Cat Deck the Halls

by Shirley Rousseau Murphy

  COPS CONVERGE ON PLAZA CHRISTMAS TREE POSSIBLE MURDER? NO BODY FOUND

  She scanned as much of the article as she could see above the fold. She was damned if she’d buy a paper; they paid for newspaper delivery. It was terrible to think of a murder at Christmastime. The circumstances sickened her-to kill or wound a man beneath a Christmas tree. She frowned, reading the strange details. Blood, but no body. Maybe the victim had been injured, but had gotten away. Except, the paper said, there had been a witness; someone had seen a body.

  But could that be a hoax? A false report? Maybe the blood wasn’t that of a person at all. Animal blood? That thought didn’t comfort her.

  The police wouldn’t have had any lab information last night, when the paper went to press. Maybe…A hundred conjectures ran through Cora Lee’s mind, and with them, the coldness. Hoax or not, this was ugly. Death, violence, the defiling of Christmas. Ugly, when there should be only love.

  She was loading her groceries in the trunk when a squad car pulled into the parking slot next to her, and Juana Davis gave her a yawning “good morning.”

  “You’ve been up all night,” Cora Lee said.

  Juana nodded. “Most of it.”

  Cora Lee looked at the little girl huddled in a blanket, in the front seat next to the detective, crowded up next to the complicated console, as close to Juana as she could get. A little girl with eyes darker even than Juana’s eyes, black as obsidian in such a thin, white little face. Long, ebony hair framing her milk-white skin. And such a sad expression that Cora Lee longed to pick her up and hold and comfort her. The child’s eyes were filled with fear, as she pushed closer to the detective-eyes as wary as those of a wild creature.

  “There was an incident last night in the plaza,” Juana said, scanning the half-empty parking lot.

  “I saw the paper.”

  “The paper doesn’t mention this little girl, but she was part of it. We found her hiding in the plaza, pretty scared. Blood on her clothes. The call came in from an unidentified informant who saw the child at the scene with the body. Max kept that out of the paper.”

  Cora Lee nodded. The child had said no word, she only watched Juana. Juana’s eyes told Cora Lee that the officer hated talking about the little girl in front of her, as if she weren’t there, told her it couldn’t be helped.

  Cora Lee wondered if the child did not speak English. Or if, perhaps, she couldn’t speak at all.

  “We have no identification, no idea who the man was, or who this young lady is. She came home with me last night.” Juana waited a moment, watching Cora Lee. “We don’t want to take her to Children’s Services.”

  “Of course you don’t.” Cora Lee had heard plenty about situations with various child welfare departments from Lori Reed. She looked at Juana’s dark eyes, the detective’s sternness gone now. “You need somewhere for her to stay.”

  “We’re not sure, yet.” Juana held the child’s small white hand. “Maybe for a few hours. There’d be an officer with her.”

  “We have plenty of room for both of them to stay. Susan’s in San Francisco for the holidays. Mavity and Gabrielle and Lori and I are just rattling around, and my cousin Donnie is downstairs. We’d love to have any officer you send, two if you like. We’d really love to have another child for the holidays.”

  “Overnight might not be safe, for any of you. But for a few hours, so she could spend some time with Lori and Dillon, and play with the dogs. She loves animals-cats, at least. When we found her last night she was snuggled right up to Clyde ’s cat and the Greenlaw cat.”

  “The dogs would be thrilled to have someone to play with. Lori and Dillon have been so busy on their contest entry they’ve had no time to roughhouse with them. And of course the girls would love to have her.” Leaning down, Cora Lee looked in at the child. “I think our guest might be the first one to test out the new playhouse.” She smiled. “Would you like that?” Then, to Juana, “Would you like to come on up now? I’m headed home.”

  “On my way,” Juana said. “If you’re sure you’re comfortable with this.”

  “I’m sure,” Cora Lee said. “Our dogs are good protection, they can be fierce, when someone threatens.” She looked at the child again. “And yesterday evening, Mavity baked pumpkin pies.”

  Juana laughed. “You know my weakness. I won’t follow you, I’ll take another route.”

