There is something sleep-making to a cat about looking at old photographs; the slowly turning pages create a rhythm that makes one give way to jaw-cracking yawns. But these pictures were of Benny’s family, each a little window into the child’s short past, and the tomcat remained alert. Pictures of Benny and Maudie, of Benny and a boy and girl about his age, who must be Caroline’s two children. Of Benny and a tall man resembling David and a pretty woman with tousled hair the color of butterscotch. These were the pictures Benny reached for, stroking their faces. “That’s my daddy and that’s Caroline, my new mother.” He looked seriously and sadly at the cats. “They’re in heaven now.”
Dulcie rubbed her face against the child, trying to cheer him. Kit nuzzled him, but the tortoiseshell was edgy, too, the tip of her tail twitching with the need to speak, to tell Joe and Dulcie something urgent. What? Joe wondered. What might she have seen, this morning, that was so important?
Well, she’d held her silence this long, and they’d be outside again soon enough—Kit had never been big on patience. Benny was saying, “This is my mother Caroline, she made real sit-down dinners every night, for all of us together. That’s Caroline and me and Daddy, and that’s …” The dry hush of turning pages and the child’s droning voice soon had Joe Grey sleepy despite his interest in the dead couple, and despite his curiosity over Kit’s unease. He came alert when Benny hugged him too hard and a salty wetness splashed on his nose. “And then we were going to Grandma’s cabin and it was dark and the gun was shooting, so loud and bright and Grandma threw us on the floor and I couldn’t see anything.” He squeezed Joe so hard the tomcat nearly yowled; he was hugging all three of them, gathering them to him like teddy bears, weeping into their fur.
Joe tolerated the child’s grief as long as he could, then leaped out of Benny’s arms and out of the carton to the top of a wooden crate. Sometimes the burden of understanding humans was more than a cat cared to handle. Looking around him at the mountain of Maudie’s possessions, he wondered where she was going to put all this stuff, in the limited space of the four-room Tudor house.
But he could see that much of it was destined for the quilting studio, the long table against the opposite wall, the cartons marked QUILTING FRAME, the two sewing machines and the dozens of boxes stacked next to them. In the far corner, the half-dozen boxes marked DESK had been opened, the tape slit, the flaps standing up, the contents disarranged so that papers and folders stuck out. A box marked CAROLINE had been opened, revealing a woman’s clothes neatly folded, layers of sweaters and blouses and among them a half-dozen small, framed pictures. Leaping across the boxes to look, he saw that some were of the two children, some of the children with Caroline and a man in a Marine uniform. Caroline’s first husband? Tucked down beside the clothes was a small jewelry chest. When he clawed it open, he found a diary with a leather strap and a little lock. He was tempted to finesse this open, too, but with the child nearby, that might not be wise. Even a seven-year-old boy would have to wonder at a cat snooping into his mother’s diary.
The next open carton marked CAROLINE contained nine-by-twelve brown envelopes marked TAXES, LETTERS, PAID BILLS, LEGAL PAPERS. Beneath these, when he clawed them aside, was a sealed, unmarked brown envelope, its flap tightly glued. Again, he was tempted, flexing his claws over the sealed flap, but then sensibly sheathing them again and turning away. The remaining boxes all seemed dull as mud, several were marked as kitchen things, and two boxes contained old tax receipts. Strange that he’d found nothing belonging to Benny’s real mother. Had Maudie kept nothing of Pearl’s, or had Pearl left nothing at all behind when she left Martin?
And, the tomcat thought, why did he care? Except that Benny’s daddy and Caroline had been murdered, the shooter had vanished, and so far neither the San Bernardino sheriff nor the LAPD had a shred of evidence. That was what Maudie had told Ryan, that neither agency had come up with any viable suspect, not enough evidence to hold anyone. Joe supposed the two agencies had done all they could. Killers vanished every day. He supposed, given the pressure in a big-city police department, such cases had to be set aside in deference to the emergencies of the moment.
But that hit-and-run this morning, and Maudie’s reaction to it, had prodded the tomcat into a frenzy of curiosity. He was slipping among the last stack of boxes, sniffing at them, when he found Martin’s name, written in Maudie’s hand. This was the first box he’d found of her son’s possessions, and quickly he ripped a claw along the tape until he’d freed the flaps.
Atop a stack of bills and papers lay another photograph album, with pictures of Benny, and Martin in his airline pilot’s uniform. There was no mistaking the resemblance between father and son. In some, they were a threesome with a tall, black-haired woman. This must be Pearl. A thin, straight woman with very white skin and sharply carved features, high cheekbones over hollow cheeks, her black eyes keen and penetrating. A severe beauty, stark and cold, in contrast to Caroline’s warm features. In nearly every picture Pearl stood between father and son, with Benny shoved nearly out of camera range. In every shot she wore black, a black business suit with a knee-length skirt, black slacks and white blouse, a black dress with a V-neck and long sleeves. Nothing casual, nothing soft or whimsical. In the few pictures where she smiled, her “camera” smile looked patently fake. In only one picture she had pulled Benny against her side as if in sweet companionship, the child looking rigid and uncomfortable.
Joe looked up when Benny crawled out of the big carton and headed for the kitchen door with Dulcie and Kit close behind, Kit fidgeting as if wild to get outdoors where she could talk. With a last look at the open carton, Joe leaped after them, trotting through the kitchen and out to the studio. He paused when the phone rang behind them, looked back as Maudie rose to answer.
There was a long silence, then Maudie said, “Who is this?” Another, longer pause, then very softly she hung up. “No one,” she said, shrugging. “Maybe a wrong number.” As she turned away, was that a look of concern, perhaps of fear? But then as she sat down again at the table, the hint of a smile touched her soft face, some secret thought that she unknowingly telegraphed to Joe. He was still staring when he saw Scotty watching him; quickly he slapped his paw at an invisible bug, then raced away as if chasing it, batting at the floor as he followed Dulcie and Kit out through an unglazed window; and the three cats vanished as swiftly as had Maudie’s strange little smile.
12
IN VALLEY MEMORIAL Hospital, Jack Reed lay fading in and out of consciousness, sometimes dropping down into deep black sleep, other times alarmed by disjointed dreams where he was back in the prison yard fighting three inmates, was on the ground trying to get hold of Vic Colletto’s knife, fighting to grab it from him. Surprised and unbelieving when the knife plunged into him, easy as into butter, seeing his blood spurting out. That would wake him, put him back in the hospital, trapped by metal bars and plastic tubes, surrounded by science fiction machines pumping who-knew-what into his veins. He’d lie burning to tear out the tubes, rip them away and rip away the bed’s confining bars. Every waking moment he fought the panic of entrapment. Even the oxygen mask over his face seemed, too often, not to ease his breathing but to constrict it. The doc said that was stress, a residual panic. And then, fully awake, he’d sink back into a debilitating depression, into the dark futility of his life.