Cat Deck the Halls

by Shirley Rousseau Murphy

  Max said, “The sheriff didn’t call us, as I asked him to. I’m waiting for a call from the D.A.”

  “The sheriff wouldn’t call. But the D.A…” She went silent as Mabel appeared in the doorway. The comfortably built blonde stepped in just far enough to hand Max a sheet of paper. Joe could smell the scent of the fax machine. Max looked up at Evina, nodding. “Your county D.A.”

  “Does he tell you how she was…That she was buried under…” She couldn’t talk for a few minutes. She said at last, “Buried under the remains of a dead deer?” She looked forlornly at the officers. “So…Maybe so dogs wouldn’t track her scent?”

  When Evina reached for her purse, both men came alert. Seeing their concern, she unzipped the bag and handed it to Dallas. “There’s a plastic bag in there, with a pair of Marlie’s panties. I…brought it with me for the DNA. In case…I thought…if her body was found here, that might prove that Leroy…” She was trying hard not to cry.

  Dallas withdrew the clear plastic freezer bag. “If this matches up with anything on Leroy’s clothes…” He glanced at Harper.

  Max nodded. “Go pick him up, Dallas. Bring him in as a person of interest.”

  Joe, seeing the pitiful little cotton panties and Evina’s distress, felt his claws digging hard into the rug. Evina smiled at Max, as if she was grateful someone in law enforcement seemed to want to help, seemed to be straight with her. Then suddenly she burst into hard, wrenching sobs. Dallas sat down beside her and put his arm around her.

  She looked up at him at last, gulping. “For the first time,” she choked. “Some…someone…who listens. Well, Mrs. Greenlaw did, but…A cop who listens, and cares. Thank you,” she whispered.

  It took Joe Grey a while, after everyone left the office and turned out the light, to stop feeling teary, himself. Evina’s reaction to simple decency nearly undid the tomcat. He had just slipped out from under the credenza when Dulcie and Kit appeared in the doorway looking hot and harried.

  “Come on,” Dulcie said. “They’re moving the playhouse earlier than Cora Lee thought. The truck’s headed for the school, and so are Cora Lee and the girls. Kit was at the seniors’, and-”

  “And the little girl was there,” Kit said, “with Officer Sand, and Cora Lee was reading her a picture book about Christmas with alligators and then they loaded the playhouse on a truck and had milk and pie and when the truck and car left I came over the roofs to get Dulcie and then we…The Wickens will be there by now with the blue van. Come on, Joe.” And she spun away, Joe and Dulcie following her out of the darkened office and down the hall, Joe yowling at Mabel to let them out.

  Mabel scolded him for his impatience as she hurried to open the front door, looking puzzled that they were in such a swivet. The cats galloped through, scorched up the overhanging oak to the roof, and took off for the Patty Rose Orphans’ Home, not really caring, at that moment, what Mabel might be thinking.

  29

  S LOWING HER CAR and turning in to the drive of the Patty Rose Orphans’ Home behind the forklift and loaded truck, Cora Lee sat a moment waiting to be admitted by the gate guard and admiring the huge Christmas tree that gleamed out through the hall’s two-story windows. Patty had loved to decorate the Home for Christmas, she believed that the children needed, and thrived on, such joyous rituals in their lives. Cora Lee thought about the old-fashioned name that Patty had insisted on for the Home. Though most people called it the childrens’ home, Patty had been adamant that there was no shame in the word “orphan”-that word always put Cora Lee in mind of the New Orleans street children, when she was a little girl.

  Maybe ten children living in one room, often with no father in residence, and their mother trying to provide for them. And some children had nowhere to live but the streets, children with no education and little hope for the future. The churches had saved many, giving them hot meals and a place to sleep and trying to find adoptive homes for them. But the children at the Patty Rose Home were so lucky-these kids had more than many children who still had both parents.

  Pulling on through the gardens behind the truck to the rear parking lot, Cora Lee hid a smile as Lori and Dillon, crowded on the seat beside her, tried to see everything at once and to assess every playhouse, even though most of them were still in their separate parts. The mansion’s usually tranquil lawns were crowded with people and trucks, and playhouses being unloaded and set into place amid a confusion of workers. Who knew there were that many forklifts in the county? The small houses being bolted together had begun to form a small city of Lilliputian dwellings, some as bright as crocuses, some rustic, some Mediterranean, all with decks and ladders, all fascinating. The girls were wriggling to get out. Cora Lee could hardly wait, herself, for a closer look.

