POCO RAN TO THE WINDOW the moment she heard the tires screech. Some flash of intuition told her what had happened. It was late afternoon. The big cat had just gone out. A bleary-eyed sun hung low in the sky.
“Juliette! Where are you?” Poco screamed. She saw a dark sports car speeding away. With another shriek of tires, it reached the end of the block, turned right, and disappeared.
Poco grabbed her coat and ran outside into the road. She searched the sidewalks up and down. An oddly shaped gray mound was lying near a street drain not far off.
“Oh no!” She crept toward it, hardly daring to breathe. The mound became a tail bent, a head crushed, a body smashed on the cold pavement. Poco’s stomach rose up. But when she stepped closer, the mound suddenly changed. It took on a brownish, brittle look, and she realized with a gasp that it was only a pile of leaves.
Poco stared weakly up the street. “Juliette? Please come. Are you hurt?”
Soft footsteps sounded behind her. A person wearing a baseball cap pulled far down over his eyes appeared at her side.
“If you are looking for your cat, it ran over there,” the person said in a low voice. He pointed to a tangle of shrubs across the road and turned to leave.
“Wait!” Poco cried. “What happened? Did you see?”
The person turned back warily. He was a boy, short-legged and wiry, not much taller than Poco herself. There was something familiar about him, she thought.
“Your cat got hit,” he said. “It flew up in the air like a football. I thought it came down on the Rollins’ lawn, but it’s not there now. Maybe it ran in the bushes.”
“Which bushes?” Poco raced across the street. The boy in the baseball cap followed and pointed. She pushed some branches aside, but there was nothing underneath.
“Maybe it kept running.” The boy began to edge away again. Beneath his cap, his eyes surfaced and met hers, then drew back into shadow.
“Walter Kew!” Poco exclaimed. “I know who you are.”
“Well, don’t go yelling it around,” Walter said, glancing over his shoulder. “I like to keep a low profile out here.”
“A low what?” Poco tried to see his eyes again. They were the palest blue, very nearly white when the light shone in them.
“Never mind.” Walter Kew pulled his cap down. “If I were you, I would look in the Rollins’ backyard. The cat is probably hiding out there.”
“Do you think she’s hurt?” Poco said, gazing fearfully down the driveway. “Could you help me find her? My mother’s at work. No one’s home except me.”
“Oh, all right,” Walter muttered, but he didn’t look happy about it.
The Rollins were berry people. Strawberries, blackberries, blueberries, raspberries—every sort of berry bush was planted in their yard. By this time of year, the berries were gone, leaving a snarl of brambles. Poco and Walter Kew waded in on tiptoes.
“Juliette! Please come out. Or make a noise and I’ll find you,” Poco coaxed.
“Cat? Here, cat,” Walter Kew called.
There was no answer.
They walked back to the street and went around the block to the yard Juliette would have come to if she had kept going through the Rollins’ brambles. Nothing was moving there, either.
Walter glanced over his shoulder. He grasped his baseball cap and pulled it farther down.
“I guess I’d better get going,” he said. “I don’t like being out on the street for too long.”
“Why not?” Poco asked.
“Spirits,” he said mysteriously. But then he stood around and didn’t leave.
“You are Poco, right?” he said, looking at her sideways.
She nodded.
They inspected the second street up and down and asked some people on the sidewalk if they had seen a large gray Siamese cat. They hadn’t. There was no sign of Juliette. Poco began to feel sick again.
“Thanks for helping,” she told Walter when they came back around to her house. “I guess I’ll just sit on our porch steps for a while and see if she comes back.”
“Time for me to disappear,” he said. He slunk off down the sidewalk. About ten minutes later, though, Poco saw him coming back. He slipped into her yard like a spirit himself and scuttled up the path to the porch.
“I thought you might like some help waiting,” he whispered, pulling up his cap a fraction of an inch. His pale eyes flashed out from under the brim. “I’ve had a few things disappear on me like that.”
“Thanks.” Poco moved to make room. “I guess the spirits are still watching you, right?”
“You never know,” said Walter Kew. “It’s a crazy world out there.”
Poco called Georgina that night. “Juliette was run over?” Georgina bellowed into the phone. “And now she’s lost? I knew this would happen! It’s Angela’s fault for going away.”
Poco held the receiver away from her ear.
“Are you sure Walter Kew was the person who came out and helped you?” Georgina went on shouting.
“Yes. He couldn’t find her, either. But he said not to worry. He doesn’t think Juliette is dead. Yet.”
“How would Walter Kew know that? He never knows anything,” Georgina pointed out. “He never speaks to anyone and he usually doesn’t answer if someone speaks to him. His parents got killed when he was little, you know. Now he lives with his grandmother and is thought to be a strange person.”
“I know,” Poco said. “He is strange. But nice. He believes in spirits. He said we could use his Ouija board if we wanted, to find out where Juliette has gone. I said I’d let him know.”
“Ouija board!”
“George, you don’t have to yell every word you say,” Poco said, holding the receiver out at arm’s length. “My mother can hear you in the next room.”
There was a rustling noise on Georgina’s end of the line, as if she was changing position.
“Listen, Poco. Don’t get mixed up with Walter Kew,” she said in quieter but more earnest tones. “He has weird ideas. Anyway, Ouija boards are fake. Everybody knows it.”
“I don’t know it,” Poco said stoutly.
“Yes, you do!” Georgina’s voice rose again. “We used to do that stuff in second grade. It never told us anything we hadn’t already figured out. Not only that but …”
Poco lay the phone down on the living room couch, where she was sitting, and got up and walked across the room. Georgina’s voice went on without pause in the distance. It sounded like a flock of ducks quacking across a pond. After a while, Poco walked back and picked up the receiver again.
“… quack, quack, quack, so I will come over to your house tomorrow, whether you like it or not, and help you look for Juliette,” Georgina was saying. “She probably went under somebody’s house. That’s what cats always do—go under houses.”
Poco hung up the phone completely when she heard this. She felt too worried to bother telling
Georgina that she was wrong, as usual. Cats do not “always do” anything. They are unpredictable, which is why humans, who are also unpredictable, love them so much. Furthermore, though a cat may go under a house, it usually will not stay there. This is because dust clogs up its sensitive nose and dirt falls onto its beautiful coat, and it is very shortly sneezing and miserable.
No, Juliette was not under a house at that moment. But in that case, where had she gone?
Poco took a telephone book out of a table drawer and looked up a number. She punched it into the telephone and waited through four rings.
“Hello! Speak up!” an elderly voice barked at the other end. Poco jumped. Old people made her nervous. They frequently looked angry or couldn’t hear what she said.
“Hello?” she quavered. “May I speak to Walter Kew?”