Something Magic This Way Comes (18 page)

And he hadn’t thought of it, not in all the times he’d driven the thing, until this woman, whom he’d never met, stared at him as if she owned the property.

“I take it you’re Joshua Clemon?” She had a bit of an accent that he couldn’t quite place, which was odd for him, since accents were his specialty. More than his specialty: They were necessary in his trade.

“And you’re the woman with the no-kill shelter,” he said.

She laughed, a sound like the bells from a French cathedral. “I am the woman who
dreams
of a no-kill shelter. Right now, I have a twenty-acre ranch just outside of town where I pretend that the animals I take in are safe.”

“So you can’t help me.” He opened the back of the gas hog and removed both computers, marveling that he could carry the boxes as if they were briefcases.

“I didn’t say that.” She watched him, hands on her hips. She probably saw him as a rich, uncaring American.

A man who bought expensive toys and had a dilapidated mansion to fix up because he had nothing better to do with his time.

“Come on in,” he said, nodding toward the front door.

She glanced at the gate, then at the woods beyond, where the cats had disappeared. He sensed a reluctance.

“We can talk out here if that makes you more comfortable.”

“No,” she said, as if she just remembered how to be polite. “It is better if we go inside.”

Better for whom he didn’t know, and if he had been on a story, he would have asked. But this woman was not in some war-torn country. Each remark she made did not have to be pursued and examined as if it were a puzzle to be solved.

He pushed open the door he had forgotten to lock and stepped into the hallway. His grandmother used to keep the wood floors shining, the occasional table beside the door spotless, and the entire place smelling of lemon polish. Now the floors were scuffed and covered with dirt, there were no occasional tables, and the entire place smelled faintly of cat.

He almost led the woman to the formal living room, where his grandmother had presided over her home, but the living room hadn’t worn its formal dress for twenty years. Old habits, he was amused to note, died hard.

Instead, he went to the library. It at least had been cleaned.

“I still have some work here,” he said.

“It’s nice to see someone rebuilding the place,” she said. “It used to be so loved.”

“You knew my grandparents?” he asked.

“No, but I have seen photographs.” She extended her hand. “I am Galiana, by the way.”

He took it. It was work-hardened, the first he’d encountered in this country.

“Galiana with no last name?” he asked.

She smiled. “It’s all consonants. People here just call me Galiana.”

He nodded, not satisfied. But he would find out in his own way, in his own time. He set the computers beside his new desk, grabbed a wooden chair and slid it toward her. Then he sat on a step of his work ladder.

“You’ve seen my problem,” he said. “What do you think?”

“That the cats aren’t a problem.” She sat with her back straight, hands folded in her lap.

“What do you mean, not a problem? There’s a thousand of them.”

“Maybe a hundred, tops,” she said, “and this is their home. They’ve lived here for generations. To them, you’re the interloper.”

She clearly didn’t understand the scope of the problem.

He’d met a lot of these well-meaning do-gooders in his travels. They were naïve and energetic and they had a vision, which often didn’t correspond with reality.

“They haven’t been here for generations,” he said.

“There were no feral cats on the property when my grandparents were alive.”

She blinked, a surprised look. It was appealing. Different, maybe, from anything he’d seen before. She wasn’t conventionally pretty. Her features were pleasant, her face one that dozens of women had at her age—pale skin, blue eyes, rounded cheeks made rounder by the unflattering cut of her brown hair.

Yet there was something about her . . .

“I meant cat generations,” she said after a moment.

“How long has this place been empty? Twenty years, right? For feral cats, that can be twenty generations. Think in terms of a hundred of your years. That’s a long time.”

“So you’re saying I should just let them live here?”

He rolled his eyes. “Is this that politically correct thing I’ve been hearing about from overseas? Because if it is, it’s gone to ridiculous lengths. They’re just cats. If we were in Southeast Asia, I’d be perfectly justified if I killed one every day and ate it.”

Spots of color appeared on her face.

“I thought you wanted to save them,” she said in a small voice.

