Chapter 8
The Cats Never Lie
The last cat had been a slow gray queen from somewhere outside Krakow who would not give her name until Honey explained to her, five times, what exactly she was doing at FACTS & FIBS. By the time she signed the book and the page slipped down through the slit, it was after three in the morning.
Honey closed the registration book and stretched the cramp out of her wrist. Roam stepped back through the front door with his coat over his arm. The house was finally settled.
"Tea?" Honey said.
"Tea." He slipped his hand in hers and they moved back into the kitchen. Roam set the kettle. Honey reached for two mugs from the shelf above the stove.
The bayou book was on the kitchen table where she had left it earlier in the night. She pulled it toward herself and began to read again. "Hmmm. Interesting."
Roam poured tea. Then he reached into the inside pocket of the coat hung over his chair-back and brought out a small, folded envelope in an evidence bag.
Honey glanced at him but did not stop studying the book.
He turned the evidence bag over in his hand a long second.
Then he stood, crossed to the drawer beside the sink, and pulled out the thin paring knife.
He opened the envelope and drew out the page inside.
He read it once. His shoulders changed. He set the page down flat on the table without looking up, and dropped into the chair beside Honey with a huff that came out of his whole chest.
"I have no idea what that means."
Honey had kept her eyes on the book at first. She was supposed to keep her eyes on the book.
The note was evidence, and she was not supposed to see it.
She leaned over but did not touch it. There was a drawing on it, inked carefully in Phineas's neat scholar's hand.
A grey tabby in profile, plain and round, sitting up the way Quill sat up when he was paying attention.
Behind Quill, half-hidden behind his shoulder, the line of a second cat.
Older. Thinner. No more than an outline.
Below the drawing, three lines in careful black ink.
Watch the cats and catch the lies.
The cats never lie.
But the lies are in the cats.
Honey did not move. Her eyes went back to the page in front of her, searching the pages the swamp witch had written.
She flipped a page. She tilted the book slightly on the table, so the page caught the kitchen light alongside the note.
She read the book, then the note. Back to the book, back to the note. She turned a page. She turned another.
And there it was.
The drawing was crude and certain, sketched in the same hand that had drawn the stitched mouth and the opened mouth: a row of cats lined up in grass, sitting unevenly like the cats on the front lawn of FACTS & FIBS. Beneath them, in red ink, a single word.
Lies.
And on the facing page, in the swamp witch's slanting cadence:
The cats don't lie, child. The cats never lie. But the lies, the lies are the cats. They come up where the lie is. They count themselves. They come for the liar.
One hand came up to her mouth. "Oh my god."
"What?" Roam said.
"Roam." She pointed at the book. She did not touch the note. "Look here."
He looked at the book, then at the note, then at her. "How did Phineas know," he said, and shook his head.
"I don't know." She wiped a tear from her cheek with the back of her hand. "He knew the whole thing. And he was trying to tell my mother."
Roam looked at the note again. He looked at the book. He looked back at her. "You know what I'm thinking," he said. "But I might need to see to make sure."
Honey looked at him. "Okay," she said. "Let's look."
She closed her eyes. Then she opened her hand on the kitchen table, and the pink glitter came up off her palm in a slow, soft fountain. It rose into the air and laid itself, like an old film, across the kitchen wall above the stove.
Her memories played. Two days of them. The porch.
The parlor. The dining room. The map. A mouth at the edges.
A mouth at the center. A mouth moving, soundless, again, again, and again.
And every time the mouth moved, Honey slowed the frame, and the pan went to a window or the front lawn, and a cat or cats had appeared.
Roam watched and did not speak until the wall went dim. Then he reached over, took her face in his hands, and kissed her.
The pink glitter sifted back down into her palm and went still.
"My brilliant witch," he breathed into her.
"Roam." She smiled.
"Get some rest." He stood and pulled her up by the hand. "I've got a plan. I'm meeting Sean at first light."
Honey closed the book and slid it into the drawer of the sideboard. Roam folded the note back into its paper square, tucked it inside the evidence bag, and slid it into his coat. They went up the back stairs together.
In the kitchen, where she had been since long before they came in, Duchess stepped out of the shadow under the sideboard.
She looked at the kitchen door they had gone through, the drawer the bayou book had gone into, the wall above the stove where the pink glitter had played.
Her blue eye blinked once. She slipped down the back hall the way a Himalayan slips through the night.
Upstairs in the east wing, behind the second door of three, Rhoda Hadwin stirred.
A sound, small and distant. The wrong kind of sound for a house that had finally gone quiet.
She had been sleeping very deep and did not entirely come up.
Her hand drifted across the sheet and found her husband's shoulder.
"Edgar."
"Mm."
"Do you hear that? It's cats…cats fighting."
Edgar did not open his eyes. He drew her in. "Sleep, darlin'. Just dreams."
Rhoda settled into him, and her breath went slow again, and the house held its breath.
Downstairs, at the end of the back hall, the door of the small storage room opened.
Duchess stepped out into the dim corridor.
She paused. She shook herself once, a luxurious full-body shake, the way a Himalayan shakes off morning dew.
A faint shower of fine black fur came off her silver-cream coat and drifted to the floorboards.
She swished her plumed tail across the boards.
The black fur lifted, moved, and went where she wanted it to go, which was nowhere a living creature would see it.
Duchess walked down the back hall the way she had walked into the front hall before, like a woman entering a private salon, unhurried, without a care in the world. She owned the place, and hopefully would soon.
Behind her, in the closet, the small dark shape of an old black tom lay folded on the canvas dust sheet, shoved behind a sack of potatoes. His copper eyes were open. They did not see. He did not move.
The first thin gold of the morning came in through the small room's window and crossed the floor and settled across his fur, and the old house gave him the only watching it could.