The Cat Between Read online

  So, Maggie had been treated to many instances of Mr. Leger putting the dog, a small beagleish thing named Frisky, on a stool in the candy shop and engaging it in a chat, much to the delight of his customers, as it turned its nose upward and bayed.

  Gerry fed the cats and heated up some of Prudence’s good soup. Then she read “The Laughing Child.” Almost immediately, she was riveted.

  The ten-year-old author explained that her mother had told her this story so she’d understand why their neighbour lived in seclusion.

  As soon as Gerry read, “I often look through the thicket at the big white house next door and wonder about the lady who lives there,” she realized it was the now empty house her aunt was referring to and its lonely occupant must be the woman Gerry remembered from her own early childhood.

  She heard a snowmobile’s distinctive roar as it drove by her house. She tensed, but the roar continued past and faded as it made for Lovering. Not all snowmobilers are bad, she reminded herself with a shiver.

  She continued to read “The Laughing Child,” written in her aunt’s childish scrawl. Simply told, it was the story of Helen Parsley, cousin to Maggie’s grandmother, Elizabeth Parsley Coneybear. Helen married (Maggie didn’t say to whom) and came to live near Elizabeth—in the house next door.

  Elizabeth had a daughter—Mary Ann—and Helen had one also—Winnifred—and the two little girls played together. Then Helen had a son—Henry—when Winnifred was six years old. And, sadly, Winnifred was playing with the baby when she dropped him out the nursery window. He died. Winnifred became a recluse and lived with her parents until they died and after, alone.

  Gerry consulted her family tree, under a pile of Mug drawings on the table, and saw that all this must have happened around 1890 or thereabouts. Helen was not on the tree but, of course, Elizabeth was. She followed her own line back to her great-grandmother Elizabeth, then dropped her gaze to her daughter Mary Anne, Winnifred’s playmate. The first of four children. Born in 1893. “Oh,” Gerry sighed. “Died 1915. Oh. Only twenty-two. How sad. And then her brother Alfred killed in the Great War in the same year. Their parents must have been crushed. And Winnifred must be the woman who lived to be more than 100, who’s recently died.

  “So that’s the old lady I’d see creeping around the garden when I was little,” Gerry told Bob, who, for once, had supplanted Min Min on her lap. “She was a distant relative. I guess if I live here long enough, a lot of things may be explained.”

  There was a little more to the story. The child Maggie wrote, “Sometimes when no one else is around I hear two little girls laughing and playing in the garden. And then I hear just one child laughing. And then the laughing turns to crying. I haven’t told anyone about this but it’s real. Mr. Puff hears it too. It makes his hair stand on end and he runs away.”

  Gerry drew a little diagram off to one side of the tree showing Helen, Winnifred and Henry, with a line connecting Helen to Elizabeth. Then she put the tree away, Aunt Maggie’s storybook with it. She felt drained and listlessly opened her Mug the Bug file. Dangerously low. Work always distracts me, she thought. Time for Mug to meet some more cats.

  Two strips and three hours later, she felt tired but much, much better.

  16

  “I found out about the child,” Gerry said absently as Prudence carefully manoeuvred the Mini around a snowplow that was stopped at the bottom of her road. As this involved negotiating a three-way stop, one direction of which was blocked by the snowplow, Prudence was giving driving her full attention.

  “Huh?”

  “In the house next door. The one Mrs. Smith mentioned to you? I found a little book of stories Aunt Maggie put together when she was about ten. About local people and things she thought were interesting. Or stuff her mother told her. And there was a story about the child.”

  “Ah.” Prudence tentatively braked, then drove through snowdrifts that had formed where the road was exposed to the lake wind.

  “I thought I would paint a herd of polka-dotted hippopotamuses coming across the ice,” Gerry said casually.

  “It’s hippopotami and that would be surrealism, wouldn’t it?”

  “Ah ha! So you are listening.”

  “I’ve got my hands full, in case you hadn’t noticed!”

  “Oh, you’re fine. Easy on the brakes, slow turns, easy on the gas; you’re doing it all right.”

