Мерфи Ширли Руссо

Cat Coming Home. Cat Telling Tales. Cat Bearing Gifts

16. CAT COMING HOME

1

FOG AS SOFT as a purr drifted among the twisted oaks and tucked down around the weathered roofs of the old hillside neighborhood, blurring their steep angles. On the twisted arm of a sprawling oak, the gray tomcat crouched above the rooftops licking at his fog-dampened fur, his claws kneading idly as he watched the neighborhood below. The old stucco or shingled homes, denizens from an age past, crowded close to one another among their overgrown gardens, descending the hill with dignity, some perhaps still sheltering their original occupants. This early morning, the tomcat was concerned with only one house, with the small, two-story Tudor that, until this week, had stood empty, its tenants long departed.

It was a simple house, and straightforward, its pale plaster walls set within heavy, crisscrossed timbers. A wide bay window at the front revealed a glimpse of the kitchen, and above the kitchen, behind a narrow ledge of dark shingles, opened the wide windows of two upstairs bedrooms topped by a steeply peaked roof. Only the garage roof was flat, out of keeping with the original design as if it had been added on in later years. Replacing, perhaps, the kind of small detached garage common in the age of the first cars, of the little Model A Fords—the kind of shed that would never have held Maudie Toola’s big black Town Car.

From the moment, three days earlier, when Maudie’s Lincoln parked at the curb and then soon the yellow moving van pulled into the drive, Joe Grey had observed the grandmotherly woman with interest. He knew she had fled L.A., some three hundred miles to the south, after the murder of her son and his wife, but it was even more than the murder that piqued the tomcat’s curiosity; it was something about Maudie herself. Something out of keeping, an attitude that didn’t seem to fit this gentle person, an occasional gesture or glance that seemed out of character in the soft little woman.

The tomcat had no clue that his interest in Maudie would soon involve a whole tangle of confusing events besides the recent murders, that a stabbing soon to occur at the state prison and the brutal home invasions that had already descended upon the small village would prove all to be connected in some way to Maudie herself. This morning Joe puzzled only over Maudie as he watched for her to appear, watched for an early light to blaze on in her bright kitchen.

The shooting of Maudie’s son and daughter-in-law had occurred eight months earlier, east of L.A. on a lonely mountain road as they headed up into the mountains north of Lake Arrowhead. Their destination was Maudie’s weekend cabin on the edge of a tiny, man-made lake, where they planned to enjoy the children’s Easter vacation. Only Maudie and the three children—her grandson and her son’s two small stepchildren—had survived; they were the only witnesses.

THEIRS WAS THE only car on the dark and narrow road, they moved through the night between tall stands of shaggy forest, the scent of pine blowing in through their open windows. Deep within the woods they could hear the occasional booming of a barn owl, solemn and intent. Only where the pines thinned for a moment did light from the low moon flicker into the front seat, catching a gleam of Caroline’s honey-colored hair and of Martin’s white baseball cap. Caroline’s two children and Martin’s little boy, Benny, were crowded into the backseat with Maudie, Benny snuggled against his grandma. They were all startled when headlights blazed suddenly into the car from behind them, blasting out of the night as if the overtaking car had snapped out of another dimension. Martin slowed to let the speeding vehicle pass so he could safely make his left-hand turn. Instead of passing, the big pickup cut its speed and pulled alongside, keeping pace with them. Maudie glimpsed the passenger for only a second before she saw the gleam of metal, too, and shoved the children to the floor, crouching down over them as a fiery blast exploded, and another. In the front seat Martin jerked and fell sideways; she could see him between the bucket seats, twisted and slumped beneath the wheel. It all happened in an instant, their car skidding sideways headed for the dense pinewoods. Maudie could see Caroline leaning across Martin’s body fighting the wheel, trying to keep them from crashing, trying to reach the emergency brake. A third shot burst from the big pickup and their car spun out of control, skidded off the shoulder, went over on its side, and crashed into a tree. The engine roared, and flooded, and died. The pickup cut out around them screeching tires, kicking up gravel, and was gone. Silence in the car. Neither Caroline nor Martin moved; all was dark and still.

The couple had been married just four months; Caroline was a widow of two years, her husband having been killed in Iraq. Maudie’s son, Martin, an airline pilot, had filed for divorce when he learned that his wife, Pearl, during his absences, would go off for days leaving Benny alone in the house to fend for himself, the six-year-old child begging meals and spending many nights up the street with Caroline Reed and her twochildren. When Martin was home between flights, Pearl had seemed a caring enough mother, though her nature was cold. Certainly the couple had had their problems, but Martin had stayed for Benny’s sake—until he learned how much he had ignored of the little boy’s life. Only when he pressed Benny for details had Benny confided that, when they were alone, his mother would drive him out of the house or, if she had company, she would lock him in his room.

Benny was always a quiet child, and Martin berated himself for not seeing clearly the little boy’s pain. What use was it to provide well for his family if he couldn’t take proper care of his neglected child. Stricken and ashamed, he had told Pearl to move out, had gotten a restraining order against her coming anywhere near Benny, had filed for divorce, and had asked Caroline if Benny might stay with her until he found live-in help. Caroline told him the arrangement need not be temporary, that her two kids liked having him there, that that was where Benny felt safe and loved, that was where he wanted to be when he couldn’t be with his daddy. Benny, in his loneliness, had drawn Martin and Caroline together, and nearly a year after Martin divorced, they knew they had fallen in love and would marry.

When Maudie returned home to L.A., after a long absence on the East Coast where she’d gone to care for a cousin, when she moved back home and learned the truth about Benny’s life, she was devastated. She had thought to take Benny to live with her, but then, on meeting Caroline and learning about their upcoming wedding, she saw there was no need. She was deeply warmed by theirnewfound happiness, she wept when they said their vows; after the ceremony she held the child and held Caroline and thanked God for the miracle that had brought the two together. Martin’s life had turned around—until the evening they headed up to the mountains for that fatal Easter vacation.

It was black night when they reached the mountains. Moving along the narrow back roads, theirs was soon the only car. Moonlight fingered the tips of the pines, and flashed between the trees into the moving vehicle. They met no oncoming lights and they passed no clearing in the forest where any faintest house light flickered, they were alone, content with one another as Benny napped peacefully against Maudie and she herself dozed.

And then the blazing lights. The gunshots. The wreck. Easing up, Maudie caught her breath as pain seared through her shoulder. In the front seat, the newlyweds lay unmoving, a dark huddle; they made no cry, no smallest sound. The children clung to Maudie, Benny’s arms so tight that pain shocked through her hurt shoulder, making her vision swim; she clung to the child, dizzy and sick. The night was so black, silent except for the dying ticking of their wrecked car. She cried out to Martin but he didn’t answer, nor did Caroline. She tried to wedge her way into the front to find Martin’s hand, or Caroline’s, to feel for a pulse. She was sick with the terrible, certain knowledge they were dead. They were alone on the deserted mountain road, no one to help them, no one to know what had happened. No one but the killer.

Maudie tried to find her purse, find her cell phone, wondering if, in that desolate mountain area, a 911 call would get through to anyone, wondering if her signal, impeded by the ragged peaks, could possibly reach a tower and be relayed to the local sheriff or the CHP. Or would her call simply die, smothered among the ridges and pinewoods? She thought of a gasoline fire but could see no lick of flame starting among the wreckage. The children clung to her, silent and shivering. As she searched for her purse, for the phone, the pain that surged through her brought tears spurting.

Later she remembered only fragments: the children climbing over into the front seat to their parents even as Maudie tried to stop them. At once, Gracie and Benny started to scream, Gracie’s high-pitched little voice screaming, “Mama, Mama, Mama, Mama, Mama …” unable to stop. Twice Benny said, “Papa,” then he began to retch.

It was so dark, the moon’s light blocked now by the mountain of the car itself towering over them. Maudie abandoned the search for her purse, and rummaged through the pockets of the backseat trying to find a flashlight—but she didn’t dare shine a light on Martin and Caroline, didn’t dare let the children see them torn and bleeding. She prayed they weren’t dead, prayed they would live, they were all these children had. Death wouldn’t be fair, not for this warm, happy, newly formed family.

But the words“fair” and “right” were arbitrary, they had no connection to real life. Were those concepts applicable in the dimension larger than life, a dimension that neither she nor anyone alive was equipped to understand?

Swallowing back the pain in her shoulder, she reached between the bucket seats, feeling for the children. She felt Gracie huddled down against Caroline, her arm slick with Caroline’s blood. Maudie tried to squeeze through between the headrests and the headliner, but Benny swarmed back away from Martin, screaming and crying, pressing her down again. Gracie followed him in a panic, and then Ronnie, the three children clinging and shivering, weeping uncontrollably in their terror and grief.

Later she remembered hugging the children, feeling sick and dizzy with pain. She remembered finding her phone, making the call, but after that the memories became disjointed. She thought a lot of time had passed in pain and blackness until, what seemed hours later, the sound of sirens startled her from half consciousness, and lights blazed in, blinding her, blinding the children…

Even now, eight months later, her memories of the shooting and crash were still tangled. She had lucid moments, and long spaces lost in between that she couldn’t bring back: waking in a moving vehicle, strapped down to a cot, unable to move or sit up. Not knowing where the children were, crying out for the children. A man’s voice, trying to calm her. Waking to a loud insistent thumping that terrified her until the man told her she was in a helicopter. Recognizing, then, the thunder of its propellers, as the white-coated medic leaned over her, telling her the children were right there with her, that they were not badly hurt. Seeing the three children, then, huddled together with blankets around them, and the medic asking her about family, askingwho they should call. She tried to tell them where, in her purse, to look for the phone numbers of her older son, David, and of Caroline’s sister. Everything happened in torn fragments, ragged and not quite fitting together, a nightmare puzzle that would never, ever leave her. She remembered the loud, slamming wind of the copter’s blades above her as the door opened and she was lifted out on the stretcher, uselessly crying out for the children.

She remembered waking in a cage of metal bars, trying to pull herself up, then seeing the tubes sticking out of her arm confining her, holding her down, remembered yanking at them trying to get free until a nurse grabbed her hands. She fought the nurse, screaming for Martin, screaming his name over and over…

It had taken her a long time, in the hospital, to face the truth that lay silent and dark within her, to face the fact that Martin and Caroline were dead, to face the grief she didn’t want and didn’t know how to deal with. A long time to understand that Martin’s and Caroline’s bodies had been transported to the county morgue to await a coroner’s autopsies. A long time to believe what the doctors and police told her, that the three children were safe, that they were in a motel nearby with Caroline’s sister, who had flown out from Miami. It took her a while to understand that her older son, David, would arrive from Georgia that evening. Not until Caroline’s sister, Maryanne, arrived at the hospital with the children, until Maudie saw for herself that the three children were all right, did that part of the nightmare begin to subside.

Gracie and Ronnie, subdued and pale, clung to Maryanne, needing their aunt, whose golden hair and warm smile so resembled Caroline. Now Maryanne, and David, and Maudie herself, were all the children had left to love and nurture them.

2

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IN THE SMALL village of Molena Point, far above L.A. on the central California coast, chief of police Max Harper and his tall, redheaded wife, Charlie, had just returned from an early evening ride up into the hills above the sea cliffs. In their cozy stable, as they unsaddled the horses, their conversation centered around plans for their annual pre-Christmas potluck. Max’s buckskin gelding and Charlie’s sorrel mare stood in cross ties between the two rows of stalls as Max and Charlie checked their feet for stones and then rubbed them down. At the end of the alleyway beyond the open barn doors, their green pastures spread away between white fences, allowing a glimpse of the sea beyond. The weather was warm for late November, the ocean breeze welcome; though in a few days, the local weather guru had forecast, a cold spell could be expected.

“That would be nice for the Christmas party,” Charlie said, “cold weather, and a fire on the hearth.” Usually, the Harpers hosted the casual buffet there at the ranch where they had ample parking for police vehicles and the cars of their civilian friends. This year, because of the rash of home invasions that had descended on the village, their friends and the personnel of Molena Point PD would gather in the heart of the village, at the Damens’ house, where officers on patrol could stop by on their dinner breaks, while their wives and families could linger on for a more leisurely visit. The invasions were worrisome, as the department had made no arrests and thus far had no good leads. Max had doubled patrols and extended officers’ hours, and many vacations had been canceled, the added costs stretching the department’s budget thin enough to cancel Max’s order for four new squad cars—and leaving Max short-tempered and abrupt, reining himself in with a far harder hand than he ever controlled his buckskin gelding.

“No one,” Charlie said hopefully, “would dare pull a home invasion Christmas week. Not with so many people crowding the village from out of town, for the plays, for the pageant, and a choir singing almost every night, tourists shopping and walking the residential streets, and so much traffic.” Although the minute she said it she saw how silly her statement was, that with crowds everywhere, who would notice a few more strangers?

Max gave Bucky a last swipe with the rubdown cloth and looked over at her, his lean, tanned face touched with amusement.“What better time, with doors unlocked to welcome guests, houses full of people going in and out, no one paying attention to who might step inside uninvited, maybe with a weapon at the ready?”

Charlie sighed, and wished the world were different, and then was ashamed of that childish thought. She watched Max lead Bucky into his stall, watched her husband’s thrifty movements as he fetched two rations of grain and a handful of carrots from the feed room. The brutal home attacks enraged Max, though he tried to remain low-key. These assaults, all on women at home alone, hadn’t so far netted the invaders much of monetary value. Maybe their victims’ fear, the enjoyment of their own power over the frightened women, was all the reward they were seeking. As the holidays approached, filled presumably with love and good cheer, these attacks on isolated homeowners seemed far more ugly. It didn’t help that the villagers’ growing unease was heightened by news coverage that was slanted with the weight all at one end.

The Molena PointGazette had always, in the past, been in harmony with the local law enforcement; the editor had liked Max and was pleased with the job he did, with the stability and low crime rate in the village compared to other nearby towns. Now that theGazette had been sold, and with a new editor at the helm, the little local paper was coming down hard on Max’s department. Emerson Ribble, the new editor, and the one new reporter he’d brought with him, seemed intent on smearing MPPD, implying that they should know beforehand the exact time and place of each attack. The paper’s cutting editorials didn’t suggest how that might be done, how any police department could run surveillance on every house and backyard cottage, on every little twisting street within the crowded square mile of the village, and do it twenty-four/seven. They didn’t seem to grasp, or didn’t want to point out, that the very basis of home invasions was the element of surprise.

One invasion had occurred just before suppertime when children were still playing in the street. Two homeowners had been attacked first thing in the morning when they went out to get the paper, leaving their doors unlocked behind them, returning to find they were not alone. So far, seven women had been beaten badly enough to be taken to emergency, four of them hospitalized. Max, besides increasing patrols into the quieter, out-of-the-way neighborhoods, had encouraged people to take their own sensible precautions as well. He’d been on TV three times, had done four newspaper interviews laying out the steps that people could take to discourage forced breakins. It was all commonsense, basic information: Keep doors and easily accessed windows locked when you’re inside or outdoors, even when you’re right in the yard. Don’t answer the door without looking first to see who’s there. Don’t open the door at all to strangers; speak to them through a window or install a simple intercom. Watch your neighbors’ houses, note any strange cars in your neighborhood. Call your neighbors if anything looks suspicious—strangers hanging around, strange cars showing up repeatedly. Report to the police anything that couldn’t be explained, that made you uneasy. He had not suggested Mace or pepper spray, though anyone with good sense should already have looked into those or other options. TheGazette had printed Max’s articles as he’d dictated them, but then in their own articles and editorials they’d gone after him viciously, as accusatory as if he were masterminding the invasions himself. The one common denominator among the attacks was that each had occurred at the same time officers were headed for,or on the scene of, some other emergency call, when cars and men were drawn away from neighborhood patrol. Assuming the invaders had a police radio, the department had switched to a new code language, plus more reliance on cell phones.

Leading her sorrel mare into the stall, Charlie removed her halter, shut the stall door, then joined Max in the doorway of the barn; they stood enjoying the evening, watching their two half-Dane mutts out in the pasture, sniffing hopefully around a rabbit hole the rabbit long ago departed. This was the first day in some six weeks that Max hadn’t worked long overtime hours. He wasn’t twenty anymore, Charlie thought crossly, he neededsome rest. Max was pushing retirement, and sometimes she wished he’d take early retirement.

But Max loved his work, he loved the department, and she wasn’t sure how he’d fare if he were idle. Though the way things were going, it looked like someone was working hard to push him in that direction, to separate him from Molena Point PD before he was ready. That enraged her almost beyond endurance, that someone was trying to destroy Max, that they were beating and injuring innocent civilians in order to hurt her husband.

Not that they would succeed. Whatever these people did, whatever this smear campaign was about, they wouldn’t destroy Max Harper, she thought fiercely, or destroy the men and women of the department who were so loyal to him.

But, standing with Max’s arm around her as they watched the evening descend, listening to the sea crash beyond the cliffs, Charlie had to smile. Despite the current trouble, there was one aspect of the investigation that even Max didn’t imagine, and lent a gleam of hope. Max could have no idea that one gray tomcat might tip the scales, that when Joe Grey and his two lady pals got their claws into the invasions, these cases could begin to open up and the department would start to receive evidence that, by its very nature, was inaccessible to the officers of Molena Point PD.

3

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MAUDIE TOOLA AND her little grandson arrived in Molena Point in early December, eight months after the murder of Benny’s daddy and stepmother. They drove up the coast from L.A. with Maudie’s older son, David, who refused to let Maudie make the three-hundred-mile trip alone. Maudie seemed to David desperately in need of rest and peace just now, with her painful shoulder from the bullet wound, and after the stress of the murders and of the subsequent investigation. And after the strain of the last eight months as she had worked to sell Martin’s house and her own house, and put Martin’s and Caroline’s affairs in order. Caroline’s sister had helped her as long as she could, then had gone on back to Florida with Caroline’s two children. Now, Benny was all Maudie had. Except for David, and his first concern, at present, had to be for his wife. Alison wasn’t doing at all well in anticipation of her upcoming cancer surgery.

David glanced over at Maudie. Still recovering from her wounded shoulder, and still grieving so deeply for Martin, she needed a hassle-free trip, and he could do that for her. In Molena Point she and Benny could settle quietly into their new home and, hopefully, Maudie could start to make a new life for the two of them.

They had departed L.A. at six on Tuesday morning, planning to arrive in Molena Point that afternoon in plenty of time to meet the moving van, which had loaded up the previous evening. Their Thanksgiving had been quiet, a restaurant meal, the first Thanksgiving dinner Maudie could ever remember not having cooked herself. As they drove north up Highway 101, Maudie and David talked softly while in the backseat the small, pale little boy slept covered with a quilt, clutching his own familiar pillow. Benny’s brown hair was just the color of his daddy’s at that age, though he wore it longer than Martin ever had. Neither Maudie nor David could look at the child without seeing Martin as a little boy. The memories hurt, but they heartened Maudie, too. Maybe she was overly sentimental, but she took comfort in knowing that something of Martin himself would live on in his little son.

The morning was damp and cold. A thick fog lay along the freeway, staining the crowded neighborhoods the dirty gray-yellow of sour milk. David took the first shift, driving until Paso Robles where they meant to stop for a late breakfast. What worried him, as he pulled into the parking lot of the Paso Robles Inn, easing in between two tall trucks where the car wouldn’t be seen so easily from the highway, was that the killer might have followed them. That whoever had shot Martin might think that, despite the dark night, Maudie had glimpsed his face. That she’d seen, if not enough to make a positive identification, enough to give the police a clue. In the months before the shooting, Martin had, on three occasions, reported questionable airport personnel who later turned out to be security risks. Two of them were baggage workers, one the member of a maintenance crew, two with prison records, one with no green card and no passport. David worried that these men might be behind the shooting, and he thought about Martin’s ex-wife, as well. Pearl Toola had some questionable contacts, men David suspected she’d remained close to, from her earlier years working in the Las Vegas casinos. Martin and Pearl had married young, when Martin was perhaps wilder, before his responsibility as a pilot had settled him down. Pearl had been so beautiful, Martin hadn’t cared that she worked dealing blackjack and ran with a fast crowd.

After the shooting, when the L.A. police interviewed Maudie, she had made no identification, and as far as he knew, they still had no leads. The police told them there were no shell casings found and, on the hardtop road, the sheriff had picked up no tire marks. Maudie told the investigating detective that she had seen only the flashes of gunfire, that she hadn’t seen the shooter. When the L.A. detectives queried her about Martin’s ex-wife, Maudie told him that considering Pearl had had several affairs while they were still married, and had once asked for a divorce herself, it didn’t seem likely, when they did go their separate ways, she’d consider herself a wronged party in need of revenge. She said she thought Pearl was glad to be free of Martin and her little boy, that surely she wouldn’t be foolish enough to turn around and put herself in harm’s way for no reason. Maudie told the detective she was leaving L.A., and gave him her new address in Molena Point. She said she couldn’t continue living in L.A. with the memories of Martin’s childhood unavoidably all around her, that she didn’t want to live with those painful reminders.

Molena Point, too, was filled with memories, but of a different kind. This was the village of Maudie’s childhood, the one place she wanted to be, the one place she thought she and Benny could find peace and begin to heal, as much as they ever could heal. Among the woods and along the seacoast of the small village, she thought Benny’s hurt spirit might begin to mend. She wanted only to lose herself again in that perfect place, to return, as well as she could, to those long-ago childhood pleasures, to that early innocence before the world forced her to see life more clearly.

She had kept the two cottages all these years, since her own parents died. She and her husband, Allen, had leased out the larger house, keeping the little guest cottage, four doors up the block, for their vacations. After Allen died, she hadn’t had the heart to return to the village, and had rented out the smaller cottage, too. It was then that she had bought the tiny log house nearer to L.A., just north of San Bernardino, the cabin where they had been headed the night Martin and Caroline were killed.

Now she had sold the San Bernardino cabin, and sold the Molena Point cottage. She and Benny would live in her old home, in the two-bedroom Tudor which, with a little addition, would provide room for her quilting studio. She desperately needed that involvement again with color and cloth and stitching, needed to get outside herself. She couldn’t hope to heal Benny’s broken life without first healing her own—without embracing once more the work that eased her spirit and that she found meaningful.

It had been hard to sell the L.A. home where Martin and David grew up, hard to sell it just after Martin’s funeral. But that part of her life was over now. She had put the money from the sale of the house and of the San Bernardino cabin into an additional trust for Benny. When Martin left Pearl he had made sure all his holdings were in trust for the child where Pearl couldn’t get at them, and Maudie had done the same. Closing out her bank accounts of her day-to-day funds, she had packed the cashier’s checks safely in her luggage among her lingerie, for deposit in a Molena Point bank.

They’d arrived in Molena Point at one, in time for a lunch of hot soup and fresh-baked bread at a small restaurant run by a Persian couple who were among Maudie’s favorite people; then they’d headed up the hills to their new home, up the steep, wooded streets above the village. Approaching the dark-timbered Tudor that had been her childhood home, Maudie caught her breath. This wastheir home now, hers and Benny’s; they would settle in here, Benny would grow up here. And whatever the outcome of their move might be, maybe the final words of Martin’s and Caroline’s epitaphs had not yet been written. Maybe, Maudie thought with a cool certainty, the last episode of her son’s death was still to be revealed.

4

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THE NOTION THAT Maudie’s fate and the fate of her small grandson might be guided by a cat would have greatly amused the older woman, the idea that she and Benny would become the subjects of a tomcat’s sharp and life-changing attention would have made her laugh. Yet even that first afternoon as Maudie supervised the moving in of her furniture and packing boxes, she was closely observed from the branches of an oak tree just above her, where Joe Grey crouched, his yellow eyes narrowed with interest. There was something about the soft little woman that made the gray tomcat tweak his whiskers and lick a paw reflectively.

She was just a bit pudgy, a pale, round woman with powdery skin, her smile warm, her voice, as she supervised the unloading, gentle even when she was annoyed at a worker’s carelessness. She was impeccably groomed, her blond-dyed hair—which was probably gray—styled in an expensive bob, her loose, smocklike jacket well cut, in subtle patterns, over silky, gathered trousers. Expensive, flat-heeled shoes. Tiny gold earrings and a gold choker. A timid-looking woman, well turned out as if to give herself confidence, and with a smile that should draw one to trust her. Yet there was an air about her, too, that didn’t seem to fit, a watchful expression that showed itself for only an instant and then was gone again, a look that puzzled the tomcat.

Over the next three days, Joe Grey watched Maudie. He watched her grown son David carry in a fresh Christmas tree, and imagined the three of them busily decorating it among their still unpacked moving boxes. He arrived early each morning with his housemate, Ryan Flannery, as she came to work on the cottage that she and Clyde had bought from Maudie. Ryan and Clyde Damen had been married only since last Valentine’s Day, the providential joining of a pair of avid collectors: Clyde of classic cars, which he restored and sold; Ryan, of antique mantels and moldings and stained-glass windows, which she used in the homes she built. Now, perhaps driven by an excess of matrimonial bliss, the couple had combined their creative fervor into restoring old houses.

On this morning, the fourth after Maudie’s arrival, Joe sat on the roof of the Damens’ remodel venture dividing his attention between Maudie and the construction project under way below him. Peering over, he watched Ryan and her two Latino helpers pulling nails and ripping off strips of weathered siding, in preparation for a new sunroom addition that would look out on the greenbelt behind the backyards: a wild expanse that ran all along this side of the hills, a favorite retreat for deer, raccoons, bobcats, and dog walkers brave enough to face the occasional curious mountain lion. The banging of boards and the screeching of rusty nails was so loud, at this early hour, he expected the neighbors to pour out into the street shaking their fists and shouting, but for the moment, the street remained empty.

Around him, the fog-blanketed rooftops angled so close together that a cat could hop from one roof to the next and not miss a beat; or he could travel above the rooftops, along the aerial highways of twisting oak branches. Later, when the fog lifted, the leafy roof would come alive with sparrows and house finches, a veritable caf? on the wing if a cat was agile and quick—and the rich supply of small game didn’t stop there. Below him among the tangled yards and wandering garden walls and toolsheds lived generations of mice and moles and fat gophers to satisfy a hungry feline.

Between the bouts of noise beneath him, and the rattle of boards being tossed into the weeds of the side yard, Joe listened to the quick Spanish voices of Manuel and Fernando, and to Ryan’s softer replies. Her Spanish was so limited that Joe was sure the two men were secretly laughing at her—but in a kind way, the tomcat thought. Both of them liked Ryan, and she seemed to get her message across, enough for the work at hand, enough for her crew to have built some pretty impressive houses. But his new housemate’s talents weren’t one-sided, Joe was still getting used to the changes in his and Clyde’s bachelor life, still happily growing accustomed to Ryan’s expertise in the kitchen, which was every bit as impressive as her skills as a carpenter, designer, and building contractor.

What her talents were in bed, he couldn’t say. That was none of his business. Ever since the couple arrived home from their honeymoon, Joe spent only short periods of time sharing the king-sized bed before he retreated to his rooftop tower, which Ryan had designed and built for him. The hexagonal little house above the second-floor roof was walled with windows that a clever paw could open for easy access to the village rooftops, and was lined with a bright array of soft cushions. The design had been a collaboration between Ryan and Clyde, before even Ryan learned that Joe could speak. Joe had told Clyde what he had in mind, and Clyde had told Ryan, taking all the design credit for himself. This was long before Ryan and Clyde were married. They had begun seriously dating when she contracted to remodel Clyde’s small, dull, one-story summer cottage into a handsome two stories with bold beams, high windows, and a touch of Spanish charm.

It was later that Ryan discovered Joe Grey’s secret; she was one of the few humans who shared the knowledge of Joe’s talents, and he had to say, the woman had a quick understanding of the feline world—she knew very well how to flatter a tomcat and how to make him smile.

Take this morning. Ryan had made pancakes for his and Clyde’s breakfast, confections as light as a fluff of bird down. There she stood in the kitchen flipping pancakes, her short, tousled dark hair dusted with pancake flour, a ruffled apron tied over her work jeans and sweatshirt. And though she hated the smell of fish in the morning, she had generously presented Joe’s serving with a half-dozen kippers tastefully arranged on the side—a perfect combination of textures and flavors, the salty fish blending smoothly with the pancakes and maple syrup.

Now, down the block, Maudie’s son, David, emerged from the front door heading away for his morning run. He was a tall man, slim and well made, his brown hair trimmed short; he was dressed in navy sweats and dark running shoes. Like his brother, David was an airline pilot—as if, Joe thought, both boys had grown up loving planes, maybe wanting to fly from the time they were toddlers. David had taken time off to get Maudie moved and settled, but soon would be going back to Atlanta, and Joe wondered how Maudie would fare alone, wondered if she was concerned about the unsettling invasions of homes occupied by lone women. But how could she not be, when theGazette kept pushing its hopeless take on the situation to further upset the village.

But, Joe thought, Ryan and her crew would keep an eye on Maudie; Ryan wasn’t only remodeling the old cottage, she was at work as well building Maudie’s new studio, enclosing the patio that was already walled on two sides where the garage and kitchen met at right angles.

Below Joe’s rooftop perch, a jogger raced by, flashing beneath the oak branches. On the next street he glimpsed an old woman walking three elderly beagles, the dogs sniffing high above them in his direction, picking up the smell of tomcat. As the sun rose, a scurrying wind teased the fog and lifted it, ruffling his short fur. Below him, Manuel barked an order to Fernando in rolling Spanish, a song of words that made the tomcat wish he could speak the language—except that all that study would make him crazy, he wasn’t the studious type. Joe’s ability to speak English had required no books and studying; the talent had overtaken him without any effort on his part.

One day he was your simple, everyday housecat enjoying a quick tussle in the bushes. The next day, when he found himself not only thinking human thoughts but speaking them aloud, he was shaken right down to his claws. The shock that he was speaking a human language, and was thinking not with sensible feline instincts, but with human logic—with the very turn of mind that so often drove a cat crazy—that revelation nearly undid him. His first awakening to this new experience had scared the hell out of him.

But when at last his terror gave way to this new kind of reason, when he realized what he might do with his new talent, the excitement had lifted Joe to heights he’d never imagined. Somehow, he’d fallen into a new, vast, amazing world. Into a life so different from his old life, so much more detailed and fascinating, that he’d soon had trouble remembering the simple housecat he’d once been—when his greatest challenges were mice, food, and females, when his greatest creative endeavor was thinking up new ways to torment Clyde. And that had been a blast, when Clyde first learned that Joe could speak, when Joe made that first phone call to Clyde and was finally able to convince him it was really his gray tomcat calling. It had taken Clyde a lot of shouting, several violent bursts of temper, before he believed it was Joe at the other end of the line, before he accepted the facts.

Strange, Joe thought. Since Clyde and Ryan married, he never wanted to harass his female housemate the way he liked to torment Clyde. Maybe that was because Ryan didn’t get mad the way Clyde did. She didn’t swear at him; she refused to indulge in shouting matches. She’d smile at his goading, just as she laughed at his altercations with Clyde that were, after all, only bachelor camaraderie. Instead of arguing, she’d pet him and hug him with an almost embarrassing tenderness.

Now, crouched between the roof’s shingled slopes waiting for the fog to lift, for the rising sun to warm his chilly fur, Joe contemplated Ryan and Clyde’s new endeavor. The project was meant to be purely for fun, to mentor an occasional forlorn and neglected structure, to see what they could make of houses that would otherwise be torn down. The newlyweds, the tomcat thought, were into creative renovation the way a little kid tackled a new toy.

For this cottage, in its narrow yard, there would be new stone walks and low-maintenance landscaping. In the back, the beams would continue upward to allow for the new, story-and-a-half ceiling of the sunroom. In Joe’s opinion, despite his sarcasm regarding Clyde’s carpentry skills or lack thereof, the couple was going to make a bright new home of this tired little cabin—and they should make a nice profit, too. Houses along any greenbelt were at a premium; many folk treasured a home where wild land touched the tamed world, where they could watch from their windows an Eden yet untouched by human meddling. For some humans, this strip of wild land would be as close as they ever got to the basics of raw nature, to the tooth-and-claw life familiar to any outdoor feline.

A cat, perhaps more than any other beast, could live most equitably with a paw in each of the two worlds. Cushions and soft comforters by night, a warm fire and a dish of liver or fillet. And in the daytime, when his adversaries were more likely to be asleep—but not always—a spine-tingling foray among the larger predators, a hunt to stalk and kill his own victims, an adrenaline rush that, if a cat was quick and clever, would send him home unscathed, with a belly full of something wild and filling. Joe was watching the greenbelt with an eye for theoccasional silent shadow, for, most likely, a silent and marauding coyote, when a harsh scrabble of claws directly above him made him leap aside.

5

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A SOFT THUD HIT the shingles as Joe’s tabby lady dropped down to the roof beside him from the branches above, her green eyes laughing at his sudden alarm. She flashed him a good-morning smile and snuggled up, her dark, striped fur cold, and as damp as his own, in the chill morning. She smelled of pine where she’d brushed among bushy branches crossing the roofs of the village, leaving her own snug cottage. Her tail twitched against him as they watched Ryan and her two helpers laboring below. Down the street, Scott Flannery’s green pickup appeared, heading for Maudie’s house to get to work, his red hair and red beard as bright as new rust in the morning light.

Easing on past Maudie’s house and past Maudie’s black Lincoln that stood on the street, he parked beyond the drive, leaving it empty for deliveries of lumber and materials. A light burned in the kitchen, and the cats could smell fresh coffee brewing. Ever since Ryan started her construction firm, her uncle Scotty had been her foreman; it was Scotty who had taught her the skills of a good carpenter, long before she’d ever studied design. When Maudie had approached her about building the studio, she’d been pleased that the two small jobs were located so close together, shortening their work time and adding to the efficiency of both jobs. Maudie seemed quite content to live among the carpenters’ clutter and noise, and she always had coffee for the workers. She even welcomed the cats; Joe and Dulcie and Kit had been in and out of the house ever since Ryan began work, prowling as they pleased. While Joe Grey was curious about Maudie herself, Dulcie and Kit were fascinated with the new studio as it began to take shape. What would a quilter’s studio be like? How exactly did Maudie put her lovely quilts together? Ryan had shown them a whole magazine article that listed Maudie’s many exhibits, with pictures of Maudie’s quilts so bright and intricate that Dulcie had had to stroke them with a soft paw. The studio was dried in now, and Scotty was building cupboards and shelves and drawers, leaving one wall bare for Maudie’s big quilting table, with hanging quilts behind it; the two lady cats were fascinated with it all. The problem was, every time they became absorbed in what Scotty was building, they would feel Maudie watching them.

No cat likes to be intently watched, even if it is a friendly gaze. Dulcie grew so irritated that she said maybe Maudie needed a pet of her own.“Then she should go to the pound,” Joe snapped. “Get herself a house cat or one of those dinky designer dogs.” The tomcat smiled. “A little puff dog that would make one bite for a respectable cat.”

Below, Scotty stepped out of his truck and reached in the back for his toolbox. He was a tall man, well over six feet, large boned and broad shouldered, his red hair and beard clearly showing his solid Scots-Irish heritage. As he headed for the house, his long stride seemed better suited to tramping the rocky green hills of the old country. He was dressed this morning in the same faded jeans and dark jogging shoes that he usually wore, and a freshly pressed brown denim work shirt. His profile, against the dark wood of the front door, was craggy and lean, his red eyebrows shaggy, his short, neatly trimmed beard streaked with gray. Maudie opened the door before he rang the bell, her smile showing her delight at his presence—Scotty always seemed to make people feel happy. In the quiet lull from just below, as Ryan laid down her crowbar and hammer, Scotty’s and Maudie’s voices carried clearly up the hill.

“The windows’ll be here this morning,” Scotty said, “after all the delay. Then it’ll begin to look like home.”

“Like a real studio,” Maudie replied, a smile in her voice. “There’s coffee in the kitchen, and some sweet rolls.” As she and Scotty moved inside, up at the top of the hill, an ancient brown pickup came out of the side street and turned down Maudie’s street, slowing as it passed the house. The cats saw the driver looking, though the windows were so dirty he was little more than a dark smear, a pale face peering out through the murky glass.

“What’s so interesting?” Joe said, bristling. The truck eased past, down the hill, the driver gunned the engine, turned onto the side street, and was gone. A brown pickup, dented and muddy, dark mud spattered heavily on its back wheels, bumper, and license plate. The cats stared after it uneasily. The morning was silent again, and as the sun began to melt away the fog, a cacophony of birdsong made Dulcie look up and lick her whiskers. They heard the Skilsaw start down in the new studio as Scotty got to work. Dulcie yawned, and the two cats stretched out together in a patch of sun, waiting for it to warm them. Dulcie said, “Maudie and Benny will be all alone when David goes back to Atlanta. It has to be hard, grieving for her son, leaving all her friends, and now to be alone, knowing no one in the village.”

“She knows Ryan and Clyde, and Scotty,” Joe said. “Anyway, she has family here.”

Dulcie sneezed with disgust.“Her sister? That prissy Carlene Colletto? And those two nephews? I don’t see them lending a lot of support, they didn’t even help her move in. Certainly the third one won’t be any help, he’s cooling his heels in prison.”

“The one nephew’s all right. Jared. It’s the other two you want to steer clear of,” Joe said. “The younger one, Kent. What a sleaze.” They watched Ryan start down the hill, tool belt slung around her waist and carrying her clipboard, where she always had a tangle of receipts and to-do lists.

Below, Maudie came out of the house and headed down the driveway toward the street where her car was parked. The little boy followed her out, but then sat down on the low front steps as if he was too tired to go farther. He was a frail child, maybe six, thin and pale with light brown hair tucked down over his ears reaching toward his collar.“His face is so drawn,” Dulcie said, feeling a deep pity for the little boy who had lost his father, who had seen his father shot and killed right before him.

Hurrying to the car, Maudie looked around with a quick intensity, despite her soft demeanor. She saw the street was empty, but glanced up once at Benny, seeming as wary as a matronly cottontail watching her vulnerable young. Turning to the car, she used her electronic key to pop the trunk open. Beneath the rising lid the cats could see a load of plastic bags stamped with the familiar names of local shops: Molena Point Gourmet Kitchen, Dolly’s Linen Den, The Village Christmas Boutique. Maudie didn’t yet have her moving boxes unpacked, but she wasn’t wasting any time preparing for the holidays. Why had she left all this in the car overnight? Maybe, Dulcie thought, knowing how her own housemate managed such matters, she’d wantedto clean and line cupboards before bringing in new kitchenware and linens. Looked as if she’d bought additional decorations, too, for the big tree that Joe had seen David carrying into the house.

Pulling out half a dozen bulky white bags, most with her right hand and favoring her left arm, she eased the trunk lid closed and turned back toward the house. Loaded with packages, she had paused to peer over them to find her footing on the curb when, up the hill, the same brown pickup appeared again suddenly, racing around the corner, barreling straight down at Maudie, its engine roaring, its sides rattling, the driver only a shadow behind the smeared window.

“Get back!” Ryan shouted as she dove for Maudie, grabbed her, jerked her from the truck’s path onto the curb, Maudie’s packages scattering around them, one bag hitting the curb with a crash of broken china. Inches from them, the truck veered out again to avoid the Lincoln, scraping down thecar’s length as it passed, a violent wrenching of metal, then skidded into a sharp turn onto the side street and vanished.

The two women stood on the sidewalk, the Lincoln between them and the street. Behind them on the porch, little Benny stood frozen, white-faced and seemingly unable to move. The cats’ own involuntary cries of warning had been drowned in Ryan’s shout. They raced down across the roofs for Maudie’s roof as Ryan snatched her cell phone from her belt. She was pressing 911 when Maudie grabbed the phone and hit the end button.

“What are you doing?” Ryan snapped. “We need the police.”

Maudie shook her head. She was as pale as Benny.

“He could have killed you,” Ryan looked at her, incredulous. “Maybe they can catch him, you need to call in a report.”

Maudie looked back at her, shaking her head. Behind them the sound of the Skilsaw had ceased, and Scotty appeared in the open doorway. Benny turned and clung to him. The big, steady man put his arm around the little boy, drawing him close.

“Give me the phone,” Ryan said, biting back her temper. The cats expected her to force the phone from Maudie’s hand. She didn’t, but her voice was low with anger. “You have to report this, Maudie. If only for the insurance claim.”

Maudie put her hand on Ryan’s arm. “I wouldn’t file for insurance. My … my deductible’s too high.” She studied Ryan. “Let it go. Please, just let it be.”

Ryan stared at her then turned away and began picking up packages. Maudie took two white plastic bags from her and headed for the house. When the cats, peering over, got a good look at Maudie’s face, she looked far more excited than frightened. What was that about? As Maudie and Benny moved inside, the cats scrambled down an oak tree and followed them through the open door into the house where they could watch Maudie and listen.

6

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AN HOUR BEFORE the truck came roaring down at Maudie, and a dozen blocks away, the tortoiseshell cat paced the early-morning rooftops looking down from between the peaks and chimneys at the village shops below. Kit’s black and brown coat shone dark within the fog, drops of fog clinging to the tips of her long fur like tiny jewels. Below her, the shop windows were bright with a dazzle of small, lavishly decorated Christmas trees, with silver and gold packages which, while only empty inside, were festive andenticing. Several windows featured carefully arranged cr?che scenes, and these always drew Kit. In the small hours of the nights before Christmas, when the streets were at last deserted, she and Dulcie would prowl the dark, empty village, standing tall on their hind paws peering in at the baby Jesus and the wise men and the little miniature animals all snuggled in their beds of straw—but there was never a cat, the cr?ches never had cats. Dulcie said there were no cats in the Bible, but Kit wasn’t sure she believed that. Why would there be horses and cows and dogs, wild pigs and weasels,but no cats? Why, when everyone knew that a little cat would have to be God’s favorite?

She’d left home this morning before daylight while her human housemates still dozed. Though Lucinda and Pedric Greenlaw, at eighty-some, liked to be up for an early breakfast and an early walk in the hills, they’d been out late last night. They’d been fast asleep as Kit bolted through the diningroom, through her cat door that was cut into the window, trotted across the oak branch to her tree house, and took off to the next roof. And the next roof and the next, heading for the village, traveling high above the ground as handily as any squirrel among the leafy canopy.

Now in the center of the village, she listened to the rhythmic thudding as an early jogger fled past, and watched a gray-haired dog walker heading for the shore pulled along by an eager red setter. A young man in sport coat and chinos stepped out from a nearby motel and, two blocks down, turned in at the nearest bakery seeking his morning coffee and, most likely, some delectable and sugary confection. As he disappeared inside the steamy caf?, two runners came up the hill from the shore, breathing hard, looking smug with their efforts. Humans wore themselves out running from nothing, but too often had no clue when to run from danger. Kit watched the human scene with interest, but she watched the rooftops around her with sharper scrutiny. She was looking for the stranger, for the yellow tomcat.

She’d glimpsed him over the past days only briefly, had seen him watching her from among shadows, from leafy cover, but had never gotten a close look at him. He was a big cat, his fur as pale yellow as sunshine. He had watched Joe and Dulcie, too, but why was he so shy, why did he keep his distance so stubbornly as he followed them? She knew he was no ordinary cat, the way he watched them, she knew he could have spoken to them if he chose. What did he want, to follow them but then refuse to approach? What was he doing in the village? Where had he come from? The mystery of him sent her heart pounding with excitement and with challenge, sent her imagination rocketing as she searched for the elusive stranger.

A sound startled her. Did she hear a soft yowl, a tomcat’s yowl? She leaped to a high peak, listening. But no, what she heard was not a cat at all but the faintest screech of nails being pulled, and then the distant thunk of boards being tossed in a heap, and Kit smiled. That was only Ryan, pulling off the siding, at work renovating that little frame cottage—had to be Ryan, from the direction, and the early hour. What other carpenter or contractor started work so early? Looking around at the empty and silent roofs, Kit licked her cold paws, and then headed across the roofs toward the residential hills where Ryan would be working. If she couldn’t find the mysterious tom, she would ease her restlessness among friends, and away she went, racing over the shingles and across the oaks’ spanning branches.

She stopped suddenly when three cop cars streamed past along the street below, moving without sirens and in a hell of a hurry. And here came an EMT right behind them, all as quiet as soaring hawks watching for prey. Spinning around, Kit followed them, praying this wasn’t another invasion but, racing over the rooftops, meaning to be there if it was, hoping to get a look at the invaders, this time.

She thought about the women who had been beaten and robbed: a lone woman in her garden picking roses, the front door left unlocked behind her and no one else at home. A lone woman opening her door at night to a stranger because he said his car wouldn’t start. He’d pulled her onto her darkened porch, where he’d already unscrewed the lightbulb, had knocked her around, trashed her house breaking furniture, taken a few small items, and left. The third woman was attacked in the dark stairway of her condo, again when the lightbulb had been unscrewed. Why had she gone in there when there was no light?

And the strangest thing was, none of the women had been raped. These men forced themselves into their homes, broke the furniture, stole money and jewelry, and fled. Sometimes two men, sometimes three, their faces covered with stockings in a trite but effective disguise. It was the very absence of further brutality that most puzzled the police, and puzzled the cats, as well. Could the perpetrators, if they got caught, not want to stand trial for the more serious offense of rape? That seemed to the cats the only possible explanation—brutal small-time thugs, wanting to have their fun but still save their own necks.

Racing over the roofs following the silent patrol cars, Kit heard a scream somewhere ahead—but not a human scream. It was an animal: a dog, in terrible pain. A little dog, screaming and screaming, its cries sickening her as she leaped from roof to roof, so upsetting her, she nearly fell off the edge, and scrambled to regain her footing on the damp, slanting shingles.

The cop cars slowed, pulled to the curb. The screams came from directly below her now, from a house she knew well. She pictured the little Skye terrier who lived there, tiny and frail beneath its long silky brown fur. If that little dog was hurt, this, to Kit, was far more upsetting than an attack on a human person. To hear a little animal hurting and helpless tore at her, left her hissing and shivering.

7

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BECKY LAKE’S SHINGLED studio home was shaded by pepper trees, its interior one large room with an alcove for the kitchen, another for the bath and closet. Its steep roof rose like a pyramid, flattened at the very peak into a four-by-four-foot skylight, the thick, clear glass usually dusted with leaves fromthe pepper trees and decorated with little cat paw prints. Kit had spent many hours lying across the glass looking down into the paneled room with its high rafters and wide stone fireplace, a retreat that might have been built at the edge of a mountain stream or in the Swiss Alps, but that fit right into this casual and wooded village. Peering down through the skylight, she could see Becky’s Christmas tree, all hung with little carved wooden toys. On the hearth stood a ceramic pot of holly branches gleaming with clusters of red berries. She didn’t see Becky, but she could see the little terrier. Rowdy lay on his side, biting frantically at his shoulder, his cries so loud they made her ears ring.

Had the neighbors heard him, was that what had generated the 911 call? Well, help was here now, but why didn’t they hurry? She looked down at the three black-and-whites on the street below and the EMT van in the drive, watched Officer Brennan and Detective Kathleen Ray pile out of a squad car and double-time it up the steps. Kathleen was taller than Brennan and slimmer, her dark hair knotted sleekly beneath her uniform cap. Brennan pounded on the door and then threw it open. Weapons drawn, they eased inside. Behind them, two more uniforms moved up the walk, and Max Harper’s pickup pulled to the curb.

The chief sent two additional officers circling around to the back, and then he, too, stepped inside, his hand on his holstered weapon. Where was Becky Lake? How badly was she hurt? Why didn’t someone help the little dog, why didn’t they help Rowdy?

Becky Lake was only twenty-something, and she and Rob were newly married: Rob was the manager of the little local grocery store. Becky, a slim, pretty girl, always looked so fresh and clean, always smelled of soap and water as if she’d just stepped from a cool shower. Even as Kit watched, Becky appeared in the open door supported by Detective Ray, her ash-blond hair a tangle, her pale blue blouse torn, revealing a white silk bra and various bruises already turning purple or red. Kathleen supported the girl, trying to calm her, but Becky clung to her for only a moment, then pulled away, turning back toward the house. “Rowdy. I have to go back. Oh, please, he needs help, not me.”

“Brennan is calling Dr. Firetti,” Kathleen said. “He’ll come as quick as he can. We don’t want to handle the dog and maybe hurt him worse; it’s best the doctor take care of him.”

Becky fought to free herself. She was shaking, wiping at her tears.“Please, please help Rowdy. Can’t I just be with him?”

“It’s a crime scene now,” Kathleen said. “We’d rather you stayed out here. If we pick Rowdy up or handle him, we could make his injuries worse. We want to wait for the vet.” But then, watching the younger woman, Kathleen relented. “Come on,” she said, “you can sit with him if you’ll stay in one place. Don’t pick him up, Becky.”

Becky nodded and they moved inside. Above them, Kit slipped down from the roof into the foliage of a pepper tree and then into the bushes beside the open door. She could see where the glass pane beside the door had been broken out, could see Becky inside kneeling beside the fireplace gently stroking the little terrier. Officer Brennan stood by the far glass wall speaking on his cell phone. He had pulled on cloth booties, as had Kathleen and the chief. Kit didn’t have cloth booties, and as she slipped inside she hoped to hell that, if they used some electronic gadget to see footprints, they’d miss hers. Shards of glass sparkled everywhere across the dark wood floor; she stepped carefully among them, staying in shadow and close to the walls. The little dog continued to scream. She wasn’t sure what she thought she’d see that the sharp-eyed cops would miss. But visual surveillance didn’t matter so much, the detective would be on top of that; it was the scents that Kit was after, the elusive smells that no human could detect.

Against a far wall, two armchairs had been overturned and an end table broken. One of Becky’s sandals lay beside them. As Kit prowled the room staying out of sight behind the overturned furniture, she could detect no scent but the sharp cinnamon smell of baking that flowed from the kitchen to drown any scent of the invaders. Across the room Brennan was growing nervous, shouting into the phone for Dr. Firetti to hurry.

John Firetti was Kit’s own doctor, she knew he’d drop everything and come—if he wasn’t in the middle of some other emergency. Beyond the overturned chairs a lamp lay broken, and the phone fallen beside it. By the time Brennan holstered his cell phone and looked up, Kit had abandoned her search and slipped backoutside to the porch—that was when she caught another smell, a rank smell, faint but unpleasant. The faint stink of fish so old and ripe it made her pull a face of disgust, flehming and nearly gagging.

Kit liked her seafood fresh, preferred it the day it was caught. This smell was like the rotting fish Lucinda buried under the rosebushes to keep them blooming with such careless abandon. Had one of the attackers come from a fishing boat? Or perhaps from the wharves along the coast where fish might have been cleaned and the offal left to rot? Or maybe from the little fishing wharf at the edge of the village? Kit took a good whiff, gagged again, and backed away. She kept backing, straight into the bushes, as Captain Harper appeared inside the house, coming out of the kitchen. Harper didn’t need to catch her snooping, he already had too many questions about cats and crime scenes.

Though the chief had grown used to the three cats wandering in and out of the station, sleeping in an office bookcase or on a desk, enjoying handouts from the dispatcher, being spotted at a crime scene wasn’t so smart, they didn’t need the officers’ puzzled stares. Now, hidden from Harper, Kit stuck her nose out of the bushes and watched as Dr. Firetti pulled up to the drive in his white van.

Parking, he stepped out, and an office nurse with him. The two hurried into the house, and soon the scent of alcohol wafted out. Maybe Firetti was giving the little dog a shot for the pain? Kit listened for several minutes to their mumbled voices, and soon the screaming stopped. Then, Dr. Firetti came out carrying little Rowdy on a dog-size stretcher. Kit watched through the van’s open side door as they settled Rowdy in a padded bed with high sides, and the nurse sat down beside him. Sliding the door closed, Firetti stopped to speak with Becky. He’d call her when he’d examined Rowdy. Stepping into the van, he headed for the veterinary hospital. In the bushes, Kit breathed a sigh of relief for the poor little mutt. Rowdy was no bigger than a cat himself—though a hell of a lot louder. Becky stood on the porch clutching Kathleen’s hand. Kathleen sat down on the step, drawing Becky down beside her, waiting as the young woman tried to collect herself. Kit, hidden beneath the mock orange bush, crouched only a few feet from them. Kathleen said, “Do you feel like answering a few questions? After that, the medics will take you to the hospital. Is your husband at work?”

Becky wiped her tears.“The questions are fine, but I don’t want to go to the hospital. And please don’t call Rob—yes, he’s at work, but he’ll be so upset. I’ll call him myself, in a little while.”

“You need someone to be with you. And,” Kathleen said gently, “we need to know how badly they hurt you. We need to know exactly what they did.”

Becky looked down at her torn clothes, at her bruised arms. The side of her face was red and swelling. When she looked up at Kathleen, her eyes were steady.“They didn’t rape me. Thank God they didn’t do that.”

Kathleen studied her.“If they did, and you press charges …”

Becky shook her head.“They didn’t. Maybe Rowdy stopped them. He’s such a little thing, but he went after them real fierce, screaming and biting them. One of them kicked him. He’s hurt so bad. Will he be all right?”

“Dr. Firetti will do the best he can,” Kathleen said, then was silent, waiting.

“I’m just bruised,” Becky said, seeing her look. “I don’t think anything’s broken. They beat me, the one did. There were two men, they ran when you drove up. They took money from my purse. Kept trying to make me tell them my PIN number. I don’t have a PIN number, Rob and I don’t have ATM cards, we’ve never wanted them. They wouldn’t believe me.”

“Can you describe them at all?”

“Both tall. One thin, maybe stooped a little. The other square and well built. Black hair, I could see that much under the stocking. A little taller than the thin one.” She was silent a moment. “Clean fingernails,” she said, frowning. “The bigger man had nice nails, as if he’d had a manicure, and that surprised me. He was the one who kicked the door in, kicked it off the chain, and burst in ahead of the other. I should never have trusted a chain.”

Officer Brennan appeared in the doorway.“Dr. Firetti called. He said Rowdy’s shoulder is broken, but so far he hasn’t found any internal injuries. He wants to put him under anesthetic so he can set the shoulder. He’ll go ahead, but he wonders if you’ll stop by later to sign the release.”

Becky nodded. Kit listened to Becky and Kathleen argue until, under Kathleen’s gentle but stubborn urging, Becky agreed to go to the hospital. The minute she had left with the EMTs, Kathleen retrieved a black bag of crime-scene equipment from the squad car, pulled on the cloth booties again, and went inside to photograph and lift prints. Behind her, Kit returned to the little cement porch, took another sniff of the odor of ancient fish, and followed it.

The fishy trail led into the house, but then out again at the other side of the threshold. She followed it to the sidewalk, trying to look casual, like a neighborhood cat out for a stroll. After only a little way, the trail vanished at the curb, most likely transferred into a waiting car.

Unable to find another trace of the scent, she left the scene and headed for Ryan’s cottage, hoping to find Joe and Dulcie. Becky’s cursory description of the invaders, plus the smell of fishy shoes, had to count for something, and Kit wanted to share what she’d learned. She was high up the hills, below Maudie Toola’s and a block over, when Maudie’s son David came jogging downhill, his short brown hair tucked under a cap, his tanned face smooth and lean. She peered down from the roof as he passed below her and disappeared down the hill, soon blocked from her view by shaggy, overhanging branches. Kit moved on up, drawn by the screech of nails and the echo of tossed boards.

Trotting along above the side street that would lead to Ryan’s cottage, she watched an ancient brown pickup truck pull to the curb beneath her, just before it reached Maudie’s street. A rusty, dented old truck with a dirt-smeared windshield. It stood with the engine idling. When the driver didn’t get out, but simply sat there, a dark shadow behind thedirty glass, a ripple of unease made her fur twitch, and she settled down to watch. The shingles beneath her paws were rough and damp.

From where she crouched she could see Maudie’s Tudor house and the roof of Ryan’s cottage. Could see Joe Grey and Dulcie lounging on the cottage roof, glancing idly up at the little birds that flitted among the branches above them—and then everything happened at once. She saw Ryan leave the cottage and head downhill to Maudie’s, saw Maudie come out her own front door heading for her car at the curb, her keys jingling in her hand. She watched Maudie step off the curb, pop the trunk open, and begin pulling out packages. At the same moment, the old truck took off fast, heading straight down the hill at Maudie. Ryan shouted. Joe and Dulcie and Kit shouted and damn the consequences as Ryan grabbed Maudie and pulled her out of its path. The truck barely missed her; it swerved around the Lincoln, metal screeching against metal, skidded downhill and around the corner and was gone.

Kit crouched among the branches, shivering. Why would anyone want to hurt Maudie? Why would anyone try to run their truck into a harmless old woman?

Down on the sidewalk, Maudie clung to Ryan. On the porch, Benny didn’t move, he stood on the step, white and frozen. As Scotty came rushing out, Ryan grabbed her phone and started to dial, but Maudie snatched it from her. Joe and Dulcie had fled to Maudie’s roof, Kit watched them scramble down to the garden and slip into the house behind Maudie. Kit remained very still, setting into memory every detail of that strange attack: the vague shadow of the driver’s face behind the dirty windshield, a thin face beneath what might have been a dark hood, the rusty scars on the truck, the mud on the back bumper and license plate. Kit’s distress at the beating ofBecky Lake, and now the attack on Maudie, left her feeling very small and useless. Ears and tail down, she at last made her way from the rooftops down into Maudie’s yard, where she crawled under a camellia bush and curled into a little ball among its fallen petals. She didn’t understand humans.She thought about all the ugliness among humans that she and Dulcie and Joe had seen, and about the grim photographs and reports of murders that were available to them on the desks of their law-enforcement friends, and the more she thought, the more defeated she felt; all alone, she put her head down on her paws, filled with a terrible remorse for humankind.

8

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AFTER KILLING MARTIN and Caroline, the driver and shooter had paused for only an instant to watch the victims’ car veer off the road, its headlights swinging crazily through the black night as it rolled onto its side and crashed into a pine tree. The shooter had tucked the .45 Colt revolver behind the seat as the driver floorboarded the pickup. They pulled to the side of the road a quarter mile on, where the driver got out, slipped into a small black sedan, and was gone, speeding away into the night. The shooter slid into the driver’s seat and moved on, knowing the narrow two-lane well enough to keep out of the ditch, knowing precisely when to make the turn into the yard of the deserted ranch house. A second turn up the old concrete driveway, and the pickup was out of sight from the country road.

How much had the old woman seen? In the flickering moonlight, before she grabbed the kids and ducked to the floor, had she gotten a look? It was only an instant that she could have seen anything, but it was a loose end, a cause for worry. Over the subsequent months since the shooting, the question had eaten and rankled. If Maudie had seen enough for a tentative ID, what had she done about it? Gone to the cops? Or, fearing for her own life, sensibly kept her mouth shut? Was there a warrant out complete with name and description, or had she seen no more than the blinding flashes of gunfire?

That night, easing around behind the farmhouse, unlocking the machinery barn and easing the pickup inside, sliding closed the heavy door and stepping into the sleek sports car that stood next to where the pickup was always parked, the shooter had waited for more than an hour, listening for any sound from the road, lounging on the soft leather seat but not daring to play the radio even softly. Then jerking suddenly alert at the sound of the sirens.

How could anyone have called the cops? Martin and Caroline had to be dead, at that close range, or too badly wounded to make any kind of call. And as for Maudie, even if she’d had the presence of mind enough to grab a cell phone, reception out there was dicey; usually there was no way to get through.

It was unlikely anyone else had heard the crash; on the little-used back road there’d been no other cars. The scattered houses and what people called ranches were all set back away from the narrow two-lane, and there hadn’t been a light anywhere; half those houses were summer places, locked up until the weather grew hot, in June.

But someone had called the cops.

Getting out of the sports car, standing at the door listening, she hadn’t heard a sound. The barn seemed safe enough. By the time sheriff’s deputies got around to searching the nearby yards and fields, and got warrants to search inside the houses and outbuildings, the pickup would be dead cold, sitting unused as the vacationing owner had left it weeks earlier. Theheavy padlock on the sliding shed door would show only the owner’s fingerprints.

Listening to the sirens and then to the thumping of a helicopter, the shooter had slid the big door open just a crack, to look out into the night. Lights from the gathered cars a mile away were reflected up into the sky in a milky haze, more cars and a hell of a lot sooner than you’d have thought, way out here in the boonies.

The shooter had waited for a couple hours more after the police lights were gone, and the helicopter gone, before opening the door fully, starting the engine of the sports car and pulling out. Had checked, with a flashlight, the garage floor and wiped away the vague tire marks. Sliding the door closed again and locking it, the shooter had headed sedately away into the night, driving slowly and carefully along the country road, flicking the beams to high when there was no car coming, flicking them low again out of courtesy when another vehicle approached.

Passing two oncoming black-and-whites, the shooter lifted a hand from the wheel in the country way of greeting, though probably that gesture would not be seen in the dark car. And all the while swallowing back a rush of adrenaline, trying to control a heart-pounding panic. The two CHPs must be headed to the scene of the wreck, to join whatever sheriff’s units might have remained behind. Maybe looking for shell casings—but they wouldn’t find any. That was the good thing about a revolver: the casings remained in the gun, didn’t scatter all over. Cops would be checking for tire marks, too, but quite a few cars and trucks, locals, used thisroad in the daytime.

A lot depended now on the old woman. Maybe she’d seen nothing in the blackness, maybe there was nothing to worry about. She’d answer the cops’ questions but have no real information to give them, then go home and mourn for her dead son. The cops would work the case for a while and then, as overloaded as the LAPD was, it would find its way among the cold files and that would be the end of it.

Except, that wasn’t the end, there was more to consider. There would be the funeral, the gathering of friends and family around the old woman, and then the disposition of Caroline’s personal possessions. That was the complication: What had Caroline done with the papers that must be retrieved before this was finished? Or did the old woman have them? If so, what had she done with them? There was no way to know what Caroline and Martin, and Maudie, might have planned between them. Sure as hell, if Caroline had been a threat while alive, she was no better dead. And the same went for Maudie, for Caroline’s soft little mother-in-law.

9

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RISING FROM THE bed of crushed petals, Kit peered out at Maudie’s front door. It was closed tight. Everyone was inside, she could hear Ryan’s voice in the kitchen. Pushing out of the bushes, she hurried around to the back, leaped in through an unglazed window of Maudie’s new studio, trotted behind Scotty, who was patching plaster, and in through the openglass slider, onto the pale linoleum.

The kitchen smelled of fresh coffee. Maudie and Ryan sat at the table, and Benny was in Maudie’s lap leaning against her, his mouth smeared with icing. A plate of sweet rolls stood on the table, smelling of cinnamon and honey. The little boy looked paler than usual, his dark eyes still reflecting fear from Maudie’s encounter with the truck.

Maudie’s kitchen was done all in tones of cream and butterscotch. At the far end of the room, pale oak cabinets lined three sides, around a central worktable. Beyond the wide bay windows, a lacy pepper tree framed Maudie’s view of the neighboring houses and the street.

The table stood nearest to Kit just opposite the glass slider. Ryan was still arguing gently with Maudie, trying to get her to call the police. Benny seemed uncomfortable with the exchange, fiddling with his sweet roll, tearing it into little bits. He hardly looked up when Kit padded behind Maudie’s chair, crossed to the open stairway, and leaped up to the fifth step, where Joe and Dulcie sat as still as a pair of statues, elegant porcelain effigies from some upscale antique shop. Dulcie cut her green eyes at Kit, looking disgusted at Maudie’s stubbornness. Kit looked back impatiently, burning to tell them about the invasion and the fish smell, and unable to say a word.

The open stairs faced not only the kitchen but the front entry across a wide tile floor, with the cozy living room to the left. Dulcie twitched her ears at Kit but made no other move as she listened to Ryan’s futile arguing. What was wrong with Maudie, why this reluctance?

“If the police can find the truck,” Ryan was saying, “and arrest the driver, that would get him off the streets. That might keep you safer, until you know what that was about, and the information would help your insurance company when you make the claim.”

“It was an accident,” Maudie said. “It could happen to anyone, the driver wasn’t looking. I don’t intend to make a claim, I don’t want to make trouble.”

Ryan simply looked at Maudie. She seemed about to form a careful reply when the front door opened and David hurried in, breathing hard from his uphill run, his dark sweats hanging limp and damp on his lean frame. His crumpled cap stuck out of his jacket pocket; his short-clipped brown hair was damp with sweat. Snatching the cap, he wiped his forehead with it and ran it over his crew cut.“What happened? I was two blocks away when I heard what sounded like a wreck, and an old truck came barreling past me.”

He sat down, looking at Maudie.“Didn’t you hear it? It must have hit the Lincoln, Mom. There’s a long brown scar along the side.” He looked at Maudie and at Benny. “Are you two all right? You weren’t in the car? What the hell happened?”

Ryan said,“The driver came down the hill straight at Maudie. He swerved, he didn’t hit her. He had to be drunk or stoned. Or … or it was deliberate,” she said softly. “He went racing off, didn’t even slow down.”

“My God,” David said. “Where are the cops? How long does it take? They’re only—”

“I didn’t call them,” Maudie told him.

David looked at her.“Why not? Why the hell not, Mama?”

“Let it go,” Maudie said. In her lap, Benny began to squirm. Slipping down from his grandma’s embrace, he disappeared through the door that led from the kitchen to the garage. Pulling it closed behind him, he left it barely ajar as if not wanting to cut himself off completely from the adults,as if wanting only to escape the arguing. Or did he leave it open so he could listen to what his grandma might say, once he was out of the room?

But Maudie and David said little more, looking at each other in silence; David’s anger had pulled his face into long, stony lines as stern as a Marine general’s. It was Maudie who looked away first, glancing out to the studio where Scotty was patching plaster. David watched his mother as if trying to think how to get through to the stubborn woman. “Mom …” he began.

Maudie turned a gentle smile on him and put her hand on his arm.“I don’t want to make waves, David. Please, just drop it.”

On the stairs, the cats glanced at each other and back at Maudie, seeing more than softness in her smile. Seeing, for just an instant, a dark spark of challenge flash out, a steely edge that both heartened and puzzled them. This lady had some backbone. Why did she keep it so hidden?

Maudie had started to speak when they heard a truck stop outside. It shifted gears and then, from the sound of it, began to back down the drive. Ryan rose to look, and the cats stretched up tall. Yes, they could see the top of a truck backing in, could see a load of windows standing upright, securely tied in place. Ryan watched Scotty and the driver for a moment, apparently decided Scotty had everything in hand, and sat down again to finish her coffee.

The dark spark had left Maudie now; she was all smiles and happiness.“It’s going to be beautiful, with the big windows, such a bright place to work, with the garden all around me.” Her laugh was so happy, but then her look turned sad. “I had such a lovely studio in L.A., with a view of the hills. But I couldn’t stay there, not after the shooting.”

David rose, muttered something about a shower, and headed upstairs, stepping carefully around the three cats. In a few minutes they heard the shower pounding in the upstairs bath.

“I read about the shooting,” Ryan said. “Of course you wanted to leave the area. I would, too. I’m sure no one can understand what an incredibly hard loss that is, what a terrible emptiness to try to endure.”

“I can’t seem to get past it,” Maudie said. “Over the eight months since Martin was shot, the pain hasn’t eased. That moment keeps coming back as if it’s just now happening. I thought, during the long sessions with the sheriff and with the L.A. police and the California Bureau of Investigation, that somehow I’d become inured, hardened to what happened, that I’d learn to live with it.

“But I haven’t,” she said softly. “They were so happy, Martin and Caroline.” She looked bleakly at Ryan. “Why was I spared, and those two young ones, who were just into a second chance for happiness … Why did they have to die?” She shook her head. “The only good thing was that thechildren were spared. Except that now two are orphans, and Benny as good as an orphan. How can that be fair?

“But,” Maudie said, “life isn’t fair. No one ever said life was fair.”

Ryan laid her hand over Maudie’s. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Did you see anything that night? Anything that would help the police?”

“How could I see the killer? If that’s what you mean,” Maudie said testily. “It was dark.” She rose, stepped to the kitchen sink, and ran a glass of water.

Ryan said,“I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“You didn’t upset me, I seem to be in a permanent state of upset.” She returned to the table, sipping her water. “Benny and I are having dinner with my sister’s family tonight, that will be a nice outing. Carlene and her husband and their two boys. I’ve hardly had time to visit with hersince I arrived. They’re just up at the top of the hill,” she said, “only about ten blocks. It’s that adobe house with the deep veranda, the high wall and jasmine vines in front.”

“I know the place,” Ryan said. “It’s lovely. Your sister is Carlene Colletto? I did a remodel on their kitchen a few years ago.”

“Of course.” Maudie nodded. “Carlene loves her kitchen, it’s so bright with that old dark wall now open to the garden.”

On the stairs, Dulcie’s ears were pricked, and the tip of her tail began to twitch. Fidgeting, she gave Joe a wild look, leaped off the steps, and disappeared into the garage. Just as swiftly, Kit followed her. Joe stayed where he was. He knew Kit was wired, but what had put the wind up Dulcie’s tail? What was so interesting about Maudie’s sister, that she and Kit needed to talk about it? And how did they think they could whisper between themselves in the garage, without Benny hearing them? He was puzzling over female cats’ erratic behavior when David came down the stairs. He was barefoot, smelling of soap and shampoo, wearing chinos and a clean white T-shirt. He gave Ryan a smile, stepped to the counter to pour a cup of coffee, then picked up the folded newspaper and stood reading the sports page.

At the table, Ryan was saying,“Don’t the Colletto boys work here in the village?”

“Jared does,” Maudie said. “He was working part-time for a moving service, but I think he changed jobs. I know he takes accounting classes at the college. I think Kent works somewhere up the coast a few miles.”

“Jared’s a nice young man,” Ryan said. “I don’t know Kent well, but Jared’s helped some of my clients move into their new homes.”

Maudie smiled.“I’m hoping, when the studio’s completed, he’ll help me move my things in. David will be gone, he flies out today,” she said, glancing across at her son. “I’m anxious to get my quilting equipment set up, get everything put away so I can prepare for an upcoming exhibit.”

“At the Humphrey,” Ryan said. “That’s a really nice gallery. Will there be a reception?”

“Just after New Year’s,” Maudie said, seeming pleased that Ryan knew about the show. “You’re on my mailing list.”

“We should be finished with the studio by this weekend. The cabinets are all in place, we’ll have the windows in today, trim them tomorrow, lay the floor, and then a few last-minute details. If Jared can’t help you move in, we’ll find someone.”

“Kent might be able to,” Maudie said, “but he works odd hours.” She gave Ryan a direct look. “I’m sure you know that the boys’ oldest brother is in prison.”

Ryan nodded, but said nothing.

“There’s no point hiding it,” Maudie said, “in such a small village where everyone knows everyone’s business. And of course, with your family in law enforcement you hear these things.”

“Maybe Victor isn’t truly a bad young man,” Ryan said. “Maybe just impetuous, slow to grow up?”

The older woman sighed.“Children can turn out so differently. Victor on the wrong side of the law, and Kent no angel, but Jared doing just fine. I guess Allen and I were lucky, to have raised two good boys.” She was silent, glancing out to the new studio where the delivery driver, apparently finished unloading, was handing Scotty an invoice.

“I’d best get to work,” Ryan said, rising and picking up her gloves. When she had gone, David returned to the table, and spread out the paper. On the stairs, Joe Grey waited, torn between listening to Maudie and David and heading for the garage to see what had so energized Dulcie and Kit, hiscuriosity pulling at him like two rabbits escaping in opposite directions.

10

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THAT MORNING AS Joe Grey eavesdropped in plain sight from Maudie Toola’s stairway, forty miles southeast of the village at the California State Prison at Soledad, the warden picked up the phone to dial an inmate’s family. This was a mission Walter Deaver seldom had to perform, and one he didn’t look forward to, particularly in this case. Jack Reed didn’t haveany family to notify except his little girl, who was only maybe thirteen. Lori’s mother had died of cancer several years before, and Jack was all the child had. At thirteen, a little girl badly needed her father—in Lori’s case, even a father in prison was better than no father at all.

Jack Reed wasn’t a troublemaker, a long way from it. This was his first offense and, Deaver would be willing to bet, would be his last scrape with the law once he was out. In Deaver’s view, Reed shouldn’t be in prison at all but should get a medal for what he’d done. But then, he didn’t make the laws.

Reluctantly he picked up the phone, not wanting to relay this news. Hoping, in the days to come, not to have to bear worse news, although Reed’s condition was critical. If Jack Reed died, the child would have no one.

Except, of course, her guardian, Cora Lee French. Lori was lucky in that respect; Jack had chosen well when he chose the woman who, in his absence, was helping to shape the child’s life. He knew that Lori was in a private school, and that she spent much of her free time in an apprentice program working for a local building contractor, a woman who was close friends both with Cora Lee and with Chief Harper.

Deaver generally didn’t take this kind of interest in the personal lives of his prisoners; he couldn’t, with a population double what the prison had been built to accommodate. Nor did he care to, when most of them were members of prison gangs, vicious, high-maintenance dregs on society. Men so seduced by the criminal culture they were too far gone for anything to be done other than keep them off the streets, keep them from killing anyone else. But because of Harper’s special interest in this case, he’d learned a good deal about Jack Reed and his daughter—he just wished the parole board, instead of releasing dangerous prisoners, would release the few men like Jack. But what the hell, who could figure what was in the minds of some state-appointed officials?

It was two hours since Reed had been stabbed in the prison yard outside the mess hall. The shank was a knife made from a length of water pipe that had been removed from the sink in the cell of the would-be killer. The prison was on lockdown, and all cells had been searched for further weapons. Reed had been tended briefly by the prison doctors before a helicopter transported him to Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital where, in the civilian ICU, he would remain under guard, hooked up to life support, closer to death than to life.

The phone rang five times. When a woman answered, Deaver asked for Lori’s guardian.

“This is Cora Lee.”

Deaver had seen the woman and child on visiting days. Cora Lee was striking, a tall, slim woman with short-clipped, curly black hair streaked with silver. He thought she might be Creole, from her caf? au lait complexion and her faint accent, as if maybe she’d grown up in New Orleans. Her manner was quiet, self-contained, and she seemed truly fond of Lori.

You got a lot of scum among the visiting crowds, grossly fat women in low-cut Tshirts, women in skintight jeans and flip-flops. As if it made no difference, as if no one cared how they looked when they entered the institution, as if his prison were some fourth-rate bordello. But Lori and Cora Lee always arrived well groomed, as neatly dressed and appealing as if they were headed for Sunday church, where they might indeed be judged—by the congregation or the Almighty—for their grooming and cleanliness.

He identified himself to Ms. French, told her as gently as he could that Jack had been stabbed and was in the ICU in Salinas, and that she had his permission to take Lori to visit him. There was a long silence at the other end of the line. Waiting, he wondered idly whether, if Reed died, the guardian would adopt the child. It was none of his business, but he sure didn’t like to see any child become a ward of the state. Lori Reed appeared to be a serious and sensible girl, and she’d need that steadiness now, if Reed didn’t make it. When these things happened to a prisoner like Reed, someone who wasn’t part of a gang, who tried to keep to himself and stayout of trouble, just trying to make it to the end of his sentence, the situation sickened Deaver. At the other end of the line Cora Lee French finally spoke; her voice, which had been light and cheerful, was low and subdued. “How bad is he?”

“He’s critical.”

“I’ll tell Lori. When can we see him?” She was direct, straightforward, but she sounded sick at having to tell the child. They talked for only a few minutes, he gave her instructions for their arrival at the hospital, told her who to ask for, told her how long they would be able to stay. She thanked him in a naked voice that left him feeling like hell.

HALF AN HOUR after the warden’s call, Lori and Cora Lee were headed inland to the Salinas hospital. Cora Lee drove in silence, her right hand holding Lori’s small, cold hand, offering what comfort she could. Lori huddled down in the seat like a hurt little animal, her school uniform, white shirt and navy skirt, rumpled from the playground where Cora Lee had picked her up, her dark hair tangled, her face pale with fear as she tried to understand how Pa, her pa, could suddenly be so injured that he was fighting for his life. Pa wasn’t a bully, he wasn’t into prison gangs, he wasn’t mean, he had never hurt anyone—no one that didn’t need hurting, Lori thought. She couldn’t imagine that Pa would die, she wouldn’t let herself believe that could happen.

But Ma had died. There was nothing Lori had been able to do, to make her well, to stop her from dying. Certainly her little-girl prayers hadn’t turned away the cancer. She’d stood by her mother’s bed in that faraway North Carolina town praying and praying, and watched her mother’s life drain away.

This hour of the morning, the traffic was heavy with commuters and with trucks: huge, loud, diesel-stinking trucks crowding them, and moving in the other direction, too, along the two-lane, their closed sides marked with bakery and beer logos, or their railed sides penning in cattle headed for some slaughter yard, Lori thought, feeling sad for them. Cora Lee didn’t talk, she left Lori to her own thoughts, and for that Lori was grateful. Cora Lee’s silence soothed her, she was there for her, but not intrusive. Not since before Mama died, when Lori was little, had anyone understood so well what she was thinking, and known, just by being there, how to make her feel better. In the year and a half since Pa was sent to prison, she and Cora Lee had visited him seven times. Sometimes, at first, she hadn’t wanted to go, hadn’t wanted to see Pa behind bars. But Cora Lee had urged her.

And then later, she hadn’t wanted to go because the other prisoners stared at her. You had to wait in line for hours outside the prison, sitting in a camp chair if you’d brought one, and it seemed like everyone in line stared at you. Then when they finally got inside to see Pa, in the big visiting room at the long table, she and Pa couldn’t be alone. Visitors sat lined up along one side of the long table, prisoners on the other, and there was that heavy glass barrier between her and Pa. How could she and Pa even try to be natural, crowded among all those strangers, and talking through a telephone? Each time, as they drove down to Soledad, she’d felt torn between her excitement to see Pa and her disgust at going into the prison.

And then she’d start thinking about the years when she and Pa were together after Mama died, when Pa had locked her in the house and boarded up the windows, and didn’t tell her why. She hadn’t understood, then, that it was to keep her safe, to save her life. She guessed Pa wasn’t comfortable enough withher to tell her. If she started thinking about that while they were driving down to see him, by the time they reached the prison she didn’t want to go in, she’d want to turn around and go home again.

But now they weren’t going to the prison. They were headed for a hospital where she’d see Pa lying helpless in one of those narrow beds with iron sides, like another kind of prison. Pa, so lean and tall, lying limp in a hospital bed hooked up to machines like Ma had been, bandages around his chest where he’d been stabbed. And even with the machines, the oxygen, the IV, maybe Pa wouldn’t live, maybe he’d die in the hospital. Die this morning before they ever got there. Or die after she went away again leaving him alone in a strange place. She didn’t realize she was squeezing Cora Lee’s arm hard until Cora Lee flinched.

“I’m sorry,” she said, easing up her grip. The wind through the open windows smelled of onions from the fields, of freshly turned earth and commercial fertilizers, and the early sun slanted sharply into their eyes. She sat nervously telling herself Pa wasn’t going to die; she wanted to killthe man who had stabbed him, she thought he should be the one in ICU or in the morgue, not Pa.

She knew when she saw Pa she’d have to be cheerful and positive, try to make him feel better, but she didn’t feel positive. She just felt scared. Pa was all she had; sometimes she missed him so bad, missed how he had been when she was just a little girl, before the bad things started to happen. When she’d run away from Pa and hidden for two weeks in the library basement, she hadn’t understood then why he’d locked her up. While she was sitting in the dark little concrete hole on the old mattress she’d dragged in, living on peanut butter and canned peaches, sometimes, not knowing why Pa had made a prisoner of her, she really had wanted him dead.

But then later when she’d understood that it was to save her life, then she’d been ashamed. When she’d learned about the children that Pa’s own brother, and that other man, had murdered, that Pa was trying to save her from them, she didn’t know what to say to him.

And now Pa’s own life needed saving. She prayed for him. She wanted to tell him she loved him, she hadn’t told him that in a long time. Right now, Cora Lee’s presence was the only thing that held her steady. As if, without Cora Lee, she’d fall into some endless dark space with nothing at all to hold on to.

11

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JOE WAS ALL set to leave the kitchen and slip into the garage with Dulcie and Kit when Maudie set a few crumbs of coffee cake and a saucer of milk before him. Settling down on the step again to enjoy the little treat, he listened with interest as mother and son argued, both so hardheaded that Joe had to hide a smile. That careening truck had worried David far more than it seemed to worry Maudie; he didn’t want to leave her and Benny alone, and Maudie refused to go home with him. Nor did she want him to stay; and Joe could tell he really didn’t want to stay, that he was too worried about his wife, Alison.

“Think about it, Mama. Whoever killed Martin and Caroline might think you saw him that night. Maybe he followed us here, intending to hurt you, to silence you?”

“Well that’s melodramatic. It was dark, how could I have seen anyone?”

“There was a moon, you told me there was a thin moon. The killer doesn’t know you didn’t see him.” David’s smooth face was stern with worry. “Betweenwhatever that was this morning and these home invasions, I don’t want to leave you two. You’re half crippled with that lame shoulder, you can’t—”

“Isaw the truck coming, I was ready to move.”

“You didn’t have a clue. Benny said you had your back to it, unloading packages.”

“I heard it, I heard the truck.”

“Come home with me, Mama, just until Alison’s through the surgery and on the mend, until I can get a live-in nurse for her, someone reliable. Then I’ll take a leave and come on back with you.”

“Benny’s had enough upset, he needs to be settled in one place, he doesn’t need to be shuttled around anymore. No one’s going to harm us. I want to get him started in school, maybe that private school where Ryan’s young friend Lori Reed goes. He’ll be—”

“He’ll be what?” David snapped.“He’ll be sideswiped by a truck on his way to school?”

“No one,” she said with certainty, “would want to harm Benny.”

“Someone already harmed him deeply when they killed his father.” Rising, David stepped to the sink, emptied his coffee cup, and headed for the stairs. “Please go pack, Mama. For the two of you. I’ll call and try to get us all on a flight.”

“No,” Maudie said. “We’re staying here. We’ll be in our own home for Christmas. And you will be where you belong, with Alison. And that’s the end of it.”

Apparently it was. David headed up the stairs shaking his head, but saying no more.

“Kids,” Maudie said to the tomcat. “Even when they’re grown they think their mothers are helpless.” Smiling a secret little smile, she sipped her cooling coffee.

“I wish someone could understand how much I dread Christmas,” she told Joe. “But Benny has to have Christmas, he’s hurting so bad. Benny’s daddy was the only stable thing in his life, until Caroline. That little boy idolized his daddy.

“When Allen was alive,” she said, “when we were raising the boys, Thanksgiving and Christmas were the most exciting times of the year.” She looked bleakly at Joe. “Is a tomcat the only one in the world I can talk to? The only one who won’t think me silly and who won’t argue with me?” Her blue eyes were flat with hurting. “I miss Martin the same way I missed his dad when he died. Like part ofme is gone. They say that when a leg has been amputated, the pain in the missing part is still there, you can still feel it there, though there’s nothing but empty space.”

Joe Grey had such a powerful desire to speak, to answer the poor woman, that he leaped off the stairs with alarm and trotted away into the garage. What was he, a feline shrink? A four-legged therapist for the lonely and grieving? Winding his way among mover’s cartons and stacks of banker’s boxes, he sniffed a dozen lingering aromas transported three hundred miles from L.A., invisible artifacts boxed and preserved like elusive archeological treasures. The labels were written in a beautiful round cursive, the kind of handwriting Joe saw only among his older human friends: PERSONAL LETTERS, FAMILY PHOTOS, TAX RECEIPTS, OLD SWEATERS. Somewhere ahead among the mountains of cartons, little Benny was talking in a soft monotone, apparently to Dulcie and Kit—unburdening himself to feline sympathy just as Maudie had. What was it about being a cat that made folks so eager to confide, to bare their very souls?

When, ahead in the gloom, he couldn’t see the two cats or the child, he leaped to the top of a four-foot carton and reared up for a better look. Nothing. Only when he gave a low hunting cry in his throat did Dulcie rise up out of an open carton, ears and whiskers at half-mast, her green eyes amused. Beside her, Benny peered over, too, but when the child realized the strange sound had come from Joe Grey, he disappeared again, down inside the box.

Leaping across the stacked boxes, Joe looked down into their hideaway. The carton was filled with packets of bright cloth: neatly cut squares of cotton print tied in bundles with hanks of bright yarn. Benny had piled them around the sides, to clear the middle into a little nest. He sat cross-legged, clutching an album open on his lap. The female cats snuggled beside him again, watching the pages as he slowly turned them. His little-boy scent wafted up, as distinctive as the scent of a puppy. Looking innocently up at Joe, Benny clearly expected the tomcat to join them. Quietly Joe dropped down among the little bales of quilting squares and settled beside Dulcie.

There is something sleep-making to a cat about looking at old photographs; the slowly turning pages create a rhythm that makes one give way to jaw-cracking yawns. But these pictures were of Benny’s family, each a little window into the child’s short past, and the tomcat remained alert. Pictures of Benny and Maudie, of Benny and a boy and girl about his age, who must be Caroline’s two children. Of Benny and a tall man resembling David and a pretty woman with tousled hair the color of butterscotch. These were the pictures Benny reached for, stroking their faces. “That’s my daddy and that’s Caroline, my new mother.” He looked seriously and sadly at the cats. “They’re in heaven now.”

Dulcie rubbed her face against the child, trying to cheer him. Kit nuzzled him, but the tortoiseshell was edgy, too, the tip of her tail twitching with the need to speak, to tell Joe and Dulcie something urgent. What? Joe wondered. What might she have seen, this morning, that was so important?

Well, she’d held her silence this long, and they’d be outside again soon enough—Kit had never been big on patience. Benny was saying, “This is my mother Caroline, she made real sit-down dinners every night, for all of us together. That’s Caroline and me and Daddy, and that’s …” The dry hush of turning pages and the child’s droning voice soon had Joe Grey sleepy despite his interest in the dead couple, and despite his curiosity over Kit’s unease. He came alert when Benny hugged him too hard and a salty wetness splashed on his nose. “And then we were going to Grandma’s cabin and it was dark and the gun was shooting, so loud and bright and Grandma threw us on the floor and I couldn’t see anything.” He squeezed Joe so hard the tomcat nearly yowled; he was hugging all three of them, gathering them to him like teddy bears, weeping into their fur.

Joe tolerated the child’s grief as long as he could, then leaped out of Benny’s arms and out of the carton to the top of a wooden crate. Sometimes the burden of understanding humans was more than a cat cared to handle. Looking around him at the mountain of Maudie’s possessions, he wondered where she was going to put all this stuff, in the limited space of the four-room Tudor house.

But he could see that much of it was destined for the quilting studio, the long table against the opposite wall, the cartons marked QUILTING FRAME, the two sewing machines and the dozens of boxes stacked next to them. In the far corner, the half-dozen boxes marked DESK had been opened, the tape slit, the flaps standing up, the contents disarranged so that papers and folders stuck out. A box marked CAROLINE had been opened, revealing a woman’s clothes neatly folded, layers of sweaters and blouses and among them a half-dozen small, framed pictures. Leaping across the boxes to look, he saw that some were of the two children, some of the children with Caroline and a man in a Marine uniform. Caroline’s first husband? Tucked down beside the clothes was a small jewelry chest. When he clawed it open, he found a diary with a leather strap and a little lock. He was tempted to finesse this open, too, but with the child nearby, that might not be wise. Even a seven-year-old boy would have to wonder at a cat snooping into his mother’s diary.

The next open carton marked CAROLINE contained nine-by-twelve brown envelopes marked TAXES, LETTERS, PAID BILLS, LEGAL PAPERS. Beneath these, when he clawed them aside, was a sealed, unmarked brown envelope, its flap tightly glued. Again, he was tempted, flexing his claws over the sealed flap, but then sensibly sheathing them again and turning away. The remaining boxes all seemed dull as mud, several were marked as kitchen things, and two boxes contained old tax receipts. Strange that he’d found nothing belonging to Benny’s real mother. Had Maudie kept nothing of Pearl’s, or had Pearl left nothing at all behind when she left Martin?

And, the tomcat thought, why did he care? Except that Benny’s daddy and Caroline had been murdered, the shooter had vanished, and so far neither the San Bernardino sheriff nor the LAPD had a shred of evidence. That was what Maudie had told Ryan, that neither agency had come up with any viable suspect, not enough evidence to hold anyone. Joe supposed the two agencies had done all they could. Killers vanished every day. He supposed, given the pressure in a big-city police department, such cases had to be set aside in deference to the emergencies of the moment.

But that hit-and-run this morning, and Maudie’s reaction to it, had prodded the tomcat into a frenzy of curiosity. He was slipping among the last stack of boxes, sniffing at them, when he found Martin’s name, written in Maudie’s hand. This was the first box he’d found of her son’s possessions, and quickly he ripped a claw along the tape until he’d freed the flaps.

Atop a stack of bills and papers lay another photograph album, with pictures of Benny, and Martin in his airline pilot’s uniform. There was no mistaking the resemblance between father and son. In some, they were a threesome with a tall, black-haired woman. This must be Pearl. A thin, straight woman with very white skin and sharply carved features, high cheekbones over hollow cheeks, her black eyes keen and penetrating. A severe beauty, stark and cold, in contrast to Caroline’s warm features. In nearly every picture Pearl stood between father and son, with Benny shoved nearly out of camera range. In every shot she wore black, a black business suit with a knee-length skirt, black slacks and white blouse, ablack dress with a V-neck and long sleeves. Nothing casual, nothing soft or whimsical. In the few pictures where she smiled, her “camera” smile looked patently fake. In only one picture she had pulled Benny against her side as if in sweet companionship, the child looking rigid and uncomfortable.

Joe looked up when Benny crawled out of the big carton and headed for the kitchen door with Dulcie and Kit close behind, Kit fidgeting as if wild to get outdoors where she could talk. With a last look at the open carton, Joe leaped after them, trotting through the kitchen and out to the studio. He paused when the phone rang behind them, looked back as Maudie rose to answer.

There was a long silence, then Maudie said,“Who is this?” Another, longer pause, then very softly she hung up. “No one,” she said, shrugging. “Maybe a wrong number.” As she turned away, was that a look of concern, perhaps of fear? But then as she sat down again at the table, the hint of a smile touched her soft face, some secretthought that she unknowingly telegraphed to Joe. He was still staring when he saw Scotty watching him; quickly he slapped his paw at an invisible bug, then raced away as if chasing it, batting at the floor as he followed Dulcie and Kit out through an unglazed window; and the three cats vanished as swiftly as had Maudie’s strange little smile.

12

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IN VALLEY MEMORIAL Hospital, Jack Reed lay fading in and out of consciousness, sometimes dropping down into deep black sleep, other times alarmed by disjointed dreams where he was back in the prison yard fighting three inmates, was on the ground trying to get hold of Vic Colletto’s knife, fighting to grab it from him. Surprised and unbelieving when the knife plunged into him, easy as into butter, seeing his blood spurting out. That would wake him, put him back in the hospital, trapped by metal bars and plastic tubes, surrounded by science fiction machines pumping who-knew-what into his veins. He’d lie burning to tear out the tubes, rip them away and rip away the bed’s confining bars. Every waking moment he fought the panic of entrapment. Even the oxygen mask over his face seemed, too often, not to ease his breathing but to constrict it. The doc said that was stress, a residual panic. And then, fully awake, he’d sink back into a debilitating depression, into the dark futility of his life.

Sometimes he’d wake thinking about Max Harper, about Max walking into Jack’s house that day and finding Fenner’s body sprawled on the couch, blood sprayed everywhere. Even when he told Max he’d killed Fenner and Max put the cuffs on him, Harper had been more than fair with him. Max had conducted the interview himself, with his two detectives present, the three of them patient and, it seemed to Jack, more in tune with him than he had any right to expect.

Max had booked him and taken him to jail himself, to the little village lockup, and later had talked with the judge privately, in the judge’s chambers. Max Harper had testified in Jack’s favor; he had Max to thank that he’d gotten off light, with only a conviction of voluntary manslaughter.

He wouldn’t have minded too much going to prison, except for Lori. Though Cora Lee French and her housemates had made that easier, taking Lori in, giving her the love and stability she needed. Cora Lee had seen that Lori was able to work when she wanted, for that woman building contractor, had even gottenher into a better school when she was so bored with her public school classes.

Sometimes he thought Lori would be better off without him, that if he were dead, that would put an end to her worry, to her fear for him in prison, and she could get on with her life. Maybe he should have died in this dustup in the prison yard.

Vic Colletto had worked for him when Jack was partners in Vincent and Reed Electrical Contractors. He’d fired young Colletto for drinking on the job; the kid had been wiring a house, dead drunk, rolling drunk. Kicked off the job, Colletto had been angry as hell, and now at last he was getting back at him. Vic, who was in for breaking and entering and several counts of theft, had been in Soledad only a few weeks when he challenged him, tried to make him fight. Jack survived in prison by keeping to himself; he’d managed to avoid confrontations until Colletto began a steady diet of harassment. Colletto hung out with several inmates he’d known on the outside, one of them a con artist whom,Jack was pretty sure, he’d seen in Molena Point. He couldn’t remember the circumstances, couldn’t recall his name. The guy was out now, back on the street, and good riddance. Strange, though—it was after he left that Victor’s bullying grew bolder.

What worried Jack was that Victor’s two brothers lived in the village. If that skuzzy Kent Colletto harassed Lori, or worse, he’d have to try to escape, to get away while he was on garden detail, find Kent and kill him. The thought sickened Jack.

He wanted to talk with Warden Deaver, get him to call Max Harper with a heads-up on the Collettos, get Harper’s people to keep an eye on Lori. Trouble was, that could backfire. It was hard to know who to trust, even within Molena Point PD. If word got back to Vic’s brothers that the law was protecting Lori, that would wave a red flag in their faces. Lori was thirteen, she was growing up fast and she was probably a lot more savvy than many kids her age—but savvy wasn’t enough by itself to keep her safe. Vic was in for robbery of a convenience store in which he’d beaten the clerk so badly he nearly died, and his brother, Kent, was no better, had twice done time in juvenile for battery. Lori was little more than a child, she had no defense against that kind of brutality.

Lori had some childish dream that he’d be pardoned, that he’d soon be home again, but that wasn’t going to happen. She talked about his release when she visited, letting her imagination run wild, about how maybe the governor would commute his sentence, let him come home, and they’d get a little house, how she’d cook and keep house for him. Jack dozed, thinking about being home again, in his own home with his little girl.

He jerked awake to see Lori standing by his bed looking down at him, at first thought she was part of his dream. She reached down over the rail, put her hand on his, careful not to move the IV tube. Her small fingers were ice cold, bringing him fully awake. Her long brown hair shone so bright, just like her mother’s. He wanted to grab her and hug her, but a guard was standing right there. She was dressed in her school uniform, looking so clean and beautiful. Cora Lee stood behind her, tall and slim, looking beautiful, too, and efficient in tailored white slacks and a cream-colored blazer that set off her warm coloring. Her brown eyes met his, dark with worry.

Holding Lori’s hands, he wished he could talk privately with Cora Lee, tell her his own worries about Lori. There was no way they could do that, with the guard standing at the foot of the bed listening to every word, watching their every move, his pale blue eyes never leaving Lori as she held Jack’s hand—even though Lori knew she wasn’t supposed to touch him—as if a thirteen-year-old child might have smuggled in a gun. She looked up into the man’s cold eyes and drew away. Nothing was supposed to pass between them, not even love. When they put you in prison, all your rights were taken from you, and most of the rights of your loved ones. Lori could bring no little gift, Cora Lee had to lock her purse in the car, leave her car keys at the admitting desk, and he knew they’d gone through a body scan.

“Pa? We came as soon as the warden called.” She searched his face, trying to see in his eyes how badly he was hurt, trying hard not to cry. He knew he looked like hell, bound up in bandages, and stuck with tubes. He wanted to hug her and hold her and he wasn’t allowed. Wanted to tell her how sorry he was that she had to endure this.

Cora Lee said,“I talked with Max.” She took a deep breath, glancing at the guard. “The warden called him.” She seemed to think the guard might stop her. “Max told me it was Victor Colletto who stabbed you.” She put her arm around Lori. “We’re doing as he told us. There will be extra patrols alongour street, and a grown-up will be with Lori twenty-four/seven, at work with Ryan, at school. And of course up with the horses. Charlie Harper will ride with her.” No one said that Charlie Harper rode armed, but Jack knew that.

“I’ll be like a prisoner,” Lori said in a small voice, and then wished she hadn’t said that.

“Can you get her out of the village somewhere?” Jack wanted to say,Send her to your sister in New Orleans. But he didn’t want to say even that in front of a stranger, not even a prison guard.

Lori shook her head.“I’m not going to run away. That Kent Colletto’s nothing but a punk.” And then, at Jack’s look, “I’ll be careful, Pa. I’ll do what Captain Harper tells me.” But then she grinned. “Warden Deaver told Cora Lee that Victor’s in confinement and will be moved to another prison, that he might have to go back for new sentencing. I hope they hang him.”

Jack tried not to laugh, it hurt like hell to laugh. For a long moment they were silent, just looking at each other. He longed to keep her safe, and there was no way he could do that. He felt as useless as he had when, before he was sent to prison, he’d tried to protect her from Fenner, and nearly failed. Felt as useless as when Fenner had found her hiding place and nearly got his hands on her.

He looked at Cora Lee.“Our friend Max, tell him to keep safe. Tell him to take care not just of Lori but of himself.” His look held Cora Lee. Her own eyes widened, then she nodded. He wanted to tell her more, but he hestitated to name names since they weren’t alone. He said, “Some guy just coming out of prison, that could be bad news.” Maybe that was enough, maybe that would give Max a heads-up. Again Cora Lee nodded, and then she grinned at him, gave him a thumbs-up and a look as warm as a hug.

13

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THE THREE CATS had hardly scrambled up to Maudie’s roof when Kit blurted out,“That was no accident, that truck was parked around the corner up there waiting for her. I saw it, the minute she came out the driver gunned it and took off and—”

“Slow down,” Joe said. This tortoiseshell, when something set her off, could be as volatile as bees in a windstorm. “What did you see? Tell it slowly.”

“He was waiting for Maudie, parked around the corner where no one could see him from the house, and the truck windows so dirty I couldn’t see much of him, only a smear behind the glass.” She took a breath, trying to go slower. “When he saw her come out of the house he stepped on the gas andbarreled straight for her, you saw him …” Again she stopped, her yellow eyes huge with distress, her tortoiseshell ears flat with frustration. “She has to know it wasn’t an accident. Why won’t she report it? Is she afraid to report it?”

“Or,” Dulcie said, “is she protecting someone? You didn’t see the driver?”

Kit moved out of the shadows, to sit where the roof was warming.“Only a pale shape with what looked like a dark cap pulled down. The windshield was caked with dirt, and there was dirt on the license plate. And there’s something else, too, there was another invasion this morning, I followed the squad cars, it was that house with the glass at the top, Becky Lake’s house. I listened when Detective Ray interviewed her, she said two men broke in when she answered the door and she was alone and they beat her and they kicked her little dog and then they ran and …”

“Slow down,” Joe and Dulcie said impatiently. “Did she describe them?” Joe asked.

“One tall and thin, the other stronger looking, both with dark clothes and stockings over their faces. Chief Harper was really mad when he got there—another invasion where they got away, and maybe mad because of theGazette this morning, too, it was on a newsstand, all about the earlier invasions that aren’t even news anymore, smeared all over the front page that there’s never a cop when one happens and Harper’s not patrolling the village, that he’s letting crooks and killers run loose while his officers sit around drinking coffee,” she hissed with anger. “Do they think he can have cops lined up on every street waiting for someone to ring a doorbell?”

Dulcie and Joe were quiet. Kit’s mood this morning had swung from despondency at the cruelty in the world to flyaway rage—calming for only a moment, for a little snuggle with Benny. Now again she was as volatile as a caged bobcat. “And there was something else, there was a fish smell around Becky’s front door, old dead fish, I followed it to the curb and then it was gone, I guess they got in a car, I could still smell a whiff of exhaust.”

“Fish,” Joe said. “Fine. A dozen wharves up the coast where people fish, hundreds of people coming and going and half of them tourists.”

“And our own little fishing dock,” Dulcie said. She was quiet, looking at them solemnly. “And there’s something else, too. Cora Lee called Wilma early this morning. Jack Reed’s in the county hospital in Salinas, they took him from the prison by helicopter. He was stabbed, and he’s critical. It isn’t fair. Why Jack Reed?” Lori Reed was the cats’ friend, she always had time to stop and pet them and find a little snack for them. Though she didn’t know they could speak, she talked to them as if they could understand her. It was Dulcie who had found Lori hiding in the library when she ran away from home that one time, when she was just a little girl.

“Jack Reed shouldn’t be in prison with those damned gangs,” Joe said.

“It wasn’t a gang,” Dulcie said, licking her paw in consternation. “It was Vic Colletto, it was Maudie’s nephew.” Sometimes the problems of their human friends were nearly too much; sometimes she wondered if she’d rathernot know about human troubles, would rather still be an ordinary housecat without a care beyond an elusive mouse or cadging another kitty treat.

Except it really didn’t work that way. A nonspeaking cat knew when trouble hit, she could feel the distress of her humans, and could suffer even more because she didn’t understand the cause. A nonspeaking cat felt the pain but had no clue as to what had caused it, or how she might help to ease the trouble. No, Dulcie thought, it was better to understand all she could, no matter how terrible. In her little cat heart, she wouldn’t want to return to that simpler life. She was lost in her distress for Lori when Joe rose suddenly, his ears laid back, staring away through the tops of the oaks, a growl low in his throat.

High in an oak tree not twenty feet from them, a cat crouched staring down at them, the big yellow tomcat that had been shadowing them. Though he was half hidden among the foliage, they could make out his wide head, broad shoulders, his coat as bright as butter. Boldly, his yellow eyes watched them.

Still growling, Joe was crouched for attack when Kit started toward the cat, her tortoiseshell fur puffed up, but her whiskers curved into a little smile. Her yellow eyes burning with curiosity, she approached the tomcat with her nose out inquisitively, her little dish face showing only fascination. Quickly Joe moved beside her, walking stiffly, ready to fight—but this was no ordinary cat, not the way he was looking at them, not with that wise and knowing expression.

There were no speaking cats like themselves in the village. Only on the empty hills was there a small band, descendants of three pairs brought over from Wales generations ago. That clowder lived now among the ruins of an old mansion, but they knew those cats. There was no big yellow tom among them, this cat was a newcomer. But from where? Even as they approached, Joe still in attack mode, the cat backed deeper among the leaves as if to leap away. The three paused. Joe was about to speak, to challenge him to come down and make himself known, when the cat vanished. He was there one second and then gone among the branches. The leaves shivered where he’d passed, the spaces between the twisting branches revealing empty sky.

They waited, but the yellow tomcat didn’t reappear. Kit peered silently up through the treetops, her paw lifted, her ears up, her fluffy tail very still. When at last they turned away, the little birds above them began to chirp again among the canopy of leaves and to flit about, lively and busy once more, now that the stranger had departed—though they kept a wary eye on the three cats who remained prowling the rooftop. Somewhere a door slammed; then once more the only sound was the hush of the sea, and the off-key chirping of the house finches. Kit looked at Dulcie, her eyes wide with interest. A speaking cat, another like themselves. Why was he so shy, why did he melt away, unwilling to speak to them?

They hadn’t seen him clearly, hidden among the oak leaves, except his golden eyes. Hadn’t caught his scent over the dry smell of the oak itself. They had glimpsed the breadth of his shoulders, but couldn’t tell his age, could see for sure only that those knowing golden eyes belonged to no common housecat. And when Dulcie and Joe looked at Kit, they knew they hadn’t seen the last of the yellow cat.

“Come on,” Dulcie said uneasily, hoping Kit wouldn’t race away, following him. “It’s nearly noon, maybe Lori and Cora Lee are back from the hospital, maybe they have some news about her pa.” Until they knew who this cat was, Dulcie hoped she could distract the tortoiseshell. They never knew where Kit’s wild impulses and giddy enthusiasms would take her, but usually it was straight into trouble.

14

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THE THREE CATS arrived at the seniors’ house panting from their long run up the rising rooftops to the north side of the village. “They’re home from the hospital,” Dulcie said, seeing Cora Lee’s car in the drive. They found the tires still warm, the hood warm when they leaped onto it, approaching the roof beneath Lori’s window.

The rambling two-story house had once been a decrepit relic, curling shingles, peeling paint, and a garden full of healthy weeds. Cora Lee and her three senior friends had attacked the neglected house with hammer and nails, new Sheetrock, fresh paint, with the help of Ryan and several handymen. They had built low walls to define new planter beds, where now winter flowers painted an excess of bright colors between the pale stonework. The ladies hadn’t known when they moved in that at the back of the deep lot, where it fell away to the canyon below, lay a row of little, hidden graves. Graves undiscovered for years until Jack Reed found his brother standing over an open pit, prepared to bury another murdered child.

It had taken courage for Lori to move here when Jack went to prison. Now she would live nowhere else—until her pa came home. Now the four ladies were her family. She knew the dead children had been exhumed from their anonymous resting places, each sent home for a proper burial, and Lori was okay with that; she could look out at the canyon now and think only that at last those little souls were at rest.

At the back of the house, where the lot sloped down, two small basement apartments looked out to the wild canyon. These were an important part of the senior ladies’ retirement plan. Having pooled their savings to buy the old place, they intended to avoid going into rest homes in their declining years. They would remain here together, and later hire live-in help who would stay in the apartments. Trustees would then see to the management. At present they were all four too healthy and strong to need a caretaker, and their only guest was Lori, who shared the upstairs with Cora Lee in a big, sunny room of her own. The cats were crouched to leap to the roof of the garage just outside her window when they heard a choked little sob, and another, from the room above them.

“Oh,” Kit whispered, tucking her tail under with dismay. What had happened? Listening to Lori weeping, not wanting to think the worst, she scrambled to the roof, the others behind her, and looked in through the decorative metal grille of the open window.

Lori lay on her bed, her face pressed into her pillow, crying as if her heart would break.

With a reaching paw Dulcie slid the screen open and the cats slipped between the curlicues of metal into the bedroom. Both Dulcie and Kit mewled to announce their presence, but not until Joe gave out a loud tomcatmeowwrrr did Lori stop crying and look up at them. At once, Kit bounded across the covers and poked her nose at the child’s wet cheek. Lori’s shudders stopped. She took Kit in her arms, pressing her face against her, then reached to stroke Dulcie and Joe Grey. “How did you know I needed someone?” She looked at the open window. “You heard me crying? Cora Lee was here and the dogs, but I sent them away. I wanted to be alone, and then I was sorry.” She looked bleakly at the cats. “I wish you could understand. Pa’s hurt so bad. He might die,” she said in a small voice. “I wish you could understand, I wish I could tell you about Pa, I wish you could talk to me.”

She wiped at her tears.“What will I do if Pa dies? He can’t die. He was so still, so white and still, and his voice was just a whisper.” She looked forlornly at Kit. “He mustn’t die, he can’t die alone in that hospital with no one there but some guard, he can’t die all alone. That damn prison! Why is he in prison!” she said, echoing almost exactly the cats’ own thoughts. “He didn’t do anything wrong; maybe he saved a lot of children’s lives! He saved my life. If that Fenner had got me alone, I’d be dead too, just like the others.” She shoved her face into Kit’s fur, her body shaking with hard sobs. It was as if only now, after she had seen her father near death, that all her grief was coming out after nearly two years with her pa in jail, and the years before that when she hadn’t understood what was happening to him. She wept uncontrollably, soaking Kit with tears. She grew still when Mavity Flowers called from downstairs, her gravelly voice reaching Lori with surprising strength.

“Lori, you want lunch?” The little woman must be standing at the foot of the stairs, but very likely she hadn’t heard Lori crying, her hearing wasn’t that good. Mavity Flowers, one of the four senior ladies, was a small, straightforward woman, her round face prematurely wrinkled from the sun. At well over sixty, she still worked for her living cleaning houses, enjoying a change of pace as she put herself to sleep at night reading her favorite romance novels.

“I made chicken sandwiches,” she called. “Charlie’s coming by, she has some news, she sounds all excited.”

The cats didn’t know what news could cheer Lori today, but Lori sat up and wiped her eyes. Slipping off the bed, looking back at the cats to come with her, she headed downstairs. Lori loved Charlie, as she loved Max and all their close circle of friends, and just now, she surely must need them around her.

At the bottom of the stairs, the two big dogs were waiting, staring up. The cats weren’t afraid of the family Dalmatian, and Susan Brittain’s chocolate poodle, but they descended stiff-legged, their ears back, steeling themselves for the inevitable pummeling and sloppy licks. The minute they hit the bottom step the dogs were all over them, washing and nudging and harrying them until Joe Grey gave them a growl as loud as a tiger, and Kit hissed and raised a paw. Only then did they settle down, their lolling tongues showing doggy laughs as they followed Lori to the kitchen.

The big white and yellow kitchen was bright with sunlight slanting in through its long bank of windows. On the round table sat a platter of quarter-cut sandwiches, a glass of milk for Lori, cups and a pot of tea for the women. Cora Lee and Mavity were already at the table. As Lori pulled out her chair, the cats leaped onto the planning desk tucked beside the refrigerator, out of the way of the dogs. The Dalmatian and poodle stood eyeing the table hungrily—until they heard the front door knocker. Then they raced away with Mavity, only to return the next moment frisking around Charlie Harper.

The tall redhead came striding through, trying not to trip on the dogs as they gamboled around her. She carried a box of books.“For the library sale,” she said. “Three more boxes in the car.”

Cora Lee nodded and took them from her. Charlie’s red hair was twisted into a lopsided knot at the nape of her neck, fiery tendrils framing her freckled face. Lithe and slim in her faded jeans, she wore a faded persimmon T-shirt, and her well-worn boots smelled of horses. She looked more vibrant than the cats had seen her since theGazette began trashing Max and Molena Point PD, her cheeks rosy, her green eyes laughing.

Mavity pushed back her glasses.“You heard from your editor.”

“She likes it!” Charlie said. “She likes the new book! She tried all morning to get me on the landline, but I was up in the hills, I took a really long ride and didn’t have my phone turned on.” She pulled out a chair as Cora Lee poured a cup of tea for her. “She likes it even more than the last book. She …”

She looked at Kit and went still. She rose at once and moved to the desk, standing in front of Kit, petting her and hiding Kit’s incensed, too revealing expression. She’d hurt Kit’s feelings. The tortoiseshell’s round yellow eyes were wide with hurt, with anger and dismay.

Charlie’s first book had been about Kit herself, about an orphaned tortoiseshell kitten trying to survive in the wild on her own. It had been a great success with readers, and in Kit’s view it was the best book in the whole world. Now, here was Charlie with another book that wasnot about her, and the editor liked it better. Kit was hot with jealousy. The editor’s enthusiasm, and Charlie’s joy, seemed a terrible betrayal.

“Editors always like the newest book best,” Charlie said, chagrined. “Or they say they do. They think that prods a writer to work harder. But,” she said, picking Kit up and cuddling her, “there’ll never be another book likeTattercoat. I’ll never, ever be able to write another story like that one. Everyone who reads it loves it, I get hundreds and hundreds of letters and emails telling me how much they love it.” Mavity and Cora Lee had read many of the letters; and of course Kit had read them all, each with a terrible thrill and with a deep and purring satisfaction.

Their friends all knew, of course, that Kit had been the model forTattercoat, for both the story and Charlie’s many drawings. But only a few people knew thatTattercoat was, in fact, Kit’s own true story, much of it told in Kit’s own words. So now of course Kit was jealous. Charlie held her close until at last Kit relaxed in her arms, her ears came up again, and she began to purr.

“Still,” Charlie said, stroking Kit, “that doesn’t mean I should stop writing. It doesn’t mean I should stop trying, even though I know there will never, ever be another adventure as compelling, for me, asTattercoat.” With Kit at last purring happily, Charlie sat down at the table, settling the tortoiseshell in her lap.

“Well, your editor’s happy,” Cora Lee said, and Mavity smiled, as Charlie’s two friends, oblivious to the little cat’s anger, celebrated Charlie’s success.

But Kit wasn’t the only one who had bristled. Across the table, Lori watched the three women with her fists clenched on her lap. Charlie and Mavity weren’t a bit interested that Pa was in the hospital and might die; neither one seemed to care at all. Charlie was so excited about an old book, so centered onherself. Didn’t grown-ups care about anything outside themselves? Didn’tthey ever feel frightened? How come grown-ups were so smug and certain all the time, when it was all Lori could do just to hold herself together?

She didn’t realize she was tearing her sandwich into little pieces until she looked up and saw Charlie watching her, saw the eyes of all three women on her. Cora Lee looked at Lori, then turned to Charlie. “I called Wilma this morning, I thought she’d call you. I guess you were riding. And when you called here …”

“What?” Charlie said. “What is it? I didn’t check my messages, I just put the mare up and jumped in the car.” She looked at Lori, at her sullen expression. “What?” she said softly.

“Lori’s pa was stabbed this morning,” Cora Lee said, “in the prison yard. They flew him to Salinas Valley Hospital, we just got back. He’s …” She glanced at Lori. “He’s not out of danger, but he’s stable.”

Charlie reached across, took Lori’s hand in hers. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. You were with him this morning?”

Lori nodded.

“Were you able to talk with the doctor?”

Again, a nod. But it was Cora Lee who answered.“The doctor says he’s strong, that he’s doing as well as he can.”

Lori said,“I think they’re taking good care of him. He can’t …” Her voice caught. “He can’t die.” She turned away from the table, standing with her back to them, petting the three cats with one hand, stroking the two dogs with the other, where they’d come to lean against her, clutching the animals in her need, not bothering to wipe the tears from her face.

Cora Lee watched her, but let her be.“The doctor said if he continues doing well he’ll soon be out of danger. He hopes he’ll improve enough by the end of the week so they can take him back to Soledad. He thought Jack should heal quickly; he’s young and strong, and he has Lori to get well for.” She looked up at Charlie, frowning. “It was the Colletto boy, Victor. I’ve already talked with Max. Until this gets sorted out, he doesn’t want Lori to go anywhere alone, not even in the yard, not even outside with the dogs.”

Charlie rose and came around the table, putting her arm around Lori.“We can ride together, I’d like that, I’d like the company. Would you feel safe with me?” Lori nodded. Charlie didn’t ask about Lori working for Ryan; she knew Ryan wouldn’t let anything happen, knew that everyone would rally around the child. She only wished they could defend the village as handily against these home invaders.

But Max would take care of them, Charlie thought—with a little assist from the feline contingent to hurry things along, hopefully to put these guys behind bars before Christmas.

15

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BY NOON, THE day after she shot Martin and Caroline, after the cops had come and gone at the small house she’d rented, to tell her Martin was dead, the shooter knew the old woman hadn’t seen her. If Maudie had fingered her, the cops would have arrested her on the spot or, at the very least, have labeled her a person of interest and taken her in for questioning. What a laugh, those cops trying to break the news gently, that her ex-husband had been shot and killed, asking if there was someone, a relative or neighbor, who could come in and stay with her. And then at last, asking ever so respectfully where she’d been that night, saying they hadn’t been able to reach her.

She had the stubs of her plane ticket, the Visa charge slip, and room receipt from Vegas. Arriving early the day before, she’d seen friends and gambled. If she’d flown out again under another name and ID, no one needed to know that. You could gamble all weekend wherever you chose, at any hour you chose, and very likely no one would remember you. If you lost money and didn’t take a big winning, there was no record.A Southwest flight into Ontario International, pick up a rental car, drive back to Vegas and no one the wiser. The cops had nothing to tie her to the shooting or they’d have been all over her—the same way they’d been all over the wrecked car after the shooting, the same way they’d have searched the road and surrounding ranches and fields the next morning looking for tire marks, footprints, shell casings. The news said there were still no leads to the shooter. It didn’t mention a second person in the truck, and by now her driver was far away. Though holdbacks by the cops were common,this time she was inclined to believe what the sheriff’s department had told the press.

Even if they’d found a casing, which they wouldn’t, they wouldn’t find a match to this gun on their fancy AFIS network. They might get a warrant to search the nearby houses and farms, but she’d left no trace in the “borrowed” truck; and she’d stayed on the gravel where there wouldn’t likely be tire marks. Any gravel in the tire tread would be natural enough, with the truck going in and out across the graveled drives and roads. The truck’s owner, Harley Owens, was the brother of a woman who worked where she’d worked. Vera Owens was so talkative that Pearl knew not only Vera’s personal habits but Harley’s as well—he wouldn’t be back there for another three weeks. The Owenses’ ranch was a weekend place, the few cattle that were pastured there belonged to a neighbor who cared for them. It had been blind luck that the ranch was located so near to Maudie’s cabin, an opportunity too good to let pass. It hadn’t taken long, watching the place for a few weekends, driving up in the morning and back at night, cruising the area, to know Vera had described Harley’s habits accurately.

Everything had gone so smoothly. Every year at Easter vacation Maudie and Martin and Benny headed for Maudie’s cabin; this year was no different except to add Caroline and her brats. She’d left Vegas with ample time to meet her partner, and then to intercept Maudie’s arrival. Had timed it so well that once she’d picked the padlock, pulled the rental car into the old barn, and hot-wired the truck,they’d had to wait less than an hour on the dark side road until they saw the pale convertible coming, and had eased in behind it. All had gone as planned, it was the weeks following after the shooting that were tedious, fending off the saccharine sympathy of her new neighbors and coworkers, enduring the funeral—oh, she’d gone, all right. Had even managed to squeeze out a few tears. The reading of the will and trust was a shocker, but she should have known he’d waste no time leaving everything to Caroline, Benny, and the old woman.

Some would say she should contest the will and try to break the trust, thatshe was Benny’s mother and should be the trustee of his share. But under the circumstances, that wasn’t smart. There were other ways to get what was rightfully hers.

And there was more than the will and trust to worry about. It was no secret that after the funeral Maudie cleared out Martin’s and Caroline’s house with the assistance of Caroline’s sister; then Maudie put her own house on the market, preparing to leave L.A. But taking what with her? Caroline’s personal papers? Or did Caroline’s sister have them?

With this in mind, and with apparently no follow-up interest from the law, she’d opted to move away just as the old woman was planning to do. She had told the LAPD detectives that staying in the city was too painful, that she was going down to San Diego for a while, to stay with a friend. Lay a trail on to Mexico for them to find, then turn around and head up the coast instead, where Maudie would soon be living. It wasn’t likely the old woman would imagine she’d come up there to the village, or that she’d maintained her own contacts in Molena Point so well. With Maudie busy getting herself settled, why would she wonder about her ex-daughter-in-law and those oldconnections, or what use Pearl might make of them? When, later, she opted to contact Maudie and get back her own, wouldn’t that be a nice surprise.

16

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JASMINE VINES COVERED the high adobe wall that shielded the Colletto house from the street, the house’s pale sides broken by a richly fashioned wrought-iron gate that led to the sheltered garden. The three cats slipped between the curves of hammered metal into a jungle of rosebushes, low and fragrant ground cover, and lavender bushes. A roofed terrace ran the length of the house, its brick expanse graced with wicker chairs and potted geraniums. They could see, above the tiled roof, a second floor rising up, indistinct in the darkness, and to their right a driveway where Maudie’s black Lincoln was parked beneath the sheltering oaks before a double garage.

The front door was of heavy oak, hand carved in the Spanish style, secured with wrought-iron hinges and a fancy wrought-iron latch. From somewhere to their left, lights spilled out onto the terrace, and they could hear the murmur of voices and the sounds of silverware on china, as if perhaps glass doors had been left open to the dining room. The air was sultry, the chill of the last few days having left the village until the next change in weather made itself known, the central California weather famous for its notional approach to Christmas.

Mixed with the smell of jasmine, roses, and lavender came a heady scent of roast beef that made the cats lick their whiskers. Silent as shadows they slipped along past the front door, through the garden toward the muted voices and the good smells of supper.

Where the light spilled out, wide glass sliders did indeed stand open, treating the diners to the mild evening breeze. In the dark surround, the lighted dining room seemed as magnified in importance as a stage, the play in progress as quaint as a painting from another era. The room was softly lit, with peach-colored walls and a pastel Kerman rug setting off dark, heavily carved furniture—ornate buffet, high-backed carved chairs—all rich and, in the cats’ view, pretentious. The long table was set with white linen, with gleaming white china, and thin crystal. The centerpiece of white candles cast flickering shadows across the faces of the six diners, and illuminated behind them an oversize gold-framed oil painting of red and pink roses that didn’t seem to go with the Spanish architecture. Or did it? Dulcie thought about the Spanish families who had settled in California during the hide and tallow days, how they had loved their rosebushes, importing them from Spain to plant around their grand haciendas, training their American Indian servants to care for and nurture the plants.

But the image of a grand Spanish don and a beautiful Spanish lady at the table, as the setting seemed to demand, didn’t apply to these diners. James Colletto, seated at one end of the table, was a small, dull-looking man with short grizzled gray hair and a gray mustache, an everyday, ordinary kind of man dressed in an ill-fitting dark suit, a white shirt, and a satin tie with huge polka dots that might have come straight out of the forties. Carlene Colletto, at the other end of the table, was pudgier than her sister Maudie and seemed even softer. Her gray hair was done in precise waves that clung tight to her head. Her flowered dress and her pink, low-heeled pumps were surely holdovers, too, from the lastcentury. Dulcie imagined her having put them away in a shoe box until they came back in style.

Maudie and Benny sat with their backs to the cats, the Collettos’ sons across from them at the far side of the table in front of the oversize painting. The youngest, Kent, looked about eighteen, a tall, lanky young man with rounded shoulders, who sat slouched in his chair as if suffering from perennially weak bones. Or perennial boredom. His shoulder-length black hair was ragged, only hastily combed. All three cats wondered why his mother had let him wear that wrinkled shirt to dinner; they could almost smell the sweat. Beneath the table his blue and white jogging shoes were dirty and worn, his jeans stained with grease. His scowl was so embedded that the cats couldn’t imagine him ever looking happy. He pointedly ignored his aunt Maudie, as if he had no use at all for her. When Carlene spoke to him, it was with an expression of helpless acceptance, and Kent’s replies were sullen. The boys’ father ignored him as if preferring to look anywhereelse.

Jared Colletto was maybe twenty. He was taller than his brother, thin and wiry and straight, neatly dressed in tan chinos and a white shirt. His thin, tanned face was clean shaven, his dark brown hair freshly cut. His eyes were a light brown; when he smiled he had dimples at the corners of his mouth, and his teeth shone white and straight. At least he knew how to smile—maybe he should give his brother lessons.

Maudie was dressed in silky beige slacks, stockings and leather sandals, and a smocky patchwork top of pastel swatches in a pattern of partridges in a pear tree, an ode to the coming Yule that made Dulcie and Kit smile. Benny, sitting beside her, was so small that the table came halfway up his chest. Apparently Carlene hadn’t thought to offer him a phone book to sit on; he was forced to eat with his elbow straight out in order to reach his plate, an awkward and surely uncomfortable exercise. He was dressed in pale jeans and a clean blue polo shirt, his dangling feet sporting clean white tennis shoes.

Carlene was saying,“… and they gave you a very nice interview, Maudie. Of course it’s only a local magazine, but still, that was very kind of them.”

“The gallery arranged it,” Maudie said, “while I was still in L.A. It’s such a beautiful magazine, so slick and bright, and they did a lovely spread. So many color photographs of my quilts. Every village shop of importance seems to advertise in it. I feel flattered to be included.”

“I’m surprised you arranged for an exhibit, with Martin barely in his grave.”

Maudie put her arm around Benny, giving him a hug as she smiled across at Carlene.“This show was scheduled some months before … some months before Easter of this year,” she said, glancing down at Benny. “The gallery had a contact down there, he took the photographs in February.

“After the shooting, I wasn’t sure I could get the show together—or get myself together. But I knew Martin wouldn’t want me to cancel. And I knew we’d be moving up here, I knew at once, when Martin died, that we couldn’t stay in L.A.”

“Aren’t you afraid,” Carlene asked, “that if that terrible person who shot Martin—that they might see the magazine, even this little local one, and learn where you are? Aren’t you afraid this kind of publicity will draw them to you?”

Maudie looked at her sister for some time.“I wasn’t the target, Carlene. It was Martin and Caroline who were murdered.”

“But you were right there, you must have seen the killer.”

“I didn’t. It was dark. I didn’t see anything, just the flash of the gun and a white empty afterglow as I grabbed the kids and ducked down.”

“But you could have seen him. How would he know you didn’t? If you—”

“All I saw were split second flashes of gunfire.” Maudie laid down her fork. “I did not see the killer’s face, Carlene. Don’t start imagining what isn’t so.” Beside her, Benny looked very small, the child sat very still, huddled into himself. Maudie hugged him again and took his hand,but she didn’t back off from the discussion; as if, Joe Grey thought, she would not encourage him to hide from this new and ugly turn his life had taken.

“But they don’t know what you might have seen,” Carlene pressed stubbornly, with, apparently, no notion how her questions might upset the little boy beside Maudie.

Across the table, Jared gave his mother a look of disgust.“She said it was dark, Ma. Let it go.”

Next to Jared, Kent lazily stirred his mashed potatoes and gravy into mush, with the manners of a three-year-old. Carlene said automatically,“Don’t play with your food,” as she must have done for Kent’s entire life; she gave Jared a despairing look that he returned with a little smile of understanding. Maudie changed the subject, tossing the conflict back into Carlene’s lap.

“How’s Victor doing?” she asked innocently. “How much longer does he have to serve, down at Soledad?” Had the two sisters been like this all their lives, at each other with this mean one-upmanship?

At the other end of the table, James said,“It was on the local news, Maudie. You must have seen it. Victor’s being transferred out, to another prison.” He said it without emotion, his thin, sharply carved features unrevealing. James Colletto had a nose as straight as a new ruler.

“I haven’t had the TV on,” Maudie told him softly, as if embarrassed that she’d broached something more painful, even, than she’d thought. Beside her, Benny had finished his mashed potatoes. Maudie picked up the serving bowl that sat within her reach, and dished him another helping. Jaredreached across the table to pass her the gravy, while James sliced more roast beef for the child. The little boy, apparently paying no attention to the adults, was shoveling in the good hot food—a real sit-down dinner, the cats thought, smiling.

“There was a stabbing in the prison yard,” James said quietly. “Three men against one, and Victor among them. Apparently it was Victor who did the stabbing. We don’t know much more than that.” He laid his fork down. “We’re told he’ll go back to court, that he could be convicted on anew charge.” His voice was flat with resignation.

“Of course they’re blaming Victor,” Carlene said. “That’s what they’ve done all along. The cops, the judge, everyone. The night that pizza place was robbed, Victor wasn’t anywhere near it. Was he, Kent? I’d never have thought we had crooked police, right here in our little village, I never would have guessed that Max Harper …” She stopped, staring at Maudie. The cats couldn’t see Maudie’s face, but in her lap, her left hand was balled into a fist, and beneath the table her sandaled foot tapped silently on the thick rug.

“What’s wrong?” Carlene said, staring at her sister.“You weren’t here.You haven’t been reading the paper, you don’t know half what’s going on.”

Maudie’s foot continued to tap. She made no reply. Jared looked sympathetic, but he, too, remained silent. Kent smirked at Maudie in such a superior way that Dulcie and Kit wanted to claw his contemptuous face. The silence at the table went on for so long that even Benny began to squirm. Carlene let her gaze settle on the child, honing in coldly on the little boy.

“Do you like your new home, Benny? Do you have a nice room? Are you in school yet? Tell us about your new school.”

The child looked down at the table.

“Can’t you speak to your great-aunt? Tell us what grade you’re in? Do you like your new teacher?” Carlene didn’t have the courtesy to gently draw the child out or to wait for a reply; she went after Benny like a bulldog after a little cat. Benny shifted awkwardly, looking up to his grandmother for help, as if silently begging permission to leave the table.

“Doesn’t the child talk?” Carlene asked. “Can’t you talk to me, Benny?”

Maudie took Benny’s hand, shaking her head. His eyes fixed on her, Benny settled down, only the stiffness of his thin back showing his continued discomfort. Carlene’s unkindness made the cats wonder how the Colletto boys had managed to survive in this household; it sure explained why Victor might be in prison, and Kent was so sullen. James Colletto didn’t seem strong enough, the cats thought, to counter this unfeeling woman.

“Benny hasn’t started school yet,” Maudie said, putting her arm around the child. “He’s been helping Lori Reed, the young girl who works for Ryan Flannery, up at the cottage. Benny—”

“A young girl works for a carpenter? How young?”

“Thirteen,” Benny said. “Lori—”

“But that’s dangerous, that’s against the law.”

“She has permission from the school,” Maudie said. “She works during certain class hours, and on weekends. Ryan is more than responsible, she sees that Lori’s work is safe.”

“Ryan can do anything,” Benny said as if the change of subject stirred his confidence. “Ryan saved Grandma yesterday when that truck almost hit her, she—”

“What happened?” Carlene said, laying down her fork. “Why didn’t you tell me this?”

“A car swipe!” Benny said eagerly. “Ryan called it a hit-and-run, a car tried to hit Grandma, he came right at her and tried to hit her. Grandma—”

“It was nothing,” Maudie said quickly, trying to hush Benny. “It was an accident, someone looking the other way, driving too fast—”

“Nothing!” Carlene said. “A car nearly hit you, and it was nothing? What did the police say? Did they catch the driver? Crime is completely out of control in this village, the police are doing nothing. An assault on my very own sister, after all your suffering over Martin’s murder …”

“It was an accident,” Maudie repeated. “As to Martin’s death, Benny and I are getting on with life just as he would want us to do.”

Carlene sniffed with disgust.“And now David’s gone back to Atlanta and left you alone in the house with that wall torn out, so anyone can walk in …”

“The wall isn’t torn out. The glass slider is far more secure now, with the studio built around it, than it was before. Benny and I are just fine,” Maudie said, smiling down at the child. Benny looked up at her and nodded.

“I want Jared to stay with you for a while,” Carlene said, “until David sees fit to come back.” She looked pointedly at Jared. “It isn’t safe for Maudie, alone there. I’m surprised David would go on his merry way and—”

Maudie’s foot was tapping again as if to deflect some of her anger. “You’d have David leaveAlison alone, when she’s having cancer surgery?”

“Alison has family there, they can take care of her.”

“Alison has one sister with five children. You think she wants the confusion of five loud, noisy little kids when she’s just out of surgery?”

“Jared, go pack a bag,” Carlene said. “You can follow Maudie home, you can stay in that spare bedroom with Benny until David decides to take care of his mother.”

“I am not an invalid,” Maudie said. “I don’t want a caretaker. You are not to come, Jared. If we need you, I’ll let you know.”

Jared gave her a little grin and nodded.“Between school and work, I’d be gone a lot. But I’d be glad to come, and I’d sure be there at night, if anyone tried to break in.”

“You’re working where?” Maudie said, as if to retain control of the conversation.

“It’s a little used-car lot just up the coast. I do some detailing, painting, cleaning up the cars before he puts a price on them. Mr. Sutter, he liked the way I rebuilt my T-Bird.” Jared grinned at her. “He says it looks factory new.” He glanced at his brother. “Kent works there some, we like working together.”

Outside in the garden, Joe Grey sat very still, his stub tail twitching with interest as he considered the possibilities of Kent’s work situation among all those used cars.

“The good thing,” Jared said, “he lets me work pretty much the hours I want, depending on school. The accounting classes aren’t real demanding, but sometimes there’s a lot of history or English homework, and I can choose my work time. When he needs extra help, Kent can get in more hours, too.”

“The money helps out,” Kent said in a bored tone. As if he really didn’t give a damn about the money, or about working anywhere. Joe watched him, and then suddenly rose, flashing Dulcie and Kit a look that had them on their feet, too, and the three took off around the side of the house. Joe was in such a hurry, and the lady cats racing to keep up, that they never once glanced above them into the branches of the overhanging oaks to see the yellow tomcat crouched above, peering down watching them.

17

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SUCH A STRONG hunch drove Joe as he raced for the Collettos’ garage. Maybe his idea was off the wall, but who was to say he wouldn’t find the old truck in there, the rusted truck that had nearly hit Maudie? The scenario was such a nice fit: angry Kent Colletto—angry at the whole world, it seemed—with access to any number of old vehicles that might later be painted and sold and never found. Those small car lots up the coast, tucked in among the fishing wharfs, had some really decrepit wrecks. He’d often gone with Clyde to look at some rusty “collector’s” treasure, a relic that Clyde would end up towing home, give it a pristine restoration, and quadruple its value. Only as he crouched to leap to the windowsill of the closed garage did Dulcie’s incredulous look stop him. “You don’t really think …” she began.

“It’s worth a shot,” Joe said impatiently.

“No way,” Dulcie said. “What could Maudie have possibly done to make even skuzzy Kent Colletto want to frighten her that way? A joke, a sick joke? I don’t think so.”

But, convinced he was right, he leaped and peered in, getting cobwebs in his whiskers.

Nothing. No truck. Only Jared’s shiny blue T-Bird, and a tan Ford sedan that was probably the family car. Dropping down, he looked at Dulcie, embarrassed. He’d been so sure, such a strong feeling. But she only grinned at him. “Good try,” she said, giving him a whisker kiss. And soon the three cats parted, Joe and Dulcie each heading home to their own supper, Kit dawdling along behind, puzzled perhaps by some faint scent, looking back over her shoulder.

Joe’s thoughts, as he raced over the rooftops, remained on Kent Colletto. The night was balmy around him, the soft breeze heavy with the smell of the sea; as he neared home, the breeze picked up the heady aroma of spaghetti coming from his own house, making him forget Kent Colletto and race faster, urgently licking his whiskers.

From his own roof, Joe looked down at the drive, surprised to see it crowded with cars. Clyde’s yellow roadster and Ryan’s red Chevy pickup stood in the carport; Dallas Garza’s tan Blazer and Charlie Harper’s red Blazer parked behind them; and on the street, Wilma Getz’s car parked behind a squad car. Was something wrong? He remembered no talk of everyone getting together for supper. Given the longer shifts the department had been working, there’d been little time for their usual impromptu gatherings.

But emergencies didn’t call for spaghetti; and as he hurried up the front steps and through his cat door, he heard only relaxed voices and easy laughter. Trotting through the living room to the big kitchen, he found them all at the table, Max and Charlie, Dallas Garza, Charlie’s Aunt Wilma, Ryan and Clyde, and Officers McFarland and Blake, both in uniform. The table wasn’t laden with spaghetti and French bread as he’d expected; supper was over, though the spaghetti pot still sat on the stove. The table was cluttered with poker chips, cards, loose change, and dollar bills. He guessed this was just an impromptu supper, Max and Dallas on call, and maybe Officers McFarland and Blake just getting off their extended shifts. He paused in the door to the kitchen listening to the familiar mix of disjointed remarks, aggressive bets, requests for cards, and a few good-natured put-downs; then he padded on in. No one seemed to notice him. In the far corner, the big silver Weimaraner was curled up fast asleep in the flowered easy chair, the little white cat asleep between Rock’s front legs, one white paw draped over Rock’s shoulder. Turning, Joe fixed his gaze on Ryan.

When she ignored him, her eyes on her cards, he gave a strident mew. Across the table, Dallas watched her, waiting to see whether she would see his raise or fold, his solemn Latino face never changing expression. Wilma Getz folded, laid down her cards, and sat with an amused expression watching Joe as he tried to get Ryan’s attention. Wilma wore a red sweatshirt over a white turtleneck, her long gray-white hair done up in a knot at the nape of her neck. She grinned at Joe as he leaped to the kitchen counter, but then she gave him a questioning look—clearly asking where Dulcie was.

Joe blinked and washed his paws and tried to look at ease, to convey to her that Dulcie had gone on home. He knew Wilma would have left a hearty snack for Dulcie, as she always did. He guessed Kit had headed home, too, where, no matter the hour, her two humans would fix a hot supper for her. Lucinda and Pedric would probably by now be doing up the supper dishes or sitting before the fire reading to each other, the tall, thin octogenarians pleasantly tired after a day’s ramble up in the hills or along the coast. Still watching Ryan, Joe shifted from paw to paw. Couldn’t she see he was starving?

“Raise two,” Ryan said, “and two cards.” When still she paid no attention, Joe gave her a series of bloodcurdling yowls that made young McFarland jump and then laugh, made both Max and Dallas scowl at him. Ryan paid no attention. Crowley said, “Ryan, feed your cat. I’ve won this hand anyway.”

Joe stared at Ryan until she won the pot and raked in her money; then at long last she rose.“Deal me out,” she said, turning away from the table, fixing her gaze on the tomcat. “You needn’t be so bossy.”

Unable to reply, he could only glower. Moving to the stove, she dished up a serving of spaghetti and slipped it in the microwave for a few seconds. Setting the warmed plate on the counter before him, she scratched his ear, winked at him, then turned away, returning to the table. Joe was still slurping spaghetti when Charlie raked in the next pot.

“That makes me feel better,” Charlie said. “If you’re still stewing about Nancyanne Prewitt,” Max said, “forget it. Don’t pay any attention to that stuff.” “I can’t help it. I’m surprised anyone reads theGazette anymore. It isn’t fit to wrap fish.” When Ryan looked up questioningly, Charlie said, “She cornered Wilma and me coming out of the plaza, and she really laid it on.”

