How to Moon a Cat

by Rebecca M. Hale

  The man steered the bike, slowly but deliberately, along a sidewalk that tracked the outside perimeter of a tennis club’s high green fence. He was headed toward his old familiar haunting grounds. He felt like a pigeon, his course predetermined by an innate homing instinct.

  It had been almost a year since his departure from Jackson Square, and he still looked back longingly on that previous life. While it had been a tough decision to leave his home of over forty years, he’d felt he had no other choice.

  He had tried, at first, to hide himself in a different part of town, but he’d abandoned that strategy after only a few weeks. Despite its international stature, San Francisco was a little city, its center spanning a meager five-by-fivemile area. Both the risk of detection and the temptation to make contact had been far too great.

  And so, he had reluctantly waved good-bye to his beloved Bay Area. He’d spent the past year traveling the globe, hoping that, over time, his adversaries would move on to other intrigues, perhaps even forget about him. He’d gone south—way, way south—eventually trekking to a rustic cabin in a Patagonian fishing village near the bottom tip of South America.

  As the length of his absence neared a year, he’d started a slow migration home, gradually progressing north toward the bulge of the earth’s equator. For the last three months, he’d been secluded on a remote tropical island, browning his once pasty white skin into a rosy-cheeked tan, finishing off the last preparations for this trip to San Francisco.

  Now, at last, here he was, enjoying this fine glorious morning, the culmination of years of planning finally coming to fruition. Long before his inevitable exile, he’d begun plotting his return.

  Tucked into one of the man’s suit pockets was a deck of freshly printed business cards. He grinned to himself, thinking of how the gold lettering stood out against the dark green pieces of paper.

  “Clement Samuels,” he said softly, testing out his new alias. “Clem. Yes, Clem. I like the sound of that.”

  The bike rounded the last corner of the tennis courts and turned onto Jackson Street where the sun’s early glint revealed the serene start of a typical Friday morning. Clem scanned the row of high-end antique shops as his bike passed beneath the neatly trimmed trees that lined the sidewalk. He noted one or two establishments that had changed ownership over the course of the last year, but otherwise the scene looked almost exactly the same as the day he left it—the same, that is, until he reached the storefront of a three-story building in the middle of the block. Here, he thought, things were different.

  Clem hopped off the bike and leaned it against the nearest tree. He rubbed a kink in his lower back as he stared at the exterior of the Green Vase antiques shop.

  He’d been aware of the initial renovations the new occupant had made to the front of the building. The crumbling facade and cracked glass windows had been torn out, replaced with a wall of crisp red bricks that ran beneath a new row of windowpanes. Several of the glass panels were embedded with the image of a slender green vase.

  Stroking his chin absentmindedly, Clem surveyed the glass door that hung in the entrance. Curling wrought iron strips complemented the gold script that announced the name of the store and its current proprietor.

  A pleased smile crossed the stubbled surface of his face as he reflected on the woman now in charge of the antiques shop. A mop of dark brown hair hung down past her shoulders. The thick heavy locks often slipped forward over the plastic frames of her bifocal glasses, partially obscuring her face. A painfully shy soul in her mid-thirties who kept mostly to herself, the woman and her two cats had moved into the apartment above the store not long after his escape from Jackson Square.

  “Little accountant,” he murmured to himself as he shifted his attention to the interior of the Green Vase. “What have you been up to?”

  Clem craned his neck, trying to see into the rear of the showroom. The once dusty space was now spotlessly clean. The wooden floorboards had been scrubbed, sanded, and refinished; the interior walls gleamed with a fresh coat of paint. The previously crowded collection of Gold Rush– era antiques had been winnowed down to a select few pieces, each one shined, polished, and laid out on a display table or bookcase for easy viewing.

  Clem grunted and arched his scraggly eyebrows. The place looked almost respectable. A worried knot stitched through his abdomen. What had she done with the rest of the store’s contents? He hoped she hadn’t thrown anything away. Or worse, he thought with growing alarm, sold any important pieces.

