The Cat Between Read online

  Anyway, the cat (Graymalkin, Blaise called him, after the devilish familiar to one of Macbeth’s witches) preferred the man and his solitary lifestyle; had been continually fighting with the other cats when he’d lived at The Maples. His name there had been Stupid and Gerry still had to make an effort not to call him that.

  She walked at the side of the road and knocked on Blaise’s front door. She noticed the Christmas wreath hanging there was looking a bit the worse for wear and made a mental note to check her own. Or take it down. Apparently, January weather wasn’t doing Blaise’s wreath any good.

  He must have been waiting for her, as the door opened almost immediately. “Come in! Come in! Thank you for coming. He’s not anywhere. I’ve been calling and calling. I’m afraid he’s stuck in a room upstairs and I’m not really supposed to climb stairs anymore.”

  Gerry had been divesting herself of her outerwear, saw her friend’s anxious face, and held up a hand. “Blaise, make us a pot of tea and sit down while I have a good look around.” He shuffled towards the kitchen and Gerry bounded up the first flight of stairs.

  New territory to her, as there had never before been a reason for her to go upstairs in Blaise’s multi-storey Victorian “monstrosity,” as she affectionately called it. As Gerry had expected, there were many nooks and crannies, which increased in number when she went up the narrower second flight of stairs to what she supposed would have once been servants’ rooms or nurseries.

  “Stu—Graymalkin,” she called, as she prowled from one room to another. A bed in one, an unused-looking desk in another, boxes in a third. She opened various cupboards and checked the windows in case the cat had found a way out.

  In the room with a bed she dragged a chair over to a high wardrobe, stepped up and ran her hands along its top. She dusted off her hands, then looked more closely at them. Chalk? She reached up again. Yes. Chalk. Or something like it.

  She hopped off the chair and onto the bed, further away from the wardrobe. This allowed her to see the hole. It was in the corner where the wall met the ceiling. “Awfully small for a cat to go through,” she muttered doubtfully.

  She went out of the room and prowled the hall, looking up. Ah. A square door in the ceiling. She bustled downstairs to the kitchen.

  “The good news, Blaise, is I’ve found a hole leading to the attic in the ceiling of one of the top-floor bedrooms. Squirrels must have chewed through the drywall. The bad news is I don’t hear anything up there.” She grasped the mug of tea he offered her and swigged half of it. “How do I get into the attic?”

  “I haven’t been up there in years. Let me think. You push up the ceiling door with a pole. The door’s on hinges. Then I just used to use a stepladder.” He wrung his hands. “Oh, I hope you find him, Gerry.”

  “I will,” she assured him. She looked at the kitchen clock. Seven o’clock. Lots of time until she’d have to leave for her one o’clock class. She chugged the rest of her tea and, grasping a mop, a flashlight and a stepladder, slowly made her way back to the third floor, trying not to gouge any wallpaper. Blaise sat on the steps in the hall, waiting.

  Gerry stood halfway up the ladder and tentatively pushed with the sponge-end of the mop. The door barely shifted. “Right,” she said determinedly, and gave a sudden hard shove. The square rose, hovered, then disappeared and banged down on the attic floor. “Success!” she shouted and heard a mumble from Blaise far away. She ascended the ladder and poked her head up into the dark.

  Blaise had not used the attic for storage (except for a pile of lumber), which was a good thing, as every surface was coated in dust and much of the airspace was taken up by fantastic cobwebs, some collapsed and ancient, others all too active looking. Gerry grimaced. “Ugh. Reminds me of Cathy’s basement.”

  She climbed up into the attic and, using the flashlight like a machete through underbrush, thrust aside webs as she checked out the perimeter of the room.

  No cat that she could see. It was too dark low down in the corners to see a hole from the bedroom below. A way out? She went to inspect the tiny window at the front of the house. No exit here. She walked to the rear of the house. Not a window exactly, but a slatted vent, out which one could see the lake. Just barely. One of the slats, low down, was missing.

  Gingerly, Gerry poked the flashlight through, and was rewarded by seeing its light shine on a little ledge stained by bird droppings. “So he could get out,” she murmured. “The little monkey.” She hastily ran back downstairs to tell Blaise.

