After what seemed like forever, the unit moved on, to disappear over the crest of the hill. He waited, listening. After some time, when he didn’t hear it coming back, he eased up, trying to get his breath, sucking on the damned inhaler and then rubbing his legs and arms to warm himself. Shortness of breath always made him cold. Doctor gave him some pills for a really bad attack, but he didn’t take them; they made him feel worse than the constricted breathing. He’d dumped them out long ago, and now he wished he had them.
When the law didn’t return, he pulled his cap lower, pulled the collar of his dark windbreaker over his face so he’d blend in with the night, and eased out of the car. He headed down the hill staying among the trees, staying in the shadows and trying not to trip on the rough ground.
Moving along the dark side of the garage where the pedestrian door etched a darker rectangle, he told himself it would soon be over and no one would ever find her. In the morning they’d fill in the trench with gravel and pour new cement to replace that part of the garage floor and be none the wiser about what lay under their careful work. By the time the cement was dry, he’d be long gone.
Once he’d laid her to rest, as the obituaries so delicately put it, and before he left the area, he’d have plenty of time to take care of the rest of his business, and by morning, he’d be two hundred miles north.
Letting himself into the garage, he locked the door behind him. There was enough moonlight coming through the window so that he didn’t have to flip on the flashlight. He pulled on the gloves he’d brought and took up one of the shovels that leaned against the wall. He was about to head down the ladder when he thought of the coveralls that he’d sat on earlier.
The foreman was bigger than he was, so it was easy to pull the muddy garment up over his pants. He tried on the boots that stood in the corner. The fit was a bit loose, but they’d save having to clean up his own shoes, which he left on the worktable. More important, they’d leave the correct, waffle-patterned footprints in the bottom of the ditch, because who knew what someone might notice before they dumped in the gravel?
Tossing the shovel down into the pit, he descended the ladder. The damp ground had already been loosened with the shovel or a pick and was soft under his feet, the waffled prints showing clearly. He chose the corner that felt soft est, and began to dig, congratulating himself on changing into the boots but annoyed that it had been a last-minute thought, that he hadn’t planned better. He began to wonder what else he might have missed.
He could think of nothing left undone, he thought he had everything in hand, but still, as he worked, the worry nagged at him. This procedure, tonight, hadn’t been planned the way their regular jobs were. She hadn’t planned it, he thought with sick amusement. Working on his own, he was shaky about his attention to detail-she’d seen to the details. Now, without her direction, he had to be doubly careful.
The digging wasn’t hard until he hit a layer of soft rock. That slowed him as he stomped the shovel into it-and the scraping sound was louder than he liked. A glint under the shovel caught his eye for a minute, but it was only a silver gum wrapper. It vanished when he tossed the next shovelful on the pile. He had to drive the blade through maybe five inches of rock, which made his breath ragged. Had to stop twice, to breathe and use the inhaler. Digging, he went over his next steps.
Once he brought her down and buried her, he’d swing by the rented garage on the other side of the village, change cars as she had planned, then get on with the night’s work. He felt strange, doing the job without her. Strange, and sick, but excited. Almost like a kid doing something new on his own.
He’d been digging for half an hour, was making good headway despite the fragmented rock and the weight of the damp earth. He wasn’t used to this kind of heavy work. He’d had to move the drainpipes out of the way, memorizing their position so when he’d finished, he could put them back in the same formation. He was taking a rest when he heard a faint brushing sound, a soft, stealthy noise that turned him cold.
Glancing at the closed door, he ducked down into the darkest corner of the pit, pulling the shovel beneath him so it wouldn’t gleam, hiding the pale oval of his face and hoping his dark clothes would blend into the pit’s shadows. Had that cop come back?
What else could it be? Not the contractor, not at this hour. He prayed seriously that it was just some animal, a raccoon or stray dog. She’d say it was insane to pray. She’d call such determined prayer arrogant and would laugh at him, say he’d already damned his own soul, so what difference would it make? Crouched in the dark corner in the earthen pit he listened again for the soft brushing, trying to envision what might have made the sound.
