Lucy Doesn't Wear Pink (36 page)
Read Lucy Doesn't Wear Pink Online
Authors: Nancy Rue
Tags: #Christian, #Juvenile Fiction, #General, #Religious, #Sports & Recreation, #Social Science, #ebook, #book, #Handicapped, #Soccer
“Keep looking,” Dad said. “I closed the cans with those big bungee cords. Artemis couldn’t have gotten them undone.”
Lucy didn’t remind Dad that Artemis, their hunter cat, was practically Terminator Kitty when really nasty trash was involved. She got one knee up on the sink and peered past the red-checked curtains again.
“The bungee is still on the lid,” she reported. “She ripped into the side of the trash can.”
“She
didn’t.”
“Well, there’s a big ol’ hole there.”
“Do you see claw marks?”
Lucy pressed her forehead on the glass, and a chill wormed its way up her back. Right where the gray plastic had been ripped away, thick gashes scrawled down the can as if someone had made them with a big nail.
“Yeah,” she said. “And they aren’t Artemis’s. Or Marmalade’s — or Lolli’s — or Mudge’s — ”
“It’s a good thing we only have four cats,” Dad said, “or we could be here for days.” The dry, Dad-calm was back in his voice. “You keep watching. I’m calling Sheriff Navarra.”
Lucy pulled her other knee up and settled into the sink. It was a good thing she’d done all the dishes and wiped everything dry in an attempt to get out of groundation, although that never worked on Dad.
From this position, Lucy could survey the whole yard, which fanned out from the big Mexican elder tree in the middle to the fence surrounding the house like a row of straight gray teeth. The umbrella was still down on the table on the patio, and the chairs leaned with their faces against the house, waiting for enough spring in the air so she and Dad could come out and sit in them. The gate on the side sagged as always beneath its fringe of cautious wisteria vine just coming into bloom — the same kind of plant that covered the toolshed and had started to creep up the dead tree by the back fence.
“Whatever it was, it’s gone now,” Lucy said.
Dad closed his cell phone against his chest and dropped it into his pocket. Two fierce lines formed between his eyebrows. “That’s a definite bummer.”
“How come?”
“The sheriff ’s on his way. He’s going to think we’re imagining things. Okay — be like the kitties. Look for movement. Up high — not on the ground.”
Lucy pulled her eyes to the top of the fence, the roof of the toolshed, the rickety arch over the gate. Nothing moved. Not until she went back to the dead tree, where a shadow was passing over it.
“What?” Dad said.
“I think I saw something — ”
“Shhh!”
Lucy froze and let Dad tilt his head and listen. People said a blind man didn’t really have a better sense of hearing than anyone else, but Dad could practically hear a cobweb fluttering in a corner.
“Do you see Artemis?” he said.
Lucy searched the top of the fence again, where Artemis Hamm normally inched, tightrope-walker style, when she was stalking a mouse or a quail who was just trying to keep her kids in tow. No sign of Artemis.
And then Lucy heard what Dad must have heard: the low growl of their huntress feline, the kind she made when some other cat was trying to horn in on the prey she’d done all the work to catch.
“Under the dead tree.” Dad put both hands on her shoulders. “Is Artemis down there?”
Lucy saw her cat’s mottled coat, the one that looked like God couldn’t make up his mind on what kind of cat he wanted Artemis Hamm to be. She crouched at the bottom of the dead tree, staring up as if it had come to life.
Because it had. Lucy gasped as she watched one paw and then another, each the size of Artemis’s head, creep its way down the spongy bark, smothering its woodpecker holes, until pointed, tufted, devilish ears came into view.
“It’s a bobcat!” Lucy said. “Dad — he’s going after Artemis!”
Dad let go of Lucy’s shoulders, and she scrambled down from the sink — but not before he got his hand up.
“You stay in this house, and I mean it,” he said.
“He’ll get Artemis!”
“He’ll get you too. I’m calling Sheriff Navarra again — ”
The rest of whatever he was going to say was lost in a screech so horrible even Dad looked bolted to the floor. Lucy hoisted herself back up onto the sink and flattened her face against the window. The big cat was almost to the ground, but there was no helpless Artemis flailing in his mouth.
There was only J.J., facing the animal with a shovel in his hand and a smear of sheer horror across his face.
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