The Cat Between Read online

  ALSO BY LOUISE CARSON

  NOVELS

  The Cat Vanishes

  The Cat Among Us

  Executor

  In Which: Book One of The Chronicles of Deasil Widdy

  Measured: Book Two of The Chronicles of Deasil Widdy

  NOVELLA

  Mermaid Road

  POETRY

  A Clearing

  Rope: A Tale Told in Prose and Verse

  DOUG WHITEWAY, EDITOR

  © 2019, Louise Carson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, for any reason, by any means, without the permission of the publisher.

  Cover design by Doowah Design.

  Cover icons: The Noun Project and Doowah Design.

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Manitoba Arts Council for our publishing program.

  ISBN 978-1-77324-050-3 (epub)

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: The cat between / Louise Carson ; Doug Whiteway, editor.

  Names: Carson, Louise, 1957- author.

  | Whiteway, Doug, 1951- editor.

  Description: Series statement: A Maples mystery

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190177810

  | Canadiana (ebook) 20190177829

  | ISBN 9781773240497 (softcover) | ISBN 9781773240503 (HTML)

  Classification: LCC PS8605.A7775 C383 2019

  | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  Signature Editions

  P.O. Box 206, RPO Corydon, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3M 3S7

  www.signature-editions.com

  for Jackie O and Mata,

  the latest arrivals

  Contents

  PART 1

  WITCH’S BROOM

  PART 2

  SHRIKE

  PART 3

  FISHER

  PART 4

  COYWOLF

  PART 1

  WITCH’S BROOM

  The slim grey cat crouched in the snowy thicket between the house of many cats and the empty house next door.

  Except the latter wasn’t empty. At least not tonight. Tonight it hummed with activity both upstairs and down. Voices. Lights. Coloured lights at an upstairs window.

  From where he sat, he saw through a window as two men entered a back room of the house on the ground floor. They both had small lights they flashed around the room. He crept a bit closer and jumped on a narrow ledge below one window. He made himself very still.

  He heard two voices rise suddenly in argument. Then the men seemed to reach some agreement. He slowly raised his head. One man, dressed in a bulky one-piece garment, handed a cat-sized package to the other man. The second man was wearing what the cat recognized as clothes similar to what his owner—the old man—would wear: trousers under a long warm-looking coat, a scarf and a hat.

  As he watched, the second man removed the hat and placed it on a counter next to a round black plastic object that reminded the cat of a fishbowl in the home of one of his previous owners. He remembered the fun he’d had scooping the little goldfish out of the water and watching them flop around before eating them. He had been charmed and waited hopefully for that owner to restock the bowl.

  It hadn’t happened. Instead, the next day, he was thrust into his cat carrier and returned to the cat adoption agency. “Just isn’t working out,” his then owner had snapped before stomping out.

  The men’s voices were raised again as they looked at the package’s contents. The first man grabbed the fishbowl and put it on his head.

  The cat blinked. Original. Fishbowl man left the second man rewrapping the package. Fishbowl slammed an invisible door. The second man sighed, put on his hat and also left the room.

  The cat heard a car engine start and then, farther away down the road, a much louder motor roar into life. He waited a moment and dropped off the window ledge into the snow.

  He was retreating back toward the thicket and his own comfortable home beyond the house of many cats when a new sound behind him made him turn. He looked up.

  The glow of the different coloured lights upstairs was growing stronger. They must be strung together like the lights the neighbour women had recently hung around his old man’s fireplace. These ones upstairs might be hung around the inside of the room’s window. But the sound.

  A little child stood in the open window, laughing. It held a cat in its arms. A black cat with white legs.

  The grey cat stiffened. His secret name for himself was Defiance and all other cats were his enemies. He didn’t know why. It was just the way he was made. His fur lifted on his back and his tail fluffed.

  Strange. He could smell the cat but not the child. As he watched, the lights pulsed stronger and stronger as the child laughed and laughed.

  Then—and it seemed as if it all happened at once—the cat fell, the window slammed down, and the lights went off.

  He blinked. Where was the cat? He trotted forward towards the snow under the window.

  1

  “Crazy weather, eh?” Gerry remarked idly to the young man standing next to her.

  “How, crazy?” he replied in heavily accented English, a puzzled look on his face.

  “Uh, it’s very mild. Everything is melting.” He must not be from around here, she thought, noting the olive skin and thick black hair. She looked around restlessly. Would this tour ever begin?

  “Is spring, no?”

  She laughed. He looked hurt. “No, no, I’m not laughing at you. No. Spring is three months away. In April. If we’re lucky, I’m told. This mild weather is temporary.” When he continued to look puzzled, she extrapolated. “Winter will return soon. Very cold. Lots of snow.”

  He nodded rather absently, then said, “So, animals will return to sleep.”

  She wondered what on earth he could be referring to, then remembered the squirrels that she’d noticed reappearing during this January thaw. She also nodded. “Yes, the hibernating ones are only out temporarily.” He seemed to retreat into his own thoughts and to Gerry’s relief the guide arrived. They set off around the campus.