  Cora Lee, swinging into her car and heading up the hills, glanced in her rearview mirror to see Juana’s white Chevy leave the parking lot, turning in the opposite direction. But when she pulled into her drive, the squad car was already there. Down the street two neighbors were out in their yards, looking, making Cora Lee smile. Every time a squad car showed up at their house, she’d see a neighbor or two peering out, and that highly amused Cora Lee and her housemates-though most of the neighbors knew of their friendships within the department, there had been one time that was serious police business, and some folks preferred to remember the unpleasantness. That case, Cora Lee thought uneasily, had also involved children.

  But nothing would happen to this little girl, not with police protection, and two big dogs on guard. Parking in the drive, she made two trips into the house loaded down with grocery bags while Juana sat in the squad car talking in a one-sided conversation with the little girl, until at last the child seemed willing to get out. Across the yard, Donnie was at work on the garden wall he was building along the side of the property.

  It seemed a very cold day to be mixing mortar, but maybe that didn’t matter. As Juana helped the child out of the car, Donnie turned away, heading for his truck. Cora Lee went on into the kitchen to put away her groceries, leaving the door unlocked behind her.

  Soon Juana and the little girl came into the kitchen hand in hand, Juana letting the child take her time. Cora Lee thought the dogs were in their fenced yard, in the back, but when the big poodle and the Dalmatian heard a strange voice, they came racing through the house. The child shrank against Juana, and Juana lifted her up, to make her feel more secure. Cora Lee grabbed the dogs’ collars, telling them to sit and stay.

  It had taken several months for Susan Brittain’s three housemates to learn to handle the dogs properly and insist they respond to commands, but the training sessions had paid off. As the dogs sat obediently, avidly watching the child, the little girl looked down at them, big-eyed-and the next minute she struggled out of Juana’s arms, straight to them; Lamb, the big chocolate poodle, surged forward, and then the child and dogs were all over one another, the dogs licking and whining, the frail, silent little girl hugging and hugging them.

  Juana stood close over her for a moment, in case of trouble, but then she looked up at Cora Lee, grinning, and backed off-and the women watched with wonder the child’s transformation from a terrified and shrinking little being to a vibrant and lively creature. Still silent, but very much more alive.

  “She needs animals, all right,” Cora Lee said.

  “She only trusts the animals.”

  The two women sat at the kitchen table with coffee and pumpkin pie. There was milk and pie for the child, but the little girl wouldn’t sit down, she wanted only to play with the dogs.

  “That was your cousin who just pulled out?”

  “Donnie, yes. He’s been working on the garden, building plastered garden walls, the way we’ve planned for so long. He laid the new stone walks, too.”

  “It’s looking great, Cora Lee. You’ve all worked hard on this house-you’ve made a new, beautiful home from a place too long neglected. And the Christmas decorations, your huge tree, and the red bells and wreathes…”

  “Donnie helped a lot-we’d never have dared such a big tree without him. It’s been a boon for us, to suddenly have him here, he’s done so much to the house. I didn’t know he had those skills. He’s been doing some jobs around the village, too, and people have already started to seek him out. He just finished a renovation for Sicily Aronson’s gallery.”

  Davis nodded. “Opening it up to t
he café and bookstore. Makes all three more inviting.”

  “I wanted to pay him for our work, but he refused. Said if we wouldn’t let him pay rent and board, he’d work for his keep.” Cora Lee smiled. “He said, ‘If you ladies keep feeding me so elegantly, I have to do something or you’ll be rolling me down the driveway.’”

  “Sounds like a nice guy. I saw him in the village the other day; Dallas pointed him out. He was talking with a middle-aged couple-tall, dark-haired woman, strangers. He’ll have all the work he wants, as difficult as it is to get skilled craftsmen.”

  “What did happen last night, Juana? You’re pretty concerned about the little girl, if Max didn’t tell the reporters about her.”

  “I’d already gotten her away from the scene when the reporters showed up.” Juana described the events of the previous night. And the anonymous phone call, like tips they had received in so many other cases, this one telling them about the child.

  “The caller said she was clinging to the dead man,” Juana said. “When Brennan found her, she was huddled in that little pump house behind the dog fountain, and those two cats were with her, Clyde’s big tomcat, and the Greenlaw’s cat cuddled right up to her.”

