The flies come next; it’s their turn. I hear the buzz, feel the warmth of the swarm, and then I see one, two zip, sail past, busy in their fly work. My muscles seize, tendons wind tight. It’s harder than it looks, finding a body, stumbling upon a body. It’s not all fun and games playing detective, and I cover my nose and my mouth with my gloves and I gasp into the worn leather and I wonder what I will do if I find your body. There’s no cell service. The police station is open only four hours a day but which hours? Your mother is expecting me. She told me not to leave. How will I preserve the evidence? Or should I just run? Should I leave you behind?
I grip my phone, as if it might start working suddenly, if I really, really need it.
The flies collect. The body appears: small, hairy and dark. The vultures are circling overhead, but they’re not here for you or me; they’re here for the cat.
I stand over the body as the threads of bugs travel in and out of the caves its bones create. The cat is black with white spots, and I recognize it immediately. It’s your cat. It’s Bumby. I remember the pictures and videos: Bumby walking on the piano, Bumby watching you with his silvery yellow eyes, Bumby accidentally pooping on the wood floor, then scratching at nothing to bury it.
I feel a deep, impossible sadness. I feel the loss for you and for me, and I don’t turn away until I know I’m a good person for looking.
I will tell your mother. I wish I could do more, and I hate to leave it there but I know better than to touch a crime scene, to tamper with evidence. There is nothing I can do to save him.
I pass Jed’s house and I start to breathe again. But I feel guilty, complicit, as if by being here I am party to the crime, party to the act. As if your cat died because I came here looking for you.
* * *
—
I knock on the front door of your mother’s house. The house is surrounded by crushed roses as if it was dropped on a garden by a tornado. No one answers the door. I step back and gaze up into the eaves. I see in one of the upper windows the gold telescope trained down at the ranch.
I hear the spit of a motor; then I see your mother speeding up a hillside trail on her ATV. She flies to another white house, smaller than the big house but with the same red accents, surrounded by a chicken wire pen.
I start up the hill toward her, past the cave of the miniature train station, past the swimming pool, which bleeds its chemical smell. I meet your mother at the door of the little white house.
“Follow me. I’ll show you the animals.”
“I have to tell you something,” I say. She scowls, unimpressed by my earnestness, as I follow her into the little barn. “I found a cat, over by Jed’s house. I found a dead cat. It was black with white spots.”
“It’s not Jed’s house.” She hands me a bucket. “These are the rabbits.” She opens a door onto a pen with a hill of rabbits piled in the far corner. “We make their feed ourselves. It’s all organic. Everything we give the animals and plants here, we make ourselves.” She scatters it across the ground. The rabbits don’t move. For a second, I think they’re dead too. Then a whisker quivers. An eyelid flickers.
“Was it your cat? Was it Jed’s?” Was it Rachel’s? I want to say but don’t.
She frowns a warning and leads me out another door, into the chicken coop. “These are the chickens.” They peck around our feet and she reaches into the bucket and she spreads their food. “We have two goats.” She points to their pen.
That is when I notice them, threading through the chickens and goats like grim illusions. They are all the same color: black with white patches. The same color as Bumby. They all move with the same jerky gait, an undomesticated crackle of energy. I am used to seeing cats on the Internet: plump and spoiled. I have never seen them this way: wiry, feral, activated.
She sees me noticing, and she beckons me toward the chicken hutch. It’s a narrow room lined with white egg-laying cabinets like tiny spaceships, and they are filled, the room is crawling, with cats. They drip down from the ceiling. They pool on the floor. They crowd in the cupboards, on top of tiny kittens, all that same patchy color, mewling like mice.
“They’re supposed to keep the rats down.” Your mother folds her arms.
“There must be a hundred of them.”
“Yes, well.” She moves away from the door and I step back. “They breed like crazy.”
I am disgusted. She should have them neutered. It’s cruel. It’s creepy, the way they share the same color, the same unseeing glare.
“They’re not pets,” she says. “You can’t pet them. Especially not the kittens. The mother will reject them. They’re here to work, like everybody else. Where did you say the body was?”
“Over by . . . your son’s house.” The cats crisscross our path as we leave, like cloning errors in a video game.
“I’ll take care of it. The trash collector comes once a week—he’s supposed to come once a week. Sometimes he misses a week in the summer and we end up buried in it.”
“You’re not going to put the cat in the trash?”
“Of course not.” She smiles. “We have a pet cemetery, above the lake.” I don’t know if I believe burying the cat there was her intention, but I do believe I have shamed her into changing her mind.
“You should have the cats neutered.”
Her smile drops. “Who’s going to pay for that?”
I want to point out that there is clearly a lot of money going through this place, with the tractor and the ATVs and the pool and the miniature train, but I can see that I am skating on thin ice with your mother. I need to find you. Then I will call animal control.
She puts the bucket back in the little barn, and we walk out to the ATV. She claps imaginary dust from her hands. “We have horses and cleaning today. I’m guessing you want to start with horses?”
* * *
—
Your mother leads me to the tack room. It is dark and dank, and the big, cracked leather saddles are piled in rows with tarps over them.
“It’s a mess in here.” She lifts a tarp and sneers at the damp. “You’ll organize it. Every horse has its own saddle and bridle. The names are stamped into the leather.” She shows me the curved script carved into the leather. “My daughter thought of that. Isn’t it cute?”
My breath whooshes in. “Your daughter?” Little sparks break out all over my skin. “Where is she?”
She turns abruptly toward the door, and her pupils expand and contract in the light. She sets her mouth in a frown.
But I can’t turn back now; I can’t let this stop. I have to get her talking. I have to talk about you. “Did she work with the horses?”