Cat Striking Back Read online

  Cat Striking Back

  Shirley Rousseau Murphy

  Beware of the cat striking back…

  On a lovely moonlit night, Joe Grey is minding his own business, carrying a gift of mice to a litter of kittens, when he stumbles upon a murder scene. Behind an empty house lies a swimming pool, its bottom covered with mud. There is also blood, the smell of human death, and drag marks. But there is no victim. Without a body, it's a crime that will be hard to prove.

  With stubborn feline curiosity, Joe Grey sets out to investigate. As he, Dulcie, and Kit follow the killer's trail among four houses whose owners are on vacation, they discover that more murder has been planned for the small, close-knit neighborhood. They uncover evidence of conflict among the residents and multiple signs of breaking-and-entering, although nothing valuable seems to be missing.

  With the help of two local ferals, the cats find the victim's hidden grave and learn of the violence that is yet to come. As they set out to alert the law, they discover the perfect way to thwart the killer – through that person's unnatural but powerful fear of cats.

  Thus unfolds the next installment in Shirley Rousseau Murphy's beguiling series about the gray tomcat P.I., his feline friends, and human companions, as, skirting danger, they unravel events shaped by human frailty and by the darkest feline imaginings from the killer's past.

  Shirley Rousseau Murphy

  Cat Striking Back

  Book 15 in the Joe Grey series, 2009

  To the memory of Willow

  She lives on in the wild clowder

  It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself-to offer violence to its own nature-to do wrong for the wrong’s sake only-that urged me to…consummate the injury I had inflicted upon the unoffending brute…my wonder and my terror were extreme…I could not rid myself of the phantasm of the cat…I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart…which give direction to the character of man.

  – Edgar Allan Poe, “The Black Cat”

  1

  THE SETTING MOON laid its path across the sea, brightening the white sand and the little village, picking out the angles of its crowded roofs and glancing off the windows of the shops and cottages; moon glow caressed the shaggy pines and cypress trees and pooled dark shadows beneath them along the narrow streets. The only sound, at this predawn hour, was the hush of waves breaking on the shore. But inland, all was silent. Where the hills rose round and empty, the moon’s path washed in bright curves. Between the moonlit hills, the narrow valleys were cast in blackness so dense that the tomcat had to make his way by sound and by whisker feel, by familiar smells, by the degree of the slope and the feel of the earth beneath his paws, rocky or soft or bristling with dry grass or smooth where sand had blown across the narrow game trail, each encounter marking more clearly his exact location in relation to home. The tomcat traveled alone, encumbered by his heavy burden.

  Padding down toward the first scattered houses, he walked clumsily, not his usual bold gait but spraddle legged and awkward, stepping wide around the half dozen mice that dangled against his chest, their tails gripped tight in his sharp teeth.

  He was a big cat, muscled and sleek coated, as silver-gray as burnished pewter. A narrow white strip ran down his nose, and his belly and paws were white, too-one paw spattered, now, with mouse blood. His tail was docked to a short, jaunty length, the product of a kittenhood disaster. His yellow eyes gleamed with the look of a fighter, but his eyes were alight, too, with a smile; he turned once to look back up the hills behind him, watching his tabby lady Dulcie and their younger, tortoiseshell friend Kit move away, trotting higher up across the open land. He had only just parted from his two companions, the lady cats not satisfied only with hunting, but hurrying off to follow their overly curious noses-typical females, he thought tenderly.

  Take care, Joe Grey thought, watching the two cats moving swiftly away up the moon-washed hills. They looked very small and alone, careening close to the scattered boulders where they could find hurried shelter. He could hear, as could they, the yipping of coyotes far away, up the higher slopes. Though this yipping of adults and the answering yaps of their cubs meant, surely, that the group of larger predators was all together, preoccupied with their offspring and not wandering far afield to sniff out unsuspecting felines.

