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Once he’d laid her to rest, as the obituaries so delicately put it, and before he left the area, he’d have plenty of time to take care of the rest of his business, and by morning, he’d be two hundred miles north.

Letting himself into the garage, he locked the door behind him. There was enough moonlight coming through the window so that he didn’t have to flip on the flashlight. He pulled on the gloves he’d brought and took up one of the shovels that leaned against the wall. He was about to head down the ladder when he thought of the coveralls that he’d sat on earlier.

The foreman was bigger than he was, so it was easy to pull the muddy garment up over his pants. He tried on the boots that stood in the corner. The fit was a bit loose, but they’d save having to clean up his own shoes, which he left on the worktable. More important, they’d leave the correct, waffle-patterned footprints in the bottom of the ditch, because who knew what someone might notice before they dumped in the gravel?

Tossing the shovel down into the pit, he descended the ladder. The damp ground had already been loosened with the shovel or a pick and was soft under his feet, the waffled prints showing clearly. He chose the corner that felt soft est, and began to dig, congratulating himself on changing into the boots but annoyed that it had been a last-minute thought, that he hadn’t planned better. He began to wonder what else he might have missed.

He could think of nothing left undone, he thought he had everything in hand, but still, as he worked, the worry nagged at him. This procedure, tonight, hadn’t been planned the way their regular jobs were. She hadn’t planned it, he thought with sick amusement. Working on his own, he was shaky about his attention to detail-she’d seen to the details. Now, without her direction, he had to be doubly careful.

The digging wasn’t hard until he hit a layer of soft rock. That slowed him as he stomped the shovel into it-and the scraping sound was louder than he liked. A glint under the shovel caught his eye for a minute, but it was only a silver gum wrapper. It vanished when he tossed the next shovelful on the pile. He had to drive the blade through maybe five inches of rock, which made his breath ragged. Had to stop twice, to breathe and use the inhaler. Digging, he went over his next steps.

Once he brought her down and buried her, he’d swing by the rented garage on the other side of the village, change cars as she had planned, then get on with the night’s work. He felt strange, doing the job without her. Strange, and sick, but excited. Almost like a kid doing something new on his own.

He’d been digging for half an hour, was making good headway despite the fragmented rock and the weight of the damp earth. He wasn’t used to this kind of heavy work. He’d had to move the drainpipes out of the way, memorizing their position so when he’d finished, he could put them back in the same formation. He was taking a rest when he heard a faint brushing sound, a soft, stealthy noise that turned him cold.

Glancing at the closed door, he ducked down into the darkest corner of the pit, pulling the shovel beneath him so it wouldn’t gleam, hiding the pale oval of his face and hoping his dark clothes would blend into the pit’s shadows. Had that cop come back?

What else could it be? Not the contractor, not at this hour. He prayed seriously that it was just some animal, a raccoon or stray dog. She’d say it was insane to pray. She’d call such determined prayer arrogant and would laugh at him, say he’d already damned his own soul, so what difference would it make? Crouched in the dark corner in the earthen pit he listened again for the soft brushing, trying to envision what might have made the sound.

When it came again he realized it was not from the door at all but from the direction of the window, a brushing and then a scratching noise. Had that cop come back and was looking in the window? But no flashlight beam shone in, reflecting through the garage.

The sound continued for so long that he lost patience and warily slipped up the ladder to look, keeping his collar pulled up and his hat low, climbing only until he could just see over the lip of the ditch, could just see the moonlit window.

He froze, his hands turning cold on the ladder rungs.

No human stood beyond the glass. A cat was there, staring in at him, a pale cat crouched and ghostly on the windowsill, pressed against the glass and looking in-straight at him. A white cat smeared with dirt or some kind of smudged markings. Its eyes caught a red gleam from the reflection of moonlight off the glass. Its intent gaze was relentlessly fixed on him, it didn’t blink or look away. Swallowing, he backed down the ladder, tripped and nearly lost his footing, his clumsiness causing a metallic clatter that made his heart pound.

When he climbed and looked again at the window, expecting the cat to have been startled and run off, it was still there watching him.

Well, hell, it was only a cat, only a stupid beast. It didn’t know what he was doing. And it was, after all, beyond the glass where it couldn’t come near him, couldn’t rub up against him as cats so often did, as if they knew he hated them and took pleasure in his fear.

Disgusted, he turned back to his digging, kicking the shovel deeper into the earth and loose rock, his breath coming in gasps, and all the time he dug, he could feel the cat watching, feel the icy chill of its stare.

He kept working, booting his shovel again and again into the earth, heaping up the removed dirt at one end of the long excavation. When he stopped to breathe and to measure the depth of the grave with the shovel handle, and then stepped up the ladder to look, the cat was still there. What did it want, why would it watch him? Turning his back on it and measuring again, he determined that maybe six more inches would allow him to cover her solidly. He’d have to make sure the last layer of dirt over her didn’t have any rock in it, because the rock all came from deeper in the earth; someone might notice that and investigate. He was tiring, but he kept on stubbornly until at last the hole was deep enough. Setting the shovel aside, leaning it against the pit wall, he started up the ladder. When he looked again at the window, the cat was gone.

20

FRANCES AND ED Becker’s house was a two-story, cream-colored stucco with dark brown window trim and a black slate roof that was always slippery in wet weather. The cats didn’t need daylight to know that the lawn was neatly mowed, the bushes trimmed to perfect spheres that they, personally, thought ugly and unnatural-how could one hide or take shelter under a bush trimmed like a bowling ball? Tansy led them straight through the cat door into the garage where dishes of kibble and a bowl of water were laid out beside two cat beds. The Beckers had two orange-and-white cats, and though neither was present, their scent was heavy and fresh. There was no cat door from the garage into the house.

“They don’t want mouse trophies under the furniture,” Tansy said. “ Frances can’t stand the thought of mouse guts on her imported rugs.” She looked up at the pedestrian door that led into the house. “We can try this, sometimes she leaves it unlocked because the garage is locked.”

Leaping up, Joe swung from the knob and pawed at the dead bolt, but at last he dropped down again, shaking his bruised paw.

“Come on then,” Tansy said, “there’s another way.” She led them outside and around the house to the front. In the daytime, the front door would be seen from the street, but at night the soft yard lights left it in shadow. There was no one about nor could they see anyone standing at a nearby lighted window.

The front door was flanked by two tall, narrow panels of glass, each covered by a decorative wrought-iron panel. The pale cat, leaping up and clinging to the iron curlicues, reached a deft paw through and pressed at the sliding window until she had pushed it open.