Cat Seeing Double (3 page)

“They'll be fine,” Clyde said, starting the engine. “It's a nice day, they want a bit of sunshine.” And as he headed down the hills, the cats remained unmoving, seeming as safe as if they wore seat belts. Ryan was sure there couldn't be another cat in the world that wouldn't leap out to the street or stand on the edge of the seat and be thrown out. Cats riding in open rumble seats, cats attending weddings.

Dulcie looked up at her with such contentment, and Joe Grey's expression was so smug that she almost imagined they were proud to be riding in that beautiful vintage car.

Clyde had completely restored the '28 Chevy—new, butter-yellow leather upholstery, gleaming yellow paint. Old cars were Clyde's love, the Hudsons and Pierce-
Arrows and old Packards that he worked on in the back garage of his upscale automotive shop. When he got one in perfect condition he would drive it for a while and then sell it. He was paying for the remodeling of his cottage with the profits from one car or another, just as he had paid to renovate the derelict apartment building he had bought. It was clear that he took great joy in acquiring abandoned relics, in making them new and useful again. Maybe that too was why she liked Clyde Damen.

In the bright autumn weather Molena Point was mobbed with tourists, but despite the glut of out-of-town cars Clyde found a parking place half a block from the church. Swinging a U-turn he neatly parked, scooped up the two cats to keep them safe from traffic, and they crossed to the deep garden in front of the Village Church.

The garden paths were already crowded with villagers. Pausing beside a lemon tree, Clyde half-lifted and half-tossed the two cats into the branches away from crowding feet. Ryan watched them climb, as Clyde headed inside the church to his duties as best man.

She saw, across the garden, her uncle Dallas and her sister. Hanni, decked out in outrageous rags, looked like a million dollars. It was the first time in months that she had seen Dallas in uniform and not in his detective's plainclothes. The entire police force had turned out spit-and-polish, everyone in the village was dressed up and in a party mood. In the excitement of celebration on such a lovely day she had no reason to imagine that disaster would, within moments, rock the church and the garden.

But as the wedding guests laughed and gossiped, and inside the church the groom in his captain's uniform paced with nerves, an unexpected event began to unfold, a drama that could alter—or cut short—the course of many lives.

At first
, no one saw the lone witness. Not even Joe Grey and Dulcie, crouched high among the branches of the lemon tree, saw the tortoiseshell cat on the rooftops across the street. The two older cats had no glimpse of the tattercoat kit hunched on the dark shingles hidden beneath the overhanging oak branches; they had no hint of the panic that would, in a moment, course through the kit's small, tensed body.

The community church was set well back from the street within its garden of flowering shrubs and small decorative trees. The nonsectarian meeting rooms of the one-story Mediterranean building were employed for all manner of village functions besides church services, from political discussions to author readings. The kit had hung around the church all morning watching the cleaning crew performing a last polish and setting up buffet tables on the back patio; and she had watched masses of white flowers being delivered and arranged within the largest meeting room. Only when the wedding guests began to arrive had she trotted across the narrow residential street, to be out of the
way of sharp-heeled party shoes and the hard black oxfords of the many uniformed officers. Swarming up a jasmine trellis to the roof of a brown clapboard cottage, she had stretched out where an oak tree's shadows darkened the weathered shingles. Here, she had the best seat of all, with a clear view across the garden and through the wide glass doors to the lectern where the bride and groom would stand, exchanging their sacred vows.

She had watched Charlie and Wilma arrive, Wilma carrying the bridal dress in a long plastic bag and Charlie carrying a small suitcase. What a lot of preparation it took for humans to get married, nothing like the casual trysting of the feral cats she had run with when she was small. The two women entered the south wing of the church through a back door, where the bride would have a private office in which to dress. The kit was watching the growing crowd when, below her, the bushes stirred with a sharp rustle, and a man spoke.

He must be standing between the close-set houses. The timbre of his gravelly voice suggested he was old. He sounded bad-tempered. “Go on. Boy. Get your ass up there, you haven't got all day.”

No one answered, but someone began to climb the trellis, slowly approaching the roof. The kit could hear the little crosspieces creak under a hesitant weight. Padding warily away across the shingles, she crouched beneath overhanging branches out of sight, where she could see.

A young boy was climbing up. A thin dirty boy with ragged shirt and torn jeans, his face smudged, but pale
beneath the dark smears. His black eyes were oblique and hard, his hands brown with dirt. One pocket bulged as if maybe he'd stuffed a candy bar in it, fortification against sudden hunger. The kit knew that feeling.