When it came again he realized it was not from the door at all but from the direction of the window, a brushing and then a scratching noise. Had that cop come back and was looking in the window? But no flashlight beam shone in, reflecting through the garage.
The sound continued for so long that he lost patience and warily slipped up the ladder to look, keeping his collar pulled up and his hat low, climbing only until he could just see over the lip of the ditch, could just see the moonlit window.
He froze, his hands turning cold on the ladder rungs.
No human stood beyond the glass. A cat was there, staring in at him, a pale cat crouched and ghostly on the windowsill, pressed against the glass and looking in-straight at him. A white cat smeared with dirt or some kind of smudged markings. Its eyes caught a red gleam from the reflection of moonlight off the glass. Its intent gaze was relentlessly fixed on him, it didn’t blink or look away. Swallowing, he backed down the ladder, tripped and nearly lost his footing, his clumsiness causing a metallic clatter that made his heart pound.
When he climbed and looked again at the window, expecting the cat to have been startled and run off, it was still there watching him.
Well, hell, it was only a cat, only a stupid beast. It didn’t know what he was doing. And it was, after all, beyond the glass where it couldn’t come near him, couldn’t rub up against him as cats so often did, as if they knew he hated them and took pleasure in his fear.
Disgusted, he turned back to his digging, kicking the shovel deeper into the earth and loose rock, his breath coming in gasps, and all the time he dug, he could feel the cat watching, feel the icy chill of its stare.
He kept working, booting his shovel again and again into the earth, heaping up the removed dirt at one end of the long excavation. When he stopped to breathe and to measure the depth of the grave with the shovel handle, and then stepped up the ladder to look, the cat was still there. What did it want, why would it watch him? Turning his back on it and measuring again, he determined that maybe six more inches would allow him to cover her solidly. He’d have to make sure the last layer of dirt over her didn’t have any rock in it, because the rock all came from deeper in the earth; someone might notice that and investigate. He was tiring, but he kept on stubbornly until at last the hole was deep enough. Setting the shovel aside, leaning it against the pit wall, he started up the ladder. When he looked again at the window, the cat was gone.
20
FRANCES AND ED Becker’s house was a two-story, cream-colored stucco with dark brown window trim and a black slate roof that was always slippery in wet weather. The cats didn’t need daylight to know that the lawn was neatly mowed, the bushes trimmed to perfect spheres that they, personally, thought ugly and unnatural-how could one hide or take shelter under a bush trimmed like a bowling ball? Tansy led them straight through the cat door into the garage where dishes of kibble and a bowl of water were laid out beside two cat beds. The Beckers had two orange-and-white cats, and though neither was present, their scent was heavy and fresh. There was no cat door from the garage into the house.
“They don’t want mouse trophies under the furniture,” Tansy said. “ Frances can’t stand the thought of mouse guts on her imported rugs.” She looked up at the pedestrian door that led into the house. “We can try this, sometimes she leaves it
unlocked because the garage is locked.”
Leaping up, Joe swung from the knob and pawed at the dead bolt, but at last he dropped down again, shaking his bruised paw.
“Come on then,” Tansy said, “there’s another way.” She led them outside and around the house to the front. In the daytime, the front door would be seen from the street, but at night the soft yard lights left it in shadow. There was no one about nor could they see anyone standing at a nearby lighted window.
The front door was flanked by two tall, narrow panels of glass, each covered by a decorative wrought-iron panel. The pale cat, leaping up and clinging to the iron curlicues, reached a deft paw through and pressed at the sliding window until she had pushed it open.
“They used to leave it open for me. She did. He wouldn’t bother.”
