Cat Playing Cupid (12 page)

“To inquire about that article in the paper.” Ryder looked at her archly. “To see if there could be some connection with Carson Chappell. You have seen the article? A lost hiker, a man who was never found…”

“I saw it,” Lindsey said. “Carson wasn't hiking in Oregon, he was here in California.”

“That's what he told you.”

“And you know differently? What do you know, Ryder?”

“I just thought I'd ask. See what the police might know. I didn't mean to step on any toes—or get you in trouble.”

“Why would you get me in trouble? And why, after all this time, would you care?”

Captain Harper took in the exchange without expression, but Mike Flannery clearly showed his annoyance. Lindsey stepped back as Ryder edged past her up the hall toward the front door.

But when Max had seen her out, and Mike was escorting Lindsey down the hall toward Dallas's lighted office, Max called Mike back. “Why don't you buy Lindsey a
cup of coffee?” Max said, nodding toward the conference room. “Take a little break, give me a few minutes with Dallas on several matters.”

Mike took Lindsey's arm, his eyes meeting Max's with a question that received only a level look, then guided her back up the hall toward the conference room, toward the smell of overcooked coffee.

I
N
C
HARLIE'S BIG
family kitchen, the coffee was freshly brewed; Wilma and Charlie had finished their pastrami sandwiches and were feasting on the first strawberries of the season, gleaming in a glass bowl on the table and liberally dusted with powdered sugar.

“This is a
good
time for you to start riding again,” Charlie said. “Of course you don't forget. All your childhood years on a farm before you moved here, how could your body forget? Come on, finish your lunch and let's head out.”

Wilma was not a timid person. And how often in the past years had she toyed with the idea of having a horse again? Now that Charlie had offered a place to keep a mount, how could she do otherwise than return to that freedom she'd known in childhood?

“The two of us together,” Charlie said, “going up to the ruins, really would look less suspicious if Max finds out. Not that I mean to tell him, but…”

“It's been hard,” Wilma said, “keeping secrets.”

“As if I had a choice.” Charlie rose to carry their dishes to the sink. “When Max proposed, you know that was my one concern, that I'd have to lie to keep the cats' secret.” She looked desolately at Wilma. “I didn't know, then, half how hard that would be.”

She put the remaining strawberries in the refrigerator and unplugged the coffeepot. “I'd always believed that in a good marriage you wouldn't ever have secrets, would never have to lie, that a solid marriage is based on trust.

“I still know that's true. But here I am lying to him nearly every day, or holding back information, which is the same thing.”

“Most marriages,” Wilma said wryly, “don't involve this kind of secret.” She put their dishes in the dishwasher, they grabbed their jackets, locked the door behind them, and headed for the barn.

In the fenced-in pasture, the two big, half-breed Great Danes raced to the gate, anticipating a run, but Charlie, rubbing their ears, told them they had to stay home. They watched longingly as their master disappeared into the stable—she didn't want them following, nosing around the ruins and sniffing out the buried corpse. While that would be a natural way to “discover” the body, those two would tear up the grave, scatter the bones before she could stop them.

And, worse, their discovery would destroy Joe Grey's plan, which, she had to admit, was very close to brilliant—though it would be a few more days before Ryan and Clyde got home and Joe could put his scenario into action. It was a crazy plan, but one that would accomplish a mission near
to Ryan's heart, a project that Ryan had put off for some time.

Bridling Bucky, and watching Wilma, Charlie knew that her aunt had forgotten nothing. Wilma already had the mare brushed and saddled, had checked her feet, and was leading her out into the yard to mount up. And the look on Wilma's face as they headed their horses around behind the barn and up the little trail through the woods was enough to keep Charlie smiling for days. This was what Wilma needed to balance the depression and perhaps fear that could bedevil a person as he or she grew older, even her cheerful and courageous aunt—fear of becoming ill and incapacitated, and, for many, an innate sadness at leaving this world, though she'd seen none of that in Wilma.

Now, if Charlie knew her aunt, she'd soon be shopping for a horse of her own. Wilma was, after all, only in her sixties, way too young to stop doing the things she loved best.

