Most locals would avoid the place until after Labor Day. In front of the bakery, there was a line of tourists spilling out the door and down the sidewalk. I slung my folding chair in the carrying case over my shoulder, locked the apartment behind me, and headed down the stairs into the alley alongside the park. As far as I knew, those who weren’t didn’t want much of anything to do with me. Mogwai’s route to the screened porch involved a series of feline acrobatics, Dumpster to fence to porch, that I doubted many humans could duplicate.Īs for nonhumans. For one thing, my apartment was on the second story above Mrs. It wasn’t the most secure arrangement, but I didn’t worry too much.
I filled his bowl on the back porch and made sure the torn screen that served as a cat door was ajar. I’d hated to do it, since he wasn’t really my cat so much as a streetwise buddy who dropped by on a regular basis, but there were an awful lot of feral Moglets running around town. Mogwai didn’t come when I called him, but he was a cat of independent means and he’d been pissed at me since I’d given in to pleas from my friends in animal rescue and had him neutered. Also, I’d seen the promo poster, and the guys in the band were pretty cute. They say music hath charms to soothe the savage breast, and in my experience, it’s true. Los Gatos del Sol, a Tex-Mex band, was playing. It was a Sunday, and I had plans to meet my best friend, Jen Cassopolis, for Music in the Gazebo. A mid-July Michigan evening, soft and warm, not too muggy, one of those evenings when the sunlight promises to linger forever. So, it was an idyllic evening in Pemkowet, the little resort town I call home. But I guess it didn’t rise to the standard required to break the Soothsayers’ Code, since no sooth was said. I don’t pretend to understand, especially since it wasn’t an ordinary, everyday tragedy after all. Something about the laws of causality being broken and the order of creation overturned, resulting in a world run amok, rivers running backward, the sun rising in the west, cats and dogs getting married. There’s some sort of Soothsayers’ Code that prevents soothsayers from soothsaying on a day-to-day basis, when it might, you know, avert this kind of ordinary, everyday tragedy. But if they did, they kept it to themselves. The Sphinx might have known, and the Norns, too, come to think of it. Well, I suppose that’s not technically true.
No one could have guessed that the town was hovering on the brink of tragedy. It was an idyllic summer evening in Pemkowet the night the Vanderhei kid died.
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