  The gate attendant had taken the girls’ names when they came through, and checked them off on his list. Now they followed their own truck to the south side of the Tudor mansion, not far from Anna Stanhope’s studio. Most of that smaller building was hidden by huge rhododendron bushes that would flaunt a riot of reds and pinks in the early spring. A spot of sun glinted off the slanted skylights that transformed the stone interior into a bright though secluded work space. The artist had spent the last thirty years of her life painting there. When she died, her rich coastal landscapes had been stacked in every room and in the small garage, though most of her work had already sold through several prestigious California galleries. The girls exploded out the door before Cora Lee quite had the car parked.

  She watched them swing up onto the truck to help the two drivers release the ropes. Watched the forklift get to work as Lori and Dillon and the truck driver guided the first portion of the little house into place. There was so much noise from the other trucks and from hammering and power tools that Cora Lee could feel a headache beginning to wrap around her temples.

  The judging would be the next day, after all entries had been inspected for soundness by a local architect and builder. When, over the noise of the drills and hammering, Cora Lee heard the delighted cries of a flock of children, she looked up toward the mansion.

  The two-story Tudor’s dark half timbers shone in rich contrast to its pale plaster walls. In the low winter sun, the steep, shingled roofs cast angled shadows down onto the wide, second-floor deck that roofed the downstairs dining room. The children stood crowded on the deck, leaning over the rail, shouting and pointing as the little houses took shape.

  Cora Lee watched as the third portion of Lori and Dillon’s house was set in place, watched the girls bolt the parts together while the drivers held them steady. But when she saw that they had everything in hand, she turned away and headed home.

  The girls wouldn’t leave until late this evening, until they’d seen every playhouse that was entered and had rated them all, in their own minds, against their own construction. Then they’d come walking tiredly home. Tired, and…what? Satisfied with what they’d created? Or discouraged? How could they be discouraged? Their house was wonderful. But no matter what their assessment, they’d be a jumble of nerves, not fit to live with until the judging was over.

  W ATCHING FROM THE bushes as Cora Lee pulled out of the school yard, the cats moved on in behind her car, trotting between beds of poinsettias and nearly deafened by the banging of hammers and buzz of electric tools and the roars of trucks and tractors. Above them at the mansion, kids were crowded on the roof deck talking and pointing, longing to get inside those small houses where only a child would fit, where a child could step into any adventure he chose. Circling the front of the estate, they slipped in among the tall rhododendron bushes that sheltered the Stanhope studio.

  They drew back at once, hissing, crouching down beneath the heavy leaves.

  The sagging garage stood open, and the fake blue van stood half inside, the front end sticking out, the rear door open. And from within the house, partially masked by the noise of builders and trucks, came the pounding of other hammers. Then the dry-harsh noise of ripping wallboard, and the ragged, tooth-jarrin
g screeches of old, rusted nails being pulled.

  Padding closer to peer into the dark, small garage, the cats saw no way through that cramped space into the house itself, no inner door. Circling the studio then moving around to the front, they looked for an open window, but they were all closed, probably locked, as Dorothy had left them.

  In the side yard a giant cypress tree stood shading the mossy roof. Storming partway up, they tried to see in. Sounded like the Wickens were taking the whole house apart.

  They could see little through the old dirty glass; the small panes reflected more of the tree and of themselves than they revealed of the room within.

  “Maybe,” Dulcie said, leaping to a higher branch, “maybe we can see through the skylights, maybe the rain has washed them clean.” Scrambling up, she sailed to the mossy shingles and looked down through the nearest slanted pane.

  The glass was embedded with chicken wire. Joe and Kit nudged up close to her, their noses pressed to the cold surface. Directly below them stood Leroy Huffman, his dark thick hair so close to them that, if not for the glass, they could have dropped onto his head. He was prying at the wall with a small crowbar, carefully removing soft pieces of composition wallboard. The scarred pine floor beneath his jogging shoes was covered with scraps of the dry, flaking board. Across the room, Ralph Wicken sat on the floor, his back to a narrow strip of wall between two doors. He was doing nothing, he sat sullenly watching. At an adjoining wall Betty Wicken was gently chipping away plaster, revealing the chicken wire beneath.

