Cat Bearing Gifts Read online

  Maybe she should go back down, slip into the medics’ van while they were busy, and the cops were all working the crash scene. She watched another set of headlights coming down the mountain on the other side of the slide, watched a lone sheriff’s car park beyond the wrecked truck. A lone officer got out and started across to join the others. The back doors of the white van stood open. In a flash she could be down the cliff and inside, hiding among the metal cabinets and oxygen tanks and all that tangle of medical equipment. I could hide in there close to Lucinda and Pedric and, at the hospital—a strange hospital, a strange town—I could hide in the bushes outside and watch the door and wait for Ryan and Clyde or maybe for Charlie to come, and then . . .

  Oh, right. And if those medics spot me in their van trying to catch a ride, they’ll try to corner me in that tight space. If they shut the doors, and surround me, and I can’t get out and one of them grabs me, what then? They’ll lock me up somewhere, to keep me safe? One of the cops will shut me in his squad car? No, she was too upset and uncertain to go back. Taking the phone in her mouth again, she moved from the top of the slide on up into the bushes that stretched away to the edge of the dense pine woods, damp and dark and chill. There she laid the phone down among dead leaves and pine needles and pawed in the single digit for the Damens’ house phone. Crouched there listening to it ring, she watched the lighted road below as the medics slid Pedric into their van, working over him, attaching him to an oxygen tank. Lucinda sat on a gurney as the other two medics splinted and taped her shoulder and arm. The phone rang seven times, eight. On the twelfth ring, she hung up. Why didn’t the tape kick in? The Damens’ answering machine, which stood upstairs on Clyde’s desk, was so incredibly ancient it still used tape, but Clyde wouldn’t get a new one, he said it worked just fine, you simply had to understand its temperament. Right, Kit thought, with a little hiss.

  She tried Wilma Getz, but she got only the machine. Where was everyone? She left a garbled message, she said there’d been an accident, that she had Lucinda’s cell phone, that it was on vibrate so the cops wouldn’t hear it ring. She hung up, disappointed by the failure of the electronic world to help her, and worrying about Lucinda and Pedric. What might happen to them on their way to the hospital, some delayed reaction that would be even beyond the medics’ control? Or what might happen in the hospital? If ever a cat’s prayers should be heard, if ever a strong hand were to reach down in intervention for a little cat’s loved ones, that hand should come reaching now. This was not Lucinda’s or Pedric’s time to move on to some other life, she wouldn’t let it be that time. Punching in the Damens’ number again, she was crouched with her ear to the phone when she realized that, down on the road, Lucinda had awakened and was arguing with the medics, her voice raised in anger. Kit broke off the call, and listened.

  “You can’t leave her, you must find her. If I call her, she’ll come to me. I won’t go with you, neither of us will, unless you bring her with us.”

  The two medics just looked at her, more puzzled than reluctant. The taller one said, “You can’t find a runaway cat, in the dark of night, it’ll be scared to death, panicked. No cat would—”

  The dark-haired medic said, “We’ll send someone, the local shelter . . .”

  “No,” Lucinda said fiercely. “I want her with us. You can’t take us by force unless you want a lawsuit.”

  Oh, don’t, Kit thought, don’t argue. Let them take care of you. But then she realized that Lucinda, in her anger, sounded so much stronger that Kit had to smile.

  But stronger or not, Lucinda didn’t prevail. Kit didn’t know what the medic said to her, speaking so quietly, but soon she went silent and lay back again on the gurney, as if she had given up, yet Kit knew she wouldn’t do that. She knows I’ll call Clyde and Ryan, Kit thought. She knows I can take care of myself. She watched them wheel Lucinda to the van, her tall, thin housemate straining up against the safety straps, trying to look up the cliff. Lucinda was so upset that Kit thought to race back down and into the van after all, but before she could try, before she knew what was best to do, they had shut the doors, two medics inside with Pedric and Lucinda, and the other two in the cab. The engine started, the van turned around slowly on the narrow and perilous road, and moved away down the mountain, heading for a strange hospital where no one knew Lucinda and Pedric, where there was no one to speak for them.

