Cat Raise the Dead

by Shirley Rousseau Murphy

  It was much later, after several swift chases, after feasting on half a dozen mice and a ground squirrel, that Dulcie, too, began to feel uncertain and morose. Pausing in her elaborate bath, she flicked her pink tongue back into her mouth, licked her whiskers once, and stared at him.

  He stopped washing, one white paw lifted. "What? What's with you?"

  "I was thinking. About Mae Rose."

  "Don't start, Dulcie. Not tonight."

  "Mae Rose thinks maybe Jane Hubble ran away. That the home didn't look for her, that they didn't want to tell the police that someone ran away."

  "Mae Rose is bonkers. How could an old woman run away from that place, an old woman who'd had a stroke? How far would she get before she collapsed somewhere, or someone brought her back?"

  "Mae Rose says Jane got better after her first attack, that she was getting really restless. Then she had the second attack, and they moved her over to Nursing."

  He just looked at her.

  "She might have run away. I read once about an old woman who-"

  "Probably she couldn't even get out of bed, let alone out of the Nursing wing." He gave her an impatient glare. "If the doors to Nursing are all locked, as Dillon says, and with nurses all over thick as a police guard, you think Jane Hubble got out of bed by herself, got dressed by herself, picked up her suitcase, and walked out."

  She lowered her ears and turned away.

  Joe sighed. "She's there. In Nursing. Safe and sound. Too sick to have visitors. Mae Rose has latched onto one fact, that they won't let anyone visit Jane, and she's turned it into a disaster."

  The moon behind them had dropped below the clouds, turning the tomcat into a silhouette as dark and rigid as an Egyptian statue. "Mae Rose is full of fairy tales. Old people get childish, they imagine things."

  "But she isn't childish, she's still very sharp. She's told me all about her life, and she isn't imagining that. She showed me her albums, she remembers every play she sewed for, every costume, she showed me the pictures, told me the characters' names and even the actors' names, she remembered them all. She-"

  "She showed her albums to a cat? She showed pictures to a cat, told her life history to a cat?"

  "No one else is interested; they're tired of hearing her."

  "Dulcie, normal people don't talk to cats, not like the cat can really understand."

  "But we do understand."

  "But no one knows that." He hated when she was deliberately obtuse. "Mae Rose doesn't know we can understand her. Anyone-except Clyde and Wilma- who thinks a cat can understand human speech is bonkers. If Mae Rose thinks you can understand her, that old lady is certifiably round the bend."

  She crouched down, deflated. "I'm all she has to talk to; everyone else treats her like she's stupid."

  "Dulcie, the old woman is in her second childhood. For one thing, what sane, grown woman would carry a doll around with her? Does she talk to the doll, too?"

  "She makes doll clothes; that was her living. If she still has dolls of her own, if she still sews for them, I don't see anything strange. She supported herself doing that, the clothes are all silks and handmade lace. She said Jane Hubble loved her dolls."

  "Dulcie…"

  The moonlight caught her eyes in a deep gleam, her pupils large and black, the thin rim of green as clear as emeralds. "No one understands how she feels; she's so terribly alone, and Jane was her only real friend. We could at least try to help her-try to find Jane."

  "Can't you understand that she's making this stuff up? That no one is missing?" He moved away through the grass, irritated beyond toleration, so angry that he didn't want to talk about it.

  He didn't want to admit his own unease.

  Mae Rose was not the only one who thought Jane Hubble was missing. Whatever the truth turned out to be, he didn't think little Dillon Thurwell was bonkers.

  Nor had Dillon and Mae Rose invented this story together. The two hadn't met each other until today, yet both were possessed with this fixation that Jane Hubble had met with foul play.

  "I want to help her, Joe. Somehow I'm going to help her."

  "Dulcie, we're cats, not social workers. We weren't born to help little old ladies, we were born to hunt and fight and make kittens."

  "Fine. You go make some kittens." She lashed her tail, her green eyes blazing. "You do what you were born to do, act like a stupid tomcat. And I'll do what I think is right."

