Free Cat Playing Cupid by Shirley Rousseau Murphy Page A

you’ll have a problem.”
    Joe just looked at him.
    â€œYou’ve done all right keeping your investigations secret, holding your own with the law.”
    All five stared at Firetti. Wilma said, “You knew this, too? The police part?”
    Firetti nodded. “It took me a while to figure that out. But I’ve known about the cats since long before Dulcie was born, Wilma. I was doctor to her mother.
    â€œMy father, when I was a boy, years before I grew up and went off to school and then joined the practice…he treated several generations of speaking cats. When I was about ten, a Molena Point woman married a Welshman and they resettled in the states, in Molena Point, near her family. They brought with them four pairs of speaking cats.
    â€œThey planned to breed and sell them, but of course they didn’t tell the cats this. When two grew very ill, they were forced to find medical care, and they came to my dad. The way those cats responded to medication he found very strange—it took him a long time to treat them, they had lymphadenitis, but they didn’t respond well to penicillin. He brought them through, but their reactions puzzled him.
    â€œHe had read tales of unnatural cats in parts of Wales and Ireland, and now, when he researched the matter, he began to suspect there might be some truth in the stories, as impossible as they seemed.
    â€œAnd then, when he examined the cats’ blood, he found it was not like any known type, not A or B, not AB. And of course it was not like any of the several subtypes, which were discovered more recently. AB is, in itself, extremely rare, but this blood was none of those, it was different. Confronted with this irrefutable fact, he began to believe the tales.
    â€œHe could find no medical reference to help him, not even the newest, ongoing studies—no medical research even in the British Isles, where he thought there might be more such cats. Either no other speaking cat had ever been in a veterinarian’s office, at least with an illness that would stir curiosity, or any other doctor who had known the truth had kept it secret.
    â€œOf course, his investigations were done quietly, he daren’t tell anyone what he suspected. He could ask no doctor or medical facility for any kind of help, he had only the myths and folk tales—and the unrecorded blood type.
    â€œAt one point, he was inclined to diagnose himself with mental derangement, was convinced he’d lost his grip on reality. He grew so upset that my mother intervened. In her direct way, she went right to the cats.
    â€œWhen two cats were brought into the clinic for nail trimming and shots, she insisted they speak to her, and she told them why. She explained how upset the doctor was, and how carefully he had kept their secret. At last one of them did speak.”
    Firetti smiled. “She was determined the young cat would answer her. But when he did, the experience left her deeply shaken. The cats told her that the Welsh couple, in order to get them to travel willingly, had promised that in America people would treat them like gods, that they would live pampered lives, would enjoy total freedom to come and go as they chose, and would enjoy, as well, all manner of fine foods and luxuries.
    â€œWhen they arrived in the village, the couple kept them inside the house, saying they must wait until the time was right to announce themselves to the public. The cats were here, and so far were being treated well enough, though nothing like they’d been promised.
    â€œBut after many months of being shut in, they grew restless and morose, and determined to leave that place.
    â€œThey found the door and window locks a kind impossible for a cat to open. They grew more and more worried, they ceased to trust the couple, and soon they would not speak unless they were tormented and forced to.
    â€œThen the couple sold two pairs. The other four cats were enraged, there had