Cat's Eyewitness (12 page)

“Harry, why are you obsessing about this?” BoomBoom figured she knew the answer but asked anyway.

“Well, what if he didn’t die of natural causes?”

“I knew it!” BoomBoom triumphantly said. “Harry, you see a murderer behind every bush, I swear.”

16

A
rrogant twit.”
Pewter, her low opinion of all fowl confirmed, had been listening to Tucker recount her conversation with the cardinal.

Mrs. Murphy listened to the cherry logs crackle in the living-room fireplace as she reposed on the wing chair facing the old mantel with Wedgwood inserts. Pewter faced her in the other wing chair while Tucker had plopped in front of the fire.

Harry, at that moment, was opening a can of asparagus. Since she was in the kitchen she missed the conversation—not that she could have understood any of it, but she did listen when her animals spoke. From time to time, she grasped a bit of what they tried to convey to her. She hadn’t gone into the basement or she would have instantly grasped the fury both cats wished to convey. They had turned their spite at being left behind on the fifty-pound bags of thistle and wild birdseed Harry stored there. With the bottoms neatly torn open, the tiny seeds spread over the concrete floor, long tendrils of edibles. Satisfied with the mess, the two returned upstairs to await Harry and Tucker.

“Brother Thomas knocked off his perch,”
Tucker said.

“Birdbrain,”
Pewter added.

“Brother Thomas, or are you still referring to the cardinal?”
Mrs. Murphy sat up to stretch.

“Both,”
Pewter succinctly replied.

“That’s mean, Pewts,”
Tucker said.
“Brother Thomas wasn’t a birdbrain.”

“Well, he was stupid enough to pray in that bitter cold and blinding snow and then get choked to death or strangled.”
Pewter, despite her thick gray fur, hated cold.

“He wasn’t strangled. The cardinal said a monk put his hand over Brother Thomas’s mouth; he saw it through the blowing snow.”

“Mmm, if he was strangled it would have shown. Apart from the marks on his neck, his eyeballs would have been bloodshot.”
Mrs. Murphy, having killed many a mouse and mole, although never by strangulation, had a sense of what happened according to type of death. And being a cat, she didn’t shy from this as a human might.

“Could have covered up the marks with makeup,”
Pewter thought out loud.

“Not really. There’s nothing anyone could have done about his eyeballs. Whatever was done to him worked quickly. Remember, too, he didn’t fall over. He stayed kneeling, with his hands resting on the boulder base.”
Mrs. Murphy was becoming intrigued by this strange death.

“Probably half frozen already,”
Pewter saucily tossed off.

“Maybe so, maybe so.”
Tucker moved a foot away from the fire, since she was getting hot.

“Does the cardinal live near the statue?”
Mrs. Murphy asked.

“On the ravine side. Lots of bushes and enough open spaces, too, to keep him and his mate happy. That whole place is full of birds.”

“Birds stink.”
Pewter made a face.

“Chickens, turkeys, and ducks stink if they’re in pens. Wild birds aren’t so bad,”
Mrs. Murphy replied.

“You can smell them, though,”
Pewter replied.

“We can smell them. Humans can’t. Humans can only smell a hen house.”
Tucker couldn’t understand how any animal could live without a highly developed sense of smell.

“Smoking,”
Pewter said.

“Doesn’t help them, but they aren’t born with good noses. Look how tiny their noses are. Can’t warm up air in that.”
Tucker laughed.

“Yeah, but look how tiny our noses are and we have excellent olfactory powers.”
Mrs. Murphy gave Tucker pride of place in the scenting department, but feline powers were very good.
“It’s their receptors—they don’t have many. Nothing they can do about it.”

“Harry uses her nose a lot for a human.”
Tucker studied Harry.
“I think it’s because she pays close attention to what’s going on around her, so even though she doesn’t have the equipment we have, she catches scent before other humans.”

“She ought to pay attention to what’s going on inside her,”
Pewter complained, as Tucker had filled in her friends concerning Fair’s deadline.

