The Cat Wears a Mask

by Dolores Hitchens

  Jennifer looked uncertain, feeling the wind of righteousness going out of her sails. “I looked for you in the library when it was five o’clock and you hadn’t returned.”

  Miss Rachel was meekly repentant. “I’m sorry. Time just flew.”

  Jennifer sniffed suddenly. “What are you chewing?”

  “A mint leaf. I’ve a touch of upset—must have been the fish at lunch.” Miss Rachel’s better nature wondered just when it was she had gotten into the habit of making up such glib lies for Jennifer. She’d been doing it, she realized, for a long time now.

  Jennifer herself had been suspicious of the fish. She rose, shook down her assortment of petticoats, and started for the hotel dining room. “I want to hear about Gail. Does she still live in that house that used to be a stage depot?”

  Sitting down before an expanse of white linen dotted with crystal, Miss Rachel recalled Gail’s house. She had been in it once, shortly after Gail had bought it with some of the money her father had left her. It was adobe, roofed with sun-bleached tile, and it sat back from the highway on rising ground, surrounded by cottonwood trees and clusters of sage. The front archway faced a sweep of Arizona desert. Mesas and tablelands jutted up against the sky.

  “I think we might stay with Gail during our visit to the Hopi reservation.”

  Jennifer lifted her eyes off the menu. “Our accommodations are paid for, Rachel. Plus the trip out to the Snake Dance. Had you forgotten?”

  Miss Rachel fiddled with her glass of water. “Gail looks thinner—a little lonely. She has the Mexican couple, of course, and I remember them as kindly and dependable—still, I think a bit of company would be good for her.”

  Miss Jennifer narrowed her gaze and mentally examined this from all angles, trying to find a trick in it.

  Miss Rachel added absently, “Mr. Dickson was a sort of cousin of ours, wasn’t he?”

  “Very distant. What did you and Gail talk about?”

  “She spoke of her old college friends rather wistfully.”

  Jennifer was weakening. “We might get a slight refund from the tour management—or an extra side trip somewhere. Did she actually ask us, Rachel?”

  “Ummm-mmmm. Look. There’s crab Louis tonight, Jennifer. And those queer little peaches they apparently stuff with cheese and toast under a flame.”

  “I’m having roast beef,” Jennifer declared. “And those peaches have brandy burned over them, Rachel. Don’t pretend you think they’re toasted. They reek of alcohol.”

  “So that’s what they reek of!” Miss Rachel waited apprehensively, but Jennifer didn’t demand a more articulate answer about Gail’s invitation.

  The talk with Gail had ended in an impasse. Gail was quietly stubborn about going ahead with the reunion of the literary club, getting everybody together at her place—Miss Rachel recalled uneasily how isolated it was—and having it out about the letters. Miss Rachel saw that the letter Gail had received must have touched some old hurt so deep, so agonizing that Gail had never forgotten, and that the emotions connected with the affair were those of self-hatred and abasement. Not pretty emotions nor easily kept bottled up … apt to burst the mind’s control and emerge in ways that were devious and cruel.

  It was here that Miss Rachel came up short, remembering suddenly the incident of the lost gambling chip and the angry blonde.

  “What are you frowning about, Rachel?”

  “Was I?”

  “You were. Is there anything about your conversation with Gail that you haven’t told me?”

  Jennifer was getting almost psychic. It would be better to have something—a small problem. “Gail was a little worried for fear we might be frightened of the snakes. Some are rattlers, you see, and the Indians handle them quite freely and sometimes they—well, almost get away.”

  “The snakes?”

  “Into the crowd.” Was she overdoing it, frightening Jennifer so that Jennifer wouldn’t go? She waited uneasily.

  “I’ll look it up in the tour catalogue,” Jennifer decided, “and if it’s safe, we’ll go.”

  As Miss Rachel recalled, the tour catalogue specifically warned against exploring the abandoned mines of the ghost towns, leaning too far out over the Grand Canyon and the rim of Boulder Dam, and drinking any strange water not recommended by the tour conductor. But there hadn’t been anything about snakes, and so Jennifer should be reassured.

