Catalyst_ A Tale of the Barque Cats - Anne McCaffrey [48]
Although she was by herself and dressed in expensive-looking new clothes, he recognized her as the woman who had come with her son to the Locksley clinic to return Chessie and the kitten. She was the wife of the arsonist who had torched his clinic and kidnapped Chessie in the first place, he was pretty sure.
“More cats, missus?” he asked the woman.
“No, but that’s why I came,” she said. “I wanted to ask you to get in touch with that cat girl and her crew. I need to buy that kitten back.”
“I thought that was settled. The ship’s five days out from port now,” he said. “Janina, Chessie, and the kitten are on it.”
The woman tightened her lips. She looked no less anxious than she had on the previous occasion. “Five days, you say? Not four?”
Jared found he knew to the hour when the Molly Daise and Janina had left the station. “Five days, seven hours, and thirty minutes actually.”
She looked puzzled. “No, he’s only been gone four.”
“The kitten?”
“Jubal, my son. I think he got his good-for-nothing father to bring him back here so he could go after that cat. I thought he’d got over it but then I got up the next day and he was gone, as was my transport.”
“He couldn’t have just taken it himself? Because if he did, station security would have detained him. It’s against regulations for an unregistered, underage youngster to enter the station without an adult.”
“I’m pretty sure Carlton brought him,” she said, her eyes shifting to the side, indicating she was hiding something.
“Why?”
“There was—a note,” she said. “And Carlton—Jubal’s father—is an old spacehand. This is where he would come. It took me awhile to catch a ride with one of the neighbors who was coming here. I need them to search the station and find my boy. If he didn’t get on board the ship with the cat, he could still be here.”
“You should be talking to station security, missus, not to me,” Jared said.
“I intend to. I came here first because I figured if that girl and the cats were here, I could take the other deal—less money for the mother but keep the kitten for Jubal. I don’t know why, but the kid was really attached to that little cat. He didn’t speak to me till the next morning, but then he seemed to be all right for a couple of weeks, didn’t mention the cat again. He’s a good boy and a big help to me with his old—his dad gone, but he’s stubborn. Gets that from me, I guess. I should have known he had something up his sleeve when he was so quiet and cooperative. He was just biding his time, I guess. Carlton’s more slippery than stubborn, but once that boy sets his mind on something … well, the thing is, Doctor, if I get my boy back and not the cat, he’s not going to stay and I know that now for a fact.”
“Still, I think you’d be better off finding your son first, ma’am. The kitten is on board the Molly Daise, and he’ll be safe with Janina until you can work something out. But I don’t know about your son. He’s probably here at the station, if what you say is true, waiting for the Molly Daise to return, but if not, ships come and go all the time and he could have boarded one of them.”
“I’ll do that, but meantime you contact that girl, okay? Tell her I can pay what they wanted for that kitten and to be sure to bring him back with them.”
“I’ll relay your message,” he promised as she turned on one shiny new boot heel and stomp-clicked her way from the clinic. He wondered why—when she and her son brought Chessie back—the reward money seemed to matter to her so desperately, and now she was willing to return a large portion of it in exchange for the kitten. He didn’t think she was willing to relinquish the funds solely because of her son’s disappearance.
Then his assistant Bill called from the waiting room that they had an emergency. The passenger liner Tesoro had brought in their cat, Tess—short for Galactic Treasure—a purebred like Chessie, injured in an accident.
By the time he finished operating on Tess, Jared had forgotten all about the woman.
When Chessie jumped as gracefully as ever onto Janina’s chest to alert her that