Cat Cross Their Graves (22 page)

Finding only bushes, she scrambled through into the next yard, bloodying her legs and arms and tearing her shirt. Dodging into the shadows beside a little shed, she paused to stare in through its open door.

Clay pots, bags of fertilizer, garden tools, a bucket. She could hide in there, pull the door closed and maybe lock it.

Yes, and be trapped there.

Slipping out again, she pushed the door shut. Maybe he'd think she was in there, waste a few minutes looking.

Zigzagging through a tangle of trees and bushes, she raced for the next street and the next; and she heard him behind her, running. Making for the next block, she doubled back toward the shops where there were people. A snapping sound behind her, like a branch breaking. Dodging between houses, she crawled under a porch, squeezed back under the steps and out of sight. The street before her was busy with traffic, and lined with parked cars. He was coming, his feet squinching the wet leaves.

Slipping out from under the porch again, she fled between the parked cars and into the middle of the
street. Running down the street between the two lanes of slow-moving cars, he didn't dare grab her. Horns honked. A woman yelled at her to get out of the street. She couldn't hear, in the traffic, if he was behind her. She was across Ocean again. What did he want? Dodging between the northbound line of cars, she ducked into the brick-paved alley behind the deli. Swerving around the little benches and potted trees, she startled a group of cats and they scattered everywhere, some into the street, some up a vine. He was still coming, running, his footsteps squeak, squeak, squeaking on the pavement. She considered the wooden trellis. Would it hold her? Racing past the closed back door where the cats had been gathered, she leaped at the frail trellis slats and climbed fast.

But he swerved into the alley, lunging for the trellis. Grabbed her foot, jerked so hard she fell. At the same instant the door was flung open and a fat man appeared. Round, shiny face, round, smooth head, and dressed all in white. He stood, startled, staring. The small man froze in place holding her, his face all sharp lines and dark stubble. “Keen.” That was Mama's word. Keen with hate. Why? Through the open door, the shop smelled of spice and sugar, cinnamon, hot cheese browning in ovens. The small man stared past her at the round man. When the round man grabbed for Fenner, as if he'd squish him, Fenner twitched and backed away, dragging her; then he dropped her and ran, pelting through the alley and into the street. Her heart was pounding so hard she wanted to throw up. She stood with her head down until the feeling passed.

When she looked up, the man in white took her hand. “Come into the deli. I'll call the police.”

“No! Oh, no!”

“The deli's safe enough.”

“Please. Don't call anyone.”

“I…All right.” He looked surprised, but he didn't fuss like most grown-ups. He led her inside, into a big bright room filled with little tables and wire chairs, long windows all facing the street. A tall counter along the back with a glass front was crowded with cakes and pies and roast beef and sliced ham and salads.

He led her to a table in the corner, away from the windows. Sitting down, she stared out at the sidewalk but didn't see the small man. Only cars moving, and tourists, some with dogs on leashes, and locals going to work in jeans and sweatshirts. The round man disappeared into the back. There were people at three of the tables. Two women in jeans drinking coffee and eating something that smelled of bacon and onions and cheese, three men in sport coats and jeans, and a young pale woman drinking tea and reading a paperback book. They all glanced up at her and then turned politely away. The round man returned with a glass of milk and a slice of cake. She wasn't hungry but when she started to eat she devoured everything—the cake was carrot like Mama made, and the milk was cold and good. Maybe she was making up for lost meals. When she had finished, the fat man sat down across from her.

“I'm George Jolly, this is my shop,” he said with pride. “You know that man?”

“No! I…He just…He just chased me.”

“I thought maybe you didn't want to get him in trouble.”

She shook her head. “I just…I don't want the police.”

“Okay. But shall I call someone else? Your mother? To come and take you home, safe?”

My mother's dead. Mama can't take me home.
“I'll be all right now.” She knew she was being foolish. Mama would scold her for being so foolish. He could call Cora Lee. When she first got in the car, Cora Lee had slipped a piece of paper into Lori's pocket, with her house phone and cell phone numbers. Now, when Lori hesitated, he said, “Who should I call?'

