by Nina Post
As he was on his way out, his father made a slight throat-clearing noise. “You’re right, though — it does look like a play schematic. In fact, reminds of a Pitch Play the Steelers used. The pulling guard ran behind the halfback. The ball carrier broke the guard’s block. The left tackle played on an inside counter move. The pulling guard maneuvered the defensive end to play a trap, then the halfback cut down the end.”
That was the closest his father ever got to apologizing to him.
“Thanks.” Shawn nodded and left.
He didn’t bother saying goodbye to anyone.
When he hit the crisp outside air, smelled the gasoline and the trees and burning leaves, he felt lighter. Learning the meaning of the diagram gave him an idea. He might as well use all those cats for something. He could send them in through the tortoise door of the Sylvain mansion and distract Vincent. But first he would have to get them all in his car. To say that was easier said than done was the understatement of the century. The most important thing was getting back to the mansion and showing those damn pictures to Vincent, for whatever good it would do. Shawn had some trust issues with murderers.
After he drove back to the mansion, Shawn wiped the camera clean in the car, then paced in the driveway as he called Sarah’s phone.
WVOJ rushed up to his windows, with WJAM on their heels.
“We were here first, WVAJ!” he heard someone yell.
“I got what you asked for,” Shawn said on the phone to Vincent, not looking at the news crew around his car. “You want to come out and see?”
“Do you think I’m stupid? You come in.”
Shawn shook his head, got out of the car, and put out a blocking hand to the mics. “I need a full week without people after this,” he muttered, as he went in through the front door. He put the phone back to his ear. “I’m in the entry way.”
Vincent came through the dining room, which probably meant that he wasn’t holding Sarah and Comet anywhere on the first floor. Shawn turned on the camera, pressed play, then handed Vincent the camera.
Behold the glory.
Vincent took the camera and pursed his bow lips. He glanced up at Shawn, then back to the camera. “This is your family?”
“That’s what I’ve been brainwashed to believe, yes.”
Vincent scratched his ear. “Do most families look like this?”
“Like what?”
“Like they would all rather be anywhere else, with anyone else?”
“You know what, Vincent? I have no idea. Some are worse, and there are probably some that are better. Like people. Some kill people in cold blood, and most don’t.”
Vincent pointed a finger at Shawn. “Ah ha! I see what you did there. Very clever.” He handed the camera back.
“Now let Sarah and Comet go, like we agreed.”
“I changed my mind.”
“Why am I not surprised.”
“I had some time to think about it, and I’m not ready to let them go yet.” With that, Vincent went back into the dining room. “So go back outside or I’ll shoot you,” he said.
It was all Shawn could do to stop himself from strangling Vincent. He hoped he could keep it up until he was in a max prison.
Shawn checked in with a patrol officer, then got back in his car. He wanted to stop by his house to check on the tech he had sent to check the claws on the cats.
The tech hadn’t called, and Shawn was a little concerned.
The front door to his house was open. Like it mattered at this point — what more could happen to his house?
Vincent could have burned it down, but it mattered more to him that Shawn saw what he had destroyed inside of it. Vincent had slithered inside Haviland Sylvain’s house and her life, seduced her with attention and service and devotion to the only thing she loved, felt victimized and entitled, then suffocated her with his neediness and possessiveness until she was rightly afraid of him.
Then when she withdrew, whether out of a perfectly correct instinct or her Emotional Contamination (Shawn could relate), Vincent felt rejected and got more aggressive. When he saw that she was giving everything, all of her money, to Lyle — the tortoise who had the attention and affection he couldn’t get from her or from anyone — he snapped.
The tech has propped himself against the wall, eyes red and watery, coon cats all over him, sitting on his legs, his waist, his hands, his chest. Other cats were in the kitchen or walking around the living room or on what was left of the trampoline. Shawn felt a pang for Comet.
“Made some new friends, huh?” Shawn put in his hands in his pockets and stood in front of Joe, the tech he sent to his house.
“I checked all the claws like you asked.” Joe sounded congested and sad. Shawn couldn’t tell if he was allergic or crying or both. Probably both.
“And?” Shawn was in a hurry.
“One of them had blood in its front claws.” Joe sneezed three times in quick succession.
Shawn’s body warmed.
“I found some nail clippers and took a sample. The cat didn’t like that at all.” Joe held up his shirt. His torso was covered with long scratches. He flicked his shirt back down. “I hope I don’t have toxoplasmosis.”
“But you got a blood sample? Is it enough to test?”
“It should be.” Joe wiped his running eyes with his sleeve. “I also took a specimen from its foot pad. That went even worse.” He lifted up his pant leg and showed Shawn even deeper and longer gashes around his shin.
“Where are the samples?”
Joe dug into his jeans pocket and handed Shawn a clear evidence sample bag with a barely perceptible DNA sample inside.
“Thanks, Joe. Why don’t you go back to the office, clean yourself up.”
“Appreciate that, Detective.” Joe’s voice wavered as he carefully got to his feet. “Hey, Detective?” Joe poked his head around the front door.
“Yeah.”
“Why do you have so many cats?”
“Please, feel free to take as many as you want,” Shawn told him. “They make great stocking stuffers.”
