Cat Crimes I, II, III by Martin H. Greenberg & Ed Gorman

Author:Martin H. Greenberg & Ed Gorman [Greenberg, Martin H. & Gorman, Ed]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1567312780
Publisher: MJF Books
Published: 1998-08-31T21:00:00+00:00

THE BEAST WITHIN

Margaret Maron

Early summer twilight had begun to soften the city’s harsh outlines as Tessa pushed aside the sliding glass doors and stepped out onto the terrace. Up here on the twenty-sixth floor, dusk blurred the sharp ugly planes of surrounding buildings and even brought an eerie beauty to the skeletal girders of the new skyscraper going up next door.

Gray-haired, middle-aged and emotionally drained by her last confrontation with Clarence, Tessa leaned heavily fleshed arms on the railing of their penthouse terrace and let the warm night air enfold her.

From the street far, far below, muffled sounds of evening traffic floated up to her and for a moment she considered jumping. To end it all in one brief instant of broken flesh while ambulances screamed and the curious stared—what real difference would it make to her, to Clarence, to anyone, if she lived another day or year or twenty years?

Nevertheless, she stepped back from the railing unconsciously, the habit of life too deeply rooted in her psyche. With a few cruel and indifferent words, Clarence had destroyed her world; but he had not destroyed her will to live. Not yet.

She glanced across the narrow space to the uncompleted building. The workmen who filled the daylight hours with a cacophony of rivets and protesting winches were gone now, leaving behind, for safety, hundreds of small bare light bulbs. In the mild breeze, they swung on their wires like chained fireflies in the dusk.

Tessa smiled at the thought. How long had it been since she had seen real fireflies drift through summer twilight? Surely not more than half a dozen times since marrying Clarence all those years ago—God! Was it really almost forty years now? She no longer hated the city, but she had never forgiven it for not having fireflies—nor for blocking out the Milky Way with its star-quenching skyscrapers.

When he first brought her away from the country, Clarence had probably loved her as much as he was capable of loving anyone; yet even then he hadn’t understood her unease at living in a place so eternally and brilliantly lit. When his friends complimented them on the penthouse and marveled at the size of their terrace (enormous even by those booming postwar standards of the fifties), he would laugh and say, “I bought it for Tessa. Can’t fence in a country girl. They need land, lots of land ’neath the starry skies above!”

It hadn’t taken her long to realize he’d bought the penthouse to feed his own vanity, not to still her unspoken needs. Eventually, she stopped caring. If this terrace wasn’t high enough above the neon glare to see her favorite stars, it at least provided as much quiet as one could expect in a city. She could always lie back on one of the cushioned chaises and remember how the Milky Way swirled in and out of the constellations; remember the dainty charm of the Pleiades tucked away in Taurus the Bull.

But not tonight. Instead of star-studded skies, memory forced her to relive the past hour in every humiliating and painful detail.

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