“Good.” Laurel’s head appeared over the lip of the sofa again, her eyes slightly crossed. “’Cause I’m not so sure about Becca.”
Clara whipped around, alarmed. Sure enough, Becca was sitting on the floor beside her, frowning as she held the baggie up to the light.
“I don’t know about this,” she was saying. Clara looked up at Laurel, but her sister only shrugged. “And I’m glad I didn’t come right out and accuse her. But I do think I owe Margaret Cross an apology.”
Chapter 9
“Now you’ve done it!” Clara was struggling to keep her voice level. Her fur was already standing up along her spine and it was only by holding her tail down with one paw that she managed to keep that from turning into a bottle-brush of fright. “Becca was off that case, and now she’s going to talk to that crazy woman again.”
Her slinky sister eyed her, curious, but Clara turned away. Bad enough Laurel could read human minds. Clara wasn’t ready yet to share what had happened at the Cross apartment. That woman—Elizabeth—had unnerved her, as few human beings could, and the moment when she could have disclosed the odd interaction had passed. This left Clara feeling out of sorts, almost as if she were alone in a shelter. Or a trap.
If Becca ran out to confront that woman again, Clara wasn’t sure what she would do.
For the moment, though, her fear was allayed. After another examination of the bagged root, Becca set it aside and, after carefully washing her hands, prepared her own dinner, which involved too many plants to be of interest to her pets. More satisfying was the speed with which she finished and settled back on the sofa with her laptop.
“Of course she does that after eating. For her, that’s like grooming,” Laurel noted as she pretzeled herself around to lick her haunches. The part-Siamese didn’t quite understand Becca’s research—none of the cats did entirely—but Clara saw enough truth in her observation not to correct her. She might not understand Becca’s work in depth, but she did know that “doing research,” as her person put it, made her happy. Besides, she was too grateful for her person’s continued presence to object. For comfort, she joined Becca on the sofa. Harriet was already nestled by her side, her fluffy form stretched not only over her special velvet pillow but extending nearly to the arm rest. But Clara was still too agitated for a nap. Instead, she perched on the sofa’s upholstered back, from where she could peer over Becca’s shoulder at the screen.
If only Clara could feel as single-minded, or as calm, as her person.
“What is it?” Laurel had jumped up beside her, so silently that she startled her baby sister, whose nerves were already on edge.
“She’s looking at pictures.” Clara knew her sister had difficulty making sense of pixels. Laurel’s sense of smell might be better than hers, but her eyesight left something to be desired. “Pictures of plants.”
“How silly.” Laurel whipped her dark tail around her toes. “Why look at pictures when she could simply go outside.”
“But it’s dark out and we don’t want her to go…” Clara broke off.
With a sigh, Becca had closed the herbalism site and clicked open a news alert. “The accident,” she murmured. “No wonder the bridge was closed.”
She read a moment longer, then clicked and another page appeared, one Clara had seen before. Along with the writing, which might as well be sparrow tracks to the cats, it featured pictures, reproductions of old engravings. This was the genealogy project Becca had been telling Maddy about, Clara realized. The research she longed to resume. Although she had seen her person looking through these pages—what Becca called an “online historical database”—before, something about Becca’s silence, or maybe it was her own unsettled mood, showed the word in a new light. Becca was searching for her family. For the small cat, whose only memories of her own mother were few and fading, the search seemed impossibly sad. Yes, Becca spoke to her mother weekly, using one or another of her devices, but she was alone in this city. Alone, except for her cats, Clara reminded herself.
Besides, mused Clara, looking over at her snoozing siblings, blood relations weren’t necessarily a requirement for domestic happiness.
Silently vowing to be a better helpmate to her person, Clara pushed her own sibling issues aside and focused in on Becca. As she watched, Becca scrolled down through the database’s images until she settled on one that the calico had seen before. In it, a woman sat with a cat on her lap. Something about her face—the bright eyes, perhaps—looked like Becca, only with longer hair and any trace of Becca’s curls squashed under a cap. With one outstretched finger, Becca traced the outline of the woman’s round face. Did this strange, flat representation bring back memories of Becca’s mother? Of herself? Clara couldn’t tell. Besides, to the calico it was the feline on the woman’s lap who was the real focus of the picture. That cat, who even in the scratchy black-and-white image bore a striking resemblance to Clara, occupied the center of the composition, drawing the eye even as she stared out at the viewer.
Despite the centuries between them, Clara felt the connection—and felt reassured, as if the calico in the picture was somehow reaching out. An older generation keeping watch over Clara and her person. Maybe, Clara thought, there was something to Laurel’s gift—a psychic connection that went back generations. Or maybe she was just too tired to worry anymore, and what she took as comfort was simply gratitude that Becca had remained on the couch rather than run out into the night.
It had been a full day, even without that strange confrontation. Brief as it was—only three words—Clara knew that encounter with Elizabeth was at the root of her desire to keep Becca away from those women. Knew as well that she was hiding the truth from her own siblings. She told herself this was her sisters’ fault. Harriet and Laurel complained whenever their person did anything involving other humans or the outside world, or, truly, whenever she left them alone. To give them any more reason to grumble could only lead to further unpleasantness if not outright trouble.
“Why trouble?” Clara turned to see Laurel’s blue eyes staring into hers.
“Did you just read my thoughts?” Clara reared up, nearly falling off the sofa. Her sister had startled her—and invaded her privacy. “Please don’t do that!”
“Oh, please!” The Siamese licked at one dark paw. “It’s almost the same as suggesting thoughts, only, more like inhaling…”
Clara eyed her sister with curiosity, even as she tried to keep her own mind blank.
“And I did smell something off about that plant, you know. Something that Becca isn’t aware of. My nose is very good. I think you did too, only you never focus…”
Before Clara could respond, the woman seated in front of them jerked back and began to type. “Why didn’t I think of this before?” The two cats seated behind her exchanged a weighted glance.
“Dear Aunt Tabitha,” she murmured as she typed. “I’m not sure if you know, but I’m living in Cambridge now, and being in New England, I’ve started to research our family history…”
“Our family?” Laurel’s soft mew dripped with scorn. In her distinctive Siamese yowl, that first word dragged out into a wail.
“She means hers.” Clara translated as quickly and politely as she could. She didn’t want Becca to be disturbed, certainly not by the idea that one of her cats was in pain. But Becca had grown used to her cats’ strange sounds. With barely a glimpse at the felines behind her, she continued typing. And so, after a moment’s pause, Clara carried on, too. “She thinks that it was her ancestor who got them in trouble with the witch trials,” she said. Thanks to her particular gifts, Clara had accompanied Becca to both the library and the city’s archives, and considered herself well versed in that aspect of her work.