Free Cat Striking Back by Shirley Rousseau Murphy Page A

her face. He didn’t want to look at her face; he still had a sense of her watching him. The blood had mostly dried, but some of it was sticky. He shut the lid as quietly as he could. Getting in the car, making sure he’d slid the shovel onto the floor of the backseat, he headed up toward the hills.
    He drove for a long time, back and forth among thedark and empty hills, trying to find a place to bury her. His headlights picked out very little beyond the road. He tried to scan the night-black hills by memory, tried to identify the few dim lights of the scattered houses as he looked for a stretch of empty land where freshly dug earth wouldn’t be noticed. And as the car nosed along the dark roads, fear rode with him, chill and black.

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    H E STOPPED SEVERAL times to look out at an empty field, but in every case one house or another was too close. He wanted a place where he wouldn’t have to carry her for miles across rough fields in the dark, but isolated enough so no one would hear him digging. The night was so still. Even from inside a house someone might hear the sound of the shovel, or a dog would hear and start barking. Though the night was cool, some hardy soul might be sitting on his front porch, his ears tuned to every small bucolic sound. To such a listener, the clink of a shovel would echo like thunder. And he’d have to do it all in the dark. If he used the flashlight, he’d sure as hell be seen. She’d really screwed things up, had really made it hard for him.
    He’d headed home after midnight, discouraged with her still in the trunk. He was exhausted and his nerves were shot. He’d put the car in the garage, put on clean tennis shoes, and in the dark neighborhood he’d headed on foot back to the Parker house. Hoping somehow, evenin the dark, to clean up the tracks he’d left. He carried the flashlight in his pocket, but when he got there he was afraid someone would see a light moving around the yard or reflecting up from the pool. Consequently, he couldn’t see what to clean up; if he tried, he’d only make a mess of it. He’d have to come back in the morning, the minute it started to get light.
    Before leaving the Parkers’ yard he removed the tennis shoes so as not to leave a muddy trail, dropped them in the plastic bag he’d stuffed in his pocket. He walked home in his stocking feet, bruising his heel on a pebble, thinking about the people on his block, about their routines on Sunday mornings.
    Two couples slept in, late. Two men he knew casually would probably play an early round of golf. But what did their wives do? He’d never thought to ask, never paid attention. Did those women garden on Sunday mornings? Leave the house to go to church? Or sit idly drinking coffee, looking out the windows? She’d know what they did, that was part of her job, to know about the neighbors. And now she could tell him nothing.
    Walking home, he saw no one. He heard two cats yowling somewhere down the street, sending chills up his spine. Everyone on the damned block seemed to have cats. If he’d known that when they bought the place, he might have thought better of moving where it wasn’t easy to conceal his disgust—but he had no choice, he needed to be liked and to be accepted, that was part of their program.
    At home, he cleaned up the tennis shoes in the kitchen sink, left them drying by the back door. He sat in the kitchen for over an hour drinking cold coffee from themorning and wishing he still smoked, to calm his nerves. He thought about going over to the all-night grocery east of the village and getting a pack, take the other car, but he didn’t feel like going anywhere. Around three in the morning he went into the bedroom, lay down on the bed, and pulled the spread up over himself—but then he could smell her sweet scent, and he ended up moving into the guest room, jerking the comforter up over his legs.
    He woke, startled, 5:45