The weight that’s constricted her chest for months has transformed into a crushing boulder, making it all but impossible for her to breathe.
How long can you hold your breath? Jiffy Arden had asked Max just the other day, outside in the sunshine. How long?
What she wouldn’t give right now to be able to breathe again, safely back home in Bedford again with Sam and Max.
Sam is gone. Home is gone. Safe is gone.
And I am slowly suffocating.
And the answer to Jiffy’s question is forever.
This is how it will always be: holding her breath, careening through the night, feeling helpless and afraid.
Right now, it’s as if she’s being tailgated by death itself, a stranger at the wheel and her frightened son in the backseat with a new mama cat and fragile babies, one of them barely clinging to life.
But what if . . .
Again Grant swerves, avoiding another gaping pothole, and her brain does the same to evade the awful thought. But it looms like glaring headlights on a blind curve, slamming her like an eighteen-wheeler.
What if he isn’t who he claims to be?
There it is: the possibility that, when it first fluttered into her consciousness, had seemed as outrageous as . . . as believing in ghosts, fairies, or murderous pirates, for that matter.
Leona is dead.
What if he’s just some . . . some strange man, posing as her next of kin?
As far as she knows, he’s had no contact with anyone in the Dale other than her until the moment he emerged from his room tonight. Helen—who’s been here many times before—didn’t recognize him.
Why would she, though? She’s never met him before.
Thank goodness her inner voice of reason is persistent. Almost as persistent as the absurdly paranoid part of her that conjured this idea in the first place.
Odelia herself mentioned that Grant comes and goes infrequently. It’s possible that he’s never crossed paths before with the Adabners or some of the other guests, but most likely, some of them have met Leona’s “nephew” Grant. And certainly, Odelia would immediately know he’s an imposter.
But she hasn’t seen him yet. No one has.
Was he really sleeping behind closed doors? Or was he . . . hiding?
Bella fights back the urge to protest as he transports them deeper and deeper into the woods.
What if she’s right about him?
Then it’s better not to let on that she’s suspicious, isn’t it? Better to go along with this shortcut charade and wait for an opportunity to make an escape.
Right. Just bolt on the spur of the moment—with a kid, a cat, and eight kittens in tow.
That’s not going to happen. Bella has to focus on the matter at hand: getting help for poor little Spider. She has to believe, for now, anyway, that Grant really is Grant. And that he’s a good Samaritan rushing to save an innocent little life.
He brakes again and makes a right onto a road she didn’t even notice was looming off to the side. So how did he?
He makes a left, and then another right, and they’re driving deeper and deeper into dense woods, and then . . .
“There it is!” Max shouts, pointing to a sign. “That’s it! Look, Mom!”
Lakeview Animal Hospital and Rescue
It’s on the opposite side of the road this time; they came from a different direction. It was, indeed, faster. Much faster. The drive that had taken Bella nearly half an hour on that first night took about fifteen minutes, tops.
A shortcut, just like he said. Okay.
The boulder shifts. Not entirely, but enough so that she can catch her breath.
Grant doesn’t seem to have lost sight of the kitten whose frail life is at stake. He jumps out of the driver’s seat and opens the back door. “How’s our little guy doing, Max?”
She’s struck by the concern in his voice and the fact that he remembers her son’s name—and used it.
I was wrong about him.
Well, of course she was, imagining that this man is some—some crazed killer, carrying out an elaborate masquerade.
How could she have entertained such a ridiculous notion?
It was just for a few moments. A few irrational, sleep-deprived moments.
“He’s kind of quiet right now, Mr. Grant. He’s not moving. Maybe he’s sleeping.”
At her son’s hopeful words, Bella deflates. How is Max going to handle yet another heartbreak? This isn’t anywhere near the catastrophic loss of Sam, and it doesn’t even hold a candle to the loss of their home, but . . .
It isn’t fair. She knows better than to think that life should be, but Max is just a little boy.
“Yeah, he’s hanging in there,” she hears Grant say. “I think he was just sleeping. Listen, he’s crying again. He’s feisty. Come on.”
Fortified, Bella gets out of the car and hurries to catch up as Grant strides toward the building with the crate, Max running alongside.
The door opens before they even reach the porch. Doctor Bailey is waiting for them, wearing his lab coat and an expression of concern.
“That was fast,” he says, flicking a curious glance at Grant.
“We need you to help Spidey,” Max says. “Please! Can you save him?”
Bella is grateful that the vet doesn’t even acknowledge the question as he reaches out to take the crate from Grant’s arms. Silence is better than offering Max false hope or gloomy statistics.
She had already confirmed, courtesy of a quick Internet search on her phone when they first set out, that Helen wasn’t being overly dramatic about the kitten’s condition. It is dire.
“Should we come with you?” Bella asks as Doctor Bailey carries the crate toward an open examination room door.
He doesn’t turn or stop walking. “Just one of you. The room is small.”
She hesitates. The only thing that makes any sense is for her to go, but that would mean leaving Max alone in the waiting room with Grant.
Grant, who took on this rescue mission and delivered them here safely.
