How to Moon a Cat

by Rebecca M. Hale

  Glancing through the open doorway, I saw that the space had been furnished to simulate the barracks during its earlier operational years, when soldiers populated the living quarters. Wooden-framed beds lined the walls on either side of the room. A chest lay neatly at the foot of each one, and samples of each sleeper’s clothing hung on designated pegs behind the headboards. Stiff wool blankets were mounded on top of each bed frame, exposing enough of the space beneath to reveal a mattress-less netting of corded wires.

  With a flourish, General Vallejo grandly motioned us down the breezeway toward a second room, on the right side of the hall, that had been set up as a more traditional museum display. Poster dividers crisscrossed the room to separate numerous exhibits.

  I felt only the slightest tingle of apprehension as he smoothly waved his hands at the doorway and invited us inside. “After you.”

  Chapter 44

  THE BEAR FLAG REVOLT

  VALLEJO’S ROUND FIGURE strolled across the dusty concrete floor, swishing past displays of an oxen yoke, a Western saddle, and a trio of three-foot-tall dolls dressed as celebrating Bear Flaggers.

  “I think you will find our most een-teresting eggs-zhibit at the back of the room,” he said suggestively.

  The building’s rock walls absorbed the sounds from the street, leaving the interior with the ambient noise of the water rushing through the gutters that ran along the rim of the roof.

  The room had a damp, clammy feeling; it was only duskily lit. The wooden shutters that framed each of the wide exterior windows were bolted shut, blocking any natural light. It had been over a hundred and fifty years since this building was last occupied by Mexican soldiers, but the Sonoma Barracks still gave the appearance—from the inside, at least—of a formidable bunker.

  I pushed the stroller after the General, leaning forward over the handlebar as I listened to his in-character commentary.

  “It’s a drra-matic story, that of the Bearr Flag Rrevolt,” he said, stroking his bushy side-whiskers. “One that I unfor-tu-netly experienced firsthand.” He cleared his throat and straightened his wide lapel.

  “You can eee-ma-gene my surprise. The morning of June 14, 1846, I was lying in bed, pace-fully watching the sun rise, when I heard someone kicking down my frront door.” He nodded his head toward the center breezeway. “My bedrroom was just around the corner there.”

  Vallejo shook his head, as if remembering. “On my frront stoop, I found a group of buck-skeen band-deets, armed to the teeth and rreeking of spirits. They said they were here to declarre Sonoma an independent rrepublic. Let me assure you, it was a quite un-see-vilized way to start the day.”

  The General stroked his side-whiskers indignantly before continuing.

  “Now, I was nut opposed to switching my allegiances,” he said, touching his chest to emphasize his sincerity. “Trruth be known, I had a fut in each camp.” He spread his legs wide and tapped each booted toe against the concrete.

  “I had dis-kussed the future of Califorrnia at length with Tomas Larrkin, the American Consul in Monterey, and William Leidesdorrff, his associate in Yerba Buena. I thought we were all of a similar mind on the matter. There would be no stopping the Americans’ Westward ex-panshon . Better, then, to join them and profit from it.” He winked at me conspiratorially. “Leidesdorrff was particularly enthusiastic about the idea.”

  There he was again—William Leidesdorff. The man I associated with the tulip-printed wallpaper that had started this whole treasure hunt kept sneaking into Bear Flag conversations. My brow furrowed as Vallejo continued.

  “But no one had said any-ting about this rrough lot showing up on my doorstep,” Vallejo said, shrugging his shoulders in confusion. “The Sonoma garrison had been unmanned for say-ver-al years, leaving my wife and family unprotected.”

  He held his hands up, as if surrendering. “There was nothing I could do. I invited the leaders—or at least the most rray-son-able looking of the crew—into my hacienda for a glass of brrandy. I hoped that would calm them down a bit.” He smiled ruefully. “We went through say-ver-al bottles of brrandy that day.”

  The General rubbed his temple, as if remembering the voluminous alcohol consumption.

