She picked the cat up just as everybody came down the narrow stairs of the old hay loft and pressed her face against its head. It struggled out of her arms, jumped down and made a dash for the kitchen, and just in time too. Miss Isabel said, “I thought I heard a cat.”
“No, indeed,” Karen laughed. She opened the front door.
Miss Isabel peered into the kitchen.
“Karen, it is a cat!”
I could hear her poking around among the pots and pans. Suddenly she gave a wild screech and flew back into the room, pulling at the glass panel. Mrs. Harris, even more terrified, made a leap for the narrow opening and streaked, hair on end, through the room, practically upsetting Philander Doyle, and out into the night. Miss Isabel Doyle leaned against the half-closed panel, her bloodstream pounding in the veins of her thin throat.
“You know, I’m terrified of cats,” she gasped, looking at her brother as if it were his fault, not Karen’s. “I do hope it won’t go over to our house.”
“It won’t,” Karen laughed. “Good night, everybody!”
She stood in the doorway for a while as we went out, calling “Kitty, kitty!” and finally closed the door.
“I’ll phone for a cab from your house, Jerry,” I said. Then I noticed that Roger Doyle was still with us. Jerry and Sandy—who’d been quieter all evening than I’d ever seen him—moved ahead. Roger walked with me.
At the steps Jerry turned.
“Good night, Roger,” she said quietly. “We won’t ask you in, it’s so awfully late.”
Roger Doyle stopped abruptly with one foot on the step.
“Oh, of course,” he said stiffly. “Good night. Good night, Sandy.”
I hoped my own too cheery good night covered Sandy’s silence. He opened the door. I heard Roger’s retreating steps crunch the dry snow.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” I said when we got inside.
Neither of them spoke for a minute. Then Jerry said, “Stay all night, Grace. It really is late. Lilac can bring you something in the morning.”
I hesitated, and then, perhaps because some primitive instinct stirred inside me, perhaps only because it was the easiest thing to do, I said, “All right, if it isn’t a lot of trouble.”
“Just be careful not to wake Dad when you go up, is all,” Jerry said. She glanced at her brother.
“I’m turning in,” he said. “Hurry up.”
He stood with his forefinger on the switch. I noticed then something I’d been vaguely unaware of all evening. He had at last taken the hand with the taped knuckles out of the pocket of his dinner jacket.
“Scram, pals,” he said.
Then at last, when Jerry had said good night, I lay slowly overcoming the frigid linen sheets. Neither of us had mentioned Karen or her party, absorbed, it would seem, in the mechanics of my staying all night—as if I’d never borrowed a pair of outing flannel pajamas before or Jerry hadn’t spent half her life coping with unexpected guests. There was no visible sign of what the pale enigmatic mask of her face concealed. No one else would have guessed that the subdued fire in her dark gold-flecked eyes was dying ember, on her heart’s altar, of a sacrifice that made the suet and raisins she’d offered up to the birds on the snow so pitifully inadequate.
7
If Capitol Hill were being demolished in an air raid, I’d still get my sleep. Unless, of course, the neighbors had left a cat out; and this night one of them had. I woke up gradually in the pitch dark, a faint “Meow, meow, meow” seeping through into my conscious mind. I turned over and resolutely closed my eyes. It still went on. Mrs. Harris didn’t yowl, she merely moaned.
I muttered savagely, for all the world like Lilac, “Why doesn’t that blasted Karen take her cat in?” I don’t know what it is about a low pitiful noise that makes it so unbearable. At last I sat up in Stygian darkness, thinking that of course the animal must be half frozen, and turned on the light. Then I thought it must be entirely frozen. It was after five; o’clock. Mrs. Harris still mewed, so close as to sound almost under my window.
I thought, “Why doesn’t it go home and wake its mistress?” but I got up, put on Sandy’s bathrobe and woolly slippers and went to the window. The sound must at last have waked Karen too, I thought; there was a light in her house, both upstairs and down. I waited a moment, expecting to see her open the door and call her cat, but she didn’t. Mrs. Harris’s cry rose again. She’d seen my lights go on, I supposed. Then I saw two little balls of fire raised from the Candlers’ garden doorstep.
“If I liked cats, Mrs. Harris,” I said, “I’d come down and get you”; and then I added, “—with more pleasure,” knowing very well that I couldn’t let a rat lie there and freeze to death. I opened the door and stepped out into the hall. The house was as silent as the grave. I crept down the wide old staircase, and stopped abruptly. Someone else was awake too. I could hear quiet footsteps behind me. I turned around. In the faint light from the window I could see no one.
“I must have imagined it,” I thought, and started on down. The soft footsteps behind me started too. I whispered, “Who’s that?” There was no answer, nothing but the utter silence, and Mrs. Harris’s faint wail still sounding outside. My heart, never too brave, crawled up to my mouth. My fingers were like icicles on the old pine stair rail as I realized that I couldn’t go back, I had to go on. “If I can reach the switch,” I thought, and started quickly. The soft thump-thump-thump sounded again, closer now. I dashed across the hall, fumbled with shaky fingers at the switch, clicked it on and whirled around . . . and saw the long heavy tassel of Sandy’s bathrobe flying around after me.
I said “Fool!” and tied it up, but I stood there for a moment, my heart still pounding. Then I made my way back through the door beside the stairs and into the garden entry. I felt around for the light there, found it at last, and started to reach for the big old-fashioned key in the polished brass lock. Then I stopped abruptly, staring down at the worn old drugget on the pine floor in front of the door.
A piece of caked snow lay in the middle of it. It was dry and perfectly firm. Someone had come in that way, and not very long before.
My lips were so parched that I moistened them without relief. Mrs. Harris’s low wail on the other side of the door was the only sound in the world except my own heart pounding dully. I turned the key in the lock and drew the door open. Mrs. Harris slithered inside instantly and rubbed against me with a grateful “Meow!”, her icy fur electric against my bare ankle.
I looked down at her, and I looked down, through the bare branches of the crape myrtles, icy black above the snow-white garden, at that little gem of a house. I don’t know what it was that made me just stand there, for a moment, staring down at it with some kind of a nameless dread catching at my heart. I’d certainly never pretend I’m psychic . . . and yet there was something about that gay lighted little building that wasn’t gay at all—like a brilliant ballroom quite empty of dancers. Maybe it wasn’t that; maybe it was just my bloodhound’s sense of smell communicating something strangely unfamiliar in the clean night to my subconscious. Or perhaps it was some curious foreboding that had been plucking at the muted strings of fear in my mind all that evening. I don’t know. I only know that as I stood there the tiny house seemed unreal and frightening to me, like brilliant rouge on cheeks drained of life.
It must have been sharper and more compelling, too, than I was aware of, or I’d never have ventured down the icy path in Sandy’s sheepskin slippers, hugging his bathrobe around my frozen limbs, until I came almost to the end of the path. And then I knew—for the foul acrid smell of gas was unmistakable.
I ran those last few steps, and banged frantically on the door.
“Karen!”