Chapter 9
The Rainbow
Honey came down the back stairs and grabbed the bayou book from the drawer. The kitchen was cold. She could hear her father at the back of the house with the cats, speaking low to each one. She sat in the chair facing the back door with the book on her knees and waited.
Roam had gone out at first light to fetch Sean, and the two of them slipped in through the back door now, both their coats up against the cold.
Sean took the chair across from her. Roam laid the note in its paper square on the table between them, gloves folded.
He took the bayou book from Honey's knees and laid it beside the note, open to the page she had marked with her thumb.
Sean's green eyes scanned the page. "Aye." He let out a long breath. "Aye, Honey. That's our perp." He looked up at her. "Show me what ye saw last night."
Honey closed her eyes. She opened her hand on the table, just as she did last night. The pink glitter rose, and laid itself, like an old film, across the kitchen wall above the stove, and the memories played.
Sean did not speak until the wall went dim. "Right then." He folded the linen square back over the note and tucked it into the inside of his coat. "We'll need to keep this one under the hat for the mornin'. Get a confession out. Ye'll have to keep mum to yer folks for now."
Roam reached across the table and laid his hand over Honey's. "Sean and I'll close this today, sweetheart," he said quietly. "I promise."
"They have to know," Honey said.
"Aye. They will. After the formal questioning is done. We don't give it away just yet."
"You want me to lie to my mother."
"Just a wee bit." Sean winked.
Honey looked at Roam, then back at Sean. "So this is part of some sort of master plan, and it has to end today. I'm not sure how much longer the familiar system will hold. The more cats we get the weaker all the bonds become."
"Understood." Sean nodded once. "Roam. Then we act like a normal mornin'. We let him think he's walkin' free. Every step, we'll be on him."
"What's normal anymore?" Honey turned a page she was not reading.
Roam picked a flake of pink glitter out of her hair. "It'll all be over soon enough, sweetheart. Then things'll go right back to how they were. Everyone safe and sound at home where they belong."
"I hope so." Honey furrowed her brow. "But I've got an icky feeling about it all still."
Sean buttoned his coat. "Sleeplessness can do that to ya. I know ye haven't had a good wink since this thing started."
"True." She rubbed her eyes and yawned.
"See there. You need sleep." Roam touched his forehead to hers.
"I've got to get goin'. You two lovebirds need a proper vacation when this is done." Sean clapped Roam's shoulder and went out. Roam followed him as far as the porch door, said a few low words on the threshold, and came back.
"Hide the bayou book," Roam said. "Your folks will be down any minute."
Honey closed the book and slid it into the drawer of the sideboard. Roam went out the back to join Edgar.
By the time Rhoda came down the back stairs in her long grey cardigan, Honey had buttered ten slices of toast and not eaten one.
"Sweetheart," Rhoda said. Then, with a small frown at the hour, "How long have you been up."
"A little while." Honey repressed another yawn.
"Where's Roam," Rhoda said.
"With Daddy. Out back."
Rhoda took Honey's place at the stove. She touched her daughter's hair as she passed. "You've done enough, sweetheart."
Edgar came in from the back porch with Roam behind him. He kissed Rhoda's temple on his way past, lifted a hand toward the cast-iron, and the eggs began to crack themselves into the pan. Edgar crossed to the window beside Roam, watching the lawn.
Lazlo came down the back stairs. "Good morning, my friends."
"Mornin', Lazlo." Edgar did not look away from the window. "Sit. Eat."
"Lazlo, you look better this morning." Rhoda smiled at her friend.
He sighed, sat at the far end of the kitchen table. "I barely slept, but something about the stillness of night can still give you peace." Duchess slid up onto his lap. His silver eyes slid from Rhoda to Edgar to Honey, warm and concerned, as they had been since he arrived.
Sean McLeary came back through the back door with the easy step of a man who had been in this kitchen on a hundred ordinary mornings. He squeezed Rhoda's shoulder, nodded to Edgar at the window, and took the seat at the foot of the table. He set a small black notebook beside his cup.
