"Cat Seeing Double" - читать интересную книгу автора (Murphy Shirley Rousseau)
3
 |
At first, no one saw the lone witness. Not even Joe Grey and Dulcie, crouched high among the branches of the lemon tree, saw the tortoiseshell cat on the rooftops across the street. The two older cats had no glimpse of the tattercoat kit hunched on the dark shingles hidden beneath the overhanging oak branches; they had no hint of the panic that would, in a moment, course through the kit's small, tensed body.
The community church was set well back from the street within its garden of flowering shrubs and small decorative trees. The nonsectarian meeting rooms of the one-story Mediterranean building were employed for all manner of village functions besides church services, from political discussions to author readings. The kit had hung around the church all morning watching the cleaning crew performing a last polish and setting up buffet tables on the back patio; and she had watched masses of white flowers being delivered and arranged within the largest meeting room. Only when the wedding guests began to arrive had she trotted across the narrow residential street, to be out of the way of sharp-heeled party shoes and the hard black oxfords of the many uniformed officers. Swarming up a jasmine trellis to the roof of a brown clapboard cottage, she had stretched out where an oak tree's shadows darkened the weathered shingles. Here, she had the best seat of all, with a clear view across the garden and through the wide glass doors to the lectern where the bride and groom would stand, exchanging their sacred vows.
She had watched Charlie and Wilma arrive, Wilma carrying the bridal dress in a long plastic bag and Charlie carrying a small suitcase. What a lot of preparation it took for humans to get married, nothing like the casual trysting of the feral cats she had run with when she was small. The two women entered the south wing of the church through a back door, where the bride would have a private office in which to dress. The kit was watching the growing crowd when, below her, the bushes stirred with a sharp rustle, and a man spoke.
He must be standing between the close-set houses. The timbre of his gravelly voice suggested he was old. He sounded bad-tempered. "Go on. Boy. Get your ass up there, you haven't got all day."
No one answered, but someone began to climb the trellis, slowly approaching the roof. The kit could hear me little crosspieces creak under a hesitant weight. Padding warily away across the shingles, she crouched beneath overhanging branches out of sight, where she could see.
A young boy was climbing up. A thin dirty boy with ragged shirt and torn jeans, his face smudged, but pale beneath the dark smears. His black eyes were oblique and hard, his hands brown with dirt. One pocket bulged as if maybe he'd stuffed a candy bar in it, fortification against sudden hunger. The kit knew that feeling.
Peering over, she studied the man who stood below. He was equally ragged, his faded jeans stained, his face bristling with a grizzled beard, his gray hair hanging long around his shoulders. Both man and boy stunk of sharp scents that made the kit's nose burn. The boy had gained the roof. He didn't swing up onto it, but stopped at the edge, turning to look down.
"Go
"I don't…"
"Just lie under the branches, no one'll see you. Wait till Harper's in there and the girl and them cops, then punch it and get out. I'll be gone like I told you, the truck gone. You just slip away, no one'll see you."
Clinging in the vines, the boy looked both determined and scared, like a cornered rat, the kit thought, trapped in a tin can with nowhere to run.
"Just punch it, Curtis. Your dad's in jail because of them cops."
Swinging a leg over, the boy gained the roof, crouching near the kit beneath the oak branches. She didn't think he saw her, he seemed totally centered on finding a vantage where he would be hidden but could best see the church.
When he'd chosen his place he removed from his pocket a small smooth object like a tiny radio, and laid it on the shingles beside him. The kit puzzled over it for some time before she understood what it was, this small, plastic, boxlike thing that the boy could hide in one hand. Wilma had one, and so did Clyde. And the old man's voice echoed,
What else could a garage-door opener do, the kit wondered, besides open the door for which it was intended? With its little battery inside, its little electrical battery, what could it do?
All the wonders of electrical things that had so astonished the kit when she first came to live among humans: the dishwasher, the refrigerator, the warmth of an electric blanket, the magical lifting of the garage door while Wilma was still in the car, its signal leaping from that opener-its electrical signal leaping…
She remembered cop talk about triggering devices. She stared across the street into the church where someone had left a gift for the bride and groom, a silver-wrapped package tucked down into the lectern where Charlie and Max Harper would stand to be married. She had seen it earlier as she watched the workers, had thought it was a special present hidden just where the preacher would stand, where the bride and groom would stand, a gift all silver-wrapped with little silver bells on the ribbon…
A special present…
She might be wrong. The boy's actions might be innocent. But…
Before he hit the ground she dropped clear and ran flashing across the street between cars…
There… there was Clyde hurrying out of the church toward his car as if he had forgotten something. As he leaned into the open convertible, reaching, she leaped to his back nearly shouting in his ear, only remembering at the last instant to whisper…
"Bomb, Clyde. There's a bomb in the church in that oak stand, in the lectern. A boy on the roof… garage door opener to set it off… tell them to run, all to run… I chased him, but…" And she bailed to the ground again and was gone, racing back across the street causing Clyde to shout after her. The street was thick with cars letting people off.
