Cat Coming Home Read online

  A lot depended now on the old woman. Maybe she’d seen nothing in the blackness, maybe there was nothing to worry about. She’d answer the cops’ questions but have no real information to give them, then go home and mourn for her dead son. The cops would work the case for a while and then, as overloaded as the LAPD was, it would find its way among the cold files and that would be the end of it.

  Except, that wasn’t the end, there was more to consider. There would be the funeral, the gathering of friends and family around the old woman, and then the disposition of Caroline’s personal possessions. That was the complication: What had Caroline done with the papers that must be retrieved before this was finished? Or did the old woman have them? If so, what had she done with them? There was no way to know what Caroline and Martin, and Maudie, might have planned between them. Sure as hell, if Caroline had been a threat while alive, she was no better dead. And the same went for Maudie, for Caroline’s soft little mother-in-law.

  9

  RISING FROM THE bed of crushed petals, Kit peered out at Maudie’s front door. It was closed tight. Everyone was inside, she could hear Ryan’s voice in the kitchen. Pushing out of the bushes, she hurried around to the back, leaped in through an unglazed window of Maudie’s new studio, trotted behind Scotty, who was patching plaster, and in through the open glass slider, onto the pale linoleum.

  The kitchen smelled of fresh coffee. Maudie and Ryan sat at the table, and Benny was in Maudie’s lap leaning against her, his mouth smeared with icing. A plate of sweet rolls stood on the table, smelling of cinnamon and honey. The little boy looked paler than usual, his dark eyes still reflecting fear from Maudie’s encounter with the truck.

  Maudie’s kitchen was done all in tones of cream and butterscotch. At the far end of the room, pale oak cabinets lined three sides, around a central worktable. Beyond the wide bay windows, a lacy pepper tree framed Maudie’s view of the neighboring houses and the street.

  The table stood nearest to Kit just opposite the glass slider. Ryan was still arguing gently with Maudie, trying to get her to call the police. Benny seemed uncomfortable with the exchange, fiddling with his sweet roll, tearing it into little bits. He hardly looked up when Kit padded behind Maudie’s chair, crossed to the open stairway, and leaped up to the fifth step, where Joe and Dulcie sat as still as a pair of statues, elegant porcelain effigies from some upscale antique shop. Dulcie cut her green eyes at Kit, looking disgusted at Maudie’s stubbornness. Kit looked back impatiently, burning to tell them about the invasion and the fish smell, and unable to say a word.

  The open stairs faced not only the kitchen but the front entry across a wide tile floor, with the cozy living room to the left. Dulcie twitched her ears at Kit but made no other move as she listened to Ryan’s futile arguing. What was wrong with Maudie, why this reluctance?

  “If the police can find the truck,” Ryan was saying, “and arrest the driver, that would get him off the streets. That might keep you safer, until you know what that was about, and the information would help your insurance company when you make the claim.”

  “It was an accident,” Maudie said. “It could happen to anyone, the driver wasn’t looking. I don’t intend to make a claim, I don’t want to make trouble.”

  Ryan simply looked at Maudie. She seemed about to form a careful reply when the front door opened and David hurried in, breathing hard from his uphill run, his dark sweats hanging limp and damp on his lean frame. His crumpled cap stuck out of his jacket pocket; his short-clipped brown hair was damp with sweat. Snatching the cap, he wiped his forehead with it and ran it over his crew cut. “What happened? I was two blocks away when I heard what sounded like a wreck, and an old truck came barreling past me.”

  He sat down, looking at Maudie. “Didn’t you hear it? It must have hit the Lincoln, Mom. There’s a long brown scar along the side.” He looked at Maudie and at Benny. “Are you two all right? You weren’t in the car? What the hell happened?”

  Ryan said, “The driver came down the hill straight at Maudie. He swerved, he didn’t hit her. He had to be drunk or stoned. Or … or it was deliberate,” she said softly. “He went racing off, didn’t even slow down.”

  “My God,” David said. “Where are the cops? How long does it take? They’re only—”

  “I didn’t call them,” Maudie told him.

  David looked at her. “Why not? Why the hell not, Mama?”