She shook her head. “No one. He won't dare follow me again, not in the middle of the village, with so many tourists and cars.”

He started to speak.

“I'll be fine. Some weirdo, that's all. When…when I've gone, you could call the police then, if you want. Tell them what he looked like.”

“I can do that,” George Jolly said, brightening.

“Just don't tell them what I look like.”

Mr. Jolly grinned at her. “
He
looked like a little, hard beetle, all angles and as if he had a hard shell.”

Lori grinned back at him. “That's exactly what he looked like! Hard, beady eyes, too, like a beetle.” Like a beetle you'd find in the garden that the kids in Greenville liked to squish under their boots to hear it pop. She rose and took George Jolly's hand. “Thank you,” she said softly. She left Jolly's Deli telling him she'd be fine, but the minute she was on the street she was scared again. That cold, falling feeling again, in the pit of her stomach.

She could go to Genelle's, but the library was closer. Hurrying along the street among window-shopping grown-ups, she wanted, now, only to get back into her cave.

And she knew something more about the beetle man. She knew, now, she'd seen this man when she was little. It was the same man, she was sure. He came in the schoolyard when she was six. In the second grade. In the schoolyard, standing inside the fence by the drinking fountain. They were playing kickball. Every time she ran near him, he watched her. He was there again the next day. She was eating lunch alone on a bench, reading. He sat down next to her and asked her what grade she was in and could he see her arithmetic and spelling papers that she had in her backpack. She stared at him and ran, back into the building. She'd called Mama, and Mama came for her. Mama didn't know who he was. That day had scared them both.

Uncle Hal always wanted to see her schoolwork, too. Or wanted her to play numbers games and do puzzles. At first she'd liked that. But Pa would make him stop, Pa didn't like those games. And
that
made Mama mad. Mama said, “What's wrong with her being smart? Why are you so set against a girl being smart? What if she were a boy?” Pa said it wouldn't make no difference, and then they'd fight and she, Lori, would go in her room and turn on her little radio loud and read a fairy tale that ended up happy.

Now, hurrying along the sidewalk staying in a crowd of people, she looked across at a shop window where a shadow moved, then jerked away suddenly behind the china and glassware. Fenner? She stopped
for only an instant to look, but now there was nothing. Two women inside; she saw no one else. Hurrying across the library garden and in through the library's front door, she glanced back at the street. When she didn't see him, she slipped into the children's room.

The librarian was starting story hour. He didn't dare come here, among the children. She sat down on a floor cushion beside the crowded window seat, leaned against its cushioned edge beside the dangling feet of a four-year-old who was in turn snuggled up to an older child. She looked at the kind face of the librarian and listened to her quiet voice, and slowly she let the story take her away, saw the goats and the mountain and the grandfather and let the story become real, let the ugliness fade away until it was gone. Almost gone. He couldn't get her here, not in this safe place.

J
ack Reed's house stood five blocks below the
home of the senior ladies, and Genelle Yardley's, but seven blocks over the crest of the hill, closer to the sea. The two cats, leaving the seniors' garden and Drs. Hyden and Anderson to their dig, stopped only once, when a yapping terrier chased them. Spinning to face the frenetic animal, they smiled, and Joe Grey lifted an armored paw. The little dog stopped. Dulcie flattened her ears and crouched to spring. The dog backed up a step. Joe's burning yellow eyes and Dulcie's poison-green gaze made the terrier tremble right down to his hard little paws. Tucking his tail between cringing haunches, he moved back three steps more, let out a screeching challenge, then spun around and beat it out of there yipping for human protection.

Enjoying his retreat, the two cats smiled at each other and trotted on through the crowded backyard gardens, their path following the rocky ridge that be
gan in Genelle's garden. An outcropping that ran for half a mile, cresting the hill in a ragged, stony spine. The yards through which it thrust were, for the most part, planted to enhance its sculpted curves. The ridge ended across the street from Jack Reed's bungalow, in an unbuildable jutting shoulder of stone. The cats paused among the boulders. They had seen this house many times, and they had never liked it.

