Лори Касс - Gone With The Whisker

I wondered when kids learned about Occam’s razor. Not that I could remember when I’d figured it out. Last week, perhaps? “You’re right,” I said. “But if someone is hiding out there, I don’t want to walk up and knock on the door. Isn’t that when things start to go bad in horror movies?”

Kate shrugged, muttering, “Mom doesn’t let me watch stuff like that.”

“Wise woman,” I said, earning me a Look from Kate.

“Why, because this way I never know what anyone is talking about?” she demanded. “What is it with grown-ups? Don’t you remember what it’s like to be a kid? Always being told what I can’t do, what I have to do, what I should be doing?” She flung her hands about. “Mom and Dad keep telling me I need to act like an adult before I get treated like one, but how will I ever learn how to act grown up until they treat me like I have half a brain in my head?”

At long last, I was clueing into the fact that Kate’s frustrated anger didn’t necessarily have anything to do with her kindly aunt Minnie. “Kate, sweetie,” I said, “don’t you see? They’re treating you this way because they actually do remember what it’s like to be young.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” she said flatly. “If they remembered, they’d be . . . I don’t know . . .”

“Be what? Nicer to you?” I smiled. “Unfortunately, that’s not the way it works.”

“It should!” she practically yelled.

I was torn between two competing reactions. The first one was to murmur sympathetic noises, to coo auntly endearments, and to give Kate a comforting hug. The second one, which was the wrong one, was to laugh out loud. Sadly, it was also the stronger reaction and Kate saw my mouth twitch.

“You’re laughing at me.” Her eyes narrowed.

I shook my head. “No, I’m not. Laughing, yes, but at myself, not you. See, I remember having almost this exact conversation with Aunt Frances the summer I turned seventeen.”

“Not sure why that’s funny,” Kate muttered.

It probably wasn’t, not to her, so I changed tactics. “Growing up is hard. You think you’re an adult because you’re so much smarter and more capable than you were a year ago. But you’ll think the same thing next year. And the next and the next. And about the time you hit thirty, you’ll realize it never stops.”

“Thirty?” Her eyes bugged out. “Mom and Dad are going to treat me like a kid until I’m thirty?”

That hadn’t been what I meant. Then again, she wasn’t ready to hear the truth; that parents tended to permanently think of their offspring as children, no matter how old they were.

“Let’s go for a walk.” I tied my car key to my shoelace and opened the car door, though walking hadn’t been my intention when we’d driven down here. At the time, I thought we’d take the car as far down the road as the road would go, see what we could see, then turn around and head for the raspberry patch. Now, however, I thought a walk in the woods might do Kate some good. Aunt Frances and I had taken lots of walks during my youthful summers, and I was finally realizing that those hadn’t happened by accident or because my aunt was such a friend of the outdoors. “Open your window a little, will you?” I asked. “Eddie could use the—”

“Mrr!!”

“—the fresh air.”

“You’re not supposed to lock animals or small children in the car during the summer,” Kate said.

Now why did her saying that irritate me? I took a deep breath, which didn’t do as much to calm me as I’d hoped, so I took another one. “The point,” I said, “is making sure they’re not in an overheated vehicle long enough to endanger their health. If you look at where we’re parked, you’ll note that the car is completely shaded by trees, and will stay that way until”—I looked up at the sky—“after lunch. And since that’s a couple of hours from now, I can’t come up with any likely scenario putting Eddie in danger.”

Kate tossed her head. “You don’t have to sound so much like a librarian.”

Since I was a librarian, I figured everything I said made me sound like one, but for once I was smart enough to keep my thoughts inside. “He’ll be fine.” The risk of theft out here on this deserted road felt so low as to be nonexistent. “The car is locked and the windows are rolled down to allow for airflow. I don’t see how even Eddie will be able to find a way to damage anything in the short time we’ll be gone, do you?”

She shrugged, but didn’t say anything, so I considered that a win for Minnie. Not that it was a contest, of course.

I looked in at Eddie through the slightly opened window. “See you later, pal. We won’t be—”

“MRR!!”

“Yes, I’ll miss you, too,” I said soothingly. “I’m so glad we have this kind of bond. Back soon, okay?”

“Is he going to be okay?” Kate asked, looking backward as we walked down the side of the gravel road, listening to the sound of Eddie’s unhappiness.

“He’s fine,” I said. Eddie’s howls could be prodigious, but as James Herriot might have said if the Yorkshire veterinarian had found himself with Eddie as a patient, if he could howl that loudly for no real reason, he probably didn’t have anything wrong with him except recalcitrance. “He’ll get tired soon. When we get back, I bet he’s sound asleep.”

Kate didn’t look convinced, but she kept walking alongside me, and by the time we reached the part of the road that was bounded by trees on both sides, we could barely hear him at all.

“Oh, no!” Kate slapped the pockets of her tight shorts. “I forgot my cell phone.”

“You can live without it for a few minutes, can’t you?”

“What if we need to contact someone? You have yours, but what if it breaks? What if the battery runs down?”

Sighing, I knelt down, untied my car key, and handed it over, because some things aren’t worth arguing over. Her light feet ran off, the car door opened, there was a pause, the car door shut, and she hurried back. I took the proffered key and tied it back on my shoe. At least she’d come back. Some kids might have driven off, leaving their poor aunt stranded.

We started walking again. Fifty yards later, the road took a slight turn and we couldn’t hear a thing except the sough of wind in the leaves and our own footsteps. It was quiet and peaceful, and I was just beginning to enjoy myself when Kate said, “So this is where that Courtney drove that day?”

I stared at her. “Excuse me?”

My niece sighed heavily. “Really? I can hear, remember?”

“But . . .” I tried to recall what conversations I’d had with whom that she might have overheard and quickly came to the conclusion that I hadn’t a snowball’s chance of pinning down anything specific.

“I. Was. In. The. Room,” Kate said, loud enough to startle any nearby wildlife. “Just because I don’t say anything doesn’t mean I’m not listening.”

“Well, sure, but . . .” I stopped talking, because my brain was catching up to the circumstances. At some point Kate would realize she might have been better off keeping that tidbit to herself. I, however, wasn’t going to be the one to bring it to her attention. That sounded like a sibling’s job.

“So this is where she went?” Kate asked.

I blinked, pulling out of my mini-reverie. “Has to be,” I said. “This road doesn’t connect to anything. It dead-ends just up ahead.” I’d confirmed this by peering at the county’s aerial photography and Google Earth. The road proper petered out quickly, narrowed to a two-track, then faded into a vanishing trail.

Kate swiveled her head, looking left and right and left and right. “And there was a second car?”

“A truck. It was ahead of Courtney’s.”