One thing for sure, Joe thought, glancing up at them, that man won’t mess with a cat again. If he didn’t fear cats before, he fears us now.
Down in the yard, Scotty stood in front of the garage talking on his cell phone. With the wind blowing and the big truck’s engine running, the cats couldn’t hear much. It seemed to be a one-sided conversation, as if he was leaving a message, most likely that they were going ahead with the work. It would cost a bundle to keep the gravel truck waiting, and would cost probably far more to delay the cement truck. In the few months Clyde and Ryan had been married, Joe had learned quite a lot about the construction business. These delivery folks charged by the hour, and they charged a lot. Where was Ryan? She’d known the deliveries would be early, she’d said she hoped to be finished by noon.
Joe watched Scotty close his phone, scratch his red beard as if perplexed, and then turn to speak to the driver, a skinny man, and stooped. He had rounded shoulders that made his khaki shirt hang in folds across his chest, and big, protruding ears beneath a striped cap. They watched him step to the cab, and in a moment the truck bed began to tilt up from the front. As it lifted to its maximum height, the gravel slid out with a grating thunder into a pile before the open garage. At once the two Latino laborers began to shovel it into the wheelbarrows to be hauled into the garage and dumped into the pit, further covering the buried victim. The tomcat watched the road impatiently.
Ryan was never late to a job. Soon Joe was not only impatient but getting worried about her, thinking about wrecks and illness, fussing as nervously as his housemates fussed when he didn’t show up at bedtime.
“We could stand in the pit, stand over the grave,” Kit said. “They wouldn’t pour gravel on us.”
Joe snorted. “And Scotty wouldn’t pick us up and throw us out of the garage? And you don’t think that little protest would make him wonder?”
Dulcie glanced back up the hill, watching the tall grass ripple where Tansy and Sage crouched. She was interested to see that Sage, after last night’s fine vindication, still wanted to hang around and see that the body was found. She wondered if he really cared, or if he was, after all, simply too hurt to go home. That worried her, but the good thing was that Ryan would be here soon. If he was badly hurt, she could get him to the vet despite his reluctance.
They could hear the older laborer, Fernando, in the garage, dumping his wheelbarrow load into the pit. He was the shorter of the two, with grizzled gray hair. The two worked one at either side of the gravel pile, so they didn’t get in each other’s way. A mist of gravel dust filled the air around them like thin smoke.
“They’ll have to dig it all out again,” Dulcie said.
“Let’s hope Ryan’s willing,” Joe said. “Sage is the only one who saw him bury the body.”
“She won’t refuse! Ryan knows Sage wouldn’t lie.”
Moving the load of gravel seemed to take forever. Long before the two laborers scraped the last bits of rock from the driveway, the driver had handed Scotty an invoice, gotten back in the cab, and rumbled off down the hill. Still there was no sign of Ryan, and half the deed was done, the body in the pit entombed beneath a thick blanket of crushed rock.
The cats had been waiting for over an hour when Dulcie said, “Looks like they’ll have to dig out a lot more than gravel. Here comes the cement.” They watched the cement truck struggle up the hill, its big, round belly rotating as it churned, mixing its load. Kit said, “I left my paw prints in the neighbors’ fresh cement once. Then I ran.” She smiled. “My prints are still there, maybe they’ll be there forever.” She looked at Joe, her eyes widening. “Can Ryan dig that up again, after it gets hard?”
“With a jackhammer,” Joe said.
The cement truck turned its nose into the street and backed up to the garage. The driver got out, Scotty checked over the order, and they set the chute in place. The cats watched the thick, muddy-looking cement begin to slide down the chute, eased along by the men’s shovels. Soon Scotty disappeared inside the garage; the cats listened to the gritty, wet stroke of shovels, imagining the red-bearded foreman and his helpers distributing the wet concrete like cake batter that would harden into manmade stone.
When the pour was finished, the driver hosed down his chutes and stored them. He carried an invoice in to Scotty, got in his truck, and pulled away. Within the garage, the sound of scraping had changed to a slick slushing. Joe envisioned Scotty floating out the cement with a wide, flat tool on a long handle, working it to a smooth finish. He had seen Ryan do this when she poured Clyde ’s back patio. “Come on,” he said, and he headed down the hill into another stand of tall grass where they could see into the garage, but could still see the road.
Inside the garage, the cement was a dark lake, lying even with the old floor. The cats had hardly gotten settled when Ryan’s red truck appeared far down the road, coming around a curve, hurrying up to the job.
Manuel, the younger Latino laborer, carried the float and the shovels out to the yard and began to hose them down. The moment Ryan’s pickup pulled in and parked, before Joe or Dulcie could stop Kit, she was gone, scorching straight to Ryan, leaping up on her as she stepped out of the truck. As Ryan gathered Kit in her arms, Joe crouched to follow, but Dulcie’s gentle claws pulled him back. “Let her go.” The tabby sat down beside him. “Let her do it, she won’t give us away to the men.”
“She’s so…”
“Enthusiastic,” Dulcie said, smiling.
Ryan stood holding Kit, laughing-but then her expression changed to puzzlement. She cuddled Kit across her shoulder, close to her ear, and wandered away from the garage toward the far end of the house where they wouldn’t be heard. The cats watched Kit look all around and then whisper in her ear. Ryan was very still-then she spun around, carrying Kit, and headed for the garage.
Moving inside, she stood looking down at the smoothly finished cement. She stroked Kit, looking at the tortoiseshell then looking back at the concrete, then glancing out to where Scotty was hosing off his boots.
STANDING AT THE edge of the finished floor, Ryan thought about digging it up again, about doing it right now, before it hardened. She could just hear Scotty, whose Scots-Irish temper matched his red hair. What the hell could she tell him? What possible excuse could she give him?
She didn’t imagine Kit was lying, any more than she would think Joe Grey or Dulcie would lie to her. If they said Sage had seen a body buried there, and if they believed Sage, then she had to believe them. This was one moment when her still limited experience with speaking cats strained every fiber of her good sense, one of the moments when she felt she’d fallen into Alice ’s Wonderland. And yet she hadn’t imagined Kit’s frantic revelation, certainly she didn’t imagine the imperious, yellow-eyed gaze Kit had turned on her, demanding and expectant.
But what about Sage? What if Sage had lied, for some unimaginable reason? Sage was wild, his band was feral, he might have very different scruples from the village cats. What if they spent the rest of the day shoveling out the heavy, wet cement, and then hauling out heavy gravel, then moving the drainpipes and digging down into the earth, and found nothing?