None of these homes had much front yard, and little more backyard. A second row of roofs could be seen close behind them. The house was stark, forbidding, without any of the welcoming air of a beloved retreat, like most of the village cottages. Against the front of the one-story gray frame, with its dull-brown trim, was a line of dead or dying shrubs. The rest of the yard, where there might once have been flower beds, was covered with brick-colored gravel uglier than a parking lot.

The concrete driveway was empty, and Jack's white pickup with its neat side boxes and “Vincent and Reed” logo wasn't parked on the street. The two cats, padding up the concrete drive to avoid the gravel, stood for a moment assessing the windows and vents, looking for the easiest route of entry.

The foundation vents were so big that Lori could have gotten out through there, if ever she'd found a way down from the house above. The cats circled the house, but all seven vents were nailed shut. Slipping along between the bushes, they leaped up to the sill of the garage window and peered in.

No room in there for a vehicle; the place was stacked with cardboard boxes of clothes and other items spilling out, cast-offs that looked too old and
tired even to give to charity. The window itself was new and clean but nailed shut, a dozen nails angled into the inside molding.

“What kind of man is this?” Joe Grey said irritably.

“Paranoid.”

“All this to lock in one little girl?”

“Nutcase.”

“You think he hurt her?”

“She's never said that, and she talks to me a lot. When Genelle asked her if he'd done anything ugly, any kind of touching, Lori said no. That she'd heard all about those things from the other kids in the foster homes.” She turned to look at him, the late-morning light catching across her green eyes and peach-tinted ears. “She's really afraid of going back to those foster places. I think, if she trusted the foster-care people, she would have called them, gotten some help.”

“But help from what? What did he do to her?”

She turned on the branch. “He locked her in, Joe! Nailed the windows shut! How would you feel? You detest being locked in! Took her out of school, and she loved school. She was a prisoner!” Leaping from the narrow sill into the oak tree that towered above them, she trotted along a branch to examine an attic vent.

It was stuck tight. She examined the other vent on that side, then leaped to the roof and across it, into another oak. There appeared to be two vents on each side. All were stuck, but no new nails were visible. These vents were too small for a child to get through, and who would fear that a cat might enter or even
want to. It was not until they were pawing at the last vent that they were able to rattle the wooden grid.

Pressing harder, then pulling with hooked claws, they loosened the hinges in the rotting frame where it had succumbed to dampness and maybe termites. Digging in harder, Dulcie flung herself backward on the branch, pulling with all her might—just as she would jerk a giant rat from its hole. The grid flew off, nearly taking her with it. In midair, she fought her paw loose, snatching at the branch. Teetering, grabbing for balance, she watched the grid spin away to the ground. She realized only then that Joe had his teeth in her shoulder, a mouthful of fur and skin to keep her steady. Turning, ignoring the pain from his teeth, she gave him a whisker kiss.

Joe released her and leaped to the edge of the hole, peering in. Dulcie edged up beside him. The attic was black and stunk of dead spiders and insects and mouse droppings, filling Dulcie with visions of black-widow spiders and the brown recluse arachnids and surly raccoons waiting in the dark to defend their lair. She wanted no truck with raccoons, better to face tigers. In Molena Point, raccoons were so well protected by the do-gooders of the village that they had grown unnaturally bold. Pet dogs had been attacked in their own yards, and just this winter, raccoons had badly bitten not only several family dogs but two different women, and a child, who tried to rescue their screaming pets. And only a few blocks from the Reed house, she and Joe and Kit had barely escaped a predatory band of raccoons in just such a black attic as this. That escapade had ended with gunshots. Dulcie still woke from nightmares in
which she and Joe and Kit had been blown away instead of the raccoons.

“Dulcie?” Crouched on the branch beside her, Joe nosed at her impatiently.

