Shirley Murphy - Murphy_Shirley_Rousseau_Cat_Telling_Tales_BookFi

The cat on the screen was younger than Misto, but with a broad head and with Misto’s same long, bony face. The same wide-set ears, the same wide, curving stripes, but in shades of rusty red. The swirl mark on his left shoulder was startlingly like Misto’s own. Sitting down in the desk chair, John peered around the cats to read the accompanying article.

Did Nursing Home Cat Die in Fire?

The remarkable red tabby cat who began, on his own, to visit infirm patients at Green Meadows Nursing Home nearly a year ago has not been seen since a midnight fire burned the complex to the ground. “We’re terribly afraid he died in the fire,” said nursing supervisor Jamey Small. “We haven’t seen him since three hours before the fire broke out, since the alarms went off and we began to evacuate the patients. He came to us as a stray, but he was a most unusual cat. He not only spent nearly every waking moment with the patients, he always favored the most depressed and lonely among them, or the sickest. He would stay with a very ill patient for hours, snuggled close. He would leave for only a few minutes, to eat or drink or visit one of the sandboxes we provided, then he’d hop back on the bed again, purring and rolling over. He gave affection, and enjoyed whatever affection the patient was able to give back. Many of his charges began to sit up in their beds, to smile and talk with the nurses for the first time in months, even to enjoy their meals again.”

Even after all the patients were evacuated to safety, to temporary quarters in nearby motels, no one had found Buddy. The night of the fire, which was caused by a faulty furnace in the basement of the building, off-duty personnel searched the rest of the night and into the next morning, searched all over the grounds and in the surrounding neighborhoods, but they found no sign of him.

“If he’s been taken in by a nearby family,” Small said, “we would very much like to know that he’s safe. The nursing staff and the attending doctors have raised a reward of two thousand dollars for information leading to Buddy’s return. If he was injured in the fire, we will be happy to repay all his veterinary bills, in order to have him back safe. Buddy is part of our family, he’s a remarkable cat, our patients miss him and we miss him, we all pray that he is alive and has not been harmed.”

“This is Pan?” John said, stroking Misto. “Your son, Pan?”

The old cat twitched an ear, and touched the picture with a soft paw. “He’s too quick to get trapped in a fire—maybe it was Pan who set off the alarm, alerted them at the first smell of smoke, but then he would have beat it out of there.” Misto’s eyes were filled with a stubborn hope, and John, watching him, prayed that he was right.

When Dulcie scrolled down the screen, two more pictures of Pan appeared, sharing the beds of other patients. In one shot he was curled up against a woman’s shoulder, in the other an old man sat up in bed, his arm around the red tomcat, both looking into the camera, the cat’s amber eyes bright, his smile laced with humor. Kit, too, lifted a paw to the screen, to touch the young tom’s nose. She looked at the picture a long time, her fluffy tail twitching—as it did when she was deep in thought or was deeply enchanted.

But while John Firetti and the three cats browsed online searching for clues to the lost Pan, down at the Damen household Clyde had lit a fire on the hearth, and had left the living room to Max Harper and Debbie. The big room was no longer done in black and brown African patterns, which Hanni’s studio had created for Clyde in his bachelor days. That primitive mood had given way to sunny yellow walls, flowered linen covers on the couch and chairs and, over the couch, an arrangement of Charlie Harper’s drawings, portraits of Joe, Rock, Dulcie, Kit, and Snowball, all handsomely framed. Three tall schefflera plants softened the corners of the room, and over the mantel was a Charlie Harper etching of Dulcie and Joe and Kit hunting through the tall grass of the Molena Point hills. The white linen draperies were new and fresh, the wood floors gleaming. The only furnishing left over from earlier days was Joe Grey’s faded, claw-shredded, fur-matted easy chair, and even its fate was under negotiation. Joe said if his chair went to Goodwill, he went with it. Ryan had proposed a washable linen cover, which, with reservations, he was considering—he wasn’t fond of the smell of laundry soap.

Debbie sat at one end of the couch, Max across from her in Clyde’s reading chair. Joe, padding into the room, leaped into his own chair and curled up for a nap, as if he was quite alone in the room; he soon let himself snore a little, his head tucked under, his closed eyes slitted open just enough to watch Debbie’s reaction as Max questioned her. The chief started out friendly enough, and low-key; he told her how sorry he was about Hesmerra’s death, and asked gently when she had last seen her mother.

“I didn’t see her much,” Debbie said, pretending to wipe at a tear, a gesture Joe thought singularly unconvincing.

“A few months, would you say?”

Debbie shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Do you come down during the winter months, when Erik’s working down here?”

“I haven’t the last few years. Erik was . . . He’s always busy with work. I have the children to care for . . . Tessa’s so little, she takes up a lot of time. And Vinnie’s in school. I don’t like to pull her out, move her back and forth between schools, that’s very unsettling for a child.” My, Joe thought, the ever-caring mother. This, from a woman who patronizes her littlest child until she cries. “It’s bad enough,” Debbie said, “that she has to change schools now. But now, of course, I have no choice. We couldn’t stay in Eugene, I have no money at all.”

“The children are how old?” Max asked.

“Vinnie’s twelve, Tessa nearly five.” She looked uncomfortably away, causing Joe to wonder about the seven-year gap between the two little girls. Family planning? he wondered. Or long-standing marital troubles?

“If you didn’t come down with Erik,” Max said, “you must at least have talked with your mother on the phone, or written to her?”

“She didn’t have a phone. I wrote to her sometimes,” Debbie said evasively. “We weren’t . . . We had differences,” she said shortly. “I didn’t see her much.”

“You want to tell me what that was about?”

“She . . . We didn’t see eye to eye. I don’t understand why you’re asking me all this. Is this really necessary?”

Max said, “What, exactly, was the problem between you?”

Debbie sighed. “For one thing, that boy she’s raising. My dead sister’s child. My mother isn’t . . . wasn’t fit to raise a child, with her drinking. When the child was born, I told her she should take it to Child Welfare, where he could be adopted.”

“What about his father? Couldn’t he have taken Billy?”

“We have no idea who the father was. Some boy from her high school, too young and irresponsible anyway to take care of a family. Greta would never say who he was, only that his family refused to help.”

“And your other sister, Esther? She didn’t want Billy?”

“Esther didn’t want children,” she said shortly. Joe, listening to Max bait her, ask her questions to which he already knew the answers, wondered where this was going. Did he think Debbie was involved in Hesmerra’s death? Or was he, indeed, simply gathering background information?

“You were sixteen when you married Erik Kraft? Wasn’t that pretty young, too?”

“But we got married, we didn’t just . . .” Again she sighed, as if losing patience with his lack of insight. “I wanted out of there, I didn’t like living with my mother, I didn’t like her drinking. All right?”