The Cat Vanishes

by Louise Carson

  “But Christmas is over, Gerry,” Cece pointed out.

  “Not really. In fact today is the twelfth day. Yes, a party this Saturday. All done?”

  During the drive home to Lovering, and beginning with “Twelve Austin Minis,” Gerry entertained her friends by trying to remember and sing her version of “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”

  Bob’s whiskers and paws twitched as he dreamt. The crawling thing was coming to get him. He had nowhere to hide, was rooted to the spot. It put out a bloody hand to touch him and — he woke up, his tail fluffed to twice its normal size.

  He groomed it back down to its usual slender sleekness and looked around the dark room.

  The girl slept, snoring gently, her red hair outspread on the pillow. He put out a paw, touched its brightness. Strange how she had no sensation in it. His own hairs were mini-receptors, sensitive to any change in temperature or breeze.

  He felt a slight motion now and knew the same insubstantial presence from before had entered the room. He turned his head to view it.

  At the foot of the bed, the other cat briefly awoke, noted the emanation and blinked once at Bob, clearly indicating this wasn’t her ghost and that he was on his own. As she went back to sleep, Bob calmly regarded the man.

  He could feel his exhaustion from across the room. The man paused in front of the disused fireplace where the room’s electric heater ticked and glowed. He examined the objects on the mantel, then turned away, seemingly dissatisfied. As he looked in the cheval glass in a corner of the room, Bob saw him pass a hand back and forth in front of his face.

  Bob jumped off the bed and stood next to the mirror. He looked up and saw in it a tall, thin man with sensitive lips, large dark eyes and black hair.

  The loose assemblage in front of the mirror put out a hazy claw as if to touch his former self. His hand passed through the glass and the image there dispersed.

  Now the thing moved to another corner, where the girl had thrown her cast-off clothes over a rocking chair. Under the clothes, Bob knew she kept a large rag doll he was forbidden to play with. Its soft head, flopped to one side, was just visible.

  The ghost looked at the doll and drew near it. Bob followed. The ghost began to tremble. It pointed at the doll, then at Bob, then back at the doll, making rending motions with its hands. It was obvious what it wanted.

  Bob methodically pulled the girl’s underwear, jeans, sweater and pullover to the floor. He jumped up onto the rocker, which began to shift forwards, backwards, forwards, backwards. He put one paw on the doll, which was longer than he was, and looked at the vibrating spirit. It nodded once, twice, then, as if its excitement made it impossible to remain, it melted away, leaving behind the odour of something burning.

  Bob wrinkled his nose at the smell and joyfully set about his task.

  PART 4

  AND TRUE

  16

  After she dropped the Muxworthys off at their modest home in Lovering’s town centre, Gerry picked up a few supplies. “Always cat litter,” she muttered, pushing a shopping cart, its wheels protesting, with six boxes balanced precariously. “I should have asked for some for Christmas.” She dropped them at home, looked longingly at The Cake-Jumping Cats of Dibble, attended to her own hungry mob, and went to get Prudence.

  The light was fading as Gerry pulled into Charlie and Rita’s driveway. Across the street, contractors were rearranging the tarps over Prudence’s bedroom. Prudence must have been watching from her neighbours’ window, because she quickly joined Gerry in the car.

  “How’d it go?” Gerry asked, putting the car in reverse.

  Prudence rested her head on the headrest, closed her eyes and sighed.

  “I bought a meat pie and some broccoli,” Gerry continued. “I thought I’d do some baked potatoes. And we still have your marvellous cake.”

  Prudence sighed again.

  “What is it, Prudence? You’re making me nervous.”

  “I spoke with the insurance. Apparently, it could take months for the claim to be settled.”

  “So?”

  “So I have to pay the contractor now. There goes Maggie’s legacy to me. There goes the money for a new car of my own.”

