Shirley Murphy - Cat Fear No Evil

When had this happened? This couldn't be…

She relaxed when the newscaster said the collision had happened late last night. This had happened while Lucinda and Pedric were safely asleep in their RV, or in some cozy inn up the coast-not at a time when the Greenlaws would have been on the highway.

She didn't like to look at the TV pictures. It was a terrible wreck, those poor people hadn't had a chance. She had reached for the remote, to turn to another channel, when a cut of the newscaster came on, interviewing the Sonoma County sheriff. She paused, curious in spite of herself.

"Now that the nearest relatives have been notified, we are able to release the names of the deceased. The tanker driver, Ken Doyle of Concord, is survived by a wife and two young children." There was a still shot of a dark-haired young woman holding a little boy and a fat baby. "The occupants of the RV were residents of Molena Point. Lucinda and Pedric Greenlaw had been…"

She couldn't move. Suddenly she couldn't breathe.

"… vacationing up the Northern California coast. The eighty-year-old newlyweds, who were married just last year in a Molena Point ceremony, were returning home to the central-coast village…"

She needed to sit down. She stood leaning against the counter, holding on to the counter, staring at the TV.

She had seen Lucinda and Pedric only a few weeks ago. She had spent the evening with them. She left the kitchen, making her way to the living room and the couch, which seemed miles.

Sat with her head down between her knees as she had been taught as a child, until the nausea passed.

Why would Lucinda and Pedric be on the road late at night?

A long time later she rose to put the shrimp and creole sauce and salad in the refrigerator. Standing in the kitchen with her back to the TV and the sound turned off, she made herself a double whiskey and took it into the living room.

But there, she couldn't help it, she turned on the larger TV mindlessly changing channels looking for more news, though she did not want to see any more. The wreck had happened Saturday night while she lay sleeping. Today she had gone about her pointless affairs while Lucinda and Pedric lay dead. She had stopped at the grocery, buying shrimp, flowers for the table, imagining the thin, wrinkled couple tooling along in their nice RV, stopping at antique shops, stopping to eat cracked crab… Staring at the TV, she didn't know what to do or what to think. She simply sat.

Did Wilma know? She ought to call Wilma. Should she call Clyde, ask Clyde to tell Wilma? Clyde was closer to Wilma than she was, they were like family. If they knew, why hadn't they called her?

And she couldn't call out; the line was dead.

She'd have to go down and get her cell phone. How stupid, to have left it in the car. Fetching her keys, she pulled on her coat, snatched up the pepper spray, locked the door behind her, and went down the stairs, hating this sense of fear. Reaching the garage she moved quickly, watching between other cars. Unlocking her Riviera she snatched up the phone, hit the lock, and slammed the door. She was up the stairs and in the apartment again before fear had immobilized her. This was crazy; she couldn't live like this. On a hunch, she tried the apartment phone again-and got the insistent beeping of the message service.

Sitting down on the couch with the now functioning phone, she started to play back her messages, then decided first to call Clyde. She needed, very much, to hear his gruff and reassuring voice.

The downstairs rooms of the Damen cottage were dark, but upstairs behind the closed shutters the bedroom and study were bright, the desk lamp lit, a warming fire burning in the study where Clyde sat at his desk filling out parts orders. Or trying to, working around the prone body of the sleeping gray tomcat where he lay sprawled across the catalogs. Far be it from Joe to move. Far be it from Clyde, who found the tomcat as amusing as he was exasperating, to ask him.

Ryan had left half an hour ago, after an early supper in the big new kitchen: takeout from their favorite Mexican cafe. Impatiently waiting for the building permit for the Harper place, she had gone home to her blueprints, anxious to finish putting together a design proposal for a remodel at the north end of the village. "I want to get that wrapped up, so I can concentrate on the Harper job."

"You are not," Clyde had said, "going to get so busy that you keep pulling men off one job to work on another, like most contractors? Delaying all the jobs?"

"No fear." She had grinned at him, flipping back her short dark hair. "I can manage my work better than that." She had given him a warm, green-eyed smile and laid her hand over his; her closeness led him, more and more lately, to imagine her always there with him. He sat at his desk now thinking about Ryan sharing the house, comfortable and warm and exciting.

Clyde's view of women had changed dramatically since the time, a few years back, when every conquest was exciting, when every new looker was a challenge even if he couldn't stand her as a person. Joe Grey had chided him more than once about bringing home some airhead. Well, that life was not for him anymore; the idea of bringing home some bimbo now disgusted him.

The change had started when Kate left her husband and came to him for help. He had been so smitten with her, and for so long, but after that night when he had hidden her from Jimmie, he had been so confused by her bizarre nature.

He had mooned over Kate for a long time after that, but she had distanced herself. She had known better than he that with the difference between them a relationship would never work; she had seen too clearly his fear of her impossible talents.

The night she left Jimmie and came running here to him, he would not believe what she told him about her alternate self, although her feline nature was part of the reason Jimmie wanted to kill her. In order to prove to him what she could do, she had done it. Standing before him, whispering some unlikely spell, she had taken the form of a cat. A cream-colored cat, sleek and beautiful, with golden eyes like Kate's and marmalade markings.

His fear had been considerable. He had charged into the bedroom and slammed the door and wouldn't open it. He did not want to see her again in either form. The next day he'd been better, although the concept still shook him. He became civil once more; but he would never get over it.

And yet even after that shattering incident, he had longed for her, had tried every way to get her to come home again after she moved to San Francisco.

Neither Joe nor Dulcie could take human form. Nor did Joe Grey want to; the tomcat said he liked his life as it was, that the talents he had were plenty. Well, the upshot for Clyde was that he had begun to look at a woman as a person. To want to know who she was and what she thought about life.

While pining over Kate, he had dated Charlie, a woman as honest and real as anyone he'd ever known. It was then he had let himself realize, as he had known deeply all along, what the real values were. It was then he put away his shallow philosophy and turned, as Max had done years before, to look at what a woman believed deep down, what she cared about in life.

Joe Grey would say, big sea change. The tomcat had ragged him plenty about his earlier lifestyle. Clyde stared down at Joe now. The tomcat seemed to make himself twice as big when he sprawled across a desk where a person was working. "You wouldn't consider rolling over, so I can finish this order?"

Joe stared up at him, his yellow eyes wide and innocent. "You think you should try Kate again? The phone has to be out, it wouldn't be busy all this time, even Kate can't talk that long- but she has to be home, she's expecting Lucinda and Pedric, she'll be worried."