  But still Joe thought again, Watch your backs, you two. And nervously he turned away, dragging his clutch of mice, hurrying down past the wooden frame that was the beginning of a new house, then past a remodel where the front garden was piled with raw earth waiting for the construction crew. He could smell, over the musty miasma of dangling mice, the fresh scent of raccoons on the trail, and of possums and coastal deer, wild creatures who had made their way down from the hills in darkness to hunt or graze or to slip in among the houses to quench their thirst at a fishpond or a leaky garden hose. As he descended, the houses began to crowd closer together. Far below him the setting moon began to dip into the sea; soon the last thin slice of gold lay reflected and then perversely drowned itself, moving on to light other lands.

  Lands he had never seen, and had never longed to see. Life, for Joe Grey, was right here and right now, he didn’t long to travel. His perpetual balancing act between the normal life of an ordinary feline and his more stressful role within the human world itself was all the excitement one tomcat could handle.

  Now, with the moon vanished, darkness gripped the yards and houses around him and all but hid the rooftops below, as if a black cloth had been dropped down over the sleeping village. Only a few scattered lights shone, disconnected and eerie, perhaps from the bedroom of an insomniac or the kitchen of an early riser. Farther down along the main street glowed the softly lit storefronts of the village’s upscale shops and restaurants. Though Molena Point was a small and close-knit little community, it was also a tourist town whose business folk offered high-end couture and accessories, valuable antiques and fine jew elry. None of which interested Joe Grey, in itself. But all of which attracted the more sophisticated and enthusiastic thief, who in turn did interest the tomcat.

  A tail jerked in his mouth as one of the mice began to struggle. He clenched his teeth harder, but he didn’t want to further injure the little beasts. They were a gift, a gift of love and caring, and they should remain lively to be of ultimate use. One stunned mouse came wide awake, wriggling wildly as it tried to flip up, tried to see and understand where it was and how to escape, to understand why it hung upside down, and Joe felt a shock of pity for the small creature.

  It had been difficult enough for him and Dulcie and Kit to trap the mice alive between their paws without hurting them, to patiently collect the half dozen mice unharmed, and the three cats had suffered considerably at the little beasts’ extended terror. One of the disadvantages of possessing human intelligence was that they had to answer to a deeper empathy for other animals than would an ordinary feline. They cared about their prey, they cared that the creatures they caught were hurt and terrified. Ordinarily they killed their catch quickly, ended the victims’ distress as fast as possible, sending the little animals on to their maker with a minimum of pain. But not this morning. This gift must arrive lively and full of fight.

  Hurrying along a sidewalk where flowering bushes overhung the concrete, he crossed a narrow residential street, the macadam warm beneath his paws, a pleasant holdover from yesterday’s bright sun and the mild night that had followed. Cutting through the overgrown yard of a house that, with the declining real estate market, had stood empty for far too long, he glanced up at its stark black windows. No curtain, not even a crooked shade broke the reflection of receding night. Joe wondered at such human foolishness, to let a v
aluable property stand empty month after month. Even a run-down, derelict house, in this village, could command an easy million.

  Yet he knew that the sale of this neglected home was delayed not only by the economy but by a marital dispute, a battle over dividing up the spoils. No one but humans could so royally complicate life. A pair of cats would fight it out tooth and claw, winner take all, loser to slink away defeated, and that would be the end of it. But not humans. Human lives were far more complicated-nuanced, some folks called it. Joe Grey called it indecisive.

  The neglected property with its overgrown garden did, however, provide fine hunting for the neighborhood cats. More than a dozen cats lived on the few blocks of this short street, and for that reason, Joe and Dulcie and Kit seldom hunted here, leaving the local game, the mice and moles and gophers, to the feline residents. Though they did have one human friend in this neighborhood, a bright, kind woman to whom they felt drawn, and who was always happy to see them. It was to her home that he was delivering the captive mice.

  Pushing through a forest of stickery holly bushes into the overgrown side yard, trying to keep his dangling charges from catching on the protruding thorns, he was just approaching the empty swimming pool when a smell stopped him, a smell that made his fur bristle.