  “He’s not up there but he could get out and then grapple his way down the tree, the one with the reddish bark.”

  “The wild cherry,” Blaise said, and led the way to the kitchen. Gerry slid the back door open and they both stepped out. Blaise stayed close to the house while Gerry located the tree and looked in the snow near its base.

  “I think I see some tracks, but they’re leading in various directions. When the sun comes up, they’ll be easier to read.” She looked at Blaise’s face, pinched with worry. “Blaise, do you have medication you’re supposed to take when you wake up?”

  “Well, I…yes, I do…but—”

  “Go in and take it and don’t worry. Shall I see if Cathy is free to help out?”

  “Yes, all right. Here. Phone her.”

  Gerry checked the clock. 7:20. Cathy should be up. She was. “I can do the searching, Cathy, but Blaise needs some company.” Cathy said she’d be right over. “Right. I’m going out now.” She let herself out the back.

  A weak light was appearing downriver, turning the snow from grey to soft creamy white. As Gerry had noticed before on other winter mornings, the sun would make the briefest of appearances before clouds blocked its glow for the rest of the day. It was as if it wished to give hope that somewhere, if not here, it was shining, that there was warmth.

  She put the flashlight in her pocket and walked carefully, looking down. The most clearly used path led to her property. “Where would I go if I was Stupid?” She grinned. “That came out wrong. Okay, Graymalkin, I’m coming to find you.”

  She followed a confusion of tracks leading to the gate that separated Blaise’s and her properties. She opened the gate and walked onto her land: the house yellow with white trim to her left; the ghostly remnants of last year’s garden poking up through snow straight ahead. As she walked up the path to the house, she thought: I should get out here and shovel again. She looked for more tracks.

  There was the distinctive hop and splotch left by a squirrel bounding from the base of one tree to another; there, under the apple tree, the longer marks of several rabbits; even the little long trails she jokingly assigned to “snow snakes,” but which were made by small rodents—mice or voles—dragging their tiny forms through loose surface snow.

  She kept along the back of the house and up onto the narrow decked walkway. So if Gray—I’ll just call him Gray in my mind, far easier—so if he came this way, when he got to here (here was the side parking area between her kitchen door and shed), he would go…where?

  Anywhere, her logical brain told her. To the road even. Oh, no! She quickly checked both sides of the road from her house to Blaise’s and back. At that moment her cousin Andrew came out of his pleasant two-storey cottage—white with black trim and roof, red shutters.

  He peered down at her from his great height. “Gerry. What’s up? You jogging now?”

  “Hardly, Andrew. I mean, in January?”

  “Some do.”

  “No, well, I’m looking for Blaise’s cat. He seems to have gotten out in the night and not come home.”

  Andrew thought. “It wasn’t too cold last night. About zero. Nothing a healthy cat couldn’t survive. If he found a warm place.”

  Gerry mused. “A warm place.” They both turned to look at the abandoned house next to hers. “Do you think…?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe. Must be lots of ways for animals to g
et in. Look at the cracked glass in that window up there. If you can get in without breaking anything, go for it. It’s obvious the owners don’t care about the place.”

  She paused. “When are you leaving, Andrew?” She referred to his proposed visit to Cathy’s sister Markie who lived in Arizona and whom they’d all met over Christmas. The attraction between Andrew and Markie had been immediate and obvious.

  Andrew blushed and smiled, his homely face made attractive. “About a week, ten days. Depends on Markie’s work.”

  She smiled. “Well, soak up some sun for me.”

  “Will do. Gotta dash.” He got into his car and drove away.

  I hope that works out for them, she thought. Gosh, it must be about eight by now. She went home, made a coffee and fed the cats. Then she phoned Blaise. “Hello?” he quavered.

  “Hi, Blaise. I’m just feeding my mob and then I’m going back out to look some more. Is Cathy there?”

  There was a bump and a rustle and then Gerry heard Cathy’s clear tones. “Gerry?”

