Slowly she emerged from among a tangle of blackberry vines into the grass, and shyly she slipped closer. Her long, wind-rumpled fur was a mix of black and brown, her face mottled black and brown, her yellow eyes keen with curiosity. Very close to him she stopped. She looked deep into his eyes, studied his face, and then again she moved closer. She looked him all over. She tasted his scent on the wind. She looked closely at the circular mark on his shoulder.
“Pan?” she said, startling him. “You can’t be Pan?”
“I’m Pan,” he said warily. “How could you know me?”
“Where did you come from? How did you come here?”
“How do you know my name?”
“Who is your father?”
“My father is Misto,” he said. “Do you know him?”
“He’s here,” she said, twitching her wind-tangled tail. “Misto’s here, he talks about you. How did you know to come here, how did you know where to find him?” Beyond them at the street the old woman had backed out of the car with a paper bag in her hand. Closing the door, she turned and headed straight toward them, wading through the blowing grass soaking her jeans, carrying a bundled-up brown blanket. Immediately the two cats hunkered down, made themselves small, peered up side by side through the blowing stalks. Both felt a rippling urge to run, an inborn alarm that she might throw the blanket over them—yet they remained still. Had she even seen them?
Unaware, she moved past them to the cliff’s edge. At the very brink, she began to trample the grass, pressing it down in a circle. Spreading out the old blanket, she sat down in the center, ignoring the fitful rain.
The tortoiseshell relaxed, laughing softly as the old woman took a strip of paper towel from the bag, smoothed it down on the blanket, and laid out her thermos, an apple, and a cellophane-wrapped sandwich.
“Suppertime,” she whispered. She looked Pan over again, her yellow eyes so clear and bold they quite unsettled him. “My name is Kit. You’ve come to find Misto. But how . . . ?”
“Is he here?” he said with excitement, lashing his red-striped tail.
“Yes, but how did you find him? Oh,” she said, “from his tales? You found this place from his stories?”
“Yes, but how do you know that? Then I saw pictures of the village, exactly the way he described. There are lots of villages all along the coast, but none quite like this one, not the same cluster of cottages so cozy beneath the spreading trees.” He looked at her intently. “Is there a fishing dock farther along the shore? Do ferals live there?”
“They live there. And Misto comes every morning and evening, he’ll be there soon, now,” she said, laughing at the light that blazed in his russet eyes. “You came all this way, because of a picture?”
“Lots of pictures, color pictures in magazines in the house where I lived, and then photographs, and I knew this was the right village.” Pan wiped at his ear with a front paw, where the grass seeds tickled. “I saw this place and thought about Pa, I knew he was growing old and would miss his kittenhood home, and I guessed he might come here.
“Once I lived in a nursing home,” he said. “I listened to those old folks, how they longed for the places of their childhood, and I thought Pa would be longing, too, wanting to return to where he was a kitten. After the nursing home burned down I set out to follow him. Do you know what it’s like not to have any notion where your pa is, or even if he’s still alive?”
“I never knew who my father was,” Kit said. “I never knew him at all. My mother . . .” She went silent as a police car came up the narrow street cruising slowly, nosing to the curb in front of Emmylou’s car as if to block its departure. Officer Brennan sat a moment talking on the radio, glancing at the empty car and then scanning the cliff. His bulk completely filled the driver’s seat; and the cats could hear the faint, tinny reply of the dispatcher—but so could Emmylou. She ducked down below the tall grass, cowed there as still as a cat, herself.
But not still enough. Brennan, seeing movement, stepped out of the black-and-white, moving lightly considering his weight, and approached through the rustling grass asking her to come out. The weight of his equipment belt made him look all the heftier, his holstered gun, the radio and phone and nightstick, the holstered pepper spray and Taser. The third time he spoke, Emmylou rose up out of the grass like a windblown scarecrow, scowling at him, clutching her thermos and lunch bag to her as if for protection.
Brennan said, “The chief’s looking for you to come in, Emmylou, for fingerprinting, right?”
Emmylou said nothing, she just looked at him, clutching her lunch bag closer.
“Why don’t you come on in with me? It won’t take long, and I’ll bring you back.” He nodded toward her old Chevy. “You can leave your car, I’ll see it isn’t ticketed.”
Emmylou’s expression was such a comical mix of defiance and helpless resignation that both cats, peering up through the tangle of green blades, had to stifle a laugh—but Kit watched Pan shyly, too. He was the handsomest tomcat she’d ever seen, he was big, well muscled, his rust-red coat beautifully striped, wide dark tiger stripes, and as sleek as silk. And he was Misto’s son, she could see Misto’s own kindness and honesty in his face, in his copper-colored eyes. She daren’t look at him too long, his returning gaze left her as giddy as a kitten on its first tumble of catnip.
As Officer Brennan helped Emmylou into his squad car, Kit led Pan along the edge of the cliff above the pale sand and dark and rolling sea, led him toward the dock and the feral band where John Firetti would be setting out the evening meal, led Pan to where he’d find his pa again after so long a searching, and she could hardly wait.
20
The three visitors to Max Harper’s office sat lined up on the leather couch as rigid as three schoolkids facing an unsmiling principal. Square and pudgy Norine Sutherland and her matching daughter. And the small, tight-looking man of the house. Their uncertainty out at the front desk seemed to have vanished. Norine had told Mabel, “We weren’t sure where to come, where to report a possible missing person. To the police? To the county sheriff? Or to some welfare agency? Well, if there is anything to report, if Alain really is missing. Officially, you know. Do you take missing person reports? Someone we think is missing?”
But now that they had an audience with the chief, as they’d been angling for, the two women were bolder. Now they sat sizing Max up, seeming to assume that he would take immediate action.
Delbert, on the other hand, still looked apologetic, uncertain whether they should be there at all, bothering the police with their family dilemma. Perhaps only Joe and Dulcie, crouched out of sight beneath the credenza, caught the sharpening of Max’s attention at the mention of Alain Bent, a tightening of his jaw that the cats knew well.
“Alain doesn’t answer her phone nor our messages,” Norine said, “we haven’t spoken with her for months, she never answers her calls. She used to have an answering machine. Maybe it’s full. We’ve been up to her house three times since we arrived in town, but no one is ever there. We thought we had a key for emergencies, but it doesn’t work. We drove down from Redding because we didn’t know what else to do, we’re worried about her. The house looks cared for, the walks have been swept, we’ve found no mail in the box, no newspapers on the drive, but still the place seems deserted. We looked in the windows. No magazines or mail left about, the beds are neatly made, no clothes thrown across a chair the way Alain leaves them. You can’t see into the kitchen from the ground but you can glimpse her desk through the bedroom slider, and it looks so neat. Usually there are stacks of papers, flyers, files. The computer’s there, at least the monitor is, but not her laptop. Well, wherever she is, I guess she has that with her.” The woman was rambling, but the picture she painted was familiar enough to the cats. The house, when they’d prowled there, had indeed looked neat and deserted. Now, in their shadowed lair beneath the credenza, both Joe and Dulcie wondered if they had missed something, some clue to Alain’s supposed disappearance. Maybe, Dulcie thought, if Alain was Erik’s lover, she was off in the Bahamas waiting for him, planning on a romantic vacation they didn’t care to advertise.