  Two black-and-whites followed them. The other two sheriff’s deputies remained behind, one car parked on either side of the rockfall. Kit watched them walk the road in both directions, setting out flares, and maybe waiting to meet the wrecking crew that would haul away the truck and pickup, maybe to wait for the tractors and heavy equipment that would arrive to clear away the tons of fallen rock from the highway.

  When those earthmovers start to work, when they start grabbing up boulders with those great, reaching pincers—like the claws of space monsters in some old movie—I’m out of here. Again she punched in the Damens’ number. Come on, Clyde, come on, Ryan, will you please, please answer! Crouched in the night alone, she looked behind her where the forest of pines stood tar-black against the stars. The coyotes were at it again, two of them away among the trees yipping to each other. When the machines come to move the wrecked trucks and clear the road, I’ll have to go higher up in the woods away from the sliding earth, I’ll have to go in among the trees, where those night runners are hunting. She looked up at the pines towering black and tall above her, and she didn’t relish climbing those mothers. The great round cylinders of their trunks had no low branches for a cat to grab onto, only that loose, slithery bark that would break off under her claws. And what if she did climb to escape a coyote, only to be picked off by something in the sky, by a great horned owl or swooping barn owl? This was their territory and this was their hour to hunt. She thought of great horned owls pulling squirrels from their nests, snatching out baby birds with those scissor-sharp beaks. The world, tonight, seemed perilous on every side.

  She called the Damens seven more times before Clyde answered. “We just got in. I guess the tape ran out.”

  A temperamental machine was one thing. A run-out tape was quite another. Now, on the phone, Kit didn’t say her name, none of the cats ever committed their name to an electronic device. They might use man-made machines, but they weren’t fool enough to trust them. Anyway, Clyde knew her voice. She pictured him in his study, his short brown hair tousled, wearing something old and comfortable, a frayed T-shirt and jeans, worn-out jogging shoes. She started out coherent enough, “Lucinda and Pedric are hurt,” but suddenly she was mewling into the phone, a high, shrill cry this time, in spite of herself, a terrible, distressed yowl that she couldn’t seem to stop.

  “I’ll get Ryan,” he said with a note of panic. She heard him call out, and then Ryan came on, maybe on her studio extension. Kit imagined them upstairs in the master suite, Rock and the white cat perhaps disturbed from a nap on the love seat.

  “What?” Ryan said. “Tell me slowly. What happened? Where are they? Where are you? Slowly, please!”

  Swallowing, Kit found her sensible voice. She tried to go slowly, to explain carefully about the wreck and to explain where that was. But try as she might, it all came out in a tangle, the kind of rush that made her human friends shout, made Joe and Dulcie lay back their ears and lash their tails until she slowed, but she never could slow down. “. . . boulders coming down the mountain straight at us and I thought we’d be buried but Pedric hit the gas pedal and the Lincoln shot through and the whole mountain came thundering down behind us and when the slide stopped the road was covered with boulders and rocks and there was a pickup on the other side crashed into the mountain and into a big delivery truck lying on its side and the driver was dead and . . .”

  “Slow down,” Clyde and Ryan shouted together. Ryan said, “Tell us exactly where you are. Did you call 911? How badly are they hurt? Did you call the CHP? Where . . . ?”

 
“I called,” Kit said. “They took Lucinda and Pedric away and Pedric’s head was bleeding and Lucinda was conscious sometimes but then she’d fade and I think her shoulder is broken and the medics took them in the ambulance and I was afraid to hide in there because if they found me they’d take me to the pound and take the phone away and I could never call you to say where I was and if I couldn’t work the lock on the cage . . .”

  “Stop!” they both yelled. “Where?” Ryan said patiently. “Where are you, Kit?”

  “Somewhere north of Santa Cruz but south of Mindy’s Seafood where we had dinner. When the tractor gets here and starts moving the boulders . . .” She wanted to say, I won’t be able to yowl and cry out to you, there are coyotes up here and owls who can hear everything. She wanted to say, When I’m up in the woods I’ll be scared to make a sound. She said, “Can you bring Rock? To track me? Joe can find me, but Rock’s bigger and . . . and there are coyotes and I love you both but humans are no good at scenting . . .” And she prayed that, this one time, no one was listening in on her call.

