Рита Браун - Cat's Eyewitness

"It's so expensive. There's no way the staff at Augusta Medical is going to put a, shall we say, ripe corpse in the MRI machine and then use it for a live patient. And there's no way the county can afford an MRI for the dead. The price for this procedure on one corpse is about four thousand dollars."

"Four thousand dollars," Harry gasped. "I could put up a three-board fence in one paddock for that!"

"Oak or treated pine?" Mary asked, blue eyes twinkling.

As they were all country women, they were keenly aware of such costs. The fluctuations in lumber prices affected them a great deal.

"But don't you find it odd, no autopsy?"

"No. As a doctor, I would like to know the exact cause of each death, but for many family members, the procedure upsets them. They think it violates their loved ones, and I can understand that although I don't agree. When the soul leaves the body, that's that. Use the body to learn. I see Brother Andrew and Brother John at the Health Co-op"—she named a clinic for the poor—"and they feel the same way. In this case, the autopsy would need to be requested by Susan."

"Susan feels he should rest in peace." Alicia happily ate her eggs, sunny-side up.

"Harry, why are you obsessing about this?" BoomBoom figured she knew the answer but asked anyway.

"Well, what if he didn't die of natural causes?"

"I knew it!" BoomBoom triumphantly said. "Harry, you see a murderer behind every bush, I swear."

16

Arrogant twit." Pewter, her low opinion of all fowl confirmed, had been listening to Tucker recount her conversation with the cardinal.

Mrs. Murphy listened to the cherry logs crackle in the living-room fireplace as she reposed on the wing chair facing the old mantel with Wedgwood inserts. Pewter faced her in the other wing chair while Tucker had plopped in front of the fire.

Harry, at that moment, was opening a can of asparagus. Since she was in the kitchen she missed the conversation—not that she could have understood any of it, but she did listen when her animals spoke. From time to time, she grasped a bit of what they tried to convey to her. She hadn't gone into the basement or she would have instantly grasped the fury both cats wished to convey. They had turned their spite at being left behind on the fifty-pound bags of thistle and wild birdseed Harry stored there. With the bottoms neatly torn open, the tiny seeds spread over the concrete floor, long tendrils of edibles. Satisfied with the mess, the two returned upstairs to await Harry and Tucker.

"Brother Thomas knocked off his perch," Tucker said.

"Birdbrain," Pewter added.

"Brother Thomas, or are you still referring to the cardinal?" Mrs. Murphy sat up to stretch.

"Both," Pewter succinctly replied.

"That's mean, Pewts," Tucker said. "Brother Thomas wasn't a birdbrain."

"Well, he was stupid enough to pray in that bitter cold and blinding snow and then get choked to death or strangled." Pewter, despite her thick gray fur, hated cold.

"He wasn't strangled. The cardinal said a monk put his hand over Brother Thomas's mouth; he saw it through the blowing snow."

"Mmm, if he was strangled it would have shown. Apart from the marks on his neck, his eyeballs would have been bloodshot." Mrs. Murphy, having killed many a mouse and mole, although never by strangulation, had a sense of what happened according to type of death. And being a cat, she didn't shy from this as a human might.

"Could have covered up the marks with makeup," Pewter thought out loud.

"Not really. There's nothing anyone could have done about his eyeballs. Whatever was done to him worked quickly. Remember, too, he didn't fall over. He stayed kneeling, with his hands resting on the boulder base." Mrs. Murphy was becoming intrigued by this strange death.

"Probably half frozen already," Pewter saucily tossed off.

"Maybe so, maybe so." Tucker moved a foot away from the fire, since she was getting hot.

"Does the cardinal live near the statue?" Mrs. Murphy asked.

"On the ravine side. Lots of bushes and enough open spaces, too, to keep him and his mate happy. That whole place is full of birds."

"Birds stink." Pewter made a face.

"Chickens, turkeys, and ducks stink if they're in pens. Wild birds aren't so bad," Mrs. Murphy replied.

"You can smell them, though," Pewter replied.

"We can smell them. Humans can't. Humans can only smell a hen house." Tucker couldn't understand how any animal could live without a highly developed sense of smell.

"Smoking," Pewter said.

"Doesn't help them, but they aren't born with good noses. Look how tiny their noses are. Can't warm up air in that." Tucker laughed.

"Yeah, but look how tiny our noses are and we have excellent olfactory powers." Mrs. Murphy gave Tucker pride of place in the scenting department, but feline powers were very good. "It's their receptors—they don't have many. Nothing they can do about it."

"Harry uses her nose a lot for a human." Tucker studied Harry. "I think it's because she pays close attention to what's going on around her, so even though she doesn't have the equipment we have, she catches scent before other humans."

"She ought to pay attention to what's going on inside her," Pewter complained, as Tucker had filled in her friends concerning Fair's deadline.

"Not her way" Mrs. Murphy accepted Harry as she was. The cat had learned a long time ago that she couldn't change anyone. She didn't have much desire to change Harry, who was, after all, a less evolved species than herself. If she could change one thing, though, it would be to improve Harry's ability to understand the cats and dog. "She hasn't told Susan or Miranda about her Thanksgiving talk with Fair. Who knows when she'll work herself up to that?"

Tucker switched back to the statue. "The cardinal said the blood smelled coppery, which it does, you know."

"Very odd." Mrs. Murphy sat straight up with both paws in front of her like an Egyptian cat statue.

"Why kill Brother Thomas? "Tucker hated all this.

"Maybe his murder has something to do with his life before becoming a monk," Pewter sensibly replied.

"Brother Thomas took his vows before most of the other monks were born." Mrs. Murphy heard the refrigerator door open and close. "Who would even know about his life before he became a Greyfriar?"

"Maybe he molested boys and they've killed him." Pewter knew about the troubles in the Catholic Church.

"How? They hardly ever see boys and girls up there, unless a parent brings a child into one of the shops. It's not a destination for kids." Mrs. Murphy kept an ear tuned to the kitchen. "The only monks who see kids are the two doctor monks, and I could be wrong but I'd bet you ten field mice there's no way either Brother Andrew or Brother John would be abusing children."

"Maybe they're abusing one another." Pewter relished the sex angle.

"If they are, who would care?" Tucker began listening to the kitchen, too.

"I would!" Pewter stoutly replied.

"No one's abusing you, Pewter." Mrs. Murphy laughed.

"If I were a monk, I'd care."

"Those are grown men. They can defend themselves." Mrs. Murphy didn't believe sex was the issue.

"Not if two ganged up on you."

"She's right about that," Tucker agreed with the gray kitty, "but it does seem unlikely."

"So does murder," Pewter fired back.

"True enough." Mrs. Murphy half-closed her eyes.

"It's either something Brother Thomas did way back when before he was a monk that's caught up with him, you know, like 'vengeance is mine'—" Tucker, having listened to the Bible-quoting Miranda for years, cited this brief sentence fragment from Deuteronomy Chapter 32, Verse 35.

"Or he knew something, something big." The tiger cat suddenly shot off the wing chair and raced into the kitchen.