No one messes with the Jane S. Dooley Cat Shelter.
There are two things I’ve never told anyone. But before I can tell those two things to you, I must tell you the rest of the story. Then, maybe there’s a chance you’ll believe me. Let me back up a few months so I can start with what happened on the day right after the fire.
I was standing alone in the old Victorian house that had once belonged to Jane S. Dooley. It was hard to remember what the living room looked like before the fire had engulfed it the previous night. The morning sun streamed in through the bay window, which looked out over the front yard and the neatly trimmed bushes that separated the yard from the sidewalk. But everything inside–the mantel above the fireplace, the wallpaper patterned with delicate flowers, the wood floors, the furniture, the shattered flower vase–was charred and stained, blackened and peeling, covered with ashes.
I had no idea if I would be able to recover the key, and for reasons I couldn’t have understood at the time, this thought inspired a feeling of panic. The floor-to-ceiling bookcase had fallen over during the fire and cracked into several pieces. Dozens of sodden books, wet from the hoses of the firefighters, were scattered across the floor. Some had lost their covers and were partially burned; others had singed pages that curled toward the bindings.
I spotted one edge of the old hardcover beneath what remained of the wooden coffee table. The cover of the book had been a prominent red, making it easy to spot in the sunlight. I kneeled on the floor, pulled the book from underneath one of the table’s legs, and brushed a light layer of ashes off the cover. The book was the only thing in the room that had been mine: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I opened it and saw that the key was still there, taped inside the front cover. I sighed with relief. Then, I loosened the tape, removed the key, and slipped it into my pocket.
“Adalyn?”
Slamming the book shut, I stood up so quickly that I slipped on the debris that covered the damp floor. My assistant, Billy, stepped through the doorway and caught my arm before I fell. I thanked him with embarrassment, clutching the book to my chest with one hand while I used the other to wipe the soot off the knees of my cargo pants.
“It’s a mess, isn’t it?” I said, looking up at Billy, who was eight inches taller than me.
Billy smiled sadly. The apartment had been his home for nearly a year, since he’d accepted the job of Assistant Director of the Jane S. Dooley Sheltering Home for Cats. A rent-free apartment came with the job. The shelter’s office was at the other end of a hallway outside the living room door, and three upstairs rooms served as living space for ten cats waiting for homes with local families. Another twenty cats, the ones who got along well in a larger group, were housed cage-free inside a spacious cement Cat House that had been built behind the old Victorian at the end of the driveway.
Loose jeans and a black T-shirt hung on Billy’s slim frame, and his short hair, dyed jet black, was messy or spiked with some kind of hair product, I could never tell which. One of his eyebrows was pierced, and he had somehow found the time–even on a morning like this–to apply the touch of dark eyeliner that always made his blue eyes stand out. When people first met Billy, especially people who lived in a small Vermont town like Pineville, they usually raised their eyebrows and assumed all the wrong things. They never suspected that Billy had a heart of gold and also was a musical genius. He could play Mozart as well as he belted out the grunge rock tunes he performed with his band, “Black Buzzard,” on Friday and Saturday nights. The job at the shelter was just a way for Billy to make money and have a free place to live while he finished his master’s thesis in music education.
Now that free place to live, the apartment inside the house that Jane S. Dooley had left to the town as a cat shelter a hundred-and-fifty years before, had been torched.
Billy glanced around the room. I knew that he’d weathered times worse than this; his mother had died when Billy was young, leaving his father to raise Billy and run their horse ranch on his own. It was one of the things Billy and I had in common even though, at thirty-four, I was ten years older. We were both raised by single fathers. I had returned to town two years before to be with my dad before he died, thinking I’d only stay long enough after he was gone to close up the house and sell it. My life had been at a crossroads at the time; I’d been living in Colorado and the software company I worked for as an office manager had been sold to a larger company. When the director of the Jane S. Dooley Cat Shelter announced that she was getting married and moving out of town, I decided to stay and apply for the job.