  “Why,” Dulcie said, “would one wall be covered with wallboard, but the other one with plaster?”

  Joe Grey shrugged. Who knew, with these old buildings? They watched Betty shake back her dark hair, concentrating on her careful work as if not wanting to damage whatever might lie beneath. The cats couldn’t see that her efforts had gleaned anything of interest, only plaster chips.

  Leroy’s wall was another matter. The next piece of tan wallboard that he removed revealed, beneath, something that made him step back, his voice rising.

  “Got it,” he said, almost shouting.

  “Shhh.” Betty hurried to stand beside him. The cats could see nothing more than a rusted screw. No, three screws, lined up one above the other, some six inches apart, holding in place a thin strip of polished wood.

  The strip seemed to frame a smooth portion of wall beneath the outer wall, a very white wall, as if plastered, but as Leroy moved aside, they could see it was painted in patches, too. Patches of gray, green, blue shone out, and quickly Betty ripped away more wallboard.

  The screwed-on strips and the board they framed ran from floor to ceiling. The cats, their faces pressed against the skylight, watched Betty move along, tearing off more wallboard to reveal the treasure beneath.

  After a quarter hour, they had uncovered a four-foot-wide, floor-to-ceiling painting. “A mural,” Dulcie said. “Part of a mural.” For now the two were stripping away the cardboardlike covering of successive panels of painted landscape. With every panel, the green hills shone more vividly, so filled with light and space that the cats might have been looking through the wall itself to the green winter hills that rose above the village: hills that were emerald bright with new grass beneath a wild and stormy gray sky so sharply reminiscent of these last winter weeks. This painting was Molena Point, the work so rich and real that the cats could almost hear the wind blowing, feel its cold fingers in their fur. Crouching over the skylight, their noses to the glass, they watched Leroy and Betty slowly remove the remaining covering to unveil the entire work; while on the floor in the corner, Ralph still sat, sulking.

  “Poor Ralph,” Dulcie said, watching him. “He can’t be too smart. No wonder she watches over him. A man like that, in prison, wouldn’t stand a chance. He’d be victim of every prison brutality in the book.”

  “If he is a child molester,” Joe said, “that’s exactly what he deserves.”

  Six panels formed the mural, each maybe eight feet tall by four feet wide, each edged by a strip of hardwood to hold it in place and keep it from warping without marring the work itself with screws or nails. The Molena Point hills ran for twenty-four feet of rolling green that slowly turned to summer brown, in a panorama of the central coast seasons-the stormy winter of the present to the sun-golden burn of summer and then back again.

  The sense of space and distance made Dulcie think of C. S. Lewis’s words that she so loved, of spaces larger, and mountains higher and farther away, than a living human had ever experienced. The painting filled Kit with the old wild longing she had known as a kitten and that often still returned to her, a hunger of the spirit that made the young cat tremble. The hills that Anna Stanhope had rendered so magnificently made all three cats want to leap away forever into far and unobtainable distances.

  Betty Wicken, working with a much gentler hand than she’d displayed when she threw that flowerpot, undid the screws from the stripping and gingerly removed the first panel. This operation showed another side of the woman, showed her art-gallery background in dealing with valuable wares. She had set the first panel aside, leaning it against the wall, when a heavy vehicle pulled up the gravel drive. She spun around, as did Leroy, staring at the door.

  “It’s Ryan,” Joe hissed, looking down over the edge of the roof. “Ryan’s truck.” And before Dulcie or Kit could move or speak, Joe’s gray rump and short tail disappeared over the edge and down the cypress trunk. They leaped after him, scrambling into the bushes, and stood watching.

  The truck door slammed, and Ryan headed for the cottage. “Mavity?” she called. “Charlie? Who’s here?”

  Trying to think what to do, the cats could only crowd through the door behind her.

  When Ryan saw strangers, and saw the painting, she stopped cold, her hand flying to her pocket. “What are you doing?” Raised by cops, she wasn’t slow to react, she saw clearly what they were up to. “Get back! Now! Stand against the wall, now!” The bulge in her pocket might be a gun, or might be a wrench or a screwdriver. “Move against the wall now! Face the wall now! Do it now!” She moved quickly, and her split-second reaction was second nature.