“Not her way.”
Mrs. Murphy accepted Harry as she was. The cat had learned a long time ago that she couldn’t change anyone. She didn’t have much desire to change Harry, who was, after all, a less evolved species than herself. If she could change one thing, though, it would be to improve Harry’s ability to understand the cats and dog.
“She hasn’t told Susan or Miranda about her Thanksgiving talk with Fair. Who knows when she’ll work herself up to that?”

Tucker switched back to the statue.
“The cardinal said the blood smelled coppery, which it does, you know.”

“Very odd.”
Mrs. Murphy sat straight up with both paws in front of her like an Egyptian cat statue.

“Why kill Brother Thomas?”
Tucker hated all this.

“Maybe his murder has something to do with his life before becoming a monk,”
Pewter sensibly replied.

“Brother Thomas took his vows before most of the other monks were born.”
Mrs. Murphy heard the refrigerator door open and close.
“Who would even know about his life before he became a Greyfriar?”

“Maybe he molested boys and they’ve killed him.”
Pewter knew about the troubles in the Catholic Church.

“How? They hardly ever see boys and girls up there, unless a parent brings a child into one of the shops. It’s not a destination for kids.”
Mrs. Murphy kept an ear tuned to the kitchen.
“The only monks who see kids are the two doctor monks, and I could be wrong but I’d bet you ten field mice there’s no way either Brother Andrew or Brother John would be abusing children.”

“Maybe they’re abusing one another.”
Pewter relished the sex angle.

“If they are, who would care?”
Tucker began listening to the kitchen, too.

“I would!”
Pewter stoutly replied.

“No one’s abusing you, Pewter.”
Mrs. Murphy laughed.

“If I were a monk, I’d care.”

“Those are grown men. They can defend themselves.”
Mrs. Murphy didn’t believe sex was the issue.

“Not if two ganged up on you.”

“She’s right about that,”
Tucker agreed with the gray kitty,
“but it does seem unlikely.”

“So does murder,”
Pewter fired back.

“True enough.”
Mrs. Murphy half-closed her eyes.

“It’s either something Brother Thomas did way back when before he was a monk that’s caught up with him, you know, like ‘vengeance is mine’—”
Tucker, having listened to the Bible-quoting Miranda for years, cited this brief sentence fragment from Deuteronomy, Chapter 32, Verse 35.

“Or he knew something, something big.”
The tiger cat suddenly shot off the wing chair and raced into the kitchen.

Tucker immediately followed.

“Hey!”
Pewter yelled at them, then the aroma of beef reached her nostrils. She hightailed it off the wing chair.

Harry placed cooked beef with crunchies and broth in three bowls. Tucker ate a different kind of kibble than the kitties. Dog crunchies usually contain less fat than cat crunchies, which meant if Tucker could filch cat crunchies, she did.

Harry fried herself a small steak while the asparagus heated in a saucepan. Fair wouldn’t be coming over tonight. Monday nights he stayed at the clinic, catching up on paperwork. They tried to spend Tuesdays, Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays together.

Late November and December gave him a breather, as Fair’s specialty was equine reproduction. In January and February breeders hit high gear and so did Fair. Thoroughbreds’ foaling season overlapped part of breeding season. Foals appeared when they felt like it, like human babies, so Fair endured days with little sleep. The season finally stabilized around the end of March.

Tucker finished first, since she gobbled her food. The cats ate with more decorum, although Pewter sported food bits on her whiskers. This would be followed by a grooming routine that would put a cover girl to shame.

“The cardinal is full of himself because he’s the state bird of Virginia.”
Tucker liked the bird despite his attitude.
“Goes to their heads.”

“State dog is the foxhound. I don’t think it’s gone to their heads.”
Mrs. Murphy liked foxhounds; she generally liked all types of hounds since they are good problem solvers.

“Should be the corgi.”
Tucker exhibited a small flash of ego.

