Around eight o’clock that evening, it started to rain heavily. Shivering in the cold wind, Ernie Bradshaw clutched his wet overcoat closer as he probed the bushes on either side of the gate with his walking stick.
“Emily!” he whispered. “Where are you?” Tentatively, he pushed the gate open, the squeak from its rusty hinges making him pause, but after waiting for a couple of minutes, he shuffled through and into the garden. Fumbling in his overcoat pocket, he pulled out a flashlight and started up the stone-flagged path. He shone the weak beam back and forth across the wet bushes and shrubs, hissing his cat’s name repeatedly as he went.
As he rounded the corner of the house, he saw light pouring from one of the main-floor windows and quickly switched off the flashlight, sidling toward the window only to realize that it was too high off the ground for him to see inside the room. Cautiously, using his flashlight again, he looked for something to stand on, but all he could find was a large clay pot containing a dead chrysanthemum. Emptying the contents onto a nearby flowerbed, Ernie placed the pot upside down below the window and gingerly climbed onto it.
“I told you! I want one thousand dollars each,” Violet’s voice came to him through the glass, “or I’m out.”
“Calm down. You’ll get the rest when the goods are delivered.”
Ernie didn’t recognize the man’s voice, so he strained on tiptoe to see into the room. “I knew she was up to no good,” he whispered to himself. The flowerpot wobbled. He grabbed at the wooden windowsill to steady himself, but felt the pot sliding under his feet, and the next moment he was falling heavily onto his knees. Shuffling to his feet, he flattened himself against the house and prayed they hadn’t heard the noise, but the window was suddenly flung open.
“Who’s there?” Violet demanded.
Ernie’s old heart thumped, and it took all of his willpower to hold his breath and remain still.
“Must have been one of your ruddy cats,” the unknown man cackled. “Don’t be so nervous.”
The window slammed shut.
The old man waited until he had stopped shaking before groping his way to the back of the house. A large garage with a shingle-roofed annex loomed up in the dark, and he debated using his light again. Gently, he turned the knob of the annex door. To his surprise, it was unlocked, and he took a tentative step inside. “Emily?” he called under his breath. The beam from the flashlight made no impression on the blackness within the building, but he thought he heard a movement. Taking another cautious step, his shaking hand making the feeble light dance on the walls, he called again. “Emily! Is that you?”
Hearing a whimpering sound from the back of the shed, he stepped in further. To his amazement, the beam of his flashlight caught, not his missing cat, but a young girl lying on a camp bed, a look of terror on her face. “Have you seen my Em . . . ?”
They were the last words that Ernie uttered. An iron crowbar cut him off in mid-sentence, smashing his fragile skull as easily as if it had been an egg. Ernie collapsed without making another sound, falling into a heap on the floor. As he lay in the pool of blood that now gushed from his head, carrying with it the last of his miserable life, a white cat walked over to him and rubbed against his still-twitching outstretched hand, and then, arching its back and lifting its tail high, it walked out into the night.