  “As the afternoon wore on, we began to rreach the end of my brrandy supply. I was so shure the Americanos were behind all this. I kept expecting one of my al-lies to arrive to help fas-cili-tate my situation. So, you can see, I was ray-leeved when the Osos finally told me they were under orders to take me to Cap-i-tan Frray-mont.”

  Vallejo leaned back with an expression of exaggerated relief. “Herre, I thought, is the American presence I had been wait-ing for. Grraciously, I permitted myself to be taken pri-son-ner. I was nut concerned; I considered it a mere formality. It was nut until they brrought me to Sutter’s Fort that I rray-al-lized what that scoundrel Frray-mont was up to.”

  Vallejo shook his head back and forth. Then he blew out a gust of frustrated air, fluttering his lips as if he’d tasted something unpleasant.

  “He was nut an honorrable man, in my opinion—that so called Path-finderr. He was rruthless and blood-thirrsty. I suppose I should consider myself lucky that I only had to withstand the in-dig-nity of being locked up for six weeks before Larrkin could arrange my freedom. Others who crossed Frray-mont’s path fared a farr worse fate.”

  He sighed sadly. “When I finally rray-turned to my home in Sonoma, I was a brroken man, my body sick and diseased. All of my cattle and horses had been stolen, my crops destroyed.”

  Vallejo bridled indignantly. His side-whiskers puffed out as his cheeks reddened. “Frray-mont later tried to deny that he had been the one puppet-teer-ing the Osos, but I had no dowt who was rray-sponsible.”

  I watched, impressed by how seriously Clem was taking his role as General Vallejo. He seemed to be channeling inner emotions—as if he were projecting a personal modern-day grudge onto the egotistical explorer’s historical figure.

  He tugged once more at the wide lapels of his jacket, puckered up his lips, and spat at the floor. “Frray-mont,” he said bitterly. “That is what I think of him.”

  Chapter 45

  A FLOWERY FABRIC

  HAROLD WOMBLER GIMPED through the plaza’s wet grass as the woman with the long brown hair left the Bear Flag Memorial, crossed the intersection, and entered the breezeway of the Sonoma Barracks.

  He paused for a moment, considering. Then he backtracked about a hundred yards into the park, keeping his cover by lurching from tree to tree, until, cautiously, he approached the street. Peering up and down the damp avenue, he hobbled across to the opposite curb. After a quick glance at the front entrance of the breezeway, he circled around to the back side of the building.

  Past the rubbled remains of Vallejo’s hacienda, Harold turned right into an overgrown alley. Less than a hundred feet down the passage, he hefted himself over a rickety rock wall and dropped into a muddy courtyard. Several inches of water had pooled in the center of the rectangular half-acre, forming a barrier of thick gooey muck between his location and the back entrance to the barracks’ breezeway.

  Harold grimaced as rain ran across the green brim of his baseball cap and dripped down the front of his face. After studying the growing pond in the middle of the courtyard, he started off around the perimeter, his wornout construction boots sliding across the slick surface.

  He had to slosh through a stream of water gushing from one of the gutter’s downspouts, but he eventually reached the barracks’ back wall. As he approached the breezeway entrance, cold mud began to ooze through the holes in his boots. The accumulating grit quickly packed in around his toes. Grumbling irritably, he nudged his nose around the corner.

  The breezeway was empty, but Harold could hear a man’s voice coming from one of the interior rooms. His face scrunched up in disgust as he listened to the General’s exaggerated accent. That’s horrendous, he thought, rolling his eyes. Vallejo wasn’t French.

  Harold’s muddy construction boots tiptoed across the concrete
floor of the breezeway until he reached the exhibit room’s open doorway. Holding his breath, he leaned around the opening to get a better visual of the Vallejo impersonator. Then he backed his way out to the courtyard.

  Taking cover beneath the building’s eaves, he fished through his pockets until he found a small cell phone. He gave the device a look of intense loathing before he flipped it open and began fumbling with its controls.

  “How’m I s’pposed to . . . ” he muttered under his breath. After several failed attempts during which time he nearly slammed the phone against the wall of the barracks, he finally managed to place his call.

