The Tell-Tail Heart: A Cat Cozy (Cattarina Mysteries) (2 page)

"Read! Read!" a man in the back
shouted. "Don't keep us waiting!"

Once the tavern settled, the gentleman who'd received
Eddie's paper spoke with solemnity. "The Glass Eye Killer has claimed a
second victim and a second trophy, striking terror in the hearts of
Philadelphians." He paused, continuing with a strained voice. "This
afternoon, fifty-two-year-old Eudora Tottham, wife of the Honorable Judge
Tottham, was found dead two blocks north of Logan Square. Her throat had been
cut, and her eye had been stripped of its prosthesis—a glass orb of excellent
quality."

"
Mein Gott!
" Josef said. "Another!"
He left his station at the bar and began wiping tables, all the while muttering
about "Caroline." I didn't know what a
Caroline
was, but it
troubled him.

The reader continued, "Mrs. Beckworth T.
Jones discovered the body behind Walsey's Dry Goods, at Wood and Nineteenth,
when she took a shortcut home. Why the murderer is amassing a collection of eyes
remains a mystery to Constable Harkness. The case is further hindered by lack
of witnesses. Until this madman is caught, all persons with prostheses are
urged to take special precaution."

I jumped from Hiram Abbott's path as he neared,
his strides long and brisk. "Let me see the picture," he said to the
portly gentleman. "I want to see the picture on page twelve. I
must
."

"I paid for it, sir. Kindly wait your
turn."

"Do you know who I am?" Mr. Abbott
asked. "I am Hiram Abbott, and I own acres and acres of farmland around
these parts."

The portly man faced him, their round bellies
almost touching. "Do you know who
I
am? Do you know how many coal
mines
I
own?" he replied.

I yawned. I didn't know either one of them, not
really. They jostled over the newspaper, bumping another drinker and pulling
him
into the argument. Three pair of shoes danced beneath the bar: dirty working boots,
dull patent slip-ons, and shabby evening shoes with a tattered sole. Fiddlesticks.
All this over ink and paper. Eddie turned and sipped his drink in peace, ignoring
the row.

"Watch it, you clumsy simpleton!" Mr.
Abbott yelled.

I wiggled my whiskers and held back an impending
sneeze. The men had stirred the dust on the floor, aggravating my allergies.

"Git back to your table, Abbott, or eat my fist!"
the man in boots said. Then he struck the bar. I needed no translation.

Nor did Mr. Abbott. He scurried to his seat, his
head low.

Now that the entertainment had ended, I returned
to my food search and discovered an object more intriguing—a curve of
thick white glass—near the heel of Eddie's shoe. It had seemingly
appeared from nowhere. My heart beat faster, railing against my ribcage.
Bump-bump,
bump-bump.
A regular at drinking establishments, I'd found numerous items
over the years. A button engraved with a mouse, a snippet of lace that smelled
more like a mouse than the button, and the thumb, just the thumb, mind you, of
a fur-lined mitten that tasted more like a mouse than the other two. But I'd
never found anything of this sort. It reminded me of a clamshell, but smaller.

I sniffed the item. A sharp odor struck my nose,
provoking the chain of sneezes I'd staved off earlier. The scent reminded me of
the medicine Sissy occasionally took. In retaliation, I batted the half-sphere along
the floorboards where it came to rest against the pair of working boots I'd
seen earlier. Their owner wore a short, hip-length coat and a flat cap—a
countrified costume. Mr. Shakey's alcohol must not have been to his liking, for
a flask stuck from the pocket of his coat. "The guv'ment's gonna make the
Trans-Allegheny a state one day," he said to the gentleman who'd won
Eddie's paper.

"It will never happen," the portly man
said. "Not as long as Tyler's in office."

"Tyler?" Eddie whispered. He kept his
back to the two, half-aware of their conversation, and spoke to himself.
"I should like to work for Tyler's men. I should like to…" He rubbed
his face. "Smith said he would appoint me. Promised he would."

The man in boots didn't bother with Eddie.
"You'll see," he said to the portly man. "One day we'll split. Then
there'll be no more scrapin' and bowin' to Virginia."

"Leave it to a border ruffian to talk
politics," he replied.

The man in boots thumbed his nose. "My
politics didn't bother you before, Mr. Uppity."

Humans typically followed
mister
and
miss
with a formal name. I'd learned that from Sissy when she called me Miss
Cattarina and from Josef when he addressed Eddie as Mister Poe, pronouncing it
meester
.
Muddy, too, had contributed to my education. Always the proper one, she
insisted on calling our neighbors Mister Balderdash and Miss Busybody, though
never to their faces. Out of respect, I surmised. At least now I knew the
older, fleshier gentleman's name.

"You think we need a Virginia
and
a
West of Virginia?" Mr. Uppity huffed. "Not hardly."

Weary of their jabber, I hit the lopsided ball again.
It spun and ricocheted off Eddie's heel. Then I wiggled my hind end and…pounced!
When the object surrendered, I sat back to study its curves. It studied me in
return with a sky-colored iris. I thought back to the picture Eddie had showed
me in the paper and the word he'd uttered—
murder
. The rest of the
tavern had certainly used up the subject. And while details of the crime hovered
beyond my linguistic reach, I knew my toy was connected. If not, some other numskull
had lost his eye. Either way, humans were much too cavalier with their body
parts.

The Three-Eyed Cat

I
spent the rest of the
evening nesting my glass eye like a hen, worried that the person who lost it
might come looking for it with their other eye. I'd never owned such a toy, and
I didn't want to return it. When Eddie had finished "refreshing"
himself—he could charm only so many drinks from so many people—the
three of us left Shakey House: me, Eddie, and the unblinking pearl. Luckily, no
one saw me depart with the prize between my teeth, not even Eddie.

