Lock and Key(72)

I just looked at him. “The what?”

He shot me a look. “You need Gervais,” he said, pushing the book at me. “And quickly.”

“That is just what I don’t need,” I said, sitting back and pulling my leg to my chest. “Can you imagine actually asking Gervais for a favor? Not to mention owing him anything. He’d make my life a living hell.”

“Oh, right,” Nate said, nodding. “I forgot. You have that thing.”

“What thing?”

“The indebtedness thing,” he said. “You have to be self-sufficient, can’t stand owing anyone. Right?”

“Well,” I said. Put that way, it didn’t sound like something you wanted to agree to, necessarily. “If you mean that I don’t like being dependent on people, then yes. That is true.”

“But,” he said, reaching down to pat Roscoe, who had settled at his feet, “you do owe me.”

Again, this did not seem to be something I wanted to second, at least not immediately. “What’s your point?”

He shrugged. “Only that, you know, I have a lot of errands to run today. Tons of cupcakes to ice.”

“And . . .”

“And I could use a little help,” he said. “If you felt like, you know, paying me back.”

“Do these errands involve Gervais?” I asked.

“No.”

I thought for a second. “Okay,” I said, shutting my book. “I’m in.”

“Now,” he said, as I followed him up the front steps of a small brick house that had a flag with a watermelon flying off the front, “before we go in, I should warn you about the smell.”

“The smell?” I asked, but then he was unlocking the door and pushing it open, transforming this from a question to an all-out exclamation. Oh my God, I thought as the odor hit me from all sides. It was like a fog; even as you walked right through it, it just kept going.

“Don’t worry,” Nate said over his shoulder, continuing through the living room, past a couch covered with a brightly colored quilt to a sunny kitchen area beyond. “You get used to it after a minute or two. Soon, you won’t even notice it.”

“What is it?”

Then, though, as I waited in the entryway—Nate had disappeared into the kitchen—I got my answer. It started with just an odd feeling, which escalated to creepy as I realized I was being watched.

As soon as I spotted the cat on the stairs—a fat tabby, with green eyes—observing me with a bored expression, I noticed the gray one under the coatrack to my right, followed by a black one curled up on the back of the couch and a long-haired white one stretched out across the Oriental rug in front of it. They were everywhere.

I found Nate on an enclosed back porch where five carriers were lined up on a table. Each one had a Polaroid of a cat taped to it, a name written in clean block lettering beneath: RAZZY. CESAR. BLU. MARGIE. LYLE.

“So this is a shelter or something?” I asked.

“Sabrina takes in cats that can’t get placed,” he said, picking up two of the carriers and carrying them into the living room. “You know, ones that are sick or older. The unwanted and abandoned, as it were.” He grabbed one of the Polaroids, of a thin gray cat—RAZZY, apparently—then glanced around the room. “You see this guy anywhere?”

We both looked around the room, where there were several cats but no gray ones. “Better hit upstairs,” Nate said. “Can you look around for the others? Just go by the pictures on the carriers.”

He left the room, jogging up the stairs. A moment later, I heard him whistling, the ceiling creaking as he moved around above. I looked at the row of carriers and the Polaroids attached, then spotted one of them, a black cat with yellow eyes—LYLE—watching me from a nearby chair. As I picked up the carrier, the picture flipped up, exposing a Post-it that was stuck to the back.

Lyle will be getting a checkup and blood drawn to monitor how he’s responding to the cancer drugs. If Dr. Loomis feels they are not making a difference, please tell him to call me on my cell phone to discuss if there is further action to take, or whether I should just focus on keeping him comfortable.

“Poor guy,” I said, positioning the carrier in front of him, the door open. “Hop in, okay?”

He didn’t. Even worse, when I went to nudge him forward, he reached out, swiping at me, his claws scraping across my skin.

I dropped the carrier, which hit the floor, the open door banging against it. Looking down at my hand, I could already see the scratches, beads of blood rising up in places. “You little shit,” I said. He just stared back at me, as if he’d never moved at all.

“Oh, man,” Nate said, coming around the corner carrying two cats, one under each arm. “You went after Lyle?”

“You said to get them,” I told him.

“I said to look,” he said. “Not try to wrangle. Especially that one—he’s trouble. Let me see.”

He reached over, taking my hand and peering down at it to examine the scratches. His palm was warm against the underside of my wrist, and as he leaned over it I could see the range of color in his hair falling across his forehead, which went from white blond to a more yellow, all the way to almost brown.

“Sorry,” he said. “I should have warned you.”