Her white fur was bloodied at both ends, mouth and rear. The blood didn’t show on Ahab’s tabby-brown fur, which looked wet, soaked at either end. “What happened to them?” I kneeled above Mitzi and lifted her side; she felt heavy and a little stiff. “They’re dead.” Rich turned at the arched entrance to the living room, turned and stared at something and said, “What’s that?” I followed him to a whitish lumpy spill of something on the floor by the fireplace, its gooey mess seeping into the fibers of Hugo’s family’s heirloom Oriental carpet. It looked like chicken stew in the kind of béchamel sauce I hated; but instead of being smoothly creamy, this sauce was pimply with something granular. A square plastic container lay overturned on the floor near the mess. Rich reached for something on the mantle. And my mind did a flip: The eight by ten photo of Joe was back in the frame. It couldn’t be. I had ripped it up and thrown it away; the garbage men had long since scattered it to the fetid winds of some landfill somewhere.
