"Cat Seeing Double" - читать интересную книгу автора (Murphy Shirley Rousseau)

4

The debris' filled smoke twisted and began slowly to settle. The dropping sun sent its deep afternoon light streaming down through the torn roof of the church, illuminating airborne flecks like falling snow through which officers searched the rubble for wounded, and quickly moved shocked onlookers away, in case of a second blast.

No one seemed badly injured; but the miracle of escape was slow to instruct the villagers. They stood in little clusters holding one another, the shock of the deed reverberating in every face, beating in every heart.

Charlie looked around her at the white petals of the wedding bouquets scattered across the detritus-as if some precocious flower girl had thrown a tantrum flinging her pretty treasures. Near her an old woman stood with her handkerchief pressed to her bloody forehead. As Charlie moved to help her, she heard Ryan shout for a medic, and saw Ryan supporting Cora Lee French, Cora Lee's dark arm around Ryan's shoulder. Holding the old woman, Charlie wanted to run to Cora Lee.

Pressing her handkerchief to the old woman's forehead, Charlie got her to sit down on the sidewalk. It was not a deep cut, only a scratch in an area that would naturally bleed heavily. As the woman rested against her, Charlie looked at the church where she and Max were to have been married. Where, if they hadn't been alerted, she and Max, Clyde and Wilma and the minister would have been standing with nearly the whole village crowded around them.

The three standing walls of the church bristled with shards of debris embedded in the cracked plaster. The rows of velvet-padded chairs that had awaited the wedding guests lay splintered into kindling and blackened rags. One side of the carved lectern lay whole and apparently untouched, smeared black and dotted with silver-bright specks. The corner of a cardboard box lay near it, still covered with silver paper. How odd, that the center had remained nearly undamaged. Sirens screamed again in the narrow street as two more ambulances careened to the curb beside squad cars whose trunks stood open, officers snatching out first aid equipment.

No villager could have done this. No villager could have performed such an act. Not now… No one could have wanted to destroy…

Destroy Max…?

Destroy Max as someone had tried to destroy him last winter, setting him up for murder? Charlie began to shiver, she was ice-cold. She turned her eyes to Max across the garden where he stood talking with two officers. Was this what their marriage would be like, this icy internal terror? Would she go through all their life together ridden by this terrible fear, so that fear touched every smallest joy, turned all their life ugly?

Fury filled her, hot rage. She wanted to pound someone, pound the person who had done this. She looked across the street at Clyde and the officers, handcuffing that young boy. And she turned away, not wanting to think a child had done such a tiling.

She watched the two medics arguing with Cora Lee until at last Cora Lee obediently lay down again on the stretcher. She watched Max talking on his field phone as his officers cleared the street, sending people home. She walked the old woman to the open door of Cora Lee's ambulance and saw her settled inside. As she turned away, the squad car carrying the boy passed her, the kid scowling out from behind the grid, his face all sharp angles and angry. So very angry.

The cats watched a squad car take the boy away, the child crouched sullenly in the backseat behind the wire barrier. Officer Green had taken the broken garage door opener from the boy's pocket. The small remote had looked badly smashed where the kid had fallen on it. They could see, within the torn church, detectives Davis and Garza photographing the scene, Juana Davis holding the strobe lights down among the dark rubble so Garza could shoot close-ups of scraps of splintered wood and torn carpet and shattered plaster and bits of silver gift wrap. Dulcie shivered. That prettily wrapped box that they had glimpsed and ignored. That innocent-looking box.

She didn't understand humans, she didn't understand how the bright and inventive human mind could warp into such hunger to destroy. She didn't understand how the human soul, that in its passion could create the wonders of civilization, could allow that same passion to warp in on itself and burn, instead, with this sick thirst for destruction.

Evil, she thought Pure evil. That kind of sickness is part of the ultimate dark, the dark power that would suck all life to destruction.

"Well, there will be a wedding," Dulcie said softly, lashing her tail, looking at the kit, then looking down at their human friends, at Charlie in her blood-splattered wedding dress holding two children by the hands as their mother tried to calm a screaming baby. "There will be a wedding." That boy had destroyed the wall of the church, but he hadn't destroyed anyone's spirit. He had not destroyed love, or human will.

