Cat Cross Their Graves Read Free Page A

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 thestatic 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 thecourage 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.

2
    W hen 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