  Many of the buildings were linked, but they’d been told to dress for outdoors and, soon enough, were wading across a slushy road.

  This building was new. Dedicated to science and technology, it gleamed. And it was a comfortable temperature. Students soon began unzipping jackets as their guide extolled the building’s virtues.

  Gerry could see her companion was interested. His dark eyes set in a thin face darted around. She looked at the others in the group. Mostly young, some nervous ones, some obviously foreign students or new immigrants.

  She’d seen the orientation tour on the list of activities for the first week of term and thought it might be fun, or at least useful. As a last-minute substitute teacher, she had to get her bearings fast.

  “Bloody hell!” the harried administrator had muttered as she’d rooted around her desk for Gerry’s details. “You think you have everything organized—oh, here you are.” She pulled Gerry’s resumé out from under a course syllabus. “Jen Carstairs—that’s who you’re replacing, sort of—teaches this course—Bridging the Gap: Western Painting from Romanticism to the Twentieth Century—and she’s very good. Well, she’s almost due—her second—and lined up her replacement herself, a young artist who’s visiting from France for a year.” She looked at her desk calendar and jabbed a finger into the middle of January. “And what does he do? Last week he drives his Jeep into the side of a mountain.” Gerry winced. “Oh, he’ll be fine, but he’s broken a lot of bone
s. Two months before he’s even walking.”

  She cleared her throat and studied Gerry’s list of accomplishments. “University of Toronto, fine arts, great honours; commercial artist; comic strip Mug the Bug. Mug the Bug! My kids love Mug!” She stretched a hand across the desk. “You’ve got the job. Tuesdays and Thursdays, one to three-thirty.”

  Gerry stopped daydreaming. Apparently they were done touring the science building and walking towards her new place of work—Gladys Berta Macdonald Hall, or Mac Hall, as the guide referred to it. He was speaking and this time Gerry paid attention as they stood in the entrance hall.

  “This fine old building, built around the turn of the previous century, is in the neoclassical style. Note the columns and arched windows, the height of the ceilings; even some of the light fixtures are from 100 years ago.”

  I bet some of the dirt dates that far back too, Gerry thought wryly, looking up at the elaborate plasterwork around the dingy glass and metal lantern, its chain black with tarnish. And the heating system. No one on the tour opened their jackets here. She rested her hand on a radiator. Tepid. Must remember that and dress warmly.

  She looked up at the painting of Gladys Berta Macdonald herself, a handsome woman with dark hair and eyes, in a white presentation gown complete with tiara and sash. How the times they have a’changed, thought Gerry. A local notable, she supposed; then heard the guide explain how Gladys Berta’s family had donated the land for the college over 100 years earlier.

  They were outside again, trudging behind their guide. He led them back to their starting place in the administration wing of the linked buildings. Humanities, police technology and physical education all resided here. Gerry spied a pool and made a note to check when she could use it.

  She turned to the young foreign student to wish him well, but somewhere during the tour, he’d melted away. She shrugged and headed for her car, parked about as far as possible from the buildings.

  A rural college, Ross Davidson had dedicated as much of its total area to parking lots as buildings, probably because most of its students arrived by car.

  Gerry surveyed her red and white Austin Mini Cooper with satisfaction. It had sustained some damage when a tree crushed it during an ice storm on Christmas day, but the dealer had done a good job repairing it.

  She rooted in her coat pocket for the parking decal she’d paid for and picked up that morning. She got in and stuck it on the upper left corner of the windshield. There, she thought, I’m legal. During the drive home, she tried not to worry about teaching her first college-level class the next day.

  “Hello, cats. I’m home,” she called out cheerily, letting herself in the kitchen entrance at the side of The Maples, the old family home she’d been living in for the last eight months after inheriting it (and the cats) from her Aunt Maggie.

  There wasn’t much response, but she heard a few thuds as furry bodies dropped to the floor in other parts of the house. She found the cats sluggish in this deepest part of winter and, far from driving her crazy from being cooped up (as she’d feared), they mostly just slept and ate.

  Gerry closed the kitchen door, put on the kettle and prepared cat suppers. First she topped up the footbath-sized plastic tub of kibble on the floor under the tiny kitchen table. Then nineteen saucers were lined up and nineteen heaping tablespoons of tinned cat food were ladled out. She’d found it a stinky messy job at first but now could have done it in her sleep and, on certain mornings, did.

  She put the saucers on the floor under the table, made her coffee and opened the door. The cats had assembled outside it as she worked, and jostled each other to find a dish. Gerry spared a moment to ensure Jay, the black and white kitten and newest member of the pride, wasn’t bullied but needn’t have bothered. Mother, a large marmalade tiger and Jay’s adoptive parent, was on the job, protecting the little one as she ate.

  Gerry passed into the living room and flopped in one of two rocking chairs in front of a cold grate. I should make a fire, she thought. Later. She held her warm mug in both hands and sipped. A double espresso with lots of milk and brown sugar. She exhaled. “Ah.” Then she looked at the long table under a window that served as her workstation during winter and flinched.