“You’re taking this pretty well,” I told Billy, trying to convince myself that I also spoke for me. At exactly the same time, our eyes strayed toward the piano that Billy had moved into the apartment with the rest of his things. It had been a shiny brown upright with gleaming black and white keys, but now it was covered with soot. It had visible water damage, and a large dark spot was burned into the side that stood closest to the window. The burning rag soaked in gasoline had landed next to the piano when it crashed through the window, which the firemen had temporarily boarded up.
“It’s insured,” Billy said with a shrug. “I’m safe, the cats are safe, Michelle is safe. That’s all that matters.” Michelle, a local nursing student whose smile lit up the shelter whenever she came by, was Billy’s girlfriend.
o0o
It’s not as if we didn’t know that a certain element in town had been grumbling about the shelter. That element consisted mostly of Doris Nelson, the woman who had moved into the house next door five years before. She was joined in her disapproval by the town’s mayor, Henry Carbunkle. Mayor Henry, as I called him, because he hated what he referred to as my “unbelievable impertinence,” had, over the previous year, made it his personal mission to shut the shelter down. I had no idea why; Henry, who is in his mid-forties, had lived in Pineville all his life and had been mayor for the last ten years. He’d never had a problem with the shelter before. We suspected that it had something to do with Doris, who complained about everything from Billy’s piano playing, which she claimed she could hear from inside her house, to what time we rolled the garbage bins out to the curb every Sunday and whether or not our driveway was plowed in the winter. She had installed a tall wooden fence between her driveway and the shelter’s, and that was fine with us. The less we saw of Doris Nelson, the better.
Unfortunately for Doris and Mayor Henry, most of Pineville’s small population loved and supported the shelter. Many local families found beloved pets at Dooley, or turned to us for help when an elderly relative passed away and left a cat in need, or when someone found a hungry stray by the side of the road.
“Should you be in here, Addy?”
Billy and I both turned at the sound of the familiar voice. Mayor Henry was standing in the doorway from the hall into the living room. I wondered why he felt he had the right to walk into my office, never mind down the hall to the apartment.
“Tom said we could come in,” I said, referring to the local fire chief. I stood up a little straighter and made sure my voice was firm. “Why are you here?” I asked.
He ignored my question. “I imagine this place is a goner,” he said, raising his eyebrows as he looked around the room. He was six foot four and, in my opinion, an overgrown bully. He wore a cowboy hat and boots as if he thought he lived in Texas and was a sheriff instead of a mayor.
“Actually,” I said, “only this room was damaged by the fire. There’s just water damage in the kitchen and bedroom. The office is fine, and the upstairs is fine.” He shrugged. Getting angry, I added, “And I’m sure you’ll be happy to hear that Billy saved all of the cats who live upstairs. You do realize that Billy was in here last night, when someone threw a flaming rag soaked in gasoline through the window. He could have been killed.”
I noticed a flash of surprise in the mayor’s eyes. “I thought you played with your band on Saturday nights,” he said.
“Oh, you did?” I asked, suddenly suspicious. I took a step toward the mayor and Billy put a cautioning hand on my arm. “Why were you keeping track of Billy’s nights out, Mayor Henry?”
I might stand five-foot-two and weigh all of a hundred-and-fifteen pounds, and my mane of brown curls might make me appear somewhat childish, but everyone in Pineville knows I’m no pushover. Once, in the tenth grade, I punched a kid in the face when he made a snide remark about a boy who didn’t have a lot of friends. My father promised the principal I would be punished, but when we got in the car so my dad could drive me home, he held up a hand and gave me a “high five.”
“I’m only saying I had no idea Billy was home last night,” the mayor said, involuntarily taking a step backward. He had recovered from his surprise and was back on the offensive. “Had I known, I would have asked if he was alright.”
“Right, just like you asked about the cats,” I said. “Whoever did this, even if they thought they were doing it when Billy was out, must have known they were going to kill ten innocent cats.”
The mayor’s face turned to stone. “Well, whoever did this might not have even known this place is a cat shelter,” he replied smoothly.
