Cat and Mouse

Jannie commented as we circled the table, putting out the “good” silverware, and also glasses and dinner plates I’d picked out years ago with my wife, Maria. “You went all the way to New York. You came all the way back again. You’re here for dinner. Very good, Daddy.”
    She beamed and giggled and patted me on my arm as we worked. I was a good father tonight. Jannie approved. She bought my act completely.
    I took a small formal bow. “Thank you, my darling daughter. Now this trip to New York I was on, about how far would you say that might be?”
    “Kilometers or miles?” Damon broke in from the other side of the table, where he was folding napkins like fans, the way they do in fancy restaurants. Damon can be quite the little scene stealer.
    “Either measurement would be fine,” I told him.
    “Approximately two hundred forty-eight miles, one way,” Jannie answered. “Howzat?”
    I opened my eyes as wide as I could, made a funny face, and let my eyes roll up into my forehead. I can still steal a scene or two myself. “Now,
I’m
impressed. Very good, Jannie.”
    She took a little bow and then did a mock curtsy. “I asked Nana how far it was this morning,” she confessed. “Is that okay?”
    “That’s cool,” Damon offered his thought on his sister’s moral code. “It’s call research, Velcro.”
    “Yeah, that’s cool, Baby,” I said and we all laughed at her cleverness and sense of fun.
    “Round-trip, it’s four hundred ninety-six miles,” Damon said.
    “You two are… smart!” I exclaimed in a loud, playful voice. “You’re both smarty-pants, smartalecks, smarties of the highest order!”
    “What’s going on in there? What am I missing out on?” Nana finally called from the kitchen, which was overflowing with good smells from her cooking. She doesn’t like to miss anything. Ever. To my knowledge, she just about never has.
    “G.E. College Bowl,” I called out to her.
    “You will lose your shirt, Alex, if you play against those two young scholars,” she warned. “Their hunger for knowledge knows no bounds. Their knowledge is fast becoming encyclopedic.”
    “En-cy-clo-pedic!” Jannie grinned.
    “Cakewalk!” she said then, and did the lively old dance that had originated back in plantation times. I’d taught it to her one day at the piano. The cakewalk music form was actually a forerunner of modern jazz. It had fused polyrhythms from West Africa with classical melodies and also marches from Europe.
    Back in plantation days, whoever did the dance best on a given night won a cake. Thus the phrase “that takes the cake.”
    All of this Jannie knew, and also how to actually do the damn dance in high style, and with a contemporary twist or two. She can also do James Brown’s famous Elephant Walk and Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk.
    After dinner, we did the dishes and then we had our biweekly boxing lesson in the basement. Damon and Jannie are not only smart, they’re tough little weasels. Nobody in school picks on those two. “Brains and a wicked left hook!” Jannie brags to me sometimes. “Hard combination to beat.”
    We finally retired to the living room after the Wednesday-night fights. Rosie the cat was curled up on Jannie’s lap. We were watching a little of the Orioles baseball game on television when Soneji slid into my head again.
    Of all the killers I had ever gone up against, he was the scariest. Soneji was single-minded, obsessive, but he was also completely whacked-out, and that’s the proper medical term I learned years ago at Johns Hopkins. He had a powerful imagination fueled by anger, and he acted on his fantasies.
    Months back, Soneji had called to tell me that he’d left a cat at our house, a little present. He knew that we had adopted her, and loved little Rosie very much. He said that every time I saw Rosie the cat, I should think:
Gary’s in the house, Gary is right there.
    I had figured that Gary had seen the stray cat at our house, and just made up a nasty story. Gary loved to lie, especially when his lies hurt people. That night, though, with Soneji running out of control again, I had a bad thought about Rosie. It frightened the hell out of me.
    Gary is in the house. Gary is right here.
    I nearly threw the cat out of the house, but that wasn’t an option, so I waited until morning to do what had to be done with Rosie.
Goddamn Soneji. What in hell did he want from me? What did he want from my family?
    What could he have done to Rosie before