Murder at the Foul Line (19 page)

“Thanks, Gwen,” Lauren managed when the icy clean water had reduced the awful taste to a burning in the back of her throat.

“Are you coming down with something?”

“You didn’t see it?”

“See what?”

“The cat. It just… appeared in front of me on the road.” As soon as the words left her mouth, Lauren realized how pitiful
they were: for this she had endangered the lives of four students? But Gwen seemed inclined to be sympathetic rather than
disapproving; after all, nothing had happened.

“Oh, how awful,” she said. “I ran over a dog once, I know how you feel.”

“Just the shock of it,” Lauren said. Gwen thought she was saying that she’d run over the thing herself. Let it be, Lauren
thought: her extreme reaction might be more easily understood if guilt were thought to be the culprit, not the weird, almost
anthropomorphic link of empathy she’d felt for the animal during those two terrible seconds.

“You going to be okay?”

“Oh, yeah,” Lauren said heartily, standing straight to add assurance.

“I could run my load up and come back for yours; it’s only about twenty minutes away.”

“No, I’m fine. Really.”

And she was. She downplayed the death of a stray cat for
the girls and turned the conversation to the game ahead, she drove at a normal speed the rest of the way, she greeted the
other coach (a high school acquaintance) with the right balance of friendliness and good-humored threat, and she worked her
girls up into enough of a lather that they bounced out onto the court with that attitude she loved. And if she hugged her
jacket around her in the warm auditorium to stifle the shivers running up and down her arms all that day, no one commented.

Her girls didn’t win, but the final score was by no means humiliating, and they sure as hell learned a lot from the others.
They even loved the funky pizza parlor the two teams had taken over for the afternoon, and left town with a dozen new best
friends and an exchange of phone numbers and e-mail addresses.

In the excitement of the day, the cat was forgotten. Lauren drove her quartet of tired players back over the hills, dropped
each at the correct front door, and wearily steered herself home. She let herself in, gathered up old Timson, and buried her
face into his fur for a minute until he mewed his bones’ protest, then walked into her kitchen, dug through the cupboards
for the dusty bottle of brandy, and poured a generous two fingers into a glass and down her throat.

After a while the trembling sensation under her skin subsided.

You’re such a wimp
, she told herself.
Cats die all the time, sad but true.

Except that she wasn’t a wimp. She’d done hard things when necessary: she’d once beheaded and buried an agonized, broken-back
garter snake that some kid had run over on the sidewalk, and she had no particular squeamishness
when it came to trapping mice or performing first aid to the goriest of cuts.

Low blood sugar
, she decided. She slopped a couple of eggs around in a frying pan and ate them on toast, and felt better. She took another
jolt of the brandy to the television and fed an old favorite movie into the VCR; that, too, helped. Pleasantly woozy from
the unaccustomed booze, she scrubbed the day away beneath a hot shower, towel-dried her short hair, and fell blithely into
bed before the clock’s hands rested on ten.

Only to find the cat waiting for her, riding the undulating concrete on four outstretched paws like a water strider riding
the surface of a fast, deep river. Under something it flew—car bumper? tree limb?—with a look of startled, outraged confusion
on its near-human features. One front paw came up in a gesture of supplication, and then a sharp noise somewhere in the reaches
of the house jerked Lauren out of the nightmare to stare into the dark room, feeling all the cat’s panic on her own face.

Cat: noise. Timson must be—but no, Timson was asleep against her feet. She sat frozen among the tangled sheets, the threat
of vomit raw in the back of her throat, straining her thudding ears for the sound to repeat itself. After a minute she got
up, took her old hockey stick out of its corner, and crept through the house to see what had invaded. She found nothing, and
when she got back to her bedroom again, she saw that the ever-nervous Timson was still fast asleep, which he would not be
if there was a stranger anywhere in the house. She propped the stick back in the corner of the room, went back to bed and
eventually to sleep.

The doomed cat came through her dreaming mind twice more before dawn, and Lauren spent the next day in a thick-limbed
daze, alternating between empty-minded half-sleep over the Sunday paper and unnecessarily vigorous housecleaning. By evening
she had barely enough energy to perform her always-on-Sunday task of the phone call to her mother.