  Mug the Bug, her successful comic strip that ran daily in several newspapers, was only one week away from the disaster of running out of episodes. She liked to be two weeks ahead.

  “Anybody have any ideas?” she asked the cats, some of whom, finished eating, had joined her by the hearth. A general consensus that grooming took precedence over brainstorming seemed to be her answer. She reached down and stroked the two closest to her feet.

  “Hello, Cocoon. Hello, Max.” The two cats in question, one a fluffy grey and white, the other a fluffy orange and white, paused in their post-prandial licking. “Oh, don’t mind me,” Gerry teased. They didn’t and returned to the important task of keeping all that fur perfect.

  Next to the pile of papers that was Mug, her prototype children’s book—The Cake-Jumping Cats of Dibble—languished. There had been too much going on. The aftermath of the Christmas storm; having her part-time housekeeper Prudence Crick practically move in after her cottage took a tree through its roof; Gerry nursing Prudence through the flu; then them finding two bodies—one old and one new, and the subsequent fallout from that—had conspired to keep Gerry from doing what she loved—creating.

  Another pile of papers included her family’s genealogy and local history. She should put that away, she mused. It would distract her from the fourth pile, the one that loomed ominously in her immediate future—her notes for the art history course.

  With a sigh, she realized she’d finished her coffee just as Bob, her black and white tuxedo cat, jumped into her lap. “Sorry, Bob. Your timing’s off. But I’ll make you a nice fire.” She stood up and the cat slid onto the braided hearthrug. He looked at her reproachfully, stuck one hind leg up in the air and began the most personal of grooming rituals. “That tells me,” murmured Gerry as she went about her chores.

  An hour later, cat boxes cleaned, garbage tossed, wood supplies replenished and a fire crackling behind a screen, she sat down at her living room table. She quickly reviewed her notes for the first lecture—an overview of the whole period she was expected to cover, from the latter half of the nineteenth century to just before the First World War. When she thought she felt all right about that, she pulled Mug the Bug over.

  Like Prudence, Mug was away on a Caribbean vacation. But Gerry had never been on such a trip and she was drawing a blank. She tried to remember what her friends Cece and Bea had told her about their recent trip to Jamaica. Pleasurable as lolling by the sea might be, it wasn’t very funny, and humour was what Gerry was trying to manufacture.

  She recalled they’d gone on a tour to a plantation where formerly rum had been made. She thought about Mug, an infinitely small speck on the page, sampling various rums, becoming inebriated, and then what? She tentatively sketched a few scenarios and when she had one that made her smile—Mug drunkenly singing while riding the plantation waterwheel as bemused tourists watched from below—was satisfied.

  Since she’d gotten home, the sun had set, and when she lifted her head to look out the back window, the snow on the lawn had turned from white to blue, the trees across the lake from dark green to black. She thought she saw something flutter in a tree by the shore and then her growling stomach made her look away and ask, “Well, what’s for my supper, cats?”

  After her baked beans and toast, a cup of tea and some cookies, all consumed at the table among her projects, Gerry had managed another episode for Mug and retired to her bed. As she drifted off—Bob cuddled close and a tortoiseshell named Lightning nestled by her feet—she thought she heard a lonely howl far away.

  2

  Bring, bring. Bring, bring.

  From a dream where she was afloat in her own backyard swimming pool as her cats took running
dives to join her, Gerry swam back up to consciousness. She opened one eye. Her radio alarm clock reposed peacefully on her bedside table. A digital 6:15 slid to 6:16. Bring, bring. Her phone? At this time of the morning?

  Dragging on her robe and slippers, she flumped downstairs to the kitchen. Maybe an extension in the upstairs office would be a good idea. She picked up the phone. “Hello?” she groggily inquired, then quickly snapped to attention.

  “Yes, Blaise. Missing? Since sometime in the night? Yes, of course. I’ll be right over.” She ran upstairs, hurried into her clothes and returned to the kitchen, shrugging on her coat and grabbing her keys. On the little kitchen porch she stepped into the giant all-purpose boots Prudence had recommended she buy. She could hear Prudence’s voice advising her. “Snowdrift-proof and warm. And cheap.”

  Gerry wished Prudence was here now, then chided herself. “She’s on a beach in St. Lucia. Well, no, she isn’t. She’s asleep in her hotel room. But soon she’ll be on a beach. Though knowing her, she’s probably up and trying to organize the hotel restaurant. Or cleaning her room herself. Sorry, cats.” She addressed the two—Bob and Jay—who’d followed her to the back door, thinking breakfast was an hour-and-a-half early. “I’ll be back soon. I hope.” She slammed the door and quickly walked to Blaise Parminter’s house next door.

  He was her only near neighbour on this side of the main road of Lovering. To the northwest of Gerry’s was a large abandoned house. Of course her cousin Andrew lived across the street and her dear friend Cathy Stribling occupied her bed and breakfast Fieldcrest next door to Andrew. But Blaise Parminter was very old—in his nineties—and Gerry felt especially responsible for him, as well as his cat, formerly one of Gerry’s Aunt Maggie’s, but given by Gerry to Blaise to assuage the old man’s loneliness.