9cb261f7cd45f33ca37c87fa6590aac1

“Giving Mrs. Macdougall something to talk about.” He smiled then, and he had the nicest smile she had ever, ever seen. He stepped over and opened the drapes. “I’ve got to think of my reputation,” he said, grinning.

“Oh.” She nodded in complete understanding. “The FBI.”

“The FBI.

She put a hand on D.C.‘s stomach and the hand shook like a vibrating machine. “Hey, you old, lazy bum, wake up. You got an FBI man here who wants to know where you were last night, and you’d better tell him the truth. Come on, come on.”

Slowly and grudgingly D.C. eased one eye open, revealing shock and angry irritation. Here she knew he hadn’t gotten in until almost dawn and needed his rest. He was hurt that she would do this. It was not like her at all. His eye then moved to encompass Zeke, and he wondered who that jerk was. He had never seen him before, and if he never saw him again it would be soon enough. He closed the eye. Sometimes they went away if he pretended they weren’t there. Man, what a hang-over. His head was bursting out the fur seams, and a wrench had gotten loose and was flying about as the head plummeted through space. If he could only get hold of the head and anchor it.

At a strange sound, almost like hissing, D.C. aroused with a painful start. Momentarily he thought he was being set upon, then realized it was the jerk sneezing. He rose to flight position, but when Ingrid reassured him he stretched his muscles, all of them, humped his back about two feet high, and eventually relaxed and stretched lengthwise to about five feet, tail tip to whiskers.

“Sorry, but I’m allergic to cat fur,” Zeke said. He sneezed again, and tears welled up in his eyes. He walked away from D.C. “Always have been.”

“Like hay fever.”

“The same.” He took out a handkerchief to dry his eyes. “If you’ve got a Kleenex.

“

She pulled several from the mouth of a pink hippopotamus sitting on her frilly dressing table alongside a picture of her father and mother.

As she handed him the tissues, she said, “I’ve never seen an FBI man before, except in the movies. I saw Glenn Ford in Experiment in Terror. I thought he was positively, def­initely terrific, didn’t you?”

This was no time to bring up Glenn Ford, he thought. The comparison at this moment between Mr. Ford and himself was devastating.

“He sure was.” Blast Glenn Ford, he thought. If he had been allergic to cat fur, he wouldn’t have looked so good either.

Ingrid cuddled D.C. and rubbed his ears. “I’m sorry I had to wake you up, terribly sorry, but it is almost one o’clock and time for your breakfast. I’ll feed you real good, and you’ll feel better then.”

D.C. licked her and switched his high-fidelity purr to maximum volume.

She turned to Zeke. “Patti says we love him for different reasons. I love him because I need something to mother and care for, and Patti loves him because he’s an old friend, sort of like a comfortable old shoe.”

Patti was so perceptive. She said that for Mike , D.C. was a link with a boyhood that was slipping away, and that he wanted to hold to: days spent stretched out in the back yard under the Chinese elm with D.C. scampering about like a puppy, and Mike throwing a stick, and D.C. retrieving it. And then both dead tired, and sleeping in the shade, with D.C. knowing that Mike would ward off any dragons that happened to be prowling about.

As for their mother, D.C. was the children’s cat, something a child needed while growing up, in the same category as the right books to read, the right school to attend. And for their dad, he was still Darn Cat, a nuisance who stole his easy chair every time he got up and scattered his darn cat hairs all over everything. But Dad enjoyed the hoked-up enmity. He would have been as grieved as the rest of them if anything happened to D.C.

note 4

As Ingrid talked, holding the cat half in her lap, Zeke ap­proached D.C. warily. D.C. eyed him suspiciously as Zeke placed a sheet of speciment paper under a paw, then ran a finger in between the pads and pushed out dirt. Outraged, D.C. yanked the paw back. He knew he should have washed his paws last night but he was so pooped when he got in. Ingrid continued rubbing his ears and that mollified him some, but he had made up his mind definitely. He did not like this jerk, and the sooner he got lost the better. “What’re you doing that for?” Ingrid asked. “I’m going to send this specimen” – he indicated the dirt – “to the lab where they will run it through what we call a spectrographic; examination. That’s a process that works on the principle that every substance – this dirt here, for instance – gives off its own light waves when heated to an extremely high temperature. And the lab photographs the light waves. So we get a picture, so to speak, of the dirt from his paw.