Cat Seeing Double

by Shirley Rousseau Murphy

  "Well, that's not very flattering," Charlie said, grinning. She smoothed the tendrils of her hair that would keep slipping out from the carefully arranged chignon.

  "Quit fussing. You look like an angel, a curly-haired, redheaded angel. Now hold still and let me finish fastening. Where are your shoes? You didn't forget your shoes?"

  "On the desk. Now who's fussing?"

  "It isn't every day my only niece gets married-my only family." Turning to fetch the shoes, Wilma moved to the window and slid the drapery back a few inches to look out into the garden where their friends were gathering. The afternoon was bright and serene. "What a lovely crowd. And people still arriving. Even…" Wilma held out her hand. "Come and look."

  They stood together peering out, two tall, slim women, the family resemblance clear in their strongly sculpted faces. "Look in the lemon tree. Two of your most ardent admirers, all sleeked up for the occasion."

  They could just see Joe Grey and Dulcie peering out from among the leaves, watching something across the street, Joe's white paws bright among the shadows, Dulcie's brown tabby stripes blending into the tree's foliage so she was hardly visible.

  "What are they up to?" Charlie said. "They look…"

  "They're not up to anything, they're waiting to see you and Max married. They have a perfect view, they'll be able to see, above the crowd, right in through the glass doors."

  "Where's the kit?"

  "I don't see her, but you can bet she won't miss this ceremony."

  Charlie turned from the window, reaching for her veil. Wilma, watching her, thought that her niece seemed as close to an angel as it was possible for a flesh-and-blood person to look. She willed the day to be perfect, without a flaw, a golden day for Charlie and Max, with not a thing to spoil it. Charlie was fussing with her veil when the door flew open and Max burst in grabbing her, pushing her toward the door and reaching to Wilma. "Get out! Now! Away from the building. Run, both of you-blocks away. Go, Charlie. Bomb alert."

  Wilma grabbed Charlie, pulling her away as Charlie tried to follow Max into the garden. Charlie turned on her with rage. "Let me go. Let me go! I can help."

  Max spun back, grabbing her shoulders. "Go now! Get the hell out of here!"

  She fought him, trying to twist free. "What do you think I am! I can help clear the area!" Her green eyes blazed. "I'm not marrying a cop I can't work beside!"

  He stared, then turned away with her into the garden. "That woman in the wheelchair, those women around her-get them off the block and down the street." And he was gone among his officers, keeping order as tangles of wedding guests moved quickly out of the garden, and a few confused elderly folks milled together in panic. Charlie grabbed the wheelchair as Wilma corralled half a dozen frail ladies.

  The cats didn't see Charlie and Wilma come out. They were watching the kit where she had fled back across the street and up the trellis. The boy had climbed again too. Running across the roof, he knelt, reaching for something. But again the kit landed on his shoulders raking and biting. What was the matter with her? Then suddenly all the cops were running, fanning out across the street, staring up at the roof. The boy snatched something from the roof and spun around, racing across the shingles, trying to dislodge the kit. He slipped and fell, and seemed to drop in slow-motion, falling and twisting.

  He hit the ground and an explosion rocked the garden. A sudden cloud of smoke hid the church and trees, smoke filled with flying flecks of plaster and torn wood and broken shingles-as if the church had been ground up and vomited out again by a giant blower.

  The side of the church was gone. There was only a jagged, smoking hole where the wall of the church had been.

  Ragged fragments of the building, and of broken furniture and wedding flowers lay scattered across the bricks and clinging to trees and bushes, and still the sky rained debris.

  The two cats crouched clinging to the branches choking with smoke and dust, shaken by the impact. Had it been a gas explosion? Maybe the church furnace? But it was a warm day, and the furnace would not be running. They stared down at a young woman staunching a child's bloody arm, at a young couple holding each other, an old woman weeping, at officers clearing the area. A bomb. It had been a bomb.

  But no villager could do this, not now when the very thought of a bomb was so painful for every human soul.