  The snowplow, having seemingly resolved its difficulties, now roared up behind them and tailgated.

  “Where does he expect me to go?” Prudence asked exasperatedly, looking in her rear-view mirror.

  “The thing no driver can control: the other guy,” Gerry reassured her. “Keep your nerve. We’re almost home.”

  Prudence pulled into The Maples’ side parking pad. The plow roared past, throwing a wave of snow and slush that hit the back of the Mini and almost filled the driveway, only recently cleaned by Gerry’s contractors.

  “What an asshole!” she stormed, exiting the car.

  “Indeed,” Prudence agreed. “Better shovel now so later you can leave for school not all in a sweat.”

  “I will. After breakfast. And I want you to read ‘The Laughing Child’ and tell me what you think.”

  They made coffee and Gerry ate toast with peanut butter. Then, with Bob supervising from the side-door steps, Gerry brushed mucky slush from the back of her car and shovelled the end of the driveway. When she came back in, Prudence had finished reading.

  “What a surprise! I never knew Maggie wrote little stories like these. I remember she was good in English composition.”

  Gerry poured herself her second coffee of the day. “And?”

  “And I know as much as you do. I didn’t live at this end of Lovering when I was a child, remember? We’d visit but the house next door didn’t register. And if the grown-ups weren’t talking about it…”

  “I guess it’s the kind of family incident you would want to suppress, if you could,” Gerry said slowly. “Winnifred—that’s the child who dropped the baby—her best friend died young so she couldn’t talk about it with her. And the grown-ups must have just closed ranks. And never referred to it again.”

  “But people knew, all the same,” Prudence said wisely, “and Winnifred couldn’t face the shame. When did she die?”

  “Just recently, I believe.”

  “I came to work for Maggie in 1988 or thereabouts. She’d hurt her back and couldn’t bend, so I started dropping by to do only the cat boxes at first, but as she got older she just couldn’t be bothered with housework. So I took it on. I didn’t pay much attention to the house next door and Maggie never mentioned anything about it. Or its inhabitant.”

  “Prudence, what did Mrs. Smith say about the child?”

  “That it didn’t mean it and that it was sorry.”

  “Aw. It sounds like that spirit wants to rest.”

  Prudence regarded Gerry with skepticism. “You sound as if you’re buying into this whole spiritualism thing.”

  “Well, after our experience over Christmas…your experience, I mean. I believe in you, Prudence, so I have to suppose what you tell me is true. About the spirit world. And such.” Gerry coughed.

  “And how is the cold today?”

  “Pretty done, I think. It’s almost a week since I got it. Gosh! A week since the murder in the woods.”

  Prudence stood up. “I’m going to get cracking.”

  “And I’m going for a nice hot bath,” Gerry said. “Going to steam away this cough.”

  After the last student stumbled through their presentation, Gerry gave a brief introduction to Impressionism.

  “I have one word for you. Light. And one name. Monet. Claude Monet, 1840 to 1926. Your homework” (Groans, sighs and rustles as the students shifted.) “is to compare two paintings. The Magpie, painted in 1869, and Green Reflections, part of one of the panels
that make up Water Lilies, done between 1920 and 1926. Talk about light, treatment of content and brushstrokes. I want five pages by Tuesday.” (More groans.) “Come on, guys. If you start tonight, that’s only a page—250 words—per day. Surprise me. Take your time and try to be original even as you reference other sources. Footnotes, please. This is a hand-in essay worth ten percent of your final mark so make it legible and good. That’s it.”

  On her way home, remembering how she’d cried when drying Jay after the kitten had fallen into Gerry’s bath, and how handling a kitchen knife had again made her cry, this time for Nolan Shrike and an unknown murdered snowmobiler, she had her eureka moment.

  “Prudence! Prudence! You’re not in a hurry, are you?”

  Prudence wasn’t, was rocking by the fire and had made a pot of chocolate coffee. “I hope you don’t mind. I never tried that flavour before and I know you like a coffee around this time.”

  “Perfect. Perfect. I’ll just heat some milk.” Gerry scalded the milk on high in a small pot and frothed it with a little gizmo she had solely for that purpose. “Ah. Best time of the day.”

