Ширли Мерфи - Cat Chase The Moon

Pressing their ears to the glass, and whispering, the three cats could just hear each other. Courtney said, “This is not the same man as in the library. This one’s bald, no beard or mustache—bald all over. I think this man is Ulrich Seaver.”

“But why did he capture you?” Dulcie said. “He’s . . .”

“Did he hurt you?” Joe said. “What does he want? Why . . . ?”

“So far, he’s been kind to me, nice salmon, a soft blanket.”

“But after that, what?” Joe said crossly.

“He wants to make a show cat of her,” Dulcie said with fury. “He has some of the old tapestries, the real ones all in frames, and he has a gallery in San Francisco and has a museum show booked in New York just of her . . .”

“And I’ll have my own Web site with colored pictures and maybe a movie and . . .”

Joe hissed and growled at his daughter. “What kind of damn foolishness has he been feeding you! You get your tail out of there, Courtney, and do it now! Before he skins and frames you !”

“I can’t get out,” she said demurely. “I’ve tried every window. But he told me, at night when he locks the big glass doors he’ll let me downstairs. All by myself,” she said, gloating.

She looked at Dulcie and Joe and Kit, her eyes sparkling. “He carried me all around the store when there were no customers, but he locked the glass doors first. Oh, it’s beautiful, he turns the lights real soft and there are damask couches and marble statues and gold screens and all kinds of ancient, carved furniture and cloisonné vases, I read the little signs. And things I don’t know what they are and can’t name them. At night I’ll have the whole store to myself, until he comes to get me in the morning and then I’ll have the upstairs and a breakfast of salmon before he opens the downstairs doors to let customers in.”

They all just looked at her.

“There is one thing,” Courtney whispered. “A woman. A woman lives here—but she isn’t here now. She must be elegant, she has tailored suits and expensive shoes, I looked in the closets. Is she his wife? They share a bedroom, lacy nightgowns and panties in the drawers, but no pictures of her and he didn’t mention her. He doesn’t seem to have any letters from her, I went through a stack of mail on the desk. How long has she been gone? There are two cars in the garage.” Courtney looked at her daddy. “Has she disappeared? Could she be the woman in the grave?”

Joe was amazed at how much the young cat already knew about the ways of the human world. He said, “She’s in the hospital. Max and the detectives were talking about it.” As he sat thinking, a flock of pigeons dove down at the sill; when one pecked at him, he struck and hissed at it, and they flew on.

“There was no ID on that battered woman, they got no make on her fingerprints, nothing in AFIS, nothing anywhere that the department can find. If that woman is Seaver’s wife she’d have some kind of identification, her prints would bring up a driver’s license or maybe city records.”

“But the woman is gone,” Courtney said. “No purse, no billfold or driver’s license, I looked all over the apartment. And she wears gold earrings, a whole drawer full of them, the kind with the little rings or buttons to hold them on.”

“For pierced ears,” Dulcie said. “When he lets you downstairs at night, can’t you open any of those windows?”

“They’re all like these. Except the powder room window. A tiny one, but even it has metal bars outside.”

“Piece of cake,” Joe said. “We can handle that small window and we can sure squeeze through the bars.”

Courtney flicked her bright tail.

Joe said, “We wait until afternoon when he’s busy with a customer, we slip in, hide under the couches, in dark places.” He looked at Courtney. “Tonight after he locks up, goes upstairs and lets you down into the store, we get to work. The five of us ought to be able to . . .”

“The latch is a metal tab,” Courtney said, “about four inches long. I think a person is supposed to squeeze it, then slide the glass open.” She looked uncertain. “Can we do that? I tried, but paws aren’t very good for squeezing. I guess the screen is on the outside but I can’t see it, the glass is that . . .”

“Obscure glass?” Joe said. “With a bumpy surface? We can take care of the screen earlier, from outside.” He went silent as footsteps came up from downstairs, then the turn of the doorknob.

When the apartment door opened Courtney was curled up on a blanket, on the big chair below the window. There was no other cat to be seen, the window ledge was blank, decorated only by pigeon droppings. A lone pigeon fluttered down to land on the carved rim: but it looked at the cats and it was gone again, in a flurry of wings. And as Courtney pretended to sleep on her blanket, she thought about Joe’s plan.

But then she wondered. Did she really want to get away yet?

What she wanted, before she escaped, was to find Seaver’s missing wife or find out who that woman was. Find out if it was she who had been beaten and nearly buried alive—find out if Seaver had done that. Sometimes he really did give her the shivers.

She wanted to stay until she found out if he was what he pretended to be.

Or did she? If he had beaten, nearly killed that woman, she wanted out of there now . Even as a little voice in the back of her head sang of glamour, of museums and bright magazine pictures, she saw too clearly the body that Joe had described and the bloody grave, and her own kitten blood filled with ice.

Shivering, she tucked deeper under the blanket thinking of ways she might force open that downstairs window.

10

Late that evening, with the store’s lights dimmed and the big glass doors securely locked, Joe, Dulcie, Pan, and Kit waited, hidden under the antique furniture, for the upstairs door to open. When at last it did open and Courtney came out, she paused on the top step, looking up at Seaver. He smiled and leaned down and petted her and handed her a little treat. “Go on, my dear, the antiques store is yours now. Have a good time. It’s a lovely place for you to roam, to get used to the finer furnishings among which you will be living. I’m sure you won’t scratch anything, I know you’ll be a good girl.”

His words made Courtney want to throw up. She glanced up at him innocently, as sweetly as she could manage, and raced down the steps. Moving out of his sight, she leaped to the top of a small, hand-carved writing desk that stood against the inner wall. The subtly lit display windows formed a background to the rich brocades, golden pitchers, gilded chairs all artfully arranged. She sat looking out among the shadows. She listened to the upstairs door close. Slowly, in the whisper of light from the windows, the shadows began to take shape, to morph into vague forms that only a cat could see. She sat watching until at last a cat slipped out, then another, each watching the door above in case it might open again.

Dulcie appeared from under a settee, Kit and Pan from behind a china cabinet. Then Joe Grey from an elegantly arranged tangle of gold satin draped over a chair. As he reared up, the tomcat’s silver-gray coat glowed against the gold like another piece of rare artwork.

Courtney sat tall on the desk before them, between a 1900 silver centaur priced at eight thousand dollars, and a seventeenth-century stone lion at twenty thousand, each price on a little card slipped beneath the object. Joe Grey, looking up at her, knew she was the most beautiful of the three. When finally she leaped down she led them winding through the store and into the little powder room with its gilt mirror, lace-edged curtains, and hand-painted tile.