“I want them off the property. The supervisor at Animal Control wanted to save them.”

“Oh.” She studied her folded hands for a moment.

Then she stood. “I misunderstood.”

He was sorry he had offended her. He had no social skills any more, not for real people. Only for people he was using to get a story or people he was interrogating for information. People he’d encounter a few times and then abandon, as he abandoned cities.

“Can you get them off the property?” he asked.

“I was hoping that they could stay,” she said. “The woods are large. I was thinking maybe we could find a way to keep them safe, feed them, and let them live their natural lives.”

So she wanted to use his property as her no-kill sanctuary. Not a shelter at all, but some kind of farm or ranch or something. “And have kittens every year? I’m already overrun.”

“We’d fix them, of course,” she said.

“And then what? They’d invite all their little friends, and suddenly I’m living in cat heaven. This is my grandparents’ home. I’ve already neglected it too long. I need to fix it up, not make it a palace for strays.”

She smoothed her hands along her jeans. He’d seen women who wore skirts do that, but he’d always thought it was to smooth wrinkles. Jeans didn’t wrinkle.

“I can guarantee that they won’t bother you. You’ll never see them,” she said.

“Or smell them? Or deal with their poop and their destructiveness? They’ve broken almost everything in the courtyard.”

“I think I can broker some kind of truce, yes,” she said.

Truce? Is that what he wanted? A truce? How many truces had he seen over the years? Every single one of them had failed.

“You make it sound like I’m at war with the cats,” he said.

“Aren’t you?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “All I want is for them to leave my land.”

“It’s their ancestral homeland,” she said.

“Oh for heaven’s sake,” he said. “It’s mine too.”

She shrugged and extended her hands. “See? Truce is the only answer.”

“They’re cats,” he snapped. “Cats can’t own property. They
are
property, and I want them gone.”

“What if I can make them disappear?” she said.

“Then do it,” he said, sorry he’d ever thought she was attractive. Sorry he still thought she was attractive, even now.

“Are you hiring me?” she asked.

“If you can guarantee that none of those creatures will ever bother me again,” he said.

“I can do that,” she said softly, although her tone seemed a bit doubtful. “I’m sure I can do that.”

That night, he had dinner with Roxy because he sure as hell didn’t want to stay home. After Galiana left, the cats returned to the courtyard and had a virtual orgy. Or maybe an actual one. He couldn’t tell, and he certainly didn’t want to investigate.

Roxy was one of his oldest friends. They went to summer Bible school together as children, and then when they were old enough to realize that coloring cardboard cutouts of Jesus wasn’t fun, they ditched Bible school together.

He thought he loved her when he was twelve. When he was thirteen, he realized she was too much woman for him. When he went to college, her letters kept him steady. When he went overseas, he realized just how provincial her world was.

She married twice, both local men, both terrible conversationalists. She visited him in Paris once—not as a sexual thing (after puberty, there was nothing sexual between them, not even a thread of attraction)—but because she wanted to escape her humdrum life.

Everything frightened her, from the double-decker tourist buses (giving guided tours in English, German, and French) to the Louvre (
It’s so big
, she said.
How
can you see it all? That’s the point,
he said,
You can’t.
) to the restaurants with their deliberately slow service and complicated French cuisine (
what is a cassoulet
? she asked.
A casserole sort of
, he said.
But what’s in
it?
she asked.
Whatever the chef wants to put in it
, he said.).

She left, deciding that foreign countries were for adventurous people like him, and he went to Somalia because Paris had been too civilized. It had always been too civilized, just as Oregon was too provincial.

Whenever something happened in these places, it was too structured. Even the chaos had order—and what fun was that?

“I heard you met Galiana,” Roxy said, pushing her chair away from the table. They were in a local Italian place that had surprisingly good cuisine. The chef had studied in Rome, and it showed in the lightness of the sauces and the delicacy of the spices.

The restaurant itself wasn’t light or delicate. It was dark, paneled, and discreet. He liked it for that. He didn’t feel as exposed as he usually did in American restaurants.

