really let him have it. Then I would grab him, hold him close and beg him never to leave me like that again. When I imagined the scenario, again and again, my eyes would well up. It had been a very emotional and exhausting time.
It crossed my mind more than once during those torturous hours, that maybe I’d never see him again. I didn’t want to think about that. So I decided to just stay pissed off.
But Max did reappear that Sunday morning, looking all freshly showered, rested and appropriately sheepish.
“Where the hell have you been?” I said. “Do you realize what I’ve been through?”
“I’m sorry. Look, I – “
“Sorry isn’t good enough! Our baby is in there!” I pointed under the bleachers. “And you have just abandoned us both! We’re supposed to be in this together! Do you know what it’s like to sleep on the floor, night after night, wondering if she’s okay, wondering if and when she’s going to come out, and where the hell you are?”
“Well, somebody had to look after Reva.”
I hesitated. This was true. “Well, maybe we could have discussed it! You know, done shifts or something! I mean, who decided which of us would stay here?”
“Yeah, like you would have left her!”
I paused. He had a point.
“But you’re right,” he added. “I was a jerk – no, a dick – to leave you at a time like this. I should have at least checked in. I was pissed off because you didn’t just grab SuMe when you had the chance. I thought we had lost another one. And I was blaming you. But it wasn’t fair, and it was wrong of me. You know me, I just have to go off and sulk for awhile and sort things out. I am sorry.”
I nodded. “I just figured it was revenge for the Godspell thing.”
His nose wrinkled. “Godspell? What the hell are you talking about?”
“You know, you being so upset that I was in the show.”
“You think I was staying away because of that?”
“Well, yeah. It crossed my mind.”
He huffed a little laugh, but then stopped himself. He shook his head at me, but his eyes shone with affection. “No, it wasn’t revenge for Godspell. I was a dick then too. I should have come and seen your show.”
“Um, yeah.”
“It just seemed like you were doing so much better than I was. I hated it. I couldn’t accept the loss of Rusty the way you could. You are so much stronger.”
“Oh, no! You have me all wrong. I wasn’t accepting it. I was running away from it. Looking for a diversion. I’m not strong at all.”
“Don’t underestimate yourself, honey. I should have just acted like an adult and used you as an example instead of resenting you for it. I’m so sorry.”
“Well,” I sighed. “You and I are okay, as far as I’m concerned. We both miss Rusty, that’s a given. But we have a new kid now who needs us. I guess the thing to do now is just concentrate on the problem at hand.”
He nodded. “I’ve got an idea about how to get her out. But it’s going to require a lot of cooperation from the other cat people here.”
I snorted. “Good luck.”
“I think it will work. I’ll talk to them.”
“Don’t try to talk them into anything without some bonbons. Here.” I tossed him a couple of Nestles Crunch bars that Kim had given me earlier. “You’ll need bribery material.”
Chapter Forty Five
Andrew Gilbert
Sunday
Well, with Tracy Pringle trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey, some of the cat people were getting what they deserved. Now the Mouth Breather had Kenya back. But I still had her pen and it suddenly occurred to me that I should really return that, too.
I took my backpack out from under Hotsy’s cage and unzipped it. I spilled about a third of the contents out onto the floor. It reminded me of that scene from, “The Breakfast Club” when Ally Sheedy dumps the contents of her duffel bag out for inspection by the other kids. I had a tortoiseshell comb – the kind with the handle that had protruded from everyone’s back pocket in the seventies. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it sticking out of that lady’s handbag in the grocery store. I didn’t think anyone used those types of combs any more. There was the usual store loot: bubble gum, licorice, a Pez dispenser. I had a comic book taken from a bratty kid at the movie store. I had sticky notes, 3 by 4 inch picture frames, bean bag animals, an extension cord, a compact, Altoid mints, and there in the midst of the mess was Cecilia’s Kenya pen on its long black cord.
She was sitting with Kenya, petting and talking to him, oblivious to the world around her. She looked up smiling as I approached.
“I took this from you,” I said.
She took the pen and looked at it, and then up at me. “Why?”
That was the question. I couldn’t explain. I stood looking at her. She stretched the pen’s springy cord and hung it around her neck. Kenya stood up and bumped her shoulder with his forehead. She looked at him, patted him and then looked back up at me.
“Okay, I might have a teensy problem.”
“What do you mean?”
“I take things sometimes.”
“You mean you steal things?”
Boy, this girl always had to put things bluntly. “Sure, I guess you could say that.”
“It is stealing. Even if it’s just a pen. If it belongs to someone it’s stealing.”
“Now you’re judging me.”
“I’m not judging you. And accusing me of judging is just your way of taking the focus off the topic. Which is, your stealing.”