  She went back to worrying mentally at the blonde’s missing dollar chip.

  How long could Gail have stood in the rear of the crowd, watching? A long while? The mention of time had been Gail’s own. And did the frustration of being hurt by someone you couldn’t reach, couldn’t identify, make you want to strike back blindly and anonymously at somebody else?

  She realized suddenly that Jennifer was speaking.

  “I’ve told you twice, Rachel, that the tour conductor has found out about our cat.”

  Miss Rachel’s eyes grew big with apprehension. The cat had been their secret. Samantha was a big black fluffy cat, independent-looking, and with a dictatorial way of staring down her mistresses which cowed them. She had grown used to travel and now refused to be left at home. So far the presence of the basket between their feet on the bus had passed without notice. Now—

  “I was slipping out with her to that little plot of sandy ground in the rear,” Jennifer went on, “that sort of cactus-garden thing, when Mr. Peele popped out from behind a shrub. That Miss Caxton was back there too—rather surreptitiously, as though they might have been holding hands or something.”

  Miss Rachel clucked gently, since this was what Jennifer expected.

  “He spied the cat under my arm and an unpleasant cunning expression came over his face. I dislike men who wiggle their mustaches.… Well, he wanted to know if I had just acquired the animal, and then rushed on to remind me that the rules of the tour forbade bringing any children, pets, or liquor other than twelve-per-cent dinner wines.”

  If Mr. Peele had linked Samantha with liquor, even fleetingly, Miss Rachel felt sympathy for him.

  Jennifer’s eyes snapped. “I decided then and there not to take any sass about having brought along our cat, even if we had asked beforehand and been refused. In the middle of his pompous little speech I interrupted to ask if that woman hadn’t been his wife—the plump one with the prominent teeth who waved good-by to him when the bus left Los Angeles.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He sort of sputtered. She was, of course. While he hemmed and hawed I looked innocently over towards Miss Caxton, who thought she was hidden by the shrubbery, and then told Mr. Peele in a whisper that he had a red smudge beside his mouth and that unless he removed it some of the members of the tour might think it was lipstick. He started scrubbing his face with his handkerchief and Samantha and I went on to the cactus patch.”

  “Did he actually have—”

  “No, no,” Jennifer said impatiently. “I made up the part about the lipstick. His scrubbing his face like that was an admission of guilt, though. And I don’t think there will be any more trouble about Samantha. What shall we have for dessert tonight? The torte?”

  Since Jennifer had, as it were, unmasked the brandied peaches, Miss Rachel accepted the torte. They finished the meal, left the mathematically correct tip figured out by Jennifer, and went up to their third-floor room.

  The tour management favored accommodations which were neat, plain, clean, but not gaudy. Their room was small and smelled of fresh curtains and of the violet soap in the bathroom. Or it had. When Jennifer stepped in, she paused suddenly to lift her nose.

  The odor was faint, teasing, alien. In the moment before the lights had clicked on Miss Rachel had been aware of ghostly movement at the windows. Now she saw that the panes were up, that the starched white curtains blew inward on the dry night wind. Outside was the glow of neon and the staccato rattle of traffic.

  Jennifer went over uncertainly to the windows. “The maid must have been here and thought the room needed fres
hening.”

  “I don’t see the cat.”

  They waited and listened. This was the time when Samantha usually woke up and wanted liver or canned salmon.

  “She’s inclined to follow people, when she’s bored at being alone,” Jennifer said slowly, “or perhaps the maid took her away because of a rule against pets.”

  “The maid has seen her before,” Miss Rachel pointed out. She poked hurriedly into the closet, looked under the bed, opened the bathroom door and called. In the bathroom the odd smell was stronger.

  Miss Jennifer came over to sniff. “There has been a maid here. She’s cleaned the bathroom with some sort of patent stuff—or with plain old kerosene. Too lazy to use soap and muscle.”

  “Yes, that’s what it’s like. Kerosene.” Miss Rachel switched on the bathroom light and looked into the shower cubicle. Just then there was a faint mewing and scratching from the window. It was a very small window, high in the wall. Miss Rachel stood on the white-enamel stool and pulled the pane inward on its hinges.