She watched officers stringing yellow crime tape, securing the area. She had heard Captain Harper calling for a bomb team, she supposed out of San Jose. She knew that those forensic technicians would spend hours going over the area, photographing, fingerprinting, bagging every possible bit of evidence. But once the team arrived, when the work at hand was organized, would mere be a wedding? Surely somewhere within the village, Charlie and Max Harper would be married.

Beside her, the kit was hunkered down among the branches looking so small and miserable that Dulcie nosed at her with concern. "What, Kit? What's the matter?"

The kit shut her eyes.

"Don't, Kit. Don't look sad. You saved lives. You saved hundreds of lives. You're a hero. But how did you know? How did you know what he planned?"

"I heard them. I heard mat old man telling the boy what to do, an old man with a beard and a bent foot. He shook the boy and told him to wait until everyone was in the church, the bride and groom and minister and everyone, then to punch the opener. I didn't know what he meant. He said to punch it and run, to get off the roof fast and get away. The boy was angry but he climbed up to the roof and the old man hobbled away. I didn't mean for the bomb to explode, I wanted to stop whatever would happen, I didn't mean for a bomb to go off," the kit said miserably.

Dulcie licked the kit's ears. "If you hadn't jumped that boy, then warned Clyde, then jumped the boy again, he would have killed everyone. You're a hero, Kit. Do you understand that? Who knows how many lives you saved."

Dulcie twitched an ear. "To those who know, to Clyde and Wilma and Charlie-to all of us, Kit, you'll forever be a hero."

"Absolutely a hero," Joe Grey said softly, nudging the kit. "But where did the old man go? Did you see where he went? Did he have a car?"

The kit shook her whiskers. "I didn't see which way. I didn't see him get in a car, but…" She paused, thinking. "He said to the boy, 'The truck will be gone.' And mere was an old truck parked down the side street, a rusty old pickup, sort of brown. And when… when I jumped the boy and the man ran, I think… I think I heard a rattley motor."

Joe's eyes widened, and immediately he left them, backing down the tree and streaking for Clyde's open convertible. He would not, among a crowd of humans, ordinarily be so brazen as to leap into the car and paw into the side pocket, hauling out Clyde's cell phone. But he had little choice. Looking up over the car door, seeing no one watching him, he punched in a number.

Dulcie and Kit heard Max Harper's cell phone ringing, across the garden. How strange it was that Joe's electronic message could zip through the sky who knew how many miles to some phantom tower in just an instant, and back again to Harper's phone where he stood only a few feet away.

Harper answered, listened, and gave an order that sent officers racing away on foot through the village, and sent squad cars swerving out fast to cruise the streets looking for an old brown truck and for the old man who was the boy's accomplice. And above the searching officers, Dulcie and the kit raced away too. Flying across the rooftops they watched the sidewalks below, peering down into shadowed niches and recessed doorways where a hidden figure might be missed; and soon on the roofs two blocks away they saw Joe, also searching.

For nearly two hours, as dusk fell, and as the police combed the streets and shops below, the cats crossed back and forth along balconies and oak branches and across peaks and shingles, peering into dark rooftop hiding places and in through second-floor windows looking for the bearded, crippled old man.

There was no sign of him. When at last the search ended, below in the darkening streets the entire population of the village joined to move the site of the wedding. Men and women in party clothes hauled tables and chairs from dozens of shops, carrying them for blocks, setting them up in the center of the village. And when the cats returned to the church garden, it was lined with cars again-the bomb team had arrived.

Within the barrier of yellow tape, grid markers had been laid out. Five forensics officers were down on their hands and knees under powerful spotlights working with cameras and small instruments and collection bags, carefully labeling each item they removed. The process seemed, even to a patient feline hunter, incredibly tedious. Watching from the roof across the street, the cats were overwhelmed by the work that must be accomplished. Clyde found them there, intently watching, perched on the edge of the roof like three owls in the cool and gathering dusk.

"Come on, cats. It's time for the ceremony. Come on, or you'll make us late."