  Feeling somewhat discomforted, Clem turned away from the window and directed his gaze toward Jackson Street. He had brought himself up to date with the current configuration of the neighborhood. That was all well and good, but it wasn’t what he’d come back for.

  He had always been more interested in this area’s past than its present. Squinting his eyes, he imagined away the street signs, the fancy cars—all the modern-day trappings of luxury and convenience that San Francisco’s current citizens took for granted. He created, instead, his own mental image of Jackson Square as it might have looked in the 1850s during the height of the California Gold Rush.

  Despite the splendid spring sunshine, the street would have been a sea of mud, the soil still saturated from the torrential downpours of the winter months. Areas of recent landfill, like the place where he stood, were particularly treacherous, laced with sinkholes that were deep enough, according to some reports, to bury a horse neck-deep.

  A weary line of recently arrived immigrants, all of them men, tromped across Clem’s vision. The group wobbled and weaved on the slick wooden clapboards that bordered the muddy road, struggling to maintain their balance, their internal equilibrium thrown off from weeks of cramped ocean travel.

  The men had met one another on the steamer they’d boarded on the west coast of Panama, a destination they’d reached after taking separate ships down from New York and crossing the jungle of the Isthmus on foot. After chugging through the Golden Gate for the approach to San Francisco, the men had disembarked several hundred yards offshore. That was as close as the large ship could maneuver to the city; a blockade of listing and half-capsized boats made it too dangerous to come closer. The captains and crews of these abandoned vessels had left behind the seafaring life for the goldfields of the Sierras.

  A rowboat ferried the new arrivals to a network of elongated piers that stretched out over the water. After a long hike across the precarious wooden walkways, the men finally found their first solid footing on the streets of Jackson Square, known during the Gold Rush–era as the Barbary Coast.

  Clem walked his imaginary characters past the entrance to the building that now housed the Green Vase. The stale scents of beer and whiskey emanated from its makeshift saloon. He watched with a chuckle as a female catcall drew the men’s attention.

  The youngest of the group blushed and quickly turned away, almost dropping the small worn satchel that contained the entirety of his earthly belongings. His fellow travelers, however, were unembarrassed to show their interest. A brutish fellow with a tobacco-stained beard stopped and leered through the doorway. His grubby hand reached into his pocket to dig out the last two coins that had survived the hazardous and expensive trip to California.

  They were a sickly, haggard bunch, from youth to scoundrel. Their grimy faces were a pallid jaundiced yellow, the outward symptom of the dysentery and malaria they had picked up during their voyage. That first night in San Francisco, they would search the sprawling, ramshackle city for a place to sleep or a shelter to crawl under, but they would find no vacancies. In this fast-growing boomtown, even the most basic commodities were in short supply.

  But no amount of hardship could dampen the enthusiasm of these newly minted Californians. No temporary inconvenience could cool their fever. Each one felt certain that tomorrow, the next day, or surely the coming week would bring an upswing in fortune. Soon, their empty, threadbare pockets would be packed with nuggets of gold. They could survive any torture if it meant r
eaching that goal.

  Clem strummed the unbuttoned front of his linen suit jacket and gummed his dentures thoughtfully. With a quick blink of his gray eyelashes, he dialed back the timeline of his vision, now picturing the area in the years before the madness of 1849.

  The saloon and the ground beneath it fell away as the bricks and mortar that lined the street faded into a marshy wetland. The mounds of sand and rubble that made up the Gold Rush–era landfill disappeared, and the shoreline retreated a hundred or so yards into the distance.

  In his mind, Clem walked down the swampy, uninhabited beach. The land that would later support some of the tallest office buildings in San Francisco’s financial district was reduced to a blustery landscape of sand dunes, short scrubby trees, and tall whipping grasses. A quiet calm, unattainable in modern times, fell in around him as he hiked up a slight grade into the scruffy little village that was still known by its Mexican Territory moniker of Yerba Buena.