They rode side by side as long as the trail permitted, then Wilma let Redwing take the lead, as the mare wanted to do. Max's big buckskin gelding always deferred to Redwing, usually with a twitch of his ears that Charlie knew was tolerant male humor. They talked only intermittently, enjoying the silence of the woods, the call of a squirrel, the hush of wind in the trees. Redwing snorted at the skittering of small animals racing to hide from them, and once she shied away, but Wilma sat her easily. The birds were busy building nests, calling out their mating songs. They were up on the open hills, above the woods and above the Pamillon ruins, when Wilma turned in the saddle, looking back at her.

“That body, Charlie…isn't there a family cemetery on the property? Could that simply be one of the family graves? Could the cats…?”

“There is a cemetery, but it's in the rose garden at the far north end. Willow said this grave is right beside the house, in a sheltered patio adjoining a bedroom. Who would bury a dead relative outside a bedroom? Where, every time you stepped out the door or wanted to have tea on the terrace, you were walking on them?”

Wilma laughed. “The Pamillons might. They were a strange bunch. I guess they still are. The way they divided up the property, all entangled in trusts and wills that have never gotten sorted out, refusing to get together, leaving this valuable land to fall to ruin.”

“I didn't think there were any Pamillons left, at least not around here.”

“Nina Gibbs was the last I know of to live nearby, the others are scattered who knows where. Olivia Pamillon was Nina's aunt.”

Charlie moved Bucky up beside Redwing, looking with amazement at Wilma. “Nina Gibbs? Ray Gibbs's wife? The woman people said ran off with Carson Chappell?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Mike's working the Chappell case, it's one of the cold files Max and Dallas gave him.”

“I wish him luck,” Wilma said. “Some people think Carson's still alive, that he and Nina are living somewhere romantic like Trinidad or the Bahamas.”

“You didn't hear about the body, the one in Oregon? It was in the paper.”

Wilma looked at her, waiting.

“A hiker's body, apparently. Been in the woods for years. Lindsey Wolf thinks it's Chappell.”

Wilma was silent, frowning, thinking about that. Moving down the hill and into the ruins, approaching the front of the mansion, the horses began to snort at the specter of ragged, fallen walls tangled among the fallen oaks, at the open caves of the mansion's front rooms. Bowing their necks, backing and snorting, they wanted to wheel away. Urging them on, the riders moved around the far side of the rambling structure, where the rear walls stood intact.

Dismounting, they haltered the horses and tied them to a healthy young oak, one of a new generation of saplings striving to reclaim the land. They made their way on foot over the rougher ground, over the rubble of fallen garden walls, skirting the back of the mansion, seeking the small sheltered grotto that Willow had described among the jutting wings and unexpected terraces.

They found the sheltered garden with its overgrown bushes and weeds, tall grass pushing up between the brick paving. Past a central flower bed, at the back of the grotto, a short wall had collapsed into a cellar, just as Willow had described. Was this damage perhaps from an earthquake? The adjoining walls of the bedchamber looked solid enough.

“Looks like this was a closet jutting out,” Charlie said. “Maybe one that had been added on?”

“Perhaps,” Wilma said. “I've been told the cellars run all under the house—wine cellars, root cellars, who knows what? Old Frederick Pamillon believed in building to last, and I guess that included basement-deep foundations. He was a civil engineer, you know. Highways, bridges, big projects.”

“Maybe he built solidly,” Charlie said, kneeling down to look into the cellar, “but the closet itself has only a slab under it, no foundation. The slab is tilted into the cellar. You've been researching Frederick Pamillon?”

“For library patrons, but not recently. It's all there in the local history department. Olivia Pamillon was a well-known figure in the village, and during her time there was a lot of interest in the estate. When the property began deteriorating, the historical society kept after her to repair it. Olivia may have had reasons for not doing so, perhaps because of the tangle of multiple owners. Or maybe she was just interested in other things. She had a busy social life, lots of charity projects, though she no longer entertained at the mansion. That was some fifty years ago.”

Charlie lay down on her stomach, looking deeper into the black hole beneath the fallen wall, then reaching in. She hoped there weren't spiders. She could tolerate common spiders, but the brown recluse, with its flesh-eating bite, frightened her, and she'd forgotten to bring gloves.

She could feel what remained of the closet floor, several inches above the tilting slab. There was a space between the two. Reaching in, her fingers stroked something smoother than the slab or the floor. Yes, something wedged there, she could feel a smooth corner of what might be the small wooden box.

