by Clea Simon
“Stupid bitch.” I heard Growler clearly enough, but he had turned from me. “Females. Always in heat.” And no matter how I asked, he refused to say anything more.
Chapter Twenty-four
I was a little concerned that Growler’s scent would linger on the brush. Still, it had seemed a worthwhile experiment, and I tried to put it out of my mind as I made my way over to the shelter. Something had to get through to that Persian, and grooming was such a basic, intimate experience that I was hopeful.
I took out the brush. It may as well have been a stick of dynamite.
“Yow-ow-ow.” The caterwaul brought Doc Sharpe running from down the hall. “Yow!” Even Pammy stuck her head in. I had knocked the brush off the examining table by then, and was using both hands to restrain the flailing, spitting cat. “Ow-wow!”
“Pru?” Doc Sharpe was nothing if not reserved.
“Cage, please?” He stepped in front of me to open the mesh door. I hefted the solid little animal and hurried her into the enclosure. High on the sterile white wall, a clock ticked. Not ten minutes had passed since I’d first come in with such high hopes. The howling diminished by a few decibels.
“Thanks.” I leaned back against the metal table, taking a moment to catch my breath. Sharpe looked at me. He deserved an explanation, but I was still trying to figure out what had gone wrong. It was midafternoon by the time I’d gotten to the shelter. I’d made my normal rounds, but that was it. No rabid raccoons. No wildcats had left their scent on me. And I’d kept the brush in my car, isolated and, I figured, clean. “That was—I didn’t expect that.”
He waited. Behind me, leaning against the door frame, Pammy popped her gum.
“We need to resocialize this animal.” I pushed my hair back from my forehead and realized I’d been sweating. “So I brought in her brush.”
This was standard procedure. I was lucky. Everything I’d done today could have fallen under classic behavior modification. Everything except looting through the widow’s trash, that is. I started talking more quickly, before Doc Sharpe would begin to wonder where I’d gotten the brush.
“The theory,” I turned toward Pammy as if to explain, “is that an animal forgets its training, forgets how to interact with humans, after it has had a shock. And that Persian, well, she certainly has been through the mill. So I got her brush, which should smell familiar and started to groom her.” I had also tried to connect with her, conjuring up images of the big, old house and the well-groomed woman I’d had tea with only hours before. I’d avoided thinking of her anger, or how I had provoked it. At least, I’d thought I had. The resulting chaos had caught me by surprise, and I rubbed a sore spot on my forearm—the cat had knocked the brush back so hard it was going to leave a bruise.
“In this case,” I finished my tutorial, “the cat may not yet be ready to be reintroduced into the family.”
“Or the animal may be traumatized beyond recovery.” Sharpe had seen me rub my arm. “Sometimes an animal cannot be salvaged.”
Pammy made a small noise. I was silent, but aghast. “Doc, it hasn’t been that long.”
He looked at me, his face set, and then up at the clock. “We are not a boarding service, and the original owner does not want this animal back in this condition.”
“But this could have been my fault.” I’d pushed too hard. Clearly, the house was the sore point—that’s where the animal had been traumatized by noise. By shock. By the death of a beloved owner. I should have eased into it, begun by placing the brush on a nearby table or in another cage.
“You tried to groom the animal. That’s as basic as it gets.” He turned from me—and from the Persian’s cage—and started to walk from the room. I needed to stop him, to intercede, but I didn’t know how. As far as he was concerned, I had gone by the book.
“Her foreleg.” I was scrambling. “I think I may have put pressure on the sore leg.” As if in sympathy, I found myself touching my own arm. Already, the spot felt warm and I could feel the injured flesh beginning to swell. Doc Sharpe saw it, too, and narrowed his eyes in thought.
“That was careless of you.” I could see him weigh my words. I knew he doubted me. “If you really did that.” I held my breath. Even Pammy, for once, was silent. The clock on the wall ticked, and the Persian whined, low and insistent.
“Doc.” I had nothing else to say. “Please.”
