Shirley Murphy - Cat Seeing Double

Cora Lee grinned at Wilma's stern tone, but Wilma's look at the kit was serious and cautionary. Don't speak, Kit. Don't answer by mistake. Don't speak to Cora Lee. Don't open securely closed doors or locked windows. Don't under any circumstance forget. Do not talk to Cora Lee or to anyone. Keep your little cat mouth shut.

The kit understood quite well. She smiled and purred and washed her paws. Certainly she was content to behave herself, at least until late at night. Only then, if her wanderlust grew too great, who would know? If, while Cora Lee slept, she lifted the window latch and roamed, who was to see her?

Meanwhile the bits of tea cake that Cora Lee fixed on two small plates were delicious. The kit, finishing first, eyed Dulcie's share but she daren't challenge Dulcie. She listened to Wilma's half-truths about how she had had a prowler and was worried about the kit because of her reputation as a highly trained performing cat, how she thought it best to get her away for a while.

Early this summer when the kit's surprise appearance onstage with Cora Lee had turned out to be the sensation of the village, Wilma had gone to great lengths to make Kit's appearance seem the product of long hours of careful training. But even trained cats were valuable.

"I'll keep her safe," Cora Lee said. "We all know the doors must be kept shut. I have no theater sets to work on now, not until close to Christmas. I'll be right here most of the time, working on the house. We still have the two downstairs apartments to paint and recarpet. Kit will be up here, two floors away from the paint fumes, and with the windows just cracked open-she can't get through those heavy screens. I've hidden some toys and games for her around the room, that should keep her entertained. Well, she's already started to find them."

The kit, exploring the bedroom, had discovered an intricate cardboard structure with many holes where, within, a reaching paw could find and slap a Ping-Pong ball. Next to it, hardly hidden but blending nicely in the fanciful room, stood a tall, many-tiered cat tree that led up to a high, small window. She found a tennis ball beneath Cora Lee's chair, and a catnip mouse under the bed.

"You will," Wilma told the kit again, sternly, "behave as we expect you to do. You will mind Cora Lee and stay inside this room, you will not slip away on some wild midnight excursion."

Cora Lee laughed. "I'll see that she behaves."

But the kit's look at Wilma was so patently innocent that all Wilma's alarms went off-alarms just as shrill as when, during her working career, she had assessed a parolee's too-innocent look and listened to his honeyed lies.

The sheriff pulled up beside Max's pickup, drowning them in dust. He was a heavy man, maybe six-four, with a prominent nose and high cheekbones, and in Charlie's opinion an overly friendly smile. He loaded Hurlie into the backseat of his unit, behind the wire barrier. "What charges?"

"Interfering with the duties of a law-enforcement officer," Max said. "Harboring a felon."

"Fine with me."

"And obstructing justice. I'll want his prints."

The sheriff nodded. "You want to toss his place? You have a warrant for the old man. Or I can do it on the way down."

Max considered. "Let's run down together and have a crack at it."

The sheriff made Hurlie hand over his keys, and moved Hurlie's truck onto the shoulder; Max and Charlie followed him down toward Little Fish Creek. As the two men entered the cabin, Charlie waited in the truck. Max had parked where she could see in through the window of the one-room shack. A single bed, covers in a tangle. An easy chair so ragged that not even Joe Grey would tolerate it, far scruffier than Joe's clawed and hairy masterpiece. One plate and cup on the rough wooden sink drain. A door open to a fusty-looking little bathroom that she imagined would be dark with mold. Max and Sheriff Beck were in the shack for nearly half an hour; she watched them going through the few cupboards, checking under the mattress, pulling off wallboard and ceiling tiles in various locations. They performed similar searches in the two scruffy outbuildings. The sheriff's unit, parked directly in front of the shack, afforded prisoner Hurlie Farger a direct view of her. She sat sideways, with her back to him, but she could feel him staring. Max came away from the search looking sour. He stood a moment in the dusty yard beside the truck, with the sheriff.

"You ask questions around those estates," Beck said softly, "you might want to watch yourself. DEA seems interested in that area. They took out two small marijuana plots up in the national forest, day before yesterday, and they still have a plane up. I haven't heard of anything on those estates, but they're all big places and there's sure plenty of money up there."

"I'll be careful," Max said, studying Beck. He nodded to the sheriff. And the officer stepped into his unit and pulled away, chauffeuring Hurlie Farger to a cleaner bed man he was used to.

Swinging into the pickup, Max grinned at Charlie. "What?" he said, seeing her uncertain look.

"I half thought you were going to ask me to ride back with the sheriff. So you could run this one alone."

"Would you have gone?"

"I wouldn't have gotten into that patrol car with Hurlie Farger, even with the sheriff there, if you gave me a direct order to that effect."

Max studied her with a small, twisted smile. "I don't think I'd want to try giving you a direct order, Charlie Harper." And he headed up the hills and across a forested plateau approaching the Landeau estate.

But sitting close beside Max, Charlie was quiet, trying to rearrange her thinking. Hurlie Farger had scared her. Something in his eyes, as well as his bold challenge of Max's authority, had left her chilled. And the sheriff's attitude hadn't helped.

Well, she had to learn to live with this stuff, learn to accommodate the ugly, adrenaline-packed moments. In fact, she guessed maybe it was time for a down-to-earth assessment of the way she looked at the world.

She had never been hidebound in what she expected of life. Life was what you made of it, and you sure didn't have to knuckle under just because there were bad guys around. But marrying Max had made her far more aware of that element. Had shoved people like Hurlie Farger right in her face.

Well, she'd experienced some unsettling changes in her thirty-two years. And every one had called for a change in attitude. The adjustments she must make now would be the hardest-but every one would be worth it.

She just wanted, right now, to get through this visit to those estates, to the Landeau place, get through the day and be alone again with Max.

Maybe the aftermath of the church bombing was still with her. The pain of the last few days mixed with Hurlie's attitude had hit home unexpectedly. Laying her hand on Max's knee and leaning to kiss his cheek, she looked ahead to the tall, marbled-faced Landeau mansion with its high forbidding wall. This was just a routine visit. It would soon be over. They'd soon be alone again cuddled before the fire at the inn, ordering in a hot, comforting supper.

Clyde's attic, once a dark tomb for generations of deceased spiders, was now free of cobwebs and dust and ancient mouse droppings, and swept clean of sawdust. The last rich light of the setting sun gleamed in where the end wall had been removed, and a soft breeze wandered through, sweet with the scents of cypress and pine. The attic was silent too, the power tools and hammers stilled, the carpenters gone for the day-it was Joe's space now. He lay stretched out across a sheet of plywood that was propped on two sawhorses, lay relaxed and purring, digesting a half-bag of corn chips that had been abandoned by one of the carpenters. The wind off the sea caressed him. The buzz of a dispossessed wasp distracted him only faintly, humming among the rafters. He was nearly asleep when footsteps on the temporary stairway forced him to lift his head- though really no action was required, he knew that step. Clyde's head appeared at the north end of the attic silhouetted in the bright triangular space. Rising up the last steps, Clyde ducked beneath the apex, walking hunched over. By this time tomorrow evening he would be able to stand tall, would be able to reach up and not even touch the ceiling-barring some delay in construction, Joe thought. Barring some accident. What if, tomorrow morning, the roof-jacks didn't hold until the newly raised walls had been secured? What if…