Shirley Murphy - Murphy_Shirley_Rousseau_Cat_Bearing_Gifts_BookFi

“But . . .”

“Emmylou’s perfectly capable of taking care of herself,” Joe said. “You’ve seen her swing that sledgehammer, breaking up those concrete steps.” Emmylou was tall, well muscled, despite her slim build and gray hair. “Besides, when she talked about Birely she made him out a timid soul, easygoing. Not like someone who’d make trouble.”

“Humans don’t always see others truly,” Dulcie said with suspicion. They’d waited and watched, and of course the minute the men went out, they’d tossed the place.

Not much to toss, in the one room. An overflowing trash bag, half a loaf of stale bread, seven cans of red beans, dirty clothes thrown in the corner beside a pair of sleeping bags that were deeply stained and overripe with human odor, the few boards that had not yet been nailed back against the rock wall, and five loosened stones lying beside them. But tonight, something was off, tonight the room seemed abandoned. The sleeping bags were in the same exact position as when they’d last come in, but the two greasy pillows and the extra blankets had been taken away, and when they prowled the room there was no fresh scent of the men, even their ripe smell was old and fading. The canned beans were gone, too, the only food was three slices of bread gone blue with mold in the package. Dulcie said, “Is their old truck still down in the shed?”

There was no way to tell except by smell, no way to see into the shed, not the tiniest crack in or under its solid door, which fit snugly into its molding. When they trotted down the steps to investigate, there was no recent scent of exhaust. Any trace of tire marks in the gravelly dirt had been scuffed clean by the wind.

“Maybe they’re having a little vacation,” Joe said, “hitting the homeless jungles for a change of scene. But why did they leave their sleeping bags?”

“I would have left them, too,” Dulcie said with disgust.

Trotting down through Emmylou’s weedy yard, they’d scrambled up to the roofs of the small old cottages in the neighborhood below. Leaping from house to house, trotting across curled and broken shingles, they’d moved on down the hill until Dulcie, quiet and preoccupied, left Joe, heading away home to her own hearth. To her white-haired housemate and, Joe suspected, to Wilma’s computer. Watching her gallop away, her tabby-striped tail lashing, Joe knew well where Dulcie’s mind was. The minute she sailed through her cat door she’d head for the lighted screen, where she’d be lost the rest of the night, caught up in the new and amazing world she’d discovered, in the secret world of the poet.

7

IT WAS EARLIER in the year, during that unusual February that brought snow to the village, when Joe found Dulcie in the nighttime library sitting on Wilma’s desk, the pale light of Wilma’s work computer glowing around her. When Dulcie turned to look down at him, the expression on her face was incredibly mysterious and embarrassed. How shy she had been, telling him she was composing a poem; only at long last had she allowed him to read it, to see what she’d written.

The poem made him laugh, as it was meant to do, and within the next weeks Dulcie produced a whole sheaf of poems, some happy, some uncomfortably sad, and the occasional funny one that made Joe smile. His tabby lady had discovered a whole new dimension to her life, to her already amazing world. That’s where she would be now, sitting before the computer caught up in that magical realm where Joe could only look on, where he was sure he could never follow. Where he could only be glad for her, and try not to mourn his loss, of that part of his tabby lady.

To Joe Grey, words and language were for gathering information and passing it along—and for making certain your humans knew when to serve up the caviar. But Dulcie used language as a painter used color, and the concept was nearly beyond him, the inner fire of such expression quite beyond his solid tomcat nature. How many speaking cats were there in the world, living their own secret lives? And how many of them had found their souls filled suddenly with the music of words, with a new kind of voice that Joe himself could hardly fathom? Contemplating such wonders of the mind and heart left him feeling strange and unsettled, like trotting along a narrow plank high aboveground and suddenly losing his balance, swaying out over empty space not knowing how to take the next step, a devastating feeling to the likes of any cat.

Joe took a long route home, thinking about Dulcie and trying not to feel left out from this new aspect to her life; but soon again his thoughts returned to the two tramps, to questions that as yet had no answers, and to the paper money they were surely finding, money old and rank with mildew. Who had hidden it there?

How long had it lain within those damp walls? That stone building was more than a hundred years old, it had stood there since the early nineteen hundreds, when it was an outbuilding for the dairy farm that had once occupied that knoll of land. Ryan and Clyde had spent hours in the history section of the Molena Point library perusing old books and photographs of the area, when they bought the little remodel just two blocks down from Emmylou, where Debbie Kraft and her girls were now living. Had the money been secreted there since the place was built, or had a subsequent owner, Sammie or someone before her, stashed it away in those old walls?

Emmylou might not know about that hidden stash, but he didn’t understand how she could fail to know that two freeloaders were camping on her property, not fifty feet from her. Yet she didn’t seem to have a clue. Misto visited her often, he was sure she thought the old place as empty as a clean-licked tuna can.

It was strange, Jesse thought, that when he talked about the missing money, Misto grew silent and withdrawn and a curious look shone in his yellow eyes. As if he knew something, or almost knew but couldn’t quite put a paw on what was needling him. As if some long-lost memory had surfaced but wouldn’t come clear, leaving the old yellow tom puzzled and uncertain. Strange, too, that Misto spent so much time with Emmylou, visiting her and prowling her house, almost as if he felt a tie to the property.

Or maybe a connection to the dead woman who had owned it? If there were memories here, if there was a story here, either Misto wasn’t ready to share it or he didn’t remember enough to share, maybe could recall only tattered fragments. But this, too, unsettled Joe. Fragments of memory from when? Sometimes Misto talked about past lives, and Joe didn’t like that, he didn’t buy into that stuff. Even if they did have nine lives, which no one had ever proven, what made a cat think he could remember them, that he could recall those faraway connections?

As he crossed a high, shingled peak, the scudding wind hit him, thrusting sharp fingers into his short gray fur. Below him, the dark residential streets were black beneath the pine and cypress trees, only a few cottage windows showed lights, the soft glow of a reading lamp, the flicker of a TV. He was crossing a tiled ridge near Kit’s house, just a block over, when he stopped and reared up, looking.

The windows of the Greenlaw house were all dark, with Lucinda and Pedric and Kit still in the city. There should be no one about, certainly there should be no creature prowling Kit’s tree house among the oak branches, but there against the starry sky moved the silhouette of a cat pacing fretfully back and forth across the high platform, an impatient figure, an interloper prowling Kit’s territory where no strange animal was welcome. Joe sniffed the air for scent but the sea wind was to his back, heavy with iodine and the smell of a rotting fish somewhere. Heading across the interceding rooftops, he slipped silently down to the Greenlaws’ garden and then up again, up the oak tree to Kit’s high, roofed platform, his fur prickling with challenge.