The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder by Patricia Highsmith

Author:Patricia Highsmith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780393345568
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

The Day

of Reckoning

John took a taxi from the station, as his uncle had told him to do in case they weren’t there to meet him. It was less than two miles to Hanshaw Chickens, Inc., as his Uncle Ernie Hanshaw now called his farm. John knew the white two-story house well, but the long gray barn was new to him. It was huge, covering the whole area where the cow barn and the pigpens had been.

“Plenty of wishbones in that place!” the taxi driver said cheerfully as John paid him.

John smiled. “Yes, and I was just thinking—not a chicken in sight!”

John carried his suitcase towards the house. “Anybody home?” he called, thinking Helen would probably be in the kitchen now, getting lunch.

Then he saw the flattened cat. No, it was a kitten. Was it real or made of paper? John set his suitcase down and bent closer. It was real. It lay on its side, flat and level with the damp reddish earth, in the wide track of a tire. Its skull had been crushed and there was blood there, but not on the rest of the body which had been enlarged by pressure, so that the tail looked absurdly short. The kitten was white with patches of orange, brindle and black.

John heard a hum of machinery from the barn. He put his suitcase on the front porch, and hearing nothing from the house, set off at a trot for the new barn. He found the big front doors locked, and went round to the back, again at a trot, because the barn seemed to be a quarter of a mile long. Besides the machine hum, John heard a high-pitched sound, a din of cries and peeps from inside.

“Ernie?” John yelled. Then he saw Helen. “Hello, Helen!”

“John! Welcome! You took a taxi? We didn’t hear any car!” She gave him a kiss on the cheek. “You’ve grown another three inches!”

His uncle climbed down from a ladder and shook John’s hand. “How’re you, boy?”

“Okay, Ernie. What’s going on here?” John looked up at moving belts which disappeared somewhere inside the barn. A rectangular metal container, nearly as big as a boxcar, rested on the ground.

Ernie pulled John closer and shouted that the grain, a special mixture, had just been delivered and was being stored in the factory, as he called the barn. This afternoon a man would come to collect the container.

“Lights shouldn’t go on now, according to schedule, but we’ll make an exception so you can see. Look!” Ernie pulled a switch inside the barn door, and the semi-darkness changed to glaring light, bright as full sun.

The cackles and screams of the chickens augmented like a siren, like a thousand sirens, and John instinctively covered his ears. Ernie’s lips moved, but John could not hear him. John swung around to see Helen. She was standing farther back, and waved a hand, shook her head and smiled, as if to say she couldn’t bear the racket. Ernie drew John farther into the barn, but he had given up talking and merely pointed.

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