No Cooperation from the Cat (14 page)

“Here it is!” A sudden radiance glowed and she held it over her travel survival kit as she continued to rummage in it. She pulled out a small flask of brandy—another essential—and considered it thoughtfully, then shook her head. “Not enough for three people,” she decided and rummaged some more, emerging triumphant. “Two unused batteries. No good for Jocasta’s transistor—they’re triple A, but they’ll keep this light going.”

“Great! Let’s see what I’ve got.” A quick search in my room found my own book light—I’d been using it recently. I dimly recalled having changed the batteries a day or so ago, so I had no spares. This would have to do. Every little bit would help. And morning would come … eventually.

*   *   *

We returned to the kitchen in triumph, waving our lights, a lot brighter than the candles.

“Wonderful, Mother! Over here, so I can get the right things out of the fridge. I thought I knew where everything was but…”

I moved forward obediently, flinching as a distant shouting erupted. They must be using full lung power. Why hadn’t we heard them before?

“Oh, dear,” Jocasta said. “They’re so impatient and we’re just getting started.”

“Throw them a bone!” Evangeline said. “Or, better still, a bottle of wine.” She disappeared into the pantry, emerging with a screw-top litre-and-a-half plastic bottle of plonk. “This will do—and it won’t break if we drop it.”

“Wait a minute—” I had a brainstorm and darted to the far corner of the room, returning with the ridiculous harness Teddy had brought for Cho-Cho. “We ought to be able to truss it up in this and lower it to the open hatch. It has one of those expanding leads, so it might just reach.”

“Good thinking!” Evangeline snatched at the harness and began strapping the bottle into it. After a couple of tries, it seemed secure enough.

“Ready?” Nigel looked up from his assignment of slathering mayonnaise on bread slices for the sandwiches.

“We need you here!” Jocasta said rather sharply, as he started to abandon his post to come with us.

“Ah! Right!” He sent us an apologetic shrug.

“We’ll be right back,” I told Martha and followed Evangeline.

“Let me go! I know I can do it!” I heard Teddy being unusually assertive. “Make them let me go—” he appealed to someone—anyone. “I know I can do it!”

“Do what?” I called down.

“Unscrew this thing here,” Teddy said. “Then I can take off another of these metal plates and there’ll be room to get out.”

“No!” I screamed. “Don’t let him do it!” I had a flashback to an old Red Skelton comedy when he and the girl were trapped in a lift in a deserted building. He had tampered with a few screws too many and it allowed them to clamber out onto the roof of the lift but then, with a few ominous creaks, the whole lift had dropped from under their feet. Leaving Red and—surely it was Ann Rutherford—hanging perilously from a crossbeam while the lift cage smashed to smithereens below them.

“Don’t let him do anything!”

“Don’t worry,” Tom called. “We won’t.”

“He may be crazy,” Mick said. “But we aren’t!”

“Stand by below!” Evangeline was leaning out into the shaft to lower the bottle. Thank heaven it was plastic. “Bottle of wine coming down. Sandwiches to follow in a few minutes.”

I held the light steady while she paid out the leash. Down below, I could barely discern groping hands reaching out to grab it and guide it through the hatch.

The bottle swung just out of reach. Evangeline leaned a little farther out.

“Be careful!” I caught my breath.

There was a shout of triumph.

“Send back the harness,” Evangeline called. “We need it for the sandwiches.”

“Thanks!” Tom shouted as she reeled in the empty harness. “You’re a star.”

“I always was!” she retorted.

Chapter Fourteen

In the morning, I was not entirely displeased to find that we were still without power. If I could keep Teddy cooped up in that lift cage for the rest of his natural life, I would cheerfully do so. And that went for the others, too!

It was still raining, but not so heavily, and the wind had dropped. Without the electrical storm raging around us, Jocasta had managed to eke out the batteries in her transistor long enough to get us a position report on storm damage before the voice faded to a whisper and gave up.

“We’ll try again at the top of the hour,” Jocasta said. “When the batteries are this low you can sometimes get the first few sentences of the news bulletin before they fade out.” She spoke with such expertise that I gathered forgetting to renew the batteries was a common occurrence in her life.

“We got the gist of it.” Nigel looked on the bright side.

“Such as it was.” Evangeline was having none of that.

“The emergency services may be working full out, but it doesn’t look as though much will happen in our area for hours yet.”