  They saw no one badly hurt, no one was down. "The kit," Dulcie said. "Where is the kit?" She hardly remembered later how she and Joe reached the kit, where she clung in a pine tree across the street. She only vaguely remembered racing between parked cars and people's legs, scorching up the pine tree and cuddling the kit against her, licking her frightened face.

  Below the pine, officers surrounded the boy. Had that small boy caused the explosion? He couldn't be more than ten. A ragged child, very white and still.

  That was why the kit had jumped him! To stop him! Then she had raced to Clyde. Dulcie licked the kit harder. What kind of child was that boy, to do such a thing? He's just a child, Dulcie thought, shivering. But then she saw the boy's eyes so cold and hard, and she felt her stomach wrench.

  Sirens filled the air. Dulcie looked around for Charlie and Wilma. Don't let anyone be dead, don't let anyone be badly hurt. What kind of sophisticated electronic equipment did this little boy have, to set off such an explosion? He seemed just an ordinary, dirty-faced kid, handcuffed now and held between two cops. Just a boy-except for those hard black eyes.

  But as Dulcie and Joe peered down from the pine tree with the kit snuggled between them, the boy looked around as if searching for someone. His gaze rose to the roofs and surrounding trees-and stopped on the three cats.

  He looked straight at the kit, his eyes widening with rage.

  And the tattercoat kit dropped her ears and backed away, deeper among the dark, concealing branches.

  4

  The debris' filled smoke twisted and began slowly to settle. The dropping sun sent its deep afternoon light streaming down through the torn roof of the church, illuminating airborne flecks like falling snow through which officers searched the rubble for wounded, and quickly moved shocked onlookers away, in case of a second blast.

  No one seemed badly injured; but the miracle of escape was slow to instruct the villagers. They stood in little clusters holding one another, the shock of the deed reverberating in every face, beating in every heart.

  Charlie looked around her at the white petals of the wedding bouquets scattered across the detritus-as if some precocious flower girl had thrown a tantrum flinging her pretty treasures. Near her an old woman stood with her handkerchief pressed to her bloody forehead. As Charlie moved to help her, she heard Ryan shout for a medic, and saw Ryan supporting Cora Lee French, Cora Lee's dark arm around Ryan's shoulder. Holding the old woman, Charlie wanted to run to Cora Lee.

  Pressing her handkerchief to the old woman's forehead, Charlie got her to sit down on the sidewalk. It was not a deep cut, only a scratch in an area that would naturally bleed heavily. As the woman rested against her, Charlie looked at the church where she and Max were to have been married. Where, if they hadn't been alerted, she and Max, Clyde and Wilma and the minister would have been standing with nearly the whole village crowded around them.

  The three standing walls of the church bristled with shards of debris embedded in the cracked plaster. The rows of velvet-padded chairs that had awaited the wedding guests lay splintered into kindling and blackened rags. One side of the carved lectern lay whole and apparently untouched, smeared black and dotted with silver-bright specks. The corner of a cardboard box lay near it, still covered with silver paper. How odd, that the center had remained nearly undamaged. Sirens screamed again in the narrow street as two more ambulances careened to the curb beside squad cars whose trunks stood open, officers snatching out first aid equipment.

  No villager could have done this. No villager could have performed such an act. Not now… No one could have wanted to destroy…

  Destroy Max…?

 
Destroy Max as someone had tried to destroy him last winter, setting him up for murder? Charlie began to shiver, she was ice-cold. She turned her eyes to Max across the garden where he stood talking with two officers. Was this what their marriage would be like, this icy internal terror? Would she go through all their life together ridden by this terrible fear, so that fear touched every smallest joy, turned all their life ugly?

  Fury filled her, hot rage. She wanted to pound someone, pound the person who had done this. She looked across the street at Clyde and the officers, handcuffing that young boy. And she turned away, not wanting to think a child had done such a tiling.

  She watched the two medics arguing with Cora Lee until at last Cora Lee obediently lay down again on the stretcher. She watched Max talking on his field phone as his officers cleared the street, sending people home. She walked the old woman to the open door of Cora Lee's ambulance and saw her settled inside. As she turned away, the squad car carrying the boy passed her, the kid scowling out from behind the grid, his face all sharp angles and angry. So very angry.

