How to Moon a Cat (14 page)

“Unlike the chap working behind the curtain at tonight’s little bistro,” Spigot muttered bitterly.

Carlin nervously eyed the now wildly gesticulating producer. “And then the, uh, yes, the next stage takes the riders inland through California’s Central Valley, its breadbasket, so to speak.”

“It was a perfectly honest piece of salmon, from what I could tell,” Spigot cut in grumpily. “Before that cook got hold of it.”

Carlin pressed on. “Stage Six takes us up into the San Bernardino Mountains . . . ”

“Coated it with that wretched pepper and paprika concoction . . . ”

Carlin wiped perspiration from his brow. “Stage Seven is an individual time trial through the streets of downtown Los Angeles . . . ”

“Seared the taste buds right off my tongue.” Spigot gripped his stomach, moaning in pain. “And now that toxic paste is working on my intestines . . . ”

“Well, you did tell them to make it extra spicy,” Carlin snapped as the producer threw his hands up in despair.

Spigot shrugged his shoulders as if surprised by Carlin’s sudden outburst.

Carlin took in a deep breath. Then he concluded, “Finally, the last stage of the race wraps up just north of Malibu, in what will surely be a thrilling—”

“I say,” Spigot interjected, leaning over the edge of the balcony, “what’s that going on down below?”

The cameraman followed the motion of Spigot’s head and aimed the focal point of his equipment at the sidewalk beneath the balcony, where a gangly-legged man in green spandex leggings weaved wildly through the crowds on a bicycle. Pedestrians scrambled to jump out of the way as he careened from side to side. Angry shouts were hurled at the wobbly rider, drowning out his frantic apologies. The front wheel of the bike hit the curb of an intersecting side street and plunged into its gutter, causing the man to somersault over the front handlebars and land, padded rump first, on the pavement.

“Poor fellow,” Spigot said sadly as he turned toward the camera and cocked his right eyebrow knowingly. “I reckon he had the fish.”

I STOOD IN
the gathering darkness, staring at the doors to the Nevada Theatre, still reeling from the realization of my encounter with Frank Napis. If nothing else, I tried to reason optimistically, the presence of Napis was a clear indication that I was on the track of one of Oscar’s hidden treasures. I just wished I had some idea of what I was searching for.

The metal brackets on the soles of Monty’s bike shoes clapped against the concrete as he marched up the hill, pushing his bike beside him. A five-foot-long flexible stick of plastic was taped to the frame’s back end. Flapping at the top of the stick was a green triangular-shaped flag that proclaimed the rider of the bike to be the “Official Representative of the Mayor of San Francisco.”

I turned to study his advancing figure, frowning in concern as he approached. The right sleeve of his nylon shirt was torn open, and the skin on his exposed elbow was raw with road rash. The reason he was walking rather than riding his bike also became obvious: The front tire was completely flat.

“What happened to you?” I asked as he staggered to a stop beside me.

“Lucky . . . to . . . be . . . alive!” Monty gushed emotionally between deep air-sucking breaths. “A bike like this . . . ” He coughed hoarsely. “It’s really quite complicated to ride.”

My mind drifted back to the treasure hunt as Monty began a long-winded explanation of his biking accident.
Bears,
I thought intensely. Oscar’s clue related in some way to the little stuffed bears.

“To begin with, there’s the pedals,” Monty said, pointing at the bike, then at the soles of his feet. “You have to fasten the brackets on the bottom of your shoes into little nubbed clips on the pedals—all while balancing on top of the bike. It’s darn near impossible to keep the thing upright while you’re trying to get your shoes hooked into the pedals. That was the
first
time I fell off . . .”

I tucked my hand into my jacket pocket and fingered the pointed tip of the latest toy bear’s flag. Bears with flags, I pondered to myself. The state flag of California . . . commonly referred to as the Bear Flag . . .

“Then I had some problems with the gears. As it turns out, it’s not so easy to shift between twenty-five settings. You flip a lever the wrong way, and everything gets gummed up.”

