Ширли Мерфи - Cat Chase The Moon

It was at that moment that Officer McFarland came in the front door, brown hair uncombed, dressed in badly worn jeans, wrinkled cotton shirt, a stubble of beard, looking more like a vagrant than the neatly groomed young cop he usually was.

He spotted the stranger, picked up a newspaper off the hanging rack and sat down across the room, half out of sight behind its pages. At the other end of the window seat, tortoiseshell Kit and red tabby Pan watched McFarland. And they keenly watched the intruder, who remained for some time working away at his notes, calm and preoccupied. His little beard was perfectly trimmed and neat compared to his shaggy hair and wrinkled cap. At last, apparently finished, he returned the books to the shelves and left the library.

The cats watched him through the big, curved window. He crossed the garden, moved around the corner, and disappeared up the side street. In a moment McFarland put down his paper and slipped away following him. Joe wanted to scramble up to the roof and track them, but Dulcie gave him another look, a look that said, He knows you’re watching him . He scowled back at her. After all, the man had really done nothing wrong.

Except that everything he did was off-key.

Was he planning to kidnap one of the children? It happened often enough, all over the country. Or had he been watching the cats? Maybe watching Courtney? But that was silly, there were calico cats all over the village, what would he want with this one? Joe looked at his beautiful daughter, the delicate black bracelets around her right front leg. He would kill anyone who touched her. So would Dulcie—and Courtney could land a few bloody strikes herself, the kitten having learned to fight early on, from her two teasing brothers.

When story hour was finished, when the children broke away talking and laughing, running, checking out books, meeting their mothers, Kit and Pan streaked out the front door belatedly following Officer McFarland. Dulcie and Courtney, thinking of a late breakfast, followed Wilma into her office; but Joe Grey never hesitated, he charged on past them through her office, through the cat door into the alley, up the bougainvillea vine onto the roof, and raced toward the side street, where Kit and Pan followed McFarland below. All three saw McFarland turn the corner then pull back as the shadowy man entered the Swiss Café. McFarland moved on up the street among a crowd of tourists and stepped into an old car parked at the curb. Slumping down, he used the newspaper guise. Jimmie had been in the library last Saturday, but had left before the snooping stranger did. Maybe he’d followed the man several times, maybe knew his habits. This wasn’t a case yet, it was a question, a quiet surveillance.

Joe Grey watched four little girls and two women crowd into the café—well, the snooper couldn’t snatch a child from that crowd.Growing restless, knowing McFarland would stay with the guy, knowing that if something ugly happened he’d hear sirens, Joe took off fast, hitting the roofs with determined paws, heading back to Dulcie and Courtney, who would be waiting in Wilma’s office.

Though he did wonder if by now the chief had returned from the hospital, should have gotten what information he could on the battered woman—if she could talk at all, with that black-and-blue throat. If her windpipe wasn’t torn or collapsed, the tomcat thought sickly; and his mind was on both cases, the nearly dead woman, a beautiful woman and not a sign of ID that he had found; and then the shadowy prowler. If the man was watching one of the children, if he meant to kidnap a child, this was the worst crime of all.

Or, at that moment, Joe Grey thought it was.

One Saturday, Joe had seen Jimmie McFarland photograph the guy’s footprints after he’d crossed the polished floor of the front entrance; and both Dulcie and Kit had seen Jimmie taking fingerprints one evening after the library had closed—and Joe couldn’t shake his unease, couldn’t forget the chill gleam in the man’s pale eyes.

What Joe Grey didn’t see, nor did Jimmie McFarland, was the prowler slip into a men’s shop, casually lift two shirts and several jackets off a rack, smile and nod at a salesman, and take them into a dressing room. No one saw him facing the mirror removing the mustache and his cap with the tangled hair attached to it. They didn’t see him take out a handkerchief and wipe his handsome bald head until it shone, didn’t see him fold the objects of disguise, wrap the handkerchief smoothly around them, and slip the package in his own jacket pocket. Departing the store, he left the new clothes neatly on their hangers in the dressing room. He thanked the nearest salesman, the first one was with a customer. He stopped at the front counter to buy two pairs of socks which he paid for with cash, and he was gone.

That was why, when Jimmie and his fellow officers kept a watch for the library prowler as they went about their routes, no one ever did see him—or didn’t know that they saw him.

But now, Joe slipped into Wilma’s office to snuggle down with his family—though he didn’t stay long.

2

“Let him go, you can’t change him,” Wilma said as Joe Grey soon raced out the cat door. Dulcie started after him, but then she sighed and turned back. Half of her wanted to follow Joe, to see what he’d find; the other half told her to stay out of it. The guy was interested in children, not cats. Anyway, Officer McFarland was on his tail. And they could shadow him all over the village, from the rooftops, until they picked up a clue or two, until they had enough to call in valuable information that Jimmie McFarland might miss.

But neither the cats nor Jimmie picked up much more information. Except for what, later, Courtney herself found out, to her dismay.

Now, Wilma sat down in her desk chair, took the clip from her long gray hair where the children had tangled it, brushed it smooth and reclipped it. Dulcie’s housemate was a tall, strong woman, a retired federal parole officer and now a part-time reference librarian. She loved best reading to the children, just as she read to Dulcie and Courtney at home, just as she had read to all three of Dulcie’s kittens until Courtney’s brothers moved away, starting their own lives.

Dulcie had lived with Wilma since she was a kitten; she was less than a year old when she discovered that she could speak. Her first words, blurted out without thought, had shocked them both. They had stared at each other in frightened silence. That moment had changed their lives forever.

They were alarmed and frightened, but then all at once they found themselves talking up a storm, both woman and cat wild with delight at being able to communicate.

Soon their household was a different place. They shared every thought, every memory. They were like long-lost roommates newly reunited, trading every secret. Or nearly every secret. Dulcie might leave out some of her and Joe’s most frightening adventures, though Wilma eventually learned about most of them and either scolded or laughed at them. Dulcie had learned to read, as Wilma read to her, the pretty tabby picking out the sound of each word, then of each letter. She learned the written word fast, took great delight in that new joy as she learned to pick out words on the computer. Soon Dulcie, listening to her own muse, found her head full of poems that she had to write down, and they were both amazed. The word pictures were simply there, something in her cat nature heard the cadences and had to save them, had to read them back to herself.

Even now, trying to ease her fear of the prowler, she padded across the desk to the computer, clenched her paws tight, and gently touching the keys, she opened her own personal document and started a new page—seeking to drown her fear of the prowling man, to calm that fluttering feeling that made her paws tremble. Whatever he wanted, she hoped Jimmie McFarland nailed him, and soon.