  “I checked the road, Cath. No body. So that’s good. I’m going down to the lake next—”

  Cathy interrupted her. “You won’t go on the ice, Gerry? It’s too soft.”

  “No, I won’t. But it would hold a cat. I’m looking for tracks. Then I’ll try the house next door. He might have crawled in there. So I’ll be another hour or so. Keep Blaise calm.”

  “Will do.”

  Gerry put her coffee in a travel mug and went outside. Bob, who, of all her cats, seemed to mind winter the least, followed her. They stared at the lake. The hole where two of her acquaintances had gone through and one had drowned a few weeks before had refrozen, but she thought she could pinpoint the spot. What if the cat had gone out there in the early hours of the morning? And fallen through? They’d never know what had happened to him. She walked down to the shore.

  A glint of red in a small tree made her look up. She reached and pulled the bough toward her. “Look, Bob, Christmas ribbon.” She unwound it from the branch and put it in her pocket. Christmas really is over, she thought glumly.

  Bob ventured out onto the edge of the ice, sniffing. Gerry went a little ways out but a cracking sound made her retreat. She compared Bob’s tracks with some others, similar but much larger. A dog? Dogs? She remembered the howl she thought she’d heard last night and pictured wolves or coyotes running across the frozen river on the hunt. Hunting a cat, out at night prowling? She shivered, imagining how they’d tear their prey apart. “But there would be blood. And fur. Wouldn’t there, Bob?”

  Bob was oblivious, bounding through the deep snow that led from Gerry’s yard through the thicket and so to the empty house next door. He stopped and looked over his shoulder as if to say, “Hey, Bigfoot, come and make a path,” which Gerry did, stepping over him and shuffling with her feet together. He followed close behind, making little clicking noises.

  “What? Do you smell your old buddy, Stupid? I mean Gray. And he’s more of an enemy, isn’t he?” When they reached the thicket, it was every man for himself, as Gerry pushed against old burdocks, bramble bushes and thorny shrubs and Bob twisted between stalks and trunks, sinking into snow with a pained look on his face.

  She thought she heard a cat mew and looked up. She did a double take. Had Jay escaped? No. This was a much larger cat, though identical in markings to Jay—black with white legs—lurking around the back of the house. “I wonder,” she murmured, but stumbling, looked down, and when she again looked up, the cat had made itself scarce.

  Finally they were through. Gerry looked around. She’d never been on this property before. It looked larger than her own, with fewer trees, at least at this end of the lot. The land sloped gently up from where she was standing toward a small wood past the house. She had a dim memory of the house being quietly occupied when she was a child visiting Aunt Maggie, but not of any person in particular.

  It was in pretty bad shape. Windows were boarded up. Some strips of siding were missing. Bits of the eaves sagged and one downspout had come away completely, rested at an angle in a snowdrift. The roof tiles were curled and flaking.

  Yet once it must have been a lovely house, painted white with black window frames, long and low with lots of views of the lake. Some of the delicate lacy trim still remained, delineating the roofline. A few windowpanes, high up, retained a distinctive diamond-paned pattern. “Miss Havisham,” Gerry muttered, “waiting in her mouldy wedding dress,” and shuddered at the image. “That would make a creepy drawing.”

  Bob, meanwhile, neither impressed by architecture nor distracted by literary allusions, was nosing around in the backyard. He sniffed, stiffened and retreated up a tree, only to smell along one long thick bough and hastily rejoin Gerry on the ground. “Whoa, Bob, found something scary?” She examined the tracks under the tree and followed them to the back door.

  They were different from any Gerry had previously seen, bigger than a cat’s, oval where most cats’ or dogs’ were round. She sucked in her breath when she saw the long claw marks in the snow. There were cat tracks as well, and her worry for Blaise’s cat increased. “Yikes, no wonder you’re freaked out. Come here.” She picked Bob up in her arms. “You don’t want to meet up with the owner of those.”