“And where were you last night, Mayor Henry?” I asked. “Your life’s mission for the past year has been to shut down the shelter.”
“You have to be kidding me!” he said, furious now. “I’m the mayor of this town and I have better things to do than to try to burn down someone’s house or a cat shelter. I spent the entire evening with my wife, in fact, at Buddy’s Grill and the cinema center in Layton.”
“Will the police be able to find out who did do this?” Billy asked, interrupting our heated exchange. He gestured toward the piano. “There’s been a lot of damage, and the truth is, sir, that I could have been killed, and the cats could have been, too.”
The mayor shrugged again. “It was probably some teenager on a dare,” he said. “I’m sure Sam will do his best to find out.” Sam Reynolds was the local police chief. Sam and Henry were thick as thieves; I had no doubt that if Henry Carbunkle was behind this fire, his buddy Sam wouldn’t do anything about it.
“Well, good luck to you,” Mayor Henry said before turning on his boot heel. He walked back down the hall and out of the house. The office door slammed.
Billy turned to look at me. “Look, Addy,” he said, his voice sounding tired, “I appreciate the invitation to stay at your house while this gets sorted out, but I’m perfectly happy to sleep on the floor of the office.”
“No way,” I said. “I’m going to sleep in that office tonight and every night until they find out who did this, and until we get the apartment back in shape.”
Billy nodded and walked toward the entrance to the bedroom, where he could pack up some clothes to take to my house. But before he left the living room, he stopped and turned toward me.
“Addy,” he said, “there’s something I should tell you.”
“What?” I asked.
“Last night, before the fire, something woke me up.”
“What?” I asked again. “Did you hear people talking, or a car outside the house?”
Billy hesitated. “No,” he said, “it was the piano. Someone was playing the piano.”
“What?” I asked for the third time. “Who?”
“I don’t know. But I heard the piano, just a few notes. The sound woke me out of a deep sleep, and then I heard it again. I got up and came in here to see who it was, thinking maybe Michelle had come over. But when I got here, there was no one. The piano was just sitting there. And then a few seconds later I heard a crash and that burning rag came flying through the window.” He shook his head as if he still couldn’t believe what had happened.
“The flames moved so fast,” he said apologetically. “The curtains caught fire. I tried to pull them down and stomp on them, but it didn’t work. The fire just kept spreading. I ran into the kitchen and grabbed the fire extinguisher, but by the time I got back here half the room was up in flames, so I grabbed my cell and called 911 while I ran upstairs to get the cats.”
Billy hesitated again before continuing. “And it was weird, Addy, someone had opened all the doors upstairs and let the cats out of their rooms. All ten of them were in the hall near their carriers. I think that’s why I was able to save them all.” We were both silent for a moment, remembering the hours that had followed that call: the sirens, the chaos, the worry about the animals still locked in the Cat House. The terrible fear that comes with loss.
I was still holding my copy of Crime and Punishment. I patted my pocket subtly, feeling for the key. It was still there.
“That’s strange,” I said. “Maybe some jokester snuck into the house before lighting the place on fire. It doesn’t really make sense. But if he–or she–comes back, I’ll be waiting.”
o0o
The Jane S. Dooley Cat Shelter was established in 1863 by an elderly Pineville resident who had inherited her father’s fortune and had no close relatives on whom to bequeath it. She had been married as a young woman, but her husband died of a terrible fever and she never re-married or had children. According to local legend, Jane used to stroll up and down Main Street on warm summer days, delighting the town’s children by handing out candy. She started a women’s book club at the tiny town library and gave generously to neighbors in need. But her passion was animals, especially cats, and when she died at the ripe old age of ninety-seven, she left her entire fortune, including the large Victorian house she had called home all her life, in a trust for the establishment of a sheltering home for cats.
