She never looked down. “I do hate to spoil your fun. That’s nothing but blood from one of Henry Roth’s chickens. You knew my cat was a thief. Now I’m gonna pay Henry for that chicken, so you have no business here.”
The sheriff walked around the side of the house. The door between the staircases stood open a crack.
“Planning to arrest the cat?” Augusta was right behind him.
He walked toward the house. Augusta moved faster. She was there before him and barring the way.
“Tom Jessop, don’t you set foot in my house without an invitation. Your father was a lawyer. I know he taught you better than to do a thing like that without a warrant.”
He ignored her and pushed his way through the door. She caught it on the slam bounce, and followed him inside. “You let six million gnats into my house.” There was nothing in the timbre of her voice to tell him she was anything but angry.
He left the long hallway and entered the kitchen. He looked up to the top of the refrigerator and engaged the yellow cat in a staring contest. Augusta was standing beside him now. He looked down at her and saw her eyes round out a bit as she stared at the gun in his hand.
He looked back to the cat. “You’re fond of that animal, aren’t you, Augusta?” He took aim. “Is that Kathy’s blood in the yard? I’m waitin‘ on a straight answer.”
The old woman put up her hands defensively, as if she were the one he meant to kill and not the cat. Then she waved her arms and shrieked. The cat’s eyes narrowed and the ears flattened back as the animal sprang from the refrigerator and sank claws into the flesh of his chest and teeth into his shoulder. He could hear the horse screaming through the kitchen screens, and birds took flight from the shrubs lining the bank of windows, all screeching and flapping, blotting out the sky and the grass. Teeth sank deep into his hand. He dropped his gun and batted at the cat. He pulled at the pelt and felt his flesh rip. “Augusta, call it off or I’ll break its damn neck!”
Augusta picked up the gun, threw open a window screen and tossed the weapon far into the grass. And now the cat released him after she had enough blood to suit her. The animal leapt to the slate counter and then back to the top of the refrigerator. She crouched there, bunching up her muscles, ready for another round.
He looked at the wound to his hand. These were not the pointy marks of a cat’s teeth. The bite mark was Augusta’s – almost human.
She pointed at the drops of his own blood on the floor. “Now don’t forget where that came from, Tom. I don’t want you getting confused again.”
He was out of the kitchen and heading back down the hall when Augusta said, “Where you going so fast, Tom? I think you can take that cat two falls out of three.”
“I’ll be right back,” he said, ever so politely. “I can’t shoot that animal without my gun, can I?” The door slammed behind him.
He found his weapon shining through the tall grass twenty feet from the house where he had parked the car. He was wondering if the stains on the grass might not be chicken blood after all – or maybe it was Fred Laurie’s blood.
What the hell?
He watched the horse race around the paddock. Now the animal reared up on his hind legs and knocked the crossbar off the fence. Hooves crashed down on the fallen bar and splintered the wood. The birds had picked up a contagion of panic and the volume of birdsong was building.
When he turned around, he was staring at a single-shot derringer, and Augusta was right behind it with her finger on the trigger. He stood up slowly and holstered his gun. His eyes never strayed to the derringer as he said, almost casually, “You wouldn’t shoot me.”
“Oh, Tom. You know better than that,” she said sweetly. “Of course I would.” She grinned wide and evil. “Do you really want to spend all damn day at the hospital while they pick this slug out of you?”
The dark idea crossed his mind that she would shoot anyone who threatened an animal on her land. Might she have found Fred in the woods? If that was what she was covering up, he wasn’t sure he wanted to catch her before she had time to dispose of the evidence. As Augusta had pointed out, Fred’s wife probably needed a rest from the beatings. “I guess I don’t need to kill a cat today. But I do need to find Kathy, and real fast. If you get in my way, I’ll forget how long I’ve known you, old woman. I’m too close to let – ”
“It always comes back to Cass Shelley’s murder, doesn’t it?” She lowered the gun; the game was done, and she was not smiling anymore. “Revenge is a real sickness with you, Tom. This isn’t what your father had in mind for you. Sheriff of St. Jude Parish should have been your first political office, not your life.”
“Well just look at you, Augusta – the damn queen of revenge. It’s your whole reason for living.”
“Oh, but I do it so well – with gusto and style. I make it a fine art. With you, it’s just an ugly occupation. Now move off my land or I’ll let fly with a bullet.” She lowered the short barrel of the derringer to his kneecaps. “Think you can catch that little girl with one lame leg?”
He backed up and eased himself into the car. When the wheels were spinning in a wide grassy lake, she fired the gun into the trunk.
God damn it!
In his rearview mirror, he could see her reloading just as the wheels found traction on more solid ground. Instead of driving forward, like any man who truly wanted to live, he backed up the car until he was abreast of her, and then he leaned out the window.
“Augusta,” he said, touching the brim of his hat in salute. “Don’t ever change.”
Her laughter followed after him as the car rolled away.
Before he was close enough to read the chiseled legend, Charles recognized the face on the new tombstone in the cemetery. Babe’s photograph was encased in a cheap wooden frame fixed to the stone. This would be the smallest of graves, only a hole in the ground for the urn. No tomb for Babe Laurie, nothing so grand.
“So when will they inter the ashes?”
“He won’t be cremated till after the big party at the end of the week” said Henry, looking down on the rough work of a cut-rate craftsman. “It’s a poor thing, isn’t it? Malcolm spent a fortune renting a fancy glass show casket for the wake, and almost nothing on the marker. Babe would have hated this. When he was alive, he thought he was king of the world.”
Charles nodded. He had encountered such a man when he was the freak child at Harvard, eleven years old in his sophomore year. In the course of research for his behavioral science project, he had observed a patient in a local hospital. The old man was ravaged by syphilis and given to shouting, ‘King of the world am I!’ But he had walked in an unkingly way, graceless, ungainly, and sometimes stumbling.
The old man had demanded that young Charles bow and use the proper title whenever the boy addressed him. A doctor had been present and explained to Charles that it was a hospital rule never to yield to the whims of dementia. The boy had dutifully complied with the policy and refused the king his due. Toward the end of this study period, the child had even had the temerity to explain to the old man that this was for his own good.
The old man had disagreed, and a fit of temper had been followed by convulsions. Then the doctor had gently pushed Charles from the room and turned back to his patient, who was screaming and being tied down with restraints.
The following day, the boy had returned to the old man’s room, bearing flowers as a peace offering – bright blooms of every color, a veritable palette of apologies. But Charles found the room empty, the bed stripped of its sheets. The king of the world had died the previous evening.
The doctor and his nurse spent the next hour calming the hysterical little boy, trying to convince Charles that he had not killed the old man. Then, speaking to the brilliant child as equals, they had carefully explained the hell of the disease, the damage they could not reverse because treatment had come too late, and finally, the mercy of the old man’s death as a release from suffering. The tantrum and the convulsions, they said, were merely behaviors common to dementia paralytica.