Fall from Grace by L. R. Wright Read Free Book Online Page B

and rolled up the windows. He got out of the car and locked it, then looked up. The house stood at the top of a very long flight of cement steps. He couldn’t imagine an old woman lugging bags of groceries up those steps. There had to be a back entrance.
    From this angle the house looked like the house in Psycho . Except that it was bright blue. And painted not so long ago, either. It was a particularly noxious shade of blue, he thought, to use on a house.
    The steps went up, and up, and up. There was a railing beside them. Alberg put a hand on it and gave it a quick shake and watched as the resulting wobble scurried upward; the whole damn railing all the way up the hillside shuddered. He squinted upward at the blue house, a bright blue shriek against the fading evening light, and started climbing.
    He labored up the crumbling steps thinking about his upcoming birthday—it made his heart grow cold to acknowledge that he would be fifty in less than three weeks. But my God my wind’s better since I quit smoking, he thought, beginning to pant.
    Halfway up the stairs there was a landing, a concrete pad about three feet square upon which sat a deck chair. Alberg stopped and looked at it approvingly. It was the old-fashioned kind made of wood and canvas, like a hammock with a frame, faded and torn but still usable. For some reason it made him think of his mother’s piano, an upright with a stool that you twirled around to make it higher or lower.
    He looked up at the bright blue house. He saw no lights, no sign of life at all—except for two cats peering at him from the veranda, beneath a window framed in lace curtains. He grasped the railing and propelled himself up the last six feet of steps and stood in front of the veranda, breathing heavily, eyeing a big sofa that he figured used to be maroon. Three more cats lay upon it. The sofa had been torn almost to shreds.
    Alberg walked up the steps onto the veranda and looked for a doorbell. There was no bell and no knocker, either. But there was a little brass crank, which he turned, and he heard it squawk inside the house. Almost immediately the door opened, and an old woman looked out from behind it.
    â€œMrs. Willis?”
    â€œMizMiz,” she said, unblinking.
    Alberg thought for a moment. “I beg your pardon?”
    â€œMizMiz. NoMissus.”
    â€œI’m sorry,” said Alberg. “Ms. Willis.”
    She wasn’t much over five feet tall. She seemed a collection of sticks and knobs, with very little hair; it was long and gray, what there was of it, and he could see her scalp through it.
    â€œMy name is Alberg. I’m with the RCM Police. Can I talk to you?”
    â€œOhohoh,” said Hetty Willis. She stared at him for a few more seconds. Then she pulled the door open wider, and scurried inside.
    Alberg stepped through into the house. He realized that he had been aware for several minutes of an unpleasant odor, which now surged out of the house and smacked him in the face. It was the smell of cat urine. He tried to breathe through his mouth.
    Hetty Willis had hurried on stick legs through the vestibule and was now crossing a large entrance hall from which a wide stairway led to the second story. There were three doors, all closed. She scuttled toward the door on the left, and as she neared it she started to make high-pitched crooning noises around quick repetitions of the word “Hurry.” Her hand reached for the glass doorknob; a roar of animal clamor rose from behind the closed door, surely too big and too loud to be coming from a few domesticated cats—Christ, thought Alberg, images of rough-coated cheetahs and cold-eyed lions springing to his mind. The old woman turned the handle and pushed open the door, releasing a tide of normal-sized cats that streamed across the threshold and into the hall. It undulated speedily across the worn hardwood floor toward Alberg.
    There were dark cats and light ones, sleek cats and