Wilma laughed, and put down her cards.“I had trouble not punching her in the face, right there in front of Tiffany’s.”

Joe hid a smile, imagining Wilma punching out that overdressed airhead reporter. Wilma could do it, too. Her self-defense skills had been well honed over her twenty-year career as a federal officer. But it was true, the pressure from this new editor and reporter and from a few sour citizens, as well as from two city council members, had to be wearing. Particularly on Max, on everyone in the department. Max Harper had served this town well for his entire career. MPPD had one of the lowest crime rates, and one of the highest rates of arrests for crimes reported, of anywhere in the state. But now suddenly the villagers, goaded by misinformation, seemed to have forgotten the high performance of their police. And the invasions weren’t over yet.

So far, the evidence that Detectives Dallas Garza and Kathleen Ray had logged in wasn’t adding up to much. Every set of footprints, whether photographed or in the form of a cast or taken by alternate light source, was different: different shoes, different sizes. The threads and fragments of cloth they’d bagged didn’t match one another, nor did the few strands of human hairs. They had picked up no fingerprints but the victims’ own or those of family members or neighbors. Their canvassing of neighborhoods and the fingerprinting of neighbors were time-consuming and costly. The department had taken men off patrol to help interview, and even the descriptions the victims gave were varied, from two tall men, to a tall man and a blond woman, to a short, stocky man. And to top it all off, the department’s three unknown snitches, who normally would have come up with some useful information, hadn’t even checked in.

The faint fish scent that Kit had found was the first clue the cats had that the cops didn’t. And how could their supposedly human snitch report an elusive smell that no human would easily have discovered? Did a human snitch go around sniffing at doorways?

The invasions hadn’t occurred in any geographic pattern, either, that anyone had been able to figure out, though they were all within the city limits. There was no time pattern. No economic or ethnic or gender or age pattern. Detective Ray had tried correlating all the various elements—time of day, day of the week, sex, age, profession, and ethnicity of victims, locations—into various computer charts, attempting to get a fix on some master plan, but so far she’d come up with nothing. Kathleen Ray might sometimes be a bit too empathetic with the victims, but she was sharp and quick, and was a genius at the computer. The tall, dark-haired beauty had, surprisingly, left a promising modeling career, disenchanted with the people she had to work with. She’d gone back to school and, after graduating from the police academy in San Jose, had signed on with the department as a rookie cop and was fast turning into a capable detective. Now, with Detective Juana Davis on vacation, Harper was relieved to have Kathleen on board.

Max Harper had done three interviews for theGazette, urging people to take certain precautions to avoid a forced breakin. But not every villager paid attention to precautions, thinking,“That won’t happen to me.” In too many households, that seemed to be the operable response. Folks depended on MPPD to protect them, and gave little thought to how they might protect themselves. So many humans, Joe thought, seemed to have forgotten the principles of self-preservation, relying on others for their security—like pampered housecats who, never having learned to hunt, lay around the house waiting for someone to open the cat food. In Joe’s case, the fact that he might yowl at Ryan to serve up the spaghetti or make him an omelet didn’t mean he couldn’t trot on out to thehills and catch his own supper, when he chose to do so.

At the poker table, Ryan was saying,“Maudie worries me, up there alone with that little boy. I don’t know what it is about her …” Letting the thought drift, she picked up her cards as Dallas dealt, and then looked across at Max. “L.A. still has no lead on the shooter?”

“None.” Max frowned. “What is it? What’s bothering you?”

“I don’t know, something about the way Maudie … When we talked about the shooting, I got the feeling she was holding back. I don’t know what it is, maybe just one of those feelings. Probably means nothing.”

But Joe Grey, watching his housemate, knew exactly the sense of wrongness that bothered Ryan. Therewas something about Maudie, a shadow behind the scenes, visible only in a certain light.

Max glanced at his cards, realized it was his bet, and slid a dollar to the center of the table.“Maudie was the only witness to the shooting,” he said, “and she swears she couldn’t identify the shooter. The sheriff thinks the three children told the truth, that they saw nothing. Pearl Toola was the only suspect they had. She stayed in L.A. long enough to cooperate in the investigation, then got permission to move down to San Diego. She gave L.A. the address and phone number of a friend there, I guess she didn’t think they’d check.

“She never showed up at that address,” he continued. “L.A. had no further information on her. Because of their heavy workload and no other leads, they put out an APB on her and temporarily shelved the case.”

Dallas dealt the last card of seven-card stud and raised a quarter. Joe was always amused at the high stakes of these friendly games. If a person came out five dollars the winner, that was a big victory, enough to gloat about for days.

Max said,“There’s always the chance the shooter will show up here. I’ve talked with Maudie, suggested she needs to be careful, to report anything that seems strange.”

Ryan looked at him, started to speak, then went silent. So, Joe thought, she hadn’t told him about the truck—but maybe she would soon if Maudie didn’t. Behind them, over in the corner, Rock woke. Lying on his back, he huffed once, staring upside down at the too-noisy humans. Wilma was shuffling the cards when the phone rang.

Ryan rose to answer, listened for a minute, then,“Hang on, I can’t hear with everyone talking.” Glancing across at Wilma and laying down the phone, she headed for the guest room. “Will you hang up for me?” she said, pushing back a lock of stray hair.

Wilma rose quickly at their little private signal. And Joe Grey dropped to the floor. Whatever the call was about, it surely involved Dulcie—or the call was from Dulcie, and that would have to be an emergency. Yawning, trying to look casual, he followed Ryan into the guest room where he could listen as she took the call on the extension.

18

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THE DAMEN GUEST room had once been the master bedroom when the house was a small, one-story cottage. The new second floor with its sprawling master suite included Clyde’s office and now a studio-office for Ryan as well; and this downstairs room had been completely changed into a charming guest retreat. The faded and anonymous bachelor furnishings that had suited Clyde and Joe had gone to Goodwill. They had been replaced by wicker and leather furniture and bright, primitive rugs, a far more elegant treatment than Clyde had ever wanted for himself. Slipping in behind Ryan, Joe leaped to the wicker desk where she sat talking softly on the phone.

Putting her arm around him, she drew him close so he could listen. Sitting tall beside her, his ear to the phone, the tomcat tried not to tickle her face with his whiskers. The voice at the other end was Lucinda Greenlaw.“No, Kit’s not home yet,” she was saying worriedly. “We haven’t seen her since early this morning, she’s been gone all day. Is Joe home? Is Dulcie? Kit’s nearly always home for supper, she’s been coming home so regularly, until tonight.”

Snuggled next to Ryan, Joe could see down the hall if anyone left the poker table and headed their way; he could see the corner of the kitchen, where the wall phone hung. He watched Wilma step to the extension and pick up. She listened for a moment, then hung up and headed for the guest room. As Wilma joined them, Ryan turned, shielding the sight of Joe from the kitchen, and held the headpiece at an angle so both Joe and Wilma could hear, and so they could speak with Lucinda. The banter out at the poker table was more than enough to hide the tomcat’s husky voice.

“Kit was with us,” Joe told Lucinda softly. “Maudie Toola went to her sister’s for dinner, that’s where we were. Not to worry,” he said, “we all left together. Maybe she stopped on the roofs to chase bats. She’ll be along soon,” he said reassuringly. “If she’s not home in halfan hour, call back and I’ll go look for her.”

He turned away from the phone wondering why Kit had to be so damned flighty. He hadn’t wanted Lucinda to worry, hadn’t told her how wired Kit was when they parted, going off by herself stubbornly lashing her tail when Joe and Dulcie headed for home. He was thinking that yellow tomcat had set her off when Wilma said, “If she isn’t home, maybe she and Dulcie are together, maybe Kit’s at my house.”

Joe hissed gently at Wilma.Just let it be, he thought. Kit might be foolish enough to race after a strange tomcat, but Dulcie wouldn’t. And what was the fuss about? He and Dulcie and Kit roamed the village at all hours; he’d thought their human families had gotten past this unnecessary worry. Tonight, everyone seemed on edge, too quick to react. That was okay for the law, but it was a different matter for the cats’ human housemates.

Lucinda said she felt better after talking with Joe, and she ended the call. Hanging up the phone, Wilma gave Joe a hard look.“It doesn’t get any easier, worrying about you three.” Picking up the phone again, she dialed her own number and waited for the machine to kick in. “If you’re home,” she said, not mentioning Dulcie’s name on the tape, “please pick up. It’s important.” They didn’t use names over the phone, they kept matters as vague as they could, in case they were ever overheard by the wrong party, or someone else played the tape. She was about to hang up when a small female voice said, “I’m here.”

“Are you all right?”

“Fine,” Dulcie said. “Just finishing up the shrimp casserole, and about to start on the custard. Lovely,” she said, purring into the phone in an excess of carelessness.

“I’ll be home soon,” Wilma told her, and quickly she hung up. “I didn’t tell her that Kit wasn’t home, she’d go out looking, and …”

“I’ll go,” Joe said, and at Ryan’s worried frown, “Go on back to the poker table, before your luck changes.”

Ryan reached to stroke him, trying to look unconcerned about Kit. She’d lived with the tomcat only since February, when she and Clyde were married. She’d known the truth about Joe’s extraordinary skills only since Christmas, and she still worried about him, she worried about all three of these special cats with their unsettling talents and their foolhardy forays into human affairs. Three little sleuths out on the streets trying to right the wrongs of the world. If she thought too much about their clandestine activities, she was left with a frightened, sinking feeling in her stomach.

Clyde said it took a person with imagination and courage to accept and to live equitably with a speaking cat. He said a rigid, inflexible mind couldn’t wrap itself around the concept, that rigid thinking didn’t allow for the wonders that might exist in the world like half-seen shadows around them. As Ryan and Wilma returned to the kitchen, Joe raced for the stairs, meaning to hit the roofs to look for Kit—he paused when he heard Max’s cell phone emit its rattlesnake buzz. One of the department’s computer gurus had, just recently, changed the signal for Max, and the sound still unnerved the tomcat. When Max said, “Garza’s on his way,” Joe waited, peering into the kitchen, listening.

“Put the additional patrols on the street,” Max said, “and call Detective Ray.” The chief looked across at Dallas, who had risen and was pulling on his jacket.

“Two restaurants,” Max said. “Blue Bistro and the Flying Galleon. They broke out the front window of the Bistro. A pedestrian saw two dark-clad figures running away, saw no moving car.”

Dallas nodded, and he and the two uniforms were out the door. Joe heard the Blazer and the squad car peel away and swing a fast turn up at the corner, their tires squealing. Joe was tempted to race out and follow them across the rooftops, but he was more inclined to wait for what might follow—maybe Max would take another call. Though the odds were long against such prompt discovery of an accompanying invasion, nevertheless Joe waited, as tense as the chief himself.

So far, all seven invasions had followed this diversionary MO. After the first two forced entries, each preceded by downtown breakins to distract the police, Max’s contingency plan had gone into place. Pulling officers from their homes and beds at the first report of a midtown burglary, they hit the residential streets, doubling neighborhood patrol, watching for any suspicious activity, waiting for the report of a breakin. The village might be only a mile square, but the neighborhoods were dense, the streets crooked and narrow among the wooded hills, the cottages close together, and some of them tucked behind others so they were nearly invisible from the street. And in the questionable interest of “atmosphere,” as the city council called it, Molena Point had no streetlights. At night, the crowded residential areas were as dark as the inside of a sealed rat hole, inviting all manner of mischief.

The chief paced, tense and irritable, and in the hall, Joe fidgeted, both the chief and the tomcat willing the inevitable invasion call to come through, though the odds were indeed against such a quick cry for help. It took time for these lone women, who were tied up or beaten, to summon assistance. In all the previous cases, their phone lines had been cut or the phones removed. At one house, the detached phones were found buried in the outdoor garbage can. Now, Max was too impatient to stay in the house. He was headed out the door when the snake rattled again. Max picked up, listened.

“On my way,” he said. He nodded to Ryan, planted a kiss on Charlie’s forehead, and was gone. Even as his pickup peeled away, Joe vanished up the stairs, leaped to Clyde’s desk, from desk to the heavy beam, out his cat door, through his tower, and out its open window, his paws pounding shingles as he followed the sound of Harper’s pickup.

19

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THIS INVASION WAS as carefully planned as the others, but this one took just the two of them before joining the others to break up a couple of downtown restaurants. This lone woman was elderly and wasn’t close with her neighbors, wouldn’t have neighbors checking on her. All the hours they’d watched the place, they’d seen no neighborly visiting back and forth. Only one car in her garage, jammed in among boxes and trash, and there was never a second car in the drive, never any visitors. That first rush was the best, when they forced their way inside—when they rang the bell and the dumb broad opened right up to them. That first rush of the attack, slamming the door open in her face hard enough to knock her down. They’d kicked her a couple of times to keep her quiet and then trampled over her into the house.

They cased these places carefully before they went in, always knew if the mark was alone, always a different neighborhood, one poor, the next one well-to-do, it didn’t matter, and always a different time of night or day. Not all the marks lived alone, but each was alone at the time they rang the bell. They’d watched this house all afternoon, watched her pull her car out of the garage, one of them pretending to jog the neighborhood while the other parked out of sight. If they were doing this for the money gained by what they walked away with, it would be a washout, they’d be earning pennies an hour. But they were paid in other ways.

When she left, they’d followed her, driving real slow like she did. Big outing for the old girl, seven blocks to the local grocery. Followed her inside, walked the aisles as she did, making sure she wasn’t buying more than usual, wasn’t in fact expecting guests.

But she’d been shopping for only one: a quarter pound of hamburger, a small head of lettuce, one tomato. Pitiful, a lone woman, timid and careful in her ways—and stupid enough to open the door in the near dark, to a stranger. You had to laugh, people so trusting they’d let anyone in. Didn’t they read the papers? What did they think would happen, what did they expect? Standing over the cowering woman, they’d laughed at her and eased the door closed behind them, shutting out any view from the street. Though it didn’t matter much, the entrance really couldn’t be seen, the way the house was positioned and the door sheltered by those trellises hung heavy with some flowering vine, thick, dark leaves sprawling up the walls—another example of how foolish people were, inviting anyone to stand hidden in the shadows.

The woman was scared silly even before they gagged her, too scared to do more than croak out a whisper. She lay huddled on the wrinkled-up rug, her hands over her bleeding face, terrified they’d kick her again, begging them not to hurt her anymore. They liked that, they were in control. They took turns, one trashing the house, breaking dishes and furniture and little figurines, while the other fondled and teased her until she was white and shaking, terrified they’d rape her.

Of course they never did, Arlie didn’t want that complication. Didn’t want any shooting or rape, with the DNA evidence. Didn’t want the heavier sentence in case something went wrong—not that it would, not with him running things, Arlie was a master of deception.

They never bothered to steal much, only enough to make it look like a burglary. These diversions had nothing to do with selling stolen goods, that wasn’t the intent. Arlie paid his people well enough, and he was, as he put it, in it himself for another kind of payback.

More likely, if he told the truth—which Arlie was never famous for—he was in it for what others paidhim, which might be considerable. He’d never talk about that, he’d just say, “For the payback,” and smile in that way that made a person’s spine crawl and leave it to your own imagination: the scenario wasn’t hard to figure out, though he’d never admit to doing this stuff for hire.

When they’d left this mark there in her trashed house, the way they’d gagged and tied her, it would take her a long time to call for help, would be hours before she could manage to reach the phone. And then when she did, she’d find it dead, the line to the wall cut and useless. There was an extension in the bedroom, but it would take her a while to make it up the stairs and get it plugged back in. That was fine, they didn’t want hernot to call. The whole point was for her frantic call to the cops to be too late, the damage already done, her attackers long gone, the ensuing publicity enough to keep the village on edge until the next invasion.

After they tied her up, they’d touched base with Arlie there on the street and then headed into the center of the village, taking their time, at last joining the others to trash the two restaurants. What a ball, broken glass, broken furniture everywhere. By the time the cops swarmed in they’d been well away from the shattered windows and trashed interiors; they’d watched from some distance, hidden among the shadows as the black-and-whites came scorching in, their sirens screaming, red lights spinning—only then, still laughing, had they gotten the hell out of there. And the cops had no notion that elsewhere in the village, another invasion had come down. That call shouldn’t come in for hours, maybe not until morning.

20

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EVEN AFTER THE two darkly dressed figures had left, Nannette Garver couldn’t cry out for help. The gag in her injured mouth was so tight it sent pain through her whole face and throat. She felt as if she were suffocating. Her jaw hurt so bad where they’d kicked her, she thought it might be broken. She lay on the living room floor, her legs bent double and bound up toher waist with heavy rope, her hands tied behind her. One big upholstered chair was overturned, her two small side chairs broken almost to kindling. Books had been pulled from the shelves, pages torn out in handfuls. The little porcelain figurines that she so loved, the little rabbits and running children, all were broken into jagged shards.

She didn’t think she could stand the pain of the gag much longer. But of course she had no choice. The phone lay across the room, where they’d knocked it off the little writing desk. When she tried to roll to it, she was jerked back—was tethered, like a tied-up dog, to the leg of the heavy armoire. She tried gingerly to pull it along with her, afraid it would fall on top of her. But it was too heavy to move at all, with the big old TV inside. She wondered if, with the receiver off the phone, that would alert 911.

But she knew better. She’d taken the receiver off many times when she didn’t want to be bothered with phone calls from salesmen or annoying pollsters. If you took the headset off, the canned voice would come on for a while, then the beeping would start, would go on and on until eventually blessed silence fell. Now shedidn’t bless the promise of silence, but prayed someonewas at the other end, someone to help her.

She thought if she could get free of the heavy armoire, even with her legs bent double and her hands tied behind her, she could roll or squirm across the room to the phone, thought that even with her hands tied and useless, she could depress the buttons on the fallen phone somehow, maybe with her chin. She couldn’t just give up, she had to do something.

The minute the robbers were out of the house, as soon as she’d heard a car pull away, she’d begun to fight the rope that tied her hands, wriggling and pulling, bending her fingers trying to get a grip on the knots. The harsh hemp fibers tore at her skin, she could feel the blood start. She hated the increasing frailty of her body as she grew older.

She’d be eternally thankful they hadn’t raped her. Because of disease, because of injuries, mostly because of the emotional distress, the terrible shame that would never go away. At seventy-two, a widow for ten years, she was sure the distress of such brutality would have been worse than if they killed her.

She wondered why therehad been no rapes in these invasions. She’d followed the news on TV and in the paper, but she never thought it would happen to her. Only now did she see how stupid that was. She wondered if these people were afraid of the prosecution involved with rape. This county attorney was known for getting maximum sentences when it came to sex offenders; he had been criticized more than once for what some called his one-sided view of the law. And didn’t that make a person laugh.

But if these men were so afraid of the law, and, according to the news, they stole no more than a few items, mostly electronics that could be easily sold, why did they bother at all? What was this about, these forced breakins, this terrifying emotional harassment?

It seemed hours passed as she worked at the knots, her fingers raw and bleeding from the rough hemp rope, blood making the knots so slick that she nearly gave up. But at last, when she was about at the end of her strength, her hands and arms shaking with fatigue, the knot she was working on loosened a little. It was so slippery. She mustn’t lose the feel of just where to pull, to untie it all the way. It seemed to take forever, but at last she worked the knot loose, felt the rope ease enough so she could slide her right hand free. Her left hand was bound separately, tied to the rope that went around her waist and legs.

With the one free hand she pulled herself up enough to work loose the rope around the leg of the armoire, tearing two nails to the quick. When the rope fell away, when she was free of the armoire, she rolled painfully to the center of the room. Her own weight on her doubled-up legs, as she rolled over on them, was excruciating.

Pausing to rest, she tried again to remove the gag, pulling and jerking at it. The blood from her hand at last turned it slick enough that she was able to slide it down around her chin, down until it circled her neck. Everything was bloody—her face, her clothes, the carpet were all smeared with blood.

She rested again, then tried once more to free her hand, which had gone to sleep beneath the tight rope that bound her waist and legs. She fought the knots until she was convinced she couldn’t loosen them. She looked toward the phone again, and again began to squirm across the carpet, heavy and clumsy and hurting, with her legs and one arm bound. She had gone only a little way, to the edge of the flowered easy chair, when she realized she was whimpering like a hurt puppy, a pitiful,begging sound.

Silencing herself, she wriggled like an injured beast toward the fallen phone, toward the one item in the room that could liberate her, toward her one contact with the world beyond her own walls.

It seemed to take another eternity before she reached the phone. She felt weak and confused. Could feel the double beating of her heart that sometimes happened when she was under stress. Hunching forward, she pressed her face against the fallen headset.

Of course it was dead, having been off the hook for so long. With her bleeding hand she depressed the button, waited with her face to the phone for the dial tone to resume. She waited a long time. When the phone remained silent, she pressed the button again, held it longer this time. Then again, her ear to the fallen phone, listening.

No dial tone, no sound. No little canned voice telling her to hang up and try again. Just a hollow emptiness as vast as eternal space. After a third try she pulled the cord toward her. Watched it snake away from the wall, the cut line slithering to her, the cut wires sharp and useless against her fingers.

The only other phone was upstairs. Bound as she was, she didn’t think she could make it up the steps. And had they cut that line, too? Cut both phone lines, intending to lead her on uselessly? Imagining herself hunching and crawling up the stairs only to find that phone dead, too, she lay down with her face against the carpet, tears spurting uncontrollably. She felt destroyed, beaten, beyond trying to think what to do.

All her windows were closed against the chill evening and because, how ironic, she was wary about breakins. Praying that some neighbor was home and would hear her despite those glass barriers, she tried to shout. She was very hoarse, her voice so weak she didn’t think anyone would hear. She wondered if young Bobby West might have his window open upstairs despite his mother’s complaints. Beverly said he’d have the house freezing all the time if she didn’t make him close that window. Expecting no response, still she tried. Even the effort of shouting hurt so badly, and exhausted her.

Death from thirst and starvation seemed impossible, right here in the little village among the closely crowded cottages, with neighbors all around. She had no relatives living close who might call or come by, wanting to check on her. How long might it be until one of her casual friends tried to reach her, tried so many times they grew impatient and reported her number out of order? And would the phone company actually come out to take a look? Despite her friends’ admonitions to get a cell phone, she had never wanted one. Until now.

When her strength returned a little, she thought about the cut phone line, and she hunched toward the wall until she found the other cut end. With one hand, she managed to hold the two cut ends together, hoping they might connect and allow a signal to come through. But she was too clumsy, the wires wouldn’t join just right. The blood was so slick, everything slippery and her fingers so stiff, too. Twice she thought she had the wires joined right, but when she bent her face to the handset there was no sound, the phone remained dead. At last, so weak she couldn’t think straight, she lay limp on the carpet, defeated, wondering if she would die there—and wondering, inanely, if she could ever get the blood out of the Persian carpet.

21

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MAX’S PICKUP MOVED so fast that Joe Grey lost it only a block from home. He raced on across the night-dark roofs stubbornly following its sound as it sped south. He could see, away in the center of the village, a gathering of bright lights and whirling red lights reflected against the sky and could hear the distant mutter of police radios—that would be the restaurant breakins, but Max wasn’t headed there.

The sound of the pickup grew fainter, still bearing south. Joe had traveled a dozen blocks when, far ahead, the truck’s soft rumble died, faded into silence. Racing on over slick roof tiles and mossy shingles, and across shadowed tree branches above dark and tangled gardens, he listened for the truck door to open. He heard nothing, only the hushing of the sea, five blocks away. Ahead against the night sky rose the spire of the Methodist Church, thrusting above the black silhouettes of surrounding houses. Leaping from a pine tree onto the church roof, he raced up its highest peak. Had he lost Harper?

Through the trees below him, no car lights reflected, the neighborhood was uniformly dark. At this height, the sea wind hit him full in the face; the balmy evening had grown chill, the shingles cold beneath his paws. In this residential area, even at this early hour, most of the houses were dark, as if the more elderly occupants were already tucked in for the night, while maybe the younger ones were out partying. He was cursing himself for having lost Harper when the scream of a siren blasted nearly below him, flashing red lights stained the sky and an emergency van raced past—he took off after it as if the devil himself were on his tail.

Ahead, the siren whooped and died as the white emergency van swerved into a driveway—and there was Max Harper’s pickup, parked and waiting. The van nearly grazed a police unit that was pulling in. Another patrol car drew up across the street from them, in front of the church just beneath where Joe crouched, his claws in the shingles trying not to slide down its steeply angled peak.

The house was a small, two-story Craftsman-style cottage, its wood siding painted off white with a soft blue trim, its front door set deep beneath a sheltering roof and flanked by climbing vines. The front garden was excessively neat, the small, manicured lawn edged with borders of bright impatiens. Joe came down from the peak of the church to its lower roof, pausing with his paws in the metal gutter, watching the emergency unit as its side doors opened and three medics piled out, heading for the shadowed front door. Max pulled shards of jagged glass out of the broken front door, reached through and released the lock. Pushing the door open, he eased through, gun drawn, and soon disappeared inside, where Joe could hear a faint cry. Behind Max, two officers entered, their weapons drawn; the three medics waited for them to clear the house.

A light came on from deep within; Joe heard Max’s voice and a woman’s faint, hoarse reply. As the EMTs hauled out their emergency medical equipment, Joe watched the street and the dark yards. He saw no movement, no one hidden among the neighborhood’s overgrown bushes, no one slipping away. Surely by now the perps were long gone. When the medics moved on inside, Joe dropped onto the roof of their van. There he waited until wiry Officer Reynolds, who stood by the front door, glanced the other way. Quickly Joe dropped to the driveway, slipped into the bushes and inside the house, melting into the shadows beneath a broken end table. He wanted, before the officers’ various personal scents compromised the scene, to try to pick up the invader’s trail, maybe even find the unlikely scent of old fish that had so intrigued Kit.

The first smell that hit him was a nose-tingling stink of perfume that sure didn’t belong to any of the officers present. The second scent was indeed a whiff of aging fish so strong that it prompted an uncomfortable gag reflex. Cats were not dogs, dogs reveled in such stinks. One thing was certain: the two smells together could hide any fainter, personal aroma the perps might have left.

Across the living room, the victim sat on the bloody Persian carpet, speaking in a scratchy, nearly inaudible voice to Harper and the two medics who were crouched beside her. She was as thin and frail as a hungry bird, white-haired, thin-boned, dressed in a peach-toned velvet lounge suit stained liberally with blood. Her birdlike hands were torn and bloody, one side of her thin face swollen, bruised and bleeding. The other officers had disappeared. Slipping out from under the remains of the little table, Joe slid in between an upholstered chair and a broken ottoman, where he could better watch the action.

The pretty, flowered living room was a shambles, side chairs and small tables overturned and broken, the flowered couch and matching chair slashed so deeply that the stuffing spilled out like dirty snow. Books, torn-out pages, and pieces of china littered the bloody carpet, the whole room had been destroyed as if with a pointless and cruel pleasure. Max looked disgusted and grim, as did the two medics, but it was Joe’s own reaction that was most worrisome to the tomcat.

He felt terrible for the poor woman. He wanted to pat her poor torn face with a soft paw, wanted to lick her hurt hands, tell her how sorry he was, he wanted to make everything all right again, for her. This wasn’t like him, this degree of sympathy was not his style, he thought uneasily. Was he growing soft? Maybe it was the holiday season turning him sentimental, all this Christmas cheer and goodwill muddying his usual detachment, he thought with dismay.

BUT JOE GREY wasn’t the only cat to feel sympathy for the suffering woman, he was not the only cat on the scene. From the roof of the invaded house, tortoiseshell Kit peered over, her black and brown coat blending into the night. She had arrived long before Max Harper’s truck pulled to the curb and the emergency van and police cars came racing. It was Kit who first heard the woman’s pitiful cries. Though she hadn’t been able to get inside, after considerable effort she’d found a phone, had made the call to 911, had seen the law arrive: Harper, the medics, the squad cars. Only when she saw Joe Grey come streaking across the roofs did she slip behind the chimney, not wanting Joe to see her, feeling suddenly too embarrassed by her own preoccupation, inexplicably shy and uncertain.

What a strange night it had been, she was all sparks and fidgets. First that peculiar Colletto family with their prissy habits and their sleazy son, the rude way Kent treated his parents that had left her so angry. Then when the cats left the Colletto house, Joe and Dulcie heading home, Kit caught the lingering scent of the yellow tomcat and she’d hung back. Studying the surrounding roofs, she didn’t see him but she knew he was nearby. Then suddenly there he was, a pale shape padding along a branch above the Collettos’ garage, looking straight down at her.

He had looked for a long moment, and then had moved away across the oak limb, but glancing back, wanting her to follow. Putting aside her unease, Kit had followed. She’d reminded herself that he was a very big tomcat, that she was alone, that she’d never really seen him clearly, that she didn’t have Joe and Dulcie to fight beside her if he turned aggressive. But so far he hadn’t bothered them, he’d only watched as if he were curious. And shewas a strong fighter, she’d thought boldly. She’d followed him because her dreams of a handsome soul mate wouldn’t let her do otherwise, because he might be the one mate in all the world she’d waited for and dreamed about. She’d followed through the treetops and across the roofs into the center of the village. There he slowed.

Where the shop roofs crowded close, he’d stayed to the deepest shadows, stopping every little while to look down at the streets and then to look back at her, and there was an urgency in his journey. His route took him across Ocean where the wide street narrowed, to the south part of the village near the steeple of the Methodist Church. Just before he reached it he paused. She heard from below a man’s chuckle and a low laugh that seemed to have no gender, that could have come from a man or a woman, she couldn’t be sure.

The tomcat backed away into the dark beneath a second-floor balcony, where he could see below and could listen. Kit felt that he wanted her to do the same, though who would care if there was a cat watching? The laughter came not from the small pickup parked on the street before the church, but from a dark sedan that had drawn to the curb behind it, a big four-door vehicle as sleek and daunting as a limousine. A figure stood beside it talking with the driver, their laughter quiet but with overtones that made her fur crawl. As she watched, a third figure got out of the pickup and joined them, slipping into the passenger seat of the sedan, and an elusive whiff of their scents drifted up. Their laughter and voices were as hushed and slithery as a wind stirring beach sand.

The pickup parked in front was old, its dark color undetectable in the night. It appeared badly dented, as beat up as the one that had nearly run down Maudie, and Kit wanted a closer look. She was sniffing for the humans’ scents when one of the men said softly, “She can’t untie herself, hell, she might never be found.” Kit pricked her ears, startled.

“That won’t do us any good,” the driver of the car said with disgust. Listening, Kit leaned farther. “She can last until tomorrow, can’t she? How bad did you hurt her? You remember what I told you!” The man’s voice, as low-pitched as it was, seemed somehow familiar. Kit stood with herpaws in the damp gutter peering over, trying to get a look at him.

“Of course I remember,” the other whispered crossly. “We just roughed her up, is all.”

Straining to listen, Kit nearly lost her balance. She backed away, alarmed, still trying to identify the man’s cold, superior tones that struck such fear into her heart.

“She’ll last,” the other said, “so what difference does it make?”

“You want murder on the ticket?” the familiar voice said. “Why do you think we don’t rape and kill them! You want to go before a hanging judge? One of you keep watch. If no one finds her by late tomorrow, call the cops yourself—you’re an unidentified neighbor—and make sure you use thethrowaway phone.”

“What do you think? We’re stupid?” The tall, thin man sounded young, though he spoke only in a grainy whisper. Why did he keep looking around into the night, fidgeting and shifting as if he thought they were being watched? That made the tortoiseshell smile. He didn’t know half how closely they were observed, who the observer was, or what she’d do with the information.

“The paper has a front-page piece ready to go,” the other said, “written, ready to insert, a nice two columns for the villagers to read over breakfast.” Still, Kit could see nothing of the figure inside the dark car. She looked away to the blackness where the pale tomcat crouched. Did he know these lowlifes? What exactly was his interest, and why had he led her there? She could just make out the curve of his pale back beneath the balcony’s rail.

The moment the pickup left, the tomcat came out from the shadows into a path of moonlight, stood looking after the vehicle. Now, for the first time with the moonlight full on him, Kit got a good look at him.

Oh, my. The surprise that she felt—and the disappointment—rippled through her clear down to her dark little paws.

22

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ONE LOOK AT the yellow tomcat and all Kit’s grand dreams slid away, crumbled like the walls of a ruined castle; she was as shocked as if the fairy-tale prince had turned into a toad. This was not the fine young tom she’d dreamed of, this was not the mate she’d waited for, whom she’d thought had finally found her. This cat was incredibly old.

She could see that he had once been powerful, even now his bony shoulders were broad beneath his ragged yellow fur. But his tail was thin in the way of an old cat, his muzzle was extended with age, his skin hung slack. Now he was frail and ancient, more in need of tender kindness than a wild romp over the green hills. Now for the first time, with the sea wind blowing in her face, she caught his scent clearly enough to realize it was thescent of an old cat, very different from a strapping young tom. And as Kit’s heart made the painful adjustment, her eager longing turned away from romantic dreams and she was filled with a shaky sense of desperation at the terrible frailty of old age.

But the tomcat’s yellow eyes were clear and intelligent, and when he turned away, following the black sedan, breaking into a gallop, he was surprisingly fast for someone his age. Not lithe or agile, but he kept up with the car and pickup for several blocks before they left him, vanishing down the hill. His interest in this human drama intrigued her. Why did he care? Who was he? Where he had come from, and what had brought him here?

Now that she was aware of his venerable age, she could imagine no aura of evil about him. He was not like the black tom, Azrael, who had once come on to her, rude and bold and demanding, who had helped his drunken human companion rob the village shops.

She’d wanted to follow him, but somewhere nearby an invasion had occurred, and her urgency to find the house, find the victim, and to know how badly those men had hurt her was stronger.

The house had to be nearby, if those men had just come from there. She had studied the dark yards below, willing herself to hear any faintest cry. She’d heard nothing but the distant surf and the sea wind fingering through the treetops. She’d wandered the roofs looking and listening but had heard nothing until the wind slackened, and then she heard a woman’s faint, thin cry, a plaintive voice that sent Kit bolting across the shingles and across the gaps between roofs to where an olive tree hugged a modest frame house. When the cry came again she dropped down through the branches and slipped along through the yard through the soft crowns of coral bell bushes. Again the cry, and Kit had looked for a way in, maybe a window open to the cool evening or the front door jimmied. The tomcat had disappeared.

The front door was locked. The high little decorative glass window was broken, but the glass shards stuck up like giant shark’s teeth, ready to cut a little cat in two. At the spot along the wall where the cry came loudest, she caught the scent of blood, a metallic whiff seeping even through the wood siding that sent her leaping up at the nearest closed window. Clinging to the sill, pulling and clawing at the casing with one small armored paw, she fought to slide the glass back. When that failed, she tried the other windows, she’d tried all the way around the house, when she heard sirens. Were they coming here? Had someone seen the invasion and called the dispatcher?

But then she heard their wail fade to silence off in the center of the village. That would be the diversionary burglary to distract the cops. Two crimes, committed within minutes of each other. But, she thought, smiling, this time there would be no long delay before the invasion was discovered—provided she could find a phone and alert the department; and off she went, circling the neighbors’ houses looking for an unlocked window, peering up, leaping up at closed windows until, doubling back to the invaded house, she heard snores softly from above, from the house next door. She peered up to the second floor, then scrambled up a ragged rosebush, sticking her paw with a thorn.

Yes, an open window, and within, a man’s soft snores. Heart thudding, she clawed through the screen with a dry, ripping sound. When the snores faltered, she waited until they steadied again, then pawed the screen out of the way so it wouldn’t catch in her fur, and quickly slipped inside.

She’d stood picking out the black shapes of dresser, desk, easy chair. She padded past the bed, watching warily the stout young man who sprawled asleep, the covers thrown back, the cool breeze blowing in on his bare skin. Rearing up to look atop the nightstand, she’d found no phone. She leaped atop the desk, then the dresser. Nothing. Maybe he used a cell phone, though none was in sight. Slipping out the open bedroom door and down the hall, she’d found two unoccupied bedrooms, their doors standing open. She prowled within, her breath coming quick with the need to hurry. Neither room had a phone. The door of the next bedroom was closed. When she sniffed at the crack beneath, she could taste the heavy smell of sleeping humans. Hurrying past, to the end of the hall, she found, tucked beside the descending stairs, a small home office.

Slipping inside, she leaped to the desk, nearly on top of the phone. She hit the speaker button, then scrambled to soften the sound of the dial tone which came in way too loud. When she pawed in 911, June Alpine answered, her young voice high and light, but steady. Kit kept her own voice to a whisper, terrified she’d wake someone in the next room. If the householders heard her and came searching for a prowler, they might be armed. As rigid as the California gun laws were, there was no law against arming oneself at home—with the laughable provision that the gun must be kept unloaded and locked away, separate from the locked-up ammunition. Which, if she heard anyone rise in alarm, would give her plenty of time to escape down the hall, through the far bedroom past the young sleeper, and out the torn screen before they had time to load a weapon and come searching.

She reported the injured woman to June, and gave her street directions. Molena Point cottages had no house numbers. Hitting the speaker button again to break the connection, she padded soundlessly back through the house and across the roofs to the invaded house, where she hid herself at the base of the chimney in the blackest shadows. As she waited for the patrol cars she’d summoned, the words of the invaders echoed in her head …can’t untie herself … How bad did you hurt her? She thought about the smooth-talking man who sounded so familiar and so cold, and she hoped the poor woman would be all right. That man was someone from the past, she thought, her ears back and her tail switching. But she couldn’t think who, she couldn’t give him a name or think when or where she’d seen him, only that he frightened her.

23

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PULLED FROM SOUND sleep, Dulcie sat straight up on the desk and peered out the front window where sirens cut through the night, echoing from the center of the village. She’d been so deeply asleep, waiting for Wilma to get home from playing poker at the Damens’, had fallen asleep after she answered Wilma’s phone call. Another blast ripped the night, whooping then dying, and she imagined squad cars gathered around another violent and destructive store breakin.

If thatwas where the cops were gathered, would another kind of crime have occurred as well, blocks away, and in silence? If the pattern ran true to form, there would be no 911 call for help. That victim, unable to reach a phone or cry out, would suffer alone, perhaps for how many hours before someone found her and an alarm went out. Springing off the desk, she fled for her cat door.

Despite the squad cars converged in the center of the village, she knew that doubled patrols would be searching the dark streets, watching for another, silent crime, shining their spotlights among the cottages and into dark gardens, looking for a running figure. Darkly clad officers would be walking the streets hoping to locate a victim who was unable to alert them, too injured to cry out and be heard. At times like this, Dulcie thought, the village seemed too big, too impersonal and dark; no way one small cat could hope to find a lone victim—but she could try. Scrambling up to the roofs, she raced for the middle of town first, guided by the burst of exploding lights.

The street was filled with cop cars. Across from the roof where she paused, the plate-glass windows of the Blue Bistro Caf? had been broken out, and two cops were busy stringing crime tape, a bright yellow ribbon above the sidewalk and back between the buildings. Beyond the broken glass, she could see inside where Dallas Garza was taking pictures, photographing broken tables and chairs, the damaged front counter and smashed wine bottles. The smell of spilled wine was so sharp it made her nose twitch. She could see another convergence of lights several blocks away, reflected against the sky—a second breakin. She watched the action for some time, saw Arnold Pence, the restaurant owner, skid his gray VW in among the police cars, pile out and run to the restaurant, his bedroom slippers crunching on broken glass, his heavy leather jacket flapping open over his striped pajamas. As the thin, gray-haired man argued with a young officer, demanding to be allowed inside, Dulcie reared up, looking away over the rooftops to the dark, residential parts of the village. How could anyone find the other, silent crime that was sure to have happened somewhere among the dark houses? She was pacing uncertainly when, over the tangle of police radios and men’s voices, came the wail of more sirens, distant sirens somewhere to the south.Had a victim called in?

She stood a moment, pinpointing the location, then fled toward Ocean Avenue, coming down only to streak across the two northbound lanes, across the grassy median and then the southbound lanes, and up to the roofs again, guided by her fix on the dying wails. She ran until lights shone ahead reflecting up through the trees, leading her on as surely as an airport beam must summon a lone pilot. Galloping up the last peak, she leaped to the roof of a house stage-lit by the headlamps of squad cars and Harper’s truck and an EMT van. Running along the edge of the roof, staring down at them, she nearly plowed into Kit.

“The sirens woke you?” Kit whispered, amused by Dulcie’s startled squeak.

“I was waiting for Wilma. They hit a restaurant in the village, maybe two. Cops all over, Dallas is at the scene.” She frowned at Kit.“You called the dispatcher? How did you know?”

“I was following someone,” Kit said shyly.

Dulcie pricked her ears, but said no more. Crouching shoulder to shoulder, they watched two medics emerge from the house carrying a stretcher. The woman beneath the blanket was so frail she hardly made a lump. Her face was bruised and swollen, and caked with blood; even from the roof, they could smell its metallic bitterness. The two white-coated medics eased her into the ambulance, got in behind her and pulled the doors closed. The third member of the team slipped behind the wheel and the van pulled away. As it headed for Molena Point Hospital, another squad car pulled to the curb, and Detective Kathleen Ray got out.

The tall, slim young woman was dressed in navy sweats, her long dark hair rumpled as if she’d just rolled out of bed, pulled on her clothes, and taken off. Stepping to the trunk of the black-and-white, she fetched a brown leather satchel that the cats knew contained evidence bags, some small tools, cameras, and fingerprint equipment. She turned as Max came out the front door, they spoke in low voices, then Max stepped into his truck. As he pulled away, a gray shadow slipped out of the house behind Kathleen and disappeared into the bushes. Not until Kathleen went inside did the leaves of a pittosporum rattle and part. Joe looked up at them and clawed his way up a spindly pine treeto the roof, giving Dulcie a warm nudge.

“The woman lives alone,” he said. “Nannette Garver. They beat her up pretty bad. She doesn’t know who called it in, her phone is dead, they cut the cord.” He looked at Kit. “Did you call the station? From where? How did you know?”

“From the house next door,” Kit said. “I found a window open, but before that, I saw them, I saw the men, and maybe a woman, I’m not sure. I heard them talking, I think I recognized one man’s voice, and one was driving the same pickup that nearly hit Maudie. There were three darkly dressed men, a black car like a limo. It was the driver who sounded familiar and …”

“Slow down, Kit!” they both said.

She tried to go slower. But only at the very last did she tell them about the yellow tomcat and how he had led her there.“As if he knew there’d be an invasion,” she said.“How did he know? Oh my, he’s like us, but he’s very old, so old he’s white around the muzzle but when those men left he followed them, chased the black car and all three were wearing stockings over their faces and—”

“Kit!” Dulcie mewed.

“Slow down,” Joe snapped.

Kit stopped for breath, staring at the two of them.“Could the thin one have been Kent Colletto? The one who drove the truck? Kent looked so superior at dinner when they talked about the invasions. Could he have left the house after we did, after we looked in the garage? It was so dark I couldn’t see his face.”

“Kent has a juvenile record,” Joe said. “He …” He stopped speaking, lifted his head, sniffing the shifting breeze and then scanning the rooftops. Catching the tomcat’s lingering scent, he rose and trotted across the shingles, pausing where the scent clung heavily among overhanging leaves, where the tom must have lingered, watching them and listening.

For a moment, Joe paused at the edge of the roof looking down at the officers below, but then he moved on. He supposed they had about all the information they’d get until Kathleen’s report lay on Max’s desk tomorrow morning and he could read it at his leisure. And off he went, following the tomcat, wanting to know how this newcomer fit into the action. Was he a friend, or was he part of the problem?

He followed the scent to the next roof and the next, Dulcie and Kit running beside him through the rising sea breeze. Where the trail descended to cross Ocean, they came down, too. For an old cat, he was making good time—heading straight for the center of the village where the sky glowed with the red reflections of police activity. Only as they approached the scene, their noses tickling at the smell of spilled wine, did they lose his trail.

Kit circled the roofs for a while but couldn’t pick it up again. Joe and Dulcie crouched at the roof’s edge watching the action around the Blue Bistro, the sidewalk beneath them glittering with shards of broken glass. This restaurant had been a fixture in the village long before the cats were born; favored by village residents, it featured locally grown produce, local wines, locally raised lamb. The dining room’s oversize fireplace, and the many photographs of famous village residents, offered a cozy aura in which one might happen on a movie star, a famous musician or sports figure. Now, not only had the big front windows been shattered, the portraits had been jerked from the walls and lay smashed on the floor, the frames bent, the glass broken, the pictures ground into the debris. Dallas Garza was lifting fingerprints from the shattered front counter where a smiling hostess should have been welcoming diners. Even the swinging kitchen doors had been ripped off their hinges, and the kitchen beyond torn apart, huge cook pots littering the floor, the counters pulled from the wall and smashed. It was hard to imagine three or four men doing this amount of damage in a short time, but maybe there were more than that. Joe guessed if a person put his mind to it, he could accomplish a lot of destruction pretty fast. Was all this, indeed, simply to divert patrols from the invasion and make the cops look bad? That, coupled with the pleasure of violence just for the hell of it? He’d be willing to bet the officers would find very little missing, maybe the cash box gone and the safe breached—all this to destroy confidence in the police and in Max Harper.

24

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BEFORE LEAVING NANNETTE Garver’s house, Max had gone through her personal phone list and called her daughter in Sacramento and her son, who lived in Orange County. They both said they’d be there by the next morning, the son arriving as soon as he could get on a plane. Max had called the hospital shortly after Nannette was checked into the ICU. She was suffering severe contusions to her throat and face, but no bones were broken. Her hands and arms were scraped raw; she was shaken, and descended easily into tears. Max had left Kathleen Ray photographing and lifting prints, and taking casts of several shoeprints in the garden beside the front door. An inventory of items missing would have to wait until Nannette was released from the hospital, but he doubted it would amount to much. Neither of the two televisions had been taken, but both were smashed beyond repair. It enraged Max that innocent people were suffering because someone wanted him removed from office. The MO of these attacks, coupled with the newspaper’s pressure, could lead to no other conclusion.

He never doubted he’d done a good job over his twenty-five years of service. Molena Point’s crime rate was down by thirty percent just in the last four years, while in the surrounding towns, as in much of the country, crime rates had risen as the breakdown in moral restraints increased. Appointed by the mayor, with a two-thirds vote approval by the city council, Max could be removed by the same process. If that was to be the result of this concerted attempt, he would be laying the village open to a new chief he couldn’t trust, no doubt backed by the same element that wanted Max out. This was a power grab,and if he could help it, it wasn’t going to happen.

He and Dallas had discussed bringing in an FBI profiler. So far, their own take was that the vandals were young, but were working under more experienced direction. The mastermind was very possibly someone their department had arrested with enough evidence to see him prosecuted. Officer Ray had set up a computer program listing all the convictions in their district for the past ten years, with release dates for those who were now out of prison. With access to personal information and fingerprints, they had nine possible suspects so far who had lived in the area or had friends or family here. Two were on probation, four on parole, three out without any restrictions. None was now living close enough to be operating conveniently in the village, but with county probation caseloads so high and its officers spread so thin, cases could slip through the cracks. The man they were looking for might easily be driving down from San Francisco, where three of the parolees were living, or from San Jose, where a fourth resided. Between a parole officer’s visits, a parolee would have plenty of time for short and unauthorized forays outside the jurisdiction. This, Max thought, was one situation where he really appreciated the belated help from one of the phantom snitches; the 911 call this evening was the first unidentified tip they’d had. Dispatcher said it was the lady, this time. Despite how edgy the anonymous phone calls left him, he felt remarkably encouraged. This call tonight had put them on the scene hours before Ms. Garver could have summoned help; in fact it might have saved her life. The older woman, weakened from shock and loss of blood, might never have been heard by her neighbors, she might have died in that house alone. How the snitch had found her, had heard her, was a matter he didn’t want to pursue.

As for the two restaurant breakins, they followed the same pattern of extensive vandalism as the others. Dallas had left the Blue Bistro to work the Flying Galleon call, and it was the same MO over there. Lots of damage, nothing much missing, cash still in the cash box at the Galleon. Shoe prints that matched none of the others. What did these guys do, change shoes for every job? He’d had a man checking the Dumpsters for weeks, thinking they might be tossing the shoes after each use. And again no fingerprints. But thanks to the snitch they now had a description of a car and a truck that had fled the invasion scene shortly before the 911 call was made—but no license numbers. Snitch said the plates were smeared with mud. They had Be On the Lookout alerts out on both vehicles. A black four-door Cadillac had been spotted, but it belonged to a new bartender up on Fifth, had been parked in front of the bar, and there was a whole restaurant full of witnesses to vouch for his presence.

Swinging by the Flying Galleon, he found Dallas had finished photographing and dusting for prints, and was trying to rouse a carpenter to board up the windows. He still had to go over the area for trace evidence, but it would take a carpenter a while to show up.“Joe Wood’s out of town,” Dallas said. “Ditto, Jim Herndon. He and his wife are in Tahoe. I got the restaurant’s head chef on the phone, he’s over there talking to Brennan. I’ve called three other carpenters, with no answer. I’m just going to try Ryan, see if she has any plywood. What about the Blue Bistro?”

“Jimmie Chu is on his way,” Max said. “He’s sending his sons over with plywood, said he didn’t need our help. He’s mad as hell, says we’re not doing our job. I’ll swing back by there and talk to them.”

He had stepped into his truck and started the engine when a white BMW convertible pulled up, double-parking beside a patrol car. Reporter Nancyanne Prewitt got out carrying a camcorder, which was all the small village paper could supply, no in-your-face camera crew to back her up. Maybe no one had called the local TV station up the coast. Or maybe they were on their way. She was dressed as if for a party in a tight, low-cut black T-shirt, voluminous gold pants, and spike-heeled gold sandals. Talk about professional. Her shoulder-length, square-cut brown hair swung in time with her dangling, gold hoop earrings. Her high heels tap-tapped across the sidewalk, and a little gold purse swung from her shoulder on a long chain as she hurried up to his truck.“Captain Harper, can I have a word?” Her smile was as fake as that of a two-bit public defender sucking up to the judge. When Max didn’t respond, she said, “Can you tell me why you had no patrol cars on the streets when these two restaurants were broken into and vandalized?”

Max just looked at her.

“I’ll want to photograph both restaurants,” she said. “Why weren’t there patrols on the street?”

There had in fact been patrols, three of them, the closest five blocks away. They had hit the Flying Galleon moments after the alarm went off, had called in four more cars to cover the area, but the vandals had vanished. No sign of a fleeing car, and no one on the street but a couple of tourists whose IDs had checked out all right. Both said there had been no moving car in the area, that they’d glimpsed two men running away, no description except that they wore black clothes, black caps. Four officers were, at present, canvassing the hotel and motels.

“This is the middle of town, Captain Harper. Why didn’t your officers see and arrest these people? They couldn’t have missed them. It seems strange that there is never a patrol when one of these shocking—”

Max opened the truck door, gently forcing her hand off the window, and obliging her to step back.“You have my permission to take pictures, Ms. Prewitt. You are not to enter either crime scene. You’ll be able to identify the area that’s off limits by the yellow police tape that is strung to cordon it off. Now if you’ll excuse me …” He revved the engine so that she stepped farther back, bristling at his sarcasm. At the intersection he glanced back. She was mincing along the sidewalk with her camcorder, busily recording the broken windows and broken door. Not only would stills be used for the newspaper, the camcorder footage would be on local TV—maybe for the late news tonightand probably prime-time news tomorrow. So far the TV station, which was short-staffed, had been far more eager to enjoy contributions from theGazette than to cover the crimes themselves. Or to see that they gave the department fair coverage. Heading for the Blue Bistro, Max didn’t see, above him, the three snitches watching from the rooftops, nor did he see another small shadow slip stiffly away—didn’t see the three snitches turn, catching sight of the yellow tomcat, and hurry to follow him as he left the scene.

25

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THE YELLOW TOMCAT seemed to know where he was going, moving swiftly away across the roofs above a street of galleries, little restaurants, a bookstore. At the Kestrel Inn, he headed along one wing of the U-shaped building toward the back, where he stood looking down into the motel patio. The courtyard was lit by ground-level lamps at the edge of the brick paving, their soft glow illuminating beds of geraniums and cyclamens. Where a bougainvillea vine climbed to the roof, he scrambled down it and under a flowering camellia bush beside a sliding glass door. From the shingles above, Joe, Dulcie, and Kit could just make out the pale curve of his back beneath the dark, concealing leaves. He peered in through the open glass slider through open draperies, only the screen barring his entry.

One lamp burned near the windows, where a man stood with his back to them. The rear of the room was in shadow. They could hear a woman talking softly but couldn’t see her, couldn’t make out what she was saying. Was the cat with these people, traveling with them? Then surely they knew his talents. No one traveling with an ordinary cat would let him go outside in a strange town and expect him not to wander off lured by his own curiosity and become lost.Only a speaking cat could be left to roam responsibly, at his own pleasure.

Deep within the room the woman appeared, moving toward the front where she sat down on the bed. She was tall and thin, her short blond hair fluffed around her face. She wore shapeless black jeans, a black T-shirt, black boots. Their voices were so soft that from the roof, even with the door open, the cats had to listen closely, cocking their ears, peering over. As the man turned to the dresser, a towel in his hand, they could see that he wore gloves, tightly fitting and flesh colored. Picking up a billfold from the dresser, he slipped it in his pocket and then carefully polished the dresser’s glass top with the towel.

“That went well,” he said. “No delays, no hitches.” His voice was so smug it made Dulcie and Kit angrily lash their tails; Kit hung over the edge, intently watching him.

“This is the last one,” the woman said. “I don’t like this. This isn’t why I came here.”

“It’s them,” Kit whispered, scrambling back from the edge. “Two of them. The man in the car, that’s his voice. And the woman—I thought she was a thin man, in that long black coat and hard shoes.”

The man was saying,“What about the kid? He thinks you’re—”

“That’s all he is. A kid. He’s had a crush on me for years, ever since he was twelve. He thinks he’s a great lover,” she said, laughing. “For the moment, he’s useful enough.”

The man was squarely built. His coal-black hair was collar length but neatly trimmed, his short black beard squarely clipped. Turning away from the dresser, he gripped her shoulders.“If you didn’t come to help me out, why did you come? Why did you want to come here, right under her nose? What the hell are you planning?”

“I came to get what’s mine,” she said sweetly. “And,” she said, laughing, “maybe to deal the last hand.” Moving away from him, she picked up the black raincoat that lay across the chair, shrugged it on. Pulling a dark cap from the pocket, she occupied herself at the mirror, tucking inher hair until not one blond strand was visible. The man approached the door, slid the screen back. Stepping out to the patio, he stood looking around him. He was only steps from the yellow cat concealed among the shrubs. He glanced up once at the roof, seemingly straight at the cats, but they werestill, and their eyes slitted nearly closed—surely, in the dark, they were invisible to human sight. His gaze was compelling, his eyes so familiar that Dulcie eased lower against the shingles and slowly backed away. He glanced several times to the left, to a walkway between the rooms that led from the patio to a small parking area. The cats could see a few cars parked back there, one covered with a tarp. After a long while he turned back into the room. Sliding the glass door closed and clicking the lock, he disappeared into the shadows at the back.

The woman moved to join him, switched on a closet light, and removed a small satchel. When he opened the door to the hall, in the sudden wash of light the cats caught a glimpse of a patterned red carpet and of the closed door across the hall. And then the two were gone, closing the door behind them with a double click of the latch and lock. When the cats looked down again at the bushes there was no hint of the yellow tom, no gleam of pale fur beneath the dark foliage.

Was he slinking through the bushes to the motel’s front door, meaning to follow the couple? Or, while the man had stood outside the open screen, had the tom slipped inside and behind a chair, moving so fast that even they, intently watching the bearded man, had missed his stealthy entry?

“Come on,” Joe said, spinning around to follow the darkly clad couple—but Kit was already across the roof and nearly to the street. They crowded against her where she crouched above the front entrance looking down. The pair was just leaving the building. The woman was as tall as her companion; she walked with a long stride so that, swathed in her loose black raincoat, shapeless black pants, and flat black boots, her hair tucked under the genderless cap, she could easily pass for a man. Only her slim hands gave her away, and even as the two headed up the street she pulled off what appeared to be rubber gloves, replacing them with heavier, black leather ones. Beyond the motel, they turned into a corner restaurant that opened to both streets, where the bar stayed open late.

In a minute, a car started on the side street, but when they raced across the roof to look, it was only a gray-haired lady pulling her VW Beetle out of the parallel parking. When they heard another car start, in the motel’s back parking lot, again they ran.

There: a white Toyota pulling away between the lines of parked cars. They could see the darkly dressed couple within, the man driving. He moved quickly onto the street and, a block down, turned up the hill, driving fast, heading in the direction of the freeway. And the car was gone, where not the fastest feline could catch it.

Returning to the patio, they backed down the bougainvillea, through the yellow cat’s scent, to the brick paving. They checked the bushes, but the tomcat wasn’t there. Crowding together before the closed glass, they peered into the darkened room.

Nothing stirred among the shadowed furniture.“The tom’s not there, he’s gone,” Kit said, and before Joe or Dulcie could reply she flicked her fluffy tail and careened away through the bushes, following his scent.

Dulcie gave Joe a questioning stare. He said,“Go on, I’ll catch up. I want a look back there, where they parked.” He watched her gallop away, and then headed for the small parking lot at the back of the motel, a gray shadow among shadows, only his white markings visible.

Rounding the hedge, Joe came face-to-face with the tarp-covered car, parked in the corner where the hedge met the motel wall. He started toward it, then stopped, his nose to the paving examining the scent of the darkly clad couple. Here, unimpeded by the smell of the garden flowers, he tasted both the man’s scent and the woman’s. Both led to the tarp.

The tan cover was made of thin, sleazy canvas, fitted tightly over the big car. The canvas covered the wheels, too, and hugged the ground. Quickly Joe nosed underneath.

It wasn’t as dark under there as he’d expected; the sleazy fabric looked like cheesecloth with the light from the motel shining through. Rearing up between the tarp and the shiny black fender, he picked out the wheel insignia of a Cadillac. Nosing along the big black car, he could see that it was a four-door. The car smelled strongly of the departed couple.

The tires were still warm, and a thin warmth radiated from the engine. When he moved to the back and edged up between the tarp and the license plate, he found it covered with mud just as Kit had described. Pawing the mud away, he traced the numbers.“4LTG747,” he said softly, wishing his recall were as certain and reliable as Kit’s. The tortoiseshell, having all her life memorized folktales, had a memory like a spring-loaded trap. Whatever was caught in it never got away. Had the couple, having used the Cadillac during the invasion, parked it partially out of sight here, and covered it? He had no sure proof to linkthis Cadillac to the invasions—unless Kathleen Ray got lucky and picked up its tire prints at the scene. But thanks to Kit, the department knew there’d been a black Caddy near the scene.

Thinking back, he was sure he’d seen, days earlier, a tarp-covered car parked here, in fact had been seeing the canvas lump for maybe a couple of weeks. Surely the street patrols had taken note, had maybe checked with the motel to make sure the vehicle belonged to a registered guest. Maybe the two cars were switched back andforth, sometimes the Caddy, sometimes the Toyota, so there was always some vehicle filling out the tarp, and it wouldn’t lie in a flat heap on the paving, calling attention to a car’s absence.

If this car was registered at the desk, they’d have the license number, but he’d bet it wasn’t. Right now, he wanted to pass the information along to the department. Maybe the cops could get here while the engine was still warm, take a look, run the plate, maybe dust for prints. And Joe took off fast for Dulcie’s house, for the nearest phone; he’d just zip in through Dulcie’s cat door onto Wilma’s desk and punch in 911,another tip from the snitch, he thought, smiling. Racing across the shingles to call the department, he was eager to see what the answering detective would find, and what information he might pick up from the desk clerk, too. Tonight was the first real break they’d had, with the yellow cat leading Kit to the invasion and then to two of the perps and their cars. Thinking about the strange tom’s contribution, Joe’s curiosity burned brighter even than did Kit’s—made him want to be in two places at once: watching a detective go over the Caddy, and finding out more about one old yellow tomcat who, one way or the other, must have a stake in these crimes.

26

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KIT FOLLOWED THE scent of the tomcat across the roofs straight into the wooded hills north of the village. Though he didn’t look back, she knew he was aware of her by the way he moved, by the way his ears would swivel around, by the way he took shelter occasionally where he could see back across the roofs, watching her. Racing uphill atop the oak-sheltered cottages, he was drawing ever nearer to Maudie’s house. But why would he go there?

Or was he headed on past Maudie’s, maybe returning to the Colletto house?Had one of the invaders tonight been Kent Colletto? If Kent had a part in this, how did the yellow cat know? And did anyone else in the Colletto family know? That would be interesting, she thought, smiling at straitlaced Carlene’s stubborn defense of Victor.

Between the few lighted windows, the oak-shrouded roofs were so dark that the yellow tom appeared and then disappeared, vanishing into the deepest pools of blackness, then out again. He had a lot of stamina for an old cat; Kit herself was breathing hard. As he crossed the next roof he stopped suddenly, stood in plain sight in the glow of a lighted window looking back at her. For a long moment he stood looking. He lifted a paw, opened his mouth in a silent meow, and then was gone again, a pale shape racing across the roofs among the dark treetops that sheltered Maudie’s street.

Next door to Maudie’s he paused again. Maudie’s kitchen light was on, and a lamp burned in the upstairs guest room. He was still for a moment, and then leaped to Maudie’s roof. He was such a big cat that even now, in his old age, he was an impressive fellow. When he turned and looked at her, his eyes held a world of knowledge, and of pain. How many years had he lived? How many miles had this cat traveled, and what had he seen of the world?

In the guest room, Maudie was making up the empty twin bed. Benny was sound asleep in the other, the covers pulled up around his ears, his face turned away from the lamp’s soft light. Padding closer to the yellow cat, Kit sat down near him. He glanced at her, but neither spoke. They watched Maudie tuck the sheets in, making square, neat corners military tight. Had David returned, was she making the bed for him? Had he decided, after all, not to leave Benny and his mother alone in a strange neighborhood and a new house? Though she was filled with questions, Kit found it hard not to stare at the tomcat, too. She felt both shy of him and bold; she wanted to talk to him, ask him questions; but for once in her life, she remained quiet.

He seemed intently fixed on the guest room, ignoring her—until he twitched an ear, in a friendly gesture, inviting her to move closer. She padded right up next to him; they sat in friendly silence watching Maudie shake a pillow into a fresh pillow slip. Kit was so sure David had returned that when she heard a man’s footsteps in the hall, she watchedfor him to appear.

Jared Colletto moved into the doorway, carrying a bulging gym bag atop two folded blankets.“I could have done that, Aunt Maudie,” he said softly, glancing at the sleeping child. “I had trouble finding the blankets—that garage is loaded. Where will you put it all?”

“Most of it will go in the new studio,” Maudie said. “Except some boxes of Martin’s and Caroline’s things that I couldn’t throw away.”

“Mementos?” he asked softly.

“Photographs, letters. Caroline’s personal papers. Some things I don’t know what to do with. Her sister has her business papers. She and I together dealt with the trust—Martin and Caroline and I had our trusts drawn up by the same attorney at the same time, just after they were married, trusts for Benny and for Caroline’s two children.”

Entering the room, Jared eased the blankets onto the dresser, set his duffel on the floor, then unfolded the blankets and spread them over the sheets on the freshly made bed.“It’s nice to be able to visit. I hope I don’t disturb Benny, moving into his space. I guess I’m not disturbing him now,” he said, grinning. “Does he always sleep so deeply?”

“Like a rock,” Maudie said. “As if this terrible ordeal has produced, instead of sleeplessness, a need to escape into sleep. At any rate,” she said, smiling, “it’s nice to have you here. Of course no one would have bothered us, but it’s nice to have your company. You’ve grown up a lot since my last trip to the village.”

Jared put his arm around her, giving her a hug.“I don’t want you to wait on me, I can do for myself.” He looked at her almost shyly. “If you don’t mind me in your kitchen, don’t mind me fixing my own breakfast.”

“You’re to make yourself at home, Jared. Help yourself to whatever you want. But what is it? Something’s bothering you.”

“It’s just … you’ll be careful, when I’m out? Now that I’m here, I feel responsible. You won’t answer the door until you know who’s there? You’ll keep your cell phone handy in your pocket?”

“Jared …”

“And you won’t let Benny play outside alone?” Jared sounded, Kit thought, as bossy as his mother. He said, “I’ll play ball with Benny when I get home from work or classes. The car lot isn’t far, just around the edge of the bay, a ten-minute drive. I’ll be glad when we’ve moved your things into the studio, when you can get your car in the garage, can come directly into the house.”

“Jared, this is silly. I promise I’m in no danger.”

He looked at Maudie, frowning.“You were in danger when that truck nearly hit you. And you mentioned to Mother something about boxes being shifted around in the garage? And a silent phone call where the line was open but no one spoke, and no caller ID on the screen?”

“I’m sure that was some glitch in the phone system, maybe one of those electronic political messages that didn’t go through. I wish I hadn’t told her those things, I should have known better, Carlene can get so excited. I’m sorry Benny mentioned the truck. Well,” she said, “you’re here and it’s nice to have you. I know I must be putting you out, but we’ll make it a good visit.” She smiled. “There’s some lemon pie. Shall I cut us each a slice?”

“Pie would be great, then I’d better get some sleep. My first class is at eight. Go on down, I’ll just hang up a couple of shirts.”

Maudie left the room, heading for the stairs, and in a minute the kitchen lights brightened as if she’d turned up the dimmer. Kit turned to look at the yellow tom. “Why did you follow us?”

His eyes looked deep into hers.“My name is Misto.”

“Are you with them, with those two in the motel who robbed and hurt that woman?”

“Would I tell you if I was?”

“I guess not,” she said, half wary, half amused.

“I came with him,” Misto said, cocking an ear toward the guest room where Jared was hauling underwear and books out of his duffel.

“With Jared? From Maudie’s sister’s house? You live with them?” Kit said, amazed.

Misto dropped his ears.“I wouldn’t live in that house.”

“What do you mean, then, that you came with Jared?”

“I came from the prison at Soledad. I hitched a ride when Jared and Kent visited their brother. I knew they were from this village.”

Kit looked at him, puzzled.“Why did you want to come here? What wereyou doing in the prison?” Soledad was where Lori went to visit her pa, where her pa was serving time for murder. “Didn’t they see you in their car?”

“It was a hot day. I banked on their putting the top down when they parked, the guards watch the parking lot pretty carefully. They did put it down, and when they returned I was hidden under a blanket behind the seat.”

“But what made you want to come here?” she repeated.

Misto smiled.“I knew about you three, I heard some of the prisoners talking.”

She felt as if her heart had stopped.“No one in prison would know about us.” But then she realized someone would know, there were prisoners in Soledad that she and Dulcie and Joe had helped send there, men they had followed and spied on and snitched on to the cops. Some of those men did know about them, or knew about cats like them.

“You lived there?” she said softly.

“I came there to the prison grounds two years ago. There are fields around Soledad; a lot of cats live there, feral cats, but not like us. There was no other like me, no other cat to talk to.”

“Lonely,” she said.

“I’ve lived a lot of places where I was lonely. Only once in a while have I come on another speaking cat. It was there in the prison yard that I heard two men talking about Molena Point and about the strange unnatural cats they’d found there.”

She didn’t like this, they didn’t need anyone talking about unnatural cats, telling where they were.

“The prison ferals live on the grounds and in the surrounding fields, but I hung out with the humans,” he said. “I was hungry to hear human talk. I followed the trustees who did the gardening, they talk a lot when they work together. I made friends with some, they liked to bring me food. One morning, two of them started swapping stories about strange cats that were more than cats. The redheaded one said he’d trapped speaking cats near this village. You can bet I hung around to hear more.”

“Tommie McCord,” she said softly. “The redheaded one. They did trap cats, he and his friends did, but we freed them.”

“They laughed about trapping them,” Misto said. “The redhead—McCord?—swore he and his partner had had them in a cage and had heard them talking. When he said, ‘Those cats are loose somewhere in the village,’ I knew I had to come here, I longed to find others like myself. It’s been along time, so many years since I had other cats to talk to, since I parted from my wife and kits.”

“Thereis a band of speaking cats, wild in the hills. Those are the ones McCord and his friends trapped, they were going to sell them. That frightens me, that he’s telling people about us. But of course he would, wouldn’t he? Scum like that,” Kit said, hissing.

“Not to worry, the other prisoners didn’t believe him, they made jokes about him, called him crazy. Though later,” he said more solemnly, “I saw one of the men watching the feral cats in a puzzled way, watching too intently.

“But in a prison there are a lot of tall stories,” he said quickly. “No one really believes them.” The old cat placed a paw softly on Kit’s paw. “That redheaded one’s still in prison where he can’t hurt us. No one likes him much. Who knows,” he said hopefully, “maybe he won’t leave Soledad alive.”

They both went silent at a rustle of leaves above them. The next instant, Dulcie looked down at them, her dark stripes blending into the dark foliage, only her green eyes sharply defined. She dropped to the roof beside them, looking worriedly from one to the other, having heard enough to be just as upset as Kit by Misto’s remarks about the prison.

But the next moment she was even more concerned about what she observed of Maudie.

From the roof of the garage wing, the cats could see not only into the guest room, but also into the kitchen below. As Kit and Misto had talked softly, Maudie had gone downstairs. Now alone in the kitchen, her expression had changed. She was no longer smiling as if with pleasure at having company. Glancing above her toward the guest room, she was scowling as if filled with dismay, as if she did not want Jared there.

“What’s that about?” Dulcie said softly, sitting down beside Kit. “She’s mad as a caged raccoon.”

But Kit’s attention, and Misto’s, were on Jared, where, within the softly lit guest room, he stood looking down at the little boy who slept so innocently. He looked for a long time; they couldn’t read his expression, and then at last he turned away, leaving Benny to his dreams. Reaching into the closet, into the inside pocket of the jacket he had hung there, he removed a lumpy, zippered black folder. Patting it as if to make sure the contents were all in place, he slipped it into the duffel beneath his folded jeans. Zipping the duffel, he snapped a little padlock to secure it and set it in thecloset. Whether the folder contained innocent, private business or something more interesting, the cats had no way to know; maybe it was just something he didn’t want Benny to play with.

27

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HAVING CALLED THE night dispatcher about the canvas-covered car, Joe left Wilma’s house and hurried back to the motel through a haze of fog, a mist drifting in from the sea to dampen his fur and blur the rooftops around him. Below him, already parked in front of the motel, was a gratifying response to his phone tip: a squad car stood at the curb, along with Dallas’s tan Blazer. From below, from the front office, he heard Officer Crowley and a strange voice, maybe the desk clerk. When he didn’t hear Dallas, he trotted across the roof to the small parking lot. Where the hedge met the wall, where he’d reported the black Cadillac covered by the tarp, Dallas stood surveying the scene.

The Cadillac was gone. The corner was empty. No black Caddy, no car at all, no tarp, nothing but blacktop, the area a shade lighter than the surrounding, fog-damp macadam. Well, didn’t that tear it. He’d been gone maybe twenty minutes, but enough time, apparently, for the two perps to double back and take the car. Or had they sent one of their pals to retrieve it?

But why? What had alerted them? Had someone seen the cats watching them, and knew what they were, knew they’d alert the cops? But that couldn’t happen, that was too far out. Or had the yellow tomcat alerted the man and woman?Was he traveling with those no-goods, and not the innocent old fellow that he seemed? Joe watched Dallas kneeling at the edge of the dry parking space, his leather bag by his side, using the department’s new, handheld laser beam to illuminate a tire mark that was, apparently, so faint Joe had missed it. The thin edge of a second, clearer mark was incised into the earth strip that ran along the hedge. Joe looked up when he heard a far door close.

Padding across the roof, he watched Officer Crowley leave the motel office and head across the patio to the parking lot. Joe kept pace with him. Even in uniform, Crowley looked awkward, his thin, stringy six-foot-four body moving as if he were walking behind a plow, his big hands seeming better suited to the plow, too, than to the 9-millimeter he wore at his belt. Approaching Dallas, Crowley stood shifting from foot to foot waiting for the detective to photograph a second tire print that shone as faint as a breath on the dry macadam.

Dallas set his camera aside.“What did you get from the desk clerk?”

“The woman checked out. Name of Karen Birkler. A single, registered for the whole month, special rate. The clerk didn’t like that she had two different men in and out at different times; that made him nervous. Maybe he thought they’d run into each other, and there’d be trouble. He was curious enough about her to follow her once, watched her carry a small plastic bag a dozen blocks and drop it in a builder’s Dumpster. Said she could just as well have dumped it at the motel. She registered with a Sacramento address.” Crowley handed Dallas a piece of paper. “Probably bogus.”

Dallas nodded, tucked the paper in a small spiral-bound notebook that he returned to his pocket. Crowley said,“I told him to make sure the lock code is changed, that the room remains locked, not to let the maids or maintenance or anyone else go in. Told him we’d cordon off the two entrances.”

Dallas removed a clean paintbrush from the satchel and began dusting bits of debris into an evidence bag, maybe loose fibers from the canvas tarp.“Did you put out a BOL on the brown pickup and the Toyota?” Crowley nodded. “Do the same for the Cadillac, do it before you string your tape. When we’re finished here, I’m headed back to the Galleon. I hope to hell we don’t have another dustup tonight, with three scenes to work. Being this shorthanded makes me edgy.”

Crowley grinned. As Joe listened to him call in the Cadillac, he worried over why the couple had bailed out so fast. He followed above Dallas as the detective headed for the motel office, watched him disappear inside. This wing of the building was an old-fashioned brick box, the swinging glass door with a glass transom above it; the other wings were newer. Edging over the roof gutter as far as gravity would allow, he peered in through the open transom.

He couldn’t see the clerk, but he could hear his reedy voice, a pale contrast to Dallas Garza’s deeper tone. Dallas wanted a look at the motel room, but when he mentioned a warrant the clerk waived that aside. Clerk said ifhe asked the law to have a look, then no warrant was needed. When their voices receded, as if they had headed down the hall behind the office, Joe padded away across the roof. He backed down into the bushes as Dallas entered the room through the inner door from the hall. Through the glass slider, Joe watched the detective fit goggles over his eyes. He squinted as Dallas scanned the room with the laser. Didn’t take long to pick up footprints from the carpet, fingerprints from the dresser and headboard. When he’d finished, Dallas turned on the lights, throwing the room into stagelike brilliance, highlighting the shabbiness of the dated, Swedish modern bedroom suite.

Avoiding certain areas of carpet, Dallas began to dust a few selected areas of furniture in the conventional way, to pick up prints the laser had found. Using the laser was a hell of a lot faster than the old drill. If scientists kept coming up with these startling new techniques, they’d put a cat out of business.

When Dallas left the scene, Joe headed for the station, hoping more information might be forthcoming. Maybe a patrol, or the CHP, had already picked up the Cadillac or the Toyota. Or even the old truck, which Kit had reported earlier. All the way to the courthouse unanswered questions rattled around in his head. If Kent Colletto was part of this tangle, could Maudie know that? Did she not want to turn in her own nephew? She hadn’t seemed that fond of Kent, but hewas family, and the woman was harboring some secret. If Kentwas involved in the invasions and he thought Maudie knew, wouldn’t that put her in danger from her own nephew as well as, possibly, from her son’s killer?

28

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IT WAS NEARLY midnight when Maudie and Jared finished their pie and coffee and Jared went up to bed. Maudie, in her robe and slippers, waited a little while to make sure her nephew wouldn’t come down again, then headed into the garage, easing the door closed so it wouldn’t squeak. Before throwing the switch for the single light, she drew closed the new, dense curtains she’d bought for the garage window. The single bulb cast the stacked cartons into sharp angles and sent long shadows against the garage wall. Pulling her fleece robe tighter, she stood scanning her labeled boxes of quilting supplies. She was so eager to move them into the new studio and to get to work, to lay out patterns for the new designs she had in mind. Christmas themes kept noodging her, though this late in the holidays whatever she began would be for the following Yule. Strange that Christmas could even interest her, this year.

But she needed something to hold on to, she needed to get involved in her work again. She wanted her studio in order so she could launch into some bright new project; she could heal Benny only when she began to ease her own pain. She imagined the newly furnished studio, the cupboards rich with bright fabric, bolts of yard goods, stacks of cloth squares already cut, the walls alive with her finished quilts. And outside the glass doors the garden blooming with all the bright color California’s winter gardens offered: candy-toned cyclamens massed against their background of red toyon berries and yellow acacia.

But before moving and unpacking her studio boxes, she had another mission. Pulling on a pair of thin cotton gloves, in case later some enthusiastic police detective might want to investigate in here, she approached the cartons of her dead daughter-in-law’s belongings. The nine boxes were neatly sealed with the same slick brown tape she’d used, but they weren’t stacked as she’d left them. And she could see that on the two top cartons the brown tape, which you could buy in any grocery or drugstore, had been slit open and then carefully covered again with a second, matching length.

Benny hadn’t done this. Even if he had been into the boxes rummaging wistfully among Caroline’s things, he’d have no reason to replace the tape. He knew he was perfectly free to look at Caroline’s books and keepsakes, at her hiking clothes, her first husband’s U.S. Marine uniforms and the papers regarding his military career, and Caroline’s few pieces of costume jewelry that were too nice to give to charity.

Slitting open the two resealed boxes with a small pair of scissors, shifting the boxes around to do the back sides, she found all this activity harder with her painful shoulder. The therapy she’d had in L.A. had helped but had been time-consuming and tedious. She lifted the flaps of the first box, reached in to examine the contents

Yes, the items had been disturbed, the order of the file folders was different, and the large brown envelopes had been rearranged. As far as she could remember, nothing was missing, though she’d never thought to make an inventory. Even if something were missing, there was nothing specific she thought would be of value to a burglar: old letters, recipes, maps to backcountry hiking trails, old tax receipts. She worried for a moment about the Social Security numbers on the tax records, but somehow she didn’t think that was what this burglar was after. Only when she selected the carton marked CAROLINE&MDASH;KITCHEN, sliding aside five stacked boxes with her good arm, did her pulse quicken.

But no, this tape hadn’t been slit, she saw with relief, the box was just the way she’d packed it. Cutting the tape, she reached beneath several layers of carefully wrapped kitchen treasures: an old-fashioned pastry blender, Caroline’s grandmother’s flour sifter and silver pie server, a dozen ornate cookie cutters each wrapped separately, three antique fluted pie pans. Seemed as if, leaving L.A., she’d kept more of Caroline’s things than her own. Sentimental, she thought. Though in fact she’d kept much of it for Benny. She and Maryanne had divided up the keepsakes, Maryanne more than generous in sharing. Benny had loved Caroline so. Maryanne had copies, and CDs, of all the family photographs, so those were easy enough to leave behind. Easing the packages of cooking paraphernalia aside, she drew out the brown, sealed envelope that she’d hidden beneath them.

This was what the burglar had come for, she was certain. Someone had been in the house, had stolen her keys, but apparently hadn’t had time to find this envelope before being startled, perhaps. Before slipping away, leaving the job unfinished. This, she thought, smiling, was what they wouldn’t find now, if they did return. By ten tomorrow morning the envelope would be tucked away in a new safe-deposit box, with a key different from the one that had been stolen, and no one would find the new key.

She’d discovered her extra keys missing the day before, when she’d misplaced her car keys. She’d looked everywhere, then had gone to her desk to get the duplicate set: house key, car keys, safe deposit, and several others which, if she ever lost the originals or her purse were stolen, would supply immediate backup. Opening her big secretary, beside the fireplace in the living room, she’d removed the little stamp drawer to reveal the hidden compartment behind it. Reaching in, she’d drawn her hand back and bent to peer inside. The little compartment was empty. She’d stood there panicked, trying to remember if she’d taken the keys out herself, and knowing she had not. She’d thought, chilled, about someone who now could enter her home any time of day or night, come stealing in when they were sound asleep. It was at that moment that she’d been sure Pearl Toola was in the village, that Pearl had followed her, and had been here in her house. At once Maudie’s plan for Pearl had quickened, the cold, precise path that she longed to follow.

Whether she’d have the nerve to carry it through was in question, but not because she was afraid. She wasn’t. Not because she didn’t have the means. She did. But because of Benny. No matter how Benny might think he hated his mother, if Maudie took such action, that could be the end of any love between them. Such a terrible betrayal by his grandmother could rob Benny of any hope at all for the years ahead, for any kind of normal life.

She knew she was courting disaster by not reporting the breakin or the hit-and-run. Maybe she should call Molena Point PD now, tonight, and report them both, certainly report the rifled boxes, the missing keys. Maybe an officer would come out, maybe take fingerprints.

But was that what she wanted? And it was the middle of the night, what kind of response would she get? If she did report those things, she didn’t want just a cop, she’d want a detective. The person she’d really want to talk to was Max Harper. And before Harper or anyone would take her seriously, she’d have to lay out the whole scenario, explain the significance of what was missing, explain what had gone on in L.A. But even if she did that, what wouldher word be worth? She stood for some time, conflicted and uncertain, shivering in the cold garage, then turned back into the house. In the warm kitchen she made herself a cup of tea and sat at the table warming her hands around the steaming cup, trying to ease her concerns, putting off any discussion with Max Harper, preferring to deal with Pearl in her own way.

29

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JOE LOOKED IN through the bulletproof glass door of Molena Point PD, but hesitated. He didn’t demand to be let in, didn’t yowl as he always did to attract the daytime dispatcher. Night dispatcher June Alpine might be young and pretty, but she wasn’t half as enamored of cats as was their friend Mabel Farthy. Now, instead of drawing June’s possible ire, maybe turning her cranky enough to chase him away, he scorched up the oak tree that sheltered the front of the building. Bracing himself on the tiled roof, he pawed open the small window that looked down into the holding cell. With the heavy bars welded across, the glass was usually cracked open—some of these arrestees couldsmell pretty strong.

This single cell, facing the main entry and the dispatcher’s desk, was intended to detain prisoners for only a short time, until they were fingerprinted and their identifying information recorded, before they were taken back to the jail that occupied its own small, fenced building just behind the two-story main building that housed the PD, the court andrelated offices.

Slipping in between the thick bars, through the open window, Joe dropped down to the cot suspended from the wall below, landing just at the edge to keep the flat springs from squeaking. The thin mattress smelled of throw-up and unwashed human bodies. Padding out through the door’s confining bars, he slipped along close to the base of the dispatcher’s counter where June might not see him as he headed for the hall. He glanced back twice, but both times she was turned away. Except for the lighted conference room, where three officers sat at the big table with laptops, typing up reports, all the offices were dark, the open doors revealed only blackness. Quickly he vanished through Max’s door, into the faint scent of horses that lingered on from years of contact with the chief’s western boots.

If Max had been there, Joe might have slipped beneath the credenza, out of sight, until he got a taste of what was going on. Now, with the room to himself, he leaped to Max’s desk among the perennial stacks of paperwork, scheduling lists, budget requests, collaterals—enough paper to make the tomcat glad all over again that he wasn’t human.

The computer stood dark and lifeless, harboring who knew what secrets, making him wish he were as adept at its use as Dulcie, who’d be able to pull up all kinds of secured information. She’d learned in the library, where she was the official library cat, though an often absent one. Wilma was a reference librarian, often sharing her office computer with Dulcie. When she worked late at night she would walk Dulcie through some fascinating bits of research, often exploring the cats’ own history, tied to Welsh and Irish mythology. Dulcie had learned a good deal about their ancestors in this way, though the subject didn’t much interest Joe. He was what he was. A speaking cat with a talent for spying. He didn’t give a damn about his ancestral heritage.

Now, looking at the dark monitor, he lifted a tentative paw over the keyboard. If he was to really try, could he learn to bring up police reports? Run fingerprints through AFIS? Access mug shots? Oh, right. And get caught in here alone using Max’s computer, and wouldn’t that tear it? Turning away from temptation, into Max’s bookcase, he curled up in a vacant space between copies of the California Penal Code, hoping the chief or one of the detectives would come dragging back in the small hours with some new information. Snuggled between the heavy books, he was soon warm and yawning; soon sleep eased around him like a huge hand offering comfort and safe harbor, all the security of home.

JOE WAS JERKED awake when the office lights blazed on. He sat up in the bookcase, slitting his eyes against the glare, watched Max toss his Levi’s jacket on the couch. The desk phone was flashing red. The chief sat down in his swivel chair, put his feet on the desk, leaning so far back that his brown, short-cropped, thinning hair was right in Joe’s face. He picked up the headset, didn’t turn on the speaker.

Leaning out from the bookshelf, Joe eased so close to the chief that his whiskers were only inches from Harper’s ear. It took him a minute to realize that Max was talking with the LAPD. Detective Sam Lakey’s voice was gravelly, he sounded like he had a few years on him, and maybe a bit of extra flesh, as well. “You have our BOL on Pearl Toola?”

“We have,” Max said. “So far, no line on her. What’s up?”

“You’ve talked with homicide, here?” Lakey said. “On the murder of her ex-husband and his wife?”

“Several times.”

“What we have now might be related, or might not. We’re looking at her in an embezzlement, a new case that just came in. Homicide’s thinking this might be connected, the thefts a possible motive for the Toola murders in San Bernardino County.

“Beckman Heavy Equipment,” Lakey said. “It’s a contractor’s rental service. Eight hundred thousand dollars missing. Pearl was their bookkeeper, she and Caroline Toola both worked there. They were neighbors, Caroline helped her get the job there some five years ago. Both were still employed there when Caroline died. Pearl left the firm shortly after the murders, told them she needed to get away for a while, too much stress after her ex-husband was shot.” There was amusement in his voice.

Max said,“And the company’s just now reporting the discrepancy?”

“They just now found it,” Lakey said. “When Pearl left, they were without a full-time bookkeeper; it was a make-do situation for a while, utilizing other office help. When they finally found a new bookkeeper, she not only uncovered the bogus withdrawals, she’s certain it was Pearl. Said most likely Pearl would have kept a second set of books, said you couldn’t pull off that kind of manipulation and keep things straight without your own written record. And of course there’s no way Pearl would have the second set of figures on the computer. Even if she’d erased it, it would still be on the hard drive, could still be found by a pro.”

“So Pearl rips them off,” Max said, “Caroline finds out, but in some way tips her hand that she knows.”

“Possible,” Lakey said.

Then Pearl killed Caroline not only out of jealousy, the tomcat thought,but to silence her, keep her from blowing the whistle? Joe was frowning down at Max’s notes when he heard Kathleen’s voice from up at the front desk, and immediately eased back between the hard volumes. He was curled up again pretending to nap when Kathleen’s footsteps came down the hall. She stopped in the doorway, looking in. Max motioned her on in, motioned for her to pull up a chair, and turned the speaker on.

Lakey was saying,“Beckman’s new bookkeeper spent several days going over the books, to familiarize herself with how the company operated and to get a jump on tax season. When she began to find the discrepancies, she called in Mr. Beckman. He took one look, and they got in a second accountant to help her. They traced the problem backward, contacted a number of customers to have a look at their statements—which didn’t match the copies in the Beckman files. The thefts, and the bogus entries, stopped after the murders. Six weeks later, Pearl left the company.

“She told Homicide she was moving down to San Diego for a while because of the stress, that she’d be staying with a friend. When Jimmie Beckman was sure the books had been doctored, he called us, called in his lawyer, and filed charges.

“San Diego said Pearl never arrived at the address she gave, and didn’t contact the friend. That was late June. Then when Maudie moved to Molena Point, homicide thought Pearl might follow her up there. You’re the best lead we have,” Lakey said. “You have a file on her?”

Max nodded.“Fingerprints. Photographs. Thirty-seven years old. Five ten, about 140 pounds. Jet black, straight hair. Shoulder length, in a forties-style pageboy. Unusually white skin. Lean, bony face. Dark brown eyes, almost black. Some ten years ago, she worked the blackjack tables at Harrah’s, in Vegas.California driver’s license, no rap sheet.”

Listening to the description of Pearl, Joe grew as edgy as if he had ticks in his fur. Tall woman, thin, bony face. How long had that tall blonde been at the motel? How long had she been in the village? In his opinion, if this was Pearl Toola with a bleach job, a short haircut, and a permanent, she hadn’t improved her looks much. He thought about the photographs of Benny’s lean, sour-looking mother. Why hadn’t he recognized her tonight, after having looked at Maudie’s album? Why hadn’t he known the sharp-faced blonde at once, despite the straw-colored hair?

Max said,“Pearl embezzles nearly a mill, keeps a second set of books, and before she skips she kills the one coworker who might know enough to turn her in. She already hates Caroline, for presumably stealing her husband, so she does a thorough job of it, and kills them both.”

When Max and Lakey hung up, Max filled Kathleen in.

“So Pearl,” Kathleen said, “thinking Maudie might have seen her the night she shot them, follows Maudie here.”

“But why didn’t Caroline blow the whistle on Pearl at once?” Max said. “Turn her in when she first found out?”

“Because of the child?” Kathleen said. “Because with the trauma of the divorce, she didn’t want that dumped on the kid, too? To know his mother was a criminal and was in jail? Maybe she meant to wait until the missing money was discovered, and then hand over the evidence?”

“Or was Caroline already blackmailing Pearl?” Max said. “And that was why Pearl killed her?”

On the bookshelf, Joe Grey was thinking that the only thing the two hadn’t nailed down—and he felt sure they were right on target—was Pearl’s connection to the invasions. If that really was Pearl in the motel, if he wasn’t imagining the likeness. Had Dallas picked up any prints in the motel? But Pearl had no record, so there’d be nothing on her in AFIS. Andwhy would Pearl, arriving in Molena Point following Maudie, take part in a series of attacks that seemed to have nothing to do with the murders or the embezzlement? What exactlywas her connection to the invasions?

But that was puzzling only until he remembered that Pearl knew Kent Colletto. That she’d been coming up to the village every summer for years, with Maudie’s family, ever since Benny was a baby, that Pearl had known the Colletto boys from the time they were little kids. The tomcat, sandwiched among the volumes of the California Penal Code, sat thinking.

So far, the police had no reason to compare the blonde’s prints—provided they’d found any—with the prints on L.A.’s report. No reason to connect the invasions to Pearl, no lead to Pearl in AFIS. The tomcat fidgeted with his need to join the discussion, to suggest to the chief they compare Pearl’s prints to the woman in the motel. And the only way he could communicate with the chief was by phone, unseen, unrecognized. He thought about the dark, empty offices opening along the hall, all those unattended phones so quickly accessible. He had only to slip into any office and place a call to Max.

Right. As far as he knew, all these phones were on one central system; he’d never heard an officer mention a private line. The minute he pressed the speaker button, June Alpine would see the light flashing up at the front and, knowing the offices were empty, she’d pick up to see who was there.

No, he’d have to hightail it back to Wilma’s house. Or go on home and hope everyone was asleep, that he wouldn’t have to listen to one of Clyde’s lectures. Sometimes he wished Maxwould discover he could talk, so he could stop breaking his butt trying to find a phone. Yawning, attempting to look bored, he dropped from the bookshelf to the floor. He guessed Max had known he was there, because the chief didn’t look surprised. Joe sat lazily washing his paws, trying to calm his pounding heart, then sauntered sleepily past the desk to the door and padded away up the hall.

At the dispatcher’s counter, the problem was how to get out of the building. If Mabel Farthy had been on duty, she would have risen from her desk at his first yowl, would have let him out at once, complaining with good-natured amusement. He glanced toward the holding cell, but that ten-foot jump from the bunk across the room up to the high window was different from dropping down; that leap would be a killer. He could imagine himself falling flat on his face on the concrete, splattering like a cartoon cat.

Yowling stridently at June, he fussed and paced until at last she scowled over the counter at him, rose, and let him out.“You keep up that kind of behavior, the chief’ll nail your hide to the wall.”

No he won’t, Joe thought smugly as the petite young dispatcher opened the glass door for him.

“Go catch a mouse,” she said flippantly, “cats don’t belong in a cop shop.” As she locked the bulletproof glass behind him and flounced back to her desk, Joe Grey ran like hell, heading for home and a phone.

30

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IN THE DAMEN kitchen, the sun’s first light shone through the bay window brightening the granite counter and warming Joe Grey’s back, where he sat watching Ryan flip pancakes. She was dressed in work jeans, a yellow sweatshirt, a frilly apron, and fuzzy pink slippers, her heavy boots waiting in the living room by the frontdoor. The smell of pancakes, frying bacon, and warming syrup was so strong it made the tomcat drool. The table was set with three places, two with the conventional mats, napkins, and silverware, one with Joe Grey’s plastic place mat printed with a motif of running mice, a gift from Ryan that might be a bit cutesy, but that amused the tomcat. Clyde, in their bachelor days, had never thought to offer him a place mat. Except maybe the want ads, which neither of them ever read. Across the room on the flowered easy chair, little white Snowball lay curled up alone, purring with the warmth of the cushions into which she had burrowed, waiting for her can of gourmet cat food to be served up. Beside her chair Rock waited, too, held in place only by Ryan’s earlier command to “Down. Stay.” His pale yellow eyes never left the stove, his sighs were frequent and dramatic.

“Don’t forget the kippers,” Joe told Ryan, licking a front paw. “Pancakes are nothing without kippers.”

She turned to look at him.“Pancakes with kippers are as disgusting as it gets. You’re lucky Clyde and I put up with the smell of fish first thing in the morning. And what about poor Rock? You know he loves kippers, and you know he can’t have them. I think you eat them just to tease him.”

“Rock understands,” Joe told her.

“He doesn’t understand at all. He thinks it’s unfair that you get treats that he can’t have. It’s hard enough for him to deal with a cat giving him orders, without tormenting him with your dietary indulgences. Don’t you ever think how he feels?”

“He’s happy—he loves obeying my orders,” Joe told her smugly. A less intelligent dog might have problems with a speaking cat giving him obedience commands, but Rock had learned early on to accept Joe’s strangeness with good will. The big Weimaraner, at first shocked and then curious when the gray cat spoke to him, had come to respect the tomcat’s talents, though still he liked to tease Joe, with a keen, doggy humor.

“As to the kippers, you know I need my protein,” Joe said, greedily eyeing the browning pancakes and stifling a yawn.

Ryan turned to look at him.“What you need is sleep. I heard you slide open your tower window, coming home. It was after three this morning.” Carefully she laid the delicate, salty fishes on his warm pancakes and set his plate on the table.

Leaping to his place mat, Joe tucked into his breakfast, thinking about his phone call to Max last night, wondering what Max would do with the information, with Joe’s suggestion that the blonde in the motel could be Maudie’s ex-daughter-in-law. The link between Pearl and the Colletto brothers left Joe edgy with unanswered questions, scattered information yet to be sorted out. He’d nearly finished his pancakes and kippers when he heard the morning paper hit the front door. Heard Clyde’s feet, coming down the stairs, make a detour out the front to pick up the daily rag. Sounded like he was wearing his heavy boots; that meant a workday at the cottage. He clumped into the kitchen dressed in ragged jeans and a khaki work shirt, sat down at the table generously laying the paper between them so Joe, too, could scan the front page.

LONE WOMAN AT THE MERCY OF UNKNOWN CRIMINALS

When Nannette Garver answered her doorbell yesterday evening the door was shoved in her face, knocking her down. Two men gagged and beat her, robbed her, broke and destroyed everything in her house. There were no police patrols on the street to deter such a crime and Nannette lay tied up for many hours before she was found and released. It is troubling indeed to realize how at the mercy of unknown criminals a lone woman is in our village, without the police protection our taxes pay for…

Stifling a rude comment, the tomcat licked his plate clean. Only then did he finish reading the vitriolic article, his ears flattened with rage.“They call this journalism?This garbage? I don’t even want to see the editorial page.”

“Thisis an editorial,” Clyde said with equal disgust, and turned to the actual editorial page at the back, where Nancyanne Prewitt’s inaccurate interpretation of last night’s events occupied two additional columns. Crowded together, Clyde and Joe read with irritated grumbles. Ryan put Clyde’s plate down on the table beside theGazette, scanned the article, but made no comment. She sat down at her own place, trying to ignore the smell of kippers, and quietly ate her breakfast, choosing not to comment on theGazette’s vitriol. Talking cats reading the local paper, punctuating the silence with angry comments, was still a bit much, first thing in the morning, she was still trying to get used to these changes in her life. She looked up at a knock from the front door and Charlie’s voice through the new electronic speaker, and rose to let her in.

After the third home invasion, Ryan had installed a simple intercom for the front door in the interests of security and peace of mind. No more leaving the door on the latch for drop-ins. Charlie followed her on back, sat down at the table between Ryan’s place and Joe, and accepted a cup of coffee. She was dressed in jeans and boots, a leather jacket over her sweatshirt, her red hair tangled from the morning wind. She barely glanced at the paper.

Clyde said,“You’ve read it?”

She nodded.

“Has Max seen it?”

Again, a nod.“At least the reporter didn’t have access to the holdbacks.”

“What holdbacks?” Clyde asked.

Joe said,“There were two cars parked near the scene. A black Cadillac and an old, junky pickup.”

All three looked at Joe. Clyde said,“Did you see the drivers?”

“I didn’t, Kit did. She called it in. A black-haired, middle-aged man was driving the Cadillac. Black shirt, short black beard neatly clipped. The other two were tall, darkly dressed. We think one was a woman; she showed up later at the Kestrel Inn, a blonde.” He told them what they’d seen at the motel, the couple switching the cars under the tarp. He left out the part about the yellow tomcat. “By the time I called the department and got back to the motel, Dallas was there and both cars were gone. He got a nice plaster cast of a partial tread mark; we’ll see where that leads.”

“A cast complete with gray cat hairs,” Charlie said dryly.

Joe felt his breakfast turn sour.

“Not to worry,” Charlie said, stroking him. “I told Max I’ve seen a gray and white cat around that motel, that I thought she lived there, or nearby.” Motel cats were common in the village. Often guests inquired, when making reservations, if there was an in-house cat, and then upon arrivalthey would seek out the little four-legged PR executive for a pet and a cuddle. Some guests liked to share supper in their rooms with the resident cat. If the manager knew them from past visits, this was often allowed, and a special meal was served for the feline host or hostess.

“So what else do they have?” Clyde said. “One tire cast, with cat hairs. Fingerprints? Footprints?”

“They have footprints,” Charlie said. “Max didn’t go into a lot of detail, he only got a couple of hours’ sleep. He was so preoccupied with his own thoughts that I have to think this is coming together. He mentioned something about a connection to someone in Soledad, someone with ties to the village or to some parolee.”

“If there’s a parolee mixed in,” Clyde said, “maybe his parole officer will come up with some information.”

Ryan shrugged.“Probation and parole is stretched pretty thin. State parole is running caseloads of three to four hundred.” Ryan’s dad had recently retired as chief of the federal probation office in San Francisco, and she’d followed with interest the increasing strains on the various state and federal departments.

Clyde glanced again at the front page.“What about the two restaurant breakins? Anything there?”

“Same as the others,” Charlie said with disgust. “Lots of damage, not much taken. Obviously diversionary, but a terrible thing for the owners.”

Ryan finished her pancakes and reached for the front page. She glanced at the first few lines, about the invasion, scowled at the tone of the article, folded the paper, and laid it facedown on the table.“Street patrol should have been right there on the spot. Oh, right. Should have been sitting right there waiting for someone to come along and break the door in.” She looked at Joe. “I’m with you, I don’t want to evensee what Nancyanne Prewitt has to say. One good thing,” she said, “the thicker these new people at theGazette lay it on, the less likely people are to buy their garbage.”

“I hope,” Charlie said. She reached to scratch Joe’s ears. “The information you cats picked up last night—the descriptions, the tire track, the motel … that’s a huge help. Between you cats and the department,” she said, stroking his back, “you’ll get these SOBs sorted out.”

Joe seldom heard Charlie swear. But then, it wasn’t every day someone came after Max like this—and Joe had no doubt that was the scenario. He just hoped she was right, and that the case would be resolved before anything worse happened.

Joe wasn’t sure why he hadn’t mentioned the yellow tomcat, why he hadn’t shared with them this strange cat’s part in last night’s surveillance. Maybe, he thought ashamedly, he wanted all the glory for himself, and for Dulcie and Kit? Or maybe it was because he knew no more about the yellow cat than he did about the invaders, didn’t have a clue what the cat really wanted or why he was here in the village. Until he had a handle on that, maybe he didn’t want to get into a long and pointless discussion.

Ryan said,“This Arlie Risso? This newcomer in the village who’s been complaining about the invasions?”

Charlie nodded.“I’ve heard the name.”

“He moved here about a month ago,” Ryan said. “I think he bought a house; he was in Haller’s Building Supply a couple of days ago when I picked up a lumber order, he was buying some replacement hardware. He’s been here less than a month, he said. He was complaining loudly about the invasions, going on to George Haller. When I heard him bitching, I moved away among the aisles where I could listen. He said he meant to be at the city council meeting, see what excuse the police have for ‘this rash of crimes,’ as he calls it.” She looked at Joe. “Black hair, neat little black beard. Well built, maybe in his sixties. Sounds like he’s going to raise hell at the meeting.”

“We’ll be there,” Clyde said with interest.

Charlie said,“Not me, I don’t want it to look as if the chief needs his wife for backup. But I’d sure like to be a fly on the wall.”

“The meeting is when?” Joe said in an offhand manner.

They all looked at him. Clyde said,“No way,” and helped himself to the last pancake.

“Why shouldn’t he go?” Ryan said. “He goes everywhere else.”

Clyde scowled at her.“Have you ever been to a council meeting?”

Ryan shook her head.

“The room’s too open, there’s nowhere for a cat to hide. Space under the pews is open, and only a bare wall at the back. I can just see the mayor dragging Joe out by his furry neck.”

“You don’t have to be so graphic,” Joe snapped. Though he knew the room didn’t lend itself well to feline surveillance. He thought about the windowsills, but those skinny strips were way too narrow even for a cat to cling to. He could perch on a branch outside with his ear to the glass, except that the meetings started at four-thirty, and it would still be light out. He’d be seen from within like one of those paper cutout cats decorating grade-school windows for Halloween. He was wondering how to bring this off when Ryan caught his eye as she reached for the bacon, gave him a quick look of complicity.

Joe licked a last smear of kippers from his whiskers, hiding a smile, and before the discussion could go further he dropped to the floor and headed for the living room and his well-clawed easy chair. Ryan would smuggle him in, and not by his furry neck. Yawning, Joe curled up on the ragged chair, thankful once again that Clyde had married a woman of such keen imagination and sly complicity, a woman more than willing to bend the rules for a deserving accomplice.

31

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IT WAS LATER that morning that Joe dropped to the roof of Ryan and Clyde’s little cottage amid the drumbeat of hammering from the yard below—and landed facing the yellow tomcat. They hissed at each other and bristled, but without much ferocity, only with the usual rush of tomcat one-upmanship, that sudden and heady surge of adrenaline that made the yellow cat lash his tail and give Joe a ritual snarl. Below them, Ryan and Clyde were building wooden forms, getting ready to pour the foundation for the new sunroom. When Joe padded around onto the small wing that extended behind the cottage, he could see that they had the big header in for the glass sliders. A roll of heavy plastic lay nearby, ready to cover the new opening against unexpected gusts of passing rain. He didn’t see the two Latino laborers; he thought they were working another job, preparing for yet another remodel. Ryan was right, this would be a busy month for her, the joys of the holidays sandwiched in between bouts of heavy labor; and that was the way she liked it. She never complained, so Joe guessed the construction work must be for Ryan as heady as restoring rusty old cars was for Clyde or, for Joe, offering up to MPPD a nice piece of evidence to fit into their investigation.

When he looked over at Kit and Dulcie, he had to laugh at the feathers stuck to Kit’s mottled face where she’d just finished off an unwary starling. Beside him, the yellow cat had relaxed his wary stance, and the four of them lounged companionably, watching Clyde drive stakes for the forms. They watched Lori Reed came out the side door, hauling pieces of carpet taller than she was. Dragging her burden into the narrow side yard, she heaved the heavy bundles into a green metal Dumpster that seemed nearly as big as the house. Her brown hair was tucked up under a baseball cap. She wore shorts, boots, a faded T-shirt, leather work gloves, and a cloth mask tied over her nose and mouth against the dust from the ancient rug.

“Her pa’s going back to prison tomorrow,” Dulcie said softly as Joe rolled over, close beside her. “To the prison infirmary.” Her fur, baked from the sun, smelled clean and sweet. Over the noise of the hammers, the three talked in little cat whispers. “That’s a visiting day,” Dulciesaid. “Lori and Cora Lee will leave at midnight tonight, to be in line in the morning.”

The yellow tom flicked an ear.“A long wait for tired families, wives and kids in line for hours, and then only a few short minutes for their visit. And a long wait, too,” he said dryly, “for the prisoners’ scuzzy partners, on the outside, to pass on their coded information. Their plans for whatever’s coming down out here, beyond the prison walls.”

From within the house, Benny appeared, also wearing a mask. He went straight to Rock, to lean companionably against the patient Weimaraner. Lori, having apparently hauled out the last of the carpet, went to kneel beside them, putting her arm around Benny.“You can help me sweep, if you like. There are two brooms.” Looking pleased, Benny nodded and rose, and the two disappeared inside again. In a moment the cats could hear their brooms swishing across the bare wood subfloor. Joe looked at the yellow tomcat.

“There was a man in prison,” Joe said. “Kit said his name was Arlie something? What did he look like?”

“He’s been out a couple of months,” Misto said. “A handsome man, maybe in his fifties, close as I could tell. Square build, very white hair. Clean shaven, soft-spoken, and—urbane is the word. The others laughed at him, called him‘the gentleman.’ But not to his face; he could be mean, you could see the rage surge up in him. They didn’t mess with Arlie, even the prison gangs left him alone.”

“And the man you were watching in the motel,” Joe said, “could he be the same?”

Misto flicked his whiskers.“His hair was black, and a black beard. I couldn’t pick up his scent, nothing but shaving lotion, and her perfume. He’s built the same, voice the same. Not hard to grow a beard, then dye his hair and beard.”

“Did you follow him here,” Dulcie said. “Is that why you came?”

The yellow cat smiled.“Not exactly. It’s what he said that brought me here. Arlie and Tommie McCord talked about the village. Prison talk, McCord going on about the burglaries he’d pulled here. And Arlie describing the fine house he’d once owned on the shore when he lived here. Bragging talk. But I thought I’dseen that house, a vague memory of concrete slabs with glass in between. ‘Modern,’ he called it. The memory of that house was like a dream, I didn’t know then where I’d seen it.

“He talked about beautiful women sunbathing on the beach, and then about cats, said there were too many cats on the shore around his house, cats hiding in caves in the cliffs. Said they were disgusting, that the village should get rid of them. That had McCord listening, all right, and laughing, astrange, mean laugh. But it sounded so like the muddy shore I remembered, that house, and the shore where the sea will come up to cover all the sand, and there’s a little fishing dock. When he told about a man who came to feed the cats, that was a jolt. I was sure I remembered him.” Misto looked at them with excitement. “I was a kitten in that place, I’m sure of it. I think I was born there.”

“That could be Dr. Firetti,” Dulcie said. “The man who fed the cats, he’s fed them for years. He’sour doctor. He feeds the strays and traps and, pardon the expression, neuters them, gives them their shots and turns them loose again.”

“He didn’t neuter me,” Misto said. “He couldn’t trapme. I remember the traps, like wire cages. When he set them, I always hid from him. I was only small when a woman began to feed me, she came every day until we were friends. And then she took me away; I made my home with her until she died. She died very young, she was fine one day, and then an ambulance was there, it took her away and I never saw her again. And then I was on my own,” Misto said sadly.

“And you came here because you remembered this village, and because those prisoners talked about us,” Kit said, her ears sharply forward.

Misto’s ears and whiskers were down, his thin tail curled around him. “It’s hard to get old among strangers. Hard, when there’s no one else like you, no other speaking cat, no one who understands.”

“And your family?” Dulcie said. The hammering below and the scurries of wind among the dry oaks masked their whispers.

“My mate and I were happy, we had three fine, half-grown kits when she disappeared. I searched for her for a year, I found tufts of her fur near some spent bullets. If she was dead, I never found her body, and at last I gave up.

“I raised the kits, they were good hunters. But then in a garden near our den they took up with a family of children, and all three decided to stay. I didn’t want another human family, I wasn’t done roaming. They were grown and on their own, and I left them.”

“You’ve traveled all over?” Joe said, wondering how that would be, to live that vagabond life.

“I traveled for months, but then returned there, I was lonely for my young ones. But they were gone, the family was gone. I looked for a long time but I never found them. At last I moved on again, and I kept moving, always traveling. I didn’t find my children, and I met no more of our own kind.”

Misto looked from one to the other.“Do you know how it feels to think you’re the only cat within hundreds of miles like you, the only cat who can understand human speech, who could speak to a person if you chose?”

They all three knew how that felt, they knew that frightened loneliness. That was how Dulcie and Joe had met, when each thought there was no other cat like them. They remembered well the wild thrill, when they discovered each other.

Only Kit had never experienced that particular kind of loneliness, for she had grown up among a band of speaking cats. Kit knew loneliness of a different kind, shunned by the others like herself, an orphaned kitten, an outsider, tagging along behind a feral band that didn’t want her, eating the few scraps they left, trying not to starve. She wasn’t born of their group, she was a speaking cat but she wasn’t one ofthem, and she was driven off again and again, a little kitten who did indeed understand loneliness.

“And then,” Misto said, “there at the prison when I learned there were other speaking cats nearby? Of course I came to find you.” He smiled, such an open, delighted smile that Joe had to trust the old cat. “When I saw that blue vintage T-Bird pull into the prison yard on visiting day, I guessed that had to be Jared Colletto’s car, and I took a chance. Victor was always bragging about that car, how his brother kept it in factory-new condition, how Jared was okay in most ways but he was real prissy when it came to that T-Bird. When I saw that car, I thought, how many vintage blue T-Birds could there be? And here I am.”

“Did you live inside the prison?” Dulcie said. “How could …?”

Misto shook his head.“I lived in the open fields among a band of ferals—or at least people called them feral. Many were dumped cats who’d once had homes. Others were truly feral, born wild and their ancestors wild before them. I was the only speaking cat, though I never spoke to them.” The old cat licked his paw. “One of the guards put out food for us, at a side entrance. He’d pet us and talk to us. I wanted badly to talk to him, but of course I didn’t. He was a kind man, he was my friend.

“Some of the prisoners were kind, too. Some saved food for us, leftovers from their meals, they’d slip food to us in the prison yard. We could get into the fenced exercise yard, and even into the prison itself if we were quick, but you had to be wary, we weren’t allowed in there.”

“Weren’t you afraid?” Kit said. “Won’t those men hurt cats?”

“Most of them liked us, they liked having an animal around, to pet and talk to. We stayed away from the threatening ones, the reaching, hard-eyed, cold or spacey guys. Or the guys who were too gentle and smarmy and tried too hard to lure us close.”

Below them, Benny and Lori emerged from the cottage carrying a big trash can between them. Misto said,“Lori’s pa was nice, we were friends. As much as you can be friends, when you can’t talk together. He talked about Lori, he described her so well that I knew her at once. Long shiny brown hair, big brown eyes and little tilted nose. He said she worked for a contractor, and he was proud of that.” Misto twitched a whisker. “There’s a lot of regret in that man, the kind of regret and hindsight that traps a human, that can eat on a person and make him miserable.”

Lori and Benny emptied the trash can, tipping it high into the Dumpster, the carpet scraps and dust cascading out. After they put the can on the back porch, Benny continued to follow Lori, as clingy as a puppy. As if, Joe thought, the kid hadn’t had many young friends in his short life. He thought about the hit-and-run, about the danger to Benny, and about the stabbing of Jack Reed and the possible threat to Lori, and he was glad Rock was there watching the two of them with that keen, proprietary gaze. He just hoped Rock’s attention, and the vigilance of the people around the children, would be enough to protect these two from harm.

32

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FIVE DAYS BEFORE Christmas, Jack Reed was transferred from Salinas Valley Hospital back to the state prison at Soledad, riding in a prison car accompanied by two guards. He was settled, not in the open infirmary, but by himself in a secure room until Victor Colletto and the other two inmates who’d attacked him had been transferred out. The room was plain, with bland beige walls and a locked, barred door. He welcomed the isolation; it beat the open infirmary, crowded among complaining, bad-tempered men with their own ills and medicines and body functions, and no nicety of canvas curtainsbetween them as in a civilian hospital. He was processed and checked in, and the prison doc looked him over. Dr. Ralph Flaggan was a tall, meaty man with a round, baby-smooth face and a closed, superior attitude that could have put Jack off, until he thought about the men this guy had to deal with on a day-to-day basis.

“Your wounds are healing well, Jack. You’re out of danger, provided there are no setbacks. Another two weeks, you should be ready to return to the general population. I don’t want you out there until you can hold your own. We’ll transfer you to the ward once Colletto is gone.”

“Tomorrow’s a visiting day,” Jack said. “If my little girl wants to come, can I see her?”

“You’ll go to the secure visiting room in a wheelchair,” Flaggan said. “The warden has notified her guardian that you’re back in the prison.” This would not be the family visiting room, but a secure cubicle, again with a glass between them, where they could speak only by phone, every word subject to prison monitoring. Now, within the confining metal bars of his narrow bed he had nothing to do but think. He didn’t feel like reading any of the dog-eared magazines the prison supplied; instead he lay worrying about Lori, increasingly afraid someone would try to hurt her as Vic Colletto had hurt him. Colletto was mean, his angry attack just a small indication of his vindictiveness. Jack thought Vic hadn’t been put with more violent men because he was young, wasn’t a gang member, and this was his first time in prison. Colletto’s hatred of Jack stemmed from two years ago, when Jack had fired him.

When, that morning crossing the prison yard on his way to breakfast, Jack overheard Colletto and his two pals talking about Molena Point and Max Harper, he’d caught the name Dorriss and paused. When Colletto glanced around and saw Jack listening, he’d come at Jack. Colletto had been thick with Marlin Dorriss in prison, before Dorriss was released. Dorriss, too, was a vindictive man, and he had no love for Harper, who’d ruined his smooth thieving operation.

Jack didn’t know what Dorriss and Colletto might be planning, but the conversation ate at him. Dorriss, on the outside and with moneyed friends, could set up any number of ugly operations to get back at Harper.

And if Colletto was in some way part of it, Lori might become a victim just to entertain him. Colletto, already hating Jack and blaming Jack because he was now in trouble with prison authorities, would sure as hell encourage Dorriss to rough her up, or worse.

He knew Molena Point PD would watch out for Lori, he had to count on that. But with Harper, Dorriss’s agenda could be anything. The man was a cool, manipulative liar, liked to think of himself as a high roller, a charming fellow who knew how to pull strings, how to get things done and be well paid for it. He’d hire someone to do any dirty work involved, though he might enjoy roughing up a few people, too. Seemed strange he was close with the Collettos; they had no high-toned connections, no power. He was probably paying them to do the grunt work; Victor’s younger brother, Kent, would be good for that. If Dorriss did plan some retribution against Max Harper, that bothered him. Max hadbeen a good friend, he was a good man, Jack didn’t want to see some scum try to take him down.

And they’d better leave Lori alone. She’d had enough ugliness in her life. She was fearful and worried about him in prison, and before that, before he was sent up, even then he’d caused her pain, he hadn’t really been there for her. Then,he’d been the one who was afraid, afraid for Lori, terrified for her. What kind of example was that? Her mother dead, and only a weak, fearful father. No one strong enough to understand and support her. That was hard on a young girl, he understood that now. And here, in prison, he was less than useless.

The night Jack found his brother, Hal, standing over those children’s graves, holding a dead child carelessly under his arm like a bag of flour, and a shovel in his other hand, the rage that hit him hadn’t abated until he’d killed Hal. Until long after he’d buried him beside those pitiful little graves and shoved weeds and overgrown geraniums back over theraw earth. Nothing in the world could shake him as he’d been shaken the night he killed his brother.

That was when the battles at home began, when he and Natalie began to argue over Lori’s safety. Natalie thought he was being overprotective. He never had told her the truth of it, hadn’t wanted to make her a party to Hal’s murder.

Then when he realized his brother’s partner, Irving Fenner, was still out there killing other children, he was wild with fear again. That was when he began to lock Lori in the house, wouldn’t let her go out even in the daytime, not even to school. He wouldn’t tell Natalie why, he didn’t want to terrify her, too, and that was his biggest mistake; their fighting grew worse until Natalie took Lori and left him, managed to get away to the East Coast where he could never find them. Since he didn’t have the money for a private detective nor was he sure he could trust one, he decided it was best for Lori if he didn’t know where she was, if he made no contact that could be traced. Lori was six when Natalie ran off with her, and Jack didn’t see her again for five years. After Natalie died, Lori was flown back from North Carolina in the care of a social worker. And the nightmare started all over again; Jack, filledwith fear for her because the killer was still out there, hid her away, boarded up the windows, locked her in the house. He’d known no other way, he couldn’t go to the law. As much as he respected Max Harper, Harper would have to bring Children’s Services into it, and that was all Fenner would need. He’d find Lori before the cops had enough on him to arrest him and take him off the streets, and Fenner would kill her.

But by then, Lori was older and she soon figured a way to get out of the house. She ran, found a cavelike hiding place that no one knew about. Even so, Fenner at last spotted her on the street, when the child ventured out for a few moments like a little animal coming up for food and air. Fenner followed her, Jack discovered him stalking her, and in a rictor of renewed fear he hadn’t waited for the cops, he’d killed Fenner just as he’d killed Hal. Only this time, he didn’t hide the body. He was too tired, he had ended the nightmare that threatened Lori, it was over, he was willing to take the lumps. When Max Harper found him with Fenner’s body and arrested him, no other cop could have been more fair, could have treated him straighter than Max did. It was Max who helped him through the legalities of placing Lori with Cora Lee French and the senior ladies, and in selecting an attorney to draw up a trust for Lori that included the income from the sale of their house and of his half of the electrical company that he and his partner had established before Lori was born.

Now, Harper himself could be facing trouble, and Jack would like to give him a heads-up. In the hospital, with the guard right there in his face, he hadn’t been able to say anything to Cora Lee or Lori. But now that he was back in prison, all he needed was a few seconds in the visiting room, with the guards’ attention diverted. If a guard overheard him talking about criminal plans on the outside, and told the warden, Warden Deaver would be required to pass that on to Molena Point PD. That was too many people knowing. As much as Jack respected the warden, he didn’t trust all the guards or every cop, not even among Harper’s own officers.

How was he going to give Lori or Cora Lee any message for Harper, in a secure visiting cubicle, able to speak only through a monitored phone? He lay there worrying until he wore himself out. And then, drifting off, he got to thinking for some reason about that stray cat. Prison cat. Wondering if, when he got out of this bed and back among the prison population, back to his gardening job, he’d see that cat again. Strange he’d think about that.

He hadn’t had a pet since he was a kid, hadn’t had time when he was grown. And he’d never paid much attention to the cats that hung around outside the prison. Living on mice and gophers, he guessed, and on handouts from the inmates and some of the guards. He’d paid little attention except for the big yellow tomcat that had followed him and made up with him. Came trotting over every time it saw him working outside, hung around the whole time he was digging weeds and trimming bushes. He’d liked stroking it and scratching its ears. Tomcat could purr like a buzz saw. There was something about the simple honesty of an animal, unlike the deceptive layers of most humans, that eased him. When he imagined a world without animals in it, without Lori’s beloved horses, without the birds that scavenged the prison yard, the friendly dogs all over Molena Point, the rabbits around the prison he saw leaping across the fields, the shy cats slipping away, he thought that such a world would be cold, and one-dimensional, that a world made up only of humans would be far more discouraging, even, than the prison that was now his home.

LORI COULDN’T STAY awake as she and Cora Lee drove through the dark midnight hours. Tired from a long morning’s work at the cottage, then school, and then riding Smokey with Charlie Harper, she fell asleep before they were out of the village onto the highway. She slept all the way to Soledad, woke when Cora Lee pulled off the freeway to park in a long line of cars beside the six-lane. She imagined, inside the cars in front of them, unseen people dozing cramped and uncomfortable, waiting for morning to enter the prison, each with his own sad story. The night was still except for an occasional bump orclick from within another car. She knew the noises were only sleepers shifting position, but they sounded stealthy, made her uneasy. The dark emptiness of the night, among so many strangers who could be convicts themselves, made her glad the doors were locked and that Cora Lee had her phone and herpepper spray. The night had turned cold, the wind from the freeway forcing icy fingers in around the closed windows, the glass cold against her hand. She yawned, pulled her coat collar up, and despite her fear she curled up against the door, dropping once more into sleep.

She dreamed that Benny was trapped underneath a whole stack of Maudie’s quilts. Maudie kept frantically pulling off quilts, trying to free him—but then the quilts were pale hands, thin, white hands reaching for him, Maudie throwing quilts over the hands to try to smother them.

She woke at first light, cold and cramped, and startled that she was in the parked car. Some time during the night she had crawled over into the backseat and lay twisted up in the blanket Cora Lee had thrown over her. Rising up, she looked into the front.

Cora Lee was asleep behind the wheel, her head resting against the side window. Her dark curly hair was so short it was never out of place. She had pulled her creamy down jacket over her legs. Her hand lay inches from her cell phone, and from the can of pepper spray half concealed beneath the edge of her jacket. Looking out across the freeway, Lori studied the huge, pale box that was the prison, a cold, impersonal building. She hated this place, it made her feel as small and helpless as a bug. Pa shouldn’t be here, he should have gotten a medal for killing those two men, not be locked up. She hated the powers in the world that you couldn’t reason with, powers that sucked the life out of a person.

Cora Lee didn’t wake until the cars around them began to start up, their engines grumbling in the cold morning. At once Cora Lee was awake, starting their own car, nosing along in the slow line to the 101 freeway and crossing over, above it, then into the prison yard. Through the gate and into the parking lot, where everyone piled out of their cars and made a dash to get in line, or for the Porta Pottis. They got in line, and in a little while Cora Lee turned to the lady behind them, a short, square, black-haired woman, and asked her to hold their place. They couldn’t take turns standing in line to use the Porta Pottis, if a guard saw a child standing there alone he’d come to investigate, tell them that was against the rules. It was so cold they were both shivering. Coming back, they washed their hands with the wipes Cora Lee had brought; then Cora Lee unwrapped their sandwiches, to eat standing in line. Cream cheese and ham, from their paper bag. Milk for Lori, which they’d kept cold in an ice chest in the car. Orange juice for Cora Lee. Around them, the lawn was neatly cut, the bushes trimmed so perfectly they looked artificial. As if the trustees who cared for them had all the time in the world, and she guessed they did.

It seemed hours until they reached the gate, dumped their trash in a receptacle, and went inside. People ahead of them had to empty their pockets, hand over their purses, go through a body scan. Like at the airport. At least they weren’t patted down, she’d hate that, a stranger’s hands all over her. Cora Lee had locked her purse in the trunk. She dropped her car keys on the table. A guard pulled Pa’s file, their picture IDs were checked, and they signed in. They moved on through the narrow entrance building, a few peopleat a time, and through a barred gate into a prison yard, then into the prison itself. Down a hall, this time not to the visitors’ big, open room with its long table and vending machines, but to a small room where they sat down at a little square table, in hard chairs, but again facing a clear glass barrier, with a phone on either side of the glass. “Why is it different?”

“Security,” Cora Lee said.

“Why? Pa didn’t do anything.”

“The other guy did. They’re protecting your pa.” Cora Lee looked down at her, her brown eyes concerned for her. They watched the prisoners march in, glimpses of them between the pillars as they moved down the table to take their seats facing their visitors. Pa arrived in a wheelchair pushed by a nurse. It shocked her to see a woman in the men’s prison, though she knew women worked there. Pa’s legs were covered by a brown blanket. He looked so frail. But as he was wheeled up to the table, he grinned at her through the glass. She hated that glass, she hated the phone that filtered their every word, their whole visit wasted on meaningless questions and canned answers: “How are you feeling?” “Much better, it doesn’t hurt so much. How’re you doing in school?” “Fine.” “How’s your pony?” “He’s fine. I’ve been riding with Charlie Harper.” So stiff and unreal, eating up their precious time. She could see Pa wanted to tell them something, something he couldn’t say with the phone monitored. Was this another message for Max Harper? She wanted to crawl through the glass so they could talk—like Alice stepping through the looking glass—so she could hug him and tell him she loved him. She wanted to tell him Harper had gotten his first message all right, Cora Lee had seen to that.

“Thanks from our friend,” Lori said, “from Charlie’s husband.”

Pa smiled and nodded, and looked relieved. Whatever more he wanted to say, he kept to himself, until, Lori thought, they could be back in the family visitors’ room again, where they might not be monitored. She hoped that wouldn’t be long, she hated this, hated being listened to, with no privacy; she hated it more for Pa, even, than for herself.

THE LAST JACK saw of Lori was her rigid, angry back, angry at the rules, he thought as she and Cora Lee filed out of the visiting room, Lori’s long brown hair shining in the overhead lights. On his side of the glass the line of prisoners marched out, too, and he was wheeled away to the infirmary, his message for Max Harper unspoken. He knew Harper would figure it out when the pieces started coming together, but meantime who knew how much damage Arlie Risso would do? He felt worn out, even with only that short time in the visiting room. With the stress of being unable to talk freely, to let Max know about Risso—about Marlin Dorriss. The doc said it was normal to tire out easily while his body was healing. Well, he didn’t have to like it, he was done in. Not since he’d tried to protect Lori when she was just a little girl had he felt so damned useless.

33

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CATS WEREN’T OFFICIALLY barred from city council meetings but only because no one had ever imagined that a cat would want to attend. It was Ryan who’d insisted they bring Joe. She’d hung tough until she won the argument, and just for an instant Joe was chagrined to be the cause of the newlyweds’ heated conflict. But if the two had to battle, what more urgent subject was there than the happiness of the family cat?

“He’ll be good,” she’d told Clyde, fixing Joe with a threatening gaze that made his fur twitch. He’d tried to look innocent, but they all three knew his behavior would depend on the situation of the moment, on his anger as a few biased citizens rose to criticize Max Harper and make trouble for the chief.

The city hall had begun life, early in the last century, as a village church. The peak of the handsome redwood building rose steeply between two lower wings that now housed a variety of city offices, from administrator to public works and zoning. The gnarled branches of a twisted oak sheltered the deep porch, which was reached by a sturdy ramp to accommodate the occasional wheelchair. Beside the front door stood two ceramic pots of holly bushes heavy with red berries. Taped to the rail were paper cutout Santas and reindeer, hand-colored by the local schoolchildren. Within the wide entry foyer stood a six-foot Christmas tree, thick and dense, decorated with silver and white bells. Deeper in, against a long expanse of wall, the cr?che had been arranged, the wise men as tall as six-year-old children, the little Christ child snuggled in his crib. The wooden figures, carved by hand nearly a hundred years before, were still celebrating the traditional spirit of Christmas despite a few hard-nosed citizens who didn’t approve of such sentiments.

Joe, concealed within the leather tote that Ryan carried, could see only the high, raftered ceiling as they entered the meeting room. Ryan tucked the bag on the seat of the wooden pew beside her, where he listened to the reading of the minutes; he yawned and dozed off during a tedious discussion of city business. He came wide awake when members of the audience began to file up, one at a time, to the little side podium that featured its own microphone. Each citizen speaker stood at the side of the room facing both the audience and the council that sat behind the polished wood barrier: a council of three men and one woman, and the woman mayor, her white hair knotted at the nape of her neck, her navy blazer well cut over a white silk blouse. Each citizen to come forward talked about the home invasions, venting considerable anger toward the police. It was amazing to Joe that the speakers would rant so vehemently about the department’s incompetence when Chief Harper sat not three feet from them, just beside their small podium.

Max wasn’t there to make a rebuttal, this was a traditional part of the chief’s job. The city charter required his presence to keep order, though there’d never been a fistfight in a Molena Point meeting. Max, in uniform and wearing a sidearm, listened without expression, an enforcer of the law, a guardian against some outbreak of unbridled rage. Hard to imagine, Joe thought, in this small village. In San Francisco or Detroit, matters might deteriorate as had indeed happened in several large cities, one even evolving into a near-fatal shooting. In most Molena Point council meetings, the tomcat suspected, one was more likely to die from boredom.

But not this afternoon. Despite Max’s disinterested expression, the tomcat would give a year’s supply of deli takeout to know what the chief was thinking as a dozen misinformed and angry diatribes were laid on the council members and audience, and on the chief. Peering discreetly over the top of the bag, he watched the tiny crease at the side of Max’s mouth, just the ghost of a smile. As each speaker questioned the competence of MPPD, the male council members maintained suitably blank expressions; only Pansy Nitonski, her thin face framed by straight, chin-length brown hair, smirked with ill-concealed pleasure at the insults, making Joe want to slash her smug face.

Well, but nothing would be decided at this meeting, no decision would be made here about whether Max was competent in his job. That issue would be resolved in private session; this display was all smoke and mirrors, because the city council had no final authority in the matter. They were advisors; they couldn’t directly fire Max though they certainly had input with the city manager. He was the one responsible for hiring and firing the chief, often advised by a board of experts that could include police chiefs from other central coast cities—but these accusations were so trumped up they were laughable. Joe burned to leap to the podium and have his own say, tell these airheads just how wrong they were.

He also would have liked to see how the audience was responding, he could see nothing from the bottom of the damned bag. He’d like to know whether Phelps Leibert was in the crowd, too. Leibert was head of security at the local college and was the man theGazette was pushing, in its editorials, as a replacement for Harper: a harsh, controlling, egocentric man who would be bad news indeed for MPPD, for the whole village. Most likely, Leibert had had the good sense to stay away from the meeting, not telegraph his punches, not let anyone think he cared what happened. How would it look for him to be there watching Max and the department deliberately trashed, when everyone knew he hoped to replace Max in the near future.

Natty Bowen had come to the podium, and she sounded nervous as hell. Joe eased up out of the bag for a quick look. The thin, worn woman had dressed for the occasion in a lavender velvet jogging suit that she’d accessorized with enough gold jewelry to serve her as workout weights—gold necklaces, gold choker, gold earrings. Her slim feet were encased in lavender and pink glitter-encrusted sports shoes that looked as if they’d never been out of the box before this very afternoon. Her delivery was nervous but pushy, and she stuck closely to an apparently rehearsed agenda, as did the other speakers: The invasions were terrifying, people were being injured, traumatized, no telling what the lasting effects would be on these poor women, and many thousands of dollars’ worth of property had been damaged. Why were the police looking the other way, not putting a stop to these atrocities? And though Natty might have stammered through her presentation, the next speaker did not.

Having returned to the bottom of the bag, Joe slipped up again when he heard Arlie Risso introduced. He was straining to see over the top of the seat in front of them when Ryan’s hand forced him back down. Holding him out of sight, she gave him the faintest headshake, as if someone were watching. Subsiding irritably under Ryan’s confining hand, he listened to Risso explain that, being a new resident, he’d been shocked and disappointed when, after buying a home in the village, these terrible invasions began, even right there in his own neighborhood. So disappointed he’d almost decided to sell and move on, find a more amenable environment in which to enjoy his retirement—his tone, and his expensive cashmere sport coat, white silk shirt, and silk tie implieda more amenable environment in which to spend his considerable retirement income. His polished delivery was as fake as that of a telephone solicitor asking for your Social Security number. Peering up again when Ryan glanced away, Joe watched Risso make eye contact with each council member, his penetrating look bringing color to Pansy’s cheeks. Risso ended his two minutes with a plea for the law to “Step in and lock up the miscreants and save our lovely village,” making Joe want to upchuck his breakfast. When Risso left the podium, and Ryan let go of Joe’s neck, he slid up for another quick look. Yes, Arlie Risso was the guy in the motel room, slick black hair, neatly trimmed black beard. Before Joe ducked down again, he caught a glimpse of Max Harper’s face, too. Max’s flash of surprised recognition, quickly hidden, made the tomcat smile. The chief had quickly stripped away the black hair and black beard, replaced them with handsomely styled silver hair. This man’s skin was tanned to a darker shade, and even his black-dyed eyebrows sharply changed his appearance. But both Joe and Max knew him as Dorriss: con artist, master chameleon, the slick investor and thief whomJoe had helped Max put in prison a couple of years back. He’d be willing to bet this was the first time Max had seen Dorriss since Dorriss arrived in the village. Dorriss had probably taken great pains to stay out of the way of the cops, either remaining indoors or hiding behind the tinted glass of the Caddy or the Toyota, keeping a low profile, avoiding anyone who might know him. Joe wondered if Dulcie and Kit had gotten a look at Risso/Dorriss from where they crouched outside among the limbs of the oak that overhung the main entry. Risso, standing at the side podium with its auxiliary microphone, appeared totally unaware of Max, as if the chief might be just any rookie cop, even though Risso had had extensive dealings with Max.

Only after Risso had his say and took his seat again did two speakers point out that if citizens weren’t prepared, if they had no alarm system or did not call 911, then patrol unitscould only arrive after the fact, after the harm was done. While Joe was grateful for these sensible folks, what he wondered was, after the meeting, would Max Harper arrest Risso? Did he have enough evidence to hold him? Or would he put a tail on the man, wait to apprehend him at the next invasion attempt and, in Risso’s words,Step in and lock up the miscreants?

SHE LEFT THE city council meeting never looking in Arlie’s direction. She had debated whether to come, had waited in the shadows of a shop across the street, and then had slipped in among the crowd of locals, taken a seat way in the back. She’d almost turned and left again when she saw the police chief sitting up front in some kind of official capacity. Why would a cop be at a city council meeting? In this little burg? This wasn’t L.A. or New York. Nervously she’d sat down behind a tall man, hoping to be out of Harper’s sight. Though he couldn’t know her, couldn’t have any interest in her, he made her nervous. The speakers from the audience had been entertaining—angry, accusing, just what Arlie wanted. It had come off very well, and she knew he’d be in a good mood later.

When that part of the meeting was finished and the council moved on to other city business, she’d wanted to leave, but couldn’t without attracting attention. She’d wasted an excruciatingly boring hour before she could vanish within the crowd. The streets were growing dark, and the sea wind was cold. Walking up the street, turning right at the first side street, and then left, she headed up the eight blocks to the new motel room she’d checked into—it was a drag to move, but something about the first place had made Arlie nervous. Hurrying through the little lobby and down the hall, into the darkening room, she sat down to wait for him. It had been a successful meeting from his standpoint, a waste of time for her. This had nothing to do with her, except that she enjoyed the drama, she liked seeing Arlie at work.

Her involvement with the invasions had started as a favor, a trade-off that had ended up entangling her more than she liked. Now she was sorry she’d connected up with Arlie; she wouldn’t have if she’d known that he and the Colletto boys knew each other, that Arlie had been in prison with Victor. Talk about coincidence—this was an ugly one.

She’d thought she could spend some time with Arlie in San Francisco, now that he was out on parole, that she could bring back some of the excitement of their weekends in Vegas, and then come on down here alone to the village, take care of her business. But it hadn’t worked that way. Well, she was moving toward what she wanted. But she was being sucked in deeper than she liked by Arlie’s affairs, and away from her own objective. It angered her that he was paying out hard cash for these breakins but wasn’t paying her, that he figured her help was for old times’ sake.

Whatever compensation she got would be from Maudie. Meanwhile, she had to admit, she liked the excitement of the invasions, getting in and out fast, the quick violence, terrifying those soft little women. The invaders were always the winners, and that was how she liked to play. And now, with David Toola gone, Maudie was just as easy a mark. She’d soon have the papers and, when she was done with Maudie, she’d have the money that was rightfully hers, would be out of California headed wherever she chose.

34

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THE OAK TREES outside Maudie’s bedroom windows were barely visible when she woke, the sky deep gray, just beginning to lighten. Rising, she pulled on her warm robe and slippers and headed downstairs, glancing into Benny and Jared’s room to make sure the two slept soundly. She liked her early mornings alone, she liked the solitude. Today she would move into her new studio and she could hardly wait to get started; she wanted to do what she could before Jared came down to help her, wanted to do it her way. She felt like a kid at the prospect of her new work space, was nearly giddy with excitement.

In the kitchen she made a pot of coffee, and while it brewed she stepped into the dark studio, enjoying the clean smell of new lumber and fresh paint. Beyond the bare glass of the floor-to-ceiling windows the twisted oak branches loomed black and remote against the predawn sky. It was still too dark to see if anyone stood among the trees, looking in—but Pearl wouldn’t be prowling this early in the morning, she needn’t be prepared for her at this hour, Pearl was a late sleeper.

She was so anxious to get settled, to stack her bolts of bright fabric neatly on the shelves, to arrange her quilting frames, quilting table, and cutting table, to have them all in place beside her computer and sewing machines. Once she got to work, she’d feel that she was really home.

Working here would be like working right in the garden, she thought, in her own small Eden where her invented patterns would vie in color with cascades of garden flowers. Martin would have liked the new studio, she told herself, trying to put away the heaviness that surrounded every thought of him; he would have approved of their moving back to the village.

Quickly she returned to the kitchen, poured a cup of coffee, and carried it into the chill garage, propping the door open behind her. Setting her cup down on a carton, she pulled the lightweight office cart over to a stack of boxes and began sliding the smaller ones onto it, using her good arm. Jared and Scotty would help later with the heavy ones, and the furniture. She worked for nearly an hour, trying not to think about Martin. Thinking about Benny, and about Pearl, her emotions swinging from sadness to rage, to a cold need to see Pearl punished, to make right this one terrible wrong in the world. Wheeling her loaded cart into the studio, she opened the boxes, began to stack fabric neatly on the shelves, to arrange her spools of thread and small equipment in the new drawers that Scotty had built. When she had put away all she could, she returned the empty boxes to the garage, stacking them in one corner. That was when she realized that some of the packed boxes were missing: two bankers’ boxes containing Caroline’s personal papers and the mementos and photographs that she was saving for Benny. They had been right here just days ago, when she removed the sealed envelope from the kitchen box.

She wondered if Benny might have taken the boxes up to his room. But no, she’d cleaned in there late yesterday, had dusted under the beds and in the closet. Would the child hide them somewhere? Did he think she might throw them out when she moved everything else, that she’d decide she didn’t want to store them? Shehad said she’d be glad when the garage was cleared out, when she could pull the car in. Did Benny think she’d give Caroline’s things away, after she’d gone to the trouble of packing and moving them three hundred miles from L.A.? But who knew what scenario might occur to a child whose first seven years had been filled broken promises?

No, she thought. Pearlhad returned, but when? Had she, not finding the ledger pages, taken the boxes to allow time for a more leisurely search? Maybe she thought Caroline had secreted the papers among her tax files or medical records, where one would have to go through everything to find them? Anger filled her that Caroline’s family photos were gone, and the mementos of Benny’s few short months with his stepmother that the child so valued, as well as Caroline’s marriage certificates, Benny’s father’s enlistment papers, and the official notice of his death. She didn’t like losing Caroline’s tax records, either, which she’d agreed to send on to Caroline’s sister along with a clutter of old family recipes and letters, and copies of a family genealogy that Caroline had saved for her own children, too many heavy items to take on the plane when she had the two children and their suitcases. The bigger cartons, containing the rest of the children’s clothes and books and toys, seemed undisturbed, nearly hidden beneath Maudie’s own cartons. She stood in the cold garage sipping her cooling coffee, feeling both frightened and energized, her hand straying once to the comforting weight hidden in her robe pocket. Now, with the whole village edgy over the invasions, who could fault her if she was prepared to defend herself and protect her grandchild?

It was six-thirty when she heard Jared getting up, heard the shower running. Rousing herself, she hurried back into the kitchen to heat the waffle iron, to get out the big pitcher of waffle batter she’d made the day before, the butter and syrup, and to put bacon on the grill. In the downstairs bath she washed her face, gargled some mouth-wash, and ran a comb through her hair. When Jared came down, she said nothing about the missing boxes. Just as, days earlier, she hadn’t mentioned the missing keys. Jared appeared in the kitchen showered and scrubbed, dressed in a fresh blue sport shirt and Dockers. Benny straggled down behind him yawning, still in his sailboat pajamas. They ate in comfortable silence, Jared reading the sports page, Maudie scanning another ugly editorial about the invasions, then turning to the home section, while Benny carefully distributed the butter and syrup evenly into each well of his waffle. He ate each quarter with equal concentration, as if even homemade waffles were a special treat. It was seven-thirty and they’d finished breakfast when Scotty arrived, parking his truck at the curb. Coming in, accepting a quick cup of coffee, he stood at the counter to drink it, avoiding the syrupy mess at the table, which made Maudie smile. Scotty’s bright blue work shirt made his red hair and beard blaze like flame. “Wanted to get in an hour’s work or so, before we begin pouring cement up at the cottage,” he said.

Jared grinned and rose, and the two men headed into the garage, Benny following. During the next hour, the child insisted on carrying heavy loads for such a little boy, but Maudie didn’t caution or scold, she knew the one thing Benny needed was to feel useful. The two of them had spent the previous afternoon, as Scotty finished up the painting and hardware and locks, baking cherry pies and apple tarts for the Damens’ potluck afternoon and evening that this year fell on the same Sunday as the village pageant. Benny was so excited about dinner at Ryan and Clyde’s house and all the events to follow: the reenactment, in the park, of the journey of Joseph and Mary; the choirs in the village streets; and, most of all, the wagon rides put on by half a dozen village horsemen, who would trailer their horses and haul the wagons into town for the event. The usually silent child had chattered nonstop as together they prepared the cherry filling and peeled the apples. In the warm, spice-scented kitchen, Benny had seemed almost to forget the nightmares that made him wake up screaming and continue shivering as she held and cuddled him.

In L.A., friends had told her she should take Benny to a therapist, but she didn’t want to do that; she didn’t like the idea of a stranger manipulating the child’s emotions. She would provide all the therapy she could, holding and loving Benny, getting him to join her in household tasks and encouraging new interests. Providing real sit-down meals and as much companionship as an old woman could give a little boy. Benny loved being in the kitchen with her; Pearl’s kitchen had been a cold, neglected place where the child had to make his own sandwiches and hope the milk wasn’t sour. Benny liked being with Ryan and Scotty, too, liked watching them at work. Under thewatchful eye of Scotty and of Lori Reed, he was learning the proper use of the simpler carpentry tools, to drive a nail without smashing his thumb, to saw a board straight and easy.

Jared’s presence in the house was a help, too, and her nephew seemed to have taken a real interest in Benny. That morning, after they’d moved everything into the studio, Jared made sandwiches, packed a lunch, and took Benny with him to run errands, and for an impromptu picnic. She was sorry Jared couldn’t join them at the Damens’. He’d said, making a face, that his mother made it clear she had special plans.

Maudie, enjoying a little break and a moment of solitude, was sitting at the kitchen table with her own lunch and a cup of tea when Ryan came down the hill, pulling her truck into the drive. She had to smile as Ryan stepped out, and not only the big silver Weimaraner jumped out, but the gray tomcat, too, behaving almost like a small dog. She didn’t know what it was about that particular cat and his two friends, but Benny surely had taken to them.

Benny had never had a pet. Pearl didn’t like animals; she said they were dirty and that people simply wasted their money on useless beasts. Caroline and Martin had planned to get the three children a puppy for Christmas—another simple joy taken from them. She rose to let Ryan in. “Have you had lunch? Jared made chicken sandwiches, and there’s a pot of tea.”

“That sounds wonderful.” Ryan laid the final bill and the studio keys on the table. “I meant to go home and warm up a bowl of soup, but this is much nicer. You sure you want company?”

“I’d love the company. Bring Rock in, please.” She needn’t invite Joe Grey in, the tomcat was already stretched out on the stairs. “Rock’s such a lovely dog,” she said, stroking his sleek head. “We had Dobermans when the boys were growing up. Martin …” Her voice caught. “Martin was very good at training them, they had lovely manners. As does Rock,” she added. “Would you prefer coffee to tea?”

“The tea smells good,” Ryan said, glancing at the steaming ceramic teapot. “Youare coming for dinner tomorrow? It will be casual, and there’ll be other children in and out, the younger officers’ children. Just a potluck buffet, and we’ll eat in relays when officers take their breaks or go off duty. The Harpers usually have it at the ranch, but with everyone on extra patrol, it makes more sense to have it at our place, where the men can move out faster.” She watched Maudie pour the tea. “You’re moving into the studio today?”

Maudie smiled.“The cartons are all moved. I’ve sent Jared and Benny on errands. Sometimes it’s easier to work alone, for unpacking and organizing.”

“And more satisfying,” Ryan said. “Organizing a creative work spaceshould be a solitary occupation.” She studied Maudie, her green eyes questioning. “You’re upset about something?”

“I didn’t think it showed,” Maudie said. “This morning, I found a couple of boxes missing from the garage, Caroline’s things that I’d saved for Benny. I thought he might have taken them up to his room, but I’d already been through the room, cleaning. I expect they’ll turn up, but it’s puzzling. I … didn’t mention this to Jared,” she cautioned. She didn’t know why she’d mentioned it to Ryan. The moment she did, she was sorry. “Nothing else is missing,” she said quickly.

Ryan looked at her sternly.“You haven’t reported it to the police?”

“I would have,” she said quickly, “if I’d found anything else missing, or found where someone had broken in. I examined the garage door, all the doors and windows. There’s no sign of damage.”

“The police wouldn’t have to send out a patrol car. If you reported it, it would be on record. That would help in case anything more happens.” Ryan tried not to scold, but this was worrisome. Why this distaste for the police? “The department does have its hands full,” she said, “with these invasions, but certainly they’d take a report.”

“You’re not thinking there’s some connection?”

“Probably not,” Ryan said shortly. On the floor by her feet, Rock rolled over, sighing. But on the third step, Joe Grey watched Maudie with such keen interest that Ryan gave him a warning scowl.

Maudie said,“That’s why I didn’t call the police, because theyare busy. I saw this morning’sGazette… I wouldn’t have started taking it if I’d realized just how one-sided the paper is.” She passed the sandwich plate, seemed pleased when Ryan took another quarter-cut morsel. “I don’t remember this newspaper being that way, all the summers our family spent in the village when the boys were small.”

“The paper was sold recently. No one I know likes this new approach—though I haven’t heard of anyone canceling their subscription,” Ryan said wryly. Glancing around the big kitchen with its glass door into the studio, she was acutely aware of how open the house was, kitchen, living room, and entry open to one another with no way to shut any room off, open stairway leading to the bedrooms, no way to secure the second floor. “You haven’t considered an alarm system?”

“I thought about it, but they’re such a bother, always having to remember to arm and disarm them, and then sometimes they go off for no reason, throwing everyone into a panic. I keep the doors locked, the windows locked except when I’m right in the room. Unfortunately,” she said, “I’ve misplaced my second set of keys, and that’s worrisome, but they’ll show up.”

Ryan remained quiet. She couldn’t understand, as vulnerable as Maudie was here alone, and with the shooting so recent and raw in her emotions, how she could be so unconcerned. She had started to speak, to ask more about the missing keys, when she caught Joe Grey’s eye, the tomcat’s look so intense that she had to look away.

What was he telling her? But then almost as if he’d spoken, Ryan knew. It was the one question Joe had asked her about the shooting, the one element of that double murder that Maudie had never made clear, that she seemed to have carefully skirted, the few times the subject was mentioned.

On that black night, on that dark mountain road, with only the thin flicker of moonlight Maudie had described,had she seen the face of the killer?

If she’d seen the shooter and had told the police, wouldn’t she have been encouraged to stay in L.A., maybe with a guard, until the shooter was arrested and she could identify him? If she was the only witness, surely the LAPD wouldn’t have wanted her to move away. Ryan could conclude only that, most likely, Maudie hadn’t seen the shooter. And yet the woman’s unease when she talked about the shooting, something apart from the horror and pain of the murder, made both Ryan and Joe Grey wonder.

“That night,” Ryan said, “the night of the shooting—did you see the killer? See anything you could tell the police?”

“Nothing,” Maudie said quickly. “The sheriff questioned me while I was in the hospital. Later when I got out, when David took me home, the L.A. police questioned me. I guess they were doing some kind of …” Maudie paused, searching for the word.

“Collateral investigation?” Ryan asked.

Maudie nodded.“But no, that night—so black … Hardly any moon at all. It had been a hot day, was still hot and we had the top down. Suddenly the pickup loomed beside us, seemed to come out of nowhere, racing along next to us, and the next instant the gunshots, the noise, and those three explosions of light blinding me, the car spinning out of control and going over …” Maudie said, telling more than she’d been asked, more than was needed.

Ryan said no more. She glanced at Joe Grey, feeling the same uncertainty that gleamed in the tomcat’s eyes. At that moment, woman and cat were caught in the same sure sense that Maudie wanted only to divert Ryan, that she was surely holding something back.

Had she lied to the L.A. detectives? Maybe lied so she’d be free to leave L.A., so the police wouldn’t press her to stay in the city, under their protection? Or if Maudie was the only one who could identify the killer, would she lie to protect herself, so the killer wouldn’t come after her?

But this was all conjecture. Probably in the dark night, Ryan thought, Maudie had seen nothing more than the flashes of the gun, she was most likely telling the truth, had told L.A. everything she knew. After all, who more than Maudie would want to see the killer pay for those brutal murders?

35

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IT WAS HARDLY light when the first good smells of party food filtered up to Joe’s tower from the kitchen below. The tomcat woke, yawning, drinking in the scents of frying meat and onions. Ryan and Clyde would be putting together the tamale pie, and probably the taco fillings, for the Christmas party. Out across the roofs, long streaks of sunrise bloomed beneath a cover of heavy gray clouds. But it wouldn’t rain, he couldn’t smell rain in the offing. No matter what the weather gurus might think, Joe knew better; he knew the sky would clear before the day’s festivities. Rising from among his pillows, his mind on the feast to come, he headed in through his cat dooronto the heavy rafter. Dropping down to Clyde’s desk, he hit the floor and galloped down the stairs.

Clyde was just setting the last of five huge casseroles on the counter, to be baked later. Joe reared up, looking.“You leave any for my breakfast? I’d be happy to lick the pot.”

“It isn’t fully cooked yet,” Clyde said, glancing at the casseroles.

“It’s cooked enough for me.” He leaped up to the counter as Clyde, having indeed saved some back, set down a small plate of the half-cooked delicacy for him. Besides the tamale pie and tacos, there would be all manner of food for the buffet, a ham, chicken pies from Jolly’s Deli, and a variety of salads and casseroles that their friends would bring, all carefully packed in Styrofoam coolers. Dinner would go on all afternoon in a marathon buffet as officers came and went, taking their hasty breaks. Every available officer would be on duty. With all the events scheduled, this could be aperfect time for an invasion—not a pleasant end to a happy holiday celebration, to return home in a happy mood and find unwelcome visitors offering a dark side to the usual Christmas greetings.

As soon as Ryan and Clyde had opened up the big round table in the kitchen and laid out the napkins and plates and silverware, Ryan disappeared into the guest room. Joe followed her, leaping up onto the wicker desk among boxes of Christmas cards and unwrapped gifts. Though their tree was up, filling a corner of the living room, and Clyde had mailed his cards to favorite clients, Ryan hadn’t started her own cards or wrapped her gifts. “Why the hurry?” Joe said. “Christmas is a whole week away.”

“I don’t need the sarcasm,” she said, scratching his ear. The bed was covered with boxes and bags from her favorite village shops, and with rolls of red and green Christmas paper. Beneath the wide windows, the wicker game table held boxes of Christmas cards, stamps, and sheets of computer-printed address labels. She had set up a folding table nearby, where her scissors and tape and fancy tags were lined up awaiting a frenzy of gift wrapping. A box of tall red Christmas candles stood on the nightstand, scenting the room with bayberry. “I was supposed to start the new house up on Third next week,” she said. “I put them off until after New Year’s. Between it and our own remodels, I’m lucky to have even a start on Christmas. I hate being stressed during the holidays.”

Joe looked at the organized start she’d already made, and thought about the nine houses she’d remodeled just this last year, and could only admire Ryan’s efficiency. If she’d been a cat, she’d be a skilled mouser, every move keenly planned—the little beasts wouldn’t have a prayer. Rubbing against her hand, he said, “Thanks for loaning us the phone. And for not asking questions.”

“What’s the point in asking? You’ll tell me only what you want me to hear.”

What he’d told her was that he needed to borrow a cell phone, just for today. She’d looked at him for a long time. He’d be around the house today, so why would he need a phone? He could use the house phone, could find privacy upstairs if he needed to make a call. And who would he call? Dulcie and Kit would be right there, as well as half the department, the chief, the detectives. But now, too curious to remain polite, she did ask.

“Is the phone for that yellow tomcat?”

Silently Joe looked at her.

“I’ve seen him on the roofs. I thought … the way he acted …” Her eyes widened, then she laughed. “So heis like you!” And then she couldn’t help it, that one question burst into multiple questions. “Where did he come from? He has to be new to the village. He’s not part of the wild clowder from up in the hills?” She shook her head. “I said I wouldn’t ask, but …” She looked down at the table, feeling shy suddenly, and spread out the first sheet of bright wrapping paper.

Joe watched her with a crooked smile. Ryan was as curious as a cat herself, no wonder they were friends. Sitting on the desk watching her wrap Christmas gifts, he told her what he knew about the yellow tomcat, about Misto’s journey from Soledad prison hiding in Jared’s T-Bird. Told her what Misto had learned in prison about Maudie’s nephew, Kent, and about Marlin Dorriss. “Right now,” Joe said, “Misto’s watching Maudie’s house, that’s why he needs the phone. She’s had one mysterious burglary, and her keys have vanished. If a burglar has them, he need only unlock the door and step in.” He couldn’t understand why Maudie hadn’t changed the locks, he didn’t think that was an oversight. Made him wonder if Maudiewanted someone to enter, perhaps when the house was empty or in the small hours, unbidden.“I don’t know what this is about,” he said uneasily, “but with no one home, with Maudie and Benny here for dinner, and Jared with his family, it can’t hurt to watch the place.”

The phone Ryan had stashed on the cottage roof was an old, discarded model that the local electronics shop had taken in trade, to pass on to old folks in home care facilities. The shop owner was a friend of hers, she’d done some carpentry work for him. The phone had a new battery and was in good working order, and she’d set up a temporary account for it under an assumed name. She’d added to its convenience by keying in one-digit operation for the Damens’ house, Wilma and Dulcie, Max’s and Dallas’s cell numbers, and her own cell. And now, to cheer the old cat while he was on watch alone in the branches of Maudie’s oak tree, she said she’d take him a plate of selections from the buffet, leave it on the cottage roof.

“Where did that cat come from before the prison?” Ryan said. “Is he all alone?”

Hopping from the desk to the table among the tangle of bright Christmas wrappings, Joe sat down on the gold paper she was folding around a box.“I don’t know the whole story, but you can bet Kit will find out.” He went silent when he heard Max’s voice just out in the hall, and then Dallas. They were talking about day patrol, the voices coming from the alcove just beside the stairs. Other voices, from the front door, cut in as more guests arrived, and then Max was saying, “… to know why she checked out of the motel. Maybe you made her nervous.”

Dallas laughed.“I’ll check the other motels. Long shot, though, that she’s registered under her own name.”

“I had a call from L.A.,” Max said, “just as we were leaving the house. Detective Lakey. He said they went over the Beckman offices again, found a false compartment under the center drawer of Pearl’s desk. Pearl’s prints were on the metal plate that holds the false bottom in place—and so were Caroline Toola’s.”

“Say Caroline knew Pearl was keeping a double set of books,” Dallas said, “she made a copy, put the original back.”

“But she didn’t report the thefts,” Max said. “As if she meant to blackmail Pearl?”

“Or she didn’t have time?” Dallas said. “Say Pearl booby-trapped the drawer, slipped a hair across the opening, something so she knew it had been tampered with. She figures it was Caroline, maybe Caroline had been nosing around before that. Pearl kills Martin and Caroline not only out of jealousy, but to stop Caroline from turning over the copies to Beckman or to the law.”

Ryan was embarrassed to be inadvertently eavesdropping, though she hadn’t heard anything the two men wouldn’t have told her. But Joe Grey smiled with satisfaction as the officers fitted the pieces together—with no clue that they were helping to inform their prime snitch as well.

Not until Max and Dallas moved away did Joe and Ryan leave their hideaway and return to join their guests. The crowd had doubled, the front door stood open, and the street was lined with cars—not much chance of robbers here, with half the guests in uniform and armed, sitting down only long enough to enjoy the pre-Christmas treats. Sunlight slanted in through the open front door, warming the living room where happy diners sat with their loaded plates on their laps. There was a crowd in the kitchen around the buffet, too, and outside on the back patio where the sun’s heat bounced off the high plaster wall, guests sat elbow to elbow at four long tables enjoying the feast. Joe was winding between pant legs and bare ankles, heading for the living room, when Lucinda and Pedric Greenlaw arrived, Pedric carrying Kit on his shoulder. As the tortoiseshell leaped to the mantel, out of the way of hard shoes, the tall, slim, gray-haired couple stood talking with Clyde. Behind them, Wilma and Dulcie came in, Wilma dressed in jeans and a red blazer with a sprig of holly on her lapel, her white hair done in a braid that circled her head. Dulcie jumped to the mantel, too, beside Kit, and Joe made a flying leap to join them. Clyde headed for the kitchen and soon returned with three small, cat-sized plates loaded with delicacies, which he set before them. Around the cats, there werescattered moments of silence as newcomers bowed their heads in prayers of thanks before they settled down to enjoy their meal. Maybe law enforcement families, Joe thought, were more aware than most of the preciousness of life, more thankful for what they had. When he looked up, Maudie and Benny were just coming in.

Maudie was dressed in one of her soft-toned quilted smocks over neatly creased slacks. Benny wore his tan chinos and a blue V-necked sweater over a white shirt. The moment they entered, the little boy pressed against his grandmother, staring up at the crowd—but then he saw Rock sitting beside the couch with his head on Kathleen Ray’s lap, and the little boy went straight to the big Weimaraner.

Rock let Benny grab him in a bear hug that would have angered many dogs, but the Weimaraner only licked Benny’s ear and wagged his short tail. Kathleen moved over on the couch to make room for Maudie; the detective was dressed for surveillance in faded jeans, an old faded T-shirt, and worn jogging shoes. Joe had seen her arrive in an older Ford sedan, one of the unobtrusive cars Max sometimes obtained from Rent-a-Wreck when he wanted his officers to move about the village unnoticed.

“Are you getting moved in?” Kathleen asked Maudie. “That’s not a job I like.”

“Actually,” Maudie said, “I’m doing pretty well. Our tree is up, I have most everything put away, and I’m moved into the new studio.”

“That wasn’t easy, with your hurt shoulder. It’s been, what, eight months since you were shot? That’s another thing that seems to take forever, to recover from a wound like that.”

“I’ve been using a rolling cart,” Maudie said. “One of those lightweight office models that I can shove the boxes onto.” She smiled. “That’s given my other arm a workout. I’m just glad it wasn’t my right shoulder that was hit.” She looked up when Lori and Cora Lee arrived, alongwith Mavity Flowers. The other two senior ladies were gone for the holidays, Susan Brittain to her daughter in San Francisco, Gabrielle, always looking for a new beau, off on a cruise to Greece. Lori took Benny’s hand and they headed straight for the kitchen buffet table, Cora Lee following the hungry pair.

Ryan came to join Maudie and Juana Davis, sitting cross-legged on the floor.“That little boy idolizes Lori. He told me he didn’t know girls could hammer and saw so straight.”

Maudie laughed.“Benny loves having someone besides an old woman for company, and Lori’s good with him. He’s enamored of Rock, too … I thought, for his birthday—it’s just two days before Christmas—I’d go out to the pound, see if they have a really nice young dog. What do you think?”

“I think that’s a great idea,” Ryan said. “Your backyard’s already fenced, with a lawn where a boy and a dog can play. Or you might decide to take Benny with you, let him pick out his own dog?” She went silent as Benny, Lori, and Cora Lee returned with loaded plates. All three sat down on the floor beside Ryan to enjoy their supper, Cora Lee nearly as supple as the children.

“The nativity pageant starts at four,” Cora Lee said. She looked up at Maudie. “You are coming, you won’t mind the crowd?”

“I’m a bit under the weather,” Maudie said. “My shoulder’s hurting, but nothing to worry about.”

“We can take Benny,” Cora Lee offered. “See the pageant, take a wagon ride, then I’ll bring him home.” She reached to pat Maudie’s hand. “No one would dare bother him with us, in that crowd.”

“I could pick him up here,” Maudie said, glancing at Ryan. “If that would be all right? It would be closer for Cora Lee.”

“That’s fine,” Ryan said. “Rock will be happy of the company.” Her glance said, No one will bother him here, either, in front of half the department. Soon Maudie had risen and hurried away, down the street to her car. Padding out to the porch, Joe watched her with interest, thinking abouther returning to her empty house alone. He had turned back inside when Kit streaked past him out the front door and up the nearest pine and took off, heading for Maudie’s. As ifshe didn’t want to see Maudie go home alone, with so much activity in the village inviting mischief in the quieter neighborhoods.

Or did Kit not want Misto to face an emergency alone? Or, fascinated as she was by the grandfatherly cat, was she simply using Maudie’s departure as an excuse to share Misto’s vigil and perhaps learn more about him?

36

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MAUDIE’S CAR STOOD in the drive and a soft light burned in her upstairs bedroom, but from up the street where Kit and Misto crouched on the Damen cottage roof, they couldn’t see the front door of the Tudor bungalow. The cell phone lay beside them, next to Misto’s plate, which he had licked sparkling clean. Above the mottled oak branches, heavy gray clouds were blowing in, leaving only patches of darkening blue as evening closed around them—but it wouldn’t rain for the Nativity play, the air didn’t smell of rain.

Lights would be bright down in the village, every house sparkling with decorations, the shopping plaza ablaze with hundreds of tiny lights for the pageant. Kit imagined folk crowded along the plaza’s upstairs balconies, against the shop windows below, and lined up all around the big, enclosed garden where the Nativity drama would be played out. She imagined Benny and Lori afterward, riding all over the village in a horse-drawn buggy. Kit had ridden on the back of a horse once, sitting in front of Charlie, but never in a wagon with a driver snapping his whip.

Beside her, Misto yawned.“Don’t go to sleep,” she told him. “You were asleep when I got here.” He’d been tucked beneath the overhanging branches in a bed of fallen leaves, had pawed the oak leaves up around himself to keep warm, and had been snoring.

“I wasn’t asleep, I was resting, I didn’t miss a thing. House has been silent as a deserted rat hole, no one there but Maudie. All the windows dark until she got home, nothing moving in the yard, no one on the street, no cars cruising.” As they watched, the bedroom light went out, and in a few minutes a faint light came on in the kitchen.

“If there had been someone,” Kit said, “would you have used the phone?”

He laid his ears back.“Of course I would. Why wouldn’t I?”

“Have you ever talked to a human?”

Misto gave her a devilish smile.“Not so they knew. When I was a kitten, I liked to sneak up behind someone, say something rude, then run like hell. I’d be gone when they swung around, I’d watch from up a tree. They’d look and look, but saw no one.” The yellow cat licked his paw, laughing. “I thought that was funny until I got older and saw what a chance I was taking—not just for me, but for all of us. After that, I didn’t play those games anymore.”

Down the hill, a second, brighter light came on in the kitchen and they could smell coffee brewing. The windows were still bare of shades, but from this angle they couldn’t see directly in, could only see Maudie when she moved close to the glass. When the brighter light went out again, and a light blazed on in the studio, they trotted over the roofs to the house next door to Maudie, where they could look down directly inside.

The new room was a storm of color, the shelves stacked with squares of rainbow bright cloth. On the far wall hung three quilts, their patterns so intricate and vivid they took Kit’s breath away. One in autumn colors, one a winter pattern in shades of gray and soft blues, with twiggy branches woven across; and the third quilt shouted of Christmas. Its many shades of red and green and brown picked out partridges, pear trees, maids asinging—such a happy scene it made Kit laugh.

“She invents the pictures,” Kit said. “Then cuts out little pieces of cloth and sews them together, to bring her dream alive.” Kit knew about dreams. “Quilts like music,” she said. “Quilts that tell stories.”

The tomcat looked and looked, then turned to Kit, his thin tail twitching.“That’s what it means to be human,” he said softly. “A cat might dream, but without human hands, what can we do? Not even a speaking cat could bring to life a work of art or an invention. We can never make our dreams into something that will please others.”

Kit considered Misto, his scarred ears and shoulder, his big, scarred paws with the one crooked claw that must have been torn and healed wrong. She imagined how he must have looked as a little yellow kitten there on the shore, and then how he’d looked grown-up and handsome, his wide shoulders hard with muscle, a fine young tomcat—but now he was frail and old, old enough to be her great-great-great-grandfather. What had he seen in his long life, this cat who had, clearly, once been a muscled brawler and bold adventurer, but who was a dreamer, too?

Below, Maudie took something from her pocket and laid it on the worktable beneath a fold of cloth, then began to select squares of fabric and lay them out into a pattern. Though she was working in the lighted room with no shades or draperies at the windows she didn’t seem nervous. When shadows stirred outside she glanced up briefly, saw only tree shadows blowing in the wind, and turned back to laying out quilting pieces in an intricate Christmas tree design.

But soon something did startle her, jerking her gaze up to the garden. Her hands stilled; then she slipped one hand beneath the fold of cloth, revealing for an instant, a dark revolver.

She was still for a long time, looking out into the night. At last she slid the gun back into her pocket, picked up her empty coffee cup, and moved away into the kitchen.

“Well,” Kit said with surprise. “Maybe Maudie doesn’t need so much protection, after all.”

Misto smiled.“That soft little grandmother. She isn’t as helpless as everyone thought. Maybe,” he said, “if we need to use the cell phone, it’ll be to help some unfortunate burglar.”

STANDING IN THE doorway to the kitchen, Maudie looked back through the darkened studio and out to the garden. She’d be glad when the shades had arrived and been put up; she knew she was vulnerable in the lighted room where anyone could look in, anyone could fire through the glass, killing her as easily as they’d killed Martin and Caroline. Though she didn’t think that would happen; she thought the shooter had another agenda. She thought she wouldn’t be in danger until Pearl had what she wanted.

Moving into the kitchen, she turned that light off and stood at the sink, looking out toward the street. The sky was heavy with clouds blending into night. As she moved on through the kitchen and up the dark stairs, a belated shiver of fear made her pull her smock closer. As if someone was here, in the house with her. As if now, this night, was the moment. Only at the top did she flip on a light. She circled through the two bedrooms and bath, but there was no one, the upstairs rooms were empty. Going back downstairs to the kitchen, she sat at the table, in the dark, waiting. If Pearl let herself in with the stolen key, Maudie was trusting her instincts to take over, trusting that Pearl’s own actions would tell her what to do.

She waited nearly an hour, listening, watching the dark glass. There was no sound outside, and nothing stirred in the house. When at last, both relieved and disappointed, she turned the kitchen lights back on, she turned the TV on in the dark living room, too, to make the house seem occupied while she was gone, while she went to pick up Benny.

She had so hoped Pearl would slip in unannounced, would come while she was alone. Once Benny was home again, and maybe Jared, it would be too late for what she planned. Picking up her coat that she’d dropped on a kitchen chair, moving to the sink to make sure she’d unplugged the coffeepot, she pulled the coat on and transferred the .38 Special to its deep pocket. As she headed for the front door she heard a car pull into the drive. She paused, listening.

PEARL HAD LET herself into the house unseen before Maudie and the boy left. They’d been all dressed up, Maudie carrying a huge cooler out to her car, awkward with her lame arm. She’d heard, the last time she slipped into the house, enough to know where they were headed. Supper with a bunch of cops. Wasn’t that just like Maudie.

In the empty house she’d searched at her leisure, searched as thoroughly as she had the other times, but she hadn’t found the ledger pages. Later, she’d watched Maudie return alone, apparently leaving the kid at the holiday party. She had stood in the hall closet listening while Maudie moved around upstairs, then came down to the kitchen, where she made coffee and carried a cup into the studio. As Maudie busied herself there, Pearl had slipped through the house behind her meaning to enter the studio and confront her. But, crossing the softly lit kitchen, she’d heard voices from somewhere out in the night, someone too near the house, and a thrill of danger had held her still, listening.

Earlier, even before she’d entered the house, even as she’d approached the property coming up the hill from behind, through the neighbors’ backyards, tearing her windbreaker on a tangle of thorny holly bushes, she’d felt watched. A strange sensation, a feeling she’d seldom experienced. Arlie said she had nerves of steel. Arlie would be along soon, on his own mission, but now, unsuccessful in her search, she was beginning to feel pushed. She wondered again if she’d been foolish to link up with Arlie. It wasn’t smart to let herself be sidetracked by his agenda, all for the little bit of help he’d givenher—and maybe because she’d wanted to recapture those Vegas weekends, she thought, smiling.

The voice came again, an old man. The other was a woman, soft and indistinct, not loud enough to make out the words. The voices seemed to be coming from above, some trick of the wind, she supposed. She stood trying to think where she hadn’t searched, what she’d missed—if Maudie did have the ledger pages. If she did, did she mean to give them to the cops? Or would the old woman try to blackmail her? But for what? To stop her in case she tried to take custody of Benny? Who would want the kid?

That had been a shocker, going into the office that morning to find the ledger had been disturbed, finding proof it had been copied. No one could have done that but Caroline, she was sure that only Caroline had any suspicions about the way she did her work.

Not only had she rigged the lock to the hidden compartment each night before she left work, fixing two hairs across it, she’d sprinkled talcum powder in the seams of the ledger pages, too. The day she found the lock disturbed and found traces of talc in the seam of the office copier between the glass and the metal rim, she’d almost panicked. Had stuffed the ledger in her carryall and was nervous the rest of the day. Weeks later, after the funeral, she’d told Mr. Beckman she was leaving, that a month’s leave wasn’t enough, that she needed to get away from the city. With the office shorthanded, the quarterly taxes already paid, and the way she’d juggled the expenses from one client’s account to another, she’d gambled that no one would find the discrepancies for many months.

But Beckman Equipment couldn’t remain ignorant forever of the glitches in their cash flow. Paying one client’s bill in arrears with part of a subsequent client’s payment, and in the process skimming off cash for herself, left balances owing that did not bear close scrutiny. The minute Beckman hired a full-time bookkeeper again, the missing money would come to light and they’d go to the cops. And LAPD would pull the file on her and talk to the homicide division, follow up on the connection between her and Maudie. She still wasn’t sure what Maudie had told them about the night of the shooting. Wasn’t sure whatthe womanhad seen, or what the kid had seen. Though who would believe a kid testifying against his own mother?

But now she’d get it sorted out. Having taken her time going through the rooms, using a small flashlight as the late afternoon light dimmed, she was puzzled as to what hiding places she could have missed. Convinced the pages weren’t among Caroline’s other things that she’d left in the garage, she’d searched all the rooms, under chair cushions, under and between mattresses, had gone through every drawer and cupboard, had rifled Maudie’s desk again thoroughly. She had even examined the Christmas tree and searched beneath its quilted skirting. There were no wrapped packages, yet. No doubt Maudie would pile gifts on the kid later. Upstairs there were just the two bedrooms, the bath, a small storeroom, and a narrow linen closet. She’d gone through them all with care. The kid’s bed was littered with sissy toys, that ratty teddy bear and other stuffed animals the boy had clung to since hewas a baby, girly toys unbecoming to a boy.

If she’dhad to have a child—and this child hadn’t been planned, it was Martin who insisted on keeping it—then why couldn’t she have had a boy like Kent? From the time the Colletto kids were little they’d been as bold as brass, she’d gotten along with them just fine. Though Kent was her favorite, Kent was the pusher, even more than Victor, taking what he wanted when he wanted, and exactly how he wanted, she thought, smiling.

Despite its two stories, the house was small, it didn’t take long to search. But it didn’t offer much space to conceal herself, either. The best place was the coat closet beneath the stairs. With the door cracked open, she could see into the living room, the kitchen, and through the kitchen’s glass door to the studio. The attached garage would have been an adequate place to wait for Maudie, but the outside pedestrian door was blocked with a stack of heavy crates, leaving no way to escape except through the noisy overhead door. By staying in the house she had access to the front door, the outside studio doors, or the low living room windows, one of which she’d unlocked earlier. She’d also unlocked an upstairs window. Later, when Maudie came up to search that floor, she’d been standing just outside on the roof that sheltered the front door below.

Earlier, at the bottom of the stairs, looking across the kitchen to the studio, watching Maudie at her worktable, she’d had no idea what instinct held her back, but she’d paid attention. Shewas nervous at the faint voices she’d heard from outside. That couldn’t be Arlie and Kent, they wouldn’t talk out loud, though they were probably already nearby, watching the target house. Maybe she’d heard some neighbors’ voices contorted by the wind, floating on the night.

As Pearl was waiting for Maudie to leave again to go pick up the child, as she seemed to be preparing to do, the sound of a car in the drive and then footsteps on the porch made her back deeper into the closet. Pulling the door to, she pushed in behind the line of hanging coats, into the smell of old wool. She heard the front door open, heard Jared call out to Maudie, heard Maudie’s step as she came out of the kitchen.

“I was just leaving to go get Benny,” Maudie said. “You missed a good dinner.”

“I’ll get him if you like. Maybe there’ll be some leftovers,” he said hopefully.

“I never saw so much food,” Maudie said. “But you’d better hurry, those cops wolf it down like it’s their last meal.”

“I’ll go get Benny, and then, early as it is, I’m hitting the hay. I’ve had a ton of homework this week, feel like I’ll never catch up on my sleep.”

Pearl heard the front door open and close, heard Maudie move away across the tile floor toward the living room, heard Jared’s car start and back out of the drive. Now, again, she and Maudie were alone. Slipping out of the closet, meaning to trap Maudie in the living room, she heard the voices again, closer. Someonewas out there, and a sense of wrongness tingled through her, the feeling she got sometimes at the poker table when, despite how the cards were falling, she knew to stop betting. That instinct was at work now. If she was smart she’d go with it.

Easing open the closet door to peer out, she saw Maudie in the kitchen, sitting at the table with her back to her. Silently she slipped to the front door, cracked it open, but drew back when the voices came again, the soft grainy voice of the man and the faint laugh of the young woman. Quietly pulling the door closed, she left the house, not through the front or side door, but out the low living room window into the bushes, where she was sure no neighbor would glimpse her. Moving along close to the side of the house and then into the neighbor’s wooded backyard, she waited for her companions. She would return in a while, this time to do more than confront Maudie, this time to force Maudie’s hand.

37

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FOUR HOUSES DOWN from Maudie’s stood a wood-sided Craftsman cottage, its ivory tones picked out by four decorative lamps standing among beds of pale alstroemerias that were nearly finished blooming for the winter. Grass clippings from the little lawn were scattered along the stone walk, where Alfreda Meiers or her gardener had apparently neglected to sweep. The walk was sheltered by a Japanese maple, bare now in the winter cold. Three steps led up to the cream-colored wooden porch and the pale front door that was carved with fern patterns and without any panes of decorative glass. The walls flanking the door were solid, too, and unbroken, there was only the peephole in the door itself through which to view whoever might ring the bell. A widow of twenty years, a shy, fearful woman, Alfreda kept her windows and front and back doors double-locked. She had no dog to provide protection or warning barks; she didn’t want dog hair on her furniture. She didn’t have a weapon for protection, she was afraid of guns, and she felt that even pepper spray was far too dangerous. She carried her cell phone in her pocket so that if she ever did have an intruder, she could summon help. She had two grown daughters, both married and living in Southern California. She had no desire to live with either of them, nor they with her. The girls visited their mother infrequently, and with restraint.

Alfreda’s dinner had consisted of a broiled chicken breast, a small salad, and for dessert a sliced pear with a square of white cheese. After dinner she allowed herself a cheerful gas fire in the fireplace, and curled up on the couch to read the latest in a series of gentle mysteries that wouldn’t keep her awake. She heard several cars pass on the street, saw their lights bleeding in arcs through her living room draperies. She was only vaguely aware of a car pulling into a drive four doors up, and then soon departing again; she knew it was at the Tudor house, by the heavy sound of the front doorclosing. She hadn’t met her new neighbor, not formally, but they waved to each other on the street. At nine-thirty Alfreda closed her book, turned off the gas logs, turned down the furnace thermostat, and switched off the lights. By ten o’clock she had washed her face, brushed her teeth, slipped on her flannel nightgown, and was in bed, already drifting off, willing her dreams to be happy. This time of year, she tried to fix her thoughts on the happy holidays of her childhood, not on those later on in her life. She woke again at ten-forty, rudely pulled from sleep by the door chimes ringing, accompanied by frantic pounding on the door itself, as if someone were in trouble.

UP THE HILL from Alfreda Meier’s house and Maudie’s, atop the Damens’ little cottage, Kit and Misto sat at the edge of the roof watching the street below. They had watched Maudie in her studio, had seen Jared arrive home and leave again, then later seen him return with Benny, the child stumbling into the house half asleep, leaning against Jared. Had seen the guest room light go on and shadows move about as if both Benny and Jared were getting ready for bed, and in a few minutes the light went off again. Soon Maudie’s light went out, too, the house was dark, and Kit imagined the three drifting off into sleep. Only the cats were wakeful, alert to every smallest sound, to that of a passing car along the surrounding streets, to the distant bark of a dog, to a door closing blocks away. To the tiny scratching from above as a flying squirrel landed on the rough bark of a nearby pine. He looked down at them with huge, dark eyes, and sailed away again into the night.

Kit had, with a thoughtfulness that surprised even Kit herself, used the cell phone to ease Lucinda’s and Pedric’s worries when she didn’t come home; they had gone to the party early and, wanting to see the pageant, had also left early. They were home now, and they did worry when she was out in the night. As Kit and Misto held their vigil, he told stories from ancient Wales that she had never heard, she had committed each to memory, making it forever a part of her hoard of mysterious tales.

Below, they heard a car park four or five blocks down, the reflection of its lights suddenly extinguished. Footsteps cut the night and then silence, as if perhaps the driver had gained his own front door, silently opened it and closed it, not wanting to wake those within; and again the neighborhood was still. Kit was reciting to herself one of Misto’s stories when they heard the faintest echo of a doorbell just down the street, and then loud, insistent banging—maybe half a block down? Kit scanned the houses below. The banging continued and the bell kept on ringing, and they could see a dark shadow on the porch of the cream-colored house four doors down from Maudie’s. As they watched, the porch light blazed on revealing a thin man pounding, his back to them. He wore a black jacket, dark jeans, a dark cap. The questioning voice from within, a woman’s voice, was as thin as a whisper. Was she peering out through the peephole? How much of him could she see of him?

“There’s been a wreck,” the man said tremulously, “I need help. Please …”

The cats looked at the empty, silent street, the silent neighborhood.They’d heard no wreck, therewas no wreck. Alarmed, they dove among the oak leaves, pawed the phone out, and Kit punched in 911, trying not to shout.“Man pounding on a door, a lone woman lives there. He says there was a wreck, but there was no wreck, there’s no car on the street … Could it be another invasion?” She ended the call before June Alpine could ask any questions. The new dispatcher hadn’t been sufficiently indoctrinated yet,in how to respond to these particular snitches, she hadn’t learned not to ask, but to call the chief pronto. Kit hit the disconnect, and they fled down across the roofs, two small, silent shadows. Kit would have carried the phone but it was too clumsy and heavy. Even as they approached the pale house two patrol cars came slipping along the street without lights, their radios silent, one from downhill, one from uphill behind them. Each pulled to the curb several doors away from where the man stood talking through the door.

Two uniforms slipped out of each car, keeping to the dark edges of the yard beyond the glow of Alfreda’s lights. They watched silently the figure at the door with his back to them. He seemed unaware of anything but the little click as Alfreda turned the dead bolt from within, possibly leaving the security chain in place—not that a chain would do any good, Kit thought. The cats watched the frontdoor cautiously open a few inches—and everything happened at once. The invader hit the door with all his weight, jerking the chain loose and ramming the door back. He grabbed Alfreda, hit her when she struggled. Two cops charged up the steps and grabbed him, breaking his grip on the victim. And three figures exploded from the bushes, streaking into the backyard, heading for the wooded greenbelt beyond; the other two officers were after them, crashing down the hill.

Officer Crowley held the invader jammed against the house, pressing his face into the wood siding. Crowley was half a foot taller, thin but big boned, his large hands jerking the invader’s arms behind him. As Crowley snapped on the cuffs, securing them through the guy’s belt, Officer Brennan pushed inside to clear the house, his overweight frame blocking the lamplight as he passed. And as Crowley marched the prisoner to the patrol car, the cats got their first good look at theman.

It was Arlie Risso, black beard, black hair. He stood straight and stiff beside the car, his expression affronted as Crowley snapped on leg irons. More than one officer leading a handcuffed prisoner whose legs were free had been unpleasantly surprised by a sudden attack and escape. Crowley didn’t mean to risk that embarrassment.

“I was trying to warn her,” Risso was arguing. “I was at the door to warn her, why are you arresting me? You’d better call your captain.”

Crowley just looked at him, his big hands gripping Risso’s shoulders, hands strong enough, Kit thought, to easily rip a bale of hay in two. His look said he’d like to do that to Risso. Risso said, “You’d better go after the thieves, Officer. You’d better arrestthem. You’d better get your commander over here, pronto, to straighten this out.”

“We’ll just make you comfortable in the patrol car,” Crowley told Risso dryly, “until we can arrange an appointment with the chief.” Towering over Risso’s six feet, Crowley turned the handsome, bearded man around as easily as spinning a doll, so he faced the patrol car. Opening the backdoor, he enthusiastically pressed Risso’s head down, making sure he cleared the opening without a concussion and an ensuing lawsuit. Above on the neighboring house’s roof, Kit and Misto grinned and switched their tails, laughing.

Officer Brennan came outside with Alfreda, where she sat down on the little low wall that flanked the porch. Three more squad cars arrived, their radios spewing canned voices, their spotlights washing across the neighbors’ yards and even up across the rooftops, forcing the cats to flatten themselves in order to stay out of sight. Leaving the black-and-whites, four officers ran for the greenbelt, their torch lights cutting through the bushes. The blare of a bullhorn thundered, telling the escapees to stop. It was pitch-dark back there, the swinging lights blinding as they swept into the tangled woods cutting pale swaths across the tree trunks.

In the Tudor house a light came on in Maudie’s bedroom, the cats could see her silhouette at the window, looking out. The guest room windows remained dark. Were Benny and Jared still sound asleep, unaware of the crashing and running, of breaking bushes and even of the bullhorn?

“Maybe the cops can make Risso talk,” Kit said. “Maybe he’ll ID the others.”

“Would he? Risso—Marlin Dorriss—he’s a cold one.”

“To save his own skin, he might.” She turned to look at Misto. “I never thought of Dorriss doing strong-arm stuff, like hitting a woman. Thought of him as the gentleman thief, the con artist, the slick crook who gets others to do his dirty work.”

“Maybe so, but they were afraid of him in prison. All the men were. And why doyou care so much?” he said with interest.

Her yellow eyes widened.“I hate that man. These invasions are for one purpose. To discredit Max Harper, discredit the department, to hurt our friends. The cops are our friends. I hope Risso rots in jail for the rest of his life, that those men burn in hell forever.”

“I’ve never had a human friend I cared so much about.” Misto licked his paw. “What must that be like, to love a human friend?”

“That’s why you came here,” Kit said, “to find friends, catand human. We’re your friends now,” she said softly. She went silent as a big pickup came up the hill and pulled to the curb. Max Harper got out, looking pleased that Crowley had nailed Dorriss. He wasn’t wearing his usual Western boots tonight, but soft black running shoes, more than ready for a chase. Up the street, Maudie had disappeared from her upstairs window, and in a moment she came out the front door. Standing quietly on the porch, she watched the scene below. Behind her, Jared came out of the front door, yawning, his hair tousled from sleep. He had pulled on a striped robe over the sweatpants he must have slept in, had pulled on his running shoes, the laces still untied. He yawned again, stood on the porch staring down the street toward the police cars.

“What’s happened? Not another invasion? Not here!”

“Where’s Benny?” Maudie asked with alarm.

“Sound asleep, he didn’t stir.” He didn’t take his eyes from the street. “It’s a robbery of some kind, the way they’re searching the yards. The lights and bullhorn woke me, their torches shining up.” He started down the steps toward the dark yards as if he meant to help search, but Maudie caught his arm. “Don’t, Jared. Don’t go out there, let the police handle it.”

He looked at her, and pulled away.

“Stay here,” she said boldly, almost angrily. “If you get into the tangle, they could mistake you for one of the burglars. In the dark they might shoot you.”

He hesitated.“I suppose you’re right, but … I’ll just go look in the backyard,” he said edgily, “while they’re searching down there. Maybe—”

“No,” Maudie began, “you—”

“Stay where you are,” Max Harper said, stepping out of the shadows beside the house. As Jared spun around, Harper grabbed him, threw him against the doorjamb, and jerked his arms behind him. Maudie caught her breath as Harper snapped handcuffs on him.

“What is this? Jared didn’t … He isn’t …” Then Maudie looked down, where Max Harper was looking.

The two cats, peering over the edge of the roof, could see it, too. A faint trail of grass clippings led across the porch from within the house. When Maudie turned on the inside light, two trails of clippings led up the stairs for as far as the cats could see, one on each side of the steps. In the entry, one trail turned away toward the kitchen, one followed Jared out onto the porch where he now stood. And when the cats looked back at Jared, they saw bits of grass clinging to the elastic cuffs of his sweatpants, to his damp running shoes and to his dangling shoestrings.

An officer came up from Alfreda’s house, and together he and Harper loaded Jared into a squad car. Same drill with the leg irons, same ducking of Jared’s head to clear the door. Maudie stood very still in the doorway, simply watching. As the two squad cars took off with their prisoners, heading for the station followed by another black-and-white, Detective Ray’s old rental Ford pulled up in front of Maudie’s house. Kathleen, dressed in jeans and sweatshirt, was carrying an evidence bag. She spoke with Maudie and Max Harper briefly and then began taking photographs of the two trails of grass, one coming down the stairs and out to the porch, the other leading away to the studio. On the roof, Kit gave Misto a quizzical look.

“That’s one we were wrong about,” she said. “Jared Colletto. Well, he was quick on his feet, you have to give him that. Slipped out of the house after Maudie went to bed? Was down there, closing in on Alfreda’s house, when the cops grabbed Risso?”

“He had to be one of the three the cops chased,” Misto said. “He veered away behind Maudie’s house, where we couldn’t see him, into the studio and upstairs again.”

“Threw on his robe,” Kit said, “and came down yawning, with not a thought to the grass clippings. Jared Colletto,” she repeated, and she felt sad that someone she’d almost trusted had turned out to be all deception and lies.

38

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FROM MAUDIE’S ROOF, Kit and Misto continued to watch Alfreda’s house, where Detective Garza was lifting prints from the front door and surround. It was nearly an hour since Marlin Dorriss and Jared had been taken away in a patrol car, Jared wearing his robe and sweatpants and a pair of bedroom slippers, his grass-covered jogging shoes having been bagged as evidence. They’d watched Dallas collect and bag fibers caught on the Meier house’s door molding, and photograph and make casts of five footprints incised in the garden earth along the edge of the lawn. They’d watched Maudie go down the hill and disappear within Alfreda’s house, apparently to commiserate with the frightened woman.

Most of the officers had departed, leaving behind a barrier of yellow crime-scene tape surrounding the house and yard. Detective Ray had finished photographing the grassy trails that entered Maudie’s house and out again, and had gone upstairs to the guest room. They could see her through the window, examining Jared’s clothes and duffel and photographing with sharp flashes of strobe light. Kit didn’t know what Kathleen could take into possession without a court order, but she guessed Maudie’s house was part of the scene now, too, and she could confiscate any evidence. Ever curious, Kit padded along the narrow lip of roof beneath the window to look in, squeezing her eyes closed when the light flashed. Benny was sound asleep, as deep under as a kitten tucked against its mama. The little boy had burrowed beneath the covers, head and all, cutting out the noise and the painful flashes; all one could really see was a lump of quilt and blanket. Had he slept like this all through the chase, even through the bellow of the bullhorn? He didn’t stir at Kathleen’s intrusion, thoughKit herself squeezed her eyes closed at each lift of the camera to avoid the fierce blazes of the strobe light. Kit returned to the garage roof squinting and shaking her head.

Out on the street, before Alfreda’s house, Officer Brennan had settled down in his patrol car as if to stay and keep watch; Kit could smell the coffee from his thermos and the faint scent of cinnamon as he unwrapped what was probably a sweet roll. Dallas was packing up to leave, putting his equipment in the trunk, when his cell phone buzzed. When he flipped on the speaker, Max’s voice crackled with a tinny sound. “Arlie’s all tucked away—one more alias to add to Dorriss’s file. That tip made all the difference, put us right on the scene.”

Dallas laughed.“Not just to mop up, this time.” Kit guessed it must have been frustrating, one invasion after another and not one fingerprint except the victim’s own, or that of a neighbor or service person, and no match to the fibers and debris they’d bagged and logged in. “Now,” Dallas said, “withJared and Dorriss off the street and a BOL out on Kent, we’re getting somewhere. Maybe the two in jail will ID the fourth guy—or maybe that will turn out to be the woman.”

Kit thought it might. The figure that had vanished so fast, even before Arlie was arrested, was tall and thin and might indeed have been the woman.

Kit had already phoned and awakened Clyde to tell Joe the news. And to brag a little, to say that it was their call, hers and Misto’s, that had brought the cops on time. From the brightness of Misto’s eyes and the way he lashed his tail, it was clear he liked this new twist to his life. She bet he’d never dreamed of working alongside a bunch of cops, that he’d never imagined such an exciting interaction with humans. Now he looked almost like a young cat, his smile as excited as that of a frolicking kitten.

ALFREDA MEIERS WAS so upset after the attempted invasion and all the fuss with the police, so nervous that two men had escaped and might return, that after Detective Garza took her statement, she wanted only to lock herself in the house and rest. But even before Detective Garza departed, Maudie Toola came down the hill and invited her up to her house for a cup of tea and a slice of pie, offering to make up the couch in her living room, on this night when both women needed company. Alfreda went back with her for the tea and pie, carefully locking the doors behind her. She felt almost comfortable, with Officer Brennan on guard, sitting there in his squad car. She told Maudie she would visit for a little while, try to calm her nerves, then would go on home. Not that she could sleep, but she could lie down, prop a chair against the bedroom door, get a little rest. She didn’t know what those men would have done to her; she didn’t want to think about that. She and Maudie hurried up the street and into Maudie’s house, looking back to see Brennan nod and wave to them.

Maudie settled Alfreda at the kitchen table and put the kettle on, then went to make doubly sure the studio door was properly locked. She found the grass trail through the studio disturbed as if someone had walked through it. But Detective Kathleen Ray had photographed the damp lawn clippings, so maybe she’d scattered the grassy trail, hadn’t been careful—though that did seem odd. Detective Ray seemed exceptionally careful in how she went about her work.

In the kitchen she laid out cups and plates, sugar and silverware on a tray. Neither of them took milk. She left Alfreda cutting the pecan pie that she and Benny had made, and went to light the gas log in the living room and draw up the little tea table she liked to use, opening out its two small leaves. She didn’t remember leaving the table standing out so far from the cupboard door; she preferred it snugged against the closet that was meant for the storage of firewood, and which she didn’t use. She’d thought of asking Ryan to convert the space into bookshelves, and maybe she’d do that. Maybe Benny had been playing in there, she thought as she hurried upstairs to check on the child.

In the dark bedroom, she wanted to whisper to Benny, wanted tell him everything was all right, in case he had awakened at some point, after the commotion was over. But apparently not, he was sound asleep, snuggled down with the covers pulled up, and she moved away and let him be. She stood a moment enjoying the little-boy scent of him, smiling because he slept as deeply as had his daddy. Martin had never awakened to sounds in the house; he could have slept through an alien attack. At last she turned away, went back downstairs to her guest.

Alfreda had cut the pie and poured the tea.“I’m better off doing something,” the frail woman said as Maudie carried the tray in before the fire. “Tomorrow I’ll be steadier, I’ll be better in the daylight.”

“You’re more than welcome to stay here for a few days,” Maudie said, though in truth she hoped Alfreda would refuse. The woman was so frail, seemed so in need of nurturing. But in fact, Maudie’s own scenario called for solitude, she would prefer the house empty; she was relieved when Alfreda shook her head.

“Thanks, Maudie, but I’ll be fine. Tomorrow I’m to help with the Christmas bazaar, and that’s good, that I keep busy.” She smiled wanly at Maudie. “I should feel relieved the police arrested two of those men. Detective Garza said there was little chance the other two would go on with these invasions now.

“He said there could be more than four of them, but from the information they have, they don’t think so.” Alfreda seemed to be talking to ease herself, to calm her fears. Maudie listened and nodded and let her go on, though Alfreda’s rambling certainly didn’t calm her own fears. When she heard Benny cry out in his sleep, she hushed Alfreda to listen, but then there was nothing more. If he were having one of his nightmares, he’d make more noise than that, would be crying for Grandma, over and over. They talked for nearly an hour, about Benny and the new school, about Maudie’s sonDavid. If Alfreda knew about the shooting, about Martin and Caroline, she didn’t ask questions, didn’t pry. Maudie avoided talking about her quilting, too, she didn’t want to have to drag a neighbor whom she hardly knew through her new studio. When Alfreda headed home, Maudie watched her hurry down the block past the squad car, where she waved to Officer Brennan, then disappear into her own house. Maudie pictured her carefully locking her door; she locked her own door, rinsed their cups and plates and put them in the dishwasher, and headed upstairs. She’d left the light on in her room, but before she got ready for bed she stepped into the dark guest room one last time, to check on Benny.

She hadn’t admitted to Alfreda how nervous she was. In a way, she wished Alfreda had stayed, even wished she had put fresh sheets on the guest bed and made Alfreda comfortable there. Not that the frail woman would be any protection.Do I just want the company? Maudie thought, annoyed at herself.Want to circle the wagons, even decrepit wagons, because I don’t know who or what will appear out of the night, out of the empty dark?

Benny was still cocooned down among the covers. Amazing how soundly he slept. She thought she shouldn’t be calling this room the guest room, it was Benny’s room now. But it didn’t fit a child; this wasn’t a child’s room, with its grown-up, too formal furniture. Benny needed a child’s furniture: toy chests, a sturdy desk, maybe one of those bunk sets with a built-in ladder, something a boy coulduse, not just tolerate.

Benny seemed drawn to the little sewing room down at the end of the hall, which Maudie was using for storage as she unpacked boxes. The room was tiny, maybe eight by nine; Benny like to slip in between the boxes and curl up on the deep bay window seat. Maybe for a few years he’d prefer that room, at least until he outgrew the space. She glanced at her watch. It was just past midnight. Guided by the night-light, she reached to straighten Benny’s covers.

As she took hold of the covers, they gave too much under her hand. She felt the little mound, but didn’t feel the solid form of the child, only the soft give of pillows. She snatched the covers away.

The bed was empty. Nothing but wadded-up blankets under the quilt. Flipping on the lamp, she stared at the empty bed, at the pile of blankets. She whirled to look around the room. Jerked open the closet doors. Nothing. Benny’s clothes, hanging on the lowered rod. A heap of toys lying in one corner of the closet. She knelt to look under the bed, thinking he might be hiding—as a joke, or because the commotion of police cars and lights had frightened him.

Nothing under the bed but a toy car and dust. Hurrying down the hall she looked in the bathroom, the linen closet, then searched in her own room. She searched the entire house, up and down, the firewood cupboard, the garage and studio, everywhere a child could hide. Had he gone outdoors, in the middle of the night?

Thinking of the two invaders who had escaped the police, she snatched up her coat from where she’d dropped it on the arm of a chair, made sure the gun was safe in her pocket. Turning on the yard lights, she locked the door behind her and hurried to her car, praying the little boy was there, curled down under the lap robe, asleep.

The car was empty. She popped the trunk lid, looked in. She searched the yard among the dark bushes, calling for him, yet certain that he wouldn’t be hiding out here in the cold, in the middle of the night. When she looked down the hill at Officer Brennan, he’d left his car, was headed up the sidewalk, looking around into the shadows, looking up at her, frowning.

It was Brennan who called the station to report the little boy missing.

39

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HOW COULD HE be gone?” Kit said, looking down from the garage roof to where Maudie wandered the yard calling Benny. “He was in bed, asleep. Has she searched the whole house?” They watched Maudie hurry down the street and Brennan hurry to meet her. Their voices were faint, and Maudie sounded nearly breathless. They listened to Brennan call the dispatcher.

Kit said,“Could he be playing games, hiding from her?” “After there were cops all over?” Misto said. “Everyone running, lights swinging everywhere? Not likely. And if he woke scared and is hiding from those men, he’d have found a place in the house, not gone outside in the dark, alone.”

Kit began to shiver, looking down into the bushes and along the street, hopefully listening. There was no sound but Brennan’s voice, talking to the dispatcher, and the whisper of the far sea. “You don’t think someonetook Benny?” Kit said in a small voice.“Kidnapped him? But how could they get him out of the house, how could anyone get him away, and we didn’t see them?”

“We can’t see the studio door from here,” Misto pointed out. “Only from the other side of the garage.”

“We’d have heard him,” Kit said. “We’d have heard Benny yelling.”

“Not if he was gagged,” the yellow cat said. “And we don’t know when he disappeared. Was it while the cops were still chasing those men? Or,” he said, “didthey double back and take him?” Misto rose. “If they took him out through the studio, we can pick up their trail, we can follow them,” and he headed for the nearest oak, meaning to scramble down its broad trunk.

Kit started to follow him, then spun around and raced up across the roofs for the cottage, for the cell phone. Pawing the phone out from among the leaves, she hit the single button for the Damen house. Rock could track Benny faster, he was bigger, and she had to admit the Weimaraner could outrun even her, over long distances.

Wilma answered, sleepily, on the first ring.

“What are you doing at Clyde’s?” Kit said. “What …?”

“I’m not at Clyde’s, I’m at home,” Wilma said hesitantly. “You dialed wrong. What’s happened, what is it? You sound—”

“Benny’s missing, we think he’s been kidnapped,” Kit hissed. “I have to call—” and she broke off before Wilma could ask even one question.

DRAGGED OUT OF a deep sleep, Clyde stared at the ringing phone and then at the bedside clock. Twelve-thirty, and this was the second call since they’d tucked up for the night. He’d just drifted off after the last frantic ringing, so what the hell was this call about? Snatching the headset off the cradle to silence it, he lay staring at it, saying nothing.

Leaning across him, Ryan grabbed the headset.“What?” she said softly, looking at the caller ID. “What’s happened?”

At the other end, Kit said shyly,“I … I need to talk to Joe again.”

“Clyde will get him,” Ryan said, nudging Clyde.

“Hang on.”

Grumbling, Clyde swung out of bed, padded barefoot into the study, and shouted up at the cat door.“Get the hell down here! It’s Kit again. What am I, your damned answering service?”

Joe appeared on the rafter above, pushing in through his cat door. He paused, peering down over the rafter at Clyde.

“Get your tail down here.”

Dropping from the rafter to Clyde’s desk, Joe hit the speaker button on the office extension. Kit had already called him about the arrests, not more than an hour ago …“Another invasion,” she’d said,“… arrested Marlin Dorriss …” It’d been hard to believe that slick con was in jail, behind bars. As Kit described the action, all he could think was that somehow Dorriss was going to slip out of this. That by morning he would have lawyered up, would have brought in half a dozen slick attorneys, posted bail, and vanished, maybe never to be seen again. “It was Dorriss who kicked the door in,” Kit had said. “Dorriss and Jared are in jail, and—”

“Jared Colletto?”

“Jared. And they have a BOL out on Kent. Harper and two squad cars are headed for his house, and …” Despite Kit’s giddy excitement, he’d gotten most of the story, and then had scrambled back up to his tower, where he’d sat staring into the night debating what to do. Whether to hightail it down to the station and pick up the latest as officers and detectives began to return—maybe slip back into the jail and hear what the two prisoners, once they were alone, had to say to each other about the night’s adventure.

Except the two would be detained as far apart as possible, in the department’s small jail, so they couldn’t get their stories straight; maybe one would even be left up front, in the holding cell. And, at the scene, the action was over. The cops had left. Whatever had come down, Kit had witnessed. At last, yawning, he’d opted to wait until morning when more information would be at hand, when he could catch an early briefing in the chief’s office, if he timed it right. Curling up among his pillows, he’d gone back to sleep, had been deep under when the phone rang again, in the study, echoing in the bedroom inches from Clyde’s indignant ear, and then Clyde had shouted at him.

Now, as he crouched on the desk listening to Kit, she sounded so scared that she scared him.“Benny Toola’s missing, Maudie came running outside all frantic looking for him, searched her car and all around the yard calling him and then started down to Brennan where he was parked at Alfreda’s house and …” She paused, was silent for so long Joe thought the phone had cut out. “Here comes Kathleen’s car,” she said, “and two squad cars, they …”

By this time, Ryan and Clyde were crowded around Joe at the desk listening to Kit over the speaker, and Rock had piled off the love seat to push against them, wanting to be in on the action. When Kit paused, Ryan nearly shouted into the speaker.“Rock,” she said, “Rock can track him.”

“Yes,” Kit said. “That’s why I called. We—”

From the bedroom, Ryan’s cell phone rang, belting out a Dixieland beat. “Wait a minute,” Ryan said. “Hold on.” Hurrying into the bedroom, she snatched up her phone from the dresser. She was silent for a moment, listening. “Benny Toola?” she said, trying to sound surprised. “Oh, not Benny. What? Rock? Of course we can, we’ll be right there.”

Hanging up, she looked at Joe and Clyde.“Dallas,” she said. “He’s afraid Kent Colletto might have Benny—they only caught his brother Jared and that Dorriss person.”

As she headed for the closet to throw on her jeans and a sweater, Rock followed her, caught up in their excitement, shivering with anticipation for whatever adventure the night offered.

It had been nearly a year since Rock learned the protocol and honed his skills to track a human victim or criminal. A Weimaraner hunts by both sight and scent, he’s bred for many jobs, and a good Weimaraner is hungry to work. But without proper training, even the best dog is of no use. Ordinarily, such training is started when a dog is very young, and takes many months, or years, to perfect. But not Rock, not with Joe Grey running the show. In one amazinglesson, in one afternoon, Joe had taught Rock to track as skillfully as a seasoned bloodhound and with equal determination.

Joe’s nose was as keen as Rock’s and, using a technique impossible for a human trainer, Joe had hurried along with his own nose to the trail, while at the same time giving Rock voice commands. Rock saw, he smelled, he followed the scent that Joe followed, while absorbing Joe’s voice command words. He learned all at once what he must do, and the command to do it, bonding with Joe’s single-minded passion as the tomcat pursued the scent. By the end of that afternoon, Rock was hooked. He knew what to do, he would stay on any given scent undiverted, would not veer off after rabbits or a deer or even a rare sirloin steak emitting its charbroiled aroma. Since that memorable day of training, Rock and Ryan had assisted Dallas in three cases, with results that left Dallas deeply puzzled, and as deeply impressed. Dallas Garza was a dog man, he knew what it took to train a good tracking hound.Rock’s sudden metamorphosis from undisciplined natural talent to honed professional was impossible—but at last Dallas had accepted what he saw, sensibly laying aside his uneasy questions. The fact that their efforts had put three separate offenders in jail was proof enough, for the moment. One man was still awaiting trial, and two were already convicted, one for armed robbery, the other for burglary and grand theft auto, for stealing the high school principal’s vintage Austin-Healey. Rock had nailed the three, and the big dog was now an unofficial volunteer for MPPD. At this very momenthe was gearing up for work, pacing and pushing at Ryan to hurry, his short tail vibrating with excitement.

Within minutes the four of them were down the stairs, Rock and Joe Grey leading at a gallop, and into Ryan’s truck, heading for Maudie’s house. Only little Snowball was left behind in the upstairs study, sitting up in her blanket on the love seat, listening to her family depart. The little white cat didn’t offer to follow, didn’t consider for a minute leaving the warm house in the middle of a cold winter night.

40

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WHEN BENNY’S MOTHER woke him in the dark room, he’d yelled once before she slapped a hand over his mouth, hurting him, pressing so hard he tasted blood. He tried to scramble out of bed on the opposite side from her, to get away, maybe crawl under the bed, but she twisted his arm, jerked him off the bed, and pulled him against her, squeezing his shoulder hard. In the glow of the night-light he couldn’t see Jared, Jared’s bed was flat and empty. He stared at the woman’s curly blond hair, not his mother’s sleek black pageboy, but it was his mother’s face scowling down at him.

The last time he’d seen her, a slant of moonlight had lit her face—then there’d been the blaze of gunshot, the white light blinding him as Grandma jerked him down to the floor of the car, into the smell of dust. In the blackness after, he could still see his mother’s face, cold with anger. He’d told no one he saw her, not even Grandma.

Now, panicked to have his mother’s hand across his mouth so he couldn’t yell for help, he bit her. She hit him so hard it made his ears ring. “You do that again, or make a sound, I’ll send you where I sent your daddy.” She smelled of the tingly perfume that made him sneeze. Bending his arm painfully behind him, she’d managed with her other hand to stuff a pillow and a blanket under the covers, patting them into a shape that, he guessed, would look like him sleeping, with his head tucked under. Then she pushed him ahead of her, gripping his shoulder like a metal claw, forced him out of the room and down the hall to the stairs. She paused at the top of the dark steps, listening.

Below, the front door stood open, the porch light was on, and Grandma stood on the porch, her back to them, talking to someone. His mother forced him down the stairs behind Grandma, keeping to the edge of the steps so they wouldn’t squeak. Why was there grass on the stairs? Grandma wouldn’t like that. With her hand hard over his mouth, his mother jerked him past the front door into the kitchen and through the glass door to Grandma’s studio. He could smell cut grass in there, mingled with the new-room smell. Pushing and dragging him through the studio, she shoved him outside, slid the door closed behind them. The bricks were cold under his bare feet as she dragged and pushed him up the hill through the neighbors’ backyard and the next yard, through the scratching bushes. Up and up the hill, behind Ryan’s cottage and up through the thorny tangles. He wanted to yell for help but was afraid she’d hurt him worse. He could still see that explosion of gunfire and her cold face as she killed his daddy and Caroline. At the top of the hill they came out of the bushes to a sidewalk. Turned right up a side street to a white, sleek car. When she tried to push him in the backseat he fought her, jerked away, ducked under the car against the tire. He clung to the tire but she loosened his arms, twisting his left arm, she pulled him out again. When he hit and kicked at her she held his hands behind him, shovedhim in the car on the floor of the backseat.

He hurt bad, but he didn’t dare move as she got in the front. She closed the door softly so no one would hear from one of the houses that loomed dark all around them. He could see her between the bucket seats, he kept his eyes slitted closed so she wouldn’t see him looking. Her white thin hands on the wheel were shaking. He watched her warily, clutching his arms around himself, shivering in his pajamas. His bare feet were cold, and stinging from the thorny bushes. When he tried to see out the window, she turned to look at him. “You keep down. I don’t want your head above the glass. Don’t bother trying the doors, they have safety locks, you can’t open them. Be quiet and keep down.” She didn’t call him by his name, not once. Starting the car, she pulled out real slow and quiet. She turned down Grandma’s street, he could see the paler sky above black trees, could see the high roof of Grandma’shouse slip by, the familiar stone chimney. Maybe he could slide between the bucket seats fast into the front, unlock the passenger door, jump out, and run—except he knew he wouldn’t be fast enough, he knew she’d catch him.

When they were past Grandma’s house she hit the gas so hard she sent him sliding, and she sped down the hill toward the village. There were no streetlights, only a few house lights swinging across the glass above him. They must have crossed the village, for soon they were among bigger, taller houses, where he could see upstairs lights burning. She slowed and pulled to the curb.

Killing the engine, she put the window down. A blast of cold air sucked in. It was lighter here, house lights and some shops. Slowly he eased up to look. She was watching the tall house down at the corner, across the street. His heart pounded with excitement when he heard the metallic sound of a police radio. When he eased up, he could see a black-and-white parked just past the tall house.

“Get down. I told you to stay down,” she snapped. She started the car and pulled away, around the corner and up the hill.

When she parked again, she was angrier than ever. Opening the driver’s door, she slipped out, closed it without even a click. Opened his door and pulled him out. “Come on. Not a sound.” He could almost smell her meanness and hate. She dragged him along the sidewalk, down the hill again, two blocks, and in among some bushes where she could watch the house on the corner and watch the cop car, its radio like talking into a tin can. Her hand on his arm was sweating, he’d never seen her sweat before. Somehow that made him feel better.

Never taking her eyes from the cop car, with her left hand she pulled her cell phone from her pocket, flipped it open. She started to dial one-handed but then, backing deeper into the bushes, she closed it again. The uniformed cop had stepped out of his black-and-white and stood looking across the street toward them.

Benny didn’t think he could see them there in the dark bushes, but his mother was as still as a scared rabbit. They stood there a long time. The cop did too, but then he got back in his car. He sat there, with his radio turned down but still tinny. Benny had to pee. He thought of asking if he could pee in the bushes, but he decided to hold it. They stood there with her hand scrunching the bones of his shoulder until another cop car came around the corner and parked behind the first one. When that cop got out, she dragged him away through the bushes and up the dark street again, to the car. Shoved himin the back, told him to stay down, swung into the driver’s seat and eased the car away, heading up into the hills. She drove slowly until a siren whooped behind them. She took off fast, careened up the hill watching in her rearview mirror so she nearly hit a parked car.

Were the cops looking for her? Had Grandma found him gone, and called them? But she was his mother, maybe she could take him wherever she liked, and what could the cops do? He wanted to look out the back window, but she kept watching in the rearview mirror as she skidded around corners, up the dark streets. Not many house lights up here, and those were far back among the trees. Suddenly she slammed on the brakes in a squealing skid, metal rammed into metal and he was thrown against the door; the car tilted sideways and went over, he fell hard onto the door and window that were now under him.

He could hear clicking and something dripping. In blackness he tried to find the door handle. His face was wet, and he could smell blood, the same as the night his daddy and Caroline died. He began to shake. His stomach heaved and without warning he threw up on himself.

Throw-up on his legs and bare feet, soaking his pajamas. He couldn’t crawl away from it. In the front seat, he heard her moan and then swear. She began to struggle, rocking the car. There was a clicking, and then thuds; then he heard the driver’s door swing open, bouncing as it fell, bouncing on its hinges. He heard cloth slide across cloth. She grunted; thenhis own door fell open under him with a screeching complaint and he fell out onto dirt and sharp rocks.

She dragged him out from under the door, didn’t ask if he was hurt. “Get up. Get up now!” Dragging him up, she jerked him away from the wrecked car. It was tilted against a tree where the road fell away, and tangled with a big pickup truck. The lights of both threw yellow rivers up into the night. In the truck, someone moaned. The air smelled of gasoline and of whiskey. She dragged him down the hill away from the wrecked vehicles, maybe before anyone saw them. “Run, damn it! Run!”

He tried to run. His feet were so cold, and his right leg hurt. Her hard shoes made running sounds on the pavement, pulling him along, running down the hill. When he stumbled and fell, she grabbed his shoulder, heaving him up and carrying him, running awkwardly. He went limp, tried to make himself heavy.

“Come on, Benny. Hold on, put your arm around my neck. I can’t leave you here.”

He didn’t see why not. He didn’t want to be with her. “I can’t hold on,” he lied. “My arm hurts. My leg hurts, it won’t work right.”

They were passing dark houses, all dark, no lights that he could run to if he could get away. But he tried pulling away and fighting her anyway. She carried him a ways as he fought her, then at last put him down. She was standing over him staring angrily down at him when voices broke the night. A man’s slurred voice and then a woman’s. Benny thought they sounded drunk, he knew about drunk. Pearl pushed him into the bushes. “Stay there and keep quiet. I’ll come back for you.” She ran, fled down the hill away from him, didn’t look back.

He knew she wouldn’t come back, she didn’t care what happened to him, all she cared about was herself. The sound of her running grew fainter until it was gone in the scuffling wind. He huddled shivering in the scratchy bushes, his leg hurting but not so bad as he’d said. The tears that squeezed out weren’t because of his hurting leg. He lay in the bushy shelter hugging himself. Which way was Grandma’s house? Could he find home? This road sloped up, and their house was in the hills, so maybe he should go that way. Rising, limping on his hurt leg, he moved up the dark road. The trees crowded black above him, branches over the road hiding the sky. Ahead, he could still hear the drunk couple arguing. He didn’t want to go near them. He was cold. He hurt, his leg hurt. His arm hurt bad where she’d jerked and pulled him. Among the trees that lined the road, there were no house lights at all now.Were there houses back in there, or was it all just woods? Should he go to those people, take a chance and trust a drunk man? Or go into the black woods and circle around the arguing couple? He moved on at last, away from them, up the narrow road, then through the woods, on up the hill through the night.

41

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THIS WON’T WORK,” Dulcie said as Wilma hurriedly pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. “From the car, we won’t see anything, won’t have a clue where they’ve taken Benny. What, you want to just drive the streets clueless?”

“But you can find him, running the roofs clueless?” Wilma gave her a skeptical look and bent down to tie her jogging shoes.

“I can scan the streets faster from up there. I can see on four sides of a block in seconds. And sound rises, Wilma. I can hear more, too. If you try to follow me in the car, how will you see me? And what if I lose you among other car lights? It isn’t like we carry walkie-talkies.” That wasn’t a bad idea, Dulcie thought, except for the weight, except for having to wear a collar, which in itself terrified her. “I can look for him better alone,” she repeated stubbornly.

“Go,” Wilma said at last, exasperated. She had never, in all her working career, let her parolees rag her the way the little tabby bossed her around. She watched Dulcie streak away through the house, heard her cat door slap open and back as she bolted through. She imagined Dulcie scrambling up the oak tree, leaping to the neighbors’ shingles and vanishing across the rooftops. Where would she go, how wouldshe know where to look? And yet, having lived with Dulcie a long time, she suspected the tabby would find a way.

She debated whether to call Ryan and Clyde, find out if they’d gone to help search for Benny. Maybe she could help them? Kit must … Oh, she thought,it’s Rock! Kit wanted Rock, she wanted him to track the child.

But then Dulcie’s on a wild-goose chase, she thought, looking away toward the windy rooftops.Will Dulcie think of Rock? Will she try to find and join them, instead of searching blindly by herself for Benny? She imagined Dulcie alone in the night searching uselessly, then imagined the ragtag midnight procession as Rock pulled Ryan through the dark streets, Clyde and Joe running to keep up, joined perhaps by a detective or two, a strange parade racing through the night.Will Dulcie find them? Or will she just go on searching all alone?

RACING OVER THE roofs toward the hills, Dulcie didn’t think about Rock, she was obsessed with the notion that the kidnappers, unless they had a safe house in which to hide, would escape among the hills above the village, among the twisting and narrow lanes. Maybe they had a cabin back in the woods somewhere. Parts of Molena Point, wild enough fordeer and coyotes and the occasional cougar, were surely remote enough to hide a kidnapper. A thin fog was beginning to drift down over the village. She paused frequently to rear up and listen, though chances were slim the child would be able to cry out. The village seemed huge tonight; one little boy could easily be swallowed up in the dark. An owl swooped low over her head, but she was too big for its supper. Ahead, a car passed on a cross street; she followed for only a block before it turned into a driveway.

A lone woman got out, a teenager who really shouldn’t be out this late. This was crazy, searching with no clue, running after every car. Though this time of night the cars were few, their tires singing a lonely song on the paving. Dulcie was maybe ten blocks from home, above the village, when she saw a red light undulating up through the pine trees some blocks ahead. A cop car? Faintly she heard a car door open, and the squawk of metal grating on metal, heard a distant police radio kick in. The sounds came from higher up the hill and, hearing no other commotion in the silent village, she headed there. She had raced three blocks when a patrol car came slipping along below her heading in that direction. She was racing to keep up when it turned on its siren, and she burned up the rooftops running, her paws pounding like rain above the heads of the sleeping village.

IN MAUDIE’S GUEST room, Ryan picked one of Benny’s dirty socks from the hamper, using a pencil to lift it into a plastic sandwich bag. She didn’t open the bag until Clyde had brought Rock in, on his lead; then she presented the scent to him, letting him take a long sniff. Rock knew what this was for, he knew the drill. His short tail wagging fast, he sniffed the lure, then sniffed thoroughly along the length of Benny’s unmade bed. Clyde and Dallas stood in the bedroom doorway, watching—and Clyde looking smug. Dallas was still perplexed at the big dog’s sudden expertise, with no long regimen of training. Rock peered under the bed for only a second, then backed out again.

From beneath the bed, Joe Grey watched his prot?g?, but made no move to join him. When Rock peered hard at him, Joe closed his eyes in a gesture that Rock knew meant,Don’t mess with me now, ignore me. At once Rock backed away, staring up at Ryan for direction, huffing with impatience.

“Find,” she said softly.

Rock put his nose to the floor, drank in Benny’s scent, and sped out of the room, nearly knocking Clyde and Dallas down, flew down the stairs pulling Ryan along so she had to grab at the rail to keep her balance. Racing through the house with his nose to the floor, through the studio, he pressed his body against the glass slider, pawing at it until Ryan could shove it open. Bolting through into the backyard, his nose to the ground, he headed up the hill crashing through bushes, jerking Ryan along as fast as she could run. This wasn’t obedience time when the big dog had to walk at heel on a loose leash, this was work time, Rock was incharge now. As he dragged Ryan up through the neighbors’ backyards, Clyde and Dallas following, the detective didn’t see Joe Grey following behind them, nor did he see, racing across the roofs above them, Kit and the yellow tomcat leaping in fast pursuit. Didn’t see Kit nipping and shouldering at Misto until he stopped and turned on her. With all the crashing through the bushes, no one heard them arguing in soft cat voices, Kit saying they should go back, should watch Maudie, not leave her alone, the tortoiseshell so adamant that finally Misto did turn reluctantly to go back with her, to peer down through the windows at Maudie.

MAUDIE WATCHED THE trackers from her studio doorway as long as she could see them, listened to them crashing up the black hill. She’d wanted to follow in her car, to be there when they found Benny, but Dallas had other ideas. “You’d be in the way of the dog,” he’d told her, his square Latino face serious with concern. “Driving along after him, your headlights behind him, you’d distract him, make him lose the trail.”

Maudie wasn’t sure this was true, but she didn’t want to impede the search. “I can keep up, on foot,” she’d argued.

“That could confuse him, too. You have Benny’s scent on you. You’d have him doubling back sniffing at you. We want him to follow fresh scent.”

Maudie didn’t know whether Dallas was speaking the truth at all, or simply wanted her out of their way. But she couldn’t argue with him, she surely couldn’t jeopardize the search. The police thought Kent might have kidnapped Benny, but she was certain it was Pearl. And if Pearl had him, she was terrified for the child.

“You’ll help most by staying here,” Dallas had said, “in case Benny somehow manages to escape and find his way home. You need to be here for him, Maudie. To comfort him, and to let us know he’s been found.”

She prayed to God he’d be found. She thought about Jared being part of that gang, and she felt sick. Could you trust no one? Soft-spoken, clean-cut Jared. Sleeping in the guest room alone with Benny. Had Jared had a hand in this, had he helped get Benny out of the house? And exactly when had they taken him? Behind her back as she stood on the porch watching the police? Or when she’d left the house to go down to Alfreda’s? This all had to be connected, the invasions, the theft of her keys, the rifled and stolen storage boxes, the invasions. All linked together with Benny’s kidnapping. But for what purpose?

Standing at the kitchen sink wrapped in her woolen robe, she watched the dark yard, praying Benny would appear out of the night, that somehow he would break free and find his way home. Praying to see his small shadow slipping along through the neighbors’ dark yards, making his way home. Praying to see him free of Pearl, and safe. Turning to the stove to pour the rest of the cocoa into her cup, she caught her breath at a sound behind her. Turning, she spilled hot cocoa on her hand. Pearl stood by the table, her thin face smeared with blood, her windbreaker torn and bloody, her expression smug. A bloody gash ran up her face into her kinky, bleached hair. She held a small automatic, aimed at Maudie.

“Where’s Benny?” Maudie whispered. “What have you done with him?” She dabbed at her hand with the dish towel, edging the towel toward her pocket.

“Give me the ledger pages Caroline had,” Pearl said. “And your bonds. You’ll sign them over to me. Then I’ll bring Benny here.”

Maudie just looked at her.

“I want the pages now, or you won’t see Benny again. You’re alone in the house, David’s gone, there’s no one here to help you.” She glanced at the dish towel. “If anything happens to me, you’ll never get Benny. No one will ever find him.”

“You wouldn’t kill your own child.” But Maudie wasn’t sure that was true.

“No woman has ever killed her own kid? I never wanted Benny. All these years, he’s only been in my way. Why would I want him now? Except to use in trade,” Pearl said, smiling.

“And Jared was in it all along,” Maudie said. “You and Jared and Kent did those cruel invasions together. And that man with the black beard. But why? Who is he?”

“Get the pages.”

“You’ve already been through Caroline’s things. If you didn’t find what you wanted, then it isn’t here.”

“Do you want me to bring your grandson back to you, dead?”

“It’s too late to trade,” Maudie said. “The LAPD has a copy of what you’re looking for, and there’s a warrant out on you.”

“I’m losing patience. I want the pages. Without them the boy’s dead.”

“What makes you think there isn’t more than one set of copies?”

“If there is and I find out, I’ll come back and kill him.”

“From behind bars?” Maudie said, laughing.

Pearl clicked off the safety. Her dark eyes were cold, her face as pale and hard as stone. Was this how she looked across the blackjack table, dealing out a crooked hand, taking the players’ money? Pearl glanced down at the gun, lifting it slightly so it was aimed at Maudie’s throat.

“There’s only one set of copies,” Maudie said, resigned. “In my safe-deposit box.”

“And the bonds?”

“And the bonds.” It was the middle of the night, they’d have hours to wait before the bank opened. Maybe this would give the searchers time to find Benny, maybe time to find and arrest Pearl? In that moment, she knew she should have made another copy. She’d thought about it, but had decidedthe pages would be safe enough, locked in the bank vault.

“We’ll be at the bank when it opens,” Pearl said. “You’ll give me the pages plus whatever cash you keep in the box, and sign over the bonds. You always kept cash in your safe-deposit box.” She smiled. “You didn’t know I knew that.”

All Maudie could think was, she wanted Pearl dead. Beneath the dish towel, her hand was so close to her pocket. Could she be quick enough? Shove her hand in, shoot through her pocket, never revealing the gun? But Pearl stood so close to her, still with the safety off the automatic. She was trying to think how to do this and not die herself when she heard a man’s voice from somewhere above them. Startled, she glanced toward the ceiling. Pearl stiffened but didn’t look up, didn’t take her eyes from Maudie.

There was no one upstairs, Maudie knew that. Unless that officer down the street had seen Pearl slip in and had followed her? Maybe he’d come to the kitchen window and seen Pearl holding a gun on her? Maybe he’d somehow gotten in upstairs. Not likely, that portly cop climbing on the fence or up a tree. She wondered if the construction ladder was still outside, lying beside the garage wall. Maybe he’d called a second cop andthey were ready to come down the stairs behind Pearl? Except, they wouldn’t be talking, knowing they’d be heard in the kitchen below.

But then, when the voice spoke again, it seemed to come not from the rooms above at all, but from over the garage. Or maybe from someone out on the street, maybe it was one of her neighbors, his voice deflected by the house walls. She shifted the towel, rubbing her hand with it as she eased toward her pocket.

But what if she killed Pearl, and Bennywas badly hurt somewhere, and the tracking dog didn’t find him? What if help didn’t come in time, if they found him too late because she’d killed the only person who knew where he was?

How badlyhad Pearl hurt him? Pearl’s face and hand were bleeding; what was that about? Had Benny fought hard enough to injure her like that, to make that deep wound down Pearl’s cheek? What would Pearl have done to him in retribution? Maudie’s heart pounded with fear for her grandson, far more fear, even, than the storm of hatred that she felt for Pearl. As Pearl gestured with the gun, quietly Maudie laid down the dish towel and slid into a chair at the table. Prepared to wait for morning, to wait for the bank to open. Prepared to do as Pearl ordered—praying that, one way or another, Benny would be safe and unhurt.

42

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PEARL WATCHED MAUDIE sitting so patiently at the table, snuggled cozily in her robe as if she weren’t afraid of the gun, as if Maudie didn’t believe she’d kill her. Certainly she wouldn’t kill her until morning, until she had the ledger copies and the bonds and hopefully some cash. Then she’d decide what to do.

Getting rid of Maudie’s body would take time. It might be easier just to leave her tied up somewhere and give herself the chance to get away, change her looks again so she could travel unnoticed. Maybe she’d dye her hair red this time, straighten it to a sleek bob. Her distinctive bone structure was a hindrance. Even her long, pale hands were too easily recognizable—a dealer’s hands, swift and clever. But ruined now, her hands bleeding and ugly from the cuts and bruises. She winced, looking at her pretty hands so cut up; she’d always taken care of her hands, babied them, had regular manicures, carefullyselected polish. Hands were important, men watched your hands at the card table, trying to catch you up or thinking how those silky hands would feel on their bodies.

It would take the abrasions a long time to heal, the ugly, broken nails a long time to grow out and be perfect again. There was blood on her face, too, she could feel it pulling as the wound began to dry. That frightened her. She didn’t want a scar marring her face, her smooth white skin; she didn’t want to come out of this ugly, she depended on her looks.

Well, the damned car was a loss, that was sure. It was while she was climbing out that she’d cut her hands so badly. And all the while, the driver of the other car wailing and carrying on, loud enough to be heard blocks away. He’d been drunk, she could smell the liquor, the whole thing was his fault. There’d been no witness to report the crash, but she supposed by now someone had come along the road and called the cops and the place would be crawling with them. Maybe they wouldn’t find the kid, though, the way he was hidden.

Him whining and crawling into the bushes, that had bought her some time. She’d dragged him a long way but at last had left him, making her way back to Arlie’s place. She knew that was foolish, but cops or not, she had to have a car. Why were the cops there? Had they caught Arlie, arrested him? She’d fled the house the minute she spotted a second cop car coming up thestreet, had gotten out of there fast, but she knew they had Arlie, he couldn’t have gotten away. Were they now watching for her? Or for Kent? They wouldn’t be looking for Jared, she thought, smiling. He’d been safe with Maudie, pretending to have just awakened. Though he’d planned to leave Maudie’s before she found the kid gone. He didn’t want to be pressed into searching for him, didn’t want any part of that.

After the wreck, she’d wanted to clean up at Arlie’s and change her clothes. She’d already checked out of the motel, of course, but could check into another, the town was crawling with motels. But going in looking the way she did, bloody and her clothes torn and without luggage, and in the middle of the night, even the dumbest desk clerk would call the cops.

When she’d gotten back to Arlie’s place, staying in the shadows, the cop cars were gone. Easing around a corner, she’d stood in the blackness across the street beside a sheltered porch, watching and fingering the keys in her pocket, keys to the house and to his car. She’d stood there a long time, but saw no dark uniform standing in the bushes or in a doorway, even as far as several blocks away. When she felt sure the cops had given up and moved on, she’d slipped into the house, easing quietly through the dark rooms, calling out softly to Arlie so if hewas there, maybe sitting in the dark, she wouldn’t surprise him. The house seemed strange, didn’t seem right. He hadn’t lived there long, but had taken great care with the placement of every piece of furniture, he was so damned picky. A living room chair was out of place so she nearly fell over it, a window shade crooked, a closet door hadbeen left open. Prowling with her gun drawn, she’d found Arlie’s flashlight in the kitchen drawer and had gone through the place again shielding the light. Several pieces of furniture had been moved, papers on the desk were in disarray, not the way he kept them. The cops had been there, all right. Or someone had. Quickly she’d retrieved her bag, didn’t look to see if someone had rummaged through her clothes but had headed for the garage.

She could have gone back for the Cadillac, which Arlie had left parked four blocks from Maudie’s, but by now the cops had probably found it. Sliding into the leased Jaguar, she was glad now that he was such a damned high roller he had to have a second car. She’d started the Jag, liking its faint but deep-throated rumble. The garage door made hardly any sound. She’d backed out, closed it with the remote, and driven sedately away—thinking Arlie wasn’t such a high roller now, with his ass cooling in the local tank. As for her, her next stop would either gain her the ledger copies and bonds or drop her straight into the cops’ laps with Arlie.

Leaving the car on a tiny side street, she’d walked the three blocks to Maudie’s. The yard lights were still on. One cop car was still parked in front of the invasion house four doors down, and she’d drawn back against an oak tree. Stayed still, then, as car lights came up the street and that contractor’s pickup pulled up in front of Maudie’s. What was this about? Ryan Flannery and her husband got out, they had that big gray dog with them. They took the dog inside, and in only a little while they came out again through the studio, the dog on a leash and moving fast, jerking Flannery up the hill following the route along which she’d dragged Benny—the dog was tracking Benny. A chill had iced her, she’d wanted to turn and run.

She wasn’t sure a tracking dog could follow a moving car. Unless there was scent on the outside of the car, she thought, remembering Benny clinging so desperately to the tire. If the dog picked that up and got to the wreck, where they’d been on foot again, he’d find their trail. Likely he’d find the kid. But would he keep on, then, tracking her? She’d watched until they disappeared, then looked to where Maudie stood at the kitchen window, looking out. Pearl could picture her twisting a dish towel, worrying over the kid. Using the key she’d taken, she’d slipped inside, and into the kitchen—and here she was, she and Maudie having a nice little chat, Maudie whining about the boy.

But now it was time to move on, she’d been here long enough, she wanted to get away before they found the kid and came back. “Get dressed,” she told Maudie. “You can’t go in the bank looking like that.”

“We can’t go to the bank, it’s the middle of the night.”

“Move it,” she said, gesturing with her gun toward the stairs.

Silently Maudie went up. Pearl followed, checked all the rooms, then watched while she dressed. When the man’s voice came again it sounded almost like he was right there in the other bedroom, but that wasn’t possible.

“Get a move on,” she told Maudie. “Hand me the belt from that robe.” She was reaching for the belt to tie Maudie’s hands when the man shouted an urgent, panicked cry accompanied by a muffled banging on a window.

“Stay here, get your shoes on. You leave this room, you’re dead.” She moved toward the hall, glanced back to see Maudie hanging up the robe and reaching for a jacket.

Slipping into the guest room, she found it empty. And no one at the windows. No one could be, there was only a thin lip of roof running along outside beneath the glass. Could the man have been at the front door and some trick of the wind made him sound like he was inside the house? Returning to the bedroom, she bound Maudie’s hands behind her, forced her out of the room and down the stairs. Hurrying past the front door, she pushed Maudie on out through the studio, through the yard, and up the street, staying to the darkest shadows, heading three blocks up where, beyond a curve, the maroon Jaguar waited out of sight.

PEARL DIDN’T SEE, on the roof behind them, the two cats watching, nor would she have paid any attention, she certainly wouldn’t have looked closely enough to see that one of the cats, a dark tortoiseshell, was placing a call on a cell phone. Hurrying away from the house, she didn’t hear the soft femalevoice that set in motion a BOL on the Jaguar, bringing into action the cruising street patrols—nor did she see the yellow cat stifle a laugh.

The old cat had found it wildly liberating to shout at Pearl; and when his shouts and paw-pounding on the guest room window distracted and unnerved her long enough for Maudie to slip the gun from her robe into her jacket pocket, that was a fine example of feline/human teamwork—even if Maudie didn’t know she’d had help. Now, both cats, following along the roofs above, wanted to whisper a word of encouragement to Maudie as she was forced up the street. All they could do was race after them over the shingles following the dark, sleek car, determined not to lose Maudie.

PUSHING MAUDIE INTO the backseat, Pearl engaged the safety switches and locked the doors. Her eyes felt gritty, she longed to clean up and tend to the wound on her face, try to prevent a disfiguring infection, but she didn’t dare return to Arlie’s house. As she headed up into the hills, she could see a convergence of lights near where the wreck would be, the lights of cop cars reflected up through the trees; when she cracked the window she could hear their radios. She hoped the driver wasn’t dead, that would complicate matters. Hoped they hadn’t found Benny, she didn’t want the kid blabbing. Maybe she shouldn’t have left him, should have gotten him away, hidden him somewhere they’d never find him even with the dog.

But maybe he’d stay away from the cops, maybe he was trying to find his way home, wandering lost up through the black woods. When she was above the wreck, heading higher into the tangle of hills, she watched for a place to park unseen among the darkened houses, maybe near where that canyon ran down. If the cops came nosing around up there, if she had to get away from the car, the canyon could be useful, even though she hated getting torn and scratched again by fallen trees and bushes. Once she had the papers and money, she’d decide what to do with Maudie. Pulling onto a twisting side street, she heard dogs barking somewhere to her right, as if she had disturbed them. But then in a moment someone must have shut them up, the night was still again, and she settled down to wait.

43

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ONCE PEARL LEFT him and Benny had come out from his hiding place and hobbled up into the woods, hurrying away from the direction his mother had gone, his leg didn’t hurt so bad. Not as bad as he’d let on, he’d wanted her to think he couldn’t walk much. Circling through the woods, past the metal heap of the white Toyota and the truck, he could see a porch light burning, in the house just above. Avoiding the man and woman who stood by the truck arguing, slipping around them, he couldn’t help the brushy sounds of his bare feet in the wet leaves. He thought they didn’t hear, because they didn’t stop arguing. Twice he stepped on sharp rocks and had to swallow back a yelp, and then a twig poked into his ankle. The woman’s voice was mean, as scratchy as a nail scraping the sidewalk. “Why the hell didn’t you look when you backed out of the damn drive?”

“Idid look, dammit. Car came around the corner so fast I couldn’t even shift gears, and you know damn well my horn don’t work.”

“First person sees this mess in the morning, first car comes down the road, the cops’ll be all over it, and you with no insurance. I told you this would happen.”

When he was past them, Benny ran, up through the woods, trying to remember the way he and Grandma took driving down to the village and home again. He thought Grandma’s house was away to the right; he wanted to go that way but the woods were so tangled and black. Who knew what was in there, hidden among the trees? When the road made a sharp bend to the right, the voices grew fainter behind him, but still he hurried uphill, his leg hurting worse. Once, he saw strings of little Christmas lights back in the woods. He guessed they were Christmas lights, hoped they weren’t something else, ghosts or something creepy. He was getting warm from walking, but he was out of breath. Sitting down on a long mound of earth at the side of the road, he yawned, and rubbed his hurting leg. He wasn’t lost, he told himself. The sudden sound of men’s voices made him look up. Had that drunk man followed him? He could see lights moving behind him, now, reflecting up among the trees. Frightened, he slipped behind the berm, out of sight from the road. A man was calling him, calling, “Benny? Benny?” How could he know his name?

The calling went on for a long time, but he was afraid to answer. He could see the light approaching uphill toward him. If he ran, the man would hear him. Quickly he dug down against the berm and pulled some fallen pine branches over himself. As he huddled there, again tears came, but these were tears of fear and of exhaustion and from the pain in his leg. He wouldn’t cry again for his mother, he didn’t have a mother, his connection to Pearl had been torn away, that woman who had hurt him wasn’t his mother. Yawning, he snuggled down beneath the branches, wanting help, but not from a stranger. Curling up trying to stay warm, he closed his eyes just for aminute.

He woke to a softmeow. He opened his eyes to see a cat crouched on the berm looking down at him. He came fully awake. He could see the darker blackness of familiar stripes, the wide, curved stripes across her shoulders, the stripe that blackened half her left ear.“Dulcie?”

She mewed at him and leaped down, and snuggled against his neck, purring. She was warm, cuddled against him; even her purr seemed to warm him. He petted her and talked to her and wished she could tell him how to get home, wished she could lead him home. But she was just a cat, she didn’t know he was lost. He lay there cuddling her, wondering if she was lost, too? Why would she be so far from home, from where he usually saw her? When she rose and moved away, he was afraid she’d leave him, he didn’t want her to go away to hunt and leave him all alone.

WHEN DULCIE HAD arrived at the wreck, there were two patrol cars nosed in facing it, their headlights picking out the tangle of the white Toyota crumpled half on its side against a badly dented king cab pickup. Rearing up until she could see the license plate where it was jammed against a tree, she discovered it was the Toyota from the motel. The tangle of wrecked vehicles spilled across the road and up into the driveway of a dark brown, shingled house, a grim, depressing place crowded on three sides by the dense pine woods. Looking at the wreck, she imagined the truck backing down the drive, the Toyota coming fast up around the curve from below, hitting it broadside; imagined the car spinning the truck around in a lethal dance before it lost its footing, skidded over, and tilted into the tree. She could see no one inside either vehicle. If the three officers on the scene had found anyone, they’d have an ambulance there by now. Or they’d have the coroner. She didn’t want to think about that, hadn’t wanted to think about Benny hurt or dead.

Had an ambulance already come and gone, maybe taking the little boy away? She watched one of the officers move up the stairs to the front door, his flashlight beam raking the face of the house, and Dulcie circled behind the other two uniforms, through the dark to nose around the Toyota.

She found the woman’s scent, mixed with the smell of blood. And yes, the little boy’s scent where he’d eased or been pulled out of the backseat through the broken door. Both trails led downhill along the narrow road. She’d followed to where the two trails parted, the woman’s scent going on down, toward the village.

Benny’s scent led into the bushes, and she’d found where he had lain beneath a rhododendron bush, curled up long enough to leave a little puddle of blood that was now beginning to congeal. When he’d moved on again alone, back up the road toward the wreck, he had circled wide around it, staying among the bushes as if avoiding the cops. Why would he do that when he needed help? Or had he passed before the cops arrived? But, thinking back to what Maudie had said when Benny’s daddy was shot, the sheriff’s spotlights shining suddenly into the car onto the torn bodies, the voices of men Benny didn’t know, the harsh police radio, the child staring at his murdered father’s torn body, maybe she understood his fear of cop cars and harsh spotlights.

Leaving the scene, she had followed Benny’s scent on uphill through the woods and back onto the dark road until she’d discovered him asleep behind the berm, huddled up like a little hurt animal. She’d snuggled with him, wondering how best to summon help, wondering if she could get him to follow her. Though she didn’t think he’d follow her back to the police units. She’d lain against him worrying until she lost patience and had padded away waving her tail, looking back at him—and it had been as easy as enticing a young kitten. Benny, distressed that she was leaving, reached out to her. When she didn’t stop, he scrambled up, ignoring his hurt leg, and limped after her, unwilling to be left behind.

BUT DULCIE WASN’T the only cat who’d raced out into the night on a search against all odds. Down in the village Misto and Kit chased across the rooftops, running as fast as they could, but soon losing the lights of the faster moving Jaguar, which had far outdistanced them. “Go on,” Misto said, panting. “Catch up, don’t lose them.”

“I’m winded, too.” But Kit fled on, her heart pounding so hard it shook her. She was thankful for the stoplights that slowed the Jaguar, she didn’t dare lose Maudie. She hoped this chase didn’t do Misto in, but she mustn’t wait for him. Such a dear old cat, so frail in his aging. Once when the maroon Jaguar passed some lighted houses she got a flash of Maudie in the backseat struggling to get loose from her bonds. Where was Pearl taking her? Fear sent Kit pelting headlong, running so fast her back and front legs crossed in deep Xs, a flying ball of fur sailing across tree branches, above alleys yawning black below her. When she lost sight of the Jaguar she followed its receding rumble. She was nearly done for, she had raced farther and harder than she had ever run chasing some terrified and willful rabbit.

Pearl’s lights flashed between houses and woods as the car moved higher into the hills, forcing Kit to leave the last accessible rooftop and race up a narrow road, led only by the sound of the Jaguar. Pearl was headed high above the village where the houses were closer together again, crowded along the wild ravine, where she’d be able to see the streets below but could park out of sight. It was a logical place to take cover. If she was pressed, she might escape down into the canyon, just as she must have escaped behind Alfreda’s house earlier that night. Escape, and leave Maudie bound in theJaguar? That would mess up her plans to hit the bank first thing in the morning. But it might save Pearl’s own neck, if she could dodge the cops.

But maybe you won’t dodge them, Kit thought, smiling.

High above her, Pearl’s lights stopped, then were extinguished. Yes, she had gone to ground in a secluded neighborhood just above the canyon where it would be easy to stay hidden—except that this was the canyon behind the senior ladies’ house. Pearl wouldn’t know that, Kit thought, smiling. She would know nothing about the seniors. Her choice of hiding places made Kit laugh out loud and lick her paw with satisfaction. This was the kind of good fortune where, when you’d slipped up on a mouse hole, you found a discarded cheese sandwich and the mice already gathered, too busy to notice their silent visitor.

Kit turned when she heard Misto panting behind her; he came flying, as if he’d gained his second wind. They raced on, not speaking, up the road among the woods toward the houses above. If Pearl was holed up for good, they had only to slip up on her, one of them keep her in sight, and the other race away to the seniors’, where Kit knew how to get in through Lori’s window. She’d just slip in past the sleeping girl, steal downstairs and use the kitchen phone, and she’d have the law up there pronto. As they approached the crest of the hill they heard a dog bark, his voice deep and melodic, and then a second dog: Lamb, the seniors’ big chocolate poodle, and their Dalmatian. Both knew something was out there, maybe they’d heard the Jaguar pull up the hill and park.

But what now? If she slipped into the house to use the phone, the dogs would be all over her. Even now, their barking might scare Pearl away, prompt her to run again. Rearing up looking through the trees trying to make out the dark shape of Pearl’s car, Kit was uncertain what to do. Uncertain how to play this game, maybe a far more dangerous game, with Maudie’s life at stake, than any she’d ever tackled.

At last, shivering, she headed for Lori’s second-floor window. Leaping to the hood of Cora Lee’s car, scrambling up, she found the window shut against the cold night, shut and locked. When she tried Cora Lee’s windows, they were locked, too. Both rooms were dark. As she crouched, peering in, she saw the reflection of a soft light come on at the back of the house, the kitchen. She could hear soft voices there, too, and could smell chocolate; maybe the ladies were having a little before-bed cocoa. She had to find a phone without alerting these ladies who had no idea she could speak, had to call the department, tell them that Pearl had Maudie. Looking up at the high little bathroom window, seeing it open a crack, she made a flying leap, clinging and clawing at the sliding glass.

44

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EAGERLY BENNY FOLLOWED Dulcie. He wanted to go home, he wanted his grandma, and apparently he had perfect faith that she would take him there, that she would save him, she thought, smiling. Little kids were like that, they believed in the wisdom of animals, the magic of animals. Well, she might not have all the magic skills the child found in a favorite fairy tale, but she could sure as hell lead him to where he could get help.

What she didn’t understand was why Pearl had kidnapped her own child. For money? For some kind of ransom? And if she’d wanted him bad enough to snatch him, why had she left him again so soon? Had he turned out to be too much of a burden? Benny would have slowed her down after the wreck, which Pearl must have feared would draw the cops to her. Whatever the cause, in her need to escape she had abandoned him, and Dulcie was glad for that.

But where were Kit and Joe? Kit had been there at Maudie’s when Benny vanished, but where was she now? She supposed Joe was somewhere out in the night with Rock and Ryan, following Benny’s trail. It was hard when they weren’t together, couldn’t talk, couldn’t help one another. She had no way to tell them that Benny was safe, they weren’t cops with their sophisticated electronic devices, able to talk to each other over long distances. Humans’ inventions were marvels of ingenuity; she wondered if humans realized how very special they were, that they could not only visualize such wonders but had worked out how to build them, how to make them real.

Hurrying uphill with the child close beside her, she headed not for Maudie’s house, which lay far to the right, but for the crest of the hill that towered above them. Benny might be lost, but she wasn’t, she knew where to find help. She left the road when it turned away to the left, leading Benny straight up through the woods, a hard climb for the tired, injured child through dense trees and tangled vines. Heading straight for the seniors’ house, she mewed her encouragement, wanting him to move faster as she leaped over fallen branches. Benny didn’t like pushing through the black, clutching woods, she could see that he was afraid, but still he followed her.Only once did he pause and whimper, but then he pushed on again bravely, trusting her, trusting that she would take him safely through the night to where help waited, where someone friendly waited.

THE TRACKING TEAM did indeed form a strange procession through the dark and empty streets, the silver-colored dog with his nose to the paving jerking Ryan along, Clyde and Dallas jogging behind her, the hurrying gray tomcat taking up the rear. An untidy line of runners tracking Benny’s scent, which clung to the long-since-vanished white Toyota. Sometimes Rock lost the scent in the wake of a passing vehicle and had to cast around to find it again. Twice he lost it so completely he had to double back, his nose lifting and then down to the macadam until he picked up the trail, alternately following airborne scent and sucking up the faintest odor that lay along the street. Joe wondered that Benny’s scent had remained so strong—almost as if the child had rubbed against the tires or maybe clung to the fender or bumper trying to keep from being forced inside the car. Joe had, some time back, given up dodging into the shadows whenever Dallas glanced back at him. The detective knew he was there, and though his remarks amused Joe, they were unsettling, too.

“Why the hell is the cat still following us?” Dallas grumbled, scowling at Clyde. “He’s like a dog out for a run, I never saw a cat that acts so much like a dog.”

Clyde laughed.“Hethinks he’s part dog, always been like that. He liked to run the beach with Rube and Barney. Remember how they’d race? Now, with both the old dogs gone, he’s grown pretty close to Rock.”

“He thinks he’s part cop,” Dallas said, “the way he hangs around the station.”

“It’s the food he likes,” Ryan said, sucking in breath, pulled along by Rock. “Mabel spoils him, you all do, he’s really getting too fat.”

Joe gave her a look as he moved along at a gallop beside Clyde. Ryan shook her head imperceptibly as Dallas glanced down at him, frowning.“Part dog,” Ryan said, laughing. “Thinks he can do whatever Rock can do.” She was about done in, was beginning to think she wasn’t as young as she used to be, not a pleasant revelation. They’d been tracking for nearly an hour when Rock swerved suddenly up a hillside street, leaped aheadso violently he nearly jerking Ryan off her feet.

“The wreck,” Dallas said, watching the light reflection among the treetops. With a BOL out on the white Toyota, the responding officers at the crash scene had called through to Dallas as soon as they ID’d the wrecked car.

“Neither driver on the scene,” Officer McFarland had said. “Some blood on the seat of the Toyota, shoe prints over the skid marks, a woman’s shoes and the boy’s, but no one here now.”

“See if you can find Benny,” Dallas had said. “The woman’s wanted on several charges.” Dallas could have pulled Rock off the scent, taken him directly there, put him back on Benny’s scent at the scene of the wreck. He’d opted, instead, to let Rock find his way without interference. Ifthey took the big dog off the trail, they might miss something. Maybe the kidnapper had stopped somewhere, maybe pulled the child out of the car, locked him up somewhere. This, plus the fact that he didn’t want to screw up the dog’s training by taking him off fresh scent—not when he was ramping ahead on the lead nearly choking himself.

They arrived at the wreck to find Kathleen Ray photographing the car and truck and taking blood samples. Neither driver nor passengers had been found. Before they reached the wrecked vehicles Rock brightened on Benny’s scent so powerfully that he nearly flew off the road, jerking Ryan downhill for a long way, and then into a tangle of bushes, sniffing at an indentation of crushed leaves, a little bed matted down into a child-sized nest. Huffing, drinking in the scent, he’d circled wide around it, his nose to the ground, and then headed uphill again, veering back and forth between two trails.

At the wreck again he gave a yip and tried to climb into the turned-over Toyota, sucking at the scent from within and around the hanging door that gaped open. Proudly Joe Grey watched his prot?g?, smiling at the success of his training.

But there was one thing Joe and Rock knew that their human companions did not.

They had now picked up not only Benny’s scent, but Dulcie’s, and a thrill of apprehension touched Joe. Dulcie, too, was tracking Benny, alone through the black night.

Or maybe Dulcie had already found him, Joe thought hopefully. Maybe by now the child was no longer alone. And though Joe wasn’t given to prayer, tonight he made an exception as he worried for his tabby lady.

Leaving the wreck behind, Rock took them straight up the steep road until it dead-ended, and there the silver dog plunged into the woods again, dragging Ryan crashing up through vines and heavy undergrowth. Rock’s human followers were soon fighting blackberry thorns that snatched at their jeans and windbreakers, swearing with a creativity that amused the tomcat. When, above them, two dogs began to bark, Rock paused, listening. But their voices were familiar and welcome, and he wagged his short tail.

“Benny can’t be headed for the seniors’ house?” Dallas said. “How the hell could he find their place in the dark? How would he even know the direction? What kind of blind luck is that?”

Not blind luck, Joe Grey thought, this was Dulcie’s doing, she had led Benny there.

They came out of the woods at the top of the hill, the three humans scratched and cranky from the blackberries’ embrace. They were half a block from the seniors’ rambling frame house. No lights burned in the flat-roofed, two-story structure, except for a faint light at the back, apparently from the kitchen. The seniors’ dogs were still barking, but now with pleased little woofs. They knew who approached, and were excited to have midnight company. Rock wasn’t distracted by them, he hurried along sucking Benny’s fresh scent from the air. Only when Dallas put a hand on Ryan’s arm did she speak to Rock and pull him to a halt. The good dog looked up at her reproachfully. He’d run for nearly two hours tracking Benny, he wanted the satisfaction of the find, he wanted a joyous reunion. “Just for a minute,” she told him, stroking his muscled shoulder.

As Dallas and Clyde stood surveying the house and street, Joe moved on up beside Rock, to reassure him that this pause was all right, that this was part of the job. Ryan waited as Dallas and Clyde walked the street, checking the interiors of the seven cars parked at intervals before they turned their backs on them. Though Joe hadn’t caught any fresh scent that could indicate someone waited concealed there. When at last Dallas nodded to Ryan and she released Rock, the big dog bolted not for the front door but around the side to the back deck.

Above the daylight basement, where a light burned in the kitchen, they could hear the murmur of voices. Benny’s voice? Rock leaped up the stairs to the deck and across it, yipping at the door with impatience. Before Ryan could knock or call out Cora Lee opened it, releasing the smell of hot cocoa—and releasing the Dalmatian and the standard poodle. They rushed at Rock, excited and ready to play. But Rock plunged past them through the open door and raced across the kitchen, heading straight for Benny.

The child sat at the kitchen table with a blanket wrapped around him. Lori had pulled her chair close beside him, and there was a big mug of cocoa on the table in front of him. There was a fresh bandage on his face, and one on his right arm. Rock reared up, softly keening and licking Benny’s face; and when the big dog cut a look at Ryan, his yellow eyes were filled with such pride that Ryan pressed her fist to her mouth and couldn’t speak; Rock’s doggy excitement at his accomplishment was so great that Clyde and Dallas, too, seemed choked with emotion.

From atop the little planning desk tucked beside the refrigerator, Dulcie looked on, purring extravagantly, her own triumph nearly as great as Rock’s. Joe didn’t know the details, but from the look on his lady’s face, Benny Toola had enjoyed two miracles tonight. One when an “untrained” dog successfully tracked and found him. The other when he must have been led through the cold night to safety by an “ordinary house cat,” a miracle that most humans would find impossible to believe. A rescue that, even to the hard-nosed tomcat, proved there might, indeed, be a touch of magic in the world. A special Christmas blessing, perhaps, that Dulcie had found Benny in the dark night, searching all alone, and that the child, lost and afraid, had been willing to follow her.

But Joe wasn’t the only one focused on Dulcie. When he looked at Dallas, the detective was frowning at the purring tabby, as if puzzled that Wilma’s cat was up there so far from home. Benny saw him looking. “Dulcie brought me,” he blurted out. “She was in the woods, a man was calling me and I saw lights and I didn’t know who that was. I ran, and then Dulcie was there, and she brought me here.”

“She must have been hunting,” Ryan said. “I’ve seen her over there on that road. Maybe she heard the police, saw the lights, and that frightened her just as it scared Benny.”

Dallas watched Ryan, puzzled and silent—maybe not really wanting to know what this was about.

“A miracle that they met up,” Ryan said. “Maybe, since she knows the seniors’ house, maybe she thought of this as a place of safety …” Ryan knew she was talking too much, but she couldn’t seem to stop. She didn’t like the skeptical look on Dallas’s face. He’d started to reply, his scowl stern, when his cell phone rang.

Picking up, the detective listened, then turned and stepped into the entry hall where he could talk in private. Silently Joe followed him, slipping into the shadows to listen.

“She’s where?” Dallas said. “How could you know that? Who is this? Where are you? Are you certain she has Maudie?”

I‘M SURE,” KIT said. “She pushed Maudie in the backseat of a maroon Jaguar, her hands tied behind her. I followed them up where you are. I saw you with that dog. She didn’t stop anywhere, she couldn’t have let Maudie out. She’s parked up in those trees, in the darkest shadows.”

Kit’s heart was pounding when she clicked off the speaker on the phone by Lori’s empty bed, after calling Dallas’s cell phone. She listened to Lori’s voice and Dallas’s voice from the kitchen below, heard him ask a question, heard Ryan answer. There was silence for a few minutes, then she heard the front door open. When she peered out through Lori’s window, Dallas and Rock were on the porch, Rock straining at the leash, staring up the dark hill, his ears up, his whole body quivering. Soon they would head up there. Kit didn’t know whether to follow them as they closed in on Pearl, or go down to poor Misto, who was crouched beneath the back deck, waiting for her.

Having clawed through the bathroom window, then slipped into Lori’s room, having found Lori’s bed empty and heard her voice downstairs, she’d made the call to Dallas, all the while worried about Misto. The old cat was worn out from running, tired and sore, and he’d been breathing hard when she left him. Now, still hearing Lori’s and Cora Lee’s voicesfrom the kitchen, she fought the lock on Lori’s window, pawed it open, and slipped out onto the roof. Peering down, she listened as Dallas spoke on his cell phone, talking with Max. She watched Rock pull on the lead, staring up into the night, fixed intently on Pearl’s hidden car. She knew Dallas was waiting for backup. She wanted badly to follow when they closed in on Pearl’s car. Instead she dropped off the roof onto Cora Lee’s hood, then to the drive, and streaked around to the back and beneath the deck, where Misto lay curled up, breathing raggedly.

45

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THE MAROON JAGUAR sat high up the hill sheltered among a dark overhang of cypress branches, well hidden from the houses below. Weeks ago, Pearl had driven up here with Arlie when he was looking for a house. He’d taken one look at the neighborhood and pronounced it a wilderness, too far from the amenities as he called them, too removed from his lifestyle. Didn’t that make her laugh. What about his lifestyle while he was in prison? Though the areawas so out of the way she wondered if the cops even bothered to patrol here.

The street ended in a cul-de-sac, but a narrower road led away down the far side of the hill, and she had parked facing that for a quick exit. The night around her was clear, but a fog was creeping up from the scrubby canyon, making it look like a pale river. She could escape down in there if she needed to, though the idea of climbing down among that tangle of weeds and trees didn’t really appeal; she’d done enough of that, earlier in the night.

Down the hill, despite fingers of fog, light from a thin moon picked out faintly the shapes of the large old houses. All were dark except for a faint glow from behind one, maybe a low-watt security light. The time was two forty-five. In the rearview mirror she watched Maudie, ready to stop her if she struggled with her bonds again; she’d already slapped her once for doing that. Maudie kept glancing down at the street below as if imagining that someone in one of those houses would wake and come to rescue her. When a couple of dogs started barking, Pearl studied the yards, but it was too dark to see where they were or what they were barking at. Only when a brighter light came on from behind one of the houses did she reach to switch on the ignition.

But then she paused. Maybe it was nothing, maybe the barking dogs had awakened someone, maybe they’d shut up and the light would go out again. This was too good a shelter to leave, she didn’t want to move. Settling back, she thought about where she’d go once she had the bonds and ledger pages and with no loose ends left behind. No good to get involved with a casino anywhere, too easy for the cops to track her through the gambling industry. Unless she left the country, worked a casino in the Bahamas or maybe the West Indies. Behind her, Maudie had settled down, too, as if giving up her hopeful vigil. When the dogs barked again, Pearl thought shadows moved in the yard before the lighted house and she strained to see—but maybe the dogs were loose or tied out there, surely it was just the dogs, milling around.

It was maybe ten minutes later when lights blazed in the front windows and the front door opened, emitting a river of light. A man stepped out with a big dog on a leash. Was that the detective? Garza? With the light at his back she couldn’t be sure. His build was the same as the Latino: square shoulders, short-clipped hair that looked dark. But what would he be doing here? He’d gone off with that Ryan Flannery and the cursed tracking dog—tracking Benny. Wasthat the tracking dog? But Benny wouldn’t be up here, the dog couldn’t have tracked him here, the kid couldn’t climb all the way up here from the wreck, that whiny, limping kid. If he’d gone anywhere it would be downhill toward the village, if he could walk even that far. He’d be scared silly to climb up here alone, through the black woods.

The man turned, and the light caught his face. When she saw him clearly, again her hand slipped to the ignition, ready to ease the car away down the far side of the hill. It was Garza.

Could he have given up trailing Benny, and started tracking her car? But how could he even know Maudie was gone? When the detective and Flannery and her husband left to search for Benny, Maudie had been safe in the house. Or so they thought. And once she had gotten Maudie away, who was going to come to the door in the middle of the night and discover Maudie wasn’t there? Not Jared, she thought, smiling. He’d be long gone, headed up the coast somewhere, maybe had hit some bar until closing time, to establish an alibi. She and the Colletto boys had escaped into the greenbelt together, Kent turning away downhill, she and Jared swinging back toward Maudie’s house. Jared had slipped in through the studio while she waited among the trees in the dark yard, then had gone in later to get the kid. Now, watching Garza, she glanced again toward the escape road, but if she moved the car, even without lights he’d hear her. Or the dog would, and make a fuss that would bring the damned cop straight to her.

Maybe they’d be gone soon, maybe the dog had lost Benny’s scent somewhere and the cop was just nosing around among the houses up here. Maybe he thought that, from above the woods, he might hear Benny crying for help. She had six hours until the bank opened, she could wait him out until he left. After thebank, she’d decide what to do with Maudie. She couldn’t turn her loose to run to the cops; she’d have to dispose of her or, as much of a drag as it would be, she’d have to take Maudie with her, kill her somewhere far away, dump her where no one would find her.

MAUDIE, FROM THE moment Pearl parked at the top of the hill under the trees, had known where she was. Below, fog lay thick along the ravine, the black line of roofs softly silhouetted against it. They were just above the senior ladies’ house. Even in the dark she knew the old established neighborhood, knew it from when she was a child and it had seemed so very far from the village. And knew it from more recently when she’d brought Benny up here to spend some time with Lori while she visited with Cora Lee, getting to know the four ladies, wanting to make friends her own age, establish some connections. Now, with the house so close, there had to be some way to reach them, to tell them she needed help.

She looked longingly at the soft light that burned around the back, most likely from the kitchen, and imagined the four women in their robes, sharing late-night cocoa. For her, they were worlds away; they might never know she’d been there. If she cried out for help, Pearl would hit her again or would drive off down the hill again. Even if she tried to cry out, she doubted they’d hear her since the dogs had started barking. She yearned to be down there safe in their kitchen. The thought of escape, of safety, broughttears of frustration that, with her hands tied behind her, she couldn’t even wipe away. She didn’t want Pearl to see how weak she was.

Whenever Pearl looked away from the rearview mirror, Maudie worked at the knots that bound her hands, picking and pulling at the soft belt, bending her fingers awkwardly. Pearl hadn’t found the gun in her pocket. Hadn’t felt it, hadn’t even looked. Apparently she didn’t think Maudie would have a gun or know how to use it. There were advantages in looking soft and helpless. And in not sharing all your personal information, even with your daughter-in-law. It hadn’t been any of Pearl’s business that she and Allen, on their weekend trips, had often included several hours at a county pistol range. They had kept several guns locked away, not only from Benny, but from any visitor who might enjoy snooping.

When one of the knots gave, a shock of excitement made her heart pound. It was almost loose. She tried to keep her upper body still as her cramped fingers fought to undo it. She was startled when, below at the seniors’ house, lights suddenly blazed on in the front windows, the front door opened, and Detective Garza emerged with Ryan’s tracking dog. She couldn’t believe he was there, not a hundred yards from her.

Had they found Benny? Had they brought him here? Was he all right? She jerked her hand loose from the last knot, tearing her skin in a long burn. Then she remained still again, not daring to divert Pearl’s attention from the scene that held them both riveted. And now with help so near, she was jolted to action. Slowly, watching Pearl, she reached toward her coat pocket.

HOLDING ROCK ON a short lead, moving along the porch away from the lighted doorway, Dallas stood against the wall of the house surveying the dark neighborhood. Beside him Rock was tense, predatory, his attention fixed on the wooded hill above. Light from the thin moon faintly defined the rising street, the big square houses and overgrown trees. Dallas couldn’t see into the woods at the top of the hill, but the big dog was alerting him in every way, straining to move out, wanting to have a look. Slowly Dallas edged toward the hill, keeping Rock close, knowing better than to approach the car alone.

Earlier, in the seniors’ kitchen, after he got the snitch’s call, Dallas had tried to call Maudie at home. He had gotten no answer, though she’d promised to stay near the phone. He’d alerted Brennan, but the officer, watching both houses, hadn’t seen or heard any disturbance. Brennan had seen Maudie’s bedroomlight go on, and in a little while go off again, and had assumed that in spite of the missing child, she might be lying down, preparing herself for whatever came next.

The dog was tense with nerves, and so was Dallas. Where was Max? Too risky to move up on that car without cover and blow the whole thing, if Maudie was up there, maybe get her killed. Staying to the darkest part of the yard as Rock tried to pull him up toward the woods, he paused when he heard a vehicle coming up the hill. Rock stopped and looked expectantly in that direction, knowing the sound of Max’s truck. They heard it park somewhere in the dark below, and Dallas’s phone vibrated.

“Rock’s fixed on the top of the hill,” he told Max. “Something’s there, all right. We’re just at the base of the hill, and he’s hyped to have a look.”

In a minute Max’s shadow moved toward him through the dark. Rock wagged his tail and licked Max’s hand, but then again he fixed his attention on the hill above, his ears sharply forward, his pale yellow eyes never wavering from the black tangle of woods.

Max looked at the eager dog, looked up the hill.“Let’s go with it,” he said, and the three headed silently up through the dark, Rock straining at the leash, the officers’ hands close to their holstered weapons. Neither officer saw Joe Grey behind them slipping from the shadows. Moving swiftly, Joe picked up Pearl’s scent from the damp air, just as Rock was doing, a scent that made the fur along his back bristle. The instant they glimpsed the car the two men separated, circling around to come at it from the back, and Joe moved unseen into the woods. When Dallas was deep among the trees he gave Rock the command to “down, stay.”

Rock obeyed, but so grudgingly Joe thought he’d soon break position. Shivering, Rock stared at the car, the rumble in his throat so faint only Joe could hear it.

As Max moved along beside the car hunkered down, keeping below the windows approaching the driver’s door, Joe saw movement behind the glass that made him want to yell, to warn the chief. Pearl had turned in the driver’s seat, watching Max. Joe saw the gleam of a gun as she swung on Harper—and he did yell, yelled a warning, he couldn’t help himself. Dallas appeared on the far side of the car, his flashlight blazing in on Pearl, her gun pointed at Max. At the same moment, Maudie rose up in the backseat, a dark silhouette.

Two shots blasted the night: Maudie’s gun and Max’s. Dallas didn’t fire for fear of hitting Max. Two shots were enough. Pearl jerked and fell against the door. Max flung the door open, his gun on her as he pulled her out of the car to sprawl facedown in the dirt.

Pearl didn’t move. In the beams of the officers’ lights a thin finger of blood began to pool from the back of her neck, and blood stained the ground beneath her. Joe could see where one bullet had exited, tearing through her throat. When Dallas shone his light around inside the car, Joe could see throughthe open door that two of the dashboard dials were shattered where a bullet must have passed through Pearl. Easing back out of the way, Joe lay down beside Rock, wanting to comfort the big dog. Rock was shaking—from the stress? From the smell of human blood? Or from the loud explosion of gunshots? Lying close together, cat and dog watched Max slip into the backseat of the Jaguar beside Maudie and put his arm around her, saw the older woman lean against him.

Who had killed Pearl was a toss. But did it matter? Pearl wouldn’t kill anyone else, Joe thought with satisfaction. And she wouldn’t torment Benny or his grandma anymore.

And the tomcat had to wonder, what would happen to Pearl if indeed she now faced some divine retribution? This was a matter of conjecture, but Joe Grey had his own version.

46

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BENNY TOOLA’S BIRTHDAY, two days after his mother’s death, could have been a grim affair for the little boy, and Maudie did her best to provide a gentle celebration. The child needed a party, needed folks around him who cared, who might herald a new stage in his life, help him deal with his fear and conflicted feelings. Benny had hated his mother, had mourned her lack of love for him. His shock when she murdered his father could have turned the child inward with a hatred and fear that might never leave him. But Pearl was his mother, after all, and he’d surely grieve for her, if only for what she’d denied him.

But Maudie’s emotions were conflicted, too, her guilt at having shot Pearl battling with her sense of strength and closure. She didn’t want to know the autopsy results, didn’t want to know whether her shot or Max Harper’s had killed Pearl. It was enough that she had taken a stand, though at that moment she could have done nothing less. Max said she had saved his life. Maybe she had, or maybe he’d saved his own. Whatever the truth, she had set out to kill Pearl, to see that Pearl paid for Martin’s death; she had never deceived herself about that. Now it was done, and she and Benny were free,now her concern was for Benny.

There would be no funeral until the coroner released the body. Most likely, he said, some time between Christmas and the New Year. Maudie hoped Benny could start the New Year with the funeral, too, behind him.

The day after Pearl died, Maudie made a trip down to the station to give her statement to Chief Harper and Detective Garza; then she fetched Benny from Ryan and Clyde’s remodel, where he was happily scrubbing the bathroom tiles alongside Lori, and together Maudie and the little boy went shopping to pick out the makings of a special birthday gift.

They found a set of furniture Benny liked, bright oak with brass fittings, and they consulted paint samples, taking home dozens of little colored swatches which Maudie held up to the wall while Benny chose the one that pleased him. Returning to the store, they bought the paint, and the next morning they were up before dawn, Maudie making pancakes as Benny set the table. Then, together, they painted the walls of the little sewing room. When the paint was dry they washed the windows and polished the hardwood floor. The next morning, the furniture was delivered: a twin-sized bed with drawers underneath, a small desk and bookshelves and a soft pad to fit the window seat, which Maudie covered with a bright quilt. They hung the big bulletin board they had bought and a trio of framed airplane prints they had found in a hobby shop. Benny moved his clothes and his few possessions into his new room, and he slept there the night before his birthday, at first curled up on the window seat under Maudie’s quilt, looking out over the rooftops and away across the greenbelt that ran behind the house.

“I looked for the yellow cat,” he told Maudie the next morning. “The yellow cat on the roofs, and for Dulcie and Joe Grey and Kit, but they didn’t come, no cat came. They haven’t gone away?”

“They’re not gone,” Maudie told him. “Ryan and Clyde wouldn’t let them go away. I’m sure that at least Ryan’s gray tomcat will be here later, for your birthday party.”

Neither Joe nor Dulcie nor Kit meant to miss Benny’s birthday, though Misto was otherwise occupied. The night that Pearl was shot, Misto, who was curled up beneath the seniors’ deck with Kit, felt lame and was hurting all over from his long run up the hills. Ryan had enticed him to come out, and she took him home with them, holding him on her lap as Clyde drove. Misto investigated the Damen house only briefly before he followed Snowball upstairs and curled up on the couch between the little white cat and Joe Grey. Next morning, the Damens and Joe crowded into Clyde’s yellow roadster to take Misto to see Dr. Firetti.

Even after all the passing years, John Firetti remembered the little yellow tom kitten who, he’d suspected even then, would one day realize that he could speak. When the kitten disappeared from the shore where Firetti fed the strays, he had searched for weeks for him. “I put ads in the paper for a lost yellow kitten,” he told Misto, “but they came to nothing. I hoped someone had adopted you, but I worried, wondered if you were with someone kind, if they were treating you well. I thought whoever took you might be strangers, tourists. I watched in case you should find your way back, and fretted about you for a very long time.”

“I did find my way back,” Misto said, laughing. “Though it took a while. I’ve wandered a long way and lived many places.” He looked at John Firetti eagerly, as if he might like to share his adventures with the doctor, as if he might enjoy settling in with a human friend for a little while; and John looked back at him with such excitement and wonder that both Ryan and Clyde had to hide a grin. Joe Grey watched the two of them with interest. Maybe, he thought, Misto’s tales might be worth a listen. Who knew what wild scenes the old cat could paint of close calls, of adventures and escapes among the human world.

There in the clinic, Dr. Firetti checked Misto over, then invited them across the way to his cottage, Clyde and Ryan for a cup of coffee. Mary Firetti settled Misto on a blanket on the flowered couch while Joe prowled the house, forever nosy, and John Firetti laid another log on the fire. Mary Firetti was a slim woman, her soft brown hair done up in a bun at the back, her denim jumper, over a white T-shirt, loose and comfortable, her leather sandals low-heeled and sensible. When she carried in the coffee tray, she set down a bowl of cream for Misto and one for Joe Grey.“Will you stay with us a while?” she asked Misto. Her direct address to him startled the yellow cat; he looked at her with alarm, then looked up at John.

“It’s all right,” John said. “Mary’s kept the secret just as I have.”

Misto looked at Mary for a long time, then stuck his nose in the cream. Yes, he would like to stay for a while. Mary seemed a warm, comfortable person, the Firetti cottage smelled of lavender and of cats, and he thought he quite liked the cozy household.

BENNY’S BIRTHDAY SUPPER featured an array of potluck casseroles and salads, many brought by their guests, and the chocolate birthday cake Maudie had made the night before, after Benny slept. Chocolate icing with Benny’s name and HAPPY BIRTHDAY in red and green writing as fancy as Maudie’s quilts. Around the cake was piled a mountain of gifts which, soon after supper, Benny tore open, scattering the wrappers and revealing bright and intriguing books he’d yet to read, board games he’d never played, more gifts than he could ever remember receiving, though Martin had done his best to please his little boy. Dulcie and Kit curled up beside him on the floor as he pored over the books, the lady cats snuggling close; around them the conversation swung comfortably from Christmas Day plans, to the depositions of Marlin Dorriss and Jared Colletto and the warrant out on Kent Colletto, to Pearl’s embezzlement. Her ledger had not been found, but the copies of her alternate set of books had been sent to the LAPD. Though she would never face a judge in this life, the information would help Beckman Heavy Equipment straighten out their clients’ accounts. The stolen money, if LAPD could uncover any hidden bank accounts in Pearl’s name, might help make up the funds that the firm had refunded to their wronged clients.

As a fresh pot of coffee brewed, and second pieces of birthday cake were cut, a heated discussion ensued as to who would bring what dishes for Christmas Day at the Harpers’ ranch. Soon that morphed into the last two church concerts and the Christmas play at Lori’s school where she had wanted to play Mary, but yet was relieved that she hadn’t been chosen; Lori and Cora Lee planned another visit to her pa at Soledad, the morning of Christmas Eve; and no one mentioned Benny’s soon-to-be Christmas present, not a word, this was a gift Benny knew nothing about. The rescued German shepherd was, at that moment, playing with the Harpers’ two dogs up at the ranch, an eight-month-old pup that his owner couldn’t afford to keep, who needed training and patiencebut needed, most of all, a little boy to love him.

The day after Pearl was shot, when Dallas and Kathleen searched the Colletto garage, they found a bag of three pairs of fish-scented running shoes. Having presented Carlene Colletto with a warrant and searched the house, they found, hidden among Jared’s last-semester school papers, ticket stubs for a round-trip flight to the Ontario airport in Southern California, under another name, but on the date that Martin and Caroline Toola were shot. The Orange County Sheriff’s Office was still checking rental cars out of Ontario in that name, thoughit was unlikely Jared’s prints would have remained in the car undisturbed all these months. The fake ID and credit card did not turn up, Jared had hidden them well or destroyed them.

Carlene Colletto had at first refused to let the detectives in. She read the warrant with the judge’s signature twice, scowling, then had called the judge. When Judge Bryant’s secretary assured her there was a legitimate warrant and she was obliged to honor it, Carlene had followed the detectives closely as they searched, crowding them, peering over their shoulders. “The boys can’t have been part of those invasions. Jared was furious that they were happening right here in our little village, he was as disgusted with you police as everyone else.” Carlene didn’t seem to get it, didn’t want to get it; her comments netted her a smile from Dallas, a haughty but amused look from Kathleen Ray.

It was the morning after Benny’s birthday that Dallas, taking a run up to the fishing wharves, to the used-car lot where Jared and Kent had worked, found the dented brown pickup. The lot was tucked between a seafood restaurant and a tool repair, next to the wharves. There were three corrugated-tin storage sheds at the back, and the truck was in the center shed. The prints of both young men were on the dash, the door handles, and the steering wheel. The scent of long-dead fish was ground into the floor mats. A long scrape of black paint decorated the truck’s left front and back fenders. Dallas photographed the vehicle inside and out, made casts of the tires, locked the shed, and strung crime-scene tape around it, effectively impounding the truck until the case was resolved.

As for Misto, he might have missed Benny’s party but he wasted no time settling in with the Firettis, enjoying a welcome rest and Mary’s succulent meals. The Firettis couldn’t get enough of his stories, of his life among the coastal fishermen, of his travels with a long-haul trucker—of passing friendships that had all been conducted in silence on Misto’s part except for an array of meows as he passed himself off as just another friendly, stray tomcat.

But soon after Christmas, the yellow cat would begin to remember other adventures, events he couldn’t account for. He would wake from a nap experiencing a moment as bright as if it had just occurred, but a scene that did not come from his wanderings. He would remember running down cobbled streets that smelled of open sewers, remember hunting birds on rooftops made of straw thatch, times and places he was sure he’d never known, not in this life. The dreams frightened him, but they needled his curiosity, too, and opened a whole new world for Misto. He didn’t know where the tales would lead but surely they fascinated his new human family—and they fired Dulcie and Kit to a frenzy of questions. Only Joe Grey scoffed. The tales of Misto’s travels might be fine, but the gray tomcat didn’t hold with this kind of story, with a cat remembering earlier lives, if indeed there was such a phenomenon. Dulcie laughed and cut her green eyes at him, and held to her own view of what Misto’s dreams revealed about feline pasts.