He shook his head. “It’s not like you to be sentimental, Pru. Sometimes we have to be professional.” He looked up at the clock again, as if measuring the hours. I knew he could notify Louise Franklin that afternoon. Tell her the cat was unsalvageable, and that meant that he wouldn’t even consider putting her up for adoption. Assuming the widow didn’t make other arrangements, the cat could be euthanized in forty-eight hours. I thought of her words. Of how she considered her late husband’s pet only for its commercial value. Once that was gone, there would be no hope for the poor creature.
“It’s Friday,” he said finally. “Let’s give it till Monday. That should give everyone a chance to settle down.” Give me a chance to get used to it, he meant. I nodded. I needed to do something and fast. “Pammy?”
He ushered her from the room, leaving me alone with the scared animal. “Kitty, don’t you know time is running out? You’ve got to work with me here.”
A low growl, that was all I got. Mentally, as I tried to reach out, all was black. This cat was not going to help herself, and I couldn’t. Was there anyone else?
Robin Gensler—she wanted the cat. I didn’t know what her involvement was, or how she figured into the Franklin marriage. At this point, I didn’t care. I dialed her number.
“Robin? It’s Pru Marlowe. Would you give me a call? It’s urgent.” I hung up, unsatisfied with my message, and bent to retrieve the brush. It had slid under the supply cabinet and reaching for it, I noticed how much dust had built up. Pammy had been letting things slide. I managed to snag the brush and stood, knocking the dust off its wire bristles. A good brush. I had one like it, back in the days when Wallis would let me groom her. But the hair that I pulled from it, long and almost as dark as my own, didn’t belong to the white Persian. In fact, it probably wasn’t feline at all. And it hit me: maybe it hadn’t been the brushing that had set the white cat off. Maybe it hadn’t been the memories of the house, or what had happened there. The brush had to be associated with a person, and that long, dark hair no more belonged to Donal Franklin than it did to Jim Creighton.
“Kitty?” I knew I was pushing it. The cat was no longer growling, but she wasn’t going to consider me fondly no matter what. That clock, though, that was the enemy, and so I set the brush aside on the supply shelf near the cage. Not too close, but where the Persian could see and smell it. Then, moving slowly, I rolled up the hair and presented it to the front of the Persian’s enclosure. Long and glossy: it could have come from Robin Gensler. If so, that almost confirmed what I suspected—Robin must have been a regular visitor in the house, at least a regular visitor to the late Donal. Or it could have been from Louise’s glossy ‘do. In which case, why was she now so set against the poor animal?
“Fluffy, or whatever your name is? Would you look at this? Is this from your person?”
Two blue eyes blinked up at me, and I felt a stray thought, almost like a tickle in my mind. For a moment, I dared hope.
“Not a friend.” There it was. “I didn’t know.” Just a flash, barely there. The cold surge of anger I had experienced the day before was back, though it was weaker, as if the cat were giving up. “Go away.” And the eyes closed once more.
“Pru?” It was Doc Sharpe. He had the door open, and from the look on his face I knew he wasn’t happy to see me still there. “Don’t you think we should let that cat be now?”
“I wanted to try one more thing.” I’d gotten through, briefly but I had.
“Pru.” It wasn’t a request. He might not be my employer, but he was the source of the majority of my paying gigs. Plus, he held this cat’s life in hi
s hands. I looked into the cage, hoping for something. The Persian turned from me and curled up as if to sleep. “It’s time for you to go,” said Doc Sharpe. At least, it was his mouth that was moving.
Chapter Twenty-five
Sometimes you just want to go back home, crawl under the covers, and go back to sleep. You’d think a cat would be sympathetic to that. But, no, when I stumbled through the front door, cursing my blindness and sheer stupidity, Wallis was waiting. The look on her face stopped me cold.
“What?”
Her tail lashed once before curling around her feet. I looked down at my own attire, much less neat. Of course, I smelled of old meat, dog, and another cat.
“It’s work, Wallis. You know that.” Something about the way she twitched her ear let me know I wasn’t getting off that easy. “And, yeah, I screwed up. Big time.”
