“As long as we’re heading into town, do we have time to take in all the Christmas decorations?” Cordelia asked. “I never get tired of seeing what Caerphilly looks like in its holiday finery.”
“Plenty of time,” I said. “And you’ll love seeing some of the new things people have come up with this year. Starting over there.” I pointed across the road to Seth Early’s sheep pasture, which now boasted what we called his partial Nativity scene. Seth hadn’t bothered with a manger, wise men, angels, or the holy family. But he’d bought half a dozen secondhand mannequins, dressed them in biblical-era shepherd’s costumes, and set them up to abide in his field on a full-time basis. One alert shepherd held his crook like a wizard’s staff and gazed out over the pasture with one hand shading his eyes, as if keeping watch over the flock. Two more were lounging companionably against the fence with their backs to the road and their crooks planted in the ground. The other three were wrapped up in their cloaks and huddled around a very realistic battery-operated fake campfire.
“Ingenious!” Cordelia insisted that I stop the car and pulled out her phone to take a few dozen pictures of the shepherds from various angles.
Our next nearest neighbor, Deacon Washington of the New Life Baptist Church, must have found the same sale on mannequins. He’d set up a celestial choir in his pasture, a dozen white-robed angels with silver tinsel halos, standing in a semicircle holding white hymn books. He’d even repainted their faces with open mouths so it looked, at least from a distance, as if they were singing.
Cordelia documented the choir, too.
“Sorry,” she said. “I know you have things to do—”
“And number one on my list of things to do today is to spend some time with my grandmother,” I said. “And you can send me copies of your best pictures—I never seem to get around to taking any.”
When we reached town, I braved the tourist traffic to take her to see the town square. This year, instead of totally closing off the streets around the town square and turning the whole area into a giant pedestrian mall, we were experimenting with allowing cars controlled access—they could enter at one point only and cruise slowly around appreciating the town Christmas tree, the highly decorated stores, and the strolling musicians in Victorian costume. Stopping long enough to unload your passengers and then continuing on to find parking elsewhere was also permissible, as long as you didn’t linger too long before creeping along to the one designated exit. The new system was proving popular with the tourists and a smidgen less annoying to the locals.
We were making our slow circuit, with me focusing on not running into or over any tourists and Cordelia oohing and ahhing. I was already planning the rest of our afternoon’s agenda—a stop at the feed store, which carried a good selection of birding supplies. Then on to Mutant Wizards. And then—
“Would you look at that?” Cordelia was pointing toward the life-sized outdoor Nativity scene in the front yard of the Methodist church.
“Look at what.”
“That rascal!” she exclaimed. “Can you stop here? Or at least slow down a bit?”
Slow down? I was only going around ten miles an hour. But she’d piqued my curiosity. Since it wasn’t safe to take my eyes off my driving, given all the stop-and-go tourist traffic, I pulled to the curb in front of the church, in what was technically a fire hydrant zone. I put on my hazard lights, then looked up.
There was a cat in the manger. A fluffy yellow tabby cat, nestled down in the hay-filled cradle. Mary and Joseph seemed to take this unexpected addition to their family very calmly, but from my angle it looked as if the angel Gabriel was rolling his eyes in exasperation, and the sheep were definitely giving the intruder the side-eye.
“I wonder what he did with Baby Jesus,” Cordelia said.
“Their tradition is that they don’t put Baby Jesus in the manger until Christmas Eve,” I said. “I guess the cat decided to take advantage of the present vacancy.”
“Can you stay here while I get a picture of this?” She was already unbuckling her seat belt.
“If the police come by and tell me to move along, I’ll go around the back and see if they’ll let me into their parking lot,” I called after her.
I watched as she pulled her phone out of her pocket and headed up the front walk, stopping every few feet to snap a batch of pictures. When she got within ten feet, the cat stood up and perched nervously on the edge of the manger—nervously and a little awkwardly. I wondered whose cat he was—he was scruffy, but far too fat to be a stray.
Cordelia took another step and the cat ran away. She turned and hurried back to the car.
“You said there was somewhere nearby where you could park?”
“Around back, in the Methodist parking lot,” I said as I pulled back out into the slow tourist traffic. “What’s wrong?”
“Do you recognize that cat?” she said.
“No,” I said. “Which is strange, because he probably belongs to someone. You rarely see strays that fat.”
“He’s not fat,” Cordelia said. “He’s a she. And she’s pregnant.”
“Ah.”
“Very pregnant. And from the way she’s walking, I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s giving birth soon.”
“Poor thing,” I said. “I suspect someone dropped her off here. Someone who didn’t want to be saddled with a bunch of kittens.”
“Yes,” she said. “And it’s much too cold to be having kittens outdoors. They might not survive. For that matter, she might not survive. She’s a very small cat—quite possibly a first-time mother, and undernourished herself. We need to rescue her.”
I nodded, and then focused back on my driving. We reached the town square exit, and once we were back on the open streets it only took two minutes to circle around the block. I pulled up in front of the gate that protected the Methodist parking lot from the swarms of tourists who would otherwise overrun it. I rolled down my window and pressed the button on the intercom.
I was in luck. Instead of Mrs. Dahlgren, the persnickety Methodist church secretary, I got the mellow Reverend Trask, who didn’t even ask why I wanted to park in their lot. Although I explained anyway, just so he’d know when we approached the Nativity scene that I didn’t have any sinister Episcopalian designs on his sheep and camels.
