“What is it? What’s so awful?” I whispered to him. “Was she—murdered?”
“I don’t know,” he whispered back.
“Then what is it? What is it?”
“She must have been dead a long time,” he whispered, not looking at me. “You know. Cats.”
8
I SCREAMED THEN.
Even telling about it, having to remember it, makes me feel sick. Most of the time, now, I can keep it pushed so far back in my mind that I’m safe against stumbling into it accidentally. But it was new then. For the first time in my life, I knew how deep horror could go.
It’s a lot different—the horror you feel from just hearing about something loathsome or reading something horrifying, like Dracula. But this was horror that was right in my own life. It was right in the house with me. I wanted to cry and shriek and push away with my hands the pictures that jumped into my head. Hodge Kistler’s face was whirling in front of me like a pinwheel, and it seemed half an hour before the world got props under itself again and steadied down.
Hodge Kistler was shaking me, and I just let myself be shaken, limp. There was a chair under me; I don’t know when that got there. For a while all I could do was wipe my forehead and the palms of my hands with my handkerchief; I never knew emotion could squeeze so much moisture out of me.
It was a while before I got around to being interested in the other people. By that time Mr. Kistler was pounding me on the back. I don’t know why it is that men think pounding on the back is such a cure-all.
I looked, then, to see if the others knew what I knew.
No. Except for Mr. Waller and the two policemen, they stood as wondering and separate as before, staring now at me; people of a different world, staring across the ocean of my knowledge. Only Mrs. Halloran was living in herself instead of in that outside fear and awe; her face was twisted into a whimper, a whimper that grew steadily stronger.
“What is it?” Mrs. Waller whispered again dully, this time asking me.
Mrs. Halloran burst into a scream.
“Nobody tells me anything! It’s my aunt Hattie! She’s been murdered! That’s what she’s been! Nobody tells me anything!”
Mr. Grant appealed soberly to Mr. Kistler.
“Surely if Mrs. Dacres can be told, then the rest of us . . .”
Mr. Kistler turned to where Jerry and Red stood at the door as if on guard. Jerry’s head nodded, almost imperceptibly; he was giving permission, but he didn’t want to be responsible for having given it. He was watching me; I had the impression he’d been cataloging every emotion I’d had when Hodge Kistler had told me.
“You tell ’em, Jerry.”
“Not me.”
“Well,” Hodge Kistler said, “I don’t know why it should be me, but here goes.”
He stood now at the side of my chair, hands in coat pockets, legs braced wide; only the two of us in the west bay; the others were halfway across the room or farther, as if we were speakers and they an audience. I could feel rising from them a wave of self-defense that still held eagerness, and fear. Mrs. Halloran, arrested in midwhisper, Mrs. Waller and Miss Sands, with faces frozen still, Mr. Grant, blinking, Mr. Buffingham, eyes alive in a dead face.
Mr. Kistler’s voice came slow and low.
“Prepare yourselves to be shocked. You especially, Mrs. Halloran. It’s worse than that she’s dead. It’s uglier than murder. It’s that the—the animals didn’t wait to be fed.”
Even with the preparation they’d had, even with some of them, surely, guessing even if they didn’t want to acknowledge the guess, it hit them like a strong blow. Mr. Buffingham’s head jerked back; his face turned as red as fire. Mr. Grant’s face whitened; he sagged as he reached behind him toward the buffet for support. Miss Sands sucked in a long, wheezing breath before she seemed to stop breathing altogether; she stood as stiffly and blankly as if she were stone. Mrs. Waller turned yellow; her husband had had his arm at her back from the moment Mr. Kistler’s voice began; she crumpled, and Red kicked a chair toward her as he leaped to help Mr. Waller hold her; they got the chair under her as she came down. She didn’t faint, though; she moaned, turned her face to bury it in her husband’s coat.
Mrs. Halloran was slow. She stupidly watched the others take it; when Mrs. Waller moaned the idea must finally have seeped into her mind, too, because she screamed once, a high-pitched, senseless cry, before her feet slipped out from under her. She went down so fast her head hit the floor, hard, before Jerry or Mr. Kistler could reach her.
Jerry, I noticed, had been watching as much as I had, his eyes flickering quickly from one face to another.
The two men lifted Mrs. Halloran to my studio couch, stretched her out flat. When Jerry began slapping her face I staggered out to the kitchen for a glass of water; the men gladly left her to me when I came back with it, Miss Sands stepping quietly forward to help me.
Mrs. Halloran was less of a nuisance out than in; we should have left her alone. Conscious, she began the oh-hu business again, varied with little cries and gulping sobs. She was a stringy, scrawny woman—nothing describes her as well as those old-fashioned words—and frightfully unlovely lying there flat on my couch, with her pointed shoes sticking up in the air and her face blue under the cheap makeup.
It wasn’t long after Mrs. Halloran revived that more police began turning up. We heard the first siren, a thin faraway whine crescendoing
