Cat Seeing Double by Shirley Rousseau Murphy Read Free Book Online

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 thing.
    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.
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    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 understandhow 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.
    â€œWell, 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.