"Rhoda. Edgar." Sean tapped the notebook once. "Roam and I'd like to speak with Mrs. Byrne and Madam Pierce this mornin', formal-like, for the record. If that's alright with ye."
"Of course," Rhoda said.
"We'll send for 'em," Edgar said.
Maeve and Oona came down separately. The night had been hard on each of them in different ways. Maeve was tight-mouthed, Pepper pressed against her ankle. Oona's hair was pinned up wrong, and Bramble looked like he'd bit an electrical cord.
Rhoda poured two cups she had already set out for them. "Sit, my dears."
"Mrs. Byrne," Sean said, with the small bow of a man who knew the day he was about to give a woman. "We'd like to speak to ye about the incident. We'll start in Mrs. Hadwin's study."
Maeve's face reddened but she didn't speak. She set down her cup. She kissed the top of Pepper's head, and followed Sean and Roam down the short corridor to Rhoda's study, and the door closed behind them with a quiet click.
In the kitchen Oona started talking.
"Now, Edgar," she said, "I've been thinking about that lavender of yours. That's a Cherokee thing if I've ever seen it. My grandmother had a man on the Tennessee line could shine a whole barn with a wave, just like you do, but he was a Methodist, you know, which was a complication, and his wife…"
"Mm-hmm," Edgar said from the window.
"…but his wife had no tolerance for the husband's magic in the kitchen, on account of her sister Verena had once had a wash-pot rise up off the line and chase her around the yard for a full half-hour, which Verena maintained until her dying day was a kitchen accident and not a curse, but the women on that side of the family… "
On the kitchen rug at Maeve's empty chair, Pepper had not moved. He had pressed himself against the chair leg and his eyes were wide and fixed on the corridor. He opened his mouth.
"Missus is terrified of butterflies. She has been since she was six. The last one that landed on her, she cried for an hour and told everyone it was hay fever."
He clamped his small mouth shut and pressed himself harder against the chair leg. Oona stopped mid-sentence.
"Oh, I knew it." She slapped her knee. "I knew it. She went pale down the lane yesterday when we passed that meadow. Pepper, sugar, the woman's a hedge witch and she's afraid of a wee fluttery thing with paint on its wings, you couldn't make it up."
Pepper made a small wet sound and pressed himself harder against the chair leg. At the far end of the table, Lazlo's hand drifted into the inside pocket of his coat. His thumb found the worn foot of fur and began its slow work.
The corridor door clicked. Maeve came back through into the kitchen with the red high in her cheeks. Pepper rocketed off the chair leg and into her arms. Maeve closed her eyes. She had expected the worst and gotten the next-worst.
Oona pivoted on her stool, her eyebrows up to her hairline. "Well?"
"Cleared," Maeve said.
"Sound the bells." Oona slid down off her stool. "My turn."
She rolled past Maeve and disappeared down the corridor. The door clicked again. Maeve sat in Oona's seat and pulled Pepper hard against her chest. She did not look at anyone. Pepper had begun to purr, a small uncertain purr; his nerves had not yet caught up with the rest of him.
The kitchen quieted. Conversation flickered. Rhoda asked Honey if she had eaten. Honey said yes, even though she had not. Edgar said something low to Roam about a cat on the side lawn.
Bramble, under Oona's empty chair, lifted his head.
"Last winter," he announced to the kitchen at large, in his forty-years-of-tobacco-he-had-never-smoked voice, "Oona pinched the choir robes off the Methodist line and dyed the lot of them in beet juice.
She has been wearin' the spare one to bed for warmth on the cold nights. "
A small noise came out of Maeve. It might have been a laugh. It might not.
"Bramble." Maeve looked down at the cat. "Bramble, my love. We are going to be very fine friends."
Bramble looked up at her with great satisfaction.
At the far end of the table, Lazlo's thumb worked the inside of his coat pocket in slow patient circles.
The corridor door clicked. Oona came back through with the air of a woman who had just told a slightly off-color joke at a small dinner party and gotten away with it. "Cleared."
