Sully kills Mrs. Harmon’s cat and tracks Maren

Sully’s killing of Mrs. Harmon’s cat turns a trace left in a library textbook into a warning that he has tracked Maren down. The discovery ends her brief sense of safety in public: she recognizes the cat, feels the old fear return, and leaves the library knowing Sully can follow her. By the time he reaches her dormitory, he has a knife and is ready to force her into a private confrontation.

The Tail in the Textbook

The encounter begins the next day, during an ordinary library routine. Maren has spent a couple of hours reading and writing at a desk, then stepped away to use the bathroom. On returning, she finds something in the gutter of her open textbook that her mind initially refuses to identify. It is a long, fluffy white strip attached to what looks like a charm bracelet. The delayed recognition makes the discovery more disturbing: this is not a stray object but evidence of violence placed among the materials of her daily life.

Maren picks it up before understanding what she is holding. Dried blood clumps the fur at one end, where the tail has been severed. She recognizes it as Mrs. Harmon’s cat’s tail, and the apparent bracelet proves to be the cat’s collar. Its tag identifies the animal as Puss and gives Mrs. Harmon’s address at 217 Sugarbush Avenue in Edgartown, Pennsylvania. The address brings Maren back to the Spare Oom and to the memory of shutting the door on Mrs. Harmon’s beautiful white cat. Her thought that she should have let him in connects the present evidence to an earlier moment of refusal, without undoing what has happened to the animal.

The collar makes the tail more than an unidentified remnant: it names the cat and ties the severed body part to Mrs. Harmon. At the same time, the tail’s placement in Maren’s textbook makes the discovery immediate and personal. The evidence does not establish when or where Sully killed the cat, but it shows that the cat has been killed and that its remains have reached Maren’s desk. The ordinary object of study becomes the place where the threat announces itself.

From Public Space to the Dormitory

Other students are present, but Maren cannot tell whether anyone notices her distress. The library’s silence seems to intensify around her; she experiences the people there as mannequins and feels Sully’s eyes on her back. Her stomach turns, and her hands recall the sickening thud of brass on skull. The bodily response links the cat’s tail to earlier violence and makes the threat felt before Sully appears in front of her.

Maren weighs hiding the tail and staying at the desk against the certainty that the library will eventually close. She closes her books, leaves them on the table, takes the tail, and walks to the nearest trash can. Outside, the afternoon is sunny and students are playing Frisbee or sunning themselves on the quad. That open, ordinary scene offers no reassurance: Maren does not look behind her and keeps walking back to the dorm. She has left the public space, but not escaped the person she believes is watching her.

At the stairwell she climbs to the second-floor landing and sits on a step. The hall beyond the double doors is deserted, and she waits for the sound of Sully’s boots. A door opens and shuts at the bottom of the stairs; then she hears the slow, steady approach. She closes her eyes, listening to her hands hum and her heart hammer. She knows she has bested him once, but recognizes that past success has not displaced the old fear. The scene stretches the interval between the warning and the confrontation through sound: Sully is first present as an approaching rhythm, before Maren opens her eyes and sees him.

Sully’s Confrontation

When Maren looks up, Sully is leering at her with a pocketknife in his hand. Blood crusts the hand, ringing his fingernails. His appearance confirms that the pursuit has become direct physical danger, while his speech frames the assault as punishment: he calls himself her granddad and says it is his job to set her right. Maren answers that he could have done it a month earlier. Sully says he had to get his strength up and invokes the idea of a dish best served cold. His explanation establishes that the delay was connected to his need to regain strength; it also makes clear that the confrontation is not a sudden encounter but the return of a threat deferred.

Sully directs Maren through the door into Kerri-Ann Watt’s room and turns the dead bolt. He pushes her toward the bed. Maren glances over his shoulder, but Lee will not be back for hours. Daylight is fading, and the room is thick with shadows. Sully threatens to slit her open if she looks at the door again. The locked room, the knife, and the threat combine to restrict her choices; the knife is not merely a visible weapon but the means by which he enforces the order to stay put.

Maren’s internal comparison of the knife with Saturn, who never needed one, registers the weapon as part of Sully’s particular menace. Sully turns a desk chair toward her, sits, and uses the knife to pick at his fingernails, flicking dirt and dried blood onto the floor. The casual gesture prolongs the confrontation after he has secured the room. He then taunts her that her boyfriend has failed to swoop in for the second time. His words make Lee’s absence part of the immediate danger, even though the passage does not establish what Lee knows or what he will do next.

Significance and Limits of the Scene

The sequence moves from an indirect sign to a face-to-face threat: the tail is found in a book, carried out of the library, and followed by the sound of boots in the stairwell. The cat’s collar identifies the victim, while Maren’s memory of having shut the cat out gives the discovery a personal association. Sully’s arrival then removes any uncertainty about whether the trace belongs to a danger that has reached her: he is there, armed, and able to lock her in a room.

The narrative keeps the event within Maren’s first-person experience, so the reader encounters the tail first as an object she cannot recognize, then as a remnant she names, and finally as the trigger for a fear she feels in her body. The threat is not resolved in this scene. It ends with Sully seated opposite Maren, still holding the knife and taunting her about Lee, leaving her confined in Kerri-Ann Watt’s room as the light fades.