Peering over, she studied the man who stood below. He was equally ragged, his faded jeans stained, his face bristling with a grizzled beard, his gray hair hanging long around his shoulders. Both man and boy stunk of sharp scents that made the kit's nose burn. The boy had gained the roof. He didn't swing up onto it, but stopped at the edge, turning to look down.

“Go
on,
Curtis. They'll be filling the church in a minute.”

“I don't…”

“Just lie under the branches, no one'll see you. Wait till Harper's in there and the girl and them cops, then punch it and get out. I'll be gone like I told you, the truck gone. You just slip away, no one'll see you.”

Clinging in the vines, the boy looked both determined and scared, like a cornered rat, the kit thought, trapped in a tin can with nowhere to run.

“Just punch it, Curtis. Your dad's in jail because of them cops.”

Swinging a leg over, the boy gained the roof, crouching near the kit beneath the oak branches. She didn't think he saw her, he seemed totally centered on finding a vantage where he would be hidden but could best see the church.

When he'd chosen his place he removed from his pocket a small smooth object like a tiny radio, and laid it on the shingles beside him. The kit puzzled over it for
some time before she understood what it was, this small, plastic, boxlike thing that the boy could hide in one hand. Wilma had one, and so did Clyde. And the old man's voice echoed,
Just punch it and get out.
She didn't understand—there was no garage door in the church to open. Why would…

Just punch it and get out….

What else could a garage-door opener do, the kit wondered, besides open the door for which it was intended? With its little battery inside, its little electrical battery, what could it do?

Just punch it and get out…Wait until Harper's in there, and the girl…

That little electrical battery, that little electric signal…

All the wonders of electrical things that had so astonished the kit when she first came to live among humans: the dishwasher, the refrigerator, the warmth of an electric blanket, the magical lifting of the garage door while Wilma was still in the car, its signal leaping from that opener—its electrical signal leaping…

She remembered cop talk about triggering devices. She stared across the street into the church where someone had left a gift for the bride and groom, a silver-wrapped package tucked down into the lectern where Charlie and Max Harper would stand to be married. She had seen it earlier as she watched the workers, had thought it was a special present hidden just where the preacher would stand, where the bride and groom would stand, a gift all silver-wrapped with little silver bells on the ribbon….

A special present….

A gift that was not a gift,
she realized with a quaking heart, and the kit exploded to life, racing at the boy, leaping on his back, raking and biting and forcing him away from that electric signal-maker, that plastic box that could send its message across the street into the church, could send its triggering message…

She might be wrong. The boy's actions might be innocent. But…
Your dad's in jail because of them cops…. Punch it and get out
…. Terrified and enraged, she clawed and raked and bit, driving the boy away across the roof, forcing him toward the trellis. Nearly falling, he swung away down the trellis, the kit clinging to his back.

Before he hit the ground she dropped clear and ran flashing across the street between cars….

There…there was Clyde hurrying out of the church toward his car as if he had forgotten something. As he leaned into the open convertible, reaching, she leaped to his back nearly shouting in his ear, only remembering at the last instant to whisper….

“Bomb, Clyde. There's a bomb in the church in that oak stand, in the lectern. A boy on the roof…garage door opener to set it off…tell them to run, all to run…I chased him, but…” And she bailed to the ground again and was gone, racing back across the street causing Clyde to shout after her. The street was thick with cars letting people off.

But then seeing her appear at the far side and swarm up a tree to the rooftops, he spun away, never questioning the kit's warning. Not daring to question, not this small cat. Never daring to question her any more than he would question Joe Grey….

 

Moments earlier, Dulcie had been licking blood from her paw where she'd cut herself on a thorn of the lemon tree. She sat among the branches licking at her pad and looking across the garden into the church, admiring the big meeting room with its high, dark-raftered ceiling and white plastered walls and its two long rows of glass doors looking out on the front and back gardens. Vases of white flowers were massed at both ends of the room, and someone had tucked a gift down inside the lectern. She could see a corner of the silver paper, maybe something special to be presented at the ceremony, though that did seem odd.

Imagining the ritual of the wedding, she was filled with purring happiness. No matter what ugliness might happen elsewhere in the world, no matter what hideous events occurred outside their own small village, here, today, human love ruled.

Behind her Joe Grey hissed, “What's she doing?”

She turned on the branch, never doubting from Joe's distraught tone that he was talking about the kit, this kit to whom disaster clung like needles to a magnet.

He was staring across the street at a dark-shingled roof. Dulcie could just see the kit crouched on the edge of the roof beneath overhanging branches.

There was a boy on the roof. The kit watched him intently, rigid with anger—and the next instant she leaped, clawing the boy and raking him. He swatted at her and ran. The kit rode his back, scratching and biting, forcing the boy off the roof, riding him down then leaping away to race across the street.