  Samantha’s black face, indignant green eyes, and flattened ears came through the opening. Her howl was lonesome and angry.

  “Someone put her out there,” said Miss Rachel, standing on tiptoe to peer through. “There’s about a three-inch sill. Her fur feels very cold, as though she may have been out for a long while.”

  “Who would be so cruel …” Miss Jennifer’s voice died off short at the impact of a new idea. “It wasn’t a maid, Rachel. It was a b-burglar!” Her gaze roamed the room, fastened ferociously on the bed.

  “I looked under that,” Miss Rachel told her. “And we haven’t anything worth a burglar’s time.”

  “Nevertheless …” Jennifer rushed to her suitcase on the luggage rack, jerked up the lid, stood ominously frozen. “Yes, I felt it. As soon as I’d opened the door tonight, Rachel. In my bones, I knew. Look, my best lisle stockings all smeared and stuck with that greasy chest rub. A mean little trick—someone opened the jar and shook out gobs of the stuff into my clothes. I wish I could get my hands on whoever did it.”

  Miss Rachel examined the evidence. “The jar is small and slippery and I think it fell. It struck the side of your suitcase—see the blob there. You’ll need cleaning fluid to get the grease out. The cleaner, I’m sure, is what we smelled in the bathroom. Some of the chest rub got on our visitor, too. So he—or she—found our spot remover and used it and then left the windows open, hoping the smell would dissipate.”

  Jennifer had rushed for the bathroom. Now she came back with the little brown bottle of patent cleaner.

  “Probably we weren’t supposed to know there had been a visitor, until the accident with the jar,” Miss Rachel went on. “Then, the situation being what it was, the prowler left Samantha out on her perch and simply skipped.”

  She examined her own suitcase. Here was a studied neatness much stricter than what she practiced. A great deal of care had been taken so that the garments would not seem to have been moved. Miss Rachel stood quiet, thinking. “Samantha was put out there so she wouldn’t get out of the room and attract attention in the hall. But I’ll make one more check.”

  She sat down at the telephone and rang the hotel housekeeper, a woman who managed to sound eminently starched and respectable even over a wire. Had there been any maids on the third floor tonight, doing rooms?

  There had not, said the housekeeper. All rooms had been finished by five. Was something missing?

  “No, everything’s all right.”

  Jennifer snapped: “Aren’t you going to report this, Rachel?”

  “Our tour leaves in the morning. We might be delayed over it, if we asked for an investigation.”

  “There may be fingerprints.”

  “I doubt it. Anyone careful enough not to go around smelling like chest rub would scarcely scatter prints. However, if you’re sure you want to report it to the manager-—”

  “Wait.” Jennifer was sitting on the side of the bed now. A queer light had come into her eyes. “Rachel, are you positive—will you promise me faithfully that you know nothing of this business? That it isn’t part of something dreadful you’re meddling with?”

  “I know of no reason whatever for our room being ransacked.”

  Jennifer tried to read Miss Rachel’s face, which had become so innocent it was practically vacuous. “I don’t know, Rachel. Some funny things have happened in the past, and when the truth came out you were always at the bottom of the business. If it weren’t that everyone on the tour seems so normal and jolly, so friendly, I’d think you might have dug up some mischief among them.”

  “No one could dig up anything except recipes and fishing stories among those people,” Miss Rachel pointed out. “As a matter of fact, this business about Miss Caxton and Mr. Peele was a shock to me.”

  She had to get Jennifer’s mind off that tack before Jennifer thought of Gail Dickson.

  “Could it have been … No, I’m sure Miss Caxton didn’t know I’d seen her,” Jennifer worried.

  “All hotels, even the most respectable, must harbor a prowler now and then, human nature being what it is,” Miss Rachel soothed her. “Harmless and curious cranks. We’re out in the world now, Jennifer, among all sorts of people, and we’ll have to endure some petty annoyances.”