“How did you hear that?” he asked.

“Because I’ve known her since your mother died. She was a nurse in the ICU. Don’t you remember?”

He remembered almost nothing of his mother’s death and funeral. He had flown in from Kuwait, eyes still stinging from the burning oil fields, and sat in the fluorescent lights staring at a woman who looked just like his great-grandmother. Nothing of his mother remained.

He had been too late, and part of him had spent those last few days wondering if it had been on purpose.

“I don’t recall,” he said, but he had a sudden flash of a memory: the doctor introducing a “healer” who could ease his mother’s pain.

“Just as well,” Roxy said. “Galiana wasn’t at her best in those days.”

And she was at her best now? Psychically in tune with stray cats? He was glad he hadn’t met her then.

Although he should have remembered a woman with such an appealing presence. He usually did.

“Well,” he said, “she’s pretty strange.”

Roxy laughed. “And you’re not?”

Not among his peers, he wasn’t. He was just like they were, tough and broken and relentless. Sometimes he forgot that the whole world wasn’t that way.

“I figure you two had a lot in common.” Roxy grabbed a toothpick and shoved it between her teeth as a substitute cigarette. “That’s why I kept trying to set you up.”

It all clicked into place now. The dinners that Roxy staged during his first week home, the ones he was too busy to attend, weren’t just because she worried that he wasn’t going to eat well. They were also designed to take some of the pressure off their friendship.

“So she knows all about me,” he said.

“Not all.” Roxy waved a hand for the waitress, then pointed at her coffee cup. “But she knows you can be a prick.”

“Can be,” he repeated. “Hell, I was a total ass this afternoon.”

“She mentioned that too,” Roxy said, “and wondered why I even thought you two would be suited.”

“Why did you?” he asked.

She shrugged a single shoulder. “You both have the same look,” she said. “Like you want to be somewhere else.”

* * *

That night he did want to be somewhere else. Anywhere else. Someplace where cats didn’t scream their pleasure at the half-moon.

He had fixed the floodlights outside, but the light didn’t stop them. Instead, they copulated as if they were the floor show at some expensive Italian villa.

Didn’t mating season end eventually? Was there a period when kittens got born and kittens got raised and the adults became serious and quiet?

At one
AM
, he gave up on sleep for a second night and went to his newly set up computer. The vast and mysterious Internet informed him that female cats went in and out of heat often, especially if the cats were well fed or in a warm climate. They also could go into heat shortly after giving birth to kittens. Males prowled for a sexually willing female their entire lives, copulated with her, and then got their faces slapped for the effort.

By three-thirty, the yowling died down, and he finally dozed off only to wake up at seven as the orgy chorus started all over again.

He refused to get earplugs. He hadn’t needed them during the bombings in all the various war zones he visited. He wasn’t about to get them now.

But in all those war zones, he’d slept when he was exhausted, not when he was supposed to. He used to say that a man could sleep through anything.

Obviously, the cats were proving him wrong.

* * *

He was rereading the
Oregonian
, obsessing that he wasn’t in the Middle East during this latest crisis, when a car pulled in front of his fence. He was outside by the time the gate opened.

Galiana entered, looking vaguely medieval in a long purple coat that nearly hid her jeans. Her hair brushed her shoulders and she wore no make-up, but her eyes glittered in the morning light.

“I’d’ve called,” she said, “but I figured you’d want this done right away.”

“I do,” he said.

The clothing suited her. She looked striking. He wondered how he had ever thought her plain.

She glanced at the woods. Of course, the cats were hiding there. They never gave the floor show when guests were on the property.

“I need you to do a few things before I start,” she said. “You have to shut off the electronics in the house, just in case, and—”

“In case of what?” he asked.

She still hadn’t looked at him. “In case my equipment causes a power surge.”

He didn’t see any equipment. “What are you going to do?”

She folded her hands, and turned toward him, serene and glittery at the same time. “I’m going to convince them to give up this part of their home.”