“Naturally, they’re working to get the hospitals back on line first,” Jocasta said.

“Hours and hours yet.” Martha sighed. She and Jocasta looked at each other. I knew they were mentally reviewing the provisions on hand. They wouldn’t want to dip into the freezer too often for fear of speeding up the defrosting process.

“And three more mouths to feed in the lift,” Jocasta brooded.

“Don’t bother!” I snapped. “Let them starve!”

“Mother!” Martha was aghast. I am not normally vindictive, but in Teddy’s case, I was prepared to make an exception.

“She has her reasons,” Evangeline assured Martha.

“Obviously.” Martha cocked an eyebrow at me. “Something tells me I missed something last night. I shouldn’t have gone to bed so early.”

“You missed the grand finale,” Evangeline agreed.

“Well…?” Martha looked at me expectantly.

“Not well at all,” I said. “I knew Teddy was thoughtless, incompetent, weak, and selfish, but I never realised the full extent of it. I couldn’t believe it when he pulled that on me. The nerve of him! The unmitigated gall!”

“What?” Jocasta was wide-eyed. She’d gone to bed early, too. “How could he upset you so much when he’s stuck in the lift?”

“Cho-Cho,” I told her. “He wanted Cho-Cho. He—he practically demanded her. He actually expected me to strap her into that ridiculous harness and lower her down to him—” I choked, too furious to go on.

“That’s monstrous!” Martha said.

“Never!” Jocasta was also horrified. “The poor little darling would be terrified. How could he even think of such a thing?”

“The chap has no sense.” Nigel was too kind. “No sense at all.”

There was a moment’s silence as we all contemplated the mental picture of a frightened Cho-Cho being forced into that hated harness and swung out into the blackness; being dropped into what would seem to her an endless distance to hover over that small opening while unknown hands snatched at her, trying to pull her inside another black confined space filled with strangers. Her little legs would be flailing wildly, claws outstretched and slashing for something to catch hold of. Serve Teddy right if she took all the skin off his hands!

“The other men in the lift weren’t too keen about the idea, either,” Evangeline said. “All they needed was a hysterical cat dropping in. They weren’t keen at all.”

“They sure weren’t.” My lips curved as I remembered the anguished howls of protest from Tom and Mick. And, rising above them, Teddy’s voice—that of a plaintive, whining, insistent five-year-old pleading for his comfort blanket. With any luck, if they all had to stay cooped up in that lift for much longer, he’d aggravate the others into throttling him.

Cho-Cho was looking from one to the other of us, sensing that we were talking about her but, fortunately, with no idea of what we were actually saying.

“Don’t worry, darling.” I scooped her up and hugged her. She responded with a loud purr as she rubbed her cheek against mine. “I’ll never let that idiot get his hands on you again! No matter what!”

*   *   *

It was midafternoon when something changed in the quality of silence around us. At first, I couldn’t identify it, I was just aware that there had been some sort of change.

“The rain has stopped,” Martha said.

“You’re right.” For a moment, I savoured the quiet, the absence of that steady drumming on the roof. But something else had replaced it, a sort of low hum that seemed to be everywhere …

“The fridge!” Jocasta dashed to it and opened the door. Sure enough, the light came on. “We’re back in business!”

“Wonderful!” Martha was regaining her enthusiasm for the project. “We can—”

“Don’t get too happy,” Evangeline warned. “If the electricity is back, you know what that means—”

The doorbell rang. Abruptly jolted out of our initial euphoria, we all realised what that meant.

“Where’s Cho-Cho?” I looked around wildly. “I’ll shut her in my bedroom.” I didn’t want Teddy to see her, to get hold of her. He might take her away out of sheer spite because I didn’t let him have her last night.

“Where is she? She was here a minute ago.” But there was no sign of her now. Perhaps she had sensed Teddy on his way to her and, being as fed up with him as we were, had gone to ground.

The doorbell rang again.

“Someone is going to have to answer it.” Clearly, that someone wasn’t going to be Evangeline. “They know we’re in here.”

“Oh, all right.” Martha sighed. “I’ll go.”

“No, no!” Nigel sprang to his feet. “I’ll go. Do those chaps no harm to know you’ve got a man here to look after your interests.”

Evangeline and Martha both bristled, but I thought Nigel was probably right, no matter how tactlessly he put it. Men who went off together on long polar expeditions were undoubtedly more attuned to dealing with other males than with a houseful of women.

