The hellcat saunters through the open door without looking at me, as if she hadn’t been shamelessly begging at the window. She settles on a fold of Arthur’s coat and begins kneading the fine wool, growling a little in case I try to touch her.
Without thinking about it, without deciding to, I delete the picture. I fold the letter back into my pocket and withdraw Arthur’s number instead.
I am aware, on some level, that six A.M. texts are well outside the boundaries of the housekeeper-and-homeowner relationship, but I picture his face upon being woken even earlier than usual—the offended red of his eyes and the black weight of his brows—and can’t help myself.
do you have canned tuna
Three little dots appear and disappear several times in response, followed by: Yes. He doesn’t ask who it is, either because he has some spooky sixth sense or because—the thought feels sharp and fragile, like it ought to be swaddled in Bubble Wrap—he hasn’t given this number to anyone else.
I don’t write back.
Twenty minutes later the truck is parked in his driveway, ticking softly to itself, and I’m knocking on the front door of Starling House. The air has a sweet, green smell this morning, like running sap, and the birds are flitting bright between the trees. The vines on the house are covered in corkscrews of new growth, waving gently at me.
Arthur greets me with his customary glare, his features twisted and sour. I could almost imagine I hallucinated the previous day, the sight of him folded uncomfortably on the bathroom floor, looking up at me with his face young and uncertain, his hands scarred and huge around that ridiculous plastic cup. I’d almost forgotten he was ugly.
But it’s too late for second thoughts, so I pretend I don’t have any. “Morning! I brought you something.” I open my coat and the hellcat explodes out of it like one of those aliens that pops out of people’s chests. She hits the floorboards, spitting, and vanishes down the hall to flatten herself under a curio cabinet. She watches us yellowly, making a sound like an old-fashioned police siren.
Arthur stares down his own hallway for several long seconds, then looks back at me. “What.” He says it with a period at the end. He tries again. “What—why—”
“Well.” I give him a modest shrug. “I owed you. You did give me a truck.”
“I did not give you a truck.”
“Seems ungenerous. I gave you a cat.”
The corner of his mouth twitches upward before he bends it back into a frown, and I think the pint of blood it cost me to get her in the truck cab was probably worth it. He crouches a little to look under his sideboard. The police siren sound goes up an octave. “Is it a cat? Are you sure?” He straightens. “Look, Miss Opal—”
“Just Opal.”
That flash in his eyes, there and gone. “I am not interested in adopting any kind of animal, Miss Opal. I do not want any—”
“Strays?” I ask sweetly. I’m already waltzing past him into the house. “Feel free to toss her out yourself. I’d get a good pair of gloves, though.”
I go straight up to the library, counting on the hellcat to keep Arthur busy. The book of Hopi folklore is right where I left it.
I tuck the letter back between the pages and return it to the shelf. I hesitate, feeling stupid, thinking about the way Arthur’s mother had capitalized the word “House.”
Then I clear my throat. “Just—keep this safe, okay? Hide it.”
When I return to the library later that afternoon, the book is gone.
TWELVE
Despite daily threats to the contrary, Arthur does not toss out the hellcat.
She spends the first day skulking from room to room like a spy infiltrating an enemy camp. I catch glimpses of iridescent eyes under couches and dressers, a puffed-up tail disappearing behind a headboard. At lunch I discover her in the kitchen, hunched possessively over a small porcelain dish of tuna. By the following morning a box of expensive litter has appeared in the downstairs bathtub, complete with a tiny plastic rake, and the hellcat has colonized the most comfortable sitting room. By the end of the week her empire includes every sunbeam and cushion in the house—and I would swear there are more of those than there were the previous week, as if the house has rearranged itself specifically to please one deranged cat—and she greets me with the insolent stare of a countess facing an unwelcome petitioner.
I swat at her with the broom. “Scoot, Your Highness.” She gives a luxuriant stretch, bites my exposed ankle hard enough to draw blood, and trots away with her tail standing straight up like a kitten.