Heart of Ice

Chapter Forty-one

It was a shock wave of fear. If it was meant to stop everyone in the middle of what they were doing, it did so. The unintelligible scream coming from the kitchen was undeniably blood-curdling. All throughout the home, the children and their keepers turned toward the sound. Even the kid who sat in front of the TV day after day with a frosted strawberry Pop-Tart on his lap and the empty look of a lost soul glued to a video of SpongeBob SquarePants moved toward the horrific scream that ricocheted throughout the facility.

Something very bad just happened. Something worse than someone wetting the bed, trading their meds, or stealing extra food.

The next scream came with words. “Oh, my God! What could have happened here! Please help me!”

The voice belonged to Consuelo Ramirez, the cook.

“She must have cut herself again!” another voice called out, as the sound of a score of feet went clacking down the linoleum corridor to the kitchen. Something very, very bad had happened. One quick-thinking employee swung open the wall-mounted first aid kit and grabbed tape, gauze, and a fistful of bandages.

Indeed, when staff and a few children arrived at the kitchen, there was blood and the stink of death. At first, no one saw Consuelo. A rapid scan of the room found her sitting on the floor, crouched in a near-fetal position.

“Sweet Jesus, who would do this to our Boots?” Consuelo looked up at those who had arrived to her aid. She held the black-and-white body of Boots, the cat that Marilyn McCutcheon had found in the parking lot seven or eight years before. It was a black-and-white cat, named very unoriginally for its white paws. To be fair, the name could have been Mittens just as easily, but Marilyn had loved Nancy Sinatra so much that she named the cat Boots and frequently found time to whisper-sing “These Boots Are Made for Walking.”

“What happened?” Marilyn said, rushing to the lifeless body of her beloved cat.

“I don’t know.” Consuelo was in tears then.

“Where did you find her?” Marilyn held gently took the cat from the head cook’s arms. A bloody Rorschach blot was smeared on her light blue blouse. The form looked a bit like a snow angel; the bloody fur had smeared in such a way that it looked like the cat had left the imprint of wings.

One of the kids started to cry, and soon others joined in.

“She was in the mixer. It must have turned on somehow. She liked to curl up and sleep in tight spaces, you know.” Marilyn didn’t cry, but the look on her face indicated a melt-down was coming. Children and staff who knew her only hoped that she’d take out her anger on someone other than them. “There’s no way Boots turned it on,” she said, looking around at the horrified faces.

She was right, of course, but there was no way anyone was going to say so.

On the other side of the facility, Michael Barton stepped from the shower and got dressed. He’d put his bloody pajamas into a plastic bag he’d stolen from the supply room and wrapped that in a cocoon of paper towels in case someone looked through the trash. He also stole clean pajamas from the laundry room and hid them under his clothes.

He’d prepared.

The cat hadn’t really put up much of a fight. He didn’t get a single scratch. It had taken a quick turn of the animal’s head, a snap, and then he could do anything he wanted to with it. It was a furry bag of dead.

A broken neck was quick and decisive. It got the job done. But ultimately, it was no fun.

How to make it fun?

A knife was the answer. It beckoned from the counter next to the sink. In a second, in a flash that was too fast for him to really grasp, he made it fun. Michael gingerly gutted Boots with a small paring knife, splashing the smelly fluids—mostly blood—over the front of his pajamas. His heart rate remained normal. It was odd, and he’d ruminate over that later in life. Though he was excited by what he was doing, he wasn’t scared.

He set the cat’s corpse with his entrails oozing into the institutional-sized mixing bowl and turned it on the setting called Pulse.

Funny, she doesn’t have a pulse, he thought in appreciation of the irony of what he’d just done.

He knew how much Marilyn McCutcheon loved that cat. It might have been the only thing she ever loved. He’d see her from across the TV lounge, holding the cat in her lap talking to it in a kind of sickening baby talk.

“Who’s the prettiest kitty in the whole wide world?” Marilyn asked, scratching the cat under the dollop of white fur under its chin. “You are, that’s who.”

The cat didn’t know Marilyn was a terror to everyone else. Marilyn had scooped her up from the cold outside and given her a cozy existence. If it hadn’t been for the annoying children at the group home, it might have been perfect.

“How’s my precious little fluff ball?” she’d ask.

How was it that a cat was worthy of love when a little girl or young boy was only the focus of derision and scorn?

Later that day, when the excitement of the horror of what happened to the cat had died down, Michael and Sarah played together in the corner of the TV lounge that had been set aside for reading. It wasn’t really a library, of course. Just as the place wasn’t really a home, though it had branded itself as one.

Marilyn came through on her rounds and looked over at the pair.

Michael looked up. No expression. Nothing at all. Then he returned his gaze back to the book he was reading to Sarah.

The Cat in the Hat.