And then he found himself falling, landing with a thud partially softened by the fur around him. Then came a sharp slamming sound. Shadow continued to fight against the furry folds enveloping him, finally getting free. This was no animal! Or rather, it might have been once, but now it was a dead thing. He had the horrible suspicion that it was now a human coat. And now that he was out of its folds, he could sense that he was in a fairly small space crowded with other things. He felt metal, and what seemed like a rug. Very faintly, he saw an outline of light. But no matter how hard he clawed at it, he couldn’t make the outline bigger.
Then the whole space began to move, and Shadow knew where he was. It was the back part of a go-fast thing—the part for holding things!
He’d investigated a few of them in his travels, but he’d always been careful not to get caught inside. There had been interesting smells and odd things that could be played with, but he’d always stayed outside.
This was very bad, indeed. He had to get out! Shadow scratched, and cried, and hurled himself at the metal walls around him until he lay panting on the floor, sick and hurting. His claws went for that faint outline of light, growing fainter now. They scraped uselessly at metal.
He tried to get to his feet, but his legs wouldn’t cooperate. Shadow flopped down, his head spinning, that dreadful scent clogging his nostrils. He gagged, and what little he had eaten came back up again. Twisting around, he managed not to choke. But the darkness inside this space seemed to grow darker yet.
So dark, he couldn’t even think . . .
17
When Sunny got home, she found her father sitting at the kitchen table, having nuked himself a bowl of frozen soup. “Sorry to be getting home a little late,” she said. “I picked up a quart of milk for Mrs. Martinson, and we got to talking.”
She got herself out another pouch of soup and began heating it up. “How was your day?”
“It feels a little odd around here without Shadow, I have to admit,” he said. “The only thing odder was some of the phone calls I got. I wish you hadn’t mentioned a reward, Sunny. A bunch of the calls I got were people checking to see whether the information they had was worth enough to leave. And most of the information that people gave for free—well, that’s about what it’s worth. We’ve got about ten thousand people living in this town, and from the sound of it, there are about five thousand gray or striped cats around here. I tried to mark where people saw these cats on a map, and it was all over the place, from the Piscataqua River to Piney Brook, up to Sturgeon Springs and Saxon.”
He smiled at her, trying to sound positive. “I guess the good news is that the word has certainly gone out far and wide. People are being very generous with their information. I just hope we’ll be able to figure out what’s useful. One nut actually claimed she saw a cat being stolen off the street. I figure by tomorrow, we’ll be hearing about the saucer people either dropping cats off or taking them away.”
“Poor Dad.” Sunny reached across the table and took his hand. “This must be such a waste of your time.”
He shrugged. “In between, I got out of the house. Went to some of the stores up in outlet-land where I take walks and persuaded them to put up posters there.” Mike gave her a lopsided kind of grin. “If we don’t ask, we don’t find out anything, do we?”
“I guess not,” Sunny said. “And thanks, Dad.” She got up to make some sandwiches to go with the soup. They still had lots of turkey in the fridge.
When they’d finished supper, they went to the living room. Sunny found it a bit odd to be sitting in an armchair again instead of on the floor, playing with Shadow. She also found that paying full attention to a lot of the shows did not improve them.
The phone rang, and Sunny picked it up, bracing herself for either a demand for a reward or some new crazy theory about Shadow’s disappearance.
Instead, it was Mrs. Martinson. “Did you know that there’s a memorial for Martin Rigsdale tomorrow evening? One of my friends from Portsmouth called with the news.”
“I knew there was going to be a memorial,” Sunny said. “It was supposed to depend on when the chief medical examiner released the body.”
She could almost feel her neighbor’s shudder over the phone. “Not that I’m going,” Mrs. M. hastily put in. “But don’t you feel it’s odd that Jane Rigsdale is doing this on the other side of the river?”
“Jane isn’t,” Sunny explained. “She’s paying for it, but letting Dawn Featherstone make the arrangements. As she always kept reminding me, Martin was her ex-husband. He went off to Portsmouth to start a new chapter in his life.”
“A final chapter, as it turns out,” Helena Martinson added disapprovingly.