The residents of Pineville, mourning their elderly neighbor, founded the cat shelter that Jane had envisioned. And no one had ever had a problem with the arrangement until Doris Nelson moved next door and began her insidious campaign to close the shelter down. Of course, Doris was the first person I wanted to blame as flames threatened to devour Jane Dooley’s house. I had demanded that Dave Miller, a local policeman who was keeping neighbors away from the fire and whom I knew I could trust, knock on Doris’s door to find out if she was home. But Doris, it turned out, was visiting relatives in Boston. She couldn’t have started the fire.
The alarm clock I had placed on the floor of the office glowed in the darkness. 1:04 a.m. The office was cold, and I was huddled on the floor in my sleeping bag, wide awake. October nights can be frigid in Vermont, but I didn’t like to turn up the heat. I was dressed in a sweat shirt and sweat pants inside the sleeping bag.
I had spent the evening working in the office, sorting through the paperwork that would be required to file a claim with the shelter’s insurance company. At 10:30 p.m., I had attempted to turn in because my eyes were hurting and I could no longer concentrate. I pulled on my jacket and went outside to do a final check of the Cat House. All twenty residents were sleeping on cat beds in the specially-designed windowsills, nibbling at the kibble that had been left out in bowls, or chasing each other around the floor in the dark. When I left, I made sure the door was locked, and then I paused next to the shed that backed up to the fence just outside the entrance. The moon was almost full, and the back of the shed was in shadow. It was there, behind the shed, that I had found Jocko on that terrible night.
Jocko. He had been a handsome, scarred, gray-and-white tom cat when he appeared in the driveway a few days after I started my job at the shelter. He was huge–twenty pounds–and tough judging by his ears, which were all chewed up, and by the scar on his upper lip that turned his expression into a permanent scowl. It was clear that he had been living on the street for a long time. But he must have decided that he’d had enough, because he marched straight up to the office door and strolled inside that day. And he proceeded, over the next two years, to become the shelter mascot and the most beloved feline on the property. He spent his days lounging in the office and his evenings sleeping peacefully on Billy’s bed after I convinced the Board of Directors to let me hire Billy and move him into the apartment.
Jocko was protective of the cats who arrived at the office hungry, scared and in search of a new home. He nudged and groomed young kittens if they cried. Every morning when I arrived at work, Jocko left Billy’s apartment, jumped up and unlatched the door from the hallway, sauntered into the office, and sat down in front of me, hoping to be petted.
Jocko was wearing a collar with a tag when he showed up, but no one in town claimed ownership, even though neighbors reported spotting the big cat roaming the streets near the shelter for years. The tag he wore was fancier than normal cat tags–it was thick and heart-shaped and made of silver. So I was sure he must have belonged to someone. But whenever I tried to remove the collar so I could look more closely at the tag, Jocko hissed, bared his teeth, and unsheathed his claws–behavior he never exhibited at any other time. So, the collar remained around Jocko’s neck until the tragic events of July 4th.
It was 6:30 a.m. and raining when Jocko raced past my legs and out the door when I arrived at the office to do some work I had planned to finish on the holiday. He ran down the driveway and behind the shed, and before I could get to him I heard something that sounded like a terrified dog yelping. The next thing I knew, I was frozen in horror, because a coyote had emerged from behind the shed. The animal ran right past me up the driveway toward the street, and I raced behind the shed, calling Jocko’s name. I found him lying on his side in the dirt behind the shed with blood seeping out of his neck. Next to him was a tiny white kitten, not more than a few weeks old, cowering against the shed, untouched. I realized in an instant what had happened: Jocko had attacked the coyote to save the kitten. I fell to my knees and begged Jocko to hold on so I could get him to the emergency vet. But he took a few last breaths, heaved a sigh, and died right there in my arms.
The death of any cat breaks my heart, but I had never taken a loss as badly as I took Jocko’s. Billy found me sobbing with the cat in my arms, and we buried him later that day in the yard in front of the Cat House. Before we laid him in his grave inside his favorite bed, I took off the collar that he’d never let me touch. As I fingered the tag, I noticed that it had a seam and might even open like a locket, but I didn’t have the heart to look more closely in my grief. The next day, I bought a small gold box and locked the collar inside it. I never told anyone about the box, which I placed in the bottom drawer of my desk at the office, or about the key, which I taped inside the cover of one of my favorite books, Crime and Punishment. I then stored the book on the bookshelf in Billy’s apartment so I would have access to the key if I ever decided to open the box.
