The Cat Vanishes

by Louise Carson

  Prudence went to the kitchen, returning with Lovering’s little phone book. She unfolded the map in the back and smoothed it on the table. “Come look at this.” Gerry sat next to her.

  “Some of the lot names I don’t recognize but some I do. See, this one. Birch Wood. That’s here.” She pointed on the map and shaded in the land with her pencil. “And here is the Sugar Bush. You know where that is.”

  Gerry made a face but said nothing. The Sugar Bush: where, last fall, she’d been scared, then skunked, just before she’d found Uncle Geoff’s dead body. Prudence shaded it in on the map.

  By the time she’d finished, there were a few gaps, but many miles of the shore, former farmland and woods that surrounded The Maples were marked. “He bought some and some he got when he married Sybil.”

  Gerry looked fascinated. “John Coneybear?”

  “Yup. This is all part of old Lovering, the land the first traders squatted on when they began to settle. By John’s time, The Maples was built and he was turning it into quite an estate.”

  “For his children,” Gerry said slowly, looking at the family tree and remembering the plaque inside St. Anne’s Church, with its sad list of children, most of them dead in childhood or infancy. “These two made it. Margaret Coneybear, 1855 to 1945, and Albert Coneybear, 1865 to 1921. Born ten years apart and poor Sybil died the same year Albert was born.

  “I think there’s a drawing of her, Sybil, I mean. Remember that sweet-faced woman? She’s still hanging in the gallery.” Gerry led the way to the little room off the dining room and went to one of the drawings. She took it off the wall and read what her Aunt Maggie had scribbled on the paper pasted on the back. “‘Sybil Muxworthy Coneybear, artist unknown, circa 1860?’ Pretty. Light brown hair, hazel eyes. Where was this one hanging, Prudence, before we brought it in here?”

  “Upstairs, I think, in the hall.” Prudence led the way. They stopped and looked at the space where Sybil’s portrait had been. A landscape was to the left while a simple sketch of a little girl hung to the right. Gerry removed the latter and flipped it over. Aunt Maggie had written “Margaret (Margie) Coneybear Petherbridge, 1855–1945.”

  “It’s hard to tell from a pencil sketch, but she seems to have been dark haired and dark eyed. A thin face and long. Not like her mother’s heart-shaped one.”

  Prudence grunted. “Must have taken after her father. Do you want to see him?” She carried Sybil while Gerry brought Margie. They descended into the large main foyer and surveyed John Coneybear, the founder of the family. Gerry placed Margie’s portrait on the table under John’s and gestured to Prudence to do the same with Sybil’s.

  “No portrait of Albert, is there?”

  Prudence thought. “Maybe in one of the photo albums. There should be some of him and lots of Margie, she lived so long.”

  “That can be another project, looking through the photographs. Gosh, I haven’t done that since I was around ten.” Gerry surveyed the family group before her. “Both parents with light brown hair and eyes; mother’s jaw heart-shaped, father’s squarish. He looks like he enjoyed his food. And a little dark girl with long straight cheekbones. Who did she look like, I wonder?”

  Prudence spoke doubtfully. “Cecil Muxworthy is dark with a long face. She could look like some other Muxworthy relation.”

  “That’s probably it,” agreed Gerry.

  They went back into the living room and sat by the fire. “What was in your letter box?” Prudence asked.

  Gerry replied, “Mostly the letters of Elizabeth Parsley, Albert’s wife. From him and her children.”

  “Oh, I remember her from when I was a little girl. She was one of Mother’s great-aunts and used to have us to tea once a year. Around Christmas, come to think of it. She was very strict and stiff. Not at all like her sister-in-law, Margie, I’ve heard. She died before I was born. They were both widowed young. Then Margie’s only child died and she moved back into her childhood home. With Elizabeth.”

  “I wonder if that was difficult for them,” Gerry said.

  “Elizabeth would have considered it her duty and Margie her right, so I guess it worked out okay. You have any thoughts about supper?”

  “Well, if it weren’t New Year’s Day, I’d say, let’s go to the Parsley for sup — oh, Prudence! I forgot all about Betty Parsley!”

  “Good,” her friend replied. “I’m going to rummage in your freezer and then we should feed the cats.”

