Read Online Cat Bearing Gifts by Shirley Rousseau Murphy - Free Book Online

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    â€œEmmylou’s perfectly capable of taking care of herself,” Joe said. “You’ve seen her swing that sledgehammer, breaking up those concrete steps.” Emmylou was tall, well muscled, despite her slim build and gray hair. “Besides, when she talked about Birely she made him out a timid soul, easygoing. Not like someone who’d make trouble.”
    â€œHumans don’t always see others truly,” Dulcie said with suspicion. They’d waited and watched, and of course the minute the men went out, they’d tossed the place.
    Not much to toss, in the one room. An overflowing trash bag, half a loaf of stale bread, seven cans of red beans, dirty clothes thrown in the corner beside a pair of sleeping bags that were deeply stained and overripe with human odor, the few boards that had not yet been nailed back against the rock wall, and five loosened stones lying beside them. But tonight, something was off, tonight the room seemed abandoned. The sleeping bags were in the same exact position as when they’d last come in, but the two greasy pillows and the extra blankets had been taken away, and when they prowled the room there was no fresh scent of the men, even their ripe smell was old and fading. The canned beans were gone, too, the only food was three slices of bread gone blue with mold in the package. Dulcie said, “Is their old truck still down in the shed?”
    There was no way to tell except by smell, no way to see into the shed, not the tiniest crack in or under its solid door, which fit snugly into its molding. When they trotted down the steps to investigate, there was no recent scent of exhaust. Any trace of tire marks in the gravelly dirt had been scuffed clean by the wind.
    â€œMaybe they’re having a little vacation,” Joe said, “hitting the homeless jungles for a change of scene. But why did they leave their sleeping bags?”
    â€œI would have left them, too,” Dulcie said with disgust.
    Trotting down through Emmylou’s weedy yard, they’d scrambled up to the roofs of the small old cottages in the neighborhood below. Leaping from house to house, trotting across curled and broken shingles, they’d moved on down the hill until Dulcie, quiet and preoccupied, left Joe, heading away home to her own hearth. To her white-haired housemate and, Joe suspected, to Wilma’s computer. Watching her gallop away, her tabby-striped tail lashing, Joe knew well where Dulcie’s mind was. The minute she sailed through her cat door she’d head for the lighted screen, where she’d be lost the rest of the night, caught up in the new and amazing world she’d discovered, in the secret world of the poet.

7

    I T WAS EARLIER in the year, during that unusual February that brought snow to the village, when Joe found Dulcie in the nighttime library sitting on Wilma’s desk, the pale light of Wilma’s work computer glowing around her. When Dulcie turned to look down at him, the expression on her face was incredibly mysterious and embarrassed. How shy she had been, telling him she was composing a poem; only at long last had she allowed him to read it, to see what she’d written.
    The poem made him laugh, as it was meant to do, and within the next weeks Dulcie produced a whole sheaf of poems, some happy, some uncomfortably sad, and the occasional funny one that made Joe smile. His tabby lady had discovered a whole new dimension to her life, to her already amazing world. That’s where she would be now, sitting before the computer caught up in that magical realm where Joe could only look on, where he was sure he could never follow. Where he could only be glad for her, and try not to mourn his loss, of that part of his tabby lady.
    To Joe Grey, words and language were for gathering information and passing it along—and for making certain your humans knew when to serve up the caviar. But Dulcie used language as a