I continued with my internal bear musings. The first bear’s flag had directed me here to Nevada City, where I’d found a Mark Twain impersonator discussing the Bear Flag Revolt. Uncle Oscar had been absolutely enamored with Mark Twain, but it had to be a coincidence that I’d run into the impersonator at this specific time and place—or was it . . . ?

“Once I finally got moving, the disc brakes nearly did me in. All it takes is one light squeeze of the handle, and the wheels freeze up immediately. I went flying over the handlebars down the hill there in front of the National Hotel. Ripped the sleeve of my jersey . . . ”

I turned my attention to the second toy bear. The stuffed animal was similar in size and shape to the one I’d found behind the wall in the kitchen. The writing on this flag was directing me to Sutter’s Fort in downtown Sacramento.

Monty continued to babble about his injuries as I pulled Clem’s flier from one of the stroller’s side pockets to check the location of his next venue. I sucked in my breath as my finger skimmed the performance listings. The following afternoon, Clem was scheduled to appear at Sutter’s Fort.

Staring at the night sky above Monty’s head, I summed up my observations. There was something disturbingly contemporary about this trail of clues that Oscar had presumably laid out before his death over a year ago—and, not to mention, strikingly convenient. Sutter’s Fort, in downtown Sacramento, was also near the finish line for tomorrow’s stage of the race.

“ . . . somersaulted through the air and landed with a
splat
on the pavement. Knocked the wind right out of me. It was a near death experience, I tell you.”

Sutter’s Fort, Sutter’s Fort
. I repeated the phrase, searching for a connection in my memory banks. Somewhere in Oscar’s book collection, I’d read about the fort’s involvement in the Bear Flag Revolt. If I remembered correctly, Captain Frémont, the Pathfinder Clem had described in today’s stage performance, had spent time at Sutter’s Fort.

Monty was beginning to wind down his tale of woe and endangerment. “It’s a good thing I brought along some spare shirts,” he said in a more practical tone. “Wouldn’t do to show up for the opening ceremony looking like this.”

“Let’s get you back to the hotel,” I said suddenly. “I packed a first aid kit in the van.” Monty’s inability to operate the mechanics of a high-end bicycle was not entirely unexpected.

“Bandage me up, Florence Nightingale,” Monty said, swooning dramatically.

“All right, all right,” I replied absentmindedly as I wrapped my hands around the stroller’s handlebar and steered Monty and his wounded bike back down the hill.

My next course of action would be to brush up on the details of the Bear Flag Revolt. I just hoped I’d brought along the right book.

 

WE RETURNED TO
the parking lot about ten minutes later. While still packed with vehicles, the earlier bustle was beginning to die down. Most of the riders were off to dinner and an early bedtime so they would be fresh for the one-hundred-plus miles they would spend on the road the next day.

From the back cargo area of the van, I dug out the first aid kit and handed it to Monty.

Then, I reached for a bag of books I’d tossed in when we loaded the cat supplies, and began searching for a certain dog-eared paperback that might have the information I was looking for. After a moment’s digging, I found it on the bottom of the sack.

Rupert sat on the van floor next to Monty, closely watching as he began dabbing his wounds with an alcoholsoaked towelette. I crawled into the front passenger seat and found Isabella perched on the driver’s side cushion, staring longingly up at the steering wheel.

“
Wran
,” she insisted.

“It’s not physically possible,” I replied, shaking my head at her. “Look at how far down the pedals are. Trust me. No cat could drive this van.”

“
Ruh
,” she muttered grumpily, clearly unconvinced.

With a sigh, I flicked on the van’s interior light and laid open the book on the center console between our two seats.

Bernard DeVoto’s
The Year of Decision 1846
was over five hundred pages of small, dense font. Even in paperback form, it was a hefty weight to lug around. The volume had been written in the early 1940s by a historian whose wry crankiness rivaled that of my Uncle Oscar’s. The book was packed with obscure details mined from every possible source its author could dig up. Suffice it to say, DeVoto had been Oscar’s kind of history buff, and it was no surprise that the book was well-worn from constant reference. My uncle’s nearly illegible pencil marks were scrawled across many of the margins.