  This was the Wild West in its infancy. The Mexican government, putative landlord to the scattered settlement, exerted little influence or control over the area’s day-today activities. The Mexican grip on the broad expanse of its California Territory was tenuous at best, near-nonexistent on this northern frontier.

  The residents of this remote outpost represented numerous nationalities, but American settlers were gradually becoming the majority. The inhabitants were, by most accounts, escapists—men with shady pasts who had slipped away to California’s mythical, unknown lands to lose themselves in its lawless society and sparsely populated wilderness. In this dusty sand-blown inlet, it was every man for himself.

  Clem strode up to a scattering of low-slung adobes that formed the middle of the settlement; then he turned in a circle as he surveyed the roughly constructed wooden buildings. One stood out among the rest, the only two-story structure in the group. His mental vision honed in on the property, sweeping around to the lavish garden that curved behind it.

  This was the home of the tiny town’s most prominent businessman, a shipping magnate who had moved to Yerba Buena from New Orleans. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man with a dusky complexion and thick muttonchop sideburns who had recently received the honorary appointment of American vice-consul. With the help of his beautiful Russian maid, he was the designated host for the area’s most distinguished visitors: disgruntled Mexican military officials, steely-eyed ship captains who’d dropped anchor in the bay’s protective cove, and the occasional renegade explorer determined to stir up the local American settlers into a rebellion.

  It was this historical figure—the American vice-consul with the elaborate muttonchop sideburns—that Clem had been researching just prior to his abrupt departure from Jackson Square almost a year ago. That research had given him valuable insights into the local intrigues and political motivations of pre–Gold Rush Yerba Buena and had led to a breakthrough in his quest to unearth several hidden treasures from that time frame. The name of the man whose historical background had proven so useful was William Leidesdorff.

  Clem turned back once more to face the Green Vase, letting the imagined scenes of Jackson Square’s past evaporate into the day’s brilliant sunlight. As he peered in through the glass windows, he needed no creative assistance to picture the building’s modern-day interior. He knew its layout like the back of his hand.

  A narrow staircase in a darkened corner at the far end of the showroom led to an apartment that occupied the second and third floors. The wooden steps were worn slick from the tread of hundreds of years’ worth of feet. A low-hanging beam over the sixth step, he cautioned himself with a wry grin, would nick your forehead if you forgot to duck beneath it.

  The top of the stairs opened into a kitchen, an odd-shaped, heavily wallpapered room with a homey wooden table, an uneven tile floor, and a temperamental dishwasher that had rarely been used in the year since his departure.

  Any minute now, Clem thought with anticipation, the woman with the bifocal glasses and the long brown hair would walk into this room. Today, she would discover something she’d been diligently searching for over the last several months. If Clem’s little associate had done his part, Oscar’s niece was about to discover a clue to one of her uncle’s hidden treasures.

  Clem reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a large white mustache with bristly unkempt whiskers that matched the scruffy hair of his eyebrows. After thumbing off a protective strip from a square of adhesive backing, he stretched out the corners of his mouth to flatten the surface beneath his nose. His eyes crossed as he centered the hairpiece above his upper lip and affixed it to his skin. Checking his reflection in the storefront glass, he scrunched up his face to confirm that the mustache was securely attached.

  “Perfect,” he said with satisfaction.

  His costume complete, Clem climbed back onto his bike and pedaled off down the street. He had a few more stops to make in the city before leaving for the next leg of his journey.

  Chapter 2

  BEHIND THE WALL

  TWO WHITE CATS with orange-tipped ears and tails sat at the edge of the kitchen in the second floor apartment above the Green Vase showroom, watching as I bent down near the back wall to study what remained of the bottom corner’s frayed wallpaper.

  Sometime during the night, a creature with sharp scraping claws—that is, Rupert the cat—had ripped open a triangular hole, about six inches across at its base, from the lower section of wallpaper. A telltale clump of fluffy white hair had been left on the floor near the opening.