  They dined on Bea Muxworthy’s homemade stew and garlic bread, also from the freezer. The phone rang as they were doing the dishes. Gerry took the call. “Doug! How did it go? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Well, I’m sorry about this, Doug, but I did explain to the — what? Oh. Yes. I see. Goodbye.” Prudence tactfully said nothing as she continued to wash the cutlery.

  “That was Doug,” Gerry said slowly. “He’s a bit upset. The police kept him in for hours.”

  “That’s not your fault,” Prudence replied briskly.

  “No. But he seems to think we should keep our distance from each other until the matter is resolved.”

  “They may never find out who did it.”

  Gerry frowned. “When the business with Uncle Geoff and Margaret happened, he wanted us to keep our distance until the spring. Then he asks me curling and that was a bust. Now it’s off again.” She sighed and added dejectedly, “I honestly don’t know how he feels.”

  As Prudence didn’t either, she wisely said nothing.

  “I’m going for a long hot bath, then to bed to read. Good night, Prudence.”

  “Goodnight,” Prudence said distractedly. “Do you mind if I read the letters in this box?”

  “Help yourself,” Gerry yawned.

  “It’s Friday,” announced Prudence.

  “So?” Gerry buttered her toast, then slathered on marmalade.

  “So, I work on Fridays. This place is awful hairy.”

  Gerry looked around casually. There were dust bunnies in the corners of the room and a layer of dust particles on that part of the table undisturbed by their breakfast. “All right,” she said doubtfully. “But you could postpone until Monday, if you want. Have a real rest.”

  “I’m uncomfortable living in a messy house,” said Prudence rather primly.

  “Then go to it. I too shall work. Maybe I’ll go shopping this aft. Make a list of what you want to eat over the weekend.” Prudence was already dragging the ancient vacuum cleaner out of its cupboard and grunted by way of reply.

  Gerry cleared the table, then spread out the cat portraits she’d begun what seemed like weeks ago. As she sketched, the portraits took on a more cartoonish flavour and she began to exaggerate the cats’ gestures and movements.

  Bob, who’d been lying on the dining room table the night before, gave her an idea, and she began to draw human characters as well. There was a tall thin old woman, a little girl, a butler. She seated them, except the butler, at a huge table adorned with all kinds of fancifully decorated cakes and desserts. And, for some reason, the cat modelled after Bob began jumping over the cakes.

  “‘The Cake-Jumping Cats of — ’ What would be a good name, Mother?” Mother stopped grooming the kitten of the moment, blinked, then resumed her task. “Of Lickspittle? No. Too yucky. Of Hairball-on-the-Marsh? Hairball-on-the-Lake? I know. It’s not a house. It’s a castle. Lots of turret things and suits of armour in the hall.”

  Gerry was amazed when Prudence plunked a sandwich down in front of her with the announcement, “It’s one o’clock. I’ve made a grocery list.” She examined the sketches while Gerry munched hungrily. “What’s all this? A children’s book?” She smiled her thin-lipped smile as she flipped through the sheets of paper and looked at the illustrations. “They’re funny.”

  “‘The Cake-Jumping Cats of — ’ I haven’t got a funny name for the place yet. For some reason, the people of this castle or village get their
cats to jump cakes. I don’t know if there’s enough to make a book.”

  “Children’s books just need a short plot, a moral, if possible, and, in the case of this one, jokes. No? I don’t think it’s beyond you. After all, you can do the writing and the drawing.”

  “I better go shop or I’ll get sucked into it again. List?”

  “Next to your wallet and keys. I’ll do this room while you’re out.”

  “Don’t touch —” Gerry indicated the sketches on the table.

  “Yes, yes. I know how to dust around your art by now.”

  As she drove to Lovering, Gerry felt the exhilaration she’d come to associate with starting a new project. She always forgot the hard graft that would be necessary to bring a project to its conclusion.

  She got a small grocery cart, then groaned when she checked Prudence’s list. Three boxes of cat litter. She put the cart back, taking one of the larger ones.

