“You’ve had no contact with Alain at all?” Max said. “Since what date?”
“That’s the strange part, that’s what makes us so uncertain,” Norine said. “She has been in touch, we’ve e-mailed back and forth, and that’s what we don’t understand. We told her we need to talk with her by phone. There’s some family business we need to discuss, and I’m never sure how private these electronic messages are. We asked her to please call or give us a number where we can reach her, but she keeps making excuses. At first she said she was on the East Coast, that she’ll be back soon and will call us then. Then she said she’d been delayed, that some business had come up, but she’ll call soon. She could call from the East Coast, what’s the problem with that? This has gone on and on. We can’t understand why she’s so evasive. We’re beginning to wonder if those messages are from Alain at all.
“Anyone,” Norine said, “could be sending them, if they had her password. I know it sounds paranoid, but this has gone on too long. A month ago when we called her office, they said she’d moved away. But she didn’t tell us that, she didn’t say anything like that to us. If she’s moved, why on earth wouldn’t she say so?
“When we identified ourselves as family, and asked for her new address, they gave us my parents’ address. Well, she’s not there. They say they haven’t heard from her at all, and one of the owners of Kraft Realty, Mr. Perry Fowler, said since she moved months ago they’re directing what personal mail they get to a post office box in our own town. He said it hadn’t been returned, so she must be getting it, but that doesn’t make sense. He was very short with us, as if he really didn’t have time for our silly questions.”
Betty Rails said, “The post office won’t tell us anything. They won’t say whether there’s any mail in her box, won’t even say whether she has a box, won’t tell us whether she’s picked up any mail. We went to our local police but they wouldn’t help us. They said we’d have to come here, because she lived here.” The two women looked helplessly at Max, all their early confrontation gone, only uncertainty remaining. They looked up when Detective Davis appeared in the doorway.
Max nodded to Davis. She stepped in and laid a piece of paper on his desk, glancing briefly at the trio, a quick assessment, like the flash of a fast camera. The cats noticed she was limping again, her bad knee giving her trouble. She’d talked about surgery, but kept putting it off, said she didn’t have time. Max read what appeared to be a short note, and a little smile touched his face. “Go ahead and interview her, Juana. She find a place to live?”
Juana shook her head. “Still on the streets. She said she was arranging to stay with a friend.” She shrugged, gestured dismissively, and moved away up the hall toward the front desk to fetch Emmylou, to take her on back to her office. Beneath the credenza, Dulcie gave Joe a questioning look. When he twitched an ear, she bellied out under the side rail and melted into the hall behind Juana, vanishing beneath Max’s line of vision. It was little indiscretions such as Max seeing them suddenly veer off to follow a witness that could prompt the chief to study them with undue attention. Joe heard the faintest sliding of paws on the hard floor as his lady streaked into Juana’s office.
Max was saying, “If you want to sign a missing persons report, we’ll talk with Kraft Realty. It’s possible, if she’s moved, that the house is on the market, and that they have a current key. If so, we might get a court order and have a look.”
“We couldn’t find an ad in the paper that it’s for sale,” Norine said, “and there’s no sign in the yard.”
“Sometimes a sale isn’t advertised,” Max said, “a silent sale, handled strictly within the office, for any number of reasons.”
But Joe was thinking, Maybe she doesn’t like these relatives, maybe she doesn’t want to be in touch. Except he thought there was more to Alain’s disappearance than that, there were too many disappearances all at once. Was Erik Kraft down in southern California, soon to head off on vacation? Where was Alain, and, for that matter, where was Emmylou’s friend Sammie, who lived not a block down the hill from Alain? Three absences, was that a coincidence? More like the first odd pieces of a puzzle just short of making sense, just short of forming a coherent picture.
High on the cliff above the shore Kit sat alone, a small tortoiseshell silhouette against the gathering evening, her fur damp and cold, her ears down in the icy gusts. Below her on the shore, despite the cold drizzle, the two tomcats strolled side by side looking deeply content at their sudden reunion. Their voices were drowned by the breakers and the wind, their pawprints quickly filled with water behind them as the tide crept in. Kit, watching them, felt as happy and proprietary as if she’d arranged their meeting all by herself, as if it was all her doing that had brought father and son together.
Well, she had guided Pan the last quarter mile of his vast journey, had escorted him along the cliff top until he’d seen, below, the feral band gathered around the little dock at their supper dishes. She had watched Pan race down the cliff in three long leaps, a red blur plowing in among the startled strays, scattering the shy ones, alarming the bold ones into hisses and raised claws. He had plunged at Misto, nearly knocking him down—and hadn’t the old yellow tomcat exploded into kittenish cavorting at the sight of his grown son. The two had erupted into a wild race that sent them streaking up the cliff again and down beneath the dock, scattering the ferals, and both of them talking up a storm, Where did you come from, how did you get here, how long was your journey, how did you know where to find me . . . ? On and on until Kit had rolled over, laughing.
Kit knew Mary Firetti watched them from the cliff above, silent and entranced. She had come tonight instead of John, loaded down with a bag of kibble and water bottles. She had fed the ferals, was leaving when she caught sight of Pan. She froze to see a new cat trotting beside Kit, had sat down at the edge of the cliff nearly hidden in the tall grass. She’d remained as still as a stone, watching the meeting of father and son. Now, as the two toms raced to the end of the dock, their voices drowned by the waves and by the fitful gusts, Kit and Mary watched them, filled with a giddy joy at their atartling reunion.
When Kit had first met Misto some two months earlier, the old yellow cat had told her he’d longed for three things. Three wishes, like a fairy tale, Kit thought. Misto had arrived in Molena Point just before Christmas, traveling all alone, paw weary from a journey that had taken many months, traveling down the Oregon coast and then the California coast hoping to find his kittenhood home. That was the first wish, to return where he was born, to find a safe haven there. That wish had been granted when John and Mary Firetti begged Misto to live with them.