Sherry Chandler

Cat and Countess

The woman who ran out of the front door of Stonington just as Jury stopped his car in the circular drive was carrying something wrapped up in a blanket. As he crunched up the gravel toward her, she called to him, “Would you please go with me to the vet’s? I can’t drive and carry the cat, too.”

Drooping out of one end of the blanket was a black, wedge-shaped face, a tiny ribbon of blood matting the fur between nose and mouth.

“Sure, only let’s use my car. You hold the cat and I’ll drive.”

She was silent as he held the door for her. He backed up and started down the long gravel drive, passing a squat gatehouse on his right. When they got to the Horndean Road, he said, “Which way?”

“Left. Toward Horndean.” She turned her head then to look out of her window, cutting off conversation. A square of paisley lawn tied at the base of her neck held back her oak-colored hair. He knew Lady Kennington had few servants — just a gardener and a cook. This was certainly neither, so it must be the lady herself. Jury was disoriented. He had got a picture firmly fixed in his mind of an imperious, elderly woman, perhaps thin and gray-haired, wearing a dress of lavender silk adorned with a cameo. The reality was substantially different.

“What’s the matter with the cat?”

“I don’t know. I think it was hit by a car, but I don’t know. I saw it running up the drive an hour ago and didn’t think anything was wrong.” She looked out her window, rather than at Jury, as she said this.

He turned to peer at the cat, which looked back, glassy-eyed, and made a sort of weak sound, as if it and Jury shared some secret knowledge of what happens to cats in this condition. The speculations of the woman beside him were probably just as sad.

—Martha Grimes, The Anodyne Necklace (Thorndyke Press, 1983)

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