Cat Deck the Halls (12 page)

Well, hell,
Clyde thought. Living with Joe Grey, he should know that kind of holiday was not to be.

But then, when he glanced at the kit, expecting to see the wild flame of challenge that crime always generated blazing in her yellow eyes, he saw, instead, only a puzzled frown. Kit's full and suspicious attention was keenly on Lucinda. And when Clyde looked into the kitchen where Lucinda was talking with the dispatcher at Molena Point PD, it was Lucinda's eyes that burned with challenge—Lucinda Greenlaw looked as excited, and as sly and secretive, as the tortoiseshell kit ever had.

J
OE
G
REY DIDN'T
learn about the Greenlaws' intruder until Clyde got home late that night. When Clyde's car pulled in, the tomcat was asleep in his tower, among the cushions, lying on his back with his four paws in the air. The reflection of moving car lights flashing across the tower's conical ceiling woke him. He blinked and flipped over among the pillows, his nose to the glass, looking down to the drive to make sure that it was really Clyde pulling in.

Joe's private, cat-size tower, rising four feet above the roof of the second floor, with its unique hexagonal shape and operable, full-length windows, was a masterpiece of luxury and, Dulcie said, ostentation. Joe disagreed about that—the tower was, in his mind, simply a utilitarian source of comfort, unimpeded view, weather control, and fast and easy access to the rooftops. To hell with ostentation.

As he listened to the purr of Clyde's antique roadster, wild barking erupted from the back patio, where Ryan's big Weimaraner had spent the evening. Joe rose and stretched,
then lay down again, listening as Clyde and Ryan let Rock in the house, laughing and greeting him. He listened to kitchen noises as they made coffee and fixed a snack, and soon the smell of coffee rose up to him. Outside his tower, the night wind increased, fitfully shaking the glass and hustling the oaks and pines against the shingles, and smelling sharply of rain. He didn't head downstairs—as lonely as he felt at that moment and as fond as he was of Ryan, he could not talk in front of her. If he went down, as out of sorts as he was, the enforced silence would leave him even more irritable.

He'd gone to sleep thinking about the little frightened child, so alone and terrified at Christmastime. He'd chided himself for growing sentimental, but he'd waked hurting for her, and badly needing company. Now, irritated by his own shaky and sentimental mood, he wondered if he was sickening for something.

He listened to the buzz of conversation from below, waiting and dozing until he heard Ryan's truck pull away and he could go on down and talk freely. Could dump some of his misery on Clyde.

Slipping quickly through his cat door onto the rafter above Clyde's desk, he dropped down onto a mess of paperwork, most likely orders for engine parts, and then to the floor. He was crouched to race downstairs when he heard Clyde slamming things into the refrigerator and rattling ice: quick, angry noises that clearly telegraphed a fight, or at best a lovers' quarrel.
Oh, hell. Not a fight with Ryan, not at Christmas!
The two seldom argued, even mildly, though they unmercifully teased each other. Trotting reluctantly down the stairs, knowing that Clyde might need a sympa
thetic friend, too, he pushed in through the kitchen door, leaped to the table, and silently watched his housemate irritably mixing a bourbon and water.

Clyde turned, his scowl deep, his dark eyes worried. “What the hell do you want?”

“Milk and gingerbread?” Joe asked meekly.

“I suppose you want it warmed!”

“Yes, please.” Joe studied his housemate's dark scowl as Clyde poured a bowl of milk, broke a thick slice of gingerbread into it, and put the bowl in the microwave. In a moment Clyde set the warm bowl, and his own drink, on the table. The tomcat looked sternly at him. “You and Ryan had a fight?”

“We didn't fight. We were having a discussion. We had a very nice evening. I don't need you to spoil it.”

“Then why all the slamming around? Why the scowl?” Joe's yellow eyes burned at Clyde. “What happened up at the Greenlaws'?”

Clyde glared, and didn't answer.

“What?” Joe said.

“Just for tonight, Joe, could you just eat and come to bed, like a normal, ordinary house cat?”

“What? What happened, up there?”

Wind buffeted the kitchen windows, then eased off. From the living room the fresh pine scent of the Christmas tree drifted through the house, mingling with the smell of the gingerbread that Clyde had made as part of an early dinner before he and Ryan headed for the ballet.

Ordinarily, Clyde would have taken Ryan out to dinner, but neither one had been in the mood for the incredibly crowded restaurants on a theater night. Instead, he'd fixed
a simple supper that they'd eaten in the living room before the fire, enjoying the Christmas tree that they'd decorated together.
I am,
Clyde thought, amused,
getting to be a regular homebody.

This Christmas, in fact, he found himself entertaining thoughts of marriage; the theme played so repeatedly that he was glad the gray tomcat couldn't read his mind. Joe couldn't keep one damned opinion to himself, he'd have way too much to say on the matter.