Sliding in on her stomach, hoping that more of the wall wouldn't fall, or the box drop out of reach, she worked it free and drew it out. Rising, she spread her jacket on a mossy bench, and opened the miniature chest.

Carefully she lifted out the leather wrapping, stirring
a fine powdering of disintegrating leather. Leather dust came away on her fingers.

Within lay the cloth-wrapped book. Lifting it out, she laid it on her jacket. The linen wrapping was dry and frail, the folds stained brown, with paler lines where it had been refolded. And it was marked with faint, dusty paw smudges that made her smile.

The book was old and looked handmade; the leather covers seemed to be hand tooled and were embossed in gold, the pages a thick, rich paper yellowed with age. The long title of the little volume startled both women:
Folktales of Speaking Cats and a History of Certain Rare Encounters.

Gently Wilma turned to the title page. “Thomas Bewick,” she mused. “He lived over a century ago.” The date of publication was 1820. “He was a typographer and engraver…”

“I remember his wood engravings,” Charlie said, “from art history.”

Wilma nodded. “I studied him in my library courses, and I've done several research questions on him.” She frowned. “He's well represented in histories of that era, but I don't remember this title. He didn't produce that many books that I'd forget this. Certainly if I'd seen it in recent years, since I learned the truth about the cats, I would have been terribly upset.”

She looked at Charlie, puzzled. “He would have been in his midsixties when he published this—after he published Aesop's Fables, some years after he did
Land Birds,
and
Water Birds,
and
A History of Quadrupeds.
If this is a genuine Thomas Bewick, Charlie, and if it's as rare as I think, it could be worth a fortune.”

The two women knelt side by side as Wilma carefully turned the dry pages. The text was deeply embossed in a handsome, old-fashioned typeface—they could see where Willow had turned pages, too, could see the little, faint smudges.

Wilma had read all the old stories and history she could find about ancient and unusual cats, and had listened to many medieval tales and earlier folklore recited by Pedric Greenlaw. But she had never come across these stories. Still, the book seemed harmless enough, there was nothing to indicate that speaking cats were anything but fiction, ancient and entertaining myth—until they turned to the last third of the volume.

The last chapters were given over to Bewick's personal observations, which he presented as being true. The author's encounters with cats that spoke to him, his experiences while on a walking trek across the Scottish highlands, left Wilma and Charlie deeply shaken.

Closing the book at last, Wilma looked at her niece. “Bewick knew about the cats, and whoever buried the book knew.” Turning to the front, to the flyleaf, she read aloud from a child's round, neat script.
This book belongs to Olivia Pamillon. Christmas 1922.

Charlie rose to look above the French doors, staring up at the rearing cat. “If there are cats embossed on the building, then did the whole family know?”

“Maybe Olivia added the carving,” Wilma said, “when she lived here alone, maybe contracted to have the carving done then?”

“Dr. Firetti said some of the cats who escaped from the Welsh couple came here, he said that was at the time
the mansion was falling into disrepair.” Charlie pushed back a lock of red hair. “Olivia could have overheard the cats whispering among themselves, could have discovered their talents, then. She would have been terribly excited to find out that what she already believed, from this book, was indeed real.”

“Or maybe she
knew
, all her life?” Wilma said. “Remember, when Olivia was small, many of the Pamillons traveled in Europe and Great Britain. The grand tour, it was called then. Maybe they learned about the cats on those journeys? Maybe even brought a pair back with them, years before the Welsh couple brought more?”

“Imagine, if there were speaking cats here on the estate during Olivia's last years,” Charlie said, “when she was alone. Maybe they were her only friends. She could have become obsessed with them. People think she turned strange and reclusive, but maybe that was simply her preoccupation with the cats.”

The two women looked at each other, both wishing they could see into the past. “Whatever happened,” Wilma said, “I find it strange that she didn't destroy the book, to keep safe the cats' secret.”

Charlie rewrapped the book and placed it in the box, and slipped the box into the little backpack she'd brought, where it would ride safely; she rose, wondering where the book would lead them now that it was unearthed again. And knowing that, above all else, in the end it must be destroyed, and feeling sad about that.