Epilogue

A young yellow tabby cat made its way across town. It crossed the street to avoid a large house with peeling paint and crooked shutters. Three stories up in a tall tower room topped by scalloped slate shingles, the curtains fluttered. The cat sat across the street cleaning its paws until a tall man came out of the house, climbed into a large SUV with a gold star painted on its side and drove away with a roar of engines and a burst of exhaust. When the curtains fluttered again, the cat stood up and walked slowly on.

Several blocks of travel brought it to an old Victorian with new paint that made its nose twitch. Still, a vaguely familiar sunny spot on the porch beckoned and the cat stole a nap until pansy-filled hanging baskets blocked the sunbeams it craved.

It padded onward to an alley behind a coffee shop where its stomach expected a bowl of cream. It waited to no avail. With a disgruntled twitch of its tail, it continued to a window of a hair salon where several surprised women made a fuss with tummy rubs and bits of sugared donuts it haughtily refused to touch.

“If I didn’t know better, I would swear that’s Violet Jesham’s old cat,” one of the women said. Her head was covered in a pungent paste that made the cat’s eyes water and burn. “It even has the same crooked stripes at the corner of its eyes.”

“Well, Gibbons did get around,” another woman replied and they all laughed.

The cat left the beauty parlor and headed to a quieter part of town. It trod a familiar path, but one it had never walked before until a niggling sense of urgency caused it to veer off course.

Padding down a side street lined with smaller homes than the ones it had passed earlier in the day, the cat found another sunny spot on another porch. This one had window boxes instead of hanging baskets so the sun could pour through and warm the pale blue boards beneath the cat’s paws. It flopped down, surrounded by a floral profusion it tolerated because it didn’t block its sunlight. Bright and colorful petals and greenery waved in the breeze. A few cool and lazy bees buzzed, but not actively enough to warrant the cat’s attention.

Here purred in its throat as it settled in to wait.

Inside the house, a phone’s musical ringtone chimed and footsteps sounded down a long hall. After several muffled sentences, an auburn-haired beauty hung up the phone and cried.

* * *

At the topmost branches of a blazing maple set back from High Lake by brambles and brush and a long gravel drive that ended in an abandoned foundation where a house had once burned to the ground, a shabby black crow stretched its wings. Its neck reached forward and its beak opened, and a rusty shriek of a caw sounded grittily to echo in the surrounding copse of woods.

Below its perch, more and more rescue vehicles arrived, silently, with no flashing lights or shrieking sirens.

The shallow grave that had finally been found warranted no rush.

With one more caw, this one stronger than the last, the crow leapt into the air to circle higher and higher on the autumn air currents, searching for an updraft that would take it home.