There was what sounded like a stampede down the hallway and the men burst into the kitchen. Tom and Mick were in the lead.

“Where is it?” They looked around frantically.

It was my turn to bristle. How had Teddy enlisted them in his rotten cause? I’d thought they were beginning to hate him.

“She isn’t—” I began.

“There’s one behind the far door over there—” Nigel cut in over me, pointing to the corner. “And another one opening off the living room.”

Tom and Mick dived for them. Oh. Of course. After all that time in the lift … Maybe Nigel wasn’t so tactless, after all. Answering the door had given them the opportunity to have a private word with him.

Only Teddy remained, lurking furtively—even guiltily—in the doorway.

“Not in a hurry?” Evangeline eyed him suspiciously.

“I, er, I can wait,” he said evasively. “A bit.”

“Can you, indeed?”

“Yes.” He wouldn’t look at her. He wouldn’t look at any of us. His gaze travelled across the floor. “Where’s Cho-Cho?”

“She’s sleeping.” If I had to lie to protect her, I would.

“Never mind the cat.” Mick was back, a nasty glint in his eye, in full troubleshooter mode. “You’ve got a little job to do before you start fooling around with the cat.”

“That’s right.” Tom came up behind, backing him up. “Someone get a bucket of soapy water and a mop. Our friend here is going to muck out the lift.”

“Me?” Teddy was indignant. “Why me?”

“You did it. You clean it up,” Mick said sternly. “Other people are going to want to use that lift now that the power is back.”

“It was pitch black in there,” Teddy protested. “You can’t be sure it was me.”

“But he could wait…” Evangeline’s darkest suspicions were confirmed.

“It might have been—”

“You can’t blame it on the cat,” Mick said. “They were too smart to let you have it.”

Was that why he wanted Cho-Cho in the lift with him? To take the blame? By this time, there was nothing I’d put past the miserable wretch.

“Here—” Jocasta had taken in the situation and moved swiftly. She thrust the bucket and mop at Teddy.

“Right you are,” Mick said. “Stop arguing and get moving!” He started forward threateningly.

“I’m going, I’m going. You don’t have to come with me.”

“Oh, yes, I do. I don’t trust you not to do a runner.”

“No.” Teddy set the bucket down and faced him stubbornly. “I’ve had enough of you. Both of you. All night in that lift with you ignoring me. Talking over my head as though I was too stupid to understand what you were saying. I hate people who think they’re talking in code about other people and think no one can decipher it—” He looked around for support and settled on Nigel who, at least, seemed neutral if not fully sympathetic. “Don’t you?”

“Lot of it around, old chap,” Nigel said.

“Especially in theatrical circles,” Evangeline added.

“We thought you were asleep,” Tom said. It was more of an explanation than an apology.

“And we’ve had enough of you.” Mick moved forward again. “You’re not to be trusted. You need someone standing over you to make sure you’re not dodging out on the job.”

“Not you.” Teddy waved the mop in a vaguely threatening gesture. “Or you, either,” he said to Tom.

“I’ll do it,” Nigel volunteered to my surprise, although, certainly, none of us was going to.

“All right,” Teddy decided after a long moment. He picked up the bucket again.

“Make sure he does a good job,” Mick called after them.

“Don’t worry.” I hadn’t known Nigel could sound so grim. “I have to use that lift, too. All the time.” That explained it.

“And when the lift is clean again,” Evangeline looked at Tom and Mick severely, “I suggest you be the first to use it.”

“Hey, not so fast,” Tom said. “We’re here on business.”

“What business?” Martha’s hand went out to hover protectively over the mixing bowl and spices she had just set out on the table. “Nothing here could possibly be any of your business.”

“Not that female stuff,” Mick said dismissively. “We mean real business.” He looked at Jocasta. “You’ve fooled around with this long enough. We need to get down to work on the expedition notebooks.”

“And I’ve got the first batch of contact sheets,” Tom said. “We need to go through them and mark up the ones we want to get blown up and printed.”

I hadn’t noticed before but, now that Teddy wasn’t around to be the focus of attention, I saw that Mick was carrying a briefcase and Tom had a portfolio with him. He opened it and began spreading the contact sheets over the table while Martha glared at him. Myriad images of a lone Banquo, looking impossibly brave and heroic against the northern wastes, stared up at us. In a few of them—very few—the sled dogs got a nose in, too.