  “Let it go,” Maudie said. In her lap, Benny began to squirm. Slipping down from his grandma’s embrace, he disappeared through the door that led from the kitchen to the garage. Pulling it closed behind him, he left it barely ajar as if not wanting to cut himself off completely from the adults, as if wanting only to escape the arguing. Or did he leave it open so he could listen to what his grandma might say, once he was out of the room?

  But Maudie and David said little more, looking at each other in silence; David’s anger had pulled his face into long, stony lines as stern as a Marine general’s. It was Maudie who looked away first, glancing out to the studio where Scotty was patching plaster. David watched his mother as if trying to think how to get through to the stubborn woman. “Mom …” he began.

  Maudie turned a gentle smile on him and put her hand on his arm. “I don’t want to make waves, David. Please, just drop it.”

  On the stairs, the cats glanced at each other and back at Maudie, seeing more than softness in her smile. Seeing, for just an instant, a dark spark of challenge flash out, a steely edge that both heartened and puzzled them. This lady had some backbone. Why did she keep it so hidden?

  Maudie had started to speak when they heard a truck stop outside. It shifted gears and then, from the sound of it, began to back down the drive. Ryan rose to look, and the cats stretched up tall. Yes, they could see the top of a truck backing in, could see a load of windows standing upright, securely tied in place. Ryan watched Scotty and the driver for a moment, apparently decided Scotty had everything in hand, and sat down again to finish her coffee.

  The dark spark had left Maudie now; she was all smiles and happiness. “It’s going to be beautiful, with the big windows, such a bright place to work, with the garden all around me.” Her laugh was so happy, but then her look turned sad. “I had such a lovely studio in L.A., with a view of the hills. But I couldn’t stay there, not after the shooting.”

  David rose, muttered something about a shower, and headed upstairs, stepping carefully around the three cats. In a few minutes they heard the shower pounding in the upstairs bath.

  “I read about the shooting,” Ryan said. “Of course you wanted to leave the area. I would, too. I’m sure no one can understand what an incredibly hard loss that is, what a terrible emptiness to try to endure.”

  “I can’t seem to get past it,” Maudie said. “Over the eight months since Martin was shot, the pain hasn’t eased. That moment keeps coming back as if it’s just now happening. I thought, during the long sessions with the sheriff and with the L.A. police and the California Bureau of Investigation, that somehow I’d become inured, hardened to what happened, that I’d learn to live with it.

  “But I haven’t,” she said softly. “They were so happy, Martin and Caroline.” She looked bleakly at Ryan. “Why was I spared, and those two young ones, who were just into a second chance for happiness … Why did they have to die?” She shook her head. “The only good thing was that the children were spared. Except that now two are orphans, and Benny as good as an orphan. How can that be fair?

  “But,” Maudie said, “life isn’t fair. No one ever said life was fair.”

  Ryan laid her hand over Maudie’s. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Did you see anything that night? Anything that would help the police?”

  “How could I see the killer? If that’s what you mean,” Maudie said testily. “It was dark.” She rose, stepped to the kitchen sink, and ran a glass of water.

  Ryan said, “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “You didn’t upset me, I seem to be in a permanent stat
e of upset.” She returned to the table, sipping her water. “Benny and I are having dinner with my sister’s family tonight, that will be a nice outing. Carlene and her husband and their two boys. I’ve hardly had time to visit with her since I arrived. They’re just up at the top of the hill,” she said, “only about ten blocks. It’s that adobe house with the deep veranda, the high wall and jasmine vines in front.”

  “I know the place,” Ryan said. “It’s lovely. Your sister is Carlene Colletto? I did a remodel on their kitchen a few years ago.”

  “Of course.” Maudie nodded. “Carlene loves her kitchen, it’s so bright with that old dark wall now open to the garden.”

  On the stairs, Dulcie’s ears were pricked, and the tip of her tail began to twitch. Fidgeting, she gave Joe a wild look, leaped off the steps, and disappeared into the garage. Just as swiftly, Kit followed her. Joe stayed where he was. He knew Kit was wired, but what had put the wind up Dulcie’s tail? What was so interesting about Maudie’s sister, that she and Kit needed to talk about it? And how did they think they could whisper between themselves in the garage, without Benny hearing them? He was puzzling over female cats’ erratic behavior when David came down the stairs. He was barefoot, smelling of soap and shampoo, wearing chinos and a clean white T-shirt. He gave Ryan a smile, stepped to the counter to pour a cup of coffee, then picked up the folded newspaper and stood reading the sports page.