On Christmas morning, as Misto basked contentedly beneath the Firetti Christmas tree, up in the hills at the Harper ranch an impromptu Christmas breakfast was under way. The invasions were ended—two of the invaders behind bars, one dead, and San Francisco PD was pursuing a solid lead on Kent Colletto. MPPD was back on regular hours, and every officer was in a mood to celebrate. As cars pulled into the ranch yard, and officers and their families and civilian friends carried covered dishes into the house, out in the fenced pasture Benny and his new pup ran, played ball, fell on the ground wrestling, took turns chasing each other. Lessons and training would come later; this was getting-acquainted time, bonding time.

From atop Ryan’s truck, Joe and Dulcie and Kit watched the two young ones, their smiles indulgent and a bit smug. Benny was safe, and they had helped to put away the no-goods. Peace reigned over the small village, their friends were gathered close around them, the air was scented with breakfast delicacies. Turkeys would soon be cooking for Christmas dinner, and all was well in their small portion of the world. Only Kit seemed restless.

She thought about Christmas parties all over the village, about happy, laughing families, about the lavishly decorated trees and beautiful music. Thought about her gift from Lucinda and Pedric that she had found under their tree this morning: a present that Kit would treasure always. She thought about the satisfying pastiche of holiday joys, and knew she should envision nothing more—and yet Kit dreamed of more. There was an empty space in her little cat soul; even with all the riches she had, still something was missing. Thinking about the new year to come, she was so filled with restless longing that she began to pace atop the truck between Dulcie and Joe, paced back and forth, looking out to the wild fields and the vast and rolling sea. She had no clue to what lay ahead, no clue to the magic that waited forher in the coming year; she could only dream her impatient dreams, could only hope and wonder what was there, waiting for her, within the bright new year.

17. CAT TELLING TALES

1

The tomcat didn’t believe in prophetic dreams, he didn’t believe in insightful visions of future events or past events or whatever the hell that was that woke him yowling and clawing at the cushions with sweaty paws. It was the middle of the night, the sky outside the windows was clearer than the glass itself, the stars hung high and bright in their universe; the cool night was tucked around him as if to say that all was good, all was right with the world.

But he’d awakened frantic, still caught in the violent storm of his dreams; black wind driving rain at him so real that, rising up, he licked his paw expecting it to be sopping wet, expecting to have to lick himself dry all over.

That was a dream? What the hell was that?

He didn’t mind lifelike dreams of, say, a rollicking hunt with his tabby lady, feasting on rats and gophers, happy dream-memories that did nothing more than enrich his restful sleep. What he didn’t need was this kind of storm-filled nightmare so real he could still hear the wind howling. Didn’t needthis chilling experience of humans he didn’t know, caught up in some violent personal battle, the dream’s aura dark and so damnably loud that his poor cat head pounded and his ears still hurt: rain pelting down hammering a thin roof, two women shouting and screaming at each other with a terrible rage as rain beat against the thin walls of their little wooden shack, both women’s anger elemental, irreconcilable.

Even in the stormy dark, he’d somehow known the shack stood beside a low hill that was flattened off at the top, a fence running along up there. That a small grove of trees stood below, some distance from the shack, sturdy saplings bent nearly double by the driving wind. He had a sense of several cats crouched at the base of the trees, terrified and shivering. Rain drove like hammers against the cottage, its drumming mixed with the women’s shouts, and then he was inside the shack itself, the air cold and stinking of onions fried in rancid fat. A thin greasy light from a bare, overhead lightbulb, only a hint of warmth seeping from a square metal heater, the smell of butane fumes. An old woman, kinky gray hair, her wrinkled face screwed up with rage. The young woman slender, maybe in her twenties, her oval face flushed with anger, dark hair, long and wet and tangled, her brown eyes huge with vengeance. He couldsee a cot in the far corner, a child curled up beneath thin blankets into a miserable ball like a little animal, hugging himself against the women’s rage.

“I didn’t do any worse than they did,” the girl shouted. “You think just because I was—”

“You were stupid and foolish and now you’re paying for it, now look what you’ve got. If you try to pressure someone like him … You don’t know half what he’s capable of. And your own sister—”

“I was doing just fine until you poked your nose in. If you’d left it alone—”

“I pokedmy nose in? I’ve kept a home for you when your own sisters won’t have anything more to do with you, and who can blame them, after how you’ve behaved?”

“Why are you so mean! You don’t care about me and the boy, all you care about is how things look, what people think. Where doyou get all puffed up, living in this shack! An old drunk living in worse than a slum. You thinkI like living here?” She whirled around, crashed out through the warped door into the driving storm, the wind wrenching the door from her hand, blowing it in with a crash. Out in the turbulent dark another figure moved, easing deeper into the windy blackness as she passed, a tall figure, flapping dark coat torn by sheets of rain. The watcher lifted a hand but she didn’t see him, she disappeared running hard into the storm, the rain almost horizontal, as powerful as water sluicing from a fire hose. Over the storm’s pounding the tomcat heard a car start, its headlights blazed on, cutting through the downpour, in the dash lights he saw the woman’s pale face, saw her jerk the wheel as the car took off skidding a geyser of mud up against the house. Behind her, a second set of headlights flashed on, a second car loomed out of the blackness skidding against the hill and then straightening, following her fast, its red taillights quickly lost in the driving rain.

The tomcat had awakened so suddenly, shivering from the storm, amazed to find himself dry and warm within his own cushions, looking out at the calm, still night from within his own cat tower. Safe in his own digs, blessedly alone in his personal tower atop the second-floor roof, its tall windows dry and free of any rain, its timbers strong around him, his pounding heart the only residue of those violent moments. He sat looking out at the calm night, thinking about the violence of the dream, the women’s mutual hatred so real it had sucked him deep down into it, seemed to have left part of him still there with them, shivering with perplexed fear. What the hell was that, where the hell had that come from? It was more like a vision than a dream, an ugly message maybe portending a view of the future—or was it a look at the past, a glimpse of painful conflict that had already happened, and that he might soon have need to know and understand?

Except, he didn’t believe in that stuff.

So-called visions had nothing to do with real life, what folks called psychic portents were nothing but make-believe, temporary derangement. Life was right here and right now. Life was fact, what you could see and smell, what you could touch with your whiskers or an outstretched paw. Life was what yousaw happening or could figure out for yourself without any kind of cockamamie ethereal message. No one, cat or human, could call forth a future that hadn’t yet happened. No one could see into a past he’d never witnessed.That was sure as hell nonsense.

Rising, he pushed out through an open window to the roof, onto the dry, rough shingles that no storm had touched this night. He sniffed the cool, fresh breeze, the homey scent of pine and oak trees, the iodine smell of the sea from ten blocks away, and the sweet stink of a skunk hunting for grubs in one of the neighbors’ yards. He thought about the two women in the nightmare, tried to think if he’d ever seen either of them around the village.

The old one looked familiar, as if he might have glimpsed her now and then among the shops; Molena Point was small, it was hard not to know the locals. But the young, dark-haired woman was a stranger to him. Oval face, ivory complexion, cleft chin as if a dimple lodged there. A pouty mouth, a sullen, selfish look about her that, whatever the argument had been about, made Joe want to side with the older woman. When he thought too hard about the dream, his paws began to feel cold and wet again, his fear gauge to shoot right through the roof. But at last he tucked the nightmare away, shoved it to the far dark at the back of his feline thoughts along with other matters he didn’t much care to dwell on, with incidents he’d bring forth into the light only if they were required.

But he slept no more, this night.

Leaving his tower, he prowled across the rooftops of the village cottages and shops, brushing among overhanging branches of the oak and cypress trees, peering into cozy second-floor bedrooms still dark and peaceful and into the occasional rooftop penthouse. Galloping up and down the steep roofs, he wondered if his footfalls woke anyone in the rooms below where even the patter of a squirrel might be heard by a light sleeper. And the dream ran with him, shattering his sense of what was real, almost made him question his own convictions. Prowling among the shadows of roof vents and warm chimneys, he watched the sky pale from deepest gray to its first predawn silver streaked with wisps of blood-tinted clouds and still he couldn’t put the dream away, couldn’t know if it was a prediction or some mysterious voice from the past—or simply damn foolishness? Badgered by futile questions, he snapped back to the present only when he caught the first smell of coffee from the cottages below and the aroma of frying bacon. As hunger jolted him back to reality, he spun around and raced for home, his soft paws pounding across the rooftops, thinking of breakfast. To hell with stormy mind games, with nighttime portents and with visions he didn’t want, and didn’t believe in.

2

The rising sun fingered in through the glass walls of Ryan Flannery’s upstairs studio, and a fire burned on the hearth against the dawn chill. The brightening room smelled of fresh coffee from the pot on the big worktable where Ryan and Clyde sat surrounded by stacks of real estate ads and flyers. The lingering scent of frying bacon and waffles had drifted upstairs, too, mixed with a whiff of Joe Grey’s breakfast kippers. He lay purring, stretched out across the mess of real estate come-ons, his hind feet anchoring a pile of foreclosure notices, his front paws idling with a stack of price lists and specs the couple had been collecting for weeks. Licking a bit of maple syrup from his whiskers, he marveled at the propensity of his two favorite humans to complicate their lives—they needed another falling-down cottage to renovate like he needed a bed full of hungry fleas.

Ryan had pulled a sweatshirt on over her jeans, its white fleece setting off her dark, tousled hair, her sea-green eyes and high coloring. Her Latino and Scots-Irish heritage had blessed her with the delicate beauty of both races—as well as the volatile temper of both, which, most of the time, she kept pretty well reined in. Across the table, Clyde looked a bit shabby this early morning in ancient, faded jeans and a colorless, threadbare T-shirt that, in the gray tomcat’s opinion, had long ago been ripe for the ragbag.Beneath the soft lamplight, both were examining eagerly the color ads for the small, neglected houses spread across the table, as if each cried out to them with the insistent voice of temptation: Buy me, remodel me, make me beautiful again.

Clyde and Ryan had been married just a year next week, but nearly from the moment Clyde slid the ring on her finger and engulfed her in a bear-hug kiss, they’d celebrated their marital bliss by throwing themselves into buying rundown houses, taking advantage of the falling market to launch into the small but challenging remodel projects that were a sideline for Ryan, turning each dilapidated shack into a bright little home so appealing that, despitethe economic downturn, it sold often within days of being listed. This, on top of her full schedule of new-house construction, indicated a form of insanity that could beset only the human mind.

Though maybe, Joe thought, Ryan’s creative inner fire was, after all, somehow akin to the same burning drive that made a cat stalk, capture, and kill; maybe, indeed, the same single-minded kind of obsession and commitment. Looking around him at the studio Ryan had designed and built atop their home, he did have to admire his housemate’s talents: The heavy wood beams of the studio and its three tall glass walls had turned what could have been a dull second-floor addition into a treetop aerie, the space skillfully tied into Clyde’s adjoining study and the master bedroom beyond. Those two rooms, she had built some months before they were married, expanding what had been a poky one-story cottage into a spacious and imaginative environment.

As the sun lifted, the glass walls of the studio seemed to melt away, the surrounding tree branches to become even more a part of the airy room, mingling their shadows with the oak worktable, the computer desk and old drafting table, the long, antique storage cabinet with its wide, thin drawers that held Ryan’s drawings and blueprints. In the far corner, two campaign chairs, fitted with deep blue canvas, faced the blue daybed where Ryan’s big silver Weimaraner lay on his back, his four gray legs in the air, snoring, his upside-down rumbles soft and rhythmic. The little white cat slept curled against his shoulder, safe and trusting. Rock was Snowball’s guardian, she felt deliciously secure under the big dog’s stewardship.

Ryan, having given up her small apartment when she moved in with Clyde on their wedding day, had started constructing the studio the minute they arrived home from their honeymoon. Frantic for a place to work, she’d been just a bit cranky as she tried to complete the designs for two new houses and four remodels, place orders for materials, do her invoices and bookkeeping, all in the downstairs guest room where she’d crammed in her office furniture, while at the same time starting construction on the studio, and supervising three building crews. Those first months of marriage she had, in short, not been your typical lighthearted bride. Thank God Clyde could cook. Or life might have degenerated into an endless round of frozen dinners for the humans and, too disgusting to contemplate, canned cat foodfor Joe himself.

Now, since she’d moved into her comfortable new studio, you’d think she’d take a break, but no way. She and Clyde had bought and completed two remodel prospects and were burning to buy more. Joe tried to keep his opinion, and more scathing remarks, to a minimum; he made no comment now as they passed real estate ads back and forth, discussing the possibilities of each little house, its charms versus its drawbacks and weaknesses. Rolling over, he edged into a patch of sunlight that shone down through the clerestory windows; the bright shaft streaming past him picked out, as well, the carved antique mantel with its hand-painted tile insets, each bearing the image of a cat—cats whose history often perplexed Joe, their uncertain origin an aspect of life that sharply unnerved the tomcat, that told him more about his own ancestry than he cared to dwell on.

Ryan and Clyde had found the mantel while on their honeymoon up in the wine country northeast of San Francisco, in a musty antique shop, and of course they had to bring it home. They’d left for their wedding trip driving a borrowed Cadillac Escalade. Two weeks later they arrived home with Ryan hauling a trailer behind the SUV, and Clyde following in a large, rented U-Haul truck, every available inch of all three vehicles loaded with dusty relics unearthed from junk shops allalong their way: six antique mantels, twelve stained-glass windows, old hand-hewn lumber, detritus from people’s basements and attics and torn-down houses that fit right in with Ryan’s remodel designs. Amazingly, Clyde had been just as hyped as Ryan over their cache, the onset of feverish love apparently affecting his mental health, generating this new obsession that replaced his erstwhile preoccupation with antique cars. Oh well, such was love, and the tomcat had settled in, to adjust to household changes that, while frenetically busy, were far cozier and more charming than the careless environ of their austere bachelor pad.

Now as the sun rose higher, its warming rays touched not only the cat tiles of the mantel, but the letter that stood on top, a small pink envelope propped against a stack of architecture books. A letter that seemed to Joe as insistent as a blinking neon sign, awaiting Ryan’s attention, a missive he found both repugnant, and worrisome.

When the letter first arrived, in the regular afternoon delivery, he’d had no idea of the dilemma it would cause. The small, note-sized envelope, addressed in a clumsy and unskilled hand, seemed unimportant, hardly worth noticing as Joe pawed idly through the mail Clyde had left on the coffee table. The writing seemed to be a woman’s, someone who had plodded through grammar school at a time when the teaching of cursive was out of fashion, a woman who had apparently spent her entire adult life still laboriously printing her awkward little messages.

There was no return address, and the postmark was too blurred to make out the point of origin. The envelope was directed to Ryan in her maiden name, Flannery, which she still used professionally, and not to Mrs. Clyde Damen, but it did not appear to be of professional content; it didn’t have the polish of a business letter concerned perhaps with the design and construction of a new house or with the proposed requirements for some costly and extensive remodel. When Ryan had come in from work in her jeans and boots, and opened it, when she scanned the letter, her green eyes narrowed to a frown. She’d stood a moment rereading it, as if to make sure she’d gotten the message straight, her dark, short hair windblown and sprinkled with sawdust like the sparkles from some children’s party. At last, making no comment to Joe or to Clyde regarding the contents, she’d turned away, carried the letter upstairs and left it on her studio mantel where it now resided, the open note folded atop the envelope, the corner of a photograph visible underneath. As if the message wasn’t exactly private, but she didn’t care to discuss it. Of course the tomcat had followed her and, when she went on about her business, had leaped up and read it for himself.

The message carried an aura of disaster, of bad karma, if you will, that made his fur twitch and his paws tingle with sharp misgiving. The fact that Ryan didn’t want to talk about it was sign enough that the request was going to screw up their lives. What was really worrisome was that, though she’d set the letter aside, she hadn’t ignored it to the point of laying it facedown and slapping a book over it, or dropping it in the round file. This unsolicited bid for bed and board would, sooner or later, require her dutiful response. Joe knew what answerhe’d give, but he guessed Ryan wouldn’t follow his advice. Social courtesy is a human trait that most cats don’t consider of much value. Except, of course, when that courtesy is toward the cat himself.

Now he watched Ryan select a dozen real estate ads, and lay them out beside him. He flattened his ears when she propped three ads rudely against his gray flank as if he was some kind of cute copyholder. She gave him an innocent green-eyed look and scratched under his chin until his ears came up again, of their own accord, and he felt a purr rumbling. That was the trouble with Ryan, her charm got him every damn time.

Some of the little houses were so cheap the brokers hadn’t bothered with flyers or color pictures at all, had simply placed small black-and-white newspaper ads. Some were tiny old guesthouses, behind larger dwellings, which had apparently been sectioned off into their own lots. Two of the cottages were foreclosures, three were bank sales, all had suffered dizzying drops in price, as the economy fell. But in Molena Point, even the bottom of the barrel was still of value, every bit of land on the central coast was at a premium, and oceanfront lots were as dear as gold, even the smallest parcel worth as much as some Midwest mansions.

But that didn’t mean Ryan and Clyde had to snap them up like a cat snatches mice from the cupboard. Rising impatiently, Joe sent the ads sliding off his side and across the table. Ryan gave him a look, and picked them up. “You needn’t be so grumpy.”

“You’re collecting economic disasters,” he said coolly, “gambling on a collapsing market, just begging to lose your shirts with these expensive toys.”

“Market’ll pick up,” Ryan said gently. “You’re just not big on patience.”

“I’m patient on a mouse hole.”

“You are patient tracking a felon,” she said, reaching again, to scratch his ears. She always knew how to get to him. “I’d like to know who’s bought up so many of these old places, though, grabbed them before the listings even hit the street.” While expensive homes and estates had takena tumble, it was the small vacation cottages and the homes of those who worked at the service trades that had been hardest hit.

But then suddenly many of these had been purchased overnight, including three of the cottages that Ryan and Clyde had badly wanted, that would have lent themselves to just the kind of renovations they enjoyed working on. And then after the houses went off the market so quickly, they had stood empty for months. No resale signs, no renters, no work crews making repairs to put them back on the market at a quick profit. They simply sat. Empty and uncared for, the weeds growing tall, the lawns turning yellow even with the early spring rains, the old paint peeling like the skin of an onion. This was not like Molena Point, where most of the cottages were carefully maintained, their paint fresh, their front gardens lush with bright blooms and flowering trees and bushes.

In two cases, in the very neighborhood where Ryan and Clyde had made their last purchase, the neighbors had begun to see hushed activity late at night around the neglected houses, soft lights behind drawn shades, strange cars pulling quietly into the drive and soon slipping away again.

And now here they were this morning, still looking at that blighted neighborhood despite the neighbors’ unease and the whole country’s worry over the real estate market—as if nothing here, in this village, could stay down for long.

But as the two diligently sorted through the ads, forever optimistic, Joe was more interested in the problem of the moment. In the letter on the mantel that needed decisive action before their happy home was invaded by some strange young woman in the throes of a divorce, with two cranky-looking kids in tow, a woman severely driven by a sudden lack of a home and income. If this Debbie Kraft gained a foothold, if she moved in with them as she was pushing to do, she might linger for months, as persistent as a bad case of mange.

Leaping from the table to the mantel, he read it again, looking pointedly at Ryan. This, not pie-in-the-sky real estate investments, was the dilemma facing them right now. He looked at the photograph of Debbie herself and the two little girls that she had enclosed hoping, perhaps, to charm an invitation from the Damens. There wasn’t much charm apparent. She was a scrawny young woman with an angry scowl on her face, long, dull hair hanging loose down her back, her ankle-length denim skirt sagging at the hem, both children clinging to it like baby possums grasping their mother. The kids were maybe four years old, and twelve, both as ragged as their mother. The older child’s expression was as sour as her mother’s, too. The younger girl didn’t look at the camera but stared at the ground, huddled into herself, perhaps in a fit of shyness, or perhaps fear. The best-looking one of the group was the cat, and even he didn’t look too happy.

The older child held the big red tabby awkwardly in her arms, squeezing him so tight the cat’s ears were flat to his broad, tomcat head. The camera had caught his ringed tail blurred, swinging in an angry lash, the cat obviously practicing great restraint in not slashing his juvenile captor. Debbie’s letter didn’t mention the cat, until the very end.

Dear Ryan,

It’s been such a long time since our art school days in San Francisco. I tried to write to you at your old address. When the letter came back, I called your husband’s office. What a shock that you’d divorced, and then he died. Well, I managed to wiggle your address out of them, anyway.

My situation has changed, too. I have two little girls, and now Erik has left me, so I guess men are all the same. He took all our savings. I have no money, even to pay a lawyer to try to get the child support he isn’t paying. He stopped paying rent, so of course we were evicted, he did that to his own children. I have to be out by next week and I have nowhere to go. I have nothing, and no one who cares, but you. I have no job, and don’t know what I’ll do until I can get some money out of Erik.

He’d never dream I’d come to Molena Point, he knows I don’t have anything to do with my mother, and that I don’t see my sister. Of course he and Perry Fowler still own Kraft Realty and he’s right there in the Molena Point office, that’s all the more reason he won’t expect to see me, he’ll think I’d go far away from him. But I don’t know where else to go, except there to you, there’s no one else to help me, only you and Hanni, you and your sister are the only real friends I have. I’m glad Erik doesn’t know about you, at least I kept some things to myself. I’m leaving Eugene the end of the week, but the drive down from Oregon will take longer with the kids, they always have to eat and go potty. Here’s our picture that my neighbor took last year, the girls were cute then but they’ve gotten so gangly now. In the picture, Tessa is four, Vinnie is eleven. We don’t have the cat anymore, Erik used to throw things at it, so I guess it ran away. A neighbor said it hung around the nursing home up the street, that they took it in, but then that burned down. The kids won’t stop whining after it, so stupid. I’ll see you soon, I do hope you have room for us, otherwise I don’t know where we’d go.

Your friend and eager houseguest, Debbie Kraft

This was just great, just what they all needed, a whining houseguest with two kids, one that looked like a royal pain—and practically on Clyde and Ryan’s anniversary, which they’d planned to spend having a quiet dinner with close friends. Joe looked again at the picture, focusing on the red tomcat, a handsome young fellow with wide, curving stripes. There was a certain look about him, a sharp awareness in his wide amber eyes that made Joe wonder, that made him pause with a keen curiosity. Debbie didn’t seem to care that he might have died in the nursing home fire, in a shocking and painful death. Had she even bothered to look for him? Or was a child’s lost cat like a lost hair ribbon, of only passing note and no value?

But the strangest part was, they had lived in Eugene. There was the home of Misto, the old yellow tomcat who had left Oregon before Christmas, hitting the highway to begin his journey south to Molena Point, searching for his kittenhood home. Both cats were from Eugene, both had the look that Joe knew well, that was not the look of any ordinary feline.

Misto had left three grown-up offspring somewhere in Eugene, he had lost track of all three as they ventured out on their own into the world.

Could this cat be Misto’s son? The picture was taken a year ago. Now, was he even still alive? There was no one to ask, no one to know his fate or to care. When Joe looked down from the mantel, Ryan was watching him. “Stop frowning, Joe. She’s not staying here.”

Joe wasn’t so sure. Ryan might be a no-nonsense businesswoman, but she had a soft spot for the less fortunate that, Joe feared, would make her cave right in, would let that woman move on in and take over their happy home.

Clyde said,“Why can’t she go to her mother? What’s that about? She’s broke. No job. Two kids to feed. Let her go to her mother or her sister. The Fowlers are loaded, why can’t she stay with them?”

“How can she?” Ryan said. “Perry Fowler’s not only her brother-in-law, he owns half of Kraft Realty, he and Erik are co-owners. He’d be sure to tell Erik she’s here.” She shook her head, perplexed. “I don’t know what the estrangement’s all about, Debbie was always secretive, often for no reason at all. She told me once, years ago, she and her sisters would sneak around, sneak out at night. That she married Erik to get away from the village and from her mother, but she didn’t tell me why. They ran off before she finished Molena Point High. Later, when she moved up to San Francisco, she was in some of my classes in art school, and in some of my sister’s. Hanni couldn’t bear her, no one could. She’d hang around on the edges of a group, pushing in, interrupting whatever you were talking about, always with a problem of her own that was far more important, always adilemma she wanted someone else to solve for her. She’d borrow tubes of paint, lengths of expensive canvas, never return anything. She’d say she forgot, then say she didn’t have the money. She cheated on tests, begged for rides even when it was miles out of everyone’s way. Tag along if we went out for lunch, and then never have the money to pay for hers. She was just there one summer semester, she never graduated, and she never did much with what she did learn. Hanni was one of the gifted ones, and Debbie tagged after her. As if, if she stayed close, Hanni’s talent—or her grades—would rub off on her.”

After listening to Ryan’s description, Joe considered packing his figurative suitcase and moving out for the duration—he knew Ryan wouldn’t refuse this woman. He could move in with his tabby lady, take refuge with Dulcie and her housemate. Wilma Getz spoiled Dulcie worse than Ryan spoiled him, she’d serve up fillet, salmon, anything he asked for. The imminent descent of Debbie Kraft, with one kid who looked mean as snakes and another who was as yet an unknown quantity, made his head hurt and his skin twitch. If Ryan and Clyde wanted kids, they’d have some of their own. Looking again at the photo, he couldfind sympathy only for the cat.

“I always wondered,” Ryan said, “what could possibly be so bad between mother and daughter, that Debbie never even phoned her, never wrote to her? Well, I guess any number of things could, but I can’t get my head around it.” Ryan’s own mother had died of cancer when Ryan was small. Theyhad been a close, happy family. The idea of hating your mother was foreign to her, and repugnant.

“Letter’s dated eight days ago,” Clyde said. “It’s only a two-day drive down from Eugene. She says she has nowhere else to go, so where is she?” He glanced away in the direction of the street as if she might materialize, standing out there looking up at him. “Even the cheapest motel,” he said, “the cheapest restaurant, is expensive if you’re flat broke and have two kids to feed.”

Joe said,“We could pull the shades. You could pull the cars on through the carport into the garage, pretend we’re out of town.”

“Quit worrying,” Ryan repeated. “They’re not staying here.”

“Where, then?” Joe and Clyde said, together.

“Maybe the Salvation Army has room,” she said, referring to the army’s charity shelter.

“Did she write to Hanni, too?” Joe asked hopefully.

“She did. You know Hanni has no room, with their two boys.” Ryan smiled. “Hanni said she wasn’t inviting Debbie Kraft there to lift the good silverware and trash the house.” Ryan’s sister Hanni was among the best-known interior designers in the village, a glamorous woman with striking prematurely white hair, a penchant for bizarre and beautiful costumes, fabulous jewelry, and sleek convertibles—but with an even deeper attachment to old jeans, a fine hunting dog, and a good shotgun, an indulgence that, these days, she got to enjoy only rarely.

Ryan said,“Don’t even suggest Charlie and Max. Though,” she added with a wicked smile, “it would do Debbie good to live in a cop’s house for a few days.” The Harpers lived up among the green hills, happily alone except for their dogs and horses. Joe could just imagine the havoc two unruly kids could create among the defenseless animals, not to mention the danger, leaving gates open, letting the horses or dogs out onto the highway. And of course getting themselves stepped on by a hard hoof or snapped at by a usually patient mutt, and then blaming the Harpers. Charlie Harper worked at home, she didn’t need the frustration of nosy houseguests underfoot. A published writer and a successful artist, she had commission deadlines, publishing deadlines, and had neither the time nor the patience for such an intrusion. Restlessly Joe dropped off the mantel. “Going for a little hunt,” he said impatiently. “You two can work out the logistics—just send her somewhere else.”

Trotting from the studio into Clyde’s office, he leaped to the desk and up onto the nearest rafter. Padding along beneath the ceiling, he pushed out through his rooftop cat door into his tower, into his hexagonal glass retreat that rose atop the roof of the master bedroom. This was his private place, daytime suntrap, nighttime lookout beneath the scattered stars—and now suddenly a trap for inexplicable nightmares that, he sincerely hoped, would not return.

Pausing among his sun-faded cushions, he nibbled at an itchy paw then pushed out a window onto the roof of the master bedroom. With the rising sun warming his sleek gray coat, he leaped away across the shingles into a tangle of oak branches and across these onto the neighbor’s roof, then the next roof and the next, heading for Dulcie’s house. He needed Dulcie to talk to; needed a good run with his lady by his side, needed to stalk and kill a few rats and work off the unease. The woman hadn’t yet arrived, and already he was clawing for fresh air.

3

“You could be wrong,” Dulcie said, licking blood from her paw, the sun gleaming off her brown tabby fur. When she looked up at Joe, her green eyes were questioning. “Debbie could be a perfectly nice person, just broke and alone. And scared, with two little kids to care for.” They had been hunting all morning, had caught and devoured four fat wood rats between them. The hills rose emerald green around them, patterned with an occasional twisted oak, the land fresh with the scent of new growth and with the salty tang of the sea; the sea itself, down beyond the village, gleamed deep indigo beneath the wide, clear sky.

“She didn’t ask if she could move in,” Joe said, “sheannounced that she was, she did her best to make Ryan feel sorry for her—played on her sympathy like a panhandler.”

Dulcie flicked her tail.“You can move in with Wilma and me. Except,” she said, cutting him a look, “you’d miss all the excitement and high drama.” Having washed her whiskers, she nibbled delicately at the new winter grass, then looked down toward the village rooftops. “Kit’s off with Misto again,” she saidwith interest, thinking of Misto’s ancient tales.

Joe laid back his ears.“She’ll forget how to hunt. Misto’s a fine old fellow, but … Does he have to fill her head with so many stories, with all that foolishness?”

“Not foolishness! He’s taking her back through past ages, through our own history. Even the old myths grow from real history, Joe.”

Joe sneezed. He didn’t like tales of ages past, he didn’t like all those yarns of peasants and nobles and magic that so pleased Dulcie and made Kit purr as if she’d rolled in the catnip; the tortoiseshell was enough of a dreamer without Misto’s help. Pretty soon she’d hardly care what was happening here and now, and where could that kind of foolishness lead her?

Dulcie said,“Let her be, Joe. Misto’s the closest thing she’ll ever know to a father. She hardly even knew her mother, the only way she could hear the old tales was to crouch in the shadows at the edge of the wild clowder, just a tiny, scared kitten, listening. Not one of those cats wanted her there, no one wanted to love her and care for her. And as to the tales,” she said softly, “if we don’t understand our past, Joe, if we don’t know where it all began, how can we understand what’s happening now, all around us?”

Joe gave her an impatient look, and turned away. He didn’t need to know what happened ten centuries gone, to make sense of life around him. He didn’t need stories to tell him right from wrong, tell him the difference between good and evil. Both cats came alert as a band of coyotes began to yip, back among the hills. The beasts were very bold, for the middle of the day. With an alarmed look at each other they raced for the nearest oak tree, scrambling up its gnarled branches to safety, above the reach of prowling beasts. There, curled up together in a fork of the heavy branches, they slept. The sea wind whispered around them, the sun warmed them, and the coyotes remained busy looking for other prey. Dulcie dreamed of medieval villages, but Joe dreamed of Debbie Kraft, her invasion bolder than any hungry coyote, and then his dreams turned darker still, caught again in storm, and human rage, and a strange prophetic fear. When he woke, the bright day was gone.

The clouds were nearly as dark as his nightmare, heavy clouds hanging low above them, hurrying night along. They yawned and stretched, and smelled rain on the wind, and the wind itself had grown colder. Weather in Molena Point, which was notional any time of year, could never be trusted this early in the year. One moment the sidewalks and rooftops were burning hot, an hour later the streets and roofs were soaked with rain. Ever since Christmas the weather had swung from heavy storm, to idyllic spring, to days as humid as summer; only a cat could tell ahead of time what the day would bring, and this time of year even a cat might be inclined to wonder. The coyotes were silent now; the cats listened, and sniffed the breeze. When they detected no scent of the beasts nearby they backed down the rough oak trunk and headed home, thinking eagerly of supper.

Below them in the village, high on the rooftops, tortoiseshell Kit and Misto barely noticed the weather or cared that rain was imminent, they were deep into another time, another place, as the old yellow tom shared his ancient tales. The tide was out, the iodine smell of the sea mixed with the scent of the pine and cypress trees that sheltered the crowded little shops. As Misto ended a tale of knights and fiery dragons, as if in concert with his words the last rays of the setting sun blazed red beneath the darkening clouds. And when they looked down from the roof of Mandarin’s Bakery where they sat, a thin stray cat, a white female, was slipping along the sidewalk and into the alley—toward a baited trap redolent with the smell of canned turkey. Maybe tonight she’d spring the trap and end her wandering.

Neither Kit nor Misto moved to stop her, to scramble down and haze her away from the waiting trigger that would snap the mesh door closed and shut her inside. This stray was starving on the streets and too fearful to approach strange houses for food, she was a dumped cat, an abandoned household pet with no real notion how to hunt for her living. Her instincts to chase and catch were still kittenish, without focus, without the skills wrought by training. She was a charming little cat but, in their opinion, helpless as a newborn.

It hurt Kit that so many unwanted pets roamed the village, animals often sick, thrown away by their human families. Coddled from kittenhood in warm houses, then suddenly evicted, they had little chance to survive on their own, no notion how to snatch gophers from the village gardens or snag unwary birds on the wing. Many still lingered hopefully near the very homes from where they’d been abandoned, houses standing empty now. Families without jobs, moved away suddenly, leaving the village to search for cheaper rent, cheaper food, for the possibility of work somewhere else. Families who dragged away their grieving children and left behind the little family cat, to make it on her own.

Only the boldest cats would yowl stridently at a strange cottage door demanding to share someone’s supper, only the most appealing cats were taken in and given homes, while the shy and frightened and ugly were chased away again into the cold night.

Some of the strays didn’t even belong to this village, they had been dropped from dusty cars stopping along the highway, the drivers tossing them out like trash and then speeding away among the heavy traffic, leaving a little cat crouched and shivering on the windy roadside. All across the state, more animals were abandoned as more houses were repossessed, or leases broken. With taxes rising, fewer customers and fewer jobs, many stores had closed in the village, their windows revealing echoing interiors furnished only with a few empty boxes left in a dusty corner. Ever since Christmas Kit and Misto, and Joe and Dulcie, had watched their human friends trap the strays and settle them in volunteer shelters. Sometimes one of the four would entice a stray into a trap, a strange occupation, helping to capture others of their kind—or, almost of their kind. There were no other cats in the village like these four.

No other cat who carried on conversations with a few favored humans, who read the localGazette but shunned the big-city papers, who hung around Molena Point PD with an interest as keen as any cop—an interest no cop would ever believe. Misto was the newcomer among them, the old cat had shown up in the village just before Christmas, a vagabond who had once been a strapping brawler but was now shrunken with age, his yellow fur slack over heavy bones, his big paws worn and cracked, his yellow tail patchy and thin. But he was a wise old cat, and kind. Now, as they watched the white cat below, Kit gave Misto a shy look. “Tell about the cats from nowhere. Could some of these strays in the village, the ones we’ve never seen before, who seem to come from nowhere, could they be the same as in that tale?”

The old tom laughed.“These are only strays, Kit. Pitiful, lonely, scared, but not magic. Magic is for stories, just for make-believe.”

Kit nipped his shoulder.“We’re as different as the cats in the stories! And we’re not make-believe. Do my teeth feel like make-believe?”

Misto swatted at her good-naturedly, and licked at his shoulder.“We’re not magical, we’re just different. If those poor strays had any magic, do you think they’d be wandering hungry and lost? They’d have made something better happen for themselves.”

“I guess.” Kit cut her eyes at him. “Tell it again anyway,” she wheedled. Above them the heavy clouds had dropped lower still, and a mist of rain had begun to dampen the shingles and to glisten on their fur. The story Misto told came from France; he had heard it among the docks on the Oregon coast, listening to the yarns of fishermen and sailing men while pretending to nap among the coiled lines and stacks of crab traps.

“Five centuries ago,” Misto began, “in a small French town, dozens of cats appeared overnight suddenly prowling the streets, attacking the village cats, slashing the dogs, chasing the goats and even the horses, and snarling at the shopkeepers. With flaming torches the villagers drove them out, but secretly a few folk protected them. Next day, the cats returned, prowling and defiant, and they remained, tormenting the villagers, until on a night of the full moon they all disappeared at once. The moon rose to empty streets, every cat was gone.

“The villagers came out to celebrate, they danced until dawn, swilling wine, laughing at their release from the plague of cats.

“But when the sun rose, the villagers themselves had vanished. In their place were dozens of strangers, catlike men and women who took over the shops, moved into the deserted cottages, settled onto the farms. It was their town, now. Not a native villager remained, except those few who had sheltered their feline visitors. Only they were left, to live out their lives among the cat folk, equitably and, I’ll admit, with just a touch of magic,” Misto said with a sly twitch of his whiskers.

Kit smiled, and licked her paw. Ever since she was a kitten, such tales had set aflame her imagination, had brought other worlds alive for her. Around them, gusts of wind scoured the rooftops and tattered the clouds ragged, and soon the rain ceased again, blown away. The sun appeared, swimming atop the sea in a blush of sunset, and below them on the nearly deserted street, an ancient green Chevy passed, heading for the sandy shore. Kit rose, the white cat forgotten, and the two cats followed, galloping over the wet rooftops until, at the last cottage before the shore, they came down to the narrow, sandy street where the old green car had pulled to the curb. The driver remained within, watching the shore.

Only three cars were parked near her, all familiar, all belonging to the nearby cottages; and there was not a pedestrian in sight. At last the driver’s door swung open and an old woman stepped out, tall and bone thin, her narrow face and skinny arms tanned and wrinkled from the sun, her T-shirt and cotton pants faded colorless from age and many washings. Her walking shoes were old but sturdy, and as deeply creased as her face. She carried a brown duffel bag that Kit knew held soap, a towel, a toothbrush, clean clothes as thin and worn as those she wore. Heading for the little redwood building at the edge of the sand that held two restrooms, MEN and WOMEN, she disappeared inside.

Three days ago Kit had followed her, in the early morning, followed her into the dim, chill restroom, not liking the cold concrete beneath her paws, which was icky with wet sand. Wrinkling her nose at the smell of unscrubbed toilets, Kit had watched from behind the trash bin as the woman stripped down to the skin, shivering, and gave herself a sponge bath. How bony she was, and the gooseflesh came up all over her. She had to be homeless, living in her car, she was always alone, keeping away from crowds, careful to move away if a police car came cruising. Kit had watched her dress again in the fresh clothes she took from the duffel, watched her fill the sink with water, squeeze a handful of soap out of the metal dispenser that was screwed to the wall, watched her launder her soiled clothes and wring them out. Back in the car, she had spread her laundry out along the back, beneath the rear window. If the next day turned hot, they should dry quickly. If the morning brought fog or rain, the clothes would lie there wet and unpleasant and start to smell of mildew. Did she have only the one change of clothes? Had she always been homeless? She was nearly as pitiful as the stray cats of the village. Except, she had more resources than they did. She could speak to others, she could find some kind of job, she had a car and she must have enough money to put gas in the tank.

On several mornings, Kit and Misto had watched her carry a plastic bucket down to the shore, scoop it full of sand, and return to the car, leaving it inside.“Is she building a concrete wall?” Misto joked. “She’s filling a child’s sandbox,” Kit imagined. “She’s making a cactus garden,” Misto replied. “She has a cat,” Kit said, “she’s filling a cat box.”

But this evening the woman didn’t bother with the sand. Reappearing from WOMEN, she spread her clothes out in the car, then, carrying a battered thermos and a brown paper bag, she walked down the sloping white shore halfway to the surf. She took a wrinkled newspaper from the bag, unfolded and spread it out on the sand, sat down on it as gracefully as a queen on a velvet settee. She unscrewed the thermos, poured half a cup of coffee into the lid, and unwrapped a thin, dry-looking sandwich that she might have picked up at the nearest quick stop—or fished out of the nearest trash. Eating her supper, she sat looking longingly out to the sea, as if dreaming some grand dream; and Kit and Misto looked at each other, speculating. Was her poverty of sudden onset, had she lost her job and her home? Had her husband died, or maybe booted her out for a younger woman? Or was she an itinerant tramp? Maybe a con artist, come to the village looking for a new mark?

But now as dusk fell, Misto rose, gave Kit a flick of his thin yellow tail, and headed away to his evening ritual. Kit watched him trot away along the edge of the sea cliff that climbed high above the sand. When she could no longer see him, when his yellow coat was lost among the tall, yellow grass, she spun around and raced for home, a dark little shadow leaping across the rooftops and branches from one cottage to the next. Her two elderly housemates would have a nice hot supper waiting, and Pedric might have his own tales to tell, as the thin old man often did. But even as she fled for home thinking of a cozy evening with the two humans she loved best in all the world, the image of the bony old woman disturbed her, the sense of a life gone amiss, of pain and worry wrapping close the lonely woman who had no home and, Kit guessed, no friends.

4

A quarter mile to the south where the cliff rose high above the sand, a little fishing dock crossed the shore below, a simple wooden structure. A tall flight of wooden steps led up the cliff, to a path that met the narrow road above. The sun was gone now, and above a low scarf of dark clouds the evening sky shone silver. On the pale sand, long shadows stretched beneath the little dock; winding among them, a band of stray cats waited, circling the dark pilings shy and hungry, rubbing against the tarred posts, waiting for their supper, listening for the sound of an approaching vehicle. There was little traffic on the road above, though earlier in the day tourists’ cars had eased past bumper to bumper, the occupants ogling the handsome oceanfront homes on the far side of the road, homes innovative in their architecture and surrounded by impressive gardens. That was a world apart from what the stray cats had ever known; they didn’t go up there among humans to hunt, they kept to the wild and empty cliff and its little sheltering caves strung above the shore. Now, when they heard the van coming, still three blocks away, heard its familiar purr and the sound of its tires crunching loose gravel, they crouched listening, ears up or flattened, tails waving or tucked under, depending on how each one viewed the approaching human.

The van stopped on the cliff above, they heard the door open, listened to John Firetti’s familiar step approaching the cliffside stairs, the soft scuff of his shoes as he descended the wooden steps.

He was a slim man, well built, his high forehead sunburned where his pale brown hair was receding. Mild brown eyes behind rimless glasses, a twinkle of compassion and amusement—and perhaps, too, a barely concealed expression of amazement. Even as he approached the cats, Misto came racing along the cliff to meet him, lashing his thin tail with humor, beating Firetti to the bottom, looking back up at him with a silent laugh. The veterinarian carried a big, crinkling bag of kitty kibble and meat, a paper sack of scraps that smelled of roast beef, and two fat jugs of water.

Descending to the sand, man and cat moved together beside the dock, from one feeding station to the next, setting down bowls of kibble, rinsing and filling water bowls. The bolder cats rubbed against John’s ankles, and none of them shied from Misto. Only two cats kept away from the crowd, peering down from the cliff above, half hidden in the tall grass. The two young ones had arrived together, most likely dumped there, and were shy and new to the group. Dr. Firetti and Misto pretended not to notice them.

John Firetti had grown up in the village and had never wanted to live anywhere else. Vet school at U.C. Davis, and then his years at Cornell, that was a time in his life when he studied hard, got his degrees, then hurried home again to practice in his own small village, near the open hills and the sea. Returning from college he joined his father’s practice, and joined, as well, the older doctor’s care of the seashore ferals, feeding them, trapping and neutering any newcomers, giving them their shots then turning them loose again. The two veterinarians were among the first practitioners of the Trap-Neuter-Release programs that were nowat work all over the country, helping sick and hungry stray cats, and preventing the unwanted tide of homeless kittens. Father and son had worked together in this venture, just as in the practice, until John’s father died of a sudden massive stroke. They had, tending to the needs of the homeless band, harbored a dream that only a few people would understand or believe. John Firetti was nearly fifty when that dream came true—though the cat he had waited for was not from the feral band as he and his father had imagined. He was not one of the new generation of feral kittens that they had hoped would be born with special talents. Often such a skill skipped generations. In fact, after waiting and watching for so many years, John didn’t discover the cat of his dreams at all.

The cat found him.

The good vet was only sorry his father wasn’t there to share the wonder of their visitor. That meeting was the best Christmas present John, or Misto himself, could have imagined. John and his wife, Mary, were still amazed to be sharing their home with the talkative old tomcat, they never tired of hearing Misto’s adventures. As for Misto, what could be more comforting than sharing his true nature, and his stories, with a pair of humans he knew he could trust? Having found his way back to the village after a lifetime of wandering, he’d received, from Joe Grey, a history of the Firettis more complete than any cop’s background report; moving in with the Firettis, he felt as if they had always been family. Evenings before the fire, the three of them trading stories, was a dream answered for all three of them.

This evening Misto watched the wild little cats eating nervously and glancing around to make sure no dog or human came up the beach; but when John went back up the stairs to approach two humane traps that he had hidden in the forest of grass, Misto followed him.

The doors of both traps were bound open with bungee cords; Misto sniffed at them, then looked up at John.“They’ve been inside,” he said, his whiskers twitching at the scent of the two half-grown kittens. “Been in again, licked the plates dry again.”

John pulled out the empty dishes.“I think it’s time.” He put in new dishes that smelled of freshly opened tuna. He removed the bungee cords from the doors, so they would slam shut the instant a cat moved deep inside and stepped on the flat metal trigger that looked like part of the cage floor. The slamming door would scare the captive but in no way would harm him; he’d be deep inside, two feet away, when it sprang closed.

“They’re only kittens,” Misto said. “Maybe you’ll find homes for them, maybe the people who dumped them will find a place to live and come back for them.”

John turned to look at him.“Would you give them back?”

Misto lowered his ears.“I guess not, I guess they wouldn’t take any better care of them the second time around.” Man and cat shared a comfortable look, and headed away together where they could watch the traps unnoticed. They were halfway to the van when Joe Grey came trotting over the roof of a sprawling clifftop home, and paused to watch.

Having left Dulcie among the roofs of the village shops, he’d watched her head for the library where, during the busy evening hours, she would preen among her admirers, always dutiful as the official library cat. He had to smile at the number of pets and hugs she’d receive from patrons all unaware that, moments earlier, the tabby’s sweet face and dainty paws had been grisly with the blood and gore of freshly slaughtered rats.

Too full of rat himself to go home for supper, he’d headed for the shore, for the little ceremony of the evening feeding. Moving over the rooftops, he had appeared as only a gray shadow within the shadows of the sheltering oaks, his white markings dancing along like pale moths, white stripe of nose, white paws and apron as disembodied as the Cheshire cat’s fading smile.

Dropping down onto the low roof of a jutting bay window, he watched John Firetti step into the van. The vehicle was unmarked by the veterinarian’s name or the name of the clinic, just a plain white Dodge van that was almost a hospital in itself, equipped inside with cupboards, drawers of medicines and bandages, animal stretchers and cages enough to handle most emergencies, to care for sick and hurt animals while transporting them to the clinic. Joe watched Misto leap to the abbreviated hood of the van and stretch out against the windshield. He watched John, in the driver’s seat, unscrew the cap on his thermos, and he smelled the aroma of rich coffee. Joe remained still and apart for some time before he scrambled down a jasmine vine, trotted across the little road and leaped up onto the hood beside Misto.

Together they watched the traps that were just visible among the tall, yellowed grass, just as John was watching. Joe had thought, coming across the roofs, that someone had been watchinghim, but it was only a feeling. He saw no one, and now that sense of another presence was gone.

They watched the grass twitch and shiver as the two young cats peered out. In the cab, John Firetti was very still, not a movement, no smallest sound, only the smell of coffee, no different than if it had come from the nearby cottages. The trapping took as much patience as watching a mouse hole, patience not only to trap the cat but to care for him, doctor him, prepare him for a new home or, if he was feral, to notch his ear and release him again into his own wild world. The only changes in the cat’s life were that he would be healthier, and that he’d miss all the fun of making kittens.

Now, the two young cats slipped out from the grass, nervous and wary but yearning toward the smell of tuna. The pale silver tabby was maybe a year old, the scruffy black kitten half that age. They crept belly down toward the reek of tuna, easing toward the cages, sniffing eagerly through the mesh walls. Once they dodged away, then crept close again. Impetuously, the black kitten skittered into the nearer cage; she paused just inside, shivering. When nothing bad happened she crept toward the back where the tuna waited. The silver tabby started to follow her but tonight something alarmed him, made him draw back.

For a week, the two had been taking their supper in the traps, the tabby always wary, slower to enter the bungeed trap but at last following the black. They would clean up one bowl together, then move to the other cage and do the same. They had no notion that at every meal they walked over an inactivated trigger—cats know nothing of triggers. The kitten had no clue that tonight, before she reached the tuna, the door would spring closed behind her and …

Snap. It slammed down as loud as a gunshot. The kitten bolted into the wire mesh, stepped in the cat food, bolted away into the closed door and then into the side again, throwing herself at the wire, clawing frantically at it as Firetti swung out of the van and ran to drop a big, dark towel over the cage.

At once the kitten quieted. The terrible thudding stopped, all was still within. A trapped creature, a feral cat or raccoon, a bobcat or cougar kitten, will fight an uncovered cage until they are so badly cut and wounded they will die or must be killed. Even domestic cats will do the same, terrified, wanting out. They can see outside, and they fight to get out there. Only the dark cover, blocking their view, will calm them.

The pale tabby had disappeared back among the grass and poison oak, where he would be peering out. John was sorry not to have caught him—now he’d be twice as hard to capture. Carrying the covered trap, and opening the side door of the van, Firetti didn’t see, behind him, the silver tabby come out to follow him. Only Joe and Misto saw.

The young cat approached nervously, bravely following his friend. Above him, Misto looked through the windshield, back into the van, and caught John’s eye. He twitched an ear toward the tabby. John looked, and froze.

For a while, he stood immobile. Then silently he lifted the cage up onto the floor of the van and backed away.

It took a long while for the silver tabby to approach. He looked up at Misto and Joe, but seemed unafraid of them. Misto, taking a chance, dropped down from the hood, padded casually to the open door, and leaped into the van. He lay down a few feet from the cage and stretched out, purring.

The tabby, watching him, crept closer; but every muscle was tensed to run. He looked in at Misto, then at the cage. Looked up through the windshield at Joe. Looked back at John, who stood far away.

At last he hopped up into the van. Misto remained stretched out, limp, as the silver tabby nosed under the towel, where he could see the kitten. When he had made sure she was all right, he settled down halfway beneath the towel, his rear end sticking out, his striped silver face pressed against the wire, close to his young friend. This was not a feral cat, the beautiful tabby had been someone’s pet. Slowly Misto strolled out of the van, dropped to the ground, and John eased the sliding door closed.

It was now, behind them, that a shadow moved across the street among the tall bushes, a thin figure, watching them.

“Someone’s there,” Joe said softly. As John turned, the figure stepped out of the shadows. A woman, bone thin and tall, deeply tanned, dressed in ancient jeans and colorless T-shirt. The cats could see, down the street, the bumper of her battered green Chevy where it was angled into someone’s drive, half hidden by a wooden fence.

She approached the van, studying John’s face. She was just about his height, her brown hair slicked back in an untidy bun, her sun-browned face wrinkled and leathery. She peered past John, trying to see in through the van’s tinted window. “Where are you taking them? What did you mean to do with them? Those are my kittens, I’lltake them now.”

“Why would I give them to you, after you’ve abandoned them?”

“I couldn’t help it. I thought they’d be safe here with the other cats, I know you feed those cats. I live in my car, you can’t leave cats in a car, the heat would kill them. What did you mean to do with them? Who are you? Open the door, they’re mine.”

“I mean to feed them and care for them,” John said. “You haven’t done that, you abandoned them. The little one needs defleaing, and they need their shots. Kittens—”

“They’ve had their shots.”

“Which shots? Which vet? There are only two clinics.”

“Dr… . I don’t remember his name. The one on Ocean, behind the Mercedes agency.”

“Firetti’s Clinic?”

“Yes, that’s it. Ask them, they’ll tell you.”

“Which doctor?”

“I don’t remember. Dr. Firetti, I guess.”

“That clinic has only one doctor. I’m John Firetti.”

She looked at John a long time, her face crumpling, a dampness welling in her brown eyes.“You were going to take them somewhere that would put them down.”

“I wouldn’t take them to a shelter that kills unwanted cats. But these kittens aren’t ferals, they shouldn’t be abandoned and on their own.”

“You’d take care of them?” she said, not believing him.

“Of course I would.”

“You’d keep them safe, and I can come for them when I find another place? I lost my job, I couldn’t pay my rent, I have no place to keep them.”

How many abandoned strays, Joe wondered, was John Firetti already sheltering at the clinic? Actually, the woman looked worse off than the kittens, half starved, badly used by the world.

“What’s your name?” John said. “How do you manage, living in your car?”

“I’m Emmylou Warren. I was renting a shack on the Zandler property, there along the river, one of the old workers’ cabins. I lost my job bagging groceries. Well,” she said crossly, “my neighborcould have let me stay with her until I found a place, even if shedoes have only the one room.” Her anger made Joe uneasy, or maybe it was her mention of workers’ cabins along the river, though he couldn’t think why. Dropping to the ground, he caught Misto’s eye, then glanced away toward her car; both cats were of one mind as they slipped away through the shadows of the darkening street to where the nose of the Chevy stuck out among the bushes.

The windows were open. The interior of the battered Chevy smelled of banana skins, crackers, damp clothes, and still smelled of the two young cats. When Joe leaped in through the back window, he sank alarmingly among a mass of bulging plastic bags and folded blankets. Misto followed, scrambling over the sill, descending carefully down among the clutter.

Beneath the bags and blankets were cardboard boxes of canned goods, paperback books, and pots and pans. Stretching up to peer out the back window, making sure Emmylou wasn’t headed their way, Joe dropped down again among the detritus, sniffing at the tied plastic bags, pawing into the boxes. He didn’t know what he was looking for. He wanted to know more about the woman, to know why she made him uneasy. “She’s living in her car, all right. Her blankets could stand a good washing.” Pawing into a box among paper plates and kitchen utensils, he unearthed a padded brown envelope, the kind lined with bubble wrap. There was something hard inside, making it bulge. No address on the envelope, no writing at all. It wasn’t sealed. He peered in, reached in with an inquisitive paw. At the same moment Misto hissed like a den of snakes and Emmylou’s thin shadow came soundlessly along the side of the car, approaching the driver’s door. The cats exploded through the opposite window, hit the sidewalk in a gray and yellow tangle, scorched into the bushes asEmmylou opened her door.

They listened to her start the engine, watched her pull away. She had no clue they’d been in the car—but what would she care, they were only cats. Behind her, another pair of headlights blazed on and the white van came down the street, moving slowly as John Firetti looked for them. When his lights flashed in their eyes he pulled to the curb, reached over and opened the passenger door.

“What was that about?” he said softly, having apparently watched them toss the car. The cats padded out of the bushes grinning with embarrassment, and Misto hopped up into the van. They both looked down at Joe.

“Headed home,” Joe said, not wanting to explain his nosiness.Just curious,he thought.Just … something about Emmylou Warren,he thought, puzzled. He watched them pull away down the street, the pale van melting into the darkening evening, its red taillights growing smaller as they ferried their two little captives home to a good meal, a flea bath, a session with the hair dryer, and a nice warm bed.

Then, scrambling up a pine and up the shingles of a steep roof, Joe galloped away across the rise and fall of the crowded peaks, across heavy old oak branches that embraced the village houses, racing for home himself, wondering if the soft staccato of his thudding paws startled the occupants below, made them think they had rats in the attic.

5

It was two days later, just at dawn, that Joe woke in his rooftop tower to a bright red sunrise flickering up against the clouds above.Flickering? He leaped up from his cushions, saw flames licking and dancing among the eastern hills. Fire, running wild just where the Harper land lay along the crest. He reared up, staring, praying it was down the hill below their pastures, not their barn or house afire. He bolted in through his cat door onto the rafter, dropped to the desk below shouting,“Fire! Fire!” then realized no one was there. Remembered hearing both the car and truck drive away before ever it was light. Clyde had headed up the coast to look at a client’s 1920 Rolls-Royce that had inexplicably quit running, and Ryan left even earlier to trap one of the feral cats; the night before he had watched her tuck her cages and cat food into the pickup among her ladders and wheelbarrow.

Spinning around, he hit the phone’s speaker and pawed in 911, his heart pounding.

Were the Harpers’ horses trapped in their stalls, helpless? Had Max already left for work? Had Charlie seen the blaze or had she, too, left early, out with Ryan and Hanni, trapping strays? The day before, half a dozen more homeless cats had been called in, and already the three temporary shelters were full. He was still shouting at the night dispatcher when he heard a siren whoop. Quickly he broke the connection, raced into Ryan’s studio, leaped on the daybed where he could see out the east windows, reared up slamming his sweating paws against the glass.

The sky was barely light, streaks of gray and silver, the hills still dark except for the lick of orange flames rising up mixed with smoke darker than the heavy dawn clouds. If the flames reached the Harper land, reached the Harper barn with the horses still inside … Even if they had already been turned out they’d be at danger, terrified by the fire, running blindly into the fences. A panicked horse could injure himself so badly that, sometimes, he had to be destroyed. Leaping for the phone on Ryan’s desk, he punched in the Harpers’ number, shivering with nerves.

When Charlie didn’t answer he tried her cell phone. “Come on! Come on!” He was trying to calculate just how far the blaze might be from the Harpers’ pasture fence when he heard the shriek of a police car following the fire trucks. He prayed it was the siren on the police chief’s pickup, prayed Max was on the way.

Charlie had left the ranch long before daylight, she was up above the village, kneeling in the side yard of a small clapboard cottage among a mass of scratchy holly bushes, setting a trap for an old black cat who had been hanging around the vacant house. She was about to put the bait in when a work crew pulled up in front, a truck laden with ladders, lawn mower, gardening equipment. Pretty early for a gardening crew to be coming to work.

The driver was a handsome Latino boy she didn’t know, and there was no logo on the truck indicating any of the usual village gardening services. A car full of Mexican workers pulled up behind, parking at the curb. She watched the driver crimp the wheels in the wrong direction, assuring that if the brakes failed, the vehicle would careen backward down the hill clear to the bottom or until it crashed into a house or car. Five Hispanic men got out. They were dressed in jeans and sweatshirts, but something about them was off, they didn’t look like garden workers, they were too focused on the house, too quick yet wary in their movements.Quietly she picked up the cat food, closed the cage door, and headed away. This stray wouldn’t come around now anyway, until these men had left. It was only a few days since the department had raided a meth house just two blocks over, and maybe she was extra wary. Or not, she thought. The meth raid had been a nasty shock to every one of the few families still living in the small neighborhood. She was wondering if she should set the trap up the street, wondering how far this cat roamed, when her phone vibrated. Picking up, she spoke quietly.

Joe’s voice came loud and clear, shouting with a mewling panic, “Fire! Fire below the ranch, below the north pasture. Fire trucks on the way.”

She grabbed the empty trap and rose, had hardly hung up when the phone vibrated again.“Fire below the ranch,” Max said. “Where are you? Can you help get the horses out?”

She ran, swung the cage into her SUV, and headed for home, punching in the single digit for Ryan’s cell phone as she barreled down the hill. Ryan was out trapping, too; Charlie had talked with her once and she already had one young stray safe in her truck. Ryan answered in a whisper, “The cat’s approaching, I’m in my truck. Can I call you back?”

“There’s a fire below the ranch, I’m going to get the horses out. Come when you can.”

For an instant, Ryan hesitated. The cat was so close. A black-and-white shorthair, a tuxedo, very thin, his fur all awry. If she scared him off, it might take weeks to lure him back again. But the horses … She held her breath as the cat stuck his head in the trap, but then he paused. She’d give him a minute longer. He must be starving. He hesitated, sniffing the smell of freshly opened tuna, then something spooked him, he spun around and took off.

Half defeated, half relieved, she threw the cage in the backseat of her king cab and took off fast for home, pausing for tourists and for stop signs so the few blocks seemed to take forever. Skidding into the drive, she ran in hauling the one covered cage, and shut it in the guest room. The cat would be all right for an hour or two. Racing back out, she could hear Rock pawing indignantly at the back door. She left him in the yard, she didn’t need an excited Weimaraner racing among the frightened horses. Maybe it was those old shacks below the pastures that were burning, those ancient workers’ cottages from years ago when the river delta was farmed for artichokes. She thought they were rented now, though how much rent could you charge for an old wooden cabin that let the wind whistle through? The three places were tinder, that was sure, dry as a bone. She could see thick gray smoke ahead, rising over the lower hills, hiding the Harpers’ pasture.

Turning up the hill beyond the village, speeding up the narrow two-lane, she watched the fire licking up below the north pasture. She had to slow to pass a dozen cars that were pulled over to the side, their drivers rubbernecking. Why did people do that, why did they feel compelled to get in the way, slow down the firefighters and police? She was nearly to the Harpers’ turnoff when she heard Joe scramble up from the backseat, felt his paw on her shoulder. “Can’t you drive faster? Those poor horses.”

“I can drive faster and get us both creamed,” she said, glaring at him. At home, when she’d settled the cat cage in the guest room, she’d called out for Joe but there was no answer, and that had been worrisome. Racing out to the truck, she’d prayed he hadn’t gone galloping up into the hills alone headed for the fiery canyon, had told herself Joe had better sense, that he wouldn’t do that. She turned, scowling at him. “Now that you’ve made your presence known, would it do any good to ask you to stay out of trouble?”

“Does anyone live down there?”

“An old woman, I think. I’ve heard she’s a pretty heavy drinker, maybe she accidentally started the fire. And her grandson—Billy’s a nice kid, he works for Max and Charlie sometimes, feeding, cleaning stalls. I guess Hesmerra’s the only family he has.” She sped up when she’d passed the gawkers, turned left onto the Harpers’ gravel road. No point scolding Joe for slipping into the truck, no point telling him he’d be in danger around the fire, it would only make him bolder. She parked on the shoulder where the lane was blocked, where Charlie had shut the gate to the yard. She got out and slipped through the gate, Joe Grey trotting beside her. Ahead, Charlie was leading her sorrel mare and a boarder across the yard at a trot, toward the south pasture. Already Ryan’s eyes stung from the smoke as she went to halter two more horses.

Charlie couldn’t see the fire below the hill, could see only dark smoke rising up, as she moved the first two nervous horses through the north gate into the stable yard, her mare snorting and pulling back. She could see in her mind the three weathered field hands’ shacks that stood below the hill huddled at the edge of the floodplain beside the river. Surely the old woman and Billy had gotten out, those places were so small, only a few steps to the door or a window. Hesmerra Young. Everyone called her Gran. Charlie thought of her and Billy waking to flames, the blaze licking at the walls and ceiling, and she felt her stomach lurch. But surely they were safe, the fire trucks were there now, and she tried to ease her worry. Billy Young was only twelve, a silent, shy boy, with gentle hands for a horse or dog; he worked for the Harpers at odd times when they needed extra help. Maybe, when the fire broke out, he was already gone, off on his bike to work at one of the other ranches. Often, as Max headed to work before daylight, he’d see Billysomewhere on the road on his bike, and give him a lift, throw the bike in the back of the pickup. The boy did odd jobs for many of the local horse people, cleaned stalls, fed, cleaned tack, lunged and exercised the horses. She guessed he went to school when he chose, maybe in the afternoon. She didn’t know how he managed that, maybe he had a work permit like their young friend Lori Reed, who was learning carpentry as Ryan’s part-time apprentice. Charlie liked that a kid wanted to learn a hands-on skill, in addition to getting a formal education. If Billy was gone when the fire started, ifhis gran was alone there sleeping off a hangover, had she gotten out, had she even smelled smoke? Redwing reared again, fighting the rope, but the boarder, a bay gelding, was calm and sensible. By leading them together, she got them across the yard and into the south pasture, as far from the flamesas their land went. As she eased the mare through, her phone vibrated. Latching the gate, she picked up. “I’m moving the horses,” she told Max. She looked up as Ryan’s truck pulled in.

“Shall I come up?” Max said.

“No, Ryan’s here, we’re fine. I’ll call if we need help. Shall we hook up the trailers?”

“No, they have it under control, not a breath of wind down here,” he said curtly.

He sounded strange. She said,“Is everyone all right?”

“Everything under control,” he said shortly. “I have to go.” He hung up, startling her.

Something was wrong, he hadn’t wanted to talk. She told herself they were busy, the place must be chaos, the men cleaning up, to keep the last of the blaze contained, not let it creep along and start in the surrounding fields. The bottomland along the river lay fallow now, gone to coarse grass and weeds, the owner waiting for an upturn in the market, for some developer to give him an inflated profit. She didn’t like the thought of condos or tract houses down here, destroying the open land where she liked a nice gallop along the trail that ran beside the river. Max said no one would build houses on the flood bed, they’d have to be certifiably crazy. But all over California, people had done just that, built on cheap lowland, and then were surprised when, during heavy weather, their living rooms filled up with river mud.

She could hear the firefighters’ shouts, could still hear the hiss of water hitting the buildings, the dull chunk, chunk of shovels as if the men were cutting back dry weeds or pitching rubble and loose boards away from the hot spots. Ryan joined her at the north gate. They haltered the other four horses and led them across the yard, Max’s buckskin gelding snorting, strung with nerves. Probably the fire wouldn’t climb the hill, with no wind, but the horses sure could smell it, and that was all they needed. At least the new green grass was rich with moisture, not tinder dry. But still, a sudden wind whipping up the cliffs from the sea, and who knew what the blaze would do? Well, the trailers stood ready if they were needed, the tires inflated, and all their horses would load easily. It was that, or tie the bunch of them head-to-tail and lead them all at once to safety, to one of the neighbors’ pastures.

Slapping Bucky on the rump she sent him trotting away, the other three following him closely, as if Bucky might protect them. Ryan’s short dark hair was atangle, the collar of her jacket turned under as if she’d pulled it on fast, leaving the house in a hurry. With the horses moved, Charlie let the two big mutts out of the barn and put them in the south pasture with the horses. They took both vehicles, heading for the blaze, Charlie following Ryan’s truck. She could see Joe Grey sitting tall on the back of the seat. A right turn, and right again a quarter mile down the hill, and they bumped along the narrow dirt track that skirted the bottomland, heading into the smoke and the tangle of men and vehicles, the confusion of fire hoses spewing water, undulating like muscular pythons. They parked short of the burn, against the hill, and got out. Charlie smiled as Ryan threatened Joe Grey.

“You stay in the truck, Joe. I mean it.”

Joe sighed, put his head on his paws, his ears down, as if browbeaten. He couldn’t say a word in front of the firefighters. How was that fair?

“Don’t scold him,” Charlie said softly. “It was Joe who called in the report.” She reached in to stroke his head, and gave him a wink. “Ryan worries about you,” she said. He gave her a smile and a cranky sort of purr.

As the two women headed into the burn, a little smoky breeze whipped ashes in their faces. Most of the flames had been smothered, but where the blackened walls had fallen in, their remains burned cherry red. The smell of wet, burned wood was mixed with the odors of melted plastic, melted electrical wires, burned food, a stink that made them gag. Four men were raking refuse farther away from the smoldering boards, piling it against the hill beyond a tangle of old timbers, wooden barrels, and an old door with peeling veneer. Past the black, sodden remains of the shack, the white EMT van stood parked near the two fire trucks. The firemen and two medics stood there in a circle with Max. His thin face was streaked with soot, black smears stained his western shirt and jeans. He had turned away from Charlie and Ryan. That, and the look on the medics’ faces, made Charlie go cold; turning, she took Ryan’s hand.

Not twenty feet from the burn, the other two cabins stood untouched, their rough wood siding soaked from the beating water, the roofs dripping. As Charlie and Ryan moved toward the group of men, a sick smell reached them, the stink of meat singed too fast on a hot barbecue. The circle of men nearly hid the portable gurney beside the EMT van. They could see it held a stretcher, strewn with a heap of blackened rags.

But not only rags. Charlie made out a frail body tangled among burned blankets.

Max turned to look at her, his mouth and jaw drawn tight.“She never left her bed, Charlie. She was there under the blankets, dressed in her flannel nightgown.” Charlie pressed her fist to her mouth. Max said, “There was glass in her bed, shards of glass under the blanket, as if a bottle had exploded in the flames.”

Behind them, up the dirt road, the coroner’s white van pulled in off the two-lane, and behind it came a kid on a bike, leaning over the handlebars pumping hard, kicking up dust as he skidded off the highway onto the dirt lane, following the van. Skidding to a stop beside it, dragging his foot in the dirt, Billy Young sat looking at his burned house and the group of silent men.

6

Joe crouched on the dash of Ryan’s truck looking out through the windshield, watching Billy. The boy sat on his bike looking at the black and smoking remains of his home: the heap of fallen timbers, steam rising up from the alligatored wood. His fists were clenched hard on the handlebars, his face gone white. He was so thin hisprotruding wrists looked like the bones someone would throw to a hungry dog. His face was long, his cheeks sculpted in close, his brown eyes huge with shock, a look that made Joe’s belly twist, that made embarrassing cat tears start—this was as sad as watching an orphaned kitten whose mother had been hit by a car.

He was dressed in frayed jeans limply shaped to his legs, run-over boots, a ragged khaki jacket that might have come from a local charity. Brown hair clipped short and uneven as if Gran took a pair of dull shears to it once in a while. Joe had seen him out in the fields when he and Dulcie and Kit were hunting, they’d see him scrounging the mom-and-pop vegetable farms, picking up culls, dropping them in a black plastic bag: cabbages that had been accidentally cut and were left to rot, ears of corn that might have been wormy, tomatoes that had been missed or that the birds had pecked open.

Max stepped over, blocking Billy’s view of the gurney, and put his arm around the boy, but Billy had already seen what was there. The firemen and medics had turned away, with their backs to him, so as not to stare at his grief. Joe watched Billy try to get his mind around what had happened, try to come to terms with the body onthe stretcher.

Did the boy have anyone else, besides his gran?What happens to an orphaned boy? Joe wondered.Will some county authority take him away, tell him where to live, put him in a foster home or institution? Tell him he can’t work anymore, that he’s too young to work? Confine him in a straitjacket of legal hierarchy? Is Billy Young nothing more than county property now?

Max walked the boy away from the stretcher, talking softly; they talked for some time, Billy hesitantly asking questions, Max’s answers direct and brief. When Billy turned again toward the medics’ van, Max shook his head, discouraging him from approaching the burned body, and guided him instead toward Ryan’s truck. Watching them, Joe dropped to the seat and curled up, his chin on his paws, his eyes slitted closed.

“No one else has been around here?” the chief was saying. “Anyone who might have accidentally started the fire?”

“No one ever comes here,” Billy said. “Except Mr. Zandler, to get the rent.” He didn’t bother to wipe the wetness from his cheeks. Joe knew Zandler, he was the kind of scruffy and rude old man that a cat made a wide path around. A lanky and stooped man, shaggy black hair and bristly beard, old black three-piece suit, grubby white shirt, a necktie loose and crooked and dark enough to hide some of the grease stains. Billy said, “Sometimes my uncle comes, my aunt’s husband. He likes Gran. But Aunt Esther never comes, neither of my aunts do. Gran’s own daughters.”

“That would be Erik Kraft,” Max said.

Billy nodded.“I need to tell him. So he won’t come, find the house burned.” Joe thought if he were to reach out a paw and touch Billy, he’d feel him shivering, the kind of tremor you didn’t really see, that came from deep down inside.

“Did your uncle come often?” Max asked.

Billy shook his head.“Maybe three or four times a year. He’d give her spending money, fill up her whiskey stash. He said if her daughters wouldn’t give her money, he would. Said it was no one’s business what she did with it. He said her daughters didn’t realize how hard it was on her, raising me alone. But I always worked,” Billy said, “ever since Mama died I worked to help out.”

“I know you have,” Max said. “The other two cabins, they’re empty? Isn’t there another tenant?”

“A woman lived in one, Emmylou Warren. After Christmas she lost her job and couldn’t pay, and Mr. Zandler made her leave. Gran … Gran wouldn’t let her stay with us, she said we didn’t have room. Well, there is … was only the one room. Emmylou’s my friend, but I don’t know where she went.”

“And the other cabin?”

“It’s empty, half the roof’s fallen in, the floor rotted. The back room, where it doesn’t leak, I have some cat beds there, for my strays. I need to find them, they’ll be so scared.”

Max nodded.“Go on, then,” as if he was relieved to see Billy distracted for a moment, or going off in private to get himself together. As Billy turned away, Max said, “If you can corral them, we can take them up to the ranch. You don’t want to leave them here alone, the coyotes will take over now.”

Billy turned to look at him.“I’ll still be here. I can sleep just fine in the room with the cats. Until Zandler kicks me out,” he added uncertainly.

“You can’t stay here alone.”

“Why not?” Billy said defiantly. “You going to turn me in, Captain Harper? Send me to some home? What about my cats? No one can keep me in a home, I won’t stay.”

“You can’t stay here,” Max repeated. “The minute someone at Child Welfare hears about your grandmother’s death, they’ll come nosing around. Go find your cats, Billy. There’s room for you at the ranch. You and Charlie can move the cats up the hill, shut them in a stall until they settle in.”

Billy looked at Max for a long time. He turned away at last, moving off toward the little stand of willow trees farther along the hill, wiping his sleeve across his face. The little wood was a natural shelter where the frightened cats would have fled from the fire and noise, from the trucks roaring in, from strange men shouting, from the flames and smoke and from the violent jets of water. Walking away, Billy avoided the burn. Circling away from the fire truck and the medics’ and coroner’s vans, his shoulders were slumped, grief clinging around him as he went to gather up his wild little cats. Maybe they were the only real family he had left, Joe thought. The only creatures in the world who cared about him were there, crouching hidden among the willow grove. But then, looking toward the grove, Joe suddenly felt the skin along his back twitch violently, and he was thinking no longer of the frightened cats, he was seeing his stormy nightmare, seeing the same grove, the same stand of willows; but in his dream they had been blowing wildly, whipped by the drivingrain. The same cliff rising up behind, rising up to the Harpers’ pasture; and the two shacks that the fire had left standing were surely a match for the rain-drenched hovel of his dream. He felt sick, he was shivering. What was this, what was he seeing? Or, whathad he seen, in that midnight violence?

That dream had been Kit’s kind of wild fancy, or could even be a product of Dulcie’s imaginative vision. Such dreams were not a part of his own nature.

And yet this was not fancy, hehad dreamed of this place, this cluster of derelict pickers’ shacks that he must have seen dozens of times while hunting the field along the river but which, until that night, until now, had no special meaning for him.

Billy returned sooner than Joe would have thought, with a dark tabby tomcat wriggling in his arms. He shut him into the fallen-down shack and had turned back to find the others when Charlie and Ryan caught up with him. They talked with him a few minutes, then Charlie swung into her SUV and pulled away, turning up toward the ranch. Ryan headed for her truck and, opening the door, seemed relieved to see Joe safe inside.“Billy’ll be all right for a little while,” she said, “rounding up his cats. We’ll just run down to Firetti’s, borrow some cat carriers. It’ll take the most frightened ones a while to come to him.”

“Is he all alone?” Joe said. “Except for his aunts? What’s that about, that they never see him? Where’s his mother? His father?”

“His mother’s dead. His father … no one knows,” Ryan said. Turning right onto the two-lane, she glanced over at him. “Why would his aunts leave a child to grow up in that falling-down shack with that drunken old woman? Everything I’ve heard, she started sucking up whiskey first thing in the morning, the minute she rolled out of bed. She did work, though. Worked nights, cleaning offices. I guess she drank and slept during the day, apparently held her liquor well enough to function on the job. Some drunks are like that. That was her old Volvo parked off against the hill.”

“When the fire started,” Joe said, “could she have been so drunk she didn’t even know, never tried to get out? Those shacks aren’t as big as a one-car garage; she could have rolled out of bed right into the yard. Was she so passed out drunk, she never knew?

“Or,” he said, “was she already dead when the fire started?”

Ryan gave him a sharp look.“You didn’t hear the coroner? He said maybe she was dead. Said it was hard to tell, she was so burned. We’ll know more once he gets her back to the lab and has a look.” She turned onto Ocean, heading for Clyde’s shops, and reached for her cell phone; she hit the single digit not for Clyde’s automotive shop itself, but for Clyde’s cell. “You back from up the coast?”

“Just pulled in,” Clyde said.

“Can you have lunch?”

“Sure, what’s up?”

“We’re just pulling up outside. It’s about Billy Young, about his grandmother.”

Joe thought maybe it was Hesmerra who had once worked with the night crew that cleaned Clyde’s shops and the Beckwhite dealership that occupied the other half of the sprawling, Spanish-style building. Some old woman Clyde had complained about, had said she’d better not be drinking when she cleaned his shop. But in a strange way, Joe thought Clyde must have been fond of the old woman. He said once, she held her liquor well—no brawling street fights, Joe guessed. No vicious cussing matches.

Ryan ended the call, made a left across traffic, and pulled onto the red tile paving of Clyde’s wide, commercial driveway. The automotive shop occupied the north half of the Beckwhite building. The white, one-story structure, with its red tile roofs, was brightened by climbing red bougainvillea and stone pines alternating against its pale stucco walls. Clyde came out through his garage-sized entrance, removing the white lab coat that he wore around the shop, revealing a red polo shirt and jeans, and brown leather Rockports. The satisfied look on his face told Joe he’d probably repaired the Rolls-Royce just fine and wouldn’t have to haul it down the coast to work on it. “What about Hesmerra?” he asked, getting in, giving Joe a nudge to the shoulder by way of greeting.

Ryan filled him in.“Why was Billy living with that old woman? I know his mother’s dead, but what about his father? Doesn’t anyone know where he is?” Ryan had been in the village only a few years, so she was not the rich source of gossip that Clyde was, having lived in Molena Point off and on for most of his life

Clyde said,“I don’t think anyone knowswho Billy’s father is. Maybe even his mother didn’t know. One of the boys at the high school, most likely. Greta had something of a reputation. She was still in school when Billy was born—she was the youngest of the three sisters. She and the baby lived with Hesmerra. Billy was eight when Greta was killed in that car accident. Both Debbie and Esther were married and settled by then, but neither aunt wanted Billy. I guess, from the time he was born, neither would have anything more to do with Gran.”

“What was that about?”

“Maybe because she let Greta run around and get pregnant,” Clyde said. “Like it was Hesmerra’s fault. What made those two so righteous? I’m not sure they were any better, in high school. Max was chief when Greta was killed, he’ll know more.”

“Don’t you think it strange,” Ryan said, “that Erik Kraft was such a close friend to the old woman? Big-time Realtor, new Jaguar every year, but he goes regularly to visit that drunken old woman?” She turned to look at him. “And isn’t it strange that just now, right after the fire that killed Hesmerra, Erik Kraft’s wife is back in the village and moving herself into our house? Or, she thinks she is. What is this? What’s going on?”

Clyde just looked at her.

“What?” Ryan said, making a right off Ocean, pulling to the curb in front of Jolly’s Deli. “What?” she said again.

“Debbie Kraft is Billy’s aunt,” Clyde said. “Hesmerra’s middle daughter. Somehow, I thought you knew Debbie’s mother was that old recluse. Debbie said in her letter she didn’t want to have contact with her mother, that they didn’t speak.”

Ryan looked at him, frowning.“She only told me she grew up in the village. I never cared enough to ask anything more.” She sat a moment, taking that in. Ryan had lived in the village only three years; she’d done a lot in that time, shaken off the baggage of a painful separation and then widowhood, established and run a profitable construction business, fallen in love with Clyde and begun a new life with him. But there were still a lot of things about the community she didn’t know, connections Clyde often expected her to understand because they were part of the fabric of his own life. Getting out of the truck, shegave him a shrug and a grin, and headed for the deli, the bell jingling as she slipped inside.

Drinking in the heady smells from the deli, Joe felt a sharp urge to nip around to the alley, see what leftovers George Jolly had offered today outside the back door. But, considering the purchases Ryan was making, he stayed put, watching through the big window as she picked out a selection of cheeses and meats, coleslaw, and three kinds of potato salad.“She’d better get crab salad,” he said, peering up over the dash.

“You can make life so difficult.”

“What’s difficult about crab salad? You’re so cheap. A couple of bucks for a little carton of something special, to cheer up your poor beleaguered cat.”

Ryan returned, sliding a white deli bag into the backseat of the king cab. Joe could smell the crab salad mixed with the aroma of ham and other delicacies. Winking at him, she headed for the veterinary clinic.“What I don’t understand,” she said, making a left onto Ocean, “is why Billy was living with Hesmerra, when she drank so heavily, why Children’s Services hadn’t stepped in, if his own aunts refused to take him. Was she his legal guardian?”

“I think everyone who knew him, their one neighbor and the ranchers he worked for, kept the situation under wraps. The boy is stubbornly independent, he wouldn’t have tolerated a foster home. I’m guessing everyone pretended things were just fine. Hesmerrawas his grandmother, she was family. She was working steady, too. She seemed to be one of those drunks who hides it pretty well. Apparently she gave no one, including the school authorities, any real reason to interfere.”

Clyde shrugged.“You might say a lot against Hesmerra, but I think she would have fought as hard as Billy himself to prevent him being taken into custody. Who knows, maybe Kraft intervened, too. He’d have pull enough.”

An interesting tangle, Joe thought.Billy’s one willing guardian turns up dead, his one defender is out of town for an undetermined length of time, and what’s going to happen to Billy now? How much can even the chief do? He imagined Max butting heads with a cadre of county do-gooders, and that made him smile.If I were a gambling cat, my money would be on Max Harper.

Ryan turned off Ocean to the next block and parked before the clinic against a tall border of Mexican marigolds that made the air smell like cat pee. Both Ryan and Clyde went inside to haul out the carriers.

The two cottages that formed the clinic had been joined together by a tall solarium, its glass walls rising above their dark roofs. The complex housed boarding and hospital rooms, large kennels, examining rooms, offices, and surgery. On the roof of the front cottage, beneath the shadows of a cypress tree, Kit and Misto sat looking down at Joe. Dulcie wasn’t with them. This was story morning at the library, she’d be curled up with the children on the big window seat, their little hands stroking her as the librarian read to them. Tourists were enchanted when they found the pretty tabby hanging out at the library and learned she was the official library cat. Many made a special effort to visit her, as, of course, did all the cat-loving locals. As Joe sat thinking of Dulcie, and looking up at Kit and Misto, a leap of recognition hit him, a moment as startling as a lightbulb blazing on.

Rearing up to get a better look, he studied Misto’s shoulder, the pattern of swirling stripes. The configuration of pale cream and dark yellow was a dead ringer for the circular pattern on Debbie Kraft’s lost, red tomcat. Even their long faces showed a likeness, and the way both cats’ ears were set at the same jaunty angle.

Joe never did believe in coincidence. So what the hell was this?Eugene, he thought. Misto had left his grown kits in Eugene, where they had all lived. A tom and two girl cats, all three as red, Misto told him, as fresh rust on a paintless fender. He looked up as Ryan and Clyde came out hauling five cat carriers and loaded them in the back of the truck.“What about Rock?” he said. “You leaving him home alone?”

“I called my dad,” Ryan said. “He’s taken him to run the beach. I didn’t want him to scare Billy’s cats.” Rock didn’t do well by himself in the Damens’ small yard; the big Weimaraner, high-strung and full of energy, didn’t like being left alone, and was inclined to tear up Ryan’s garden. He wanted to be out and busy, wanted to be tracking felons as Joe himself had taught him, or out running with the horses.

It was after one o’clock by the time they met Charlie back at the burned house. Billy had managed to corral all seven cats and shut them in the back room of the half-fallen shanty. Slipping in with the carriers, he came out a few minutes later hauling three carriers heavy with cat, then went back for the other two, the plastic cages emitting a chorus of yowls and snarling through the mesh sides. As they loaded them into Charlie’s SUV, Ryan said, “Dr. Firetti wants you to bring them down for shots, and to make sure they’re healthy before we take them up to the ranch.”

“They’re healthy,” Billy said, bristling. “I don’t want to take them to a vet, they’re already scared half to death.” His thin face was still white with the shock of the morning, with the death of his gran and, now, with an imagined threat to the only other creatures in the world who meant anything to him.

“My cat goes up to the ranch,” Ryan told him. “So do the cats of our friends. We don’t want them to catch something that your cats might be carrying.”

“Sometimes,” Charlie said, “cats can carry a disease that they don’t have themselves, and they can pass it on to others.” Billy looked unconvinced. “Firetti’s a kind man,” Charlie said, “the cats will be fine. I don’t think we’ll need to leave them, just get their shots and bring them home again. Maybe take a little blood for testing, and he can call us later with the results.”

Billy looked at her for a long time. He’d worked for Max since he was nine, and he trusted both Max and Charlie. At last he nodded, and climbed in the back of the Blazer, crowding in among the cages. Ryan looked in at him through the window. “We’ll clean up a stall, so the cats can settle in. If we turn them loose too soon they’ll hightail it right back down the hill—to the delight of the local coyotes.”

Joe thought, when Billy and his gran were in residence, the predators might have kept their distance. He imagined Billy and Gran out in the front yard at dusk, maybe throwing rocks at the coyotes’ slinking shadows. He wondered how the old woman’s aim was, with a skin full of whiskey. He watched the SUV head away for Dr. Firetti’s, Billy wedged in among the carriers to keep his little charges calm. The seven cats were a mixed crew, all sizes, all colors, from kitten to codger. Joe knew they’d be fine at the ranch. He hoped Billy would be, too. Though a number of questions gnawed at him as he rode between Ryan and Clyde, in the deli-scented pickup, up the hill to the Harpers’.

7

The Harpers’ pastures spread away above the cliff untouched by the fire, the grass green and lush and tall from the winter rains, weaving up into the wire mesh between the white fence rails. The north and south pastures were separated by a narrow gravel drive leading in from the highway to the pale frame house and stable. A big hay barn rose at the rear, stark against the dark pine woods. The old house had started out small and plain but now a tall new great room, all glass and timbers, looked down across the pastures to the falling cliffs and the sea below. Max and Charlie, with happy disregard for convention, had turned the old living room into a new master suite, had converted their old bedroom to Max’s study, and joined the two smaller guest rooms together to give Charlie a spacious new studio.

Now, the stable’s big sliding doors stood open, allowing the roofed alleyway between the two rows of stalls to catch the ocean breeze. Joe watched Clyde fetch the wheelbarrow from behind the stable, watched him and Ryan wheel the heavy bags of feed from the back stall out to the hay barn, emptying the stall forBilly’s seven cats. He watched Ryan sweep the stall’s hard dirt floor clean of straw and attack the cobwebs along the ceiling, then carry in the five old Styrofoam coolers that Billy used for cat beds. Turned on their sides, with the lids taped on and new doors cut near one corner, they made cozy little houses, shutting out the chill. Clyde lined them up along one wall, while Ryan washed Billy’s chipped crockery and filled a bowl with fresh water. It was nearly two hours before Billy and Charlie returned with their little patients, and Charlie backed the Blazer down to the stable door.

Getting out, Billy stood looking into the stall, then looked shyly at the three adults, his cheeks coloring with pleasure. Then he went to fetch his cats. Setting the carriers in the stall, he left them closed while he headed out to the hay barn.

“What?” Charlie said.

Billy turned back.“Getting straw for my own bed. If—”

“You’ll be sleeping upstairs,” Charlie said, “over the stable. There are two bedrooms, you don’t need to sleep in a stall.”

Billy looked at her quietly.“I’d rather, if it’s all right. The cats’ll be easier if I’m with them. And …” He grinned at her. “More like home, maybe. And I like the smell of the horses, I’ll like hearing them around me at night.”

“You’re sure?”

He nodded.“I can park my bike in here, too, out of the way of the horses, to keep it dry.”

“All right, then,” Charlie said. But as Billy turned to head for the hay barn, Clyde stopped him.

“We have a folding cot down at the house, and some camping blankets. Leave the straw until you try that.” There was even a half bath up by the tack room, a convenience that saved Charlie and Max and their boarders from tracking mud and hay into the house. The tomcat could just imagine what kindof bathroom had been in the burned shack; even a litter box would be more luxurious.

Sure as hell, he thought, that old shack had been ripe for the smallest spark to break into flames. But why not the other two? Why hadn’t they burned? And whyhadn’t the old woman gotten out of there?Or, the tomcat thought again,was she dead before the blaze started?

Padding out the big door into the stable yard, he watched Ryan, Charlie, and Billy start off across the south pasture to bring the horses back. Clyde headed for the pickup to go fetch the cot, then turned to look at Joe.“You coming?”

“Think I’ll hang out here for a while,” he said innocently, as Max’s truck turned in from the highway.

On the narrow lane the two trucks paused, driver to driver. Clyde said,“Billy’s moved in. The kid … What’s wrong? What have you got?”

“Coroner’s preliminary,” Max said. Joe eased closer, along the pasture fence, as Max glanced toward the stable. “Where’s Billy?”

Clyde nodded toward the south pasture.“Bringing the horses in.”

Max nodded.“Looks like Hesmerra was poisoned.”

“What, spoiled food? Billy wasn’t sick.”

Max was silent.

“You mean deliberately poisoned? With what? Why the hell would anyone poison that old woman?”

“Coroner hasn’t done the autopsy yet, but he’s thinking wood alcohol. There’s isopropanol in the blood. He’ll work on her tonight. Alcohol could have been easily added to her booze. Heavy drinker like that, she probably never noticed the difference.”

Easing deeper into the bushes, Joe wondered if the old woman might have been so hard up for booze, she’d purposely drink rubbing alcohol? But that didn’t make sense, she had all the whiskey she wanted, Erik Kraft bought it for her.

Would Erik give that old woman poison? But why? Who else was there? She lived practically as a hermit, only her grandson around most of the time, and Billy sure hadn’t poisoned his gran. He wondered about the neighbor who had moved out, Emmylou Warren, the woman who had come to the fishing wharf looking for her two cats. Could she have poisoned Hesmerra’s whiskey before she moved out? But why? A lot of questions to be answered, Joe thought, laying back hisears.

Max glanced away to the south pasture where Ryan and Charlie and Billy were coming back with the horses, Charlie carrying a grain bucket that would now be empty, a little enticement to catch the nervous mounts.“I need to talk with Billy,” he said, and drove on into the yard. Joe watched the sorrel mare buck and snort as Charlie and Ryan turned the horses back into the north pasture. But it was half an hour later, after they’d all eaten a bite of deli lunch around the big kitchen table, that Max took Billy aside. As they walked outdoors, Joe followed, slipping into the bushes as the two hoisted themselves up on the pasture fence. They sat in companionable silence, their boot heels snug on the lower rail, their backsides nudged occasionally by the small bay mustang who, always curious, had comeup to be friendly. The chief looked down at Billy. “Did Gran keep wood alcohol around the place?”

“Wood alcohol? Rubbing alcohol?”

Max nodded.“Maybe for aches and pains, sore muscles?”

“Not that I know of, I never saw any. If she had a sore muscle she used Vicks rub.”

“Do you remember rubbing alcohol around your neighbor’s?”

“Emmylou?” Billy shook his head, frowning.

“Did Gran ever try to drink wood alcohol?”

The boy’s brown eyes widened. “She wouldn’t do that, that’s poison. Gran might be a lush, but she had better sense than that. She could hold her liquor all right, too. She drove to work every day, five days a week, and only ever got one ticket. Why would she do something dumb like drink poison?”

Max said,“Are those your trash cans, out by the highway?”

Billy nodded.“I took them out this morning before I went to work. Mr. Zandler’s real strict about that, said he didn’t want rats around the place.” Billy smiled. “My cats took care of any rats that showed up. Well, Zandler paid for the garbage pickup.”

“Where did she keep her stash of whiskey, Billy? She must have had more than one bottle.”

“She usually had a case. There’s a cave under the hill, behind that stack of boards and doors, maybe an old vegetable cellar. She’d bring home a couple of bottles at a time, stash them in the cardboard box. And Mr. Kraft, when he came, he’d bring four or five.” Billy looked at Max a long time, his brown eyes searching the captain’s face. “You’re saying she drank wood alcohol? If she did, someone gave it to her. Put it in her whiskey?” He swallowed. “You’re saying she was poisoned.”

“The coroner thinks she was. He should have a definite cause of death by tomorrow. He says she didn’t die from the fire, she was already dead when the fire started. She didn’t feel the flames, Billy.”

Billy’s tears welled. “Thank you. But how could she be poisoned, no one would do that. I’ll show you where she kept her whiskey. Could one of those bottles have been that way when she bought it?”

“They were bottles with labels, and sealed? Not someone’s home brew?”

“From the market, yes. She didn’t suffer, then? Except … she must have been sick from the poison. But she was dead when the fire began?” Billy couldn’t seem to get beyond that. He wiped his sleeve across his face, and Max put his arm around him.

“Did your neighbor know where she kept her whiskey?”

“Emmylou? Probably. Gran always had a bottle. If Emmylou watched Gran much, she might have seen her go in the cave. You don’t think Emmylou hurt her? She wouldn’t. If she saw anyone else go in the cave, she’d have said, she’d have told Gran.”

“Did they get along all right?”

“Yes, they’d go back and forth for coffee, breakfast sometimes. Emmylou doesn’t drink, but they got along fine. Emmylou tried to see that Gran ate, she’d fix something for the two of them, and for me if I was home. They were fine—until Emmylou couldn’t pay her rent.” Billy shifted on the fence rail. “Gran wouldn’t let her live with us. Emmylou asked if she could, just for a little while, until she found a place to rent, but Gran said our house was too small. Well, there was just one room, our two cots, the stove and table. That’s the only argument they ever had. Emmylou had nowhere to go and I guess not much money. She has another friend in the village, but she’s gone off somewhere. Gran wouldn’t let her stay, but they didn’t fight, exactly.”

“Do you know where she went?”

Billy shook his head.“I guess she’d have to live in her car, an old green Chevy, a four-door.”

“Did Gran keep money in the house?”

He looked down at his worn boots.“Under her bed, under the floor. At least some of it was there. She thought I didn’t know. She’d cash her paycheck, give me some for food, keep the rest for whiskey. Mr. Kraft always gave her money, a wad of money. Maybe she kept that somewhere else.”

“She didn’t put it in the bank?”

“No. In a little tin box under the floor. She thought the box was fireproof. That’s all I know of. Maybe it all burned up.”

“You think Emmylou knew where the money was hidden?”

“I don’t know. I knew, so I guess she could have.”

They were quiet, Billy scraping his boots on the fence rail to dislodge the dried mud from his heels. When Max asked who he should notify about Gran’s death, besides Erik Kraft and Billy’s two aunts, Billy said, “There’s no one else. And my aunts … Gran hasn’t seen Debbie in years, she lives up in Oregon. Aunt Esther lives in the village, but she hardly ever came to see Gran. Except at Christmas. She’d bring a basket of food like we were some kind of charity case. She hated that we lived there, she was always so snooty. She hated that Gran drank, she always acted mad at Gran. She didn’t like me much, either. I don’t know why she came.”

“Did your gran ever get any letters, did your aunt Debbie write to her?”

“I never saw any letters. Usually Emmylou brought the mail in from the highway before I got home. I guess Debbie could have written, but Gran never said. Why wouldn’t Gran say, why would she keep that secret? I saw Debbie’s phone number in Gran’s little address book, but Gran never said shetalked to her. I guess the book got burned, too.” The boy’s voice was flat, shut down. These two aunts had never been his family, had never tried to be. The two people he cared about had both been taken from him, his mother when he was eight, and now his gran. Now he had no one. A lone child, trying hard to become a man.

Max said,“You don’t know who your father is.”

Billy shook his head.“Before Mama died, she said it didn’t matter, that I only needed her. But then she died.”

Max shifted his position on the fence.

Billy said,“Gran would never talk about it, she said Greta wouldn’t tell her which boy she’d been with, she said the high school was way too lenient, letting the kids do anything. Then she’d start drinking more, and didn’t want to talk to me about it—like it was my fault I had no father. I didn’t understand all of it, then. I was only eight.

“Well,” Billy said, “no one came looking for me. No one ever came there saying he was my father.” He turned to scratch the ears of the bay pony, hiding his face from Max. “After the accident, after Mama’s car went off the bridge, Gran said it was her fault, it was her fault Mama died.”

“Why would it be her fault?”

“Because they fought, because Mama got so mad she ran out in the storm, took off in the car, got in a wreck and died.”

The boy’s words startled Joe. Brought his nightmare reeling back again: the stormy night, the two women yelling at each other, the child huddled on the cot. Shivering, he pushed the memory aside. He didn’t want to think about it, the unbidden nightmare sickened and scared him.

Billy said,“Gran would never tell me what they fought about that night. If I bugged her, she’d just drink more. Before Mama died, she didn’t drink so often. That night, the night Mama died, they were yelling and screaming, and when I tried to make them stop, they yelled at me, told me to go to bed and shut up. It was raining hard. Mama screamed at Gran that she didn’t understand anything and started to cry and slammed out, I heard her take off fast up the road, for the highway.”

Ducking his head, he straightened the pony’s mane. “That was the last I ever saw her. Except for her funeral. That night after the cops came to tell us Mama was dead, Gran said she should have stopped her, should have grabbed her keys, made her stay in the house. But she couldn’t have,” he said angrily. “You couldn’t stop Mama,she’d never listen. You couldn’t make her listen.”

Joe sat shivering, stricken, seeing the scene Billy had painted, reliving his nightmare, every word and every move, the feel of the rain, of his soaking fur. Savagely he licked at a front paw, wished he could lick away the dream as easily as dislodging a blade of grass—wished he could lick away the cruelty of the world, all the ugliness of humankind.

“After Mama died, there was always a bottle. By the stove, by Gran’s bed, under the covers. She stank of whiskey, and it made her mean. I hate the smell. She didn’t want to eat, she’d come home from work with no groceries, nothing in the cupboard, maybe crackers. That’s when I started working at the Peterson ranch, cleaning stalls. They didn’t turn me away because I was so young, I’m good with animals, I did good work for them. I earned enough to buy beans and bread on the way home.”

Joe looked up the lane as Clyde pulled in off the highway, the red king cab kicking up gravel and dust against the taller grass at the edge of the long dirt drive. He parked near the stable, got out and slid his old, folded camping cot out of the bed of the truck, along with some folded blankets and a striped mattress just about thick enough to make a small cat comfortable. Billy dropped down off the fence, took the load from him. Max said,“Get your cot set up, then I want to walk down the hill, have a look at Gran’s cave.”

Billy nodded and disappeared into the stable, as Max fetched a heavy flashlight from the cab of his truck. Joe waited until the chief and Billy headed down across the north pasture, then he slipped into the rank grass outside the fence and followed, slinking along unseen, the tall blades tickling his ears.

8

Where the pasture fell away to the delta below, Joe crouched under the fence among the tall weeds, looking down on the burned shack. Detective Garza was moving slowly through, sorting among the debris, his jeans and blue sweatshirt smeared with ashes, the pockets of his dark windbreaker bulging with what were surely small items of possible evidence, each secured in a paper or plastic bag. Garza’s tan Blazer stood parked near Hesmerra’s rusty old Volvo with its thick coat of smoky ash. Directly below, Max and Billy were clearing the cave entrance, moving the rotting doors and cobwebby boards away from the opening.

As Max ducked down into the cave, shining the electric torch across dry earth, Joe slipped down the cliff between the two cars and under them, where he could see into the cave. Inside, the light of Max’s torch swung slowly back and forth across the earthen ceiling and walls, across the heavy posts, the rough crossbeams and hard dirt floor. On an earthen shelf stood a cardboard carton with five screw-top whiskey bottles sticking up. Max pulled on a pair of cotton gloves and examined the circular strips of black plastic that sealed the lids, then picked up the carton and backed out. “Erik Kraft brought her whiskey, but he didn’t know about the cave?”

“Not that I know of,” Billy said. “She’d put them in here after he left. I don’t know why all the secrecy, but Gran was like that.” Billy peered at the bottles. “Are you thinkinghe poisoned them? Why would he do that? He liked Gran, he was kind to her, he gave her money, brought pizza, things to eat. He bought medicine once, when she had the flu.” But then the boy went quiet, very still, as if perhaps letting his thoughts touch something new and unwelcome.

Max studied his face then moved away, carrying the carton. As he set it down on the open tailgate of Dallas Garza’s Blazer, beyond him Emmylou Warren appeared, coming down the lane from the highway. Joe could see a glimpse of her car, of its back bumper and a patch of green sticking out past the bushes that grew along the edge of the two-lane. Max and Billy saw her at the same moment.

Billy moved as if to go to her, but then seemed to change his mind, to think better of it, and turned his attention back to the whiskey, studying the seals more closely.“If none of those was poisoned, poison could still have been in the open one.”

Max nodded, his attention on Emmylou. She had stopped beyond the cars, stood watching Dallas sifting through the rubble. When Dallas saw her he came to join them, looking back at Emmylou.“I sent her away once. When I got here she was parked right down at the yellow tape, sitting in her car, crying.” He looked down at Billy. “She was worried about you. I told her you’re all right.”

“Go on,” Max said to Billy, “go talk to her.”

Billy ran. When Emmylou saw him she let out a whoop and ran, too, flinging her arms around him and nearly toppling them both. Joe was crouched beneath Hesmerra’s car, not six feet from them. Emmylou’s sun-browned face was as wrinkled as crushed leather, her jeans worn and soft, her colorless T-shirt thin, with two holes in one sleeve. “You’re all right!” She held Billy away, looking deeply at him. “I was in the market when I heard about the fire, about your gran. No one knew where you were, what happened to you. Where are your cats, are they all right? Where will you go, do you have—”

Billy nodded up toward the Harpers’ place. “They’re in Captain Harper’s barn. I’ll be staying there, too, for now. Did you find a place to live?”

Emmylou gestured toward her car.“That’smy home, for now,” she said, grinning. Behind them, Max watched Emmylou, his expression thoughtful. Was he, like Joe himself, curious about why she’d come up there? Wondering if she’d only been worried about Billy, or if she’d had some other reason?

As broke as she was, would she come nosing around looking for Hesmerra’s hidden money, however little it might be? Had she meant to make off with it before the fire inspectors and detectives appeared on the scene? Shehad arrived before Garza. Had she already rooted through the burn and, knowing where Hesmerra hid the tin box, already stolen the money that was rightfully Billy’s?

Max stepped over to join them.“We’ll want you to come down to the station, Emmylou. For routine fingerprinting.”

Emmylou just looked at him, the expression in her faded brown eyes wary.

“A matter of elimination,” Max said. “If you were in the house, your prints could come up on broken dishes, glasses. With a set on file, we can eliminate you as someone who shouldn’t have been there. I’d like you to come in today, if you could,” he said gently, “so we can move on withthe investigation. Any of the officers can take your prints.”

Emmylou frowned.“You’re saying someonestarted the fire? On purpose?”

“It’s possible,” Max said. “Both the fire and Hesmerra’s death are under investigation.”

She was quiet, studying his closed face.“I’ll come,” she said, subdued. As she put her arm around Billy, Max turned away, stepping over to the burn to talk with Dallas. Billy said, “You can’t live in your car for long, the street patrol will arrest you, or the sheriff will.”

“Remember my friend, Sammie Miller? She worked with Hesmerra for a while, cleaning? She came here a couple of times?”

Billy nodded.“You feed her cats when she’s gone. Can’t you stay with her?”

“She’s away now, but this time she didn’t leave her key. When she gets back, maybe I can stay there.” She smiled down at Billy. “I’ll be fine, I’ll come to see you. Maybe pick you up at school, give you a ride home. We can tie your bike on the back.” Before she turned away, to head for her old Chevy, Joe shot through the grass along the top of the cliff and dropped down to the car, where the driver’s window was open; he shot through and into the backseat before she was halfway up the lane.

Pawing through the rubble, he scented among the clothes and blankets for the faintest smell of ashes, looking for Hesmerra’s lost money, burrowing among cartons of canned goods and paperback books. How did she sleep in here? Actually, though, the plan was pretty neat: everything tucked on the floor up to the level of the backseat. A thin foam pad was folded up against the door; he imagined her laying it across the seat and her stacked belongings, to make a wide bed. She’d have to pull her knees up, though, as tall as she was. He was peering between the pad and the door when he heard her outside brushing off her jeans. As he turned, his hind paw slipped, sliding against cold metal—and he smelled burned woodand wet ashes.

Digging aside the blankets and some newspapers, he uncovered a tin box, tall and narrow, made to hold office files. His exploring paw came away liberally dusted with dirt and ashes. He froze when she passed the window. But she went on to the back of the car, and he heard the trunk pop open.

The latch of the box was of a kind hard for a cat to snap open, one of those affairs where a lever is pulled down, securing a metal bar into a hook. He fought it, shifting position until he had his claws under it, took a deep breath, pulled with all his might, praying he wouldn’t tear his claws right out of their sockets.

Snap, the latch popped open with a scrape so loud she heard it, the trunk slammed and there she was at the side window. Quickly flipping the box open, he got one glimpse of the contents: not money, but letters and business papers. He clawed through sheets of figures. The name on the letterheads was Kraft Realty.

Behind him, the door jerked open. He spun around staring up at Emmylou with all the forlorn fear he could muster; choking out a shaky“Meow,” he backed away.

She laughed and reached to pet him.“You poor thing. What are you doing in here? You’re not one of Billy’s cats. Where did you come from?”

Joe looked at her helplessly. He was crouched to bolt past her when Max Harper appeared behind her, looking in.

“What the hell? Get out of there, Joe. What are you doing in there?” With no ceremony he reached in, lifted Joe gently by the back of his neck and one hand under his belly, and deposited him outside on the ground. “Why the hell are you so nosy?” he said with a dry little grin. “Get your tail up to the ranch, Clyde will be looking for you!”

Joe vanished. Scorched up the cliff into the tall grass, pretending to race away. Max Harper seldom touched him, and never unkindly, only sometimes to scratch his ears if Joe was lounging on his desk. Below him, Max and Emmylou stood talking, Harper making clear to her again that she was expected to come in and be fingerprinted, Emmylou still looking reluctant. As her car headed away up the narrow, rutted road, and Harper and Billy started back to the cave, Joe hightailed it for the ranch, his thoughts on the metal box and the documents it contained. Some were emblazoned with the letterhead of Kraft Realty, but there were half a dozen other real estate firms, as well, names that meant nothing to Joe. All the letters and documents he could see, in that quick glimpse, presented neatly typed accountings of funds ranging up into the high seven digits—ten million, twelve million. A financial smorgasbord that Joe found singularly interesting, considering that, from the burned smell, and the ashes and dirt coating the container, the collection had come from the burned house, had perhaps been buried in the earth, beneath the floor. Many of the dates were recent. Where had Hesmerra gotten these and why? Why would Erik Kraft give his business papers to Hesmerra Young?

Could she somehow have stolen them? But why? What good would his legal papers do her? If Kraft was her friend, why would she steal from him at all? Even if he was only a convenient source of whiskey and cash, why would she jeopardize that? Or had the old woman, when she died, been quietly pursuing some other agenda involving Erik Kraft, driven by some motive of her own?

9

Debbie Kraft arrived two days after the fire; she showed up just after midnight at the Damens’ front door repeatedly ringing the bell, dragging Ryan and Clyde from sleep, sending the big Weimaraner into a fit of barking, ripping Joe Grey straight out of deep and pleasant dreams. Grumbling, he slipped out from his cushions, left his tower, and padded across the roof to the edge to look over.

They were crowded on the little porch around the front door, a young woman, two kids, three threadbare suitcases, a pile of ragtag carryalls and cloth bags with the contents oozing over the tops. The skinny woman, clutching her arms around herself against the night’s chill, was dressed in black tights, a puffy black jacket, high-heeled black boots. The two little girls clung to her, the little one silent and still, the older kid whining and pulling on her. Above them at Ryan’s studio window, Ryan appeared like a ghost in her white gauzy robe, looking down just as Joe was looking at the little group, at the dusty brown station wagon parked in the drive behind the king cab, the back so full of jumbled belongings the windows might as well have been boarded over.

The porch light went on. The front door opened. Clyde stood there bare-chested, in his sweatpants. Debbie’s voice was shrill and animated, a gushing greeting from a woman Clyde had never met and, from the look on his face, didn’t want to meet. There was a short exchange, then Debbie and the two girls swarmed in around him, dragging what baggage they could carry. Clyde, turning away resigned, left the door open so Debbie could haul in the rest.

Joe watched for only a minute, torn between the fear he’d miss something, and his sure knowledge that the rest of the night would be chaos, the woman’s high, emotion-driven voice reaching up even into his tower. He wouldn’t get a wink of sleep. If he had any sense he’d get the hell out of there. Whatever drama the night might hold, as the Damens got Debbie settled, he’d hear about in the morning.

He went. Heading across the rooftops toward the center of the village, beneath the bright full moon, he leaped over rivers of moonlight and over shadows as black as hell itself. If Dulcie was prowling the library, exploring among the books, maybeshe’d give him a little sympathy for this midnight eviction that was, after all, the next thing to a full-blown home invasion.

From the roof of a shop behind the handsome Spanish-style library building, with its tan stucco and heavy timbers, he peered down at its back door that opened on the narrow alley. Yes, the faintest light shone out through Wilma’s little office window, the ambient green glow of the computer. He caught Dulcie’s fresh scent, too, on the tile roof and among the leaves of the bougainvillea vine as he descended. Nosing up the flap of Dulcie’s cat door, he pushed on inside.

Wilma Getz’s office was small, crowded, and cozy, her desk placed between two tall file cabinets stacked to the ceiling with books. Dulcie’s housemate worked only part-time now in her position as a reference librarian, but she’d managed to keep her tiny office. Much of her work was done in there, on peripheral projects, including the library’s old-fashioned vertical file. The library saved clips from the local paper and local magazines, historical information about Molena Point. And—because of Dulcie herself—they maintained an extensive collection about cats who lived in libraries across the country. Having a special interest in working cats, they saved, as well, clips about any number of cats in shops and business offices, a tribute to the talents and skills of even your ordinary, everyday feline.

Dulcie sat on the desk, her back to him, silhouetted by the glow of the computer, her peach-tinted ears nearly transparent in the light, her nimble paws playing across the keyboard, so engrossed she didn’t hear him push the door in. Only when the plastic flapped back into place did she spin around, startled.

She stared down at him, her green eyes wide, guilt writ large on her sweet, striped face. What was this? What was she up to? What was so secret that she didn’t want him to see? Leaping up beside her, he nestled close to her warm shoulder. When she lifted a paw to darken the screen, he swiped it away. She hissed, and cut him an irritated look, her striped tail lashing.

The short lines of type on the screen, even to the antiliterate tomcat, were obviously poetry. Was she reading dirty verses, something ugly that humans had put on the Web? He’d never known his lady to go for smut. But then, scanning the lines, his eyes widened.

There was no title, no author’s name, nothing but the nine lines of poetry, and he could feel her shy embarrassment as he read.

What a lovely cat she is

Posed behind the curtain’s gauze

Like a princess robed in gold.

Coy her gaze through laces gleaming,

What dainty vision does she embrace

Behind that dear, exquisite face?

I step to the veil, draw back its folds,

And there it lies, at my feet,

The bloody rat she’s brought to eat.

“You wrote this,” he said, grinning. Her tail went very still, he could feel the uncertain tremor of her heartbeat through the warmth of her tabby fur. He read the lines again, and at the last line, he couldn’t help it, he let out a loud guffaw that echoed through the office and into the empty library. “How long have you been doing this? Is there more? You’re writing from the human viewpoint.”

If a cat could blush, her little striped face would be pink as cotton candy.“It made you laugh,” she said, pleased.

“Does Wilma know?”

“How could she not? It’s her computer. I guess I could have set up an access code, but … She thinks … She’s pleased,” Dulcie said modestly.

Joe nuzzled her cheek.“I like it. It makes pictures, it does make me laugh. How do you do that? How do you even begin, where does it come from?”

Dulcie’s tail swung more easily. “I don’t know, it’s just … there. In my head. I write it down before it gets away.”

“Can I see more?”

“Not tonight, you didn’t come to read poetry,” she said, looking deep into his eyes. “What’s happened?” she said. “What’s the matter?”

“Debbie Kraft. Arrived at midnight. Enough luggage to stay a year.”

She gave him a sympathetic nudge.“Ryan and Clyde don’t need this. You think they’ll let her stay? But she must be devastated, grieving for her mother. No matter what Billy says about Debbie never seeing her.”

“She didn’t sound devastated. She sounded rude and pushy.”

Dulcie was quiet a moment, then,“I was thinking about the fire, about Emmylou prowling in the rubble. About the tin box she apparently took from Hesmerra’s, the Kraft Realty papers. Wilma was talking with Chichi Barbi, andshe said Hesmerra applied with her for a job.” Chichi Barbi had, late last year, bought Charlie Harper’s cleaning service, Charlie’s Fix It, Clean It. “Chichi said when she hired Hesmerra, the old woman dickered and argued about locations and hours. Said she was dead set to get on the crew that cleans the house of one of the Kraft Realtors. And then later, the minute the Realtor moved away, Hesmerra quit her job.”

Dulcie gave him a sly smile.“Next thing you know, Hesmerra’s working nights for the firm that cleans the Kraft offices. And now, Kraft papers turn up in her burned house? How does that add up?”

“How indeed,” Joe said. “Particularly when her two daughters are married to the two owners of Kraft Realty?”

“When Wilma suggested Hesmerra used her pull with one of her daughters to get the Kraft job, Chichi said she doubted it. Said those girls aren’t friendly with their mother. And, she said, Kraft has a strict policy about hiring family. She thought the cleaning company didn’t know who Hesmerra was.”

Joe said,“Maybe Erik Kraft put in a word, bent the rules to help her out? Or, again, maybe he didn’t have a clue. And, if she did lift those papers, what did she mean to do with them?” He licked his whiskers, thinking. “First she cleans for one of the Kraft Realtors, then turns up cleaning the Kraftoffices. Then she turns up dead. Which Realtor’s house?”

“That Alain Bent woman, the tall elegant one. That painted white brick up on the hill above where Ryan and Clyde bought their last cottage, where so many houses went vacant, that’s her house.” Dulcie rose from the computer. “Alain Bent and Erik Kraft worked together, they were sales partners, like a team, until she left the village. She kept the house, maybe until prices go up. Come on, I’ll show you, their picture’s spread all over.” Leaping down, she pushed open the inner door to the big, echoing reading room.

The high-raftered room seemed vast when it was empty of patrons and lit by only the soft glow of the moon shining in through the tall windows; moonlight threw twisted tree shadows across the reading tables, and across the leather couches that stood empty before the tall stone fireplace.

On the table nearest to the magazine racks, Dulcie had laid out half a dozen brightly colored Molena Point magazines. They were older copies, as if the newest volumes were still on some librarian’s desk. Each was open to a two-page real estate ad, the corners of the pages dimpled by the marks of little cat teeth. The full-color ads, arranged with four elegant residences to a page, included all the best real estate offices in the village, and each ad included a picture of the listing salesperson. In nine Kraft Realty spreads, partners Alain Bent and Erik Kraft were featured together, in their handsome two-agent sales pitch. Both were tall and slim, Alain’s dark hair sleeked back in a chignon at the nape of her neck, her black business suit trim and well tailored. Erik’s black hair was short, neatly trimmed, his sport coat casual and expensive, his open collar showing a deep tan. In one shot he was wearing white shorts and a white polo shirt, his legs and arms tanned and well muscled.

“Nice-looking couple,” Joe said suspiciously. “Debbie’s ex-husband, and his beautiful sales partner.”

Dulcie’s tail twitched, and she smiled a wicked little cat smile. “You’re thinking he could have left Debbie for Alain?”

Joe shrugged. Who knew, with humans?

“So,” she said. “What does this add up to? Erik Kraft and Alain Bent work their listings together. Hesmerra stole papers from the Kraft offices, and was snooping in Alain Bent’s house, then turns up murdered. Emmylou Warren steals the papers. Hesmerra’s two sons-in-law own Kraft Realty. And, to add to the mix, Debbie Kraft arrives in the village just two days after her mother is poisoned.”

Joe rose and began to pace, padding across the magazine pages looking down at them as if the puzzle might be all laid out before him, but not yet making sense. Dulcie had started to speak when she spun around. Together they stared across the room at the tall windows as a scratching sound was repeated, soft but insistent.

A branch swung against the glass where no other branches moved, there was no wind to stir its wild sweeping back and forth; then they saw the dark shape swinging on it, riding the pine limb. The branch went flying as Kit dropped to the windowsill.

She pressed her face to the glass, looking in. When she saw Joe and Dulcie her tail lashed with impatience, and she disappeared again, dropping to the ground. In a moment they heard the cat door swinging, and Kit came bolting through into the reading room. She leaped to the table, sliding on the slick magazines and nearly careening over the side.

“What’s all this? What are you doing? When I couldn’t find you I went to Joe’s house and in on the rafter but you have company, a woman talking and talking real shrill and a whining kid, and when I went in Ryan’s studio Rock and Snowball were huddled up on the daybed so miserable they scared me, and then I saw the picture on the mantel standing up beside a letter and I jumped up and—”

“Slow down!” Dulcie and Joe yowled together.

“Who was that woman?” Kit said, her yellow eyes wide. “I read the letter, what nerve. But—”

Joe said,“You saw the red tomcat, the picture of him.”

“He looks like Misto, only younger,” Kit said. “Red stripes instead of yellow and Misto said his son was that color and his name was Pan and I raced out to find you and they lived in Eugene where that letter came from, too. Helooks like Misto and did you see he has exactly the same mark on his shoulder and the letter said he just got lost and they didn’t even look for him, they didn’t try to find him, they didn’t care where he went, they didn’t care if he’s hurt or dead and—”

“Slow down, Kit!” Dulcie hissed, her ears flat.

Kit tried, but she couldn’t contain her excitement. “If he lived in that nursing home we can find him on the computer, there are all kinds of things about cats and dogs in nursing homes and hospitals and—”

“Stop!” Dulcie cried, losing patience; of course Kit was right, she’d seen hundreds of entries about animals in hospitals, cats in a children’s hospital, therapy animals—if she could just find this cat, this particular nursing home. Leaping down, she raced for Wilma’s office, Joe and Kit right on her tail, and the three crowded onto the desk around the computer.

It took her a while, her paws pinched tight as she carefully pressed the keys, pulling up a number of subjects until she’d found the Eugene nursing home and then a clip about their amazing therapy cat. Kit was so fascinated she pawed eagerly at the screen, her eyes widening at the young red tom, who was held in the arms of a white-coated doctor—a strapping red tabby with a thoughtful expression, his knowing lookfar wiser than that of any ordinary cat. And the pattern on his shoulder was just the same as Misto’s, a clear medallion of concentric swirls narrowing in toward the center. Kit was so excited she was shivering. “We have to tell Misto, we have to go right now and wake him up and show him the picture and—”

“Wait,” Dulcie said. “Maybe we don’t want to tell him.” She scrolled down through a number of articles about the red tomcat, pausing at a headline that silenced Kit.

Did Nursing Home Cat Die in Fire?

The remarkable red tabby cat who began, on his own, to visit infirm patients at Green Meadows Nursing Home nearly a year ago has not been seen since a midnight fire burned the complex to the ground … “We haven’t seen him since three hours before the fire broke out… . He came to us as a stray …”

They read it together, crouched on the edge of the desk. At the last words, Kit sat silent, her ears down, her tail hanging over, limp.“What if he is Misto’s son? What if he’s dead? Oh, we can’t tell Misto … But he so misses his son. If he is dead … Oh, fire is a terrible thing. I don’t understand. All at once, that woman dead in a fire, and now this fire …”

Dulcie said,“No speaking cat would get caught in a fire, he’d have gotten out, he’d be too clever to get trapped.” She looked to Joe, begging him to help ease the tortoiseshell’s distress.

“That tom would have saved himself,” Joe said. “If he is Misto’s son or maybe grandson, you can bet he’s smart enough to get out of there, one way or another.” He pressed a paw on Kit’s paw. “He’s somewhere in Oregon, Kit, right now. And you can bet he’s safe.”

“But what if he was hurt in the fire, what if … ?” Her yellow eyes blazed at them. “We have to find him, we have to go and find him.”

“Then we have to plan,” Joe said patiently. “Do you know how many miles it is to Eugene? Do you remember how long it took Misto to get here, months, hitching with truckers and tourists? And then, when we get to Eugene, what? How do we find one lone cat in all that city? He could be anywhere.”

“Maybe,” Kit said, “maybe Misto would know where he might have gone. Misto knows Eugene and he—”

Dulcie said,“What if that is Misto’s son? What if he did die in the fire? You want to tell Misto that?”

“We can tell him we think we’ve found his son but not tell him about the fire.”

They both looked at her.

Dulcie sighed.“He’ll want to see the pictures. If we pull up those articles, he’ll read about the nursing home and about the fire. Maybe he’ll try to call them. If the nursing home burned down, does it even have a phone?” Dulcie dropped her ears, giving Kit a stern look. “We can’t tell him, not yet, we need to find out more.”

But, watching Kit, she knew Kit would tell Misto, that they couldn’t stop her. Or, if she didn’t tell him, and as flighty and irresponsible as the tortoiseshell could be, would she take off alone for Oregon in a fit of goodwill and passion and not much common sense?

Or would she and Misto go off together, an old cat too frail to survive a second journey halfway up the California coast and up into Oregon, and the flighty young tortoiseshell? Again, Dulcie looked at Joe for help. They’d backed themselves into a corner. Now, either they distressed Misto by telling him before they knew enough, or they abandoned Kit to her wild and headstrong passions.

“We’ll tell Misto,” Joe said softly. “We’ll show him the pictures. Tell him the whole story. We can’t tell him only half.” Maybe, Joe thought, Misto would show better sense than Kit and wouldn’t go racing off with no plan, no notion where the red tomcat might be.

“There are all kinds of animal rescue groups,” Dulcie said, “Humane Society, SPCA, Animal Friends. Maybe they can find him. Or maybe he’s already chosen a home, maybe he’s already settled in with someone, is rolling in luxury lapping up cream and he has no need of our help.”

“But he’d want to find Misto,” Kit said indignantly, “he’d want to find his father, he doesn’t know where Misto’s gone, he might be worried about his dad, wandering all over Eugene looking for him.”

Joe just looked at her. Kit could get pretty worked up.

“First thing in the morning,” Dulcie said, “I’ll call Eugene. Maybe I can find out if anyone at all saw him after the fire, or saw him escape the fire. Maybe by this time, someone has come forward, called to say he’s all right. If I can’t locate anyone from the nursing home, Wilma can, that’s what she does. She spent her whole career running investigations. Missing humans, missing cats, what’s the difference? Wilma can find out what happened to the red tomcat.”

10

It was after three in the morning when Joe left Dulcie and Kit, and headed home. As he trotted along above the village streets, the night sky arced clear and vast around him; below him, the streets themselves were deserted, even the late-night party crowd seemed to have packed it in. He sniffed the wind and knew, though the stars shone diamond bright, that weather was on its way, he could smell a storm gathering, could smell cold weather coming down from the north. The shingles, damp from the ocean air, were only slick now, but soon rain would sluice down the steep peaks, rushing into the gutters. Racing onto his own roof, Joe caught the scents from within, the smell of a strange woman’s perfume, the unfamiliar smells of people he didn’t know and didn’t want to know.

But at least he could hear no voices. Maybe, with luck, they were all asleep, Debbie Kraft and her kids bedded down in the Damens’ guest room, stuffed like sardines among their ragtag belongings. Stepping to the edge of the roof, he looked down at the old battered Suzuki wagon with its thick patina of road dust, its windows smeared with little handprints, and blocked by the jumble of blankets and cardboard cartons that Debbie hadn’t dragged into the house. A skateboard pressed against the glass, and a ragged teddy bear. He could just imagine the smell in the closed car: hamburger wrappers, broken crayons, half-eaten candy bars, the smell of little children shut into a small space for many hours. He imagined the same smells in the rooms below.

Maybe, with great good luck, they’d remain asleep until late morning and he’d be gone again. Or, if the gods really smiled, they’d get up early, collect their possessions, shove everything back in the car, and head on down the coast for some other unfortunate “long-lost” friend.

Or, he thought, Debbie would make up with her sister, after all these silent years, and move on up there to the wooded hills high above the village, where half-hidden and expensive homes stood in self-satisfied privacy. Turning away from the roof’s edge, he pushed into his tower and on through into the house to have a look around, to see how the land lay.

Crouched on the rafter, he peered down into the dark study, and into the master bedroom where Clyde and Ryan sprawled, fast asleep, Rock and little Snowball curled safely across their feet. Both animals flinched when Joe dropped down onto Clyde’s desk. They looked up at him frazzled, their ears at half mast, their coats bristling from the stress of dealing with a small, rude child, their eyes reflecting a frantic unease that left no doubt Vinnie, the older girl, had been at them.

Joe looked at them with pity but turned resolutely away. There was nothing he could do, just now, to ease their misery. Dropping to the floor, he padded down the stairs, his nose twitching with annoyance at the smell of strangers that rose up the steps. Below, he descended into a chaos of abandoned sweaters, grubby dolls, children’s dirty tennis shoes dropped at random down the hall. In the kitchen, a blue plastic cooler stood on the floor dripping water across the tile. The table was strewn with food-crusted paper plates, a package of cupcakes with one bite out of each. Two thermos bottles stood open, smelling of souringmilk. He had to guess that Ryan and Clyde, losing patience, had left it all for Debbie to clean up—if she was so inclined.

The guest room door stood open. Despite the fusty smell of sleep, he slipped inside, skirting the two duffel bags, the clothes draped over the rattan and cane chairs and the desk, and the rattan game table. On the handmade Konya rug, an open suitcase lay, revealing a tangle of sweatshirts, big and little, a woman’s lace panties, a makeup case, a grubby white brassiere. The room smelled of the same perfume, of unwashed hair and dirty socks. In the queen-sized bed, Debbie and the two children slept tangled together, the girls snuggled up to their mother, their long pale hair strewn into her dark hair, their arms around her as if, at least in sleep, the little family found solace in one another. Looking at the sheer volume of their belongings, he imagined them camping in his home until Christmas, and he backed out again feeling depressed. The only upside to this woman’s arrival would be whatever he could learn about her dead mother, about Debbie’s relationship with her, and maybe about Hesmerra’s interest in the affairs of Kraft Realty. Hurrying back up to his tower in the black predawn, he burrowed deep beneath the cushions, shut his eyes, and listened to the rising wind, its wail as miserable as he felt.

Joe woke at first light; as he rose up out of the pillows, the sharp sea wind harried and chilled him, blowing in through his open windows. The temperature had dropped. The treetops loomed in dark islands, and in the east above the black hills one finger of light streaked across below the clouds, blushing pink from the hidden sun. He could smell coffee, pancakes, bacon, but this happy greeting was broken harshly by Vinnie’s shout, “I won’t, I won’t! You can’t make me!” He heard no word from Tessa. Didn’t the smaller child ever talk?

Slipping inside, onto his high rafter, he looked down at the empty king-sized bed, the covers tossed back in a tangle. On the leather love seat in the study, Snowball slept curled against Rock, the two animals staying sensibly clear of their houseguests. He froze as childish footsteps pounded up the stairs.

Twelve-year-old Vinnie raced to the top, her curly blond hair rumpled from sleep, her eyes as dark as Hershey bars. Dog and cat watched her warily. Ignoring them, Vinnie looked around the study with a keen and destructive eye.

Stepping to the desk, she picked up a ruler and, turning to the love seat, she began to poke at Rock. The big silver dog looked at her, shocked, and hunched away. When she poked harder, he stood up on the couch facing her, glancing around for a way of escape but unwilling to abandon Snowball. But when Vinnie turned her attention to the little white cat, Rock snarled at her and in the same instant Joe dropped from the rafter to the desk and made a flying leap to the kid’s head, his claws out. Snowball exploded over the back of the love seat and beneath it, and Rock gave Joe a grateful look and raced away down the stairs. Joe was still clinging. Vinnie snatched at him and then hit him. He scratched her hand and leaped clear, and she ran screaming down the steps behind the escaping dog, hit the kitchen bellowing that the cat had attacked her. No wonder that red tom had fled the Kraft household. He heard the dog door flap as Rock bolted for the backyard. Smiling, he sauntered down the steps and into the kitchen. When Vinnie saw him she screamed and tried to twist out of her mother’s hands. “It jumped right on me! Get it away, it tried to kill me!”

Debbie was busy dabbing at Vinnie’s head with a wet paper towel. Turning, she fixed her gaze on Joe, her dark brown eyes blazing, her brown hair tangled across the shoulders of her skintight black T-shirt. Vinnie, cradling her bleeding hand, backed away from Joe. At the table, Ryan and Clyde watched the scene tense and ready to move—Joe had no doubt to protecthim if the need occurred.

He was glad he’d been there when Vinnie grabbed that ruler; he had no idea how much torment it would take for gentle Rock to turn on her—no idea how badly the kid might have hurt the innocent animals. Ryan rose at last to rummage in a drawer for salve and Band-Aids. All the while, little Tessa looked on fromher own chair at the table beside Clyde. Her brown eyes were huge, filled with a different emotion than Vinnie and their mother, and when she looked at Joe her eyes shone with a shy wonder. Tessa liked it fine, that he had nailed her sister, maybe she even envied him, that he had the nerve to do that.

The child was seated on two phone books tied to the seat of her chair, with a pillow over them. Beside her, Clyde grinned at Joe conspiratorially as Debbie doctored Vinnie’s wounds, and Vinnie yelled louder. “Hold still,” Debbie snapped, staring at Joe with an expression that made him want to ease away.

Ryan said,“Whatever Joe did, he had good reason. Look at me, Debbie.” Debbie looked up, scowling at her. “You are to leave our animals alone, do you understand? You, and Vinnie both. If you so much as touch one of our animals or torment them in any way, you’re out on the street pronto.” She stared at Debbie until Debbie turned away. At the table, both Clyde and Tessa hid a smile, and Tessa reached up and took his hand.

Joe, feeling righteous and smug, leaped onto the table beside them. Ryan took her seat again, returning to her pancakes and bacon. Debbie sat down at her half-finished plate, glaring at them all as Ryan took up the conversation where they had apparently left it.“As to the battered women’s shelter, Debbie, you need to contact them this morning, see if they have room.”

“How couldI get in?” Debbie said, scowling. “You need a judge or a cop to get you in one of those places.”

Joe wasn’t sure that was true, but it sounded good. Ryan said, “There’s one other option. We have an empty cottage that just closed escrow.” Was she out of her mind? “It needs a good cleaning, inside and out, and the yard needs weeding and trimming. If you want to work for your rent, you can staythere—for a limited time,” she added. Ryan would do almost anything if she thought a person or animal was in need, but she wasn’t knuckling under to Debbie Kraft’s demands. “The cottage is old and small and neglected. There’s no furniture, but the water and electricity are on. If—”

“We don’thave any furniture,” Debbie said. “You can see we have just what’s in the car. All our furniture belonged to that landlord. Erik has expensive furniture in the condo, here in the village, but we didn’t see much of it. Expensive clothes and car, too, but nothing like that for his family—he says he has to look well, for business.”

Clyde said,“There are a number of resale stores, sometimes with good furniture. Salvation Army, Goodwill.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t buy anythingused.”

“And why is that?” he asked.

Ryan said,“You can pick up what you need at a bargain, the better charity shops have some really nice things. Or, you could check out the furniture-rental places.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t—”

“The place is empty,” Ryan said. “If you want to work for your rent.”

“You don’t understand. I wouldn’t have time to—”

“We can go up as soon as you finish your breakfast,” Ryan said, “and you can take a look at it. Bring your suitcases and things, and we’ll take some cleaning supplies.” She gave Debbie a big smile. “You’ll be all set.”

“But I can’t take the children into some filthy shack. Who knows what kind of germs they’d pick up. You’ll have to get someone else to do your cleaning.”

Ryan rose, fetched a couple of buckets from the laundry room, and began filling them with supplies: Clorox, disinfectants, rags, brushes. She set a broom and mop beside them, looking evenly at Debbie.“Use these. The children will be fine. It’s that, or the shelter.”

“You’re saying I can’t stay here? Why not? You have plenty of room. I could never go into a shelter, it’s too degrading. And that’s the first place Erik would look. I’ve always known that. Whenever I wanted to leave him, I knew I couldn’t go to a shelter—and then he left me, stranded.” She looked intently at Ryan. “I don’t think you understand how cruel he is. There’s no telling what he’d do if he found me in one of those places. He wouldn’t allow it, that would make him look bad, if anyone found out. And of course I don’t have any money to rent a place, Erik took everything. He stripped the checking account that I used for groceries, and that wasall I had.”

Oh, right, the tomcat thought.And why, if she’d ever wanted to leave Erik, or suspected he might leave her, why didn’t she set something aside? This woman is all about grabbing everything she can, to provide for her own comfort. There’s not a chance in hell she’s broke.

Dropping down from the table and leaving the kitchen, he wondered if Ryan had told Debbie about her mother’s death. Of course she must have, but Debbie sure wasn’t grieving. He couldn’t see that she’d been crying, and so far he hadn’t heard her mention Hesmerra. Nor did the death of her mother seem to have affected her appetite, he thought, as she greedily shoveled in pancakes. Heading for the guest room, he felt Vinnie watching him. Expecting her to follow, he lay down in the hallway beyond the kitchen door. He heard her sliding out of her chair, and Clyde said, “You follow that cat, Vinnie, I’ll take a belt to your backside.”

No one spoke. The silence was profound. When Vinnie didn’t appear, Joe fled for the guest room. Slipping in between the open suitcases spread across the floor, he saw Debbie’s purse lying on the seat of the little chair that was pulled up to the desk. In a flash he was up there, pawing open the bag and nosing out her billfold.

He made quick work of clawing through the money compartment. Twenty bucks? Come on, she wasn’t that broke. He could feel a little change in the side pocket, but that was all. Three credit cards, and those could already be maxed out. Dropping the billfold delicately back into the bag, he concentrated on the zippered side pockets.

Nothing but women’s stuff, lipstick, emery boards, Band-Aids, old bills and receipts. Abandoning the purse, he dropped to the floor, and considered the open suitcases.

The children’s clothes and Debbie’s were all mixed together, most of them none too clean. Carefully pushing each item aside, he searched between them, and looked in the side pockets among panty hose, a dingy bra, children’s tattered little Tshirts and panties. In Debbie’s makeup case he rummaged amongbottles and tubes, wary of meeting a stray safety razor or a pair of sharp scissors, and getting unpleasant smells on his paws. Nothing, no hidden cash, not even loose change.

He went through the second suitcase and into the side pockets, he was losing hope when his reaching paw stroked a thick packet of folded paper with the greasy texture of paper money, and secured with a rubber band. Listening for any movement from the hall, hearing only Vinnie’s shrill voice from the kitchen, he pawed out the bundle.

It smelled of uncountable human hands, the oily scent of well-circulated greenbacks. Rifling through with a finesse more suited to Dulcie, he counted fifties and hundreds to a total of two thousand dollars. Well. That should pay rent on a simple room and groceries until she got a job. If, in fact, a jobwas in Debbie’s plans.

Straightening the stack, he put the money back in the side pocket, fought the zipper closed, and sauntered out of the room. Heading for the kitchen, he stopped still, hearing Tessa’s voice for the first time. She was crying. “I did, too,” she sobbed. “I dreamed about Pan and in my dream he talked to me.”

Vinnie laughed rudely.

“Don’t make up impossible stories,” Debbie said. “That’s the same as lying.”

“I didn’t make it up, I dreamed it.”

As Joe padded into the kitchen, Debbie was saying,“That’s the cat we had, I think it was in the picture I sent. It was only a stray, but the kids made such a fuss to let it stay that I gave in. Tessa decided its name was Pan, she said it told her its name,” Debbie said sarcastically.

Joe thought about the many times Misto had talked about his son, Pan. How many cats were named Pan?

“I did dream it!” Tessa said boldly, and Joe watched with interest the way she’d suddenly come alive. “He told me in my sleep, his name is Pan.” She looked hard at her mother. “After that, when I called him Pan, he always came to me.” Tears were rolling down her cheeks, tears of angerat her mother, tears of grieving for her friend who’d vanished, an innocent friend her mother hadn’t ever bothered to look for.

Ryan said,“How long did you have the cat?”

“I guess a year or so,” Debbie said. “It showed up at suppertime wet from the rain, slipped in when I heard a noise and opened the door. Got muddy water all over the carpet. I tried to push it out, I didn’t want to pick it up and get scratched,” she said, glancing meaningfully down at Joe. “Tessa pitched a fit until I fed it, it was easier to give in than listen to her bawl. Next morning she started calling it Pan,” Debbie said, amused.

“What happened to it?” Ryan said. “You said something in your letter, but—”

Debbie shrugged.“It left again, that’s what cats do.”

Clyde said,“Did you look for it?”

Debbie laughed.“How can you look for a cat? There one day, gone the next. Tessa bawled and bawled.” She looked at the little girl with disgust.

“You didn’t think it might have been hurt?” Ryan asked, trying to control her temper.

“With two kids to take care of? When did I have time to look for some stray cat?”