  A female voice answered on the other end.

  “I don’t like the look of this,” he grumbled tersely. “She’s inside the Sonoma Barracks with a rogue Vallejo.”

  The voice twittered worriedly out of the receiver.

  “I can’t go in there,” he snapped back. “She’d pick me out immediately.”

  He held the phone up against his right ear, his already unhappy expression growing more and more affronted as he listened to the woman’s instructions.

  Harold made several uninterpretable sounds of disbelief before he managed to spit out a coherent sentence.

  “You want me to do what?”

  TEN MINUTES LATER, Harold propped himself against the side of his pickup, panting despite the cool rain trickling down his neck. His knees ached from the sprint across the park, but he had no time to waste. Sure enough, in the bottom right-hand side of the metal locker in the bed of the truck, he found a brown paper bag, just as Dilla had described.

  His grim expression soured further as he lifted the bag out and peeked at the garment folded neatly inside.

  “Tulips,” he groaned. “Perfect.”

  Chapter 46

  THE REPLICA

  I STOOD WATCHING the Clemlike Vallejo as he finished his Frémont rant, waiting to see what else he had to say about the Bear Flag Revolt. But as his face lifted from where he’d spat on the floor, his gaze shifted to the front of the room, and his lips curved downward into a strangely discordant frown.

  “I am afraid,” he said in a flat tone, suddenly dropping his fake Spanish accent,”that you will have to excuse me. An old acquaintance of mine has just arrived.”

  I watched as the General strolled toward the front of the room, where a dumpy woman in a flower-print dress stood examining the saddle display. Her back was partially turned to me, and a headscarf of matching flowered material obscured the small portion of her face that I might otherwise have been able to see.

  With a shrug, I focused my attention on the display the General had alluded to at the beginning of his speech. Here on the back wall of the Sonoma Barracks, mounted on a board inside an airtight Plexiglas case, was a replica of the original Bear Flag.

  Made for the fifty-year commemoration of the revolt, it was this 1896 replica flag whose picture I had seen in my guidebooks and in the exhibit at Sutter’s Fort.

  I crouched down to read the handwriting on the flag’s bottom left-hand corner. The ink had bled through the fabric, blurring some of the letters, but after several minutes of close examination, I was able to make out the signatures of the two surviving Bear Flaggers who had assembled the flag, Ben Dewell and Henry Reason.

  The flag retained the made-in-the-moment improvisation of the original. The star and bear appeared to have been either glued or stamped onto the fabric. Not a great rendition of a bear, I thought to myself, but certainly not something that would have been confused with a stoat. The creature stood on all four of its feet, not upright, as the original bear emblem had been described.

  I pulled out my notebook from the pocket in the back side of the stroller and flipped it to my attempted sketch of the original flag, pondering. For some reason, Dewell and Reason had changed the positioning of the bear figure in this replacement flag. Was it an oversight or done intentionally? Perhaps they simply preferred the four-feet-onthe-ground stance.

  More importantly, I wondered as I reflected on the notation my uncle had left in the margin by the description of the original flag, why had the change been significant to Oscar?

  I reached beneath the stroller and pulled out the DeVoto book, which I had stashed into a lower zippered compartment beneath the carriage. As I flipped through the thick book to the section on the Bear Flag, a yellowed piece of paper tucked into the pages fell out and dropped to the floor.

  The paper unfolded as it floated through the air, revealing a sheet of typewritten stationery. I reached down to pick it up, immediately focusing on the bold monogram next to the professionally printed header. This appeared to be official correspondence from the now-defunct Jackson Square Board, the organization which had been responsible for the historical preservation of the Jackson Square neighborhood.

  The paper suddenly felt toxic in my hands. My eyes jumped to the signature line at the bottom, and I almost dropped the sheet as I read the identity of the author. The letter was written by Gordon Bosco, a onetime alter ego of Frank Napis, in response to a query he’d apparently received from my Uncle Oscar.