“So, what happened?” Joe said, patiently licking milk from his whiskers.

Clyde sighed. He really had no choice. The damned cat would just keep on pushing, as nosy as a case-hardened cop. No one who'd ever lived with Joe Grey, when the tomcat felt left out of the loop, would deliberately withhold information and incur his verbal abuse, as sharp as his threatening claws.

Refreshing his drink, then settling again at the kitchen table, reluctantly Clyde filled Joe in on the Greenlaws' female intruder, the backpack and camera, and the two envelopes of pictures. He'd barely finished when Joe's ears twitched toward the living room, and he crouched ready to spring away through his cat door. Clyde rose fast, shut the kitchen door, and stood in front of it. Like a flash Joe leaped for the big doggy door that led out to the back patio, not looking carefully in his haste.

He hit the locked plywood cover, bouncing back, as off balance as a flailing cartoon cat.

Clyde restrained a belly laugh. He had set the cover in place after Ryan and Rock left. He had, in fact, locked the dog door every night since old Rube died, since the black
Lab was no longer sleeping right there, near the two-foot-high opening, to ward off potential burglars. Even Clyde himself, in an emergency, could squeeze through that dog door. Though it was unlikely an intruder would take the trouble to breach their patio walls, in these days of weird crimes, who knew what a thief might do.

With Joe trapped unceremoniously in the kitchen, Clyde picked him up. Joe growled and bared his teeth. Clyde set him down on the table again, and held him by the nape of his neck in a way that enraged the tomcat.

“Just listen, Joe. Just listen for one minute. Then, if you insist on heading for the Greenlaws', okay.”

Joe glanced toward the closed kitchen door. Clyde squeezed the fold of skin more firmly. “Harper's up there. Lucinda was calling him when we left. By this time, he's going through the apartment, maybe with Dallas, maybe the two of them already fingerprinting and taking photographs. Don't you think it would seem strange if you came waltzing in, quite by accident, in the middle of the night? How many times in the past have you appeared precipitously at a crime scene and made Max Harper wonder? How many times has Dallas Garza looked at you strangely? How many times have those guys watched you so closely you began to squirm?”

“Don't squeeze so hard. That hurts!”

“How many times, before even those hard-nosed cops are
forced
to guess the truth?” Clyde leaned down, his face inches from Joe's face. “Max Harper isn't stupid. Dallas Garza isn't stupid. Neither would
want
to believe in talking cats. But you keep pushing it, Joe, and they may no longer be able to avoid the truth.”

Joe sighed.

“Do you really want to hasten the arrival of that cataclysmic day?”

Joe just looked at him.

“You don't think Harper gets uneasy, with you three cats showing up every time they're working a case? You don't think he wonders about all the times evidence has appeared ‘mysteriously' at the back door of the station? You don't think he gets goose bumps every time an anonymous snitch calls in a new tip—and that tip brings in the goods? You don't think that makes a cop edgy?”

Clyde let go of his neck and propped a chair against the kitchen door. “Have you thought about would happen if Max Harper ever takes the time to really think about this! To put aside all his more immediate concerns, put aside his natural skepticism, and really examine this phenomenon?”

“Of course I've thought about it. How could I not think about it? Don't be such a nag!” Joe had thought about the matter more than he wanted to admit—and about the possible repercussions.

From a purely selfish aspect, if he and Dulcie and Kit blew their cover with the law, life would change dramatically for them. But their human families would suffer far more. Clyde, Wilma, and the Greenlaws—and Charlie Harper, the chief's own wife—would be the ones in the hot seat. Their silence would render them far more guilty, in Max's eyes, than the cats themselves.

There was no way, if Max ever did suspect the truth, that Charlie could convince him of her own ignorance. Not when, in her forthcoming book, both her drawings and her story revealed such a keen knowledge of feline nature that
Max marveled at her perception, at her amazing intimacy with feline secrets. Max was already impressed to the point where he sometimes looked at Charlie in the same way that he studied the cats, puzzled and just a bit uncomfortable.

The bottom line was, instead of heading for the Greenlaws' and making Harper wonder, Joe padded docilely up the stairs beside Clyde and crawled into bed—making sure to hog both pillows. Drifting off, he thought he'd catch just a few winks and then, in the small hours after Harper had left the Greenlaws', he'd slip on up there and get the scoop from Kit.

Maybe they'd toss the downstairs rooms, too, to see what the law might have missed. Then they'd go get Dulcie, and hit the station—innocent, hungry, freeloading little cats. Get a look at Harper's report and at the photos. And the tomcat fell asleep wondering about those pictures of the children.

But when he was deep under, his dreams of the orphan children and the break-ins at the school and at the Greenlaws', and of the body under the Christmas tree and that little girl huddled in the pump house all tangled together in confusion badly frightening him.