Isabella scanned the upside-down text as I flipped through the pages, looking up index citations to the Bear Flag Revolt.

I stopped at an entry with extensive doodling across its top header. The page described the creation of the original Bear Flag, which was raised on June 14, 1846, by a group of American rebels who took control of the tiny town of Sonoma.

The flag was constructed by William Todd, nephew of Mary Todd, the wife of then-senator, and later, U.S. president, Abraham Lincoln.

For the rectangular base of the flag, Todd cut a stretch of white fabric from an old shirt. Next, he sewed a strip of red flannel across its bottom length. In the upper left-hand corner, he used red paint to create a five-pointed star—an imitation of the emblem then associated with the independent state of Texas. Facing the star, Todd sketched the upright figure of a bear. Across the lower-middle of the flag, Todd printed the phrase
California Republic
.

According to DeVoto, the original flag was destroyed during the devastation of San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake when the building where it was being stored burned to the ground.

I tried to block out the overwrought expressions of pain coming from the cargo area as Monty painted his elbow rash with iodine. Having seen enough of the bandaging process, Rupert hopped over the center console and crawled into my lap. Stroking his head absentmindedly, I pulled the latest bear from my pocket and studied its miniaturized version of the California state flag. The Bear Flag, as it was commonly referred to, was meant to simulate the one raised by the rebels at Sonoma.

“Wait a minute,” I murmured slowly, returning my attention to the section of the book describing William Todd’s flag. The bear on the state flag was depicted on all four feet, but the description in DeVoto clearly stated that the original bear had been “standing on its hind legs.”

A dense block of my uncle’s scrawled handwriting was crammed into the margin next to the text. I grabbed a flashlight from the glove compartment and shone it down onto the page, trying to decipher Oscar’s annotation. After a minute’s squinting, I finally translated the writing. The words read as if they had been copied from another reference:

“Stoat?” I asked, puzzling at the last underlined word. “What’s a stoat?”

I looked questioningly at Rupert, who was now flopped across my lap. The tip of his tail lightly tapped my leg, the extent of his response.

“
Wrao
,” Isabella offered as I pulled out a pad of paper and tried to recreate the original flag using DeVoto’s description. Monty was a much better artist, I thought, but, judging from the whimpers still emanating from the back of the van, his skills were temporarily unavailable.

My lips rolled inward in concentration as I sketched a large rectangle with a colored stripe across its bottom length. The star on the left-hand side was relatively easy to place, but the bear was a far more difficult challenge. After several attempts, I finally traced the crude outlines of an upright grizzly bear. I scrunched up the side of my face, trying to see the pig resemblance.

“I can’t say I’ve ever seen a pig standing upright,” I said, still perplexed by the Bear Flag anomaly. With a shrug, I shaded in the area around the bear’s stomach, filling out a more piglike belly.

“Stoat, stoat, stoat . . . ” I repeated the word over and over, but no image came to mind. “I have no idea what a stoat looks like.”

I looked up through the front window of the van to the back side of the hotel. It was the same historic vintage as the other venues up and down Broad Street and, I suspected, would have some sort of lobby or sitting area that might offer a bookshelf to its guests.

Isabella followed my gaze. “
Mreo
,” she said encouragingly.

“Yep,” I agreed with her. “I bet they’ve got a dictionary.”

I CALLED OUT
to Monty, who had almost finished dressing his wounds in the back of the van. “Can you stay with the cats while I check on something inside the hotel?”

There was a loud clunking as he clambered up toward the front seats.

“I’ve still got to check in,” he said, his head appearing over the center console. He’d put on another clean cycling shirt that was identical to the one he’d torn earlier. “How about we all go in with you?”

I twisted my head around to look at him. “
All
of us?” I asked skeptically, trying to avoid Isabella’s affronted gaze. I lowered my voice to a tense whisper. “Wouldn’t it be better to sneak them in after we get the room keys? I’m sure they don’t allow cats inside.”

Rupert looked up from my lap with a questioning grunt.