  Because it was the holidays, she amused herself by going up and down all the aisles, choosing little treats she and Prudence could enjoy together. Prudence had put peanut butter, crunchy, large, and bread-and-butter pickles together on the list. Gerry grinned, knowing her friend would usually eat nothing else for lunch, at least on a weekday. “Ooh, chocolate-coated digestives,” Gerry noted, and took one package each of dark and milk chocolate. They weren’t on the list, but what the heck.

  She paused by the tinned fish. Kippers? Kippers with scrambled eggs and buttered toast. She was just reaching for a couple of cans at the top of the pile when a voice at her elbow spoke.

  “Hi, Red.”

  She was so startled she turned abruptly and found herself looking up into Steve Parsley’s face. The cuff of her coat caught the stack of canned fish and many, many tins cascaded onto her shoulder and from there to the floor.

  Steve stooped to help her with the tins. “Red’s herrings,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Red’s herrings,” he repeated. “Not so funny the second time but I don’t know your name, so —”

  “Yes, you do. It’s Gerry. We met at the curling —” Gerry’s voice trailed off as she realized she was in the presence of Steve’s twin. “Are you Ralph Parsley?”

  “Yep.” He finished restacking the tins. “Sorry I distracted you. And sorry I’m not Steve.” He smiled. “He seems to have made quite an impression.”

  “You mean, so much so that he gets tins of kippers hurled at him?” Gerry said, a trifle sarcastically. She put two tins in her cart and mumbling, “Sorry about that,” walked on.

  “Hey, I’ve had worse.” He was having no difficulty keeping up with her. She stopped in the pet supplies aisle and heaved a ten-kilo box of litter into her cart. “Let’s start again,” he pleaded, as he assisted her with the other two boxes. “I’m Ralph Parsley, bro of Steve, member of Doug Shapland’s curling team. And if I’d known you were coming to our practice, I’d have gotten over that flu bug much quicker.”

  It wasn’t working: his charm, or whatever he called it. He looked and sounded like his brother, but there was something “off,” something Gerry couldn’t warm to.

  “I’m sorry about your relative,” she said.

  He paused with the final cat litter box resting on the edge of her cart. He looked confused. “Relative?”

  Assuming he hadn’t yet heard, Gerry was horrified. She wasn’t going to tell him about Betty Parsley’s death in the pet supplies aisle of their local supermarket. She dropped the box into the cart and hurried on, saying, “Forget I said anything.”

  He followed her, though. “Oh. You must mean Betty. I thought you meant, you know, a real relative. She’s just married to Cousin Phil, you know. Not blood. So, what about a coffee?”

  Appalled, Gerry blurted out, “Now?”

  “Yeah, now. Or whenever you like. Tomorrow? Tell ya what. I’ll take you for brunch tomorrow. They do a great buffet at that place up by the highway.”

  Gerry was unloading her groceries as fast as she could. She paid the cashier. As Ralph went to steer her cart to the car, she removed his hands, and, drawing herself up to the length of her five-foot nothingness, said, in full hearing of the cashier, bag boy and next customer, “Mr. Parsley, I am sorry for your family’s loss but I have no wish to accompany you to brunch, lunch or dinner.” She gestured at the bag boy to accompany her, and added, “Or coffee!” Her last glance back was of a scowling Ralph Parsley, standing, staring after her.

  She felt tears coming into her eyes as she fumbled for a dollar for the boy. “Thank you, miss,” he mumbled, as he dragged her cart away.

  She sat in her car and fumed. “So irritating! So pushy! No filters!” In her rear-view mirror she saw Ralph burst through the doors of the store with a case of beer under his arm, narrowly missing an old lady creeping in, and slid down in her seat, snapping the mechanism that locked the car doors. At least he didn’t appear to know hers was the red Mini with the dent in its roof. He got into an old black pickup truck and burned rubber pulling out of the lot.

  As she drove carefully home, she quickly forgot about him, looking forward to unpacking the groceries in Prudence’s peaceful presence, to enjoying a cup of coffee, and then getting back to work.

  13

  “Dibble!” shouted Gerry. “It’s Dibble, Prudence!”

  “All right, all right. What’s Dibble?” Prudence was taking the armloads of wood Gerry was bringing from the woodshed to the back porch and stacking them neatly on the tarp.

  “I saw one on Aunt Maggie’s little potting bench and remembered the word. You know: that tool used for making holes in the earth for seeds. A dibble!”