He woke worn-out, hissing and angry. He felt better only when, trotting downstairs to the kitchen, he found Clyde in a cheerful mood again, an omelet already waiting for him on his side of the breakfast table and the morning paper opened neatly beside it. He did not, tucking in to his breakfast, question the change in Clyde's demeanor, from grouchy to sunny. Clyde seemed almost as if he'd settled some personal quandary, made some decision. But maybe it was only that he had finally decided, at the last minute, what to get Ryan for Christmas.

W
HILE
J
OE
G
REY
twitched through fitful dreams of threatened children and secret photographs and jimmied windows, the tortoiseshell kit took the investigation into her own paws. She woke several hours after Max Harper left her house. The sky outside the bedroom window was black. The lighted dial of the bedside clock said 5
A.M
. The cold winter wind huffed at the windows, sending a chill over the top of the blankets. Lying tucked warmly between Pedric and Lucinda, she woke so filled with questions that she couldn't help but wriggle and scratch at nonexistent fleas, was so fitful that after a few minutes Pedric turned over, irritably glaring at her, stared at the bedside clock, and glared again at Kit.

Ashamed of waking him, Kit dropped off the bed and raced away through the house to the dining room. Leaping to the window and out her cat door, and across the oak branch to her tree house, she looked down to the rental house—not a sign of Christmas cheer down there, no bright tree or colored lights, though the other neighbors' Christmas
lights, even at this hour, were cheerily burning. No smells of Christmas from that rental, just the smell of mud and rotting leaves surrounding the old neglected dwelling, sad and depressing and somehow coldly foreboding.

But someone was awake down there, already stirring. A light was on in the kitchen and she could see movement behind the shade.

Twice last week she'd seen the woman leave very early. Now, backing down the thick oak trunk, dislodging bits of bark with her claws, she hit the ground running. It crossed her mind that she might be foolish to prowl there alone and try to get inside, among strangers, that she really should wait for Joe and Dulcie, for a little backup, an additional arsenal of tooth and claw.

But Kit didn't often heed the wiser choice, it wasn't her nature to wait for the safer moment. Right now she felt far too impatient. Belting down the hill through the oak woods, she paused in their leafy shadows, her paws sinking deep in masses of wet leaves, looking up at the old, dusty windows.

They were all closed and covered with cheap brown window shades hanging slightly askew. As she circled, looking up at the flaking tan walls and studying each window, her paws were soon soaking. If there had ever been a lawn, generations of leaves had long since eaten it away. All she needed was one window left open, and she could be up and through in an instant.

She didn't know, at this point, who was on the right side of the law, these three strangers or the woman who had spied on them. Or maybe they were all on the wrong side. Crooks against crooks?

She ignored the fact that there had as yet been no crime
committed by these three, that the only criminal act was that of the woman breaking into Kit's own home. She ignored the possibility that the woman's spying might be the result of a domestic crisis, perhaps a cheating husband, a situation in which the Molena Point police wouldn't have the slightest interest unless it turned violent. At that moment, the tortoiseshell kit wanted only to know why that woman had been spying, to know what she found so compelling.

There was no garden walk leading around the house, just the deep layer of wet oak leaves beneath the dripping trees. Soon not only her paws were soaked, but her legs and belly and tail, her long, fluffy fur sodden with icy water. Circling the house, she could see no windows open. The light had gone off in the kitchen; now that room, too, was dark. Three times she crouched to leap up to a first-floor windowsill, hoping to force an ancient lock, but each time, a frightened chill made her drop down again and sent her hurrying on around, not really knowing what had scared her.

She could hear no movement within, but at the back of the house, when she paused beneath the higher windows of an upstairs bedroom, she could hear the soft, slow breathing of someone asleep; and at the next bedroom window she heard the same. Trotting around the far side and up onto the driveway, she left dark, wet paw prints on the pale concrete. The car that stood in the drive was cold and dripping with dew, its tires and wheels cold, the air around the hood reflecting back to her only the night's chill. She wondered why they didn't use the garage.

How could it be full? It was a double garage, and she hadn't noticed another car down here; and when they moved in she hadn't seen very many boxes. That day, as the
movers unloaded, as she and Lucinda watched through the dining-room window, Pedric had teased them about being nosy, and he had disdained to spy on the new neighbors—but later they saw him secretly looking, and they'd grinned at each other.

The garage protruded out beyond the skinny front porch. Padding along beside it, Kit approached the three concrete steps leading up to the front door. Above her in the garage wall were three high little windows, so small they'd be a tight squeeze for a human. Might one of those have been left unlocked? But when she reared up to look closer, they appeared to be covered from the inside with plywood or cardboard.

She considered the thin trellis beside the porch, where a dead vine clung. From its top rung she could easily leap to the first sill and try to get in. If that
was
only cardboard, wouldn't it be taped or tacked to the window frame? If she could fight the window open, maybe the covering would go with it.