We stood on the sidewalk in front of the shuttered
bakery. Though I'd been blessed with a long coat, it withered against the
autumn air. Eddie, however, seemed impervious to the cold. He whipped his cloak
over his shoulder with a flourish and rubbed his hands together.

"Exquisite evening, Catters," he said.
He took three steps forward and stumbled into a sidewalk sign, righting himself
with the aid of a lamppost. "Let's tour the Schuylkill on our way home."
He hiccupped. "A walk down memory lane?"

Had I not been carrying something in my mouth, I
would've bit him. That's where Eddie and I met, on the boat docks near the
Schuylkill River. I found him there one evening, his cloak inside out, his
boots unlaced, staggering too close to the water's edge. While I'd seen humans
swim before, they usually undertook such irrational activities during daylight
and when they had full command of their faculties. Fearing for his safety, I
called out to him—a sharp meow to cut through his confusion—and
lured him from certain death. Once I'd seen him home, he insisted I stay for
dinner. How could I refuse a plate of shad? Two autumns later, Eddie was still
in my care, an arrangement that both complicated and enriched my life more than
a litter of eight.

I nudged him forward and herded him down
Callowhill, switching back and forth across his path to keep him from veering
into the street and getting hit by a wayward carriage or breaking his ankle on
the cobblestones. At the intersection of Nixon, we passed two girls dressed in
striped cotton dresses—a garish print, but terribly in fashion—huddled
near a milliner's door. They were trying without success to lock up for the
evening.

"Good evening," Eddie said to them. He
nodded and swayed to the left.

They giggled and rustled their skirts in the
moonlight. But when they looked at the bobble between my teeth, they screamed and
left in a flounce of fabric. It didn't help that I'd begun to drip at the
mouth. Carrying the object these last few blocks had provoked a salivary response
that soaked my chin.

"I assure you, I bathed last week!" he
called out. Visibly perplexed by their behavior, he watched them depart. "Strange,
Catters. I usually scare"—he hiccupped—"frighten women
with my tales, not my appearance. Sissy says I'm quite handsome."

We voyaged on, Eddie's sideways gait growing
increasingly slanted, until we bumped into husband and wife just this side of
the railroad crossing. The man shook his fist and instructed Eddie to "steer
clear of the missus." I thought the misstep might lead to a row, but the
wife's piggish squealing put an end to my concern.

"Your cat!" she cried.

"Yes, my cat," Eddie said. "What
of her? One tail, two ears, four feet."

The woman wiggled a fat finger at me. "And
three…three…" She melted into her husband's arms in a dead faint, her
bonnet fluttering to the sidewalk.

I needed no enticement to leave. I bolted, the
eyeball still between my teeth, and dashed along the railroad tracks. North of Coates
Street, cobblestone boulevards gave way to the dirt roads of Fairmount, our
neighborhood. Split-rail fences divided the land into boxes, some of which had
been filled with dozing sheep and the odd cow. Unlike Eddie, I could cut through
whichever I liked and did so to reach home well ahead of him. Lamplight spilled
from the bottom-floor windows of our brick row house—a lackluster dwelling
set apart by green shutters—cheering me immeasurably. My companion arrived
shortly after, his cloak flapping about his shoulders. Out of breath, we tumbled
through the front door and into the warm kitchen, heated through by a wood
stove. The smell of mutton and of brown bread welcomed us.

Old Muddy stood by the stove, stirring a pot of stew,
the fringe of her white cap wilted by the steam. "And where have you been?"
she asked.

"Frightening the public, as is my duty."
Eddie cast off his cloak and draped it over a dining chair.

I hopped on the woolen fabric and ignored the
ache in my jaw while I decided where to hide my treasure. The closet beneath
the stairs?

"Have you been drinking?" she asked
him.

Eddie held onto the chair back for support. "I
am as straight as judges."

"Humph. Sissy and I expected you an hour
ago," Muddy said to us. "The stew's nearly boiled dry and—"
She pointed her spoon at me, broth dripping to the floor, and shrank against
the wall. "Ahhhh! The cat! The cat!"

Sobered by his mother-in-law's reaction, Eddie
knelt and examined me for the first time since we left Shakey House. "Oh,
Jupiter!" He fell back in shock, one hand on his chest.

Sissy, an embodiment of feline grace, glided
into the room. Her complexion had grown whiter in recent days, giving her the
pallor of a corpse. While I feared for her health, I hadn't yet revealed my
concern to Eddie. He wasn't ready. "What have we here, Miss Cattarina?"
She bent down, plucked the object from my mouth, and examined it with eyes
large and dark. A kitten's eyes.

Eddie and Muddy joined her. The three huddled
around the shiny half-orb that lay on her palm. Sissy leaned closer for examination,
swaying the lampblack curls that hung on either side of her ears.

"It's an eye," Muddy said. She
squinted one of her own, deepening her wrinkles.

"Of course it's an eye, Mother," Sissy
said. "The bigger question is, 'where did it come from?'"

"Astute as ever, my darling," Eddie
said to Sissy. "But the even bigger conundrum is '
whom
did it come
from?'"

"Quite right," Sissy said. "Quite
right."

Eddie stroked his mustache. "It has to be
from the poor woman found…deceased this afternoon, Eudora Tottham."

Muddy gasped. "The one in the paper? You
don't think—"

"I do," Eddie said.

Sissy blinked, her confusion evident. I blinked,
too.