There she goes again, I thought. I took a deep breath. “Okay. I do have a problem. I take things. Sometimes it makes me feel better when I do it. I can’t really explain why that is. It gives me a little high.”
“That’s pretty sick.”
“Thank you.” I turned to go.
“Wait!” she said. “Let’s talk about this.”
“What is there to talk about? I took it, you got it back.”
“But you gave it back!”
“Umm, yeah.”
“Why?”
“Well, it just seemed like you had been through enough.”
She smiled. “You’re a klepper.”
I rolled my eyes. “Well, if you feel the need to label, then yes, I suppose I am.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “You might need Prozac.”
“I don’t want that. I hear it gives you the runs.”
She laughed. “Yeah, people as skinny as you probably shouldn’t have it.”
“Okay, so I return the pen, and this makes me your physical and emotional fodder.”
“Oh Daddy!” she laughed. But then seeing that I wasn’t joking, she sobered. “I’m sorry. I am really not being very nice about this. I’m a clod. Thank you for bringing it back. And thank you for Kenya!”
The next thing I knew she had jumped up and was hugging me. It was quite bizarre, but I hugged her back. She was warm and soft, and her hair smelled like baby oil. She released me and pulled away, and looked a little embarrassed. I assumed she was not normally this demonstrative, and it warmed me to her a little. She was a dork, but she was doing her best.
“Okay,” I said. “I admit it. I do have a problem. I take things, little things I don’t need, all the time. And it appears that maybe I also have an eating disorder. Maybe it’s time for me to clean house a little.”
She stepped back, looked at me and smiled. When she smiled, she really was sort of pretty.
“You know,” I added. “You should do something with your hair.”
Chapter Forty Six
Ginny Robards
Ruminating
When I was a child, I had a cat, a white one. She had a black spot on top of her head. My mother let me keep her in my bedroom but Dad didn’t like cats and he didn’t want her. Well, one day that kitten disappeared. I looked everywhere, but never found her. Later some school kids told me they had a white kitten show up in their barn. She had a black spot on her head. She grew up and had kittens and lived her life hunting mice in the barn. I liked to think that it was my kitten but I never knew for sure.
I had dreams of that cat – her name was Daisy – for years. My father never mentioned her again after she disappeared.
Liesl and I had refrained from naming any of our cats Julie Andrews. We were waiting for the perfect specimen. It would have to be one with a sweet temperament. I often thought she would come to us in the form of a white cat with a black spot on her head.
And then things would have come full circle. Wrongs would be righted. It had happened for Julie herself.
“Sometimes I’m so sweet even I can’t stand myself.” She had said that, and I thought it so becoming. So humble. She had starred as Eliza Doolittle in “My Fair Lady” onstage, but they wouldn’t give her the movie role. That went to Audrey Hepburn. So, she turned to Mr. Disney instead. She became Mary Poppins. And she won the Academy Award that year! Not Audrey.
Then came, “The Sound of Music.” Her crowning glory.
Some people just deserve what happens to them.
Chapter Forty Seven
Kim Norwich
Sunday Morning
I’d been made a fool. I kept turning events over and over in my mind. Tracy Pringle was dead, and we were obviously dealing with a serial killer now.
What the hell was wrong with me? I decided that I had let my attraction to Reynolds cloud my judgment, that I had accused Tracy Pringle of murder just because he had been flirting with her. That was really bad. Really unprofessional. And even worse, a second person had been killed on my watch.
I did my rounds in a sort of haze that morning, wondering how in the hell I had gotten to this point. My instincts had never let me down before. Now I was just like a dumb schoolgirl with a crush. God, how humiliating.
I needed to put a stop to this infatuation. Reynolds wasn’t good for me. He was messing up my logic. I wondered if, when this show was over, I should start looking for another job. If I was letting my emotions screw up my performance this much, then I wasn’t cut out for this line of work. Maybe I was entering some kind of midlife crisis. Whatever the reason, it was very depressing. My intuition had always been the one thing I could count on.
I walked up and down the aisles, answering the greetings of various exhibitors with a brief hello. People had to be pretty shaken by this new development, and yet they all just sat by their cat cages, huddled in groups, talking. Nobody was packing up to leave. The cats were mostly exhausted by this time, sleeping curled in their cuddle beds or splayed out in the laps of their owners.
As I turned to go down another row, I noticed a woman dressed in a long dark skirt, moving up the aisle away from me. There was something wrong about her. Wrong and weird. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was something.
She was walking slowly up the aisle, looking at the cats but not looking. She had a large canvas handbag hanging over one arm. She had the air and movements of a shoplifter. Her hair was pitch black and fell down her back from beneath the wide brim of a tan velvet hat. I didn’t like the way she was overdressed, her sneaky air, her tentative step. It was odd to me that no one else seemed to notice her.
