Deaths of Jocasta Read Online Free PDF

music room. I turned on the stereo, and used headphones to listen to Holst’s The Planets, in honor of my stargazing. When it was over, after the last faint notes had faded, I curled up on the couch and fell asleep. I awoke sometime in the dim morning and stumbled up to my bed, setting the alarm clock for a few hours later.

Chapter 3

    I awoke to an insistent buzzing in my ear and slapped off the alarm clock, willing my eyes to open. They weren’t very willing.
    Saturday sunshine streamed through my window, crisscrossing the bed with its bright paw prints. I swung out of bed, glancing at the now mercifully silent alarm clock: nine thirty. I heard voices from the yard. Time for me to be up and about. Past time, really. My morose mood was gone; I looked forward to the sunshine and bright woods. It would be warm enough in a few hours to make swimming almost obligatory.
    I looked out my window, but couldn’t see the bodies belonging to the voices, only a few cawing bluejays feeding greedily on bread crumbs.
    I dressed hastily—well-patched cut-offs, T-shirt, and old sneakers—and headed for the kitchen. Rachel wasn’t there, but evidence of her earlier presence was. I poured myself a cup of coffee, then paused indecisively at the various pastries, muffins, and breads left out to feed the famished. I was reaching for a decadently sugar-laden beignet when Rachel entered.
    “Damn cat,” was her first remark, followed with, “I’ll save it for you,” her hint that the beignet would have to wait.
    “What now?” I inquired.
    “Magnolia tree past the gazebo. She chased a squirrel halfway up and now can’t get down. Damn cat,” she repeated. “She’ll wake up every last guest we have, including the ones still in the city, if we don’t get her down soon.”
    “We?” I asked.
    “You,” she clarified.
    “Am I the only butch around here, or what,” I grumbled as I put down my coffee mug.
    “Naw, sugar, just the best.”
    “On my way,” I said, exiting the kitchen and heading for the old magnolia tree. Halfway there I could hear distant cat-up-the-tree sounds. The older P.C. got, the stronger her lungs became. P.C. was her name, but what exactly the initials stood for varied: Pussy Cat, Politically Correct, Pushy Chewer, and Proficient Cunnilinguist had all been suggested, the time of day and state of the suggesters obvious by their choices.
    Her cries became louder and more insistent as I got closer. I grasped one of the lower branches and hauled myself up. About ten feet off the ground, I looked and saw a twitching tail.
    “Come on, P.C., you putrid cunt,” I called to her, sure that her limited vocabulary would not catch the insult.
    “Talking to yourself?” a voice below me asked.
    “Now, why would I lie about my anatomy like that?” I answered, twisting around to see the questioner. Joanne Ranson was looking up through the branches at me.
    “And here I thought I’d finally met an honest woman,” she replied. “Do you have any reason for being up that tree other than muttering obscenities to yourself?”
    “Cat rescue. P.C., the house cat, has treed herself.”
    “Need any help?” Joanne asked.
    “Yeah, stay there and catch me if I fall.”
    “Sure, Micky, no problem,” she replied in a tone that told me she would probably be in the kitchen eating my supposedly saved beignet by the time I got to P.C.
    I continued climbing, resigned to leftovers for breakfast. I sighted P.C.’s tail again, about five feet above my head. True to form, P.C. saw me, and with rescue assured, started calmly licking herself. The nonchalant cleaning meant that she was ready to allow herself to be draped over my shoulder and ferried, à la Cleopatra on her barge, down the tree.
    “Well, I’ll be damned. There is a cat up here,” said Joanne who, instead of stealing my breakfast, was climbing up the tree behind me.
    “Would I lie to you?”
    “Yes.”
    She was catching up. I took a long step, then jumped up, landing