Jake knew what he needed-knew exactly what he had to do.
And ever since night had fallen over St. Albans, he'd been there, hidden by the shadows, holding perfectly still in the darkness, waiting.
The hours crept by. He could feel the people inside the house, almost see them tossing in their troubled sleep.
His ears, sharpened by a life spent tracking the creatures that roamed the night, could almost hear them breathing, and when, in the small hours of the night, the cat leaped from the windowsill, he heard it clearly, even though its paws struck the ground so lightly they made almost no sound.
As the cat moved through the darkness, Jake tensed, waiting.
His ears and eyes tracked it as it moved through the area, exploring the wilderness that had closed around the house as the years had passed. He waited patiently, knowing that soon it would move in his direction.
Perhaps it would even sense him.
But if he held still-if he made no sound at all-
Yes!
It was coming toward him now.
Jake held his breath as the cat stopped, tensing as it caught his scent. For an instant he thought it was going to bolt, but then, as he silently willed it forward, it dropped low to the ground and began slinking nearer.
Jake waited, every muscle in his body vibrating with the strain of holding perfectly still.
The cat crept closer, its tail twitching.
It paused once more, when it was still just beyond his reach. But then, its curiosity overcoming its caution, it moved still closer.
Closer…
Close enough!
So quickly the cat had no time to react, Jake's arms snaked through the darkness.
His huge hands closed around the cat's neck.
CHAPTER 10
You promise you'll look for Muffin?" Kim asked when Janet pulled the Toyota to a stop in front of St. Ignatius School the next morning.
"Will you stop worrying?" Jared said as he slid out of the backseat. "She's a cat. They do what they want to do. She'll come home when she feels like it."
"But what if she tried to go back to Shreveport?" Kim fretted.
"I'm sure she didn't do that," Janet assured her. "Jared's probably right. But I promise I'll keep an eye out for her." She looked at her watch. "Now let's get you two enrolled so I can get back to the house before your father-" She cut her words short, but it was too late. She saw Kim and Jared glance at each other and was certain they were supplying the words she hadn't uttered: starts drinking.
But maybe, just maybe, he'd really meant what he said about making this work, about starting over again in St. Albans. When she woke up this morning, Ted was already out of bed, and for a fleeting moment-and it had only happened because she wasn't quite awake yet-she felt the same despair that had washed over her at least half a dozen times in the last few months when she woke up to find that Ted hadn't come to bed at all.
Mostly, she'd found him passed out on the sofa in the living room.
Once, she found him in the bathtub.
And once he hadn't come home at all. That morning, she'd been on the verge of calling the police when he'd phoned her with a story-which she chose to believe, although she knew it was undoubtedly a lie-about having worked most of the night and finally collapsing in one of the rooms at the Majestic.
But this morning, Janet had found him downstairs ripping up the worn carpet that covered the dining room floor, in order to expose the intricately inlaid hardwood hidden beneath it. "Will you look at this?" he crowed. "It's incredible! Oak inlaid with cherry, walnut, and God only knows what else. All it needs is sanding and refinishing." He kept working while she put together a makeshift breakfast, and when she left to enroll Jared and Kimberley at St. Ignatius, he was still at it. Molly, in her playpen, had been watching her father work and happily played with a scrap of carpet he'd given her. And for the first time in years, Janet allowed herself to hope that maybe this time things really would change. But even as she let that tiny ray of hope into her consciousness, she reminded herself that he'd made dozens of promises before. None of them had ever been kept.
"Come on," she said now, starting up the steps to the school. "No matter what's happening at home, I still need to be there. I'll keep an eye out for Muffin. I promise."
The moment he stepped through the door, Jared's worst fears about what St. Ignatius might be like were instantly validated. The front door opened onto a long, narrow corridor lit only by a few old-fashioned glass globes that hung at the intersections where other hallways led off to the right and left. The walls were wainscoted, but the wood and plaster had been painted the same color-a sort of beige that looked yellowish and dirty. The floor was covered with a dark linoleum unbroken by any pattern, unless you could count a worn strip down the middle through which the wood of the floor beneath was starting to show. Jared decided the worn strip didn't count.
As they made their way to the office, Jared and Kim glanced uneasily at each other, but neither said anything.
Half an hour later, after their mother had left, the twins started up the stairs to their new homeroom. "You'll like Sister Clarence," Father Bernard, the priest who ran St. Ignatius, had assured them. "She's one of our best teachers, and all the children love her."
"Not exactly like Shreveport, is it?" Jared observed as they emerged from the stairwell onto the second-floor landing. Ahead of them stretched a duplicate of the corridor on the first floor, except this one contained a bank of lockers, two of which had been assigned to them. "They'll need to have locks, of course," Father Bernard had told Janet. "We require combination locks, and the combinations must be on file in the office." He'd fixed Jared with a hard look, as if he expected his charges to try to get away with as much as they could. "We do spot checks, and if the combination has been changed, it is an automatic one-week suspension."
Now, as Jared eyed the lockers, he grinned at his sister. " 'Spose if I put a padlock with a key on my locker, I could get kicked out completely?"
Kim resisted the urge to laugh. "Let's just make the best of it. Mom's got enough problems without having to worry about us."
Jared sighed. "I know. But I'd still like to see the look on Father Bernard's face if he found a lock he couldn't open."
They found their room halfway down the hall, and Jared pulled the door open for Kim. As they stepped through, the black-clad figure who had been writing on the blackboard turned and impaled them with a stare that knifed through steel-rimmed glasses.
"I am Sister Clarence," she said.
"I'm Jared Con-" Jared began, but the nun cut him off.
"I know who you are." She indicated two seats in the second row with the slightest nod of her cowled head. "We are discussing the role of the Vatican in World War Two," she went on. "You've already missed the first two weeks of school. I'll expect you to have caught up with the reading by tomorrow."
As she turned back to the blackboard, Jared and Kim slipped into their seats at the old-fashioned school desks. Directly behind Jared sat Luke Roberts, who slipped Jared a note. Jared unfolded the note and read the scrawled message.
Welcome to St. Ignoramus.
Suppressing a smile, Jared refolded the note and passed it across to Kim. A nearly inaudible giggle escaped her lips. She silenced it a moment too late.
"You will share that note with the rest of the class, Kimberley," Sister Clarence pronounced, her eyes boring into Kim, whose face reddened.
"I-It doesn't really-"
"Stand up," Sister Clarence ordered. "In this school, we always stand when we are spoken to, or when we wish to speak."