Hangman's Root Read Free

house behind clumps of yaupon holly and cedar—a long, low brown-shingled ranch, part of which Dottie had built herself. When I stepped onto the porch, I woke a clutch of dozing cats. Samantha, Dottie's favorite black cat, got up to greet me with an amiable sniff. With Dottie, favorite is relative. She has hundreds of favorites.
    Dottie Riddle teaches at CTSU, where she's the only woman in the biology department. But when Dottie's name is mentioned, people don t think of her profession, they think of her passion: cats. Black cats, white cats, cats without tails, cats with fleas, mama cats with baby cats, any cats who need a home. For the past five or six years, Dottie has rescued as many cats as she could entice, trap, or trick into the cage she always carries in her Blazer, along with bags of cat food, feeding dishes, a net, and leather gloves. Until recently, she kept the animals in the house and in a small wire pen behind the garage until she could find homes for them. But there's a limit to the number of people in Pecan Springs who are willing to adopt a cat, and the extras keep adding up. When Dottie's mother died and left her some money, she built a spiffy new cattery, doing most of the work herself.
    I've known Dottie for a couple of years now, and I like her, but her obsession is a great enigma to me, a mysterious center I've never quite been able to plumb. Here she is—an intelligent, educated, liberated, and otherwise reasonable woman who lets stray animals dictate the terms of her life. I don't get it.
    But Ruby does. She told me the other day that Dottie's passion is just another version of the heart-to-heart connection that brings people alive. "Dottie's animals make her human," she said. "So stop trying to figure it out. Just appreciate it."
    So today, I was here to appreciate Dottie's all-new, world-class Cat Holiday Hilton, with all the amenities of a luxury feline resort. In honor of the occasion, I had brought pink champagne

    and lemon basil teacakes for the humans and a dozen catnip mice for the cats.
    Dottie answered my knock in a gray sweatshirt and paint-stained jeans, with tendrils of graying hair escaping under a red bandana. Dottie is big boned and muscular, with the look of a woman who isn't afraid to put her muscle to work. When she shifted the orange tabby she was holding from her right arm to her left and took my hand, the strength of her grip was impressive.
    "Glad you could come, China." Her voice was raspy from the cigarettes she smokes too much of the time. Her colleagues in the biology department, to a man, consider her strident and abrasive. But her students admire and respect her, even though she believes in calling an F an E They've voted her Best Science Teacher of the Year for so many years running that it's gotten to be an embarrassment to the rest of the faculty.
    I held up the champagne and the catnip. "Party time."
    Dottie's face is long and narrow, and her intense eyes signal an impatient, combative disposition. It's hard to tell because her normal expression is somewhere between a frown and a scowl, but it looked like she had something on her mind. She hefted the cat, which had just one ear. "Let me shoot Ariella and we'll see if we can find any clean glasses."
    Ariella (the name, I understand, means "Lioness of God") did not appear to object to being shot. Dottie sat down with the cat on her lap and deftly injected something under a fold of shoulder skin. Ariella jumped off her lap and padded purposefully in the direction of the kitchen.
    "Insulin," Dottie said, brandishing the empty syringe. "Ariel-la's diabetic."
    "Isn't that pretty expensive?" I asked.
    Dottie stood up. "Yeah. But she's a good friend. And a brave one. She lost that ear defending her last litter against a dog.

    Anyway, if I weren't spending the money on her, I'd be spending it on one of the others." She coughed. "Or on cigarettes."
    "I could say I told you so." For Christmas last year. Ruby and I went in