  At the table, Ryan was saying, “Don’t the Colletto boys work here in the village?”

  “Jared does,” Maudie said. “He was working part-time for a moving service, but I think he changed jobs. I know he takes accounting classes at the college. I think Kent works somewhere up the coast a few miles.”

  “Jared’s a nice young man,” Ryan said. “I don’t know Kent well, but Jared’s helped some of my clients move into their new homes.”

  Maudie smiled. “I’m hoping, when the studio’s completed, he’ll help me move my things in. David will be gone, he flies out today,” she said, glancing across at her son. “I’m anxious to get my quilting equipment set up, get everything put away so I can prepare for an upcoming exhibit.”

  “At the Humphrey,” Ryan said. “That’s a really nice gallery. Will there be a reception?”

  “Just after New Year’s,” Maudie said, seeming pleased that Ryan knew about the show. “You’re on my mailing list.”

  “We should be finished with the studio by this weekend. The cabinets are all in place, we’ll have the windows in today, trim them tomorrow, lay the floor, and then a few last-minute details. If Jared can’t help you move in, we’ll find someone.”

  “Kent might be able to,” Maudie said, “but he works odd hours.” She gave Ryan a direct look. “I’m sure you know that the boys’ oldest brother is in prison.”

  Ryan nodded, but said nothing.

  “There’s no point hiding it,” Maudie said, “in such a small village where everyone knows everyone’s business. And of course, with your family in law enforcement you hear these things.”

  “Maybe Victor isn’t truly a bad young man,” Ryan said. “Maybe just impetuous, slow to grow up?”

  The older woman sighed. “Children can turn out so differently. Victor on the wrong side of the law, and Kent no angel, but Jared doing just fine. I guess Allen and I were lucky, to have raised two good boys.” She was silent, glancing out to the new studio where the delivery driver, apparently finished unloading, was handing Scotty an invoice.

  “I’d best get to work,” Ryan said, rising and picking up her gloves. When she had gone, David returned to the table, and spread out the paper. On the stairs, Joe Grey waited, torn between listening to Maudie and David and heading for the garage to see what had so energized Dulcie and Kit, his curiosity pulling at him like two rabbits escaping in opposite directions.

  10

  THAT MORNING AS Joe Grey eavesdropped in plain sight from Maudie Toola’s stairway, forty miles southeast of the village at the California State Prison at Soledad, the warden picked up the phone to dial an inmate’s family. This was a mission Walter Deaver seldom had to perform, and one he didn’t look forward to, particularly in this case. Jack Reed didn’t have any family to notify except his little girl, who was only maybe thirteen. Lori’s mother had died of cancer several years before, and Jack was all the child had. At thirteen, a little girl badly needed her father—in Lori’s case, even a father in prison was better than no father at all.

  Jack Reed wasn’t a troublemaker, a long way from it. This was his first offense and, Deaver would be willing to bet, would be his last scrape with the law once he was out. In Deaver’s view, Reed shouldn’t be in prison at all but should get a medal for what he’d done. But then, he didn’t make the laws.

  Reluctantly he picked up the phone, not wanting to relay this news. Hoping, in the days to come, not to have to bear worse news, although Reed’s condition was critical. If Jack Reed died, the child would have no one.

  Except, of course, her guardian, Cora Lee French. Lori was lucky in that respect; Jack had chosen well when he chose the woman who, in his absence, was helping to shape the child’s life. He knew that Lori was in a private school, and that she spent much of her free time in an apprentice program working for a local building contractor, a woman who was close friends both with Cora Lee and with Chief Harper.

  Deaver generally didn’t take this kind of interest in the personal lives of his prisoners; he couldn’t, with a population double what the prison had been built to accommodate. Nor did he care to, when most of them were members of prison gangs, vicious, high-maintenance dregs on society. Men so seduced by the criminal culture they were too far gone for anything to be done other than keep them off the streets, keep them from killing anyone else. But because of Harper’s special interest in this case, he’d learned a good deal about Jack Reed and his daughter—he just wished the parole board, instead of releasing dangerous prisoners, would release the few men like Jack. But what the hell, who could figure what was in the minds of some state-appointed officials?

