Shirley Murphy - Murphy_Shirley_Rousseau_Cat_Bearing_Gifts_BookFi

“I’ll get Ryan,” he said with a note of panic. She heard him call out, and then Ryan came on, maybe on her studio extension. Kit imagined them upstairs in the master suite, Rock and the white cat perhaps disturbed from a nap on the love seat.

“What?” Ryan said. “Tell me slowly. What happened? Where are they? Where are you? Slowly, please! ”

Swallowing, Kit found her sensible voice. She tried to go slowly, to explain carefully about the wreck and to explain where that was. But try as she might, it all came out in a tangle, the kind of rush that made her human friends shout, made Joe and Dulcie lay back their ears and lash their tails until she slowed, but she never could slow down. “. . . boulders coming down the mountain straight at us and I thought we’d be buried but Pedric hit the gas pedal and the Lincoln shot through and the whole mountain came thundering down behind us and when the slide stopped the road was covered with boulders and rocks and there was a pickup on the other side crashed into the mountain and into a big delivery truck lying on its side and the driver was dead and . . .”

“Slow down, ” Clyde and Ryan shouted together. Ryan said, “Tell us exactly where you are. Did you call 911? How badly are they hurt? Did you call the CHP? Where . . . ?”

“I called,” Kit said. “They took Lucinda and Pedric away and Pedric’s head was bleeding and Lucinda was conscious sometimes but then she’d fade and I think her shoulder is broken and the medics took them in the ambulance and I was afraid to hide in there because if they found me they’d take me to the pound and take the phone away and I could never call you to say where I was and if I couldn’t work the lock on the cage . . .”

“Stop!” they both yelled. “Where?” Ryan said patiently. “Where are you, Kit?”

“Somewhere north of Santa Cruz but south of Mindy’s Seafood where we had dinner. When the tractor gets here and starts moving the boulders . . .” She wanted to say, I won’t be able to yowl and cry out to you, there are coyotes up here and owls who can hear everything. She wanted to say, When I’m up in the woods I’ll be scared to make a sound. She said, “Can you bring Rock? To track me? Joe can find me, but Rock’s bigger and . . . and there are coyotes and I love you both but humans are no good at scenting . . .” And she prayed that, this one time, no one was listening in on her call.

“We’ll bring Rock,” Clyde said. “We’re leaving now. Be there in an hour or less, with luck. Please, my dear, keep safe.”

Kit hit the end button, feeling small and helpless. She wasn’t a skittish cat, she’d spent plenty of black nights prowling the dark hills above Molena Point and farther away than that, hunting and slaughtering her own hapless prey, but tonight the wreck and her fear for her injured housemates, and then the hungry cry of the coyotes, had taken the starch right out of her. She thought about her big red tomcat traveling all alone down this very coast, making his way from Oregon down into central California, Pan traveled all that way and he wasn’t scared, so why should I be? But she was. Tonight she was afraid.

Pan had come to Molena Point following little Tessa Kraft, nearly a year after Tessa’s father threw the red tomcat out of the house. Tessa’s mother didn’t want him, either, she didn’t like cats. Pan hadn’t returned, but he had watched the household. He knew when Debbie Kraft moved to Molena Point, and he followed the family, tracking his little girl and, as well, looking for his own father.

He could only guess that Misto, when he vanished from Eugene in his old age, might have returned to the shore of his kittenhood where he’d grown up among a feral band of ordinary cats; no other speaking cat among them, that Pan knew of, but the place was Misto’s kittenhood home. And Pan had been right, he had found the old yellow tomcat there, and he had found Tessa. And he found me , Kit thought. That’s where we found each other .

Where is Pan now, right this minute? Could he be thinking of me and know I’m scared, the way he senses me when we’re hunting, the way he knows where I am even when he can’t see me? Or is he crouched in Tessa’s dark bedroom, as he so often is, whispering to her, ready to vanish if her mother comes in?

Pan isn’t scared of Debbie, but if she catches him there’ll be trouble for Tessa. Probably right now he’s whispering away and laughing to himself because Debbie doesn’t have a clue that he’s anywhere near Molena Point. But no matter how Kit tried to distract herself, thinking of Pan, all she could really think about was that she was all alone and scared clear down to her poor, bloodied paws.

5

IN THE LITTLE wooded neighborhood below Emmylou Warren’s house, the red tomcat was indeed crouched on Tessa’s windowsill looking into the dark bedroom where she and her big sister slept head to foot in the one twin bed. The other bed was unoccupied. A light shone under the closed bedroom door, from the kitchen. When, approaching Debbie’s ragged cottage, he’d looked in through the kitchen window, Debbie sat at the table sipping a cup of coffee, the dark-haired, sullen-faced young woman sorting through a stack of new purses and sweaters with the tags still dangling from them, items that he knew she hadn’t paid for, beautiful clothes and gaudy ones laid out across the oilcloth as she clipped the tags from them.

At the bedroom window he reached a silent paw in, through a hole he’d made in the screen months before. Silently he flipped the latch and pulled the dusty screen open. Sliding in under it, he pushed the window casing up with infinite care and finesse so as not to make even the smallest sound and wake twelve-year-old Vinnie. Tattletale Vinnie, who would let her mother know at once that he had followed and found them.

Not even Tessa herself knew that he had arrived in Molena Point against all odds, like a cat in some newspaper story traveling across the country to follow his family. Pausing on the sill, at the head of the bed, he watched the two sleeping girls, listening for sounds from the kitchen. When he was sure that both children slept soundly, and that Debbie remained occupied sorting through her stolen bounty, he eased down onto Tessa’s pillow, the tip of his red striped tail barely twitching.

He sat quietly watching her, the flicker of her dark lashes against her smooth cheeks, her pale hair tousled across the pillow. And softly, as she dreamed, he pressed his nose close to her small ear and began to whisper, to send gentle but bold words into the child’s dreams, painting strong visions for her.

Tessa was only five, hardly more than a baby, and a silent one, at that, a timid little girl who seemed always fearful, never eager for life, a drawn-away, wary child. Perhaps only Pan knew how watchful she was beneath the shyness, how aware of what occurred around her. Few grown-ups ever saw Tessa smile or saw her reach out to embrace the bright details of life that so fill a normal child’s world, few ever saw her pluck a flower from the garden, snatch a cookie from the plate and run, laughing, or tumble eagerly across a playground screaming and shouting. Tessa Kraft clung to the shadows, bowing her head at her mother’s voice, backing away from the overbearing tirades of her sister. Her father wasn’t there to stand by her, not that it had ever occurred to him, even when he was home, that Tessa might have feelings that he should nurture, fears that he might have soothed and healed. Tessa’s mother didn’t bother to explain about her pa going to prison, or to help with her daughter’s loss. Eric Kraft’s final absence from their home, which had begun long before his arrest and sentence for murder, had left a deep hollowness within the child that, Pan thought, nothing in her future could ever erase. But he meant to try.