  "Dulcie-"

  "You were eager enough to solve Samuel Beckwhite's murder."

  "But there hasn't been a murder."

  Her ears went flat, her whiskers tight to her face, her tail lashing. "And you're anxious enough, now, to spy on that harmless woman burglar just because she loves pretty things."

  "Come on, Dulcie. The woman is stealing." Dulcie's logic-female logic-drove him crazy.

  "I suppose," she said, "it makes no difference that Jane Hubble isn't the only one who's missing. That there are five other patients who were moved to Nursing and haven't been seen again."

  "That old woman ought to write for Spielberg. And you heard what Eula said, that some of those people have been seen-the one with the cataract operation, and the man who spent all afternoon with his attorney."

  She gave him a dark look. She didn't have an answer; but that didn't change her mind. Exasperated, he stared down the hill toward the lights of the village.

  She said, "If I can help you stalk the cat burglar, which I think is stupid, then you could help me search for Jane Hubble."

  "If it's so stupid, why did you read all those news clippings? Why…?"

  "Will you help me look? It's safer with two," she said softly.

  Joe knew he was defeated. She always knew how to push some vulnerable button.

  "For starters, I want to search the Nursing wing." She assessed his mood through narrowed eyes. "If we can get into Nursing," she said softly, "we can see for ourselves if Jane and those other old people are there. And that should settle it." She lay down in the grass watching him, all gentleness now, quiet and submissive.

  He was beaten. She wasn't going to let go of this; when she got her claws in like this, and then turned gentle, she'd hang on until her quarry-him-was reduced to shreds. "All right," he said, ignoring the uneasy feeling in his belly. "Okay, we'll give it a try."

  She smiled and rolled over, and leaped up. Sooner than he liked they had licked the last dribbles of mouse blood off their whiskers and were headed across the hills for Casa Capri.

  Trotting across the grassy slopes between scattered houses, as he looked past Dulcie, down the hill, watching the tiny lights of a car leave the police station, heading away toward the beach, he thought about Dillon Thurwell.

  Dillon had joined Pet-a-Pet so she could look for Jane Hubble; she had dyed her hair so the nurses wouldn't recognize her. And maybe because of Dillon more than any other reason, he'd let himself get hooked into a predawn break-and-enter that could get plenty hairy. He thought of getting locked into that hospital wing among half a dozen antagonistic nurses, nurses who could wield a variety of lethal medical equipment, and he could almost feel the needles jabbing.

  The doll lay in a small dark enclosure just large enough to accommodate her eight-inch height. Her blond hair was matted. Her blue eyes, dulled by grime, stared blindly into the blackness. Her little hands were raised as if she reached but there was no one to pick her up and cuddle her or to examine the knife slit across her belly beneath her little dress.

  Her porcelain skin, which had once been clear and translucent, was grayed with dust. Her flower-sprigged blue-and-white frock, made of the finest sheer lawn, and her white lacy slip, all hand-sewn with tiny, even seams, now hung yellowed and limp. And beneath her pretty dress, where her cloth body had been ripped, the three-inch gash had been sewn up again with ugly green thread in large, ragged stitches jabbing any which way into her white muslin body, and the thread knotted with a heavy, lumpy closure.

  The walls around the doll were of thick oak, and the con
tainer bound outside with brass corners. Someone had hidden the doll well. If anyone had ever loved this doll, she lay forgotten, abandoned. If someone should find her there, they might have no notion of her significance-she was simply a grimy old doll ready for the trash or the Goodwill. Very likely, if she had a tale to tell, no one would know or care. No one would question who had ripped her apart and sewn her up again, or question why. And if there were significant fingerprints remaining on her porcelain face or arms, who would think to look for such a thing? She was not, at this juncture, a clue to any known crime.

  17

  As the cats crouched on the moonlit hillside, above them the high grass stems thrust black and sharp as knives against the moon. Through the grass they looked down onto the rooftops of Casa Capri, the sloping tiles struck into patterns of curving shadow. Far down beyond the retirement villa and beyond the village roofs, the moon's path cut like a yellow highway across the dark Pacific.

