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“Chicago, Illinois,” he said. “Thursday, September ninth, 1920. I don’t know the exact time…my mother said I was born just as the sun was coming up.”
That would work. I could check online to see exactly when sunrise on that fateful day so long ago had occurred. And then I’d feed all the numbers into my favorite astrology website to get Archie’s vitals. Yes, I could do it the longhand way using an ephemeris, but online was so much quicker and easier.
“How’d you end up in Globe?” I asked. It seemed like an awfully long way from Chicago. And it wasn’t as though he’d settled down in an established city like Phoenix or Flagstaff, but a dinky little town out in the middle of nowhere.
“Does this third degree mean I’ll get an extra salmon treat this evening?”
“Whatever you want,” I promised.
He tilted his head. “I had asthma,” he said. “I was 4F when the war came — you do know what that means, don’t you?”
Since I didn’t much like the condescension in his voice, I replied, my tone arch, “Medical exemption?”
“Yes.” Judging by the grouchiness of that single word, I guessed he was annoyed that I hadn’t proven my ignorance once again. “I was in college when the war broke out, so I was able to continue since I couldn’t serve on active duty. Afterward, my health worsened, and a doctor suggested that I should move out west where the air was drier. That was when I began actively looking for employment in Arizona or New Mexico or California. The job at the high school came up, so I traveled out here to interview for it, and that’s how I met Amanda Gardner. She had the interview at her home — and I can assure you that there were no demonic goings-on while she lived there.”
Of course there hadn’t been, just as there hadn’t been during the long decades when Hank and Nora Anders had owned the property. I absolutely refused to believe that the presence of my mother and her husband could have triggered a demonic attack — they were far too nice for that — so there had to be something else going on here.
Even if I couldn’t begin to figure out what that “something” might be. One heck of a detective I was.
When I didn’t say anything right away, Archie remarked, “I fail to see how knowing any of this can help you return me to my human form.”
At the moment, I didn’t, either. But knowledge was always a good thing, since you never knew when a particular tidbit might come in handy.
Something occurred to me then. “Aren’t you worried that if I do turn you human again, you’ll be an old man? I mean, you’d be more than a hundred years old.”
His ears flattened. Voice prim, he responded, “I have been in this cat body for decades. It has never aged. I believe that when I become human again, I will look as I was when that witch first cursed me. I was thirty-four years old, with most of my life still ahead of me.”
Thirty-four. It was hard to fathom that Archie — who always reminded me of a fussy old maid — had been only a few years older than I when he had his human form stripped from him. No wonder he was cranky.
“And you’ll get that life back,” I said. “Or at least, a life. Things have changed a lot since” — I paused to do the mental math — “1954.”
“So I’ve noticed,” he observed dryly. “But even being forced to live in the twenty-first century is preferable to being stuck in this cat’s body for all eternity. Speaking of which, it’s nearly six o’clock. I hope you’re not going to get so wrapped up in this ‘investigation’ of yours that you forget to set out my dinner.”
“I feed you at six-thirty,” I pointed out.
“Just a reminder.”
I shook my head. “You have nothing to worry about, Archie. Just one more listen-through, and then I’ll get on it.”
That announcement made him get up from the chair and drop gracefully to the floor. “Then I’ll wait in the office until you’re done. I have no desire to listen to that ruckus all over again.”
He stalked off toward the back of the apartment, tail in the air.
I don’t feel like listening to it again, either, I thought. But some of us don’t have a choice.
Feeling resigned, I pulled the recorder toward me and hit the Play button again.
Well, hot damn, I thought as I stared at Archie’s chart. We’ve got a whole lot of Virgo up in here.
Because it wasn’t just his sun in Virgo — it was also his ascending sign, along with Mercury, Jupiter, and Saturn, a grouping of planets that was known in astrology as a stellium. No wonder he wanted everything to be exactly just so. And yes, of course there was much more to the sign of the Virgin than a predilection toward neatness and order, but still. True node in Scorpio; it didn’t surprise me that one of the karmic lessons Archie needed to learn from this life was to be a little less rigid and to embrace change.
Maybe he’d be able to do that once he wasn’t a cat anymore.
That day seemed far off, though, and I still had the issue of the demons infesting the Bigelow mansion to deal with. A second listen of the recording, while uncomfortable, hadn’t yielded any further useful data. The noises from the demons didn’t seem to have changed materially from the time when Brant Thoreau was listening to them to the horrible moment when he tumbled down the stairs. If any of them were the culprits, they’d been pretty stealthy about it.
I set aside my laptop and reached for the bowl of soup I’d heated up for my dinner. Because I was planning a big dinner for Calvin and Tom and my mother, I’d decided to take it easy during this quiet evening in. Or not so quiet; unlike a lot of monsoon storms, which did their business and then moved on, the one that had parked itself over Globe in the late afternoon seemed ready to stick around for a while.
Archie had eaten his dinner and then gone back to his bed in the office. Something about his manner seemed almost diffident, as if he wasn’t quite sure he’d done the right thing by revealing so much of his past to me. I appreciated that he’d opened up, though, because even if I didn’t quite know what to do with any of that information at just this moment, I at least felt as if I understood him a little better. Had it been difficult for him to sit out World War 2 as people he knew fought and died, or had he been glad that his asthma had ensured he wouldn’t perish on the battlefields of France or in the jungles of the Philippines?
