Old Muddy stood by the stove, stirring a pot of stew, the fringe of her white cap wilted by the steam. “And where have you been?” she asked.
“Frightening the public, as is my duty.” Eddie cast off his cloak and draped it over a dining chair.
I hopped on the woolen fabric and ignored the ache in my jaw while I decided where to hide my treasure. The closet beneath the stairs?
“Have you been drinking?” she asked him.
Eddie held onto the chair back for support. “I am as straight as judges.”
“Humph. Sissy and I expected you an hour ago,” Muddy said to us. “The stew’s nearly boiled dry and—” She pointed her spoon at me, broth dripping to the floor, and shrank against the wall. “Ahhhh! The cat! The cat!”
Sobered by his mother-in-law’s reaction, Eddie knelt and examined me for the first time since we left Shakey House. “Oh, Jupiter!” He fell back in shock, one hand on his chest.
Sissy, an embodiment of feline grace, glided into the room. Her complexion had grown whiter in recent days, giving her the pallor of a corpse. While I feared for her health, I hadn’t yet revealed my concern to Eddie. He wasn’t ready. “What have we here, Miss Cattarina?” She bent down, plucked the object from my mouth, and examined it with eyes large and dark. A kitten’s eyes.
Eddie and Muddy joined her. The three huddled around the shiny half-orb that lay on her palm. Sissy leaned closer for examination, swaying the lampblack curls that hung on either side of her ears.
“It’s an eye,” Muddy said. She squinted one of her own, deepening her wrinkles.
“Of course it’s an eye, Mother,” Sissy said. “The bigger question is, ‘where did it come from?’”
“Astute as ever, my darling,” Eddie said to Sissy. “But the even bigger conundrum is ‘whom did it come from?’”
“Quite right,” Sissy said. “Quite right.”
Eddie stroked his mustache. “It has to be from the poor woman found…deceased this afternoon, Eudora Tottham.”
Muddy gasped. “The one in the paper? You don’t think—”
“I do,” Eddie said.
Sissy blinked, her confusion evident. I blinked, too.
“You’ve got to turn it in to the police,” Muddy said.
“And cast suspicion on myself?” Eddie said. “I think not.”
“What are you two talking about?” Sissy asked.
Eddie reached across and cupped Sissy’s face. “We mustn’t talk of such things around your delicate ears, Sissy. Serve the soup, won’t you, Muddy?” He snatched the object from his wife’s palm and stuck it in his pocket.
At once, Muddy sat her daughter on stool near the stove and began dishing stew into little china bowls painted with blue dragons. Anticipating the feast to come, I riveted my gaze to the dragon bowl on the floor, the one with the chipped rim. I longed for a big chunk of mutton, not just broth and a cooked carrot that looked like a shriveled finger. How I hated carrots. When Eddie scooped me up, it was clear the contents of my bowl would remain a mystery a while longer. He carried me to the front room, a small, spare area that served as parlor, keeping room, and office. Eddie may have liked his damned stories, but they never amounted to a check-in-the-mail, something I suspected correlated to the size of our home. Though I couldn’t be sure since the inner workings of human commerce were more confusing than a butterfly’s drunken flight path.
Eddie set me on his desk, hooked his thumbs in the pockets of his vest, and gave me a long look. The dying embers of the fireplace glowed behind him. “It’s clear to whom the eye belongs…rather, belonged to, Catters. Anyone with a copy of theGazette could deduce that. But where did you find your treasure? Along Coates? Near the razed tannery?” He took my toy from his pocket and tossed it in the air, catching it. “And, most importantly, did you see the fiend who dropped it? So many questions, so many murders.”
There it was again,murder. It looked as if he wanted me to talk about my discovery. While eager to tell him everything I knew, I couldn’t find the words.
*
My eyeball became Eddie’s eyeball following our little chat. He set it on the mantel before we left for dinner and shut the door, sealing the room from further investigation. Throughout the meal, I plotted how to recover the lost item, deciding at last on a midnight caper. Once the Poe family fell asleep, I would trip the latch on the door and take back my property. Easy as mouse pie. After we feasted—they on stew and bread, me on a chunk of mutton and crust soaked in broth—we retired to our separate chambers.
While I longed to sleep at the foot of Eddie’s bed, my place was with Sissy. I assigned myself that duty after she fell ill one winter’s afternoon in our old house. We’d gathered in the parlor to listen to her sing when, in the middle of a high-note, she caught her breath, looked at Eddie with surprise, and coughed blood onto her gown. Ghastly. I’d smelled sickness on her that fall but had been unable to alert the household due to my verbal shortcomings. As penance, I provided the one comfort I could: warmth. Since then, we’d moved again and again. But try as Eddie might, he could not outrun her illness.
The eyeball still pressing my thoughts, I accompanied Sissy to the bedroom she shared with Muddy and waited for them to peel away layers of dresses, slips, and corsets down to their chemises. I snoozed on the dresser between the tortoiseshell comb set and the hair cozy, eyes half-closed, for their routine. In my opinion, humans attached a distasteful amount of pageantry to covering their skin. Still, I pitied their lack of fur.
Sissy slipped into her bed. “What were you and Eddie talking about in the kitchen, Mother? Before dinner? You spoke of a woman named Eudora.”
Muddy took her own bed against the opposite wall and pulled the quilt to her chin.
“Mother?”
“Don’t trouble yourself, dear.”
“I know I’m ill, but I—”
“Virginia,” Muddy snapped, “you arenot ill. You are under the weather.”
Sissy gritted her teeth. I heard it across the room. “Yes, Mother.” She blew out the candle and called to me. “Cattarina, come.”
I alighted from the dresser and took my place on her chest, curling myself into a ball. As it did each night, her body trembled beneath me, shuddering and seizing with each little cough as it relaxed into a fitful sleep. I longed to heal her but didn’t know how. Yes, I loved Sissy, but I loved Eddie even more, and losing her would cast a shadow over his heart that nothing, not even a litter of suns, would banish. That’s why I hated to leave her.
But the eye had possessed me.
I tiptoed downstairs in the dark, moving like mist over the floorboards. I’d taught myself how to open the front door latch, letting myself in and out of the house at will. However, the office latch was nearly impenetrable. I knew because I’d tried it before. With no nearby bookshelf from which to launch myself, obtaining the proper trajectory and momentum had proved difficult in the past. Still, I had to—
Scratch, scrape, scratch,scrape.
I paused in the hall, listening to a sound I hadn’t heard in days. I hastened to Eddie’s office door and found it ajar, firelight streaming through the opening—a welcome sight, as he’d left the room unoccupied for days. I slipped inside to find my companion at his desk, quill pen in hand, furiously scribbling upon the page. But what had lifted his melancholy? When I leapt onto his desk, I found my answer. He’d set the eyeball near the ink blotter whereit watched him.
At once, jealousy struck me. Watching Eddie wasmy job. I batted the thing and knocked it to the floor, startling him. He looked up, his hair mussed, his cravat askew.
“Catters? I didn’t see you come in.”
I meowed softly, so as not to wake the women.