  Gulping nervously, I focused in on the main text. Water stains blurred much of the first paragraph, but from the portion of writing that remained legible, Napis appeared to be responding to Oscar’s request for a valuation estimate on the original Bear Flag raised by the Osos in 1846. Presumably, Oscar had targeted the Board’s President as someone with expertise in antiquities from the era.

  I looked up from the letter, my thoughts racing as I stared at the Plexiglas surface of the display case holding the replica flag. If the original Bear Flag had been destroyed in San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake, as DeVoto and every other source I’d read had reported, why had Oscar sought an estimate of its current worth?

  Napis had raised this same issue in his response. After a few sarcastic remarks about the difficulties of assessing the value of an item that did not exist, he had provided a potential dollar range based on recent sales of items of similar age and historic significance.

  The fingers of my free hand wrapped tightly around the handle to the stroller as I read the eye-catching amount.

  ISABELLA POINTED HER nose into the air, trying to get a better angle on the figure in the flowered dress on the opposite side of the room. He was engaged in a glowering standoff with the side-whiskered man in the wide-lapelled coat. Her blue eyes scanned down past the hem of the lumpy flowered dress to the bony knees, hairy shins, and mud-splattered construction boots.

  Hmm, she thought curiously as the man in the flowered dress stiffly followed General Vallejo out into the breezeway.

  I wonder what happened to Harold’s overalls.

  Chapter 47

  THE LIFE COACH

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, the cats and I exited the barracks. I hadn’t located a toy bear pointing to the next stop on the hunt, but now, at least, I had a better hint of what kind of hidden treasure Oscar might have left for me to find. Somehow, I suspected, the original Bear Flag had escaped its widely reported destruction in the 1906 earthquake.

  I began to retrace my steps across the plaza’s park to the van. The rain had finally abated, and the slightest hint of blue was beginning to creep into the sky—but my head was still clouded with thoughts of the Bear Flag trail.

  Isabella was apparently pondering her own theories. A light singsong of feline commentary floated up from the carrier compartment of the stroller. I rolled up the rain cover so I could look down through the mesh screen. Rupert was stretched out across the blankets in a deep snoring snooze, but Isabella sat alertly upright, her head tilted slightly to the left, her expression conferring the impression of focused deliberation.

  “You let me know when you’ve got it figured out,” I said with laugh.

  As we neared the opposite side of the park, Isabella’s musing chatter sharpened into an instruction-sending chirp. She leaned forward in the stroller, her eyes honing in on the restaurant across the street from the parked van.

 
I felt my forehead crinkle as I followed her gaze. Monty stood next to a table littered with a pile of used plates, silverware, and glasses. He stepped out into the aisle, turning toward us. With a brisk, efficient motion, he brushed his hands over the front of his suit and smoothed out the dark fabric. Then he leaned forward to shake hands with the man who had been seated across the table.

  Monty’s metal cufflink flickered in the afternoon’s growing sunlight as his slender hand met the stubby-fingered grip of his lunch companion—a man in a wrinkled linen suit and tattered black bow tie with a bristly white mustache.

  My mouth fell open as I recognized Clem’s Mark Twain costume, and I whipped around toward the barracks. If Clem had been sitting at lunch with Monty for the past hour, who had been playing the role of General Vallejo?

  The shadowed breezeway past the dripping eaves was vacant. The General, I felt certain, was long gone.

  I pursed my lips for a long moment, a feeling of terror amplifying along my spine. I had one guess who had been entertaining me in the exhibit room. For the second time in as many days, I had the sudden intuition that I had come into contact with Frank Napis—and lived to tell about it.

  As I struggled to calm my racing pulse, I tried to reassure myself that this was a good sign, an indication that I was on the track of Oscar’s treasure.

  There had to be something more for me to uncover, I thought, feeling a fresh wave of optimism. It was time to head back to the Green Vase.

  Chapter 48

  SNEAK ATTACK

  A BRIGHT SUN hit the finish line’s wet pavement outside Spigot and Carlin’s Santa Rosa broadcast booth. Crowds of spectators were beginning to line the race route to watch the riders come in. Despite the day’s soggy start, it looked like the fans would be treated to a thrilling finale for the race’s second stage.