“What do you mean? Who are you?”
“I’m nobody but who I am,” he said. “Just old Rosie Frost. If you’re thinking that maybe I’m one of the people behind all this, you’re wrong.”
“What people? Behind what?”
Looking at the four security-camera views on the quartered video monitor, he said, “With any luck, they’re not even aware that I know about them.”
“Who? People at Wyvern?”
He turned to me again. “They’re not just at Wyvern anymore. Townspeople are in it now. I don’t know how many. Maybe a couple of hundred, maybe five hundred, but probably not more than that, at least not yet. No doubt it’s gradually spreading to others…and it’s already beyond Moonlight Bay.”
Frustrated, I said, “Are you trying to be inscrutable?”
“As much as I can, yes.”
He got up, fetched the coffeepot, and without further comment freshened our cups. Evidently he intended to make me wait for morsels of information in much the way that poor Orson was being made to wait patiently for his snack.
The dog licked the tabletop around the three biscuits, but his tongue never touched the treats.
When Roosevelt returned to his chair, I said, “If you’re not involved with these people, how do you know so much about them?”
“I don’t know all that much.”
“Apparently a lot more than I do.”
“I know only what the animals tell me.”
“What animals?”
“Well, not your dog, for sure.”
Orson looked up from the biscuits.
“He’s a regular sphinx,” Roosevelt said.
Although I hadn’t been aware of doing so, sometime soon after sunset, I had evidently walked through a magic looking-glass.
Deciding to play by the lunatic rules of this new kingdom, I said, “So…aside from my phlegmatic dog, what do these animals tell you?”
“You shouldn’t know all of it. Just enough so you realize it’s best that you forget what you saw in the hospital garage and up at the funeral home.”
I sat up straighter in my chair, as though pulled erect by my tightening scalp. “You are one of them.”
“No. Relax, son. You’re safe with me. How long have we been friends? More than two years now since you first came here with your dog. And I think you know you can trust me.”
In fact, I was at least half convinced that I could still trust Roosevelt Frost, even though I was no longer as sure of my character judgment as I had once been.
“But if you don’t forget what you saw,” he continued, “if you try to contact authorities outside town, you’ll endanger lives.”
As my chest tightened around my heart, I said, “You just told me I could trust you, and now you’re threatening me.”
He looked wounded. “I’m your friend, son. I wouldn’t threaten you. I’m only telling you—”
“Yeah. What the animals said.”
“It’s the people from Wyvern who want to keep a lid on this at any cost, not me. Anyway, you aren’t personally in any danger even if you try to go to outside authorities, at least not at first. They won’t touch you. Not you. You’re revered.”
This was one of the most baffling things that he had said yet, and I blinked in confusion. “Revered?”
“Yes. They’re in awe of you.”
I realized that Orson was staring at me intently, temporarily having forgotten the three promised biscuits.
Roosevelt’s statement was not merely baffling: It was downright wacky. “Why would anyone be in awe of me?” I demanded.
“Because of who you are.”
My mind looped and spun and tumbled like a capering seagull. “Who am I?”
Roosevelt frowned and pulled thoughtfully at his face with one hand before finally saying, “Damned if I know. I’m only repeating what I’ve been told.”
What the animals told you. The black Dr. Doolittle.
Some of Bobby’s scorn was creeping into me.
“The point is,” he said, “the Wyvern crowd won’t kill you unless you give them no choice, unless it’s absolutely the only way to shut you up.”
“When you talked to Sasha earlier tonight, you told her this was a matter of life and death.”
Roosevelt nodded solemnly. “And it is. For her and others. From what I hear, these bastards will try to control you by killing people you love until you agree to cease and desist, until you forget what you saw and just get on with your life.”
“People I love?”
“Sasha. Bobby. Even Orson.”
“They’ll kill my friends to shut me up?”
“Until you shut up. One by one, they’ll kill them one by one until you shut up to save those who are left.”
I was willing to risk my own life to find out what had happened to my mother and father—and why—but I couldn’t put the lives of my friends on the line. “This is monstrous. Killing innocent—”
“That’s who you’re dealing with.”
My skull felt as though it would crack to relieve the pressure of my frustration: “Who am I dealing with? I need something more specific than just the people at Wyvern.”
Roosevelt sipped his coffee and didn’t answer.