  “We’ll bring Rock,” Clyde said. “We’re leaving now. Be there in an hour or less, with luck. Please, my dear, keep safe.”

  Kit hit the end button, feeling small and helpless. She wasn’t a skittish cat, she’d spent plenty of black nights prowling the dark hills above Molena Point and farther away than that, hunting and slaughtering her own hapless prey, but tonight the wreck and her fear for her injured housemates, and then the hungry cry of the coyotes, had taken the starch right out of her. She thought about her big red tomcat traveling all alone down this very coast, making his way from Oregon down into central California, Pan traveled all that way and he wasn’t scared, so why should I be? But she was. Tonight she was afraid.

  Pan had come to Molena Point following little Tessa Kraft, nearly a year after Tessa’s father threw the red tomcat out of the house. Tessa’s mother didn’t want him, either, she didn’t like cats. Pan hadn’t returned, but he had watched the household. He knew when Debbie Kraft moved to Molena Point, and he followed the family, tracking his little girl and, as well, looking for his own father.

  He could only guess that Misto, when he vanished from Eugene in his old age, might have returned to the shore of his kittenhood where he’d grown up among a feral band of ordinary cats; no other speaking cat among them, that Pan knew of, but the place was Misto’s kittenhood home. And Pan had been right, he had found the old yellow tomcat there, and he had found Tessa. And he found me, Kit thought. That’s where we found each other.

  Where is Pan now, right this minute? Could he be thinking of me and know I’m scared, the way he senses me when we’re hunting, the way he knows where I am even when he can’t see me? Or is he crouched in Tessa’s dark bedroom, as he so often is, whispering to her, ready to vanish if her mother comes in?

  Pan isn’t scared of Debbie, but if she catches him there’ll be trouble for Tessa. Probably right now he’s whispering away and laughing to himself because Debbie doesn’t have a clue that he’s anywhere near Molena Point. But no matter how Kit tried to distract herself, thinking of Pan, all she could really think about was that she was all alone and scared clear down to her poor, bloodied paws.

  5

  IN THE LITTLE wooded neighborhood below Emmylou Warren’s house, the red tomcat was indeed crouched on Tessa’s windowsill looking into the dark bedroom where she and her big sister slept head to foot in the one twin bed. The other bed was unoccupied. A light shone under the closed bedroom door, from the kitchen. When, approaching Debbie’s ragged cottage, he’d looked in through the kitchen window, Debbie sat at the table sipping a cup of coffee, the dark-haired, sullen-faced young woman sorting through a stack of new purses and sweaters with the tags still dangling from them, items that he knew she hadn’t paid for, beautiful clothes and gaudy ones laid out across the oilcloth as she clipped the tags from them.

  At the bedroom window he reached a silent paw in, through a hole he’d made in the screen months before. Silently he flipped the latch and pulled the dusty screen open. Sliding in under it, he pushed the window casing up with infinite care and finesse so as not to make even the smallest sound and wake twelve-year-old Vinnie. Tattletale Vinnie, who would let her mother know at once that he had followed and found them.

  Not even Tessa herself knew that he had arrived in Molena Point against all odds, like a cat in some newspaper story traveling across the country to follow his family. Pausing on the sill, at the head of the bed, he watched the two sleeping girls, listening for sounds from the kitchen. When he was sure that both children slept soundly, and that Debbie remained occupied sorting through her stolen bounty, he eased down onto Tessa’s pillow, the tip of his red striped tail barely twitching.

  He sat quietly watching her, the flicker of her dark lashes against her smooth cheeks, her pale hair tousled across the pillow. And softly, as she dreamed, he pressed his nose close to her small ear and began to whisper, to send gentle but bold words into the child’s dreams, painting strong visions for her.