  Nothing moved. No wind. The night was still and bright.

  Just above the main building of Casa Capri, the rows of small retirement cottages climbed up toward them, their moonlit roofs gleaming pale, their little streets lit at intervals by the decorative lamps spaced along the winding lanes. But the cottages themselves were dark. No light shone, no curtain stirred where retirees slept. The time was 4:00 A.M.

  The main building of Casa Capri was dark at the front. Along the sides, a thin glow from the softened hall lights seeped out from the residents' rooms. At the back of the building, in the Nursing wing, bright lights burned. One imagined sleepless patients suffering late-night changes of IV bottles, or perhaps restless with pains and discomforts and with the fears which can accompany old age.

  Glancing at each other, the cats slipped on down through the grass, down between the dark cottages, and across the little narrow streets. Pausing in a geometrically neat bed of pansies, they studied the Nursing wing.

  The windows in Nursing were high and securely closed, as if perhaps those shut-in patients disliked the cool night air. There was no access there, through those windows. They had crossed the last street into the shadow of the building when suddenly a clashing explosion of sound hit them, loud as the crash of wrecking cars. Metal clanging against metal. They crouched belly down, staring wide-eyed, frozen to the earth, ready to run.

  But then they identified the harsh metallic music of a radio booming out from the Nursing wing, a blare of Spanish brass, of trumpets blasting and snorting, and they crept on again, ears tight to their heads, slinking.

  The next instant someone turned the volume down, and the noise subsided to a nearly tolerable decibel level.

  Eight cars stood in the parking lot, their metal bodies pale with dew from having been parked most of the night. Not a car among them was more than two years old, and they were all top-of-the-line Buicks, Chevys, even two Mercedeses. Skirting the parking lot, the cats headed for the Care Unit, and there, slipping in through the wrought-iron fence that guarded the little terraces, they searched for an open glass door, for access to a bedroom and the hall beyond.

  Most of the glass doors were closed. The two that had been left open a few inches were secured in place by a bar, and the screens were latched. As if the occupants worried seriously about human intruders scaling the six-foot fence and strangling them in their beds.

  The cats could hear the soft breathing of the shadowy sleepers, but some of the occupied beds looked hardly disturbed, the covers nearly flat and only a small, thin mound where the sleeper lay. Other occupants had tangled their covers and twisted them or thrown them on the floor. One old man, wrapped in a cocoon of blankets, snored like a bulldog with bad tonsils.

  Trying each door and screen, they were nearly to the end of the row before they found a glass standing open and the screen unlatched, or perhaps the latch was broken. The room smelled of cherry cough syrup. Slipping inside, they crept past the bed and its mountainous occupant. A metal walker with rubber feet stood beside the open door to the hall. They crouched beside it, looking down the empty corridor, then fled along it toward the social room.

  In the darkness, the room seemed huge, the hulking shapes of couches and overstuffed chairs looming like fat, misshapen beasts. Beyond their hunching black forms, the white-clothed dining tables were moonlit, the moon itself shining in through the glass. To the left of the dim room, the patio gleamed pale through its glass doors. They leaped to the back of a dark sofa, listening.

  From down the hall, toward the admitting desk, two women were talking; and the cats could smell coffee. Leaping from the couch to a chair, and to a couch again, they moved in that direction, then quickly through the open doors and down the hall.

  At the parlor they slipped into the deep shadows beneath a chair. Staring out, they studied the brightly lit admitting desk and the open doors of the two lit offices.

  The admitting desk was deserted, but in one of the offices the two women were laughing, and a coffee cup rattled. The cats fled past and down the hall, toward the closed door of Nursing, where they could hear the brassy music playing softly. Sliding into the nearest darkened bedroom, they sat close together, looking out through the crack of the door, studying the secured entrance to Nursing.