But then seeing her appear at the far side and swarm up a tree to the rooftops, he spun away, never questioning the kit's warning. Not daring to question, not this small cat. Never daring to question her any more than he would question Joe Grey…
Moments earlier, Dulcie had been licking blood from her paw where she'd cut herself on a thorn of the lemon tree. She sat among the branches licking at her pad and looking across the garden into the church, admiring the big meeting room with its high, dark-raftered ceiling and white plastered walls and its two long rows of glass doors looking out on the front and back gardens. Vases of white flowers were massed at both ends of the room, and someone had tucked a gift down inside the lectern. She could see a corner of the silver paper, maybe something special to be presented at the ceremony, though that did seem odd.
Imagining the ritual of the wedding, she was filled with purring happiness. No matter what ugliness might happen elsewhere in the world, no matter what hideous events occurred outside their own small village, here, today, human love ruled.
Behind her Joe Grey hissed, "What's she doing?"
She turned on the branch, never doubting from Joe's distraught tone that he was talking about the kit, this kit to whom disaster clung like needles to a magnet.
He was staring across the street at a dark-shingled roof. Dulcie could just see the kit crouched on the edge of the roof beneath overhanging branches.
There was a boy on the roof. The kit watched him intently, rigid with anger-and the next instant she leaped, clawing the boy and raking him. He swatted at her and ran. The kit rode his back, scratching and biting, forcing the boy off the roof, riding him down then leaping away to race across the street.
The kit hit Clyde, flying up clinging to his shoulder. They could see her poke her nose at his ear, whispering… lashing her tail and whispering…
In the church office provided for her use, the bride dressed slowly and carefully in her simple linen gown, trying not to fall apart with nerves. In the mirror her freckles looked as dark as paint splatters across her pale cheeks.
Charlie's kinky red hair was pulled back and smoothed, as much as it could be smoothed, into a handsome chignon and clipped with a carved ivory barrette loaned to her by her aunt Wilma. Wilma, tall and slim and white-haired, stood behind Charlie buttoning her dress. The starched-lace wedding veil and crown of white flowers sat on a little stand, on the office desk.
For something blue, Charlie wore blue panties and bra printed with white roses, a private joke between her and Max. Over this, a white lace half-slip and camisole. The "something old" was her mother's wedding ring, one of the few mementos she had from her dead parents. The
She was no child bride. At thirty-something she had almost abandoned the idea of falling truly in love and being married. Now that it was happening, and seeming so inevitable, she felt as if she had stepped into a different world and different time, or maybe stepped into someone else's life.
For a while she'd thought Clyde was the one, and that they might marry, but she'd never had this totally lost and committed and ecstatic feeling with Clyde. She and Clyde had ended up no more than good friends, the best of friends. Her feeling for Max was totally different. Her love for Max was the kind of nervous oneness that
"Is that a tear?" Wilma said, watching Charlie in the mirror. Wilma was dressed in a long, pale blue shift, her gray-white hair done in a bun bound low at her neck.
"Of course it's not a tear. I'm not the weeping sort. Steady as a rock." She knew she'd have to get over her fear for Max, that a cop's wife couldn't live like that or she would perish; but right now it was all she could do to keep herself together and get to the altar with Wilma's help and not collapse in a fit of uncontrollable nerves.
"You're not steady at all. Are you this nervous on the firing range?"
"I'm not on the firing range. I'm getting married." She stared at her aunt. "This
Wilma hugged her and smoothed Charlie's hair. "It's different when you're marrying someone like Max Harper. You're having a perfectly normal case of nerves. And maybe second thoughts?" She held Charlie away, looking deeply at her, then grinned. "A simple case of premarital hysteria. I expect Max is having the same. You'll be fine."
"Not second thoughts. Not ever. It's just that… If I worried about him before, what will it be like after we're married?"
"He's sharp enough to have lasted this long," Wilma said brusquely. "If something were to happen… just give him everything you can. Just fill what time he has-what time we all have. You
Wilma looked deeply at her. "You know what to do-you prepare as best you can for the bad times- then live every moment with joy." She touched Charlie's cheek. "Law enforcement and protecting others, that is his life, Charlie. You can't change what he wants from his life."
"And there's Clyde," Charlie said, her perverse mind wanting to dredge up every vague cause for unease. "No matter what he says, I feel…"
"Guilty."
"As if I dumped him. But he…"
"Not to worry," Wilma said. "Not only is he bringing Ryan Flannery to the wedding, he's still pursuing Kate Osborne, trying to get her to move back down from San Francisco. I don't think with two women to sort out, trying to pay attention to both, that Clyde is going to spend much time grieving."