  “It is, isn’t it?” Prudence agreed, as the two settled down in the living room, Bob on Gerry’s lap, little Jay on Prudence’s. “Your Eccles cakes came out just fine. I already ate two.”

  “Have another. I doubled the recipe so I have lots.” They munched happily for a moment. “This morning in the bath I just let my mind go down one direction, then another. I had all this stuff in my head. Mr. Shrike looking after the house next door and being murdered there. Finding drugs in the woods. Snowmobiles. The dead snowmobiler.

  “And those things were all mixed up with Graymalkin getting almost killed and me meeting Jean-Louis. And by the way, he hasn’t called me since last weekend. So what’s that all about?”

  Prudence shrugged and made a face. “Go on.”

  “And then in the car this aft, it came to me. I had a good cry yesterday when I was washing the dishes. You know?”

  Prudence nodded. “Lets the feelings out. You cried?”

  “Well, it was pretty awful. The body, I mean. You couldn’t see the face. The visor was down. So, except for the blood, it looked like a giant toy just sitting there.”

  Prudence patted Gerry’s hand. “It will fade, the picture.”

  Gerry nodded. “Oh, I know. But today I realized. Prudence, a knife. Mr. Shrike and the guy in the woods were killed the same way. By a knife.”

  “It’s a silent weapon,” Prudence began.

  “No, no. Don’t you see? Same weapon. Maybe exactly the same weapon. Maybe the same murderer killed Nolan Shrike and the snowmobiler.” She paused for effect. “The other snowmobiler!”

  “The other snowmobiler?”

  “There are always two!” Gerry said excitedly. “When I’ve been up in the woods! There were two last Friday night. J-L and I saw one heading for Lovering along the tracks and then we found the dead guy about a half hour later.”

  “So apart from dying by knife, what’s Nolan Shrike got to do with anything?”

  “Okay, okay. Snowmobiles in woods. Drugs in woods. Mrs. Shrike said her husband used to walk the dog in these woods. So all these things—snowmobiles, drugs and Shrike—in the woods.”

  “But he was killed next door,” Prudence protested.

  “Well, I often hear snowmobiles going by on Main Road, especially at night. Right by the house next door. So if we have Shrike and snowmobiles here, why not drugs?”

  “There’s something loose about your logic,” Prudence said, shaking her head.

  “That’s where the knife or knives come in. Suppose we accept the snowmobiler in the woods was knifed there by another snowmobiler. Then it’s possible Nolan Shrike was knifed by the same killer.”

  “And the one in the woods was killed because he knew about the Shrike killing, or knew and disapproved. And fell out with the killer!” Prudence was starting to get excited.

  “Now you get it!” Gerry encouraged her.

  Prudence wilted. “You know we’re making it up, don’t you?”

  “No, no. We’re feeling our way. We’re intuiting,” Gerry concluded.

  “Huh.” Prudence drained her coffee cup. “Well, I intuit I’m getting hungry so it’s time for me to go home to my supper.”

  That evening Gerry cranked out another Mug episode and, taking her own advice so freely handed out to her art history students, planned out her weekend work schedule.

  Friday she organized the next week’s two lectures, thought about what the drawing class might do and finished two more Mugs by the time she settled down for her afternoon coffee. She flipped through Aunt Maggie’s recipe collection. “Mm. Lemon cranberry scones. Mm. Got to be them.” She started a shopping list with lemons and dried cranberries, and then checked supplies in the kitchen. “Rats, I’m out of everything again.” She sat back down at the living room table.

  “Okay, cats, shopping tomorrow. And I need to go to the bank. And Prudence wants to scrub out your cat boxes on Monday so I need tons of cat litter. And I want to drop in on Bea. Gosh, I better do some more Mug tonight. Tomorrow’s going to be nothing but errands.”

  She worked until midnight, then stepped outside for a breath of fresh cold air, Jay tucked inside her coat, curious little face peeking out at this, her first winter.