As Joe closed the door — unsurprisingly without any cats — Shawn heard him mutter, “But why so many?”
Shawn looked at his living room, at his floor of cats. He would have to get them out through the back kitchen door and into his car. Had he completely lost his mind? Okay, maybe ten would be sufficient. He didn’t have time to get, by now, more than fifty cats into his car. That would take hours. As it was, he didn’t have time to move ten.
So he would move ten.
With only one carrier.
He got an idea that was as good as anything else he could try. He picked up his hobby telescope and took it in an exaggeratedly slow way to the back kitchen door. The cats blinked their mismatched eyes, looked away out of boredom, and swished their feathery tails on the floor.
“No?” He put down the telescope. “This is worse than trying to get that family photograph.”
He got another idea. He and Sarah had picked up a bunch of catnip at Argosy on their first non-date. He ran to the cupboard and took it out of the container he had it stored in. Then he ran back to the kitchen door and held three stuffed mouse-fuls of it at chest-height. The cats went crazy.
“Got you.” Shawn held open the back door and more than ten cats got out before he managed to close the door to the rest, who growl-meowed with disappointment. “Sorry!” Shawn said through the crack just before he closed the door.
He went through the narrow back porch out to the driveway, holding the mice just out of their reach, which was considerable. How in heck was he going to get them into the car? He opened the rear door on the passenger side and tossed one of the mice into the backseat. Some of the cats jumped in, but some didn’t. He tossed a second catnip-filled mouse into the front seat from the open door, and he was relieved that most of the remaining cats jumped in. He quickly closed the door.
One just stood there on the pavement and said mrrow.
He he
ld out the one remaining mouse. The cat yawned.
“Please? You were interested a minute ago.”
He could swear the cat sighed, though he wasn’t familiar with that response. Comet never sighed. Sometimes he did a sneeze/snort thing, sometimes he went with a dismissive chuffing noise — whichever one best communicated his disapproval. He was a good-natured cat, and very expressive, but nevertheless, a cat.
Finally the lone new cat deigned to comply with his request, and seemed to wait for him to open the door. Shawn picked up the mouse and received a low grumble of consternation, opened the door, and put it on the seat. Then he slowly shut the door, making sure no tails were swishing out.
He ran around the back of the car and very carefully opened the driver’s side door. He pushed over a few cats, then very carefully closed the door. To regain his equilibrium, he put his head back on the seat for a moment. The cats had formed one big Dionysian pile in the back, each in their own catnip-induced world. The catnip mouse flew overhead a few times.
Shawn called Tom, the senior tech who had recognized that his aunt’s radio was, in fact, a radio, and not a bomb, and asked if he would meet him at the mansion in ten minutes or sooner to help him with an old TV.
“Why, cause I’m old?”
“You were born old. Regardless, you know old stuff. Good enough?”
Shawn had to agree to bring donuts every morning for a week, but Tom said he’d meet him by the solarium on the north side of the mansion.
Shawn drove to the Sylvain mansion, fending off cats that wanted to be on the dashboard, on the steering wheel, on the gear shift, on the floorboard by the brake, or around his shoulders with a tail wrapped around his eyes.
He called ahead and got a patrol officer to distract the news crews. Shawn told him what was okay to say and what, under any circumstances, he should not say. Then he waited down the street for the patrol officer to show, and waited until the news crews had encircled him like a Druid ritual.
The sky darkened into a purple bruise, sparking with fissures of light.
Shawn pulled into the far side of the house, driving over the grass so his car was hidden at the left side of the mansion, near the tortoise door in the rear solarium. He had no idea how he would get the cats from the car and through the door, but didn’t think he’d get them from the house into the car, either.
Would they fall for the catnip ploy again? It wasn’t as though they were denied the catnip the first time; they had no reason not to trust him.
The cats rolled around in the back, a little stoned. Shawn contorted himself to find the three catnip mice in the car.
Shawn took the telescope and the catnip, got out of the car, and opened the front passenger door. The cats moved forward, poised to leap out. “I want you to go in there.” He pointed to the tortoise door by the ground in the solarium. “And then spread out and distract Vincent. Can you do that for me? Because I’ve somehow managed to feed and tend to almost fifty of you in the past two days while I’m trying to solve this case, so I think I’ve built up a little credit.”
The cats blinked, and, of course, looked bored.
“Okay. Worth a try.” He held out the catnip, and the cats almost seemed insulted that Shawn thought they were that easy. They huffily ignored the catnip and went through the tortoise door anyway. Then Shawn went through the opening after them.
Shawn crossed from the solarium door over to the first floor drawing room and paused there. The cats ran all over the place, their claws making delicate tink sounds on the limestone floor.
Perhaps he shouldn’t have ignored everything he knew about cats and figured that they would adhere to an infantry maneuver. It sounded nuts, he knew that — but maybe the cats had some kind of connection to the house.
He listened. Then he called Sarah’s number.
He didn’t hear any ringing, so they were either in the basement, or the second floor, or the third floor, or the half-story storage room over the third floor. “Great, that really narrows it down,” he muttered under his breath. He checked to make sure his phone was on low vibrate then watched some of the cats stream up the stairs.