  Miss Jennifer went to work on the lisle stockings. She gave Miss Rachel one final sharp glance. “True. But I’m getting more and more of a queer feeling … It’s like the time Aunt Lily was getting ready to run away with that salesman who boarded next door. I was just a child, but I remember the feeling of tension and slyness all through the house, and how things kept disappearing: Mother’s brown suitcase and Father’s top hat and your pig bank and my lace parasol. The first lace parasol I’d ever owned—”

  “Aunt Lily paid us back for everything when she got a job.”

  “In a—a leg show,” Jennifer reminded; then, getting back to the subject, for Jennifer was like a bulldog with a subject: “And what I’m trying to tell you is that I recall that feeling distinctly, that feeling of invisible scurryings and plottings, and this is it.”

  Miss Rachel reflected that Jennifer was growing very acute, almost supernaturally knowing. “If I had a stack of Bibles, which I haven’t,” she said virtuously, “I’d swear on the whole lot that I haven’t any idea whatever of who might have been in our room.”

  Jennifer didn’t glance up. She didn’t look convinced, either.

  When a decent interval had passed and she could think of an excuse—the cat needing to go out—Miss Rachel hurried down and found a telephone. Gail had mentioned the hotel where she was staying and Miss Rachel tried to reach her there. The room clerk couldn’t raise her, however.

  Trying to think of a way to reach Gail without making a nightlong tour of the gambling clubs—or of a way to make that tour without Jennifer knowing—Miss Rachel took her cat out through a side entry and back towards the cactus garden. The darkness was marked by square patches of light from hotel windows above, and in these patches, like little arrangements of still life, odds and ends stood out plainly, framed in black: a dwarf willow in a blue pot, a bed of zinnias around a bird-bath, a gardener’s rake leaning against a bench, on that same bench a hand, a human hand laid neatly on the top bar of the back …

  She looked again. It had been a gloved hand, so white and motionless that it had seemed a prop, something put into the picture up at the far corner, next the dark, to make the collection of oddities more interesting. And now it was gone.

  The bench was painted gray. The rake made a spindling shadow, a huddle of leaves and twigs at its base like a crouched furry animal. Miss Rachel stopped beside the dwarf willow, called her cat softly, and waited. She sensed the waiting of that other presence too. And an intent regard, since she was between those other eyes and the light.

  Something moved on the other side of the bench. The hand came back into the light and beckoned.

  She knew what Jennifer would have said. Nobody but a fool would have fol
lowed that spectral beckoning. Even a white hand, floating in the dark, has something behind it. Something frightening, perhaps, even dangerous.

  So, being as she was, intensely curious and self-confident, she went where the hand seemed to want her.

  Chapter 3

  Gail had changed her clothes. She wore a dark suit and her hair was tied up with a navy-blue scarf. Only the white gloves were the same. She touched Miss Rachel’s hand with one of hers and the glove was cool from the night air—cool as Samantha’s fur had been from sitting on the window ledge.

  “I have an idea I wanted to talk over with you. I’ve been trying to think of a way to get you down here without Miss Jennifer knowing,” Gail explained.

  “I’ve been trying to reach you too. Something a little odd happened tonight—while we were at dinner someone went into our room and examined our belongings.”

  Gail didn’t speak; there was a moment as of shock. The night sky was big and black, and the dry wind that rattled the shrubbery had a smell of desert sage and of far-off sun-baked earth growing cool under the dark. Finally she said: “You think this may have had something to do with what I told you?”

  “It may have. Not seeing your letter, I’m a little in the dark. But someone may be curious as to whom you meet in Reno.”

  Gail’s white glove brushed at some blowing tendrils of hair. “I’ll show you the letter. It’s in my room, not far from here—we can duck down the side street.”

  “I believe I’d rather stay out where it’s light,” Miss Rachel decided. She took her big black cat under her arm and they went out into Virginia Street where the clubs stood open under brilliant neon signs. In most the slot machines were nearest the door, the roulette and craps and other games farther back. Miss Rachel looked into several doorways interestedly as they went past. “Just a minute,” she said suddenly. “I’ve a dime in my pocket and I have a queer feeling I’ll be lucky.”

  She came back with a lot of dimes, having hit the jackpot. Several people were looking curiously after the cat. One man called pleadingly: “How much for the mascot?”