Shirley Murphy - Cat Cross Their Graves

She prowled the windowsills peering out at the solidly nailed plywood. She checked the bathroom and kitchen windows again, then approached a door at the end of the kitchen that must lead to the garage. Sniffing underneath, she breathed in the damp smell of sour, musty boxes and old clothes. Leaping at the knob, she swung and kicked.

Beneath her swinging weight, the knob turned. She kicked against the molding and, to her amazement, the door swung into the room, creaking with rusty complaint, carrying her with it. Not locked at all! Jack had grown careless since Lori ran away. Dropping down, she leaped down the two steps into the garage, into the musty stink.

The concrete floor was icy beneath her paws. She considered the smelly boxes piled against the walls, with their contents spilling out. Atop one box lay an abandoned toaster and an old hot plate caked with grease. Leaping onto the workbench among a clutter of string and rope, three six-packs of beer, and scattered tools, she reared up to paw at the window with its new glass.

It was locked, as well as nailed shut. She dropped down to the floor again and studied the side door, but it was secured by a dead bolt, she could see the metal through the crack. Staring above her, she considered the electric garage-door opener that was mounted on the center of the ceiling. The usual small metal box with its long metal track. Lori said Jack had disconnected it.

Now that Lori was gone, was it working again? Had he reconnected it, after Lori left? But why would he? It wasn't like he could park in there. Caught apparently in deep depression or something worse, why would he even remember the garage door?

Just below the light switch beside the inner door was the little button that should operate the mechanism. No trick at all, with the cardboard boxes piled against the wall, to reach the button and press it. Leaping atop the stacked boxes, she crouched until they stopped teetering, then pressed.

Nothing. Not even a click to indicate a flow of electricity. She pressed the button three more times, bruising her paw. She was about to drop down again when she thought to scan the ceiling directly above her.

And there it was, in the smooth ceiling. A second attic door, leading to the space above the garage, a rectangle of plywood set into a wooden molding.

The other attic door had been loose, Jack Reed knew Lori couldn't get out through the attic, so why would he nail this one shut? And she could see no new nails at the edges. Maybe Reed had even taken cruel pleasure in imagining Lori climbing unsteadily up onto the flimsy cardboard boxes, reaching up, straining to move the plywood and climb through-only to discover that the crawl space led nowhere. That, after searching among the dark and the spiders, there was, after all, no way out. And Dulcie hated Jack Reed. If he had appeared before her just now, she would have leaped in his face clawing and biting.

Instead, she leaped up as powerfully as she could, striking the door with her front paws. She felt it give before she dropped back, and she saw a little line of unpainted wood where it had shifted position. She leaped again, and again it moved, leaving a wider crack. Apparently this one had no hinges. Crouched atop the musty boxes, waiting for her skipping heart to slow, she leaped and pushed it one more time, opening a crack as big as her paw.

Certain that they could get through, she dropped down again, feeling relieved and smug, and returned to find Joe.

He was still in Jack Reed's bedroom, pawing into the stacks of newspapers and paperback books and catalogs. She knew better than to ask what he was looking for; neither cat knew. Glancing at Joe, she padded past him to search through a pile of Reed's folded jeans, patting at the pockets and slipping her paw in.

All the pockets were empty. Together they searched Jack's dresser drawers, working as efficiently as any pair of thieves, then investigated the high closet shelf. They snooped along in the dark beneath Jack's hanging clothes and prowled among his shoes and heavy work boots. They searched under the bed among the dust mice and peered up at the cheap flat bedsprings, poking their paws in among them. They found nothing. Coming out again to study the electric plugs above the baseboards, they reared up to sniff at those possible hiding places. The lack of opposing thumbs, their inability to use a screwdriver to remove a switch plate or pry off a fascia board, was maddening. In their attempt to detect some hollowed-out secret cache, and not knowing what kind of evidence they were looking for, they could only sniff those suspicious areas and thump them with a paw, listening to the faint, empty echo.

But a cache of what? Drugs? Weapons? What were they looking for? If Jack had killed his brother, he hadn't taken much care with Hal's billfold and belt and ring. Why would he be careful about hiding anything else? Moving on to Lori's dark little room, with its one small, boarded-up window, again Dulcie imagined Lori as a prisoner there, locked inside her own house. She imagined the child curled up on her bed reading the fairy tales that stood on her bookshelf. Perhaps in her imagination trying to invent an exciting adventure story to cloak her father's mistreatment.

Except that Lori, despite her love of fantasy, or perhaps because of it, was at heart a true realist.

Feeling enraged for and weepy about Lori, she watched Joe fight open the top drawer of the little chest. Leaping onto the chest to look, she waited while he opened each of the three drawers in turn. The first yielded only the child's tattered T-shirts, some little socks, one with a hole in the heel, and two pairs of jeans so small that Lori must long ago have outgrown them. The other two drawers offered little more. A nightie, a heavy sweater, some spelling and arithmetic papers that were graded A or B.

But then in the bookcase, on the bottom shelf beneath a stack of oversize picture books, three shoe boxes were lined up. Nosing the books aside, they pawed the lids off.

The first held an old rag doll, a tiny battered teddy bear no bigger than a newborn kitten, and the picture of a woman who was surely Lori's mother. Natalie Reed, it said on the back. She had dark brown hair like her daughter, and the same huge dark eyes. Beneath the picture, wrapped with tissue paper, were a faded cotton apron printed with blue flowers and a dime-store strand of pearls with a flimsy bit of bent wire for a clasp. Was this Natalie's legacy to her daughter? Was this all that Lori had left from Natalie Reed's life?

But Lori herself was Natalie's legacy. In Lori, Natalie Reed had created, with her love and caring and teaching, a treasure of great value, a treasure to be cherished.

In the second box was a small album, the kind with old-fashioned black pages. Joe, lifting the pages one at a time with his claws, adeptly flipped them. Pausing before four photographs arranged on a single page, he let out a chittering hunting cry, raucous and loud. His yellow eyes had grown huge, his muscled crouch over the pictures as predatory as a stalking lion. "Voila, Dulcie! Look at this! Wait until Harper and Garza see this!" He stared at her, all sparks and fire, his paw pressing on the page. "Talk about the heart of the matter! Talk about cracking the case!" Shifting from paw to paw, the tomcat rumbled with crazy purrs. "I think," Joe said, hardly able to be still, "I think we just cracked both cases!"

The minute the weather cleared, Ryan's building crew began to work again on the Harpers' new living room, leaving Charlie and young Dillon finishing up Charlie's studio. Having installed and mudded the drywall, Charlie couldn't wait to paint the walls and move into her new space.