Slipping inside, the cats paused in a large entry hall, their paws sinking into a thick oriental rug. A tall, lush schefflera plant in a blue pot filled one corner. A narrow teak table stood against the opposite wall beside a rosewood bookcase holding small, carved boxes. A large, intricate basket stood on the floor before it, in an artful arrangement. The dining room was to their left past the schefflera plant, a formal room with deep blue walls and a pale, carved dining set. Beyond it they could glimpse the kitchen. The living room was straight ahead, blue walls, a high, raftered ceiling, and a bank of tall windows. To their right, past an open stairway that led to the second floor, was a hall and, Tansy said, two more bedrooms. Between these was the door of a locked closet; they could see the dead bolt running through the slit between the door and molding. But Frances had left the key in the lock.
“For the cleaning crew,” Tansy said. “She always did that, she wants it dusted. A huge closet, stacked with sealed boxes and long packages wrapped in brown paper. I used to play and hide in there-until once I got locked in. I was so scared. I cried for hours before Frances found me and let me out.” She padded into the living room, onto another deep Persian rug.
“Handmade,” Dulcie said, flipping up one corner with careful claws and examining the weave. “No machine made these.”
“How do you know such things?” Tansy said.
Dulcie showed her the uneven weave. “From library books,” she said. “Late at night when the library’s closed and no one’s there. And my housemate, Wilma, knows about antiques.” She admired the sofa and easy chairs, upholstered in tiny, intricate patterns with a primitive flavor. She examined the small carved tables. “Old and handmade,” she said, sniffing them. “And expensive.”
To Joe, the furnishings seemed nice enough but it was just a handsome room, large and comfortable. Beside him, Kit seemed nervous, peering out the windows, scanning the trees and bushes that flanked the dim patio. Tansy prowled among the furniture, sniffing longingly the scents she remembered. They prowled all the rooms looking for anything that seemed disturbed, for any space conspicuously empty, or for small indentations in a rug where some piece of furniture had been removed, looking for anything that Charlie might have missed. A photograph of Ed and Frances Becker stood on the dining room buffet, Ed tall and darkly handsome and smiling, Frances nearly as tall, a slim, gentle-looking woman with brown hair wound in a French twist. Frances was an accountant, and Ed worked for the California Department of Children’s Services.
“He doesn’t seem the type to be a children’s caseworker,” Dulcie said disapprovingly. “Not with those movie-star looks and that too charming smile-and his eye for other women.”
“Are all humans like that?” Tansy said.
“Like what?” said Joe, turning to look at her.
“Catting around,” said Tansy smartly. “Ed Becker and Theresa Chapman,” she said knowingly. “And Ed Becker and Rita Waterman, too, with her fancy jewelry. Do all humans do that?”
“Where did you get that expression?” said Joe sharply.
“I guess from humans,” Tansy said contritely.
Joe twitched a whisker and turned away to the hall. They had found nothing in the living room that seemed missing or out of place. He stood considering the door to the linen closet. Leaping up, he swung on the knob until he had turned it, and turned the key, and with a violent kick of his hind paws he swung the door open, revealing a deep space with shelves on three sides, all crowded with brown-paper packages and sealed boxes.
“What is all that?” Dulcie said.
“ Frances calls them accessories,” Tansy told her. “Rugs and vases and little tables. She loves to change the house all around, move all the furniture, lay out new rugs while she sends the others to the cleaners. Three times when I was here, she rearranged the whole place, even every vase, every book. He wouldn’t help her, he left the house until she was done.”
“But how did she…,” Dulcie began, then went silent, listening to a faraway sound from the hills, to the distant yodel of coyotes.
“You won’t go home tonight,” Kit told Tansy.
The scruffy little cat shrugged. “They’re far away, and the moon’s bright.”
Joe and Dulcie and Kit looked at the little mite, all thinking the same. If ever there was coyote bait, she was it. How could this small waif expect to escape a pack of hungry predators?
“They have pups,” Tansy said. “Can’t you hear them? The parents won’t wander when the pups are learning to hunt, they stand guard, I’ve watched them. Besides,” she said, “I won’t be alone, Sage will be waiting for me.” And she smiled that cocky smirk that seemed so out of place in the shy little cat.
“He’ll be mad, he was mad when I left him there by that house where they’re digging, where all the dirt is piled. But even so, he’ll wait for me,” she said with assurance.
