“ That old stuff!” Nora murmured. She brightened. “Anyhow—if it ever did happen—it would probably be a hydrogen bomb and there wouldn’t even be a stone standing in the uttermost corners of the County.”
He stared at her. “Sometimes,” he said gently, “I feel that would be best.”
He slammed the door. His daughter shrugged several times and tittered. Inasmuch as her mother was putatively making sandwiches, Nora went dutifully around back. She was given a cheese-and-jelly and a cold meat.
These she took into the yard, eating one and then the other, like Alice with the mushroom edges. She thought of climbing on the trunk and scrutinizing the objects her father kept in a locked garage closet. From the trunk, a dusty window gave a good view. But that had lost its shock. She saw Queenie, the cat, move furtively through the hedge into the Bailey yard. Queenie then bounded forward a number of times and flattened out again. Sneaking.
Nora went through the hedge also, skirted the summer-house and came to rest, kneeling, behind the chimney of the Bailey barbecue pit. What Queenie was after was a bird, Nora told herself interestedly—a small one with red on it. The cat looked at the girl with hate in his eyes until he saw Nora was positively rather than negatively engrossed in his stalking. Then, showing off a little perhaps, he made a pitch for the bird. He moved inchmeal, all but invisibly; when the bird moved he froze. The bird didn’t notice Nora, who ate thoughtfully, taking care to make no sudden movement. It was a fairly fascinating thing to see, and she hoped old Queenie would get the bird because she had never seen a cat eat up a bird and never even really got a good look at a bird’s insides.
Thus Nora was where she was with reason. She was not engaged in eavesdropping, hiding in bushes, or any other such furtive occupation. She was merely watching her own cat hunt, while she ate her own sandwiches. The fact that she was concealed had to do with the cat’s quarry, and nothing whatever to do with the descent upon the summer-house of Lenore and Kittridge Sloan.
Lenore came jouncing and hurrying and laughing in a sweater and a skirt but no bra, Nora observed. The man—Nora at that time did not know who he was—had a mustache, black, small, twisty. She failed to observe that he was more than six feet tall, about thirty years old, built like a first baseman and dressed in sports clothes. She did notice that he wore three gold rings, looked like a “Mexican movie actor,” and got out a little leather thing that had a file in it and dug his nails, when angry.
“I haven t got long,” Lenore said, “so let’s sit here—”
“The Jaguar would take us some place a lot better in about five minutes.”
“I told you, Kit, I have to go to a meeting…”