  “But, Prudence, you wouldn’t be able to buy a car until you get your licence and that won’t be until next winter.” There was another sigh. Sensing her friend was gloomy, too, because of a day spent listening to Charlie and Rita shout, watching part of her house being dismantled, Gerry thought of something. “You know what? Now would be a perfect time for you to take that week down south. I insist you go. Check with the police if it’s all right, then book the flight for next week. If you want, I’ll visit your house and make sure the work is ongoing.”

  Prudence roused herself. “Oh, Charlie can do that. He’s a retired carpenter himself, among other things. He’s itching to be involved. Could I really just leave everything and go?”

  “Absolutely. I don’t have any students for at least another month, and I’ll just have to drag the vacuum cleaner around and do cat towel laundries myself.”

  “I’ll do it,” Prudence vowed.

  As they passed Cathy’s house, they saw a tall figure — not Cathy — following a rotund, red-coated Prince Charles about his business. The person stooped, picked up a snowball and flung it near Charles, who paused, gave the ball an incurious sniff, and continued cocking his leg on all available protrusions.

  “But that’s —” Gerry thought she heard Prudence say.

  “Who?”

  “I was going to say the Stribling boy, but he’d be a man now. And anyway, that was a woman.”

  “Must be a guest,” Gerry offered. “Doesn’t Charles look like a walking tomato in that coat?” Prudence laughed.

  They’d arrived back at The Maples, where Gerry surveyed her own reconstruction dilemma. “You know, I think I’ll just wait until spring to get the shed repaired. We’ll have burned all the wood by then and the workers will have more room to manoeuvre. Doug suggested I have a sale to shift all the old furniture and junk.”

  Prudence stood in the driveway taking in the garish courtesy car. “How long for your car to be fixed?”

  “Couple of days. Hungry?”

  “I could eat.”

  Gerry prepared supper while Prudence uncharacteristically relaxed. “You wouldn’t think standing around watching other people work could be so exhausting,” she complained, a purring Bob on her lap.

  “Why not?” said Gerry, coming from the kitchen with two glasses of red wine. “I get tired watching you work around here.”

  “Nonsense. You work too. All this.” Prudence gestured at the mess of drawings and text Gerry had pushed down to one end of the table.

  “Yeah, I suppose. I can’t imagine teaching in that gloomy dining room. Maybe in here where I have the fire. It’ll be so nice to get back into the studio in the spring. Which month will it be warm enough?”

  “May, probably. Early May.”

  Gerry groaned. “Four more months.”

  Prudence thought for a moment. “I don’t know why we didn’t think of this before. Let’s set you up in the room off the big dining room. You’re not planning another show, are you?”

  Gerry considered. “Not until spring. Would it be warm enough?”

  “Warmer than the studio. I could help you move your stuff in there if you like.”

  “I wonder if the art class would fit.”

  “Probably. Anyway, you can try it and if you don’t like it, move back to either the dining room or in here.”

  The oven timer went off and they ate their supper. Prudence helped with the dishes, then trudged off to her room. Gerry reread some of the cake-jumping book and worked on it for a while. The tea party in Dibble was ongoing.

  “Latooth, would you serve?” asked the Queen. “Now, Max, what were you saying about the young — and m
oving?”

  “I forget,” said Max, eyeing the recently arrived confection. “But did you hear about Crumpet? They’re claiming to be the champions of the world.”

  “In what, dear?” asked Latooth, who, after first serving the Queen, put a slice of chocolate sponge in front of Max’s nose.

  “In cake jumping.” Max had barely uttered the three fateful words before his ham tongue neatly drew the entire slice of cake into his mouth.

  Queen Atholfass almost fell off her chair. Well, she did fall off her chair, or rather, jumped to avoid the droplets of drool flying from Max’s mouth towards her face.

  Gerry paused to make a small sketch of the angry, fur-fluffed Queen in mid-air, crown askew, dog spit everywhere, cake half in, half out of Max’s wide-open mouth.

  “What?” she roared. “Those, those, alley cats are claiming to be the world champion cake jumpers?!”

  Languida drooped in and slumped in her chair. Latooth eyed her uneasily for a moment and then asked the question. “What on earth is cake jumping?”

