fur she was looking at—but skin. Except for his head, tail, and legs, the hair on his body was gone.
9
HER FIRST THOUGHT was that Smokey had been attacked by an animal, but as she edged toward him, she saw that all his fur was missing, not just chunks of it. And he had no wounds, not even a scratch mark. It couldn’t have been done by a dog or a raccoon.
“It’s okay, Smokey,” she said softly. He had pressed himself into the corner and she could see he was trembling. As she took another step toward him, Smokey bolted back behind the armchair and began to wail. She’d been able to get a closer look, though. There were row marks on his body. He’d been shaved, with what must have been an electric razor. A person had done this to him.
Flushed with fear, she turned quickly to face the two large windows on either side of the fireplace. They looked out at the narrow side lawn and border garden between her house and David and Yvon’s, but right now all she could see was pitch-blackness. Was the person who’d done this still out there, perhaps even spying on her to see her reaction? She rushed toward the nearest window and yanked the long yellow drapes closed and then did the same with the other windows in the room. With Smokey still wailing under the chair, she double-checked that the front door of the house was locked as well as the two doors off the kitchen.
Who could have done this? It was clearly a prank of some kind, a mean, nasty one. Suddenly she recalled the adolescent laughter she had heard waft through her bedroom window not long before Smokey returned. She felt more than scared now. She felt enraged.
I’ve got to call the police, she thought, hurrying back to the living room. But as soon as those words flashed across her mind she knew that she couldn’t. There would be a record of her call, and through some inter-network of police, Hull and McCarty might learn of it, which would not be good. She couldn’t afford to be on their radar any more than she already was. She couldn’t let her life seem anything less than perfectly normal.
Smokey had stopped wailing, though he was still behind the armchair. Lake decided to try to get a blanket around him to calm and contain him.
After grabbing a chenille throw from the arm of the sofa, she bent down on one knee and tried to coax him out with her voice. Smokey let out a soft, mournful cry, as if eager for contact. But when she reached one hand behind the chair, he scratched at her with his paw, drawing three thin red lines along the top of her hand.
“Damn,” she muttered. She stood up and pulled the chair forward with both hands, forcing Smokey out of hiding. As he shot across the living room again, she tossed the blanket over him. Trapped, he squirmed frantically beneath it. She scooped him up and fell on the couch, holding him as firmly to her chest as possible.
“There, there, little boy,” she whispered, pulling the blanket back from his head. He writhed in her arms, trying to escape her grasp, but eventually he began to relax, as if from pure exhaustion.
She held him like that for at least ten minutes, purring softly to comfort him. All the while, though, she kept one ear cocked, listening for sounds from outdoors. If she heard anyone moving out there, she would have no choice but to call the police.
When Smokey finally seemed calm, she carried him into the kitchen and slipped him into the carrying case. She figured he’d sleep better that way and it would allow her to keep watch over him.
As for herself, she knew there was little chance of her falling asleep, especially upstairs. Better to stay on the couch, she thought, so she’d be able to detect if anyone was prowling around outside. She scurried upstairs to grab a pillow, blanket, and an alarm clock. There was an animal clinic that opened early about twenty minutes away and she would take Smokey there first thing in the morning to make certain he wasn’t injured.
For the next few hours, she lay on the couch with one lamp burning and Smokey in his case on the floor by her head. In her mind she replayed her search through the backyards. Had the teenagers who’d done this—if