Shirley Murphy: Cat Cross Their Graves

Settling into Otter Pine Inn for the holiday, visiting with their friend Patty Rose, the kit had every possible luxury-her own cushioned window seat, her own hand-painted Dalton china dinner service, and anything at all that she cared to order from the inn's gourmet kitchen or from attentive waiters on the dining patio. Now, twitching an ear, she listened harder. Had she heard, on the instant of waking, angry human voices?

Below, the bar's lights went brighter, and three yawning couples emerged, maybe the last customers, heading for their rooms. Molena Point was not a late-hour town; even the tourists turned in early, many to rise at dawn for a walk with their dogs or a run along the white-sand beach. The shore in the morning was overrun with wet, sandy dogs running insanely and barking at nothing.

Now in the bar, the lights blazed and she could see the waiters starting to clean up, wiping the tables; the cleaning staff would arrive soon to sweep and scrub. The smell of rain came sharply through a thin crack around the side of her window. She could hear voices now, hushed and angry, an argument from somewhere beyond the dining room. Maybe from the stairs that led down to the parking garage? She hated that garage; the vast concrete basement made her shiver with unease; she didn't like to go there. When she was little she had thought that caves and caverns were wonderful places, peopled with amazing and mythical beings. Now those grim, echoing hollows frightened her. Angrier and louder the voices came, though maybe too faint for a human to hear. Burning with curiosity and a strange sense of dread, she pressed at the glass of the side window with an impatient paw until it opened.

Yes, a man and a woman arguing. She didn't recognize the man, but the woman was Patty Rose; she had never heard Patty so angry. Impatiently Kit pushed against the screen. The way the echoes bounced and fell, she thought they were on the stairwell down to the garage, their words deflected by the inn's plastered walls. Patty's tone was hot and accusing, but the way the man was snapping back, Kit could make no sense of their words. She was pawing at the screen's latch when three sharp reports barked between the walls, echoing and reverberating across the patio. Slashing hard down the screen, she ripped a jagged hole.

Behind her she heard Lucinda thump out of bed. Before the agile old lady could stop her, Kit forced through the screen tearing out hanks of her fur and dropped to the second-floor balcony. Below her, doors banged open, people were running and shouting. She heard a tiny click as Lucinda snatched up the bedside phone, heard Lucinda alert the dispatcher as, likely, a dozen people were trying to do.

"Three shots, that's all I know," Lucinda said as Kit slipped beneath the rail. "Yes, shots, my dear," the old woman said testily. "That was not a backfire. I know gunshots when I hear them. And there was no smallest sound of a car engine."

Kit dropped onto the back of a bench and into a bed of cyclamens. Racing across the brick walk and through the taller flowers, she listened for the shooter running, but all she heard was her own fur brushing through the foliage. As she skirted a bed of geraniums, her nose tingled at the flowers' smell where she crushed them.

Strange, the stairwell that led down to the parking garage was dark, the little lights along the steps had been turned off. As she reached the top of the stairs, she heard running below, the faintest footsteps fast descending: soft shoes heading for the parking basement. She caught a whiff of geranium mixed with the sharp iron smell of blood, heard the squeak of rubber soles on concrete.

On the dark stairs, a body lay sprawled head down. Staring at the mutilated woman, Kit glimpsed, far below, a running shadow disappear through blackness into the garage. But Kit's attention, her whole being, was centered on the dead woman.

Patty Rose lay tumbled, unnaturally twisted down the concrete steps, her white silk dressing gown slick with blood. Her face was turned away but was reflected in the steel hood of the recessed light: bloody, distorted. The smell of blood filled Kit's nose; she could taste the heavy smell. Sirens screamed closer, muffled by the wind and by the walls of the buildings. Heart pounding, she crept down the steps to Patty. The sirens grew louder, coming fast. Trying not to look at Patty's poor torn face, Kit reached out her nose searching for breath. And knowing there would be none. Police cars careened around the building, slamming on their brakes. Then silence. Car doors slammed and the night was filled with the static of police radios, with the dispatcher's voice, with footsteps pounding across the patio above her, cops running down the stairs; and Kit ran, pelting down into darkness.

Crouched far down the steps in blackness, she smelled Patty's blood as strong as if it was on her own whiskers. Her tail was between her legs, her whole being felt shrunken.

Patty Rose had held Kit on her lap and loved and petted her, Patty had shared tea with her and fed her bits of shortbread all buttery warm, Patty had talked so softly to her. This kind woman had talked and talked to her and had never known that Kit could have answered her.

That seemed terrible now, that Patty had never known. Patty Rose would have been thrilled. Kit wished she could talk to her now, that she could tell Patty she loved her.

Below her she heard another scuffle of footsteps near the door to the parking garage, a faint squeak as of rubber soles on concrete, and then, from the far side of the garage, the cops surging down the two ramps and inside. Kit stood on the dark steps alone, heartbroken and shivering.

Oh, she longed for Joe Grey and Dulcie to be there with her, for the strength of the big gray tomcat and for tabby Dulcie's mothering. She knew she was nearly a full-grown cat, but right now all she wanted was to push close between the two bigger cats, like a lost kitten.

Joe Grey and Dulcie, and their human friends, had cared for Kit ever since she left the wild bunch she had run with. Always picked on, she hadn't had the courage to leave until she met Joe and Dulcie, and Lucinda and Pedric. Oh, then her life had so changed. To find two speaking cats like herself, and to find humans who understood-that had been an amazing time.

But right now this minute, she ached just to feel Dulcie's nose against her ear, to hear Dulcie and Joe Grey tell her that everything would be all right-she longed, most of all, for this terrible thing to have never happened, for Patty Rose to be alive and unharmed.

Above her, two medics knelt over Patty's poor bloody body. Kit's nose was sour with the smell of death. Far below, she could hear the faint scuffs and voices as the officers searched. Strange, she'd heard no car screeching out to escape. Was the killer hidden among the parked cars or under them? Or ducked down in a car, thinking the cops would miss him? She imagined him creeping out later through the confusion of police cars and rescue vehicles and somehow eluding them. Was that possible? Oh, the officers would find him, they must find him!

But if they didn't catch him, Kit thought… she knew something about that man that the law didn't know.

Racing down, she hit the bottom step and fled into the garage dodging a confusion of swinging spotlights, the officers' torches burning leaping paths through the blackness. Crouching in shadow under a small black car, she listened, paws slick with sweat.

At last she began to creep along between the cars, scenting the concrete, seeking the smell of crushed geranium-and listening for the sound of softer shoes slipping away accompanied by that telltale little squeak, that chirp of rubber against concrete.

When sirens careening through the night woke the village, the most curious or adventuresome residents threw on whatever clothes were handy and followed, running through the streets to form an unwanted crowd, so many unruly onlookers that they had to be forcibly kept in check by half a dozen busy officers; the more considerate folk sat by their open windows tuning their radios to the local station, or stood in their miniscule front gardens asking their neighbors what was happening.