Cat Raise the Dead (4 page)

Now, staring up into the shop window at the red silk dress, Dulcie yearned. She thought about the feel of the silk, and about diamond earrings and about midnight suppers at lovely restaurants. Who knew what strange heritage produced such unfeline dreams? Who knew what lineage made the little cat yearn so desperately, sometimes, to be a human person. She knew there were Celtic tales of strange, unnatural cats, stories so old they were passed down and down before history was ever written; she knew folk stories that made the fur along her back stand stiff with amazement and sometimes with fear.

Fear because she longed so sharply for things a cat did not need, longed so intensely for a life she could never know.

Joe Grey's talents were just as remarkable as her own, but Joe was quite content to remain a cat, was totally happy to experience human perceptions and human talents but not have to bother with neckties, income tax, or vicious lawsuits.

Leaving the dress shop, she trotted north up the sidewalk to the Aronson Gallery, and there, pressing her nose against the glass, she enjoyed a moment of pure self-indulgence. Studying the three drawings of her that were exhibited in the window, she let her ego fly, allowed her own lovely likeness, gold-framed and more than life-size, to inflate her feline ego, enlarge her self-esteem like a hot balloon threatening to sail away with her; she imagined herself dangling in the sky, unable to return to earth, hoist on her own silly vanity.

The artist's rendering of her long green eyes was lovely; her peach-tinted paws and her peach-toned ears and little pink nose were a delight. She luxuriated
in the sleek lines of her graceful form, in the curving mink brown stripes of her glossy tabby fur, and sighed with pleasure. Who needed red silk cocktail dresses? Charlie Getz had drawn her with such love, had made her so beautiful, she should long for nothing more.

Charlie, Wilma's niece, had come to visit early last fall, moving into Wilma's guest room with her paints and drawing pads and with a monumental disappointment in her young life. A disenchanted graduate of a San Francisco art school, Charlie had discovered only after completing her courses that she couldn't make an adequate living at her chosen major, that she was not cut out for the demands of today's commercial art and that there seemed little money in a fledgling career as an animal artist.

After a short sulk, she had started a household repair and cleaning business, CHARLIE'S FIX-IT, CLEAN-IT. In Molena Point her services were already in such demand that she was working ten and twelve hours a day and couldn't hire enough help. She loved her new business, loved the hard work, loved the success of her venture. And she gloated over the growing balance in her bank account. But belatedly, after giving up an art career, she found that the Aronson Gallery wanted her animal sketches. Dulcie knew the gallery well, and it was highly respected.

Just last fall, she and Joe had broken into the Aronson Gallery when they were searching for clues to the murder of Janet Jeannot, one the gallery's best-known artists. Of course Sicily Aronson knew nothing of their B&E, or of their involvement in solving the crime. Who would suspect a cat of meddling?

Smiling, remembering that night she and Joe had prowled the locked gallery searching for clues, she dropped down from the windowsill and sat a moment on the warm sidewalk, washing her paws, then headed across the village to find Joe.

She made a little detour up Ocean, past the greengrocer's, sniffing the lingering scent of peaches and melons, then the delicious aromas which seeped through the glass door of the butcher's, but soon she crossed the westbound lane of Ocean, crossed the wide, tree shaded median and the deserted eastbound lane. Heading up Dolores toward the white cottage which Joe Grey shared with Clyde Damen, she plotted how best to soften up Joe, get him to join Pet-a-Pet. And she kept thinking about Jane Hubble and the other patients, who, Mae Rose said, had disappeared. Probably she was being silly, believing such stories; probably the old people at Casa Capri were just as safe as babes tucked in their beds, the staff kind and unthreatening—except perhaps for the owner of the care home.

Beautiful Adelina Prior, in her lovely designer suits and her crème-de-la-crème coiffure and makeup, seemed, to Dulcie, as out of place at Casa Capri as a tiger among bunny rabbits. Why would a woman who looked like a model want to spend her life running an old people's home?

Trotting through the inky shadows where large oaks roofed the sidewalk, she thought of being trapped in Casa Capri, behind those tightly locked doors—if there was some criminal activity—and her paws began to sweat.