Kit looked at her jealously. Did Tansy know Sage better than she did, even though she and Sage had grown up together? Pulling the closet door closed behind them, she followed Joe as he impatiently headed up the stairs to prowl the four upstairs bedrooms.
The cats found nothing on that floor that seemed out of order. They were thinking this was all a wild-goose chase when Joe caught that elusive scent again, that puzzling whiff that smelled like catmint.
He’d thought he smelled it in the Chapman house, but it was so faint he couldn’t be sure. And again in the Waterman house he wasn’t sure, with the lingering smell of the old dog and the scent of Rita’s perfume. They galloped back down the stairs and, having found nothing amiss, they left the Beckers’ house, slipping out into the night through the wrought-iron grid beside the front door. Sliding the glass closed, they headed for the Longley house.
“We can never get in there,” Tansy said. “I tried enough times, I even tried the attic.”
“But the Longleys have cats,” Dulcie said.
“Three,” said Tansy. “They’re kept inside when she’s gone. When she’s home, she opens a window, or sometimes the back slider for them. Then I could get in. But I was never sure when I could get out again.”
Eleen Longley taught at the local college. She was an attractive, lively woman, slim and with long, mousy, fine-textured hair that seemed to catch in every breeze. Earl was an architect; Ryan said his work was all right if he’d stick to the engineering aspects, if he didn’t try to design anything new and interesting. When Clyde suggested that her remark was sarcastic, she said, no, that was fact, that many architects weren’t talented at both creative design and engineering, and that was too bad.
“There has to be some way in,” Kit said stubbornly.
Tansy said, “If we can get in, we’ll know right away if something’s missing, I know where the treasures are. They have drawings by famous architects and books locked up in a big glass case and a whole cabinet of little glass domes with pictures inside. Pictures of humans doing things,” she said, turning her face away with embarrassment. “She calls it porn…porn…”
“Pornography?” Dulcie said. “A schoolteacher collects pornographic paperweights? Oh, my.”
“They talk about how much they’re worth. They talk a lot about money and what th
ings are worth-when they’re not fighting. They fight a lot, and then the cats hide.”
“Come on,” Kit said, “I’ve seen a window at the back, once I watched a mockingbird pecking at the glass.” She took off around the side of the house, plunged into a bougainvillea vine, and clawed her way up between its swinging tendrils and sharp spikes. High up, she crawled out again onto a second-floor balcony that was not more than a foot wide. In the thin, shifting moonlight as clouds blew over, she was hardly visible among the balcony’s changing shadows. The others swarmed up behind her, under the decorative rail and onto the narrow ledge. Above them was a small bathroom window, maybe four feet wide but only a foot high, that made the cats smile. Joe and Dulcie and Kit had shimmied in through more than one small, high window, always feeling smug at discovering an entrance inaccessible to humans, which was innocently left unlocked.
21
THE GRAVE WITHIN the pit was finally deep enough. The earth he’d removed stood piled at one end. He climbed out, changed shoes at the edge of the pit, and, just to be safe, he put the boots and shovel against the wall where he’d found them. He’d be back soon, but what if someone came while he was gone to get the car? Moving out through the side door, he left it unlocked. Imagining that cat prowling around, he made sure it was tightly shut.
It was harder climbing back up the hill, he was worn out from digging and the climb took more out of him. The hill was darker, now, too, the moon hidden behind blowing clouds. Were those rain clouds? He didn’t like the thought of maybe a heavy rain, of water flooding down the hill into the hole he’d dug. Of water filling her grave before it rose high enough to run out through the drainpipes at either end of the pit. Earlier, he hadn’t thought of that.
Scrambling up through the woods, he tripped in the tall, tangled grass. He wondered if, trampling the grass, he was leaving a trail. But why would anyone look for a trail? Why would anyone be interested? In the morning when they entered the garage, they’d see nothing to alarm them. The pit would be just as they’d left it.
Cat Striking Back Page 14