That had been only a few months back, in early March, when Lee headed down the West Coast to take a job in the Coachella Valley at the parole board?s direction, working one of the vast vegetable farms that fed half of California. Leaving Steilacoom, their train had swayed along beside the sea through green pastures and through small cozy towns dwarfed by Washington?s snowcapped peaks. When, along the ever-changing coastline, flocks of birdsexploded away, the cat leaped after them into the wind, diving and banking, gulping the small, winged morsels as a hawk or eagle might feast.
Only near the end of their three-day journey did the land abruptly change. As they moved south through green miles of orange and avocado groves, suddenly the groves ended. They were racing across pale, dry desert. As they descended a rocky, parched mountain the ghost cat crowded between Lee and the window, watching the flat desert, dry as bone, stretching to the horizon.
But soon, startling them both, the sandy expanse was broken by green farms laid out in emerald squares on the pale bare desert. A patchwork of vegetable fields, each as lush as a jungle, where river water fed the land, water piped in from the great Colorado. They could see men with trucks and tractors working the fields, harvesting rich crops of beans, melons, strawberries, and produce Lee couldn?t name?but the ghost cat, ascending again to the top of the train for a wider look, was suddenly engulfed in blackness. Darkness hid the sun and from it a man-shape emerged towering over him, its eyes gleaming.
Hissing, the cat stood his ground, ears back, teeth bared.?What do you want?? He had no physical power over the wraith, he had only the power of the spirit?his will against Satan?s eternal and devious lust. ?You?ve done your work,? Misto growled, ?or tried to. You?ve made your pitch too many times over the years. Every time, you?ve failed. At none of the crimes you?ve laid out have you succeeded in corrupting Lee. Whatever robbery he undertook, he did it his way, not yours.?
His yellow eyes raked the devil.?You think the curse you laid on Lee?s family is still to be won? No,? the tomcat rumbled. ?You?ve failed in your vow to take down the heir of Russell Dobbs, you?re the loser. Go torture someone else, you have no business here.?
Satan?s smile made the cat?s fur stand rigid, but the next moment the wraith was gone, vanished, his lingering look of promise stirring a shiver along the tomcat?s spine.
It was only a few weeks later that Lucifer appeared on the farm where Lee was working. Again, after weeks of sparring, Lee refused to commit the crime Satan pressed on him. It was that refusal that had led Lee here to Springfield. Lee had chosen, against the devil?s seduction, a robbery that, instead of maiming and destroying lives, would harm no one. Scoffing at the devil, he had devised a foolproof alibi that would remove him from the crime scene but leave him with a wealth of stolen cash. And that would burden him with only a few months? prison time ona less serious misdemeanor.
But even then, the wraith continued to torment Lee. And, as well, to ply his evil on the little child back in Georgia who was the other half of the puzzle that so fascinated the ghost cat, the child about whom Lee knew nothing.
Though in a previous life Misto had lived with Sammie, had been her own cat, she was still a mystery to him. He knew only that there was, somehow, an inexplicable connection between nine-year-old Sammie Blake and Lee Fontana.
Lee, nearly all his life, had carried with him the small framed photograph of his little sister Mae, taken some sixty years ago on the Dakota ranch. Mae was eight then, and Lee was twelve. He carried the picture when he left the ranch, a boy of sixteen setting out to conquer the world. Setting out to learn, on his own, to rob the steam trains as skillfully as Russell Dobbs could ever do. Lee didn?t seek to join Dobbs or to find him, Dobbs would have had none of that. To him Lee was only a boy.
Lee hadn?t seen Mae since he?d left the ranch; he?d seen none of his family again and didn?t know if they were still alive, except for his granddaddy. The legends and stories he heard of Dobbs?s feats, and the newspaper headlines, were fodder to his young mind. But, like Dobbs, Lee was a loner. He hadgone his way, and the rest of his family had gone theirs. Still, he thought about Mae often and always carried the small tintype wrapped in cloth, bent from being stuffed into a saddlebag or in his pocket.
It was only the ghost cat who knew and worried over the likeness between Lee?s little sister of some sixty years gone, and the child now in Georgia, the child Misto loved and had so recently lived with. The mirror images shared by the two children teased at the tomcat. But even now, as a ghost with his wider vision, he was not all-seeing: The puzzle was as stubborn as a knot of tangled yarn.
Was there a connection between the two children? How could there not be when they were so alike, and when fate had put them both so close to Misto as he moved through time and space? It seemed to him that Lee, and present-day Sammie Blake, were being inexorably drawn together; he felt himself part of a drama that was only beginning to play out. A pattern was forming within the vastness of eternity, but he didn?t know why. Were these events driven by the will of the dark one? Or were they happening in defiance of Satan?s efforts? That was the heart of the question.
Misto?s short life in Georgia occurred between the moment he died at McNeil Island and the instant that he, moving back in time, rose from his own grave as a ghost cat. A whole life lived outside the linear view of time. He was given to Sammie when she was five, when her daddy first went in the navy. Now, as a spirit, he saw his various lives floating on the realm of eternity as fishing skiffs might float rocking and shifting on an endless sea.
Now, stepping off the hospital roof, Misto rode the wind, floating along peering in through the rows of windows, one window to the next until he found Lee in a small examining room. There he rested on the fitful breeze, watching.
The old convict looked so vulnerable sitting on the metal table with his shirt off, his thin, ropy shoulders, his chest ivory white and frail. But his lower arms, his neck and wrinkled face were hard-looking, tanned to leather. Dr. Donovan, stethoscope in hand, was listening to Lee?s lungs. Ed Donovan was young and lean, short blond hair, deep blue eyes. He was a runner, Misto would see him of an early morning circling the paths inside the prison complex, his pale hair mussed, his pace easy. He was patient with Lee, and at each visit he seemed to read precisely Lee?s stateof health, even before he examined the old man. He could tell by Lee?s expression, and the way he moved, how Lee felt, though he always did examine him, designing Lee?s treatments according to what he observed. Under Donovan?s guidance, Misto thought Lee would grow as healthy as he could ever expect to be, considering the debilitation caused by the emphysema.
The cat thought about Lee?s hope that within a few months, under the good care at Springfield, he would be pronounced healthy, would be discharged from the federal medical facility, would be back on parole heading for Blythe to retrieve the stolen money and then down to Mexico beyond easy reach of the feds.
Misto didn?t think so. Trying to see the future, he felt his fur crawl. He sensed a far longer journey ahead, a more complicated and dangerous tangle than Lee dreamed before he reached California again to claim the treasure. Misto?s fragmented glimpses into the future were often like the abandoned skiffsinhigh water, visible for only an instant: the shadow of a prow or of a coiled line obscured by engulfing waves. Now the yellow tom prayed for the old train robber in the journey that lay ahead; he prayed that Lee might find a new kind of treasure, more tender than Lee would ever imagine.