They left Alain Bent’s house through the cellar window. Leaping up one at a time from the cardboard cartons to the sill, swinging and kicking, they fled up and over, and down into the garden beneath a holly bush bright with red berries. Crouching beneath their stickery shelter, they looked down at the neighborhood laid out below them. At the Damen cottage, the front door was open and they could see Ryan and Clyde kneeling just inside on the living room floor.
“They’re praying?” Dulcie said, twitching a whisker.
“Praying it’ll hold together,” Joe said, “that it won’t collapse when they drive the first nail.” Rock stood on the little porch outside the open door, his long leash looped around one of the stanchions. He was looking up the hill, his ears erect, watching them or maybe listening, where they hid among the holly shadows. Weimaraners were sight as well as scent hounds, they could spot a bird in the sky when it was less than a speck, when even Joe and Dulcie could see nothing.
Ryan and Clyde seemed to be examining the linoleum, they had one corner up and were peering at the floor beneath. Joe said, “Maybe they plan to rip it out. Who wants linoleum in a living room?” The minute he spoke, as far away as they were, Rock’s tail began to wag madly, he jumped off the porch, tightening his leash and whining. Amused, they went still; they didn’t speak again, they let him settle down so he wouldn’t break his leash and come charging up the hill.
Two blocks over, at Hanni’s remodel, someone was at work clearing out a flower bed, turning the earth as if preparing it for the bright cold weather cyclamens that stood in flats along the drive. “Billy Young,” Joe said. “Maybe Hanni hired him for the day.” They didn’t see his bike, Hanni must have picked him up at the ranch. Billy looked up as Detective Juana Davis’s Toyota came down the street and parked in front of the cottage. A black-and-white was right behind her, and the department’s SUV pulled up behind it. “What’s this?” Joe said softly. “What’s happened?”
Leaving their prickly shelter, they headed down through the tangled yards. Below them, young Officer Jimmie McFarland stepped out of the van, his brown hair falling in a boyish cowlick over his forehead. He and Davis stood talking with Hanni, then moved into the garage. The two officers in the black-and-white stayed where they were. Not until the cats were halfway across the yard could they see inside the garage clear to the back, where Juana Davis had set her black satchel on the workbench and was removing a camera. Slipping closer, they settled down among the yard’s overgrown geraniums to see what they had missed.
17
The U-Haul was headed slowly through the jammed-up traffic of downtown San Francisco when Pan reared up against the passenger window and began to yowl and paw against the glass.
“What?” Denise said, scowling over at him. “You can’t get out here, in the middle of the city. You out of your mind? You have to go? I knew I should have fixed up a sandbox. You’ll have to hold it, tomcat. There, there’s a Chevron station up ahead, bound to be some dirt, a patch of garden or lawn.”
Pan hissed at her, turned back and continued to paw the window, peering out at the busy city.
Denise saw nothing out there that a cat should get excited about. A white passenger bus traveling alongside them in the slow lane, the driver signaling that he wanted to get over, maybe wanted to make a left. Slowing, she let him in. The bus was full of older women, frizzed hair, long faces and round faces, all as wrinkled as old apples. All of them seemed to be talking at once, gabbing away having a good old time. Some kind of senior outing, she guessed, maybe a group from some retirement home. The script on the bus’s white side said MOLENA POINT FOUNDATION, whatever that was. The driver gave her a wave as he cut over and made a left, into the Chevron station. She pulled in behind him. The minute she did, the tomcat settled right down, for all the world as if he knew she’d pulled in so he could take a leak.
Smartest cat she’d ever seen; she was already thinking of him as her cat. She’d picked up an unusually handsome and intelligent stray, and she surely meant to keep him. At the first Target or Walmart she passed, she’d pick up some decent cat food, a cat bed and sandbox, all the supplies to make a cat comfortable. She was wondering what to call him, what name would fit the big red tom. He’d do well on her acreage outside Stockton, he was bold and strong and looked like he’d be a good mouser. Her last two cats had died of old age and she was more than ready for a new companion.
Beyond the three rows of gas pumps and the office and restrooms was a patch of scruffy lawn and a bed of ragged pink geraniums barely surviving in the dry sand. She pulled over there, parked, and because he had come right back into the truck on previous stops, she let the tomcat out. He bolted out in a hell of a hurry, straight into the geraniums. Smiling, she swung out herself, and went to use the women’s more private facilities.
When she came out, the cat was gone. He wasn’t in the cab, where she’d left the door open. He wasn’t in among the geranium bushes. She searched the paved gas station area, the open bay with its two lifts, and the surround. She called him, sounding foolish shouting, “Kitty, kitty.”
Afraid he might have been hit by a car, she walked the edge of the highway and then the access road, looking carefully. Returning to her U-Haul, she talked with other drivers who had stopped, but no one had seen him. Finding no clue to where he’d gone, she borrowed some paper and a stapler from the cashier and put up half a dozen signs, on the posts and trees, giving the cat’s description and both her cell number and her Stockton phone number. She went on after several hours, praying for the tomcat and sick with the loss of him.
Maybe he’d turn up, maybe someone would find him and call her, but she didn’t hold much hope. Moving on through the city, she pulled onto the Bay Bridge with a heavy heart. Why had he vanished like that? There’d hardly been time for someone else to pick him up. Could that cat have had his own agenda and left her on purpose? Was he traveling maybe to rejoin his family, as in some of the strange stories in the paper or on the Web? Cat gets accidentally locked in a truck and carried off, a year later has found his way back home again?
Whatever this was about, she had lost a friend. Even as short a while as she’d known him, it would take her a long time to get over his loss. She didn’t think, after traveling with this handsome tomcat, there would be another cat in the world who could mean anything to her, who could touch her heart as he had, in that short drive down from Oregon. Heading inland, she made sure her cell was on, in case anyone did call.
That was the last Denise Woolsey ever saw of the big red tomcat. The last she ever heard of him, though his objective, single-minded destination wasn’t sixty miles, as the crow flies, from her own new home.
The women on the bus talked nonstop, they were worse than a yard full of chickens announcing their egg-laying scores. Pan, crouched out of sight on the dusty, rough-riding floor, wedged between a bulging cloth shopping bag and a shoe box that smelled of sausages, tried to shut out the shrill voices that had already begun to pound like hammers in his head. Twenty-three women, all of them marathon talkers. Peering out from beneath the last seat, riding practically over the rear wheels and bumpy as hell, he counted two dozen conversations rambling on all at once. A woman sitting right up in front was quizzing the driver querulously. “When will Tom be back? He’s our regular driver. Did you say he’s your cousin? Then you’re Wallace, nice to meet you, Wallace. I hope Tom’s not sick, we all enjoy him, he’s such a riot.”