Free Pawsitively Dead (A Wonder Cats Mystery Book 2) by Harper Lin Page B

danger.
    Together, Bea and Jake rushed through the aisles between the police officers’ desks.
    They met Police Chief Talbot, who shouted over his shoulder at Diane, “Put that down and stop dialing! I said that we have a direct line!”
    “Direct line to what?” Jake asked. “Who was shouting?”
    “Our prime suspect in the Perry case, of course,” Talbot answered. “Murray Willis. Looks like a heart attack in the interrogation—hey!”
    Bea ran toward the interrogation room despite Chief Talbot’s objection. She ran past Diane, who spoke into the phone that had a direct line to the hospital, “Hi, this is Officer Diane Davis, requesting an ambulance at the Wonder Falls police department. Please hurry!”
    “Where’s your wife going?” Talbot asked Jake.
    “I’ll get her,” Jake said to the police chief.
    When he caught up to Bea, she had her face and hands pressed to the glass window of the interrogation room. “That’s not a heart attack. It’s something else. I can see it! I need to get in there—I need to help him!”
    Jake didn’t hesitate. He rapped his knuckles against the door until Jason, one of the other officers, unlocked it for him.
    Jason swung open the door but said, “Jake, we can’t have random civilians passing by and—even if she is your wife—”
    “She knows how to resuscitate him,” Jake said as Bea bolted in.
    Jason frowned as she passed. “So do I, and that’s what I was doing. But did you”—he turned to Jake—“stop me just now so that she could…” He turned back to Bea, who was on her knees beside Old Murray. Her eyes were closed and she was waving a hand over Old Murray’s unconscious body. “Do nothing? She’s not doing CPR. That is not CPR.”
    “I’ll take it from here then,” Jake assured him then locked him out. Jake knelt at Old Murray’s other side. “What does it look like?”
    “A heart attack,” Bea said decisively. “But only because that’s where the knot is.”
    “The knot?”
    “Where Cath put the Unfamiliar. A binding spell. She can’t get rid of the thing, only tie it up so it won’t do any more damage to the host. The knot is still there, but the Unfamiliar is gone.”
----
    B ack at the graveyard , Aunt Astrid and I outran the smell. It wasn’t difficult to outrun a corpse, which walked so slowly.
    “How do we kill it?” I asked.
    Aunt Astrid raised an eyebrow. “Ruthless! She hasn’t done anything to us, other than come near when she smells bad.”
    “She’s supposed to be dead,” I argued. “If this body is anything like Shelley Marina, killing her would be a mercy. But this is impossible!”
    “Saying that this is impossible obviously won’t stop it from happening,” Aunt Astrid said.
    “I know her,” I said, “but I don’t want to wait until she grows back completely. Where’s her gravestone? Can we walk around to take a look?”
    We could, and we did, jogging over the turf in the afternoon sunlight. The corpse turned slowly when it heard us and inched toward the grave she’d left. On the gravestone, it said—
    “Dolores Thompson. 1946 to 2009. Thompson! I thought I knew that dress.” I turned to Aunt Astrid. “It belonged to Tommy’s grandmother!”
    “She was buried in it.” Aunt Astrid nodded. “I wasn’t at the funeral, but I heard when she passed away. Breast cancer.”
    “She was only sixty-three,” I said gloomily. I hadn’t been at Tommy’s grandmother’s funeral either.
    A death rattle sounded behind us, like, “Taaa…mmm…”
    “I think,” I said, as I covered my nose and mouth with my sleeve, “she’s calling for Tommy. How do we tell her?”
    Aunt Astrid stepped between myself and Dolores and declared, “You can join him in the grave!”
    “But how?” I wondered. “The bones are moving with some magic force, must be, because the muscles haven’t even all grown back. That magic is borrowed by an Unfamiliar, but the only one I’ve seen in this town recently is bound to