Read Cat Seeing Double for Free Online Page B

for something. But again the kit landed on his shoulders raking and biting. What was the matter with her? Then suddenly all the cops were running, fanning out across the street, staring up at the roof. The boy snatched something from the roof and spun around, racing across the shingles, trying to dislodge the kit. He slipped and fell, and seemed to drop in slow-motion, falling and twisting.
    He hit the ground and an explosion rocked the garden. A sudden cloud of smoke hid the church and trees, smoke filled with flying flecks of plaster and torn wood and broken shingles—as if the church had been ground up and vomited out again by a giant blower.
    The side of the church was gone. There was only a jagged, smoking hole where the wall of the church had been.
    Ragged fragments of the building, and of broken furniture and wedding flowers lay scattered across the bricks and clinging to trees and bushes, and still the sky rained debris.
    The two cats crouched clinging to the branches choking with smoke and dust, shaken by the impact. Had it been a gas explosion? Maybe the church furnace? But it was a warm day, and the furnace would not be running. They stared down at a young woman staunching a child’s bloody arm, at a young couple holding each other, an old woman weeping, at officers clearing the area. A bomb. It had been a bomb.
    But no villager could do this, not now when the very thought of a bomb was so painful for every human soul.
    They saw no one badly hurt, no one was down. “The kit,” Dulcie said. “Where is the kit?” She hardly remembered later how she and Joe reached the kit, where she clung in a pine tree across the street. She only vaguely remembered racing between parked cars and people’s legs, scorching up the pine tree and cuddling the kit against her, licking her frightened face.
    Below the pine, officers surrounded the boy. Had that small boy caused the explosion? He couldn’t be more than ten. A ragged child, very white and still.
    That was why the kit had jumped him! To stop him! Then she had raced to Clyde. Dulcie licked the kit harder. What kind of child was that boy, to do such a thing? He’s just a child, Dulcie thought, shivering. But then she saw the boy’s eyes so cold and hard, and she felt her stomach wrench.
    Sirens filled the air. Dulcie looked around for Charlie and Wilma. Don’t let anyone be dead, don’t let anyone be badly hurt. What kind of sophisticated electronic equipment did this little boy have, to set off such an explosion? He seemed just an ordinary, dirty-faced kid, handcuffed now and held between two cops. Just a boy—except for those hard black eyes.
    But as Dulcie and Joe peered down from the pine tree with the kit snuggled between them, the boy looked around as if searching for someone. His gaze rose to the roofs and surrounding trees—and stopped on the three cats.
    He looked straight at the kit, his eyes widening with rage.
    And the tattercoat kit dropped her ears and backed away, deeper among the dark, concealing branches.

4
    The debris-filled smoke twisted and began slowly to settle. The dropping sun sent its deep afternoon light streaming down through the torn roof of the church, illuminating airborne flecks like falling snow through which officers searched the rubble for wounded, and quickly moved shocked onlookers away, in case of a second blast.
    No one seemed badly injured; but the miracle of escape was slow to instruct the villagers. They stood in little clusters holding one another, the shock of the deed reverberating in every face, beating in every heart.
    Charlie looked around her at the white petals of the wedding bouquets scattered across the detritus—as if some precocious flower girl had thrown a tantrum flinging her pretty treasures. Near her an old woman stood with her handkerchief pressed to her bloody forehead. As Charlie moved to help her, she heard Ryan shout for a medic, and saw Ryan supporting Cora