It was one thing to pry into the crimes she and Joe had solved earlier this year, where they could escape through windows and unlocked doors and over rooftops. But to be confined within Casa Capri, where the doors were always bolted, made a chill of fear clamp her ears and whiskers tight to her head, made her cling low to the dark sidewalk, in a wary slink.

But yet she wanted to go there. And she knew, if something was amiss, she'd keep digging at it, clawing at it until the mystery was laid bare.

In the hills high above the village a miniature world of tiny creatures crept through the grass, vibrating and humming, a community whose members were unaware of any existence but their own, of any needs but their own to kill or be killed, to eat or be eaten. The two cats, poised above this Lilliputian landscape, waited motionless to strike. Around them the grass stems had been pushed aside to carve out little mouse-sized trails, but some of the paths were wide enough for rabbits, too, major lanes winding away, dotted with pungent droppings. One pile of rabbit scat was so fresh that grass blades still shivered from the animal's swift flight. The cats, leaping to follow, panted with anticipation.

Above them the clouds drew apart, freeing the moon's light, and the moon itself swam between washes of blowing vapor; the dark hills caught the light, humping between earth and sky like the bodies of sprawled, sleeping beasts.

All night they had worked together stalking cooperatively, not as normal cats hunt but as a pair of lions would hunt, hazing and driving their prey. Dulcie's eyes burned toward the trembling shadows, her smile was a killer's smile, her paws were swift. She was not, now, Wilma's cosseted kitty rolling on stolen silk teddies.

But yet as they hunted, a poetry filled her, and she began to imagine she was Bast, stalking among papyrus thickets, clutching live geese in her teeth. Racing
through the grass, she was Bast, hunting beside Egyptian kings, Bast the revered cat goddess, Bast the serpent slayer leaping to the kill…

The rabbit spun and bolted straight at her and beyond her, exploded away, was past before she could strike. She jerked around streaking after it, hot with embarrassment. Joe had flushed the creature nearly into her paws, and she had missed it. It sped away, kicking sand in her face, dodged, zigzagged, showed her only its white fluff tail, and disappeared into a tangle of wild holly. Her nostrils were filled with its fear and with the smell of her own shame.

But then it swerved out again, and she dodged after it. As it doubled back she sprang, snatched it in midair, clamped her teeth deep into its struggling body.

Its scream cut the night as she tasted its blood, its cry was shrill, as terrified as the scream of a murdered woman. It raked her with its hind claws, slashing at her belly. She bit deeper, opening its throat. It jerked and stopped struggling and was still, limp and warm, the life draining from it.

She carried the rabbit back to Joe, and they bent together over the kill. He did not mention her daydreaming inattention. He scarfed his share of the carcass, rending and tearing, flinging the fur away, crunching bone.

“Someday,” she said, “you're going to choke yourself, gorging. Snuff out your own life, victim to a sliver of rabbit bone.”

“So call 911. What were you dreaming, back there?” He gave her an annoyed male look, and ripped fur and flesh from the bones.

She didn't answer. He shrugged. The rabbit was succulent and sweet, fattened on garden flowers. Dulcie skinned her half carefully, then stripped morsels of meat from the little bones, eating slowly. Only when the bones were clean, when nothing was left but bones and skull, did they settle in for a wash. Licking themselves,
cleaning their faces, then their paws, working carefully in between claws and between their sensitive pads, they at last cleaned each other's ears. Then, stomachs full, they sat in the moonlight, looking down upon the village, at the moonstruck rooftops beneath the dark oaks and eucalyptus.

Because many of the village shops had once been summer cottages, the entire village was now a tangled mix: shops, cottages, galleries, and motels, crowded together any which way. But where the hills rose above the village, the houses were newer and farther apart, with dry yellow verges between. It was here that the cats hunted. Besides the rabbits and ground squirrels, the mice and birds, there were occasional large and bad-tempered rats. Both cats carried scars from rat fights; and Joe remembered too vividly the rats in San Francisco's alleys when he was a kitten, rats that had seemed, then, as big and dangerous as Rottweilers.

It was Clyde who had rescued him from those dark alleys. He'd had a piece of luck landing with Clyde and then the two of them moving down here to Molena Point. Though if he ever admitted to Clyde how much he really did like the village, he'd never hear the last of it.

“What are you thinking?”

“That Clyde can be a damned headache.”

She stared at him. “You mean about the Pet-a-Pet program? If Clyde ordered you not to go near Casa Capri, you'd be up there in the shake of a whisker.”

“I wasn't thinking of…Oh, forget it.”

She looked at him unblinking.

“You're going to keep at it, aren't you? Keep nagging until I agree.”

“What did I say?”

“Staring a hole through my head.”

“You could at least try.”

He looked hard at her.

She smiled and licked his ear.

He watched her warily.

“They talk to me, Joe. That little Mrs. Rose, she tells me all kinds of secrets. I feel so sorry for her sometimes.” She didn't intend to tell him all of Mae Rose's secret, but she'd like to tweak his curiosity ever so slightly.

He lay down and rolled over, crushing the grass beneath his gray shoulders. Lying upside down staring at the sky, he glanced at her narrowly. There was more to this Casa Capri business than she was saying.

She patted at a blade of grass. “Those old people need
someone
to tell their secrets to.”

The cry of a nighthawk swept the moonlit sky, its
chee chee chee
rising and dropping as the bird circled, sucking up mosquitoes and gnats.

She said, “Wilma tells them stories.”

“Tells who stories?”

“The old people. Cat stories. About the Egyptian tombs and cat mummies and Egyptian hunting cats and about…”

He flipped to his feet, staring at her.

“Not about speaking cats,” she said softly. “Just cat stories. She's always done story hour for the children at the library. This is no different. Both our visits, after the cats and dogs were all settled down in the old people's laps, when everyone was yawning and cozy, she told stories.

“She told the little milkmaid cat. You know,
There was a little cat down Tibb's Farm, not much more'n a kitten
—
a little dairy maid with a face so clean as a daisy but she wanted to know too much…. And all was elder there and there was a queer wind used to blow there…
”

“Boring. Boring as hell. Probably the old people love that stuff.”

But her look iced him right down to his claws.

“And why do they need animals to visit them, if Wilma tells them stories? Isn't that excitement enough? You don't want to overtax those old folks.”

She sighed.

“Get her to read that story by Colette, the one where the cat gets pushed off the high-rise balcony, that ought to grab them.”

She shivered and moved closer to him in the tall grass. They were quiet for a while, listening to the nighthawk and to the far pounding of the sea. But, thinking of Casa Capri, she felt like the little milkmaid cat. She wanted to know too much. She was certain, deep in her cat belly, that she was going to find, like the little milkmaid, that there was
summat bad down there
.

She could hardly wait.

Mae Rose had her good days, when she was able to walk slowly out onto the patio, holding on to the back of the chairs, when she could sit out there enjoying the flowers and the warm sun. But there were days when she was so shaky, when she looked back at herself from the mirror white as flour paste.

Those days she felt vague and afraid, those days she was too weak to walk at all, and had to be helped not only from her bed and to get dressed, but even into her wheelchair. Those bad days, a nurse wheeled her into the social room and through it to the dining room and helped to feed her, and she felt 120 years old.

But the times when she woke feeling strong and happy and ready for the day, she felt as good as she had at fifty. Those times she could even sew a little. Of course, she still made the doll clothes—that was nearly all she had left. All her life she'd made doll clothes, even when she was so busy working in wardrobe before the children were born. After the children came she'd left little theater, and that was when she hit on making a business of designing doll wardrobes. James had laughed at her—James had always patronized her—but she'd had a brochure printed up with pictures of her dressed dolls, and she sent carefully stitched samples of her little doll coats and dresses, too. It didn't take long before she was making enough money from her exclusive toy-store customers to dress herself and their three girls and buy the
little extras they wanted. James said she spoiled the children. James thought her impossibly childish just because she loved the little, pretty details of life. If that made her childish, she couldn't help it. James said she would have fit better in the Victorian era, when a woman could be admired for choosing to deal only with the minute and the pretty.

Well she'd raised three children, and not a lot of help from James. He had died when their oldest, Marisa, was only twelve. It wasn't her fault that she hadn't been able to deal with the passions of those children; they were James's children, born and bred. When they got into their teens, and she was trying to raise them alone, it seemed impossible that the little beasts could be her own. The girls' puberty had been a terrible time: she had suffered from too many sick headaches during those years.