She bumped and jostled others as she moved, but she never turned or spoke to anyone. I drifted along behind her.
Finally, she came to the cages where the Somalis were benched, and she stopped. Cecilia Fox had taken Kenya up to a ring, and there was no one close by. The woman looked in the cage at Zephyr, the other Somali.
“She’s going to steal that cat,” I thought.
I turned away, predicting her next move, which indeed was a furtive glance around. I had timed it just right so she didn’t see me watching her.
The next thing I knew, she was moving swiftly toward the exit. I followed her, dodging around the grooming carts that blocked the aisle here and there. She was practically running. I stayed right behind her, and as she swung the door open, I said, “Hold it right there!”
Her head turned quickly, an unintended acknowledgement that she had heard me and understood. She bolted through the door, passing the small group of exhibitors who stood outside smoking cigarettes. When she got past them, she started to run. I raced after her. She was still carrying that canvas bag, which swung heavily.
“Stop!” I called.
But she kept going. That was my cue. She was taller than I, but she wasn’t very fast. I just doubled my efforts, caught up to her and made a flying tackle. She went down easily, rolling on the pavement. The bag flew from her hands and landed a few feet away.
Her body was big and heavy, and she thrashed madly on her stomach, swinging her hands back trying to grab me. I felt her fingernails rake my forearm, peeling the skin up in tight red lines. As her hand flew away from my arm, I grabbed it and pulled it back, flexing the palm backward, hard. She yelled in pain and immediately stopped moving.
The smokers by the door were laughing and whooping, yelling, “Cat fight! Cat fight!”
How cliché! I yelled at them to shut up.
I straddled her, pulled my handcuffs out of my back pocket, and with one hand, clipped them around her wrists.
“What are you doing?” she gasped. “Let me go, you crazy bitch!”
I noticed a movement out of the corner of my eye, and saw that the bag had taken on a life of its own. I got up, picked it up and unzipped it, to find the frightened face of a Somali cat looking up at me. Zephyr.
I turned back to the woman lying flat on her stomach, out of breath. The hat was gone, and her black wig was sliding sideways on her head. I pulled it off to reveal the garish red hair of Roxanne Moore.
Just then the door opened and out came Detective Reynolds. “Good work, Norwich. Impressive. I’ll take it from here.”
I walked right up to him and slapped his face as hard as I could. He staggered one step, put his hand up to his cheek and looked at me.
“You knew she was alive!” I said.
“Well, yeah.”
It was all coming back to me now, the frantic way the deputy had waved to Reynolds when the ambulance came in. The way the ambulance lights flashed. The way Reynolds went running.
I felt like a fool. I should have seen the signs, all the indications that she was still alive. But I had felt her pulse, and found nothing. The others had too. She must have stopped breathing for a few minutes.
“You bastard! Why didn’t you tell me? You just let me go on believing-“
“I couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t tell anyone. We were going to find the killer.”
“What is she doing here? How is this possible?”
He was rubbing his cheek, the flaming red spot spreading there, and looking at me mildly. “She came to in the ambulance. She had a concussion and she had sleep apnea. She would stop breathing during sleep for sometimes as long as a couple of minutes.”
“I’ve heard that happens to fat people sometimes,” I said.
“Shut up you bitch!” she roared.
Reynolds ignored our jabs. “She’s not supposed to be here. She was supposed to stay home until the killer was found. She was supposed to check in by calling the station every few hours. She says she didn’t see who attacked her. Isn’t that right, Roxanne?”
Roxanne lay on the pavement on her stomach, glaring up at the two of us. “I don’t know who it was.”
“Uh huh,” Reynolds said. “Pretty ironic that you would show up on the same day another victim is found. Looks like you tried to turn the tables.”
“You can’t prove that!” she screeched. “This redhead is a psycho! She attacked me for no reason!”
I rolled my eyes. “I told you to stop. You stole a cat.”
“He’s my fucking cat!”
“I didn’t know that. You were supposed to be dead. Unfortunately, as it turns out, you’re not.”
“I’ll sue you! I’ll sue the whole precinct!”
Reynolds said, “Good luck. We’ll have forensic evidence. They found some black hairs on the body. They’ll probably match this.” He picked up the wig.
I held Zephyr, cradled inside the bag in my arms. He had relaxed and was even purring, gazing up at me with half-closed eyes.
“I’m going back in.” I glared at Reynolds and then turned away from him.
“Norwich,” he said.
I stopped but did not turn around.
“Good call,” he said.
Nancy J. Bailey - Furry Murder 01 - My Best Cat Page 15