Tessa had stopped crying, retreating into her silence but staring angrily at her mother, her face red and splotched, the tears still running down.This little kid, Joe thought,is going to be trouble when she gets older—trouble for Debbie but, most of all, trouble for herself, so hurt and miserable and unloved.

And, he thought,how doesshe know Pan’s true name?

The nursing home in Eugene hadn’t known, they had called him Buddy. In the dead of night,did Pan tell Tessa his name? Was that young cat foolish enough to talk to the child as she slept? Had he crept into the little girl’s bed late at night, whispered to her over and over,The kitty’s name is Pan, your kitty is called Pan,and when she woke up she thought she’d dreamed that whispered message?

Joe was turning this over in his mind with a strange little shiver when there was a knock on the front door and Max Harper’s voice came through the intercom. “Anyone home? Any breakfast left?” The chief seldom stopped by early in the day, his sudden unannounced visit startled Joe. Clyde glanced at Debbie and rose to let him in.

Had Ryan or Clyde called Max to tell him Hesmerra’s daughter was there, one of the two sisters Max needed to notify of the old woman’s death? Or had a patrol unit spotted Debbie’s station wagon parked in the drive, called it in because of theBe On the Lookout that was out on it? A BOL not only because of the need to notify Debbie, but because of the manner in which Hesmerra died, because of a possible murder, because Debbie Kraft might have information useful to the department.

Max came on back to the kitchen, shook hands with Debbie, sat down at the crowded table, and accepted a cup of coffee. At the far end of the kitchen, Joe stretched out in the flowered easy chair where he could watch Max and Debbie without calling attention to himself. Debbie didn’t seem comfortable in the presence of the law, and that was interesting. But then, some people just naturally became defiant and angry at what they considered the intrusion of uniformed authority. Debbie was, under Max’s scrutiny, as silent and withdrawn as her smaller child.

11

When John Firetti left the veterinary clinic at midmorning, crossing the garden to his own small cottage to retrieve some paperwork, he stepped through the doorway into the empty house and paused. He listened, puzzled, to the faint echo of voices coming from his study.

Mary’s car was gone; he knew she’d left early to work with the cat rescue group setting up another shelter. No one else lived with them, and this wasn’t cleaning day, the housekeeper’s car wasn’t in the drive. He could hear nothing that sounded like burglars, no stealthy sliding of drawers orwrenching open of locks, just soft voices, one of them female, and John smiled. Was Misto entertaining guests? Pausing beside the fireplace, he listened.

Sunlight shone in through the big living room windows onto the two flowered couches and glinted across the coffee table that was littered with flyers and veterinary magazines and decorated with paw prints etched into a faint coat of dust. Beyond the fireplace, through the door to his study, he could see the pale, cool light of his computer screen. Silently he approached, looking in.

Three furry backs were silhouetted against the screen’s glow. Three pairs of upright ears, one pair orange, one pair tortoiseshell, and Dulcie’s dark tabby ears. Three tails hanging over, swishing in unison like metronomes for an unheard symphony. The attention of all three cats was fixed on the picture of a red tabby tomcat. But as John approached, they started, looked around at him like children caught at a forbidden prank—and Misto’s yellow eyes reflected such a strange mix of excitement and pain that John leaned down for a better look.

The cat on the screen was younger than Misto, but with a broad head and with Misto’s same long, bony face. The same wide-set ears, the same wide, curving stripes, but in shades of rusty red. The swirl mark on his left shoulder was startlingly like Misto’s own. Sitting down in the desk chair, John peered around the cats to read the accompanying article.

Did Nursing Home Cat Die in Fire?

The remarkable red tabby cat who began, on his own, to visit infirm patients at Green Meadows Nursing Home nearly a year ago has not been seen since a midnight fire burned the complex to the ground.“We’re terribly afraid he died in the fire,” said nursing supervisor Jamey Small. “We haven’t seen him since three hours before the fire broke out, since the alarms went off and we began to evacuate the patients. He came to us as a stray, but he was a most unusual cat. He not only spent nearly every waking moment with the patients, he always favored the most depressed and lonely among them, or the sickest. He would stay with a very ill patient for hours, snuggled close. He would leave for only a few minutes, to eat or drink or visit one of the sandboxes we provided, then he’d hop back on the bed again, purring and rolling over. He gave affection, and enjoyed whatever affection the patient was able to give back. Many of his charges began to sit up in their beds, to smile and talk with the nurses for the first time in months, even to enjoy their meals again.”

Even after all the patients were evacuated to safety, to temporary quarters in nearby motels, no one had found Buddy. The night of the fire, which was caused by a faulty furnace in the basement of the building, off-duty personnel searched the rest of the night and into the next morning, searched all over the grounds and in the surrounding neighborhoods, but they found no sign of him.

“If he’s been taken in by a nearby family,” Small said, “we would very much like to know that he’s safe. The nursing staff and the attending doctors have raised a reward of two thousand dollars for information leading to Buddy’s return. If he was injured in the fire, we will be happy torepay all his veterinary bills, in order to have him back safe. Buddy is part of our family, he’s a remarkable cat, our patients miss him and we miss him, we all pray that he is alive and has not been harmed.”

“This is Pan?” John said, stroking Misto. “Your son, Pan?”

The old cat twitched an ear, and touched the picture with a soft paw.“He’s too quick to get trapped in a fire—maybe it was Pan who set off the alarm, alerted them at the first smell of smoke, but then he would have beat it out of there.” Misto’s eyes were filled with a stubborn hope, and John, watching him, prayed that he was right.

When Dulcie scrolled down the screen, two more pictures of Pan appeared, sharing the beds of other patients. In one shot he was curled up against a woman’s shoulder, in the other an old man sat up in bed, his arm around the red tomcat, both looking into the camera, the cat’s amber eyes bright, his smile laced with humor. Kit, too, lifted a paw to the screen, to touch the young tom’s nose. She looked at the picture a long time, her fluffy tailtwitching—as it did when she was deep in thought or was deeply enchanted.

But while John Firetti and the three cats browsed online searching for clues to the lost Pan, down at the Damen household Clyde had lit a fire on the hearth, and had left the living room to Max Harper and Debbie. The big room was no longer done in black and brown African patterns, which Hanni’s studio had created for Clyde in his bachelor days. That primitive mood had given way to sunny yellow walls, flowered linen covers on the couch and chairs and, over the couch, an arrangement of Charlie Harper’s drawings, portraits of Joe, Rock, Dulcie, Kit, and Snowball, all handsomely framed. Three tall schefflera plants softened the corners of the room, and over the mantel was a Charlie Harper etching of Dulcie and Joe and Kit hunting through the tall grass of the Molena Point hills. The white linen draperies were new and fresh, the wood floors gleaming. The only furnishing left over from earlier days was Joe Grey’s faded, claw-shredded, fur-matted easy chair, and even its fate was under negotiation. Joe said if his chair went to Goodwill, he went with it. Ryan had proposed a washable linen cover, which, with reservations, he was considering—he wasn’t fond of the smell of laundry soap.

Debbie sat at one end of the couch, Max across from her in Clyde’s reading chair. Joe, padding into the room, leaped into his own chair and curled up for a nap, as if he was quite alone in the room; he soon let himself snore a little, his head tucked under, his closed eyes slitted open just enough to watch Debbie’s reaction as Max questioned her. The chief started out friendly enough, and low-key; he told her how sorry he was about Hesmerra’s death, and asked gently when she had last seen her mother.

“I didn’t see her much,” Debbie said, pretending to wipe at a tear, a gesture Joe thought singularly unconvincing.

“A few months, would you say?”

Debbie shrugged.“Maybe.”

“Do you come down during the winter months, when Erik’s working down here?”

“I haven’t the last few years. Erik was … He’s always busy with work. I have the children to care for … Tessa’s so little, she takes up a lot of time. And Vinnie’s in school. I don’t like to pull her out, move her back and forth between schools, that’s very unsettling for a child.”My, Joe thought,the ever-caring mother. This, from a woman who patronizes her littlest child until she cries.“It’s bad enough,” Debbie said, “that she has to change schools now. But now, of course, I have no choice. We couldn’t stay in Eugene, I have no money at all.”

“The children are how old?” Max asked.

“Vinnie’s twelve, Tessa nearly five.” She looked uncomfortably away, causing Joe to wonder about the seven-year gap between the two little girls. Family planning? he wondered. Or long-standing marital troubles?

“If you didn’t come down with Erik,” Max said, “you must at least have talked with your mother on the phone, or written to her?”

“She didn’t have a phone. I wrote to her sometimes,” Debbie said evasively. “We weren’t … We had differences,” she said shortly. “I didn’t see her much.”

“You want to tell me what that was about?”

“She … We didn’t see eye to eye. I don’t understand why you’re asking me all this. Is this really necessary?”

Max said,“What, exactly, was the problem between you?”

Debbie sighed.“For one thing, that boy she’s raising. My dead sister’s child. My mother isn’t … wasn’t fit to raise a child, with her drinking. When the child was born, I told her she should take it to Child Welfare, where he could be adopted.”

“What about his father? Couldn’t he have taken Billy?”

“We have no idea who the father was. Some boy from her high school, too young and irresponsible anyway to take care of a family. Greta would never say who he was, only that his family refused to help.”

“And your other sister, Esther? She didn’t want Billy?”

“Esther didn’t want children,” she said shortly. Joe, listening to Max bait her, ask her questions to which he already knew the answers, wondered where this was going. Did he think Debbie was involved in Hesmerra’s death? Or was he, indeed, simply gathering background information?

“You were sixteen when you married Erik Kraft? Wasn’t that pretty young, too?”

“But we gotmarried, we didn’t just …” Again she sighed, as if losing patience with his lack of insight. “I wanted out of there, I didn’t like living with my mother, I didn’t like her drinking. All right?”

“She was drinking then?”

“Not as much as now, I’ve heard. Not every day. She worked in an office then, some kind of clerk. Some weekends she’d go on a tear, then call in sick on Monday. We were living up in the hills above the village, renting a backyard guesthouse. My mother’s a loud, mean drunk. She yells and cries. I’m surprised they didn’t kick us out. Esther and Greta and I would get out of the house, go our separate ways. When I left to get married, she and Greta moved to that shack. Esther was already married and gone. What does this have to do with the fire and with my mother’s death?”

“Just trying to get a picture of her situation,” Max said quietly. “Did your mother try to get financial help from the state or county to raise the child?”

“I don’t know. Probably not. Who would give her help when she lived in that shack, and the way she drank? They’d just take the kid away from her. No, she would never apply for help, she didn’t like government do-gooders.”

“Did Hesmerra drink after the baby came?”

“I don’t know, I wasn’t there. Once in a while, I talked with my sister Esther. She said Mother was about the same.”

“You didn’t talk with Esther often.”

“She and I had a blowup. These questions have nothing to do with my mother.”

“They help to give me a picture of your mother’s life,” Max said, “to understand what might have happened.”

“What’s to understand? She got drunk and burned the house down. Howdid the fire start?”

“Fire investigators determined she left a skillet on the stove, with the burner on high. The grease in the pan got too hot, flamed up. Flames ignited the wall and then the ceiling. The house went up like tinder.”

Debbie’s face drained of color. But, strangely, her hands lay relaxed in her lap. Joe watched Tessa creep in and slip behind the couch. Vinnie appeared behind her, as if not to be left out. She found a place on the floor beneath a schefflera plant, sat there silent for once. Was Vinnie, too, intimidated by the law? Joe wondered, amused.

“It was about twelve years ago that you and Erik first separated?” Max asked. “That you left the village and moved up to your uncle’s, in Eugene?”

“Yes, but first I took what little money Erik gave me, and some I’d stashed, and enrolled for a summer semester at San Francisco Art Institute. Moved into the cheapest room I could find. I hardly had enough for food and for paper and paint. I don’t know, I thought it would lead somewhere, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I just knew I had to get away.

“Halfway through the semester, I found out I was pregnant,” she said bitterly. “When school was out, I moved up to my uncle’s—just before Vinnie was born.”

“And then some five years later you and Erik got back together?”

“Yes, but what does—”

“That’s when you left your uncle’s farm, and Erik rented the house in Eugene?”

She shifted her position on the couch, glancing impatiently toward the door.“I still don’t see what this has to do with my mother.”

“Just trying to get the whole picture,” Max repeated. “There’s some question about the cause of her death. In the investigation of a murder, we need to have some sense of the victim’s family as well as of her own life.”

Debbie stared at him.“A murder? Someone killed her? Someone set that fire and …” Her hands went to her face. “Someone burned … ?”

“She was dead before the fire started,” Max said. “But possibly not from natural causes.”

Debbie’s brown eyes remained fixed on Max. Joe tried to read her, as Max was reading her, but the chief was more skilled at this stuff. At first she had been too calm, too cool. Now, was her shock and distress genuine, or a good act?

Max said,“We don’t have many answers yet. I’m sorry to press you, but can we go back in time again, for a moment? Try to bring me up to speed?”

Debbie nodded, mute and still.

“When you and Erik moved into the Eugene house, he worked in that office during the summer months, came down to the Molena Point office for the winter, while you and the children remained in Eugene?”

“Yes. Tessa was only a baby.”

“And that is still the arrangement?”

“Until last fall, when he filed for divorce,” she said. “September. He sent child support money until just after Christmas, then the checks stopped. A month ago he stopped paying the rent, too. The landlord said we had to get out. I told him we had nowhere to go, and no money. Itold him Erik took everything, but he didn’t care, all he wanted was money. I had to close out my household account, it was down to nothing. We have nothing.”

Nothing, Joe thought,but the two thousand bucks tucked away in your suitcase.

“Since you arrived in the village,” Max said, “have you been in touch with Erik? Or with Esther and Perry Fowler? Have you asked them for help in getting resettled?”

Joe knew Perry Fowler, the older of the two partners. You’d see him around the village dressed in tennis clothes, sometimes Fowler and Erik together. He was tall and slim like Erik but strangely pale despite the fact that he must be outdoors a lot. Pale hair, whitish skin, pale blue eyes, a hesitant way of moving. Joe had never seen Fowler’s wife headed for the tennis courts; he guessed Esther wasn’t interested in the game. He wondered what kind of tennis player Fowler was, as uncertain as he seemed.

“Erik doesn’t know I’m here. I don’t want him to know, so of course I haven’t contacted Perry, either. He’d be sure to tell Erik.” She looked at Harper pleadingly. “Erik would knock me around for coming here where he works. He doesn’t want people to know he left me. He won’t think I’d come here, this is the last place he’ll look. He’ll think I headed north, away from California. Maybe just keep going until I found a job.”

“How long did it take you to drive down from Eugene?” The chief knew she’d moved out of the rented house ten days ago; he’d called Eugene just after the autopsy, Charlie had told Ryan that. Apparently, while Debbie had left the landlord’s furniture intact, she’d taken everything else, down to the curtain rods, the towel racks, and the lightbulbs. Joe wondered if she’d left that little lightbulb in the refrigerator. He watched her fidgeting in her chair, her hands busy now, moving nervously, and then going rigid as she tried to keep them still. Max said, again, “The trip down from Eugene took you how long?”

“I … about a week and a half, I guess. We camped along the way. I needed time to think, I didn’t know what I was going to do, I needed time to work out a plan. I didn’t think he’d look for me in the campgrounds. I wouldn’t normally camp, I don’t like the dirt and the inconvenience.”

“It takes money, even to camp.”

“We brought what food we had in the cupboards, canned food, crackers. Ryan and her sister Hanni are the only friends I have, we had enough to get here, to them. I need to think of some way to make a living, some kind of job where I can take care of the kids, I don’t want to impose on Ryan any longer than I have to.”

Joe rolled over in his chair, hiding a silent cat laugh.

Max said,“If he left you, Debbie, why would he look for you at all? Why would he care where you went?”

Debbie sighed again.“He might think I’d make trouble. He … he was into some real estate scams, some deals he made in Eugene. If he found out I knew about them, he’d want to hush me up, he’d come looking for me.” She pulled up the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “The purple is faded now, there were always bruises. That scar … he cut me with a paring knife, just before he left.” The scar on her inner forearm was maybe four inches long. “That wasn’t the first time. When he was in Eugene, and even when he wasn’t, I was afraid to run away, I knew he’d come after me. I was glad whenhe left. Maybe he doesn’t suspect what I know. But,” she said tremulously, “I can’t be sure of that.”

“You want to tell me about the scams?”

“I … would really rather talk about it later,” she said, glancing at Vinnie. “That can’t have anything to do with my mother.”

“Did Erik get along well with your mother? Did he ever visit her?”

“I don’t know why he would. They’d get along all right, I guess, if he ever saw her. But why would he bother with her?”

“Could Hesmerra have known about his real estate deals?”

“How could she possibly know something like that? Why would she care?”

“How did you know about the deals?” Max said. “Did you see contracts, sales agreements?”

“That would take a while to explain. Ryan’s waiting for me,” she said, “to take me up to her cottage.”

Max rose.“We can talk about this another time,” he said easily. “Meanwhile, we’d like you to stop by the station, get your fingerprints on file.”

“What for? I’m not being investigated. Why would you need my fingerprints?”

“We need family prints to eliminate from others we might find at the scene.”

“It’s years since I went there, before Greta’s child was born. Whatever prints I might have left wouldn’t still be there.”

“You’re family,” Max said. “It’s customary. We’ll need Billy’s prints, of course, and Esther’s, as well as yours.”

When Debbie rose, Vinnie leaped up and grabbed her around the legs. Max looked at the child a moment, then let himself out the front door. Debbie stared after him, then turned away toward the guest room, dragging Vinnie. The child acted as if Debbie was private property, to push and pull as she chose. Just as, Joe thought, Debbie seemed to view those people around her, who might be useful.

Alone in the living room, except for little Tessa, behind the couch, a number of questions nudged Joe. The more he saw of Debbie Kraft, the less he liked her. He wondered whathad happened to the family cat. Had Pan, the night of the fire, tried to return to the Krafts’ rented house? If he’d shown up there, maybe injured from the fire, would Debbie have chased him away? Run him off, even if he needed help? She’d already dismissed the young tom as no more than a discarded toy: a cat her little girl loved, a cat who was quite possibly smarter, and surely more decent, than the woman he had come to for shelter.

12

From the back of his well-clawed easy chair, Joe watched through the front window as the chief drove off in the direction of the station. He watched Clyde carry out a load of plastic bags and duffels, kiddie blankets and stuffed toys, and push everything into the back of Debbie’s station wagon. Debbie followed him, scowling, bearing a tangle of clothes and stray shoes, none too happy to be shuffled off so quickly. Joe sat enjoying the drama until he heard Ryan’s footsteps in the studio above him, then, leaping from his chair, he hightailed it up the stairs, where they could talk in private, hopefully without Vinnie charging in to catch her hostess and the house cat in a private discussion.

Ryan stood beside the tall studio windows looking down to the drive, the sun teasing a shine across her short hair. There was a more relaxed look on her face as she watched Clyde and Debbie pack up the car. Leaping onto the mantel beside her, Joe gave her a wicked smile.

“What?” she said, turning from the window, her green eyes looking into his. When he’d left the kitchen earlier, she knew he was taking advantage of the moment to toss Debbie’s room. “What did you find?” she said softly.

“She’s not so broke, ” Joe said with sly satisfaction.

“How much?”

“Two thousand, in cash. I didn’t find a bankbook, so maybe that’s all she has, but that’s hardly the same as broke. That should hold her until she gets a job—if she plans to get a job. I wonder,” Joe said, “how much money she had when she left Eugene. Aren’t there some pretty nice resorts in southern Oregon and on down in Mendocino?”

“You do have a suspicious mind, tomcat.”

“And you don’t?”

“Cop’s kid,” she said. “Comes with the territory. That’s why we survive, suspicion breeds safety. Two thousand bucks! Poor thing. Talk about destitute.” Standing on tiptoe, she kissed him on top his head. “You did good, tomcat.” If a cat could blush, he’d look like a pink plush kiddy toy. Licking a paw to hide his embarrassment, he watched her make her way back downstairs, heard her in the living room hurrying Debbie along. When he peered down again through the window, the two kids were in the car, enthroned among the blankets and duffels, and Clyde was stuffing the last load in around them. Dropping down from the mantel, he pawed open the sliding glass door and slipped out onto the deck. Looking over, he watched Ryan hand Debbie the want ads, listened to her suggest job venues, including a contact with their friend Chichi Barbi, who had recently bought Charlie Harper’s cleaning service. Chichi was expanding the business, taking on a long waiting list of homeowners who wanted their houses cleaned and maintained on a regular basis. She was interested in any possible new employee who could pass the background check and was a good worker. He wondered if Debbie could pass on either count?

But maybe he was being too hard on her, maybe with encouragement she’d knuckle down and get a job—or maybe, he thought, she’d run quickly through the two thousand, and then start whining again.

Debbie was saying,“I need to stop for groceries.” She sighed, looking toward the car. “Something to feed the kids.” Joe imagined them pulling up before the little village grocery, imagined Debbie asking Clyde to come inside, to show her where things were, so it wouldn’t take her so long. And then at the checkout, giving Clyde that helpless, big-eyed look when she discovered she was short of cash.Right,Joe thought. And Clyde’s going to sucker up to that?

As Ryan and Clyde headed for Ryan’s pickup to lead Debbie up to the cottage, Joe thought to scorch on down and ride with them, see how this played out. Except, he’d had more than enough of Debbie Kraft and Vinnie for a while. Instead he raced away across the roofs for Molena Point PD, where he could relax among easy cop talk, away from Debbie Kraft’s lies and fake smiles; he pitied Rock, who had already scrambled up into the backseat of the truck.

If Max was back at the station, maybe he’d already called Eugene to check on Debbie’s movements, see when shehad left Oregon for California. He wondered if he should call Eugene himself, to try to get a line on the red tomcat. The nursing home must have set up a temporary office, maybe even with the original phone number. Running across the roofs, with an icy wind at his back, he hurried for the station, thinking that winter had turned serious and bold. Dark clouds hung low over the village, the damp air smelled of rain and of a deeper cold yet to come. Well, but February weather on the central coast was never to be relied on. Racing beneath the wind, sailing across the occasional narrow alley, he hit the cold tile roof of the courthouse, ran its length, and dropped down to the roof of MPPD.

He was just backing down the oak, headed for the front door, when a black-and-white pulled to the curb below. Hidden within the prickly oak leaves, he watched two uniformed officers step out, force their handcuffed prisoner out of the backseat and through the glass door, into the little foyer: a young, skinny fellow, long face, long greasy hair. Even from the tree Joe could smell the oily stink of his old leather jacket. As they marched him inside, Joe hit the ground behind them and slid in, too. The arrestee looked startled to see a cat race in past his feet, but the officers paid no attention. They stood at the dispatcher’s counter, portly Officer Brennan booking the guy in, printing him, listing his personal effects that Brennan had laid out on the desk; a dirty handkerchief, a little greasy coin purse, a squashed candy bar.

Joe strolled past them and down the hall, thinking that there was a lot to be said for the ambience of a small-town police department. He couldn’t imagine being allowed this kind of freedom in the vast, impersonal complex of San Francisco or LAPD. He’d seen the pictures of those daunting establishments with their complicated security, bulletproof glass walls, locked doors. He’d heard the officers discuss the many divisions of the metropolitan hierarchies, and couldn’t envision a feline sleuth trying to function in that high-powered maze.

Surprisingly, though, catswere serving their own important role in big-city PDs. Even in L.A., feral cats were doing important work. Not sleuthing, but protecting the criminal files and records. Several L.A. precincts, whose buildings were plagued by rats, had brought in colonies of feral cats, housing, feeding, and caring for them, setting them loose among the offices to handle the out-of-control rodent population. Rats in the offices. Rats in the lunchroom. Rats running down the halls into the storage rooms, eating paper supplies and, more alarming, destroying old criminal files: a felon’s record quickly expunged, vanished into the belly of a hungry rodent. And it wasn’t only L.A. that was employing ferals who might otherwise be killed. Other large city police departments were taking notice, bringing in their own bands of ferals, working with foundations of volunteers like Alley Cat Allies or Animal Friends. Feline exterminators were now working at city offices, college campuses, all kinds of institutions—stable cat populations that did not produce unwanted kittens, but went happily about their business destroying the rats, not only saving valuable paperwork, but saving lives, too. For every rat the cats killed, they destroyed a potential carrier of hantavirus that was fatal to humans, and for which there was no vaccine and no cure. Dogs, Joe thought, weren’t the only four-legged professionals serving human needs. Those cats could be as important as Red Cross nurses, giving folks a helping paw.

Slipping into Max’s office, into what he considered his personal lair beneath the credenza, he sniffed the sweet scent of horses from Max’s Western boots. The chief was on the phone, glancing up now and then at Detective Juana Davis. She sat in one of the leather chairs, leaning over massaging her left knee where a prospective felon, now in Soledad Prison, had graced her with a well-placed kick while she was cuffing his partner. Orange cat hairs clung to Juana’s dark uniform, evidence of the kitten she’d recently adopted. Juana seemed more relaxed since the kitten had come to share her condo; the little creature was born nearly in the middle of a murder case that Juana, and Joe himself, had worked in tandem, Juana happily unaware of the identity of the snitch who alerted her to the murder, unaware of the three cats’ roles in the timely demise of the killer. Max hung up the phone, looking across at the detective.

“As far as Eugene PD can tell, Debbie did leave ten days ago, about the time she mailed Ryan’s letter. Landlord said her lease was up three months ago, but she refused to move. He called her husband here in the village. Erik was out of town, but he got him on his cell. Kraft told him he was divorcing her, said if she wanted to stay she’d have to sign her own lease, pay her own rent. Landlord went over there three times with a lease. Her car was there but she wouldn’t answer the door. Brown, 1998 Suzuki station wagon. Eugene has our BOL on her but hadn’t spotted her. Strange, if she was camping, they watch those campgrounds pretty close. Well, she’s here now, arrived last night, stayed with Ryan and Clyde. I went by this morning, talked with her, asked her to come in and get printed. She doesn’t want Erik to know she’s here, claims she’s afraid of him. Claims he’s into some kind of real estate scam.”

“If she’s avoiding him,” Davis said. “Why would she come here?”

Max shook his head.“Says he won’t expect her here, that he’ll think she’s headed north.”

“His condo’s right in the middle of town,” Davis said. “Pretty hard to keep out of his way. The Brighton, that second-floor penthouse.” In Molena Point, as in much of California where the buildings were designed to resist impending earthquakes, even a second story often rose above the surrounding rooftops. Joe knew that penthouse well; its walled back patio was a favorite for the village cats, a sunny spot out of the wind on cold days. The little terrace had no access from the roofs around it except to the pigeons and seagulls, and through open aspects at the base of the wall meant for rain runoff, where the local cats could easily slip inside. With Erik gone so much of the time, it was an ideal hunting preserve. One could enjoy a sunny afternoon nap, wake when a pigeon landed, snatch him up before he knew you were there. Warm nap and instant feast, how could any cat resist?

Max said,“Kraft’s still out of town, expects to be gone for another month or more. I talked with Fowler. Says he’s down in Orange County reorganizing the branch office there, some kind of staff shake-up. Says from there, he’s headed for the Bahamas on vacation.”

Davis smiled.“Pretty tough life.”

Max laughed.“For sure, Debbie’s current digs won’t match that kind of luxury. Ryan and Clyde are moving her into one of the cottages they bought, that dilapidated one up near the meth house we raided.” He frowned, none too happy with that operation.

“They sure saw that coming,” she said. “Empty house, nothing left but the smell. Crime-scene cleanup service should be in there this week. Took us a while to locate the landlord, the house sold six months ago to a Jarvis James, in Chicago.” They exchanged a look of disgust. Someone out of state buys an old cottage, next thing you know they’re making meth.

And, Joe thought,most likely ruining the house for future sale. Even if the house was torn down, the land could be useless if it was sufficiently soaked with lethal chemicals.

Davis said,“We have computer copies of the deed and the closing papers. Most of it was done online.” Neither Davis nor the chief liked the shift from paper contracts to those completed online, which the real estate and escrow companies had so eagerly embraced, and which made evidence harder to nail down.

“Kathleen’s working on the contract,” Davis said, “trying to pick up the trail.” Kathleen Ray, the newest of the three detectives, had brought with her a fine expertise in the world of computers, and both older detectives were more than happy to see her take on that annoying aspect of their work. Davis said, “She’s found other purchases for James, so we’ll see where that leads. Looks like Ryan and Clyde, and Hanni, are stuck with those places for a while. Besides the economic slump, no one wants to buy near a meth house.”

Max said,“Hanni’s nearly done with her renovation. Ryan and Clyde mean to go ahead, too, and then wait it out.” He tilted back in his chair. “The meth house isn’t the only problem up there. The papers on some of those places are in a hell of a tangle. City attorney’s beginning to see illegal foreclosures, false documents, the works. Could keep that area depressed for some long time.”

“Anywhere else,” Davis said, “I’d worry. But land’s too valuable in Molena Point, city council’s too concerned, city attorney rides too close when these things begin to happen.”

Joe thought about the cats that the rescue group had trapped in that neighborhood. Many members of their local CatFriends group had taken three or four cats apiece into their homes, to shelter on a temporary basis. He thought some of them would turn out to be so charming they’d end up as permanent family members. Juana had already told Charlie she’d take another young cat, that her orange kitten was growing bored, home all day alone, that he was clawing and chewing up the furniture. Davis hoped that two cats, if they were compatible, would chase each other, climb the cat trees, play tag, rather than spend their energy as a two-cat demolition crew.

“Anything more on the burn?” Max asked.

“We lifted three sets of prints from the whiskey bottles and the carton, besides Hesmerra’s. Sent the whole thing for contents analysis to the lab, along with the shattered remains of the bottle she had in bed. The few dishes, glasses, pans, knives and forks were melted, but we sent a collection of that to the lab. I’m guessing, even with the new methods, they won’t be able to lift much. The rest of the burn, Dallas and I lifted four sets of prints besides hers.”

Joe had taken a good look at those transformed blobs of glass, smoky and milky and as weird as artifacts from an alien planet. The pots and pans, too, the knives and forks, all were melted into misshapen monstrosities that might have been turned out by some misguided, first-year art student.

As for the wood alcohol that had killed Hesmerra, that was as common as bargain brand cat food; a person could buy the stuff anywhere, any grocery or drugstore. Slip into Hesmerra’s cave, ease off one of the little plastic cap covers, remove the lid. Pour out some of the whiskey, replace it with denatured alcohol. Slip the plastic back on, and wait for her to retrieve that particular bottle and suck it down. The hitch was, the killer couldn’t be sure of the timing; it might be months before she picked up the poisoned offering—unless he’d doctored all the bottles.

Or had the killer slipped into the shack, maybe when Hesmerra was sleeping or passed out? Added the wood alcohol to her already open whiskey?

Davis said,“Billy told you that Erik Kraft and Hesmerra were friends?”

Max nodded.“Billy thought that was because Debbie, herself, never went to see her. Neither sister did, Billy said it’s been like that since his mother died. Greta was the youngest, maybe her sisters felt protective, felt Hesmerra was remiss in letting her go out in the storm that night. Though that doesn’t really explain such rigid, long-standing anger.”

“Doesn’t explain a lot of things,” Davis said. “Doesn’t explain Hesmerra’s maneuvering for jobs that gave her access to the Kraft offices, and to Alain Bent’s house.”

Max said,“I asked Emmylou Warren to come in for prints, I want to talk with her, maybe she can fill us in. Up at the burn this morning, she was pretty nervous. Billy said she and Hesmerra had a falling-out when she was evicted.”

“You want a BOL on her?”

“Not at this point. If she doesn’t show, have the patrols watch for her, give her a little nudge.”

Of course she was nervous, Joe thought,if she lifted that file box from the crime scene. It had sure smelled, and looked, as if it had been buried in the earth beneath the fire. Question was, would she bring the box to the chief? And, a more worrisome question, how much had Max seen in the backseat of her car when he grabbed one guilty tomcat and tossed him out?

Joe thought he must have seen the box. But before he grabbed Joe, did he see the letterheads that were barely sticking out, had he seen enough so that when he did have the box, he’d focus right in on the gray tomcat pawing through the evidence—if thatwas some kind of evidence?

Or would Emmylou decide to keep those papers to herself, maybe hide them, and not get involved? He was wondering if he should make a call, fill Max in on the letterheads in case she didn’t give the papers to him, when a woman’s querulous voice cut loudly down the hall. “I’ll see him now! He left three very curt calls on my machine, when one polite message would have done, and I don’t expect to be kept waiting.”

The dispatcher mumbled an answer Joe couldn’t make out. The woman said, “I’ve been out of town. Now that I’m home, I have better things to do than waste my time in this place, with the implication that if I don’t show up I’m under some kind of arrest. I’m not in the habit of being summoned by the police, by a public servant, and then kept waiting.”

With a look of sorely tried patience, Max rose from his desk and headed up the hall. Davis was slower to rise. Limping, she moved out close behind him. Silently Joe followed them, his claws itching for action. MPPD was his second home, and he didn’t take kindly to rude humans throwing their weight around.

13

Three hundred miles north of Molena Point, the red tabby tomcat sat in the cab of a U-Haul truck as it roared down Highway 101. Perched comfortably atop the driver’s duffel bag, he watched the pinewooded hills race by, broken now and then by green pastures. For most of the trip, the sky had been clear, the sea to their right sparkling blue, but then as they neared the Oregon paper mills they’d hit that area’s overcast, as thick as curdled milk, the sky hanging low and gray, the sea as unappealing as a smear of mud.

Whatever the weather, though, hitchhiking was a blast—if you chose your mark with care, if you didn’t hook up with some nutcase who had no respect for a lone tomcat. Lazily washing his paws and whiskers, he glanced at his hefty driver. She was a big, square woman dressed comfortably in faded jeans, a khaki shirt, a soft brown leather jacket, highbrown boots that could stand a good polish if one cared about such matters. Her U-Haul rental agreement, tucked carelessly into the visor above her head, gave her name as Denise Woolsey. She was maybe sixty-some, though he had trouble discerning the exact age of a human. Cats were easier, advancingage providing the clear signs, lengthening chin, graying muzzle, spreading toes and dropped belly; and of course the changing smell of old age.

Denise had told him, conversationally, that she was moving house; she talked to him as she might to any hitchhiker, and he liked that. She was hauling her furniture, all her worldly goods, from Astoria to her new home in Stockton. She said she’d given away half of what she owned, meaning to simplify her life. She seemed hungry for conversation, even if it was one-sided. Maybe she’d taken him aboard simply for someone to talk to, imagining that he couldn’t repeat any of her shared secrets. She hadn’t a clue he could have contributed to the conversation, could have entertained her, himself, with tales of his own travels. The cab smelled of ancient dust, fresh coffee from her thermos, and the stink of the southern Oregon paper mills, the sour, acid smell of ground-up wood pulp trapped beneath an increasingly heavy fog that hugged the coast.

“You wouldn’t catch me living in this stink,” Denise told him. “Bad enough to have to drive through it. I guess if you have to make a living, though, if you have a family to feed, some folks don’t have a choice.

“Me,” she said, looking over at the tomcat, “you won’t catch me tied down. Any more than you, right? Single, footloose, a little money in the bank, and I go where I want, when I want.” She didn’t seem to consider that cats don’t have money in the bank. Maybe she thought mice in the fields took the place of hard cash.

She’d picked him up early that morning at the rest stop, a long way from where he’d left his last ride. From the minute he’d approached Denise’s U-Haul, she’d been kind to him. When he hopped in the cab waiting expectantly for her to head out, she hadn’t even done a second take. She had simply laid a folded blanket atop the duffel, so he could be comfortable and enjoy the view. They had shared her burger and fries in equal portions, and her remarks to him were direct and comfortable—making him wonder what shewould do, if he answered her.

But he’d never find out, his commitment to secrecy was way too deeply embedded. Caution was bred irrefutably into his every cell, passed down for thousands of generations, and reinforced by parental discipline. The occasional transgression of some individual cat, they all knew, was recklessly dangerous.

While beyond his partially open window the sea lay flat and gray, the sluggish waves smothered by the fog, on their left they passed an occasional small lake that, despite the fog, gleamed blue and clear against a background of dark pines, lakes with no houses around them, the surrounding forest dense and wild. He watched an osprey arrow down into the fresh water; a violent splash and it rose again with a fish gleaming in its talons. The great bird’s powerful flight made him dream of soaring high above the hills, effortlessly winging the long, long miles, high above the killer wheels of speeding cars and trucks—made him wish he could dive down out of the clouds with such power as that bird, drop straight down onto his destination. And the photographs from Debbie’s album filled his mind, the little seaside village with its sheltering pines and cypress, its white beach and fishing dock, the ocean bright and clear, so very like the home his pa had described for him, when he was young. That was the first place Pa could remember, fromhis lonely kittenhood.

He couldn’t be sure he was headed for the same place. For that one spot, on this vast coast, where Misto, facing old age, might have gone, in the way so many animals longed to do. He could only pray Misto had returned there, and that he could find him.

He had left Eugene three days earlier in the backseat of a 1992 Toyota Camry, sweltering in the lap of a fat old lady who smelled of mothballs and pee. Even when he lifted an armored paw and growled at her, she couldn’t stop petting and hugging him. He had stayed in the car because they were headed south, the woman’s daughter and son taking turns driving. And because they seemed a harmless threesome, didn’t seem like people who would hurt a cat. A prime path of learning, in a young cat’s life, was to listen to his own instinctive fears, to go with what they told him—or not, and learn a hard lesson.

He had picked up the little family just outside Eugene, just two miles west of the burned-down nursing home. Their car had been parked at a lunch stop. The family had sat nearby at an outside picnic table eating hamburgers, studying an unfolded Oregon map, discussing where to stay for the night. It was already late in the day, they had come down Highway 5 from Seattle, were headed over to the coast, to Coos Bay. He’d bummed some hamburger by charming the old woman, and then conned them into a ride. He hadn’t counted on the woman’s overheated lap and her endless petting. At Coos Bay, where they pulled into a motel with a lighted VACANCY sign, he’d streaked out of the car the minute the old woman opened her door, had vanished among a tangle of shops, small gardens, and garbage cans. Had sat among the overgrown bushes listening as they called and called him, “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.” He’d watched them set a half sandwich torn in small pieces, and a used Styrofoam bowl of water, outside the motel door. He’d slept hidden in the bushes ten feet from their door, listening to their blaring television tuned to an old sitcom, and to the frequently opening door as they looked for him, and to their annoyed and worried calls.

“Maybe this was his destination,” the old woman had said querulously, just before they turned out the light, “maybe he didn’t want a home at all, maybe he was just hitching a ride.”

“Cats don’t hitch rides, Mama. Go to sleep,” and the room went dark, leaving only the faint sounds of covers rustling as the three got settled.

They called him the next morning, too, before and after partaking of the motel’s free breakfast, but at last they gave it up. Leaving a torn-up sweet roll for him from the motel’s free continental breakfast, they went on their way. As the car grew smaller and then merged onto the highway, he’d eaten the sweet roll then settled down among the bushes just at the edge of the parking lot, waiting to cop another ride south. His dreams filled with pictures from Debbie Kraft’s photo album, shots taken when Vinnie was small, before Tessa was born, apparently before Debbie and Erik began fighting and carping at each other. Pictures of a shore that blended exactly with the tales his daddy had told him, pictures of a rocky cliff above the white beach, the blue and roiling sea, the white-crested waves.

There was no picture of the man his daddy had told him about, who brought food to the feral cats, who talked to them as if they could understand him. Misto had been only a kitten when he was part of that feral band, but he’d known enough not to answer back to the man. How could it be, that Misto had been a kitten in the same village where Debbie Kraft grew up, where her husband still spent part of his working year? How strange was that?

For months after he abandoned the Kraft household, after Erik threw one too many shoes at him, he had searched Eugene for his sisters and his daddy. He’d gone to the house he remembered, from when he was a kitten, but Misto’s scent wasn’t there. Even after he went to live in the nursing home, he’d go rambling at night searching for Misto, but he never found his scent; he hadn’t seen Misto now for well over a year.

Once, after the fire, he’d returned again to the Krafts’ house, imagining Erik might indeed have abandoned his wife and children as he’d sometimes threatened, imagining he could be with Tessa again. But, lingering in the overgrown yard and then leaping up a tree to peer in through the dirty windows, he’d seen and smelled the emptiness, the abandoned trash, the discarded clothes, and knew they would not be back. And he’d gone away again, missing Tessa.

After the“mothball woman” and her family departed Coos Bay, he headed south again, traveling on the berm and through the tall grass of pastures that bordered Highway 101, warily crossing the occasional side road. It was late afternoon when he’d come at last to a rest stop set beside the highway among the pine woods. He was paw weary. The clearing was deserted save for two cars parked together near the restrooms, beyond a cluster of picnic tables. A dusty willow tree sheltered the cinder-block building, while a second willow provided shade for a half dozen picnic tables with attached benches, allbolted to concrete slabs buried in the earth. Could you trust humans with nothing? The dusty earth was embossed with numerous tire marks crossing over each other, and these were dissected by lines of long, thin paw prints that stank of coyote. He’d backed away from these, and looked the two cars over, wondering about a ride.

But both were muscle cars, an old fishtailed Chevy painted red and white, and a low-riding orange roadster with the top down; and he could hear the bantering voices of several young men echoing from the restrooms. Moving into the bushes at the edge of the clearing, he’d settled down, listening, wanting to know where they were headed and to assess their character, see whether it would be safe to try to make nice and con a ride—he was feeling desperate to move on—but already their strident voices made his skin twitch.

The voices grew louder and more raucous, then two young men emerged laughing and idly shoving each other, scruffy-looking fellows, a Caucasian and a Latino, long hair hanging down their backs, black jackets and baggy black jeans sagging wrinkled over dusty black boots. Ducking down, Pan remained still as they swung into the Chevy, watched the driver race the engine with a heavy foot and take off in a storm of dirt and gravel. With his eyes squeezed closed, he’d felt gravel pepper his face. Soon three more guys followed. Laughing loudly, they didn’t bother to open the doors of the roadster but swung in over the top, took off with a roar, another shower of dirt and rocks and blast of exhaust.

Then, blessed silence.

Pan came out of the bushes. The rest stop was deserted once more, the sun low, the only sound the hushing of the sea. Heading for the willow tree beside the restrooms, he scaled its rough bark through its lacy fronds, leaped to the warm metal roof, and curled up in the willow’s late shade. On the roof, safe from dangerous humans and coyotes, he slept. The coyotes yipped and yodeled all night.

He dreamed he was crouched, not beneath the willow tree, but in an oak outside the nursing home. In his dream, the night was red with flames, his elderly friends were being led out, or wheeled and carried out to safety from the licking flames. Then the flames were mixed with other fires: hearth fires, bonfires, blazes from other times, ghostly flames echoing from past centuries. He heard bits of conversation that were not of this time, saw strangers’ faces tangled together without order. Only when a late car pulled into the rest stop did he wake.

The wind was up, the night growing cold. He looked the driver over, but didn’t like what he saw. Between midnight and dawn only three cars came, stayed a little while as the drivers used the restroom, then left again. Pan remained where he was, on the tin roof. Dawn broke late, beneath dark clouds, the sky heavy, the wind icy. He watched a U-Haul truck rumble in off the highway and park at the edge of the pine grove just beyond the picnic tables—and that was how he met Denise Woolsey.

The driver got out, sat down at one of the tables and opened a brown bag that apparently contained her breakfast. A large woman in jeans, flat-heeled boots, soft leather jacket over a faded khaki shirt. Interested, Pan had slipped to the edge of the roof to look her over, had watched her feed a nervous squirrel a portion of her sandwich, watched her fill a paper cup of water for the little beast, and knew she’d be his next ride.

He rode with Denise as far as the San Francisco Bay Bridge, where she meant to head inland for Stockton. He tried not to think about getting out of the safe and cozy cab when she stopped for gas and to use the restroom, he didn’t relish going it alone on the mean and windy streets of the city. But he’d find his way. He always did. Somehow he was always able to sniff out an accommodating soul to carry him. In the world of concrete and fast cars he didn’t have much choice, it was either con some softhearted human, use all his charm and panache, or perish.

14

Slipping into the conference room, Joe watched Juana and the chief escort their loud, pushy female visitor back to Max’s office, both officers trying to hold their tempers. She was a big, square woman, solidly constructed, her skin tanned and coarsened from the sun as if she might be an avid golfer, her sun-streaked hair hanging limp to just below her jaw, her scowl lines deeply embedded. Where Debbie cultivateda helpless demeanor, her older sister, Esther, exuded an overriding bad temper, her dark brown eyes flat and cold, a woman Joe would prefer not to tangle with.

Following behind the chief, slipping inside his office and quickly beneath the credenza, he watched Esther settle heavily into the leather couch facing Max’s desk. Juana sat tentatively on the arm of the leather chair to Esther’s right, easing her sore knee, her black uniform stark against the tan leather. Max stepped to the credenza, reached for the coffeepot that smelled of the usual overcooked brew, turned to Esther and offered her a cup.

“No,” she said defiantly, with no touch of a graceful refusal. “Why did you call me here? Is this about my mother? What’s she done now? I just got back in town, I haven’t even unpacked. Whatever kind of trouble she’s gotten into, I’m not responsible for her, and I don’t appreciate your messages. My husband uses that answering machine for business.”

“Your husband is with Kraft Realty?” Max asked, knowing perfectly well that Perry Fowler owned half the business. She nodded curtly. He said, “I was at your house twice, Mrs. Fowler. I left messages on the door, and then two e-mails asking you to come in.”

“I’m here now. What do you want?”

“I asked you in here with bad news. To tell you that your mother died yesterday morning.”

The woman’s eyes widened, her mouth pursed tight, but Joe couldn’t read her expression. Was it pain? Remorse? Some sort of distaste? “What did she die of?” she said. “Did she drinkthat much, to go into some kind of alcoholic seizure?”

“Why do you say that?”

“That’s the first thing you think of, with a drunk. Or did her heart give out, from abuse?”

“There was a fire,” Max said. “Her house burned, there was little left, just blackened timbers and ashes.” Put off by the woman, was he goading her to see what she might reveal? For sure, he was taking a cop’s keen pleasure in seeing her squirm. He didn’t trust this woman, and the tomcat felt completely in tune with the chief’s sentiments.

Esther sat pressing one hand to her mouth, her other hand fisted so tight her knuckles had whitened. Max said, more gently,“She was dead before the fire broke out.”

This seemed to ease her, help her regain her composure.“Who have you notified?”

“Your sister, Debbie. She preferred that we notify you.”

“If Mother died before the fire, howdid she die?”

“She was poisoned.”

“Poisoned? What did she get hold of? Or, what was she taking?” she said suspiciously. “Was she on some kind of pills?”

He didn’t answer.

She was quiet for some time.“You’re not saying she … that someonegave her poison? Oh, you must be mistaken. You’re not saying she was murdered? Why would someone do that? Who would take the trouble? Not for money. She had nothing, whatever money she earned, she drank away.”

“She could have drunk the poison by accident,” Max said, “though it doesn’t seem likely.”

“I can’t believe someone would do that. Are you saying they burned her house, too?”

“We’re not sure yet whether it was arson.”

“I can certainly imagine her setting the house on fire by accident, you know how they are when they drink. She was never careful, she’d leave the electric heater too close to the bed, leave something on the stove with the burner on high, dash over when she saw flames, smother them with a wet towel.”

She didn’t ask how Debbie was taking their mother’s death, she didn’t ask if Debbie was on her way down from Oregon. She showed little sign of pain or loss, no pity. Nor did she ask about Billy. Didn’t she care that her sister’s little boy might have died in the fire or been badly burned? Max glanced at Davis, whose stern face was ungiving, then turned back to Esther. “When did you last see your mother?”

Esther hesitated as if thinking back.“This last Christmas. She was in jail overnight for drunk driving. I had to come down here Christmas morning to bail her out, so you can understand why I dislike this place. Check your records, you’ll see. Seven o’clock Christmas morning, I have to bail my mother out of jail.”

“She spent Christmas with you, then?”

“No. I dropped her off at her place. We were having people in. She … doesn’t mix well with our friends. As it was, I had to leave all the preparations to the housekeeper.”

No wonder that old woman drank,Joe thought, knowing she’d raised a daughter like that. Except,he thought, which came first? Did Hesmerra drink because of her two sour daughters? Or did Esther turn mean-spirited, and Debbie self-centered and manipulative, because of their mother’s drinking? Who was the cause and who was the victim?

But now Hesmerra was the final victim, the prey of someone spiking her drinks, offering an embellishment she hadn’t even tasted in her early morning toddy. Max said, “Before you saw her at Christmas, how long since you’d last seen her?”

Esther shrugged.“Maybe a year.”

“What was the problem between you?”

“The drink,” Esther said shortly. “And other things. Family matters, from the past.”

“Such as?”

“Captain Harper, that is private business, that has nothing to do with her death. I still can’t believe you think she was murdered.”

“It’s always possible she took her own life,” Max said. She didn’t answer to that. He said, “Are you not concerned about your nephew? You might like to know that he wasn’t hurt in the fire.”

She looked at him coldly.“I’m not taking the boy in, if that’s what you’re thinking. Is that why you summoned me here? I’ll make this plain, Captain Harper. I want nothing to do with that boy, I’m perfectly content to see Child Welfare take him.”

Max and Juana simply looked at the woman. He turned away only when the phone buzzed, the dispatcher ringing through though he knew Max was interviewing. Through the intercom, the young rookie’s voice sounded tinny and uncertain. “Captain, you might want to take this one.” The way he said “this one,” Joe felt his heart quicken. Everyone in the department knew that certain, informative calls were to go directly to the chief. As Max picked up the phone, switching off the speaker, Joe bellied closer beneath the credenza. With his ears sharply forward, he could barely make out the higher tones of a female voice, though he couldn’t tell what she was saying, couldn’t even tell whether it was Dulcie or Kit. He watched Max hesitate, his gaze returning to Esther. “Hold on aminute.” Then, to Esther, “Detective Davis will take you up to the front for fingerprinting. Thank you for coming in.”

Esther rose, glaring at him.“I don’t appreciate that you demand I come in, and then dismiss me just as rudely. I don’t appreciate that you order me to submit to fingerprinting, like some common criminal.”

Juana Davis put a hand on Esther’s elbow, guiding her to the door. “Mrs. Fowler, this is standard procedure, we need the prints of all family members, to eliminate them from other prints we might lift at the scene.”

Esther said,“If the house burned to the ground, how could you find any fingerprints at all?”

Max waited until Davis had removed the woman and had pulled the door closed behind them. Leaning back in his swivel chair, he flipped on the speaker—testimony, Joe thought, to the comfortable way the chief now related to these anonymous calls. Years ago, when Joe and Dulcie first began using the phone to pass on information, every call from the unnamed snitch had made the chief edgy, as nervous, himself, as his four-legged informants. But now a rapport had developed, a trust and ease as if between old friends that made the tomcat smile.

“Sorry,” Max said into the phone, “someone was in my office.”

Now, with the speaker on, Joe smiled at his tabby lady’s voice, innocent but businesslike, a savvy young female quite in charge of the situation: “You wanted to talk with Emmylou Warren?” And now, with Esther Fowler gone and the door shut, Joe strolled out from beneath the credenza, yawned and stretched, looked idly at the desk, leaped, and curled up in Max’s overflowing in-box, yawning in the chief’s face.

“Yes, we’d like to talk with her,” Max was saying. Joe closed his eyes and tucked his nose under as if concerned only with a soothing nap.

“She’s up near where you raided that meth house,” Dulcie said. “I’m watching her as we speak, she’s going from door to door, asking about some lost cat. I think she’s living in her car, an old green Chevy, full of blankets, household stuff, clothes. It’s parked at the corner above Clyde and Ryan’s place, she just … Gotta go!” she said with alarm. Joe could almost hear her hiss of fear. There was a click, and the phone went dead. Involuntarily, Joe’s claws raked into a Department of Justice report. What had happened? Had she been caught using someone’s phone? Had she slipped into someone’s house, near where Emmylou was working the neighborhood, and the householder caught her? But Ryan and Clyde were there, why hadn’t she used one of their phones? Or had she, and Debbie walked in on her? Or Vinnie? The very thought made him shiver. And, what was Emmylou doing, looking for a lost cat, when her own cats were safe with John Firetti?

Beside him, Max sat frowning, looking irritated and impatient, then he buzzed the dispatcher and sent a patrol car to pick up Emmylou. He looked up when Davis returned, and he filled her in. Davis said,“What’s she doing in that neighborhood? Well, hell. Is that old woman part of the action up there?”

“Could she be looking for a place to rent?” Max said. “Half those houses are empty, maybe she thinks she can find a cheap room.” Then, “Didn’t one of the Kraft Realtors live just above that neighborhood? Alain Bent? Three or four blocks above the meth house, that white brick with the big front patio? Wasn’t she Erik Kraft’s sales partner, until she moved away?”

Davis nodded.“I understand she kept the house, waiting for the market to pick up.”

Sprawled across the in-box, Joe lay trying to put it together. Alain Bent had lived just above the active foreclosure area, with its suspicious occupants and a busy meth operation. Alain’s partner was the husband of Debbie Kraft, Hesmerra’s middle daughter; the wives of both Kraft partners were her daughters. Hesmerra held cleaning jobs that gave her access to Alain Bent’s house and to the Kraft offices. What the hell did all this add up to? No good telling himself this was a matter of coincidence; it wasn’t. It was simply a tangle of knots neither he nor the department had yet sorted out. He was burning to race out and find Dulcie, find out what else she’d seen, make sure she was all right after that aborted phone call. But he didn’t want to miss anything. Max said, “Why exactly did Alain leave town? She had a successful following, I heard she did very well.”

“Left about six months ago. The story I got, a client complained to the real estate board that she was trading down. I’m not sure this is illegal, but it’s right next door. She takes a buyer and seller into escrow, buyer deposits a check for the down payment, at the agreed price. Then, while the sellers are distracted packing up their moving boxes, she brings in a second appraiser, tells the sellers this is common practice. When the house is appraised for less, she tells them they’ll have to lower the price—and they’re already in escrow, or supposed to be.

“The way I heard it, she pulled this on old people who might be a little confused, often na?ve about real estate transactions, old couples anxious to sell out and get moved into assisted living quarters, people with no adult children to look out for their interests. An old couple, maybe one of them sick, both of them worn out sorting through their household goods and packing up. Sometimes it doesn’t take much to get them to agree to the lower price, anything to close the sale—and all the time, they’re supposed to be already in escrow.

“Of course the loan officer’s in on the scam. If the sellers get edgy and make a fuss, loan officer claims the check for the down payment was never actually deposited into escrow, that it’s still waiting in the file for the final price resolution.” Davis smiled. “What happened this time, the sellers weren’t having any, they went to the real estate board.” Her square face, so often too solemn, lit with pleasure. “Everything hit the fan. Loan officer and mortgage officer were fired. Mortgage company made good to the seller. I’m guessing either Kraft Realty sent her packing, orshe left before they could fire her.”

The two officers were silent, their satisfied looks matching closely the tomcat’s own hidden smile as the three enjoyed a rare moment of justice.

Max said,“Alain Bent and Erik Kraft were partners, they worked most of their sales together. Makes you wonder if he was in on the scam.”

Davis nodded.“Apparently Fowler wants nothing more to do with Alain. Their latest ads, he’s removed her picture. As to Esther Fowler—whatwill happen to Billy? I’m sure he wouldn’t choose to live with her, even if she did want him.”

Max shook his head.“For all intents and purposes, the kid’s an orphan. I don’t want to bring in Children’s Services. Right now, he’s staying up at our place. He has a permit to work part of the school day; I talked with the principal this morning, and that’s all in order. I didn’t say much, just that hewas doing some work for me, didn’t mention where he’s living and, interestingly, he didn’t ask.”

Joe hoped Max could keep it that way. Maybe, one way or another, Erik Kraft had used some pull to stifle questions about Billy. When Davis left, the tomcat slipped up the hall and out through the glass door, on the heels of an unhappy young woman who had just paid a stout traffic ticket. Scrambling up the oak tree, he headed fast for the hills and the neighborhood where Dulcie’s phone call had so abruptly ended. It was always touchy to break into a house and use a stranger’s phone and not be overheard, to get out again fast, before you were discovered.

Even the matter of using their own phones, at home, was stressful. Clyde’s and Ryan’s, and Wilma’s phones all had caller ID blocking, but you never knew when it would fail. After the Damens’ phones had done that twice, Clyde did a daily check on the house phones, to be safe. Wilma had researched the possibility of falsifying their numbers, but such a call had to be made through a computer, and that was more than a cat in a hurry could deal with.

No, there had to be a better way. He hadn’t really addressed the problem fully, but one idea had promise—he should have checked it out when he had the chance, before he woke to see flames licking at the sky, before all hell broke loose. Annoyed at himself for his procrastination, he headed fast up the hills. Leaping from oak limb to roof and across the chasms of narrow alleys, he could only pray his lady hadn’t, while making that call, stepped with all four paws into a tangle of trouble.

15

The rough wood siding of Ryan and Clyde’s remodel badly needed paint, the roof looked frail even for a cat to walk on, the yard resembled an untended vacant lot given over to stray dogs. The neighborhood, even at midday, seemed dark, the clouds low, the giant cypress trees, originally planted far apart as spindly saplings, now spread their reaching arms over the frail cottages as if to bury them. The Damens had bought their gray board-and-batten shack just after Christmas but so far had done no work at all as Ryan finished up Hanni’s remodel, and a new house, pushing their own investment aside. The one-bedroom dwelling was as grim inside as out; Debbie Kraft would have to make do with a good cleaning, provided she was willing. Having pushed into their lives uninvited, demanding bed and board, how could she refuse to work for her shelter?

How, indeed? Ryan thought as she pulled the king cab onto the cracked drive, waving Debbie in to park beside her. It was over an hour since they’d left home in their two-vehicle parade, she and Clyde trying not to lose their tempers as they detoured for Debbie to buy groceries, again when she insisted they swing by the school Vinnie would be attending, and the nearest day care for Tessa. “So I’ll know where these things are,” Debbie said. “Life will be hard enough if I have to get a job, with two children to take care of.” She didn’t ask if Ryan and Clyde had time for side trips, or if this particular day care was safe and caring; her concern was that it was convenient, as close as possible to the cottage. “If I have to go to work, I can’t be running all over dragging kids, I won’t have the time for that.” Even Rock looked disgusted, he’d had enough of Debbie’s brassy voice. Ryan had to grin when she thought what Joe would have said. She didn’t know where he’d gone, but he’d disappeared in a flash the minute they started loading the car.

Now, the minute Debbie parked, Vinnie piled out, stood scowling at the frame shack, the front door peeling long strips of gray paint, the rusty window screens deeply dented, two of them torn, and a long crack across the corner of the front window.

“I’m not staying here,” Vinnie said. Turning, she stared between the trees, up the hill to where the woods ended, where the houses were larger and well kept, the gardens trimmed and bright with sun, and her gaze fixed on the rambling white brick house with its deep front patio. “I want to stay upthere, I want to go backthere, that’s—”

“Go unload the car,” Debbie snapped, grabbing her arm.

“Why can’t we—”

“Unload the car. Now.”

Ryan and Clyde, glancing at each other, watched the two with interest. Why would the child fix on a strange house, what did she mean,“go back there”? What was that about?

Earlier, stopping at the little village grocery, they had taken the two little girls into the king cab while Debbie went in to do her shopping. Watching the kids gave them an excuse not to accompany her, not to be present at the checkout to watch her fumble over her purse, making excuses that she was short of cash. In the pickup, Vinnie had sat in the front seat between them, sulking, while Tessa crawled into the backseat and snuggled up with Rock. It wasn’t long until Vinnie crawled in back, too, crowding her sister. Taking off her shoe, she began to poke it at Rock, jamming the toe into his silky hide so that Rock was forced to either snap at her or scramble away to the far corner. He scrambled, lunging away as Ryan reached over and snatched theshoe.

“You do that again, Vinnie, you’ll get this shoe, hard, across your backside.”

Vinnie had stared at her defiantly, while four-year-old Tessa moved closer to Rock, smoothing her hand gently down his sleek shoulder. The Weimaraner nosed at her with infinite patience, though her small hand must surely have tickled. As Tessa stroked his satiny warmth, a little smile bloomed on the child’s face. Only when Vinnie began talking about Hesmerra’s death did Tessa’s face crumple. “Our grandmother burned to death,” Vinnie said, standing up on the seat watching with satisfaction as Tessa’s tears welled up.

“Your gran did not burn to death,” Ryan said. “Your grandmother was already in heaven when the fire started. The fire didn’t hurt her at all.”

“There’s no such thing as heaven. How do you know she was dead?”

“I read the coroner’s report. The doctor who did the death investigation.”

Vinnie smiled wickedly.“That’s where they cut your body open, take out all your insides, and cut them up in little pieces.”

Tessa went white. Clyde looked like he could happily take the coroner’s knife to Vinnie.What can you expect?Ryan thought. Look how Debbie was about Hesmerra’s death, hard as nails. Her own mother. She reached back and took Tessa’s hand. “Your grandmother is in heaven. When she died, she left her body behind. She flew right out of that body, she doesn’t need it anymore, she’s an angel now, and she can fly free.” This might be unorthodox, might seem trite to an adult, but it was what four-year-old Tessa needed to hear—and it was infinitely effective. Tessa clutched Ryan’s hand, looking up at her, her brown eyes trusting, wanting very much to believe her.

“Do you know how a caterpillar makes its little nest?” Ryan said.

The child nodded.“A cocoon. They showed us in Sunshine School.”

“That’s right, it wraps itself all in silk and goes to sleep. And do you know what happens when it wakes up?”

Tessa wiped at her tears.

“When it crawls out of its silk nest, it’s no longer a caterpillar. It has turned into a beautiful butterfly, as beautiful as a princess. It spreads its wings and flies away on the soft wind.” Ryan stroked Tessa’s hair. “For a person to be dead is just the same. When your gran died, she slept for a little while all warm and safe just like the butterfly. She woke up in a most beautiful place, and she had turned into a lovely young woman, even more beautiful than when she was young, in this world.” Ryan didn’t dare look at Clyde; she could feel him raise an eyebrow. She only knew that she believed what she said, she believed something like that happened—and that right now, Tessa needed to believe it, she needed not to dwell on her sister’s ugly interpretation.

“Mama doesn’t want a funeral,” Vinnie told them. “She said—”

“That’s enough, Vinnie.”

“If there’s a funeral she has to see Aunt Esther. Mama says no one can choose what kind of sister or relatives they get.”

Ryan sighed.“I’m sure that’s true. If Tessa could choose her sister, she’d surely choose a kinder and more caring child than you.”

Vinnie glared, and turned away scowling, fiddling with the button on her sweater. She looked up again only when Debbie passed by the pickup wheeling a grocery cart full of bulging paper bags, heading for her car. Clyde put his hand on the door meaning to get out and help her, but Ryan stopped him with a scowl. She didn’t enjoy being cruel, but if you gave Debbie an inch, she was all over you. They watched her cram the bags into her car, into the spaces the children had left when they changed cars. The meal choices Ryan could see sticking up looked to be all boxes of crackers, cookies, and quick-fix meals full of unpronounceable chemicals. No sign of fresh fruits or vegetables, the items that would ordinarily be on top. When the car was loaded, Ryan headed for the day-care center where Debbie meant to park Tessa while Vinnie was in school. Their two vehicles paused before the one-story redwood complex only long enough for Debbie to take a look, then they led her on up the hill eight blocks to the rambling elementary with its dark-shingled roofs. Location, close proximity to where she’d be living, was apparently far more important to Debbie than the safety and quality of either establishment. Ryan had pointed out where the school bus stopped, and then headed on up to the cottage.

Two centuries earlier, this hill had been open grazing land, part of the vast open ranges inhabited by longhorn cattle, and by deer, cougar, and grizzly bear. When civilization overtook the wild, when the land was broken up and cross-fenced into smaller ranches, and then later into farms, this hill had become pasture for dairy cows. In the nineteen thirties, several small adjoining hillside farms were bought up by a retired civil engineer who thought to construct a community of vacation cottages and rent them out. He built the little houses solidly enough, but without any discernible imagination. As he grew older he had sold off many of the cottages as second homes or income rentals. Some of the buyers added porches, second-floor bedrooms, walled patios. In subsequent years the houses were turned over again and again as the market inflated. Everyone made a profit as real estate prices soared. Then suddenly, under changed federal laws, mortgages were easier to obtain: One hardly needed a down payment or any collateral at all. A buying frenzy began among families with little or no savings. Soon the new owners were maxing out their credit cards on new cars, a motorcycle, an RV or fast boat, trusting the government to bail them out when they let their mortgage payments slide. There was always tomorrow, they and the government were in this together, Uncle Sam would help them out. Thus was the beginning of the financial landslide, repeated a million times over combined with more complicated economic manipulations, at government level, until the bottom fell out, the stock market dropped, businesses began to close, folks lost their investments and lost their jobs.

When the default on home loans mounted, homes were repossessed and the occupants left the area. Folks who had kept cash and real assets at hand began to buy up abandoned, repossessed homes. Ryan and Clyde bought three cottages with cash from the sales of the antique cars Clyde had so lovingly restored. They meant to improve their purchases, wait for the market to pick up again, make a good profit, and leave something nice in the place of neglected and empty dwellings.

Erik Kraft was one of the first and heaviest buyers, making purchases all over the village. Though he had made no discernible improvements in the shabbier places, he had already turned over nearly half of them at a profit. He’d give a place a rough mowing and trimming and, in the worst cases, a coat of cheap paint. Ironic, Ryan thought, that Erik’s estranged wife would be living—practically in poverty, as she put it—in the very area where Erik must already have made a couple of million dollars’ worth of clearprofit.

But the saddest victims of the downturn, Ryan thought, were the abandoned pets left behind like broken toys for trash pickup, innocent animals who had become victims of a vast financial war. So far CatFriends, her volunteer group, had taken in nine dogs and trapped twenty-three abandoned cats, settling them all in volunteer foster homes until new and permanent homes could be found. Ryan wasn’t sure how many creatures the local Animal Friends group had saved, as well, but the two organizations tried to help each other. Yet even with the work of over two dozen volunteers, the police continued to field complaints about stray cats.

Calls came in not only about abandoned animals around the empty homes, but about the cottages themselves. Often, lights came on late at night in empty, unoccupied houses, then soon went dark again. Rented houses had half a dozen decrepit cars parked in the drive and on the street, and many had trash piled up in the yards. And then, of course, there was the meth house, bulging black trash bags stacked in the side yard, to be hauled away in the small hours. That was why the department had been alerted, the black plastic bags smelling strongly of chemicals. Strangest of all, perhaps, was a FOR SALE sign going up in the weedy yard of a decrepit cottage, soon to come down again as if the house had been sold, but then to be replaced a week later. Another FOR SALE sign. Another apparent sale, then soon another sign, in a seemingly endless two-step.

Ryan’s sister, Hanni, had bought one of the cottages early on, before the blight was apparent, and had at once set about restoring it, contracting with Ryan to do the heavy professional work; Hanni was an interior designer, not a builder. When events in the neighborhood began to make her nervous, still she moved ahead. Now, the renovation was almost finished, waiting for the interior hardware and window shutters, while Ryan and Clyde hadn’t yet begun on their own remodel. At least now their shabby investment would have an occupant. When Ryan pushed the front door open the cold, damp wind caught it, slamming it against the wall. She stepped aside so Debbie could enter, directly into the living room.

Standing in the open doorway, you could see right on into the bedroom and the tiny bath beyond, and with a full view of the kitchen to the left. There was no furniture, only a very old refrigerator in the corner of the little kitchen and an ancient gas cook stove that Ryan had been assured by her plumber wouldn’t blow up or asphyxiate anyone. If the house had any virtue it was the high, raftered ceiling and strong beams, the surprisingly solid construction. This was its one redeeming feature—plus the location and price, she thought, hearing again Joe Grey’s caustic remarks about their obsessive bargain hunting.

As Clyde joined her on the tiny porch, putting his arm around her, Vinnie crowded in past them, scuffing her shoes across the dusty gray linoleum that floored all the rooms. She peered with disgust into the small, dim bedroom and ancient kitchen.“I’m not staying here, we can’t livehere.” Moving to the grimy window, she stood looking up the hill. “There’s real beds up there, we—”

“We have our sleeping bags,” Debbie snapped. “Bring in your toys and shoes.”

“But I don’t—”

“Now!” Debbie said, her glare silencing the child. Clyde had started to speak when, above them, a hard thump hit the roof. They all four stepped back, as if the ceiling might give way. Next minute, a scrambling of claws shook the cypress tree beside the house, and Joe Grey leaped down to the hood of the king cab. While Debbie’s attention was diverted, Vinnie raced out across the yard and was gone, running up the street, her long blond hair whipped by the cold wind, her fists clenched. Behind her Tessa appeared from nowhere, racing after her. Debbie ran after them, yelling as if they were runaway dogs escaped from their leashes. Ryan pressed her face against Clyde’s shoulder, trying hard not to laugh.

Vinnie made it almost to the white brick house, Tessa trying in vain to keep up. Passing Tessa, Debbie grabbed Vinnie by the arm, jerked her around, shouting. Clyde turned away, disgusted, and went to unload Debbie’s car. Ryan looked at Joe, on the hood of the king cab. “What’s Vinnie after, up there? Can she have been in that place? In Alain Bent’s house? How could she have been?”

“Maybe she looked in the windows,” Joe said. “Saw furniture and beds.” He turned to look at Ryan. “Orhas the kid been inside?”

“They only arrived last night.” Ryan’s green eyes looked into his. “She’s been with us all morning.”

Joe stretched out on the pickup’s warm hood, wondering, his back pummeled by the cold wind, which smelled of rain. Together they watched the family saga as Debbie dragged Vinnie home, scolding all the way. Ryan scratched Joe behind his ears then picked him up, draped him over her shoulder in a manner few people were allowed, listening to his purr as they watched Debbie haul Vinnie into the house, and Tessa slip in behind. Debbie’s angry scolding seemed overkill—what was she so mad about?

16

In the dumpy little kitchen, Debbie had torn open the wrapper of a loaf of bread and was hastily putting together sandwiches for the children, maybe hoping to keep Vinnie from whining any more about the white brick house. The kitchen counter was crowded with grocery bags that were still not unpacked except for the bread and peanut butter. Joe watched from Ryan’s shoulder as Vinnie grabbed the open jar, stuck her fingers in, retrieving a big glob, and licked them clean, her small face pinched with anger.

Though Joe had come up looking for Dulcie, hoping she’d escaped whatever tight squeak she’d gotten herself into with that aborted phone call, he’d found no sign of her. No scent of her, nothing. Coming up the hill, he’d passed two cops he knew, dressed in blue coveralls with the water department insignia on the pockets and sleeves. They were kneeling together at the curb beneath a spreading cypress tree, pretending to examine a water meter, their position giving them a straightaway view beneath the branches to the meth house. Did Harper expect other members of that ragtag gang to return to their little home business? He had passed Ryan’s sister Hanni, too, pulling her blue Chrysler van up to the one-car garage of her own remodel. Ryan was nearly finished with the exterior, had covered the gray board siding with white stucco and added a new tile roof as deep blue as an autumn sky.

Now as Ryan headed outdoors from her own cottage, away from the crowded kitchen and away from Debbie, Joe looked from her shoulder up the hill, scanning the rooftops for Dulcie. He looked past the rambling white house, but then quickly back as two dark streaks flashed across the roof into the shadow of the pines that sheltered the double garage; the sight of Dulcie, safe, made him inadvertently dig his claws into Ryan’s shoulder.

“Hey!” she said, pulling his claws free.

“Sorry.” He patted her cheek with a soft paw. “Gotta go, explain later,” and with a leap into the overhanging cypress tree, he left her, heading up the hill from roof to rising roof, looking for his lady.

There, they appeared again, two dark shapes barely visible atop the garage, two pairs of sharp ears silhouetted against the low clouds. Racing to join them, he greeted Dulcie with nose pushes and purrs.“What happened to you? You were caught with someone’s phone? I was in Harper’s office when you clicked off.”

“Emmylou saw me.”

“Oh my God. She heard you using the phone? She—”

“She didn’thear me,” Dulcie interrupted, “she saw me through the glass. When I saw her looking in, I pretended to be batting at a moth. She was outside, and I was talking softly, she couldn’t haveheard me.”

“I hope to hell not,” he said crossly.

“We saw her on the street, going door to door asking about two lost cats. She came up into the patio, sat down on that low wall beside the camellias. Took a sandwich out of her pocket, unwrapped it, one of those dry-looking sandwiches in yellow paper. I was inside the house, it was a perfect timeto phone, without losing her.”

“How did you get in?”

Dulcie smiled.“A basement window, all locked but the last one.” She lashed her tail smugly. “Broken, rusty lock, and when we pushed the window it swung right in. Come on, I’ll show you.”

But Joe paused, watching Kit. All this time, she hadn’t said a word, she sat apart from them, staring off into space. Watching her, Joe twitched an ear at Dulcie. “What?” he said softly.

“We were with Misto,” Dulcie said. “Her head’s full of stories, that’s all. He talked about Pan, too. He misses Pan, and he’s worried because of the nursing home fire. Kit’s worried for them both.”

Joe shifted uneasily, wishing Kit had never told Misto about Pan, that she had never upset the old cat. The tortoiseshell was so damned impulsive, as unpredictable as the leaps of a grasshopper. Well, what was done, was done. He said,“What about Emmylou? What did she do when she saw you?”

“She looked puzzled to see a cat in there, and when she finished her lunch she walked all around the house, looking to see how I got in. I watched from above, from the windows.” Dulcie smiled. “I’d kicked the window closed when I jumped, she didn’t have a clue, she went right on by. The next thing I know she’s at the front door and it sounded like she had a key, trying to get inside.”

“But she—” Kit began, suddenly paying attention.

“That’s when Kit appeared,” Dulcie said.

“I watched her from the roof and the key wouldn’t turn,” she said. “She tried and tried and seemed really sure it was the right key, so maybe Alain Bent changed the locks when she moved and Emmylou didn’t know and—”

“Where did she get a key?” Joe said. “From Hesmerra? Did Hesmerra have it copied when she was with the cleaning crew? Maybe on her lunch hour, then turned the keys in as usual at the end of the day?”

“Why not?” Dulcie said. “Maybe Emmylou found the key in the burn, maybe knew where she kept it?”

“So,why did she?” Joe wondered. “What did she do when she couldn’t get in?”

“She sat down on the patio wall,” Dulcie said, “sat there looking at the house as if deciding what to do next.”

“But then Ryan’s pickup came up the hill,” Kit said, “and Debbie’s car behind it, and when Emmylou saw them she slipped away through the backyard and that’s the last we saw of her, she vanished like when a rabbit smells a coyote, and there’s something else, too. Debbie’s been inside, you can smell her and the little kids all around the door on the threshold and then inside the house.”

Joe said,“I’m guessing they stayed there, maybe one night, maybe more, before they ever showed up at our place.” He told them about Vinnie saying there were beds to sleep in, up there in that house, and then racing away up the hill.

“What’s Debbie up to?” Dulcie said, looking down the hill to where Debbie was hauling in a last load from her car. “What would she want in Alain Bent’s house? How did … ?” She looked at Joe. “It has to do with Erik. He and Alain were partners—or were they more than partners?”

Joe smiled.“If they were, maybe Erik had a key. Say Debbie found out they were lovers,” he said, “found a key she suspected was Alain’s … How tempting to copy it and then do a bit of snooping, get the goods on him.”

“But why?” Dulcie said. “She wouldn’t need to know he was sleeping around, to get a divorce in California.”

“Maybe for child custody,” Joe said. “Except,” he said, “who’d fight to keep Vinnie? Maybe some other reason. Looks like Alain was into some real estate scams or maybe, who knows, Erik and Alain together. Debbie wants to know more, to make some mischief for them. She decides to get intoAlain’s desk, into her personal papers. Who knows what she’d find, what trouble she could make? She could have come down here from Eugene any time she chose. Catch a commuter flight, round trip just for a day while the kids were in school and nursery school? But as it worked out, she drove down, left Eugene for good.”

“With Alain’s key in her pocket,” Dulcie said. “Alainis beautiful, so slim, and her dark sleek hair done up in that fancy chignon, and her elegant suits. You’ve seen her pictures, of course Debbie would be jealous.”

“Beautiful,” Joe said, “and as cold as a mannequin in Saks’s window.” He looked down into the wide front patio with its angles and nooks and lush plantings, its different level walls and neatly tended flower beds. “Alain might have been fired and moved away, Perry Fowler might not be intouch with her any longer, but she isn’t neglecting her property. Maybe she does have it listed, with another firm, and they’re seeing that someone’s watering.”

“And pruning,” Dulcie said. There wasn’t a dead bloom or fallen leaf anywhere, and they could see fresh cuts where the red geraniums had been clipped back. “Or could Emmylou be taking care of the yard? When Alain moved away, could she have hired her? Was that why she was here? Maybe …maybe when she was pruning she found a key hidden under a flowerpot, the way people do? Found it just today, and thought she had a way in? Sheis homeless, shedoes need a place to stay. She finds the key and thinks she’s found a place to crash. Only, Alain has changed the locks.”

“Maybe,” Joe said. But something about the scenario was off. As little as he’d observed of Emmylou, he wasn’t sure she’d be bold enough to move into someone’s house, when workmen might be scheduled to come in, or maybe other Realtors, to have a look, if the housewas going on the market. The garage roof was in shadow now, around them, the clouds low and heavy above them. Moving closer together with their backs to the chill wind, the three cats tried to sort out what they knew about Alain Bent: She was Erik Kraft’s sales partner, and maybe his lover. She’d not only been fired, but moved away, maybe before her other scams caught up with her. How muchdid Debbie know about Alain? What had she been after, when she broke in?

“And what’s Emmylou Warren’s connection?” Dulcie said. “Will that lead back to Hesmerra and maybe to Hesmerra’s murder?”

Joe looked down into the patio of the silent, locked house. He rose, nudged Dulcie, and the three cats skinned down a bougainvillea trellis to the warm paving and headed for the basement window.

Pushing the little window open, they peered down into the dark cellar. Its cold breath chilled their noses; it smelled of damp cement, sour earth, and mouse droppings.“How deep?” Joe said, frowning down into the blackness. “Looks like about seven feet. How did you get out? The boxes?”

“Yes,” Dulcie said. “I pushed that stack of boxes over,” she said, glancing down at the dark cartons piled against the wall directly beneath them. “I could just see them there in the corner where more daylight comes in; my shoulder’s still sore from shoving them. The labels say ‘dishes’ but who knows what’s packed in them. They smell sour, like old clothes.” Slipping in through the window, she dropped down onto the stack, and to the floor. Kit followed, and then Joe, each one careful not to tip over their means of escape.

The cellar was L-shaped, following the lines of the house above. The dark corners and the spaces behind the furnace and water heater were thick with cobwebs, and garlands of cobwebs hung down from the floor joists. Three folded aluminum chairs leaned against one wall, their plastic seats frayed, and gray with mildew. There was no scent of Debbie or the little girls down here, and they padded up the dusty wooden stairs. Leaping at the knob, Dulcie curved her paws around it, swinging and kicking until the door flew open.

The house was dim, the rooms lit coldly as the coming storm gathered. They had come up into the front entry, the basement door at right angles to the more impressive front door with its deep carvings, and that did indeed smell of Debbie and the children. A smear of chocolate candy had been smashed into the grout between the floor tiles.

Across the tile entry, six steps led down to a sunken living room, which was only half furnished. The clay tile floor was bare, but Dulcie could imagine richly colored throw rugs. There was a creamy leather couch but no end tables or coffee table or lamps. White walls, vast windows looking out on the lowering gray sky and the trees and roofs below, white ceiling crossed by burnished oak rafters. The house was silent, no hush of footsteps, no thump or rustle of someone hurrying their way, summoned by the sound of the cellar door. Already, Kit had left them, racing down into the sunken room to look at the fireplace wall.

The entire wall was painted in an intricate mural, a floor-to-ceiling scene in rich colors, though Joe and Dulcie couldn’t see the subject clearly from the angle where they stood, up on the dining balcony. Moving out from beneath the carved table and chairs, Dulcie leaned out through the rail, to look.

“Medieval,” she said softly. “Oh, my. It’s beautiful.” Below her, Kit sat in the center of the room looking up at the mural, her fluffy tail wrapped around her, twitching with excitement, her front paws kneading at the tiles in nervous concentration as she absorbed each detail of the ancient scene. From the look on her face, Dulcie knew the tortoiseshell was already transported back into time, how many centuries ago?

“It’s a beautiful home,” Dulcie said. “Even if Alain was fired, it’s strange she’d leave this, and leave the village, when Molena Point’s doing better than much of the country. Couldn’t she get a job somewhere else, another real estate firm? You’ve seen the ads. The high-end houses are still selling, some of the really wealthy people are doing just fine. Where else could a Realtor make better money?”

Joe said,“Word gets around. If she was pulling scams on her buyers, who else would hire her?” Out through the wide living room windows, they could see down the hill to the roof of Ryan and Clyde’s cottage, Ryan’s truck still parked at the curb. Two blocks over was Hanni’s deep blue roof, her own van parked halfway into the garage, and two blocks to the right of Hanni’s, forming a rough triangle, the meth house stood forlorn with its curled shingles and overgrown yard. A neighborhood in transition, people forced to move away, uneasy events among the homes they left behind, dramas that couldwell fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw. Was a pattern taking shape here that would lead directly back to Hesmerra and to the fire, and to the poison that killed her?

Below them, Kit sat with her back to the view, her attention centuries away on a narrow, cobbled street between houses built of wattle and thatched roofs, a medieval street that must speak deeply to the tortoiseshell’s romantic dreams. To Joe, dreams of the past were pointless, ancient history was, after all, forever gone and useless, and uncomfortably he turned away. Silently Dulcie followed him, amused and annoyed by her practical and hardheaded tomcat.

The house wasn’t large. A hall led back to a bedroom and bath on the right, and to a master bedroom straight ahead that took up the whole back of the house. The bed in the smaller room smelled of the two little girls and of chocolate candy, but it was neatly made. Padding into the master suite, they looked outthrough the glass doors to a back patio, its tile paving matching the interior floors. An empty swimming pool just outside the glass was covered with heavy, transparent plastic that sagged beneath a pile of pine needles and oak leaves from the woods beyond the white brick wall. Against the wall itself stood oversized pots of tall, drought-resistant grasses in shades of bronze and gold.

In the bedroom, the only furniture remaining was a king-sized bed that smelled of Debbie, and a large office desk along one wall, with a swivel typing chair. The closet was all but empty, a few limp jackets hanging at one end, a lone hanger fallen to the floor. A large suitcase lay on the floor, too, and was heavy when they pushed at it; and when Dulcie leaped up to the closet shelf, its dusty surface showed the marks where two smaller bags had been removed. She glanced down at Alain’s expensive leather suitcase. “Why did she leave that?” The shelf smelled of Debbie, too, and she could see where Debbie had smeared the dust, probably reaching above her head, searching, for what? She dropped down again to sniff at the leather bag. It was secured with a little padlock; maybe they’d find the key, maybe not. The whole room smelled of Debbie, as did every drawer in the master bath, as if she’d gone through the entire house.

While Dulcie went to inspect the kitchen, Joe had a go at the desk. This was not a desk someone would pay to have moved, just an ordinary office-supply model made of fake oak laminate. The dusty cubbyhole that yawned in the left-hand pedestal was pocked with small black marks where a computer had stood. A thick, old-style monitor had been left behind. The blotter was still in place, dog-eared and incised with various notations, phone numbers, little floor plan sketches, used perhaps to clarify Alain’s memory of some particular house as she talked with a client. Beside it, a rectangle with less dust showed where something the size of a briefcase, or laptop, had lain. There was no dust on the drawer handles, and Debbie’s scent was strong. The desk’s file drawer was marred and dented with fresh scratches, as if someone had jimmied the lock. When Joe fought the drawer out, pulling with stubborn claws, he could see that the lock’s little metal arm was broken off.

Rearing up, he pawed through the hanging folders. Most were empty, folders labeled for house insurance, car insurance, medical records. Alain had left behind files of notes about old sales, but nothing more recent than four years. If there’d been anything of interest to others, had Debbie made off with it? Climbing into the dark drawer, he pawed under the files. He felt the broken metal bar, cold against his paw. Lying beside it was a small cardboard folder. He clawed it out, was backing out with it in his teeth when Dulcie returned from prowling the kitchen and leaped up beside him. Dropping the folder on the desk, he flipped it open.

It was one of those studio photographer’s folders with a picture inserted inside, into the cardboard frame. The photo was of a couple, maybe in their sixties, a small, thin man, and a big square woman, both with sour looks on their faces. A younger version of the hefty woman stood in front of them. A daughter, perhaps? Didn’t any ofthem know how to smile? Both women were frumpy, looked as if their clothes had come from a markdown rack, perhaps from the middle of the last century. The women had mousy brown hair, square faces, and pasty white skin, and were surely mother and daughter. The man, by contrast, was a neat little fellow dressed in a three-piece suit, white shirt and subdued tie, his thin cheeks clean shaven, narrowing down to a precisely trimmed goatee. There was not any notation to indicate their identity.

“Flip it out of the frame,” Dulcie said. “Maybe there’s something on the back. Here.” Hissing with impatience, she pawed the picture out.

But there was nothing, only Debbie’s smell, though she hadn’t been interested enough to take the picture with her. Dulcie slid it back into the cardboard frame, and pushed that into the drawer. “They stayed here more than one night. Leftover pizza in the refrigerator, half a hamburger, a carton with some vile-looking spaghetti. A little carton of milk that’s just going sour. Wrappers and takeout cartons in the trash, too.” She frowned, her ears at half-mast. “What was Debbie looking for? If this is about custody of the children, about proving Erik’s having an affair, why bother? If he wanted the kids, why would he leave them in the first place, why not take them with him?”

“Why would either of them want Vinnie?”

“Debbie would, they’re exactly alike, Vinnie’s one of her own. Maybe she’s afraid when Erik gets back from his vacation, finds out she’s here in the village, he’ll claim custody, jinx Debbie’s claim for support payments. No kids, no child support. Maybe that’s all this comes down to, Debbie’s grab for support money.”

But Joe didn’t think so. “Say Erikis into some kind of scam, Erik and Alain together. Debbie would look for proof and, who knows, maybe Hesmerra was after the same thing, when she cleaned for Alain.”

Dulcie licked her paw.“If Alain is doing more than trading down, she gets out when that’s discovered, wants to cover her tracks before she’s charged with real estate fraud? She skips, leaves Erik holding the bag?”

“Maybe.” Joe smoothed his whiskers with a quick paw. “Maybe Hesmerra was spying for Debbie, maybe they weren’t as estranged as Debbie let on. That would explain the Kraft business papers in the metal box Emmylou lifted. Erik finds out the old woman is snooping, and he silences her. Say he killed her, looked for whatever papers she’d taken, but didn’t find anything? So he sets the house on fire, to destroy the evidence.”

In the dining loft, when they looked down through the wrought-iron railing, Kit was still engrossed, rearing up on her hind paws before the mural studying every smallest detail, her dark nose twitching as if she could actually smell the cobbled streets, the wandering sheep and chickens, the homely scents of suppers cooking in the stone and wattle cottages; they watched her dreaming away until suddenly she looked up and saw them, looked embarrassed, dropped down and turned her back as if she had no interest at all in that lost world.

They left Alain Bent’s house through the cellar window. Leaping up one at a time from the cardboard cartons to the sill, swinging and kicking, they fled up and over, and down into the garden beneath a holly bush bright with red berries. Crouching beneath their stickery shelter, they looked down at the neighborhood laid out below them. At the Damen cottage, the front door was open and they could see Ryan and Clyde kneeling just inside on the living room floor.

“They’re praying?” Dulcie said, twitching a whisker.

“Praying it’ll hold together,” Joe said, “that it won’t collapse when they drive the first nail.” Rock stood on the little porch outside the open door, his long leash looped around one of the stanchions. He was looking up the hill, his ears erect, watching them or maybe listening, wherethey hid among the holly shadows. Weimaraners were sight as well as scent hounds, they could spot a bird in the sky when it was less than a speck, when even Joe and Dulcie could see nothing.

Ryan and Clyde seemed to be examining the linoleum, they had one corner up and were peering at the floor beneath. Joe said,“Maybe they plan to rip it out. Who wants linoleum in a living room?” The minute he spoke, as far away as they were, Rock’s tail began to wag madly, he jumped off the porch, tightening his leash and whining. Amused, they went still; they didn’t speak again, they let him settle down so he wouldn’t break his leash and come charging up the hill.

Two blocks over, at Hanni’s remodel, someone was at work clearing out a flower bed, turning the earth as if preparing it for the bright cold weather cyclamens that stood in flats along the drive. “Billy Young,” Joe said. “Maybe Hanni hired him for the day.” They didn’t see his bike, Hanni must have picked him up at the ranch. Billy looked up as Detective Juana Davis’s Toyota came down the street and parked in front of the cottage. A black-and-white was right behind her, and the department’s SUV pulled up behind it. “What’s this?” Joe said softly. “What’s happened?”

Leaving their prickly shelter, they headed down through the tangled yards. Below them, young Officer Jimmie McFarland stepped out of the van, his brown hair falling in a boyish cowlick over his forehead. He and Davis stood talking with Hanni, then moved into the garage. The two officers in the black-and-white stayed where they were. Not until the cats were halfway across the yard could they see inside the garage clear to the back, where Juana Davis had set her black satchel on the workbench and was removing a camera. Slipping closer, they settled down among the yard’s overgrown geraniums to see what they had missed.

17

The U-Haul was headed slowly through the jammed-up traffic of downtown San Francisco when Pan reared up against the passenger window and began to yowl and paw against the glass.

“What?” Denise said, scowling over at him. “You can’t get out here, in the middle of the city. You out of your mind? You have to go? I knew I should have fixed up a sandbox. You’ll have to hold it, tomcat. There, there’s a Chevron station up ahead, bound to be some dirt, a patch of garden or lawn.”

Pan hissed at her, turned back and continued to paw the window, peering out at the busy city.

Denise saw nothing out there that a cat should get excited about. A white passenger bus traveling alongside them in the slow lane, the driver signaling that he wanted to get over, maybe wanted to make a left. Slowing, she let him in. The bus was full of older women, frizzed hair, long faces and round faces, all as wrinkled as old apples. All of them seemed to be talking at once, gabbing away having a good old time. Some kind of senior outing, she guessed, maybe a group from some retirement home. The script on the bus’s white side said MOLENA POINT FOUNDATION, whatever that was. The driver gave her a wave as he cut over and made a left, into the Chevron station. She pulled in behind him. The minute she did, the tomcat settled right down, for all the world as if he knew she’d pulled in so he could take a leak.

Smartest cat she’d ever seen; she was already thinking of him as her cat. She’d picked up an unusually handsome and intelligent stray, and she surely meant to keep him. At the first Target or Walmart she passed, she’d pick up some decent cat food, a cat bed and sandbox, all the supplies to make a cat comfortable. She was wondering what to call him, what name would fit the big red tom. He’d do well on her acreage outside Stockton, he was bold and strong and looked like he’d be a good mouser. Her last two cats had died of old age and she was more than ready for a new companion.

Beyond the three rows of gas pumps and the office and restrooms was a patch of scruffy lawn and a bed of ragged pink geraniums barely surviving in the dry sand. She pulled over there, parked, and because he had come right back into the truck on previous stops, she let the tomcat out. He bolted out in a hell of a hurry, straight into the geraniums. Smiling, she swung out herself, and went to use the women’s more private facilities.

When she came out, the cat was gone. He wasn’t in the cab, where she’d left the door open. He wasn’t in among the geranium bushes. She searched the paved gas station area, the open bay with its two lifts, and the surround. She called him, sounding foolish shouting, “Kitty, kitty.”

Afraid he might have been hit by a car, she walked the edge of the highway and then the access road, looking carefully. Returning to her U-Haul, she talked with other drivers who had stopped, but no one had seen him. Finding no clue to where he’d gone, she borrowed some paper and a stapler from the cashier and put up half a dozen signs, on the posts and trees, giving the cat’s description and both her cell number and her Stockton phone number. She went on after several hours, praying for the tomcat and sick with the loss of him.

Maybe he’d turn up, maybe someone would find him and call her, but she didn’t hold much hope. Moving on through the city, she pulled onto the Bay Bridge with a heavy heart. Why had he vanished like that? There’d hardly been time for someone else to pick him up. Could that cat have had his own agenda and left her on purpose? Was he traveling maybe to rejoin his family, as in some of the strange stories in the paper or on the Web? Cat gets accidentally locked in a truck and carried off, a year later has found his way back home again?

Whatever this was about, she had lost a friend. Even as short a while as she’d known him, it would take her a long time to get over his loss. She didn’t think, after traveling with this handsome tomcat, there would be another cat in the world who could mean anything to her, who could touch her heart as he had, in that short drive down from Oregon. Heading inland, she made sure her cell was on, in case anyone did call.

That was the last Denise Woolsey ever saw of the big red tomcat. The last she ever heard of him, though his objective, single-minded destination wasn’t sixty miles, as the crow flies, from her own new home.

The women on the bus talked nonstop, they were worse than a yard full of chickens announcing their egg-laying scores. Pan, crouched out of sight on the dusty, rough-riding floor, wedged between a bulging cloth shopping bag and a shoe box that smelled of sausages, tried to shut out the shrill voices that had already begun to pound like hammers in his head. Twenty-three women, all of them marathon talkers. Peering out from beneath the last seat, riding practically over the rear wheels and bumpy as hell, he counted two dozen conversations rambling on all at once. A woman sitting right up in front was quizzing the driver querulously.“When will Tom be back? He’s our regular driver. Did you say he’s your cousin? Then you’re Wallace, nice to meet you, Wallace. I hope Tom’s not sick, we all enjoy him, he’s such a riot.”

The driver didn’t answer, just kept his eyes on the road, as if this shepherding of loquacious women wasn’t his preferred portion of the job description. All Pan could see of him was his gray uniform, wide shoulders, and protruding ears beneath a gray cap. The woman behind him, talking with her face inches from his ear, wore a black slouch hat pulled down as if to hide a bad haircut. Three rows back, two women exchanged a look between them and began to whisper, glancing up at Wallace, then drifted into a discussion of the funniest television shows, a subject that would have put Pan right to sleep exceptfor all the other women talking and giggling among themselves. Too bad he hadn’t spotted a busload of men headed for the same village, at least men’s voices were lower. By the time Wallace had put the city traffic behind them and they were out on the highway rolling along, Pan was wild for solitude, for the restorative peace of the woods and fields that he had left behind him. But then four of the women began to talk about Molena Point, and he came wide awake and alert.

“We’ve worked on that auction for months,” said a frail little brown-haired woman as bony as a wren. “We’re hoping to bring in at least fifty thousand, maybe more.” At mention of that amount of money, Wallace came to attention, too, his hand tightening on the wheel, his shoulder and head shifting as he positioned himself to hear better. “Fourteen local artists have given work,” the little wren was saying, “four of the nicest hotels have donated luxury weekends for two, and—”

“That much money?” interrupted a big woman across the aisle. She was dressed in a jacket embroidered with pink flowers, her white-blond hair arranged in an elaborate knot, the white roots showing around her face. “I can’t believe that much money for a bunch of stray cats.” She shook her head, her long gold earrings jangling. “That kind of money should go to fight disease or help starving children. Cats can take care of themselves.”

“The cats were abandoned,” the wren told her. “They’re house cats, theydon’t know how to fend for themselves. Little frightened animals dumped by cold, uncaring people without any feeling,” she said pointedly, “thrown away like garbage.”

A woman with long dark hair turned around in her seat to stare at the round, complaining woman.“I’m fostering five of the rescue cats. They’re so dear, I don’t know if I’ll want to part with them at all. As for the auction, I’m helping out, and I’m certainly going. I have my eye on one of Charlie Harper’s etchings. There’ll be a mob, I mean to get there early.”

“What’s troubling,” said a tall, skinny woman in a white sweater and cream-colored slacks, “the auction’s on Sunday, and the banks won’t be open. All that money they take in, a lot of it will surely be in cash. What will they do with it until Monday morning?”

“Surely no one would steal from a charity,” said a woman whose black hair was so thin you could see her scalp, like spaces in a poorly made bird’s nest. “Surely not from a charity for homeless animals.” Pan thought about the abandoned cats who’d started showing up around Eugene as the economy faltered, hungry, pitiful cats who’d never been on their own. He thought about the Animal Friends’ rescue truck setting out traps, which he had watched with a fierce ambivalence.

On the one hand, those cats didn’t know flip about hunting. Pan himself had hunted for a few of them, but they were frightened and shy, even of him. Sometimes he’d thought,They’re betteroff in a shelter,but then he’d think,They’re better off trying to learn, better off taking the challenge to survive or die, and he’d argued with himself, back and forth, until he didn’t know what he thought. Sometimes he’d dreamed of starving cats, too, thin and scruffy cats that lived in ancient, rough villages, centuries past, cats from the stories his pa had told when he was just a kitten. His pa’s tales of other times had frightened him, the cruel life among the wattle and stone cottages that crowded close along dirty, cobbled streets. Pa told of rats bigger than a kitten, as big as a dog, lurking in the thatched rooftops, of stinking sewers slimy with offal, of thin, shaggy donkeys straining so hard to pulltheir overloaded carts that they collapsed, lay untended until they died.

As he grew older, those stories made him think a lot about staying alive, himself. This world was better now, but in a way, it was more dangerous, the machines and fast highways, a world not built for a cat’s survival. Especially when you hitched rides with humans, folk who might truly care about a lone cat—or might only take him in to torment him.

Well, hewas traveling south, and these women were harmless enough. He could only pray this buswas going to the right destination, to Pa’s rugged cliff along the sand, with its little caves and fishing dock, tall pines and crowded cottages, to the shore his daddy had painted for him with such longing.

At last the women ceased arguing and settled down to nap or read, looking up now and then as the tall bus was buffeted and rocked by a rising wind blowing from the west, carrying the smell of the sea and of coming rain. He woke twice, thirsty and hungry. He eyed the shoe box that smelled so enticingly of sausages, but it was taped shut all around the edges, and tied with heavy, knotted string. What did the owner think, that someone would try to tear into it and rob her of her sausages? He considered the matter, but he would make too much noise ripping the tape off. He tried to force himself back to sleep, to avoid thinking about food and water.

He woke fully when the bus slowed and turned off the highway, descending a residential hill. Below, small cottages crowded close together, a tangle of shops among pines and cypress trees, that already looked familiar. A misty rain veiled the village, and the wind smelled briny, too, deeply of the sea. As tree branches swept across the bus windows, the passengers stirred and began to gather up their belongings. Bags and bundles and jackets, scarves and water bottles. When the round, gray-haired woman waddled to the back and pulled her shoe box of sausages from his lair, Pan pressed under the seat against the wall, hiding himself from her view.

He waited until the bus had parked, the engine died, the doors opened, and the ladies had all filed out, then he slipped out on their heels. The minute he hit the ground, the rainy wind swept at him and the smell of the sea came stronger. Overhead, a gull screamed, making him smile. He could hear the breakers crashing, but as he reared up, drinking in the smells, a passenger spotted him.

“A cat! Oh, look, a little cat! It can’t have been on the bus with us!” When she dove to pick him up, he headed away fast down the sidewalk, dodging shoes and pant legs and leashed dogs that lunged at him, their barks echoing between the crowded shops.

He evaded them all and soon left them behind, leaving the main street for a side street, trotting down a less crowded sidewalk past small and charming shops built of stone, adobe, stucco. Tubs of flowers by their doors, the smell and the hushing of the sea ever stronger as he wove past shop doorways and their bright gardens; the crashing surf ever louder, and the smell of brine stronger, and the sure sense thiswas the right village.

There—the first gleam of choppy water, and a wide white beach. He reared up, looking, then headed fast for the sand, dodging humans and dogs, slashing a lunging nose, and racing on.

Only a few people on the shore, a few hardy children running, chasing their unleashed dogs. To his left the land rose up, big houses sprawled up there behind a grassy meadow. The meadow stopped suddenly in a steep cliff that dropped straight down to the sand. The view was familiar from Pa’s words, and from Debbie’s photographs, too. This was his father’s place, this was Pa’s first home, he was sure of it.

As he hurried up the steep cliff, the sea was soon below him. To his left beyond the meadow, the handsome houses stood, built of stone, of brick set in fancy patterns, of pale stucco with roofs displaying richly curving shingles. Between the houses and the meadow ran a narrow street, lined on his side with spreading cypress trees.

Not many cars were parked along the street, and those were spaced far apart where the cypress branches didn’t hang so low. An old battered sedan was nosed in between the trees, its back door open and a thin woman leaning in rummaging in the backseat among a tangle of paper bags and boxes, her jeans worn pale and threadbare. Thin, knotty legs. Worn jogging shoes. A short-sleeved T-shirt clinging so he could see her spine. A whiff from the car smelled of cat, but he saw no cats. He wasn’t sure what made him stop to watch her, but he eased deeper into the tangle of grass, held by an amused curiosity. Maybe the old woman and her cats would lead him to the cats his pa said lived on this shore. Maybe he’d even find cats who knew his pa, maybe elderly cats as lanky and lean as this old woman herself. Maybe, he thought, hardly daring to think it, maybe somewhere here, on this strip of shore, he would find his pa.

18

Earlier, while the three cats were busy tossing Alain Bent’s house, down the hill among the smaller cottages Ryan’s sister Hanni had pulled her van into the drive of her own remodel. Billy Young sat in the cab beside her, feeling shy of the beautiful woman. Even in frayed jeans and a faded T-shirt she was elegant, her short white hair curling carelessly around the perfect oval of her smooth, tanned face, her dark lashes and brows making her hazel eyes look huge, her hands long and elegant, busy with a clanging of jade and silver bracelets.

Hanni glanced over because he was looking at her, and gave him a wink. Now, with her construction work nearly finished, she’d brought over a load of plants, and had picked Billy up at the ranch knowing he’d be glad of the work. She’d chosen pink and red tea trees, two mock orange bushes, and a dozen breath of heaven plants; their common names pleased her more than the Latin ones, which she never bothered to remember. All of these were showy, but so hardy they lent themselves well to a rental. She had wanted oleander with its bright red or pink blooms but the bush was poisonous, and that would rule out renting to a family with little, leaf-eating children.

The sky was low and threatening, and the wind chill. Getting out of the van, she pulled a warm cap over her short white hair, pulled on a ragged jacket to keep out the wind. Preoccupied with planning the garden, she was unaware she’d had a visitor during the night. While Billy unloaded the plants, trying to shelter them from the wind, she opened the garage—and stopped.

The back door was ajar, swinging back and forth in the wind, wasn’t locked as she’d left it. She remembered distinctly pushing in the simple thumb lock before she turned out the light. When she crossed the garage and stepped outside, she could see where the faceplate was bent and pried half off, fresh tool marks on the newly painted door and on the frame. She touched nothing. Stepping back inside, she stood quietly assessing the rest of the single-car garage to see what building supplies and tools might be missing.

The boxes of hardware she’d left stacked on the worktable were still there, and the cartons of new lighting fixtures that stood on the floor against the wall. Nothing seemed to be missing, but, in fact, there appeared to be more boxes than she’d left there, the pile was half again as large.

Examining the cartons, still not touching, she found seven that were unlabeled, no brand insignia or bar codes or shipping instructions. Reaching for a screwdriver, she chose the largest blank carton, pulled on her gloves, and pried the lid open—maybe that was dumb, she knew she should have handled it differently but she was too curious.

There were cleaning materials jumbled inside, a collection of solvents, ammonia, drain cleaner and, strangely, several drugstore bags containing cold medications: a combination that made chills creep up her back. She stood looking for only a minute, then closed the box and used her cell phone to call the department.

Coming up the hill she had seen the police stakeout still in place, two officers she knew, wearing water company uniforms, kneeling at the curb tinkering with a water meter, watching the meth cottage that had been raided. Now, as she talked with dispatcher Mabel Farthy, she returned to the driveway; she didn’t want to move around in the garage and maybe scuff through someone’s faint footprints, didn’t want to destroy anything more than she already had.

When she’d hung up she stood by her van looking in the side mirror, pretending to adjust her cap, watching the uphill reflection. She saw Officer Blake answer his phone, glance briefly down at her and then away again. The two officers didn’t leave their post, she assumed they’d been told to stay put.

But it wasn’t five minutes until a car appeared answering her call, not a black-and-white, but Detective Juana Davis’s pearl-colored Toyota slipping up the hill to pull into the drive behind her van. A black-and-white appeared behind Juana, pulling to the curb. As the detective stepped out, Hanni had to hide a little smile. Juana always looked so serious, her square face so forthright and no-nonsense, the severity of her dark uniform and black stockings and hard black shoes, black cap pulled down over her smooth hair, dark Latino eyes that could look as flat as a wall. Or could, with her friends or with an unfortunate victim, turn deeply kind and caring. Now, most likely, Juana would make Hanni’s cottage part of the crime scene, locking it into their investigation of the meth operation.

That was fine with her, if they rooted out this scum. At least four men had been seen by neighbors coming and going from the meth house, two Caucasians, one Asian, and the Latino man who was now taking his meals courtesy of Molena Point Jail. She joined Juana, pulled on the cotton booties Juana gave her, and followed the detective into the garage, where Juana first used an electronic device to scan for footprints. Behind them, a white police van slid to the curb, a vehicle big enough to haul away the cartons. Officers McFarland and Crowley got out, young McFarland with his clean good looks, Crowley towering over him, his big-boned body maybe six foot five, broad shoulders, the broad hands of a farmer.

Juana pulled off her booties and stepped out to talk with them, then the two men began to walk the perimeter of the house, moving with care, scanning for anything dropped, and for footprints. Hanni watched them, thinking about the drug dealers hiding their supplies in her garage. Had they thought that because she was Detective Garza’s niece, the cops wouldn’t search here? Maybe they thought she wouldn’t notice the extra boxes right away? Maybe they’d meant to haul them out again in a day or two, maybe they were setting up a new operation somewhere else. She didn’t like that some of these guys were still around, she’d made an investment in this neighborhood, and so had Ryan and Clyde, they wanted to see this area turned back again into the charming neighborhood it had once been.

She’d bought the house eight months ago, before the surrounding houses began to stand empty, and before that enterprising parolee, who was now in jail, had started his mom-and-pop meth business, before the neighbors began to wonder about the many different cars suddenly parked on that street, and somany strangers going in and out, and called in a report. Early on, though, she’d begun to see stray cats slipping around the empty houses, wary and hungry, and she’d put out food in unset traps, luring them in, getting them used to the open wire cages. So far, she’d trapped five, who were nowin a temporary shelter, but she was still seeing strays.

This morning when she’d told Billy about the trapping operation, driving down from the ranch, he’d asked a lot of questions about how the trapping was done, about the people who were sheltering the cats. He was an animal-oriented kid, good with horses and dogs as well as the cats he’d taken in. Before they’d left the ranch, he’d shown her their new home—he was touchingly proud of his little brood and really happy with their cozy new accommodations.

But then when he’d gotten in the truck and they were headed down the hills, he was quiet again, and looked so sad. She knew he was grieving for his gran, but thought there was something more. “What is it?” she’d said softly.

He’d looked at her helplessly. He didn’t say anything for a long time, then, “I just hung up from talking with my aunt Esther. Why wouldshe call me? How did she know I was there at the Harpers’?” He went silent, looking down at his hands, then looked up at her, his dark brown eyes questioning. “I don’t want to live with her,” he said angrily.

“She asked you to live with her?”

“No, she didn’t ask me. But what else could it be? She said she wanted to come up and see me. Why would she want to see me, she never has before. She never came to see Gran, even right after Mama died. She never came when Mama was alive, either, not that I know of.”

“You must see her around the village?”

He nodded.“She acts like she doesn’t know me, never speaks to me or looks at me.”

“This morning, did she say anything else?”

“No, but she had something on her mind. She asked about the fire, asked ifeverything was gone, if we’d saved anything.” He was quiet, then, “She sounded real caring and friendly. She said twice that she’d be coming up to see me.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I couldn’t talk any more, I had to go to work, that my ride was waiting, and I hung up,” Billy said, his cheeks coloring.

Hanni laughed.

Billy looked at her, frowning.“Can she make me live with her? Sheis my aunt. Does she have some kind of … claim? Some legal way to make me live there? Why would she want me? Except to work, maybe, like in the old days when kids were adopted out to do farm work. But people don’t do that anymore.”

Hanni reached over, took his hand.“You see that on TV?”

“We don’t have TV. I read it.”

She smiled.“Esther won’t do that, this isn’t the eighteen hundreds. Max Harper wouldn’t let her do that.”

“If I don’t go there, will I have to go to a foster home?”

“What do you want to do?”

“I can take care of myself.” But then he looked at her shyly. “What I really want?”

She nodded.

“I want to stay with the Harpers.”

“And they want you there,” she said. “They both do. Max knows a few people,” she said lightly, “he has a little pull.” She smiled wickedly, gave him a wink that made him blush. “I know enough dirt myself about some of the folks working in Children’s Services, enough to pull a few strings.”

Billy looked at her, surprised, and then laughed.“Can you do that?”

“Try me.”

He looked as if he wanted to hug her, and then as if he wanted ask something more. Instead he looked away, out at the dropping hills and the village roofs below. And that was where they left it, with Billy’s worries eased, but Hanni wondering just what Esther Fowlerhad wanted.

The three cats were crowded together on the roof of the house across the street from Hanni’s, shivering in the cold; the wet wind was dying now, giving way to colder, misty rain. They were watching Officers McFarland and Crowley load seven large cartons from Hanni’s garage into the back of the police van, when Dulcie let out a low hunting cry and took off across the roofs where a thin figure was slipping away behind a sagging fence. Joe and Kit saw little more than a shadow, an impression of jeans and faded T-shirt. Emmylou? Dulcie meant not to lose her again; she’d followed her, lost her twice, seen her trying to get into Alain Bent’s house, and then lost her yet again. Now there she was appearing suddenly out of nowhere, but then gone again. She glanced back to see Joe following, pushed along by a last gust of wind, but behind him, Kit had paused.

Lifting her paw uncertainly, Kit watched Joe and Dulcie race away in pursuit of the hurrying shadow, then turned to watch the interesting activity around Hanni’s cottage, and she shivered with indecision. But she was caught even more powerfully in her own agenda. Leaving all the human excitement to play out below her, she spun around and streaked down the dropping rooftops for the center of the village, her head full of the medieval painting that so fit Misto’s stories, full of lost centuries and ancient dreams, and she raced away to tell the old tomcat about the wonderful mural.

It was too early for the ferals’ feeding time, but maybe he’d be there, the day was growing cold and dark and maybe John Firetti would feed early. She was only vaguely aware that something else, besides those ancient times, might be drawing her so powerfully; she raced down across the roofs like a wild thing, her own urgencystartling and puzzling her.

Joe caught up with Dulcie two blocks above the Damens’ cottage, as she paused to look over the roof’s edge down into a scrappy yard: brown earth, bare beneath overhanging branches, the narrow house made of rough brown boards, an old house, dour and neglected. “Emmylou vanished in there,” Dulcie said. “Maybe she broke in, I heard glass break.”

He moved close to her, in the cold drizzle.“Could she mean to camp in there? Break into a stranger’s house to get out of the cold? Is that what she was doing, all along, poking around up here, looking for the best empty house to crash in?” The dark brown housewas sheltered from its neighbors, jammed in between two huge cypress trees, their heavy branches sweeping the roof like the tails of giant beasts. A tentlike acacia stood at the back, hiding the house behind. The yard itself was thick with broken cypress branches fallen across the cracked cement walk. Backing down a rough trunk, they paused among the browning cypress fronds that were wet now in the mist. On the little cement porch, a stack of wet newspapers lay moldering. Lace curtains, limp and gray, hung crookedly over the windows. The cats could just detect Emmylou’s trail, overridden by the fresh scent of a man, a nervous smell and fearful.

“Was that aman I saw?” Dulcie whispered. “So thin and tall, so like Emmylou?” They followed his scent in silence, watching the shadows—and nearly plowed into him standing among the multiple trunks of a spreading cypress, his clothes as dark as the rough branches, his face in shadow; they leaped away, startled, then, gathering their wits, they crouched dumb and innocent, looking up at him.

He was dressed as a gardener, but he didn’t have a gardener’s tan, his face was pasty white. Slim, dark jeans, heavy shoes, faded brown T-shirt, and, slung low on his thin hips, a leather carpenter’s belt holding clippers and gardening tools, and who knew what else? When he turned to look at them, his eyes were so cold that the two cats slipped away again, frightened.

When they glanced back, he hadn’t moved. But he was paying no attention tothem, he stood watching, down the hill, the activity around Hanni’s remodel, watching the cops and Detective Davis. “Could he be from the meth house?” Dulcie whispered. “One of the men they missed, who disappeared before they raided it?”

“One way to find out,” Joe said softly. “Why don’t you slip on up to the roofs and keep an eye on him?”

Dulcie smiled and vanished, scrambling up to the shingles, as Joe streaked down through the tangled yards for the Damens’ cottage, to find a phone. He was headed for the open front door when he saw Clyde in the backyard and veered in that direction, leaping to Clyde’s shoulder.

It took only a minute, Joe clinging to Clyde’s jacket, his whiskers tickling Clyde’s ear as Clyde made the call. They listened to Mabel pass his message on as, out in front, McFarland answered her call. At once, the two officers stopped loading the van and moved away to vanish among the wooded yards. Listening to their soft, fast footfalls as they ran, then a dry scraping and sliding as if their quarry was climbing a fence, Joe leaped from Clyde’s shoulder to the roof, to see better. Yes, there went Dulcie racing across the roofs, looking down, watching them. He sped to join her, but soon she lost the runner between the houses.

Together they watched Crowley circle through the trees to the left while McFarland disappeared to the right. Ahead, a branch snapped. McFarland shouted, dove in among the trees behind the brown cottage; they heard a scuffle, then McFarland’s sharp command.

The young officer came out marching the erstwhile gardener ahead of him, hands cuffed behind him. Crowley joined him, moving close to the man, carrying the tool belt. Behind them in the cottage the curtain twitched aside and a figure appeared, watching them, watching the prisoner. McFarland had his back to the window, he didn’t see Emmylou—until some inexplicable cop instinct made him turn, and look back.

They halted their prisoner, and moved him away from the window. Crowley took a frowning look at her, and moved up the three cement steps. Standing to the side of the door, he knocked.

There was a long pause. When he knocked again, Emmylou eased the door open, stood looking at the officers, looking at the handcuffed prisoner, at his pale, angry face; and she took a step back. Crowley towered over her, made tall Emmylou Warren look as petite as a doll by comparison.

“Do you live here?”

She nodded, then shook her head.

“Could you tell us your name?” By the look on his face, he knew who she was. When she didn’t reply, he said, “You’re Emmylou Warren?”

She stood with her veined hands loose at her sides, her wrinkled face impassive but her jaw set tight, a little muscle twitching.“It isn’t my house, it belongs to a friend. She’s … I don’t know where she is. You can see the mail’s piled up.” She nodded toward the mailbox at the curb, its door open, the mail so jammed inside that half of it stuck out. She glanced toward the soggy newspapers littering the porch. “I’ve been up here several times. When I saw she was gone, I started coming to feed her cats, but now they’ve disappeared, too. I’m worried about her, and I’m worried for them. She always leaves the key, tells me if she’s going away. But it isn’t there, and at last, today, I broke in.” She looked at Crowley pleadingly. “I’m afraid something’s happened to her. Someone’s been in here, they’ve made a terrible mess.”

“Does she have any family near? Have you tried calling them?”

Emmylou shook her head.“No one. No one I can call, no one who’d come. Only her brother, and he never comes up here, he’s … He calls himself a vagabond.”

“Homeless?” Crowley said.

She nodded.

“Where does he hang out?”

“Up and down the coast.

“With bad weather on the way,” Crowley said, “might he have come here, wanted a place to crash? Found her gone, and broke in?”

She shook her head.“It doesn’t look like that, Birely wouldn’t make that mess, he wouldn’t trash the place. He shows up in the village a couple times a year. When she worked bagging groceries, he’d meet her out in front of the market, she’d give him money, buy him some food. When he’s in town, he camps down by the river with the other homeless, or, in cold weather like this, under the Valley Road bridge. Bridge is just behind the market where we both worked, they’d meet there, she’d see him a few times then he’d be gone again.”

“Do you think she’d have gone off with him?”

“She’d never do that, she hated the way he lived. Sammie’s a homebody, she loves her home. I don’t understand where she’s gone.”

“Would he have harmed her?”

She looked intently at Crowley.“No, not Birely. He’s stable enough, he’s not a nutcase, he just likes that life, no responsibility. I’ve met him a couple of times, and the way she talks about him … He calls himself a vagabond, a hobo, a wanderer. He’s a happy man, and gentle. No,” she said, “he would never hurt her, he loves his sister.” She frowned. “It isn’t like her to leave the village without telling me, so I could feed the cats. She didn’t know I’d been evicted but she knows my old car; if she’d wanted me, she’d have found me.”

“You want to file a missing persons report? You can do that when you come in for fingerprinting.” At her uncertain look, he said, “You’ll have to come in, Ms. Warren. We need your prints in the investigation of the fire and of Hesmerra Young’s death. When you delay, you’re holding up a murder investigation.”

She looked at him blankly.

“Hesmerra was your friend?”

“Yes, she was.”

“There’s a possibility she didn’t die naturally.” Emmylou was silent, looking at him, gripping the door frame. He said, “You could help her by giving us your prints. You want to ride down to the station with us? I can bring you back to your car.”

From the roof, the cats watched the exchange, Dulcie’s ears sharply forward, the tip of her tail twitching as Emmylou backed away from the two officers. The cats looked at each other, puzzled. Surely Emmylou hadn’t poisoned Hesmerra, they didn’t like to think that, though they had no real cause to believe otherwise. “I’ll come to the station on my own,” she said stiffly. She seemed not to know the prisoner, he might have been a tree standing there in handcuffs for all the attention she paid him. The officers didn’t question her about him, nor question him about Emmylou. Maybe they were leaving that up to one of the detectives, who would want to do the questioning in their own way.

Emmylou said,“I’m parked down the block, around the corner.” She stepped on out, carefully pulled the door closed, latched it as best she could despite the way she’d pried the lock loose. It looked, Joe thought, much like the jimmied lock on Hanni’s garage door. Coming down the three steps, she walkedpast the officers and their prisoner with her head high, and moved on down the street. She was just approaching Hanni’s cottage when Billy looked up from the garden, saw her, and the two officers just behind her with their cuffed prisoner. The boy went still, looking, then he raced to Emmylou andthrew his arms around her.

19

“They can’t put you in jail,” Billy said indignantly, clinging to Emmylou, watching the officers and their prisoner. “What didyou do?You didn’t do anything.”

“They only want my fingerprints,” she said, “they say it’s routine. Didn’t they take yours?” Billy nodded. She said, “Sammie’s house is trashed inside, I don’t know what happened. While I’m at the station I’ll report her missing, maybe they can find out where she’s gone. First the fire, and Hesmerra, and now … seems like everything’s gone wrong.” She saw the hurt in his eyes at mention of his gran, and hugged him hard. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to upset you. I’m just a foolish old woman.”

“Have you been staying at Sammie’s?” he said so softly the cats could barely hear.

Emmylou shook her head.“She didn’t leave the key, I can’t find the key. But I did break in, just now, to look inside for the cats. She always comes to tell me if she’s going away, she always leaves the key.” She looked at Billy, frowning. “She said more than once that someone was watching her, maybe followingher. She’s been gone since before the fire, and not a word. She could have found me, found my car. And now, where are the poor cats? Muddy raccoon prints all over the back porch, too, and in the house, so maybe it wasn’t a person at all, but those beasts … Oh, the poor cats.”

The raccoons of Molena Point seemed singularly wicked, they killed unwary cats, attacked small dogs in their own fenced yards, attacked the owners when they intervened. Several villagers had been so badly bitten they were taken to emergency for shots and stitches. Twice an angry mother raccoon, apparently rearing her kittens in the bushes of a downtown cottage, attacked small dogs as their owners took them for an evening stroll. It did no good to trap and move the beasts, they either came back or, wherever they were released, became someone else’s problem. And the village’s no-kill policy regarding predatory wild animals meant the raccoons increased in numbers at their own pleasure. One’s only choice was to stay out of their way.

As Emmylou headed away for her car, on the roof above, Dulcie said,“Didn’t Chichi Barbi trap a black-and-white cat last week? Was that one of Sammie’s cats?”

“Don’t know,” Joe said, distracted. Below them, the prisoner either couldn’t speak English, or pretended he couldn’t. Juana had joined them and was having a go in Spanish. When the guy wouldn’t talk to her, either, pretending not to understand her, Crowley helped him into the backseat of the squad car, holding the guy’s head down so he wouldn’t crack his skull, and took him away. McFarland followed in the SUV, hauling the meth supplies from Hanni’s garage, and the cats headed for the Damen cottage, where they could hear Debbie inside, complaining.

“That old linoleum’s filthy, I can’t live in this mess.” Ignoring the cleaning rags and scrub brushes, she said, “I’d better get down to the police, for fingerprints, Captain Harperdid seem in a hurry,” and she fled the house, calling the kids, moving away toward her car. The cats, with both Debbie and Emmylou headed for MPPD, raced away across the roofs, eager to see how this came down, amused that Debbie hated scrubbing the floor even more than facing Harper again.

Running through the cold rain across the wet shingles and the slippery limbs of oak and cypress, Joe and Dulcie hit the courthouse roof soaked nearly to the skin, galloped its length, and dropped down through the branches to MPPD’s glass door. Any sensible cat would be curled up on a deep couch before a warming fire. But what the hell, Joe thought, pawing at the door.

Mabel Farthy, behind the counter, rose at once to let them in. There was nothing quite as satisfying to a persistent cat as an obedient human, as to see his training pay off.“Oh, you poor things, you’re soaking.” The grandmotherly woman fit snugly in her uniform, its dark color setting off her creamy complexion and blond-dyed white hair. She, and the office, smelled of cinnamon buns, testimony to the competence with which Mabel mothered the officers. From beneaththe counter she produced a baker’s box, which she set beside the in-box. Enticing Joe and Dulcie up, she broke a bun into small pieces, laid them out on a clean paper plate. By the time their rough tongues had snatched up the last sticky crumb, she’d dried them both off with paper towels, all the while scolding them for getting wet. They were washing the damp places she’d missed when they heard Vinnie Kraft’s whining from beyond the glass door, looked up to see Debbie hurrying across the parking lot dragging Vinnie and Tessa.

Shoving in through the glass door, Debbie sailed past the bars of the holding cell, past the folding chairs that stood against the wall, bearing down on Mabel.“I’m here to see Captain Harper. Athis request, so I don’t expect to be kept waiting.” The eyes of both children were fixed on the cats, particularly on Joe, who sat center stage on Mabel’s counter.

“That’s Ryan and Clyde’s cat,” Vinnie said sharply.

“Don’t be silly.” Debbie stared at the cats as if something disgusting had been left in a public place. “What would their cat be doing in a police station? Sit down, Vinnie.” Moving away from the cats to the other end of the counter, she returned her scowl to Mabel. “Is Captain Harper here? He as much as demanded that I come in. I don’t have time towait.”

Mabel looked her over, her round face expressionless.“Captain Harper is busy. Would you like to take a seat?” Deftly she moved the tray of outgoing mail back from the edge as Vinnie reached a hand up. Dulcie and Joe backed away, too, watching the kid warily.

Debbie huffed and took a seat, pulling the children away with her. Mabel resumed sorting the mail, looking up only when the glass door opened again and two women and a thin little man stepped in. The women were dumpy and soft, faintly unkempt, their hair marceled into rigid waves, their dresses reminiscent of the flowered rayon frocks one saw in old’40s movies. The man was a precise little fellow decked out in a dark three-piece suit, his thin face clean shaven except for a carefully trimmed beard of the same salt-and-pepper gray as his neatly styled, short hair; the trio might have just stepped out of the photo the cats had found in Alain Bent’s file cabinet. Their expressions were every bit as sour, though they approached Mabel’s counter uncertainly. Behind them Debbie had turned away, leaning down over Tessa to adjust the little girl’s hair bow.

Both women were squarely built, as sturdy as pit bulls, they had to be mother and daughter. The older woman’s face was pale as milk, her skin thick with small scars as if she’d suffered endless little surgeries. “I’m not sure we’ve come to the right place,” she said, “to report a missing person? Or someone we think is missing? My cousin … I’m Norine Sutherland. This is my daughter,Betty, my husband, Delbert,” she said abruptly. “My cousin is Alain Bent. The Realtor?” She launched into a long and complicated explanation of why they thought Alain was missing—but the cats’ attention was on Debbie. She watched the three warily, and when the older woman glanced idly at her, she leaned down again as if dusting lint from her shoe. She knew these people—but perhaps they didn’t know her? Could she know them only from the same picture, which was tucked into Alain’s file cabinet?

Yet if they didn’t know her, why was she so wary? One more glance from the older woman and Debbie rose and left, hurrying the kids out, her expression hard to read. Behind her on Mabel’s counter Joe and Dulcie sat washing their paws, highly entertained by the little drama. But across the village, another, subtler drama was unfolding.

On the cliff above the sea where the rainy wind swept cold, the big red tom stood still, looking. Something watched him, something hidden among the blowing grass; while beyond him, at the street, the lone woman still rummaged in her car, the rain blowing in on her backside as she looked for something or maybe tended to her vagabond housekeeping. Then suddenly among the shifting grasses the darker shadow moved again, staying downwind so he could get no scent at all.

He’d come a good way along the cliff, looking down at the shore below, searching for the little fishing dock. Maybe it had been torn down or perhaps swept away by a high sea, was no longer there, where Misto had remembered it from his youth? But now again Pan searched the grass, and again his skin rippled from the shadowy presence. Who would follow him, and why? No cat knew him here. This wasn’t a dangerous predator, he didn’t sense that at all, but still he crouched, ready to fight or run, whichever was expedient. Above him the dark clouds heaved lower, heralding an early dusk, and the drenched grass forest began to fill up with shadows—but there, where a tangle of blackberries wove dense and dark, something solid crouched, poised. A darkly mottled shadow, a pair of eyes bright as marigolds, holding steady on him. He eased forward, and caught the scent of her, mixed with the smell of sea and rain. He could see the tip of her fluffy tail twitching, her only movement as she watched him.

Slowly she emerged from among a tangle of blackberry vines into the grass, and shyly she slipped closer. Her long, wind-rumpled fur was a mix of black and brown, her face mottled black and brown, her yellow eyes keen with curiosity. Very close to him she stopped. She looked deep into his eyes, studied his face, and then again she moved closer. She looked him all over. She tasted his scent on the wind. She looked closely at the circular mark on his shoulder.

“Pan?” she said, startling him. “Youcan’t bePan?”

“I’m Pan,” he said warily. “How could you know me?”

“Where did you come from? How did you come here?”

“How do you know my name?”

“Who is your father?”

“My father is Misto,” he said. “Do you know him?”

“He’s here,” she said, twitching her wind-tangled tail. “Misto’s here, he talks about you. How did you know to come here, how did you know where to find him?” Beyond them at the street the old woman had backed out of the car with a paper bag in her hand. Closing the door, she turned andheaded straight toward them, wading through the blowing grass soaking her jeans, carrying a bundled-up brown blanket. Immediately the two cats hunkered down, made themselves small, peered up side by side through the blowing stalks. Both felt a rippling urge to run, an inborn alarm that she might throw the blanket over them—yet they remained still. Had she even seen them?

Unaware, she moved past them to the cliff’s edge. At the very brink, she began to trample the grass, pressing it down in a circle. Spreading out the old blanket, she sat down in the center, ignoring the fitful rain.

The tortoiseshell relaxed, laughing softly as the old woman took a strip of paper towel from the bag, smoothed it down on the blanket, and laid out her thermos, an apple, and a cellophane-wrapped sandwich.

“Suppertime,” she whispered. She looked Pan over again, her yellow eyes so clear and bold they quite unsettled him. “My name is Kit. You’ve come to find Misto. But how … ?”

“Is he here?” he said with excitement, lashing his red-striped tail.

“Yes, but how did you find him? Oh,” she said, “from his tales? You found this place from his stories?”

“Yes, but how do you know that? Then I saw pictures of the village, exactly the way he described. There are lots of villages all along the coast, but none quite like this one, not the same cluster of cottages so cozy beneath the spreading trees.” He looked at her intently. “Is there a fishingdock farther along the shore? Do ferals live there?”

“They live there. And Misto comes every morning and evening, he’ll be there soon, now,” she said, laughing at the light that blazed in his russet eyes. “You came all this way, because of a picture?”

“Lots of pictures, color pictures in magazines in the house where I lived, and then photographs, and I knew this was the right village.” Pan wiped at his ear with a front paw, where the grass seeds tickled. “I saw this place and thought about Pa, I knew he was growing old and would miss his kittenhood home, and I guessed he might come here.

“Once I lived in a nursing home,” he said. “I listened to those old folks, how they longed for the places of their childhood, and I thought Pa would be longing, too, wanting to return to where he was a kitten. After the nursing home burned down I set out to follow him. Do you know what it’slike not to have any notion where your pa is, or even if he’s still alive?”

“I never knewwho my father was,” Kit said. “I never knew him at all. My mother …” She went silent as a police car came up the narrow street cruising slowly, nosing to the curb in front of Emmylou’s car as if to block its departure. Officer Brennan sat a moment talking on the radio, glancing at the empty car and then scanning the cliff. His bulk completely filled the driver’s seat; and the cats could hear the faint, tinny reply of the dispatcher—but so could Emmylou. She ducked down below the tall grass, cowed there as still as a cat, herself.

But not still enough. Brennan, seeing movement, stepped out of the black-and-white, moving lightly considering his weight, and approached through the rustling grass asking her to come out. The weight of his equipment belt made him look all the heftier, his holstered gun, the radio and phone and nightstick, the holstered pepper spray and Taser. The third time he spoke, Emmylou rose up out of the grass like a windblown scarecrow, scowling at him, clutching her thermos and lunch bag to her as if for protection.

Brennan said,“The chief’s looking for you to come in, Emmylou, for fingerprinting, right?”

Emmylou said nothing, she just looked at him, clutching her lunch bag closer.

“Why don’t you come on in with me? It won’t take long, and I’ll bring you back.” He nodded toward her old Chevy. “You can leave your car, I’ll see it isn’t ticketed.”

Emmylou’s expression was such a comical mix of defiance and helpless resignation that both cats, peering up through the tangle of green blades, had to stifle a laugh—but Kit watched Pan shyly, too. He was the handsomest tomcat she’d ever seen, he was big, well muscled, his rustred coat beautifully striped, wide dark tiger stripes, and as sleek as silk. And he was Misto’s son, she could see Misto’s own kindness and honesty in his face, in his copper-colored eyes. She daren’t look at him too long, his returning gaze left her as giddy as a kitten on its first tumble of catnip.

As Officer Brennan helped Emmylou into his squad car, Kit led Pan along the edge of the cliff above the pale sand and dark and rolling sea, led him toward the dock and the feral band where John Firetti would be setting out the evening meal, led Pan to where he’d find his pa again after so long a searching, and she could hardly wait.

20

The three visitors to Max Harper’s office sat lined up on the leather couch as rigid as three schoolkids facing an unsmiling principal. Square and pudgy Norine Sutherland and her matching daughter. And the small, tight-looking man of the house. Their uncertainty out at the front desk seemed to have vanished. Norine had told Mabel, “We weren’t sure where to come, where to report a possible missing person. To the police? To the county sheriff? Or to some welfare agency? Well, if thereis anything to report, if Alain reallyis missing. Officially, you know.Do you take missing person reports? Someone wethink is missing?”

But now that they had an audience with the chief, as they’d been angling for, the two women were bolder. Now they sat sizing Max up, seeming to assume that he would take immediate action.

Delbert, on the other hand, still looked apologetic, uncertain whether they should be there at all, bothering the police with their family dilemma. Perhaps only Joe and Dulcie, crouched out of sight beneath the credenza, caught the sharpening of Max’s attention at the mention of Alain Bent, a tightening of his jaw that the cats knew well.

“Alain doesn’t answer her phone nor our messages,” Norine said, “we haven’t spoken with her for months, she never answers her calls. She used to have an answering machine. Maybe it’s full. We’ve been up to her house three times since we arrived in town, but no one is ever there. We thought we had a key for emergencies, but it doesn’t work. We drove down from Redding because we didn’t know what else to do, we’re worried about her. The house looks cared for, the walks have been swept, we’ve found no mail in the box, no newspapers on the drive, but still the place seems deserted. We looked in the windows. No magazines or mail left about, the beds are neatly made, no clothes thrown across a chair the way Alain leaves them. You can’t see into the kitchen from the ground but you can glimpse her desk through the bedroom slider, and it looks so neat. Usually there are stacks of papers, flyers, files. The computer’s there, at least the monitor is, but not her laptop. Well, wherever she is, I guess she has that with her.” The woman was rambling, but the picture she painted was familiar enough to the cats. The house, when they’d prowled there, had indeed looked neat and deserted. Now, in their shadowed lair beneath the credenza, both Joe and Dulcie wondered if they had missed something, some clue to Alain’s supposed disappearance. Maybe, Dulcie thought, if Alain was Erik’s lover, she was off in the Bahamas waiting for him, planning on a romantic vacation they didn’t care to advertise.

“You’ve had no contact with Alain at all?” Max said. “Since what date?”

“That’s the strange part, that’s what makes us so uncertain,” Norine said. “Shehas been in touch, we’ve emailed back and forth, and that’s what we don’t understand. We told her we need to talk with her by phone. There’s some family business we need to discuss, and I’m never sure how private these electronic messages are. We asked her to please call or give us a number where we can reach her, but she keeps making excuses. At first she said she was on the East Coast, that she’ll be back soon and will call us then. Then she said she’d been delayed, that some business had come up, but she’ll call soon. She could call from the East Coast, what’s the problem with that? This hasgone on and on. We can’t understand why she’s so evasive. We’re beginning to wonder if those messagesare from Alain at all.

“Anyone,” Norine said, “could be sending them, if they had her password. I know it sounds paranoid, but this has gone on too long. A month ago when we called her office, they said she’d moved away. But she didn’t tell us that, she didn’t say anything like that to us. If she’s moved, why on earth wouldn’t she say so?

“When we identified ourselves as family, and asked for her new address, they gave us my parents’ address. Well, she’s notthere. They say they haven’t heard from her at all, and one of the owners of Kraft Realty, Mr. Perry Fowler, said since she moved months ago they’re directing what personal mail they get to a post office box in our own town. He said it hadn’t been returned, so she must be getting it, but that doesn’t make sense. He was very short with us, as if he really didn’t have time for our silly questions.”

Betty Rails said,“The post office won’t tell us anything. They won’t say whether there’s any mail in her box, won’t even say whether she has a box, won’t tell us whether she’s picked up any mail. We went to our local police but they wouldn’t help us. They said we’d have to come here, because she lived here.” The two women looked helplessly at Max, all their early confrontation gone, only uncertainty remaining. They looked up when Detective Davis appeared in the doorway.

Max nodded to Davis. She stepped in and laid a piece of paper on his desk, glancing briefly at the trio, a quick assessment, like the flash of a fast camera. The cats noticed she was limping again, her bad knee giving her trouble. She’d talked about surgery, but kept putting it off, said she didn’t have time. Max read what appeared to be a short note, and a little smile touched his face. “Go ahead and interview her, Juana. She find a place to live?”

Juana shook her head.“Still on the streets. She said she was arranging to stay with a friend.” She shrugged, gestured dismissively, and moved away up the hall toward the front desk to fetch Emmylou, to take her on back to her office. Beneath the credenza, Dulcie gave Joe a questioning look. When he twitched an ear,she bellied out under the side rail and melted into the hall behind Juana, vanishing beneath Max’s line of vision. It was little indiscretions such as Max seeing them suddenly veer off to follow a witness that could prompt the chief to study them with undue attention. Joe heard the faintest sliding of paws on the hard floor as his lady streaked into Juana’s office.

Max was saying,“If you want to sign a missing persons report, we’ll talk with Kraft Realty. It’s possible, if she’s moved, that the house is on the market, and that they have a current key. If so, we might get a court order and have a look.”

“We couldn’t find an ad in the paper that it’s for sale,” Norine said, “and there’s no sign in the yard.”

“Sometimes a sale isn’t advertised,” Max said, “a silent sale, handled strictly within the office, for any number of reasons.”

But Joe was thinking,Maybe she doesn’tlike these relatives, maybe she doesn’twant to be in touch. Except he thought there was more to Alain’s disappearance than that, there were too many disappearances all at once.Was Erik Kraft down in southern California, soon to head off on vacation? Where was Alain, and, for that matter, where was Emmylou’s friend Sammie, who lived not a block down the hill from Alain? Three absences, was that a coincidence? More like the first odd pieces of a puzzle just short of making sense, just short of forming a coherent picture.