  “Surely a tool invented by Eve in the Garden,” muttered Prudence.

  “What? No, I don’t mean a dibble. I mean Dibble! The village where my cake-jumping cats are going to live!”

  “Ah,” Prudence said wisely, “That Dibble.” She was happy Gerry had this new project to distract her from Betty Parsley’s mysterious death, and even from the discovery of the body under the woodshed floor. Prudence didn’t know which made her more nervous: the old bones or the new. “Dibble, indeed,” she said, as Gerry, shadowed by Bob, disappeared around the corner of the house to get more wood.

  Prudence stretched and looked out over the frozen lake. She supposed life would get back to normal after the weekend. For most people, that is. She wondered when she’d be back inside her own cottage. She was getting accustomed to staying at The Maples. Not that it was the first time. One winter, Maggie Coneybear had had a flu turn into pneumonia and had needed nursing. Prudence had stayed for a week, rather than leave Maggie to the mercies of her sister Mary or niece Margaret. Not that they’d offered to stay, anyway.

  And, on another occasion, Maggie had sprained her ankle and needed crutches, so Prudence stayed for a few days. She’d been happy to do it. Maggie had been her best friend. Hard to believe she was gone. Prudence’s reverie was broken into by the reappearance of Gerry’s happy face.

  “And Marigold is going to be the Queen of Dibble Castle and I’m going to put Aunt Maggie in it too. Well, just someone who looks like her. And dogs and some of the other cats. Bob, of course, will be the hero. And a little girl who’s very bored at first but then tries to train the cats to jump, which we all know won’t work. Prudence, did Aunt Maggie have a cookbook with photos of really fancy cakes in it? You know. Old-fashioned giant things with decorations?”

  “I’ll have a look. That’s enough wood now, Gerry.”

  “Okay. I’ll just lock the shed.”

  Prudence made coffee and got a stack of old cookbooks from a cupboard. She was flipping through the pages when Gerry joined her. “Ooh, I’ve got to have that one.” She pointed at a Gâteau Saint-Honoré, its top piled with creampuffs.

  “We don’t have to make these, do we?” begged Prudence.

  “I’d like to, but no. Expensive ingredients
and just us to eat them. Look at that! Floral Basket Cake,” she read. “How on earth do they get it to stand up?”

  “There are things called dowels, not unlike dibbles, special cake-reinforcing sticks.”

  But Gerry had moved on. “Chocolate Swans. I’m in awe. Battenberg Cake. Very royal.”

  “I can make that,” said Prudence. “It’s just finicky.”

  “Lucky Horseshoe Cake. Rose Garland Cake. Lovely names. Lazy Daisy Cake. Apricot Ribbon Cake. Prudence, I’m getting hungry.”

  “Have a marshmallow square,” said Prudence, handing her the tin.

  Gerry spent the rest of the day roughing out the first half of the book. She hooted with laughter as she named her characters: Atholfass, a calico cat, Queen of Dibble in the province of Fasswassenbasset; Max Scarfnhatznmitz, a border collie, courtier to the queen; Tess, Lady Ponscomb, a retriever, lady-in-waiting; and the humans: Latooth Élonga, a middle-aged authoress; Languida Fatiguée, a twelve-year-old girl; and Sneathe, a supercilious butler.

  She was sketching the book’s opening scene — a tea party — when Prudence called “Supper!” Gerry walked into the kitchen.

  “Smells yummy. What did you make?”

  “I roasted the chicken with peppers, onions and mushrooms, opened a can of tomato sauce and boiled some spaghetti.”

  “Did you ever consider moving in here permanently, Prudence?” Gerry loaded up her plate and they ate amidst the pages of her prototype book.

  “Huh,” Prudence grunted. She lifted pages and studied the characters. “I like your dogs. Did you ever have a dog?”

  “No. But lots of my friends did when I was a kid. I want the book to appeal to cat and dog lovers alike.”

  “And who’s this?” Prudence pointed to a long skinny middle-aged woman with glasses, her hair in a bun. She wore a long baggy dress and loads of necklaces and bracelets.

  “That’s Latooth Élonga. She’s the queen’s best friend and lives in the castle. She writes mystery novels.”