But is that just one side of him? Is there another side? A dark side?
Too muddled to remember exactly why she even thought that in the first place, she makes a snap decision. “I’ll be right back,” she says—a reassurance for Max and perhaps a warning for Grant.
In the examination room, Doctor Bailey is already handling the little black kitten with tenderness and efficiency. The crate is on a low counter next to the examining table. Chance lies inside nursing the rest of the litter, but her head is upright, eyes fixed warily on the vet as he places Spider on the table and shines a bright light on him.
“It’s okay, little guy,” he croons, gently checking over the mewing kitten.
“Have you dealt with many cases like this?”
He nods. “With a litter this size, the runt sometimes starves to death because there isn’t enough milk to go around or because the siblings shut him out. Sometimes, the mother is overwhelmed and she rejects it altogether, and once in a while, she even kills it.”
“Kills her own kitten?” she asks in horror. “Why?”
“Maternal instinct.”
“That sounds like the exact opposite.” Bella is nothing if not overwhelmed herself, but if anything, she’s more protective of her child.
“Ever hear of a little thing called Darwin’s Theory of Evolution?”
“Oh. Right.” She nods. “I guess my emotions got the better of me for a moment there. I’m a science teacher, so—”
“So then you know all about nature and survival of the fittest.” As he talks, he holds the kitten on the table with one hand and opens an adjacent cabinet and rummages around with his right. “If the mother senses a birth defect or an illness that threatens the rest of the litter, she might sacrifice one offspring to improve the odds for the others.”
“Chance isn’t going to hurt her baby,” Bella says firmly. “I’ve seen how she is with him.”
When they left the h
ouse, she was gently licking little Spider and keeping him warm beneath her arm, shielding him from the squirmy sibling fray.
“I hope that’s the case, but you just never know,” he says. “When were the kittens born?”
“I’m not sure what time, but it was today.”
Again, she thinks about how Chance mysteriously vanished from the bedroom this morning. Obviously, she was seeking a private place in which to deliver her litter—but how on earth did she manage to get out of the room? And how did she get into the train room the first night?
Either she’s a magical cat who can lock and unlock doors—or walk through walls—or someone let her in and out.
“The good news,” Doctor Bailey lines up several items on the table and closes the cabinet, “is that this little guy he can be syringe-fed kitten formula through a feeding tube. I’m going to try that now, and we’ll see how it goes.”
She watches as he measures out a length of tube along the kitten’s body, marks it with a Sharpie, and draws some liquid into a narrow syringe.
“It’s so hard to listen to him crying.”
“Crying is actually a good sign. It means he’s hungry. If he weren’t crying, I’d be worried.”
Holding the kitten so that he’s lying on his belly, Doctor Bailey gently places the tip of the tube into his mouth. Amid continued high-pitched wailing, he eases the tube inside, gradually getting it all the way down the kitten’s throat and into its belly.
“The first time is always hard,” he says, “but once they get used to it, they swallow the tube more easily, knowing food is coming.”
With the tube inserted, he presses the syringe ever so slightly. As the first few nourishing drops hit the mark, the crying stops.
“There we go. That’s it, little guy,” Doctor Bailey says softly.
Bella leans over his shoulder to see. “He’s eating?”
“Yes, he is. Like a champ,” he adds with a laugh.
She swallows hard, so unexpectedly moved that it takes her a moment to find her voice. “Do you think he’ll live?”
“I think he has a fighting chance.”
For a few minutes, they watch in silence punctuated only by the squeaky cries from Spider’s siblings in the crate.
Then she asks quietly, “What about the puppy?”
“Hmm?”
“The puppy. The one you were trying to save the other night, when we were here. He’d had surgery. Did he make it?”
He looks up. “So far. He’s still here, out back, recovering.”
“So you’ll keep the kitten here, too?”
“Do you mean boarded, as a patient?” He shakes his head. “The queen hasn’t rejected him, and we don’t want that to happen, so he should continue to nest with her and the littermates.”
“The queen?”
“The official name for a feline nursing mother.”
“Queen Chance the Cat. I can’t wait to tell Max she’s royalty.”
Doctor Bailey flashes a brief smile. “I’m going to give you everything you need to hand-raise him, and I can loan you a good book on the subject, too.”
“Wait—hand-raise . . . ?”
“It just means you’ll do the feeding, and the queen will do the rest—grooming, litter-box training, socializing. She’ll instinctively handle everything he needs to become self-sufficient. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. For now, you’ll have to feed him every two hours around the clock for the first week, then every three hours for the next—”
“Wait,” she cuts in again, “I don’t even live here. Max and I are leaving on Monday.”
He frowns faintly, digesting this information. “I see. So the cat . . .”
“I don’t know. I don’t know who’s going to take care of her, or the kittens.”
She thinks of Grant, with his fancy watch and vagabond lifestyle.
And of Odelia, who already has her hands full—not to mention a lame leg.
And of Millicent, barely willing to take in her own daughter-in-law and grandson.
Somebody has to rescue Chance and her kittens.
But it isn’t going to be me. I wish . . .