"'Course ye were," Maeve said back.
Two pairs of eyes met across the kitchen. Maeve set Pepper down. Oona scooped Bramble up. Without quite knowing they were doing it, they linked elbows.
"Murph's," Oona said.
"Murph's," Maeve agreed.
"Mrs. Hadwin, my pearl," Oona called, "we'll be at Murphy's if ye need us."
"Of course, my dears," Rhoda said.
They went out the back door footloose and fancy free, Pepper trotting at Maeve's ankle and Bramble high in Oona's arms with his one ear forward like a flag.
Sean came back through the corridor with his notebook closed. "I'll need to see you now Mr. Varga."
Lazlo's eyes shot up. "Me. Whatever for?"
"Is that really necessary," Rhoda chimed in. "He's been through so much already."
"Well, we have to speak to everyone, ma'am." Sean motioned for him to follow him to the study.
"Certainly." She nodded.
Lazlo hesitated, sat Duchess at his feet, then rose with the clearing of his throat. "Yes. Of course."
He nodded once to Rhoda, and left to follow Sean.
"Sweetheart," Rhoda said when Honey began to gather the plates. "Take the small pot of plum preserves from the storage. The cellar tin's near empty."
"Yes, Mama."
Honey crossed the kitchen and went into the back hall.
The back hall was dim. It had not yet had its morning light.
She passed the first door. She passed the second door.
She opened the third door, the small storage room with its preserves on the shelves and its low chest under the small window and the wooden chair beside it.
She did not see the preserves first. She saw, on the canvas dust sheet draped across the chair, the small dark shape of an old black tom curled the way a cat curls when he is asleep. His head was tucked. His paws were under him. There was nothing wrong with the way he was lying.
There was only the way he was not moving.
"Oh," Honey said. She closed the door behind her.
She crossed to the chair and knelt. His coat was dust-dark and patchy.
His ribs were too much against his skin.
His throat was dark with a different mark now.
Small. Bruise-blue. The shape of one careful bite.
His copper eyes were open, but they did not see.
The tears came before she could stop them. She did not try.
"I am so sorry I did not find you sooner, friend," she said, very quietly. "I'll find who did this to you."
She opened her hand. The pink glitter came up out of her palm in a soft slow fountain, and rose into the air above the old tom, and curved itself into the arc of a rainbow she had heard about as a little girl from women older than her mother, and that she had never, in all her life, had cause to make. The colors held. The rainbow waited.
Honey laid her hand on the old tom's flank one time. She did not press. The dust-dark fur was cold under her fingers. The tears kept coming.
"Go on now," she said. "Go on."
The rainbow leaned down. It took him up gently. The small, folded shape of him. His copper eyes finally closing. It held him in the bright center of itself a long quiet moment, and then it folded itself in on its colors, and it was gone.
Honey did not stop to wipe her eyes. She rose, grabbed the jam, opened the door, and went very fast back toward the kitchen.
Roam caught her at the second door of the back hall.
He had been on his way back from the study, notebook still in his hand.
He saw her face and was moving before she had taken three steps.
His hand closed around her upper arm in the dim, firm and quick, and he turned her into the alcove beside the linen press.
"Honey. Sweetheart. What is it."
"He's dead Roam. The black tom cat."
"Honey."
"Phineas, now this little old cat, Roam, I…"
"Hon. I'm sorry." Roam had both hands on her face now. He was not letting her past. "We can't move just yet."
"They are dead, Roam."
"I know, darlin'. I know."
He held her face one count more. His jaw had set, and the blue of his eyes had darkened toward a color closer to amber.
"We keep our heads. Let Sean and me work."
She closed her eyes. She opened them. Then she folded against him.
His arms came around her in the dim of the back hall.
He pressed his cheek to her hair. There was nothing to say about a small black tom who had not even given his name.
He just held her, and she pressed her face into his coat, and the two of them stood a long moment in the alcove beside the linen press, and grieved.
From the front of the house came the brass clatter of the door knocker.