After the fire I realized how close I had come to never being able to find out what was inside the cat tag. So after Billy went to my house, I removed the key from my pocket, pulled the box from the drawer, and opened it.
The box was empty.
Sleep continued to elude me. I couldn’t stop thinking about the fire, about the fact that Billy could have been killed, about the cats who had been helpless upstairs, about Mayor Henry’s visit. I went over and over our conversation with the mayor in my head, trying to pick out anything that would indicate he was responsible. And finally, when my thoughts had raced in circles for so long that they had to land somewhere, I thought about Jocko’s empty box, which was now sitting on the floor next to the alarm clock. Twenty minutes had passed since I’d last looked at the clock.
And that’s when I heard it.
Plink, plink, plink.
At first it was one note, then two, then a slow crescendo as someone ran his or her fingers up the piano keys. I grabbed the flashlight and struggled up and out of my sleeping bag. Trying to control my ragged breath, I crept on my tip-toes through the door that led to the hallway and made my way toward the apartment. The door to the living room was open, even though I was certain I had closed it after Billy left. I clicked off the flashlight and moved quietly toward the doorway, guided by a sliver of moonlight shining through it.
Peeking into the room, I looked toward the piano, but no one appeared to be there. The piano sat silent in the empty room, which was cast in a bluish light by the moon. I walked into the apartment and over to the bay window, listening for footsteps or any other sound, and keeping my flashlight off. Nothing. No one. Confused, I stared out the window.
Something moved behind the bushes near the street, and suddenly I saw what looked like a human being running down the street, away from the house. I dashed into the foyer, unbolted the front door, and raced down the walkway to the sidewalk, forgetting that it was freezing outside and my feet were bare. Staring in the direction that I had seen the person running, I saw nothing but darkness past the streetlamp on the corner.
Whoever it was had disappeared.
o0o
Two weeks later on a Thursday night, the meeting of the town council was a mob scene. Every seat in the Town Hall meeting room was taken, and men, women, and children were lined up along the walls and milling around the hallway just outside the double doors. Mayor Henry rapped his wooden gavel hard against the podium in a vain attempt to quiet the angry crowd. His wife, Anne, was sitting in the front row with their two children, twelve-year-old Jimmy and ten-year-old Janine. She stared straight ahead, and the children hung their heads and looked at the floor.
The mayor had just announced that the Jane Dooley house was condemned. The insurance company had mysteriously turned down our initial claim, saying they suspected that the fire had been a ploy to get money for the shelter by collecting on the policy. I was outraged at this implication, which, in any case, made no sense. But to make matters worse, the mayor had decided that because there were no other locations in town suitable for a cat shelter, the shelter would have to be shut down. Rumors had been circulating for days that this was his plan, and supporters of the shelter had vowed to pack the meeting and make their feelings known.
“What about the cats?” someone yelled from the middle of the crowd.
“They’ll be sent to shelters in nearby towns,” the mayor said, “and if any are left without a place to go, they’ll have to be put down.”
There was an angry roar from the crowd. I was shaking with rage, and Billy and Joanne Watkins, one of our most loyal volunteers, each pulled at one of my arms as I stood at a microphone stand that had been placed in front of the audience, shouting.
“What do you mean, condemned?” I shouted. “One room has smoke and fire damage. The rest of the building is sound. What are you talking about? You’ll harm one hair on one cat over my dead body!”
“According to the town inspector–” the mayor began, but his comments were drowned out by more shouts from the crowd.
Billy dragged me back to my seat on the end of the seventh row, where I collapsed into my chair, uncertain if I would be able to stop the angry tears that were springing to my eyes. I couldn’t believe what was happening.