  The cats watched a squad car take the boy away, the child crouched sullenly in the backseat behind the wire barrier. Officer Green had taken the broken garage door opener from the boy's pocket. The small remote had looked badly smashed where the kid had fallen on it. They could see, within the torn church, detectives Davis and Garza photographing the scene, Juana Davis holding the strobe lights down among the dark rubble so Garza could shoot close-ups of scraps of splintered wood and torn carpet and shattered plaster and bits of silver gift wrap. Dulcie shivered. That prettily wrapped box that they had glimpsed and ignored. That innocent-looking box.

  She didn't understand humans, she didn't understand how the bright and inventive human mind could warp into such hunger to destroy. She didn't understand how the human soul, that in its passion could create the wonders of civilization, could allow that same passion to warp in on itself and burn, instead, with this sick thirst for destruction.

  Evil, she thought Pure evil. That kind of sickness is part of the ultimate dark, the dark power that would suck all life to destruction.

  "Well, there will be a wedding," Dulcie said softly, lashing her tail, looking at the kit, then looking down at their human friends, at Charlie in her blood-splattered wedding dress holding two children by the hands as their mother tried to calm a screaming baby. "There will be a wedding." That boy had destroyed the wall of the church, but he hadn't destroyed anyone's spirit. He had not destroyed love, or human will.

  She watched officers stringing yellow crime tape, securing the area. She had heard Captain Harper calling for a bomb team, she supposed out of San Jose. She knew that those forensic technicians would spend hours going over the area, photographing, fingerprinting, bagging every possible bit of evidence. But once the team arrived, when the work at hand was organized, would mere be a wedding? Surely somewhere within the village, Charlie and Max Harper would be married.

  Beside her, the kit was hunkered down among the branches looking so small and miserable that Dulcie nosed at her with concern. "What, Kit? What's the matter?"

  The kit shut her eyes.

  "Don't, Kit. Don't look sad. You saved lives. You saved hundreds of lives. You're a hero. But how did you know? How did you know what he planned?"

  "I heard them. I heard mat old man telling the boy what to do, an old man with a beard and a bent foot. He shook the boy and told him to wait until everyone was in the church, the bride and groom and minister and everyone, then to punch the opener. I didn't know what he meant. He said to punch it and run, to get off the roof fast and get away. The boy was angry but he climbed up to the roof and the old man hobbled away. I didn't mean for the bomb to explode, I wanted to stop whatever would happen, I didn't mean for a bomb to go off," the kit said miserably.

  Dulcie licked the kit's ears. "If you hadn't jumped that boy, then warned Clyde, then jumped the boy again, he would have killed everyone. You're a hero, Kit. Do you understand that? Who knows how many lives you saved."

  Dulcie twitched an ear. "To those who know, to Clyde and Wilma and Charlie-to all of us, Kit, you'll forever be a hero."

  "Absolutely a hero," Joe Grey said softly, nudging the kit. "But where did the old man go? Did you see where he went? Did he have a car?"

  The kit shook her whiskers. "I didn't see which way. I didn't see him get in a car, but…" She paused, thinking. "He said to the boy, 'The truck will be gone.' And mere was an old truck parked down the side street, a rusty old pickup, sort of brown. And when… when I jumped the boy and the man ran, I think… I think I heard a rattley motor."

  Joe's eyes widened, and immediately he left them, backing down the tree and streaking for Clyde's open convertible. He would not, among a crowd of humans, ordinarily be so brazen as to leap into the car and paw into the side pocket, hauling out Clyde's cell phone. But he had little choice. Looking up over the car door, seeing no one watching him, he punched in a number.

  Dulcie and Kit heard Max Harper's cell phone ringing, across the garden. How strange it was that Joe's electronic message could zip through the sky who knew how many miles to some phantom tower in just an instant, and back again to Harper's phone where he stood only a few feet away.

  Harper answered, listened, and gave an order that sent officers racing away on foot through the village, and sent squad cars swerving out fast to cruise the streets looking for an old brown truck and for the old man who was the boy's accomplice. And above the searching officers, Dulcie and the kit raced away too. Flying across the rooftops they watched the sidewalks below, peering down into shadowed niches and recessed doorways where a hidden figure might be missed; and soon on the roofs two blocks away they saw Joe, also searching.