High on the cliff above the shore Kit sat alone, a small tortoiseshell silhouette against the gathering evening, her fur damp and cold, her ears down in the icy gusts. Below her on the shore, despite the cold drizzle, the two tomcats strolled side by side looking deeply content at their sudden reunion. Their voices were drowned by the breakers and the wind, their pawprints quickly filled with water behind them as the tide crept in. Kit, watching them, felt as happy and proprietary as if she’d arranged their meeting all by herself, as if it was all her doing that had brought father and son together.

Well, shehad guided Pan the last quarter mile of his vast journey, had escorted him along the cliff top until he’d seen, below, the feral band gathered around the little dock at their supper dishes. She had watched Pan race down the cliff in three long leaps, a red blur plowing in among the startled strays, scattering the shy ones, alarming the bold ones into hisses and raised claws. He had plunged at Misto, nearly knocking him down—and hadn’t the old yellow tomcat exploded into kittenish cavorting at the sight of his grown son. The two had erupted into a wild race that sent them streaking up the cliff again and down beneath the dock, scattering the ferals, and both of them talking up a storm,Where did you come from, how did you get here, how long was your journey, how did you know where to find me …? On and on until Kit had rolled over, laughing.

Kit knew Mary Firetti watched them from the cliff above, silent and entranced. She had come tonight instead of John, loaded down with a bag of kibble and water bottles. She had fed the ferals, was leaving when she caught sight of Pan. She froze to see a new cat trotting beside Kit, had sat down at the edge of the cliff nearly hidden in the tall grass. She’d remained as still as a stone, watching the meeting of father and son. Now, as the two toms raced to the end of the dock, their voices drowned by the waves and by the fitful gusts, Kit and Mary watched them, filled with a giddy joy at their atartling reunion.

When Kit had first met Misto some two months earlier, the old yellow cat had told her he’d longed for three things. Three wishes, like a fairy tale, Kit thought. Misto had arrived in Molena Point just before Christmas, traveling all alone, paw weary from a journey that had taken many months, traveling down the Oregon coast and then the California coast hoping to find his kittenhood home. That was the first wish, to return where he was born, to find a safe haven there. That wish had been granted when John and Mary Firetti begged Misto to live with them.

The next wish had gone unfulfilled until this very moment, was answered when Pan appeared, as if by magic, right out of the old cat’s dreams.

Now only the third wish remained. But this last desirewould remain a dream, a longing as ephemeral as the wind itself. No cat could return to his past lives, no cat could go back to times and places he might indeed remember, to lives long since gone to dust. Misto could not step back again into some fabulous past, he could only bring those times alive by painting the stories for others.

Now as dusk pushed in more willfully, Mary rose from the grass, brushing off her jeans. When Misto led Pan up the cliff to greet her, Kit hung back, feeling suddenly out of place. Watching father and son so happy, watching Mary’s quiet joy in them, she felt shy and uncertain, and she turned away. She was headed away for home and her own family, was trotting away through the blowing grass when Pan came racing after her, “Come withus, Kit.” And Misto behind him, “Come with us.”

Kit fidgeted.“Lucinda and Pedric are waiting. Lucinda said—”

Mary caught up with them. She didn’t argue, she picked Kit up, cuddling her over her shoulder. “I’ll call her, maybe they’ll come to supper.” And, carrying Kit, she headed for the van.Oh, my, Kit thought, glancing at Pan shyly now as they all crowded onto the front seat together. Mary said,“John will be home soon, he’ll be so excited. I have steaks to cook. Shall I open the smoked salmon appetizer, and maybe some artichoke hearts?”

Kit and Misto licked their whiskers, but Pan laughed aloud with pleasure.“I didn’t eat like that in Eugene. Debbie favored the cheapest cat food. And nursing home leftovers—they run to strained squash and instant potatoes.”

“Tonight,” Mary said, “you will dine royally. And you will sleep on feather pillows, not on the bare, hard roadside.”

And that’s the way it was, dinner for seven, four humans, three cats. Seven chairs at the table, three fitted out with sturdy file boxes from John’s office, to raise the cats up so they could easily reach their plates. Kit’s tall, thin housemates came down from their hillside home, bringing a large tray of Kit’s favorite flan for dessert. Neither Lucinda nor Pedric Greenlaw, both in their eighties, a tanned, active couple, had lost their appetite for a good steak. The filletswere good, rare and tender, the artichoke hearts swam in butter, the caramel custard was so good it made a cat’s whiskers curl. And all evening, neither Lucinda nor Pedric could take their eyes from Pan. Their wonder at another speaking cat suddenly among them was overridden, perhaps, only by the suspicion that this red tomcat might have brought with him a heartbreaking change in their lives.

To see Kit and Pan together, see their looks at each other even this early on in their acquaintance, to see the sharp chemistry already sparking between the two, was to imagine a future in which Kit might draw away from them, or perhaps leave them altogether. The concept saddened the Greenlaws for selfish reasons, but it thrilled them for Kit’s sake. After all, they wouldn’t be around forever. Now at last, maybe Kit had found someone good enough, strong enough, wild but loving enough, to share the next stage of her life. Pedric gave Lucinda a smile and a wink that said all was well, all would be well. He looked down at Kit, sittingnext to him, and he prayed that that was so.

When the table was cleared and they’d gathered before the fire, Pan’s russet eyes closed sometimes as he told of his travels, as he brought back the little, quirky moments, the rough fishermen in an Oregon harbor drinking a mix of wine and beer for breakfast, the story of Denise Woolsey in her U-Haul truck. But then his gaze would turn to watching Kit as she tried to imagine such feats: cadging rides from strangers, dodging fast trucks and then riding in them, nimbly sidestepping dangers that made her shiver clear down to her paws.

“One thing I wouldn’t have liked,” Kit said, “is living with the Kraft family all those months.”

Pan said,“I stayed because of Tessa. Vinnie could be mean, but she was afraid of me, I could make her back off from Tessa. Debbie never bothered. But,” he said, “it was Erik I was afraid of. I stayed out of his way. I was glad he was gone so much of the year, it was more peaceful then.” He gave her a sly smile. “Debbie liked it that way, too. When Erik was gone, or at work, she’d go through his desk, pull out files and make notes. I could never get a good look, she’d push me off the desk. I never saw her copy anything on his Xerox, I think she was afraid he’d find out. Maybe he kept track of the copy count on the machine. Sometimes she’d copy things in the files by hand, too. She sent them all to her mother, she wrote to her mother a lot. I’d jump up on the desk to look, and she’d shove me away. Letters about Erik, though, I saw that much. About his real estate transactions. When she finished a letter she’d seal it right away, drop it in her purse and be off to the post office. As if she was afraid to leave it even for a few minutes where he might come home and find it.”

Kit said,“Debbie’s nephew, Billy, told Max Harper that Debbie never wrote to Hesmerra, that Debbie would have nothing to do with her mother.” And Kit burned to tell Joe and Dulcie that therewere letters, that either Billy had lied or he didn’t know about them. Between this new bit of intelligence, and the presence of Pan himself, Kit was so wired she could barely settle in Pedric’s arms, as Pan asked Misto for a tale. This was the story Misto told, of a deep cold winter such as Kit could hardly imagine.

“In a village five centuries before Dickens’s London, in the frozen cold of winter in a cottage as rude as a cow byre, a child huddled alone, chilled on the icy hearth, her father gone to fight the invaders. The cries beyond the sod walls and banks of frozen snow were the cries of pain and death. The child hugged herself with fear and cold; the only movement in the dim hut was that of a half-wild village cat, as he crept to the child and lay up against her, to share his meager warmth. She put her arms around him, and only when the shouts of the hordes drew close did the cat rouse the child, hissing and pawing; he led her out into the dark and snowbound streets, and quickly on beneath a hill of frozen snow that covered a village haymow. He led her deep into the heart of the hay, where the fermenting heap had made its own warmth. There they remained huddled as the night passed, until the screams of the dying, and the trample of hooves, at last grew faint.

“At dawn the Huns had vanished, and child and cat came out. Beside the hill of snow and hay lay a warrior, dead. The child’s own father lay there, the reins of his steed tethered among his armor. The child wept as the cat took the reins, freed the mount, and leaped into the saddle. When he pulled the child up before him, he was a cat no more, but a fine young knight dressed in catskins, with a lashing tail. And the child … Her cheeks grew rosy, her frail body bloomed stronger, until her beauty shone with the light of love, out over all the bodies of the dead.

“Together they left that place, knight and damsel. They rode away in the dawn to where the land grew warm and sweet and the crops lay untouched by fire. There they gathered around them strong warriors and kind, they gathered a fine army, and there among plenty they waited, armed and strong, to turn away the Goths or to slaughter them,” Misto ended, his golden eyes smiling at Kit.

The evening ended, too, with Kit still in Pedric’s arms, looking back over her shoulder where Pan and Misto stood together in the open doorway. The wind had died, but, strangely, the night air felt as cold as that medieval winter. As she looked back at the two tomcats, she could see the hearth fire blazing behind them, in a scene that seemed as magical to the tortoiseshell as Misto’s ancient tales. And then Pedric was slipping into the car, holding her, and home they went through the cold night to their own warm house, Kit carrying the tales with her, carrying dreams with her of times long past—and, perhaps, of amazing times yet to be known.

21

It was earlier that evening, the icy wind rattling the trees and fingering down among the darkening cottages and shops, when Debbie Kraft and the little girls returned to MPPD. They came in shivering in their thin coats. Maybe because of her long wait and having to return, Debbie seemed chastened. She was silent as a deputy fingerprinted her and then ushered her and the children back to Max’s office.

The two cats were sprawled on Max’s couch when, over the intercom, the dispatcher announced her. Now, at her approach, Dulcie slipped beneath the credenza, but Joe wasn’t in a mood to move. He stayed where he was, but the next minute he was sorry, when Vinnie bolted in ahead of Debbie, spied the tomcat and grabbed him up, nearly strangling him.

“Why is Ryan’s cat in here? Why is this cat always in the police station? Is it lost?I know where it lives,” she said, staring up boldly at the chief, squeezing Joe so hard it was all he could do not to bite the kid’s grubby fingers. What was this preoccupation with cats? She didn’t even like cats. He remained very still, trying to keep his claws sheathed. Not easy. Passive acceptance wasn’t in his nature, he wanted to bloody the little brat.

Debbie pushed in, with Tessa behind her. The little girl slipped into the nearest leather chair where she curled up like a sleepy kitten. Debbie tossed her jacket and purse on the couch and sat down huffily, scowling at Max as she wiped the last smear of fingerprinting ink on the leather cushion, then reached into her purse for a tissue. Vinnie, still clutching Joe, squirmed up next to her. Joe pushed his hard paws into her bony chest, finally growling as she wriggled to get settled. Vinnie didn’t see Dulcie peering up from beneath the credenza, whiskers twitching, green eyes bright as the tabby tried her best not to laugh aloud.

“I came in to be fingerprinted,” Debbie said. “They did that. I thought that’s all you wanted. What is it now? I have to get back, I have work to do.”

“You arrived in the village when?” Max asked her.

“I told you that, we got to Ryan’s last night,” Debbie said.

“I understand you have a key to Alain Bent’s house.”

“Alain gave my husband a key. She works with him.”

“She gave Erik the key for what purpose?”

“I suppose in case he needed to pick up papers, sales contracts, like that.”

“And he gave the key to you?”

“No, he went off without it. I didn’t want to leave it in the vacant house, and I didn’t want to throw it away. I put it in my purse. As long as I had it, I stopped there at Alain’s last night to pick up some clothes she borrowed, stopped on the way to the Damens’. What is this, some kindof interrogation?”

“Only a few questions,” Max said easily. “Alain Bent borrowed clothes from you? You were friends, then?”

“No, not close. Once when she flew up to Eugene, they lost her bag. Erik insisted I loan her some things, and she never returned them.”

“She borrowed clothes. Isn’t she somewhat taller?”

The irony seemed lost on Debbie.“She’s taller, but she’s thin. What in the world does that have to do with anything?”

“What kind of clothes did she borrow?”

“A couple of long vests, and some smocky blouses. Things she could manage to get into.”

Max had to hide a smile. This woman didn’t even lie well. “When you arrived in town, then, you went into the Bent house to get the clothes. You and the children slept there that night, the night before you went to the Damens’?”

“No. I told you, we went there just before we went to the Damens.” Beside her, Vinnie looked up at her mother and began to fidget. Debbie scowled down at her until Vinnie settled back, Debbie so tense that even her scent had altered. Joe was surprised Max had let the children stay in there, when he’d meant all along to interrogate her. He could have had one of the officers watch them and give Debbie some privacy. But maybe that was his intention, to pressure her, to see if Vinnie, the talkative child, would make some comment and give her mother away.

Though what really pleased Joe was that, while Max had onlyhis word that Debbie and the kids had stayed at Alain’s and slept there, the chief was taking his word against hers; Max was running with what Joe had told him, and that made him feel pretty good.

Max looked at Debbie a long time, letting the silence build, then abruptly switched the subject.“You said you came here because Erik wouldn’t expect you to, that he’d think you’d go somewhere else?” Debbie nodded. “Were you afraid of him?”

Another faint nod.

“Can you tell me why?”

“Sometimes he hit me,” she said sullenly. “When he got really mad, he’d knock me around. I told you that before.”

“What was it about Erik’s work that caused friction between you?”

Debbie scowled at him, and looked down at her lap. Max said,“What was it he didn’t want made public, that he was afraid you’d talk about?”

She didn’t answer.

“It will be easier to tell me now, than to explain later why you withheld information from the police.”

Still, she didn’t answer. Beside her, Vinnie was quiet. When she relaxed her grip on Joe, he thought of bolting. He tensed, then decided to stay put, even if she was hot and sweaty. Debbie’s brown eyes had gone flat. “Alain and Erik worked most of their real estate listings together.”

“Why would that upset you?”

“I didn’t say it upset me.”

Max seemed to change tack again, as if to keep her off balance.“You knew your mother was cleaning the Kraft offices, that she was working with the night crew of Barton’s Commercial Cleaning?”

“I knew she worked with some cleaning service. I didn’t know she cleaned Erik’s offices. How long had she been doing that?”

“Do you have any idea why she wanted to work nights, when she had to leave Billy alone? That must have been hard for them both.”

“Maybe it was the only work she could get. The way she drank. I guess the boy was independent enough, he’d have to be, with no one but my mother to look out for him.”

“You think, then, that it was coincidence she was cleaning the Kraft offices?”

“What else would it be? What choice would she have? I imagine she worked where they told her. After all, shewas working, despite the drink. Earning enough to buy booze,” she said bitterly.

“Debbie, did your separation from Erik have to do with Alain Bent?”

She didn’t reply.

“Were they lovers?” Max asked.

“They …” She glanced down at Vinnie, then nodded.

Max sat relaxed in his swivel chair, looking interested but kindly.“And what else about their relationship troubled you?”

Debbie fiddled with her purse, opened it, found a tissue, crushed it in her hand. It took her a while to speak.“They … were into some kind of … something outside the regular real estate sales. Something they kept secret.” She looked up at him, perhaps not aware she was busily shredding the tissue. “Some kind of transactions that weren’t … That I don’t think were legal.” She glanced down again at Vinnie. “Could we talk about this another time? The children … I need to get them home, fix their supper.”

“We can talk again,” Max said. “Do you think Perry Fowler would have been a part of their scams, if that’s what this turns out to be?”

“I have no idea.”

“Was Fowler close to Alain?”

“I really don’t know. Fowler is …” She shook her head, didn’t finish. When Joe thought of Fowler, he thought of a slick, slippery man, pale and soft and evasive.

Max rose, buzzed Mabel, and sent the two children on up the hall to her.“I can’t force you to tell me what these scams are about, Debbie. But if this involves criminal activity, you’re better off coming to us with what you know, than to face a charge of withholding information, and perhaps as an accessory. You’re better off telling us what you know, than facingcriminal charges yourself.”

Debbie looked at him uncertainly, coloring with a sudden hesitancy that made Joe wonder.Was she telling the truth? Or was she setting Erik up for her own purposes, for something he hadn’t done? As Max wrapped up the interview he asked Debbie about Hesmerra’s funeral.

“It’s just a graveside service,” she said. “Sunday morning at ten, at the Pacific Sea Cemetery. Esther arranged it. Just the family, I guess. But you can come, if you want.” Joe watched from the couch, and Dulcie from her shadowed lair, as Max escorted her out. The cats followed, could see from the hall out the glass door as Debbie hurried the children away to her car; her walk was quick and angry, as if she’d escaped a dominance she found hard to handle.

Why, Joe wondered, hadn’t Max questioned her more intensely about just when shehad arrived in the village and what shewas doing in Alain Bent’s house? Why had he let her sidestep so many questions? Still, though, Max had asked enough to see she was lying, that was clear enough.

Maybe he didn’t want to distress her so badly she’d slip back into Alain’s to set the house to rights, to clean off fingerprints and any other telltale evidence of her presence before the department had a chance to search the place? She’d have to clear the food out of the refrigerator, Joe thought, carry away the trash, get rid of the wet towels.

Out in front, Davis’s car pulled into the parking lot and up to the red curb before the station. The detective got out, gave Max a little crooked grin as she pushed in through the glass door. The scent of cinnamon drifted around her, from the small white bakery bag she carried.

“Just drove Emmylou back to her car,” she said. But clearly she had something more to tell him, and the two headed back to his office, Davis limping badly again. The cats followed, sniffing the aroma of cinnamon buns with an interest that would seem, to the two officers, as natural as if Juana had brought in a bag of live mice; neither officer would imagine the cats’ interest lay, rather, in police business, in whatever secrets Emmylou Warren had passed on to Juana Davis.

22

“What do you cats want?” Davis said, opening the bag of cinnamon buns she’d dropped on Max’s credenza, and pouring two mugs of coffee. Joe and Dulcie looked at her hopefully, drinking in the cinnamon smell. She broke apart one of the buns onto a napkin, laid it on the floor, put the bag, Max’s coffee, on the deskbefore him. “Emmylou didn’t much like being picked up, but nothing seemed off.She grumbled about being printed, but she settled in, and let me question her.” Carrying her coffee, she sat down in the leather chair that was still warm from little Tessa Kraft.

“Said she was up the valley at the time of the fire, had pulled off onto a side road, was sleeping in her car, said she heard the sirens. She described her friendship with Hesmerra pretty much as she told you. What made her nervous was when I asked her about breaking into Sammie Miller’s place.She claimed to be worried about Sammie but didn’t want to file a missing report, said she thought the woman would turn up soon. She sounded more worried about Sammie’s cats. I’d like to have a look at the place, but without a missing report we have no cause. I dropped her at her car, told hernot to leave the village.”

“She’s living in her car,” Max said.

Juana nodded.“I didn’t press it. Said she had two cats herself and that John Firetti had taken them in.” Ever since Davis had adopted a kitten, courtesy of Joe and Dulcie, she’d been more aware of the cats that might suffer when she made an arrest or during a domestic dispute. Among all the officers, Davis was quickest to bring in the SPCA or CatFriends to care for the family pets. She had always been willing to help abused women, too, advise them on how to escape to safety. “I called three women’s shelters to find Emmylou a place but they’re all full. Called Chichi Barbi, they’re full, too, extra beds in all four rooms. Chichi has a PI running background checks on the women she’s taken in, he’s cleared five and they’re all working for her.”

Just before Christmas, Chichi and her housemate, Maria Rivas, had bought Charlie Harper’s cleaning service. Charlie had started the business with very little money, working out of an old, used VW van badly in need of repair. When she sold the business it included four new vans, a staff of sixteen cleaning women and two handymen. Now Charlie had the workday to herself, no more bookkeeping, no more scheduling and unforeseen disasters. She had time to finish the drawings for her second book, attend to the final editing of the manuscript, and complete five commissions for animal portraits, two of local Thoroughbred stallions, three of champion shorthair pointers. Max said, “What about the boxes in Hanni’s garage?”

“We lifted three sets of prints.” She grinned. “Matches for those from the meth house, including the Romero brother we picked up this morning, Raul. No ID yet on the others. Kathleen’s canvassing the local retailers, running the bar codes on the chemicals. A long shot, to find a clerk who remembers a Latino customer with a big purchase, but worth trying.”

Joe wondered how long it would take to get an ID on the other prints. Depended on what was in the system, on how backed up the lab was, and how complicated those particular prints were to identify. Licking the last cinnamon crumbs from his paws, he wondered if the hoods from the meth house had had some warning about the raid, giving them time to move their chemicals to Hanni’s garage. Hanni had left the house unattended for nearly two weeks while she finished up an extensive interior design installation, plenty of time for them to make the shift. He kept wondering, too, about a connection between the meth house, Alain Bent’s place, and Sammie Miller’s cottage—and, wondering why Emmylouhad broken in.

Licking their cinnamon-flavored whiskers, the cats curled up on Max’s Persian rug and pretended to doze, as if lulled asleep by the monotonous drone of the officers’ voices. But when Davis left and Max headed for Dallas’s office, they hurried up the hall, their minds on those three neighborhood houses and on Sammie Miller’s jimmied front door.

Outside, the night was still. An icy cold radiated through the door, nearly frosting their noses. A green van stood in the red zone just outside, its back doors open and a courier in a green and white uniform emerging, carrying a brown manila envelope. As he ducked his head beneath the dripping oak, and pushed the glass door open, the cats slipped quickly out past his hard shoes. The parking lot was wet, reflecting the overhead vapor lamps in yellow pools. Scrambling up the wet trunk of the oak to the roof, they headed across the slick tiles, their paws already freezing.“Feels like snow,” Dulcie said.

“Oh, right,” he said, cutting her a look. How many years since the central coast had seen snow flurries? This was California. What felt like snow, and smelled like snow coming, was no more than a fanciful illusion.

“Do you think,” she said, “we should swing by Jolly’s alley? I’m more than starved, that cinnamon bun only made me hungrier. If we go by my house, Wilma will start asking questions—she’ll worry for sure if we head out again in this weather.”

“She’ll worry more if you don’t come home.”

“Well, she has to know what’s going on,” Dulcie said to ease her conscience. “Maybe she’ll think we’re still in Max’s office, cozy and warm and picking up information.” Wilma Getz was as close with the department as were Ryan and Clyde, she knew about the meth house, and she would already know about the cartons of chemicals. Dulcie, lashing her tail with irritation because her housemate too often looked over her shoulder, swerved away in a sharp detour, heading for Jolly’s alley. Joe galloped close behind her, thinking of smoked salmon, crab salad, scraps of rare prime rib—thenthey’d search Sammie Miller’s cottage. He wondered, as they dropped down into the picturesque alley, if Emmylou had hidden Hesmerra’s metal box there in the house, when she broke in. Would she do that, with cops all over the neighborhood?

He still wasn’t sure whether Max had seen the box half hidden in the backseat of Emmylou’s car and whether he’d glimpsed the Kraft letterhead sticking out. Wasn’t sure what Max had thought at seeinghim there. He told himself the chief was used to seeing him in strange places—he was, after all, an annoyingly nosy tomcat. Given the chief’s matter-of-fact take on life, what else could Harper think?

“Oh, my,” Dulcie said, licking her whiskers at the smell of roast chicken drifting up to them from Jolly’s alley. Scrambling down a potted bottlebrush tree into the brick-paved alley, they were about to make a dash for the food bowl when, from the shadows, a dark little shape leaped away and vanished, a little black-and-white cat, diving behind a potted geranium where, in fact, they could easily corner the little thing. They remained still, hoping it would come out again; they didn’t want to scare it all the more. The scent was of tomcat, a little young tomcat.

“Sammie Miller’s other cat?” Dulcie said. “Did he have a mustache mark?”

“I don’t know,” Joe said. “I’m starved.”

“We’ll share,” she said, “we’ll leave him some, he’ll come out when we’re gone. I’ll tell Wilma, maybe he’ll come out for one of the volunteers.” No one wanted to trap a cat unnecessarily, if he was friendly. And Jolly’s alley didn’t make good trapping, with so many neighborhood cats stopping in for handouts. Odds were, they’d have to release two dozen cats before they caught this one. Dulcie headed for the bowl, and Joe shouldered in next to her. It took great restraint to leave any chicken for the stray, they slurped up the deli’s offering as eagerly as if they, too, were homeless and starving.

When they’d finished, leaving a generous portion, they scaled the bottlebrush tree back to the roof, and waited nearly half an hour for the little cat to come out. When at last he did creep to the bowl, he inhaled their leavings in six big bites. “If they can catch him,” Joe said, “he’ll be happy to see his sister, and they’ll be fine at Chichi’s.” Chichi Barbi’s cages, set up in her airy daylight basement between the guest rooms, were large and clean with multiple levels for each cat; the cats, according to Ryan, got plenty of petting and attention from the women Chichi was sheltering. Leaving the young cat licking the bowl, they headed for Sammie Miller’s. This was a lot of fuss for a box of business papers that could turn out to be nothing; but something prodded Joe to find it, his instinct about those papers was as urgent as the curiosity of a stubborn cop.

No exterior lights burned around Sammie’s cottage; Molena Point neighborhoods didn’t have streetlights, the only illumination was what homeowners chose to install on their own. Sammie’s yard was not only dark but smothered by overgrown bushes clutching the walls, reaching toward the grimy windows. The frame building was no wider than a double garage, maybe six hundred square feet at best. Even from outside, the house had the sour smell of accumulated dirt and rotting wood, a house overripe for a teardown. In better economic times someone would already have bought it, razed it, and be building a new little retreat in its place. Or would have bought several adjoining houses, torn them all down, and built yet another overlarge, too impressive residence; even in this unpretentious neighborhood, every square foot of land was valuable.

The little front porch was no more than a slab of flaking concrete with three cement steps leading up. The front door was painted a dark, sticky color undetectable in the night, sealed with a new hasp and padlock, courtesy of MPPD, where Emmylou had pried the old lock open. There was a small window at either side, but no cat door. Trotting around the side of the house, they pushed downhill through patches of thorny pyracantha bushes, moving to the back where the dropping lot allowed for a taller basement, enough space for another pair of small, dirty windows. Twelve wooden stairs led up to a wooden landing supported by four-by-four pillars. The steps smelled rank and wild.“Raccoons,” they said together, hissing with disgust.

The back door was narrow, decorated with the same dark sticky paint. To the left, a cat door had been cut into the wall, a homemade affair closed by a flap of warped plywood hanging on rusty hinges. Raccoon fur was caught around the edge, where the beasts had pushed inside.“This,” Joe said, “might not be such a breeze, if we corner one of those mothers in there.”

“You want to leave? Wait until the department has a go? If they can get a search warrant. We could tell them we think maybe there might be a box hidden in there and maybe it contains information …”

“All right. Enough.” Laying back his ears, he shoved beneath the plywood flap into the kitchen. The place stank of raccoons and, even more viral, it smelled of soured milk and spoiled food from the refrigerator. They paused, listening.

There was no sound, no scuffling or snarling as if they had surprised some rough-furred bandit. The linoleum was gritty beneath their paws, the floor scattered with kibble where the animals had torn open a large bag of dry cat food. A five-foot length of counter held the sink, its dark cabinets featuring the same sticky paint as the front and back doors. The ancient gas stove was small, round cornered, pale enamel with chrome trim, short curved legs and curved feet. It stank of old grease and of the gassy pilot light, those smells blending with the aroma of cat kibble and the stink of raccoon.

A cracked white bowl stood on a rubber mat just inside the cat door. It was empty, licked clean save for two muddy, long-toed pawprints marking the white interior. Together, the cats pawed the cupboards open.

Old dented pots and pans in the bottom, five cans of soup in the top cabinets, a bag of flour with bugs crawling out, and half a dozen ants wandering aimlessly as if discouraged in their hopeless scouting trip. The inside of one cupboard door held a row of cup hooks where Sammie had hung a beer opener, a flat grater, a key on a ring, a set of measuring spoons, and a little rusty strainer. The refrigerator, when Joe swung on the handle and kicked the door open, offered half a loaf of moldy bread, a bottle of curdled milk, a bowl of spaghetti green with mold, three rotten tomatoes. The freezer, the size of the glove compartment in a compact car, held two packs of rotten meat. Had Sammie neglected to pay her bills, even before she vanished? The power company, with so many folks moving away with rent and bills unpaid, had grown rather surly in such matters.

Moving into the front of the house, they found one long room, with a notch cut out for a bathroom that left a narrow sleeping alcove with a brown curtain drawn halfway across. The same dark walls as the kitchen. A fusty gray carpet, gritty beneath their paws. Toppled stacks of newspapers cascaded against the furniture, some of the papers shredded among torn-apart paperback books. Had the raccoons done this? Or had someone else? Rumpled clothes were tossed across a fat, overstuffed couch and matching chair of undetermined color.

The room had four small windows, those each side of the front door, and two artlessly placed in the center of the side wall, half covered by graying lace curtains hanging crookedly. Sammie might have a roof over her head, in contrast to her wandering brother, but this environment seemed far more grim than his open roads. Beneath the smell of raccoons and the smell of dust came, faintly, the hint of young cats, an old and fading scent. No cats were visible. They started at floor level, scenting out like bloodhounds looking for the tin box, trying to pick up a whiff of water-soaked ashes, nosing into every pile of papers, old sweaters and rumpled Tshirts, feeling with careful paws for the smooth cold feel of metal. But only Joe thought the hunt might be worth the effort; Dulcie really didn’t think Emmylou would have hidden Hesmerra’s box in here, it didn’t seem to her a safe place at all—if the paperswere of any value.

The heavy sideboard and two end tables were coated with the same dark paint as the doors and kitchen cupboards. Had Sammie bought a barrel of the stuff and kept painting until it was all used up?

The receiver of the phone had miraculously remained in place but when Joe pushed it off and listened, the line was dead. With all the letters jammed in the mailbox, it was likely Sammie hadn’t paid her bills; the phone company wasn’t charitable about such oversights. The cats, prowling and poking, lost track of time as they dragged stacks of debris aside to search among the next layer. Together they fought out heavy drawers, looked under the couch and chairs, burrowed beneath the cushions, wondering what Emmylouhad been doing in here. Outside the grimy windows, the pines pressed against the house heavy and dark, the night sky beyond forming small, pale islands between the shaggy limbs.

“This is dumb,” Dulcie said. “Emmylou wouldn’t hide anything in here. Why would she, when whoever was here might come back?”

Joe was silent, rummaging in the little closet.“Come smell this,” he said, his voice muffled from beneath a bag spilling out old towels and linens. She bellied under, and then into the bag. Over the smell of very old cloth, she breathed in the scent of smoke and wet ashes.

But there was no box, nothing like hard metal beneath their seeking paws.

“If she did hide it there,” Joe said, “then moved it again, why would she? Unless itwasof value?”

“Well, it’s gone now,” Dulcie said crossly. “I just know, if we have to toss a house, I’d rather search anywhere else than this depressing mess. How could she live like this?” Lashing her tail, she looked down with disgust at the old metal vent set into the carpet. “Even the heat vents are rusty and dirty and …” She paused, and approached closer. She sniffed at the metal grid then backed off, making a flehmen face.

“What?” He was beside her in one leap, sniffing at the grid and then backing off, too, with the same grin of disgust.

She said,“Maybe it’s a dead raccoon. Or … Oh, not one of the cats. One of Sammie’s cats? Oh, the poor thing can’t have gotten trapped down there, trapped under the house?”

“I don’t know, Dulcie,” he said impatiently. While the smell was certainly of something dead, of a body left to perish, the faint stink wafting up from the basement could be anything. Gopher? Ground squirrel? Dead dog?

But whatever it was that lay moldering down there, there was only one way to find out.“Come on,” he said, and headed back through the kitchen, through the homemade cat door and out, to find a way underneath.

23

The wind had stilled as Joe and Dulcie prowled outside the house looking for a way into the dank cellar, to the source of the dead smell. The thin rain was sullen, and colder, hiding any hint of moon or stars. It was strange, fitful weather, its penetrating cold made them shiver and move closer together beneath the dense bushes; and even under the wet bushes the smell of death clung in their nostrils. Easing around to the far side of the house where they hadn’t yet explored, where the land dropped down, they at last found a small door into the basement, a crude affair built of matching wooden siding and crowded by early-budding mock orange bushes whose sweet scent blended strangely with the stink of decay. The door was locked.

Leaping up, Joe pawed at the rusty hasp and padlock hoping the screws might be loose. He knew that, in his desire to get inside, he was destroying fingerprints with his grasping paws, but it couldn’t be helped. He was fighting the lock when Dulcie said, “Wait, Joe. Come this way.”

He could see only her backside, she was halfway under the house where the siding had rotted, leaving a ragged slit barely high enough for her to wriggle through. Joe dropped down, and joined her, pushing under, the wood so soft that pieces of desiccated siding clung to their fur as they bellied through into the dark, earthen cellar.

Drooping cobwebs hung down from the floor joists, so thick and long they brushed their ears. The dead smell led them into the blackness toward the front of the house, where the ground rose.

“If it is a human body,” Joe said, “there’s not much room for a cop to crawl back in there.” In most of the cellar, there was hardly belly space for a cat. Only where a swale ran along between the rough wooden wall and the earth, was there room for a human to move, bent over. The thought of a human body stuffed up into that claustrophobic crawl space made Joe’s fur rise along his back. Hard clods of dirt bit into their paws. Splintered scraps of wood and bent nails cut their pads, and the longest cobwebs clung to their whiskers like sticky tape. “This is what we do for entertainment?” Joe said.

“No. This is what we do because we can’t help ourselves. Because we’re cats. Because we’re cursed with too damn much curiosity.” She moved ahead of him into the blackness like a stalking tiger, every fiber honed to the quarry. He could see the ancient furnace deep in, a hulking black box sprouting fat pipes that led up through the floor, a squat, low affair beyond which Dulcie vanished.

Soon he could hear her digging. He picked out her dark shape, half hidden, clawing at the earth. How could she stand the stink? When she gave a sudden squeak and flew backward, he jumped nearly out of his skin.

When he pushed up against her, she was shivering. When he nosed at her, her paws smelled so bad he backed away. Hastily she pawed at fresher earth, trying to wipe the smell off, unwilling to lick her paws and force the taste into her mouth.“Fingers,” she said, looking at him.

“Fingers?”

“Human fingers, Joe. A hand, an arm. I left them half buried. Let’s get the hell out of here. We need to call the station.”

They fled for the crack where icy air wafted in together with the clean cold smell of rain. This wasn’t the first body they’d dealt with, they’d reported plenty of deaths over the years, but this one smelled the worst, sent them scrambling out beneath the rotted siding sucking fresh air and then racing straight up a juniper, inhaling its sharp, clean scent.

Only high in the branches did they stop, looking down, and consider the implications if they called the department. To report what appeared to be a murder, to report those frail skeletal fingers and arm—to try to explain how the department’s two best snitches, supposedly human snitches, had “just happened on” a body buried in a space hardly high enough for a child, half hidden behind a furnace in a pitch-black cellar that could be entered only through a padlocked door.

Whatever they said, or didn’t say, was going to generate any number of unanswerable questions. Queries to which they couldn’t even imagine a believable reply. Uncomfortably they looked at each other, trying to figure out how to handle this new level of deceit, this even more complicated web of lies, to the very officers they wanted only to assist.

The rain had all but stopped, the drops seeming to have slowed until they were almost floating. The midnight village was wrapped in a strange silence, even the rhythm of the sea hushed. High in the hills, Kit could hear not even a passing car; no sound at all until suddenly a great horned owl boomed, too close to her. From her tree house she watched him descend above her and on down over the village gardens; he would be sensing the warmth of some small creature.Not me, Kit thought, you won’t take me,you daren’t come in my tree house, you’d snatch nothing in here but a beakful of pillows—and my claws in your face.

She and Lucinda and Pedric had been home from the Firettis’ for nearly an hour but she couldn’t sleep. She’d started out in the house on the bed between the old couple but she was too restless, too warm, her blood pounding too hard. Slipping down off the quilt to the floor, she’d trotted through the house to the dining room, leaped to the table, across to the sill, and pushed out through her cat door along the twisted oak in the icy night and into her tree house, where she’d burrowed deep beneath the pillows.

She listened in the silence until another owl answered from farther up the hill; she thought about Pan, and that was why she couldn’t sleep and her claws kneaded sharply into the pillows. She thought how the firelight glanced off his red coat, thought about his travels, thought how she and Pan had listened together to Misto’s tales. Pondering the stories and adventures of both tomcats, she grew so restless that at last sheleft her warm cushions, too, scrambled down out of her oak tree, and raced across the neighbors’ yards until, where the houses rose closer together, she hit the roofs again. Putting the call of the owls behind her, farther and farther behind her, she prowled the roofs above the village shops, scrambled over peaks and dormers feeling bold and wild, looking into second-floor penthouses, trotting, racing, stopping again to peer into the rooms of strangers. She looked into Erik Kraft’s elegant penthouse, slipping under the terrace wall. It still looked neat and unlived in, the bedroom elegantly furnished and totally unused. Quilted black bedspread made up just so, thick black towels folded perfectly on the shelf in the master bath, one black towel perfectly aligned on the rod, as neat as if a decorator had placed it there. Even the white ceramic drinking glass and tray by the basin wereplaced just so.

It hadn’t been so neat when he was in town; then, looking in, you’d see his clothes dropped here and there, and often a woman’s things, sleek nightgown, satin slippers tossed under the bed, a mess of jars and tubes on the bathroom counter—Alain, she supposed, or maybe some other woman; human men were so fickle.

She prowled until her paws felt like ice cubes and then she spun around and headed for home. She was freezing when at last she clambered up her own oak tree and back under her own soft pillows, just her nose and face sticking out where she could see the street and yards below. From her high vantage she sighed once, purred twice, and was nearly asleep when she saw, down on the street, Emmylou’s old car moving slowly along. What was she doing out at this hour? Looking for a place to park for the night? Somewhere the cops wouldn’t hassle her?

Strange old woman, Kit thought, very independent even with the law. She guessed Emmylou didn’t like the cops or anyone else telling her what to do—didn’t like to be bossed around, any more than a cat did. Maybe in ancient times, Kit thought, letting her imagination run, maybe Emmylou would have been a homeless loner then, too, always at odds with the world, an outcast faring no better, then, out in the cold looking for a place to rest and get warm.

Rambling along in her old Chevy, with the heater turned on full blast, easing along beside the village shops looking in their softly lit windows at wares she couldn’t buy, Emmylou at last turned up into the narrow residential streets, to find a place to park. But she stopped now and then where a living room light burned, sat watching the flicker of firelight against drawn curtains, imagining the cozy room within. Then, moving on, she tried to think what sheshould do; she had to find a job but she so hated the regimentation. She’d tried, at three groceries, to get on as a bagger, had filled out applications, left her name, but no one needed her. Maybe, like others down on their luck, she should steal just a little, just enough to get by, if she could do it without getting caught.

The cops were right, shehad meant to stay at Sammie’s. Until she saw the mess, until she thought someone had been in there—or something. Something she didn’t want to share a bed with. She’d hidden the metal box there earlier, but then had gone back to retrieve it. The trashed house had frightened her so that, even if the cops stopped watching the place, she wouldn’t go back inside.

Earlier in the evening, driving around looking for Sammie’s cats as well as for a place to get warm, she’d stopped outside Dr. John Firetti’s clinic, thinking about her own cats. Wondering if they were still there, if she could get them back when she did find a place, or if he had already found homes for them.

Maybe better homes than she could give them. He’d known when he questioned her that she was lying about their shots, but he’d been willing to help them anyway. She liked him for that. The clinic complex was a hodgepodge affair, the two small cottages joined by the big solarium and then, across a little patch of lawn, the doctor’s own small cottage. Two outdoor lamps burned in the yard, their glow smeared by rain, lighting the way between the house and clinic. Neat flower beds flanked the front door, and through the shuttered windows the undulating light of a hearth fire gave her a sharp jolt of loneliness. Listening through the car’s open window, she caught soft laughter, a happy sound that twisted at her and made her move on, feeling left out, knowing she wouldn’t be wanted there.

Chilled by loneliness as much as by the icy night, she headed up among the winding hillside streets where the cottages were crowded close and the streets didn’t have parking limits, where if she could find an empty spot among the residents’ own cars, she could safely stay the night. She was searching for a parking place, thinking the cops didn’t usually bother a person up here, when a black-and-white approached her from the rear, startling her, coming fast, its tires throwing up sheets of water. Slowing, she pulled over. What didthey want? They had no reason to follow her, no reason to hassle her.

But the squad car didn’t slow, it sped on past, and another behind it, and then two civilian cars, all of them heading straight up the hill—in the direction of Sammie’s neighborhood. She looked after them with unease.

But hundreds of people lived up there, in those little pocket neighborhoods separated by ravines or outcroppings of boulders too rugged to build on. Why would she think they were headed for Sammie’s? They had no reason to go to Sammie’s, she was worrying for nothing.

She was just tired, exhaustion always left her edgy and nervous. Turning onto a short dead end, she found a parking place no one else had wanted, really only a swale, a runoff that directed rushing rainwater down into a little ravine, sheltered by a dripping willow so her car would be nearly hidden.

She backed parallel into that portion of curb, her front and back wheels straddling the low dip. She locked her doors, rolled up her windows to just a crack. Crawled over into the backseat, stacked the bags and boxes on the floor as she did every night, to make a flat surface. Shook out her blankets and quilt and pulled them around her. The backseat still smelled of ashes from Hesmerra’s metal box. Hesmerra had called it her safe, and she’d been partially right. It wasn’t insulated like a fire safe, but the metal had been enough to protect the papers from the dampness of the earth where it was buried; and the earth in turn had protected it from the fire.

The problem now was, should she take it to the police, or keep the papers to herself as Hesmerra had done? Maybe at some future time, she thought uneasily, the papers would serve as a payback? A payback for Hesmerra’s death?

“And what,” Joe said, stretching out along the juniper branch where the rain didn’t reach, “what do I tell the department? I just happened to crawl under Sammie Davis’s deserted house? I, a grown human, just happened to squeeze through a space not big enough for a miniature Chihuahua?”

“Tell them … that the cellar door was standing open and you smelled something.I can’t call, they might think it’s Emmylou. She’s been in that house, nosing around. That would sure make her a person of interest.”

“Maybe sheis a person of interest. I have to tell them the cellar door was open, how else would the killer, or the snitch, get in? So how come it’s locked now? What, I tell them I locked it when I left, after discovering the body? Oh, right.”

“We’ll have to unlock it,” she said sensibly.

“You’re going to pick the lock. Like some trick movie cat? Jimmy the lock with your clever little claws.”

She narrowed her green eyes at him, the tip of her tabby tail twitching.“Maybe that’s what the key in the kitchen was for. You think? It looked like a padlock key.” Scrambling backward down the tree, she disappeared around the corner, was up the back steps in an instant and in through the cat door, leaving the little square of plywood banging in Joe’s face.

This was a long shot, but who knew? Joe watched her leap to the counter and open the cupboard, watched her ease the key off its hook with a delicate paw, trying not to smear any existing fingerprints. Maybe the killer had used this key. Or not, Joe thought. Maybe he had a key of his own. Either way, they didn’t need paw prints. Cat prints might be just as unique as human fingerprints, if any of the three detectives decided to follow a hunch and check out the markings they found.

So far, they had been lucky no one had thought to compare paw prints found at a scene, with prints an officer could lift within the department itself. Joe imagined Juana or Dallas offering them little treats, and then restraining them long enough to ink their paws, to produce a set of fingerprint cards that would go into the office files. The idea gave him chills. Could he get used to wearing gloves? Pulling on little cat mittens?

Dulcie, taking the key carefully in her teeth, dropped to the floor looking smug, and they beat it out again, down the steps and around to the cellar door. Carefully Joe took it from her, and climbed up through the brittle branches of the nearest bush, trying not to drool, not get the key wet and slippery. Clinging within the bush, he found a steady position and pulled the lock to him with a careful paw.

Holding it steady, turning his head at an angle, he tried to ease the key in. Just a little finesse, and he’d …

He dropped it.

Silently Dulcie retrieved it, and climbed up through the bush; he took it, and tried again, but it wouldn’t go. He turned his head, adjusted his balance. Another try, but it didn’t fit. This wasn’t the right key. Ears back, he tried forcing it, but still it wouldn’t go. He turned around in the branches, poised to leap down.

“Try again, Joe. Is the lock rusty?”

Of course it was rusty. This baby’d been out in the weather since locks were invented.

“Take your time,” she said. “Try just once more.” In the female mind, any impossible problem can be solved with sufficient patience. Ducking lower, he tried again, bowing his back so the key wasn’t angled, giving it a straighter approach.

Nothing. Nada.

“Turn it over.”

He’d already tried that. It wouldn’t fit. He couldn’t talk with his mouth full, couldn’t even hiss at her. He was fighting it, the metal hard against his teeth, when he dropped it again. Dulcie gave him a look, dove into the bushes, rustled around, and came out with the key safe between her teeth.

Motioning with her head for him to get down, she climbed, silent and quick. Around them, the rain had quickened again, they were both soaking wet, the raindrops on Dulcie’s back pale and icy. His paws felt like blocks of ice. Above him Dulcie was fiddling and fussing as she eased the key up to the lock. Females were so nitpicky, not direct like a tomcat.

Within minutes she had it open. With a quick paw she pulled the padlock off, let it fall, the key still protruding, a rustle and dull thud as it dropped to the ground among the bushes.

She didn’t brag or tease him. “What shall we do with it?”

“Lose the key, keep the lock. If anyone else knows the key was inside the locked house, that leads right back to Emmylou. Maybe she’s innocent,” he said doubtfully. “Maybe she’s not.” He watched Dulcie remove the key and, with it safe between her teeth, they scrambled up the nearest pine and headed across the roofs.

They carried it six blocks away where two steep peaks angled together, and tucked it down beneath the overlapped shingles. Then shoulder to shoulder they headed for Dulcie’s cottage, and a phone.

“I just hope Wilma’s asleep, we don’t need to drag her into this, in the middle of the night.”

“You don’t want to listen to her scold,” Joe said, grinning. Though, in fact, Dulcie’s housemate was as tolerant of the cats’ involvement with the law as a human could be. Wilma had been, for twenty-five years, a federal parole officer, she knew very well the intense fascination of sorting out a crime, she knew how it felt to be deeply involved with a case.

But that didn’t stop her from worrying, she knew the disasters, too. She worried because they were small and vulnerable, and because they were, in her opinion, far too brash and bold. Worry made her overprotective, and so she fussed at them. Joe followed Dulcie in through her cat door, stopping midway to easethe plastic flap down along his back, to keep it from swinging, thump, thump, and waking Wilma. She slept attuned to that sound, to any small noise that would herald Dulcie’s return home.

Crossing the laundry, they left wet paw prints on the blue kitchen floor, left a wet trail across the oriental rug in the dining room, and when Joe leaped to Wilma’s desk, again a damp row of prints incised across the blotter. As he pawed at the phone’s speaker, pressing the arrow down until the sound was as soft as it would go, Dulcie slipped down the hall to the bedroom, peering in, to make sure Wilma was asleep.

Yes, she slept, breathing deeply, her back to the phone on the night table. Dulcie, watching her, decided she really was asleep and not faking, that she wouldn’t see the phone’s flashing light. Trotting back through the dim house and leaping to the desk, she watched Joe key in 911 and prayed, as she always did, that Wilma’s ID blocking was working as it should. She’d heard a number of stories where the service had failed, incidents too alarming to bear thinking of, at that moment.

The night dispatcher came on, a young man they didn’t know well. Joe asked for the chief or whichever detective was on duty.

“If this is not an emergency, you—” the dispatcher began.

“Itis an emergency. Do itnow. Max will be mad as hell if you fool around. And no, I won’t give my name. Justdo it!” There was a short silence, then Kathleen Ray came on. She knew his voice, she didn’t interrupt as he described the location and probable condition of the body.

“In the crawl space of a dark cellar? How did you find that?”

“I was walking my dog, he smelled something. The body must be pretty rank.”

“You crawled back in there, to look?”

Joe went silent, and clicked off.“Does she have to be so damned nosy?”

“She’s a police detective. That’s her job.”

He hissed at her companionably and they waited, listening, looking out at the cold night. The raindrops had turned suspiciously white and slushy. Dulcie said,“It’s going to snow.”

Joe turned, gave her a look.“Snow. Right. Since when did it snow on the central coast?”

But even through the glass, the night felt cold enough to freeze the rain solid. They were peering out when a lone siren cut through the silence from the direction of the station: one whoop, like a squad car clearing traffic as it sped away. They imagined the black-and-white moving fast through the village followed by another and maybe by Kathleen’s white Ford two-door. Dropping from the desk, they slipped quickly out of the house, scrambled to the roofs again through the rain, which was heavier now, almost sleeting, and they followed where they knew the cop car was headed. The immediacy of the police response took precedence over the cold, over their sharp hunger, and over their need for sleep—even over their caution to remain unnoticed at the soon-to-be-busy crime scene.

24

Wilma was awake when the cats quietly left the house. She’d heard them come in just moments earlier, the faint brush as they slipped through the cat door, and she’d thought Dulcie was in for the night. But then when Dulcie didn’t trot in to leap on the bed, and she heard Joe’s soft voice from the living room, she’d rolled over to look at the phone.

With the red light for the main line flashing, she knew the phantom snitches were at work, calling the department, she knew the scenario too well. She hadn’t dared turn on her speaker to listen in, the little click would have alerted them at once. Swinging out of bed, shivering even in her flannel gown, she’d slipped barefoot to the bedroom door and listened, only mildly ashamed of herself. She could hear the faintest mumble, not Dulcie’s voice, but Joe’s, serious and urgent, too faint to make out a word he was saying.

She daren’t slip closer, they’d hear even the faintest brush of her gown against the wall or door, or would scent her approach. The next moment, the whoop of a siren rose from the center of the village, a squad car leaving the station. How cold the night had grown, her bare feet were freezing. She’d stayed by the bedroom door debating whether to go on out, but then she heard them leave as stealthily as they’d entered. Searching for her slippers, she pulled them on and went up the hall to the living room, turned on the desk lamp, and hit the redial button.

The number 911 came on the screen, and quickly she clicked off.

She couldn’t ask the dispatcher what was happening. How wouldshe know they’d just received a tip from the snitches? That lone siren could have been a patrol unit pulling over a speeding driver, but from the cats’ stealth and haste, she didn’t think so. Something was happening out in the night, and she knew she wouldn’t sleep again. Wide awake, she turned out the lamp and pulled the curtain aside.

The rain had turned to slush, the cold was as sharp as knives. Closing the curtain again, she moved into the kitchen, flipped on the light over the sink, got the milk from the refrigerator, and a saucepan, and made a cup of cocoa. Carrying it back to bed, she opened the curtain, then tucked up under the covers, getting warm as she sipped her cocoa and looked out at the night. The slushy rain was falling more slowly, in a strange, drifting pattern.

She sat up straighter when she realized it was snowing, small flakes floating beyond the glass. Snow, here on the coast. And the weatherman apparently hadn’t had a clue.

This hadn’t happened in a decade, smatterings of snow in the village, deeper drifts up in the surrounding hills, an amazement that had brought the whole village out to look. There were newspaper articles in the library’s local history collection, pictures of heavy snow some fifty years ago when, one article said, Molena Point High School students abandoned their cars to throw snowballs in the drifts, getting to class hours late. That was the year that the steepest grades were too icy to drive on, and the Bing Crosby Pro-Am Golf Tournament was postponed because the golf course was covered with snow. The newspaper pictures made the higher elevations look like ski country, hills and roads solid white, roofs and the tops of the fence posts heaped with snow. The papers said that all day a steady stream of drivers headed up the valley to have a look and take photos.

And now here it was again. The real thing. She imagined the village waking in the morning to a white world, everyone running outdoors, excited by the novelty.

But right now, tonight, the two cats were out in it freezing their busy little paws. If they had alerted a patrol car, you could bet they were headed back to the scene, to whatever violence had occurred, that they’d be in the middle of the action, peering down from some freezing rooftop into the glare of strobe lights, hardly able to hear the officers’ voices for the harsh radio’s grainy insistence. Two little cats out in the icy night with no thought to frozen ears, their entire attention on the investigation unfolding below them.

It seemed so long ago that Dulcie was just a giddy kitten, with no thought to human crime, human evil, and with no notion of her true talents.

Though even then, that tiny little thing was strange and different. So covetous, for one thing, stealing the neighbors’ sheer stockings and bright scarves right through their bedroom windows, even then a clever little break-and-enter artist. And look at her now, a bold, grown-up, crime-solving lady, too often wired for trouble.

The day Dulcie first spoke, that was a shock to them both, had left them both shaken, staring at each other, Dulcie’s green eyes huge with amazement, Wilma trembling as if with vertigo. Dulcie’s disbelief had made her laugh, and hearing her own human laugh, she was startled all over again.

And now, besides her aggressive fascination with village crime, look what else the feisty little tabby was up to. She was suddenly filled with poetry, caught up in a whole new obsession,“What a lovely cat she is, Posed behind the curtain’s gauze …” And tonight, when Wilma stopped by the library after leaving the Damens’, and had turned on the computer, she found a new poem waiting. She hoped this was only the first verse, only the beginning, because it did make her smile.

All along the cliff top blowing

She stalks her prey in grasses growing

Forest tall and thick above her

Quick and silent feline hunter

Queen of the high sea meadow

She thought there would surely be more verses, that Dulcie might even be toying with the lines as she crouched beside Joe out in the freezing night, watching the police at work. She longed to follow them, but sensibly she ignored the urge, finished her cocoa and set the mug aside. She drew the curtain again and switched on the lamp, dispelling the comfortable dark, and reached for her book. Sliding deeper under the covers, she read for the rest of the night, or tried to. Even through the book’s gripping mystery she kept seeing the cats out in the cold, seeing the squad cars, the busy officers, wondering which detective had come out, which officers were on duty, all of them illuminated in theatrical unreality by the harsh strobe lights; she kept wondering what had happened to bring them out, whatwas happening, called out by the phantom snitches.

The cottage roof next door to Sammie’s was quickly growing white with snow, and the cats’ backs and noses were dusted with snow. This wasn’t a five-minute flurry, destined soon to melt away again, this snow was building, it was clinging, it seemed to be serious. The harsh lights below them picked out each drifting flake, and reflected from the cops’ slickers, and from the snow-covered patrol cars. One black-and-white was parked just below them in the side yard, one out at the curb beside Kathleen’s white Ford. In the drifting snow, two officers were stringing crime-scene tape; they had already cordoned off the open cellar door, which spilled light out into the yard brightening each drifting snowflake. Only a few minutes ago, Detective Kathleen Ray had gone down into the cellar alone, carrying more lights and her black crime-scene bag. “Where’s Davis?” Dulcie said.

“Her knee’s worse,” Joe said. “I heard Brennan talking, said it was swollen twice its size, said she was meeting the doctor at his office. Brennan says she’ll probably have to have a knee replacement.” Dulcie shuddered, she didn’t like to think about surgery. When Wilma had had gall bladder surgery, that was bad enough, she’d worried herself into a frazzle until her housemate was healed and well again. Below, more lights came on in the cellar as Kathleen got to work. The tall, slim brunette had arrived dressed in jeans and a yellow slicker, her long dark hair stuffed up under a yellow cap. Entering the cellar, she had pulled on cloth booties over her running shoes. She reached out the door twice as Officer Crowley handed her additional lights and her camera bag. Kathleen was, in Joe Grey’s opinion, too beautiful to be crawling around in the dirt, crawling back under there into that putrid stink.

“I crawled in,” Dulcie said. “You didn’t worry aboutme spoilingmy looks, or gassing myself or getting splinters in my paws.”

“You’re tougher than a human woman,” Joe said, cutting her a look. “And far too beautiful to ever spoil your looks, even with dirt in your fur.”

They could see into the cellar for only a little ways, could see, in the painfully bright lights, deep marks in the earth where the body had been dragged in. Kathleen hunkered along at the side, away from these. Twice she paused to look at Dulcie’s paw prints, and both times, she’d photographed them. The first time, she had called out to the waiting officers to ask if Sammie had cats.

“Did she have to notice that?” Dulcie said.

“Of course she’d notice, that’s her job,” he said smartly.

Officer Brennan, looking like a tent with legs in his wide black slicker, had said Sammie had two cats, that when they found Emmylou Warren in the house she said she had come up to feed them, said she couldn’t find them. Kathleen had nodded, and disappeared. There’d been a long silence in which they imagined her inching her way back toward the furnace, placing her lights as she went.

They imagined her finding the partially buried fingers, envisioned her carefully uncovering them until she had, like Dulcie, revealed the buried hand and arm; she would photograph them, and photograph the surround. She would be kneeling on a small sheet of plastic, and as she resumed digging, she would brush away a few grains of earth at a time with a soft paintbrush. To find what? Only the hand and arm? Or the murder victim?Was this Sammie Miller? And, beneath this bloated but intact body, what would she find to account for the far more sick-making smell that seemed to come from underneath?

Sounds were becoming muffled as the snow accumulated. On the snowy roof, the two cats huddled together shivering as the temperature dropped degree by falling degree. Dulcie hoped Wilma’s garden wouldn’t freeze, she hoped Wilma wasn’t out there in her slippers and robe, covering her prize plants with newspapers and old sheets.

In the cellar, the position of the lights changed again and again, coming from different angles as Kathleen photographed the grave. They heard her talking on her cell phone, there was a little silence when the call ended, then the lift of her voice as she made a second call. At the third call, Dulcie eased forward.“Maybe I can just slip in and listen.”

“No way,” Joe said, hauling her back with a nip to the butt that got him a swat on the nose. “You want to get caught in there? She’s already wondering about the paw prints.”

Sighing, she settled back, pawing snow off her ears. Silence again, only the soft mutter of the police radios. Kathleen would have a black-and-white camera in there, one for color, and a video. She would already have photographed the drag marks and, who knew, maybe she’d found a trace of the killer’s footprints. By the time Dallas Garza’s tan Blazer pulled up next to Kathleen’s car, Sammie’s yard and drive were more white than brown, and the pines and cypress trees looked like a Yosemite postcard.

Dallas stepped out of the Blazer looking as if he had just rolled out of bed, his heavy boots pulled over the gray sweats he might have slept in, his black slicker hanging crookedly, his short dark hair mussed from sleep. Walking the narrow path between two barriers of yellow tape, to the lighted cellar door, he knelt down, looking in, touching nothing as he talked with Kathleen.

“We have a body,” she said. “Smells like more than one. I called the state forensics lab, two techs are on the way. We’ll have another in the morning, and possibly their entomologist. And I called Ryan. I’m thinking we could cut away the outside wall nearest the grave, give them space to work, room to move back and forth, and get the body out without trampling the surround.”

Dallas considered this, and nodded.

Atop the roof, Dulcie said,“Working in there, with that stink, has to be like working right inside the grave. Why does anyone do that, why do people choose this kind of work?”

“The need to know,” Joe said. “Why arewe here freezing our butts and starving? You ever think what life would be like, if no one went after the bad guys?”

Dulcie sneezed.“So, all this work, and the courts let half of them loose again.”

Joe didn’t have an answer to that. They were licking snow from their fur when Ryan’s red king cab came up the street. Parking just beyond the squad cars, she moved down along the house following the officers’ footsteps on the narrow, muddied path between the yellow tape. Crouching beside her uncle Dallas, she peered in. The conversation came in snatches as they considered ways to keep the scene from being trampled and contaminated by sawdust as she removed a portion of the wall.

“I can prefabricate a frame,” she said, “then bolt it together inside the cellar, a barrier between the basement wall and the grave. Staple a sheet of plastic to it, seal off the site before we start the tearout.”

Dallas nodded.“That should contain the debris, keep it off the surround and body.” They discussed the details of the construction, then he headed around the house to the front, to work the scene inside. Joe wanted to follow him, but there was a limit to how much they could push. Cats in the office. Paw prints at the scene. Cats following him around that little crowded space inside wouldn’t be a good idea. Dulcie said, “I’m freezing and I’m starving, and there won’t be much more action for a couple of hours, until the techs get here.”

He looked at her like she was abandoning the mission.

“Even then,” she said, “it could take them the rest of the night to free the body, bag the evidence underneath, take samples, get the corpse onto a gurney. And maybe have to dig out a second body. While we freeze our tails and starve, and then they’re off to the lab, and we don’t know anymore than we do now.”

“I guess,” he said reluctantly. If he’d been alone he’d have stayed all night, hungry and cold or not. But he saw how cold she was, her ears down, her tail tight around her, trying not to shiver, and he knew she needed breakfast and a warm bed. “I guess they won’t bring the first body out until daylight,” he said. Another patrol car had arrived with two officers to help secure the scene if onlookers or the press began to gather. Maybe, with the amazement of snow, the villagers’ attention would be elsewhere. As the officers worked, one or another would look up at the falling snow, look around at the white yard, the accumulating snow weighting down the trees, and they’d start to grin. Snow, and it was nearly Valentine’s Day.

Nearly Valentine’s Day, Joe thought, nearly Ryan and Clyde’s first anniversary. And here Ryan was, pulled out of bed on a freezing morning to work in the middle of a foul-smelling murder scene—plus, the happy couple was saddled with Debbie Kraft, whining to be taken care of. He looked at Dulcie again, at theway she was shivering. “Let’s cut out of here, my ears are freezing off.” He looked toward Ryan’s truck. “If we hurry, we can hitch a ride.” They were poised to drop down the nearest tree and race to the truck bed when Ryan turned away from the cellar, headed for her king cab to go gather the materials she’d need, and swung in. The cats were halfway down the tree when she started the engine, and backed out and pulled away.

Hadn’t she seen them? It had looked as if, when she glanced in her side mirror, she was looking right at them. “Well, hell,” Joe said. Sopping wet and cold, they looked after her longingly, then took off across rooftops, bounding like rabbits in the cover of snow. Hadn’t she guessed they’d bethere? Who did she think called in the report? When she was summoned out of her warm bed, didn’t she wonder why Joe didn’t come bolting down from his tower? Where did she think he was, but already at the scene? When she saw it was snowing, didn’t she worry about her poor little cat, out in the freezing night? And where was Clyde? Still home in bed sound asleep and not a worry in his thick skull? Humping across the white roofs beside Dulcie, freezing his paws, he had worked himself almost into a temper when, two blocks from the crime scene, they saw the red king cab parked at the curb, the engine running, its exhaust flume rising white on the cold air.

Ryan was standing out on the curb, looking up.

Within seconds they were inside, snuggled warm against her, drenching her jeans and her red leather seats as they licked their sopping fur. Heading down the hill, she looked over at them with a little smile.“How did you explain to the dispatcher that you just happened on a buried body in the back of a deep crawl space, in the middle of the night?”

“I didn’t,” Joe said. “I hung up.”

“Three squad cars,” she said, “six uniforms and two detectives, the San Jose techs on their way down that icy freeway, a contractor called out in the middle of the night. All of this, Joe, hanging on one short, unidentified phone call.” She looked at him and smiled and shook her head. “Sohowdid you find the body?”

“A little break-and-enter,” Dulcie said innocently. “From there, one thing just led to another.”

Ryan sighed, reached in the backseat, found a towel ripe with the smell of dog, and dropped it over them.“I guess the department has decided not to ask questions, just to be thankful for what they get.” Letting the truck ease over an icy patch without touching her brakes, she coasted to the curb in front of Dulcie’s house.

The front windows were dark. But they could smell smoke from the woodstove, and could see a light at the back, glancing up the hill, so Wilma would be awake in bed, reading.“Awake and worrying,” Dulcie said guiltily.

Ryan reached over the cats, opened the passenger door, watched Dulcie streak for the house and vanish through the plastic flap. When she looked down at Joe, he was laughing.“What?”

“She’ll climb in bed ice-cold and sopping wet, push right in against Wilma.”

That, in fact, wasn’t a bad idea. Snuggle up next to Clyde, thaw his frozen paws on Clyde’s warm, bare back.

Ryan scowled at him.“You can do what you’re thinking, Joe. Shock him out of a nice sleep—and go to your own bed hungry. Or you can endure the hair dryer to get warm, and finish up the fillet I saved for you, from supper.”

Well, hell. What choice did a little cat have?“Rare?” he asked.

“Of course, rare,” she said. “With a side of kippers on a warm plate.”

And that, of course, was no contest.

25

The Harpers kept the barn closed up at night, the big doors at both ends drawn shut against the wind and cold, and against predators, two-legged or four. Now in the early dawn, the alleyway was dim, but the light was strange, unnaturally pale. Billy woke in his box stall to a glow more white than shadowed, white light seeping in above the stall door, and the air was freezing. His face and hands were icy while the rest of him was too hot. Six cats were piled on top of him, and one curled up between his shoulder and chin, all seven snuggled close trying to keep warm. Sliding his hands under them, he luxuriated in their body heat and warm fur. For a moment, he didn’t know where he was. He wasn’t in his own bed on the thin pad through which you could feel the rough slats, this bed was soft, and saggy in the middle, and he was tucked between real sheets, smooth and smelling of laundry soap, and the blanket was soft and thick, too. And the air—the cold air didn’t stink of whiskey and throw-up, it smelled of horses and of fresh, sweet hay. All this in an instant, and then he sat up spilling cats every which way, realizing he was in the Harpers’ barn.

He swung out of bed, and stood looking out through the hinged mesh barrier that formed the top half of the stall door. Down at the end of the alley, the light seeping in around the big doors was bright white, the faint movement of air freezing cold. The horses were stirring in their stalls, restless and wanting breakfast. When he turned to look at the cats, they were hungry, too, all seven lined up in a row, now, waiting to be fed—but they, too, were puzzled by the light, they sat glancing up at the door and up at the ceiling, watching a shaft of white light that fingered through, where the timbers joined the wall. Striped Sam, and black Lulu, they were Gran’s favorites. He thought of Gran and felt his stomach go hollow. The image would never be gone, Gran lying dead on that stretcher, her charred body, his not wanting this to be real, wanting it not to have happened, wanting to believe that such a thing couldn’t happen.

He had seen the fire as he came up the highway, pumping hard up the steep hill, saw the EMT van turn in and had raced to catch up, raced behind in its cloud of dust down the dirt lane, saw the fire truck and cop cars and felt his stomach turn hollow. Like he felt now, hollow and sick. Gran on the stretcher, her clothes and skin burned black. They had pulled him away, wouldn’t let him near, he couldn’t touch her. She was gone, she wasn’t his gran anymore, she was a foreign thing. He had stood by the wet, black timbers, the live red coals, the smoke and steam and the stink of burning rags, trying to understand that Gran was dead, stood there until the hollow sickness in his belly made him retch and turn away.

But then later a jolt of something else hit him and he was immediately ashamed. Part of him feltfree.Free of Gran’s drinking, of dragging himself awake in the middle of the night to hold a bucket so she could throw up, free of cleaning up after her and cleaning her up, having to change her nightie and get her back into her bed. He hated trying to clean up the rough wood floor, you could never scrub that stuff out, never get the smell out, the place always stank of throw-up. And then every night when she went off to work, seeming to be sober, worrying she’d have a wreck, get hurt, or hurt or kill someone else.

Now he was free. So free he felt like running, like he could fly, he was free of an old woman who refused to take care of herself, refused to take any responsibility for what she did to them both.

He loved Gran, but even right after she died, right after the fire, the burst of lightness and freedom inside him had felt pretty damn good.

Did you burn in hell for such thoughts?

The bag of kibble stood on a cardboard box that Charlie had brought in for him to use as a table. He poured the dry food into the cats’ dishes, set them on the hard dirt floor, and the cats dove in growling softly at each other. No one tried stealing, they were pretty good about that. Out in the stable, Charlie’s sorrel mare nickered for her hay and banged the door, and the two big dogs, who were shut loose in the alleyway atnight, stood up on their hind legs, their front paws on the stall door, looking in. Both were fawn colored, they were litter brothers, Charlie had said, most likely of a Great Dane mother and maybe fathered by a German shepherd. Both were huge and ungainly and still acted like puppies, until Charlie or Max took a hand with them. After the fire, Charlie had shown him the smoke alarm that was wired from the barn to the house, and the speaker that, if there was trouble, if there was fire or a breakin, would let her and Captain Harper hear the dogs barking.

Opening the stall door, he pushed the dogs back, stroking and pummeling them, and stepped out into the alleyway. Moving out between the two rows of stalls past the restless horses, he approached the barn door with curiosity, where the white streaks of light shot in.

When he slid it open, the yard was white around him, the pastures white, the far hills, the roof of the house, the tops of the cars, all white, snow piled up in a white dazzle, snow on the sills of the bay window framing the lighted kitchen where he could see Charlie inside, getting breakfast.

The dogs had already bolted past him bouncing and barking and biting at the snow. Still wearing the old sweatsuit he slept in, he ran to join them and pummeled and pelted them with snow, rolled in the snow with them, laughing as they barked. Not in his whole life had he ever seen snow, only in pictures in books. He played in the snow with the dogs until he was freezing and soaking wet and then turned back inside the barn to get dry. He put on his day clothes, and fed the horses, measuring the grain carefully, following Charlie’s instructions, flaking off just the right amount of hay for each, filling their buckets with clean water. By the time he’d turned the horses out into the pasture and cleaned their stalls, the smell of bacon and pancakes was nearly more than he could stand. The two big dogs had long since gonein the house, and as he headed across the yard he could see Max Harper at the table hurriedly eating his breakfast, as if something pressing was pulling him away.

The minute Billy pushed into the warm kitchen, Charlie dished up his plate. Even as he pulled off his boots, Max gulped the last of his coffee and was up and headed for the door.

“A murder victim found last night,” Charlie said when he’d hurried away to his truck. “An old murder.” She said no more and he didn’t like to ask. The thought of murder made him queasy. She moved to the bay window, stood looking out at the white world, the snow-deep pasture. “Who would have imagined?” She watched her mare shying at the snow and acting silly, and Max’s buckskin gelding pawing at the white stuff with his usual single-minded determination, as if to clear the world of this unwanted intrusion. The kitchen table was piled with papers and flyers where she’d been working on the Cat Rescue Auction. A stack of posters lay on the sideboard showing pictures of three rescued cats, with a list of the donations to be auctioned: a weekend for two at the fancy Molena Inn, six months’ housecleaning service, a year’s car maintenance donated by Clyde Damen, three ofCharlie’s original etchings of dogs and horses and two paintings. The impressive list went on and on down the page, making Billy wonder what he’d bid on if he had any money for such luxuries. Sitting down at the table, he reached for the syrup and butter, spread his pancakes liberally and beganto shovel in breakfast.

Emmylou woke stiff and uncomfortable, bent nearly double in the too-short backseat. No matter how long she slept in the car, she couldn’t get used to not stretching out. She had pulled all the blankets over her, but still she was cold. What time was it? Her watch said seven, barely dawn, but a curious white light shone in, pale and icy. Rising up holding the blankets close around her, she peered out.

The world was white. The ground and roofs white, the tree branches patched with white, snow stuck to the car windows.Snow. In Molena Point, that wasn’t possible. But during the night it had snowed. The very fact of it made her joints ache.

Snow was fine if you had a warm little house and a fire on the hearth, a hot shower, something warm to eat and drink. She had none of these comforts, and she was damned cold. And soon she’d have to leave even this poor nest, before people came out and saw her, she’d have to get back in the cold driver’s seat and move the car before some do-gooder reported a homeless woman camping on the street and the damned cops hauled her in.

She longed for a hot shower. Longed to be inside a warm house with the furnace turned up all the way and maybe a blaze on the hearth, too, and a nice hot cup of tea. And the only place was Sammie’s.

Yesterday, she hadn’t thought to see if Sammie’s power was on, hadn’t had time before the law showed up. Even if the heat wasn’t on, the house would be warmer than outdoors, and therewas the fireplace.

Slipping to one end of the backseat, she folded her covers neatly. Laying them over the bags and boxes, she thought about Hesmerra—wouldn’t she have been amazed at the snow. Waking with her usual hangover, she’d look outdoors, startled, and then turn the old stove up high and call across the yard to her, tell her it was snowing, tell her to come on over for coffee and they’d fry up some breakfast.

Hesmerra would do that, would have done that. She thought about Hesmerra dead, maybe poisoned, and a sick reality filled her, she couldn’t really believe Hesmerra had been poisoned. By whose hand?

But Hesmerra was dead, and Sammie had disappeared. And the fact that the two events were related was her secret.

Even the fact that that Realtor’s house stood empty, up there so close above Sammie’s, that could be a part of it, too. All a part of what Sammie knew.

Shivering, she crawled over into the front seat and, on the third try, started the engine. She let it idle a while, the poor thing was as cold and stiff as she was herself. She backed out clumsily from the swale, the water in it running fast enough to keep from freezing solid, and she headed up the hill toward Sammie’s. Despite whoever or whatever had made the mess in there, despite what she knew that no one else knew, it was the only place she could think of to get warm. If the cops weren’t nosing around again, if the cops would leave her alone.

She drove slowly, didn’t use her brakes, or barely touched them in little feathery motions, staying in the tracks of other cars, which had crushed the snow and ice to slush. She drove the last two blocks within the wide prints of some heavy vehicle, but when she came in sight of Sammie’s she stopped suddenly, braking in spite of herself, skidding sideways into the snowy berm.

There were cops all over. A black-and-white sitting in the side yard, two more in front parked beside a couple of civilian cars with bubble gum lights attached to the top. A white van with the logo of the state of California. Whatever this was, it wasn’t good, she guessed those patrol cars last nighthad been headed up here.

She could see where they’d cut a great hole into the cellar and dragged bright lights in under there, and that made her hands begin to shake. Two men stood leaning down, looking in, talking to someone. She sat looking for only a minute, then backed up beneath a low-hanging willow, halfway into a driveway where she mightbe able to turn around, unnoticed. They had found Sammie. She knew they had. She sat for a moment hugging herself, thinking about what she was seeing. She cracked her window open, wondering if she could hear the cops talking, and then wished she hadn’t, she went sicker, at the smell.

From this moment, she was going to need all her strength. She couldn’t let herself fall apart. First she had to get warm, and eat something, or she would be sick. She had to take care of herself, and then think about this, think about the cops in there under Sammie’s house.

Backing deeper into the drive, she looked up across the hill between the other houses, where she could see part of Alain Bent’s place. The windows were dark, the paler shades and curtains looked just as they had for weeks. Reaching under the seat, she fished out the crowbar she kept there, completed her turn, and headed over to the next block and up toward Alain’s.

Joe woke at dawn, the king-sized blankets bundled around him. By the silence, he knew the rest of the bed was empty, Ryan gone, finishing up the hole in Sammie’s basement, Clyde already up and gone. No sound of the shower pounding, no buzz of the electric shaver like a swarm of hornets loose in the bathroom. Why wasn’t he up on the roof, in his own tower? The bedside clock said 7:15. A lingering smell of coffee drifted up the stairs, but no smell of breakfast cooking or having been cooked. A pale white light filled the room. Through the open curtains a clear white glow streamed in across the walls, as weird as if he’d awakened in some alternate world—and then he remembered.Snow! It snowed last night! The bedroom even smelled different, and the air was so cold it burned his nose. Leaping off the bed he flew to Clyde’s desk, glancing down at Snowball asleep on the love seat bundled in a quilt. Snoring softly, she didn’t stir. Leaping up to the rafter, he bolted along it and out his cat door—into the blinding white light. The world was so bright he felt his pupils slitting closed, white roofs all around him, snow piled up six inches around his tower, hills of snow against the neighborhood chimneys, snow weighting down the pine and cypress branches. When he looked over the edge of the roof, the white yards and street were patterned with shoe prints where the neighbors had walked. One set of dark tiretracks snaked through between the white curbs. Children’s voices screamed as kids raced by pelting each other with snowballs. In his own yard was a trampling of big paw prints, the snow matted down where Rock had apparently performed a doggy snow dance. Clyde’s prints came out of the house to join Rock, and the two sets led away as if on an impromptu walk through the village, a walk in the incredible snow.

And left me asleep, he thought irritably. But in his own fascination at the snowy world, he raced away over the white roofs, swerving around chimney drifts and leaping weighted branches, running until his paws were so numb with cold that he had to stop and lick them.

In the center of the village he watched half a dozen early-rising locals cavorting in the snow, as excited as kids themselves. He watched several pairs of tourists, emerging from the motels, head for one or another of the village bakeries, stomping off snow in the doorways, pushing inside to warm up on coffee and strudel or cheese Danish. Dulcie would say, the village looked like a scene from Dickens. Where was she? Why wasn’t she out in this, racing through the frozen morning? Leaping away, he headed for her place, but on the pristine rooftops he saw not one paw print, not Dulcie’s, not Kit’s or Misto’s, not even a squirrel. Maybe Dulcie was already at the crime scene, maybe watching the early-arriving forensics team.

He thought of the techs driving two hours down from San Jose on the icy freeway, eating doughnuts and coffee in the cab of their warm van. Once they got to work, they’d bundle up, heavy sweaters under their lab coats, faces masked against the smell. Maybe they’d be warmed a little by heat from the high-powered spotlights shining beneath the beams and cobwebs as they brushed away earth from the first body. A pair of techs crouching low in the tight space, dropping bits of trace into evidence bags: fibers, hairs that might be other than the victim’s, maybe a button or a fragment of shoelace. He hoped not cat hairs. Maybe a broken fingernail, but not a broken claw. Maybe the forensics entomologist was there, aswell, waiting for the second body to be exhumed, to diligently consult the colonies of insects that had created their own tiny worlds within and, in fact, might turn out to be the only living witnesses to the time of death.

Inside Sammie Miller’s house, Dallas finally had the lights on, after an earlier call to the power company. It was cold as hell in there. He’d left the furnace off, keeping the atmosphere in the house as he found it, and so as not to disturb the scene below where the old furnace, which had to be far from airtight,would suck and expel air and disturb all manner of evidence. The house and yard were cordoned off, and most of the overgrown lot, and they’d established a control center where Officer Brennan was handling the documenting. He’d told Davis to stay home, her knee was pretty bad. She’d said it was damn near as big as a basketball, and she was trying to wrap her mind around the upcoming surgery.

He had photographed the interior of the house, which, in this mess, had taken the better part of two hours, had done three rolls just of close-ups of the tangle of clothes and scattered household debris. What was a part of Sammie’s lifestyle, and what disarray the vandals had caused—raccoons or humans or both—was pretty much up for grabs. He had gathered trace evidence, including the intrusive raccoon fur, and begun lifting prints and scanning electronically for footprints, working one section at a time as he tried to figure out what might be out of place and how much of the mess Sammie had left herself. So far he had prints for what looked like four separate individuals, besides those of the damned raccoons. Talk about contaminating the scene. One set would be Sammie’s, one possibly Emmylou Warren’s. The stink of the raccoons, mixed with the smell of death and the smell of spoiled food from a refrigerator without power, made him sorry he’d eaten breakfast. No wonder Emmylou Warren, when she came in here, hadn’t smelled the body. Below him in the cellar, the forensics team should be pretty close to lifting the victim, sliding a stretcher under it and easing it out onto a gurney. The question was, what would they find underneath?

And the real question was, how the hell had the snitchfound the damned grave? What was he doing snooping around underneath Sammie Miller’s house, in the middle of the night?

Or had this call not been from their regular snitch at all? Kathleen wasn’t as familiar with the snitch’s voice as he and Davis were. What if it was someone else?

Had that meth bunch broken in, thinking to hide more chemicals under there? Or to stash the meth itself, get it out of their possession where they thought no cop would look?

Or had someone broken in under there to get out of the cold, maybe meant to sleep safely hidden beneath the house? Maybe Emmylou Warren had returned but afraid to go back inside after they ran her off? She slips in underneath, maybe thinks the furnace is running and it will keep her warm. But then she smells the stink and makes a hasty retreat?

Butshe didn’t call the department, it was a man who called—unless she was pretty good at disguising her voice.

He thought about the snitch, this guy, and the gal, who were so unlike the usual informant with whom you maintained a quiet relationship; someone you knew and could talk to, a barkeep, a mechanic, city clerk, someone who had contact with a lot of people, and who liked the high of helping the law, liked to feel they were on the inside. And, he thought, smiling, liked seeing their marks go to jail.

They knew most of their snitches and nurtured the relationships, yet for some six years now they’d been getting anonymous calls from this man or the woman and they didn’t have a clue to either one. Yet not once had they been led astray, every tip was a good one, though too often perplexing in the things they turned up. Evidence no cop might have come up with, items lifted that no one could have gotten their hands on without a pretty elaborate breakin. Information that didn’t involve locked houses or cars but seemed to have been overheard under the most unlikely of circumstances. It was almost as if they had a ghost on the payroll, someone skilled beyond any normal ability to get their hands on all manner of evidence, someone almost uncanny at eavesdropping, and at slipping in and out of locked houses and offices unseen. An invisible snitch who left no smallest mark of jimmied lock or fingerprints, no trace of any kind.

Sometimes a few cat hairs at a scene, as if maybe the snitch kept cats. But what were you going to do with that? Half the people in the world owned cats. What, run DNA on the cat hairs and then run DNA on every cat in the village until you found the right owner?

As Dallas mulled over the puzzle of the snitches, he had no idea his two informants crouched just above his head on the neighbors’ rooftop. When Joe first arrived he’d found Dulcie already hunkered down there against the brick chimney where the snow hadn’t gathered. Freezing their restless paws, they’d listened to the faint voices of the two crime-scene investigators working in the cellar, and they could see down across the narrow scrap of yard through the hole Ryan had cut in the wall, could see the men’s shadowed movements. They had watched Kathleen find and bag the open padlock, and had prayed that if the lab found fingerprints, they wouldn’t find cat prints badly smearing them. Dulcie said, “If the lab picks up a few good fingerprints, why would they bother with the smears? With even one good print, plus whatever information they get from the body itself, maybe they won’t be so nosy.”

“And maybe they will,” he said. “Nosy is what makes good police work.” He wished the sun would come out, he’d had enough of the cold. Snow was fine as a novelty, but this freezing morning, snow was best seen from a snug house as you lay curled before a crackling fire.

They had watched Dallas enter the house, glimpsed him through the windows as he worked the scene lifting prints, taking blood samples, taking roll after roll of photographs of the detritus from every angle, a hard job, sorting out anything that might be linked to the murder, among that chaos. Seemed like Dallas had been in there forever before the front door opened, he stepped out, and secured it with the department’s own lock. He stood on the little porch looking around at the snowy neighborhood as if he’d expected, when he came out, the snow would have started to melt.

It hadn’t.

Where the snow was exposed to the full morning sun, ithad begun to soften, but then the heavy drifts slicked over again as the temperature dropped, the morning sun gone again behind a pale mist. Black ice glittered in the gutters, icicles hung from the trees. Dallas paused on the porch as Ryan came around the corner of the house, her frown stern and uncomfortable.

“What?” he said, looking down at her.

“Thereare two bodies, just as Kathleen thought. Two bodies, Dallas, crammed into that terrible, dark place.”

He came down the steps, put his arm around her.“You okay?”

“Yes. Just—maybe the smell gets to me. Two graves, the earth packed down with the back of the shovel, shovel marks where the footprints were smoothed away.”

Joe hoped Dulcie’s prints were all smoothed away.

“They are,” Dulcie whispered, cutting him a look. “I brushed them away, Ihope I got them all.”

26

Warmed from his breakfast of pancakes and bacon, Billy was coasting his bike down the steep two-lane, down the hill from the Harpers’, headed over to the Harmann ranch to feed their horses when, passing the narrow lane to his burned house, he saw Gran’s landlord standing at the edge of the burn, his silver-colored pickup nosed nearly out of sight against the hill. Billy stopped, softly dragging his foot, silently braking his bike. The stink of burned wood still hung in the air, souring the clean cold smell of the snow. The old man stood just at the edge of the fire-chewed timbers, his back to him, and as Billy watched, he stepped in over the crime-scene tape, carrying a sharp-nosed shovel.

He stood a moment, looking, then began to poke the shovel in among the wet, burned walls and debris; the shovel made an ugly, grating sound as it sliced through ashes and charcoal. The crusty old man had every right to be on his own property, but the burn was still off limits, Max Harper had told Billy that. Maybe not even Zandler should be disturbing the scene until the cops released it. Zandler always looked like an ancient crow in his dusty black suit with its old-fashioned vest. Stained white shirt open at the collar, grizzled gray hair combed sideways over his balding head, hanging down around his collar. Short gray beard as stiff as a scrub brush. He was a tall old man, long angled face under the bristle, and small angry eyes that could fix on you like the eyes of a mean-spirited old crow wanting to peck and strike. Didn’t he know he shouldn’t be in there? But there was no cop around, so what did he care?

Zandler’s footprints led from his truck across the snowy yard to Emmylou’s shack and then to the collapsed one. Had he gone to see if Emmylou had moved back in, on the sly? Or if Billy himself meant to stay on there hoping he wouldn’t be caught? The old man was always sure someone was taking advantage of him. He was nosy, too, asking Gran, when he came to get the rent, if she had enough money set aside for thenext month’s payment, saying he hoped she had it in a safe place. Gran always said the same,What I have is none of your damn business. If I can’t pay you, we’ll get out.But she always had the money, and Zandler always remarked slyly on her frugal ways. Every time, the minute he’d gone, Gran would say, Nosy old goat.

The burn was still warm enough so no snow clung to the black rubble, and Zandler was just poking and prodding with his shovel, bending down to look sometimes, or to pick something up. What was he looking for? And why was his pickup parked right beside the old lumber and doors that hid Gran’s cave?

He had to know about the cave, but Billy didn’t think he’d ever shown any interest or snooped around there. The land and buildings belonged to Zandler, but Billy wasn’t sure the cave did. It might even be on the Harper property, cut back into the hill the way it was, only a few feet from their pasture fence. Gran had always been secretive about it, didn’t want anyone snooping in there, sure not Zandler. She might have been drunk a lot of the time, but she knew if even one board in that pile had been moved. If Billy went out there to count the bottles, to see how much she was drinking, he’d better be sure she was asleep, and besure to replace the boards exactly right. Now, easing his bike down into the gulley that ran alongside, he laid it down in the weeds that grew at the bottom. Climbing back up the bank, he stayed close to the hill where Zandler might not notice him, walked silently and tried to melt into the hill.

The old man still hadn’t seen him. He was scraping around the remains of their burned table, and then scraping at Gran’s burned bed, pushing aside what was left of it. Billy thought to try to stop him, but common sense held him still. Zandler might be old but he was strong and he had a mean temper, he handled the big shovel as if it weighed nothing, shoving aside melted pots and pans, melted dishes and burned rags, then gouging at the floor beneath Gran’s bed, squinting and poking at whatever might lie beneath. If someonehad started the fire on purpose, Zandler’s rummaging could destroy important evidence, and …

Was that what the old man had in mind?

But why would Zandler hurt Gran and burn his own house? Surely not just for her whiskey money. Billy watched him scrape aside the remains of their cupboard and the two chairs with their legs burned off. He wished Max Harper was there to see what he was doing and to stop him. He watched Zandler kneel, examine the burned wooden floor under where the cupboard had stood, and then begin to dig. When the old man rose, Billy melted into the hill among the grayed lumber and bushes.

But the old man found nothing, his hands were empty except for the shovel. Idly swinging it, he headed for his truck, started it, and spun a turn kicking up snow and gravel, sped up the lane, and a right turn onto the highway heading for the village. When he’d gone Billy hauled his bike out of the ditch and took off fast for work, thinking he’d call Captain Harper from the Harmann place, tell him Zandler sure was looking for something.

Misto was lame with the cold, but despite his paining shoulder, father and son raced across the snowy rooftops wild and laughing, amused by this sudden surprising touch of displaced Oregon winter. Eugene hadn’t had snow every year, but when it did they’d found it highly entertaining, the whole family, even when the kittens were small, plunging through the drifts like demented hound dogs. There was never much snow on the valley floor, in the business section of Eugene. But up in the residential hills snow formed drifts high enough to bring cars to a halt, people clueless how to drive in it, cars skidding, drivers honking or stalling or both—while Pan and his sisters, watching from the snowy rooftops, could barely contain their laughter.

Now, below the two cats, the same drama was at work, cars sliding sideways, drivers going super slowly hanging their heads out of ice-blind windows; and Misto and Pan, as they headed for Kit’s house, delighted by this familiar circus of winter confusion.

The morning was so cold that twice, when a car pulled to the curb to park, they waited for the occupants to hurry away then bellied down a tree, leaped to the car’s hood, and sat warming their paws and backsides before they raced on again. When they reached Kit’s house, the smell of waffles and syrup drew them like bees to honey, despite their own ample breakfast. Licking his whiskers in anticipation, Misto led Pan up the fat trunk of Kit’s oak tree and into her tree house—where Pan halted, staring around with amazement.

“This is Kit’s? All hers?” He looked up at the timbered roof and out at the surround of twisted oak branches that formed an extended bower. “Allhers?” he repeated.

“All of it,” said Misto, laughing, “the fancy pillows, the velour lap robe, the works.” The cushions smelled deliciously of Kit, and there was a fine mat of her tortoiseshell fur embedded in the velvet and brocade. Drifts of snow had piled up outside one edge of the planked floor, but the tree house itself was fine and dry. Pan lingered, looking, followed Misto only reluctantly as he headed for the smell of breakfast, padding along a snow-covered branch to Kit’s cat door. The old cat pushed in under the plastic flap onto the windowsill, a leap to the dining table, and he paused, listening.

The house was silent. The smell of breakfast was immediate and rich, but the table had already been cleared. Peering into the kitchen, they could see dirty plates hastily stacked, sticky with syrup, as if Lucinda and Pedric and maybe Kit, too, had gone off in a fine hurry.

But at the far end of the table, two small saucers had been left on a single white place mat. Each plate presented a waffle, cut small and glistening with butter and syrup, and a slice of bacon broken into small bites. On the place mat itself shone one perfect, syrupy paw print carefully incised: a pretty invitation to breakfast, which they could hardly ignore. Pan said,“How did she know we’d come here?”

Misto smiled.“How could she not? She knew I’d be showing you the village, and where else would we start?” He turned his attention to breakfast, handily licking up every bite of his own share, and the good food warmed them right down to their icy paws. When no one appeared, they circled through the empty house, then returned to the tree house. Backing to the ground, their claws deep in the rough bark, they circled the house on the outside, as well, and finding Lucinda’s and Pedric’s boot prints leading away, and Kit’s paw prints trotting along beside them, they followed.

“They’re heading for the murder scene,” Misto said. The grave had not remained a secret for long, word never did in this small village; news traveled from friend to friend, neighbor to neighbor, and back again. The Firettis had heard it over breakfast from a busy-minded neighbor, and where else would Kit go?

The two tomcats galloped along in the wake of the Greenlaws’ footprints, amused when Kit’s paw prints vanished suddenly, to appear again after a block or so—little forays to the rooftops, or sometimes where Pedric had picked her up and carried her, most likely tucked inside his coat until her paws grew warm again. The two toms followed them up into the neighborhood of the Damens’ remodel and on up to where the yard and street were full of cop cars. Ryan Flannery’s red truck, too, and a white van marked with the seal of the state of California. There were cops everywhere, and over all came the sick smell of something dead for a very long time. Warily they scrambled up into the low, weeping branches of an acacia tree, crouched there behind its leafy curtain, looking out, their fur dusted with yellow pollen from the tree’s early blooms. The snow outside the tree was stained yellow, too, as was the bare ground within, sheltered by the tent of branches.

Lucinda’s and Pedric’s footprints made patterns among the tangle of other prints as if they had stood talking with the officers, then their trail headed away again, while Kit’s prints vanished at the base of a pine tree. And there she was above them, on a neighbor’s roof, Kit and Joe and Dulcie, three dark small shapes silhouetted against the milky overcast, watching the action below. Pan and Misto didn’t race to join them, there were too many people to see them, too many cops. Enough to seethree cats together there on the rooftop so intently watching. What would they make of five? Such a gathering would stir far too puzzled an interest.

From among the drooping branches they could see directly into the big hole that was cut in the side of the small brown cottage, the raw earth within picked out with bright spotlights, blinding in their intensity. A slim, dark-haired woman in faded jeans stood looking in, her dark glasses shielding her from the searing light.“Detective Ray,” Misto said. A curtain of clear plastic had been hung over the opening, pulled to the side and tied back like a hastily devised shower curtain. They couldn’t see what was happening inside but could hear the soft brush of careful digging, as delicate as the brush of a cat’s paws.

But then soon, another decaying smell reached them, a bit different from the cellar’s taint of death. Pan, following his twitching nose, looked down beneath the tree where the ground was bare of snow, where rotted leaves were matted between the tree’s exposed roots: smooth gray roots as thick as human arms, twisted together, and over the aroma of death from the cellar, and the honey scent of the acacia blooms, this other faint, metallic smell. Dropping down from the low branches, Pan sniffed at the roots and at the dark stains on their smooth gray surface, and curled his lip in a flehmen face. “Blood.” He looked intently up at Misto. “Human blood.”

Misto jumped down and sniffed, too, flehming, trapping the smell on his tongue.“Old blood, not fresh,” he said. There was no scent of anyone having recently entered under the tree’s low branches, and he looked away to where the officers were at work. “How could they miss this? Stay here,” he said, and slipped out through the leafy curtain.

Easing across the snowy yard among the white-crested bushes, he scrambled up through the dark pine that crowded the neighbors’ house, and across a swaying branch onto the neighbors’ roof to join the other three, and excitement filled the old cat.

When first he’d arrived in the village just before Christmas, the three village cats had been nosing into another murder investigation; he’d fallen eagerly in with them, and found this work even more interesting than his many travels. Now, he whispered to Joe and led him down the pine and through the bushesinto the leafy tent. Joe looked at the bloodstained roots and smelled them. He gave Misto a whiskery smile and a nod, then he melted away again, along the edge of the yard heading for Ryan, making straight for his housemate.

Within minutes Joe and Ryan were in her truck, her cell phone lying on the seat where Joe could punch in 911. Before he made the call, Ryan got out again, left the far door cracked open, and stepped over to join Kathleen. Joe was crouched on the seat, his face close to the phone, when dispatcher Mabel Farthy picked up. Knowing his voice, she was quick to put the snitch through to Kathleen, Mabel never wasted time on useless questions.

“Why did you wait until now?” Kathleen said. “When did you find this blood? No one’s beenin the backyard, last night or this morning, there are guards all over. When did you—”

Joe broke the connection, then peered carefully up over the edge of the window, watching Kathleen as she dropped the phone back in its holster.

Slipping out of the truck, Joe was crouched in its shadow as Kathleen turned to Ryan.“The snitch,” she said. “What the hell is this? How does he do this? Couldn’t he give us a little more information? Why so damned secretive? What’s the point in calling, when he … ? Oh, to hell with it,” she said, looking away toward the acacia tree.

Kathleen was the newest detective on the force, she was still tempted to cross-examine the unknown informant. Not that it ever did her any good. She stood frowning, then headed for her car, pulled out her evidence bag from the trunk, hung two cameras around her neck, and headed for the acacia. As she approached its drooping branches, she didn’t see a pair of shadows slip out from the other side and vanish among the neighbors’ yards. When Kathleen knelt down to peer under, the space was empty.

Before crawling in for a closer look, she circled the tree and poked her camera in through the leaves, taking shots of the trunk, the roots, the faintly disturbed mat of dry leaves. When at last she entered, looking unconvinced she’d find anything of value, Misto and Pan were on the roof with Dulcie and Kit, only Joe was absent.

From their high vantage, they couldn’t see in under the falling branches, the tree was like a little tent; but they could see Kathleen’s shadow, kneeling as if she was shooting close-ups of the dark stains on the pale roots.

The detective took her time beneath the tree, lifting blood samples and then digging carefully through the leaves looking for any smallest item of evidence, a human hair, a torn fingernail, a shell casing. She was thus occupied when Kit caught a glimpse of something shiny, just by Kathleen’s left boot—a leaf had been turned over as she shifted position, and something bright shone out. They all saw it, they all stifled a mew, and Kit drew back her paw where she’d reached as if to alert Kathleen.

But the next instant something, some unknown sense, made Kathleen turn and look, too.

Carefully she lifted the leaves away.

A cell phone lay buried among the mat of leaves, its bright surface plastered with damp acacia leaves. Carefully Kathleen photographed it in the position she’d found it and then, with her gloved hand, she slipped an evidence bag over it, and dropped it in her pocket. Whatever was there, phone numbers, notes, or perhaps photographs, she would examine back at the department, once she’d finished working the scene. The cats looked at each other, and grinned, and they felt high on the discovery. Whatwould she find? Had the killer dropped it? Or had one of the victims buried it there, unseen, hoping to pass on what evidence?

Or had the phone nothing at all to do with the killer, maybe had lain there long before the victims died? The detective continued to search among the moldering leaves, and then she rose to examine the tree itself. She started when her exploring fingers found a tiny dimple within the damaged bark.

Photographing this, and then exploring it with a small dental tool, carefully she bent away a small sliver of bark, to reveal a spent shell.

She cut out a piece of the tree itself, leaving the slug embedded, and carefully she bagged it. She had the bullet. It would be too much coincidence to think this slug hadn’t killed one of the victims—though stranger anomalies had happened. The cats were considering this when two of the CSIs came out of the cellar, and fetched a stretcher from their van and a body bag; as the four watched from the roof, Joe Grey slipped out across the yard and quickly up to the roof to join them, pushing beneath the shadowed branches.

The CSI team, having photographed the first body and its surround, had covered the victim’s hands for more careful examination at the lab, then had spent several hours lifting trace evidence. Now they wanted Dallas and Kathleen in the cellar before they eased the corpse into the body bag, wanted to see if either of them knew the woman. With the bloating and discoloration that takes place even in a week or two, a victim is not always easy to identify. The cats watched the two detectives slip in through the hole in the wall.

The detectives were in there for some time; when they came out again, the expressions on their faces told the cats clearly that they didn’t recognize the victim. Now, in the cellar, the team would be bagging the body. Below the cats, Dallas was on the phone to Mabel Farthy. “I want a BOL on Emmylou Warren, you have the description. We need her to look at a body. If she’s picked up within the hour, let me know, before the CSI unit takes off.”

Otherwise, Joe thought, they’d have to haul Emmylou up to San Jose, to the crime lab, to ID the body. If thatwas Sammie Miller buried under her own house. As reclusive as Sammie seemed to be, and with most of her neighbors moved away, Emmylou might be the only one who did know her—besides the killer, and Sammie’s vanished brother. As Dallas ended the call, the five cats slipped away, disappearing like ghosts among the snowy rooftops.

27

Before Billy fed the Harmanns’ horses, he had called MPPD from their stable. By the time he’d pumped his bike back up the hill to the burn, Detective Garza was there, his tan Blazer parked in the yard, and old man Zandler was long gone. Garza wore jeans and a faded down jacket, his dark Latino eyes smiling when he looked at Billy. Billy had done some thinking since he called the station, and he was debating just how much he should keep to himself. If Gran did have money hidden in the cave—and what else could have made her so protective?—what would the cops do with it? Would it belong to Debbie and Esther? They were her daughters, but he was only the grandson. That money would be all he had to take care of himself, except for what he could earn, and at twelve, that still wasn’t much. He hadn’t helped take care of Gran all these years without learning the value of money, seeing how much she spent on whiskey that could have bought something to eat besides beans and potatoes and cheap sausage, could have bought new tires for his bike, might have paid rent on a house where the wind didn’t blow through the walls. If he told the law about the money, would he have to give it to his aunts? He hoped Zandler hadn’t found it, but maybe not, the boards and old doors didn’t look disturbed. Detective Garza was photographing the burned house all over again, where Zandler had dug into the rubble. When he finished taking pictures, he began to dig around in the rubble, himself, photographing wherever he could see that Zandler had disturbed anything. “You got moved in okay,” Garza said, talking as he worked. “You and the cats?”

“Yes,” Billy said, “just fine.”

“You have any idea what Zandler was looking for? He wouldn’t have been looking for the cause of the fire, he knows it was a grease fire.” Max Harper had told Billy that, that it looked like Gran had started making her breakfast, put potatoes on to fry and then went back to bed, forgetting theburner was on. She’d done that more than once, their skillet was blackened and crusty where she’d burned it. That was mostly at supper, though. She’d put something on to cook, then forget it, but Billy had been there to smother the flame before it got going.

That morning, he wasn’t there.

Garza poked around for a while longer, then rose, looking across at Billy.“The week or two before the fire, was Zandler up here?”

Billy shook his head.“I doubt it, Gran didn’t say anything, and it wasn’t rent time. That’s the only time he ever came. Maybe he came up to be sure Emmylou was gone, though, after he evicted her, make sure she hadn’t come back.”

“Hesmerra was working regularly?”

Billy nodded.

“Did she have a bank account?”

“She didn’t like banks, she kept the money somewhere around the place. She never even told me, she’d never get into her stash when I was home. She said once, if I knew where her money was, I’d take it so she couldn’t buy what she wanted. She meant, so she couldn’t buy whiskey.”

Billy knew what the next question would be: Could the money be in the cave? He was surprised when Dallas didn’t ask it. The detective said, “We’ll compare these shots with the photographs we have, maybe they’ll show us if he took anything.”

Billy waited until Garza left, made sure he’d turned onto the highway, then he pulled some boards away from the cave’s entrance, and moved the old door just enough to slip inside, into the smell of sour earth and rotting timbers. Maybe the moneywas here, maybe she’d saved back more than he’d thought, between what she’d earned and what Mr. Kraft gave her.

He never knew how much Kraft gave her, Gran was so closemouthed, he only knew thatthat money made him feel strange, he never understood why Kraft gave her money. Kraft said it was because Debbie, Gran’s own daughter, wouldn’t help her out, he said it was Debbie’s duty to help her mother and if she wouldn’t, he would. To Billy, that didn’t make sense; his other aunt didn’t help Gran, or hardly speak to her. The idea of family helping each other wasn’t something he was used to.

If Gran’s moneywas in the cave, he wanted it before someone else got it. He might be only twelve, but he knew that money laid by meant freedom. You could eat, you didn’t have to workall the time, you could keep your bike running so you could get around. Gran had hidden her whiskey here, so why not the money?

Or, he wondered, had there been more to hide than money?

He’d wondered sometimes when Gran’s car pulled in at midnight but she was so long coming in the house, wondered what she was doing. Sometimes he’d rise and look out to see a faint light shining out between the old door and the boards. He thought she’d gone to get a bottle, thought she’d forgotten there was a nearly full bottle under her bed. But maybe she was hiding something else there.

In the cave, he found the flashlight she’d kept by her whiskey case, and flicked it on, shining the beam along the rough dirt walls. Besides the sour smell of damp earth, the cave stank of mice or rats, and of rotted potatoes from a bag Gran had stored months before. Even the smallest rotted potato smelled like something dead. Billy explored the earthen floor where the whiskey case had stood, which Detective Garza had taken away, then he pushed on back into the darkness.

The dirt between the supporting timbers was packed hard, the dirt walls and ceiling seemed as solid as concrete behind the grid of rough planks. He hadn’t been back in here for a long time. After his mother died, he’d spent weeks in here alone, way at the back, hoping Gran wouldn’t come in and try to cheer him up, which only made him cry. Moving slowly toward the back, he looked along the walls and above him where beams held the earth up, shining the light into earthen crevices behind the timbers.

At the very back there was rubble, loose rocks, three old empty baskets made of half-rotted wooden slats. He searched among these and searched overhead. He was halfway back to the opening when he heard a sound outside, the scrunching of a foot on the rough ground. He switched off the flashlight, stood quiet and still.

The opening darkened as a figure knelt, looking in.“Billy?”

He breathed again, switched on the flashlight. Heard a horse snort, then one of the dogs pushed in past Charlie, nearly knocking him over.“I’m here,” he said, “I’ll be right out.” He was trying to settle the dog, who was rearing up as tall as Billy, licking his face. He was trying to wrestle him away, the flashlight still in his hand when its beam shone low against a four-by-four support.

Where the floor met the rough earthen wall, light reflected off a sliver of something white, shining white.

It was only a speck, which he’d missed from the other side of the rough timber. Kneeling, he dug the earth away, and pulled it free.

It was a plastic sandwich bag stretched thick over a packet of folded white paper. He could see a stamp, could see awkward hand printing, clumsier than his own handwriting that Gran had been stubborn about teaching him: Debbie’s printing. Pushing the dog away more forcefully, he shoved the packet deep in his jeans pocket, hiding it from Charlie. He felt his face heat. He didn’t know why he did that; and he moved on out to join her.

“You okay?”

Billy nodded.

“Dallas stopped by, when he left here. I’d just saddled Redwing, I said I’d ride down this way.” Her green eyes searched his. “That Mr. Zandler was here earlier? I don’t like him much.”

Again Billy nodded.“I won’t tangle with him, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Charlie grinned, and glanced at her watch.“I thought I’d take a little ride and then, if you want to, we could go shopping.” He thought she meant he could help her carry groceries. “Clothes for Gran’s funeral,” she said. “Maybe chinos and a new polo shirt?”

Billy looked down at his worn jeans with the frayed bottoms, at his run-over boots. He didn’t want her to buy him things, he had his own wages, but he didn’t want to spend them on clothes.

She said,“We could go to J.C. Penney’s.”

Well, he guessed he could do that.

“It isn’t a gift,” she said, “you’ll earn it back soon enough, taking care of our spoiled animals.”

He hadn’t thought of working for clothes. Well, that was all right, he did want to look nice for Gran. He watched her ride away easing the mare into a canter, the two dogs racing ahead. When she’d gone, he opened the plastic bag, took out the letters.

He read them twice, but didn’t understand much. He didn’t want to think about what the earliest ones might mean, the ones dated twelve years ago just after he was born. The surprise was that Debbie had written to Gran at all, when Gran always complained she never heard from her. Why would Gran lie about that? There were twelve letters, the envelopes roughly printed. In the two bulkier envelopes, the letters had been torn into tiny pieces, wadded up, stuffed back inside, and the flap loosely stuck closed again. Besides these, the letter with the earliest postmark was only a few lines:

“No, I don’t want to come there. How can you even ask that. Why would I want to see her and why would I want anything to do with that child? I certainly don’t want to see you again, after you let this happen, what you did was way worse than simple lying. Well, you’ve always lied to us. I thought, in my stupidity, that it was only about your drinking, not about something like this.”

Then came the two torn-up letters, the envelopes postmarked just a few months later. Then nothing for eight years. The next letter was very short.

“How do you know that’s what happened? Go to the cops, if that’s what you think, he deserves whatever he gets. But remember, I won’t help you. And you don’t have an ounce of proof. You go to the cops, they’ll just laugh. As to the other, I’ll have to think about that.”

Whatever this was about, Debbie was sure vague. Was she afraid someone else would read it? Whatwas this about, what was she afraid of?

There was another long space, nearly two years. The letters after that were different and there were more of them, as if she and Gran had talked on the phone maybe, and maybe made up a little. There was no phone in the cabin, but maybe Gran had called her from work. Now, it seemed like they were into something secret, something they didn’t want to write much about. In one, Debbie said,“I have nine sets of papers,”and she had enclosed a list of names and dates, with one single address at the end. That street was up near the Damens’ and Hanni Coon’s remodels. In the next letter she asked,“Did you copy the statements? Call me on my cell but do it soon, it might not be working after next week, not sure I can pay the bill.”Later there was mention of some kind of contracts, and terms Billy didn’t understand. Further on, she complained about a woman.“I hope she double-crosses him, that’s what he deserves.”

The last letter was dated a month ago:“Copy all the discs you can find. Just follow the instructions I gave you. Don’t be afraid of the damn machine. Maybe I should come down there. I wish you knew more about computers.”Whatever they were into sounded illegal. What he wondered was, did this have anything to do with why Gran died?

Emmylou couldn’t lock the bedroom slider once she’d pried it open and stepped inside Alain Bent’s house. She pushed it shut and closed the draperies over it, making sure there was no crack for light to shine out. There was no one back there in the woods, surely no one to hear her prying metal against metalas she’d jimmied the door, but still she was nervous. She had parked on a little side street down the hill where her car might not be noticed. The house was stuffy inside, and cold. Moving up the hall, she found the thermostat, she felt a thrill of satisfaction as she turned it up to nearly eighty and heard the furnace click on. She wondered if the water heater had been turned down, too. She made a quick tour of the house to be sure she was alone, then returned to the master bath, with its peach-tinted tiles and peach-colored marble, and ran the hot tap in the basin.

When the water ran hot she smiled, shed her clothes, dropping them on the floor, turned the shower on full blast and got in, luxuriating in the hot water and steam. She stayed in a long time, scrubbed real good and washed her hair. When at last she came out she found a thick towel in one of the drawers, and dried off beneath the heat blowing from the furnace vent. Moving into the bedroom, she pulled a blanket off the bed, draped it around herself and tucked it in. Carrying her clothes into the alcove by the kitchen, she found the laundry soap and threw them in the washer, jeans, shirt, socks, panties, everything. While the wash ran she ransacked the kitchen cupboards. Finding canned soups and fruit, she pulled a saucepan from a lower cupboard, warmed a can of black bean soup, and opened a can of apricots. She had found the bowls and was gulping her breakfast when she heard the bedroom slider open—she was so startled she burned her mouth on a big spoonful of soup. She half rose, pulling her blanket tighter, looking to the front door for escape.

She was too late. One second’s hesitation, and here came a woman down the hall, silent and quick, a tall woman dressed in jeans and sweatshirt, long dark hair down around her shoulders, and she was wearing a holstered gun. Emmylou had seen her around town, but only in uniform. Cop. Woman cop. She stepped to the table.

“Having breakfast?”

Emmylou stared at her.

“Smells good. I guess you’re doing a load of laundry, too?”

Emmylou said,“You were down at Sammie Miller’s house. What’s happened down there? How did you know I was in here?”

“Someone saw smoke, they thought it was from the chimney. I came up to see if Alain had returned.” She glanced down over the rail at the cold fireplace. “I guess what they saw was hot air from the furnace vent.”

Kathleen didn’t mention that Ryan Flannery had already come up here to have a look, had circled the house and then slipped inside while Emmylou was in the shower. Kathleen didn’t mention—because she didn’t know—that it was not, in fact, Ryan who had first spied the white trail rising up from the chimney, it was Joe Grey. He saw the condensation, alerted Ryan, and, because Kathleen was busy with the CSI technicians, she’d walked up the snowy street, walked along the front of the house and through the patio, had knocked then rang the bell. When no one answered, and she could hear water running, she’d gone around to the back, found the glass slider to the master bedroom jimmied, the frame bent, the door not quite closed, and a crowbar lying inside tucked against the wall. After slipping in to look, which she knew was foolish, after seeing that it was only Emmylou in there, she’d called Kathleen on her cell.

Ryan had remained in the bedroom while Kathleen cleared the house. She could hear them talking, Kathleen and Emmylou, she heard the washer stop and in a moment the clothes dryer kicked on. When Kathleen came back down the hall, her expression was both annoyed and amused; the detective had trouble, sometimes, maintaining the unreadable fa?ade of a seasoned cop. “Emmylou’s having breakfast. Wrapped in a blanket, cozy as a cat in a basket.”

“Itwas pretty cold last night,” Ryan said, straight-faced. She followed Kathleen into the kitchen, where Emmylou had found some tea and had put a saucepan of water on to heat. They watched her drop teabags into three cups. She poured hot water over them, looking up inquiringly. Kathleen nodded, and they sat down at the table,Kathleen facing both the front door and the hall. It might be out of order for an arresting officer to socialize with someone breaking and entering, but Ryan didn’t think, from Emmylou’s behavior, that Kathleen had made an arrest. The detective was watchful and silent—there was something in the moment as tentative and frail as a whisper.

Did Emmylouknow that was Sammie Miller down there? Ryan wondered. Was that what this was about? Was she on the verge of identifying the body without ever seeing it? Or even, perhaps, on the verge of confessing to killing her? Ryan remained still, sipping her tea, trying not to telegraph her interest, trying to keep her thoughts, her whole demeanor, blank and withdrawn.

Whatever their individual thoughts, none of the three women, not even the detective, was aware of movement in the master bedroom, of someone else slipping in through the glass door and down the hall to listen: an intruder padding stealthily, his shadow low to the floor; no one heard the hush of his soft paws.

Joe slipped closer through the shadows of the hall, crouching where he could see all three women. Now, he realized, Alain Bent’s house was an adjunct to the case, a part of the crime scene: It had been broken into at least twice by players in this tangle, once when Debbie searched it, and again this morning by Emmylou—to say nothing of the phantom snitches. With this much interest, one had to wonder what the connection was, whatwas here of such value, or what had been here? What did Debbie, and Emmylou, think was hidden here? How did their interest tie in with the murders, and with Alain’s absence? How, in fact, might this house play out in the scenario of Hesmerra’s death? Kathleen was saying, “We’d like you to have a look at the body, Emmylou, see if you can identify the woman.”

“You think it’s Sammie,” Emmylou said, her face going pink as if with suppressed tears. “Who else would be buried there, under Sammie’s own house? When did this happen? I saw her two weeks ago, and I’ve been up here nearly every day since, looking for her cats. Was she lying there all that time?”

Kathleen said,“You told Officer Brennan you had a key. I’m surprised you didn’t stay there in the house, as cold as it’s been. You’ve been living in your car?”

“She kept the key under the porch. Itold the officers it wasn’t there, that it’s gone. Yes, I broke in but when I saw the mess I was afraid to stay there, someone’s been in there. Maybe only raccoons, maybe not. Someone has the key, and that scares me.”

Kathleen said,“If the body is Sammie Miller, did she have family, someone to be notified?”

“No one,” Emmylou said. “Just her brother, and Birely would be hard to find. He does have a cell phone, the number’s in Sammie’s Rolodex, you could try that. He doesn’t have a home, he calls himself a hobo, he comes to the village now and then and phones her, that’s why she bought himthe prepaid phone. She meets him down near the river, the homeless camp there. Or up at the bridge where they all camp in bad weather.” She looked evenly at Kathleen. “There’s no one else who cares about Sammie. No friends I know of, only me.”

“Which bridge is that?” Kathleen said.

“The one on Valley Road, just off Highway One, just above the market where Sammie worked, where I used to work.” Her answer brought Joe Grey’s ears up. He rose, slipped down the hall where he could better watch Emmylou from the shadows.

Ryan said,“The bridge where Hesmerra’s daughter Greta died?”

Emmylou nodded.“That was a long time ago,” she said vaguely.

“Four years,” Ryan said. “Billy was eight when his mother’s car went off the bridge. I heard it was a really bad storm, driving rain, heavy winds, the kind of storm where you can’t see the road at all.”

Emmylou’s face colored, she busied herself with her bowl of apricots and the last of her soup; Joe studied her with interest. She wanted to tell them something, she was on the verge of it, was filled with an urgency that she found hard to conceal. The ghost of something hung in the room, as dark as a storm cloud, some new information, vital and unstated. Watching Emmylou, both Ryan and Kathleen tried to hide their intensity, but their curiosity was as keen as that of the gray tomcat.

“What happened that night?” Kathleen said softly. “What happened when Greta’s car went off the bridge?”

Emmylou rose, never taking her eyes from the detective.“I’ll come down with you now, to look at the body. Afterward, if you like, I’ll come into the station. I’ll tell you about the bridge. As soon as we … as soon as I’ve gotten through this, seeing … seeing Sammie. If that is Sammie, down there.”

But Joe Grey’s skin rippled with suspicion.You know that’s Sammie, don’t you? You’re already certain! What do you know, Emmylou, that you haven’t told?

28

Kathleen Ray’s office was half the size of the chief’s, just enough room for her desk crowded between file cabinets, a console that held her little coffeemaker, and a small leather armchair. The desk faced the door, neatly stacked with papers and reports, and carefully arranged bookshelves stood behind. Onthe adjoining walls Kathleen had hung well-framed photographs of the rugged Molena coast, close-ups of stone escarpments and tide pools and stormy skies, fine work done half a century earlier by the region’s famous photographers. The only place to hide was beneath the minicredenza, and quickly Joe and Dulcie slipped under, into the shadows against the wall.

By the time they’d left the crime scene, after watching Emmylou identify the body, which was indeed Sammie, after watching her turn away shaken and sick, the day was growing warmer, the snow starting to melt. The sun did its work quickly; even as they headed for the station, the rooftops and streets below were turning dark and glistening wet, and snowmelt dripped from every crevice and weighted branch.

With a new officer behind the desk, they had padded quickly past, slipping into the empty conference room as Kathleen came in the front door ushering in Emmylou. They’d watched from beneath the conference table as Kathleen snagged half a dozen fresh doughnuts from a tray by the coffeemaker, and herded Emmylou on to her office. Silently they’d followed.

Now, from the shadows beneath the console, they watched Kathleen make Emmylou comfortable in the small leather chair, easing her back into the rapport Kathleen had established at Alain’s table, before Emmylou went down to identify the body. Much of the identification was based on Sammie’s hair color, on her watch and little silver bracelets, on her silver locket that opened to pictures of her two black-and-white cats. Emmylou knew who Sammie’s dentist was, and Sammie’s dental records had been sent up to the lab. The CSI techs estimated the date of Sammie Miller’s death at two weeks; they would have more information once the lab had finished the autopsy. Kathleen poured two cups of coffee; Emmylou refused sugar or milk, took the cup from Kathleen along with two doughnuts on a little paper plate. The two were silent, sipping coffee.

Both women were tall and slim, Emmylou sinewy and bony with sun-leathered skin, Kathleen pale and smooth, her shining dark hair back carelessly at the nape of her neck, the grace that had made her a good model very much apparent, even in her severe uniform. Her dark eyes studied Emmylou kindly, without a cop’s closed shield of authority, and her voice was soft.

“What did happen, that night on the bridge, Emmylou? You told me, in the car, that Sammie’s murder could be connected to the death of Hesmerra’s daughter?”

“Her youngest daughter,” Emmylou said. She broke her doughnut in two, concentrating on that, and said no more.

“I have the accident report,” Kathleen said, picking up some papers from her desk. “There was heavy rain that night, a strong wind, hardly any traffic on the roads. The report shows one witness to the accident. He wouldn’t give his name, he claimed to have no address, no relatives.” She glanced at the report as she talked. “Says a car came up fast behind Greta’s car, pulled up beside her and swerved into her, forcing her off the road. The witness saw her car crash through the rail, land on its side on the concrete abutment below.” She looked up. “What do you know, Emmylou, that isn’t in the report? Was this man Sammie’s brother?”

Emmylou nodded.“She was with him that night, they saw it all. The car came up fast on Greta’s left, started to pass, then swerved over straight into her car. He had some kind of bright spotlight in his hand, he shone it in her face, the light must have blinded her. Sammie said Greta looked startled, like a deer in your headlights. She swerved hard, lost control, and rammed into the abutment. Crashed right through, right through that corrugated rail, Sammie said, as if it was made of paper. She said the two sections, where they were joined, broke away from the post.

“Sammie said the car rocked a moment, balanced there, then dropped straight down on the concrete and rolled. I guess Greta didn’t have her seat belt on, she was thrown around and then thrown out, and the car rolled on top of her. That’s how Sammie told me. She saw it, and Birely saw it, they were together at the foot of the bridge. Sammie called 911 while Birely ran to help her—but Greta was already dead, she was beyond help.

“When they heard the siren coming, Birely told Sammie to run, to get away, not let anyone know she was a witness. Even then, he was afraid for her, he thought the killer must have seen her face in the spotlight, and would come after her. Birely waited for the cops, gave them a statement. They told him to stay in town, but he disappeared. Left town, vanished.”

Joe, crouched beneath the little console, saw not only the scene Emmylou described, he saw the earlier scene as well, saw his nightmare, the driving rain sluicing against the little shack in the windy night, saw and heard the two women yelling at each other, Hesmerra and Greta. Saw the young woman race out to her car and take off into the stormy night, saw the second car, dark and sleek, skid against the hill as it raced to follow her.

Emmylou said,“The killer saw Sammie that night. He knew there were two witnesses, not just a homeless man.”

“But if he knew that, why … Ifhe killed Sammie, why did it take him four years? It couldn’t have taken four years to find her, in his small village.”

Emmylou shook her head.“He found her before that. Maybe a year ago. He must have been looking for her. Yes, it’s a wonder it took him that long. She was real careful, stayed away from people, shopped when the stores were busy so she could get lost in a crowd. Other times, she kept to herself, that was the way she lived anyway.

“He found her when she was walking up in the hills, just at dawn, barely light. A car passed her, a dark two-door. It slowed, the driver did a double take, swerved into a driveway, turned around and pulled to the curb. The minute it slowed she slipped away through an overgrown yard. She watched him from there, and then ran. Through the backyards to another street, through the backstreets and then through yards where a car couldn’t follow.

“But days later,” Emmylou said, “he tracked her down, he discovered where she lived, and he began to watch her—just to watch, and follow.

“She thought he meant to scare her, keep her afraid so she wouldn’t talk. She thought maybe he was afraid to kill again. Or,” Emmylou said, “that he hoped she’d lead him to the other witness. Sammie pretended to be unaware of him, she thought that was her best protection. She thought sooner or later he’d decide she wasn’t going to the law and he’d back off, would give up watching her.”

“Why didn’t she file a report, that she was being followed? Why didn’t she tell us what this was about?”

Emmylou shook her head.“What was she going to say? She said the cops, even with Birely’s report on file, did nothing to find the man the first time, so what were they going to do now?” Emmylou gave Detective Ray a wan smile. “Sammie wasn’t fond of cops—of the police. Maybe because of her brother. The law hassles him a lot.”

“He has a record?”

“Not that I know of, but he’s been picked up for loitering, and … the homeless get hassled, that’s the way things are. He calls himself a hobo. Travels up and down the coast, stops in the village now and then and calls her. He won’t stay at her place, though. When he shows up … when he showed up,” she said, “he wouldn’t stay with her. She’d bring him a meal, wherever he was, and they’d visit a while. If the weather was bad he’d stay there under that bridge with the other homeless, that’s where he was headed that night. Or he’d stay down by the river where you always see smoke rising, and in a few days he’d move on again.

“That night, Sammie had come up to the bridge to meet him, she was working as a checker at the same market where I worked. She worked a different shift than me. She got off at nine, pulled on her slicker, left her car in the parking lot and walked up there in the rain, brought him some deli chicken, hot coffee, and a piece of apple pie in a plastic bag. They were headed under the bridge to get out of the rain when the Jaguar hit Greta’s car, she said it happened so fast, and they were just a few feet from where the car came over.”

“Did they ever get a look at the driver? The report says Birely didn’t.”

Emmylou shook her head.“Only that bright light in their eyes, blazing on Greta’s face, and past her onto them. But Sammie remembered the car, those sleek Jaguar lines. Birely told the police that, that should be in the report.

Kathleen nodded.“If they couldn’t see the driver, how could she be sure, later, who was following her?”

“She didn’t know who else would follow her, who would watch her, and watch her house. She was certain, even though he had a different car, a black Audi. Maybe he sold the Jaguar, or maybe he hid it away. There must have been damage to the right fender, though I guess he’d have had that fixed,maybe up the coast somewhere.”

“Once he started following her, and she saw him, did she know, then, who he was?”

Emmylou reached to the desk, took another doughnut, began to break it into little pieces on her paper plate. Beneath the console, the cats waited, glancing at each other.

Kathleen said,“Emmylou?”

She looked up at Kathleen.“She knew him. I know him.”

“Do you want to tell me? Do you want to see Sammie’s killer caught?”

Emmylou just looked at her.

“If you know him, Emmylou, do you have any idea why he would kill Greta?”

Emmylou said,“He was her lover. He was the father of her child.”

Quietly, Kathleen waited.

“Greta was sixteen when Billy was born. No one knew who the father was, except Greta herself, and Hesmerra. The father gave her money to support the child, if they’d keep quiet. But after eight years, apparently Greta wanted more. Maybe decided she wanted to live better, that he wasn’t givingher enough. She threatened him, threatened to tell his wife the truth.”

“And his wife was?” Kathleen said softly. Only the silent tap of her toe on the little rug beneath her desk signaled her impatience.

“Debbie Kraft,” Emmylou said. “Erik Kraft is Billy’s father. Debbie’s own husband got her little sister pregnant, not some high school boy.”

In the shadows, the two cats were very still. Amazing where human lust could lead, the resultant twists of human deception. Kathleen said,“Hesmerra knew he killed Greta? But still she was friends with him? She accepted money from him, when she knew he’d murdered her daughter? She let him buy her whiskey, like some kind of cheap bribe?”

“Money to support Billy,” Emmylou said, “such as it was. And, yes, to buy whiskey. Payments from the man who murdered her child, to keep her from going to the police, from telling what she knew and starting an investigation.”

Joe could feel his claws kneading at the hard floor as the little bomb of truth pulled the various fragments together: a married couple, the husband dallying with his wife’s little sister. Impregnating the girl, paying to keep her silent. And then when Greta rebelled, he killed her. Afterward he paid the boy’s keep or paid Hesmerra blackmail money, whichever way you wanted to put it.

And then when matters changed between him and Hesmerra, he killed her, too? When for instance he found out Hesmerra was snooping into his business affairs, into his illegal transactions, he poisoned her whiskey and set fire to her house? A grease fire, on the stove. How simple to replicate, once Hesmerra lay dying.

Kathleen said,“Does Billy know that Erik Kraft is his father?”

Emmylou shook her head.“I’m sure he doesn’t. If that’s the case.”

“What does that mean?”

“Hesmerra had some suspicion it could have been Perry Fowler. Fowler was nosing around Greta for a while, about the same time Erik was seeing her. He came around the house a number of times. He said, to see if Hesmerra needed anything. She was his mother-in-law, too, and she thought he felt guilty Esther didn’t have much to do with her. Hesmerra always thanked him, but then sent him on his way. He always came just at suppertime, when he knew Greta would be home, never earlier in the day. She said sometimes there would be a look between them, that made her wonder. Later, after Billy was born, Fowler didn’t come anymore.”

“But Fowler never gave her money, presumably to support the boy? It was always Erik? And Billy had no clue to the truth?”

“As far as I could tell, Hesmerra managed to keep it all from him. I didn’t repeat to her anything Sammie told me, but Hesmerra figured out for herself about the bridge ‘accident,’ she was certain Erik had killed Greta, she was certain Erik was Billy’s father.

“Billy’s aunts never came there to see her,” Emmylou said, “so Billy wouldn’t have overheard any comments from them. He thinks Erik came to see Hesmerra out of guilt because Debbie wouldn’t visit her. And because Erik seemed to be truly fond of Hesmerra.”

“Was he?”

“Erik’s very smooth, always so charming. I never liked him. When he came, Hesmerra would ask me over for tea, but I was never comfortable. I always felt his friendliness, and the money and whiskey were like a sales pitch, like window dressing.”

“Did Hesmerra see that? Why did she go along with it? She could have come to us,” Kathleen said again. “We could have reopened an investigation into Greta’s death.”

“Hesmerra had something else in mind,” Emmylou said. “Something more.”

Kathleen waited. When Emmylou didn’t continue, she said, “You had a box of papers with real estate letterheads, and with the Kraft letterhead. Do they tie into this?”

“Yes. They were in a metal box, under her bed. I dug it out of the burn.” She reached into her canvas tote, withdrew a thick packet of business papers and letters and laid them on the desk; she had the grace not to deny she’d lifted them. “That’s everything that was in the box. Captain Harper saw it in my car.”

Kathleen nodded, and picked up the stack of papers. Below in the shadows, Joe was so edgy to have a look that Dulcie had to nudge him to be still. Kathleen shuffled through, pausing to read passages, her expression growing more intent as she compared a number of pages. She looked up at Emmylou.“Where did Hesmerra get these? Some of the dates are recent, business that seems still in progress. Hesmerra stole these from Erik?”

Emmylou looked down at her hands, then shyly up at Kathleen.“This was Hesmerra’s retribution. It took her a long time to collect these, working in his office at night, and cleaning Alain’s house, too. It took too long,” she said bitterly.

“Those papers,” she said, “together with what Debbie has, should be enough to put Erik Kraft in prison. Erik may never serve time for Greta’s death, there may be no sure way to prove he killed her. But Hesmerra meant to see him pay.”

“But Sammie saw him kill her, she could have come forward.”

“Sammie was afraid. She felt she had no real proof. She was afraid she wouldn’t have enough to convict him, that he’d go to trial but then go free, and would come after her.”

“He’d be a fool to do that, to harm someone who’d testified against him.”

“No one said he wasn’t foolhardy, that he didn’t make stupid choices.” Emmylou frowned. “Only recently did Sammie seem bolder. I think she was getting tired of being watched and followed, tired of his sly bullying.”

Kathleen sat looking at her.“All along, while Hesmerra was taking his money, she was working to destroy him.”

“Yes. She made copies at night, from Erik’s personal files, then put the originals back. Evidence of fraud, real estate scams, and theft. That’s what she and Debbie were working toward, together.”

“But Debbie—”

“Debbie hated her mother, yes. In her opinion it was Hesmerra’s fault, that Erik was able to lure Greta into bed. Allowing Greta too much freedom, not keeping track of where she was. As if Hesmerra could have done much. Greta was never an angel, Hesmerra said she was headstrong, defied her at every turn. And Erik. I see him as sly and smooth, I think he may be totally without conscience.

“A year or so after Greta was killed,” she said, “though Debbie still hated Hesmerra, they came together in this. Mother and daughter, teaming together to ruin him, each to have her own revenge. Working together, they thought they could put him in prison. If not for murder, then for fraud, for as many felony counts as they could provide.”

In the shadows, Joe and Dulcie were both thinking the same. Right now, Erik was still in control, he had ended each life that crossed him: Greta. Hesmerra. Sammie Miller. So far, all but Debbie herself.

29

Yesterday’s snow seemed long forgotten, the morning was nearly too warm, the birds and squirrels were out everywhere, soaking up the sun. At the edge of the cemetery, Joe slipped down from the branches of a thick and twisted oak onto the manicured lawn. February weather on the central coast was always fitful, cold one day, hot the next, but on this day the events to occur were even more at odds: Hesmerra’s burial this morning that marked the end of an unhappy life. The auction this evening that should bring happiness to any number of lives, human and cat. And then, tonight, a late supper to mark what Joe hoped would be an incredibly long and happy married life, as Ryan and Clyde celebrated their first anniversary—and to top it off, it was Valentine’s Day, a strange day, indeed, for Esther Fowler to choose to bury her mother.

This was Esther’s bit of twisted irony? Sending Hesmerra off on a day of love, when there had been little love between them?

The early dew had nearly burned off, its last glitter broken by trails of cloven hoofprints leading away to the woods that surrounded three sides of the small cemetery. Joe could see deer among the shadowed trees, quietly grazing, relinquishing their nighttime pasture to the unpredictable whims of the human world.

The grave markers were all set flat into the velvet grass, its expanse broken only by three miniature hills: outcroppings of boulders that thrust up out of the earth as if shoved up by an unseen hand, and from which, oak trees had managed to grow. Joe headed for the rocky hill nearest the open grave.

Leaping up the boulders, he lay down among them, between the gray oak trunks so he was nearly invisible except for his white nose and white paws. Below him the freshly dug grave was discreetly covered by a sheet of blue plastic edged by a scattering of black earth to hold it in place. The pile of removed earth, too, was dressed in plastic, like a low blue tent. The plain oak casket stood to one side, facing five neat rows of metal chairs, a box that looked to Joe like the cheapest one available. It was a wonder Esther hadn’t nailed together the slats from old orange crates.

The little access lane that ran near the grave was already filling up, a line of cars parked along the edge, two wheels on the macadam, two on the grass. Clyde’s yellow roadster, in which Joe himself had ridden to the funeral in style with the top down and sitting on Ryan’s lap. Charlie’s red SUV was parked behind it, then a couple of police cars. Then Max’s truck, Emmylou’s battered green sedan, a sleek tan Mercedes belonging to Esther Fowler,and a number of cars he didn’t know. He was surprised to see so many folks turn out for Hesmerra. Esther and Debbie stood far apart, at opposite sides of the gathering, pointedly ignoring each other. Tessa clung to Debbie, who had Vinnie firmly by the hand. A half-dozen more cars drew in and parked, the drivers’ windows open to the warming morning, and behind them, Wilma’s car came up the street.

She paused at the turn-in, her driver’s door opened, Dulcie and Kit leaped from her lap and vanished into the woods. Joe could see Lucinda in the front seat beside Wilma, Pedric in the back. Wilma drove on in, parked, and they got out, all three respectfully dressed, no casual jeans today. Lucinda wore a long, slim black skirt, black boots, a soft shawl in muted tones. Pedric was nattily dressed in a tan suit, white shirt, and plain brown tie, his tall, slim figure fashion perfect. Wilma had resurrected what looked like a dark business suit from her working days, narrow skirt, soft white blouse, flat dark shoes. Among the women present, only Debbie wore high heels, apparently unaware that she could not walk across the grass without sinking in. Joe watched her tiptoe over the turf, hunching in her short, tight skirt. An usher escorted her to the front row beside Esther, who was dressed more appropriately in a plain brown suit and flats. Neither looked at the other, neither spoke.

Joe heard a rustle of leaves and then Dulcie was beside him; and when he looked up, Kit crouched on a jutting ledge of granite, her yellow eyes shuttered against the sun. At the grave, four men in black suits stood to one side of the chairs, cemetery employees as rigid and expressionless as plastic department store figures. There would be no indoor service for Hesmerra, just this simple burial. Among the rows of folding chairs, people were sitting down, talking in whispers and occasionally glancing at Billy where he stood to the side between Charlie and Emmylou. Charlie held his hand, and Emmylou’s arm was around his shoulders. When Charlie bent to ask him something, he shook his head. Maybe he didn’t want to go up to the front, beside his two aunts. During the short service, Max Harper stood watching Debbie. Did that make her nervous? She seemed more aware of him than of saying farewell to her mother.

The minister wore the requisite black habit, his spiel short, dry, and generic. Until this morning, he had probably never heard of Hesmerra Young. He prayed dryly for her soul, then prayed for Billy, which made the boy look down in embarrassment. Joe had never imagined he’d find something as grim as a funeral too short, but this service seemed cruelly abrupt. The four attendants stepped forward, removed the plastic cover from the grave. Lifting the casket by the two heavy black ropes that had been laid under it, they lowered it down into the hole, and deftly pulled the ropes out. Either the cemetery hadn’t seen fit to provide, or Esther hadn’t wanted to pay for, one of those machines that lift the casket securely into its last resting place without the possibility of it falling on its side and dislodging its contents. Esther picked up a handful of earthand tossed it in. Debbie rose and did the same, as Tessa hid in her chair. Vinnie stepped forward, snatched up a big clod of dirt, threw it hard down onto the casket.

Billy was the last to take up a handful of earth and scatter it. He stood a moment, his back to Joe, his head bent, then turned away, perhaps as much from the gaze of his aunts as from this last and final contact with his grandmother. What Billy was feeling had to be as mixed and confused as had been his young life. A child doing a grown-up’s work, taking care of an old woman who preferred to remain as helpless as a child herself, a child held captive by his grandmother’s weaknesses and by her twisted life. Watching the boy filled Joe with a heavy sadness, and when he looked at Dulcie, his dismay was reflected in her green eyes. Kit’s ears were down, too, her yellow eyes sad, hurt that a young boy’s life could be so without joy. For all three cats, the mysterious balance between joy and pain was the deepest mystery they knew, the real meaning of that conflict was too confusing to sort out, in this life.

Billy and Charlie didn’t linger over the grave, the cats could see he wanted to get away. Within minutes, he and Charlie got into her SUV and pulled on around the curve behind one of the black-and-whites, making the circle through the cemetery to the main road, heading away toward the ranch. Nearly everyone seemed glad to escape, moving toward their cars, including Wilma and the Greenlaws. Kit looked back toward Dulcie and Joe, but then she went on, wanting to be with her old couple, caught perhaps in the sadness of the funeral and the fragility of life.

Quickly Debbie turned to leave, too, she was dragging the children away when Max caught up with her.“Debbie?” She turned to look at him, frowning.

“Would you want to come on down to the station? We have some papers we’d like you to look over, they were among your mother’s things. Do you have someone to watch the children for a while?” Joe glanced across at Ryan and Clyde, they were just about the only people remaining. If Max was going to press them into babysitting, he was out of there.

“No,” she said, “I don’t have anyone to watch the children. We just buried my mother, this is not a good time. What is it, that can’t wait?”

“The papers were just brought to our attention, and could be important. You can bring the children, it won’t take long. One of the officers will watch them.”

“This really isn’t an appropriate time.”

“It’s a good time for me,” Max said. “I don’t see the need to arrest you, just for questioning, if you’re willing to cooperate. I’ll follow you down to the station.”

Debbie gave a dramatic sigh, and headed for her car. Opening the back door, she pushed the girls in the backseat.

“Well,” Dulcie said, smiling.

“Come on,” Joe said, racing for Clyde’s roadster just ahead of his housemates. As the cats leaped in, the little cemetery tractor came lumbering along the lane. It stopped at the open grave, uncovered the mound of earth, and began to scoop it over the casket, patting it down with the tractor’s toothy bucket. Soon the two gardeners would lay squares of sod over the raw earth; in a few weeks the grass would fill in, and the velvet lawn would look as if no hole had ever been dug there. Deer would graze on Hesmerra’s grave, leaving cloven hoof prints in the damp grass. Joe wondered if Debbie or Esther, or Billy, would bring flowers to put in a little vase. Off in the woods, two deer had stopped grazing and stood watching the tractor at work, and for some reason, their interest made the fur along Joe’s back prickle. Then Ryan and Clyde were there at the car and, at Joe’s direction, Clyde headed obligingly for MPPD.

