Ширли Мерфи - Cat Chase The Moon

When the officer had noticed nothing suspicious among the fallen and tangled trees, when the car had passed and turned back toward the village, when Joe was convinced the woman would keep breathing on her own, he raced for a ramshackle cottage at the edge of the shore. Leaping to a sill, he clawed his way through the rusty screen and slid open the rickety window. This house was the only relic in the long line of seafront homes, the rest all restored to elegance or replaced by new dwellings. This old place smelled of cats but he didn’t see any.

Slipping through the dim kitchen he found a phone in the hall. He called 911 and relayed his message, then beat it out of there, the torn screen clawing at his fur. Racing back across the dead-end street, crossing the narrow lane where it ended at the sea, he kicked away pawprints in the drifted sand—but there were cats in the village. Why would he be suspected of being the phantom caller? He had been faced with this dilemma before and never been caught. Slipping out of sight among the fallen branches just as the first siren screamed, he searched hastily for the woman’s purse, for a billfold or ID, but found nothing. She was still breathing but the oozing blood had slowed, not a good sign. He was looking for the shovel her attacker might have buried when the medics screeched to a halt, cop cars behind them; Joe Grey dove into the tall grass and bushes and was gone.

He watched from across the street as the medics worked on her: oxygen, all kinds of tubes, then loaded her into the ambulance. He would know little more until the information was on Captain Harper’s desk, until he could saunter into the chief’s office and have a look at the report.

Ordinarily Joe would stay after the medics left, would watch from the bushes to see if the cops found any clues he’d missed. But this was Saturday morning and he was already late. His tabby lady would be waiting with her striped ears back, her striped tail switching, sitting rigid among the small children on the library window seat, her green eyes flashing at his tardiness.

How many tough tomcats spent their Saturday mornings in the library among a bunch of snively little kids listening to story hour? How many patrons smiled with amusement at Joe and the other four cats snuggled among the children: Joe’s lady, Dulcie. Their grown kitten, Courtney. (Courtney’s two brothers were otherwise occupied.) Tortoiseshell Kit and her mate, red tabby Pan, as macho a tomcat as Joe Grey himself, all curled up among warm and cuddling children listening to a tale of magic.

But the cats were there for more than the story. Intently they watched for the mysterious man who had appeared these last few Saturdays prowling among the books, striking their curiosity and sometimes their concern.

Ever since Dulcie, who was Molena Point’s official library cat, first saw the shadowy figure slip behind the book stacks and stand watching the children, the cats’ curiosity had drawn them. Browsing among the books, he kept his eyes on one lone child, then another.

Public libraries were not the welcome retreats they had once been, peaceful and safe. These days, even small libraries had guards on the premises. Plainclothes officers walked through the paneled, silent rooms, sometimes arresting a stoned man, taking him away to sleep it off in jail. All across the country, addicts were frequenting the book rooms, hiding their stashes among the shelved volumes or concluding their sales in the towns’ most innocent refuges. It was not uncommon, at closing hour, for a librarian to find a drugged man asleep in a soft chair, a newspaper spread over his face.

Molena Point Library was a handsome building with pale stone walls, mullioned windows, and carpeted floors, a peaceful retreat set back from the sidewalk by a deep garden graced with flowers, small ornamental trees, and stone benches. This morning when Joe Grey had entered, trotting among the blooms and up four stone steps, crossing the stone porch to the carved oak door and pushing inside, he knew he was laughed at, but in a friendly way. Most of the patrons knew him. Padding down six steps to the big reading room, sauntering across in plain sight of half a dozen elderly men sitting in comfortable chairs reading, he had leaped onto the wide, cushioned window seat and settled down beside his tabby lady in the lap of a blond little girl who smelled of peppermint. Two women at a reading table watched the five cats among the children and laughed and whispered to each other. Three old men smiled, and one laughed softly. Smile if you want, Joe thought, half amused himself. Better than a couple of drug dealers settling in, waiting for their contacts.

He heard from across the village the short blast of a police siren that made him want to leap away and follow, racing across the rooftops as he usually did. But Dulcie gave him a look that settled him down. Every siren wasn’t a major crime; this one could be anything: traffic violation, fender bender. Or a domestic argument. They’d had plenty of those since Zeb Luther’s family all moved out, leaving the old man alone. Moved in across the street from Joe, shouting altercations in the middle of the night that woke Joe and his housemates and left them all cranky, to say nothing of enraging the neighbors.

He was wondering if the adults in the library were listening to the story, too, only pretending to read the papers. And, speak of the devil, here came his quarrelsome new neighbor Thelma in the front door dragging her little girl. At once Mindy broke away and ran to the window seat, crowding in at the end. But when she spotted Joe and started to scramble to him, the librarian Wilma Getz, Dulcie’s silver-haired housemate, told her kindly to sit down where she was. The tale Wilma was reading was one of the Narnia books; the boys and girls were already entranced, as were the cats, drawn to the war-refugee children and the secret world they found at the back of a closet—but soon again the cats’ attention was drawn away to the open balcony, to the second-floor bookshelves that looked down on the reading room. Even as the world of Narnia unfolded in snow and ice, a figure appeared on the balcony among the deepest row of bookshelves. In the shadows he was hardly visible. As on every other Saturday morning, he was watching the children. The same man, the shadow of his close-clipped, pointed beard, dark cap pulled down over shaggy, dark hair. Why was he watching the children? Or was he watching the cats, was he some kind of mentally obsessed cat fancier?

Not liking to be stared at, and quick-tempered, Joe wanted to race across the room, leap up through the rail, knock the man down and question him until he knew what the guy wanted.

Oh, right! And tell the whole world I can talk.

The man stood still for a while, looking, watching brown-haired Mindy, Joe’s new neighbor. But then he turned away, faded into the shadows of the back row of bookshelves, and glided toward the stairs that led down to the main floor. Joe knew that Wilma Getz watched him, too, as she read aloud the tale of Narnia.

The next the cats saw of the man he was at the nonfiction shelves just across the room, flipping through bright, oversized books. He was wearing thin pigskin gloves, expensive ones, new and pale. He carried half a dozen books to a table, spread them out, and began to make long, careful notes from the front and back pages of each. While he recorded his references he would glance up now and then around the room or at their little group. Joe wanted to wander over, hop casually on the table and see what subjects he was recording from the title pages and index, what pictures he was lingering over. The tomcat was about to slide down and pad across to take an innocent look when a nailed paw stopped him and Dulcie’s green eyes pulled him back. She could see he was warming up for trouble, she could sense his rising challenge.