The Alarm of the Black Cat by Dolores Hitchens

Author:Dolores Hitchens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Miss Rachel stood in the soft gloom of the cellar and listened. There was someone in the kitchen above, moving about almost without sound. Occasionally a board creaked; once it seemed she heard the latch of the door that led into the pantry. Miss Rachel expected it to be as all the other intrusions had been: vague, menacing, but inconclusive. Instead, the door at the top of the cellar steps suddenly opened. Mrs. Karov put her head in.

When she saw Miss Rachel a trace of disappointment came into her eyes. For a moment it seemed as though she might withdraw. Then, with a glance behind her, she came through and walked slowly downstairs. She stopped on the bottom step.

“It smells of death here.” She drew a long, noisy breath, expelled it lingeringly. “Bad. Very bad. I remember in Russia …” She took in the details of the cellar from rafter to floor. “I was Russian when I was a child, and in a cellar near my father’s house many people were killed one night. It was over a year before I was in that place, but it still smelled of death.”

She came off the steps and looked about curiously. Miss Rachel backed toward the windows over the workbench. Mrs. Karov’s intimacy with the odor and permanence of death was at once fascinating and repulsive.

“Though not the sort of smell you imagine, I think, for the bodies were not there, not even buried under the floor. They had been removed to a mass grave outside the city.”

She looked at once gaunt and solid standing there with her thick body wrapped in white, topped by the dark skin and black hair, the eyes oddly alive behind the masklike face. “Were any of your people killed?” Miss Rachel asked, meaning to be sympathetic.

“But no.” She seemed surprised. “They were of the secret police. It was good to be of the secret police in those days.”

Her gaze swept from left to right, and suddenly she took in the meaning of the space under the stairs.

Miss Rachel didn’t wait for Mrs. Karov’s further opinions. She went up while the Slavic woman was engaged in getting the closet door open. Until Mrs. Karov was satisfied concerning the odor—and other properties—of the cellar, Miss Rachel wanted to be elsewhere. She went out into the garden.

The fuchsia which she and Claudia had transplanted looked unwell. Its leaves had begun to curl. Miss Rachel brought a pitcher from the kitchen, filled it at an outside faucet, and watered the plant. The dust allowed the water to flow away. Miss Rachel saw that a trench had better be made to hold moisture near the roots.

She dug and patted the ground with her finger tips. She had formed half the circle when something bit through the covering of soil into her flesh. She jerked her fingers up. At the tips of two hung drops of blood, heavy, slow-forming.

She picked up a scrap of twig and probed the earth, and a chunk of glass heaved into sight, razor-edged on all sides, broken roughly into the shape of a star.

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