  When the divorcing couple vacated the house, the pool had been drained. Why they hadn’t covered it, why the city hadn’t made them cover it, the tomcat didn’t know. The concrete and tile chasm was cracked and stained. Silt and debris had collected in its bottom into a sour-smelling mire. But now, another kind of stink drew him up short, a scent far stronger than the rancid mud or the sweet, musty smell of the mice he carried.

  The stink of death, of blood and human death.

  As many murders as the tomcat had witnessed in his busy life, he knew that smell intimately, but he still found human death unsettling, not at all like the death of the simpler animals who were his normal prey.

  Sniffing again, he told himself this might be animal blood, but he knew it wasn’t. He stood looking around him, listening. He’d like to drop the mice so he could get a clearer scent message. But he’d hauled them this far, partly at Dulcie’s insistence, had nearly put his neck out of joint, and he wasn’t dropping them now-it would take the little beasts only a second to realize their opportunity, come fully alive, flick away from his reach, and run like hell, scattering in every direction. In Joe’s opinion, the intended recipients were far more needful of his gift than were the dull little rodents of their time on earth-let them scamper on into mouse heaven where they could live in mousy glee with no more cats to chomp on them. As he approached the abandoned pool, the grass growing up through the cracks in the coping tickled his paws. Standing at the edge, he looked over.

  In the first weak light of dawn, the mud and slime on the bottom still held the blackness of night; the view was murky even to a cat’s sharp vision. He could see that one area had been disturbed, the mud and moss so churned up that surely something much larger than himself had squirmed around, or had been moved around, and then had been dragged across the pool to its far side; the drag marks were accompanied by a line of shoe prints embossed sharply in the mud. A man’s shoes, and the indentations had been there long enough to have filled with seeping, muddy water. The double trail led to the tile steps which, if the pool had been full, would be underwater. The tile was covered with slime that would be slippery, but the wide track led upward and over the coping to the tile apron. Moving around to stand above the steps, he studied the disturbed surfaces.

  From this angle, he could see dark spatters of what looked like blood. Letting the mice rest for a moment on the tile while still firmly gripping their tails in his teeth, he took a good whiff.

  Yes, blood. Human blood, nearly dry now despite the damp surround. He could tell, by other scents, that it was a woman who had died here.

  The footprints and the slithery smear headed across the patio to the concrete drive and straight up toward the street. He followed, taking care to leave no paw prints on the pale cement. Halfway up, the trail stopped. From that point on, the drive was unmarked. Someone had dragged the body from the bottom of the pool to this juncture. And then, what? Studying the concrete, he found several small marks where the tire of a car had picked up mud and deposited it. Sniffing along the concrete, dragging his mice, he caught the faint scent of the man, too, though it was so mixed with the smell of human blood and of sour mud, that he wasn’t sure he would be able to identify it if he should smell it again later. There were no other tire marks, no other footprints. The tomcat, standing alone on the empty drive dangling his mice, studied the surrounding yards and looked up and down the street.

  It was such a peaceful Sunday morning, the sky just beginning to lighten above a tangle of pale clouds and above darker and more serious clouds that smelled of showers. The sea wind was clean and fresh, blowing from the south. There was no other sound, even the birds were quiet, no doves crooning, no scream of a nervy crow. There was no sound of a door closing somewhere, no distant car starting up.

  But suddenly he did hear a car turning off from the next block. He bristled as it made its way down the street, moving slowly as if scanning the neighborhood-he relaxed as the driver began tossing out Sunday papers, thunk, thunk, one by one, into the neighbors’ yards. The tomcat dodged away as a paper sailed to the gutter in front of him.

  Other than the paper man, he could not see another human soul on the empty street; he stood looking around him, filled with a sudden chill. A woman had died here and been hauled off. And Joe Grey wondered, not for the first time, why he had been the one to happen on the scene. Was there something in his nature that drew him to such events? Some hidden sense that pointed his inner compass toward human violence and suffering, some weird feline perception, some impossible or poorly understood magnetism?

