The Cat Wears a Noose by Dolores Hitchens

Author:Dolores Hitchens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

14

Shirley stirred upon the bed and rose up and made a slim silhouette against the window.

“It must be fearfully late,” she murmured. “I feel as if I’d slept for hours. Where have you been?”

Miss Rachel, slipping out of her petticoats, decided not to tell Shirley about the silly cowardice that had kept her crouched in the cook’s room with her ear to the door panel. It had been cowardice, and it was silly, she thought annoyedly. A woman of seventy—really practically seventy-one—had no business hearing things like werewolves in the hall and sitting in the moonlight for hours with her eyes glued on the door as though the werewolf might jump in at her. And it had been madness, too, to think that sly steps had come up from the lower hall and had led the werewolf thing away.

She folded the third petticoat over a chair and sat down to remove her shoes, but her mind skirted back through the recent hours to the discoveries she had made across the hall.

The first thing she had found of any importance was a bottle such as druggists provide with prescriptions, having a medicine dropper built into the cap. The bottle, uncorked, had smelled faintly of a turpentinelike mixture. Miss Rachel had wrapped it carefully in a bit of cloth and stowed it in the pocket of the cook’s apron.

The second discovery had been the small box with the scarlet stripe lying empty on the floor under the window, beside it a ball of cotton like a little nest.

The third, the one she liked least because it had held her gaze throughout the vigil by the door, had been a wreath of garlic pinned securely to the wall over the cook’s bed. Dry and dusty, filmed with a breath of cobweb, it had cast a black halo on the moonlit space and had brought into the room all of the middle-Europe frightfulness at which Miss Rachel had previously scoffed.

She slipped into bed and tucked the little box and the bottle wrapped in cloth beneath her pillow. The garlic she had left firmly behind. Werewolves, she thought, couldn’t come into Parchly Heights. Parchly Heights simply wouldn’t let them.

But in the dreams she had during the remainder of the night strange phantoms drifted, and the memory of the toe-nailed thing in the hall returned more vivid than when she had been awake, and the sly steps on the stairs were recognizable, and a face she knew looked in at the door of the cook’s room and grinned at her.

She awoke suddenly to find it was morning and that Shirley stood at the dresser pulling a comb through her thick hair.

“Mmmmm….” Shirley said through a mouthful of bobby pins. “Pete’s starting breakfast for us. You look tired. Where did you disappear to during dinner?”

“I was—just scouting,” Miss Rachel answered.

“Pete asked me if I thought you’d be leaving.”

“He did, did he?” Miss Rachel sat up and looked interested. “And why did he think I might?”

“He said no lady could stand it.

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