  Though Gerry had a pretty good idea of what cake jumping involved, she decided to call it a night. She stretched and yawned, did her last cat-related chores and climbed the stairs to bed.

  Bob and Lightning were already there and she regarded them affectionately, carefully stroking Lightning between the ears (practically the only spot the damaged cat allowed caresses) and giving Bob a good tummy scratch. He lolled on his back, squinting up at her.

  She changed into pajamas and crawled into bed. Half an hour later, she crawled out again, grumbling. “I hate when I’m tired but not sleepy.” She shrugged on her Winnie-the-Pooh robe and SpongeBob slippers and shuffled down the hallway to her office.

  She picked up one of the boxes of family papers and carried it back to bed. She turned on all the lights in her room, placed the box on a chair next to the bed and climbed back in.

  Lightning remained a tightly coiled calico ball at the foot of the bed, but Bob, like some ancient lawyer, gravely indicated which papers he thought were important by placing one paw delicately on them.

  Gerry amused herself and him by putting two papers side by side on the coverlet and letting Bob’s paw decide which one she read first.

  “These are interesting, Bob. These must be the oldest papers I’ve read so far. From the 1800s. A letter from England from a Jonah Coneybear, dated 1820. ‘This is my son, John Coneybear, legal issue of myself, Jonah Coneybear, and my wife Anne Grey of Luton-on-Marsh, Devon.’ Huh. A letter of introduction. Rats, I need my family tree.”

  She got out of bed again and tromped downstairs to retrieve it. Once back, she checked John Coneybear’s birthdate. “1810. 1810! He was only ten years old when he emigrated! Poor little soul.”

  She added the two new names to the tree, then scrabbled in the box. She began to lay things out, oldest on top. Bob, his advice no longer required, jumped off the bed and, rooting around in a corner under the rocking chair, found a catnip mouse and amused himself flipping it around.

  There was nothing between 1820 and 1830. He’d have been working as a sailor, she seemed to remember, so would have had little need for paper. “Now what is this? 1831. A letter offering him a job. He’s twenty-one and he becomes an employee in a trading company, The North West Wood and Timber Co.” Gerry’s voice grew excited. “In Lovering! I remember! That’s how Uncle Geoff and Andrew’s furniture company began. Wood!”

  She picked up the next paper. “1838. From his father, telling him his mother has died.” She paused, remembering her own mother’s premature death, how difficult it had been for her father to comfort her. And here was John, receiving such news months after the fact and having to cope, alone.

  She looked at the old envelope the letter had come in. It was addressed to the care of Thomas Muxworthy, Main Road, Lovering. Again Gerry referred to the family tree. Thomas was Sybil Muxworthy’s father! So John had been a lodger in the very house where his future wife had just been born in 1837.

  “Fantastic!” Gerry said, quite loudly. Loud enough to make Bob pause in mid-bite of the catnip mouse. And loud enough that Lightning jerked, uncoiled, stretched, made sure all was well, gave Gerry a peevish look and went back to sleep.

  Gerry, at this point wide awake, went downstairs and made a cup of tea. While she waited for the kettle to boil, she wandered around the main floor of her house, thinking about the man who’d built it, imagining him picking the lot of land, supervising its construction, bringing home his bride, raising his family. She brought her tea upstairs and returned to the papers.

  First, she wanted to know when John and Sybil had married. Her tree told her 1854, when John was forty-four and Sybil only seventeen! How had such an age difference worked out for them? What had occurred during those seventeen years while Sybil grew up and John established himself as a man of business?

  She listed the subsequent papers. Receipts for wood purchased from various landowners along the Ottawa River. John’s own lists of men hired by him to transport the wood. Dates of log booms and calculations of how much wood was lost as it floated down the river.

  And more personal papers. A receipt for a suit of clothes he bought in Montreal, and another for a purchase he made at a Montreal jeweller, dated December 15th, 1853.

  Gerry smoothed the little paper out. “Cley or,” it said. She stared at the words, puzzled. Clay or what? And why buy clay — she assumed a misspelling — at a jeweller’s?”