  Little Ralph Wicken immediately did as he was told; he stood up to face the far wall, and he stood still. Leroy stood still, watching Ryan, undecided about her resolve or whether she was armed. The cats knew she didn’t have a gun, that she wouldn’t come onto the grounds of the children’s home armed. As Leroy made a move toward her, Betty dove at her, swinging a hammer and hitting her a glancing bow; Ryan sidestepped and tripped her. At the same instant the cats leaped and landed on Betty’s back, biting and clawing. Ryan grabbed the end of Betty’s hammer, bending Betty’s wrist back and jamming the hammer into her ribs. Catching her breath, Betty fell. As Leroy lunged at Ryan, Joe Grey leaped in his face, raking with strong hind claws. Beside him, Kit, too, clung to the man, biting and clawing. But Leroy, despite their attack, swung his hammer a glancing blow at Ryan hitting her hard on the side of the head. She staggered, dropped, and lay still.

  Betty spun away, ripped a panel from the wall, and passed it to Leroy. “In the van. Hurry up. Put the blankets between.” She snatched another panel, spattering it with her blood. The cats wanted to go to Ryan.

  “They’ll be gone in a minute,” Joe whispered, “be still.”

  “I can’t be still,” Dulcie hissed. “She needs help.”

  30

  “H OLD THE DAMN door, Ralph! Get out of the way!” Betty stepped over Ryan where she lay unconscious, bleeding onto the stone floor. Quickly she and the two men loaded the panels, piled into the van, and took off with a squeal of tires, leaving the garage door banging.

  Leaping to Ryan, the cats crouched over her, nosing and pawing at her, trying to rouse her. “Her cell phone!” Dulcie said, pawing at her jacket pockets and then at her belt, trying to find the little holster. “Where…?”

  “The truck!” Kit mewed, and fled for Ryan’s truck. Leaping and scrambling in through the open window, she vanish
ed, her tail waving and then gone.

  She appeared again almost at once, her mouth gaping around Ryan’s cell phone. Dropping out the window and bolting into the studio, she laid it at Joe’s feet.

  Joe knew how to operate Clyde’s phone, and he’d used Wilma’s. But every phone was different, and it took them precious minutes to understand this one. Finally, with a prayer and a fast paw, he reached the dispatcher-one ring, two, and a familiar voice.

  “Thank God it’s Mabel,” he blurted to Dulcie. “Stanhope mansion,” he shouted. “Thieves, struck Ryan with a hammer, she’s out cold, maybe concussion…The old studio…” He heard Mabel speaking to the medics on another line and in a second they heard the siren whoop, half a mile away. Whoop, whoop, coming fast, straight for the school. Joe described the blue van look-alike, gave Mabel the plate number and the number of the tan Suburban with which, he thought, the van might rendezvous. They wouldn’t get far in that conspicuous blue van, they’d have to shift the paintings somewhere. As Joe talked with Mabel, Kit and Dulcie pawed at Ryan and licked her face, trying to wake her.

  T WO MILES SOUTH of the village, below the black cliffs, a lone hiker descended to the shore. The tide was unusually low, the sea sucking back into the far distance, leaving a long slope of wet and gleaming sand bejeweled with tiny, sea-washed treasures. Wandering slowly, the woman left a single line of footprints pressed into the silver skein, each indentation quickly filling again with seawater; the cold smells of salt and iodine were strong enough to taste.

  Although it was against coastal rules, she bent down now and then to collect a rounded stone or a shell of particular beauty, or a small bit of sea-smoothed driftwood, placing each carefully in the lightweight backpack that she carried over her shoulder. She was twenty-two, with lank brown hair, a lean and tanned young woman who seldom wore makeup. The wind was at her back, pressing her along as she moved north from where she’d left her small, two-door Civic on the cliff above, parked in a pullout, its bumper against the log barrier at the edge of the cliff stairs. Her stride was long and swinging, her delight complete at finding the beach empty on this bright, cold afternoon. Buoyed and excited by her isolation, relishing the perfection of the day that nothing could spoil, she stopped suddenly.