“Who set the fire?” someone yelled from the crowd, and the question was echoed by a chorus of other voices. “They need to be held responsible!”
“And who got into the house and let the cats out from their upstairs rooms?” Someone shouted from the back of the room. “Who knew that the fire was going to be set?”
The mayor banged his gavel on the podium again until the noise had subsided just enough for him to say, “The police have not found a suspect in the fire. It is the assumption of the insurance company that someone involved with the shelter did the deed to make money, which would explain why the cats were let out.” Anything he said after that was drowned out by angry objections.
o0o
Back at the shelter an hour after the meeting, at least twenty volunteers gathered under the outside light that hung above the door of the Cat House. They were wrapped in jackets, gloves, and hats. Everyone was still angry.
“There’s no way we’re going to let this happen,” Joanne said.
“It’s crazy, anyway,” said Emily Leblanc, owner of the local breakfast spot, Toffee Coffee, and a long-time volunteer at the shelter. “Why shut the whole place down even if the house is condemned? The Cat House is still fine, and we could always rebuild.”
“There’s absolutely no reason to condemn that house,” said Eric Horner, a local handyman who did repairs at the shelter and who had recently built an outdoor enclosure for the cats. “The structure is fine. Heck, most of the house is perfectly fine. This is a conspiracy if I ever saw one, and when we find out who started this and who set that fire, there’s going to be hell to pay.”
I had been sitting in the office, exhausted from my fury, trying to figure out what to say to everyone. When I finally joined the group, Joanne turned to me and said, “If the insurance company won’t pay, we can fix the house ourselves.”
“There’s no way we could raise enough money,” I said. The last few hours had drained my fighting spirit, and the reality of what we were facing had kicked in. “Our operating budget doesn’t include a line item for repairs, and this is a major job. The shelter is barely making ends meet as it is.”
“I’ll give up my salary,” Billy said. He was shivering, and his hands were stuffed in his pockets. Michelle put her arms around him and leaned her head against his chest.
“That’s sweet of you, Billy,” I said, and I was surprised that my voice cracked when I said it. My throat felt tight, and I forced myself to take a deep breath. “But I would never let you do that—and it wouldn’t be enough, anyway. Believe me, I would give up my salary, too.”
A young girl standing in the group started to cry. Her mom, Audrey Benson, leaned down and gave her daughter a hug. “It’s okay, honey,” she said. “Let’s go into the Cat House and visit Pepper.”
The girl sniffed but looked up hopefully. “Can we take Pepper home now, Mom?” she asked.
Audrey looked at me and I smiled weakly. I knew that her family already had three cats. “Yes, sweetie, I think so,” Audrey said. “I think it’s time for Pepper to come home.”
I nodded at Billy. He unlocked the door of the Cat House and followed them inside.
After everyone left, I climbed once again into my sleeping bag in the office and finally let myself cry. Occasionally, I heard the swish of a car as it passed by the house on the street. As always, I’d closed all the window blinds. There was no moon that night, and the room would have been pitch black if not for the red neon numbers on the alarm clock. The first time I looked over at them it was midnight. By 1:00 a.m., I had exhausted myself by crying and my tears had dried. By 2:00 a.m., I was falling asleep.
Plink, plink, plink.
Three notes on the piano. My eyes flew open.
Plink, plink. Two more.
I was out of my sleeping bag in seconds, the flashlight in my hand. I crept down the hall toward the living room, and again was surprised that the apartment door was open. When I reached it, I stepped right into the room, sweeping the beam of my flashlight from one wall to the other. Finally, I pointed it toward on the keys on the piano.
Nothing. No one. But then, I heard something: footsteps from somewhere past the foyer. I sighed with relief, thinking Billy must have decided to sleep in his room one last time. I crossed the room and entered the foyer.
The front door to the house was wide open. I must have forgotten to bolt it shut that morning when I’d been arguing with the fire inspector in front of the house. Suddenly on guard, I looked toward Billy’s bedroom on the opposite end of the foyer and saw what looked like a hooded figure moving around in the shadows. I held my breath, hoping whoever it was hadn’t seen or heard me. Then I heard a quiet click and saw a small flame burst to life, illuminating a man who was standing near the bed. It looked like he was holding a rag in one hand.
