Кроха - Dedication

In seconds he was gone.

Now, in this world, Misto slept deep and forever, but beyond this world a brightness glowed. They all could see it, they watched Misto’s spirit rise up, they could feel his passing, they saw his golden form as delicate as gauze above them. He was, for a moment, a clear light above them, and then he was gone. To another place.

They sat with him for some time. No one moved or spoke. From far away they felt his spirit caress them, and an echo of his thoughts drifted back to them: Do not grieve, I am with you. You have lives to live, wrongs to right before you complete your journey. You have kittens to raise,his voice said with a smile, before you move on to the next adventure.

As dawn began to color the sky, John and Mary rose. They fetched the little casket that John had prepared, with its carved designs of flowers and trees and its silk liner. They laid Misto within, and John said a prayer for him.

In the living room Wilma rose from the couch where she had dozed. They carried Misto in his small casket to his resting place, which Mary had prepared in the garden. The morning was chill, barely light, the sky streaked with trails of dark clouds and the first hints of sunrise shining through; it was the kind of morning Misto liked best.

The humans knelt. John uncovered the grave he had dug, set among its five granite boulders. The cats crept close and sat quietly. It was then that Kate appeared and, behind her, silent and close together, came Ryan and Clyde, and Charlie. Ryan took Wilma’s hand. Both wiped away tears.

John laid Misto’s casket in the flower-lined grave between the granite boulders. They patted the earth down, each hand and each paw adding a benediction.

When the grave was covered, each mourner said a few words, then Mary planted primroses over the little mound. As they turned away, weeping, in Dulcie’s head the words of a poem began. The first few words of an ode to Misto, a bright caress that would be a long time in the making, but would speak for all of them.

Golden spirit, you reach down

Your ghostly paw to touch the earth you love

To touch the sea

To stroke the lakes and rivers . . .

29

It was later that morning that Max Harper received a third call on the BOL for Tekla and Sam Bleak. All three reports were from California Highway Patrol. Max hadn’t had much description to put out, no make or model, no year, no license number. Just an older brown SUV, faded and dirty. One responder thought it might be an older Chevy. None caught the license number, the plates were smeared with dirt. In one response the car carried three occupants. In the others, only two people were visible. It annoyed him that the snitch hadn’t gotten a better handle on the car, hadn’t found a way to follow it. But then, Max hadn’t been there to witness the action; maybe the car had vanished too fast. The positive part was, in all three calls the car was moving east, heading now through Nevada.

This same morning, in Anchorage, the Greenlaws parted from Mike and Lindsey Flannery, watched them take off in a light plane for a few more days of fishing north of Anchorage. The Greenlaws spent the morning comfortably before the Inn’s fireplace. Their flexible schedule and their several side trips aboard small ferries had been exciting, but they were tired out, they missed Kit, they worried about her—it was time to go home.

And it was much earlier that morning that, up at the new shelter construction, Kate Osborne ended up crying in the arms of Ryan’s uncle Scott, her tears drenching Scotty’s red beard. Kate wasn’t sure how this had happened. Scotty wasn’t sure what Kate was crying about. He knew she was grieving for Ben. He knew that the Firettis’ old yellow cat had died, that Ryan and Billy were sad about him, too.

But no one could tell Scotty how deep the grieving went, no one could tell him Misto’s story. In Scotty’s arms, she didn’t try to stop the tears; she just let herself weep.

She was well aware that Joe Grey and Ryan were glancing in their direction, trying not to show their interest in this sudden tenderness—but did they have to stare?

When she had arrived at the shelter site, parking beside Ryan’s red king cab, Scotty had looked up from where he was installing a window. He had paused in his work, watching her approach, had looked hard at her, at her tear-blotched face. She had headed on back into the building, but he’d stopped her.

“Kate?”

She’d turned, looking at him in spite of her tears. He’d switched off the drill, laid it down and, as natural as the shining of the sun, he’d put his arms around her, had held her, let her cry against him. Across the yard Joe Grey, draped over Ryan’s shoulder, watched the couple until Ryan politely walked away to disappear behind the building.

“When did this start?” she asked the tomcat. “It’s just this week that I’ve noticed.”

Joe shrugged. “How do I know when it started? You put Scotty up here working on the shelter, and Kate is here all the time. How can he work around Kate Osborne and not be aware of her, she’s a knockout.”

Ryan looked at him. She said nothing. She moved farther back among the raw wooden beams and posts behind the main building. Sunlight warmed the plastered block walls of the shelter and warmed the three outdoor enclosures—these open-air spaces would be living quarters for dozens of feral cats who would not want to be shut inside. Wild-living cats that CatFriends would neuter, give their shots, and turn loose again in their own colonies.

Ryan said, “If Scotty and Kate get serious, that does present problems.”

Joe agreed. Scotty and Kate would be another couple where one partner knew the cats’ secret and one didn’t. Scotty had no notion the cats could speak. Not an easy way to live, where one member of a happy couple had to harbor lies, as did Charlie Harper. No happily wed couple wanted the dark specter of deception shadowing their honesty with each other. And in Kate’s case, the stress could be worse.