The two cats beat Max to the station by minutes, as the chief dawdled along behind Debbie, who in his presence seemed compelled to obey every village speed limit. By the time the two little girls had been settled in the conference room with Officer Brennan, Vinnie complaining all the while, Dulcie and Joe were under Max’s credenza. They watched Debbie flounce in, into one of the leather chairs as if she owned the place. Behind her, Max was saying, “I can’t give you any guarantees. We’ll do what we can. If he’s put away for a while, you won’t have to hide from him.” He sat down at his desk, leaning back. “Were the transactions all on Molena Point property?”

“Some were here,” Debbie said. “Most of them, they couldn’t have pulled off here, in their own territory. They had deals going in five states, sales I’m sure can’t be legal.” She looked at him pleadingly. “If he finds out I was here, that I told—”

Max said,“You have no choice. You were ordered to come in.” That seemed to ease her, she looked uncertain, but relaxed a little. He said, “How did you get your hands on the papers without him knowing?”

“Late at night, when I was sure Erik was asleep. I photographed whatever papers were in his briefcase that day. I didn’t dare use his copier, I was afraid he’d check that little counter thing that keeps track. I took digital photos, put them on my computer, printed them out, put them on a disc, then erased the hard drive.” She looked intently at Harper, a more intelligent look than the cats had seen, a look not just of anger now, at being hauled into the station, but of a canny malice. “They’d sell one house several times. Sell it over and over again.”

“You mean buy it back, and sell it again?”

“No, they didn’t buy it back. They just kept selling it. Out-of-state buyers, people who never even flew out to see what they’d bought. They looked at the pictures and maps he sent, took his word for everything. People who wanted investment property. Erik invented fake titles, drew up fake escrow papers, fake deeds. He and Alain made the sales just after the yearly property taxes were paid, so no one would inquire about a tax bill, find it was in the wrong name.” She went quiet, looking down at her hands. Max waited, relying on that void in a conversation that will prompt an interviewee, uncomfortable in the silence, to frantically fill up the empty space, revealing perhaps more than he intended.

Debbie fidgeted, and sighed.“They’d buy old, rundown foreclosures, too. Take pictures, doctor the pictures on the computer to make them look like a nice renovation, nice landscaping. Advertise them on the Web, for sale by owner. They’d double the price, again sell to some out-of-state buyer who didn’t have time to come out and look at the place, who wanted coastal real estate for investment. I know of one buyer, bought five houses. Erik’s agreement was, he’d rent the houses out for them until the market went up and they could make a profit, he’d keep ten percent of the rent, send the buyer the balance. That part was legitimate, and why not? He’d already made a hundred percent profit on the deal. It was easy to find tenants, people scrambling for low rent. They did all this under fictitious Realtor’s names, so if the buyer wanted to sell, or came out here and got a look at the house, he couldn’ttrack them down.”

“Did you plan to bring this to the attention of the police or the real estate board, either here or in Eugene?”

She looked down again.“I … Eventually, I meant to. I made the copies so I’d have some power over him. So he’d give me a decent support settlement and child support.” She looked up at him pleadingly. “If I went to the cops right away, I’d lose what power I had. I thought … I meant to wait until I could bargain for a cash settlement. Then give him the papers I had, and that Mama had, and promise to leave it alone. Maybe, then, I’d bring you copies. It … It was for the children,” she added lamely.

Max didn’t look like he was buying all this. Nor were Joe and Dulcie. What made her think Erik would believe her when she promised to back off? What made her think he wouldn’t get really angry and turn more violent? Joe guessed that now, with Hesmerra dead, and Sammie dead, Debbie was feeling a little less cocky in her expectations.

Or, he thought, was she only making up Erik’s scams? Maybe for some agenda of her own? Maybe setting him up for something he really hadn’t done? Joe had little doubt Erik Kraft had knocked her around, he could see the fading shadows of bruises on her face and neck—unless she was an artist with the makeup, he thought with interest. A little purple eye shadow, carefully applied? Yet it made perfect sense that Kraft, known for his ironfisted business ways, would be raking off all he could, and that he wouldn’t be soft with Debbie. If Kraft and Alainwere into illegal deals, and he found out Debbie had proof, Joe didn’t doubt that he’d turn more violent, just as Debbie feared.

Max said,“Your mother was in on this? You knew about the papers she had?”

Debbie just looked at him.

“You knew your mother was cleaning the Kraft offices,” he said patiently. “That she took that job with the night crew of Barton’s Commercial Cleaning, in order to gather evidence.”

Reluctantly, Debbie nodded.“I knew.”

“Did you put her onto that company?”

Again, a nod.

From the shadows, Dulcie glanced up at Joe. Everything seemed to fit, just as Emmylou had said. Debbie and her mother working together to bring Eric down, Debbie in contact with Hesmerra all along, unknown to Billy. Was it possible that Hesmerra had, at some point, balked at any more spying? Decided to pull out? Maybe she wasn’t sure that Erichad killed Greta, after all? Maybe she’d wondered if Perry Fowler had? Maybe she’d grown to like Eric, didn’t want to think him guilty of murder or of the scams?

Or maybe Hesmerra grew afraid of him, became nervous that he might find out what she was up to? Maybe she decided to go to the cops with what proof she had, before Erik turned on her.

But going to the law would destroy Debbie’s power over Erik before she had a chance to extort money from him. Would that make her angry enough to stop Hesmerra? To kill her own mother? From the looks of the sales contracts and letters, the rake-off for this operation could have run into the nine figures, and people had killed for a lot less. In a way, that seemed a far stretch: No matter the bad blood between them, theywere mother and daughter. Except, Joe thought, murder within a family wasn’t all that unusual, it was often the first place the police would look, in an investigation.

But what of Alain? Where was she now, having left town when her deals went awry? Where had she gone when she pulled out to save herself?

As for that, was Erik down in southern California straightening out the branch office as Fowler claimed? Or had he already flown off to the Bahamas on vacation? Or had Erik and Alain both skipped? The two lovers gone off together taking with them the money gleaned from their various scams?

If they had, did Perry Fowler know that? Had Fowler, all along, been in on their operations and lied to protect Erik? Or was he, as he appeared, aware only of Alain’s wrongdoing and ignorant of Erik’s own involvement?

It didn’t matter where Erik was the morning of the fire when Hesmerra died; what mattered was, where was he when someone poisoned her whiskey? As to that, where was he when Sammie was killed?

And wherever he was, Joe thought, smiling, did he know how vulnerable he had become? Did he know that, from the evidence laid out on Max’s desk right now, plus whatever else the detectives and the CSI team might find, there could soon be a warrant out for him, an order that could perceptibly change his opulent lifestyle?

Joe was sorry to have missed Max’s interview of Fowler; he hadn’t known about it until he glimpsed a notation among the papers on Max’s desk. He pictured the pale, wimpy Realtor slouched in the leather chair farthest from Max’s desk nervously answering the chief’s questions—nervous simply at having to deal with the police, or from more than that?

From what Joe could see of Max’s notes Fowler had known nothing about Erik’s scams. Possibly, Joe thought, Fowler had suspected what Erik was up to but hadn’t wanted to think badly of his partner? Hadn’t wanted to rock the boat, hadn’t wanted to confront Erik? Hadn’t really wanted to find out what was going on? Somepeople were like that, didn’t want to know all the facts, to see what was too awkward, too painful.

And how convenient that many of Erik’s scams had been made through bogus real estate firms and nonexisting escrow companies, venues that Erik had fabricated, and were not connected to Kraft Realty. Given that Fowler didn’t appear to have much backbone, he might latch onto that fact as exonerating the firm itself from any connection to Erik’s crimes, ignoring those that did involve their partnership.Foolish, Joe thought,and self-destructive. But hey, we’re dealing with humans, here. What’s a cat to expect?

30

Kit didn’t join the other cats high on the balcony of the Aronson Gallery as they looked down on the auction party nor, in the soft evening, did she slip in with Lucinda and Pedric when they entered among the jostling crowd; nor did Pan appear. Misto arrived in style riding from the Firettis’ van on John’s shoulder. But as John and Mary approached the front door, the old cat left them, leaping up into a tangle of jasmine vine that climbed the stucco wall. Clawing his way up to the high little window that opened above him, he could see Dulcie looking out. He disappeared inside, onto the gallery’s balcony, and there he sat with Dulcie looking down through the railing, watching the party crowd below. “Where’s Joe Grey?”

“Out in Ryan’s truck,” she said. “He’ll be along shortly. He’d never miss supper.” She glanced down at the fine buffet laid out below, licking her whiskers at the aromas that rose up to them.

The Aronson Gallery, along with the caf? and bookstore that joined it, was a favorite meeting place for the villagers. Wide archways linked the three airy shops, and a walled patio opened through glass doors at the back of the caf?. The gallery’s high white walls featured tonight not a carefully selected art exhibit, but the items to be auctioned: five vibrant oriental rugs that hung on the exhibit panels, flanked by small pieces of handmade furniture, some intricately carved, some painted in vivid patterns by one of the cats’ human friends. There was sporting equipment, even a canoe. Charlie Harper’s animal paintings and etchings occupied one long wall and included portraits of several of the rescue cats—while out on the patio the rescue cats themselves were housed in oversized cages among the potted flowers and little tables, each of the ten cages featuring two to three friendly felines looking for new homes.

As the auction party gathered, out on the street Ryan and Charlie sat in Ryan’s truck, Joe Grey on the seat between them as Charlie passed on what Max had told her as they’d headed for the auction. “Autopsy’s finished on the second body. They don’t have a positive ID yet, but they’re pretty sure it’s Alain Bent. They found a .32 slug that had entered near the temple. Same riflings as the .32 slug Kathleen dug out of the acacia tree, which appears to have passed through Sammie’s throat.”

She looked down at Joe.“Those white marks on Sammie’s back? CSI’s photographs of them, and Kathleen’s shots of the acacia tree roots, are a perfect match. Looks like the killer shot her there as if maybe she was hiding from him. Left her lying there for several hours. As the body cooled, her blood pooled around where the roots pressed in, that’s what made the white marks, pressure from the roots, pressing all the blood out.”

“Maybe he left her there until dark,” Joe said, “then dragged her into the cellar.”

“That’s what they think. Pathologist says the blood on the acacia roots is O positive, same as Sammie’s, though that type’s common enough. You know how long it takes to get DNA, with the lab backed up.”

Joe knew some two-and three-year-old cases were still waiting. Outside the truck he could hear folks talking and laughing as they hurried inside.“What about the cell phone Kathleen dug from under the tree?”

“It’s Sammie’s, all right,” Charlie said. “Complete with photos to add to the evidence. Kathleen printed out five shots of a tall, lean man dragging a woman’s body across the yard—that could be the first victim. From the angle of the shot, looks like Sammie might have taken them from the cottage window. Kathleen made some enlargements where you can see a portion of the woman’s face, and an old scar on her upper left arm, and it sure looks like Alain. CSI has contacted Alain’s dentist for a positive ID. The man’s face wasn’t visible, only his back. Dark hair, tall. From his haircut, and the angles of his body, looks very much like Erik Kraft. Forensics is working to lift prints from the victim’s clothes.”

“No gun?” Joe said.

“Not yet,” Charlie said.

“You want it all, right now,” Ryan said, laughing, unceremoniously picking Joe up. “Come on, we’re missing the party.” She and Charlie swung out of the truck, Ryan carrying Joe over her shoulder. Going in through the gallery door, she stopped just beneath the balcony—gave Joe a little toss, and he leaped up to the second floor, scrambling through the rail, where Dulcie and Misto sat looking down on the crowd, still eyeing the buffet, and Dulcie assessing the women’s attire with as keen an eye as any fashion model.

Joe settled down between them and, in whispers, repeated what Charlie had told him; and didn’t that make Misto smile. The old cat liked their clandestine role, he liked helping the cops. He liked the mix of human skill and electronic techniques, with the skills that only a cat could have offered.

“Where’s Kit?” Joe said. “Where’s Pan?”

“Not a clue,” Dulcie said innocently.

Misto looked at them and smiled. Beyond the windows, the evening was balmy, the sky so clear that every star shimmered.“A perfect night for a hunt in the hills,” the old cat said. “Or, for a bit of romance on the rooftops?” he said thoughtfully.

Dulcie gave the two toms a sly little smile.

“She’s a charming lady,” Misto said.

“She’s very young,” Joe said in a fatherly manner that made Dulcie laugh.

But in truth Kit and Pan weren’t preening and flirting, not at the moment. Nor were they hunting the starlit hills—though theywere stalking some human game, following Erik Kraft.

Did anyone know he was back in the village? Had they spotted him before even the cops had? They had been on the roofs, wandering in the direction of the auction, when they saw lights on in Kraft’s second-floor condo; they had galloped across the roofs to the rear of his penthouse, where the little walled terrace shut away any ugly view of roof vents and heating units and of the narrow back stairs that led down to the street.

When they peered in under the low, wide arches that had been left along the bottom of the stucco wall for drainage, a soft light shone out through the wide glass doors, and the closed curtain shifted in the breeze where the slider stood open. They could see the flickering light of a television, too, and could hear its tedious recap of yesterday’s snowfall, details already far outdated, on this balmy evening.

They could see a round teak table against the terrace wall with two folding canvas chairs, and three flowerpots containing dead geraniums as dry as old hay. They saw no movement beyond the glass, no shifting shadows.“Come on,” Kit said, and bellied under, emerging to paw roofing gravel from her fur, shake gravel from her paws. The air drifting out smelled of steam and shaving soap. Kit reached her nose to push the curtain aside, sniffing at the aroma of lime soap and at the scent of male human. Carefully they peered in.

The apartment was stark, very modern and not to either cat’s taste, all done in black and chrome against cold blue walls: chrome headboard, chrome chairs with black leather slings, a glimpse of chrome kitchen cabinets beyond the bedroom. They could hear him in the bathroom, where a brighter light shone through the cracked-open door with a glimpse of black marble floor, mirrored walls, they could see his shadow moving about. Warily they pushed on into the bedroom, their paws sinking into the deep black carpet. They paused with the curtain still across their backs, listening.

The bedcovers were tumbled in a heap, white silk sheets, soft black comforter, a sleek black phone on the nightstand beneath a chrome lamp. A closed suitcase, made of expensive black leather, sat on a chrome stand near the closet doors, just below the recessed TV that was still belaboring bygone snow scenes. A pair of jeans lay dropped on the carpet beside a pair of black Italian boots, worn and dirty. Brown shirt thrown over the back of a chrome chair, black leather jacket folded across the chair’s arm. When Kit approached the clothes, they smelled of smoke and ashes, smelled exactly like the burn. As she pressed forward to look closer, Pan’s hiss stopped her; the sound of a sliding door made her dive beneath the bed.

But then they heard the shower come on, water pounding. As a cloud of steam ghosted out to them, Kit approached the clothes again, sniffing. His boots smelled of ashes, and were streaked with gray. The pounding of the shower was broken by the sluicing sounds of someone vigorously washing. She said,“He’s been at the burn, he’s been up at Hesmerra’s, so what was he looking for? The papers she stole?” Then, “Oh!” she said, as she turned. Rearing up, she peered at the top of the dresser. “Oh my, what’s this?” she said, smiling.

On the dresser stood a thin black laptop, its case open, its cord plugged into the wall, its lighted screen not as bright as the TV, writhing in an abstract pattern of purple and red squares that changed and retreated and appeared again as the screensaver did its work. Leaping up, Kit reached out a paw, then warily drew it back, looking down at Pan.“You any good with these things?” She wished she had Dulcie’s expertise.

“I never had the chance, Erik was as secretive with his computer as he was with his files and papers. I can adjust a patient’s oxygen, I can work some of the levers on a folding bed and ring the alarm for a nurse. But computers, no way—I could erase everything.”

Kit was afraid she’d do exactly that. The laptop was not at all like Pedric and Lucinda’s big computer at home, everything seemed different, there wasn’t even a proper mouse. One wrong stroke, and whatever evidence it might contain could vanish forever. She studied the keyboard. Uncertainly she reached out again, and drew back again, looking down helplessly at Pan.

But she had to do something. It wasn’t in Kit’s nature to back away. She had to makesomething happen.

Carefully she pressed the flat space that she thought might be the built-in mouse. The screensaver vanished, and a page of e-mails flashed at her: two short messages, the first signed by aBetty. Could that be Alain Bent’s cousin? But why … ? The second was signed by Alain herself, dated three days ago, long after she was murdered. Kit caught only a few words when the pounding of water stopped, “ … Toronto, promise to be home next week and we can …” They heard the shower door slide open. Asthe bathroom door opened, she dropped to the floor and under the bed expecting Pan to follow. He didn’t, she heard him hit the bed above her and burrow under the covers. As she peered out, Erik came out of the bathroom naked and headed for the closet as if to retrieve clean clothes. He moved quickly, tense and in a hurry.

When he slid the closet door back, the rod and shelves were nearly empty. He removed one of three shirts and the only pair of jeans. From behind the fallen covers she watched him jerk the suitcase open, grab a pair of black Jockey shorts and black socks, and begin to hurriedly pull on his clothes. Why the rush? Was he afraid a police patrol would see the light, find out he’d returned? Why had he come back at all?

As nervous as he was, and with a suitcase packed and waiting, this time might he be gone for good, taking with him the evidence to fraud and murder? What, in fact, could be more damning than that he’d been faking Alain’s e-mail—while she lay rotting in her grave?

She wondered if he had just now heard about the fire? If he had poisoned Hesmerra’s whiskey months earlier, had he just now learned that she was dead? Had he come back to find the papers he knew she’d stolen, papers he’d searched for before she died, and had never found?

The laptop lay on the dresser just a few feet above her. Once Kraft vanished again, even as efficient as MPPD was, there was the chance he’d somehow evade them. If she knocked the little computer off the dresser onto the soft carpet, she and Pan could drag it, between them. She was trying to think how to get it out the door unseen when Erik finished dressing and turned to the bed; silently she slid deeper out of sight.

She heard him throw the covers back, perhaps meaning to lay the suitcase on the bed and open it. With a swish of sheets, the quilt fell to the floor—she thought Pan would leap clear of it and run, maybe distracting Erik so she could snag the laptop.

Pan didn’t run, she heard him hiss and growl, and knew he must be standing boldly where Erik had jerked the covers away. She slid out behind Erik, to look. Oh my. Pan stood facing Erik, snarling like a cougar, his claws bared, his daggered paw lifted to strike.

Kraft backed away. Clearly he recognized the tomcat, this cat he had tormented—clearly he thought that if the cat was there in the village, Debbie must be there, that she must have brought the cat with her. His puzzlement made Kit want to laugh, but his rage scared her so bad her paws began to sweat.

Was he wondering if Debbie had come back because of her mother’s death, if she suspectedhe’dkilled Hesmerra? Seeing Pan seemed to ignite all his anger at Debbie. When he lunged for Pan, the tomcat struck, his bared claws tearing long slashes down Erik’s arm and hand, then he leaped away and fled for the open glass door, Kit beside him looking back, reluctant to leave the laptop.

But Erik was fast, he blocked the opening, kicking at them, jerked the door closed, and lunged to grab them. They vanished under the bed, waiting with claws lifted for his hand to reach under. He kicked the bed and swore, but he didn’t kneel down and reach in. When he couldn’t drive them out by kicking and pounding on the bed he turned away, as if to waste no more time on stray cats.

Peering out, they watched him snatch a handkerchief from the suitcase, wrap it around his hand, and toss the last of his clothes in, watched him fetch a batch of papers from the top dresser drawer and drop those in on top. Before closing the suitcase, he returned to the bathroom. Kneeling before the vanity, he removed a drawer, and then slid a portion of the cabinet’s inner wall aside.

A small metal safe was set into the wall. Deftly he worked the dial, swung the little door open, and began to remove thick packets of money, bills bound together with paper strips. From behind these he pulled out a dozen plastic tubes, each half as big around as a tiny cat food can, but longer and made of pale, thick plastic.

“Gold coins,” Pan whispered, his words barely a breath. “He had cylinders like that in Eugene, I watched him count out the coins, each one as bright as the sun.”

As Erik tucked this fortune into the suitcase and locked it, Kit crept out from beneath the bed and hid among the black folds of quilt. She watched him turn off the laptop and unplug it, watched him wind the cord and slip it into a side pocket of the computer case, watched him zip the case and set it atop the suitcase. As he returned to the bathroom to lock and conceal the safe, the cats were a blur. They leaped on the suitcase, dragged the laptop off and to the door, and they were out of there, their hearts hammering as they fought the door open and hauled the laptop through, their teeth deep in the leather case. They dragged it across the patio, noisily across the scatter of gravel, and out of sight beneath the patio wall. Kit was ready to race away with it, when Pan set down his end and vanished under the wall again into the terrace. She peered under.

Kraft was still in the bathroom, she could see his moving shadow. She watched Pan take a roofing pebble in his mouth, leap to the glass door, and push the pebble down into the bottom track, wedging it in just where the door would shut, a tiny black pebble that might never be noticed within the creases of the dark metal track.

Pan returned from beneath the wall, saying nothing. He picked up his end of the laptop, and they carried it between them, their teeth firmly in its padded case. They dragged it across the roofs and up a sharp peak, and down again within a sheltered niche where three roofs joined—down into a dark and shingled crevice not easily accessible to a human, only to someone smaller and more agile. Sliding the laptop into deep darkness, they scrambled out again and ran. Erik Kraft wasn’t likely to climb up those peaks and look down.

They raced down the stairs and up the street into the shadows of a narrow alley, and there they waited for Kraft to appear.“He’ll think it fell on the floor,” Pan said. “Black laptop, black carpet, black folds of comforter. Take him a minute to realize it isn’t there. When he sees the slider open …” He went still, listening. They heard the glass door open, heard Kraft race across the terrace, heard the patio table rattle as he scrambled over the wall. They didn’t run. Backing deeper among the shadows, they wanted to see what he would do, listened to his footsteps pounding across the roof and down, watched from their dark recess as he raced up the sidewalk stopping strangers, asking questions, looking for an escaping thief. Watched him peer into parked cars, race from one little alley to the next, stop to stare in through the doors of closed shops.

“When he gives up,” Kit said, smiling, “when he knows he won’t find it, what’s he going to do? Call the cops? File a report for one stolen laptop, that’s ripe with evidence?”

Pan gave her a satisfied look as they followed Kraft around the corner, watched him double-time up the front stairs.

“He’ll grab his bag and be out of there,” Kit said. “We need to see his car, get his license,then we call the station.” She turned to look at Pan, her green eyes widening. “The pebble!” she said. “That’s what the pebble was for? So we can get back inside.”

31

Looking down from the balcony to the crowded room, Joe cut a look at Dulcie. How easy to drop down onto the buffet table, right between the sliced turkey and the salmon mousse, grab a few bites before anyone even noticed.

“Don’t even think about it,” Dulcie said. Misto smiled, the older cat, too, envisioning a grand leap into the heart of the feast—what a stir they’d make in the crowded room.

People were still arriving, eager for the auction, and Joe thought about all the money CatFriends would raise tonight, to pay for cat food and medicine. Out through the tall windows on the patio, the rescue cats themselves, safe in their cages, were drawing as much attention as the treasures to be bid upon. They were of every color, every disposition. Some rubbed against the bars or reached out a friendly paw to whoever spoke to them. Only a few backed off, keeping their distance, still distrustful since their own humans had abandoned them. Sammie Miller’s two black-and-white cats snuggled together on a blue blanket looking up hopefully when anyone approached. Twenty-five unadopted strays, from the sixty-two cats that CatFriends had trapped and placed in foster homes. Those who didn’t find homes tonight were destined to become permanent members of their adopters’ families—but they didn’t know that. They looked out through the bars at a conflicted and perplexing world: They were imprisoned, but they were safe. Surrounded by kind hands and gentle voices, but yet crowded by too many strangers pressing against their cages. Frightened or friendly, they didn’t know what was happening to them. “Maybe,” Dulcie said, “they’ll all find new homes tonight.”

The auction would not be a silent affair with a prim sorting out of written offers, this would be a lively free-for-all of bidding, led by a volunteer auctioneer who had driven down for the occasion from Sacramento: a friend of Max Harper’s who presided over all manner of auctions including the horse sales, which was where Max and Charlie had met him. Among the prizes to be auctioned, besides various valuable maintenance services and luxurious vacation weekends, and Charlie’s drawings, and the decorative rugs and furniture, thebright blue ocean kayak stood upended in one corner of the gallery, crowded by handsome brass lanterns and other select items for the boat lover, a set of state-of-the-art golf clubs, a St?bben English saddle, a carved Western saddle, both saddles on racks, both valued at several thousand, and a locked glass case displaying ten pieces of diamond and emerald jewelry, all donations from various local shops for the abandoned cats. Joe had already spotted a number of MPPD officers among the crowd, all out of uniform, all enjoying the party but watchful, in the event unknown visitors were temptedby the high value of the jewelry and sports equipment.

As the three cats watched the auctioneer take his place on the podium, and the mayor join him to say a few words, they didn’t imagine that, away among the dark rooftops Kit and Pan had narrowly escaped an angry and desperate Erik Kraft—with evidence enough to put Kraft in the hands of the county DA and of federal authorities as well.

As Kraft raced up the front stairs to retrieve his suitcase, Kit and Pan crouched near the entrance to the underground parking garage waiting in the shadows to see the make of his car and his license number. Kraft was gone maybe ten minutes, then came hurrying down, two steps at a time, carrying the black suitcase, his black leather jacket slung over one shoulder barely hiding a shoulder holster and the butt of a handgun. Moving swiftly down the ramp, he disappeared into the parking garage. They heard a car door open and slam, an engine start, and in a minute a black, two-door Audi sped up the incline, Kraft’s profile sharp against the garage lights. Kit took one look at the California license plate and would remember it for life. The minute his car roared off, they raced around to the back steps and up to his condo, worried that he’d found the pebble and dislodged it, and locked the slider. Or, in his hurry, had he abandoned the faulty door and locked only the front door? Why bother with an apparently broken latch, when he must have taken everything of importance with him anyway? The money, the little cylinders of gold, the real estate papers or contracts? Up the back stairs they streaked, under the wall, and with frantic paws they scrabbled at the glass door.

Together they slid it open and bolted inside, Kit laughing at the resourcefulness of the red tomcat, and leaped to the bed beside the phone. Pan had never had so much fun. Nothing he’d ever done, from comforting the nursing home patients, to the edgy thrill of hitching rides with strangers, could equal the excitement of facing human evil head-on, of attacking this man who seemed so eager to turn humans’ lives to ruin.

It took Kit only a few minutes to make the call. By the time they fled the condo again, racing down the back stairs and around to the front, Kathleen was already pulling to the curb, Max in her car beside her. Two black-and-whites pulled up behind them, and on the side street two more police units moved swiftly past, heading in the direction of Highway One. They imagined more patrol cars setting out to comb the area, skimming the night as silent as sharks. Kit had told Max about the laptop and its counterfeit messages from Alain, she told him about the safe, the money, the holstered gun. The call had been a long one, never before had a snitch told an officer so much, or had stayed on the line to answer his questions. She couldn’t explain why she did that, why she didn’t back off.

“Youtook the laptop, from his apartment?” Max had said. “You broke in and—”

“I didn’t break in, I walked in. The back slider was wide open.” Her paws were cold with unease, she wanted to race away but she wanted, more, to keep talking.

“You went over the wall into his private patio?”

“Well, yes. I looked over, and saw the door was open.”

“What were you doing on the roof?”

“I went up the stairs, I knew the back of his condo was there and I was curious. I looked over, saw the door open, saw the lighted computer screen. Saw there were messages on it, and when I saw they were signed Alain, dated long after she left the village, I thought you might want it.” Now, herpaws were sweating. “He was all packed and ready to leave. I thought, if I didn’t take it, he might erase those messages before you ever saw them.”

There was a little silence, as if he’d expected her to hang up. She said, “When he found the laptop missing he burst through the door looking for me, he came after me. I didn’t want him to catch me with it, he’s bigger, he’d have taken it. I hid it on the roofs, got rid of it where I didn’t think he’d find it. Then I ran, tried to lead him away from it, down the back stairs. It’s there now,” she said, and described the hidden well between the precipitous roofs. “It’s waiting for you to get it.” And she’d hung up then, worrying that, because the laptop was stolen, maybe that would taint the evidence it contained. What did the law say about that? Had she and Pan, in their hurry to retrieve the evidence, only destroyed it themselves?

But what other choice did they have? Once he was on the freeway, the minute he saw the first cop after him, he’d erase everything, Alain’s messages, whatever financial dealings were there. There’d be nothing left, all the proof vanished like smoke sucked away on the wind.

Kit thought later maybe she’d talked so long to Max because, without any explanation at all, their stealing of the laptop and hiding it on the roof, slipping it into that little niche that most humans would never notice, was too far out, too strange. Would create one more uneasy scenario to puzzle Max Harper, make him wonder just what kind of snitch would choose a hiding place that only a pigeon or roof rat might be aware of.

After they’d called Max, and had watched the police deploy after Kraft’s car, they watched Max Harper and Kathleen head for the back stairs, watched Kathleen climb in over the steep roofs and retrieve the laptop. Watched her and Max head for her car, saw them grin at each other as they locked the laptop safely in the trunk. As their car turned up toward the freeway, the cats heard gunfire. One shot, two more, and they seemed very close. They had no way to know what was happening, they could only pray Kraft had been taken without any cops getting hurt. Kit debated whether to race for the station where they could hear the calls coming in, could follow the action via police radio. But there would be cops at the auction with their radios. When Charlie heard sirens and gunshots, wouldn’t she get the news right away? And when Kit thought of the delicious buffet waiting, hunger won, she leaped away across the roofs for the gallery, Pan beside her, Kit worrying about her human friends, and both cats famished for supper.

32

Galloping over the rooftops for the gallery, Kit and Pan could hear the auctioneer’s quick staccato and then in a minute other voices and laughter rising up, as if the auctioning had finished. Kit imagined folks heading for the buffet, and the good smells drew her on, making her lick her whiskers. But running full tilt, Pan stopped suddenly and doubled back, looking down and across the street.

Debbie’s car was parked below, in front of the village Laundromat. The windows were open and little Tessa was looking out, both children were there, but not Debbie. They scanned the street and looked in through the Laundromat windows but didn’t see her, and Kit flattened her ears, lashing her fluffy tail. “What kind of mother leaves her kids alone at night, on the street, in an unlocked car?”

“Debbie does,” Pan said. “She has them sit up in front so if anyone bothers them, they can blow the horn.”

“Fat lot of good that would do.”

Pan crouched over the roof gutter looking down at Tessa, his expression so filled with longing that Kit reached out a paw, touched his paw gently.“You want to go down there?” she said softly. “We could—”

“I can’t let Tessa see me. She’d never stop talking, telling her mother I’d followed them, begging her to look for me. And Vinnie? She catches one glimpse, who knows what trouble she’d make, asking how I got here. That kid won’t leave anything alone, we don’t need that kind of attention. ”

“Maybe, though …” Kit said, “maybe at night you could slip into the cottage to see Tessa? Wait until she’s asleep, until they’re all asleep, then talk to her the way you did before?”

“How do you know that?”

“Debbie told the Damens. She laughed at Tessa, made fun of her, said a talking cat was impossible, but Tessa wouldn’t back down. She said that in the night, in the dark, you told her your true name. Joe heard it all, he told me and Dulcie. He said it was all he could do not to claw Debbie. No wonder Tessa never talks, when her mother is so sarcastic.”

“I wish she hadn’t told,” Pan said quietly. “I did whisper to her, how else could she have named me? She’s so small, and … dear,” he said, looking embarrassed. “Debbie doesn’t deserve her.” He looked at Kit, flicking his ears. “Maybe …Is there some way I could visit her, get her to keep the secret?”

“If youcould talk to her at night again, maybe you could help her. Show her how to survive that woman. I could be the lookout,” Kit said. “I could watch Debbie and Vinnie, make sure they don’t wake and hear you, make sure that Debbie, if she’s still up, doesn’t come sneaking in.”

Pan smiled.“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe we could do that.” His amber eyes were so deep, his look so close and real it made her tremble. “Late in the night,” he said softly, “when the house is dark, maybe we can help her, maybe together we can.”

Charlie found all five cats in the bookstore, out of the way of the workers who were cleaning up the last of the buffet, folding up the big table and the metal chairs, putting the little caf? tables back in their usual places. On a bookstore table, Kit and Pan crouched before their empty plates waiting for news, licking the last smears of salmon mousse from their whiskers. Dulcie and Misto sat above them on a bookshelf, as Joe Grey paced back and forth along the shelves, the five cats waiting impatiently to know if Kraft had been caught. They’d heard no more shots, no more sirens, the night was silent, but somewhere out in the dark, officers might still be in danger.

Charlie sat down at the table beside Kit and Pan and flipped open her cell phone, pretending to make a call, to key in a number that never rang at the other end. She said softly,“They got him.” The cats came to full attention, Joe Grey paused on the bookshelf and lay down just above her, and on the table Kit rolled over, handily drawing closer. All ears were up, all tails very still.

“They spotted the Audi headed north just before the off-ramp to the hospital. When he saw two patrol cars coming up fast behind him, and a CHP cutting across the median from the southbound lanes, he swerved up the ramp, doubled back southbound, weaving in and out. Cut a right at Carpenter, grazedtwo oncoming cars, headed up into the residential. A Realtor must know those little winding streets like the back of his hand, he must have been convinced he could lose them up there. It didn’t work,” she said, grinning. “They forced him over, he fired once at Brennan. McFarland took him downwith two shots. He struggled out of the car bleeding, his hands up, and didn’t fight anymore.”

Kit was so pleased she almost laughed out loud.

No wonder we heard the shots,Joe thought.Those hilly streets, they’re only a few blocks from here, just up past the gallery.

“He’s all tucked away in the hospital,” Charlie said. “Private room with a guard, regular VIP treatment. Max has talked with the DA, there’s enough evidence for an arraignment, he was really pleased to have the laptop.” She reached to pet Kit, and shyly to stroke the top of Pan’s head. “Kathleen made copies of everything on it, the fake messages from Alain, all kinds of real estate transactions on a dozen different letterheads. From what they’ve found so far, those are all fake. They searched the condo, got a lock man up there to open the wall safe but of course it was empty. Max has the cash, maybe a hundred thousand and I don’t know how much in gold. They’re still lifting prints in the condo.”

Well, Kit thought, the whole department had been busy. In the time it took the party to break up, and her and Pan to demolish their big plate of seafood, turkey, salmon mousse, and three desserts, everyone at the department had been hard at work, she imagined the computers and phones and fax machine just humming away. Never overly modest, tonight Kit felt pretty smug.

“The murders are in our jurisdiction,” Charlie said, “but the real estate swindles reach way beyond California. Oregon, three Midwestern states, North Carolina and Virginia. Max is turning copies of that evidence over to the FBI, everything on the laptop, and the papers from Hesmerra’s tin box. I expect our county DA will charge Kraft with multiple counts of real estate fraud, as well as two counts of murder—the investigation of Hesmerra’s death is still under way.” She glanced up as Billy came across the room. “See you next week,” she said, pretending to end the call.

Billy had been helping with the cleanup, with moving tables and folding up cages; he’d worked willingly all evening at various tasks, but now as he approached, his expression wasn’t happy, and he looked at Charlie forlornly. Away behind him, Perry and Esther Fowler stood watching.

He stepped close to the table, speaking softly.“They said … My aunt Esther said a person from Children’s Services will be at school tomorrow morning. To talk to me. To make arrangements for my placement …” He looked down, his voice faltering.

“Placement?” Charlie said, trying not to shout. “What placement?”

“To tell me what institution or foster home they’re going to put me in.”

“The hell they are,” Charlie said, scowling past him at the Fowlers. “They’re not taking you anywhere. Who are they sending, did you get a name? Did they say what time?” She looked up as Ryan came to join them, passing the Fowlers without speaking.

Billy said,“They didn’t say a name. Said first period, around nine.” The boy’s face was white, he was trying hard not to cry.

“Max and I will be there,” Charlie said, her voice low and measured with anger. “You’re not going anywhere, you’re staying with us. For as long as you like.” She looked up at Ryan. “If the Fowlers won’t cooperate, if they won’t sign the legal papers to let you live with us, I’m sure Debbie will.”

“Debbie will,” Ryan said. “Or she’ll be out on the street looking for a roof overher head.”

Billy tried to grin at them, but still he was pale and uncertain. Ryan hugged him, and Charlie said,“It will be all right, we’ll take care of it. Go on out and help Clyde with the rest of the tables.”

The boy walked silently past the Fowlers hardly looking at them. He didn’t stop, though they tried to question him. Watching him, Joe hoped a signature from Debbie would be sufficient. He wondered what other leverage Max would have, maybe with Perry Fowler, as well as his hold over Erik Kraft.

There’d been no mention of Fowler’s involvement in Kraft’s embezzlements, but Joe thought maybe Fowler wasn’t clean, maybe he and Esther had known all along, and looked the other way. If that was the case, Max might have plenty of information to use to help Billy.

He guessed the truth would come out when Max and Kathleen had all the loose ends wrapped up. Detectives Garza and Davis were, at this point, pretty much out of the loop. Dallas had started working another case, a domestic violence that had flared up noisily, night before last. And Juana was at home tonight, fasting, preparing for an early morning surgery. She had decided to go ahead with the knee replacement; Ryan had said Officer Brennan would be taking her to the hospital.

Joe thought about his strong and reliable friend having to deal with the pain of surgery and then with a mechanical knee, and he prayed that all went well. Charlie’d said Juana had taken her young cat over to the Firettis, to board, where he’d likely be spoiled just the way Juana spoiled him. Joe thought maybe Misto would play nursemaid, and spoil the little cat, too.

Out in the patio, as Billy helped Clyde arrange the tables, he watched a young couple leaving with their carrier, their new kitty peering out. Every cat had been spoken for, and those folks that the volunteers knew well had taken their cats with them. Others, not so well known, would wait while CatFriends checked them out, talked with their veterinarians, even visited their homes. Charlie said they weren’t going to rescue and doctor and nurture a cat, then not make sure it would be well cared for. Billy looked in at George Jolly’s two black-and-white adoptees, who waited in their carrier on a table near the kitchen. One reached out a paw to him, while the other rolled over for a tummy rub.

Charlie had told him the last one of George Jolly’s three elderly cats had, shortly before Christmas, been put down by Dr. Firetti because of painful liver failure. Charlie said Jolly was now, at last, ready for new housemates. When she described Jolly’s house, Billy knew the cats would like it. There were high shelves and all kinds of climbing places, and out in back, a lush garden, Charlie said, with an escape-proof fence. He guessed Sammie Miller’s two cats were, for sure, going to a happy home.

But his own cats had lucked out, too, Billy thought, with a whole hay barn full of mice to hunt. He didn’t know what made him think about Zandler just then. Except that the landlord had groused about his cats, said they were dirty. Well they were cleaner than that old man. He thought about Zandler prowling the burned house, and wondered again if Gran’s moneywas still hidden there—or if Zandler, or someone else, had found it. Maybe he’d never know, but he sure meant to keep looking.

As the remaining volunteers gathered for a good-night celebration, the scent of fresh coffee filled the patio and George Jolly brought out the anniversary cake he’d baked, setting it before the Damens: a three-layered confection iced in white, decorated with a red Valentine heart and a border of running cats. Everyone toasted the newlyweds, and toasted each other at the success of the auction. They had raised over forty thousand dollars, and every last stray had a new home, a more productive night than any of CatFriends had dreamed.

Charlie and Billy left soon after the boisterous toasts ended, Billy yawning, full of good food, sated with too many people talking all at once—and worried about tomorrow. Wondering if his friends could, indeed, stand up to the power of the county authority that meant to take him away. Now, tired and discouraged, he wanted only to climb into his bed, in his cozy stall, among his own furry family.

As Kit and Pedric and Lucinda left the party, Kit looked back over her shoulder hoping Pan would decide to come with them, but he didn’t, he only gave her a conspiratorial smile, and hopped into the Firetti van beside Misto. Wilma and Dulcie were leaving, too. Wilma, having done a background check on Emmylou Warren, had thought of asking her home with them, but Emmylou had already vanished; she hadn’t stayed long, a silent observer at the edge of the party, then had slipped out again into the night as was her way.

“Where will she go?” Wilma said, turning the car heater up as she and Dulcie headed home. “Keep on sleeping in her old car, among all the bags and boxes?”

“Or maybe off to look for Birely?” Dulcie said. “To tell him his sister has died?”

“How would she ever find him? Oh, but she has his cell phone number.” She glanced down at Dulcie. “What about Sammie’s house, now the police have released it? You suppose she left it to Birely?”

“What would he do with it?” Kit said. “A wanderer like Birely, settle down in one place? I don’t think so. Trapped by a roof and four walls? He’d be about as happy as a feral cat shut in a box.”

“I guess,” Wilma said. “Maybe she left the house to Emmylou, if shewas Sammie’s only friend. That would be nice” She looked down at Dulcie and scratched the tabby’s ears. “You cats did all right,” she said. “Cats and cops together.”

Joe arrived home yawning, endured Rock’s wet licks across his face, gave Snowball a few licks of his own, and then was up into his tower stretched out among his cushions, staring up at the stars.

“Sleep tight,” Ryan called up to him.

“You did good,” Clyde said, “you all did.”

“Didn’t do bad yourselves,” Joe told them, thinking of their welcome help. And he slept, as did each of the cats, each warmed by their own private mystery: Joe Grey with dreams he hadn’t wanted, but wasn’t able to forget. Misto filled with visions of his lost past and, maybe, visions of what was yet to be. Dulcie awash in poetry whose source she could never have explained. And Kit, her wild dreams now given over, so suddenly, to an amazement of romance.

And Pan? What did Pan dream? Of past lives, as his daddy did? Of medieval times long vanished? Or did he dream of one tortoiseshell lady? Or, perhaps, dream equally of both, and with equal fascination?

But as the cats dreamed, each reaching out into realms they could not fully define, Wilma Getz dreamed, too. As Dulcie snuggled beside her beneath the quilt, Wilma slept wrapped in her own sense of miracle. Before leaving for the auction this evening, she had switched on her computer and found Dulcie’s last, finished poem, and didn’t that make her smile. The tabby’s sudden creative flare was, to Wilma, the greatest joy of all. The transformation of the thieving kitten she had adopted so long ago, to this most surprising and talented of cats, still left her marveling. Now, more than ever,left her nearly purring, herself, with excitement. And they slept, side by side, Dulcie and her human, dreaming, to the echo of Dulcie’s poems.

All along the cliff top blowing

She stalks her prey in grasses growing

Forest tall and thick above her

Quick and silent feline hunter

Queen of the high sea meadow

Mouse creeps very close to edge

She snatches it from narrow ledge

Sparrow tardy in his flight

Will never see another night

He’s gone to feed the queen

Through dark to early morn she’ll roam

Waves crash below

Gulls scream above her

Scolding as the wild queen passes

Through the swaying summer grasses

Queen of the high sea meadow

18. CAT BEARING GIFTS

1

THE CONFUSING EVENTS that early fall in Molena Point began perhaps with the return of Kate Osborne, the beguiling blond divorc?e arriving back in California richer than sin and with a story as strange as the melodies spun by a modern Pied Piper to mesmerize the unwary. Or maybe the strangeness started with the old, faded photograph of a child from a half century past and the memories she awakened in the yellow tomcat; maybe that was the beginning of the odd occurrences that stirred through the coastal village, setting the five cats off on new paths, propelling them into two forgotten worlds as exotic as the nightmares that jerk us awake in the small hours, frightened and amazed.

The village of Molena Point hugs the California coast a hundred and fifty miles below San Francisco harbor, its own smaller bay cutting into the land in a deep underwater abyss, its shore rising abruptly in a ragged cliff along which Highway One cuts as frail as a spider’s thread. Maybe the tale commences here on the narrow two-lane that wanders twisting and uncertain high above the pounding waves.

It was growing dark when Lucinda and Pedric Greenlaw and their tortoiseshell cat left their favorite seafood restaurant north of Santa Cruz. Lucinda had carried Kit to their table hidden in her canvas tote, the smug and purring tortie curled up inside anticipating lobster and scallops slipped to her during their leisurely meal. Now the threesome, replete with a good dinner and comfortable in their new, only slightly used, Lincoln Town Car, continued on south where they had reservations at a motel that welcomed cats—an establishment that even accommodated dogs if they didn’t chase the cats or pee on someone’s sandals.

They’d departed San Francisco in late afternoon, Pedric driving, the setting sun in their eyes as it sank into the sea, its reflections glancing off the dark stone cliff that soon rose on their left, towering black above them. The Lincoln took the precipitous curves with a calm and steady assurance that eased Lucinda’s thoughts of the hundred-foot drop below them into a cold and churning sea. In the seat behind the thin, older couple, tortoiseshell Kit sprawled atop a mountain of packages, her fluffy tail twitching as she looked far down at the boiling waves, and then looked up at the dark, wooded hills rising above the cliff against the orange-streaked sky. The trip home, for Kit, was bittersweet. She loved the city, she had loved going around to all the exclusive designer’s shops, riding in Lucinda’s big carryall like a spoiled lapdog, reaching out a curious paw to feel the rich upholstery fabrics and the sleekly finished furniture that Lucinda and Pedric had considered. She loved the city restaurants, the exotic foods, she had rumbled with purrs when they dined grandly at the beautiful old Mark Hopkins Hotel, had peered out from her canvas lair secretly amusing herself watching her fellow diners. Part of her little cat self hadn’t wanted to leave San Francisco, yet part of her longed to be home, to be back in her own village with her feline pals and her human friends, to sleep at night high in her own tree house among her soft cushions with the stars bright around her and the sea wind riffling the branches of her oak tree. Most of all, she longed to be home with her true love.

It had been a stormy romance since the big red tomcat showed up in Molena Point nearly seven months earlier, when he and Kit had first discovered one another, on the cold, windy shore. Pan appeared in the village just two months after Christmas, right at the time of the amazing snowstorm, the likes of which hadn’t been seen in Molena Point for forty years—but the likes of that handsome tomcat, Kit had never seen. Almost at once, she was smitten.

Oh, my, how Pan did purr for her, and how nicely he hunted with her, letting her take the lead, often easing back and letting her make the kill—but yet how bold he was when they argued, decisive and macho and completely enchanting. Even as much as she’d loved San Francisco, she felt lost and small when she was parted from him.Why can’t I be in two places at once, why can’t I be at home with Pan and Joe Grey and Dulcie and Misto and our human friends, and have all the pleasures of San Francisco, too, all together in the same place? Why do you have to choose one instead of the other?

In the city, the Greenlaws had hit every decorators’ showroom of any consequence, thanks to their friend, interior designer Kate Osborne, who had unlimited access to those exclusive venues. How fetching Kate had looked, ushering them into the showrooms, her short, flyaway blond hair catching the light, her green eyes laughing as if life were a delicious joke, and always dressed in something creamy and silky, casual and elegant. Kate’s scent of sandalwood blended deliciously, too, with the showrooms’ aromas of teak and imported woods and fine fabrics.

Lucinda and Pedric had made wonderful purchases toward refurbishing their Molena Point house. Ten new dining chairs and five small, hand-carved tables were being shipped down to the village, along with a carved Brazilian coffee table, three hand-embossed chests of drawers, and six lengths of upholstery fabric that were far too beautiful for Kit to ever spoil with a careless rake of her claws. The bundles of fabrics and boxes of small accessories filled the Lincoln’s ample trunk and wide backseat, along with the Greenlaws’ early Christmas shopping, with gifts for all their friends; Kit rode along atop a veritable treasure of purchases—to say nothing of even greater riches hidden all around her, inside the doors of the Lincoln where no one would ever find them.

They had stayed with Kate in her apartment with a grand view of the bay where, lounging on the windowsills, Kit could watch San Francisco’s stealthy fog slip in beneath the Golden Gate Bridge like a pale dragon gliding between the delicate girders, or watch a foggy curtain obscure the bridge’s graceful towers as delicately as a bridal veil. But best of all were their evenings before the fire, looking out at the lights of the city and listening to the stories of Kate’s amazing journey: tales that filled Kit’s dreams with a fierce longing for that land, which she would never dare approach. Kate’s adventure was a journey any speaking cat would long to share and yet one that made Kit’s paws sweat, made her want to backaway, hissing.

In her wild, kitten days, she would have followed Kate there, down into the caverns of the earth, and she would have ignored the dangers. But now, all grown up, she had learned to be wary, she no longer had the nerve to race down into that mysterious land, overwhelmed by wonder. Now only her human friend was brave enough to breach that mythical world with a curiosity at least as powerful as Kit’s own.

It was just last June that Kate had phoned her Molena Point friends to say she had quit her job in Seattle and moved back to San Francisco. But then, after that one round of calls, no one heard from her again. Their messages had gone unanswered until two weeks ago when, in early September, she resurfaced and called them all, and this time her voice bubbled with excitement. She spoke of a strange journey but left the details unclear, she talked about a gift or legacy, a sudden fortune, but she left the particulars vague and enticing.

Now, Kit, safe in the backseat as Pedric negotiated the big Lincoln down the narrow cliff road, idly watched the white froth of waves far below glowing in the gathering night. She sniffed the wind’s rich scent of kelp and dead sea creatures and she thought about the wealth that Kate had brought back, treasures Kate insisted Lucinda and Pedric share—as if gold and jewels were as common as kitty treats or a box of chocolate creams to pass around among her friends.

Though Kate made sure the Greenlaws took some of that amazing fortune back with them to Molena Point, she had in fact already sold much of the jewelry, traveling from city to city—Seattle, Portland, Houston—taking care that she wasn’t followed, telling the dealers the most plausible of stories about her many European visits where, she said, she’d acquired the strange and exotic pieces. Though the gold coins she’d insisted on giving to the Greenlaws were common enough, she’d had them all melted down and recast into the tender of this world, they could be sold anywhere without question. “No one has followed me,” Kate said, “no one has a clue. If anyone did, don’t you think they’d have come after me by now? Someone would have broken into my apartment weeks ago, or intercepted me on my way to a bank or getting off a plane. And now,” she’d said with a little smile, “who would suspect a respectable couple like you of carrying a car full of jewels and Krugerrands?”

Kate and Pedric together had removed the Lincoln’s door panels, using special tools, one that looked like a fat, ivory-colored tongue depressor, and a long metal gadget that might pass for a nail puller or a bottle opener. They had tucked twenty small boxes into the empty spaces, taping them securely in place so they wouldn’t rattle or become entangled in the wires and mechanisms that ran through the inner workings of the car. Pedric was as skilled in these matters as any drug smuggler, though his lawless days were long past. Kate said the coins were theirs to use any way they chose, and Lucinda suggested the village’s cat rescue project, which the cats’ human friends had organized early in the year to care for the many pets that had been abandoned during the economic downturn, cats and dogs left behind when their families moved out of foreclosed homes. There was enough wealth hidden in the car to build a spacious animal shelter and still leave a nice buffer for the Greenlaws, too, against possible hard times to come.

“I’ve seen what can happen,” Kate said, her green eyes sad, “when a whole economy fails. That land, that was so rich and amazing … all the magic is gone, there’s nothing left but the ugliest side of their culture, all is fallen into chaos, the castles crumbled, the crops dead, the people starving. Everyone is drained of their will to live, not even the wealth I brought back was of use to them. What good is gold when there’s nothing to buy, no food, nothing to trade for? People wandering the villages scavenging for scraps of food, but with no desire to plant and grow new crops, no ambition to begin new herds or bring any kind of order to their ruined world. All their richly layered culture has collapsed, they are people without hope, without any life left in them. Without,” Kate said, “any sense of joy or of challenge. Only the dark has prevailed, and it feeds on their hopelessness.”

Now, as night drew down, fog began to gather out over the sea, fingering in toward the cliff as if soon it would swallow the road, too. As they rounded the next curve, Kit could see, far below, the lights of a few cars winding on down the mountain—but when she looked back, headlights were coming toward them fast, truck lights higher and wider than any car, racing down the narrow road. Then a second set of lights flashed past that heavy vehicle, growing huge in their rearview mirror, then the big truck gained on the pickup again, accelerating at downhill speed, the two vehicles moving too fast, coming right at them, their lights blazing in through the back window, blinding her. The truck swerved into the oncoming lane, passing the pickup, its lights illuminating the rocky cliff—then everything happened at once. The truck and pickupboth tried to crowd past them in the left-hand lane, forcing them too near the edge. The truck skidded and swung around, forcing the pickup against the cliff, their lights careening up the jagged stone. At the same instant the cliff seemed to explode. Pedric fought the wheel as an avalanche of dirtsurged down at them. Kit didn’t understand what was happening. Behind them great rocks came leaping down onto the truck and a skyful of flying stones skidded across their windshield. She thought the whole mountain was coming down, boulders bouncing off the pickup, too, and on down toward the sea.Pedric crashed through somehow, leaving the two vehicles behind them. The stones thundering against metal nearly deafened her, a roar that she knew was the last sound she’d ever hear in this life.

And then all was still; only the sound of the last pebbles falling, bouncing across their windshield and across their dented hood.

2

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VICTOR AMSON’S OLD gray pickup raced too fast down the steep two-lane, its bare tires squealing around the curves, its headlights glancing off the stony cliff, following the taillights of a big produce truck, drawing close on its tail. The truck driver swerved onto a turnout at the sheer edge of the drop, impatient for him to go on past. As Vic swung into the oncoming lane, he could see the round-faced driver giving him the finger. Prickly bastard. Moving on around him, Vic smiled, grateful that nothing was coming up the hill; though the narrow, winding road didn’t bother him. Beside him, his passenger was hunched way over to the center, his eyes squeezed shut with fear. Didn’t take much to scare Birely.

Once Vic was free of the truck he sailed right on down the mountain, driving one-handed, his tall, wiry frame jammed in behind the wheel, his lined face catching light from the dash in a cobweb of wrinkles, a thin face, narrow nose, his pale brown eyes too close together. Worn jeans and ragged windbreaker, rough, callused hands. Long brown hair streaked with gray, hanging down, caught on the back of the seat, loosely tied with a leather band. He drove scowling, thinking about those three cops in their patrol cars watching him when he came out of that fence’s place.

The damn fuzz might not have been on his case at all but they sure as hell made him cranky, their marked units parked there in front of the Laundromat that the fence used as a front. That had made Birely fidget, too. Birely’d wanted to ditch the truck to get the cops off their trail, steal another car on some backstreet and then hit the freeway, he said they both should have had haircuts, that shaggy hair always set a cop off. Suspicious bastards, he said, and he was right about that.

Having passed the truck, Vic was coming down on a big sedan, shiny black in the wash of his headlights, maybe a small limo, its red taillights winking on and off as it negotiated the winding road, its headlights sweeping along the ragged cliff. When his lights hit it right, he could see a lone couple in the front seat, and what looked like a small dog perched up in the back. On past it, farther down the steep grade, occasional taillights winked, gearing down the steep curves, maybe trucks hauling their loads to one of the small coastal towns that stood like warts down there along the marshy shore. The truck behind gained on him again. Birely went rigid as a fencepost, glancing back, trying not to look down over the steep drop, his faded brown eyes turned away, his bony hands nervously clutching at his worn-out leather jacket that he’d probably picked up at some rescue mission. They had, until they hit the mountain road, been passing the bottle of Old Crow back and forth, but now, when Vic offered the bottle, Birely shook his head, glancing sideways toward the hundred-foot drop and scooting over even tighter against the middle console, his fists tight whenever their old tires let out a squeal. Made Vic wonder why the hell he’d linked up with Birely again after all these years, the guy was a total wuss, always had been. Scared of his own shadow, clumsy, always out of sync with what was going on around him, a real screwup.

Years back, when they were younger and ran together some, any time Vic had something profitable going, Birely managed to screw it up. Every damn time. Make a mess of it, blow the plan, and they’d end up with nothing for their trouble but maybe a night or two in the slammer.

He’d finally dumped Birely, didn’t see him for years. Until three months ago, he’d run into him again. That was just after he’d confiscated this current pickup truck from a ranch yard north of Salinas, slapped on different license plates courtesy of a roadside junkyard, bolted on an old rusted camper shell he found dumped back in the woods. As he headed over to the coast, it had started to rain when he ran into Birely outside a 7-Eleven when he stopped for beer. Birely sat huddled on a bench out in front, under the roof that sheltered the gas pumps, sat eating one of them dried-up package sandwiches, and you’d think they were long-lost brothers, the way Birely went on. Bastard was broke, and happy as hell to see him.

Birely said he was headed over to the coast because his sister had died, how he’d read it in the paper. He still had the clipping in his pants pocket, all wrinkled up. Going on about the house she’d left to some stranger instead of to him, when he was her only family, how it ought to be rightfully his. How he meant to confront this woman who’d supposedly inherited Sammie’s worldly goods, and how Sammie’d had a stash of money hidden away somewhere, too, way more than just a few hundred bucks, and he wanted to know what had happened to that. Listening to Birely’s tale, Vic decided he was glad to see the poor guy after all, decided he’d give his old friend a lift and maybe help him out some. He knew that area pretty well, Molena Point and back up the valley, he’d used to grow a little weed back up in the hills there, break into a few cars now and then, never anything big time, and never did get caught.

Birely’d told him Sammie’d been shot to death, if you could believe it, her body buried right there under her own house. That hurt Birely, but mostly it was the loss of an inheritance, the loss of Sammie’s love and confidence, that she’d leave everything to a stranger, that made him mad at the whole damn world. He didn’t seem so much mad at the killer as he was mad at Sammie for getting herself killed and for leaving him nothing.

Birely needn’t fret that the cops wouldn’t find Sammie’s killer, they’d already done that, the guy was doing time right now up at Quentin, some local Realtor there in Molena Point killed her, and that was a long story, too.

Well, the house she’d lived in wasn’t much, but more than Birely’d ever had or wanted, until now. Sammie’s death seemed to change him—he was Sammie’s only family, but look how she’d gone and done him, she’d even made a regular will, leaving the big lot with its two small houses to, “Some woman friend of hers,” Birely’d whined. “I’m her own kin. Why would she do me like that, leave it all to this Emmylou Warren? I met that woman once or twice when I came that way up the coast, stopped to see Sammie, just some dried-up old woman, nothing special about her. Who could be so special, over Sammie’s own brother?”

“Maybe Sammie thought you wouldn’t want a house,” Vic had said, “being a hobo and all. You always said you couldn’t stand to live under a roof, to be fenced in, you always said that.”

“Maybe. But there’s more than the house, there’s the damn money, I never said I wouldn’t want the money, I just never thought about her dying. Well, the newspaper didn’t say nothing about no money, just a will leaving the property. Maybe,” he said, frowning, “maybe this Emmylou Warrendon’t know about that.”

“Where’d your sister get money?” Vic had said, watching Birely as alertly as a rattler onto a mouse.

“Old uncle left Sammie a wad. Even after all these years, she still had half of it, she told me that’s what she lived on. Except for those times she worked at some job, housecleaning, bagging groceries. She was real tight with money. Told me she still had over half of it hidden away different places, right there in the damned house. Old bills left over from the middle of the last century. She never did like banks. Our old uncle, he stole it but she never would tell me much about that. Well, hell, she was just a girl when the old guy sent it to her, mailed it to her in a box, for Christ’s sake, from somewhere in Mexico.”

It was such a wild story Vic wondered if Birely’d made it all up, a pie-in-the-sky daydream because he wanted there to be money and maybe because he wanted a reason to be mad at Sammie. That would be like him, mixed up sometimes between what was real and what he thought was real. But hell, whatever was in the poor guy’s head, what could it hurt to take pity on him and go have a look.

They’d come on over to the coast, got to Sammie’s place, got a glimpse of the old woman who’d inherited the property, living right there in Sammie’s house. They’d watched her for a few days, while they lived in the truck, hidden back up in the woods or moving the old pickup around the windingvillage streets from one small neighborhood to another, sleeping at night in the rusty camper shell and, in the daytime, approaching the old woman’s house on foot. They’d watched her for over a week, doing some kind of carpentry on the house during the day but she went to bed early, the lights would go out at eight or nine, and they never once saw her go up the hill through the woods, to the old stone cabin on the back of the property; she seemed to have no interest in the old abandoned two-story farm building that was on Sammie’s land, shed underneath, one-room stone shack on top. Birely said Sammie hadn’t had much use for it, either, just left it there overgrown with bushes. Said the land was plenty valuable, if she ever needed more money she could sell it but she never had.

Late one night they’d moved into the stone shack when Emmylou was sound asleep, house all dark, and they didn’t make a sound, didn’t use a flashlight. Vic had picked the old lock, and had jimmied the padlock on the shed, too, hid the truck in there, fixed the lock back so it looked untouched, still hanging rusty against the peeling paint of the old, swinging shed door.

The single stone room had maybe been workers’ quarters back in the last century, when there were mostly little scraggy farms up here. At some time, rough planks had been fitted up against the bare stone walls, nailed onto two-by-fours, most likely for warmth. Stained toilet and old metal sink in one corner. Stone floor, cold as hell under their sleeping bags.

It was some days before Birely, lying in his sleeping bag staring at the plank walls, said,“Money could be up here, where no one’d think to look. Maybe Sammie didn’t leave Emmylouall of it, maybe she left some for me to find, in case I wanted to come looking. Sure as hell she didn’t put it in any bank, she got that from Uncle Lee, herobbed banks. He told her, never trust your money to a banker. As little as she was, maybe nine or ten when he left for Mexico, I guess she listened.” Birely shrugged. “Sammie lived all her life that way, hiding what she earned and hiding what Uncle Lee sent her. Lived alone all her life, stayed to herself just like the old man did, never got cozy with strangers—until this Emmylou person.”

There were no cupboards in the stone shed to search, no attic, no place to hide anything except maybe in those double walls. They’d started prying off one slab of wood and then another, putting each back as they worked. Used an old hammer they’d found in the truck, had muffled the sound with rags when they pulled the nails and tapped them back in real quiet, moving on to the next board, and the next. Underneath the boards, some of the stones were loose, too, the mortar crumbling around them—and sure as hell, the fifth stone they’d lifted out, behind it was a package wrapped in yellowed newspaper. Unwrapped it, and there it was: a sour-smelling packet of mildewed hundred-dollar bills. Birely’d let out a whoop that made Vic grab him and slap a hand over his mouth.

“Christ, Birely! You want that old woman up here with her flashlight, you want her calling the cops?” But nothing had happened, when they looked out the dirty little window no lights had come on down at the house below.

“Hell, Vic, there’s a fortune here,” Birely said, counting out the old, sour-smelling hundred-dollar bills.

Took them several days to examine all the walls. They’d found ten more packets, and made sure they didn’t miss any. They came away with nearly nine thousand dollars. But even then, Birely said that originally there’d been maybe two hundred thousand in stolen bills, and he’d looked down meaningfully toward the larger house.

Over the next weeks, whenever they saw the old woman get in her old green Chevy and head off into the village, they’d go down through the woods and search the house, and that tickled Birely, that he still had his key to the place, that Sammie’d given him years back, in case he ever needed a place to hide out from the law or from his traveling buddies.

While they searched her three rooms they took turns watching the weedy driveway so the old woman wouldn’t come home and surprise them. Emmylou Warren was her name. Tall, skinny. Sun-browned face and arms wrinkled as an old boot. Long brown hair streaked with gray. She had a couple of cats, maybe more, there were always cats around her overgrown yard and going in and out of the house.

They’d see her drive in, watch her unload lumber that was tied on top the Chevy, all the while, cats rubbing against her ankles. Birely said, “You think that’s Sammie’s money she’s spending for all them building materials? Or,” he said, his face creasing in a knowing smile, “or did Sammieonlytell her about the money, tell her it was hid, and she’s looking for it?

“Sammie would do that,” he said. “Not put anything in writing to keep from paying inheritance. Sammie didn’t like the gover’ment any better than she liked banks.

“That’s why she’s tearing up the walls,” Birely said, scowling at the nerve of the woman. “Tearing them up just like we’re doing, and it’s rightfully my money.”

“If she’sfound any,” Vic said, “why’s she driving that clunky old car? I’d get me a new car, first off. And if sheis looking for the money, why would she have help coming in, those two carpenters that are here sometimes, and that woman carpenter? She wouldn’t have no one else around. That dark-haired woman’s a looker, I wouldn’t mind getting to know her better.” Slim woman, short, roughed-up hair. Fit her faded jeans real nice. He’d heard the old woman call her Ryan, she drove a big red king cab, her own logo on the side, Ryan Flannery Construction. Pretty damn fancy. Well, hell, Vic thought, she was likely too snooty to give him a second look.

He did meet a little gal down in the next block, though, and she wasn’t too good for him. Debbie Kraft, flirty little gal with two small children, both girls, light-fingered woman not too good to steal, neither, he soon found out.

They burned no lights in the stone house at night, and didn’t cook none, or warm up their food. Just opened a can of cold beans, kept a loaf of bread handy and maybe doughnuts. He missed hot coffee. Even in the hobo camps they boiled coffee. And they didn’t drive the truck, just left it hidden in the shed below and hoped she’d stay away from there. If they needed beer and food they’d walk up the hill through the woods and then down the next street to the village. Carried out their trash, too, dropped it in a village Dumpster, in one alley or another, always behind a different restaurant. Fancy place like Molena Point, even the Dumpsters were kept all neat and covered.

They’d kept on slipping down to the house whenever Emmylou went out, searching where she was starting a tearout, fishing back between the studs, but then one night she came up the hill snooping around the stone house. They were inside sitting on their sleeping bags eating cold beans and crackers, they heard her come up the steps, saw her through the smeared window, and they eased down out of sight. They were sure she’d have a key, but she didn’t come in. They’d stayed real still until they heard her leave again, her shoes scuffing on the steps, heard her rustling away down through the bushes, heard her door open and shut.

They’d waited a while after her lights went out, feeling real nervous. They’d opened the shed door real quiet, shoved some food and their sleeping bags in the pickup, with what money they’d found, hoping she wouldn’t hear the pickup start. Had eased up the dirt lane and around through the woods, and moved on away from there. Had parked for the night way up at the edge of the village beside an overgrown canyon. Had waited until dawn, then had made a run back down near Emmylou’s place, where Vic tended to a deal he’d made with Debbie Kraft. Had picked up some goods he’d told her he’d sell for her up in the city and some fancy, stolen clothes. A nice stroke of luck, when he’d seen Debbie and her older child shoplifting, and had got the goods on them. A nice little deal he’d set up with her: he’d make the sale and take his share, and not turn her in to the cops. He’d metwith Debbie, picked up the goods, and then headed for the city. Let Emmylou think they were gone for good—if she everwas onto them living right there above her.

They were gone a week up the coast, boosting food from a mom-and-pop grocery or a 7-Eleven, and they’d gone on into San Francisco, where he’d made the business transaction. That turned out pretty good, except for the damn cops sitting out in front, there. Well, hell, the goons hadn’t followed them, maybe it was just coincidence, maybe they were watching someone else.

He’d made a bit of cash off that, and who knew what other arrangements he might make with Debbie. Now, headed back down the coast to the stone shack, he hoped the old woman had settled down and they could finish looking for the money. Vic was daydreaming about what he’d do with that kind of cash,when the produce truck he’d passed came roaring down right on their tail, its lights so bright in his mirror he couldn’t see the road ahead. Swearing, he eased over to let it pass. Truck hauled right down on them, riding their bumper. Let the bastard tailgate that big sedan up ahead, it was moving too damn slow anyway. That was what was holding him up, some rich-ass driver in that big Lincoln Town Car—one more curve, he was right on top of the Town Car, and the damn truck was climbing his tail. Swearing, he pulled over, pushing the big sedan closer to the edge. “Go on, you bastard!”Why the hell didn’t the guy driving the Lincoln step on the gas, get on down the grade? Vic drew as close to the edge as he could to let the truck pass, tailgating the Town Car, then pulled toward the left lane. But the truck shot past him, rocking his truck, kicking up gravel, shaking the road with a hell of a rumble, and its headlights made the cliff look like it was moving—well, hell, the cliffwas moving, rocks falling, bouncing across the road. He stood on his brakes but couldn’t stop. The whole mountain was sliding down. The Town Car shot past, rocks thundering down across its tail. A whole piece of the mountain was falling. The big truck skidded, Vic smashed into its side and into the cliff. The front end of his pickup crumpled like paper, squashed against the biggerbumper. The passenger door bent in against Birely like you’d bend a beer can, Birely struggling and twisting between the bent door and the crumpled dashboard. Pebbles and rocks rained down around them. The produce truck lay turned over right in his face, one headlight striking off at an angle, catching the rising dust, its other light picking out the black Town Car on the far side of the rockfall, where it had plowed into the cliff. That light shone into the interior where the driver and passenger were slumped, and picked out through the back window the eerie green glow of a pair of eyes, he could see the animal’s tail lashing, too, and realized it wasn’t a dog, but a cat. Who would travel with acat! A damn cat, its eyes reflecting the lights of the wrecked truck where it peered out, watching him.

3

[Ęŕđňčíęŕ: _3.jpg]

VIC COULDN’T OPEN the truck door, it was bent and jammed. The passenger side was pushed in, trapping Birely against the dash. Birely lay moaning, his face and neck covered with blood, reaching out blindly for help. The big delivery truck lay on its side among the fallen boulders, Vic’s pickup crumpled inagainst the roof of the truck’s cab, its right front fender jammed deep against its own wheel. Well, hell, the damn thing was totaled, was no use to him now.

But when he looked off across the rockfall at the Lincoln, it didn’t look too bad. Looked like it had missed most of the slide, rocks and rubble thrown against it and scattered across the hood, but he could see no big dents in the fenders to jam the wheels, and the hood and front end weren’t pushed in as if to damage the engine. The couple inside hadn’t moved.

Reaching under the seat for the tire iron, he used that to break out what remained of his shattered window. Knocking the glass away, he crawled out and swung to the ground. Stepping up onto the unsteady heap of rocks, trying not to start the whole damned mountain sliding again, he worked his way around to the other side of the pickup, to have a look.

Birely didn’t look good, sprawled limp and bleeding across the dash. Poor Birely. So close to finding the rest of his sister’s money, and now look at him. What kind of luck was that? Vic thought, smiling.

Vic’s one working headlight shot into the big truck’s cab, casting a grisly path onto the driver. He lay twisted over the wheel, his head and shoulders half out the broken window, his throat torn open by a spear of metal from the dashboard, his blood coursing down pooling into the window frame. Dark-haired guy, Hispanic maybe. No way he could be alive with his throat slit. Vic turned his attention again beyond the fall of rocks, to the black sedan nosed in against the cliff. As the door of the Town Car opened, he stepped back behind the turned-over truck, out of sight.

The driver’s forehead was bleeding. Vic watched him ease out of the car, supporting himself against the open door. The minute his feet touched the ground his right leg gave way. He fell, pulled himself up, stood a moment, his weight on his left leg, then tried again, wincing. Tall old man, thin. White hair. Frail looking. Easing out of the car on his left leg, clinging to the door and then to the car itself, he moved painfully around to the back of the car, making his way on around to the far side, to the woman. He stood beside her, reaching in, clinging to the roof of the car. She was as thin as theman, what Vic could see of her. She sat clutching the cat to her, mumbling something. The man reached past her into the glove compartment, found a flashlight and held it up, looking at her, and then looking at the cat, studying it all over, giving it more attention than he gave to the woman; but hewas talking to the woman, mumbling something Vic couldn’t hear over the crashing of the sea below. The man spoke to the cat, too, spoke right to it, the way someone’d speak to a pet dog. People made asses of themselves over their dogs. But a cat, for Christ’s sake? He watched the old man flipopen a cell phone. Speaking louder, now, the way people did into a phone, as if they had to throw their voices clear across the damn county. He was talking to a dispatcher, giving directions to the wreck. Hell, here he was, the truck no use to him, smashed too bad to get him out of there, and the damn cops on the way.

The old guy had turned, looking across the rock slide toward him, but Vic didn’t think he could see him, there behind the truck. Guy told the dispatcher, “Nothing stirring over there. I’ll have a look, see what I can do. Yes, I’ll stay on the line.”

He spoke to the woman again, dropped the phone in his pocket, and started limping across the rock slide. He turned back once, to the woman, his voice raised against the pounding of the surf.“You sure you’re okay?” She nodded, then mumbled something as he moved on away. The old guy negotiated the rock pile half crawling, his white hair and tan sport coat caught brightly by the truck’s one headlight. But Vic’s attention was on the Town Car, on the big, heavy Lincoln. A car like that could take a lot of abuse. Even with deep dents and dings from the slide, it looked like it would move right on out and with plenty of power to spare.

Easing back around to the pickup, where the old guy crossing the rocks couldn’t see him, Vic pulled the plastic bag of money out from under the seat and stuffed it inside his shirt. He didn’t speak to his passenger; Birely was pretty much out of it, close to unconscious, gasping as if he wouldn’t last too long. Vic watched the old man approach, balancing precariously,the pain showing in the twist of his long face. He moved on past Vic, never seeing him, and as he scrambled and slid down the unsteady boulders, Vic eased closer in behind the camper, hefting the weight of the tire iron. The old guy paused at the turned-over delivery truck, stood looking in at the dead driver. Shook his head and moved on, to the pickup. He still didn’t see Vic until Vic stepped out into the truck’s headlight, holding the tire iron low against his leg. The old man looked him over, took in the tire iron, and glanced into the cab of the pickup. “Your friend needs help.”

“Best let him be,” Vic said, “best not move him.”

The old man nodded, watching him.“My wife’s hurt. I called 911, ambulance is on its way. They’ll both have help. I’ve got to get back to her, I think her arm is broken. You have any flares? I have two, I can set them down the road, at that end.”

Vic didn’t say anything. He nodded and stepped closer. The man was lean and, despite his look of frailty, Vic could see now that he was wiry, tightly muscled. He wore his white hair short, in a military cut, ice pale against his tan. The old guy was quick, he saw Vic’s intention—the instant Vic swungthe tire iron he lunged, grabbing for it despite the hurt leg.

But his timing was off, Vic stepped aside, hit him a glancing blow across the head. When he tried to break his fall, clutching at loose rocks, Vic kicked him hard. He went flat, didn’t move again, lay bleeding onto the blacktop. Stepping around him, Vic saw Birely looking out at him, helpless and pleading.

He’d thought to leave Birely, the guy was already half dead, but some stupid softness touched him, he couldn’t leave the dumb bastard. “Hoist yourself out of there, Birely.” He didn’t wait to see if Birelycould get out, he headed on past the old man, who was bleeding bad now, past the turned-over truck and across the rockfall toward the Lincoln. He heard Birely struggling behind him, groaning as he tried to free himself. Hell, he wasn’t jammed in there that tight, he could get out if he tried.

Approaching the driver’s side of the Lincoln, Vic saw that the bumper was knocked loose on one end. It wasn’t low enough yet to drag and make a racket, he’d find something to tie it in place. He didn’t see much else wrong, he just hoped to hell the other side wasn’t bashed in or that the other wheel wasn’t bent. The passenger door hung open, the interior lights on. The woman sat holding her left arm, the damn cat still in her lap.He could see the keys in the ignition. He stood by the hood, watching her, holding the tire iron low and out of sight.

KIT WATCHED HIM approach, the thud of his steps timed to the rhythm of the breaking waves. He paused by the hood of the car, and frantically she nudged Lucinda, her nose against Lucinda’s ear. “Get out,” she whispered, “get away. Now, Lucinda! Move!”

Slowly Lucinda climbed out, unsteady on her feet, shaking her head as if to clear it, cradling her hurt arm.

“Hurry,” Kit hissed.

“I can’t, I can’t move faster.”

The man stood watching.Can he hear me? Kit thought.So screw him.“You can!” she hissed, her fur bristling. “Run,Lucinda.Run!” her voice more hiss than whisper.

He stepped to the car, blocking Lucinda. Lucinda grabbed Kit with her good hand, catching her breath with the pain. She twisted awkwardly, threw Kit as far as she could, out toward the rock slide.“Run, Kit! Run!” Kit landed on rubble, spun around and leaped atop the car. Lucinda had turned, reaching in. She backed out holding the big flashlight where he might not see it. When he grabbed for her, she swung.

But again he was faster, he snatched her hand, jerked the flashlight from her, shoved her down against the fallen rocks. Kit leaped on him, landed in his face clawing and raking him. Lucinda rose awkwardly, turned, kicked him in the shin then in the front of the knee. He swung the tire iron hard across her shoulder, shoved her down again as Kit rode his back, clawing. He grabbed her by the scruff of her neck, swinging her out away from him. When she bit down hard on his arm, he threw her against the car. She tried to run, but staggered dizzily. Sick and confused, she backed away among the fallen rocks. He was a hard-muscled man, his arms brown and knotted and tasted unwashed. Long hair hanging down his back, dishwater brown, a short scraggly beard oozing blood where her claws had raked. Ice-blue eyes, cold and pale. He had moved around the Lincoln to the driver’s side when, across the slide, she heard a car door open.

The passenger in the pickup staggered out. A small man with short brown hair, his face and plaid shirt slick with blood, his nose running blood. He came slowly across the rock pile, stumbling uncertainly, breathing through his mouth, wiping at the blood that ran from his nose. The man with the tire iron got in the Lincoln.“Get a move on, Birely.” He started the engine, gunned it, paying no attention to Lucinda sprawled so near the front wheels. His friend stumbled on across, falling on loose rocks, clutching at the larger boulders, stepping over Lucinda as if she were another rock. Edging around the Lincoln, he crawled awkwardly into the passenger seat. The driver pushed the engine to a roar. Kit ran to Lucinda, Lucinda grabbed her and rolled away as he backed around narrowly missing them. He took off in a shower of rocks, heading fast down the mountain on the twisting two-lane.

ALONE AMONG THE wreck with only a dead man to keep them company, Kit and Lucinda huddled together trembling with rage. Against the rhythm of the waves came the metallic ticks of the two wrecked trucks, settling more solidly into the highway. From higher up the mountain among the pine forest, a lone coyote began to yip.

“Cops will be here soon,” Kit said, “and an ambulance.”

“I’m fine,” Lucinda told her. “Go to Pedric. Go and see to Pedric.” Her color was gray. She held her left shoulder unnaturally, and her left arm hung limp. Kit pressed a soft paw against Lucinda’s wrinkled cheek, pressed her face to Lucinda’s jugular, listening. Lucinda’s heartbeat was too rapid, faster even than Kit’s own feline rhythm. She pawed into her housemate’s jacket pocket, careful not to touch Lucinda’s arm or shoulder, searching for Lucinda’s phone. It seemed forever ago that Pedric had called 911, but she couldn’t hear even the faintest sound of sirens down on the flatland, could see no flashing emergency lights below approaching up the two-lane, no one to help them. The shushing of the sea, with its eons-old assurance that all was well, that all of importance in the world would last forever, didn’t comfort her much. She thought about a car comingdown the mountain from above moving too fast as those trucks had done, the driver ignorant of the wreck ahead, not yet seeing the lone and disembodied headlight shooting up the rock slide. How far could such a lightbe seen, on that curving road? With no flares to mark the wreck, would an approaching car stop to help or would it crash into them? She found the phone, and before she raced to Pedric, she hit the key for 911.

She had no notion where central dispatch was located for these small coastal towns north of Molena Point, and she didn’t know if they could track a cell phone. Some areas could, and some didn’t have that equipment. When a woman dispatcher came on, Kit gave directions as best she could. She said Pedric had called earlier but that no one had come. She was so afraid of another car plowing into them that she was nearly yowling into the phone, her frightened words not much better than the scream of a common alley cat. “Hurry! Oh,pleasehurry … They’ve stolen our car, a black Lincoln Town Car, could you watch for it? Put out a BOL on it? Two men in it, one hurt bad.” She described the men as best she could, all the while thinking about the treasure hidden in the doors of the Lincoln, wondering how soon the thieves would find that. The wealth was of no consequence, compared to her hurt housemates, but it enraged her to see it stolen. Clicking off, she stood looking down the highway wondering if, alone, she could drag Lucinda off the road and up among the boulders, safe from an oncoming car? Drag Pedric up, too, get them both higher up, away from further danger? When the dispatcher asked for her name, she said, “Lucinda Greenlaw. My husband’s hurt, the man who took our car beat him.” When the dispatcher told her to stay on the line, Kit laid the phone down, set her teeth firmly in Lucinda’s jacket on her unhurt side, and began to pull. Shecould do this, shehad to do this. Maybe the loose rocks beneath Lucinda would serve as a kind of rolling platform. Straining to get Lucinda up onto them, she fought as she had never fought, every muscle of her small cat body taut and stretched, crying out, her paws scrabbling for traction until her pads tore and became slick with blood that made her slip and slide. Lucinda tried to help, tried to roll with her, tried twice to get up but fell back, sweating with pain.

“Go to Pedric, Kit. You can’t move me. Let me rest, then we’ll try again. Maybe easier, once I’ve rested. Go help Pedric. Is he bleeding? Can you stop the blood?”

Kit licked Lucinda’s face, her own face wet with tears, then headed fast across the rock slide, praying for the gift of strength, knowing that if she couldn’t move Lucinda, she couldn’t move Pedric, either, only knowing that she had to try, that she had to help them.

4

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IF EVER KIT cursed her small size it was now as she raced across the slide to Pedric. Diving under the twisted delivery truck, its metal cab tilting over her, loose rocks shifting under her blood-slippery paws, she heard the coyote yodel again, high above her, and then go ominously still. Pedric lay in a pool of blood beside the crumpled pickup, his forehead running blood. Hesitantly she pressed her paw against the gash where it flowed hardest, telling herself that head wounds always bled a lot. Soon she was pressing with both paws, with all her weight, but still the blood pooled warm beneath her pads, mixed with her own blood. She tried not to think of the billions of cat germs she was sharing with Pedric, that might harm him, and about the gravel her paws had collected, that would become embedded now in his open wounds. He was conscious, but only barely, whispering vague little love words to her. The only other sounds in the empty night were the tick, tick of the settling vehicles, the voice of the waves far below, and the dripping of some liquid nearby that she prayed wasn’t gasoline. Well, she didn’t smell gas, so maybe it was oil or water.

Her paws grew numb with the pressure, but soon the bleeding did ease, and when the coyote yipped again she wondered if he smelled Pedric’s blood on the rising sea wind. Pedric said, “Don’t let me sleep, Kit, keep me awake. I need to stay awake.” He talked vaguely about a concussion, then rambled on from one subject to another that had no connection to what was happening at that moment. When he went silent she nudged him andmade him talk again. Once, as she shifted her weight over him, he startled and tried to rise, looking around fearfully as if expecting another blow from the tire iron.

“He’s gone, those men are gone. Lie still.”

“Lucinda? Where’s Lucinda?” he said, pushing her aside, straining to get up.

“She’s fine,” Kit lied, trying to press him down. “She’s only hurt a little, she …” She went still, listening, her heart quickening. She could hear, far down the mountain, the faintest echo of sirens whooping, she heard that thin ululation long before Pedric did. “They’re coming,” she said, “the cops, an ambulance.” Rearing up, she could see lights flashing far down the mountain, red and blue lights disappearing around the curves and appearing again, accompanied by the approachingwhoop whoop and scream of emergency vehicles that put the coyote’s cries to shame. Now Pedric heard them, and he lay back, dragging her onto his chest, hugging and loving her.

But soon again he rose on one elbow looking past the turned-over truck, searching for the reflection of the Lincoln’s lights that had been angled up the cliff, lights that would mark the wreck on the other side, for the approaching cars to see. “Lucinda,” he said, struggling up. “They won’t see her. I left the lights on … Did she shut them off?” He rose further, looking. “Where … ? Kit, where’s the Lincoln?”

She looked at him, puzzled. Hadn’t he seen and heard the Lincoln drive away? “It’s gone,” she said softly. “They took our car, those men took it.”

He struggled up, the blood gushed harder again.“Lucinda.Where’s Lucinda?”

“She got out before they took the car, she’s fine.” She nuzzled him, but as the sirens drew near she spun and raced away again, under the cab of the big truck and across the rockfall. Surely they’d see Lucinda lying there. How could they help but see her? The sirens blared, approaching up the steep highway, soon their lights would blaze along the side of the cliff. But Lucinda seemed so small, lying there unprotected and alone.In just a second they’ll be here, the world will be filled with their bright, swinging lights, they’ll see her, there’ll be uniforms all over the place, they’ll see Lucinda and help her and comfort her. They’ll help Lucinda and Pedric, cops or sheriff’s deputies or whoever come, they’ll have spotlights, they—

Oh,she thought, but what will they do with me?

Or try to do, if they could catch me?

They sure wouldn’t take her in the ambulance, that was probably against the rules, to contaminate their germ-free rolling hospital with kitty fur and dander. Maybe they’d try to lock her in a squad car, drop her off at the nearest animal rescue to be kept “safe” in a locked cage until someone claimed her, like a piece of baggage lost at some lonely airport.

And, if no one claimed her soon enough, if no one thought to look for her there, what, then, would they do with her?

No way! No one’s takingme to the pound.

She found Lucinda several feet higher up the rockfall than she’d left her, lying huddled into herself, the phone abandoned beside her, her face white with the effort it had taken to climb just that far. She licked Lucinda’s cheek and nosed at her worriedly. She prayed to the human God or the great cat god or whoever might be listening, prayed for Lucinda,and then the cops were there, the flash of colored lights, the last whoop of the sirens, the powerful shafts of spotlights sweeping back and forth. Patrol cars skidded to a stop, cops spilled out, the flashing strobe lights blinded her, strafing the highway and the fallen rocks, picking out Lucindaand the two wrecked trucks. Lucinda clutched at her, attempting to hold her safe. Kit ducked beneath Lucinda’s jacket, trying to decide what to do.

The thought of strangers’ hands on her, even the kindest of cops, the thought of barred cages that she might not be able to open, of being locked in some shelter all alone, the thought of possible clerical mistakes where she’d be put up for adoption before anyone could come to fetch her, or consigned to a far worse fate, was all too much. Cops knew how to care for needful humans, but that might not extend to a terrified cat. Snatching up Lucinda’s phone between her gripping teeth, she scrambled out from under the jacket and ran.

“Oh, Kit, don’t …”

She didn’t look back, she fled straight up the cliff, dodging between rivers of sweeping light, gripping the heavy phone; it nearly overbalanced her as she scrambled up the sheer wall of stone. Only tiny outcroppings offered a claw hold until, higher up, an occasional weed or stunted bush kept her from falling. The phone grew heavier still, forcing her head away from the cliff. Twice she nearly fell. Scrambling in panic, she veered over into the rock slide where she had more paw hold, though the rocks were wobbly and unsteady. Moving up over the loose stones and boulders, she was afraid the whole thing would shift and go tumbling again, hitting her and raining down on Lucinda, who lay now far below her. Higher and higher she climbed, dodging away whenever a slab shifted, breathing raggedly around the phone through her open mouth, her heart pounding so hard that at last she had to stop.

High up on the lip of the slide, she laid the phone down on a stone outcropping. Below her, portable spotlights blazed down on Lucinda and two medics in dark uniforms knelt over her. Two more medics, one carrying a stretcher, the other carrying a dark bag that would be filled with life-saving medical equipment, were headed across the slide to Pedric. Young men, strong and efficient looking. The very sight of them eased her pounding heart.

Where will they take them? What hospital? I have to tell Ryan and Clyde, butwhat do I tell them? A hospital somewhere in Santa Cruz, that’s where we were headed.They’ll know the hospitals, they’ll call CHP to find out, Ryan and Clyde will know where to come, and they’ll come to get me, too,she thought, comforting herself. But how soon? Soon enough, before those coyotes up there find me, soon enough to save my little cat neck?

Maybe she should go back down, slip into the medics’ van while they were busy, and the cops were all working the crash scene. She watched another set of headlights coming down the mountain on the other side of the slide, watched a lone sheriff’s car park beyond the wrecked truck. A lone officer got out and started across to join the others. Theback doors of the white van stood open. In a flash she could be down the cliff and inside, hiding among the metal cabinets and oxygen tanks and all that tangle of medical equipment.I could hide in there close to Lucinda and Pedric and, at the hospital—a strange hospital, a strange town—I could hide in the bushes outside and watch the door and wait for Ryan and Clyde or maybe for Charlie to come, and then …

Oh, right. And if those medics spot me in their van trying to catch a ride, they’ll try to corner me in that tight space. If they shut the doors, and surround me, and I can’t get out and one of them grabs me, what then? They’ll lock me up somewhere, to keep me safe? One of the cops will shut me in his squad car? No, she was too upset and uncertain to go back. Taking the phone in her mouth again, she moved from the top of the slide on up into the bushes that stretched away to the edge of the dense pine woods, damp and dark and chill. There she laid the phone down among dead leaves and pine needles and pawed in the single digit for the Damens’ house phone. Crouched there listening to it ring, she watched the lighted road below as the medics slid Pedric into their van, working over him, attaching him to an oxygen tank. Lucinda sat on a gurney as the other two medics splinted and taped her shoulder and arm. The phone rang seven times, eight. On the twelfth ring, she hung up. Why didn’t the tape kick in? The Damens’ answering machine, which stood upstairs on Clyde’s desk, was so incredibly ancient it still used tape, but Clyde wouldn’t get a new one, he said it worked just fine, you simply had to understand its temperament.Right, Kit thought, with a little hiss.

She tried Wilma Getz, but she got only the machine. Where was everyone? She left a garbled message, she said there’d been an accident, that she had Lucinda’s cell phone, that it was on vibrate so the cops wouldn’t hear it ring. She hung up, disappointed by the failure of the electronic world to help her, and worrying about Lucinda and Pedric. What might happen to them on their way to the hospital, some delayed reaction that would be even beyond the medics’ control? Or what might happenin the hospital? If ever a cat’s prayers should be heard, if ever a strong hand were to reach down in intervention for a little cat’s loved ones, that hand should come reaching now. This wasnot Lucinda’s or Pedric’s time to move on to some other life, she wouldn’t let it be that time. Punching in the Damens’ number again, she was crouched with her ear to the phone when she realized that, down on the road, Lucinda had awakened and was arguing with the medics, her voice raised in anger. Kit broke off the call, and listened.

“You can’t leave her, you must find her. If I call her, she’ll come to me. I won’t go with you, neither of us will, unless you bring her with us.”

The two medics just looked at her, more puzzled than reluctant. The taller one said,“You can’t find a runaway cat, in the dark of night, it’ll be scared to death, panicked. No cat would—”

The dark-haired medic said,“We’ll send someone, the local shelter …”

“No,” Lucinda said fiercely. “I want her with us. You can’t take us by force unless you want a lawsuit.”

Oh, don’t,Kit thought, don’t argue. Let them take care of you.But then she realized that Lucinda, in her anger, sounded so much stronger that Kit had to smile.

But stronger or not, Lucinda didn’t prevail. Kit didn’t know what the medic said to her, speaking so quietly, but soon she went silent and lay back again on the gurney, as if she had given up, yet Kit knew she wouldn’t do that.She knows I’ll call Clyde and Ryan,Kit thought. She knows I can take care of myself.She watched them wheel Lucinda to the van, her tall, thin housemate straining up against the safety straps, trying to look up the cliff. Lucinda was so upset that Kit thought to race back down and into the van after all, but before she could try, before she knew whatwas best to do, they had shut the doors, two medics inside with Pedric and Lucinda, and the other two in the cab. The engine started, the van turned around slowly on the narrow and perilous road, and moved away down the mountain, heading for a strange hospital where no one knew Lucinda and Pedric, where there was no one to speak for them.

Two black-and-whites followed them. The other two sheriff’s deputies remained behind, one car parked on either side of the rockfall. Kit watched them walk the road in both directions, setting out flares, and maybe waiting to meet the wrecking crew that would haul away the truck and pickup, maybe to wait for the tractors and heavy equipment that would arrive to clear away the tons of fallen rock from the highway.

When those earthmovers start to work,when they start grabbing up boulders with those great, reaching pincers—like the claws of space monsters in some old movie—I’m out of here.Again she punched in the Damens’ number. Come on, Clyde, come on, Ryan, will you please, please answer! Crouched in the night alone, she looked behind her where the forest of pines stood tar-black against the stars. The coyotes were at it again, two of them away among the trees yipping to each other.When the machines come to move the wrecked trucks and clear the road,I’ll have to go higher up in the woods away from the sliding earth, I’ll have to go inamong the trees, where those night runners are hunting. She looked up at the pines towering black and tall above her, and she didn’t relish climbing those mothers. The great round cylinders of their trunks had no low branches for a cat to grab onto, only that loose, slithery bark that would break off under her claws. And what if she did climb to escape a coyote, only to be picked off by something in the sky, by a great horned owl or swooping barn owl? This was their territory and this was their hour to hunt. She thought of great horned owls pulling squirrels from their nests, snatching out baby birds with those scissor-sharp beaks. The world, tonight, seemed perilous on every side.

She called the Damens seven more times before Clyde answered.“We just got in. I guess the tape ran out.”

A temperamental machine was one thing. A run-out tape was quite another. Now, on the phone, Kit didn’t say her name, none of the cats ever committed their name to an electronic device. They might use man-made machines, but they weren’t fool enough to trust them. Anyway, Clyde knew her voice. She pictured him in his study, his short brown hair tousled, wearing something old and comfortable, a frayed T-shirt and jeans, worn-out jogging shoes. She started out coherent enough, “Lucinda and Pedric are hurt,” but suddenly she was mewling into the phone, a high, shrill cry this time, in spite of herself, a terrible, distressed yowl that she couldn’t seem to stop.

“I’ll get Ryan,” he said with a note of panic. She heard him call out, and then Ryan came on, maybe on her studio extension. Kit imagined them upstairs in the master suite, Rock and the white cat perhaps disturbed from a nap on the love seat.

“What?” Ryan said. “Tell me slowly. What happened? Where are they? Where are you?Slowly, please!”

Swallowing, Kit found her sensible voice. She tried to go slowly, to explain carefully about the wreck and to explain where that was. But try as she might, it all came out in a tangle, the kind of rush that made her human friends shout, made Joe and Dulcie lay back their ears and lash their tails until she slowed, but she nevercould slow down.“… boulders coming down the mountain straight at us and I thought we’d be buried but Pedric hit the gas pedal and the Lincoln shot through and the whole mountain came thundering down behind us and when the slide stopped the road was covered with boulders and rocks and there was a pickup on the other side crashed into the mountain and into a big delivery truck lying on its side and the driver was dead and …”

“Slow down,” Clyde and Ryan shouted together. Ryan said, “Tell us exactly where you are. Did you call 911? How badly are they hurt?Did you call the CHP? Where … ?”

“I called,” Kit said. “They took Lucinda and Pedric away and Pedric’s head was bleeding and Lucinda was conscious sometimes but then she’d fade and I think her shoulder is broken and the medics took them in the ambulance and I was afraid to hide in there because if they found me they’d take me to the pound and take the phone away and I could never call you to say where I was and if I couldn’t work the lock on the cage …”

“Stop!” they both yelled.“Where?” Ryan said patiently. “Where are you, Kit?”

“Somewhere north of Santa Cruz but south of Mindy’s Seafood where we had dinner. When the tractor gets here and starts moving the boulders …” She wanted to say, I won’t be able to yowl and cry out to you, there are coyotes up here and owls who can hear everything. She wanted to say, When I’m up in the woods I’ll be scared to make a sound. She said, “Can you bring Rock? To track me? Joe can find me, but Rock’s bigger and … and there are coyotes and I love you both but humans are no good at scenting …” And she prayed that, this one time, no one was listening in on her call.

“We’ll bring Rock,” Clyde said. “We’re leaving now. Be there in an hour or less, with luck. Please, my dear, keep safe.”

Kit hit the end button, feeling small and helpless. She wasn’t a skittish cat, she’d spent plenty of black nights prowling the dark hills above Molena Point and farther away than that, hunting and slaughtering her own hapless prey, but tonight the wreck and her fear for her injured housemates, and then the hungry cry of the coyotes, had taken the starchright out of her. She thought about her big red tomcat traveling all alone down this very coast, making his way from Oregon down into central California,Pan traveled all that way and he wasn’t scared, so why should I be? But she was. Tonight she was afraid.

Pan had come to Molena Point following little Tessa Kraft, nearly a year after Tessa’s father threw the red tomcat out of the house. Tessa’s mother didn’t want him, either, she didn’t like cats. Pan hadn’t returned, but he had watched the household. He knew when Debbie Kraft moved to Molena Point, and he followed the family, tracking his little girl and, as well, lookingfor his own father.

He could only guess that Misto, when he vanished from Eugene in his old age, might have returned to the shore of his kittenhood where he’d grown up among a feral band of ordinary cats; no other speaking cat among them, that Pan knew of, but the place was Misto’s kittenhood home. And Pan had been right, he had found the old yellow tomcat there, and he had found Tessa.And he found me, Kit thought.That’s where we found each other.

Where is Pan now, right this minute? Could he be thinking of me and know I’m scared, the way he senses me when we’re hunting, the way he knows where I am even when he can’t see me? Or is he crouched in Tessa’s dark bedroom, as he so often is, whispering to her, ready to vanish if her mother comes in?

Pan isn’t scared of Debbie, but if she catches him there’ll be trouble for Tessa. Probably right now he’s whispering away and laughing to himself because Debbie doesn’t have a clue that he’s anywhere near Molena Point. But no matter how Kit tried to distract herself, thinking of Pan, all she could really think about was that she was all alone and scared clear down to her poor, bloodied paws.

5

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IN THE LITTLE wooded neighborhood below Emmylou Warren’s house, the red tomcat was indeed crouched on Tessa’s windowsill looking into the dark bedroom where she and her big sister slept head to foot in the one twin bed. The other bed was unoccupied. A light shone under the closed bedroom door, from the kitchen. When, approaching Debbie’s ragged cottage, he’d looked in through the kitchen window, Debbie sat at the table sipping a cup of coffee, the dark-haired, sullen-faced young woman sorting through a stack of new purses and sweaters with the tags still dangling from them, items that he knew she hadn’t paid for, beautiful clothes and gaudy ones laid out across the oilcloth as she clipped the tags from them.

At the bedroom window he reached a silent paw in, through a hole he’d made in the screen months before. Silently he flipped the latch and pulled the dusty screen open. Sliding in under it, he pushed the window casing up with infinite care and finesse so as not to make even the smallest sound and wake twelve-year-old Vinnie. Tattletale Vinnie, who would let her mother know at once that he had followed and found them.

Not even Tessa herself knew that he had arrived in Molena Point against all odds, like a cat in some newspaper story traveling across the country to follow his family. Pausing on the sill, at the head of the bed, he watched the two sleeping girls, listening for sounds from the kitchen. When he was sure that both children slept soundly, and that Debbie remained occupied sorting through her stolen bounty, he eased down onto Tessa’s pillow, the tip of his red striped tail barely twitching.

He sat quietly watching her, the flicker of her dark lashes against her smooth cheeks, her pale hair tousled across the pillow. And softly, as she dreamed, he pressed his nose close to her small ear and began to whisper, to send gentle but bold words into the child’s dreams, painting strong visions for her.

Tessa was only five, hardly more than a baby, and a silent one, at that, a timid little girl who seemed always fearful, never eager for life, a drawn-away, wary child. Perhaps only Pan knew how watchful she was beneath the shyness, how aware of what occurred around her. Few grown-ups ever saw Tessa smile or saw her reach out to embrace the bright details of life that so fill a normal child’s world, few ever saw her pluck a flower from the garden, snatch a cookie from the plate and run, laughing, or tumble eagerly across a playground screaming and shouting. Tessa Kraft clung to the shadows, bowing her head at her mother’s voice, backing away from the overbearing tirades of her sister. Her father wasn’t there to stand by her, not that it had ever occurred to him, even when he was home, that Tessa might have feelings that he should nurture, fears that he might have soothed and healed. Tessa’s mother didn’t bother to explain about her pa going to prison, or to help with her daughter’s loss. Eric Kraft’s final absence from their home, which had begun long before his arrest and sentence for murder, had left a deep hollowness within the child that, Pan thought, nothing in her future could ever erase. But he meant to try.

Since Tessa and her family had arrived in the village, and then Pan had followed them there, the other four speaking cats had come to know the child, too, and to care about her, as had their human friends. Maybe only they saw Tessa’s hidden joy in life, saw the secret pleasures that she so carefully concealed from the dominance of her mother and sister. They watched and waited. They stood by Tessa when they could, hindered by a tangle of legalities specific to the human world, rules that no cat would pay attention to.

But Pan, with his own goal clearly in mind, sought to lead Tessa with his whispered suggestions, to slowly strengthen and transform the silent little Cinderella into a bold young princess.“Don’t let their talk hurt you,” he told her over and over as she slept. “Inside yourself, you can laugh at them. You are stronger than they are, that’s your secret. You are your own strong person, and you never need to be afraid.

“You can be quiet and secret in your thoughts, but all the while you can see the world clearly. You can be wary of others but strong in yourself, and you will grow up stronger than they are. One day, you will pity their stubborn ignorance.

“You’re little now, Tessa. But you grow bigger every day and already, on the inside, you’re bigger than they are. You’re stronger than they are, you have a wall of strength inside you that no one’s meanness can hurt. Your mother and sister can’t hurt you, they can’t touch the part of you that’s whole and bright and that loves the world around you.”

As Pan whispered, reaching deep into Tessa’s sleeping mind, he thought about his pa, too, and about that other little girl so long ago. That child far back in time who had also needed a special friend, the little girl Misto remembered from an earlier life among his nine cat lives.

How strange, Pan thought, the mirroring of father’s and son’s connections with the two little girls from two different times. Tessa here in this time. Misto’s friend, Sammie, from sixty years past and from the other side of the continent.

How strange that Sammie, now dead, lay buried right here in this village, a continent away from where Misto had known her. Sammie Miller, found shot to death right there beneath her own house, that she had willed to Emmylou Warren. What a strange tale it was and a convoluted one, a saga of three generations, Sammie’s part of it ending here, in this village.

It had been young Sammie Miller’s photograph that had stirred Misto’s memory of his earlier life, a picture that the yellow tomcat discovered when he visited Emmylou, a childhood picture that had drawn him back again and again to look at little Sammie, his visits generating a comfortable friendship with the old woman though he never spoke to her, he never breached the cats’ secret.

The grown-up Sammie Miller, having no family but her wandering brother who could never stay in one place, had willed her cottage and the old stone building in the woods above to Emmylou. She told Emmylou more than once that Birely had no use for a house, that he preferred to travel footloose and free. Nice euphemisms, Pan thought, for a man with no ambition, for a drifter who let the world do with him as it would.

In the warm bed beside him, Tessa stirred suddenly and Pan drew back, crouching on the pillow. But the child only whimpered and turned over, dreaming. Often Kit came with him on his nighttime visits, she was his lookout, watching Debbie through the kitchen window, ready to hiss a warning if the woman rose and headed for the bedroom. But this night Kit was off up the coast with her humans, visiting the city. Or maybe they were already on their way home, after a week of shopping in what Kit said were“elegant stores thatsmell so good.” How long it seemed, and how he missed her.

He had loved Kit since that first day he arrived in Molena Point, hitching the last leg of his journey on a tour bus, and then making his way through the small village to the sea cliff. Pushing through the tall, blowing grass above the sea, he’d seen the tortoiseshell hiding, watching him, her yellow eyes so bright with curiosity that even in that instant he knew that he loved her. Now he not only loved her and missed her but, as he crouched beside the sleeping child, his thoughts left Tessa suddenly and uneasily, the fur down his back stood stiff, his thoughts suddenly all on Kit. What was this shivering fear he felt, what was happening?

His ears caught no sound save Tessa’s soft breathing, yet he heard Kit’s silent cry. His fear made him abandon the child, sent him flying out the window knowing that Kit was in trouble, that she was afraid and alone. He sensed her crouched shivering in the black night and he was filled with her terror, he wanted to run to her but she was far away, she was in danger and far away and he had no way to find her or help her.

But maybe the disaster had already happened, he thought sensibly. Maybe he was feeling her fear from a moment already gone, maybe now she was safe. Maybe she and Lucinda and Pedric had already returned to the village, maybe he was feeling her residual fear telegraphed between them. Maybe if he raced up across the rooftops to her tree house he’d find her already there, safe and dreaming among her pillows. Willing this to be so, Pan scrambled to the roof and took off fast, racing through the night across the peaks and shingles, praying Kit was home and safe—but knowing, deep down, that she was not, that Kit was still in danger.

6

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CROUCHED HIGH UP the rocky slide, having crept into a dark cavity between two jutting boulders, Kit shifted from paw to paw listening to the coyotes yipping back among the woods, and they sounded more focused now and intent. Nervously she watched the road below for the first glimpse of Clyde and Ryan’s red king cab. Flares glowed along the narrow highway, those nearest to the slide reflecting sparks of light against the wrecked trucks. How lonely the night was, now that the medics had taken Lucinda and Pedric away. Who would look out for them and sign papers at the hospital, if Lucinda fainted from the pain of her shoulder, if Pedric passed out from the concussion? Who would make phone calls to their own doctor and to their friends, who would make sure that everything possible was being done to help them?

Ryan and Clyde will, she thought, trying to ease her worries. Down below her on the highway, even the two CHP cars looked lonely, one parked to the north of the rock slide, one to the south. She could hear their police radios’ static mumbling and could smell coffee from their thermoses, each man cosseted in his small electronic realm, maybe talking back and forth on their cell phones as they waited for the wreckers and then the earthmovers to come and clear the highway.

She thought about their nice new Lincoln—a used one, but new to them and the first car Lucinda and Pedric had bought in ten years. The Lincoln gone, with all their beautiful purchases for their home and for Christmas. And Kate’s treasure gone. Those men had a fortune hidden in the door panels, but they didn’t know that. Maybe they wouldn’t discover what they’d stolen, she thought hopefully.

Or do they know? Somehow, in San Francisco, did they find out what Kate had, did they spy on her, and then follow us here, follow us down Highway One?

Not likely,she thought. I’m letting my imagination run.But,she thought, will they, for some reason of their own, remove the door panels anyway, and find Kate’s treasure there?

Whatever they did, they were sure to root around in the glove compartment, find the car registration with Lucinda and Pedric’s address, and they already had the house key, right there on the chain with the car keys.

But why would they go to Molena Point? They were probably headed miles away in the stolen Lincoln, maybe away from the coast where the cops might not be looking for them yet. Above her, the coyotes had eased nearer, through the trees, muttering among themselves. At a faint yip she crouched lower. They’d soon catch her scent, if they hadn’t already, and come snuffling down among the rocks, hungry and tracking her.

If the beasts attacked, those two cops down there wouldn’t help her. Why would they? A cat screaming in the night, they’d think it a wild cat, maybe hunting or mating, all a part of nature. All part of a world in which they had no call to interfere. How long before helpwould come, before she saw the lights of Clyde and Ryan’s truck approaching up the road? It seemed forever since she’d called them. Hunkering down between the rocks, she stared up at the vast night sky, stared until the wheeling stars turned her dizzy, and made her feel so incredibly small. Tracing their endless sweep, she couldn’t conceive of anything so huge that it went on forever.

What wasshe, then, in this vastness? Forgetting the innate cat creed that made each individual catknow that he was the center of all else, Kit thought, at that moment, that she was less than nothing, a speck of dust, a pinprick.

Except, I have nine lives to live, and that is notnothing.

And to a hungry coyote I’m something. I might be nothing in the vastness of time and space, but I’m something to those hungry mothers.

But then she was ashamed of her fear. What if, right now, no one knew I was here, no one in all the world was coming to help me? What would I do, then? I’ve rambled all over on my own, I grew up alone without humans to help me, and ignored by the other clowder cats. I made out all right, then. I always outsmarted the coyotes, I didn’t cower, then, shivering like a silly rabbit. So what’s the big deal, now? I’ll just hunker down here betweenthe boulders where they can’t reach me, and damn well bloody them if they try.

But then she thought, Maybe I have more to lose now. More than I did when I was a harebrained youngster wandering alone. Now I have Lucinda and Pedric, I have all my friends, cat and human, I’m part of the human world now, as I never dreamed could happen. And best of all, I have Pan. I can’t die now in the mouth of some slavering predator, and lose what we have together.

From the moment she’d spied Pan up on the cliffs, heading for the windy shore searching for his father, she’d never doubted they were meant for each other, never doubted it even if, sometimes, their arguing grew volatile.We always make up, she thought with a little cat smile, and making up was so nice. No, she thought,I don’t mean to check out of this worldnow, in the jaws of some slobbering coyote. Screw the damn coyotes.

Listening with renewed disdain to the beasts’ yodeling, she backed deeper down between the rocks where she could lash out in safety, where they, if they tried to reach her, would meet only slashing claws. Curling up in a little ball, she deliberately made herself purr, and in a more sensible feline mind-set she imagined herself, as was proper to a cat, the very center of the vast universe.She was the center of all time and all space, one small and perfect cat, the universe whirling around her in endless veneration. This was cat-think, even nonspeaking cats knew in their hearts this assurance, and it made her feel infinitely better. Soon she felt whole again. Sheltered deep down among the rocks, too deep for a prying nose or reaching paw, Kit smiled to herself, and she slept.

BUT TO PAN, tonight, the universe seemed unruly and fierce as he hurried from the last roof down a pine tree, and across the Greenlaws’ dark yard. Scrambling up Kit’s oak tree to her tree house, clawing up over the edge, he already knew she wasn’t there, her scent was old, mixed with the aged smell of feathers from a bird she had consumed weeks ago. The high-roofed aerie was empty, its cedar pillars pale against the night, Kit’s tangle of cushions abandoned, crumpled together and half hidden by browning oak leaves.

Looking back along the oak branches to the big house, he saw no light in any window. There was no sound, and no lingering whiff of supper. No faintest scent of exhaust from the empty driveway as if the Greenlaws had only now returned and perhaps already gone to bed, as if maybe Kit would be tucked up under the covers between them.

Maybe they’re on their way. Maybe they stopped for supper along the coast, and will be here soon. Sand dabs and abalone,and Kit’s making a pig of herself. Trying to reassure himself, he crept at last onto Kit’s cushions. Burrowing among the leaves and pillows, he lay on his belly watching the street below, his whole body rigid with waiting and with his lingering sense of danger. He was so tense he couldn’t rest; soon he rose again and began to pace, his heart filled with Kit’s fear, his belly churning with her uncertainty and loneliness. He was pacing and fussing when the sound of leaves crumpled in the yard below by approaching paws brought his fur up, sent him peering over the edge, swallowing back a growl.

EARLIER THAT EVENING, two blocks up the hill from where Pan would spin his whispered magic for little Tessa Kraft, Joe Grey and Dulcie had slipped down through Emmylou’s ragged yard, departing the stone shack. Over the past weeks, whenever they found its two scruffy occupants absent, they had searched the fusty room, pawing behind whatever boards the men had loosened, sniffing the old stone wall so long concealed there. Early on, when the men first moved secretly into the stone shack, the cats, spying through the dirty window, had watched them searching and had pressed their noses to the glass wondering what could be of such interest, wondering why two tramps would tear the siding from the walls, removing it board by board and digging into the concrete behind, lifting out loose stones. What were they looking for?

What the cats had found was the oily smell of money, old paper bills, sour with mildew, but no money was there now in those spidery recesses. From the size and shape of the concentrated scent, they were certain thick packets of old bills had lain there. Hidden away for how long? Looked like the men hadn’t finished searching, one whole wall was still boarded over. The cats took turns, tabby Dulcie crouched on the windowsill watching the woods and the weedy driveway below, while Joe Grey sniffed and poked behind the loose boards, where rocks were loose or missing. Was this Sammie’s money, that had been hidden here? Did Emmylou know about it? In the six months since she’d inherited the place and moved in, they’d never once seen her near the stone hut.

It was Dulcie who first discovered the men slipping down through the woods and into the stone house carrying two grocery bags, a loaf of bread sticking out. She had been sunning herself on Emmylou’s roof, deeply absorbed in composing a poem, when their stealthy approach made her fur go rigid.

“They’ve broken in,” she’d said to Joe later. “Emmylou can’t know they’re there, she doesn’t go up there, she’s said nothing to Ryan though Ryan has been helping her with the lumber for her renovation.” They were about to pass the word, see that it got back to Emmylou through human channels, when Joe saw the men as he was hunting rats in the yard below. From the looks of the smaller man, and from descriptions he’d heard, he thought that was Sammie’s brother.

“Why would he be so secretive?” Dulcie said. “Why wouldn’t Emmylou welcome him, Sammie’s own brother?”

“Let’s wait a while, and watch them.”

“But …”

“Emmylou’s perfectly capable of taking care of herself,” Joe said. “You’ve seen her swing that sledgehammer, breaking up those concrete steps.” Emmylou was tall, well muscled, despite her slim build and gray hair. “Besides, when she talked about Birely she made him out a timid soul, easygoing. Not like someone who’d make trouble.”

“Humans don’t always see others truly,” Dulcie said with suspicion. They’d waited and watched, and of course the minute the men went out, they’d tossed the place.

Not much to toss, in the one room. An overflowing trash bag, half a loaf of stale bread, seven cans of red beans, dirty clothes thrown in the corner beside a pair of sleeping bags that were deeply stained and overripe with human odor, the few boards that had not yet been nailed back against the rock wall, and five loosened stones lying beside them. But tonight, something was off, tonight the room seemed abandoned. The sleeping bags were in the same exact position as when they’d last come in, but the two greasy pillows and the extra blankets had been taken away, and when they prowled the room there was no fresh scent of the men, even their ripe smell was old and fading. The canned beans were gone, too, the only food was three slices of bread gone blue with mold in thepackage. Dulcie said, “Is their old truck still down in the shed?”

There was no way to tell except by smell, no way to see into the shed, not the tiniest crack in or under its solid door, which fit snugly into its molding. When they trotted down the steps to investigate, there was no recent scent of exhaust. Any trace of tire marks in the gravelly dirt had been scuffed clean by the wind.

“Maybe they’re having a little vacation,” Joe said, “hitting the homeless jungles for a change of scene. But why did they leave their sleeping bags?”

“I would have left them, too,” Dulcie said with disgust.

Trotting down through Emmylou’s weedy yard, they’d scrambled up to the roofs of the small old cottages in the neighborhood below. Leaping from house to house, trotting across curled and broken shingles, they’d moved on down the hill until Dulcie, quiet and preoccupied, left Joe, heading away home to her own hearth. To her white-haired housemate and, Joe suspected, to Wilma’s computer. Watching her gallop away, her tabby-striped tail lashing, Joe knew well where Dulcie’s mind was. The minute she sailed through her cat door she’d head for the lighted screen, where she’d be lost the rest of the night, caught up in the new and amazing world she’d discovered, in the secret world of the poet.

7

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IT WAS EARLIER in the year, during that unusual February that brought snow to the village, when Joe found Dulcie in the nighttime library sitting on Wilma’s desk, the pale light of Wilma’s work computer glowing around her. When Dulcie turned to look down at him, the expression on her face was incredibly mysterious and embarrassed. How shy she had been, telling him she was composing a poem; only at long last had she allowed him to read it, to seewhat she’d written.

The poem made him laugh, as it was meant to do, and within the next weeks Dulcie produced a whole sheaf of poems, some happy, some uncomfortably sad, and the occasional funny one that made Joe smile. His tabby lady had discovered a whole new dimension to her life, to her already amazing world. That’s where she would be now, sitting before the computer caught up in that magical realm where Joe could only look on, where he was sure he could never follow. Where he could only be glad for her, and try not to mourn his loss, of that part of his tabby lady.

To Joe Grey, words and language were for gathering information and passing it along—and for making certain your humans knew when to serve up the caviar. But Dulcie used language as a painter used color, and the concept was nearly beyond him, the inner fire of such expression quite beyond his solid tomcat nature. How many speaking catswere there in the world, living their own secret lives? And how many ofthem had found their souls filled suddenly with the music of words, with a new kind of voice that Joe himself could hardly fathom? Contemplating such wonders of the mind and heart left him feeling strange and unsettled, like trotting along a narrow plank high aboveground and suddenly losing his balance, swaying out over empty space not knowing how to take the next step, a devastating feeling to the likes of any cat.

Joe took a long route home, thinking about Dulcie and trying not to feel left out from this new aspect to her life; but soon again his thoughts returned to the two tramps, to questions that as yet had no answers, and to the paper money they were surely finding, money old and rank with mildew. Who had hidden it there?

How long had it lain within those damp walls? That stone building was more than a hundred years old, it had stood there since the early nineteen hundreds, when it was an outbuilding for the dairy farm that had once occupied that knoll of land. Ryan and Clyde had spent hours in the history section of the Molena Point library perusing old books and photographs of the area, when they bought the little remodel just two blocks down from Emmylou, where Debbie Kraft and her girls were now living. Had the money been secreted there since the place was built, or had a subsequent owner, Sammie or someone before her, stashed it away in those old walls?

Emmylou might not know about that hidden stash, but he didn’t understand how she could fail to know that two freeloaders were camping on her property, not fifty feet from her. Yet she didn’t seem to have a clue. Misto visited her often, he was sure she thought the old place as empty as a clean-licked tuna can.

It was strange, Jesse thought, that when he talked about the missing money, Misto grew silent and withdrawn and a curious look shone in his yellow eyes. As if he knew something, or almost knew but couldn’t quite put a paw on what was needling him. As if some long-lost memory had surfaced but wouldn’t come clear, leaving the old yellow tom puzzled and uncertain. Strange, too, that Misto spent so much time with Emmylou, visiting her and prowling her house, almost as if he felt a tie to the property.

Or maybe a connection to the dead woman who had owned it? If there were memories here, if there was a story here, either Misto wasn’t ready to share it or he didn’t remember enough to share, maybe could recall only tattered fragments. But this, too, unsettled Joe. Fragments of memory from when? Sometimes Misto talked about past lives, and Joe didn’t like that, he didn’t buy into that stuff. Even if theydid have nine lives, which no one had ever proven, what made a cat think he could remember them, that he could recall those faraway connections?

As he crossed a high, shingled peak, the scudding wind hit him, thrusting sharp fingers into his short gray fur. Below him, the dark residential streets were black beneath the pine and cypress trees, only a few cottage windows showed lights, the soft glow of a reading lamp, the flicker of a TV. He was crossing a tiled ridge near Kit’s house, just a block over, when he stopped and reared up, looking.

The windows of the Greenlaw house were all dark, with Lucinda and Pedric and Kit still in the city. There should be no one about, certainly there should be no creature prowling Kit’s tree house among the oak branches, but there against the starry sky moved the silhouette of a cat pacing fretfully back and forth across the high platform, an impatient figure, an interloper prowling Kit’s territory where no strange animal was welcome. Joe sniffed the air for scent but the sea wind was to his back, heavy with iodine and the smell of a rotting fish somewhere. Heading across the interceding rooftops, he slipped silently down to the Greenlaws’ garden and then up again, up the oak tree to Kit’s high, roofed platform, his fur prickling with challenge.

LIGHTS WERE ON at the Damens’ house, upstairs in the master suite, lights silhouetting hurrying shadows against the shades, the commotion stirred by Kit’s phone call as Ryan and Clyde hastily pulled on jeans, sweatshirts, and jackets, grabbed up backpacks, stuffing in flashlights, cat food and water, and the first-aid kit. Rock, the big silver Weimaraner, was off the love seat and pacing; he knew they were going on a mission and he couldn’t be still.

The upstairs lights went off again, the stair light came on, then the porch light blazed as the three of them headed out for the king cab, Ryan locking the door behind them. Rock bounded past Clyde into the backseat, lunging from one side window to the other with such enthusiasm he rocked the heavy vehicle like a rowboat, staring out into the night looking hopefully for the first hint of his quarry and then poking his nose in Ryan’s ear or against Clyde’s cheek, urging them to hurry, demanding to be out on the trail tracking the bad guys. The sleek silver dog had no clue that tonight his target would not be an escaped convict armed and dangerous, but one small cat, frightened and alone, a quarry who, if at last he foundher, would snuggle up to him purring mightily.

But even to find one small cat, a tracking dog needs a sample of his mark’s scent, a clear and identifiable smell to follow among the millions of odors he’d encounter along the high cliff. “Pillows,” Ryan said. “Stop by the Greenlaws.”

“Pillows?” Clyde looked over at her, frowning.

“Kit’s tree house. Her pillows. I brought a clean plastic bag.”

“You’re going to climb the oak tree?”

“Ladder,” she said, glancing up at the cab roof where, above it, her long construction ladder rode securely tethered on the overhead rack. “Just take a minute, we’ll have a nice, fur-matted pillow for Rock to sniff.”

“If we had Joe, he’d put Rock on the trail. Where the hell—”

“Even with Joe,” she said, “I’d want a scent article, as you’re supposed to have, so as not to spoil Rock’s training.”

“The one time Joe might be of help,” Clyde said, ignoring her logic, “he’s off hunting. Or off with Pan whispering in that little kid’s ear. Talk about an exercise in futility.”

“If Pan can help that little girl, we ought to cheer him on. Scared of her mother, bullied by her sister. Besides, Joe might not even be with Pan. He and Dulcie have been hanging around Emmylou Warren’s all week, around that stone building up behind, whatever that’s about.”

“I don’t want to know what that’s about. More trouble, one way or another.”

Ryan just looked at him.

“Name one time Joe went off on some crazy round of surveillance that he didn’t stir a carload of trouble.”

“Name one time Joe wasn’t leaps ahead of the cops,” she said. “That he didn’t drop valuable information in Max Harper’s lap, a lead that Max was grateful for, even if he didn’t know where it came from.” She sat scowling at him. “Don’t be so hard on Joe, we’re blessed to know him, and all you do is rag him.”

Clyde grinned.“He loves it. Rags me right back.”

“You don’t realize how lucky you are just to share bed and supper with Joe, just to know those five cats. But,” she said, “there is something strange going on at Emmylou’s that Joe doesn’t want to talk about. I guess, in time, he’ll tell us,” she said. “In his own good time.”

JOE SLIPPED UP the oak tree and onto Kit’s tree house ready to fight the intruder, his ears and whiskers flat. Only when the pacing cat turned, startled, and approached him stiff-legged, did Joe laugh and relax. Pan paused, too, tail twitching, his ears going back and up, edgy and questioning.

“What?” Joe said. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know.” The big tom lowered his ears uncertainly. “Kit’s in trouble, I can feel her fear, she’s scared and alone somewhere out in the night.”

Joe took a step back.“She’s miles away, up the coast. You can’t know what she’s feeling, what she’s doing.” This kind of talk made his paws sweat.

Pan drew his lips back.“She’s in some kind of trouble.”

“Nightmare,” Joe said. “You fell asleep and dreamed of trouble.” Generally the red tom was a steady fellow, macho and straightforward—until he got off on this perception nonsense beyond all logic and reason.

But Pan’s amber eyes blazed, he growled deep in his throat and spun around and was gone along an oak branch and in through the dining room window, through the cat door. “The Greenlaws, their cell phone …” he said over his shoulder. “Help me find the number.”

Joe sighed. He was crouched to follow, knowing they’d sound like fools to the Greenlaws with such a call, when car lights came down the street below. They slowed, and Ryan’s red king cab turned into the drive, headlights sweeping the front of the house and up through the oak branches, blazing in Joe’s face. Squinting, he peered over, breathing exhaust as the engine died.

Ryan emerged from the passenger side, stepped around to the rear bumper and up onto it, reaching up to the overhead rack where the extension ladder was secured. He watched Clyde swing out the driver’s door and move to help her. Why did they need a ladder? Theyhad a key to the house, all the Greenlaws’ close friends had keys. From the dining room, Pan shouted, “Youpicked up! Say something. Pedric?Is this Pedric?” Silence, then,“Pedric, are you all right? Where’s Lucinda?”Another silence, then,“Whois this? If this isn’t Pedric, who are you? Why do you have Pedric’s phone? Where’s Lucinda?Speak up or I call the cops, they’ll put a trace on you!”

Joe smiled. He didn’t think MPPD was set up to trace the immediate location of a cell phone but it sounded good. He watched Ryan open the extension ladder, lean it against the edge of the tree house, and climb nimbly up. Joe waited until his housemate had swung up onto the platform and switched on her flashlight, then stepped out into its beam. The eerie nightglow of his eyes made her catch her breath.

“Did you have to do that, sneak up like that?” she asked shakily.

“I’m sneaking? What areyou doing climbing up here in the middle of the night like some—”

“Like some cat burglar?” she said, laughing. She knelt and grabbed him up and hugged him. Her hugs always embarrassed him, but they made him purr, too.

Putting him down again, she fished a plastic bag from her pocket and reached across him to snag one of Kit’s well-used pillows from the untidy pile. He watched her drop it into the plastic bag and seal it up with a twisty. He looked over the edge at the king cab where Rock was hanging out the open window, whining softly. He looked toward the house where Pan was on the phone, and looked again at Ryan.Now there was silence from the house. Joe watched Pan emerge through the cat door, ears back, tail lashing, his tabby forehead creased with worry, unsettled by that distraught phone conversation.

“Come on, Pan,” Ryan said, swinging onto the ladder and down, frowning up at Pan there above her. “Come on, we’re headed up the coast.” She looked worriedly at the red tom. “It’s Kit,” she said softly. “She … We’re going to look for Kit.”

Pan leaped from the oak to the ground, sinking deep in the leafy mulch, fled to the king cab and up through the window past Rock. Joe followed, as Ryan descended the ladder clutching Kit’s pillow. Inside the pickup, Pan was crouched on the back of the driver’s seat, tail lashing. Joe, unsettled by the red tom’s unnatural perception, hopped sedately up into the front seat beside Clyde, and snuggled close. Pan might indulge in these wild flights of fancy, but he could count onClyde for a soothing dose of hardheaded commonsense.

8

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VIC PULLED DOWN off the highway into the village, easing the Town Car away from the main street and through the darkest neighborhoods, the narrow lanes as black as the Lincoln itself. Molena Point streets were not lighted, and here among the crowded cottages only weak lampglow shone through a few curtained windows, vaguely illuminating the nearest tree trunks. Heading a roundabout way for the stone house, the big car slid through the inky streets nearly invisible except for its low beams picking out parked cars and an occasional cat racing across. In the passenger seat Birely huddled, his arms around himself, moaning at every bump and there were plenty of those on these backstreets, potholes, and warped blacktop where tree roots pushed up, jolting even the easy-riding Lincoln. The trip down Highway One had been tense, watching for cops. There hadn’t been much traffic and the Town Car stood out too clearly, making him jumpy as hell.

Leaving the scene of the wreck and moving on down the winding two-lane, they’d barely hit the flats, the highway straight and flat along the shore, when they’d heard sirens ahead. He’d turned off into a clump of eucalyptus trees, onto a narrow road that led away to a distant farmhouse. Pasture fences, faint lights way off up the hill. Waiting there on the dark dirt road for the cops and ambulance to pass, he’d done what he could for Birely, had cleaned the blood off his face with bottled water and an old rag. Birely’s nose wouldn’t stop bleeding, and he couldn’t bear anything pressed against it. He couldn’t hardly breathe, as it was. And the way he was holding his belly, whimpering, he was hurt more than a bandage could fix. When they’d left the wrecked pickup Vic had cleared out the glove compartment, had left most of the junk from the previous owner that he’d stole it from, but had pocketed a beer opener, an old pocketknife, and an out-of-date bottle of codeine prescribed in the name of the truck’s owner. He’d given Birely two of those, had left the wreck trying to figure out what to do with him when they got back to Molena Point. He sure couldn’t show up at a hospital emergency room driving the Lincoln; by this time, there’dbe a BOL out. First thing was to get the Town Car out of sight, then decide what to do.

Waiting on the side road, he’d felt the inner pockets of his windbreaker, patting the one pack of bills he’d kept on him. Most of the money they’d found, that he’d been carrying, he’d stashed in the Lincoln itself. Rooting behind the stacked packages in the backseat, he’d pulled down the armrest and found a space lined with a plastic tray, the old folks had a couple of them little water bottles in there. Pulling the bottles out, he’d stuffed the packs of bills in, ten stacks of hundreds, all bound up in their little paper sleeves. One sleeve tore, spilling its contents, but he gathered it all, slipped the torn wrapper back on, and sandwiched it between the other packets. The hiding place, when it was covered up with packages again, would be easy enough to get to in a hurry. He still couldn’t figure out if the woman Sammie’d left the place to, that Emmylou Warren, knew about Sammie’s stash.

Had to, he thought, with all that carpentry work she was doing down there. Sure as hell she was going to find the money. Sammie’d told Birely, long ago, that she’d split the cash up, that she hadn’t hid it all in one place. Sammie must have wanted Birely to have it, to tell him that—maybe wanted him to know about it, but not know too much, in case he turned greedy before she passed on, and came looking, nosing around maybe egged on by some “friend” he’d met on the road, Vic thought with a smile. Birely never was one to see he was being used. If she’d wanted Birely to have the money, but not whileshe was still around, she must’ve meant him to have the house, too. But something made her change her mind, and she wrote that will to the Warren woman instead. It didn’t make sense, but people seldom made sense. He was just pulling off the street onto the dirt lane that led back through the woods to the stone building whenthe cell phone rang, the phone he’d taken off that old guy. It began to gong like a church bell. Birely sat up rigid, groaning with pain, staring around him like he thought he was about to receive the last rites. He came fully awake and grabbed up the phone.

“Don’t answer it,” Vic snapped. “Don’tanswer the damn thing.” But Birely, groping, must have hit the speaker button.

“I didn’tanswer it,” he said. “I just …” A man’s voice came on, soft and quiet. “Pedric? Pedric, is that you?”

“I told you not to answer.”

“I didn’t, I only picked it up. What … ?”

“You punched something. Hang up.” Vic grabbed the phone from him.

“You picked up!” the caller shouted.“Say something. Pedric?Is this Pedric?”

Vic stopped the car among the trees, couldn’t figure out how to turn the damn phone off.

“Where’s Pedric?”the voice shouted.“Pedric, are you all right?If this isn’t Pedric, who are you? Where’s Lucinda?” Vic started punching buttons. The screen came to life rolling through all kinds of commands, but the voice kept on.“Who is this? Why do you have Pedric’s phone? Where’s Lucinda? Speak up or I call the cops, they’ll put a trace on you!”

“Sure it’s me,” Vic said. “Who did you expect?”

There was a short silence.“This isn’t Pedric. I want to talk to Pedric.”

Holding the phone, he wondered if the copscould use it to trace their location. Maybe some departments had the equipment to do that, he didn’t know. But this little burg? Not likely. He tried to recall the soft, raspy voice of the man he had hit with the tire iron. Uptight-looking old guy, neatly dressed, tan sport coat, white hair in a short, military cut, white shirt and proper tie. Lowering his voice, he tried to use proper English, like the old guy would. “Of course this is Pedric, who else would have my phone? Could you tell me who is calling? We seem to have a bad connection.”

There was a long silence at the other end. The caller said no more. Vic heard him click off.

The encounter left him nervous as hell, made his stomach churn. An unidentified call, coming over a stolen phone like the damn thing had ghosts in it. Birely had curled into himself again, as if the pain were worse. His smashed nose was bleeding harder, his breath sour, breathing through his mouth. Where his face wasn’t smeared with blood, he was white as milk. Vic knew, even if he stashed the Lincoln out of sight, got some other wheels and hauled Birely to an emergency room, they’d start asking questions and who knew what Birely’d say? The little wimp wasn’t too swift, at best, and in the hospital, drugged up for the pain, he might tell the cops any damned thing.

It had started out as a lark, when they’d first headed over to the coast to find that wad of money that Birely swore Sammie’d stashed away, a simple trip to retrieve Birely’s own rightful legacy, and the whole damn thing had gone sour. It was that run up to the city that did it, their pickup totaled, and now the cops would be after them because they’d taken the damn Lincoln. But what else could he do? He didn’thave no other way to get Birely to a doctor, he’d tell them that, with Birely hurt so bad, and all. And that truck driver dead, which would sure as hell send the cops after them, too. They’d be all over him for that, claiming you weren’t supposed to leave an accident victim. Hell, the guy was dead, it wasn’t like he could have helped him none. With Birely bad hurt, what could he do but take the one working vehicle to go for help?He didn’t kill the truck driver, the rock slide killed him.

But the old man and his skinny wife, that was another matter. If one ofthem died he’d sure be charged with murder even if he didn’t hit either of them very hard, not hard enough to kill them. If they died from shock or something, was thathis fault? And there again he’d had no choice, had to get them off his back so he could help Birely. The law never took into account extenuating circumstances, they had no feel for a person when you were really up against it. Sure as hell those two people could identify him—and would swear he’d attacked them. And now, once he’d hidden the Lincoln, what was he going to do with Birely?

It was after they’d turned back on the highway, after the cops and ambulance went by, that was when Birely had started to talk. Rambled on as they skirted the little cheap towns along the peninsula, when the codeine took hold and loosened up his tongue. Talked about how strange Sammie was when she was a child, rambled on about their old uncle, the old train robber who was close to Sammie when she was small. All so long ago that Birely wasn’t even born yet. He’d heard the stories from Sammie, how the old man had robbed some government office of big bucks, hid the money and got away clean, and the feds could never pin anything on him. Back to prison on other charges, and then a year later made a prison break and took off with the money, down into Mexico.

And then, some years later, maybe with a guilty conscience, he’d shipped a big share of it back to Sammie. Birely’d grown up knowing only those parts of the story that Sammie chose to tell him, he wasn’t much good at filling in the spaces between.

Easing the Lincoln on down through the woods, Vic was about to pull around to the front of the stone shed, hoping to hell he could squeeze the Lincoln into that little space that had probably been built for cows or farm machinery, when he saw a light in the yard down below, saw Emmylou Warren descending the hill, heading down from the stone house. He killed the engine, watched to see if she’d heard the car. She made no indication, didn’t pause or glance back. Had she been poking around inside there? Had she seen them before they left, knew they were staying in there? That would tear it. Was she looking for the rest of the money, maybe had found some down at her place, decided when she saw them that they were looking for it, too? Birely said the original theft was two hundred thousand, a big haul, back in those days.

But maybe Emmylou Warren didn’t know nothing, was just out in the yard maybe feeding those cats that hung around her. Useless creatures, what were they good for? In the light from her porch he watched her poking around down in her yard and she didn’t once look his way. Dark as hell up behind the pines and heavy bushes. He watched her head up the steps to her back door, that big yellow cat walking along beside her, following her like a dog, old woman talking to it, crazy as hell, walking around in her yard in the middle of the night gabbing away to a cat, talking as if the damn thing would answer her.

9

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MISTO GLANCED UP twice toward the woods as he followed Emmylou up the back stairs and inside. He was quite aware of the black car that had pulled in among the trees high above the stone house, though Emmylou was not. He could smell the fumes of its exhaust drifting down, cutting through the scent of the pines, and on the riffling breath of the night he caught a whiff of blood that tweaked his curiosity. Accompanying Emmylou inside, he leaped to the sill where he could look back up the hill, studying the denser blackness among the night woods where the big car stood. Pretty nice car to be jammed in among the trees that way. He’d like to tell Emmylou to turn the porch light off so he could see better but he never spoke to her, she didn’t share his secret, she was not among the few who knew the truth about the speaking cats, she was simply a kind and comfortable friend. Misto had, in fact, a number of secrets he didn’t share with Emmylou Warren—though it was she who had, unwittingly, opened a new door to Misto. Had, by accident or by strange circumstance, pulled aside a curtain into the tomcat’s ancient memory, had let cracks of light into a life he’d lived long before this present existence.

Maybe the memories began with the smell of the mildewed money there in Emmylou’s house, often it was a smell of some sort that stirred a lost vision. The sour stink of those three packets of old bills she’d found had nudged him as if a hand had reached up from his past, poking at him, bringing back scenes from a life nearly forgotten. Or maybe it was the grainy photograph in a tin frame that had awakened those long-ago moments, the picture of a child who had, by now, already grown up, grown old, and died. Maybe that little girl’s eager smile had stirred alive that lost time.

Back in February, when the cops found Sammie’s body, Misto had no idea who the dead woman was but he knew her name, it stuck in his thoughts and wouldn’t go away. He hadn’t put it together until later, thatthis Sammie was the little child from his own past, from a life lived many cat generations before this one.

Emmylou usually left the back door open while she was working inside, replacing Sheetrock and sawing and hammering. Hearing her at work, he’d slip in for a visit with the stringy, leathery woman. With his own humans away for the week, Dr. John Firetti and his wife, Mary, off at a veterinarian conference, he’d been up here every day. He was staying with Joe Grey and the Damens, which suited him just fine: sleeping on the love seat with the big Weimaraner and little Snowball, or up in the tower with Joe. But Ryan and Clyde were busy folks, Clyde with his upscale automotive business and Ryan with her construction firm. And Joe was off at all hours with his tabby lady, following their lust for crime, hanging out with the cops atMPPD, waiting eagerly for some scuzzy human to be nailed and jailed. Sometimes, then, Misto would slip up to visit this homey and comfortable woman, to stretch out on her windowsill as she went about her work. He liked to watch her tear out cabinets and finish the walls with new Sheetrock, and Emmylou was good company. That was how he came on the picture of the child, she had moved it back onto the dresser after shifting the furniture around. He’d hopped up there to be petted, and there it was, the picture of a child that so shocked him he let out a strange, gargling mewl.