No matter how much she aches to keep a pet for Max, no matter how badly she wants to care for Chance and the kittens, no matter how desperately she wants to save this fragile newborn life . . .
She can’t take the cats with her to Millicent’s, and she has nowhere else to go.
You can stay.
And have Max surrounded with people who make a living by talking to the dead? A Spiritualist colony is no place to raise an impressionable child who’s lost his father, and it’s no place for a widow who needs to accept that the love of her life is gone forever.
“I can’t,” she says quietly. “I just . . .”
Choked up, she shakes her head and swallows hard, staring down at the miniscule kitten. He’s once again huddled beside his siblings but cradled beneath his mother’s protective paw.
Chance feels about her baby exactly the way Bella does about Max. She’ll do anything to keep him safe.
She finds her voice. “I don’t have any options. There’s just no way I can help.”
“All right. I understand.”
“You do?”
“Believe me. I hear that a lot.”
“What about you? Can’t you keep him? And help him? Isn’t this an animal rescue?”
Doctor Bailey’s face is grim. “I’m overextended as it is. This time of year is kitten season. Do you know how many nursing queens and litters have come my way this week alone? It’s hard enough to find foster homes for the healthy ones. If you’re positive you can’t take responsibility for them,” he says, gesturing at the crate, “then the most humane thing to do might be—”
“No!” Bella hears herself shout as the awful insinuation hits her. “No, you can’t do that.”
“Isabella, my fosters are all tapped out. I can’t hand-raise a kitten at the expense of all the other animals who need me.”
“I thought you had other people on your staff?”
“Just my assistant. She lives in a one-room apartment with three cats of her own, and she’s already fostering a stray queen and litter in her bathroom and a contagious stray in her closet.”
“What about—don’t you have a friend or relative, maybe, who can—”
He gives a bitter laugh. “Are you kidding? The ones who are willing to help are already above and beyond, and the others—believe me, after all these years, they run when they see me coming. Look, there’s no one.”
No one but me, Bella thinks, looking from Spider to his seven siblings to Chance, who meets her gaze with a long stare and then a slow blink.
She isn’t begging, Bella realizes. She’s . . .
Trusting. Trusting me with her own life and with her babies. Nine lives, all in my hands. What am I supposed to do? Throw them away?
No. No way. I’ve got this.
“It’s okay,” she tells Doctor Bailey. “I’ll take care of them for now—all of them—until I can find someone else.”
Surely Odelia will take on the challenge after she and Max leave for Chicago. Or Grant will. He, of all people, should understand the importance of stepping up to foster.
“I’m going to go talk to my son and my . . . friend,” she tells Doctor Bailey as he removes the kitten from the crate again and puts him on the examining table. “I’ll be right back.”
He nods, again focused on tending to the kitten.
Bella steps out into the waiting room—and finds it empty.
The world skids to a halt. “Max? Max!”
She knew something was off about Grant! She should have known better than to—
Then through the screen, she hears, “We’re out here, Mom.”
Rushing for the door, she sees her son standing on the cement stoop. He’s holding a pair of binoculars pointed at the filmy night sky, and Grant is beside him.
“What are you doing?”
“We’re look
ing for Sirius. It’s the brightest star in the sky,” Max informs her, intent on the view through the lenses. “It’s part of the dog constellation.”
“Canis Major.” That comes from Grant. “But you usually can’t see it from here at this time of year.”
Talk about a coincidence. Just this afternoon, Odelia was going on about constellations, about trying to connect the dots when you can’t see anything but the occasional glimmer of light.
“There’s a full moon tonight,” Max says. “It keeps going behind the clouds, though.”
“Where did you get the binoculars?”
“From Mr. Grant.”
She doesn’t allow herself to wonder why he might have a pair of binoculars handy.
“Here,” he says, leaning over Max from behind and turning him a bit, adjusting his aim at the heavens. “Try looking that way.”
“Nope. It isn’t there tonight.”
“It’s always there. Sometimes, we just can’t see it because the clouds get in the way.” As he speaks, Grant turns to look at Bella over Max’s head, raising a questioning brow and giving a slight nod toward the building.
Realizing he’s wondering about the kitten, she says, “Hey, I have some great news about Spidey. He’s eating.”
Lowering the binoculars, Max asks, “Really? What is he eating?”
Grant answers before Bella can. “Probably a cheeseburger.”
“Kittens can’t eat cheeseburgers!” Max informs him. Then an afterthought: “Can they?”
“No. But I can, and I’ll bet you can, too.”
“And French fries,” Max agrees, and turns to Bella. “Mr. Grant is taking me out to eat after this.”
“Is that so?”
Sam used to take Max out for burgers and fries, she finds herself thinking. That was their thing.
“I told him that maybe we can swing by a diner later. I hope that’s okay?” Grant asks.
No. It isn’t okay at all.
She says to Max, “I don’t think you can bite into a burger without knocking your tooth out and swallowing it.”
“That’s okay. The tooth fairy will come anyway.”
“I thought you said—or was it Jiffy?—that was against the rules.”
“Mr. Grant says it isn’t. She’ll come no matter what.”
Nine Lives Page 19