Lilian Braun - The Cat Who Turned On and Off

"What's happened to you, Mary?" he asked. "You've changed." She smiled joyously. "I feel as if I've been living under a cloud, and the sun has just broken through!" "Can you tell me about it?" 'Not now. Later. I'd better go back to Iris. She'll wake and think she's deserted." After she had left, QwiIleran took another look at the hair brooch — and a good hard look at the cats. The male was graciously allowing the female to wash his ears.

"Okay, Koko, the game's up," he said. "Where are you getting this loot?" Koko sat very tall and squeezed his eyes innocently.

"You feline Fagin! I'll bet you find the stuff, and you make Yum Yum steal it. Where's your secret cache?" Koko unfolded his rear half and with dignity walked from the room. QwiIleran followed him — into the bathroom.

"You're finding them under the tub?" "Yow," said Koko with a noncommittal inflection.

QwiIleran started to go down on all fours, but a twinge in his bad knee discouraged the effort. "I'll bet no one's cleaned under that monster for fifty years," he told the cat, who was now sitting in his sandbox with a soulful look in his eyes and paying no attention to anyone.

Shortly after, when QwiIleran returned to the Ellsworth house to pick up the Cobb car, he did some treasure hunting of his own. He looked for footprints and tire tracks in the snow and telltale marks in the dust of the stripped rooms.

White plaster dust had settled everywhere. Large objects had been dragged through it, leaving dark trails, and footprints had piled on footprints, but here and there a mark could be distinguished. Qwilleran noticed the patterned treads of boots, the imprint of a claw hammer, some regularly spaced dots (made by crutches?), and even the pawprints of a large animal, and a series of feathery arabesques in the dust, perhaps caused by the switching of a tail. Evidently every dealer in Junktown had been through the Ellsworth house at one time or another; recent prints were lightly filmed over and the older ones were almost covered.

Qwilleran dug Cobb's flashlight out of a pile of rubble and retrieved his crowbar. Then he went upstairs.

Everything on the stair treads had been obliterated, but on the landing there was evidence of three kinds of footwear, and although it was impossible to guess whether all three had been there at the same time, they were sharp enough to be recent. The newsman copied the tread marks on the folded sheet of newsprint that was always in his pocket. One print was a network of diamond shapes, another was a series of closely spaced dots, and the third was crossbarred. His own galoshes left a pattern of small circles.

The tire tracks in the yard contributed nothing to Qwilleran's investigation. There was no telling how many junkers had been in and out of the driveway. Tire tracks had crisscrossed and frozen and melted and frozen again, and snow had frosted the unreadable hieroglyphics.

Qwilleran backed the tan station wagon out of its hiding place in the backyard, and as he pulled away, he noticed that the vehicle left a rectangle of gray in the field of white snow. He also noticed another such rectangle nearby. Two cars had parked there on the dirty ice Sunday night, after which a light snow had fallen. Qwilleran jumped out of the wagon, thanked fate and Mary Duckworth for the tape line in his pocket, and measured the length and breadth of the second rectangle. It was shorter than the imprint left by the Cobb wagon, and it was not quite square at one corner, the snow having drifted in from the northwest.

Qwilleran's findings did not amount to much, he had to admit. Even if the owner of the second car were known, there was no proof that he had engineered Cobb's fatal fall. Nevertheless, the mere routine of investigation was exhilarating to Qwilleran, and he drove from the scene with a feeling of accomplishment. On second impulse he drove back into the Ellsworth yard, entered the house, and salvaged two items for the Cobb Junkery: a marble mantel and a chandelier of blackened brass.

Later he drove Mrs. Cobb to the airport.

"I don't have anything black to wear," she said wearily. "C. C. always liked me to wear bright colors. Pink especially." She huddled on the car seat in her cheap coat with imitation fur lining, her pink crocheted church-going hat, and her two pairs of glasses hanging from ribbons." "You can't pick up something in Cleveland," Qwilleran Isaid, "if you think it's necessary. Who's going to meet you there?" "My brother-in-law-and Dennis, if he gets in from St, Louis." "Is that your son?" "Yes." "What's he doing in St. Louis?" "He finished school last June and just started his first job." "Does he like antiques?" "Oh, dear, no! He's an architect!" Keep her talking, Qwilleran thought. "How old is he?" "Twenty-two." "Single?" "Engaged. She's a nice girl. I wanted to give them some antique silver for Christmas, but Dennis doesn't approve of anything old…. Oh, dear! I forgot the presents for the mailman and the milkman. There are two envelopes behind the clock in the kitchen — with a card and a little money in them. Will you see that they get them — in case I don't come home right away? I wrapped up a little Christmas treat for" Koko and Yum Yum, too. It's in the top drawer of the Empire chest. And tell Ben that I'll make his bourbon cake when I get back from the — from Cleveland." "How do you make bourbon cake?" Keep her talking.

"With eggs and flour and walnuts and raisins and a cup of bourbon." "Nothing could beat that coconut cake you made yesterday." "Coconut was C. C.'s favorite," she said, and then she, fell silent, staring straight ahead but seeing nothing beyond the windshield.

When Qwilleran returned from the airport in the Cobb station wagon, he saw a fifth of a ton of Fluxion photographer squeezing into a Volkswagen at the curb.

"Tiny!" he hailed him. "Did you get everything?" "I went to five places," Tiny said. "Shot six rolls." "I've got another idea. Do you have a wide angle lens? How about shooting a picture of my apartment? To show how people live in Junktown." The staircase groaned when the photographer followed Qwilleran upstairs, and Yum Yum gave one look at the outsize stranger decked with strange apparatus and promptly took flight. Koko observed the proceedings with aplomb.

Tiny cast a bilious glance around the room. "How can you live with these crazy anachronisms?" "They grow on you," Qwilleran said smugly.

"Is that a bed? Looks like a funeral barge on the Nile. And who's your embalmed friend over the fireplace? You know, these junk dealers are a bunch of graverobbers. One guy wanted me to photograph a dead cat, and those three dames with all that rusty tin were swooning over some burial jewelry from an Inca tomb." "You're not tuned in," Qwilleran said with the casual air of authority that comes easily to a newsman after three days on a new beat. "Antiques have character — a sense of history. See this bookrack? You wonder where it's been — who owned it — what books it's held-who polished the brass. An English butler? A Massachusetts poet? An Ohio schoolteacher?" "You're a bunch of necrophiles," said Tiny. "My God! Even the cat!" He stared at Yum Yum, trudging into the room with a small dead mouse.

"Drop that dirty thing!" Qwilleran shouted, stamping his foot.

She dropped it and streaked out of sight. He scooped up the gray morsel on a sheet of paper, rushed it into the bathroom and flushed it down the toilet.

After Tiny had left, Qwilleran sat at his typewriter, aware of an uncommon silence in the house. The cats were snoozing, the Cobb radio was quiet, Ben was about his business elsewhere, and The Junkery was closed. When the doorbell rang, it startled him.

There was a man waiting on the stoop — an ordinary — looking man in an ordinary-looking gray car coat.