Shirley Murphy - Cat Spitting Mad

Setting Bucky's foot down, Harper shone his torch along the line of Bucky's hoofprints leading out into the yard. "Same prints as at the scene." His face was set like a rock. "Photograph them, Juana. Every few feet, back down the alleyway, across the yard, up the lane. Pick out individual trails of prints, going and coming. Get them going down the road, where I left this afternoon, and coming back, as far as you can see them."

Davis knelt, looking. "Exact same scar. I got plenty of shots at the scene."

"Shots where I rode?"

"Shots where Bucky never set foot." Rising, she began the tedious, close-up photographing, while Harper put Bucky in his stall, fed and watered him, and headed for the house, avoiding the lines of hoofprints.

Two shadows followed him, flashing across the porch into the darkness beneath a metal chair, Joe's eyes blazing with anger.

Moving inside, Harper picked up the phone, dialing quickly.

"Turrey, you awake?" Through the screen door, his voice was clear and decisive. He listened, and laughed. "I know it's not light yet. I need you now. Get a cup of coffee and get over here. We need to pull Bucky's shoes to be entered as evidence, and reshoe him. No, I can't pull his shoes. They're evidence. I need someone not connected. I have to tell you, Turrey, somewhere down the line you'll likely have to testify in court."

Turrey must have reacted sharply to that announcement. The cats could hear the faint, sharp crackle of his voice at the other end of the line, and Harper smiled.

"That's all right, the judge doesn't care if you're not a professional speaker."

"I don't understand," Dulcie whispered. "Those big heavy hoofprints at the scene, they did have a scar. But they weren't Bucky's. They were there before Harper arrived."

But Joe was watching the threesome in the kitchen. Clyde and Harper sat at the table, where Harper was opening a cold can of beans and a box of crackers. Outside, Detective Ray had stopped sifting sand, retrieved a box from her car, and came carrying it into the kitchen. "Here are the Polaroid shots, Captain. And the first plaster casts."

Harper wolfed down cold beans and crackers as he studied the casts and the photos.

"Same scar, deep in the outside curve."

Kathleen Ray looked hard at the captain. "That one, Captain, is from Bucky. This one, with the leaf at the edge of the cast? That was underneath the bodies. Underneath. Helen Marner's shoulder. The casts are of the same horseshoe. Or one is a good copy."

Harper just looked at her.

"And this shot was made way up the hill, in a place you didn't go. I know where you rode. You didn't go up there, didn't go near that part of the hill."

"Appears to be Bucky's shoe," Harper said tiredly. Joe and Dulcie looked at each other. Charlie, standing at the stove, scrambling eggs and cooking bacon, was white faced and grim, her freckles as dark as paint splatters. Harper looked up at her. "Charlie, I don't have time to eat."

She stared at the cold beans and crackers. "You are eating. I bet you haven't had a hot meal since yesterday."

Harper nodded to Detective Ray. "Turn your tape recorder on, Kathleen. You can take my statement."

Charlie turned away. Clyde looked at Harper a long time, his eyes filled with helplessness. He looked around him once as if half expecting help to materialize from the woodwork; then he rose and left the house, passing within three feet of Joe and Dulcie. He was too preoccupied to see them.

The two cats, sitting in the shadows beneath the porch chair and peering in through the screen door, listened to Harper recount his movements of the previous afternoon, giving Detective Ray place and time for every smallest action, laying it out in far more detail than he had for Detective Davis-as if Harper were the suspect. And as the facts and Harper's vulnerability were revealed, the cats' fears deepened into a raw, claw-tingling indignation. Joe Grey sat glowering, working himself into a deep rage.

Any pleasure he had ever taken in teasing the police captain vanished now. Any smug tricks and sly innuendos, as Joe secretly collected and passed on information, were forgotten. At this moment, Joe's admiration for Max Harper ruled him.

Someone, some lowlife, was out to get Max Harper, to ruin him big time.

Harper, with no witness to his movements during the time of the murder, would have only his uncorroborated statements, as told to the two detectives. As the cats crouched listening, deeply alarmed, above them the sky began to pale and the dawn wind to stir sharper; and up the hills, the lights of the searchers moved ever higher into the wild, rocky forest.

And farther north, at the edge of the forest within the Pamillon estate, the cougar prowled, stepping soundlessly on thick pads among the fallen walls of the mansion, the big male seeming, in the first gray haze of dawn, no more than a shifting shadow. He was a powerful beast, sauntering casually across the rubble as if he owned this land. In his own wild way, he did own it-had made it part of his territory.

The front walls of the big Victorian mansion had fallen away, leaving the first and second floors open like a two-story stage set on which the king of beasts was, at this moment, the only player.

Pausing at the threshold to the open parlor, he scented out keenly, his ears sharply forward, his eyes narrowed and intent. Softly panting, he lifted his gaze up past the broken stair to the second-floor nursery, where something drew his attention.

Moving silently into the parlor, he prowled among the rotting, vine-covered furniture, his yellow eyes fixed on the ragged edge of the floor above. He crouched.

In one liquid and powerful leap he gained the broken ceiling and stood in the upstairs nursery.

Moving without sound among the remnants of chests and beds, he sniffed at the fallen bricks beside the fireplace. He licked the leg of a rocking chair, tasting blood.

He pawed, for some moments, at the bloody debris around the chair, then dug beside the fireplace at a pile of broken timbers. Something was there, had been there, something had bled there.

But the sharp stink of wet ashes within the fireplace warped all lesser scents. The smell stung his nose, made him grimace. He could scent nothing alive now, nothing edible. He dug again at the timbers, stopping when he raked his paw on a nail and his own blood flowed. Snarling, he backed away.

Padding to the edge of the broken floor, he looked back once, then dropped down again to the parlor, his movements as smooth as water flowing, and sauntered away into the garden. He was, in the rising dawn, the color of spun honey.

Deep beneath the timbers, the kit listened to the cougar depart. Her little body was iced with terror. From the moment the big beast gained the nursery and began to paw and dig, she had been frozen with fear. Even concealed inside the woodbox, beneath the fallen wall, she was petrified. Why had she come here? Why had she left the safety of the ranch yard to go adventuring on such a night?

The lid of the box did not close fully. Crouching in the black interior, she had seen the cougar looking in. She had prayed so hard she thought her heart would stop, prayed that her black and brown coat was invisible. That the stink of ashes would conceal her scent. They were old, wet ashes, packed deep.

The kit did not know or care that the fires of the nursery hearth, laid down forty years before, had, over generations, been augmented by the fires of hoboes and then of occasional flower children, then of the present-day homeless wandering the Molena Point foothills, seeking shelter on cold nights. But indeed, the accumulated charcoal and lime, sour water and rot and mildew hid many scents from the lion.

The kit cared about none of that. She cared only that she was still alive and uneaten. But when, warily, she slipped out and padded across the nursery to hide herself at its edge, looking down, she forgot even her debilitating fear.