  Tessa was only five, hardly more than a baby, and a silent one, at that, a timid little girl who seemed always fearful, never eager for life, a drawn-away, wary child. Perhaps only Pan knew how watchful she was beneath the shyness, how aware of what occurred around her. Few grown-ups ever saw Tessa smile or saw her reach out to embrace the bright details of life that so fill a normal child’s world, few ever saw her pluck a flower from the garden, snatch a cookie from the plate and run, laughing, or tumble eagerly across a playground screaming and shouting. Tessa Kraft clung to the shadows, bowing her head at her mother’s voice, backing away from the overbearing tirades of her sister. Her father wasn’t there to stand by her, not that it had ever occurred to him, even when he was home, that Tessa might have feelings that he should nurture, fears that he might have soothed and healed. Tessa’s mother didn’t bother to explain about her pa going to prison, or to help with her daughter’s loss. Eric Kraft’s final absence from their home, which had begun long before his arrest and sentence for murder, had left a deep hollowness within the child that, Pan thought, nothing in her future could ever erase. But he meant to try.

  Since Tessa and her family had arrived in the village, and then Pan had followed them there, the other four speaking cats had come to know the child, too, and to care about her, as had their human friends. Maybe only they saw Tessa’s hidden joy in life, saw the secret pleasures that she so carefully concealed from the dominance of her mother and sister. They watched and waited. They stood by Tessa when they could, hindered by a tangle of legalities specific to the human world, rules that no cat would pay attention to.

  But Pan, with his own goal clearly in mind, sought to lead Tessa with his whispered suggestions, to slowly strengthen and transform the silent little Cinderella into a bold young princess. “Don’t let their talk hurt you,” he told her over and over as she slept. “Inside yourself, you can laugh at them. You are stronger than they are, that’s your secret. You are your own strong person, and you never need to be afraid.

  “You can be quiet and secret in your thoughts, but all the while you can see the world clearly. You can be wary of others but strong in yourself, and you will grow up stronger than they are. One day, you will pity their stubborn ignorance.

  “You’re little now, Tessa. But you grow bigger every day and already, on the inside, you’re bigger than they are. You’re stronger than they are, you have a wall of strength inside you that no one’s meanness can hurt. Your mother and sister can’t hurt you, they can’t touch the part of you that’s whole and bright and that loves the world around you.”

  As Pan whispered, reaching deep into Tessa’s sleeping mind, he thought about his pa, too, and about that other little girl so long ago. That child far back in time who had also needed a special friend, the little girl Misto remembered from an earlier life among his nine cat lives.

  How strange, Pan thought, the mirroring of fa
ther’s and son’s connections with the two little girls from two different times. Tessa here in this time. Misto’s friend, Sammie, from sixty years past and from the other side of the continent.

  How strange that Sammie, now dead, lay buried right here in this village, a continent away from where Misto had known her. Sammie Miller, found shot to death right there beneath her own house, that she had willed to Emmylou Warren. What a strange tale it was and a convoluted one, a saga of three generations, Sammie’s part of it ending here, in this village.

  It had been young Sammie Miller’s photograph that had stirred Misto’s memory of his earlier life, a picture that the yellow tomcat discovered when he visited Emmylou, a childhood picture that had drawn him back again and again to look at little Sammie, his visits generating a comfortable friendship with the old woman though he never spoke to her, he never breached the cats’ secret.

  The grown-up Sammie Miller, having no family but her wandering brother who could never stay in one place, had willed her cottage and the old stone building in the woods above to Emmylou. She told Emmylou more than once that Birely had no use for a house, that he preferred to travel footloose and free. Nice euphemisms, Pan thought, for a man with no ambition, for a drifter who let the world do with him as it would.

  In the warm bed beside him, Tessa stirred suddenly and Pan drew back, crouching on the pillow. But the child only whimpered and turned over, dreaming. Often Kit came with him on his nighttime visits, she was his lookout, watching Debbie through the kitchen window, ready to hiss a warning if the woman rose and headed for the bedroom. But this night Kit was off up the coast with her humans, visiting the city. Or maybe they were already on their way home, after a week of shopping in what Kit said were “elegant stores that smell so good.” How long it seemed, and how he missed her.