  She restacked the papers in the box, turned out the lights and fell asleep to dream she was standing balanced precariously on a log out in the middle of the lake. She woke, knowing something was wrong.

  It was still dark. She heard a groan, followed by the sound of retching. “Prudence?” she called, peering into the bedroom next door. Not there. She ran to the bathroom and found Prudence lying on her side on the bathmat, shivering.

  “Flu,” she croaked.

  Gerry patted her shoulder, covered her with a towel and ran downstairs, rushing past several startled cats. She grabbed a large plastic bowl and ran back upstairs. She found a hot water bottle and a heating pad and put them both in Prudence’s bed. Then she returned to the bathroom, washed Prudence’s face — her teeth were chattering with fever — and supported her back to bed. She placed the bowl next to her pillow. Prudence promptly filled it. “Oh, poor you,” Gerry wailed softly and ran to rinse it out. When she returned, Prudence seemed more comfortable, dozing. Gerry went back to her own room and dressed.

  “I don’t remember dropping my clothes on the floor last night,” she muttered, pulling white socks out from under the rocker. Only they weren’t white socks.

  She found herself holding the rag stuffing from Aunt Maggie’s treasured antique cloth doll. “What on earth?” She got down on her knees and scrabbled in the dark corner under and behind the chair, pulling out bits of rag and other assorted objects.

  From on her bed, Bob and Lightning watched. “Which of you?” she accused. Bob yawned, looked away and began grooming. “Aha!” She brought the assemblage over to her bed.

  The doll had been gutted but could be repaired. Its head lolled on its shoulder and its deflated body made it look pathetic. Gerry put it and its erstwhile stuffing to one side. “Not a catnip mouse!” she admonished Bob, holding up her index finger and pointing from him to the doll.

  Bob slowly sniffed the doll and sat back with a satisfied air.

  “Cats have absolutely no consciences,” mumbled Gerry, sorting through the other objects. Could they have been hidden in the doll? By a child? They were things a child might think were treasures: a lump of what looked like green glass, smooth and bumpy at the same time; a crow or raven feather, long and black; a heart-shaped piece of wood. A groan from the next room made her jump. She ran to assist Prudence.

  Much, much later that morning, after Gerry had looked after the cats and checked on Prudence half a doze
n times, she was having her breakfast when the phone rang.

  “Hello?” she managed, swallowing a mouthful of toast practically unchewed. This set off a spasm of coughing.

  “Hello? Hello?” she heard coming from the phone. She took a deep breath and sip of coffee.

  “Hello, Father Lackey? Is that you?”

  “Do you have a cold, Miss Coneybear?”

  “No, no, just food going down the wrong way. How are you?”

  “Fine. I’m fine. And I think I may know to whom your bones belong. Shall I tell you over the phone or will you come for a visit?”

  “Much as I’d enjoy a visit, Father, I’m looking after a sick friend. Could you just tell me now?”

  “Of course. Well, I worked my way back from the late 1800s, looking for a parishioner who had not been buried in St. Peter’s graveyard.”

  “Yes?” Gerry was excited and sat back down at the table.

  “I found several.”

  “Oh. That’s disappointing.”

  “To be expected, I’m afraid. Then I looked for anyone with a connection to your family or property. I didn’t find any.” Gerry groaned. “Yes. But then I noticed Sheila McCormack, who’d sadly died at an early age — sixteen, I believe — and been buried at St. Pete’s, and she’d worked for your forebear John Coneybear at The Maples.”

  A puzzled Gerry asked, “But if she’s buried at St. Pete’s?”

  “She had a brother, indentured to Thomas Muxworthy.” Gerry felt a thrill as she heard the name. “And I can find no record of his burial here.”

  “He might have moved away,” Gerry suggested.

  “As an indentured servant he couldn’t have done that. And if his term of service was finished, the parish priest of that time would have noted it. I found several examples where he did so for others.”

  “What was his name?”