  “I guess even that macho tomcat might have a soft spot,” Cora Lee said, smiling.

  “She was afraid of Brennan, shrinking away from him. That’s when he called for a woman. She likes Jimmie McFarland, though, maybe because he’s quieter. She didn’t shy away from the chief and Dallas, either. I think it was just last night, so soon after the shooting, and Brennan’s voice is loud and gruff.”

  “Can’t she stay here with us?” Cora Lee said. “We’re all women in the house, except for Donnie, and he’s a gentle soul. She and the guard could sleep in my room, with the dogs in there, and in the daytime she could hang out with Lori and Dillon while they work on the playhouse.”

  Though there was two years’ difference in age between Lori Reed and Dillon Thurwell, the girls were fast friends, in part because both rode together, both keeping their horses up at Chief Harper’s ranch. Lori Reed, though she was the younger, had helped Dillon in school. Lori was intently committed to “real history,” as she called it, and to English, and her eagerness had rubbed off on Dillon, an interest that had changed Dillon a great deal.

  Juana looked out to the living room, where the big poodle and Dalmatian and the little girl had curled up in a tangle among the floor cushions, the dogs panting.

  “There’s no name tag on her clothes?” Cora Lee said. “No labels you can trace?”

  “Kmart labels, could have come from anywhere. I bathed her last night, bagged her clothes for evidence, put her in one of my T-shirts. This morning Officer Kane brought me some clothes, his boy’s about the same size.

  “There’ve been no California missing reports,” Juana said, “for an adult or for a child of her description. Nothing so far on the West Coast, and nothing yet in the national reports. Taking the word of our informant that there was a dead man, we’re guessing he was a tourist.”

  “You think she was kidnapped?”

  “It seems unlikely if, as the caller said, the child was snuggled up to him. It’s possible that an estranged father could have taken her, and run, against a court order. We have no report to that effect, yet, where the child fits that description.”

  Cora Lee shivered. The two women looked at each other, both touched by the horror that the child must have experienced, if she was in that man’s arms when he was shot.

  Though the child seemed busy with the dogs, they kept their voices low. She might not speak, but it was obvious that her hearing was just fine, turning when a dog huffed, glancing up at the women if they laughed. When they finished their pie and coffee, Cora Lee called the dogs, Juana wrapped up the child’s pie for later, and they headed out the front door, across the front deck, and down the four steps to the big garage, where Lori and Dillon were building their contest entry.

  11

  P ASSING THE WIDE garage doors, Cora Lee and Juana stopped to wait as Jimmie McFarland pulled in, then the three adults moved, with the child between them, around the side to the pedestrian door accompanied by the two gamboling dogs. They could hear, from within, the buzz of the electric screwdriver and the rhythmic pounding of a hammer, and the two girls bantering and laughing. Pushing the door open, Cora Lee turned, looking across the yard for Donnie, but his truck was still gone. His wheelbarrow and bags of cement and tools were scattered where he’d been working, which wasn’t usual for him. But he’d been at work since dawn, and was obviously coming right back-he must have run out of something unexpectedly.

  When she and her housemates had bought the house, the yard was a mass of weeds. But once they’d moved into the neglected dwelling, most of their work had at first gone into the interior, painting and repairing, decorating the communal living area in a way to bring their divergent pieces of furniture and tastes together. Each of them had designed her own room as she pleased. Blond Gabrielle, who wasn’t much for yard work and who didn’t like to get her hands dirty, was a fine seamstress and had made all the curtains and draperies. That, in Cora Lee’s opinion, took far more patience and skill than wielding a garden trowel or a paintbrush. Holding the child’s hand, she led her inside. “You have an audience,” she called, “a special visitor.”

  Along the walls of the three-car garage, Cora Lee and the girls had constructed a sturdy cutting table and a paint table out of sawhorses and plywood. The permanent workbench offered ample room for hardware, nails and hinges, and the small power tools. Ordinarily the garage was Cora Lee’s furniture studio, and she had orders nearly three years ahead. But until later this week, when the girls would deliver the playhouse to the contest grounds, this space belonged to them. The playhouse nearly filled it.