Maybe he was my friend, and maybe the warning he’d given me would, if I heeded it, save Sasha’s life or Bobby’s, but I wanted to punch him. I might have done it, too, might have hammered him with a merciless series of blows if there had been any chance whatsoever that I wouldn’t have broken my hands.
Orson had put one paw on the table, not with the intention of sweeping his biscuits to the floor and absconding with them but to balance himself as he leaned sideways in his chair to look past me. Something in the salon, beyond the galley and dining area, had drawn his attention.
When I turned in my chair to follow Orson’s gaze, I saw a cat sitting on the arm of the sofa, backlit by the display case full of football trophies. It appeared to be pale gray. In the shadows that masked its face, its eyes glowed green and were flecked with gold.
It could have been the same cat that I had encountered in the hills behind Kirk’s Funeral Home earlier in the night.
23
Like an Egyptian sculpture in a pharaoh’s sepulcher, the cat sat motionless and seemed prepared to spend eternity on the arm of the sofa.
Although it was only a cat, I was uncomfortable with my back to the animal. I moved to the chair opposite Roosevelt Frost, from which I could see, to my right, the entire salon and the sofa at the far end of it.
“When did you get a cat?” I asked.
“It’s not mine,” Roosevelt said. “It’s just visiting.”
“I think I saw this cat earlier tonight.”
“Yes, you did.”
“That’s what it told you, huh?” I said with a touch of Bobby’s scorn.
“Mungojerrie and I had a talk, yes,” Roosevelt confirmed.
“Who?”
Roosevelt gestured toward the cat on the sofa. “Mungojerrie.” He spelled it for me.
The name was exotic yet curiously familiar. Being my father’s son in more than blood and name, I needed only a moment to recognize the source. “It’s one of the cats in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, the T. S. Eliot collection.”
“Most of these cats like those names from Eliot’s book.”
“These cats?”
“These new cats like Mungojerrie here.”
“New cats?” I asked, struggling to follow him.
Rather than explain what he meant by that term, Roosevelt said, “They prefer those names. Couldn’t tell you why—or how they came by them. I know one named Rum Tum Tugger. Another is Rumpelteazer. Coricopat and Growltiger.”
“Prefer? You make it sound almost as if they choose their own names.”
“Almost,” Roosevelt said.
I shook my head. “This is radically bizarre.”
“After all these years of animal communication,” Roosevelt said, “I sometimes still find it bizarre myself.”
“Bobby Halloway thinks you were hit in the head once too often.”
Roosevelt smiled. “He’s not alone in that opinion. But I was a football player, you know, not a boxer. What do you think, Chris? Has half my brain turned to gristle?”
“No, sir,” I admitted. “You’re as sharp as anyone I’ve ever known.”
“On the other hand, intelligence and flakiness aren’t mutually exclusive, are they?”
“I’ve met too many of my parents’ fellow academics to argue that one with you.”
From the living room, Mungojerrie continued to watch us, and from his chair, Orson continued to monitor the cat not with typical canine antagonism but with considerable interest.
“I ever tell you how I got into this animal-communication thing?” Roosevelt wondered.
“No, sir. I never asked.” Calling attention to such an eccentricity had seemed as impolite as mentioning a physical deformity, so I had always pretended to accept this aspect of Roosevelt as though it were not in the least remarkable.
“Well,” he said, “about nine years ago I had this really great dog named Sloopy, black and tan, about half the size of your Orson. He was just a mutt, but he was special.”
Orson had shifted his attention from the cat to Roosevelt.
“Sloopy had a terrific disposition. He was always a playful, good-tempered dog, not one bad day in him. Then his mood changed. Suddenly he became withdrawn, nervous, even depressed. He was ten years old, not nearly a pup anymore, so I took him to a vet, afraid I was going to hear the worst kind of diagnosis. But the vet couldn’t find anything much wrong with him. Sloopy had a little arthritis, something an aging ex-linebacker with football knees can identify with, but he didn’t have it bad enough to inhibit him much, and that was the only thing wrong. Yet week after week, he wallowed in his funk.”
Mungojerrie was on the move. The cat had climbed from the arm to the back of the sofa and was stealthily approaching us.
