“Will you tell me?”
“Someday, if the mood strikes me. But the mood doesn’t strike me just now. Now is the wrong time. Why don’t you tell me something instead?”
She sighed. She could have guessed that it wouldn’t be that easy. Dirk revealed what he knew of things only now and then. “What would you like to know that you don’t already know?”
“What do you intend to do now that you are back home again?”
“You sound like my father. He wants to know that, too. But I guess I haven’t decided, so I don’t have an answer to your question.”
“Perhaps you do. Perhaps you just need to consider the possibilities.”
She glared. “Why don’t you save us both a lot of time and list them for me. In fact, why don’t you just tell me what you think I should do and save me the trouble of having to decide anything at all?”
The cat blinked and then began washing himself. He took a long time in doing so, a rather deliberately slow process that she was certain was intended to aggravate her. But she held her tongue and waited.
Finally Dirk looked at her. “It isn’t my place to tell you what to do with your life. But I do think putting things off is not a good idea. Or leaving things undone. Cats never do that. They always finish what they start before going on to anything else. Cats understand the importance of completing what they start. They are easily distracted, as you know, so it is necessary for them to establish good life habits early so that they learn to focus.”
He paused. “It might be true of young girls, as well. Although I do not pretend to understand young girls in the same way I understand cats.”
She studied him a moment, and then she nodded. “I think you probably understand young girls pretty well. For a cat.”
Edgewood Dirk closed his eyes and then slowly opened them. “Just the ones who merit understanding. And only once in a very great while.”
Suddenly she heard her father calling her, although later she could never be certain that she had heard anything at all, and she turned toward the castle to look for him.
When she turned back again, Edgewood Dirk was gone.
She stood staring at the spot he had occupied for a very long time, as if by doing so she could make him reappear. She could hear him speaking in her mind; she could hear his words quite clearly. They jumbled together at first and then they sorted themselves out, and suddenly she discovered she knew exactly what she was going to do. Maybe she had known all along, but just hadn’t realized it. In any case, it hadn’t taken any time at all to figure it out. It had just taken a few words of wisdom from a very unusual cat.
She started back to the castle. She would tell her parents at dinner. She would tell them that it was important to finish what you start and to make a habit of doing so. She would tell them that she had learned this from a rather unexpected source, and now she must act on it.
DEJA VU
Vince stopped when he reached the aviary and stood looking for what he already knew wasn’t there. He couldn’t seem to help himself. Every day he came and every day he looked and every day it was the same thing. The bird was gone. The crow or whatever it was with the red eyes. After all these years, it had disappeared. Vanished. Just like that.
No one knew for sure what had happened. Most hadn’t paid much attention to the bird for months—years, really, if you didn’t count the ornithologists. Some still didn’t realize it was gone. There were more important matters to occupy their working lives and dominate their conversations. But Vince was of a different mind. He didn’t think there was anything more important than the disappearance of the bird. Even if he wasn’t sure why, he sensed it.
That bird shouldn’t have gotten free. Security should have taken greater care than they did when they opened the door and took those two madmen into custody. But they weren’t paying attention to anything but the two men, and the crow would have been watching.
Just like it was always watching.
Vince knew, even if the others didn’t. It gave him a creepy, uncomfortable feeling, thinking about it. But he knew.
Five weeks gone now, and things were pretty much back to normal. No one had forgotten that day, a day that had started out pretty much like every other. He wasn’t the first one to notice the two men in the aviary, but he heard Roy shouting and rushed over to see what was happening, and there they were—these two guys, trapped in the aviary, kicking and hammering on the bars and shaking the cage in their efforts to get free.