  The door was one of those pneumatic arrangements which, the cats knew from past experience, was beyond their strength to open. If they waited long enough, someone had to come through; all they needed was patience. Behind them, in the dark bedroom, the sleeper moaned and turned over; the room smelled sour, of sleeping human, and was too warm. Soon Dulcie began to fidget, and then a flea began to chew at Joe's rump. He bit at it furiously, easing the itch, trying in vain to catch the little beast. Lately he'd begun to think of his minor but stubborn flea infestation as a serious breach of personal hygiene, a scourge on the civilized being he had become, a source of deep embarrassment.

  Clyde had suggested that if he hated flea spray so much, he might try a daily shower. Well, of course, Clyde would offer some incredibly stupid solution. Joe was surprised Clyde hadn't bought him a razor, encouraged him to take up shaving; certainly that would get rid of the fleas.

  They waited, watching the lit crack beneath the door to Nursing for what seemed an endless time before suddenly that space darkened, and footsteps hushed on the carpet within.

  The pneumatic door sucked inward, and a nurse hurried out past them, her white shoes flashing along, inches from their noses. Before the door sucked closed they bolted through.

  They nearly rammed into the heels of a second nurse. Crouching behind her, their hearts pounding, they stared around for a place to hide, but the best bet, the only real option, was the cart beside her. She stood with her back to them, arranging something on its metal shelves. They could smell hot cocoa and buttered toast, and, as she turned toward a counter, they fled underneath, between the chrome wheels.

  Soon they were creeping along beneath the moving cart as she pushed it down the hall, their ears flicking up against the cold metal. The rubber tires made a soft pulling sound on the carpet, like tape being ripped from a fuzzy surface. Around them they could see only the wheels, the wooden molding along the wall, and the bottoms of the evenly spaced doors. If there were charts on the doors presenting the patients' names, they could see nothing of these. They might be passing Jane Hubble's room at this moment and never know. This procedure wasn't going to cut it. If they could ride on top the cart, that would be an improvement. Dulcie glanced at him with impatience, her tail twitching nervously against the metal wheel.

  Some of the rooms were dark, but most were lit, and in some the voice of an elderly occupant groaned or called out. The smells of medicine and of sick people made them both want to retch. They could see the bandage-wrapped feet of one patient who was out of bed sitting in a chair. Halfway down the hall the cart stopped, the black rubber tires were stilled, and the nurse's white shoes padded away into a softly lit room. Behind her, they crept out to look

  Through the open door, a bedside lamp threw a narrow g
low across the metal bed and across the thin, wrinkled occupant; he had an obedient, gentle face, as if he had long ago resigned himself to the entrapments of old age. As the nurse turned to straighten his nightstand, the cats slipped in behind her and under the bed.

  Crouching beneath the dusty springs, they were only inches from her size five white oxfords, so close they could smell the mown grass through which she must have recently walked. This blended pleasantly with the smell of cocoa and buttered toast, and they could hear her arranging a tray before the patient, could hear the plate slide on the metal surface. She spoke to the old man in Spanish, but he answered her in English. Both seemed comfortable with the arrangement. They could hear her fluffing his pillows, then she braced her feet as if helping him into a sitting position. When she had him settled she left the room, wheeling her cart away.

  The patient ate with little sucking and clicking sounds, as if his teeth didn't fit very well. They could see no chart on the inside of the partially open door, to tell his name. They had started to creep out when another nurse came down the hall.

  Retreating again beneath the bed, Dulcie hunched uncomfortably, her paws tight together. She didn't like this part of Casa Capri-the Nursing wing was a fullblown hospital, reminding her too sharply of the vet's clinic. The disinfectant and medicinal smells and the cold, hard surfaces brought back every dreadful moment of her five days in Dr. Firetti's animal hospital, when she was sick with a respiratory infection.

  She had, over in the social room, been able to maintain the illusion of happy days for these old folks, in a comfortable little world set aside just for their nurturing. But suddenly illness and the failure of the body were too apparent. In this wing of Casa Capri, all she could think of was sickness and dying.