“Queen Elizabeth has dibs on that.”
Mrs. Murphy laughed.

“Yeah, Tucker, you belong in Buckingham Palace or Sandringham or wherever.”
Pewter bit into a delicious warm bit of beef, the fat still on it making it extra sweet to her tongue.

“I do, don’t I?”
The sturdy animal smiled.
“Well, you know the only reason the foxhound won out is because Virginia is the center of foxhunting in America. I mean, it’s practically the state sport.”

“Yeah,”
both cats laughed,
“and the fox always wins.”

Pewter quickly hollered,
“Jigs for a bite.”
Then she stuck her face in Mrs. Murphy’s bowl, grabbing a juicy chunk of beef.

“Damn,”
Mrs. Murphy cussed.

“Hee hee.”
Pewter chewed with delight.

“I know. I wished I’d said it first.”

“Ever notice how a cardinal’s beak changes color?”
Tucker, observant, edged closer to Pewter’s bowl, some food still inside.

“Hey, I see you. Forget it.”
Pewter growled.

“In case you’re full, I’ll help you out.”

“Tucker, you liar.”
The gray cat hunched over her bowl.

“The cardinal’s beak is black when he’s a juvenile; he’s grayish brown with color on his wings then. Sometimes people who don’t pay attention to birds confuse the young males with females.”

“Oh, how can they do that?”
Pewter, mouth full, slurred her words.
“The female has an orange bill, orange on her crest, and pretty orange-red on her wings and tail. And she has a blush of color on her light gray breast. Can’t miss her.”

“Sometimes they’re yellowish. There’s a lot of color variation. One time I was talking to a female cardinal who was poking around in Harry’s rhododendrons and I thought she was a cedar waxwing until I realized she didn’t have the black mask.”
Mrs. Murphy finished her delicious dinner.

“I think what they eat affects their color. What we eat affects the gloss on our coats.”
Pewter finally gobbled the last mouthful, to Tucker’s dismay.
“Greedy,”
she said under her breath.

“Fatty,”
Tucker fired back.

The cat, lightning-fast, swatted the dog, who scooted backward.

“Ugly. I don’t expect my friends to be ugly.” Harry flipped her steak in the frying pan.

“It’s Tucker’s fault.”

“Sure.”
Tucker shrugged.
“To change the subject, I think our mother is on the trail again.”

“But how would she know? She can’t understand what the cardinal is saying.”
Pewter had already gotten over being angry at Tucker.

“The tears of blood.”
Mrs. Murphy cleaned her face.

“Huh?”
Pewter began her grooming, too.

“She saw the tears of blood. Originally she wanted to go back and double-check, but Brother Frank cooled her with his phone call. Then Susan called and told her Brother Thomas died in front of the statue. Set her off. You know how her mind works.”
Mrs. Murphy knew her human very well.

“Or doesn’t.”
Pewter moaned.
“More treks in the cold.”

“You don’t have to go,”
Tucker airily said.

Pewter gave her an icy stare as Harry sat down at the kitchen table.

“We’d better be extra vigilant.”
Mrs. Murphy leapt onto an empty kitchen chair.

“Is there a state cat of Virginia?”
Tucker asked.

“I don’t think so.”
Pewter thought this a terrible oversight.

Virginia license plates carried various messages. Some had a ship with the date 1607, the year Jamestown was founded. Others had a yellow swallowtail butterfly, the state butterfly. Some had a horse on them, others a school logo. Harry’s old license plates were simply white with blue letters, but she liked the ones with a cat and dog on them, signifying the driver as an animal lover. Pewter thought there should be a license plate devoted exclusively to cats, using her slimmed-down image, of course.

“How can that be?”
Tucker wondered.
“If we have a state butterfly, a state flower, a state tree, how can there not be a state cat?”

“Certainly it should be a tiger cat.”
Mrs. Murphy smiled.

“No, it should be a gray cat just like me.”
Pewter jumped onto another kitchen chair, peeking over the tabletop.