A patrol car passed slowly, making its rounds. The fog was so thick the officer didn’t see a thing among the tangled tree branches nor would he have heard any strangled cry, over the static of his radio. As the unit passed, Joe considered yelling out for help.
Right, and have the guy’s strobe light catch him, a tomcat, yelling “Help!” and then running. Worse, Joe knew most of the officers and they knew him, dark gray tomcat, white paws and thin white strip down his gray face. He was in and out of the station all the time, was practically the station cat. For a cop to see him here on what would turn out to be a crime scene wasn’t smart. One more puzzle for the department, Joe Grey nosing around a crime scene at just about the time the “phantom snitch” called in the report—if he could find a phone. His presence here would be one more coincidence he didn’t need. He prayed that Haley would pull over, get out of the car, find the half-buried victim himself and call the dispatcher—while Joe fled among the rubble of the wild little park and vanished.
When the officer had noticed nothing suspicious among the fallen and tangled trees, when the car had passed and turned back toward the village, when Joe was convinced the woman would keep breathing on her own, he raced for a ramshackle cottage at the edge of the shore. Leaping to a sill, he clawed his way through the rusty screen and slid open the rickety window. This house was the only relic in the long line of seafront homes, the rest all restored to elegance or replaced by new dwellings. This old place smelled of cats but he didn’t see any.
Slipping through the dim kitchen he found a phone in the hall. He called 911 and relayed his message, then beat it out of there, the torn screen clawing at his fur. Racing back across the dead-end street, crossing the narrow lane where it ended at the sea, he kicked away pawprints in the drifted sand—but there were cats in the village. Why would he be suspected of being the phantom caller? He had been faced with this dilemma before and never been caught. Slipping out of sight among the fallen branches just as the first siren screamed, he searched hastily for the woman’s purse, for a billfold or ID, but found nothing. She was still breathing but the oozing blood had slowed, not a good sign. He was looking for the shovel her attacker might have buried when the medics screeched to a halt, cop cars behind them; Joe Grey dove into the tall grass and bushes and was gone.
He watched from across the street as the medics worked on her: oxygen, all kinds of tubes, then loaded her into the ambulance. He would know little more until the information was on Captain Harper’s desk, until he could saunter into the chief’s office and have a look at the report.
Ordinarily Joe would stay after the medics left, would watch from the bushes to see if the cops found any clues he’d missed. But this was Saturday morning and he was already late. His tabby lady would be waiting with her striped ears back, her striped tail switching, sitting rigid among the small children on the library window seat, her green eyes flashing at his tardiness.
How many tough tomcats spent their Saturday mornings in the library among a bunch of snively little kids listening to story hour? How many patrons smiled with amusement at Joe and the other four cats snuggled among the children: Joe’s lady, Dulcie. Their grown kitten, Courtney. (Courtney’s two brothers were otherwise occupied.) Tortoiseshell Kit and her mate, red tabby Pan, as macho a tomcat as Joe Grey himself, all curled up among warm and cuddling children listening to a tale of magic.
But the cats were there for more than the story. Intently they watched for the mysterious man who had appeared these last few Saturdays prowling among the books, striking their curiosity and sometimes their concern.
Ever since Dulcie, who was Molena Point’s official library cat, first saw the shadowy figure slip behind the book stacks and stand watching the children, the cats’ curiosity had drawn them. Browsing among the books, he kept his eyes on one lone child, then another.
Public libraries were not the welcome retreats they had once been, peaceful and safe. These days, even small libraries had guards on the premises. Plainclothes officers walked through the paneled, silent rooms, sometimes arresting a stoned man, taking him away to sleep it off in jail. All across the country, addicts were frequenting the book rooms, hiding their stashes among the shelved volumes or concluding their sales in the towns’ most innocent refuges. It was not uncommon, at closing hour, for a librarian to find a drugged man asleep in a soft chair, a newspaper spread over his face.
Molena Point Library was a handsome building with pale stone walls, mullioned windows, and carpeted floors, a peaceful retreat set back from the sidewalk by a deep garden graced with flowers, small ornamental trees, and stone benches. This morning when Joe Grey had entered, trotting among the blooms and up four stone steps, crossing the stone porch to the carved oak door and pushing inside, he knew he was laughed at, but in a friendly way. Most of the patrons knew him. Padding down six steps to the big reading room, sauntering across in plain sight of half a dozen elderly men sitting in comfortable chairs reading, he had leaped onto the wide, cushioned window seat and settled down beside his tabby lady in the lap of a blond little girl who smelled of peppermint. Two women at a reading table watched the five cats among the children and laughed and whispered to each other. Three old men smiled, and one laughed softly. Smile if you want, Joe thought, half amused himself. Better than a couple of drug dealers settling in, waiting for their contacts.
He heard from across the village the short blast of a police siren that made him want to leap away and follow, racing across the rooftops as he usually did. But Dulcie gave him a look that settled him down. Every siren wasn’t a major crime; this one could be anything: traffic violation, fender bender. Or a domestic argument. They’d had plenty of those since Zeb Luther’s family all moved out, leaving the old man alone. Moved in across the street from Joe, shouting altercations in the middle of the night that woke Joe and his housemates and left them all cranky, to say nothing of enraging the neighbors.
He was wondering if the adults in the library were listening to the story, too, only pretending to read the papers. And, speak of the devil, here came his quarrelsome new neighbor Thelma in the front door dragging her little girl. At once Mindy broke away and ran to the window seat, crowding in at the end. But when she spotted Joe and started to scramble to him, the librarian Wilma Getz, Dulcie’s silver-haired housemate, told her kindly to sit down where she was. The tale Wilma was reading was one of the Narnia books; the boys and girls were already entranced, as were the cats, drawn to the war-refugee children and the secret world they found at the back of a closet—but soon again the cats’ attention was drawn away to the open balcony, to the second-floor bookshelves that looked down on the reading room. Even as the world of Narnia unfolded in snow and ice, a figure appeared on the balcony among the deepest row of bookshelves. In the shadows he was hardly visible. As on every other Saturday morning, he was watching the children. The same man, the shadow of his close-clipped, pointed beard, dark cap pulled down over shaggy, dark hair. Why was he watching the children? Or was he watching the cats, was he some kind of mentally obsessed cat fancier?