“Hey! Stop that!” I yelled, turning on my flashlight, and the man dropped the rag and took a few steps out of the room toward me, trying to shade his eyes against the light.
I stared in surprise. The man in the hood–a hooded sweatshirt, it turned out–wasn’t a man at all. He was a twelve-year-old boy named Jimmy Carbunkle.
“Jimmy?” I said in surprise. The boy dropped the lighter and dashed toward the front door, but I caught him by his hood and he slid and fell backward.
“What are you doing here?” I asked while he struggled to break free. “Are you here to...are you the one who…did your father put you up to this? Did you come back to finish the job?”
“Let me go!” Jimmy sobbed as he tried to wriggle out of his sweatshirt. A police siren had started wailing and was getting closer to the house, and by the time Jimmy got the sweatshirt off and broke loose from my grasp, a squad car with revolving lights had pulled onto the curb. Dave Miller, illuminated by the street lamp on the corner, leaped out of the car and raced up the walkway. He stopped short when he saw Jimmy standing at the front door.
“I parked at the end of the street after the meeting,” Dave said when he saw the confused look on my face. “I was worried there would be trouble. I thought I saw some movement a few minutes ago, so I drove a little closer, and when I saw the flashlight go on inside the house I put on the siren and pulled up.” He looked at Jimmy. “So, who do we have here? Jimmy Carbunkle?”
The boy, who was shaking now, continued to sob. Dave stopped me with a gentle hand when I reached down to pick up the lighter that Jimmy had dropped. “Evidence,” he said, and I left it where it was.
“As for you, young man, it looks like I’ll be giving you a ride down to the station.”
Jimmy wiped his eyes with one arm and started to hiccup.
“Wait,” I said. “Before you go…” I turned toward Jimmy, who refused to look at me. “Jimmy, tell me why you did this. Why would you want to hurt the shelter and the cats we keep here? I know your father doesn’t like Dooley very much, but why would you get involved?”
Jimmy sniffed and stared at the floor. Dave and I waited. Finally, the boy said, “Mom and Dad keep arguing about this place. Dad says he wants to get rid of it because that new lady, Miss Nelson, promised to help him get re-elected if he did. My mom was really upset. She said she was tired of my dad pan…pan…”
“Pandering,” I said softly.
Jimmy hiccupped again. “Yes, pandering to people who he likes and who can help him, or something like that. She said she knew that my dad was in love with Miss Nelson and she was sick of it all and going to leave him. She’s said she would leave him before, but this time, I think she meant it.”
“But why would you try to burn down the shelter?” I asked.
“Dad said some bad things about Billy, about how he was a poor role model for the kids in the town anyway, and how he played with some kind of crazy band on the weekends. He made jokes about his hair and his makeup and stuff. I just wanted it all to go away. I wanted it to stop, for everything to go back to the way it was before Miss Nelson and Billy moved here. I figured since Billy was out of the house on the weekends I could just…just…” his voice faded.
“I think you’d better save the rest until we call your father and he meets us at the station,” Dave said. “Let’s go.” He led Jimmy down the walkway toward his patrol car. Just before they reached the sidewalk, Jimmy turned back to look at me.
“I didn’t know there were cats in the house,” he said. “I thought they were all out back. I didn’t know. I never meant to hurt them. I’m sorry!” And he started to cry again. Dave put a firm hand on his shoulder and opened the back door of the squad car before ushering Jimmy inside. They drove off into the night.
It wasn’t until after they were gone that it occurred to me: if Jimmy hadn’t known there were cats upstairs, he hadn’t been the one who let them out of their rooms.
o0o
A week had passed since Jimmy made a full confession. Ann Carbunkle had packed her bags and left her husband, who had been keeping a very low profile. The local paper printed at least twenty letters to the editor calling for the mayor’s resignation–not because his son had been implicated in a crime, or even because of the whispers that he had been having an affair, but because an investigation had unearthed a conspiracy to close down the shelter between the mayor and the town’s police chief and fire inspector.
