Tanno – Part III

 Apparently what we were going to do first was sleep. Despite the adrenaline and all of the more-than-strange events of the previous day (and night), both Miss Dixon and I found ourselves dozing off in my living room. I would have been willing to bet my next good date that I wouldn’t have been able to sleep for at least a week, so it was a good thing that I didn’t have anyone to bet with – I don’t have enough dates, let alone good ones, to be losing them in stupid bets.

Anyway, after we had both nodded off and jerked ourselves awake again, we agreed that sleeping was the only thing we were capable of doing right now. Miss Dixon took Titania with her and I walked her to her back door. I insisted on going in with her and we did a quick walk though of her house to make sure no one was there waiting for her; neither one of us was feeling very safe right now. Then I stumbled home and locked my house as securely as I could before I retired to my bed with Tanno in attendance. The last thing I remembered was thinking with relief that I didn’t have to work in the morning.

When I opened my eyes again, the sun was well up and Tanno was no longer in the room. However, I could hear some thumping and thudding noises downstairs. Alarmed, I bounded down the stairs two at a time to save Tanno from what I was sure was a crazed catnapper.

I needn’t have bothered. It was Tanno who was making those noises. That is, Tanno and the two balls of yarn that had been in my knitting basket beside the sofa. They had been being turned into new mittens. Now they were being turned into a fair imitation of ragged light blue and dark blue cobwebs, festooning the whole front room. If you think a regular cat can make a mess with yarn, you should see what a cat with wings can do with it. I was holding my head and moaning while Tanno lovingly stropped my ankles like he didn’t know anything about any old yarn when I heard a knock on the back door.

Since apparently I had gone to sleep in my jeans and t-shirt, I went straight to the door and found Miss Dixon peering anxiously through the window. “Come on in. I just got up,” I told her.

Miss Dixon had come prepared. She had two mugs of tea in her hands and thrust one at me. “Good. I was hoping you were awake. You are awake, aren’t you? Well, this should help. Let’s go sit down. I think I may have an idea.” I wasn’t sure if the tea was supposed to help me wake up or if it was the eye-popping shirt she was wearing – bright, bright yellow with tiny pink daisies dotting it. I squinted and took the tea.

She followed me into the front room to the dining table and stopped in awe. “My goodness!”

“Yeah. It was baby alpaca being turned into mittens. Now it’s Halloween decorations, two months early.” Tanno sauntered up with a smug expression on his feline face.

 Miss Dixon looked at him. “Oh, I have some things for you, too, Tanno.” She turned to me. “Go and look on the back porch, Em.”

I went out and brought in a litter box, litter, cat food and dishes – and a catnip mouse and a little ball with a bell in it. I looked at the cat toys and snorted. I could have used the ball with the bell in it earlier – it might have saved my yarn. Oh well.  Miss Dixon must have been shuttling loads over here for quite a while.

“I knew Tanno would need a few things, and I had some extras for when I watch Tanno and Titania.” Miss Dixon had appeared behind me.

Tanno was clearly delighted that Miss Dixon had remembered him and was quite insistent about the cat food, so before we sat down with our tea he was crunching kibble out of a bowl with paw prints on it on top of the fridge.

“Now, my dear – here’s what occurred to me,” Miss Dixon began. “Last year, when Sarabeth was on a camping trip and away from civilization for two weeks, she gave me the passwords so I could check her voice mail on her cell phone and the messages on her answering machine. That was just in case there was something she needed to know sooner rather than later, you know. I was supposed to call a friend of hers if there was, and the friend would hike in and find her. Until the police will let us back in to look around her house, we can’t get to either of her phones. So let’s see if we can find anything out this way.”

I handed Miss Dixon the handset to my house phone and she was dialing away when

I stopped her. “Hold on, and I’ll put it on speaker.”
“Oh, good! That would be much better!” she replied.

Most of the stuff on the cell phone voice mail was normal stuff – a few friends and relatives, and one request from a publisher to call him back. Near the end was a message from the bookstore, asking where she was – she was scheduled for six and it was almost seven. I had left her at 5:30. This meant that whatever had happened, had happened right after I left.

We moved along to the answering machine. Again, most of it was everyday stuff. There were a couple of strange ones, though. In these, a man was saying he needed to meet her – it was urgent. He sounded stressed and upset and he had called several times over the last few days. The odd thing was that in the back ground, we could hear cats meowing – lots and lots of cats. The phone number that he gave was a cell phone number.

 Miss Dixon looked at me. “What do you say we try it, Em? Do you want to risk it?” I gnawed my lip for a minute and then said, “Why not? We can always say we’re looking for someone else and pretend it’s a wrong number.”

When we tried the number, it rang and rang, but no one picked up.

Miss Dixon called the police department next. The detective who had been assigned to the case wasn’t in, but the person we talked to told us that we could go back over to the house now; they were done there for the time being. I looked at Miss Dixon and she nodded.

I brushed my hair, slipped on my shoes and picked up my giant economy sized combination purse and knitting bag and my car keys, Tanno helping me with every step.

When we walked through the kitchen, he ran into the cat carrier that was still sitting there after last night. I called to Miss Dixon, who was already headed out the door, “Wait a minute, I think Tanno wants to go with us this time.”

She turned around, exasperated. “Tanno, I certainly hope you know what you are doing. All right, you can come.”

I shut the door on the carrier, picked it up and followed Miss Dixon out the door.

When we got to Sarabeth’s house, I was at a disadvantage when it came to searching. While I had known Miss Dixon for several years, I had only just met Sarabeth, and I didn’t have any idea what I was looking for. I felt like I was snooping around in someone’s personal life and it made me uneasy. I opened the carrier for Tanno and then stood around in the middle of the front room, uncomfortable. Miss Dixon noticed and bustled around near the desk, finally handing me a stack of mail to sort – it would be clear what was business and junk, and I could put anything that looked personal aside for Miss Dixon to look at. Most of it was opened – Sarabeth had tucked things back in their envelopes and stacked them to be dealt with later- and most of it was bills. A few coupons she wanted to keep and some non-business envelopes with handwriting on them were near the bottom of the stack. As I picked one up, I noticed that the paper inside had been crumpled up and then smoothed out and replaced. The postmark was from the next town over.  I called Miss Dixon over and handed it to her. She frowned and pulled out the sheet, smoothing it to read it. She looked up sharply and said, “I think you need to look at this, Em.”

The paper was nearly blank, but it had a few words on it in a rough scrawl: I need to meet with you as soon as possible. There was a phone number after it, the same one we had dialed earlier. Then something near the bottom of the page caught my eye, chilling me.  It was a crude drawing of a cat with wings.

   -She Wolf (c) 2007