Gone by Midnight by Candice Fox

Author:Candice Fox [Fox, Candice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2019-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

Leena Ainsbury was run off her feet, but that wasn’t an unusual occurrence. The Happy Scratch Cat Refuge in Yorkeys Knob tended to attract volunteers who were more interested in cuddling and playing with the centre’s kitten population than the kind willing to use a little elbow grease.

The bell above the door rang just as Ainsbury was finishing off the paperwork on that morning’s surrenders – a van-load of felines rescued from a suspected hoarding situation. She looked up over the rim of her glasses as a pair of heavy boots with clanking steel buckles traversed her spotless floor, leaving dirt prints on the tiles. The man who approached the counter was heavy-set, deeply sun-weathered, his bald head shining in the light of the overhead fluorescents. He didn’t smile, and neither did she. On his wrinkled neck she could make out the shape of an ancient tattoo, a red-back spider.

‘I’m here to adopt some cats,’ the man said.

Ainsbury took her glasses completely off, squinting at what she thought was gold teeth flashing beneath his untrimmed moustache.

‘You …’ She glanced at a stack of forms on the counter, suddenly forgetting completely what they were even for. ‘I’m sorry. You’re here to …?’

‘To get some cats,’ the man said. He took a crumpled slip of paper from the inside of his leather jacket, unfolded it and glanced at the writing there. ‘I want two.’

‘Well, two is the legal maximum, yes,’ Ainsbury stammered.

‘One of them,’ the man continued, ‘has got to be orange, with white feet and green eyes. I want the other one to be black, yellow eyes, with a small white patch on its chest.’

‘Well, sir.’ Ainsbury shook her head, bewildered. ‘I can’t guarantee that any of our animals will match your specific description.’

‘Oh, I think they will.’ The man gave a menacing smile, and Ainsbury confirmed her sighting of the gold teeth. She picked up an adoption form, feeling oddly faint.

The bell above the door jingled again as she set the paper before the man.

‘Would you mind if I asked you to …’ Ainsbury spied the second man. He was almost a carbon copy of the first, muddy-booted and windswept, though his boxy skull was covered in black hair that didn’t seem to thin before becoming his heavy brows and beard. As he reached the counter, he drew a piece of paper from his jacket, his words halting as he struggled to read the writing.

‘I am here to … adopt … two cats,’ the man read. ‘One of them is … grey with yellow eyes. One of them is …’ He paused, squinted at the paper. The bald man, filling out his form with his pen clutched in his fist like a knife, stopped his writing and leaned over.

‘Tortoiseshell,’ the bald man read.

‘Tortoiseshell,’ the hairy man said, smiling.

Ainsbury fanned her face with her hand. She looked at the big, clumsy lettering the first man was scrawling on the adoption form. In the first name section of the page, he had written ‘Kidnees’.

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