Kate, who had divorced a philandering husband long ago, said she’d never trust another man. Scotty, the loner, dated casually but had never found a woman he loved—he said he wouldn’t marry for less than a deep, true commitment. How would Kate hide the truth from him, when she herself had such a close connection to speaking cats?

Joe looked around for Billy, wondering if he, too, had been watching Kate and Scotty, but then he remembered this was a full school day in the work/school schedule that had been set up for the boy. Joe had turned on Ryan’s shoulder so he could look behind them when Ryan spoke softly. “Look,” she whispered, facing away toward the tree-sheltered Pamillon mansion that stood beyond the rise.

Across the hilly meadow, on the remains of a fallen stone wall, a brown tabby crouched. “One of the clowder cats?” Kate said. “Oh, have they come back from the Netherworld, too? But Kit and Pan can’t know, they didn’t say anything.”

Joe stretched up from her shoulder to look. The tabby was gone, but a white face peered out from the shadows; he could barely see her pale calico against the light stone wall. “Willow,” he said. “That’s Willow! I don’t see the tabby, but Willow’s back! They’re back!” He leaped down to join the clowder cats, racing away.

Ryan stood looking after him. What would this mean? Were the ferals still fine with her building the shelter here? They’d better be, at this late stage. They’d known about it before they descended down the tunnels to that other world. She would not have begun the project without Joe and Dulcie and Kit and Pan seeking out the wild clowder and telling them. Asking them, she thought, smiling.

The ferals had seemed all right with the plan, had seemed comfortable with the close proximity to the rescues. They were pleased with this caring human help for cats in need. Though no one had been sure, in fact, that the little group of feral cats would return from the Netherworld; there were charms and wonders in both lands.

Kate had situated the shelter, and the road that approached it, nearly half a mile from the mansion, away from the ferals’ preferred hunting grounds, from the overgrown rose gardens and the woods beyond. Ryan and Kate hoped, as the shelter was populated, as volunteers came and went, they wouldn’t drive the shy little band away. They would never want to do that. They had already posted small signs around the mansion grounds marking that area dangerous and off-limits.

When Ryan heard the sound of the drill once more and saw Scotty back at work, she found Kate inside the main building in a large communal room, busy with her drawing pad. Planning the cat perches, the overhead walks, the lofts and hiding places to entice the resident cats. Laying down her drawing pad, Kate handed Ryan one end of her tape measure. Neither spoke of Scotty. Kate smiled and hugged Ryan, showed her what she wanted to measure, and said nothing more.

Joe Grey galloped across the wide, hilly berm and through scattered trees into the weedy grounds of the stone mansion, searching for Willow and the ferals. There, by the stone wall: Willow came out, stepping delicately, smiling, then rubbing whiskers with Joe. One by one the ferals appeared to greet him. Soon he was surrounded by seven cats all talking at once. He followed them deep behind the big house where no human would see or hear them. Their eyes were bright with a secret, their tails lashing. There was no small talk, not even tales of their return up the tunnels. What were they so eager to tell him? He had no notion that their message would send him racing away again for a phone.

The ferals greeted him with nose touches and rollovers and a little crazy chasing, then they led him to a narrow dirt road back in the trees beyond the mansion. “You’ll want to see this,” pale-coated Sage said. “This might be for the police. These people that were here made our fur bristle. Those humans coming here into the ruins, they were scum.”

The cats led him down the old sunken road, hidden deep in the woods, where he and Dulcie had sometimes wandered. It was hardly wide enough for a car, so cars never came there. But now a car had come, its tire marks fresh and deep in the mud where a small rivulet crossed. Joe could see where the vehicle had parked and where it had turned around, making several passes, its bumpers and fenders biting into the earthen berm. The feral cats crowded around him, dark tabby Coyote, creamy Tansy, light tabby Sage, and Willow of the pale calico coat, all seven of the small band of ferals that had ventured down to the Netherworld. Willow said, “This is your kind of hunting, Joe Grey. Hunting humans. Those people smelled of evil.”

“The car nearly got stuck,” Coyote said, the long-eared tabby smiling with pleasure. “They came here in daylight yesterday. The first thing they did was turn the car around. Took them a long time, big clumsy wheels spinning in the mud,” and that made Coyote laugh. “Way too big for this narrow road. They waited until dark to leave. Hiding,” the dark tabby said. “Hiding from what?”

“Did they see you?” Joe said.

“Not us,” said Sage, glancing at Tansy. “They had a boy, a big, rude boy, he got out and stamped around in the woods and broke branches and threw them. We made ourselves scarce.”

“What kind of car?” Joe said, not expecting them to remember. “What make?” The ferals didn’t pay much attention to man’s noisy machines, except usually to avoid them.

“Brown,” Willow said. “Like a station wagon.”

“An SUV?”

“I think so. It opened in the back so you could see through to the front. There were suitcases, blankets, as if for traveling. We could see the mark that said Ford. The license was all mud, caked and dry. But close up, you could read it. We thought you might want to know what that was?”