I passed her on my way to the kitchen. The situation with the Persian had not only left me with an aching arm but also aggravated my headache, which now pounded like the construction on Route 2. Throwing three aspirin into the back of my mouth, I scooped up a handful of tap water to wash them back and swallowed hard. I could feel, rather than hear, her tail lash, just once, waiting. “I don’t know what you can pick up, Wallis. I don’t even want to go over it again.”
Silence. “Look, I messed up. It’s the woman—one of the women—but I don’t know how or why.” Was the Persian reacting to the widow’s clear dislike? Was the cat somehow disturbed by her person’s attachment to the younger brunette? Or was there a whole other option that I wasn’t considering? Whatever, I only had the weekend to figure it out.
Wallis wasn’t helping. “What?” I asked her again.
“Clueless.” Her muttered voice reached me as she walked into the kitchen. “Clueless as a kitten.” She started to wash. I waited. One long white stocking later, she looked up. “Don’t you see? You’re on the verge of making the same mistake.”
“Yes?” I knew she wanted me to do something, but I was missing what.
With the little shake that’s the feline equivalent of rolling her eyes, Wallis went on. “You’re thinking of scent the wrong way. Do you remember the weasel?”
“Frank? Yeah, sure.” I wasn’t going to correct her. Not now.
“Do you remember when he started? Got scared. Whatever?” I did, all too vividly. Frank recoiling in horror. That was the first time my gift seemed to fail me.
This time she did roll her eyes. She must have picked it up from me, because on a cat it looked downright silly. I squelched my laugh, however. I needed to hear what she had to say.
“The damned weasel wasn’t horrified by you.” Her voice, even in my head, had taken on a peevish tone. “He wasn’t even scared, probably. Stupid rat doesn’t have the sense to be scared.”
I bit my lip. She started on her other foot. “Wallis?”
“You’re so literal,” she said finally. “When we smell something, we don’t simply react to that smell. We get an entire picture. What happened that produced that scent. The history, if you will.”
“So Frank wasn’t horrified—he was smelling someone else’s fear?” I struggled to remember what had led up to that strange interaction. “Was Frank picking up what happened to the Persian?”
Again, that feline shrug. “Or what the Persian witnessed or how the Persian had felt at some point in the past. Your sense of order, of how things happen, it’s strange to us.”
I nodded. I’d often heard that cats in particular live in a dream state. An eternal present. Our linear sense of time wouldn’t fit well with that. What I didn’t understand was how this played into what I had just experienced.
“So, the brush just now—are you saying that the Persian wasn’t terrified of the brush, or of whichever brunette had used it?”
It was Wallis’ turn to stare.
“Okay, I’m being simplistic, but what am I missing here? Are you trying to tell me that perhaps the Persian was picking up on someone else’s fear?” I tried to imagine either of the women, perhaps in the act of brushing the cat, suddenly startled. Suddenly confronted with a horrible scene.
Had someone been in the room when Donal Franklin was murdered? I made myself picture the scene. The man on the floor. The scattered papers. The open window…Jim Creighton had implied that they’d checked for prints. Something wasn’t making sense, however.
The widow. She had been on the phone with her husband when it had happened. That was her alibi, and the horror of her situation. And if she’d been chatting with her husband, presumably she would have known if there had been someone else in the room. Wouldn’t she?
Unless her husband had been keeping something from her. Suddenly, my need to talk to Robin Gensler was becoming more immediate. Except…
“Wallis, Robin is the one person who seems to care about the cat. She may be the key to saving her life, too.”
That feline shrug, again. And then she turned and left the room.
I should have followed her. I know Wallis, that was what she wanted. But the greasy jeans were getting to me. Besides, I needed something for my aching head. I reached for the comfort of faded sweats. Sitting on the bed to pull on the soft, baggy pants, it occurred to me that the headache might be from my disrupted sleep. Maybe if I took a short nap. Curled up…
“Wallis?” I opened my eyes. The tabby was nowhere to be seen. It was a silly thought, anyway, the one that had flashed through my mind. I’d been half asleep. I mean, what would a cat know about preserving evidence?
