She drew her shoulders up and tucked her head down, pulling her chin in tight against her chest, protecting her neck as best she could. She swung one fist up behind her back, struck only air, tried again, and hit the cat with a blow that was too weak to have done any harm.
Nevertheless, Aristophanes squealed with rage and snapped at her neck. He was foiled by her hunched shoulders and by her thick hair, which got in his mouth and gagged him.
She had never wanted anything half so much as she wanted to kill the little bastard. He was no longer the familiar pet she had loved; he was a strange and hateful beast, and she harbored no ghost of affection for him.
She wished she could use the gun she was clutching in her right hand, but there was no way she could shoot him without shooting herself, too.
She struck at him repeatedly with her left hand, her arthritic shoulder protesting sharply, painfully when she twisted her arm up and backwards at such an unnatural angle.
At least for a moment, the cat abandoned its relentless but thus far ineffective attack on her neck. It slashed its claws across her flailing fist, slicing open the skin on her knuckles.
Her fingers were instantly slick with blood. They stung so badly that her eyes started to water.
Either the sight or the odor of the blood encouraged the cat. It shrieked with savage glee.
Grace began to think the unthinkable—that she was going to lose this fight.
No!
She struggled against the grip of fear that threatened to incapacitate her, tried to clear her panic-befuddled mind, and suddenly had an idea that she thought might save her life. She stumbled toward the nearest stretch of open wall, to the left of the dresser. The cat clung tenaciously to her back, insistently pressing its snout against the base of her skull, hissing and snarling. It was determined to force its way to her sheltered neck and rip open her jugular vein.
When Grace reached the wall, she turned her back to it, then fell against it with all her weight, slamming the cat into the plaster behind her, pinning it hard between her body and the wall, hoping to break its spine. The jolt brought a flash of pain through her shoulders and drove the animal’s claws deeper into her back muscles. The cat’s scream was nearly shrill enough to shatter fine crystal, and it sounded almost like the wail of a human infant. But its grip on her didn’t weaken. Grace pushed away from the wall, then slammed into it a second time, and the cat wailed as before, but still held fast. She thrust herself off the wall, intending to make a third attempt to crush her adversary, but before she could fall back on him, the cat let go of her. He dropped to the floor, rolled, sprang to his feet, and scurried away from her, favoring his right foreleg.
Good. She had hurt him.
She sagged against the wall, raised the .22 pistol that was stilt in her right hand, and squeezed the trigger.
Nothing.
She had forgotten to switch off the safeties.
The cat hurried through the open door and disappeared into the upstairs hall.
Grace went to the door, closed it, leaned wearily against it. Gasping.
Her left hand was scratched and bleeding, and her back bore half a dozen claw punctures, but she had won the first round. The cat was limping; he was injured, perhaps as badly as she was, and he was the one who had retreated.
No celebration, though. Not yet.
Not until she had gotten out of the house alive. And not until she was certain that Carol was safe, too.
After the unsettling telephone conversation he’d had with the receptionist at Maugham & Crichton, Paul didn’t know what the hell to do.
He couldn’t write. That was for sure. He couldn’t get his mind off Carol long enough to advance the plot of his novel by so much as even one sentence.
He wanted to call Lincoln Werth, at police headquarters, and arrange to have a sheriff’s deputy waiting at the cabin when Carol and Jane arrived up there. He wanted them brought home. But he could imagine the conversation he would have with Detective Werth, and the thought of it daunted him: