Catwalk (2 page)

two

Alberta scurried around the
back of her SUV and opened the back passenger-side door. She glanced at me, her eyes feverish, then turned her attention to my dog. “If anyone can find her, Jay can,” she said, leaning over to press her lips into the top of his muzzle. “You have to find
…
” Alberta choked, stood up, and turned wide, wet eyes my way. “She's pregnant, you know.” I did not. After all, I didn't even know who
she
was. One of Alberta's dogs? She had a litter only about every five years, when she wanted a new puppy herself, and I was pretty sure her youngest terrier was only about two years old. Of course, the older I get, the faster time slips by, so I knew I could be wrong. I decided to wait until we were underway to ask who we were after, but I did have another question.

“What happened to your car?” The paint on the hood was pitted and crazed into a loose map of Australia.

Alberta didn't answer. She pointed to the open door and waited for Jay to jump in. I put my bag and long line on the floor and shut the door while Alberta climbed in behind the wheel. She really did have to climb. Alberta is maybe five feet tall in her sneakers. She has at least a dozen years on me, which puts her on the downslope to seventy, and she's even less athletic than I am. When we were both buckled in, she slammed the accelerator, raced to the end of my street, barely slowed for the corner, and ignored the thirty m.p.h. signs.

“You might want to watch your speed, Alberta,” I said. “Our local speed trap is just behind those shrubs.” We whizzed past the sprawl of unpruned forsythia and I swear I pulled three G's as we turned the corner onto Lake and shot toward downtown. Whoever set the Fort Wayne traffic lights years ago did a bang-up job because, as usual, once we got a green light on Washington, we had green all the way to Covington Road. We were through the business district and into the Westside historic before I talked my fingers into releasing the edge of my seat.

“So, Alberta, what's going on? Who are we looking for?”

“Gypsy! They've kidnaped her. Those …” Her voice morphed into little heart-rending whimpers for a moment, and then anger restored its strength. “They did
that
a couple of weeks ago.” She indicated the messed-up paint on the hood. “Egged it in my own driveway.”

“But weren't quite a few cars vandalized out your way? I mean, Halloween …”

She cut me off. “And they sprayed ‘crazy cat lady' across my garage door with red paint. Ruined the fiberglass. But those are just things, I can fix them, replace them. But this …” Her voice dissolved, then reassembled itself into a snarl. “If they've hurt her …”

I was starting to get a glimmer of clarity. “Gypsy is the cat you took in, right?” Alberta had told several of us at agility class the previous week that she had adopted one of the feral cats she fed in her neighborhood.

“Lovely little creature. Calico. I've always loved calicos. Not that it matters, really, what color they are. And she takes no nonsense from my dogs. They like her, well, all but Lola, and I keep her away from the cats. The rest of them like her, and I like her. I love her.” Alberta karate chopped the steering wheel and then closed her fingers around it. I watched her knuckles blanche as she squeezed the leather cover.

“Could she have slipped out? I mean, she's been living on her own. Feral cats don't always like being confined.”

“I just don't think she would.” Alberta shook her head and spoke slowly, as if considering the possibility for the first time.

“Okay, let's just focus on finding her. Then we can worry about how she got out.”

We drove the rest of the way in silence. Alberta turned into her subdivision, oddly named The Rapids of Aspen Grove. Sycamore or oak or maple or beech­—those would make sense in northern Indiana. Perhaps the developer dreamed of Colorado. The subdivision was a place of sprawling homes, mature trees, and professionally maintained perennial borders radiating out from the centerpiece private golf course. The grandest of the homes are nearest the
course, which seems counterintuitive to me. We pulled into the driveway of Alberta's 1990s take on the Craftsman. It
was as stunning as I remembered, even in the bleakness of early November. The huge wreath of bittersweet on the double front door didn't hurt. If I remembered correctly from my only visit, the back of the house was virtually all windows, which looked straight at the clubhouse and the first tee.

“Alberta, aren't you afraid you'll get a golf ball through a window?”

She turned off the ignition and turned to me, eyes wide. “I suppose they might do that. I mean, they sprayed my door.”

“No, I mean …” I stopped, wondering for a split second whether this might all be a hallucination. “Your garage door looks fine.”

“That's the new one.”

She was out of the car before I could babble any more, so I hopped
out and stood for a moment just inhaling the intoxicating fragrance of burning wood. The house to the north of Alberta's place was a sprawling ranch. To the south lay a field that sloped into a pond backed by a stand of bare-naked trees. A mixed assortment of waterfowl dotted the water's surface, and large stands of cattails hemmed the pond at ragged intervals. A truck was parked on the street in front of the pond, a small caterpillar chained to its trailer bed. A pile of bland white rocks, the sort used to shore up slopes on highways, filled two parking spaces in front of the trailer.

“What's that all about?” I indicated the construction equipment.

Alberta didn't even check what I was pointing at. “Bastards want to ‘improve' the edge of the pond.” She sneered the word
improve
. “They also want to put up condos.”

“Where?” Other than the small field next door, I didn't see any available land.

She swept her arm to take in the pond and woods. “There. They
want to cut down the trees and fill the wetland.” A fire burned in her
eyes. “We're trying to stop them.”

That piqued my curiosity, but it could wait. The sun was low and hazy on the horizon, and we needed to get moving. I opened the back door for Jay. He waited, as he's been taught to do, and I snapped a leash to his collar, slipped the coiled long line onto my shoulder, and said, “Free.”

A chorus of high-pitched barks sounded from inside the house, and Jay bounced around and wriggled his nubby tail, then looked at me and barkwhined. We followed Alberta onto the porch and waited while she punched numbers into a lock pad. Her hands were shaking and she had to try twice before the door opened. The barking got louder, but was coming from somewhere toward the back of the house.

“They're in the family room. I have the gate up. They're okay.” She seemed to be trying to convince herself.

“Do you have something with Gypsy's scent?”

“Food bowl?” she asked. Then turning toward the uproar, she yelled, “Quiet!” Jay lay down with a thunk, I froze, and the barking all stopped.
Impressive
, I thought, although I'm not much for yelling at my dog. Then again, I don't have a house full of terriers.

Alberta was staring at me, and I realized she was waiting for an answer. “Something she's slept on maybe?”

“Perfect.”

As I watched her hurry down a hallway and into a room, I felt my phone vibrate. It was a text message from Tom saying he wanted to help but needed an address. An odd blend of gratitude and annoyance whizzed through my mind.
We can manage this,
snarked Janet demon.
He knows that,
countered good Janet.
He wants to help, not take over.
I decided to give Jay a few minutes on the track and then call Tom and let him know what was happening.

Alberta returned, breathing hard. She set a pink-and-white striped cube with a pointed top on the floor in front of Jay. It looked like a smaller version of one of those old-fashioned tents for changing clothes on the beach. The floor inside seemed to be a fleece-covered cushion. Jay shoved his head into the thing and, from the sound of his sniffing, got a good schnozful of the cat's scent.

I checked my shoe laces, a tracking precaution I learned the hard way, and zipped my sweatshirt up to my chin. “Are you going to follow us, or wait here?” I ask.

“I'm coming with you!”

I knew she would, of course, but I worried about her tendency to wheeze and gasp with minimal exertion. Still, it was her cat, or at least she thought of her that way. Some feral cats don't settle into domestic life easily, even if they like you, and I wondered whether Gypsy had simply followed the siren call of freedom, despite its hardships and dangers. I snapped the long line onto Jay's harness,
removed my leather leash, and handed it to Alberta. “Jay!” He looked at me, back at the cat bed, and back at me, as if to say, “Yep, got it
. Let's go find her!”

three

Jay hit the ground
pulling, making me feel a bit cartoonish as I scrambled both to keep up and slow him down a notch. He was definitely on a trail, and I hoped it was Gypsy's. That's the thing with tracking—with our poor deficient noses, we must trust that our dogs are on the scent trail we want them to be on. It's a bit like asking someone to translate a page of writing in a script that we can't read. Trust. We have to trust the other guy. Jay had never let me down.

We angled across Alberta's leaf-strewn front lawn, the one next door, and the next. Jay's shoulders were well into the harness and I had to force myself to hold him to a speed I could manage at a faster-than-normal walk. Running may seem more efficient, but—another hard lesson learned—the small margin of time gained is offset by the high risk to middle-aged joints, bones, and skin trying to keep up with an engaged dog over rough ground. Sixty seconds into the search and I was already warming up inside my sweatshirt, but I couldn't stop to adjust my clothes. Alberta was still with us, but her breathing sounded a bit like my mother's old fireplace bellows.

“Gypsy never goes out anymore! Someone must have come in and grabbed her.” I was surprised that Alberta could still talk between gasps. “They hate me, you know, because I feed the poor strays that live behind the club house.” Maybe she was oxygen deprived, I thought. She was starting to repeat herself.

Jay veered toward the street, so I shortened the line and stopped him at the curb. Alberta bumped into me and clutched my arm. Her cheeks were so pink they glowed.

“Who hates you?” I asked. Jay turned to look at me. He whined
something that sounded a lot like “Come on!” and bounced his front end impatiently. “Hang on, Bubby. Car.” We could have crossed
before the car reached us, but I thought Alberta could stand to catch her breath. Jay turned away from me, put his nose to the ground, pulled into the harness, and muttered again when I anchored him in place.

Alberta released my arm and put a hand to her chest. “But how can they hurt an animal? Especially one that's no threat?”

“Who?” I asked.

“Golfers for one. They claim the cats leave dead things on the greens.” She snorted. “It's their damn kids out there with BB guns do the killing, you know, birds and squirrels and things, and they know I know it, too.” She coughed and patted the notch of her collarbone. “They shoot the cats, too.”

That I knew to be true. The paper had run several articles about Halloween violence aimed at animals in the area, including two elderly pet cats from Alberta's neighborhood that were shot with BBs at close range in their own backyard. One lost his eye. They still hadn't caught the shooter.

“Let's not get ahead of ourselves,” I said. “Gypsy may have just slipped out. You said you had a plumber here this afternoon, right?”

Alberta looked past me. The red in her face spread and deepened and an artery in her temple puffed up and pulsed. I turned my head toward the street. A big white SUV slowed as it rolled by, but the occupants were invisible behind tinted windows. Jay startled me with a series of short, deep-throated barks and I took a step back from the curb, pulling him with me. “Jay,” I said. He glanced at me, then back at the car. “Here,” I said, and heard a bright edge in my voice. In a flash Jay was at my side, leaning into my calf, still alerting on the car. I had learned to pay attention when my dog seemed to find something amiss. I knelt and sank my fingers into Jay's dense fur and folded my fingers over the muscular curve of his shoulder.

“That's them.” Alberta stepped into the street and screeched, “What have you done with my cat?” She swung the snap end of my leash at the car and missed. The driver's-side window opened a couple of inches and a chorus of male voices erupted within. Most of what they yelled was unintelligible, but I made out “crazy” and “cat” and “tree hugger.” Then the window rolled up and the vehicle squealed away.

“Delinquent bastards,” yelled Alberta.

Jay barked a parting insult, then went back to sniffing and whin
ing. I gathered and re-coiled the loose end of the long line and let Jay haul me across the street. His posture told me that he was partly tracking scent on the ground, but also reading something in the air. He pulled me up a driveway and across a backyard. The dormant grass felt crisp under my feet, the ground level and safe. Jay's head came up and he leaped forward, shoulders strong against his harness. A small storage shed, salmon-pink with white gingerbread,
huddled among bare-naked forsythias in the far back corner of the yard, and Jay raced toward it. He was no longer tracking. He seemed to know where he needed to be. Ankles be damned, I broke into a run and let him h
ave his way.

“Go. Go.” Alberta wheezed encouragement. “I'll catch up.”

Jay went into a sniffing, whining frenzy at the door to the shed and pushed against it. A violet rocking chair sat on the brick patio that ran the length of the little building, and lace curtains waved gently behind a window that stood open a few inches. Jay started to dig at the threshold and the door swung open.