But the girls all got married off at last, and whatever went on in between she had wiped from memory. Now, of course, all three girls lived so far away that they could seldom visit, two on the East Coast with their husbands, and Marisa in Canada on a farm and already five children of her own to worry over. Now that she didn't see the girls except every few years, and now that Wenona, her one good friend, was dead these long years, and Jane Hubble wasn't here anymore, the doll wardrobes were all she had.

She missed Jane. She missed Wenona. Years ago, when Wenona died, before she, Mae, ever came to live here at Casa Capri, she had known she would spend the last years of her life alone. Wenona had been her only real friend. In little theater all those years together, Wenona in charge of scenery and publicity, and they'd had such lovely times. Their long walks through the village, and shopping together, going up to the city. Wenona had loved to look at fabrics for the doll wardrobes though she didn't sew. Wenona couldn't really love the dolls, not like she cared about cats.

She had to laugh, the way Wenona always had to go feed the stray cats down at the wharf. As if that were her sole responsibility. And the way she spoiled her own cats, putting in cat doors, buying special food, tramping the neighborhood calling if one of them didn't come home. Always worrying over her cats.

But then Wenona went on down to Hollywood with a wonderful chance to work in the MGM prop department. She'd thought Wenona would be back, that she really wouldn't like Hollywood, but she had stayed. She came up once a year, and they had a few days together, but then the cancer, very quick, and Wenona was gone.

And she was alone again.

Wenona dead. James dead. And her own daughters across the country. When Jane Hubble had come to live here, that was a blessing, but now Jane, too. The nurses said she was over in Nursing, said where else would she be? But she didn't believe them.

She'd given Jane one of her five dolls before Jane had the stroke—they said it was a stroke. Once she asked a nurse if Jane still had the doll, and the nurse had looked so puzzled. But then she said yes, of course Jane had the doll.

If Jane had gone away or died, she'd like to have the little doll back again as a keepsake to remind her of Jane. But she didn't ask. They were so strict here, strict and often cross. They took good enough care of you, kept you clean, changed your linens and washed your clothes, and the food was nice, but she sometimes felt as if Adelina Prior's hard spirit, her cold ways, rubbed off on all the staff. There was no one Mae could talk to.

When she had phoned her trust officer to tell him that she didn't think Jane really was over in Nursing, he treated her as if she was senile. Said he was sorry, that he had talked with the owner, Ms. Prior, and Jane was too sick to have visitors, that he saw nothing wrong. Said that the Nursing wing was too busy and crowded with IV tubes for anyone to visit, that visitors got in the way and upset the sick patients.

Jane would hate it over there. Jane was so wild and full of fun. In that way, Jane was like Wenona. Those years when Mae and Wenona roomed together, Wenona was always the bold one, always making trouble. She would never put up with any kind of rules, from their landlord or from the manager of little theater when she was helping with the sets. And Jane was like that, too, always telling the nurses how stupid the rules were. She made everyone laugh, so crazy and reckless—until they took her away.

Four times Mae had tried to go over to Nursing to visit, and every time a nurse found her and turned her chair around and wheeled her back. So demeaning to be wheeled around against her will, like a baby.

Eula said maybe Jane packed up and walked right out of Nursing, even if she did have an attack. Eula was her only friend now. Eula—so sour and heavy-handed.

She had wanted to tell Bonnie Dorriss, who ran the Pet-a-Pet program, about Jane, but she decided not to. Bonnie Dorriss was too matter-of-fact. That sturdy, sandy-haired, freckled young woman would never believe Jane had disappeared; she'd laugh just like everyone else did.

Well at least when Pet-a-Pet started, she had the little cat to talk to. Holding Dulcie and stroking her, looking into her intelligent green eyes, she could tell Dulcie all the things that hurt, that no one else wanted to hear. Cats understood how you felt. Even if they couldn't comprehend the words, they understood from your voice what you were feeling.

Maybe the little cat liked her voice, too, because she really seemed to listen, would lie looking up right into her face, and with her soft paw she would pat her hand as if to say, “It's all right. I'm here, I understand how you are grieving. I'm here now, and I love you.”