Shirley Murphy: Cat Striking Back

She had no idea that the snitch sat on the roof above her, ready to melt away out of sight if she turned to look up.

THE GRAY TOMCAT smiled with satisfaction each time Juana scraped up a bit of what he knew was human blood. She worked fast but carefully until the rain started. When it began coming down in earnest, she pulled off her boo ties and packed up her slides and equipment. Joe watched her circle the house again before she headed for her car, and only then did the tomcat decide to abandon the scene himself and head home. He wasn’t partial to a drenching rain, and he felt hollow with hunger. This was Sunday morning, and Ryan, in her new mode as a blushing bride-which probably wouldn’t last too long-would very likely be cooking up a fine breakfast.

But then, hurrying over the roofs, shaking raindrops off his ears, he felt the rain stop again as suddenly as it had started. He watched the last clouds part above him and begin to move away, allowing shafts of sun to stream through onto the wet shingles. Just a harmless summer rain, a passing shower-but that harmless little rain, together with a judicious hosing down, had sure screwed up the crime scene. Joe wondered where that would leave the department, wondered what Juana would make of what little evidence she’d been able to retrieve. Would she decide that, without a body, she didn’t have enough to run with? That her morning’s work had been for nothing? She had, after all, only his anonymous description of the original scene.

And where was the perp hiding, that he could return and hose down the place and vanish again so quickly? Was he in the empty house? Was the body in there? Earlier, circling the house, he had found no hint of fresh scent. He wondered if Juana would take the little remaining evidence seriously enough to come back with a search warrant. Wondered if she had enough evidence so the judge would be willing to issue a warrant. His head filled with questions, but with his stomach alarmingly empty, the tomcat headed for home-no cat can think productively on an empty belly.

One thing for sure, he thought as he raced over the rooftops, he was keeping this morning’s events to himself. Though Ryan would listen with interest, he didn’t need Clyde ’s acerbic remarks. He didn’t need to be told that he was only imagining a murder and that if he had any sense, he’d learn to stay out of police business. Though Clyde’s harassment was half joking, though Joe knew Clyde respected the results of his past investigations, he didn’t feel, this morning, like being hassled by his teasing housemate.

HAVING PARTED FROM Joe Grey before dawn, the two lady cats had followed the elusive scent of the band of feral cats that they’d detected during their hunt, had followed their trail and then followed the faint sound of the cats’ voices softly laughing and talking, these cats who were like themselves.

This was the clowder in which Kit had grown up, the band whose leaders had so tormented her. The band she had left the moment she was big enough and brave enough to go out on her own-and the moment she discovered a pair of true friends among some very special humans. Oh, that had been a change in her life, to come to live with humans she soon learned to love, to live in a warm house with wonderful food, and music, and with all the joys of the human world.

Kit did love her life, and surely she loved her housemates. But still, sometimes, she missed the clowder. Sometimes, despite all her domestic pleasures, she felt strongly drawn back to that wild life. When, this morning, high up in the hills near the ruins of the old Pamillon mansion, she and Dulcie saw five wild, speaking cats slip up over a nearby crest and pause to look down at them, Kit had felt a thrill clear down to her paws. Watching those members of her old clowder, she’d reared up, staring at them-and staring straight at the tomcat who had once been her love, and from whom she had parted.

It had been only a few months ago that Sage, badly wounded, had been brought into the village where Kit’s human friends cared for him-and where he asked Kit to be his mate. She had refused him, had realized that she loved him more like a brother. But now, watching Sage, whom she had so painfully rejected, she considered intently the small, buff-colored female who crouched beside him.

Was this Sage’s new love? This scrawny, bleached-out, nondescript young cat as thin as a sick rabbit? Kit stood tall on her hind paws, looking. Did she even remember this waif of a young cat from among the clowder? For a moment, despite the fact that she had jilted Sage, Kit was riven with jealousy.

But then she thought, startled, had she seen that scrawny cat in the village? Had she seen that little cat among humans? Oh, but that wasn’t likely. The clowder cats never went there unless in a terrible emergency. And then it was only brave Willow who would come seeking human help. Certainly that scrawny, nervous young cat would never come down into the human world.

As she watched, the pale cat reared up, too, and opened her pink mouth, staring down at them, intently interested in Kit and Dulcie, her thin little face filled with excitement-until Sage nuzzled her and pushed her away.

But even as Sage bossed the little buff-colored cat and demanded her attention, she ignored him and continued to stare-and Kit could see clearly the younger cat’s wild yearning. She seemed to know at once that cat’s dreams.

She’s like me! Kit thought with surprise. Not just that she can speak, we’re all alike in that. She feels the same hungers that I do, she wants to understand the whole world the way I always did, she wants to know everything. She isn’t content in the clowder, she wants to see and smell and taste everything in the world, she wants to know more than she’ll ever learn running with the clowder, she wants to know human ways…

The words of an old English tale filled Kit’s mind. “…A pretty little dear her was, but her wanted to know too much…” And Kit’s heart had gone out to the young cat. She’s like me when I was her age, she wants to know what it’s like to live among humans and hear music and ride in cars and have more wonderful adventures than a clowder cat can ever know. And Kit yearned for the young cat as she would yearn for the ghost of her own younger self.

Beside her, tabby Dulcie watched the silent exchange, saw Kit’s jealousy but then, far stronger, Kit’s fascination with the buff-colored cat. Dulcie had been a grown cat when she and Joe found Kit up on Hellhag Hill. Kit had been just as thin and scrawny and half starved as this little waif-and as full of dreams. Kit was grown now, but that spirit still burned in her, that often irrepressible kindling of curiosity and joy, so much joy that sometimes Dulcie thought the little cat would explode.

As Kit and the pale cat silently regarded each other, Sage’s look made Dulcie uneasy. Clearly he didn’t want Kit’s flighty and irresponsible ways to infect his sweet new lady, he didn’t want his chosen mate to be a dreamer. He wanted her to be an obedient wife, he wanted a family, he wanted a steady female cat who could give him kittens, a stolid, matronly cat, a cat he could understand and who would understand him. How sad, Dulcie thought, that he had chosen this cat who seemed not like that at all, who seemed so like Kit. Another dreamer, another impetuous rebel he might never be able to make happy? Sage had tried to change Kit, and had failed. Did he think, now, that he could force this little scruff to his wishes?

Dulcie didn’t think so.

As the buff-colored cat reared up to look at Kit, as the two stood staring at each other across the blowing grass, Sage fluffed himself up to twice his size and lashed his tail, his ears back, his eyes narrow, and growled fiercely at his lady.