Silently she padded across the porch between a dozen empty clay pots, some tilted over, spilling dried clods of earth and dried-up ferns, brown and brittle, maybe abandoned by some previous renter. Crouching, ready to leap and scale the trellis, she heard footsteps within the house and before she could run, the porch light blazed on and the front door flew open. Kit froze, hunched among the pots, hoping her dark mottled fur looked like just another dry fern.

She could smell sleep on the woman who stepped out. A tall woman, her dark hair hanging lank and dry. She was fully dressed, but hurriedly so, her blouse only half buttoned over dark jeans, and over that, a heavy black peacoat. She
didn't notice Kit; she shut the door behind her and the lock clicked. But then, fumbling with her car keys, she glanced down—and caught her breath, staring straight at Kit, and backed away from her with a look of fear that quickly flared to anger.

Phobic,
Kit thought.
I'm in luck, she's scared of me, she
…The woman dove at Kit, striking out at her. Kit yowled and clawed her hand, and ran; as she hit the drive she glanced back, ducked as a clay pot came flying. It crashed on the concrete inches from her, flinging shards in her face; she leaped away, terrified, through the deep leaves and up an oak tree, climbing and not stopping until she was so high among the tangled leaves that the woman couldn't see her.

There she crouched, shivering and licking sweat from her paws and wanting suddenly to be home, wanting to be held and comforted, wanting to be home with Lucinda and Pedric. She had done some wild break-and-enters, but never where someone threw things at her, threw great, hard pots at a poor little cat.

If that pot had hit her, it could have done her in. She imagined her lifeless body sprawled on the drive as flat as highway kill, imagined her two old folks finding her there and kneeling over her, weeping. Imagined her little cat spirit wandering alone and lost in some mysterious otherworldly realm as she tried to find her way into cat heaven. And she wanted to be gently held and comforted.

But she couldn't go barging into the bedroom soaking wet and covered with rotting leaves, reduced to nothing but a heap of trembling fear. Nor did she want to explain to Lucinda and Pedric where she'd been, after they'd warned her not to go snooping around that place.

No one had ever thrown things at her like a stray mutt, not since she was a starving kitten and a man in an alley had thrown a shoe at her. That had frightened her very much, had enraged and shamed her because she was so small and alone that she could not fight back.

That shame filled her now, and she was not ready to go home.

Leaping through the oak branches to the next tree and the next, she headed away across the roofs for Dulcie's house. Dulcie would understand. Both Dulcie and Wilma might scold her for being reckless, but she would not be embarrassed to confess to them, as she would with Lucinda and Pedric. Through the dark predawn she ran, the sky above her streaking with paler gray, the sea wind fingering cold into her wet fur.

Wilma's garden flowers were wet, too, when she plowed through; she was soaked when she plunged in through Dulcie's cat door, the plastic flap slapping her backside like a powerful hand chastising her.

She stood in Wilma's kitchen dripping onto the blue linoleum, sniffing the lingering scents of crème brûlé and chowder from last night, of Dulcie's late-evening snack that Wilma had brought home, and of the Christmas tree from the living room. And the aroma of freshly brewed coffee, too, which she followed through the familiar house; crossing the dining room toward the hall and Wilma's bedroom, she paused, dripping water on the Oriental rug, to look in at the Christmas tree; it shone bright and festive with its white and silver and red decorations gleaming among the deep green needles. She looked with interest at the richly wrapped gifts, then moved on, following the smell of fresh coffee.

Dulcie's housemate so loved coffee in bed that when she woke up she would pad barefoot out to the kitchen, switch on the coffeepot, wait patiently in the cold dark dawn, then carry a full mug back to bed, where she'd tuck up again beneath the warm, flowered quilt. Kit found her so now, sitting up in bed cradling a steaming mug, a warm fire lit in the woodstove, and Dulcie curled by her side looking up sleepily as Kit entered.

“What?” Wilma said, putting out her hand, seeing clearly Kit's distress; and Dulcie leaped down to sniff her face and her wet fur.

“Where have you been?” Dulcie said. “Oh, what happened?”

“Come up, Kit,” Wilma said, patting the covers. “Come up and get warm, I don't care if you're wet.”

Leaping up onto the quilt, Kit snuggled down between them. She was silent for a long time, getting warm, licking at her wet fur, and wondering where to begin. She remained silent until Wilma lifted her chin and looked into her face.

“What, Kit? What upset you?”

Sensibly, Kit started from the beginning, from the moment last night when she'd left Dulcie and Joe on the roof of the Patio Café. Carefully she told everything that had happened since, every little detail. If she didn't tell it all, Clyde or the Greenlaws would—and if Kit told it first, she could tell it her way.