Still, our problems weren’t over. The insurance company had agreed to review our claim, but the appeal process was going to take months. We had to repair the main building so that Billy could move back in and there could be 24-hour supervision at the shelter, a town requirement. Our volunteers had put up donation boxes in every store they could think of and were brainstorming about organizing fundraising events. But I couldn’t think of any way we could get the money we needed in the short time we had to save the building and the shelter.
I had continued to sleep on the floor of the office so we would be complying with the town’s 24-hour requirement. I just didn’t feel right making Billy do it. But my back was beginning to hurt, winter was getting closer, and I knew I couldn’t sleep there forever. I lay awake in my sleeping bag late almost every night trying to come up with a solution. But as the days wore on and no answer presented itself, I began, in my exhaustion, to consider whether it might be best to focus my energies on finding homes for our remaining cats and preparing to close down—at least, temporarily.
Late one night, I was running through the names of the cats in my mind as the light of the returning moon peeked through the blinds. Dave might take Midget, I was saying to myself. Joanne might open her home to one more. I know she loves little Simba.
And then, I heard it again.
Plink, plink, plink.
I thought I might be dreaming in my half-asleep state; but this time, the notes kept coming. Plink, plink, plink, plink, plink, up the piano keyboard and down again. It was 3:00 a.m. I crawled out of my sleeping bag, picked up my flashlight, and walked through the office into the hallway and toward the apartment.
The door was open again.
I closed my eyes, shook my head a few times, and looked again. Yes, it was open. And this time, I could still hear the piano. Plink, plink, plink, faster and faster.
“Billy?” I called out. Silence.
“Who’s playing this joke on me?” I said in a loud voice as I walked hesitantly into the room. The music stopped, and it took a moment for the beam of my flashlight to find the piano. I thought I saw something move. Was it a shadow from the branch of a tree outside? Or was it the flick of a tail? I walked over to the piano, but the window was closed and no one was there. Then, I stopped dead in my tracks. Something was lying across the piano keys.
Jocko’s collar.
I stood motionless for a moment, barely able to breathe. Finally, I moved forward and picked up the collar. It was time. I opened the locket, and something small and shiny glinted in the beam of light.
It wasn’t until the diamond was appraised two days later that I was able to announce that the Jane S. Dooley Sheltering Home for Cats had been saved.
o0o
Here are the two things I’ve never told anyone. The first one is this: before I placed Crime and Punishment on the new bookshelf Eric built when the apartment was fully renovated, something fell from the middle pages onto the floor. It was an old photograph of Jane S. Dooley. When I looked closely at the picture I noticed she was wearing something around her neck. It was a thick, heart-shaped locket, probably silver.
The second thing is this: when I left the apartment on the night I found the diamond, I paused at the door and looked back into the room. I swept the beam of my flashlight from one wall to the other, letting it rest first on the piano and then on the floor. And there, for the first time, I saw something in the soot that I had never noticed before. There were paw prints leading from the door to the piano and back.
And then, I recalled that on the night of the fire, I had also seen paw prints–on the staircase leading to the upstairs rooms.
Both times, the paw prints were gone by the next morning.
About the Author—Faye Rapoport DesPres
Faye Rapoport DesPres is a lifelong writer whose fiction, nonfiction, reviews, interviews, and poetry have appeared in a variety of literary journals and magazines, including Ascent, BOXY Magazine, Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, Eleven Eleven, Fourth Genre, Into the Arts, Superstition Review, and the Writer’s Chronicle. She earned her MFA at the Solstice Creative Writing Program at Pine Manor College. Her first book, a personal essay collection/memoir titled Message From A Blue Jay, was published by Buddhapuss Ink in 2014. Faye lives in Massachusetts with her husband and rescued cats, and is an Adjunct Professor of English at Lasell College.