  It was two hours since Reed had been stabbed in the prison yard outside the mess hall. The shank was a knife made from a length of water pipe that had been removed from the sink in the cell of the would-be killer. The prison was on lockdown, and all cells had been searched for further weapons. Reed had been tended briefly by the prison doctors before a helicopter transported him to Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital where, in the civilian ICU, he would remain under guard, hooked up to life support, closer to death than to life.

  The phone rang five times. When a woman answered, Deaver asked for Lori’s guardian.

  “This is Cora Lee.”

  Deaver had seen the woman and child on visiting days. Cora Lee was striking, a tall, slim woman with short-clipped, curly black hair streaked with silver. He thought she might be Creole, from her café au lait complexion and her faint accent, as if maybe she’d grown up in New Orleans. Her manner was quiet, self-contained, and she seemed truly fond of Lori.

  You got a lot of scum among the visiting crowds, grossly fat women in low-cut T-shirts, women in skintight jeans and flip-flops. As if it made no difference, as if no one cared how they looked when they entered the institution, as if his prison were some fourth-rate bordello. But Lori and Cora Lee always arrived well groomed, as neatly dressed and appealing as if they were headed for Sunday church, where they might indeed be judged—by the congregation or the Almighty—for their grooming and cleanliness.

  He identified himself to Ms. French, told her as gently as he could that Jack had been stabbed and was in the ICU in Salinas, and that she had his permission to take Lori to visit him. There was a long silence at the other end of the line. Waiting, he wondered idly whether, if Reed died, the guardian would adopt the child. It was none of his business, but he sure didn’t like to see any child become a ward of the state. Lori Reed appeared to be a serious and sensible girl, and she’d need that steadiness now, if Reed didn’t make it. When these things happened to a prisoner l
ike Reed, someone who wasn’t part of a gang, who tried to keep to himself and stay out of trouble, just trying to make it to the end of his sentence, the situation sickened Deaver. At the other end of the line Cora Lee French finally spoke; her voice, which had been light and cheerful, was low and subdued. “How bad is he?”

  “He’s critical.”

  “I’ll tell Lori. When can we see him?” She was direct, straightforward, but she sounded sick at having to tell the child. They talked for only a few minutes, he gave her instructions for their arrival at the hospital, told her who to ask for, told her how long they would be able to stay. She thanked him in a naked voice that left him feeling like hell.

  HALF AN HOUR after the warden’s call, Lori and Cora Lee were headed inland to the Salinas hospital. Cora Lee drove in silence, her right hand holding Lori’s small, cold hand, offering what comfort she could. Lori huddled down in the seat like a hurt little animal, her school uniform, white shirt and navy skirt, rumpled from the playground where Cora Lee had picked her up, her dark hair tangled, her face pale with fear as she tried to understand how Pa, her pa, could suddenly be so injured that he was fighting for his life. Pa wasn’t a bully, he wasn’t into prison gangs, he wasn’t mean, he had never hurt anyone—no one that didn’t need hurting, Lori thought. She couldn’t imagine that Pa would die, she wouldn’t let herself believe that could happen.

  But Ma had died. There was nothing Lori had been able to do, to make her well, to stop her from dying. Certainly her little-girl prayers hadn’t turned away the cancer. She’d stood by her mother’s bed in that faraway North Carolina town praying and praying, and watched her mother’s life drain away.

  This hour of the morning, the traffic was heavy with commuters and with trucks: huge, loud, diesel-stinking trucks crowding them, and moving in the other direction, too, along the two-lane, their closed sides marked with bakery and beer logos, or their railed sides penning in cattle headed for some slaughter yard, Lori thought, feeling sad for them. Cora Lee didn’t talk, she left Lori to her own thoughts, and for that Lori was grateful. Cora Lee’s silence soothed her, she was there for her, but not intrusive. Not since before Mama died, when Lori was little, had anyone understood so well what she was thinking, and known, just by being there, how to make her feel better. In the year and a half since Pa was sent to prison, she and Cora Lee had visited him seven times. Sometimes, at first, she hadn’t wanted to go, hadn’t wanted to see Pa behind bars. But Cora Lee had urged her.