  For nearly two hours, as dusk fell, and as the police combed the streets and shops below, the cats crossed back and forth along balconies and oak branches and across peaks and shingles, peering into dark rooftop hiding places and in through second-floor windows looking for the bearded, crippled old man.

  There was no sign of him. When at last the search ended, below in the darkening streets the entire population of the village joined to move the site of the wedding. Men and women in party clothes hauled tables and chairs from dozens of shops, carrying them for blocks, setting them up in the center of the village. And when the cats returned to the church garden, it was lined with cars again-the bomb team had arrived.

  Within the barrier of yellow tape, grid markers had been laid out. Five forensics officers were down on their hands and knees under powerful spotlights working with cameras and small instruments and collection bags, carefully labeling each item they removed. The process seemed, even to a patient feline hunter, incredibly tedious. Watching from the roof across the street, the cats were overwhelmed by the work that must be accomplished. Clyde found them there, intently watching, perched on the edge of the roof like three owls in the cool and gathering dusk.

  "Come on, cats. It's time for the ceremony. Come on, or you'll make us late."

  5

  In the darkening evening, Ocean Avenue's two lanes were closed off by rows of sawhorses; and its wide grassy median beneath spreading eucalyptus trees was filled with wavering lights; lights shifted and wandered and drew together in constellations. Nearly every villager carried a candle or battery-operated torch or, here and there, a soft-burning oil lantern retrieved from the bearer's camping supplies.

  Down the center of the median a narrow path had been left between the crowd, for the wedding procession. The long grassy carpet led to a circle of lawn before a giant eucalyptus whose five mammoth trunks fanned out from the ground like a great hand reaching to the star-strewn sky. Within the velvet-green circle ringed by wedding guests, the pastor waited, holy book in hand. Beside him, the groom looked more than usually solemn, his thin, lined face stern and watchful.

  Tall and straight in his dark uniform, Max Harper was not encumbered with the cop's full equipment, with flashlight, handcuffs, mace, the regulation array of wea
pons and tools; only his loaded automatic hung at his hip. His gaze down the long green aisle where the bride would approach was more than usually watchful; and along the outer limits of the crowd, his uniformed officers stood at attention in wary surveillance. This was what the world had come to, even for an event as simple as a village wedding-particularly for such an event. Harper's nerves were raw with concern for Charlie.

  She stood a block away at the other end of the grassy path waiting, apparently demurely, between her aunt Wilma and Dallas Garza, her red hair bright in the candlelight, her hands steady on the bridal bouquet of white and yellow daisies-she had chosen his favorite flowers. No stain of blood shone on her white linen dress or on Wilma's blue gown, as if the two women had diligently sponged away the slightest hint of trouble.

  Charlie did not look up along the grassy path at him but glanced repeatedly to the street watching for Clyde's arrival. Max got the impression that the moment the best man's yellow roadster appeared, at one of the side-street barriers, she meant to sprint down the lane double-time and get on with the wedding, before another bomb rent apart their world.

  But then when Clyde's car did race into view, parking in the red before the sawhorses, Max saw Charlie laugh. He couldn't see what she found amusing, but among the guests who had turned to look, several people smiled.

  Only when Clyde and Ryan came across the street, did he catch a flash of movement along the ground- three small racing shadows almost immediately gone again from view, among the wedding guests. He wasn't sure whether to laugh, or to swear at Clyde. Buddies they were, but there were limits. Watching his best man push through to take his place, Max fixed him with a look that would intimidate the coldest felon.

  Clyde's sly grin told him that indeed cats were among the wedding guests; and the faintest scrambling sound behind Max told him those guests were now above his head, in the branches of the eucalyptus tree- doing what? Cats did not attend weddings, cats did not know about weddings. Max looked down the long grassy aisle to Charlie, needing her commonsense response to such matters. This business of weirdly behaving cats left him out of his element, off-center and shaky, as nothing else could do.