The kit hit Clyde, flying up clinging to his shoulder. They could see her poke her nose at his ear, whispering…lashing her tail and whispering…

 

In the church office provided for her use, the bride dressed slowly and carefully in her simple linen gown, trying not to fall apart with nerves. In the mirror her freckles looked as dark as paint splatters across her pale cheeks.

Charlie's kinky red hair was pulled back and smoothed, as much as it could be smoothed, into a handsome chignon and clipped with a carved ivory barrette loaned to her by her aunt Wilma. Wilma, tall and slim and white-haired, stood behind Charlie buttoning her dress. The starched-lace wedding veil and crown of white flowers sat on a little stand, on the office desk.

For something blue, Charlie wore blue panties and bra printed with white roses, a private joke between her and Max. Over this, a white lace half-slip and camisole. The “something old” was her mother's wedding ring, one of the few mementos she had from her dead parents. The
new
something was her long white linen gown with its low embroidered neckline and embroidered cap sleeves. Charlie's calloused and capable hands shook both from nerves and excitement and from a sense of the unreal. Time seemed out of kilter, as if in some strange fantasy, the wedding preparations of the preceding few days swirling around her, each moment warped in time and place by her own disbelief.

She was no child bride. At thirty-something she had almost abandoned the idea of falling truly in love and
being married. Now that it was happening, and seeming so inevitable, she felt as if she had stepped into a different world and different time, or maybe stepped into someone else's life.

For a while she'd thought Clyde was the one, and that they might marry, but she'd never had this totally lost and committed and ecstatic feeling with Clyde. She and Clyde had ended up no more than good friends, the best of friends. Her feeling for Max was totally different. Her love for Max was the kind of nervous oneness that
made
her hands shake, made her tremble sometimes, and turned her terrified because he was a cop, terrified that he would be hurt, that she would lose him.

“Is that a tear?” Wilma said, watching Charlie in the mirror. Wilma was dressed in a long, pale blue shift, her gray-white hair done in a bun bound low at her neck.

“Of course it's not a tear. I'm not the weeping sort. Steady as a rock.” She knew she'd have to get over her fear for Max, that a cop's wife couldn't live like that or she would perish; but right now it was all she could do to keep herself together and get to the altar with Wilma's help and not collapse in a fit of uncontrollable nerves.

“You're not steady at all. Are you this nervous on the firing range?”

“I'm not on the firing range. I'm getting married.” She stared at her aunt. “This
is
different than the firing range. Tell me it's different. Tell me…” She collapsed against her aunt, shivering, her head on Wilma's shoulder.

Wilma hugged her and smoothed Charlie's hair. “It's different when you're marrying someone like Max
Harper. You're having a perfectly normal case of nerves. And maybe second thoughts?” She held Charlie away, looking deeply at her, then grinned. “A simple case of premarital hysteria. I expect Max is having the same. You'll be fine.”

“Not second thoughts. Not ever. It's just that…If I worried about him before, what will it be like after we're married?”

“He's sharp enough to have lasted this long,” Wilma said brusquely. “If something were to happen…just give him everything you can. Just fill what time he has—what time we all have. You
must not
fear the future, no one can live like that.”

Wilma looked deeply at her. “You know what to do—you prepare as best you can for the bad times—then live every moment with joy.” She touched Charlie's cheek. “Law enforcement and protecting others, that is his life, Charlie. You can't change what he wants from his life.”

“And there's Clyde,” Charlie said, her perverse mind wanting to dredge up every vague cause for unease. “No matter what he says, I feel…”

“Guilty.”

“As if I dumped him. But he…”

“Not to worry,” Wilma said. “Not only is he bringing Ryan Flannery to the wedding, he's still pursuing Kate Osborne, trying to get her to move back down from San Francisco. I don't think with two women to sort out, trying to pay attention to both, that Clyde is going to spend much time grieving.”

“Well, that's not very flattering,” Charlie said, grin
ning. She smoothed the tendrils of her hair that would keep slipping out from the carefully arranged chignon.

“Quit fussing. You look like an angel, a curly-haired, redheaded angel. Now hold still and let me finish fastening. Where are your shoes? You didn't forget your shoes?”

“On the desk. Now who's fussing?”

“It isn't every day my only niece gets married—my only family.” Turning to fetch the shoes, Wilma moved to the window and slid the drapery back a few inches to look out into the garden where their friends were gathering. The afternoon was bright and serene. “What a lovely crowd. And people still arriving. Even…” Wilma held out her hand. “Come and look.”