Free Cat Breaking Free by Shirley Rousseau Murphy Page B

Chichi slipped the bag between the two mattresses. She didn’t shove it very deep, she didn’t slit the mattress ticking. Good show, Joe thought, itching to get his paws under there, get his claws into that black silk. For a long moment, she just knelt there. Then, almost as if she’d read his mind, she pulled the bag out again and set it on the bed, as if she meant to hide it somewhere more secure, harder to discover.
    But maybe, Joe thought, he wouldn’t have to retrieve it. Maybe he’d know what she’d hidden, as soon as he found out what had happened in the village. Chichi’s stealthy arrival home while the sirens were still shrieking, plus the unanswered puzzle of who was watching TV, had to add up to trouble.
    The thin branch was cutting into his belly, and itsthorns had stuck his hind paw so deeply he could smell his own blood. Hurt like hell to back away when, within the bright room, Chichi turned suddenly and approached the window.
    She stood looking out, her eyes on a level with his own, which were slitted closed, his white parts hidden in an uncomfortable crouch. Did the bedroom light pick him out like a possum on a leafless branch?
    But so what? What difference? So there was a cat in the tree, a neighborhood cat. Clyde Damen’s cat, harassing the sleeping birds, maybe snatching baby birds from their nests.
    She didn’t remain long at the window, but bent down to root around in a suitcase that lay open on a chair beside the dresser. Hadn’t she unpacked? She’d been there two weeks. That spoke of a transient, fly-by-night attitude that made Joe smile with satisfaction at his own astute character assessment.
    But when she drew from the suitcase a long, sharp-looking bread knife, and looked up directly through the glass, he swallowed back a yelp of surprise and nearly fell out of the tree. Backing away into the tiniest twiggy branches, he lacerated two more paws and bent the limbs so far that he swung and wobbled wildly before he righted himself, nonchalantly licked a paw as if he hadn’t seen anything frightening but had just lost his balance, and crept back to a safer perch. Maybe, with the inside light reflecting against the glass, she had only seen her own reflection.
    But why the knife? What made her pick it up and peer out so intently?
    And what, in the next instant, made her draw the shade?
    Maybe she’d heard something, the soft hush of his scrabbling among the brittle branches; maybe that was all. There was no reason for her, even if she’d seen him, to feel threatened. By a cat? Why would she?
    Annoyed at his own cowardice, Joe dropped from the lemon tree and sped for the front of the house. Rearing up with his paws on the sill, he peered through beneath the shade, stretching and tilting his head, his nose pressed against the cold glass.
    Studying the dim room in the TV’s flickering light, Joe laughed softly. Little Chichi had some artistic flair, some talent as a sculptor.
    Maybe she had worked in department store window display, or maybe on stage sets. Or maybe she was simply talented. She had created a very lifelike silhouette using a mop and several other common household items.
    The mop formed the body; it was one of those old-fashioned mops with twisted rags on a stick; these were the woman’s tresses, tangled like Chichi’s blond coiffure. The figure wore a blue sweat suit, artfully padded out in just the right places. The head itself was made of wadded and pasted newspapers. A small table lamp behind the figure gave off the weak glow that helped, with the flicker of the TV, to silhouette her against the shade. The creative dummy was, at the moment, being treated to an old rerun of Lassie, a series Joe found particularly disgusting.
    It was one thing to see animal stories that were obviously imaginary takeoffs, like Alice in Wonderland , or the Narnia series, or The Lion King . Children knew this was make-believe, and they loved it.