The Hanging Hill

2

Reginald Grimes sat alone in the kitchen of his sparsely furnished apartment, sipping a mug of bitter tepid coffee and flipping through the pages of his dog-eared script for Curiosity Cat.

Grimes was the artistic director of the Hanging Hill Playhouse. Had been for years. He was famous for his magnificently mounted musicals. Infamous for his rants against anyone who didn’t work as tirelessly as he thought they should.

“Cut this,” he muttered, scratching a red line through a sentence. “This, too.” Another red line. “Fix this.” A looping red circle.

Rehearsals for the new musical would start first thing tomorrow morning. The author, Judy Magruder Jennings, would be arriving at the theater tonight.

She’d have work to do.

The show was good as written. Nearly great.

But it would be absolutely perfect when Grimes had finished working his theatrical magic.

He flipped forward through the pages and came to a scene in the second act. Curiosity Cat had gone missing. The two children who love him—a boy and a girl—are out in the dark alleys of a scary city, searching for their beloved pet. They fear he might be hurt or trapped.

Or worse.

Grimes read the lyrics to the children’s emotional duet: We’ll never find another cat like that.

“Just like Jinx,” he muttered, remembering the sleek gray cat with the amber eyes who used to howl out in the alley just below his bedroom window when he was a child living in that horribly dark, dank place.

The Saint Ignatius Home for Boys.

The orphanage.

Grimes would sometimes sneak food from the cafeteria and smuggle it back to his room for Jinx. Perhaps a pinch of tuna fish, if there was any to be found in the nauseatingly crusted-over noodle casserole so often served for supper. Maybe an almost-empty carton of milk retrieved from the big rubber barrel where the boys dumped the scraps and trash from their trays.

He’d slink with his treasure back to his bedchamber, wait for the other boys to fall asleep, then creep over to the window, pry it open, and place Jinx’s dinner outside on its filthy sill. Grimes would even try to fashion the waxy box into something resembling a bowl—even though this was extremely difficult, given his unusual deformity. Then he’d lie on his bed, the one nearest the window, and sleep with one eye open, waiting for Jinx to spring up to the ledge, tightrope-walk over to the milk, and lap up his feast, which, of course, he always did.

Until the day he didn’t.

The last carton of milk stayed outside the window for two full weeks. The sun soured it. Maggots writhed in the curdling slime. Still, Grimes would not remove the milk—hoping against hope that Jinx would return, knowing the cat would be ravenously famished, and therefore not very finicky, when it did.

Soon the rancid milk began to smell. The nuns who ran Saint Ignatius scoured the building, searching for the source of the foul odor, and found it perched outside the window near young Reginald Grimes’s bed.

“It was for my friend, Jinx the cat,” he told them after a prolonged interrogation. “I was attempting to feed the hungry.”

Grimes hoped the nuns might forgive him, perhaps even praise him. After all, wasn’t that what the Bible said to do, feed the hungry?

“Young man,” Sister Beatrice, the sternest of the stern lot, had snapped at him, “that commandment does not apply to stray dogs, pigeons, or alley cats!”

Grimes was severely punished. For stealing food. For endangering the health and hygiene of everyone in the building. For misinterpreting Scripture.

Grimes pushed the Curiosity Cat script aside.

“Bah!” he said, rubbing his watery eyes. “Silly, emotional sap. Going all weepy for a flea-infested feline?” He tsked and sounded just like Sister Beatrice.

Good.

He didn’t have time for silly saccharine-soaked sentimentality.

There was a new show to put on.

He needed to: Concentrate. On. His. Work.

Still. That song. It haunted him.

We’ll never find another cat like that.

It had been thirty-five years since he had last seen Jinx. The cat had been dead for three decades and more.

Still.

Reginald Grimes wished he could see Jinx again.

Wished he could hear his throaty, contented purr.

He wished he could bring that yellow-eyed cat back from the dead, because it might be nice to have at least one friend.

There was a noise at the window over the kitchen sink.

A low rumble.

A purr?

“Meow.”

For an instant, maybe half an instant, Reginald Grimes saw his childhood companion. Sleek and gray. Glowing amber eyes. Jinx was perched right outside his kitchen window!

Claws out, Jinx hissed and swatted at the glass.

And then, before Grimes was even certain what he had seen, the cat was once again gone.