She did so at the kitchen table, knowing that if she listened to her mother’s endless monologue from a comfortable chair,
she’d soon be snoring. As it was, she drifted in and out of awareness with her chin resting on her hand, grunting responses
into the pauses provided and wondering how long this creepy cat thing would take to fade.

When she had fumbled and nearly dropped the phone twice, she cut into her mother’s epic narrative of the retirement center’s
inefficient postman, told her she’d call again Wednesday, and went to bed.

The cat was waiting for her.

In the morning she felt so utterly wretched at the idea of the new week that she thought about calling in sick. Except that
she was not sick, she was haunted, by an idiotic feline who hadn’t had enough sense to know an unsafe resting spot when it
found one. For some ungodly reason, those vivid moments had been seared onto Lauren’s mind as if it had been her own life
passing before her eyes. She groaned, held an ice-filled cloth to her inflamed eyelids while the coffee brewed, and went to
work.

Monday afternoon: a bleary and out-of-control practice session; Monday night: a third set of sessions with the unknown cat.
Three nights of broken sleep that reduced her to a nervous wreck—or maybe her nervous state had reduced her to sleeplessness,
she could not be sure. She could not, in fact, be too sure of her own sanity. The next night was the same; following that,
she knew something had to be done. During
Wednesday’s prep period, Lauren picked up the phone to call for help.

Unfortunately, the only psychotherapist she knew, the woman she’d seen a decade before when she’d been an insomniac college
student, couldn’t see her before Friday. Lauren’s desperation did, however, make an impression on the receptionist, because
Dr. Minerva Henry herself called back twenty minutes later. Greetings, a brief catch-up, Lauren’s halting and by now embarrassed
description of the cat episode and its consequences, and Min’s regrets that she had no free time until Friday.

“That’s all right, I understand,” Lauren told her. “I’m sure I’ll be okay until then. It’s just so… silly.”

“It doesn’t sound at all silly.”

“I mean, to be so upset by such an inconsequential event. I really am a very stable kind of a person. Or I was until Saturday.”

“This episode has clearly driven a wedge under some firmly shut door in your mind. You may remember, I recommended ten years
ago that you remain in therapy. I take it you did not.”

“But I was fine,” Lauren protested.

“You were functioning well,” the doctor corrected her gently. “Now you’re not. We’ll sort it out beginning Friday.”

“Two more nights like I’ve been having, you might want to book me a padded cell,” Lauren remarked. As an attempt at dry humor,
it fell completely flat, leaving Min Henry to take it as a cry for help. In truth, it was.

“Avoid caffeine,” the good doctor recommended. “And no alcohol, either. Eat well, get some nice healthy outdoor exercise,
and drink a glass of warm milk before bed. You might also take a pen and paper to bed with you, to write down any
words or images that come to mind when you wake up. We’ll talk about those on Friday.”

The mere suggestion that the problem might be sorted out was a comfort, and helped Lauren make it through the day and the
practice session. She ate a balanced dinner, corrected the stack of exam papers, and phoned her mother to listen to the endless
trickle of gentle complaints about the workers and neighbors in her quite comfortable retirement home.

“Mother,” she said at one point, interrupting a detailed description of the tragedy inflicted by the cook on a poor, unsuspecting
piece of beef. “Did anything ever happen to me as a child that involved a cat?”

“A cat, dear?”

“Yes. The other day I saw a cat get… hurt, and it’s given me nightmares. I just wondered if maybe something similar happened
when I was small, that I forgot about.”

“Oh, dear, how terrible for you. One of the ladies down the hall has bad dreams, she talks in her sleep so you can hear every—”

“Mother? The cat?”

“We never had cats, dear. Your father didn’t like them.”

“But did I—oh, never mind. How is Mrs. Peasley’s leg doing?”

She hung up twenty minutes later, knowing more than she cared to about the pernicious results of circulatory problems but
little the wiser about cats. However, mention of her father, an uncomfortable topic at the best of times, seemed to drive
another section of wedge into the gap opened by the cat. That night’s dream found her sitting not behind the wheel of her
car as the frantic man-faced cat spun around and around on the surface of the roadway, but rather on a hard bench of a seat
beside her long-estranged father. He seemed enormous in her dream, as he had not been in life, bristling with the self-importance
she had believed in until college freed her of illusions, the father of her youth.