Chapter Twenty-six
The doorbell woke me, and I sat up with a start. The room didn’t seem appreciably darker, and as I ran my fingers through my hair, I tried to remember what other appointments I had today.
“One of your men.” Wallis had curled on the bed beside me. That’s right, I’d told Tom I’d see him again. But that was to be at Happy’s. The doorbell rang again, and Wallis tilted her head in the direction of the door. “You don’t expect me to answer it, do you?”
“Sorry, Wallis.” I had to be coming down with something. This headache, the strange silence. I wondered if my sinuses were somehow involved in my sensitivity. Could congestion be keeping all the voices quiet?
“Didn’t wake you, did I?” It was Jim Creighton, looking none the worse for wear if you didn’t count the slightly sour expression on his face.
“Sorry, I’ve not been feeling well.” His blue eyes took in my tousled hair and the baggy sweats. Once, during a February snowstorm, we’d spent the weekend together. It had been nice, until the sun came out. Two days of pretending I was normal. That he was a possibility. I’d raced home to Wallis as soon as the roads were plowed, but I’d not returned the sweats, and I could see that they brought up the same memory for him. For a moment, I thought he’d soften. I was wrong.
“We need to talk, Pru. Seriously.” I stepped back to let him in. He knew me well enough to follow me into the kitchen. I needed to tell him about the cat, though how I’d explain the brush—or the Persian’s reaction was beyond me. Something was niggling at the back of my brain. The brush…More coffee. That’s what I needed.
“Hang on.” I knew him, too, and I wasn’t going to tackle whatever he’d brought over until I felt more awake. He wasn’t sitting down though. Wasn’t even leaning on the counter. So I downed some more aspirin with a handful of water from the sink and turned to face his questions.
“Tom Reynolds.” This wasn’t what I’d expected.
“What about him?” Wrong answer. Creighton looked pissed.
“Don’t play, Pru. What’s his story? Why is he in Beauville, and what’s his connection with Llewellyn McMudge?”
I paused for just long enough to annoy him. “Pru…”
“Give a girl a minute, Jim.” I tried a smile. “Just woke up and all. So, how did you know Tom was in town?”
“That’s not an answer, Pru.” As he said it, I realized: He had Lew’s phone records. Tom was trying to reach Lew. And any one of a dozen good citizen
s could have seen me having dinner with a big stranger last night at Hardware.
“Honestly? I don’t know, Jim.” Always a mistake to start with “honestly.” It makes you sound like you’re lying. I had to offer him something. “He called me out of the blue. We had dinner. Turns out he wanted an introduction to Llewellyn McMudge.” He nodded. He’d known this much. “But I don’t know why. He didn’t say.”
It had been some kind of business deal. That thought came into my mind the moment the words were spoken, and as I poured the hot water over the grounds, I tried to remember if he’d shared any details, but my thoughts kept straying, distracted by something I’d forgotten. What was it—the shelter? Doc Sharpe? Whatever it was, I needed to put it aside and focus. What did I know about Tom’s latest project? Had Tom told me that he wanted Lew as a client, or had I assumed that?
“So you didn’t call Llewellyn McMudge because of Louise Franklin’s cat.” I filled a mug for Creighton. He ignored it.
“Wait a minute. That’s not true. I did call him about the cat. I don’t know if I’d have said anything about Tom. Tom’s, well, he can get mixed up in things.”
“So I gather.” Creighton had leaned back against the counter by this point, but the way he’d crossed his arms didn’t make him look particularly relaxed. I sipped my own coffee and waited. “I’ve got some feelers out, but NYPD takes care of its own.”
“He’s not on the force anymore.” He had all my attention now. Almost all.
“Doesn’t matter. Not when it comes to anything that could make the force look bad.” He caught my look. “Come on, Pru. Tell me you didn’t know.”
I raised my mug in what I hoped was an eloquent gesture. I needed to end this conversation. “I knew he cut some corners sometimes. So when I’d heard he’d left…”
Creighton waited a moment. When it was clear I wasn’t going to say any more, he filled in the blanks. “And you never heard anything about him going to work for a private consortium? A group looking to recover a missing item?”