  But the tomcat huffed at that idea. That was Dulcie’s kind of thought, that was the fanciful conjecture of fe males. Joe was a down-to-earth tomcat. What happened, happened. There was nothing mysterious about it.

  And yet even Joe’s human housemate, who did not believe in things occult any more than Joe did, would accuse him of being drawn to murders, of being attracted to human death as surely as a nail is attracted to a magnet. He could just hear Clyde scolding, over the dinner table or at breakfast.

  “Why is it, Joe, that you are always the one to find the body? Or to stumble on a burglary?” That wasn’t true, and Clyde knew it. Sometimes the case was well under way before he got involved. But still Clyde would grouse at him: “Why is it you have to have your paws in police business? Why are you always there, right in the middle of a case?”

  It did no good to point out that Dulcie and Kit were just as involved in the details of human crime, in what went on at Molena Point Police Department. In Clyde’s view, the cats’ preoccupation was all Joe’s fault, and he could already hear Clyde ’s comments about this discovery. But whatever his housemate might imagine, the fact was that a woman was dead, apparently only Joe had happened on the evidence, and the tomcat was burning with questions.

  Dangling his mice, he padded on up the drive to the street, studying the concrete, seeking further tire marks.

  He found no more, only the few small hints down the drive behind him, hardly visible. And when it rained, he thought uneasily, those would be washed away. The smell of rain was strong, the clouds and wind shifting in an unsettling manner.

  Pausing at the curb, he studied the parked cars. All were cars he recognized, all belonged in this neighborhood, all were fogged with the night’s damp breath as if they had been sitting here for many hours.

  Even so, he made the rounds along the one block, sniffing tires and walking close to engines to see if he felt any warmth. There were only five cars parked on the street, and four in driveways, all of them familiar, all tires and hoods cold, and not a whiff of lingering exhaust. As he returned to the empty house and made his way back to the swimming pool, the sun was rising, the tops of
the hills to the east catching its glow, the dawn beginning to brighten around him.

  Along the steps that descended into the empty pool, the blood was drying, as were the muddy shoe prints, as if several hours had passed. Whatever had occurred had taken place, he’d guess, maybe late yesterday afternoon. Any earlier and the hot sun would have dried all the marks to a powdery consistency that would easily flake. Very much later and the prints would still be wet. Studying the scene, he was startled when the rising light of morning dimmed suddenly, as if someone had appeared from nowhere, stepping up behind him.

  But it was only cloud shadows, the mass of darker clouds moving in below the white ones, gray and dense and smelling more heavily of rain, serious clouds descending over the village-only some twelve hours later than the weatherman had predicted. That guru of scientific data had said it would rain last night.

  With the primitive methods humans used, such pre dictions couldn’t be easy. Joe and Dulcie and Kit had known it wouldn’t rain until morning, they’d known they had the night to hunt. Though the month of June was temperamental, scorching one minute, dark with rain or fog the next.

  But now, for sure, the rain was coming, and if it got here before the law did, the cops would find little left of blood, of drag marks or of footprints, the evidence would all be washed away. That mustn’t happen. The cops needed to see this, he needed to get them here before the rain hit.

  Before hastily departing the scene, he took one last look for additional evidence, circling the house, investigating beneath the overgrown bushes-and making doubly sure that he, himself, had left no paw prints. His jaws were aching with the weight of the mice. Prowling, he found nothing more of significance until, beneath the yellow flowers of a euryops bush beside the drive, he spotted a pair of dark glasses. They smelled of suntan oil. He studied them, but left the silver-rimmed shades untouched, lying among the dead leaves, and hurried away from the scene. Pushing through between several overgrown mock orange bushes, he scorched up an oak tree to the neighbors’ roof and headed across the peaks to deliver his gift, and then to alert the law, though with some small misgivings.