  There were twenty-three entries, most of them produced by adult teams and professional builders. Once the winner was chosen, all the other entries would be auctioned off. Given the popularity of custom playhouses along the coast, Cora Lee had no doubt they’d all sell at a profit-in her mind, it was a win/win situation; but the girls were set on getting the first prize.

  Above them, Dillon Thurwell was perched atop a six-foot-high platform of joists, the red-haired fourteen-year-old carefully balancing as she screwed lightweight cedar boards onto the raised deck-the playhouse, which was nearly finished, could be taken apart in three sections to be transported by truck. If the girls’ dream came true, their entry would win twenty thousand dollars to be split between them, to add to their college funds.

  Dillon’s parents had started her college fund long ago, and added to it regularly; but Dillon’s mother was a real estate agent, and her father a college professor. Lori, on the other hand, with her father in prison and her mother dead, had little more than odd jobs and her own ingenuity with which to amass the huge sum she would need for her education. And Lori Reed was dead set on college, no matter what it took. Lori had lived with the four women since her father was sent to San Quentin to serve a sentence for second-degree murder, a crime that everyone who knew him felt they might have committed themselves, considering that the man he killed had brutally murdered innocent and very bright children, and had intended to kill Lori.

  The little child beside Cora Lee stared up round-eyed at the bright, multicolored playhouse; it was a confection of brilliant colors, of closed and open spaces and ascending levels, and of wild cutouts for air and light, and all the surfaces were painted in amazing patterns. There were three ways to climb to the top-a knotted rope, a ladder, and a vertical bar with protruding rungs. Standing on the tumbling mats that were scattered underneath, to make the low work easier, the little girl stared up at the wonderful confection, her eyes wide, her mouth curving in the tiniest hint of a smile.

  “Paint dry?” Cora Lee asked, keeping the dogs back, worrying that they would smear Lori’s careful work.

  “It’s dry,” Lori said. Kneeling beside the front of the playhouse, she was nailing on freshly pain
ted, bright persimmon trim. The younger girl had long, straight brown hair, light brown eyes that could look achingly hurt and needy-or could look as secretive and feisty as could Dillon’s impish glance. But Lori’s attention was on the little girl, clearly seeing the child’s shy fear. Lori put out her hand.

  The little girl came to her slowly at first, but then with trust. This was not an adult bid for contact, this was child to child, as nonthreatening as the earlier, guileless greetings of Joe Grey and Kit, and then of the two dogs. Above them, Dillon remained still, her red hair catching a shaft of light through the garage windows, her cropped, flyaway locks gleaming like flame.

  At the sound of a car pausing on the street, Davis stepped to the door, but then it moved on by, and she returned to watch the child explore the bottom part of the playhouse then scramble up the ladder. Forgetting the adults, the little girl disappeared into the three rooms and out again in a little dance across the various decks, so losing herself to wonder that Davis and Cora Lee beamed at each other-and Davis dared to think, now, that the child might find her voice, and be able to speak to her.

  S O THIS WAS where they meant to hide the kid, at least part of the time. This, and that detective’s condo. What a laugh-those women had no clue that he knew all about this place. Kuda watched the woman cop lift the kid out of the car, and he smiled. The kid was a sitting duck.

  He waited warily but with patience while they were in the house. Watched the second, lone uniform pull in. So the kid had two guards. Oh, this was too good. This was security?

  And still he waited.

  Kid hadn’t said a word, so far, he could bet on that. Hadn’t, or the cops wouldn’t be so relaxed. They were just normally watchful, but not sweating it. No, the kid hadn’t told anything she saw, and he didn’t think she would-and how much could they believe, from a kid? Kid was no kind of witness.

  So why mess up a good thing? Kill her, and they’d be after him for sure. No, for now, let sleeping dogs lie. So far he was home free. Keep it that way. Body disposed of, and only some passing witness’s word there ever was a body. How far would the cops go to investigate hearsay? This was Christmas, the stores had to be full of enough shoplifters and petty thieves to keep the street patrol plenty busy.