“So one day,” Roosevelt continued, “I read this human-interest story in the paper about this woman in Los Angeles who called herself a pet communicator. Name was Gloria Chan. She’d been on a lot of TV talk shows, counseled a lot of movie people on their pets’ problems, and she’d written a book. The reporter’s tone was smart-ass, made Gloria sound like your typical Hollywood flake. For all I knew, he probably had her pegged. You remember, after the football career was over, I did a few movies. Met a lot of celebrities, actors and rock stars and comedians. Producers and directors, too. Some of them were nice folks and some were even smart, but frankly a lot of them and a lot of the people who hung out with them were so bugshit crazy you wouldn’t want to be around them unless you were carrying a major concealed weapon.”
After creeping the length of the sofa, the cat descended to the nearer arm. It shrank into a crouch, muscles taut, head lowered and thrust forward, ears flattened against its skull, as if it was going to spring at us across the six feet between the sofa and the table.
Orson was alert, focused again on Mungojerrie, both Roosevelt and the biscuits forgotten.
“I had some business in L.A.,” Roosevelt said, “so I took Sloopy with me. We went down by boat, cruised the coast. I didn’t have the Nostromo then. I was driving this really sweet sixty-foot Chris-Craft Roamer. I docked her at Marina Del Rey, rented a car, took care of business for two days. I got Gloria’s number through some friends in the film business, and she agreed to see me. She lived in the Palisades, and I drove out there with Sloopy late one morning.”
On the sofa arm, the cat was still crouched to spring. Its muscles were coiled even tighter than before. Little gray panther.
Orson was rigid, as still as the cat. He made a high-pitched, thin, anxious sound and then was silent again.
Roosevelt said, “Gloria was fourth-generation Chinese American. A petite, doll-like person. Beautiful, really beautiful. Delicate features, huge eyes. Like something a Chinese Michelangelo might have carved out of luminous amber jade. You expected her to have a little-girl voice, but she sounded like Lauren Bacall, this deep smoky voice coming from this tiny woman. Sloopy instantly liked her. Before I knew it, she’s sitting with him in her lap, face-to-face with him and talking to him, petting him, and telling me what he’s so moody about.”
Mungojerrie leaped off the sofa arm, not to the dinette but to the deck, and then instantly sprang from the deck to the seat of the chair that I had abandoned when I had moved one place around the table to keep an eye on him.
Simultaneously, as the spry cat landed on the chair, Orson and I twitched.
Mungojerrie stood with his hind paws on the chair, forepaws on the table, staring intently at my dog.
Orson issued that brief, thin, anxious sound again—and didn’t take his eyes off the cat.
Unconcerned about Mungojerrie, Roosevelt said, “Gloria told me that Sloopy was depressed mostly because I wasn’t spending any time with him anymore. ‘You’re always out with Helen,’ she said. ‘And Sloopy knows Helen doesn’t like him. He thinks you’re going to have to choose between him and Helen, and he knows you’ll have to choose her.’ Now, son, I’m stunned to be hearing all this, because I was, in fact, dating a woman named Helen here in Moonlight Bay, but no way could Gloria Chan have known about her. And I was obsessed with Helen, spending most of my free time with her, and she didn’t like dogs, which meant Sloopy always got left behind. I figured she would come around to liking Sloopy, ’cause even Hitler couldn’t have helped having a soft spot in his heart for that mutt. But as it turned out, Helen was already turning as sour on me as she was on dogs, though I didn’t know it yet.”
Staring intently at Orson, Mungojerrie bared his fangs.
Orson pulled back in his chair, as if afraid the cat was going to launch itself at him.
“Then Gloria tells me a few other things bothering Sloopy, one of which was this Ford pickup I’d bought. His arthritis was mild, but the poor dog couldn’t get in and out of the truck as easy as he could a car, and he was scared of breaking a bone.”
Still baring his fangs, the cat hissed.
Orson flinched, and a brief keening sound of anxiety escaped him, like a burst of steam whistling out of a teakettle.
Evidently oblivious to this feline-canine drama, Roosevelt said, “Gloria and I had lunch and spent the whole afternoon talking about her work as an animal communicator. She told me she didn’t have any special talent, that it wasn’t any paranormal psychic nonsense, just a sensitivity to other species that we all have but that we’ve repressed. She said anyone could do it, that I could do it myself if I learned the techniques and spent enough time at it, which sounded preposterous to me.”