  Bob struggled to be let go and disappeared around the far side of the house. Before she followed him, Gerry bent over and looked closely at a hole in the siding low to the ground. Big enough for a cat, she reasoned, or perhaps whatever possessed those frightening claws. She went to look for Bob and found him sitting in a window box with one paw hooked under the edge of a board that had been hammered on to cover a window. Gerry looked furtively toward the road. No one passing. She pulled on the board and it came away easily, its wood crumbling in the nail holes. “Rotten,” she said and set it down under the window, which, to her surprise, was intact. So the plywood was to protect the glass not instead of it, she realized. She pushed the window up. As it opened, Bob darted in. “In for a penny,” she muttered, pushing it all the way up, stepping in and closing it behind her.

  She looked around and took out her flashlight. Mostly empty of furniture, the house was as dusty and dirty as Blaise’s attic. Dirtier, as mouse poop littered the floor. But she could see that it might be habitable. By the time she thought to look for cat tracks, Bob had trotted around the first room and the second before disappearing.

  Gerry shone the light up the stairs. A single set of cat footprints had disturbed the dust. “Bob?” He appeared from behind her and bounded up the stairs. She followed, whispering, “Were those your tracks?”

  Bob and Gerry prowled from room to room. Her reflection in a mirror in one room startled her, as did the glimpse of a dressmaker’s dummy in another. She heard Bob’s low growl start and abruptly stop. “Bob?” She shone her light into another room. There he was, crouched, tail thrashing, his hairs puffed. A string of old-fashioned Christmas lights with large bulbs lay on the floor.

  Gerry could see nothing to make him behave so. She picked him up. “Well, you must have made those tracks coming up the stairs. Gray’s not here. Let’s go home.”

  Once out the window, she propped its plywood cover partially over the glass and walked around to the front of the house. More boarded-up windows. The path from the gate in the white picket fence looked like it might have been shovelled that winter but fresh drifts of snow made it hard to tell. There were partially obscured human footprints leading to the front door, and on its peeling surface someone had hung a faded Christmas wreath.

  3

  Gerry let herself and Bob into her house and checked the time. 9:20. She called Blaise. Cathy picked up. “Anything?”

  “I don’t think so but I found some wicked tracks in the snow. Long curved nails.”

  “A fisher,” Cathy crisply said, then lowered her voice. “They kill cats. I hope Graymalkin is hiding. What now?”

  “I’m goin
g to shower and change. I teach my first art history class today so I have to leave at 12:30. Twelve-fifteen would be better because of finding parking. But tell Blaise I’ll be over in a few minutes.”

  Gerry whisked in and out of the shower, dithered a bit over what to wear to school, settled on a white turtleneck with a pink sweater and blue jeans. No need to really dress up. After all, it was art history, not law. She quickly cleaned the cats’ six litter boxes, lined up in the downstairs toilet, topped up the kibble tub and adjusted the thermostat. “Don’t want you guys to be cold,” she said as she passed through the dining room. “I’ll make a nice cozy fire tonight.”

  Sleepy eyes blinked at her as the cats sitting on chairs around the large dining room table digested her words. The black and white kitten, Jay, a tuxedo cat like Bob, rolled on the ancient oriental carpet, Mother giving her fond supervision.

  Gerry petted the kitten. “I’m sorry, sweetie, I don’t have time to play. Wait.” She retrieved her coat and fished in one pocket. “Here.” She dangled the red ribbon in front of Jay who snagged it with one claw and rolled under the table in a ball of ribbon-shredding fun.

  Gerry straightened up. “Make sure she doesn’t swallow any, Mother.” The marmalade tiger looked at Gerry indignantly. “All right, I know you will,” Gerry soothed. “Bye, guys.”

  She threw her course notes into her car, then trudged back to Blaise’s. Testing the front door, she found it open and let herself in.

  Blaise and Cathy sat in the kitchen drinking tea and eating toast. Gerry helped herself to a piece of toast, slathering it with butter and marmalade. “I’m famished!”

  Cathy, a middle-aged lady whose comfortable shape revealed her fondness for cooking and eating, poured her a cup of tea. Gerry swallowed a mouthful. “I checked the empty house next door to mine but I don’t think Graymalkin was ever in there. I had to pry off one of the window covers. It’s in not too bad shape inside.”