As it turned out, it was Father who took up most of the Friday session with Min Henry, not the list of words and images she
had jotted down in the still of the night (
wet fur
and
fast current;
also
mouth “O” in surprise
and
too fast for fear
and
thunk!
). Her ambiguous feelings toward her parent, his peculiar combination of the ineffectual and the quick to anger, her jumble
of respect and love and fear that must, it occurred to her, be very like the feelings her mother still bore for the man who
had abandoned her with two small children and a mountain of debts.

What did all that have to do with a cat? she asked the therapist at the close of the session.

Patience, the woman said. And maybe we should meet twice a week.

The nightmare retreated a fraction, in frequency if not intensity. Once or twice a night instead of every couple of hours:
cat/panic/bench, father/thud/wake.

The following Wednesday, Lauren forced herself to ask her mother again about what might lie in the past.

“The cat again, dear?”

“When I was with Daddy.”
Daddy?
she thought;
I haven’t called him that since I was eight.

“Oh, sweetie, I wouldn’t know. I mean, your father often took you and your brother off for a while so I could go to the hairdressers’
or some such thing. You’d go to the beach or the country club. He liked to show you off. But I’d have thought that if something
happened during one of those outings, he’d
have mentioned it. Then again I suppose he could have told me and I’ve forgotten it, I do forget so much. But not usually
from the past—isn’t it funny how I can forget where I put my book down but I can remember what dress you wore to your fifth-birthday
party? No, I think I’d remember if something happened to a cat while you were out with him. There was the time your brother
cut his hand at the racetrack, I remember that. And you were frightened once when you got separated from your father for a
few minutes at the county fair; you clung to my skirts for a week after that. I suppose you could have seen a cat get hurt
during that time, although what a cat would be doing wandering around a crowded fairground I can’t think.” (
Dropping out of a shiny red tractor, maybe?
) “And there was the time, when was that? Just after your brother was born, that’s right, when your father took you for the
day. You went fishing with him and, um, Arty. You remember Arty?” Lauren’s antennae pricked at the casual tone of her mother’s
voice. Arty? But her mother was rushing on. “I wasn’t too keen on the idea of you in a boat, you were awfully young, but your
father promised me he’d keep your life vest on you every second, and with both of them to keep an eye on you, you’d be fine.
Which you were.”

“Arty? I don’t remember—wait a minute. Was he a man with a red face and a mustache?”

“That’s right, fancy you remembering that! And he was always smoking a cigar. It had a lovely smell, I thought, but your father
wouldn’t let him smoke in the house. You loved the smell, always followed him around, even when he went outside to smoke.
He called you his little shadow,” she said wistfully. “You missed him so when he left, moped around for days.”
I
missed him, Lauren heard in her mother’s voice.

“Where did he go?”

“They told me he’d gone to Montana.”

Lauren waited for more; when nothing more came, she found herself sitting forward, as if to pull information out of the telephone.
Her mother’s uncharacteristically brief answer seemed to echo down the line.

“Did he?” she prompted.

“Oh, dear,” her mother replied with a sigh. “I don’t know. I suppose he must have, although at the time, well, I thought he’d
maybe had an accident, out hiking somewhere. He was a great one for hiking.”

“Didn’t anyone go looking for him?”

“No, honey, that was only for a couple of days. And then he called your father to tell him he was quitting—a middle-aged crisis
I guess they’d call it today. Anyway, he just quit, threw it all over of a sudden and left town. It must have been right after
that fishing trip, come to think of it. That’s right—your brother was just born, you were moping around and having tantrums
at the drop of a hat, your father was even more short-tempered than usual. We thought it really was very thoughtless of Arty,
to leave him in the lurch like that, and at such a difficult time. Then a few weeks later the accountant found that Arty’d
been siphoning off cash. He was your father’s manager, you remember. Young for the job, but capable. Later the police decided
he’d panicked, thinking they were on to him, and that was why he left in such a hurry. He probably moved to Mexico or something—your
father had a few phone conversations with him, asking him to take care of some things, but those stopped after a few months.”