Cat Seeing Double by Shirley Rousseau Murphy Page B

as the kit put it—only to turn home again very soon, the little cat dreadfully carsick. Three times the Greenlaws had tried, three journeys in which the Kit became deathly ill.
    Nearly a year since Lucinda brought the little tattercoat back for good, to stay with Wilma while the elderly newlyweds traveled.
    She’s grown up , Dulcie thought sadly. That fact, coupled with the kit’s wild and unruly temperament, made Dulcie feel not simply lonely suddenly, but sharply apprehensive.
    Once the kit realized that she was a grown-up cat who need not necessarily obey her elders, what might she do then?
    Crouching among the branches watching the big pale hound racing along with his nose to the ground eagerly following their scent, Dulcie’s head was filled with a cat’s natural fear of the unfamiliar beast, and filled as well with all the fear that had accumulated during this strangest of days. With the terrible tragedy that might have been. And with the kit’s boldness in preventing that disaster.
    And suddenly life seemed to Dulcie overwhelming.She felt totally adrift, she and Joe and the kit. Alone in the vast world, three cats who were like no other—not totally cat, and not human, but with talents of both. Were they, as Joe had once said, the great cat god’s ultimate joke? Three amusing experiments invented for His private and twisted amusement?
    She did not believe that.
    And why, tonight, did her thoughts turn so frightened?
    That terrible explosion had upset her more than she’d imagined.
    â€œHe’s leaving,” Joe said, peering down the hill where the dog had swerved away. They watched the animal disappear between cottages, causing housebound dogs all along the street to bark. Block by block, barking dogs marked his progress until all across the village, dogs bored with their dull lives chimed together delighted at any new excitement.
    When the dog had vanished and the barking died, the cats dropped out of the tree and headed across the slope to hunt. Prowling in the still night, it was no trick to start a rabbit among the tall grass, to corner and dispatch it. Wedding party food was lovely, but it didn’t stay with one like a nice fresh rabbit. At three in the morning, by the chimes of the courthouse clock echoing across the hills, they were crouched in the grass sharing their third rabbit when two gunshots cut the silence.
    Distant shots echoing back and forth across the hills.
    The cats stopped eating.
    The noise could have been backfires, but they didn’t think so. They hadn’t heard a car purring along thestreets. And when they reared up to look above the high grass, they saw no reflection of headlights moving through the dark village. And the sounds had been sharper, more precise than the fuzzed explosion of a backfire—the cats knew too well the sound of a handgun, from listening outside the police station to cops practicing on the indoor range. And Joe and Dulcie knew, from being shot at themselves, an experience they didn’t care to repeat.
    The echo bouncing among the houses had made it impossible to pin the exact location, even for sensitive feline ears. But certainly the shots had come from the north end of the village. Watching the few scattered lights in that direction, looking for a house light to go on or to be extinguished, they saw no change.
    When no further shots were fired, the cats headed down the hills toward home and safety. They might love adventure, but they weren’t stupid. But then as they crossed the little park above Highway One, they heard a car somewhere off to their right, its progress muffled among the cottages.
    Racing up a pine tree they spotted a lone car, its lights glancing across buildings and through the trees’ dark foliage, shafts of intermittent light bright and then lost, then appearing again. They heard it gear down, heard it rev a little as if it had turned in somewhere. Then silence. And the moving glow was