She flicked an ear at him.

“You going to hang there all day? Is there a problem?”

Fixing her back claws in the molding, she gave a tail lash and bolted into the unknown dark, onto a soft surface that gave unpleasantly until she realized it was a matt of dust-embedded fiberglass insulation between two rafters. The faint echo as she scrambled in implied that the attic was empty, she didn't even hear mice, though her nose tickled with the smell of dry mouse droppings and the leavings of generations of squirrels. She was peering around her as Joe landed behind her. “Go on, Dulcie.
What
is
the matter?
” He pushed hard against her. She moved on hesitantly, picking her way along a rafter and watching through the blackness for the trapdoor that every house must have to give access to the attic—praying
that
wasn't nailed shut.

It would be just their luck if Lori's pa was at home after all, lying motionless on the bed below them, as Lori had described. Morosely staring up at the ceiling just where she and Joe might emerge. This was, after all, the weekend, when most folks didn't work. Maybe he'd loaned his truck to someone.

But, she thought, it was only Saturday. Contractors did often work on Saturday, catching up on an ever more demanding building market. Maybe he was on some extensive job or some difficult old remodel, or
maybe, hopefully, deep into a tangle of ancient, frustrating wiring that would take him the better part of the day. She watched Joe leap across the rafters searching for a way down, his white nose, chest, and paws in the blackness seeming disembodied.

“Here,” he said softly. “Here it is. Come on, Dulcie, shake a paw.”

Leaping after him, she crouched beside him at the edge of the trapdoor. His head was bent over the plywood square, his ears sharply forward, listening to the house below.

When they had listened for some time and had heard nothing, he clawed at the edge of the door. He was able, just barely, to wiggle it in its molding. “Come
on,
Dulcie.” He turned to look at her, his patience wearing thin. “I've never seen you so reluctant.”

She'd seldom felt so reluctant. All Lori's unhappiness in this house seemed to have collected like a chill around Dulcie's own heart, and she didn't want to go down there.

Well, the trapdoor was probably bolted, anyway. Padlocked maybe, from the inside. She set her claws in, and on his count of three, she jerked upward.

The door lifted an inch, then dropped back.

Again they listened, Joe as still as a snake about to strike, Dulcie's heart pounding.

When the house remained silent they tried again. With their back paws well under them, and their front claws deeply engaged over the lip of the door, Joe whispered, “One, two, three, heave.”

The door flew up—but then dropped back again, forcing some swift paw work to leap clear.

On the next try, they were able to lift it far enough to get their shoulders under it. Cats were not built for this stuff, for using their bodies like wedges. But they heaved, heaved again, and finally with their backs under it, the rest was kitten play. A last heave and the door fell backward onto the rafters. They flew cringing away, out of the sight of anyone below.

But they saw then why the door had given.

“We pulled the hasp out,” Joe said, amazed.

Dulcie stared at the softer wood where the hasp had pulled loose. Splinters had flicked off, scattering on the carpet below. When there was no sound, when the house remained as still as death itself, they crouched on the edge, looking down.

Below them down the dim hallway, they could see a living room at one end and next to it a kitchen. Along the hall were four narrow doors that probably led to a bath and three bedrooms. All the doors stood ajar. The rooms beyond were dark. The place reeked of stale air. They could see, inside the door to the farthest bedroom, stacks of newspapers and an unmade bed that even from this distance smelled of unwashed human. Glancing at Dulcie, Joe dropped the eight feet to the worn carpet, his heavy landing causing a muffled thunk. Dulcie, flehming at the smells, dropped down beside him, her legs and shoulders jolted by her landing. And, staring high above her at the attic crawl hole, which was now unreachable, she felt her courage drained away. Without a ladder or a tall piece of furniture, they were not going back out that way. And maybe, with the windows all boarded up, there was no other way out. Crouching on the
stained carpet, breathing in the stale smells, Dulcie was filled with the terror of being trapped, unable to escape, a feeling so debilitating that it turned the little tabby cold and weak.