  “Look at the world, Jay. It’s why we were born,” Gerry urged the kitten, repeating words her mother had said to her when Gerry was a child. She often wondered if those instructions—look at the world—had been the reason she had become an artist. Gerry looked at the house next door. She pictured it in summer, surrounded by greenery; a happy young family of 100 years ago in residency.

  She wondered if it had been summer the day Winnifred dropped Henry. Morning. If the nursery window had been open to admit the lake breeze. If a sheer curtain had wafted out of the room.

  She walked down where there had been (until the last big snowfall) a path to the lake. The kitten, passive and warm inside her coat, purred.

  She turned to face the backs of the houses. Her house shone with a few lights at one end: her porch, kitchen and living room were illuminated. Smoke from the fire exited the chimney. At the other end of the house, exhaust from the furnace did the same from its separate chimney. Her home looked snug and cozy. She turned her gaze to the right.

  The uninhabited house slouched amidst the drifts of snow piled up by its walls. The semi-circular driveway that curved behind it hadn’t been cleared.

  Gerry thought she saw the shape of an animal flit across the house’s backyard. She clutched Jay, thinking of the fisher that might be out hunting. The kitten mewed.

  The shape on the lawn froze then continued on its intended trajectory away from where Gerry stood.

  In the distance, she heard a snowmobile and, in her haste to re-enter her house, she missed the flicker of multi-coloured lights that briefly illuminated an upstairs window of the house next door, the echo of a child’s sob.

  17

  Valentine’s! How had this escaped her notice? Really? She was young, not unattractive, had a job (or ten) and owned her own house. And she was going to be alone on Valentine’s Day. Again.

  Gerry yanked one of the small grocery carts from where it nested with the others and turned left, began the clockwise stroll that was grocery shopping in Lovering. Because it was Saturday, the store was manned (and womanned) by the youth of Lovering, bored-looking young cashiers and bagboys.

  “I bet they have dates, or parties to go to,” Gerry muttered, flinging a less than satisfactory package of bacon back on the pile. “And I have work, work and more work, and a bunch of cats to go home to. Happy Valentine’s.” She found a package with the most meat and the least fat to satisfy her requirements and added it to her cart.

  She zigged around a white-aproned, scared-looking kid, who was peering at best-before
dates on packages of chicken before he deposited the rejects in a basket. Then she zagged right into Doug Shapland in front of the fish freezer. He deposited a large box of fish fingers in his big cart.

  Gerry sneezed. She groped in her coat pocket for a gnarly tissue and blew. “Hi, Doug. Just finishing a cold.”

  He smiled. “Yeah, we’ve had it at our place. I didn’t get it but the boys all did. Otherwise, we’re good. How are you?”

  Gerry, frantically hoping there was nothing disgusting smeared on her cheek or hanging out of her nose, tried to appear nonchalant. “Oh, very busy. Work, the cats, more work.”

  “I hear there’ve been some unfortunate events down your way.” Doug lived at the other end of Lovering from Gerry, in a house he’d remodelled twenty years before.

  “A body next door and one up in the woods.” She lowered her voice. “And drugs.”

  His face darkened. “God, I hope none of my boys ever get involved in that. You want to move along and chat? Only, I’ve got to get back. I’m tending bar at the rink starting at one.” The rink was the curling rink, indoors of course. Gerry was struck by the incongruity of Doug, a recovering alcoholic, tending bar, but supposed with the sailing club where he maintained boats closed, and gardens under snow, he had to take what jobs he could.

  They entered the cookie and juice aisle and Doug loaded up. Gerry looked in dismay at his selections. She made a face. “Chocolate-covered marshmallow cookies? Really?”

  He shrugged. “Geoff Jr.’s favourites. He gets them when he’s ill.” He added a few jugs of apple juice. “I swear they can each glug one of these a day.”

  Gerry looked thoughtful. “It’s kind of like the cats. They don’t do anything and they eat a lot.”

  Doug laughed as they strolled the soup aisle. Gerry took a couple of cans of chicken noodle. Doug chose six of a cheaper brand that was on sale and a flat of assorted Chinese noodle packs. Likewise, when they passed the canned fish. Gerry selected two tins of kippers; Doug got a six-pack of tuna.