The three young boys, all around ten years old, stood in front of the old lady’s house.
“Let’s all flip a coin,” said Kenny, their apparent leader who was in the boy scouts. “The odd man out has to ring the doorbell and tell her about the cat.”
They could hear the playing of a piano inside. She still gave lessons to the neighborhood children though she was in her eighties.
“That bastard Billy Gates should be ringing that doorbell,” said Eddy. “He’s the one that done it.”
“Yeah, but we get to collect the reward, one hundred smackeroos, that’s over thirty bucks each,” said Kenny.
They flipped, Kenny, Eddy and Harry. Eddy came up tails, the other two had heads so they pushed him up the sidewalk toward her house and wished him good luck. Then they waited out of sight under a tree to find out how it went.
Eddy stood there frozen in front of the door, looking around, thinking maybe he should just run home. It wasn’t him who done it. It was that psycho Billy Gates who’d been sent to reform school twice already, who had started the fire near their school that the janitor miraculously discovered and put out and he got expelled for it. He was a foster kid who lived in a swanky house in the neighborhood and his adopted parents gave loud outdoor parties in the summer that sometimes went past midnight and they drove fancy cars and had a boat and Billy bragged about his water skiing and had a great tan and looked like he lifted weights and he was being home-schooled now with a private tutor and he had a thick head of platinum blond hair and always a big smile on his face which all the guys thought was really creepy considering the things he had done, but all the girls thought he was cool; they saw him as an adorably cute rebel rather than a pyromaniac who endangered over a hundred kids in the school.
He pushed the doorbell button, but he didn’t hear nothing. Maybe it was broken, maybe Miss Scott didn’t have her hearing aids on. He rapped, gently at first, then louder and finally he was pounding when he heard the music stop abruptly and then the sound of feet padding softly toward the door. She opened it with a big smile on her face.
“Why Eddy, what a pleasant surprise.”
Eddy spoke almost in a whisper while gazing down at his shoes,
“Your cat, Miss Scott, me and Kenny and Harry saw all your lost cat signs with the reward, and we found it.”
“This is so wonderful, Eddy, Oh, please tell me tell me where she is right now, where you’re keeping my beautiful little black Mystic?”
After a long pause and still looking down at his feet, Eddy said,
“We had to bury it, Miss Scott.”
Miss Scott gasped and put her hand over her mouth, tears, welling up in her eyes.
“Oh my. Where did you find her? I need to know. Please. Mystic was my darling. She slept at the foot of my bed every night since she was a kitten over ten years ago. What happened to her? Was she run over by a car? Is that it? Tell me! Was she hurt when you found her? Why didn’t you bring her over here and I could have taken to the vet.”
Eddy mumbled, “ She was dead, Miss Scott,” but he could barely speak. He dare not try to stammer out an explanation for what the boys actually found and buried. There was no way he could relate to her what Billy Gates later bragged about around the neighborhood. What he had done to the poor creature that caused its painful death.
“Eddy, you look upset. Do you want to come inside and sit a spell and talk about this?”
Eddy, his eyes still downcast, shook his head no.
“Miss Scott, I really have to go home now. Please excuse me.”
“Don’t you boys want your reward? You certainly earned it for all you’ve done. You boys got a hundred dollars coming to you.”
“It’s okay, Miss Scott, hey, don’t worry about it. Look, I really gotta go now. It’s almost dinnertime. My mom will be worried.”
“Why, Eddy Parker, it’s not even two o’clock yet.”
After a pause, she gently brushed the boy’s cheek with the back of her hand and said,
“Eddy, can you boys at least show me where you buried my cat? I’d like to have my gardener move her to my backyard and bury her there in the flower garden just so I would always know where she is and that she’s resting peacefully here by me.”
This simple request really unleashed the floodgates of tears and Eddy just stood there and then started sobbing and looking around desperately, hoping the other two guys were still hiding behind the tree. Thinking now, all three of us really should have rung this doorbell together. Or, better yet, maybe the three of us should have just kept our big, greedy, stupid mouths shut.