  “All right,” I said briskly, tapping the wall as I stood up. With a quick nod to my cat audience, I turned toward the kitchen table and the home improvement book that lay open on its surface. “Let’s go through this one more time.”

  My eyes skimmed over the paragraphs describing wallpaper removal.

  “Gloves?” I asked in a stern professional voice.

  I stretched my arms out in front of my chest and tugged, one at a time, at the cuffs of the thick rubber gloves encasing my hands.

  “Check,” I confirmed, glancing at the cats as I released the right cuff. The elastic rubber snapped back into place with a loud smacking pop.

  “Coveralls?” I ticked off the list, lightly stamping my feet to flap the loose vinyl fabric of the orange jumpsuit that covered my T-shirt and blue jeans.

  “Check.”

  “Goggles?” I asked, thumping the rubber thumb of my glove against the rim of the protective gear strapped around my head. It had been a tight fit, but I had managed to stretch the goggles over the plastic frames of my bifocal eyeglasses. An uncomfortable pressure was beginning to pinch at my ears. This project, I hoped, wasn’t going to take very long to complete.

  “Check.”

  “Face mask?” I slid the cup of a white cotton mask down over my nose and mouth and gave out a much more muffled “Check.”

  I turned to model my home improvement costume to my feline observers.

  Isabella’s sharp pixielike face carefully scrutinized my altered appearance. She raised her right paw in the air and made a series of intricate clicking noises with her mouth as if she were issuing instructions. There were few aspects of my life, in Isabella’s opinion, that couldn’t be improved by her modifications.

  A slender cat with a proud, angular head and a silky white coat, Isabella had the color point pattern typical of a Siamese. But instead of brown or gray, the darker hair on her ears and tail was a peachy orange shade, probably inherited from a tabby ancestor. The orange and white fur of her coat paired with ice-blue eyes to make a stunning combination, a fact of which she was well aware.

  Isabella carried herself with an elegant, regal poise, the self-appointed queen of all she surveyed. She was, for the most part, a benevolent ruler, although her patience was frequently tested by her lowly subjects: Rupert, who usually ignored her commands, and me, who rarely understood them.

  After a long string of Isabella chatter and paw-waving, I nodded a pretended acknowledgment of her cat com
mentary and shifted my attention to her brother.

  Even if he didn’t match her in physique, Rupert’s chunky fluff of feathery hair matched his sister’s in coloring. He had inherited the tabby forebear’s more rounded figure, longhaired coat, and voracious appetite. He was content to play the sloppy joker, lolling about for hours on end in a sleepy, punch-drunk haze. Most days, the hunger pangs of an empty stomach were all that could wake Rupert from the pleasure of his daydreams.

  Every so often, however, a short burst of insuppressible energy would sweep over him, and he would set off on a scrambling, high-speed sprint across the slick wooden floors of the Green Vase showroom, a furry white hazard to any antique—or human—that might cross his wild slinging path.

  It was during these spontaneous moments of brief but frenetic activity that Rupert performed his most notable acts of destruction. His middle-of-the-night renovation to the kitchen wall was just the latest example of his handiwork.

  Rupert had skittishly avoided the area all morning, as if he might implicate himself by proximity to the scene of his crime. He sat on the floor next to his sister, hunched forward as he nervously eyed my orange vinyl coveralls and goggled headgear.

  “It’s okay,” I said shaking my head in puzzlement at this unusual display of contrition. Rupert had never been known to apologize for the messes he created. “You’re not in trouble.” I cleared my throat to emphasize the clarification. “This time.”

  I returned to the home improvement book to scan through the list once more.

  “Check. Check. Check,” I repeated to myself as I made another adjustment to my face mask and goggles. These last two items weren’t actually cited in the how-to manual as required equipment, but given my late Uncle Oscar’s eccentricities, I wasn’t taking any chances. Who knew what might be lurking in the crawl spaces behind these walls? I slapped my gloved hands together optimistically—I knew what I was hoping to find.