Tom was supposed to meet him near where he had come in. A few minutes later, Shawn heard a distant thud and groan. A moment later, he waved Tom over from just outside the solarium to the drawing room.
“We’re going to the second floor,” Shawn said in a low voice.
The detective and the tech walked quietly up the main staircase.
“Nice balustrade,” Tom said.
The second floor was quiet, and the cats were still heading up, toward the third floor.
Shawn led Tom to the right, into Lyle’s playroom.
“Is that the device?” Tom cast a skeptical eye at the old screen and console.
“Yeah.”
“When’s it from, 1952?”
“Looks it.”
“Let’s fire it up.”
Shawn turned it on. As always, the screen took its sweet time warming up and bringing something into focus.
“What the hell is this thing?” Tom said when it showed the other Shawn leading a team of patrol officers at the mansion. It looked like they were digging everything up. “That’s you!”
“Sort of. Not exactly. I’m me, and I’m right here.”
“Who’s that, your brother?” Tom crouched down, inspected the console. “Is this a tape? I see this console and the cartridges, but there’s not a cartridge in the slot.”
“No, it’s another me.”
Tom gave him a look Shawn was familiar with, then scoffed. “Really, what is this?”
Shawn shook his head. He had passed exhausted several times, just climbed over it like he was riding a bike up a series of sizable hills, and somewhere, that vile, candy-eating and strawberry-milk-drinking emotional vacuum was holding Sarah and Comet. He didn’t care about the other Shawn unless it helped him get them back.
“It looks like here.” Tom raised his head to glance out the window.
“Yeah, that’s the backyard,” Shawn said, staring at the black-and-white screen. “They’re digging it up.”
“Digging up the yard? Why?”
“They’re looking for her body, I think.”
“Whose body?”
“Haviland Sylvain’s body.”
‘What are you talking about? They found her body just over there!” Tom hooked his thumb in the direction of the door.
“Not this Haviland Sylvain. The other one. The other heiress is missing.”
Tom raised an eyebrow.
“Trust me, I know how it sounds. Do you mind, Tom, taking a look at the innards of this thing?”
“No prob, Detective.” Tom crawled around to the corner, behind the screen, and took a small screwdriver out of his pocket. He removed the back plate and shone a penlight into it, undoubtedly thinking that Shawn just needed some shut-eye, or that this case was really messing him up.
“I have to go find Sarah.”
“I’ll be here,” Tom said. “Well, not forever. I hope.”
Shawn turned just past the door. “Hey, uh, why don’t you tell SWAT to come on up to the third floor, say, five minutes from now?”
“You got it.”
Shawn checked all the rooms on the second floor, and was in the master bedroom when the ground rumbled again. Vases and a lamp fell off their tables and smashed into tiny pieces on the floor. He rushed over to the right bedside table and held on to the dragonfly lamp he liked so it wouldn’t topple and break. Objects fell off the fireplace mantle, and then the trembling stopped.
Shawn poked his head back in Lyle’s room. “You okay, Tom?”
“Doin’ good,” he said behind the TV.
Shawn hurried up to the third floor, crouched by the balustrade, and called Sarah’s number. He heard it ring, faintly, way in the distance. That was something. One of the cats brushed against his knee and put the tip of its tail right under Shawn’s nose. He nudged the tail away and the cat ran up to the t
hird floor.
She answered. He started with an apology that she had ever met him.
“Oh, you’re regretting it now that you have to go to all this trouble to come get me?” she said.
He heard Vincent in the background, “He’s not coming to get you!” His voice got closer through the statement, as though he were coming for the phone. So he wasn’t paying close attention to her?
“Don’t listen to him,” Shawn said. “I’m surprisingly indu—”
The phone disconnected.
“— strious.” Shawn sighed and pocketed the phone. Well done. He should have said, if you can depend on anything in this world, it’s that I’m coming to get you.
Shawn considered the third floor: ballroom with musician’s balcony, two bathrooms, a sitting room, storage rooms, and a half-story on top of that, accessible by ladder. Shawn figured Vincent could have stowed them up in the half-story while Vincent was right below them. Or not. He inched through the landing and into the ballroom.
Yes. There.
He spotted Sarah on the balcony, but where was Comet? He squinted a little, and noticed the carrier on the floor of the balcony, difficult to see between the railings. Relief made him feel lighter. Nothing felt right with Comet gone.
Vincent was pacing the worn oak flooring of the ballroom, cursing at the cats, which were all underfoot, threading in front of him, and rushing in front of him at just the right moment to make him fall on the floor with a thud. Vincent grabbed for the one that tripped him but it shot out of the way. Vincent’s upper lip was coated with blood when he got up, and Shawn smiled slightly then edged back a few inches, out of sight.
Vincent let loose a stream of shouted invectives at the cats, then disappeared into a door at the back of the ballroom under the balcony, reappearing a moment later in the balcony. He pulled Sarah’s arm and picked up the carrier.
“Forget it, I’m not going with you,” Shawn heard her say from his spot by the slightly open door. Vincent held a gun to her head and she was quiet.
