“A little of this, a little of that,” she said breezily. She lifted her coffee cup and let the steam rise to her lips. “I may go out later if the weather stays fair.”
“Out?” Muddy frowned. “Do you think that’s a good idea? It may turn windy later.”
Sissy shot me a furtive look, though I knew not why. “I’ll be fine, Mother.”
“As long as you’re feeling up to it, let’s take tea outside,” Eddie said to Sissy. “We’ll have a little picnic along the river.” He pushed his chair from the table, scraping its legs along the floor. “Now if you’ll excuse me. I saw Mr. Coffin poking around this morning, and I want to talk to him about—”
“The wobbly porch rail,” Muddy said at once. She stood and gathered the dishes. “And the cracked window in the parlor.”
“Just what I had in mind,” he said.
“And don’t let that fatted goose convince you we owe money. We’re paid up until the end of October.”
Eddie drummed his fingers on the table. “Catters?”
I looked up from a rather indelicate grooming pose, one leg high above my head.
“Let’s visit Mr. Coffin,” he said. “Shall we?”
The remainder of my bath could wait. I followed Eddie outside, where we found Mr. Coffin hammering a board onto Ms. Busybody’s broken stoop next door. He looked up as we approached, a row of nails clenched between his teeth. Though I hadn’t known him long, Mr. Coffin had already secured a spot on my “favored humans” list. A gentle soul with the temperament of fresh, cold milk on a hot day, he’d never once raised his voice, not to Eddie, not to Muddy or Sissy, and most of all, not to me. Besides which, I rather liked fatted geese.
Mr. Coffin stood with a grunt and removed the nails from his mouth. He tossed them into his toolbox, along with the hammer. “Hullo, Poe.”
“Good morning, Mr. Coffin,” Eddie said.
“How is your dear wife? Any change?”
“Virginia is well.Very well.”
I wove between Mr. Coffin’s legs, gifting him with fur. When a fresh breeze blew in from the Schuylkill, I lifted my nose, reveling in the scent of fish. The pastureland we lived in now smelled better than our previous haunt, a dense city neighborhood that reeked of garbage and other human wastes of which I dared not think. Fairmount was a tree climber’s paradise, and I, for one, hoped we never left.
“Any news about your job in the Custom House?” Mr. Coffin wiped his hands on a rag he took from his back pocket. “I faithfully scour the papers each morning, hoping for a glimpse of your name.”
“The machinations of the federal government are beyondmy meager comprehension. In the meantime, I am hard at work on my future—The Pennmagazine. We are still looking for investors. Have I mentioned it before?”
“Youmay have,” Mr. Coffin said.
Eddie flashed his teeth. Devoid of merriment, the gesture intuited nervousness. Cats, I might add, are incapable of such subterfuge. He picked a piece of chipped paint from the finial. “Say, Mr. Coffin, what do you know about the murders near Logan Square? As alderman, your brother-in-law must have some insight into the crime.”
“What is it about violence that fascinates you?”
“I have so few hobbies. Without them, I might perish from boredom.Then who would pay my rent?”
Mr. Coffin laughed. “You got me there, Poe.” He replaced the rag in his pocket and turned to me, his double chin stretching with a smile. “I see you’ve brought God’s favorite creature round this morning. Hullo, Cattarina. Have you missed me?”
I nudged his leg.
With great fanfare, he took a sliver of jerky from his pocket and dangled it above me, his fingers a baited hook. Yet I made no move toward the treat. So he knelt down on one knee—a task that took real effort—and held it out for me. When he realized the futility of his scheme, he handed the jerky to Eddie, who in turn handed it to me. I wasn’t above taking food from Mr. Coffin. Things just tasted better from Eddie’s hand, and I ate from it when I could.
“She’s the fickle one, isn’t she?” Mr. Coffin said. He stayed low and helped himself onto the bottom step of Ms. Busybody’s stoop. “Now about those murders.” He paused, squinting into the sun. “I take it they’re research for a story.”
“Yes. I don’t have a title yet, but I do have a draft of the opening lines.” Eddie cleared his throat and recited a speech that, from its timbre, seemed to carry importance.
“TRUE!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story.”
He coughed, mumbled apologetically about the “anemic opening,” then continued:
“It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night. Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture—a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees—very gradually—I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.”
Eddie finished by bowing to Mr. Coffin. Mr. Coffin applauded. It was all too much for me. I sat on a sun-warmed patch of earth and kneaded my claws in the grass, the problem of Claw still taxing me. Perhaps I could offer him a bribe for safe passage. But he and his gang surely had all the mice they could handle. A carriage might move me through dangerifI could sneak onto one heading the right direction. A meadowlark landed in the dust near our porch and hopped about on little stick legs. Had I not been so full of Mr. Coffin’s jerky and my own questions, I might’ve dispensed with the nuisance for flaunting such nauseating patterns this early in the day.
“You assume madness as the motive for the killings,” Mr. Coffin said.
“How can anyone think otherwise?” Eddie gazed past the line of row houses into the adjoining field. “Though I’d like to be certain. Details matter. Details are everything.”
“The district, from what my brother-in-law tells me, knows nothing of the villain. No suspects, no witnesses. Two murders a fortnight apart, two prosthetic eyes taken as plunder, both of them pale blue. That is all.”
“Both of them pale blue?” Eddie asked. He gave Mr. Coffin his full attention. “I—I hadn’t realized. The paper never stated the color of the prostheses. How very curious.”
Mr. Coffin rose and retrieved his hammer. “No matter the color, two women are dead. And when they catch the culprit, I hope they lock him in the Eastern State Penitentiary.”
I froze at the utterance of the prison, a name I knew all too well, and a plan began to form. I didn’t need brains or bribes to get past Claw; I needed brawn. And the Eastern State residents had plenty.
[Êàðòèíêà: img_8]
Hunting the Spider
Big Blue and his extended family lived behind the Eastern State Penitentiary, near the northwest corner, away from the houses and roads. I’d spent long afternoons in the field separating our neighborhood and the prison, observing the band of ferals as one might a bird through a window. An extraordinary strategist, Big Blue moved his troops with the passage of the sun, staying hidden in the building’s shadow for much of the day. When individuals ventured into the light, they did so with great speed and cunning. This hearkened back to something my Auntie Sass taught me: unseen cats are safe cats. I hadn’t seen Sass since Eddie adopted me, but I thought of the cream-colored longhair often and the wooden crate we shared behind Osgood’s Odd Goods. If not for her, I would’ve starved on the streets after my mother died.
I turned and looked toward home. Eddie and Mr. Coffin, no bigger than fleas at this distance, were exactly where I’d left them. With any luck, my friend would continue chatting and my absence would go unnoticed. I slunk through the tall grass, crossing the boundary between Big Blue’s territory and mine, and came to rest at its edge where I yowled an all-purpose greeting.