Cordelia and I checked the stable, which actually made a reasonably good shelter for a stray cat. It didn’t have a real roof—only a few beams and rafters for the Angel Gabriel to perch on—but the solid back wall and the life-sized shepherds and farm animals did a decent job of blocking the wind. But the cat wasn’t there. We spent twenty minutes rummaging through the shrubbery, earning a withering glance from Mrs. Dahlgren when she came back from whatever errand she’d been on, but saw no sign of the cat.
“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” I said. “Let’s go back to the car and warm up.”
Cordelia didn’t propose going inside the church to warm up, which suggested that she’d met Mrs. Dahlgren on one of her previous visits to town.
When we got back to the car, I picked up my phone and called the Caerphilly Veterinary Hospital. Clarence Rutledge, its owner, was a sucker for stray animals of all kinds.
“What’s up, Meg?” he asked, when his assistant put me through to him. “One of your critters ailing?” Given that we currently had five llamas, two peacocks, several dozen chickens, two barn cats, five resident dogs, and three or four dogs who were regularly dropped off for what I referred to as our free doggie daycare, we saw a lot of Clarence.
“Last I looked they were all fine,” I said. “But we spotted a pregnant stray cat sheltering in the manger at the Methodist church. My grandmother thinks she’s probably pretty close to her due date and needs to be rescued. Can we—”
“Stay there,” he said. “I’ll bring over a couple of humane traps and you can show me where you saw her and help me set them up.”
“Can do,” I said.
Cordelia and I waited in my car until we saw Clarence pull up in his battered white van. It took him a lot longer than seemed reasonable to get past Mrs. Dahlgren, but eventually the barrier arm went up and he rattled into the parking lot.
A good thing Cordelia and I had dressed for the outdoors, since we spent half an hour helping Clarence—studying the terrain and figuring out the best places to set the traps. And the four he’d brought were all festooned with shiny gold tinsel garlands, which suggested he was forewarned about the kind of objections Mrs. Dahlgren might raise to their presence on the church grounds.
“We’ll probably catch all the local ferals a time or two,” Clarence said, when we’d finished baiting the traps with sardines or chunks of cooked chicken, dusted two of them with catnip, and laid a couple of trails of tiny sardine or chicken bits to each trap. “But that’s okay. I’m off to West Virginia tomorrow, fetching a load of cats and dogs from a kill shelter—can you drop by and check the traps a time or two? Of course, I could ask Lucas to do it—”
“Lucas will have plenty to do at the clinic if you’re going to be gone,” I said. “How in the world did you manage before you hired yourself an assistant?”
“I have no idea,” Clarence said. “And you’re right—I don’t want to overburden Lucas, so if you can check the traps a time or two—”
“No problem,” I said. “And if we catch her, I’ll take her straight over to the clinic. And alert Dad that he’s on standby as a substitute feline obstetrician while you’re gone.”
“Perfect! And you can rebait the traps with this.” He handed me a battered paper bag. I peeked in and saw three plastic deli containers—one of chicken, one of sardines, and one of catnip. I made a mental note to label it as cat food when I put it in the fridge, to make sure that Cousin Nora didn’t appropriate any of it for tonight’s dinner.
We all took a last look at our handiwork, then hurried back to our cars. It wasn’t getting any warmer.
At Flugleman’s Feed Store we nearly cleaned out their stock of feeders and made a serious dent in their birdseed and suet supply. And I wasn’t sure whether to be pleased or dismayed to see that they’d cleared out a space in what was normally their bulb and seed department for a big display of ice skates.
“The skate department is new,” I said to the teenage Flugleman who was helping load all our purchases into the Twinmobile. “You really think you’re going to sell that many?”
“Well.” He looked around as if to make sure no one was eavesdropping. “Mayor Shiffley had us order a pair for him, and when he picked them up he told my dad that according to his granny he’d have plenty of use for them this winter, and if we were smart, we should stock up so we could be the only place in town where you could get them.”
“Interesting,” I said. “I bet this weather’s been helping you sell them.”
“So far they haven’t exactly been flying off the shelves,” he said. “But ever since word got around that Caerphilly Creek’s starting to freeze over, people haven’t been laughing nearly as much. You might want to get some for your family before the run starts.”
The kid had the makings of a good salesman.
“We already have skates,” I said. “And I dug around in the attic and found them when I heard about the creek.”
“You want to make sure they’re nice and sharp,” he said. “We can do that, too, same as with garden tools. Just bring them by anytime.”
“I’ll keep it in mind.” Actually, I’d sharpened all our skates myself—it wasn’t that much different from sharpening tools, which I did all the time—both my blacksmithing tools and all our various house and garden tools. But I didn’t want that to get out, or I’d find myself spending more time sharpening skates than wearing them.
So was Randall Shiffley making sure that at least he’d be able to take advantage of the skating rink? Or had he invented his granny’s weather prediction and deliberately fired up Flugleman’s to carry ice skates as a way of making sure Dad’s surprise didn’t fall flat?
Knowing Randall, probably a little of both.
“You think that creek really is likely to freeze over?” Cordelia asked.
“It’s been a few years since it did,” I said. “But I think our odds of getting in a little skating this year are pretty good.”
“I think I’ll get a pair, then,” she said. “Unless that would interrupt your plan for the afternoon.”
“As I said, my plan for the afternoon is to spend time with my grandmother,” I replied. “Let’s go get you some skates.”
As I could have predicted, Cordelia knew exactly what size and style she wanted, so after only a minimal delay we were back on the road, heading for Mutant Wizards.