"Well, that's not very flattering," Charlie said, grinning. She smoothed the tendrils of her hair that would keep slipping out from the carefully arranged chignon.
"Quit fussing. You look like an angel, a curly-haired, redheaded angel. Now hold still and let me finish fastening. Where are your shoes? You didn't forget your shoes?"
"On the desk. Now who's fussing?"
"It isn't every day my only niece gets married-my only family." Turning to fetch the shoes, Wilma moved to the window and slid the drapery back a few inches to look out into the garden where their friends were gathering. The afternoon was bright and serene. "What a lovely crowd. And people still arriving. Even…" Wilma held out her hand. "Come and look."
They stood together peering out, two tall, slim women, the family resemblance clear in their strongly sculpted faces. "Look in the lemon tree. Two of your most ardent admirers, all sleeked up for the occasion."
They could just see Joe Grey and Dulcie peering out from among the leaves, watching something across the street, Joe's white paws bright among the shadows, Dulcie's brown tabby stripes blending into the tree's foliage so she was hardly visible.
"What are they up to?" Charlie said. "They look…"
"They're not up to anything, they're waiting to see you and Max married. They have a perfect view, they'll be able to see, above the crowd, right in through the glass doors."
"Where's the kit?"
"I don't see her, but you can bet she won't miss this ceremony."
Charlie turned from the window, reaching for her veil. Wilma, watching her, thought that her niece seemed as close to an angel as it was possible for a flesh-and-blood person to look. She willed the day to be perfect, without a flaw, a golden day for Charlie and Max, with not a thing to spoil it. Charlie was fussing with her veil when the door flew open and Max burst in grabbing her, pushing her toward the door and reaching to Wilma. "Get out!
Wilma grabbed Charlie, pulling her away as Charlie tried to follow Max into the garden. Charlie turned on her with rage. "Let me go. Let me go! I can help."
Max spun back, grabbing her shoulders. "Go now! Get the hell out of here!"
She fought him, trying to twist free. "What do you think I am! I can help clear the area!" Her green eyes blazed. "I'm not marrying a cop I can't work beside!"
He stared, then turned away with her into the garden. "That woman in the wheelchair, those women around her-get them off the block and down the street." And he was gone among his officers, keeping order as tangles of wedding guests moved quickly out of the garden, and a few confused elderly folks milled together in panic. Charlie grabbed the wheelchair as Wilma corralled half a dozen frail ladies.
The cats didn't see Charlie and Wilma come out. They were watching the kit where she had fled back across the street and up the trellis. The boy had climbed again too. Running across the roof, he knelt, reaching for something. But again the kit landed on his shoulders raking and biting. What was the matter with her? Then suddenly all the cops were running, fanning out across the street, staring up at the roof. The boy snatched something from the roof and spun around, racing across the shingles, trying to dislodge the kit. He slipped and fell, and seemed to drop in slow-motion, falling and twisting.
He hit the ground and an explosion rocked the garden. A sudden cloud of smoke hid the church and trees, smoke filled with flying flecks of plaster and torn wood and broken shingles-as if the church had been ground up and vomited out again by a giant blower.
The side of the church was gone. There was only a jagged, smoking hole where the wall of the church had been.
Ragged fragments of the building, and of broken furniture and wedding flowers lay scattered across the bricks and clinging to trees and bushes, and still the sky rained debris.
The two cats crouched clinging to the branches choking with smoke and dust, shaken by the impact. Had it been a gas explosion? Maybe the church furnace? But it was a warm day, and the furnace would not be running. They stared down at a young woman staunching a child's bloody arm, at a young couple holding each other, an old woman weeping, at officers clearing the area. A bomb. It had been a bomb.
But no villager could do this, not now when the very thought of a bomb was so painful for every human soul.
They saw no one badly hurt, no one was down. "The kit," Dulcie said. "Where is the kit?" She hardly remembered later how she and Joe reached the kit, where she clung in a pine tree across the street. She only vaguely remembered racing between parked cars and people's legs, scorching up the pine tree and cuddling the kit against her, licking her frightened face.
Below the pine, officers surrounded the boy. Had that small boy caused the explosion? He couldn't be more than ten. A ragged child, very white and still.
That was why the kit had jumped him! To stop him! Then she had raced to Clyde. Dulcie licked the kit harder. What kind of child
Sirens filled the air. Dulcie looked around for Charlie and Wilma.
But as Dulcie and Joe peered down from the pine tree with the kit snuggled between them, the boy looked around as if searching for someone. His gaze rose to the roofs and surrounding trees-and stopped on the three cats.
He looked straight at the kit, his eyes widening with rage.
And the tattercoat kit dropped her ears and backed away, deeper among the dark, concealing branches.
| © 2025 Библиотека RealLib.org (support [a t] reallib.org) |