Cat Seeing Double Read Online Free PDF

clapboard cottage, she had stretched out where an oak tree’s shadows darkened the weathered shingles. Here, she had the best seat of all, with a clear view across the garden and through the wide glass doors to the lectern where the bride and groom would stand, exchanging their sacred vows.
    She had watched Charlie and Wilma arrive, Wilma carrying the bridal dress in a long plastic bag and Charlie carrying a small suitcase. What a lot of preparation it took for humans to get married, nothing like the casual trysting of the feral cats she had run with when she was small. The two women entered the south wing of the church through a back door, where the bride would have a private office in which to dress. The kit was watching the growing crowd when, below her, the bushes stirred with a sharp rustle, and a man spoke.
    He must be standing between the close-set houses. The timbre of his gravelly voice suggested he was old. He sounded bad-tempered. “Go on. Boy. Get your ass up there, you haven’t got all day.”
    No one answered, but someone began to climb the trellis, slowly approaching the roof. The kit could hear the little crosspieces creak under a hesitant weight. Padding warily away across the shingles, she crouched beneath overhanging branches out of sight, where she could see.
    A young boy was climbing up. A thin dirty boy with ragged shirt and torn jeans, his face smudged, but palebeneath the dark smears. His black eyes were oblique and hard, his hands brown with dirt. One pocket bulged as if maybe he’d stuffed a candy bar in it, fortification against sudden hunger. The kit knew that feeling.
    Peering over, she studied the man who stood below. He was equally ragged, his faded jeans stained, his face bristling with a grizzled beard, his gray hair hanging long around his shoulders. Both man and boy stunk of sharp scents that made the kit’s nose burn. The boy had gained the roof. He didn’t swing up onto it, but stopped at the edge, turning to look down.
    â€œGo on, Curtis. They’ll be filling the church in a minute.”
    â€œI don’t…”
    â€œJust lie under the branches, no one’ll see you. Wait till Harper’s in there and the girl and them cops, then punch it and get out. I’ll be gone like I told you, the truck gone. You just slip away, no one’ll see you.”
    Clinging in the vines, the boy looked both determined and scared, like a cornered rat, the kit thought, trapped in a tin can with nowhere to run.
    â€œJust punch it, Curtis. Your dad’s in jail because of them cops.”
    Swinging a leg over, the boy gained the roof, crouching near the kit beneath the oak branches. She didn’t think he saw her, he seemed totally centered on finding a vantage where he would be hidden but could best see the church.
    When he’d chosen his place he removed from his pocket a small smooth object like a tiny radio, and laid it on the shingles beside him. The kit puzzled over it forsome time before she understood what it was, this small, plastic, boxlike thing that the boy could hide in one hand. Wilma had one, and so did Clyde. And the old man’s voice echoed, Just punch it and get out. She didn’t understand—there was no garage door in the church to open. Why would…
    Just punch it and get out….
    What else could a garage-door opener do, the kit wondered, besides open the door for which it was intended? With its little battery inside, its little electrical battery, what could it do?
    Just punch it and get out…Wait until Harper’s in there, and the girl…
    That little electrical battery, that little electric signal…
    All the wonders of electrical things that had so astonished the kit when she first came to live among humans: the dishwasher, the refrigerator, the warmth of an electric blanket, the magical lifting of the garage door while Wilma was still in the car, its signal leaping from that opener—its