“That’s Sammie,” Emmylou had said, looking down at him. “Sammie when she was little, so many years ago. My goodness, cat, you look frightened. How could an old picture scare you?”

The photo was sepia toned, and grainy. The child was dressed in an old-fashioned pinafore, crisply ironed, and little patent-leather shoes with a strap across the instep, over short white socks. He had known this child, he remembered her running through the grass beside a white picket fence, he could see her bouncing on her little bed with the pink ruffled spread, he could hear her laughing. Those moments from another life crowded in at him in much the same way he remembered fragments from a long-ago medieval village, scenes so clear and sudden he could smell offal in the streets and the stink of boiled cabbage and the rain-sodden rot of thatched rooftops.

Here in Emmylou’s house, the time of Sammie’s childhood grew so real he could smell the bruised grass on her little shoes, could feel her warmth when he curled up close to her, the softness of her baby skin, the smell of little girl and hot cocoa and peppermints, the sticky feel of peanut butter on her small fingers. How strange to think about that lost time. How clearly he remembered the humid Southern summers, the buzz of cicadas at night, the days as hot as hell itself, and so muggy your fur was never really dry. How had he been drawn here to this place where, so many long years later, the grown-up Sammie had lived and died?

Soon he wasn’t going off with Joe Grey at all, or even with his son, Pan, but heading up alone to see Emmylou and revisit those memories that so stirred him, to sit on the dresser looking at little Sammie while Emmylou hammered and sawed and talked away, and all the while it was Sammie’s young voice he wished he could hear.

He wasn’t sure how many of his nine cat lives he had spent, and he wasn’t sure what came after. Some of his lives were only vague sparks, bright moments or ugly, a scene, a few words spoken, and then gone again. Only his life with Sammie was so insistent. As each new memory nudged him, another piece of that life fell into place, toward whatever revelation he was meant to see, another moment teasing his sharp curiosity.

But tonight, crouched on Emmylou’s windowsill, a different kind of curiosity gripped Misto, too. He waited patiently until he saw the black car move on again down through the woods, following the lane that led to the old, narrow shed beneath the stone house. Misto guessed, with its wide, hinged doors, it was a kind of garage, maybe built for farm tractors or a Model A. Did the driver expect to fit that big car in there? Not likely, not that long, sleek vehicle. Though in the reflection of light from Emmylou’s back porch he could see dents and scrapes in the fenders, too, and a loose front bumper. The driver stepped out,left the motor running, the taller of the two men he’d seen coming up there before, shaggy brown ponytail hanging down the back of his dark windbreaker.

He opened the heavy swinging doors, got back in and, amazingly, he pulled the car on inside. It was a tight fit, barely enough room for him to help his companion out, the shorter man stumbling, and that’s where the smell of blood came from. Blood smeared down his face, soaking into the rag he held to his nose. Moving up the stone steps to the room above, he bore much of his weight on the wooden rail. The taller man closed the shed doors, replaced the padlock, and followed him up. Watched him struggle into the house but didn’t help him. The door closed behind them. Misto heard the lock snap home.

No lights came on inside, except the faintest glow as if they had an electric lantern up there. Wanting to see more, Misto dropped from Emmylou’s windowsill to the floor and trotted out through the old cat door that was cut in the back door. Emmylou’s own three cats used it, wild creatures he thought might have been feral, who came and went as they chose. Galloping up the hill and up the stone stairs, through the men’s scent, he leaped to the stone sill beside the door, peered in through the dirty glass.

10

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HEAVY FOG HUGGED the coastal highway, slowing the king cab as Clyde negotiated the blind lanes following the dim taillights of the sheriff’s car that led them, both drivers watching for unexpected obstructions in the heavy mist. He and Ryan and the two tomcats were all fidgeting, thinking about Kit alone somewhere on the cliff ahead, her little tortoiseshell face peering out from some stony crevice that could hardly protect her from larger predators, waiting for help to come rescue her. Kit might act brash and brave with her friends but tonight her voice on the phone had been shaky, scared, and uncertain.

“Good thing we have friends in the department,” Joe said, rearing up on the backseat peering out the side window into the rolling mist. “Someone to get us through the roadblock back there. I wouldn’t have wanted to climb up this damnable, fog-blind road ducking falling boulders you can’t even see coming down at you.”

“The rocks have quit falling,” Clyde said. “Ryan and I will be climbing, carrying you and Pan.”

Max Harper had called the Santa Cruz County Sheriff, who had, in turn, alerted his deputies to let them through the barrier down at the foot of the mountain.“Deputy will meet you,” Max had said, “lead you on up.” Now as they climbed above the flatland on the narrow, rising curves, the fog blew and shifted, arms of whiteness blinding and then revealing, playing with their senses, with their perception of place and balance. The streaming wisps made even the two cats giddy. Joe was glad they had the heavy king cab with its reliable four-wheel drive to keep them grounded. The only unsteadiness about the truck was Rock lunging nervously from one side of the backseat to the other, his eager weight rocking the heavy vehicle and, at each lunge, shouldering Joe and Pan aside.

“Settle down,” Ryan told him, “you’ll wear yourself out before you ever start to search.” Rock gave her a sullen look, but he lay down, sighing dramatically, sprawling across the wide seat. Ryan had, long ago, filled the leg space of the backseat with empty boxes, and laid a thin pad overboth boxes and seat to make a solid platform, preventing the big dog from losing his balance on the narrow bench. The resultant bed would have accommodated all three animals nicely if Rock wasn’t hogging it all. Joe watched the deputy’s disembodied taillights leading them up through the shifting blanket of white, watched the blurred reflection of their two sets of headlights move along the black cliff in their ethereal, half-blind world. The deputy leading them, plump and baby faced, had told them the wind was stirring higher up the mountain, “Maybe the night’ll clear, make your tracking easier,” but his tone had implied that this venture was nonsense, to bring a tracking dog all the way up here in this weather to find some lost cat. Maybe the fogwould clear, Joe thought, but right now they couldn’t even see the edge of the road where it dropped away to the sea; the muffled sound of the waves from far below seemed stealthy and threatening.

But central coast fog was notional, slipping along the base of Molena Point’s coastal hills one moment, rising the next to leave the lowland clear and enfold only the tallest peaks. Many afternoons the cats, hunting across the high meadows, would watch a thin, white scarf of fog creep in from the sea just above the Molena River, down below the hills that rose bright green and clear. And the next time they looked, the fog had expanded to cover all the hills and the sun, hiding the world around them.

Now suddenly Rock leaped up to pace again, and so did the red tomcat, the two shouldering past each other peering out one window and then Joe, too, caught a whiff of coyote mixed with the smell of the sea and of the pine forest. Pan’s ears twitched back and forth, his striped tail lashing as he fretted over Kit, his every movement urging them to hurry. The red tom had traveled this coast, one small cat alone following Highway One from Oregon to Molena Point, he knew the bold beasts that hunted these coastal mountains, he knew the way coyotes tear their prey, and that was not a pleasant picture. He was aware of the bobcats and owls, too, the silent night hunters, and he was frantic for Kit.

Even as Clyde had backed the king cab out of their drive, Max had called them back to tell them that Lucinda and Pedric were safe in the ER, in Santa Cruz, but that both were driving the staff crazy, fussing about their cat.“They’ve refused to have the X-rays and MRIs that were ordered,” he said crossly, “until they know someone’s gone to fetch the damn cat.” Max wasn’t big on cats—though he had grown unusually fond of Joe Grey, brightening at Joe’s presence on his desk or in his bookcase, and not a clue to the cat-sized detective lounging across his reports; to Max Harper the five cats were no more than housecats. “Why the hell did they take that cat with them? Try to control a cat, in a car? Why can’t they have a nice little lap dog that they can keep on a leash?”

Joe imagined the tall, lean chief and Charlie, his redheaded wife, disturbed from an evening at home, tucked up before a warm fire in their hilltop living room maybe with an after-dinner toddy, maybe watching an old movie. The chief didn’t get that many leisurely nights off without some emergency or another breaking in, too often taking him out again into the small hours. Max said, “You think Rockwill track that cat?”

“Of course he will,” Ryan said indignantly, “he’s primed for the hunt.”

“Charlie’s making noises like she wants to head for the hospital. We may see you there, or she will,” and he’d clicked off.

They were high up the mountain when, around the next sharp bend, a line of sputtering orange flares broke the thinning fog. The deputy parked beside two more black-and-whites. The landslide loomed beyond, a ragged hill of fallen boulders blocking the highway, the tons of rock lit like a movie set by three spotlights fixed to tall tripods, their blaze picking out broken glass and twisted metal, too, where the wrecked truck and pickup lay tangled together in a deathly heap. Clyde parked beside the patrol car that had led them, both cars backing around so their rear bumpers were against the cliff. The deputy got out of his unit and stepped over to talk with them, his round face pulled into a frown.“Town Car was on this side. It barely slid through, or they’d be dead. Strange what some people will think of, time like that. Worried about acat.”

He didn’t like bringing civilians up to a crash scene, he didn’t like them tramping around the scene of a wreck, and didn’t like the idea of these people going up the slide area with their dog, didn’t like that at all. Most likely they’d get in trouble, fall down the cliff, and that would complicate matters, but orders were orders.“Well, at least the fog’s lifted,” he said dourly. “There’s a hiking path on up the road another quarter mile. That’ll put you up to the tree line, and bring you back there, right above us. I want you to stay in the woods. You’re not to go down on the slide. Can you control your dog?” He looked doubtfully at Rock, who was huffing at the air, sucking in scent and staring up the tall, rocky cliff. “That cat could have taken off for anywhere. You ever try to catch a scared cat?” he said, backing away from Ryan’s door so she could get out of the truck.

“We’ll find her,” Clyde said mildly. He reached over the seat for his backpack as Ryan strapped on her own heavy pack. Neither Joe nor Pan was in sight. The deputy looked at Rock, and reached a hand for the Weimaraner to sniff. “Nice hound. Trouble is, when that cat sees this big beast it’ll take off like a bat in a windstorm, you never will find it.”

“Dog and cat are friends,” Clyde said, his voice slow and measured. “They eat out of the same supper bowl. Cat’ll be happy to see him.”

The deputy shrugged, unconvinced.“Wreckers and earthmovers’ll be here at daylight. If the wind dies and more fog rolls in, you won’t be able to see your own feet.”

Not until he had moved away did Ryan make a rude face, and she and Clyde grinned at each other. Joe peered out of Clyde’s pack, watching the pudgy officer depart, and from Ryan’s pack Pan uttered a low, angry growl.

Climbing gingerly over the rock pile toward the upper road and the trail, they left the key in the king cab in case the deputies needed to move it. Negotiating the unsteady boulders, they tested every step, moving with infinite care despite Rock’s eager pulling on his lead. Coming down onto the solid macadam again on the other side, past the wrecked trucks, they headed up the two-lane, passing two more sheriff’s cars that had come down from the north. Rock pulled Ryan up the steep grade, straining on his leash. He wasn’t expected toheel, he was working now, heeling and city manners weren’t part of this program. In her left hand Ryan carried the plastic bag with Kit’s scent. Once they’d left the rock slide, they didn’t talk. Clyde swept his beam along the road ahead, lighting their way, while Ryan shone her light up the cliff, cutting back and forth through dried-up vegetation and ragged outcroppings, all of them hoping to see a pair of bright eyes reflecting back from the stony drop. Joe, half smothered in Clyde’s backpack, didn’t like the silence, he didn’t like that there was no distant sound of coyotes yipping to one another, silent coyotes were bad news. Kit hadsaid there were coyotes, hesmelled coyotes, and their silence meant they were watching, well aware of them. But worse still, there was no sound from Kit, not the faintest mewl to tell them where she was.

Not likely she’d mewl with the coyotes so close, but I sure wish she would, wish she’d yowl like a banshee.Her silence made him shiver with dread.

11

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THE HARSH RING of the phone woke Kate Osborne, but when she reached for the phone in the dark room, trying to sit up, tangled in the covers, she couldn’t find the damn thing. Feeling around her, she realized she wasn’t in bed; her bare legs were tangled in fur, making her shiver. She gingerly touched the animal feel of it, realized she was stroking the fur throw that she kept on the couch, that she’d gone to sleep in the living room. The phone was still ringing. Last night, she hadn’t bothered to turn on the answering machine. She used it when she went out, if she thought of it, but since she’d returned to San Francisco from her long, dark journey, she’d found even that innocuous electronic gadget annoying. This change in her life, leaving her cozy and successful designer’s position in Seattle, opting for unfettered freedom back in California with no obligations, taking the small apartment in the city, and then the amazing events that led her down through the cavernous tunnels into that terrifying other world, all of it had left her nervously intolerant of anything nonhuman speaking up for her. She found the phone on the ninth ring. Snatching it up, she pushed her pale hair out of her eyes, found the lamp, and switched it on. Her watch said ten o’clock, but it felt like way after midnight. “What?” she said. “If this is a sales pitch—”

“Kate, it’s Charlie Harper.”

She sat up, shivering in the cold room, pulled the heavy throw around her, shoved another pillow behind her. Beyond the open draperies the great, lighted span of the Golden Gate thrust its curves against the night.

“Wilma and I are in Santa Cruz, at Dominican Hospital. There’s been a wreck. Lucinda and Pedric aren’t hurt too bad, but—”

Kate came fully awake.“What happened? Are they all right? Where’s Kit?Charlie, is Kit all right?” A wreck at night on that narrow, winding two-lane.“Where’s Kit?” she shouted, imagining Kit thrown out of the car or running from the crash, terrified.

Charlie said nothing.

“Where is she?” She pictured Kit hurt, the confusion of cops and EMTs crowding in at her, Kit running from them in terror and confusion, the little cat who was more than cat but who, under stress, could revert to her basic feline instincts, running mindlessly, hiding even from the people she loved best, just as an ordinary cat might do.

“Ryan and Clyde have gone to look for her. She ran, but she’s all right. She called,” Charlie said, “called on Lucinda’s cell phone. She’s all right, Kate. They’re taking Rock, he’ll find her.”

Kate kicked the fur cover to the floor. Carrying the headset listening to Charlie, she made for the bedroom.“Where’s the wreck? Whereexactly … ?”

“You can’t do anything, Kate. They’ll find her. I only thought you’d want to know—”

“I’m coming. Kit’s all alone—”

“She’s not, she … Rock will be there soon, Rock and Joe and Pan, they’ll find her. You’d only … If you took Highway One, you couldn’t get past the slide, you wouldn’t be able to drive on down to the hospital. You’d have to leave your car there, walk across, and ride with someone.”

“I’m coming. On my way. I’ll take 280 …”

“Come to Dominican, then. In Santa Cruz, we’ll meet there. I know a vet there, I’ve already called him, just in case. But she’ll be fine, Kate, trust me. Kit’s a resourceful little soul.”

In the bedroom, pulling off her robe, she thought about getting a car in a hurry. She’d been taking cabs and cable cars since she’d returned to the city, didn’t want to bother with a car, had rented one when she needed to. She thought about how Kit had loved the city, how only yesterday Kit had been right here shopping with them, the little tortoiseshell whispering secretly in her ear, letting no salesclerk see her, but so filled with joy at the wonders of the elegant stores and restaurants, and now she was lost, frightened and lost and maybe hurt. Oh, God, she couldn’t be hurt.

Standing naked in the bedroom she called 411, got the number for the Avis office just down the block, made arrangements to have a car brought around. Pulling on panties and jeans and boots and a dirty red sweatshirt, she snatched up her purse and headed for the door. Whatever she needed, toothbrush, change of clothes, she’d buy somewhere. She stopped at her desk long enough to lock her safe. She checked the balcony glass doors, locked her front door behind her, and headed for the elevator.

The driver was at the curb, a tall, thin redheaded man, his long hair tied back beneath a chauffeur’s cap. Kate drove him back to the Avis office over streets slick with fog, waited in the car for him to run her credit card, and then headed south, the city’s narrow streets reflecting passing car lights and colored neon from the small caf?s and shops. She pictured the city as a friend had described it from sixty years ago when Kate’s grandfather was alive, her mother’s father, Kate’s link to her amazing journey. It was a friendlier city then, without the stark, tall buildings whose lighted offices thrust up into the night around her now like tethered rocket ships, dwarfing the cozy neighborhoods of an earlier day. A city that had somehow soured with the spoils of modern greed and degradation. A gentler San Francisco then, where you could walk the streets in the small hours unmolested, laughing and acting silly but never in danger; and where so many true artists had come together, living in the lofts and in the Sausalito houseboats, their work singing with the passion of life, Kate’s own father among them. She had only recently visited his paintings again, in the San Francisco museums—but only his earlier works. Braden West, too, had gone down into the Netherworld,had lived there a long life with her mother.

She knew, now, that they had returned at least once, bringing their youngest child back with them, had made that last journey up to the city to put Kate herself into the care of a San Francisco orphanage. They’d had no choice. Even then the Netherworld was crumbling, they had wanted her away from its inevitable fall, wanted her to grow up in a city that would offer her some future, in a country brighter with promise than that decaying land.

As the tires of the rented Toyota sang along the wet macadam of the Embarcadero, she debated taking Highway One despite Charlie’s advice. She moved on past the entrance to the AT&T Park. The traffic seemed light for this time of evening. Accelerating up onto the 280, she merged into fast traffic heading south between the clustered lights of the bedroom cities that ran one into the next, San Mateo, Palo Alto, the smaller communities separated like islands by short realms of black and empty night. The east hills rose invisible in the darkness, marked only by their scattered lights high up like gathered fireflies in the night sky. She’d be in Santa Cruz in less than two hours. She knew Charlie was right, that she could do nothing for Kit but get in the way of the searchers, slowing them and causing them added trouble. But she prayed for Kit, her own kind of prayer that had little to do with churches, she prayed for Kit and was filled with an aching fear for her, for one small and special cat shivering and alone among the vast, wild cliffs.

KIT LOST HER nerve when the coyotes drew too close. Crouched among the jutting rocks, she shot out of the dark niche at the last minute, scrambled back down the crumbling cliff where she hoped the beasts wouldn’t venture. She still carried the phone, reluctant to leave her only link to the world of humans, but its weight was a hindrance, and put her off balance. Halfway down, sliding and clinging to the scruffy clumps, she heard the rush of the beasts above her, and when she looked up their shadows were too close, coming down the boulders. She scrabbled away across the face of the cliff, lost her balance and nearly fell, and it was then she dropped the phone. She froze, listened to it clunk end over end down the mountain.

When she looked up again a coyote stood just above her, peering over the top of the slide, his pale eyes narrow and hungry. She looked past him to the trees and knew she couldn’t make that long run. He stank of spoiled meat, his smell made her flehmen, pulling back her lips with disgust.

He padded casually along just above her, easily keeping pace as she worked her way along the cliff’s face, moving more easily now without the weight of the phone. She kept moving, seeking some fissure or shelter, until at last, ahead and below her, the black scar of a narrow crevice cut down into the earth. Zigzagging toward it, nearly falling, she slipped down into the four-inch crack. Therewas barely room for a cat, no room for the larger predator. The rough sides of the cleft was perfumed with the old, faint scent of skunk. She followed it deep, smug in her escape but terrified of being trapped in there if the earth should shift again. Above her, the coyote clawed at the stone, and she edged deeper down until she could go no further, until the rock closed beneath her hind paws. Above her the coyote’s eyes shone in, reflecting light from the floods on the road below. He began to dig.

Watching his frantic, shifting silhouette, listening to the beast’s scrabbling paws and smelling his rank breath, she longed to bloody that toothy muzzle. If ever the great cat god reached down with a helping paw, she needed him to do that now. Soon the coyote was joined by another and then a third, the beasts edging cleverly down the unsteady rocks and digging at the narrow crevice, panting and slavering, hungry with the smell of her. The night sky was milky, fog settling in again as the wind died, the thick mist easing down like a pale quilt over the shaggy beasts. She didn’t know how long she cringed there wanting to leap out and attack and knowing she’d lose the battle. She was shivering with cold when the coyotes suddenly stopped digging.

Turning, they stood looking down toward the road; they shifted nervously, the faint hush of paws on stone. A new, moving light reflected up against the roof of fog and she heard a car’s engine, heard tires crunching on the fallen gravel. Not one car, but two. She could hear voices muffled by the fog and the surf. The coyotes moved away and then back again, began to dig again. Still she heard voices, she listened for some time and then the talking stopped and she could hear someone walking up the road, two sets of boots tapping softly along uphill. Only then did the coyotes shift away, their shadows gone above her, but still she sensed them there, maybe crouched and waiting. She started up to look, scrambling up the narrow rift, straining, pulling herself up until she was at the top of the fissure again and could peer out.

Fog was thickening across the road below but she could see a long pickup. Ryan’s king cab? Or maybe only the first of the cleanup crew, come to disentangle the wrecked trucks, preparing to haul them away? Looking along the cliff, she saw the coyotes crouched in fog at the edge, their backs to her, looking down the steep drop, too bold to back away, too familiar with the human world to fear the approaching hikers. Disdainful of mankind but still tensed to run, their ears moving nervously. Could she run now, while they were distracted? Streak away, and up that nearest tree that stood tall and ghostlike at the edge of the misty woods? Could she reach it before they wereon her?

She was crouched on the lip of the cleft, poised to spring away, when one of the beasts turned, glancing back at her. She vanished down the hole again, scrambled down as deep as she could go. Now the beast blocked the hole, digging, his breath as rank as soured garbage. His frantic seeking stopped when a glare of light shone behind him, picking out his shaggy coat. She heard a roar—Rock’s snarling roar, heard humans running, heard Rock’s barking attack, and a cat yowled with rage, and another cat, the night rang with snarls and cat screams, she heard the thunder of boots on stone. Ryan screamed, “Hold, Rock. Back off!” Rock’s roar was like a great wolf above her,a coyote screamed in pain, and she heard Pan’s yowl of challenge.

Clyde shouted,“Not there, the cats …”

A gunshot thundered down the cleft, deafening her, accompanied by a pained yip. Another shot, another cry of pain, cut short. Running paws scrambling away across the stony escarpment.

Then, silence.

She peered up to the mouth of the cleft. Pan looked over, backlighted by the beam of a flashlight behind him. Joe Grey and Rock looked over. Ryan and Clyde crowded to peer down behind them.

“Come out,” Pan said. “One of the beasts is dead, the rest ran off. Come out, Kit.” The light swept away, out of her eyes, and she could see again. She scrambled out, bolted into Pan yowling and crying and talking all at once.

A dead coyote lay beside the cleft. Ryan held Rock away from it, the big Weimaraner fighting to get at the animal, but then he strained up toward the woods, too, where the others had vanished. He huffed and pulled at his lead, torn between the two prey, but held in check by Ryan. Kit backed away from the mangled coyote, its face torn and bleeding. She glanced at Ryan’s revolver.

“I fired point-blank,” Ryan said, “away from you, away from everyone.” But Kit was hardly paying attention. Pan was licking her face, and she preened against him.

Ryan picked Joe up and held him in her arms, cuddling him, and she pulled Rock close, admiring them both, praising them both for their tracking, telling them they were the finest of SWAT teams. Joe Grey tried to look modest—not easy when he could still taste coyote blood, could still feel his claws in its rough coat, and felt more fierce than modest.

It was Clyde who had pulled Joe off the beast, forcing him away, and had grabbed Pan and somehow got hold of Rock’s collar, too, and dragged them away so Ryan could fire and keep them from being bitten. Joe allowed Ryan to admire him until he heard someone coming up the hiking trail.

“The sheriff’s deputy,” he said softly, peering down the cliff where the trail angled up toward them, watching the law approach to see what the shooting was about. “You two better get your story together,” he murmured. He wasn’t sure whether shooting an attacking coyote, in California, like shooting any wild animal in the state, was a major crime, whether such an act was punishable by unrealistic fines and extreme jail time.

“He attacked me,” Ryan said, “and he attacked Rock. Get in my pack, Joe. You, too, Pan. We don’t need any extra cats on the scene.”

Joe dropped from her shoulder into the pack, silent and obedient. Clyde scooped Pan up and deposited him unceremoniously in his own pack, then picked Kit up and cuddled her.

Settling down inside Ryan’s pack, Joe thought about rabies, and about the red tape and bureaucratic confusion that was going to follow this little event, maybe even quarantine for all of them while the carcass was examined and rabies was ruled out.Ornot ruled out, he thought glumly. Looking down at the dead coyote, he hoped this one was clean. Looking out through the netting in the side of the pack, he watched the baby-faced trooper step smartly up the trail, his hand poised lightly over his holstered weapon.

12

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VIC GOT BIRELY into his sleeping bag, kneeling uncomfortably on the hard stone floor wishing to hell they had a couple of cots. The only light in the room, the only light they ever had, was the dinky emergency lamp with its six-volt battery, its glow so faint that from outside it didn’t show at all. Even so he kept it under the sink to fully block it from the window.

“Can you pull the bag up higher, Vic? It’s so cold.”

Vic hauled the edges of the sleeping bag up around Birely’s neck, immediately soaking it in blood. Guy must have lost a bucketful of blood, and it wasn’t just his nose that got smashed. Every time he touched Birely, the little turd groaned and clutched his belly. When Birely began to retch, Vic snatched an empty fried chicken tub from the overflowingtrash and shoved it under his face to catch the throw-up. That made Birely heave harder, maybe at the rancid smell. Dry heaves, but all he coughed up was blood. Christ, what had the damn fool done to himself? The way he’d been thrown across the dashboard, Vic guessed the dash had gouged some kindof wound in his belly. When Birely started begging for water, Vic found a paper cup that smelled of stale coffee, filled it from the tap at the sink. Water always ran rusty, there. He rooted through Birely’s pack, found a neatly rolled-up pair of Jockey shorts thatlooked clean, used it to wipe the blood off Birely’s face. Found a shirt to tie around his face, to soak up the blood that was still gushing. Bleeding would stop for a while but if Birely moved at all or talked too much, it’d start again. Vic left his mouth clear so he could breathe, that was the only way he could get air in. Once the blood stopped for good, he’d be all right.

Vic’s own hurts from the wreck were mostly bruises, but he sure as hell was sore. Probably bruised all over, if he’d bothered to pull down his pants, pull up his shirt, and have a look. He knew there’d be a gash down his leg where blood was seeping through his jeans. He wasn’t a bleeder, neverhad been, he expected it would stop in a while. Birely asked for water again, he was lucky the water was working. That had been a plus, when they first broke in. Turned the tap on expecting they’d get nothing. Vic thought maybe the indoor and outside water were all on one cutoff, maybe Emmylou had left it on so she could water the half-dead flowers down in her scruffy yard. When Birely began to moan again, Vic gave him another codeine. He kept whining that his belly hurt, but Birely’d always been a whiner.

“What’re we gonna do, Vic, now the truck’s wrecked? I need you to take me to a doctor,” as if he’d forgotten they had the Lincoln. Though Vic sure didn’t want to be driving it around, under the noses of the local cops.

“It’s okay,” Vic said, “don’t worry about it. If you get worse I’ll take you to somewhere, Doctors on Duty, one of them twenty-four-hour walk-in places.” He got up from the floor rubbing his knees, waiting for Birely’s codeine to kick in, so he’d drift off. Digging into one of thepaper bags on the kitchen table, he pulled out a can of red beans, opened it with the rusty can opener, found the Tabasco and dumped some in. They hadn’t eaten since Denny’s on the outskirts of San Francisco, way early this morning, hours before they headed south. He stood scooping beans out with a plastic spoon, wolfing them down, filling his belly.

They’d spent the morning, in the city, looking up the fence he’d been touted on, taking care of business with him. Old man working out of a Laundromat. Guy had given him a fair deal, though. Birely’d been edgy about going in there, but hell,they hadn’t stolen the stuff. That little chippie, Debbie, that was her haul. He wasn’t sure why he’d helped her out. Maybe because she worked so damned hard at conning him. Well, hell, he’d take his thirty percent like he’d told her, give over the rest. Maybe something would come of it. Young, dark eyed, and feisty, she wasn’t a bad looker.

Scraping the last of the beans from the can, he watched Birely drifting off, sucking air through his open mouth, the blood still running down staining his teeth red. Good thing they had the codeine, put him out of his pain for a while. But what if he got worse? And what would happen if he died? That would complicate matters.

The way things stood, he figured Birely had some kind of legal claim to this property and to the cash, too. Hewas Sammie’s only relative, so he said. Maybe a claim they could make stick. All they had to do was find some softhearted defense group, a two-bit lawyer providing free legal help for the needy, making his money from some kind of federal grant. Guy like that, he went into court, he could get anything.

But if Birely died, what? In a way, that would free things up. He could just take off with the money, get the hell out of there, and who would know? Forget about the property that he’d thought Birely could sell, move on out with the cash, and the cops’d never think about any hidden money, how could they know? Sure as hell Emmylou wouldn’t tell them, if she’d found any of it for herself. Not unless she could prove it was hers, which he doubted. Say she did tell the copsthere was hidden cash, but couldn’t prove she had some legal claim. Cops got in the act, she’d never see those packs of bills again, they’d vanish like spit in a windstorm.

Picking up the keys to the Lincoln where he’d laid them on the edge of the stained sink, he stood looking at the other five keys on the ring. Had to be a house key on there, and who knew what else? Little fat key that might fit a padlock or a safe. Moving to the far wall, he removed the last few planks they’d left loose, removed the loose stone behind them. Reached down into the disintegrating pocket of old concrete, fished out the last two packs of musty hundred-dollar bills they’d left stashed there. Turning toward the door, he saw Birely was awake.

“What you doing, Vic?” Little bastard had raised up on one elbow, groaning watching him, his breath wheezing in his throat.

“Going to hide this in the Lincoln with the rest,” Vic said easily. “Maybe pull off one of the door panels. If that Emmylou comes snooping, spots us in here and maybe calls the cops, we’ll need to take off fast. I want the money stashed where they can’t find it, ready to roll.”

Birely retched and coughed and reached for the cup of water that Vic had set on the floor beside him.“What if the cops get their hands on the car, what then? We’ll never see that car again, and there goes my money, every damn bit of it.” Birely always put the worst spin on things, he never could see the positive side.

“I’ll muddy up the license plates until I can steal some. Maybe I’ll dirty up the whole car.” Vic smiled. “A bucket of garden dirt, a little water. Don’t look like the cops have a BOL out on the Lincoln yet, we passed three CHP units on the highway and two sheriff’s cars, and not one of ’em even turned to look. Maybe that old couple didn’t think to report the car stolen, maybe they were too far gone.”

But Birely wasn’t paying attention, he was real white. “I need a doctor, Vic. Otherwise I’m gonna die. You got to take me somewhere, to an emergency room.”

“Codeine should have kicked in by now,” Vic said. “I’ll give you another pill, then you’ll rest easy.”

Birely was hugging his belly and wheezing for air, and Vic felt his temper rise. Birely was going to slow him down, was going to get in his way, going to give the cops time to start looking for the Lincoln, and maybe time to find it.

As Vic stood pondering what to do, Birely began to talk as he had earlier, as he’d been muttering on and off ever since the accident, snatches of his childhood, some of them repeated over and over, useless memories of his sister and their old uncle, that old train robber that he guessed was famous in his day. “It was our uncle, Lee Fontana, sent the money to her,” Birelysaid now, “and Sammie only a kid, twenty-some, that old man sending her money like that, what was that about? He didn’t send me none.”

“Why didn’t she put it in a bank?” Vic said. If Birely kept on talking he’d wear himself out and go to sleep again.

“Maybe she hid it all that time because it was stolen,” Birely said, “afraid the feds had the serial numbers and would trace them if the money went in the bank, maybe thought the feds would want to know where she’d got it. Well, anyway she hated banks. Uncle Lee hated banks, she got that from him. I’m not so fond of banks, neither. Never have done business with one, all my life long.” That made Vic smile. Birely’d never had no money toput in a bank.

Some of what Birely muttered about was things before he was born, that Sammie’d told him. Some man following their mother, coming to the house when her daddy was off in the war. World War II, and that was some long time ago. Birely’d said Sammie was about seven. This stuff Sammie’d told him years later, it got stuck in his memory and he’d keep repeating it, stories about the man following and beating their mom, and the cops wouldn’t do anything, garbled stories warped by time and distance. Birely started whimpering again, as if the codeine hadn’t ever taken hold. Vic didn’t know how much codeine he could give him before he checked out for good, and he was torn about that. You had a dog this sick, hadn’t eaten and couldn’t eat, dog hurt like that, you’d put it out of its pain.

Sick man, dying man, what use did he have for two hundred thousand in musty bills? Nor did Emmylou, neither. What was she going to do with that kind of money? All she ever did was work away at her so-called remodeling project, and clump around in her scraggly yard talking to that mangy yellow cat. That in itself showed she didn’t have good sense. Sure as hell she was seeking out the money little by little, down there, as she tore out the walls. What a waste, what would she use it for?

OUTSIDE, EVEN AS Vic headed over to open the door, the yellow tom dropped down from the window and was gone. He’d watched from among the trees as the man stared around into the night searching for a prowler he’d never find. He’d heard enough through the window to know that Birelywas Sammie’s brother, and to remember more clearly that moment from his earlier life. To remember that ex-con following Sammie’s mother and beating her. The other guy was a classmate from her high school. Sammie’s daddy off in the Pacific fighting in the war that was meant, once again, to end all wars,and this scum comes onto his young wife. Now, listening to Birely, that distant time came clear, the rooms of their tiny cottage in that small Southern town, the polished floors and handmade rag rugs, a gold-colored cross hanging over the bed; and then the old gas station and garage that Sammie’sdaddy bought when he did get home from the war, bought to make a living for the three of them. Birely’s words woke in him sharp fragments of memory, each scene filtered through the eyes of the young and careless tomcat that he had been in that earlier life.

13

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LUCINDA GREENLAW’S GLASS-FRONTED cubicle in the Santa Cruz ER was so tiny that Kate had to slide in sideways, pushing back the canvas curtain, joining Charlie Harper and Charlie’s aunt, Wilma. The two women stood crowded against the wall between the water basin, the hazardous-waste receptacle, and Lucinda’s hospital bed. But Lucinda was even more constricted, bound to her bed by a tangle of tubes and wires, as captive as a bird caught in a net, this active older woman whom everyone admired for her youthful outlook and vigorous lifestyle. Now, she slept, she was hardly a bump beneath the thin white blanket, so fragile, her breathing steadied by the oxygen that whispered through her mask. She wore a cast on her lower left arm, and a heavy white bandage around her left shoulder.

Charlie gave Kate a hug.“Sorry I brought you out in the night.” Her unruly red hair shone bright in the overhead light, tied back crookedly with an old brass clip, caught across one shoulder of her brown sweatshirt, which she’d pulled on over what looked like a pajama top, pale blue with little white stars.

“I’d have been mad if you hadn’t,” Kate said. Her questioning look at Charlie brought a shake of the head. There was no word, yet, of Kit, then. Wilma took Kate’s hand, trying to look hopeful. She wore a red fleece jacket over jeans and a navy sweater, had pinned her gray hair hastily back into a knot. Her canvas carryall stood on the floor beside her booted feet, looking so suspiciously lumpy that Kate knelt and peered in.

Dulcie looked up at her, the expression in her green eyes worried for Kit. Above them in the narrow bed, Lucinda stirred a little, muttered then was silent again.

“Still sedated,” Charlie said. “They set the arm right away, and slipped her dislocated shoulder back into place. Thank God it wasn’t broken. She’s bruised all over, and scraped down her left side, where he jerked her out of the car. The nurse said she was still mad as hell, too,” Charlie said. In the bright fluorescent light, Lucinda’s skin seemed as thin as crumpled tissue, the veins of her wrists dark above the adhesive that held the invasive needles. She barely resembled, now, the slim, robust woman who walked the Molena Point hills several miles a day with Pedric, their Kitracing joyfully ahead leading them to the wildest paths and up the steepest climbs.

“She was able to describe what happened, then?” Kate asked, still kneeling and stroking Dulcie.

“Clearly,” Charlie said. “We talked a few minutes, while they were preparing her for surgery. It’s Pedric who doesn’t remember much, and that’s worrisome. Some moments come clear, but then he can’t fill in the spaces between. That should come with time,” she said. “Even so, he remembers enough to be raging mad, too. When they’re awake and lucid, they’re both impatient to talk to the CHP, to the county sheriff up there, and most of all, to Max.” Max Harper, Charlie’s husband and Molena Point chief of police, would most likely coordinate the Greenlaws’ statements forthe other law enforcement agencies. “He’ll bring it all together,” she said, “that will help ease Lucinda and Pedric from so many interviews. Multiple interviews are necessary, but it will wear them out.”

Charlie watched Lucinda, sleeping so quietly.“You won’t get these two down for long,” she said hopefully. She filled Kate in on the wreck and the attack, repeating what Lucinda had told them. “There’s a BOL out for the Lincoln. If those two men are picked up, they’d better belocked up, away from me.”

“Away from all of us,” Kate said, looking into Dulcie’s own angry eyes. “By now, who knows how far away they’ve gotten. Headed where? Arizona? Oregon? Mexico?”

“Lucinda told us what’s in the car,” Charlie said. “If they dump the car or sell it, will they trash all those lovely purchases? But maybe,” she said, “maybe they won’t find the rest.

“At least Kit wasn’t in the car,” she said, thinking of what Kit might have tried to do, trapped in the Lincoln with those two men, and what they might have done to her.

“Have Ryan and Clyde called?” Kate asked. “Can you call them?”

“They called once,” Wilma said, “when they parked up at the slide. They were just setting out to search.” She touched Kate’s shoulder, where she knelt beside the carryall. “Kit’s tough, Kate. She’s smart and quick—and she has Lucinda’s phone. When she sees the Damens’ truck, sees them start up the cliff, don’t you think she’ll use the phone or else call out to them, lead them right to her?”

“If she’s not afraid to lead something else to her,” Kate said. She wished she were there, she couldn’t shake her fear for Kit, she felt as weak with fright as if she herself, in cat form, crouched small and lost up there in the black night, with only her claws and little cat teeth to protect her against whatever prowled, hungry and listening.

“Their house keys are on the ring with the car keys,” Wilma said. “Ryan said that first thing in the morning she’ll get her lock man out. I’ll put holds on the credit cards. They have some blocks on them and on their bank accounts, but better to be safe.

“Pedric gave the hospital their insurance information, he still had his billfold, the guy missed that, too busy harassing Lucinda and stealing the Lincoln. When we got here, Lucinda’s focus was all on Pedric and on Kit, she couldn’t rest at all. She wouldn’t let them take the X-rays until we assured her the Damens had gone after Kit, she just kept begging for Kit, fussing and trying to get out of bed. She made such a rumpus she disrupted the whole floor, the nurses had a time with her. We got here, talked for only a few minutes, told her Rock was tracking Kit. Finally they took her toX-ray, gave her a shot, and in less than an hour she was off to surgery.”

The three women watched Lucinda and watched the lighted monitor above her bed with its moving graphs and numbers that mapped Lucinda’s life processes, oxygen level and blood pressure and the slow steadiness of her heartbeat. “Once we’ve taken care of the credit cards and changed the locks,” Charlie said, “we need to make arrangements for when they come home. Maybe they won’t have to go into rehab, if we take turns staying at the house, have nurses come if they’re needed. Wecould put someone in their downstairs apartment if …”

She shook her head.“I’d even thought of Debbie Kraft,” she said with a wry smile. “She needs the job, and the Damens’ would be thrilled to get her out of their cottage. But it would take more effort to ride herd on Debbie than to move in ourselves. To say nothing of the torment that older girl would dish out. There’d be no peace, with Vinnie in the house.”

“I can stay,” Kate said. “I’d planned to be with them for a while. I could stay, and you all could run the errands, pick up the meds and groceries. Would that work?” She wanted to be there, in part to watch over Kit, whose wild but vulnerable nature was so like Kate’s own temperament. She longed to hold the little tortoiseshell safe, keep her close and safe. No one said, If Pedric comes home, if he heals from the concussion, and can come home.No one said,If Kit comes home, if Ryan and Clyde can find her.Wilma took Kate’s hand and Charlie’s, as if by touching, by all of them willing it, they could help to heal the older couple and could bring them home, and bring Kit home. It was in that quiet moment that tabby Dulcie crept out from Wilma’s carryall and slipped up onto Lucinda’s bed. Stepping delicately among the snaking tubes, she padded up beside Lucinda, on her unhurt side, slipped under the covers, laid her head on Lucinda’s shoulder, and softly began to purr. Maybe Lucinda, deep in dreams, would imagine she held Kit in her arms, snuggling close, maybe that thought would help to heal her.

LEAVING BIRELY HALF asleep, Vic headed out the door and down the stairs along the side of the stone building carrying a couple of rusty screwdrivers he’d found in the stone shack, an empty old bucket and a dirt-crusted spade he’d found in the yard, and a paper bag with four bottles of water, eight cans of beans, the rusty can opener, and the two packs of hundred-dollar bills he’d had on him. Maybe he’d find something useful among all thatjunk in the Lincoln, maybe a couple of blankets. The rest of the stuff he’d dump somewhere, all them fancy packages from the San Francisco stores. He should have had all this when he linked up with the fence, it’d be worth something. He didn’t know much about upholstery material, if that’s what those bolts of cloth were, but the fancy pictures and lamps had to be worth something—that old couple were big spenders. Had to be, driving a Town Car and all. Maybe when he headed out he’d swing through Frisco again and see what he could get for the lot.

Standing in shadow at the bottom of the stairs, he watched the house below. The old Chevy was parked off to the side on the dirt drive where that stringy old woman kept it. There was no light in the kitchen window, no reflection of lights from anywhere in the house, shining out against the pine trees. Moving around to the shed door, he removed the lock, eased the door back so it wouldn’t squawk, and slipped inside.

He deposited the paper bag among the packages in the backseat, then carried the bucket outside again. Kneeling close against the stairs, he began scooping up loose garden dirt with the spade and with his hands. Filling the bucket, he turned back inside, poured in a bottle of water, and stirred the mess with the spade, into a thick mud. Earlier, leaving the wreck, he’d hidden the cash behind the back console. Maybe he could do better than that before he took off, maybe find a hiding place the cops wouldn’t think to poke into with just a casual stop, a stop he might talk his way out of. If he changed his looks, got a haircut, cleaned up in different clothes, maybe he could slip by.

He thought how drug dealers pry off the door panels of a car to secure their stash, he’d watched a guy do that, once. Took special tools, which he didn’t have. He sure didn’t want to bend or crack the panel, not be able to put it back right. But he didn’t want the money on him, neither. And if he decided to stay put here for a while, he didn’t want to hide it again in the stone room. He had an uneasy feeling about Birely up there whining and carrying on. If that old woman heard him and came nosing around, who knew what she’d poke into that was none of her business?

Pulling down the armrest, he removed the packs of hundreds. The little metal tray beneath was screwed in place, with a small square hole in the front, along with two small connections where, he thought, people could charge their cell phones. When he poked the screwdriver down in the hole he could feel a space beneath, about an inch deep. Using the Phillips, he removed the screws and lifted the tray out.

The space beneath was big enough to stash most of the packs of bills. He stuffed the rest in his pocket, screwed the black plastic tray back in place, then got to work on the outside of the car. Stirring up the bucket of dirt and water, and using a wadded-up shirt from Birely’s pack, he began to spread the mud on. First the license plates, and then the outside of the car, dirtying up the shiny black paint and the dents, just enough, not to overdo it. Working away humming to himself, he thought about a better place to hide the car, away from that old woman poking around. One thing, he’d have to lift a new set of plates, maybe from the far side of the village. But the car itself he wanted nearby where he could keep an eye on it.

There were plenty of empty houses down the hill, abandoned places, no one ever around, no furniture when he’d looked in through the dirty windows. Skuzzy neighborhood, foreclosures, empty rentals, the grass grown tall and brown, FOR RENT signs tipped crooked or lying on the ground. Their narrow, one-car garages, the ones he could see into, were empty. Stash the Lincoln for a few hours, steal himself another set of wheels or borrow them.

That little tart Debbie Kraft, she owed him one, the good sale he’d made for her. Maybe he’d use her old station wagon. Take the money he’d got from the fence down to her, and make nice. He’d sold everything she’d stole. When he handed over near three thousand in cash, that should make those dark eyes sparkle. Hell, she couldn’t refuse the loan of her car, not when she knew he could finger her for stealing, tip the cops that she was boosting the local stores. She sure wouldn’t want the cops to know she was using her daughter Vinnie as a distraction and, sometimes, setting the kid up to heist small items herself, silk bras and panties, a few pieces of costume jewelry, while Debbie kept the clerks busy.

Judiciously Vic went on spreading mud, not too much, keeping it to the lower parts of the car, the wheels and fenders and bumpers. Spreading the slop, watching it splash onto the shed’s dirt floor, he smiled. It was all coming together, his running into Birely like that, south of Salinas, the story Birely’d told that turned out to be true, the money in hand now, everything going real smooth. He had only a few more moves and he’d be out of there. Sell the Lincoln, get someshiny new wheels, not like Debbie’s old heap, and head north out of California, maybe way north, up into Canada. Get lost up in Canada for a while and then off again, he could go anywhere he wanted now, with this kind of money.

14

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THEY’RE SURE TO stop us,” Ryan told Clyde as they entered the hospital from the covered walkway. She avoided looking directly at the two guards in dark uniforms who watched them from within, through the wide glass doors. “We look like a couple of tramps, with our dirty backpacks, look like we’re up to no good.” Their wrinkled, stained clothes smelled of sweat and of dog, of gunpowder and maybe of coyote, too, to a discerning nose, maybe even the scent of animal blood. “And my mop looks like a Brillo pad,” she said, pushing back her dark hair where it clung, frizzled into tight curlsfrom their night in the fog. “Not to mention how your backpack is bulging. Be still, Kit,” she muttered, leaning close to the pack, afraid the guards would see it move and want to investigate, would paw through the pack and find Kit staring up at them or scrambling to bolt away.

But no one bothered them, they received only a bored glance from the two uniformed men who were deep in conversation, totally uninterested in what they might be carrying inside with them. Maybe they looked too tired and limp to be bringing in a bomb, to be smuggling in anything that would take much effort. Or maybe Santa Cruz Dominican hadn’t had any problems yet with bomb threats or petty vandalism, as the bigger city hospitals were experiencing.

But when they reached the emergency room, down an open flight of stairs, that area was more secure. The ER’s doors were locked, they had to give a nurse their names, and provide Lucinda’s and Pedric’s names, and wait for another nurse to lead them in through the heavy double doors. The short, pillow-shaped woman in green scrubs escorted them past the inner nurses’ station and on past rows of small, glass-walled rooms not much larger than a walk-in closet, some with the curtains closed, some open so they glimpsed patients within, sleeping or looking forlornly back at them. Lucinda’s glass doors stood open, the canvas curtain drawn halfway across, the lights dimmed down to only a soft glow. Wilma Getz and a lean, dark-haired nurse in scrubs stood one at each side of her bed, frowning as if they’d been arguing. Lucinda lay awake, scowling, but she seemed groggy, too. She smiled vaguely at Ryan and Clyde. “Kate and Charlie were here,” she said. “Gone down to Pedric.” And almost at once she dropped into sleep again. The cast and bandage on her left arm looked heavy and uncomfortable. Her right arm lay across a red windbreaker, holding it possessively. Wilma stood beside her, holding the red jacket, too, keeping it firmly in place as the nurse reached to remove it, apparently not for the first time. At Wilma’s angry glare, she paused and drew her hand back. Wilma’s gray ponytail was awry; she looked as if she’d pulled on her jeans and navy sweatshirt while climbing straight out of bed. But she looked, even so, not a woman to defy, with that steady and uncompromising gaze. Wilma had intimidated her parolees for thirty years, until she’d retired from the federal court system. She didn’t tolerate patronizing behavior from a person committed to easing the suffering of others, particularly of helpless patients.

“Lucinda wants the jacket near her,” Wilma said. “She says it smells of pine trees, and of the hills of our village. What harm, if it comforts her?” Her stubborn grasp on the jacket, and Lucinda’s own protective arm across it, even in sleep, didn’t hide adequately the little mound beneath but, confronted by Wilma, and now with Clyde and Ryan’s presence, the dark, sour woman seemed reluctant to push the matter. She smiled woodenly at the Damens, shook her head as if there were little she could do about unreasonable patients or visitors, and turned away leaving the jacket in place.

Moving to Lucinda’s bed, Ryan reached beneath the jacket, speaking softly to Dulcie, smiling up at Wilma.

Wilma grinned back at her.“Lucinda thinks Kit’s cuddled next to her. She’s much more peaceful since Dulcie slipped into bed with her. If the nurses will just leave us alone.”

“The best therapy,” Clyde said, slinging his pack off, resting it on the edge of the bed. “But there’s no need for a standin now.” And Kit peered out at them, her green eyes bright.

“Oh,” Wilma said, reaching for her, pausing to glance out the door and then leaning to hug her. “Oh, you’re all right, you’re safe.” She hugged Kit, squeezing almost too hard. “Pedric’s been asking and asking for you, they’ve been so upset. That’s made the doctor upset, he doesn’t want Pedric stressed.”

Ryan moved to the glass door and pulled it closed. She stood a moment looking out to the big, center island of counters and desks from which the nurses and doctors and orderlies could see into all the rooms. Only the canvas curtain offered privacy. When she closed that, too, leaving only a crack to look out, Kit slipped from the backpack, her dark coat stark against the white cover.

“Hurry,” Ryan said, “she’s coming back.” Kit didn’t crawl under with Dulcie, but returned to the depths of the canvas pack.

“Come on,” Clyde said, slinging her over his shoulder. “We’ll look in on Pedric. What time does the shift change, when does that nurse leave?”

“Twelve, I think,” Wilma said, glancing at her watch. The clock above Lucinda’s bed had almost reached eleven. Clyde and Ryan moved on out with their stowaway, leaving Lucinda sleeping happily with Dulcie as surrogate, and Wilma standing guard.

“How many cats,” Clyde whispered, moving down past the nurses’ station to the other side of the big, open square, “how many cats can you smuggle in, before you have Security in your face?”

“They let therapy dogs in,” Ryan said softly. “If the cats wore those same little therapy coats, maybe …”

He gave her a lopsided grin.“Don’t even think about it. This is dicey enough.”

“What would they do if they caught us?”

He laughed.“What could they do? Two innocent little cats? At least we don’t have to worry about Joe and Pan.” They’d left the two tomcats in the king cab, both solemnly promising not to open the door, not to set foot outside, had left them pacing back and forth past Rock, who lay curled up asleep. Having completed his night’s work, the silver Weimaraner didn’t mean to be kept awake by a couple of edgy tomcats.

“I just hope those two are as good as their word,” Clyde said.

“And how good is that?” she said nervously.

PEDRIC’S ROOM WAS brightly lit, the overhead fluorescents turned up high as if the softer lights of evening would too easily lull the patient to sleep when, with a concussion, he must be kept awake. Charlie and Kate sat crowded into folding chairs that they’d jammed between the wall and Pedric’s bed. His head was wrapped in a thick white bandage. His thin, lined face was painted with black-and-blue marks down the right side and around his eye where Vic had hit him with the tire iron, bruises that made him look like a dignified clown halfway through applying his makeup. A young, redheaded nurse was fluffing his pillows, he was talking softly to her, the look on his face intense. Whatever he was saying made her uncomfortable. She turned away as Ryan and Clyde entered, bending to adjust the height of the bed. She glanced up embarrassedly at them and at Charlie and Kate, her face flushed, and silently fled the room. Behind her, Charlie and Kate exchanged a look of amusement.

“What?” Ryan said when she’d gone. “Pedric, what were you saying? You weren’t coming on to her?” she said, laughing.

Pedric looked puzzled.“I was talking about the old country, the old myths, the old Celtic tales. I told her she looked like the princess from under the hill, but I guess she didn’t understand. I guess I made her nervous.” He looked vaguely up at them. “I guess if you’re not into mythology, that might sound a bit strange?”

Charlie pushed back her red hair, where a loose strand had caught on her shoulder.“You got her attention, all right. Maybe nurses aren’t into folklore. Maybe, when you work in a world of discipline and hard facts, slipping away into imaginary places can be unsettling.” Though for Charlie that wasn’t the case; she seemed, in her paintings and her imaginative writing, to live comfortably in both realms.

But Pedric’s attention was on Clyde’s backpack, which had begun to wriggle. When he saw Kit’s bright eyes peering out through the mesh his face broke into a smile, he raised his arms to her as she struggled to get out to him. She was about to leap down beside him when another nurse, a blond, shapely woman, started across from the nursing station and Kit ducked down again. She was stone-still as the nurse entered. Her name tag said HALLIE EVERS. She opened the glass door wide, and opened the curtain.

“You can visit,” she said, looking sternly at the four of them. “But not so many at once. One, maybe two if you’re quiet. We don’t want him excited, though we do need to keep him awake. We need to do that calmly, do you understand? Dr. Pindle will be in shortly. Are you all relatives of Mr. Greenlaw?”

“We’re good friends,” Clyde said. “The Greenlaws have no relatives. We came to do whatever we can for them.”

She frowned.“He’s been talking strangely, going on about some kind of fairy tale, about harpies and dragons as if they were real,” she said doubtfully. “Maybe the concussion has stirred up some childhood fancy.”

Kate hid a smile. Charlie frowned, looking down at her hands.

“That’s not surprising,” Ryan said, giving Nurse Evers her most beguiling smile. “Pedric’s a folklorist, that’s his profession. Hestudies the old, classical myths and folktales, he has an impressive collection of ancient literature, he tells wonderful stories. You should visit with him sometime, if you’re interested in such things. But you’re right,” she said, her green eyes wide and innocent. “Four of us is too many, all at once.” She turned to Pedric. “We’ll take turns visiting, then, seeing that you don’t sleep,” she said gently.

Kate grinned at Charlie and rose, and the two of them left, highly amused by Nurse Evers.

“We’ll be quieter,” Ryan told the nurse. “How long must he be kept awake?” Still smiling, she stepped back, easing against Clyde.

“Until the doctor has done an evaluation,” Nurse Evers said, “possibly longer, depending on what is found. Dr. Pindle will give you that information. Mr. Greenlaw’s hurt his knee badly, as well. He seems to want to wait for treatment on that until he returns home to his own doctors. He’s very vague, most likely due to the concussion. The doctor may want to talk with you about that.” All this as if Pedric were not in the room with them or as if he didn’t hear or understand her. “Vague, and then he’ll start in again on those strange stories.”

Clyde pretended to adjust his backpack, where Kit had begun to wriggle with impatience.

“He seems able to remember only fragments of the accident, but that’s to be expected. He remembers more distant … things. I suppose,” she said doubtfully, “if these stories are his profession, I expect he would remember those.” She gave them a brighter smile as if to humor them, andshe left abruptly, leaving the door and curtain wide open behind her. Returning to the nurses’ station, she moved directly to a computer where she sat facing them, keeping them in view.

Ryan moved to the door, smiled across at Nurse Evers, then closed the door and drew the canvas curtain. She turned to the bed, where Clyde had lowered the backpack and opened it. Kit’s black-and-brown ears emerged. As her little tilted nose pushed up over the edge of the pack, Pedric reached in to her, such joy in the older man’s face that Ryan had to wipe her eyes and Clyde turned away embarrassed by his own emotion. Quickly Pedric lifted the sheet and Kit crept under, tucking down so close to him that when he’d covered her again, she was barely a lump in the thin white blanket.

“After the wreck,” he whispered, “where did you go? Where were you when they found you?”

“Above the landslide,” Kit said softly. “Rock and Joe and Pan found me and Ryan and Clyde right behind them and Ryan had her revolver, one shot at that coyote that was trying todig me out of the rocks, andthat mother died, serves him right, trying to eat a poor little cat, and those other two ran like hell and then Pan was there and, oh my …” She stopped talking, purring so loudly that anyone passing might have heard her. But then, suddenly yawning, she went quiet beneath the blanket, all worn out. Snuggling deeper against Pedric’s side, she drifted off into a deep and healing sleep—while Pedric, longing for sleep, for a forbidden nap of his own, lay watching over her, as their friends stood guard.

15

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IT WAS MIDNIGHT when Vic crawled into his sleeping bag on the floor of the stone shack, careful not to wake Birely and have him start whining again. The little turd was finally sleeping deeply, despite having to breathe through his open mouth. Even in the dim glow of the battery light, he was pale as milk. Vic had tried to get him to eat but he didn’t want anything, just sucked at the water in the limp paper cup. He’d woken up once and talked for a while, his voice slurry, rambling on about his childhood again and his sister, Sammie, and how she came by all that money. Birely’d never say why the old man would send that kind of money to a young niece, send it clear up from Mexico, maybe didn’t know why. They’d already found over a hundred thousand, and sure as hell Sammie’d had more down in the house. Weird, her growing old in that rundown place when she’d had enough to live high on the hog. Birely said she liked living the way she did. He said, look at Emmylou, her only friend, another recluse just like Sammie.

Strange, the change in Birely. He used to be a real wuss, a drifter, went right along with whatever anyone wanted him to do. But after Sammie’d given away what was his, now he was all anger, so mad at Sammie that he got moving, all right, looking for her hidden stash.

Birely never knew the old uncle, all he knew was what Sammie and maybe their folks told him. Old train robber did his share of prison time back then, Birely knew that much. Sammie was about nine when Lee Fontana made his big haul and lit out for Mexico, running from the feds, got out of the country shortly before Birely was born. Sammie called him the cowboy, Birely said. She claimed that sometimes she knew from her dreams what he was doing, knew what was happening to him even when he was halfway across the country. Well, you couldn’t believe half what Birely told you. Birely said the old man’s last robbery was big in the papers back then, and Vic could believe that, all right. Some kind of federal money, Birely didn’t know exactly what. Said you’d get burned bad, back in them days, for a federal heist. Vic wondered if the feds kept records back that far. If, tucked away in some musty drawer of ancient files, some federal office had the serial numbers on those old bills.

But what the hell? Even if these cops here in Molena Point got their hands on the money, which wasn’t likely, even if they figured out it was real old money, who would think to look back to the last century for some federal robbery? Who would even care?

Except, he thought, if that federal case was still open and he did take Birely to some hospital and Birely started talking, who knew what the dummy would blurt out? Enough to make some nosy cop curious, start him rooting around into the past? Birely could talk on and on, and Vic didn’t want to chance that—there were times when a man had no choice, when he did what was needed just to save his own neck.

THE DAMENS WEREN’T night people, Ryan and Clyde were early risers, they were often in bed by nine or ten, but somehow in the small hours of this long night they managed to stay awake and to keep Pedric awake, taking turns, one dozing, one asking Pedric for details about the wreck to keep him from drifting off.

Charlie had gotten two adjoining motel rooms nearby at Best Western, so they could all take turns sitting with Pedric; Ryan had stayed with him while Clyde left to take Rock and the two tomcats there, to feed them and get them settled in. Kibble and dog food for Rock, a nice spread of takeout for Joe Grey and Pan, of rare burgers and fried cod. He praised the three trackers lavishly again for their night’s work before he left to join Ryan.

Rock, having bolted down his supper, was tucked up with Charlie on her bed. Joe sprawled across Wilma’s empty pillow while she and Kate and Dulcie were still at the hospital; Pan didn’t settle but paced restlessly, leaping onto the daybed that had been set up for Kate, aimlessly wandering the two rooms, missing Kit, wanting to be with her, still suffering the aftermath of his worry over her.How strange is that? he thought. Kit was his first true love, and he didn’t quite know what to make of the condition, of the intensity and turmoil that had descended to change his carefree life.Kit is all fluff and softness—over slashing claws, he thought, smiling,sharp teeth, and a will more stubborn even than my own. She was brave as a cougar one moment, dreamy the next, always volatile, keeping him forever off balance. All he knew was that right now he missed her; he paced until he wore himself out, and then settled down next to Rock and Charlie and, like the softly snoring Weimaraner, Pan slept.

IT WAS ONE A.M. The lights in most of the ER rooms had been dimmed, only Pedric’s lights shone brightly behind the drawn curtain. Ryan had left the glass door cracked open, but the few nurses and attendants visible were busy at their desks, able to get computer records entered, now that most of the patients were sleeping. At this predawn hour a quiet lull held the ward, perhaps before the next sudden round of broken legs and stomach cramps that would have nurses hurrying again to minister to the wounded and accident-prone. Quietly, Clyde pushed in through the canvas curtain.

Pedric was sitting up in bed, in his skimpy hospital gown, a white cotton blanket around his shoulders, looking relaxed despite the fierce headache he said still plagued him. Beneath the blanket he held Kit safe, so happy to have her there. Ryan sat beside the bed, Clyde’s backpack near, in case someone came to tend to Pedric; nurses were never shy about waking patients from sleep to administer pills, to poke and prod and straighten blankets.

“I can remember only fragments of this week,” Pedric was saying worriedly, “a breakfast of Swiss pancakes, a cable car ride in the rain. Kit stretched out on Kate’s windowsill,” he said, smiling, “watching fog slip in beneath the Golden Gate. Whole mornings and evenings are blank.

“I remember Kate’s stories more clearly, the granite sky, those cavernous sweeps of stone lit by the green glow of the subterranean daytime, a winged woman with a …” He went still then as the canvas curtain moved and was eased aside.

A doctor in a white coat stepped in.“Dr. James Pindle,” he said, rigidly watching Pedric. He didn’t offer to shake hands with him, or with Ryan or Clyde. He was a thin-boned man, narrow arms and shoulders, small hands. Milk-white skin against ink-black hair, eyes so black you couldn’t see the pupils.

“I left orders for only one visitor at a time,” he said accusingly. “I don’t want him talking away like this, I don’t want him stressed. Didn’t the nursetell you that?”

Ryan had risen, pretending to straighten Pedric’s covers as Kit slid deeper down; too late now to slip into the backpack, and they were terrified Pindle would lower the rail to examine Pedric.

“At least you didn’t let him fall asleep,” Pindle said. “I hope he hasn’t slept. The nurse must have told you that much, if you were allowed to stay in here with the curtain drawn. Youmust have been instructed what to watch for.” He glanced out toward the nurses’ station, where Nurse Evers seemed totally preoccupied at her computer.

“You do understand,” he said coldly, “that with a concussion he can’t have drugs or painkillers or caffeine, and that he will try to escape the pain by retreating into sleep.”

“We understand,” Clyde said. “He hasn’t slept. We’ve been very quiet, and he hasn’t talked much.”

“He just seems glad for the company,” Ryan said. She didn’t say which company had so pleased and calmed the patient. Pindle gave her a chill look and moved to the bed rail, forcing Ryan to step aside. He stood not inches from where Kit hid beneath the blanket, looking at Pedric. “One of youwill have to leave. The patient is a bundle of nerves, surely you can see he’s disturbed.”

“Not at all,” Pedric said, smiling easily at him, putting out his hand for a proper introduction. “In fact, I’m feeling better, the headache is less severe. I’d like something to eat, if there’s anything available at this hour.”

Pindle’s face seemed frozen into scowl lines. “I’ll tell the nurse. Maybe some crackers and applesauce.” He looked at Clyde. “Is he still worrying about hiscat?” he said with disgust. “This foolishness about a cat has him unduly upset. I can’t have him worrying, certainly not over something so inconsequential. I’m moving him to the ICU in the morning, until he’s stable. Blood sugar way too high, and that could mean any number of things. And the torn knee needs attending to. The hospitalist will be in shortly, he’s the one who will admit him. I don’t suppose either of you have a medical power of attorney?”

“We both do,” Clyde said coolly. “As do Ms. Osborne, Wilma Getz, and Mrs. Harper. Ms. Osborne is down the hall with Pedric’s wife. We are all listed on both of the Greenlaws’ health care directives. Mrs. Harper signed him in, so that should be on the chart.”

“Then there should be no problem if further tests are warranted,” Pindle said. “His wife will be kept in ER overnight. If nothing else shows up, she can go home. I’m on my way to look at her. We’ll keep Mr. Greenlaw until the concussion has healed and the torn meniscus in his knee is repaired, though we may find that other procedures will be needed.”

What other procedures, Ryan thought, here in a strange hospital? And who said Pedric and Lucinda weren’t alert enough to do their own signing?

“Maybe Dr. Carroll can deal with him,” he said without explanation, and without any comforting word to Pedric, he left the room, the canvas curtain swinging behind him. Ryan looked after him, rigid with anger, then hurried to catch up as he moved along the hall toward Lucinda’s room.

“I’m not sure,” she said, walking beside him, “that it’s wise to separate Lucinda and Pedric, to send Lucinda home alone.” She kept her voice loud enough to alert Kate and Wilma. One close call was enough, they didn’t need this man finding Dulcie. Dr. Pindle didn’t respond, he didn’t speak or turn to look at her. He pushed past her, was just entering Lucinda’s room when Ryan, glancing back, saw another doctor leave the room next to Pedric’s, heading for Pedric’s door.

Praying Kate and Wilma had heard her warning, she turned back again, to help Clyde get Kit out of there unseen, or try to get her out. But, stepping in behind the doctor, he didn’t alarm her as Pindle had; his movements were easier and unthreatening as he turned to look at her.

He wore the requisite white coat with its little brass name tag, same dark slacks as Dr. Pindle, soft-soled black shoes. But this man looked relaxed, he had an easy walk, a big man, big hands, tousled red hair framing a face that looked sunny and thoughtful. As he approached Pedric’s bed she saw Wilma hurry out of Lucinda’s room carrying her heavy tote bag, the canvas bottom sagging. Had Pindle seen Dulcie and angrily sent them packing? Or had Wilma moved fast enough to clear the premises before they found themselves in a nasty tangle of red tape and security guards, mired in a diatribe that would leave both the cats and humans shaken, leave the two patients sicker than they’d been when they were admitted?

EVEN BEFORE RYAN left Pedric’s room Kit was digging her claws into the mattress trying not to squirm, not to burst out hissing at that Dr. Pindle person. She felt trapped by his cold voice, trapped by the bed rails and the tightly tucked blanket that hid her, trapped even by the tubes and wires that confined Pedric, that seemed to confine them both. Hidden in the near dark against Pedric’s warmth, she couldn’t see out; she’d listened with growing anger to Dr. Pindle, had heard Ryan follow him out of the room, heard her voice moving away down the hall as if to warn Kate and Wilma, but still she felt he might appear again, and the man made her fur crawl. But then, crouched there listening, she sensed Pedric start to fall asleep. She felt Clyde shake his arm, prodding him awake. “Talk to me, Pedric,” Clyde urged.

Oh, don’t talk about the Netherworld again, Kit thought, but already he was saying,“A world so green, like the green underworld of the old myths,” and even as he rambled on again, to keep himself awake, she heard footsteps in the room next to them, a man’s soft-soled step. “Green drifting out of the granite sky …” Pedric was saying, and she pawed at him to make him be still. She heard the next door slide open, the scuff of rubber-soled shoes approaching Pedric’s door. She peered out searching for the backpack, but she couldn’t see it. Yes, there, Clyde was holding it open. She tensed to slip out but she was too late. Another doctor had stepped in and with no time to hide she pushed closer to Pedric, her heart pounding.

He came to stand beside the metal rail. He would be looking down at Pedric, looking right at the covers where she hid. She tried not to move even a whisker, prayed not to sneeze or purr. Purrs weren’t always controllable, sometimes they just slipped out.

He didn’t smell like Dr. Pindle, he had a friendly scent, laced with a touch of spicy shaving lotion. His voice was easy, deep, and relaxed. “I was in the next room, Mr. Greenlaw. I’m Dr. Carroll. That was a fascinating tale you were spinning.”

Kit swallowed. There was a long, awkward silence. She listened to Clyde and Ryan introduce themselves, standing near the foot of the bed. And Clyde launched into Ryan’s explanation of Pedric’s seemingly wild talk.

“Pedric’s knowledge of Celtic folklore is remarkable,” Clyde said, “he—”

Dr. Carroll stopped him.“Not necessary,” he said. “I heard quite a lot, from next door.” He smiled down at Pedric. “Dr. Pindle doesn’t get it, does he?”

Pedric was silent, his body gone tense.

“The old tales are an interest of mine, too,” Dr. Carroll said. “In my Scotch-Irish family, I grew up on the Celtic myths. Dr. Pindle seems concerned that you’re delirious,” he said, laughing. “I don’t think that. Pindle has no feel for the ancient wonders. Maybe they frighten him.”

There was another silence, Kit sensed the two men looking at each other. Dr. Carroll said,“Pindle seemed concerned that you are unduly distressed, Mr. Greenlaw. Over the loss of your cat? I understand she escaped from your car, after the wreck? I suppose he didn’t understand why that would worry you. Has there been any word of her?”

Pedric’s voice came stronger now. “She … she ran up the cliff, into the woods. But Ryan and Clyde found her, she’s safe now, and that has eased my mind.”

“I imagine it has,” Dr. Carroll said, “and eased Mrs. Greenlaw, too.” Kit felt him touch the blanket, and before she could slide away or thinkwhat to do he’d pulled the covers back. She stared up at him, stricken.

Dr. Carroll smiled. He looked straight down into her eyes, and it was a look she could never have feared. He reached to stroke her, his big hands gentle. His nails were very short, clean and neatly trimmed. His blue eyes were full of light, his red hair curly and wild, his freckles dark across his square cheeks. He spoke right to her.“The next time you hide,” he told her, “you want to be sure you haven’t left a tortoiseshell hair or two, on the white blanket.”

Kit blinked, and then purred, but her poor heart was pounding so hard she knew he could feel it beneath his stroking hand.

He couldn’t know that she understood him, but he spoke as if she did, he looked at her as if he knew what she was. He scratched her ears, then looked up at Pedric. “I’m glad she’s safe, Mr. Greenlaw. I know you and your wife are relieved. Now that your little cat is here, I can already see the healing in your eyes, in your smile. This little lady,” he said, “is the best medicine you could have. Don’t be disturbed by people like Pindle. But,” he said softly, “do keep her hidden.”

He turned to look at Clyde.“Several of you came up from Molena Point to be with the Greenlaws?”

“Yes, my wife and three friends. Charlie Harper is the wife of our police chief.”

“I know Max. We talked on the phone just a little while ago. You’re not going back tonight?”

“Charlie got a couple of motel rooms, we plan to take turns sitting with Pedric, keeping him awake. If we’re needed.”

“It will be a big help. He mustn’t sleep, yet.” He gave Clyde a wink. “If you can keep their little cat close to them, maybe pass her back and forth, that will be good medicine for both patients.

“You’ve done well, so far, hiding her.” He glanced up at the screen above Pedric’s bed. “His vital signs are already stronger. Between the five of you,” he said, “you should be able to keep the staff from discovering her.”

“We’re doing our best.”

“Some of the nurses can get testy when a rule is broken.” He scratched Kit’s ears again, in just the way she liked. “If there’s a problem, call my cell number. I’ll be on duty all night, until six A.M.” He jotted the number on two cards, handed one to Clyde, the other to Ryan. He winked at Kit, his blue eyes still laughing. He turned away, slipped out through the glass door, shut it, and pulled the curtain closed.

16

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IT WAS MUCH earlier that night when Misto, wanting company, prowled the cool night looking for Joe and Dulcie or his son, Pan, to share the late and secret hours. Thinking that Pan might be visiting Tessa, he galloped away through paths of moonlight, through shadows as black as soot, trotted across rough oak branches above the narrow alleys, making for the crowded cottages that rose just above the village. Soon, from the roof of Tessa’s small cottage, he looked down on the dark driveway where a reflection of light cut across from the kitchen window.

Backing down the pine tree by the front door and peering in, he watched Debbie at the kitchen table sorting piles of bright new sweaters and blouses and cutting the tags from them. He didn’t scent Pan, and when he moved on to Tessa’s window, there was no sign of him, no red tomcat. When he tried the screen, it was firmly shut and latched, and Tessa slept soundly. He wished she’d wake and talk to him.

He didn’t hide from the child as Pan did, to keep Debbie from knowing he was about. But he didn’t flaunt himself in front of the woman, either. Sometimes he’d come into the yard when Debbie wasn’t watching Tessa, and the child would follow him, slipping away from her mother and sister up across the deserted streets into Emmylou’s yard. If Debbie saw her, she’d drag her home again, she didn’t want the child wandering off after “some stray cat. First that cat up in Oregon, that red-colored cat always hanging around. The fuss you made over it. And now this scrawny yellow one. What is itwith cats, Tessa? Can’t you play with one of your dolls and leave the dirty animals alone? I won’thave it in the house, a dirty stray sneaking in and out carrying fleas and germs and dead mice.”

But up at Emmylou’s, the older woman was kind to Tessa, she liked the shy child, she talked to her just as she talked to Misto, never expecting an answer, just rambled on, and that put Tessa at ease. She would soon curl up on a chair or on the bed close to Misto, watching Emmylou and listening to her random comments and stories, and then she didn’t look pale and pinched anymore. Now as he looked in at Tessa he heard Debbie’s step, and saw the kitchen light go out. He dropped from the sill down into the bushes.

Heading away again, on up to Emmylou’s house, he saw her windows were all dark, her lights already out, and he thought to curl up at the foot of her bed. It was lonely with his own family gone, even staying with the Damens sometimes it was lonely. Slipping in through the old, splintery cat door and through the dim house, he found Emmylou sound asleep. But before settling for a nap on her bed, he leaped to the dresser.

A finger of moonlight through the window reflected across the two pictures of Sammie. The little child. And the grown-up Sammie. Two photos taken sixty years apart, and that long-ago life nudged at him.

He thought about nine-year-old Sammie and how she had confided her fear of the man who followed her mother, and confided her dreams of her uncle Lee Fontana and his last big robbery, a lone bandit in the style of an earlier century making off with saddlebags full of stolen cash, never a hint of conscience or remorse, just a smug smile at the corner of his thin, leathery face. Was this, then, what these old musty bills were about, was this young Sammie’s legacy from Lee Fontana that he’d sent her after he fled the country for Mexico? Misto’s memory of that time was as fragmented as a shattered windowpane, only a few scattered moments coming clear, only a few snatches of that past life.

It was a noise outside from up the hill that drew him away, footsteps moving down the stone stairs from the little building above. Dropping to the floor and slipping outside again, he stood in the shadows of the porch, tail twitching, as the taller man eased down the stone steps carrying a bucket, a spade, and a heavy paper grocery bag. His jacket pockets bulged, too, and on the night breeze Misto caught the money scent. He watched him open the shed and disappear inside. The place was so small it was a wonder he’d gotten that long black car in there and been able to shut the door against its rear bumper. He came out again carrying only the spade and bucket. He knelt beside the stairs and began to dig, dumping crumbling dry earth into the bucket. There was a sense of hardness about him that Misto sometimes encountered in his travels, the cold brutality of some of the men around the coastal fishing docks that made him steer clear of them.

He expected the black car must be stolen, and he wondered what they’d done with their old truck. Maybe it had quit running and they’d traded it, in the way of thieves, for something far more grand. Easing down Emmylou’s wooden steps and then up the hill for a closer look, he veered into deeper shadows as the man carried the full bucket inside and shut the shed door, shut it right in his face, never seeing him.

There was no way to see inside, no windows. The door itself, though ancient, was so tight a fit there wasn’t a crack to peer through. The sounds from within were a dull clunking and gritty scraping, almost as if he were stirring the dirt in the bucket, and then a sliding, rubbing sound, then after a very long while there was another clunk and then silence. Waiting, he grew impatient, and at last he slipped on up the hill and up the stone stairs to the stone room to whatever he might see there.

The one window was crusted with grime, its screen fallen off, lying far away overgrown with weeds. The small pane of glass stood open to the autumn night, and he leaped up to the sill to look in. He could smell the stink of soured food in dirty cans, and of dirty clothes, could see a pile of clothes flung in one corner. The room smelled of the tall man, and of the smaller man and, sharply, the stink of sickness and blood.

Slipping in through the open window onto the short kitchen counter, he dropped as soundlessly as he could down to the grimy linoleum. The man lying in a sleeping bag didn’t stir. He lay curled up like a hurt animal. This was Birely, the same man as in Sammie’s grown-up photo of the two of them, still the same slanted forehead and fat cheeks as the tiny child he had known, same protruding lower lip caught in a permanent pout. His nose and face were a mess of blood and he was breathing through his mouth; he was doubled up in pain, he needed help, but apparently his tall friend didn’t think so. He looked to Misto like he wasn’t far from death. The old cat’s instinct was to find a phone and paw in 911, to alert the medics. Leaping to the sill again, he was out the window racing down through the tangled yard to Emmylou’s dark house, passing the shed where clicking sounds had begun again.

The phone was in the kitchen. He was through the cat door and up onto the counter. He could do it without ever waking Emmylou, he had only to whisper into the speaker, he thought nervously, hoping the call couldn’t be traced, that the dispatcher wouldn’t pick up Emmylou’s number. Hoped Captain Harper and his detectives wouldn’t start looking at innocent Emmylou Warren for the identity of the phantom snitch, for the source of so many informative phone calls over the years when, in truth, Emmylou hadn’t a clue. The older woman had no notion about speaking cats or undercover cats who’d left their pawprints on so many village telephones.

But did Emmylou even have ID blocking? Not likely—why would she? This woman lived the simplest life, she didn’t take a daily paper, didn’t have a TV, didn’t allow herself any amenities that he could see. Why would she pay for ID blocking? If her phone numberwere public knowledge, who did she have to fear? He had lifted a paw to the phone’s speaker when Emmylou’s bedroom light came on.

He heard her moving about and in another minute she came into the kitchen, in her robe and slippers. She glanced at him where he sat innocently beside the phone, and then moved silently out the back door. Stood on the porch looking up at the stone shed, listening to the faint scraping noises from within, then she moved silently down her steps, pulling her robe tighter against the chill. Moved up the hill in her slippers, the hem of her robe catching on weeds and on the overgrown bushes, stood to the side of the closed shed door, listening.

Two more taps, and then another long silence. When footsteps within approached the door, Emmylou ducked into the bushes, crouching comically, her tall form hunkered down among the tangled twigs, her long hair caught on the branches.

The door didn’t open, the footsteps turned away again toward the back, and then again there was silence. So long a pause that Emmylou gave it up, just as Misto had done earlier. Rising, she looked up at the stone room above, stood listening, glanced back at the stone shed and then moved on up the hill as Misto had done, only pulling a small flashlight from her robe pocket and switching it on. The thin path of light picked out patches of wiry grass and the matted damp leaves trampled into a rough path. Twice she paused looking up at the house above her. The stone steps followed the ground only inches above it, and only near the top did she move from the yard up onto them, her damp slippers making no sound. On the little landing she switched the light off, and moved directly to the dirty window, again as Misto had done, and she peered in.

Even in the near dark she must have seen the figure doubled up on the floor, or maybe she heard Birely moan. She looked back down the long empty flight, making sure the man hadn’t left the shed and was watching, then she shone her light in.

She stiffened when she saw Birely. Even with his bloodied nose, she had to know him from Sammie’s pictures, and maybe she knew him, too, from when Sammie was alive? “Birely?Oh, my.What … ?” But even as she spoke, Misto saw the taller man slip out of the garage.

The doors had made no sound, only when he closed them was there the faintest scrape—but enough to startle Emmylou. As she turned, he saw her. He froze, then ducked into the bushes and was gone. Misto could hear him moving away, bumbling in the darkness crackling the branches, but then, as if gathering his wits, he moved on nearly silent as a cat.

Emmylou stood looking where he’d vanished, not where he was now. And then she ran, down the stairs and down the hill, up her own steps and into her cottage, and Misto heard the door lock behind her. Racing after her and in through the cat door, he watched her snatch up the phone and dial the three digits. He could hear the little canned voice at the other end, faint as a bee buzz, as the dispatcher questioned her.

When she’d hung up the phone, she fetched the crowbar, stood hefting it, looking out the kitchen window at the back porch. Misto rubbed against her ankles, wondering how Birely had been hurt so bad, wondering whether Birely would die, wondering why he still cared so much. Wondering why those lives, long past, had returned to haunt him so sharply, or whyhe had returned to this particular place and time. To play a part in Birely’s sad life? Or, perhaps, so he could know the last, sad fate of his little Sammie?

17

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HAVING LEFT PEDRIC’S room hidden in Clyde’s backpack curled up atop his spare sweatshirt, Kit lay now beneath Lucinda’s white covers pressed between the bars of the hospital bed and Lucinda’s warm, familiar side. Her housemate seemed frail and vulnerable in her heavy bandages and cast, and wearing only the flimsy hospital gown. Whenever Lucinda slept, Kit drifted off, too. She woke when Lucinda stirred sleepily and stroked her back and head. Wilma sat close beside the bed in a folding metal chair, her brocade carryall hanging on a knob of the bed where Kit could slip easily down into it. Three times within the last hour, the nurse had come in. Each time, Wilma had risen to distract her, asking needless questions, going into useless detail about Lucinda’s condition and care—maybe if she made a pest of herself the nurse would stay out of there for a while.

But nurses weren’t easily distracted. This small, square Latina woman had answered Wilma’s questions briefly as she checked and replenished the IV bottle and went about tidying up, picking up discarded tissues and adhesive tape and paper wrappers from the metal table, and then bringing Lucinda a fresh pitcher of water. Clyde was down the hall with Pedric, but soon someone would come to relieve him and to pass Kit back to Pedric again—like a library book forever changing hands. The time, by the big round clock above Lucinda’s bed, was three A.M. and despite Kit’s satisfaction at being with Lucinda, the predawn hour made her incredibly lonely.

This was the cats’ hour, the shank of the night, the time when, if she were at home, she would be bolting out her cat door and down her oak tree to hunt the hills with Pan. Or they’d be lounging in her tree house listening to little animal sounds bursting suddenly out in the silent dark. But tonight, here in this strange town and strange building, shut in this small unfamiliar room among unpleasant hospital smells, she felt edgy and dislocated.

She knew that Lucinda and Pedric, lying bound to their beds, felt much worse, helpless and so far from home, felt far more displaced than she.

There were no windows in the ER—when dawn did come Lucinda wouldn’t be able to look out at the sky, at the first hint of sun as she so liked to do. She always rose from bed when the sky was barely light, would put on the coffee and then, with the house smelling deliciously of that dark brew, she would sit at the dining tablesipping her first cup, looking out through the big corner windows enjoying the sunrise, watching its blush brighten and then slowly fade again and daylight spill golden onto their little corner of the world, onto the round and friendly hills and the intricate tangle of rooftops spread out all belowher.

And Kit herself, if they were at home, as they should be, would soon return from hunting. Another two hours and she’d bolt into the house as dawn broke, Pedric and Lucinda up and showered and in the kitchen making breakfast. She’d sit on the windowsill cleaning up, washing off the blood of the hunt. She’d long for a nap but breakfast would win, the three of them would enjoy waffles and bacon and then headout for a walk up the hills or through the nearly deserted village streets looking in the shop windows.

Would they do that ever again? Would her housemates come home healthy and well, ready to enjoy their long, free rambles and simple adventures?

But she knew in her little cat bones that they would, just as she knew the dawn was on its way, just as any cat at this hour would wake and begin to prowl restlessly—knowing something good was coming. Soon her housemates would be home again, as eager and hardy as ever; stubbornly Kit clung to that thought with a keen and sharp-clawed resolve.

She could hear, up and down the ward, little clinking sounds as late-night medications were prepared or other mysterious routines attended to. The smells of alcohol and human bodily wastes were not Kit’s favorite scents; she longed for the smell of new grass and its sweet, cool taste. Around her the ER, though still shrouded in the hush of night, was slowly beginning to stir, the steps of the nurses quickening as they attended to late-night medications. Glass doors to several little rooms wereslid open, curtains were drawn back. Whenever their night nurse left them alone, pulling the door closed as Wilma requested, the three of them talked in whispers. Lucinda sometimes slipped into sleep, but always when she woke she asked after Pedric.

“He’s feeling better,” Wilma told her, “the concussion’s not a bad one. As soon as we get home, the knee will be repaired. Clyde’s with him now, to keep him awake.” And they talked again about that lost world where Kate had gone to learn about her forebears and had found only a dying civilization. All the anticipated magic was gone, only the cruelest creatures still blazing strong with their greedy hunger.

Wilma, like the Greenlaws, was comfortable with Kate’s secrets. While Clyde, like Joe Grey, shied away from the tales. But, Kit wondered, what did Ryan think?

Ryan had cleaved easily enough to the knowledge that Joe Grey could talk, she hadn’t been terribly shocked the first time the gray tomcat spoke to her—but still, Ryan had been raised in a hardheaded law enforcement family. Where were the limits of her sometimes willing imagination? What did she really think of a world teeming with remnants from the old Celtic tales that so embraced the cats’ own history?

And what, Kit thought,will Pan think, when he learns where Kate has been?

She could imagine Pan’s amber eyes blazing with a keen and hungry fascination, with a bold curiosity that would lead,where?

Kit herself had long ago come to terms with her own dreams of such exotic ventures, she had turned resolutely away from her own longing to descend down into the darkest pockets of the earth. When she was very young, when she first came to Molena Point, she had been drawn to Hellhag Cave that cleaved the hills south of the village, to its mystery, had sensed that dark fissure leading down and down, and down again deeper than any cat she knew had ever gone, she had longed to wander there, to discover whatever she might confront that would surprise and amaze her. Only fear—or a touch of good sense—had held her back. Then later she had been drawn to the cellars and caverns beneath the ruined Pamillon mansion that rose in the east hills above the village, intrigued by those dark clefts beneath the fallen buildings. But again she was afraid, she sensed evil there and a destruction she wouldn’t dare to face.

But Pan was bolder. What would he do with Kate’s secret? She thought Pan had never turned from danger. Her red tomcat had a hunger for adventure that had sent him traveling the coast of Oregon and half of California, one small cat alone never turning from a new and frightening adventure.Oh, she thought,when he hears Kate’s tale will he want to go there? Will he go away to follow the harpies and chimeras through that evil land, will he leave me for that adventure?

Or would he want me to go with him down to that dying place that could destroy us both?

VIC WATCHED EMMYLOU hurry down the hill tripping on the hem of her robe, watched her double-time up her own steps and inside. She was going to call an ambulance or call the cops, the damned old busybody. He should have done Birely while he had the chance, and now it was too late. Unless he could stop her, push on in and grab the phone from her. Had she even locked the door? He’d started down, two steps at a time, but then he thought about the car.

He had to get the Lincoln out of there before the cops came swarming all over. Maybe he’d been foolish stashing the money there, but where else could he have hidden it? He thought about moving the money before the cops arrived because it was too late to move the car, but he didn’t have time for that. He was reaching to open the shed when the whoop of the ambulance nearly deafenedhim, its flashing lights stabbing between the trees, a white medic’s van pulling up into Emmylou’s dirt driveway.

He eased back into the bushes as four medics in dark uniforms piled out and Emmylou came out her door onto the little porch and started down to them. He watched the shorter medic with the mustache follow her up the hill while the other three hauled out their trappings: stretcher, oxygen tank, black bags, and fancy stuff he couldn’t name. Sure as hell, there’d be a patrol car right behind them. What he couldn’t figure was, why would that old woman call the medics for a sick tramp? Why would she care?

And where would they take Birely? Some fancy emergency room? What if he started talking, if they gave him drugs for the pain and he got blabby, talking about the money, got some cop curious enough to start asking questions. Emmylou paused up on the stone porch while the medics hurried inside. That yellow cat had followed her winding around her ankles, damn thing gave him the shivers, he could see it there in the bushes, it kept looking at him, its yellow tail twitching in a way that madehim twitch.

They took a long time in there. He grew cold in his light jacket. He crouched in the bushes hugging himself, antsy to get the car out. What had that old woman told the dispatcher? Had she said there’d been a breakin? Would she want them to search the whole damn property? Two medics came out of the stone house carrying Birely on a stretcher. Emmylou stood to the side, watching. Damned old do-gooder. A third medic, dark-skinned Latino, was asking her questions, writing down her answers on a clipboard. Vic watched her sign a paper when he passed the clipboard to her, and wondered what that was about.

She couldn’t be making herself responsible for some tramp she didn’t know, she couldn’t be promising to pay his medical bill? Talk about a bleeding heart.

Ordid she know Birely? Maybe Sammie’d had pictures, family pictures. Maybe this old woman recognized him and had got all sentimental over Sammie’s little brother? Or maybe she knew Birely from when Sammie was alive? Birely had come here once in a while but Vic couldn’t remember if he said he’d ever saw anyone but Sammie.

If this old woman had any sense, she’d let charity or the government pick up the bill. The medics had to take Birely to the emergency room, it was the law, and the hospital had to treat him, the law said they couldn’t refuse. So whypay for it? Hell of a waste of money. He watched the white van back around in the old woman’s driveway and move on down the hill again, heading for some ER. Watched Emmylou head back down to her house, her bathrobe pulled tight around her. The black-and-white never had showed up. What had she told the dispatcher? Just that there was a man sick up there, and nothing about a breakin? Maybe said he was renting the place—all to protect Sammie’s little brother? He waited a few minutes, was about to slip back down to the shed when she hurried out again, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, and got in her old Chevy. Hell, she was going to follow the van to the hospital. What a patsy.When she started the car it belched out a puff of dark exhaust. Yellow cat crouched on the porch watching her back out and head away following the medics, and Vic thought uneasily about Birely there in the hospital blabbing about the money.

He waited until the Chevy had disappeared, then headed for the shed, smiling. Maybe he could silence Birely right there in the ER, and wouldn’t that be a laugh. Shut him up before he spouted off about the money and the fancy Lincoln they’d stolen or, worse, about some of Vic’s own, earlier ventures. If Birely died in the ER before he started bragging about Vic’s successful robberies, and maybe about that store clerk he hadn’t meant to kill, if Birely died right there under the care of a doctor, how could he, Vic, be responsible?

18

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HEADING FOR THE hospital following two blocks behind Emmylou, her old green Chevy nearly bumper to bumper with the ambulance, Vic spotted the turn-in to Emergency but went on by. He drove on half a mile farther, turning into a wooded neighborhood with big, expensive houses set back among the trees, their grounds softly lit by fancy lanterns but only a few windows showing lights, at this hour. Rolling his car window down, he heard no barking dog. There was no one on the street, no night joggers with their fancy, lighted shoes, no reflective gear of a cyclist who might prefer the empty streets of night, no late partiers headed home. Big houses, three-and four-car garages, but most of the driveways empty. He drove until he found a place with two cars parked in front, a Mercedes and a Jag, and a Toyota sitting on the street. Pulling over beside the Toyota and killing the engine, he got out, slipping a short, oversized Phillips screwdriver from his back pocket.

In less time than it would take the householder to hear some tiny sound and turn on the lights, he was driving away again with his new license plates on the seat beside him. He stopped ten blocks away and switched the plates on the Lincoln, smearing on a little of the Lincoln’s damp mud to make them match the rest of the car. Then he headed back to the hospital, following the big red signs to the emergency entrance at the mouth of the underground parking garage, easing the muddy, dented Lincoln along the first level to the back row where cops coming into the ER mightnot notice it.

Parking, he hit the lock button on the pendant with the key and walked back to the emergency room’s wide glass doors, thinking about somewhere secure where he could hide the Town Car later for a few hours, get it out of sight. He couldn’t take it back to the stone shed; the minute the EMTs filed their report with the PD, the cops’d be all over the place, the stone shack and Emmylou’s house, too. And, in the ER, they’d be all over Birely, wanting to know how he got hurt, asking who else was involved, asking him why he’d been staying in an empty house with only a sleeping bag and where was his friend that the other sleeping bag belonged to?

Approaching the glass doors of the emergency room, he saw an ambulance parked down at a garagelike bay, which stood open but was dark inside. He saw no activity there, no sign of any medics, no stretcher or gurney visible. He moved on up the few steps to the glass doors of the admittance room; they slid open automatically for him. He was hardly inside, moving on past the clerk at the desk hoping she wouldn’t try to stop him, when he spotted Emmylou sitting in a small glass cubicle to his left. Her back was to him, facing a desk where a young man in a white shirt and V-necked sweater was filling out papers. Turning away, he moved into the general seating area, sitting as near to Emmylou as he could, hoping to hear what she was saying. She didn’t know him, she’d never seen him that he knew of, but he picked up a magazine to hide his face. He couldn’t hear much through the glass, and their voices broken by the conversation of passing orderlies and nurses going in and out, carrying clipboards, pushing wheelchair-bound patients on into the ER. He’d catch a few words and then the meaning would be interrupted. He was pretty sure Emmylou was passing herself off as Birely’s sister, he heard her clearly when she said there were no other relatives. He waited until the clerk led Emmylou down a short hall to a set of heavy double doors and used his ID card to open them. Quickly Vic followed, slipping in behind them, moving on down the row of small glass rooms as if intent on his own business. Center of the big space was all open, with an island of counters and desks. The clerk at the nearest desk gave him a look. He nodded at her and moved on past. Maybe his stained chinos and worn-out windbreaker got her attention, and his mud-stained jogging shoes. If he had to make another trip here, he’d have to do something about clothes, find something to wear that didn’t make him stand out. Several cubicles down, he turned back to see where the clerk had led Emmylou, and nearly ran into two employees, right behind him. They were both in blue scrubs, with ID badges pinned to the pockets. They stood blocking his way, their expressions bland but businesslike. The white-haired woman’s badge said NELLIE MACKLE, RN. Short hair, thin, a small woman, maybe a hundred pounds, and no physical threat to him, but her dark eyes set him back, hard and challenging. “Are you looking for a patient?”

“My neighbor. My neighbor was brought in,” he said. “At least I think they brought him here. Birely Miller? I heard he was hurt in a car accident, all the lights went on at the house and then I heard the ambulance and I thought … Well, he’s kind of a loner, I wanted to know if he’s all right, if there’s anything I can do.”

Nurse Mackle glanced back down the hall, where Emmylou stood in the doorway of one of the glass cubicles, number 12, then stepped behind a desk to a computer. She looked at the screen for a moment, returned to Vic, but said nothing. The man, whose hospital badge had no name, looked down at Vic from a healthy six foot four. Dark skin, dark brown eyes that looked soft and understanding, but with a gleam of challenge. Big hands loose at his sides, his fingers twitching just a little.

“Only family is allowed,” Nurse Mackle said. “If you’ll give us your name, we’ll pass it on to his sister, she can let you know his condition.”

Vic said his name was Allen James, that he lived four blocks down from Birely. He made up a phone number. She wrote down his information, nodded, and looked meaningfully toward the big double doors. Her dark friend’s look, too, implied serious consequences if Vic didn’t do as she suggested.

He left the two, feeling like a felon, turned away knowing their eyes followed him. He moved on behind another nurse who was headed for the big, closed doors just beside a unisex bathroom. Most California bathrooms were unisex like this one, the door marked with both his and hers symbols and, in this case, a picture indicating wheelchair access. When he glanced back, the two inquisitors had moved on away, but as he passed the last little room and was about to go on out through the big doors, voices made him turn back to a brightly lit cubicle.

Its glass doors and canvas curtain were open. The patient filled the whole bed, his broad shoulders crowded against the side bars, his feet pressed against the bottom rail. Beside the bed a small woman, round and wrinkle faced, fuzzy hair the color of old newspapers, stood talking with a dark-haired, white-coated doctor.“You might want to go on home, Mrs. Emory, and get some rest. In a little while I’ll be moving Michael to ICU, I want to run some more tests, and watch him for a few days. That was a bad fall he took.”

When he glanced up, Vic turned away, facing the door to the bathroom as if he were waiting his turn.“He can have one or two visitors at a time, Mrs. Emory, but they’re not to stay long, you understand.”

Vic turned his back to them, trying not to smile. With the patient’s name, he had all he needed to get back into the ER without being interrogated. When the door to the bathroom opened and a woman stepped out, Vic stepped on in. He used the facilities, ignored the sign that said wASH YOUR HANDS,and left. Keeping his back to Michael Emory’s room, he pressed his hand to the mark on the wall as he’d seen the nurse do, watched the big double doors swing open. He moved quickly out through the waiting room to the dim parking garage; he still had things to do. He needed a change of clothes, and a haircut. Maybe a barbershop cut, not just him snipping around his ears with a pair of rusty scissors, making a mess. A haircut could go a long way toward keeping the cops off your back.

He’d gone through the packages in the Lincoln again, there was some expensive stuff there, all right. Maybe he could add a few things to it, unload the whole lot with that fence. Them bolts of heavy cloth for covering a chair or sofa, fancier, for sure, than the kind of upholstery goods they used in prison industries to cover the cheap office chairs they turned out. He’d found the old folks’ two suitcases in the trunk under all the other packages, and had gone through them. Maybe he could sell the clothes, the woman’s stuff had labels so well known even he recognized the value. But among the old man’s stuff there was nothing for him to wear, even if it would fit. Two dress suits, white shirts and ties, the kind of clothes that would call attention to himself in just the opposite way from his own stained jeans and mended windbreaker.

Maybe when he returned to the hospital he could lift a pair of blue scrubs like everyone wore in there. He’d blend right in, except for the badge. Everyone he saw, nurses, orderlies, was wearing a badge. Did these people wear their scrubs to work, or put them on here? Maybe they got them from a supply closet, same as they’d get clean towels and sheets? And did they keep the closets locked?

He could think of a dozen ways to get tripped up, though, stealing hospital clothes. He kicked himself again for not snuffing Birely when they were alone and he’d had the chance. If he’d done him then, he’d be long gone by now, and wouldn’t have all these details in his way.

But maybe Birely was so bad he wouldn’t have to help him along, maybe before the night was over, the hand of fate would end the poor wimp’s misery.

Heading upstairs to the main level, he glanced at his watch. Nearly four A.M. He found a phone, got the information he wanted. He was back down on the dim parking deck by four-thirty, easing the Lincoln out of the covered garage, turning down toward the freeway. Taking the on-ramp south, back toward the village, he wanted to get cleaned up, change his looks if he could, and get into some clothes that didn’t make people stare at him.

He had the Lincoln’s registration in his pocket giving the address, and now he had the phone number. One of the keys on the ring had to be the key to the Greenlaws’ house, where the old man would have plenty of clothes. Let them two old folks give him a helping hand, it was their fault his truck was wrecked. If they’d been traveling at a decent speed he’d have been past the slide when the rocks fell, would have been well away from the damn delivery truck and would have never crashed into it.

Leaving the ER, he had wandered the main floor of the hospital until he found the courtesy phone on a little table in one of the seating areas. A nice amenity so patients’ families like him, he thought smiling, could make local calls. Sitting down on the couch, he’d punched in 411, hoping Santa Cruz was in the same area code, because the phone sure as hell wouldn’t reach long distance. Even these free spenders weren’t going to let you call all over the country, at the expense of Peninsula Hospital.

But he’d lucked out, it was all the same code. He’d found the hospital pen he’d put in his pocket, jotted the names and numbers on a magazine, of the two Santa Cruz hospitals. He’d called Dominican first, asked for the room of Pedric Greenlaw, and he hit it right. The guy was there, secure in a hospital bed, maybe an hour away from Molena Point, and no way he’d be home tonight. He was advised that the patient was sleeping and that he should call back in the morning.

“And Lucinda Greenlaw?” he’d said, repeating her name from the car registration.

The operator would not disturb Mrs. Greenlaw, either, at this hour.“Try around eight in the morning, when the patients are awake,” she’d said shortly.

Hanging up, he’d called local information again, for the Molena Point residence of Pedric Greenlaw. It was listed, all right—as if the Greenlaws had no idea someone would want their information for less than a friendly social call. When he was automatically connected, the phone rang twelve times before he hung up. He waited a few minutes and then called twice more, let each call ring a long time, but still there was no answer. Jingling the Greenlaws’ keys, he’d headed back through the hospital and down the stairs, out through ER to the parking garage.

Before he pulled out, he’d gone through the glove compartment of the Lincoln again, found the local map stuffed in with a handful of Northern California maps, this one a colorful tourist edition meant for out-of-town visitors. He’d found the Greenlaws’ street, and now he headed there, down the freeway and off into the hills above the village.

The neighborhood was wooded with scattered oaks, and dark as hell with no streetlights. He saw no light in any window. No house numbers in the village, either. But higher up on the hill there were numbers on the curbs, in reflective paint. Driving slowly, he found the Greenlaws’ place and pulled up in front.

The drive and garden were lit by low lamps at ground level, real fancy. The driveway and walk were of stone, a huge oak tree overhanging the garage. He could see a tree house up among the branches, as if maybe these people had grandkids. He sat looking and listening. There was no sound, no lights, no window open with curtains blowing, all was dead still.

He looked for a button on the car’s overhead that would open the garage door. How much noise would that make, to alert the neighbors? Some of them doors were as loud as a stump grinder. At last he decided to risk it. If there was no other car in there, that was one more good indication he was alone.

He finally found the button in the visor. The door slid up with hardly a sound. He smiled at the empty two-car space, pulled on in, and killed the engine. Hitting the button to slide the door closed behind him, he fished his flashlight from his pocket and stepped out of the Town Car.

He tried three keys before he had the inner door open. Shielding the flashlight, he moved in through a hall that opened to a laundry and bath, and then on into a big, raftered living room, high ceiling, windows all along two sides. The drapes were open and through the tall glass he could see the lights of the village down below, all pretty damn fancy. Garden lights at the back, too, a level lower, picking out a narrow deck that probably opened to a daylight basement. No light shone from that level out onto the deck or bushes, but in case anyone was sleeping down there, he took off his shoes. Still shielding the flashlight, he checked out the living room.

Big, flat-screen TV hidden in a cabinet, that should bring a nice sum but would be a bitch to haul around, there wasn’t room in the Lincoln unless he dumped what he already had in there. CD and DVD players and music system were small enough to tuck in the car. Nothing else of much value in that room, a wall full of old, worn-looking books along the back, cracked leather bindings, nothing worth taking. In the dining room they’d cut a cat door in the window, at table height, he supposed for that cat they’d had with them. People were weird about their pets. There was a kind of study in one corner of the living room, desk and computer and more books, floor-to-ceiling books, all of them old. The money these people had, why didn’t they buy some new ones, buy some of them fancy bestsellers with bright covers?

There was just the one bedroom, but it was nearly as big as the living room, with a bath and two closets, his and hers. In the old guy’s closet he tried on several pairs of pants and sport coats, looking at himself in the full-length mirror. Everything fit pretty good. He settled on a tweed sport coat, tan chinos, and a brown cotton turtleneck, a pair of soft leather Rockports that were stretched enough to fit his larger feet.

In the bathroom he dared a light, closing the shutters first, pushing their louvers tight together. Rooting through the drawers, he abandoned the idea of a barber, he didn’t want to wait until one opened, and he didn’t want some guy to ID him later. Small town, cops poking around, in and out of places, asking questions. He found a pair of scissors and set about trimming off his long hair, and that took him a while. Felt strange as his hair dropped away, made himfeel naked. Belatedly he spread out a towel to catch the mess, sweeping what had fallen onto it with his hand, trying not to leave evidence. When he’d done as good as he could, he found a razor and shaved the back of his neck, holding a hand mirror he’d found on the woman’s side of the cabinets, twisting awkwardly to see.

He shaved off his short scraggly beard, which never would grow thick the way he wanted. He took a shower, using a big thick towel on the rack. He slapped on the old guy’s aftershave, which had a lime smell. He found clean shorts and socks in a dresser drawer, and pulled on the brown turtleneck. Posing in the full-length mirror, he thought he looked pretty good. Except for his white, newly shaven cheeks and chin and the back of his neck. He rooted around among the woman’s things, looking in the medicine cabinet and in drawers, but couldn’t find any bottle of colored makeup to disguise the pale marks.

It took him a while, in the kitchen, working by flashlight, to figure out the fancy microwave. In the freezer he found a package of spaghetti, read the directions, opened it, and shoved it in. While he waited, he put his own clothes in the washer, threw his canvas jogging shoes in, too. While the washer rumbled away, and with the spaghetti smelling good, he opened a cold beer from the refrigerator door.

Retrieving his supper, he found a plate to put it on, and sat down at the table where he could look down at the village lights. He even found a paper napkin, tucked it in the high turtleneck to keep it clean. How would it be to live like this, in a fancy house? Well, hell, with the money he’d stashed in the Lincoln, and maybe twenty thousand more when he unloaded the car itself, he could live any way he wanted.

But not in a house like this. Not in a tame village like this where he’d be bored out of his mind. The kind of money he had now would put him in Vegas or some Caribbean island with plenty of action. Party all night, poker and roulette tables to help him double or triple what he had, and a choice of showgirls offering anything he could pay for.

Finished eating, he dumped his dish in the sink. He’d meant to make his way back to the hospital tonight, what was left of the night. Walk right on in, with his new, respectable look, take care of Birely and be done with it. But when he thought of going back there so soon, and maybe with those same goons on duty, he decided to hide the Lincoln first, maybe around Debbie Kraft’s place, empty houses on the streets around her. He couldn’t think of a better neighborhood. That woman contractor was around there some, but he could avoid her. Meantime, tonight, he wouldn’t turn down a few hours’ sleep, he thought, yawning.

Moving into the bedroom again, he undressed, folded his new clothes all neat on the upholstered bedroom chair, and climbed naked into the old folks’ bed, sliding down under the thick quilt. Before he switched off the flashlight, its beam on the pillow picked out a couple of dark cat hairs. He flicked them off with disgust, turned the pillow over, got himself comfortable, and dropped into a deep, untroubled sleep.

19

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MISTO, HAVING WATCHED the four EMTs load Birely into the ambulance and head away for the hospital, sat now on Emmylou’s porch, alone, pondering again Birely’s presence there in the village, Birely whose grown-up photograph in Emmylou’s house was neatly inscribed along the bottom with his name and Sammie’s and the date the picture was taken, just a few years ago. Once when he’d hopped up on the dresser for yet another look, Emmylou had laughed at him. “You’re an art critic now? I took that picture myself, with my old box camera, took it right out on the highway by the market where Sammie and I used to work. Took it one time Birely showed up, the way he did without ever letting her know, stoppedoff at the village from wherever he’d been wandering.”

Misto had already died by the time Birely was born, the family already out in California, he was dead but he’d never left Sammie’s side. Call him a ghost cat or whatever one liked, he’d stayed near her as they headed for the West Coast, stayed nearby through all that happened to her and to Lee Fontana, moving effortlessly in and out of their lives. Seeking to protect them, to face off whatever would harm the old man or the child. He’d been protective of Sammie’s little brother, too, when Birely came along, and now in this different life he still felt protective of that little boy grown up and grown older. Birely was still irresponsible and maybe often useless in his ways but he was still Sammie’s brother, lying alone in that cold stone house injured and hurting until Emmylou had discovered him and saw that he was cared for. When she’d left for the hospital behind the EMTs, Misto had paused at the edge of her yard, undecided whether to follow.

It was a long journey up to the hospital through tangled woods, down through a deep ravine, and across the busy freeway. Even if he could avoid the coyotes and occasional loose dogs, and dodge the fast cars, even if his aging bones didn’t give out, it wasn’t likely he could slip inside unseen through those bright halls, among so many people, and find Birely’s room. Even if he got that far, how could he help Birely? He was only mortal, now. What couldhe do to help? He’d been more effective as a ghost without the limitations of a mortal body—and without the aches and pains. When he was spirit alone, he could appear suddenly wherever and whenever he chose, and more often than not he could subtly influence others with his whispers, just as he’d prodded toughold Lee Fontana.

He knew he’d had an effect on Lee’s life, that he had hazed Lee away from some of the more shameful moves he’d considered. Even that last big robbery, when Lee held his forty-five to the head of the cowering postal clerk, Lee hadn’t hurt the man. How much of that was due to Fontana’s own sense of kindness, which he couldn’t seem to escape, and how much to Misto’s influence, would never be clear—though Lee’s successful escape from the law was Lee’s own sly plan. Misto couldn’t take credit for that any more than he could be blamed for the darker presence that harassed Lee, and that Misto had sought to drive away.

But Misto’s own ghostly power hadn’t lasted long, and he found himself again among the living, encumbered again by a living cat’s uncertain existence, by the forces of pain and of joy that the mortal world bestowed, and now by the pains and aches of old age descending on him once more; he didn’t like that part of growing old.

Deciding against that perilous journey to the hospital, he left Emmylou’s yard wanting companionship, wanting the other cats to talk with, Joe and Dulcie and his son, Pan. Scrambling up a pine to Emmylou’s roof, he looked down upon the shabby neighborhood of small old cottages, to the village stretching out beyond, and to the vast expanse of lonely peaks and steepridges that sheltered the coastal town. Tonight he had no heart for wandering, for roaming through the chill wind and the unforgiving dark, and he headed back to Joe Grey’s house, to the most welcoming home he knew while his own two humans were absent. Maybe Joe was there now and would claw away his uncertain feelings, make him laugh again, and to hell with getting old.

Padding morosely over the roofs, the way seemed long tonight and the sea wind was unkind. He was deeply chilled by the time he reached Joe Grey’s tower. Bellying in through one of the six windows, he found Joe’s heap of cushions empty. Pushing on in through the cat door, leaving it flapping behind him, he crouched on the nearest rafter, looking over, down into the upstairs suite.

The big double bed had been slept in but was now empty, the covers thrown back in a heap. A fleece robe lay crumpled on the floor, a silk nightie flung over a chair. The doors to the walk-in closet stood open, a shirt dropped on the floor inside. Where had they gone, in such a hurry in the middle of the night? He looked down at Clyde’s little office, his desk hidden by piles of papers, and through the open doors into Ryan’s studio. The house smelled empty and sounded hollow, he had no sense of anyone there among the unseen rooms, not even Rock. The big silver dog, the minute he heard the cat door, would have been right there huffing at him, making a fuss. Rock was not in the house, the only living soul present was little Snowball, curled up on the love seat, so deeply asleep that even the flapping cat door hadn’t woken her. The sleep of an aging cat, her sweet spirit floating deep, deep down among her hoard of dreams.

But what had gone down, here? Why had Ryan and Clyde risen in the middle of the night and left the house? Some emergency, someone hurt? Feeling a cold chill suddenly for his own humans, who would be traveling now on their way home, he dropped down from the rafter onto the desk, jolting his poor bones, and set about searching for a note or phone number jotted hastily, for some clue to where they had gone and, most important, for any hurried notation about John and Mary Firetti. Perhaps for some note from the veterinarian who was temporarily minding the practice and feeding John’s feral band of shore cats.

He found nothing. Slipping down to the floor, he looked for some bit of paper that might have fallen. Again, nothing. He padded into Ryan’s studio beneath its high rafters and tall, bare windows. Trotting beneath the big drawing board, circling the solid oak desk and blueprint cabinet, he looked out the west window, down at the drive where he had not thought to look before while he was still on the roof.

The king cab was gone, only Clyde’s antique roadster was there, parked to one side and shrouded in its canvas cover. He circled the studio again, then prowled the bedroom, tracking Rock’s scent back and forth as he’d followed close behind Ryan and Clyde from bed to bath to closet, back again to the stairs, and down. But thenhe thought, not only his own family was headed home. So were the Greenlaws and Kit. Could something have happened to them, on the road or before they left the city? He leaped onto the desk again, eyeing the answering machine.

He’d never used one of these. He nosed uncertainly at the flashing red light. Warily he punched the play button, hoping he wouldn’t erase whatever was there.

Nothing happened. He punched again. There was a long, annoying buzz and the red light flashed and then died. The green light blinked twice and died, too. No lights now and only silence. He hissed at the uncooperative lump of plastic, hoped he hadn’t erased anything, and turned away. His medieval life—what he remembered of it—might have been harsh, but one didn’t have to deal with machines. And the machines of young Sammie’s time had been simple ones, even cars had been slower and more predictable. Leaping from the desk to the filecabinet and across to the love seat, he climbed into Snowball’s crumpled blanket close to her, and curled up. She woke only a little, looking at him vaguely. He spoke nonsense to her, as much to comfort himself as to comfort her. He washed her face and licked her ears, talking to her as Clyde andRyan or Joe would do, telling her what a fine cat she was.

But soon she began to grow restless, to glance toward the stairs and toward the kitchen below. Leaping down, he led her down the stairs to her kibble bowl, which of course had been licked clean. He hopped from a chair to the counter, pawed open the cupboards until he found her box of kibble. With considerable maneuvering, and spilling quite a lot, he managed to tip the box on its side and send a cascade of little, aromatic pellets raining down over the side, some of it into the bowl. He sat atop the counter looking over, watching her gobble up the dry little morsels, watching her drink her fill at the water dish, her curved tongue carrying water into her pink mouth like a little spoon. She didn’t offer to jump up on the counter, her arthritis was worse than his. Snowball’s face was getting long, her belly dragging with age.

But she still handled the stairs all right, and when they headed back up, she settled into the exact same spot on her blanket again. When, purring, Misto stretched out near her, she looked at him expectantly. He looked back, puzzled—it was frustrating that his feline cousins couldn’t talk to him, that, despite a vast repertoire of body language, they couldn’t communicate their desires exactly, as a speaking cat could.

But he could see she wanted him to talk again, wanted to hear his voice. Snowball, too, was lonely, she wanted to hold on to the rambling cadences of a speaking voice. Clyde and Ryan often read to this little cat, the same way the Greenlaws read to Kit, or as Wilma Getz read to Dulcie, in bed at night. Just as Mary and John Firetti read to Misto himself, though John’s reading too often involved veterinary journals that put him right to sleep. The difference was that the speaking cats understood all of the tale, while, for Snowball, the excitement and drama of the story lay in the tone of voice, in the emotion that one could impart.

Now, tonight, Snowball needed a story. To please her, and to distract himself from his own worries, too, he told her about his kittenhood in that long-ago Georgia time, about the steamy summers, playing in the grassy yard with small Sammie behind the white picket fence, playing with a little rubber ball she threw for him, or climbing together up the twisting oak tree that shaded the little front lawn. He left out the bad parts that happened later; and he left out the way he himself had died. He gave Snowball a happy tale, nothing angry in his voice to spoil her dreams, no dark shadow of Brad Falon stalking Sammie and her mother. Where was Sammie, now that she was gone from this world? Did humans, like cats, return to experience more than one life on this earth? Or did human spirits go on somewhere else altogether, wandering farther than Misto himself could ever imagine?

And what about a cat, once his nine lives were finished? Did he move on, too, as a human might? Did a cat at last rejoin his human companions? So many questions, and not even the wisest cat or human could know the true answer. All Misto knew was, there were more adventures to come than one could see from the confines of a single life. And that, from the other side, looking back, one saw many more patterns to the tangles of mortal life than were apparent while you were still there.

But, speaking his thoughts to Snowball and telling his tale, half his mind still worried uneasily at what had taken Clyde and Ryan out in the small hours. He didn’t like the absence of the other cats, either, when usually one or another would come wandering in through Joe’s tower, or he’d see someone silhouetted out on the rooftops, someone to race away with and laugh with. Thankful for Snowball’s presence, he pushed closer still to the white cat and closed his eyes, and tried mightily to purr, to lull himself into a soothing sleep, too.

20

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BIRELY LAY BENEATH the bright lights in the operating room, sedated but awake, his nose numbed by a local anesthetic as Dr. Susan Hunter leaned over him working swiftly, carefully rebuilding the shattered bone. With normal breathing impossible, with the breath sucked through his mouth too ragged and labored, she could not administer a general anesthetic. She was a thin woman, wiry and strong. Pale dishwater hair barely visible beneath her blue cap, long, thin hands, long fingers, a light, sure touch with the surgical instruments. Birely lay relaxed, deeply comforted by the welcome cessation of pain, his waking dreams happy ones; he was a little child again safe between his parents, not a grown man tramping some dusty road to nowhere, with no home to come to at the end of the day. No watchful traveling companions waiting to separate him from any small amount of cash he might have in his jeans, no overnights in a strange jail for some petty crime that, usually, his buddies had committed. His childhood memories were far different and more comforting—until the last memory grew frightening and he became restless, fidgeting on the table.

Sammie had told him this story many times, it happened when she was just nine and Birely wasn’t born yet. Her daddy was gone away in the Second World War, her mama working as a bookkeeper in their small Georgia town. The town had three gas stations, one of which their daddy would later buy, when he returned from the war. Sammie and her mother lived in a small rented house that would havebeen peaceful if not for an old schoolmate who, the minute her daddy was sent overseas, began to pester Becky, coming around the house uninvited wanting to spend time with her, a pushy man who frightened young Sammie with his cold eyes and slippery ways. Sammie had a cat then, a big yellow tom who liked the man no better. On the night Brad Falon came there drunk, knocking and then pounding, not beseeching anymore but demanding to be let in, it was the cat who at last drove him away.

When Falon pounded, Sammie’s mother bolted the door and ran to the phone. Falon broke a window, reached in, and unlocked it. He swung through, grabbed the phone, and threw it against the wall. He threw Sammie hard against the table, shoved Becky to the floor, and knelt over her, hitting her and pulling up her skirt. As Becky yelled at Sammie to run, the big yellow cat exploded from the bedroom and landed on Brad Falon’s face, raking and biting him. When Falon couldn’t pull him off, he flicked open his pocketknife.

The cat fought him, dodging the knife. Becky grabbed up a shard of broken window glass and flew at Falon. He hit her, he had her down again, cutting her, but the cat was on him again. He leaped away when a neighbor man, hearing their screams, came running, a wiry young fellow. He saw the broken window and climbed through, but already Falon had fled, banging out through the front door. Their poor cat lay panting where Falon had hit him.

Now, on the operating table, Birely woke hearing Sammie weeping, the dream always ended this way, her weeping always woke him; but he knew the cat had survived, Sammie always ended the tale the same way. Groggy now and filled with the dream, he was jerking on the table. Dr. Hunter had drawn back. She waited, trying to calm him, until at last she could proceed.

After surgery, Birely was taken back to the ER for the rest of the night. The next morning he would be moved to ICU or to the observation ward. The ER doctor on the floor said that, with whatever emotional trauma he’d suffered there on the table, he could have no visitors. “Only his sister, and only if he calms down sufficiently.” It was that order from the attending physician which, had it been strictly heeded, might have saved Birely’s life.

VIC WOKE BEFORE dawn in a real bed, under smooth sheets and real blankets, and it took a moment to think where he was. Then, when he looked around at the big, fancy bedroom, he had to laugh. It was his room, now.Last night the bed had smelled of soap or maybe of that old woman’s face powder. Now, did it smell of him? If those old people came home again to sleep in it, would they smell that he’d been there, and be frightened? He guessed that cat would smell him if they let it inside. Well, of course they let it in, they’d had it right there in the car with them. Good thing that cat couldn’t testify how he’d roughed up those two, he didn’t need no witnesses.

Climbing out of bed, he stood naked to the side of the open drape, looking out at the faint glow of predawn lights from the village. Watching the sky grow light in the east, he went over what he had to do before he made a last trip back to the ER, or to wherever they took Birely, if they meant to fix his smashed nose. He wondered again if Emmylou was paying for all that.

Maybe if he didn’t go back too soon, they’d put Birely in a regular room where there’d be fewer nurses going in and out, and more visitors allowed. People wouldn’t notice him so much; with his new “look,” he’d blend right in, could take care of business without being bothered. Birely’s final business. What more natural place to die than the hospital? You were there because something was wrong, people went to the hospital to die. He wondered how many folks had been done in there with help, and no one the wiser. How many cadavers did they haul out of there in a week, and no one suspicious that one or two hadn’t died natural?

He went over, again, the way that paperback book had laid it all out, a book he’d picked up at the Goodwill when he was buying a pair of jeans, waiting for Birely to find a shirt he wanted. He’d got real interested in the story, had read that part four or five times, off and on, had carried the book in his pack for a long time. Well, it was sure as hell the foolproof way.How would you ever get caught? With a little adaptation, you could use it on a druggie, too. Just one more needle puncture. A little creativity, you could use it on just about anyone.

But in the book, this guy had died in a hospital exactly like he meant for Birely. All you needed was a 30cc or 50cc syringe, and he was sure he could pick that up around the nurses’ station, there’d be syringes there somewhere, in a drawer or cupboard. If he couldn’t find any, he could put on those rubber gloves he’d seen handy in the wall dispensers in the rooms, slip on gloves, dig a syringe out of the hazardous-waste bin right there in the room, too. Hospital was all organized for fast work, they made everything easy.

The way they did it in the book, you do the injection, the guy goes into some kind of fit or trauma, half a second later he’s dead. Touchy part, you had to get out fast. Book said the minute the injected air hit the heart, the dials went crazy, alarms going off, the whole damn staff running in to save a life and you’d better be long gone.

Moving into the bathroom, he brushed his teeth with the old guy’s toothbrush, and even took a shower. Felt strange to be so clean, didn’t seem quite comfortable. First, before he went back to the ER and did Birely, he had to hide the Lincoln. Then he’d need wheels to get back to the hospital, Debbie’s station wagon would do for that. How could she refuse, when he’d sold that stuff for her to the Frisco fence—that, plus what he had on her.

When he and Birely’d first moved in, up the hill, he’d seen her down there around her cottage, and then seen her twice in the village market, light-fingered and quick. He’d drawn back into the shadows, to make certain, knowing he’d find the information useful, one way or another.

Two days later, he saw her come out of a village dress shop pushing one of them fancy baby carriages. She didn’t have no baby that he’d ever seen, just the two girls. She came out of the store with the sun hood pulled over, the “baby” all covered up with a blanket, and the older girl walking beside her.

After that, a couple times he’d watched her return home, haul the carriage out of the station wagon all folded up, no sign of a baby, but she always carried four or five bulging shopping bags inside. For a few days he’d followed her, too, walked into town when she left. It wasn’t far, and it was never hard to find that old brown Suzuki station wagon, the village was so small. She liked to park beside the library where there was more shade than on the street. She often had the twelve-year-old with her, but never the smaller girl. He’d see Debbie take off with both girls in the morning, come back without them as ifshe’d dropped them at school, but in the afternoons, she’d have only the older one in the car again. Or maybe the little one was in the back where he couldn’t see her. The older kid, Vinnie, she was a smart-ass, but when she shopped with her mother she was quick, fingers nearly as slick as a professional.

He’d gotten acquainted with Debbie, walking down there of an early evening as her kids ate supper, walked the roundabout way, coming up from below. When he’d let her know he knew what she was up to, that had scared her. She’d denied it until he told her exactly what he had seen. The woman was feisty but she was easy enough to intimidate. He got her to show him what she had, and some of the stuff was high-end, from the Neiman Marcus and Lord& Taylor stores in the village plaza, and that had surprised him. Molena Point might be small, but there was money here, and Debbie had gone right for it.

Once he’d complimented her on her skill, she came around real nice, got real friendly. He noticed that, heading out for those high-end stores, she dressed real slick, tried to look like she belonged in there. She said she was selling what she lifted through a consignment shop up in San Jose, the guy wasa second-rate fence, using the shop as a front. Said she’d drive up there once a month. She’d told him what they paid, and after a couple conversations, they’d struck a deal. He said he knew a fence in the city—well, he knewof him. Said he could get way better prices, that he’d sell what she stole, keep his share, and still make more for her than she was getting. He wasn’t sure why she trusted him. Or why he bothered. Except she was a looker, and she had a snotty little way that he liked. Who knew, maybe something more would come of that.

Out the bedroom windows, the sky was growing lighter. He dressed in his new clothes, folded up the old ones, clean now from the washer. Carrying those, moving into the living room, he looked down from the front window to make sure the street was clear, then moved on through the laundry into the garage. Locked the door behind him, and slipped into the Lincoln. He’d thought to eat something, there in the house, but he wanted to move on out of the neighborhood before people came out to walk their dogs, take kids to school or go to work. Starting the engine, he hit the button to open the big door, checked the street for cars as he backed out, closed it again fast. On the street he saw only the same three cars that had been parked there the night before, their windows fogged over. Moving on away, down the hill, he studied the houses as he passed. No one out in any of the yards, no kids, no one on their porch or looking out a window, that he could see. He had a good feeling about the day ahead. By tonight he’d be miles away from the coast headed inland and north with the Lincoln and the money, and he wouldn’t have to worry about Birely anymore. By tonight, Birely would be history.

IT WAS THE next morning that Pedric was transferred down the coast from Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz to Molena Point’s Community Hospital. Joe peered through the mesh in Ryan’s backpack as she walked along beside Pedric’s gurney, approaching the ambulance. Wilma stood with Clyde, Dulcie looking up over the edge of her carryall. Clyde’s backpack bulged with Pan and Kit crowded in there—a four-cat entourage to accompany Pedric’s careful transport home.

But in Clyde’s pack beside Pan, Kit couldn’t be still. Fidgeting and staring out, her gaze followed Pedric worriedly as he disappeared into the ambulance. “He’s so hurt. All that talk about MRIs and arteriograms, whatever they are, and about maybe a tumor and more blood work to do and—”

“Those are just tests,” the red tom said, his tail twitching irritably. Did she have to fuss so, in the confined space? “Only tests,” he said, “precautions. They don’t necessarily mean anything.”

“But Dr. Carroll said Pedric’s blood sugar’s high, and he’s having trouble with his eyesight, and—”

“He said there could be any number of causes. It doesn’tmean anything, Kit. He just wants to be sure. Will you settle down?”

“He said there might be something going on in Pedric’sbrain,” she said, her voice quavering. “He talked about abrain scan.That means something,I heard him say they’d look for a tumor, maybe a pituitary tumor, whateverthat is, and an abnormality in an artery, and—”

Pan hissed at her impatiently.“Those things can be fixed. Would you rather theydidn’t look, and missed something important and Pedric got worse?”

“I’d rather he wasn’t hurt at all and we hadn’t been in that wreck and thatscum hadn’t hit him in the head and we were all home right now, all safe at home and they had never been hurt,” she said, shivering.

Pan fixed her with a hard gaze.“You can’t help Pedric by crying, and you can’t help Lucinda if you’re all weepy.” Reaching out a paw, he tucked it around her paw, and licked her ear. “They’re lucky to have you, and they’re lucky to have good doctors. Now can’t you settle down?”

Kit settled, glancing sideways at him, and together they peered out through the mesh, watching the ambulance pull out of the parking area, to the street. They watched a nurse wheel Lucinda out from the ER in a wheelchair and help her into Kate’s rental car, which was the newest and most comfortable of their three vehicles. When Lucinda was settled inside and the nurse had gone, Clyde leaned in and Kit and Pan slipped out of his backpack onto Lucinda’s lap. Lucinda was a bit groggy from the pain medication; she smiled sleepily at thetwo cats. Kit licked her hand, which tasted of disinfectants. Through their open car door, they watched Charlie settle Wilma into her Blazer, setting the carryall by Wilma’s feet, watched Dulcie emerge and climb up into her housemate’s lap. The rented Lexus and the Blazer pulled out, with the Damens’ red king cab behind them, Joe Grey and Rock peering out the side window, the little parade moving through the quiet morning, heading home.

21

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THE CLICK, AS Clyde unlocked the Greenlaws’ front door, echoed hollowly in the deserted house. Outside in the drive, Kate’s rented Lexus stood next to the Damens’ red king cab. Charlie had gone on to the hospital, to offer moral support as Pedric was admitted. She would swing by Wilma’s first, drop Wilma and Dulcie at home where the two meant to tuck up for a midmorning nap; their all-night vigil in the motel, broken by only a few hours of sleep, had left both woman and cat yawning, and a bit fuzzy in their thoughts.

Clyde and Lucinda moved on inside, Lucinda leaning on his arm, still groggy and unsteady from the pain medication. The room was chill and smelled musty even after only a week’s absence. Ryan and Kate followed them in, but tortoiseshell Kit hung back, looking off where Joe and Pan had raced away. The moment the two vehicles came to rest in the drive, Pan had taken off for the rooftops, his amber eyes flashing with anger. Joe Grey had followed him, perplexed, uncertainhow to think about Kit and Pan’s sudden conflict.

In the car, driving down, Pan had been fascinated by Kate’s tales of the Netherworld, but Kit had soon gone sullen and cross. She’d always been drawn to the thought of mystical lands that might link to their own history, but this morning suddenly, faced with Pan’s enthusiasm, she hadn’t wanted to hear about Kate’s journey.

Now, she watched the two toms race away, and then quietly she entered the house. There she paused, shivering at its neglected feel. The kind of gloom that makes folks hurry to flip on the lights in the middle of the day and open the windows, as Ryan was now doing, to let in the fresh ocean breeze. But Kit, entering, sensed more than abandonment. Nervously she scented out and backed away, curling her lip at the smell.

She watched Clyde settle Lucinda in her chair before the hearth and then turn to lay a fire, arranging logs from the stack in the wood box, and striking the gas starter. She could hear Ryan in the kitchen filling the coffee maker, and taking a lemon cake from the freezer, as Lucinda had asked her to do. Kate settled in Pedric’s chair, near Lucinda, looking questioningly at Kit when she didn’t leap up into Lucinda’s lap.

With the smell of that man in the house, Kit turned away to prowl the empty rooms—hopefully empty.He used Lucinda’s keys to let himself in, she thought.If he’s still here, he’s cornered, and he’s even more dangerous. Giving Clyde a look, she moved off toward the bedroom. Watching her, Clyde picked a short length of firewood from the stack behind Lucinda’s chair, and followed. Kate looked after them, frowning, then rose to tuck a lap robe around Lucinda.

“Kit’s just in a mood,” Lucinda said. “All this stress. She’ll be all right, in a while.”

“That was my fault,” Kate said, “that argument in the car, my fault for telling Pan about the dark world. His interest didn’t sit well with Kit.”

“They’ll have to work it out,” Lucinda said sadly. “They were so happy. But it wasn’t your fault at all, Pan had to hear the story sometime. How could he not, when Joe and Dulcie both know about your journey.”

The drive down from Santa Cruz had started out pleasantly, the morning bright and cool, the sea on their right a deep blue beneath stacks of high, blowing clouds. Pan had curled up on the seat between Kate and Lucinda, while Kit snuggled in her housemate’s lap, her tortoiseshell coat dark against Lucinda’s white bandages. But then as Kate spun her tale, Pan sat up straight, listening eagerly, and soon he was asking excited questions, his tail twitching—and soon Kit grew restless watching him, her ears back and her own tail lashing hard when Pan talked about going down himself, about going there with her. Kit had once dreamed of that land, but not the way it was now, she didn’t want to go there now. What was Pan thinking? Kate had had a reason to go, searching out her mother and father’s own history, but Pan had no such excuse.

It was in San Francisco that Lucinda had asked Kate,“Your journey down into that world? It was your father’s old journals that led you there?”

Kate nodded.“Yes, the diary he left me. And the jewelry I found there and brought back, it’s so like the pieces he left me. The same ancient Celtic jewelry style that has haunted me. And so many pieces with cats worked into the design.”

“I remember you sold a few pieces, those without cats.”

“Those lovely pieces stashed away for nearly half a century, in the back of a walk-in safe.”

It was the grandson of the attorney who gave Kate the first pieces of jewelry, who had journeyed with her down through the caverns. He had found her again, up in Seattle, got her address from the San Francisco designer firm she’d worked for. He meant to retire, to leave the firm, and he had the trip all planned. He’d wanted her to go because of what her parents had done in trying to save that land. “He wanted to know if I’d like to join him.”

“You said yes, just like that,” Lucinda said.

“Oh, I did some research on him, as much background check as I could, by myself. I didn’t want to involve anyone else. From what I found—mostly what I didn’t find—from the holes in his own family background that were so similar to mine, I decided to trust him.”

She moved into the right lane; they were making good time. The sea wind had turned warm now, as the sun rose higher.“I knew it was risky, but I was burning to see where my mother was raised.” She had described for Pan the vast caves of the Netherworld, the rich veins of gold reaching down miles below California’s own depleted gold fields. And then, in the car, when she talked about the shape-shifting beasts and the winged lamia, Pan’s paws kneaded with excitement—and Kit’s claws kneaded with unease, and as they’d passed Seaside, just north of Molena Point, the two cats had begun to argue.

Pan wanted to descend down into those dark tunnels despite the dangers, and he expected that Kit would go with him. Kit said that ifhe went, that would be the last adventure he’d live to see, and Pan didn’t see why she was suddenly so timid. Her hissing refusal sent them into a snarling argument, the matter ending when Kit leaped into the backseat, curled up in a dark little ball with her back to them all. In the front seat, Pan had crouched forlornly between Kate and Lucinda looking helplessly from one to the other, not knowing what to do, not wanting Kit’s violent anger, but unwilling to give in to her.

The minute they pulled into the Greenlaws’ drive, and Kate parked and opened her door, Pan leaped out and took off across the yard, vanishing among the neighboring oak trees. Kit dropped to the drive and headed for the house, looking at no one, her ears flat to her head, her eyes blazing, her fluffy tail lashing with rage. Glancing backonce, she saw Joe jump out of the Damen truck and follow Pan and she hissed at him, too. Joe didn’t know what had happened but he was with Pan all the same, as if he were certain that it was her fault.

Now as Kit explored the house, Kate looked after her, dismayed.“I thought Kit loved my stories. It wasn’t until this morning that I saw the truth.”

She hurt for Kit, and for Pan; she had no idea how this clash of feline stubbornness would resolve itself.

They could hear Clyde in the bedroom opening the closets and cupboards. They watched Kit return, her nose to the carpet, moving on through to the kitchen.

“What?” Lucinda said. “What is it?”

Kate shivered, listening to Clyde’s movements as he investigated the house. Someone had been in there but was gone now, she’d heard Clyde open every closet, every door. Their assailant had Lucinda’s car and house keys; and Lucinda’s muzzy, sedated condition had left her without her usual sharp perception.

Kit, returning from the kitchen, looked up at Lucinda, lifting a paw.“The man who hurt you and Pedric, he made himself at home. He ate, he messed up the kitchen, he rummaged through your closet. He slept in your bed,” she said, hissing indignantly.

Ryan appeared from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dishtowel.“There’s a dirty plate in the sink, an empty container from frozen spaghetti, a crushed beer can.”

Clyde came out of the bedroom.“He took a shower, left wet towels on the floor. Hair all over the floor, long hair, and more wrapped in a towel. As if he’s cut off a pigtail. Left a hell of a mess.”

Lucinda rose, and they followed Clyde back to the bedroom. She looked with disgust at the mussed bed, which she had made carefully before they’d left for San Francisco. She inspected the dresser drawers, and then the closet. “Pedric’s tweed sport coat’s gone,” she said. “He didn’t take that to the city. His tan slacks, too, with the stain on one cuff.”

“And the dark brown Rockports,” Kit said, “that he wears to walk the hills.” She looked up at Clyde, her ears flicking uncertainly. “If he wanted clothes, the suitcases were right there in the Lincoln. Did he have to come in here, invade our house, mess it up, and leave his smell everywhere? What a pig.”

“What else has he done?” Lucinda said. “What else has he taken?” She moved back to the dresser, began opening drawers to examine them more carefully, lifting layers of sweaters, socks and underwear, leaning awkwardly with the weight of the cast.

Kate opened the carved pine armoire, but the big, flat TV and the DVD player were in place, the rows of CDs lined up on the shelves beside them. Ryan, stepping out to the living room, opened that armoire but returned shaking her head.“TV, music system, looks like it’s all there.”

“He means to come back,” Lucinda said.

Ryan put her arm around Lucinda.“I’ll call the locksmith again, get him on out here pronto.” But Kit looked worriedly at Lucinda. Even if the locks were changed, Lucinda and Kate would be alone tonight.

With only me to guard them, she thought with dismay. Despite the angry, predatory twitch of her claws, despite knowing she’d do her best to protect her humans, she was no hundred-pound police dog.Even with new locks, she thought,he can break in easily enough. Now, since the accident, her housemate seemed so frail, hindered by the cast and the pain, her senses dulled by the drugs that were meant to ease her pain.

Ever since she first met Lucinda and Pedric, up on the grassy slopes of Hellhag Hill when she was a very young cat, she had looked on them as invincible. She’d never before known a human in her short, wild life. She’d had no idea they could be like these two, so wise; two humans who understood her, who saw at once her true nature as a speaking cat, and delighted in their discovery. That first day as she spied on Lucinda and Pedric while they enjoyed their picnic, as she listened to Pedric recite the same ancient Celtic tales that she herself loved, Kit had felt as one with them. It hadn’t taken long for them to coax her out with gentle questions and with smoked salmon, and that was the beginning of their friendship. Despite Kit’s wild andindependent life roaming the hills alone, she soon went home with them. She had never left again, they were her family, two strong humans she could trust with any problem, any secret, could trust with her very life, the two humans who would be there for her forever, wise and indestructible. But nowsuddenly she might have to protect Lucinda, or try to. Now suddenly Kit had a hard glimpse into human mortality, and she didn’t like it much.

She listened to Ryan calling the locksmith back, watched her hang up the phone, looking at Lucinda.“He’ll be here within the hour. I’ll call the department, they can photograph, and run prints.”

“Do we have to?” Lucinda said. “There’s nothing else missing, a jacket, a pair of pants, and a pair of shoes. Clothes that Pedriccould have packed and forgotten though I know he didn’t, clothes he might have left in the city. The TVs and computer are still in place.”

“It’s vandalism,” Ryan said. “Whatever they find, including prints, might help as evidence later, if … when they recover the Lincoln.”

“Call them,” Lucinda said at last, resigned. She didn’t want to be disturbed, she only wanted her house to herself again, cleaned of every trace of the man, wanted to wipe away every invading trace of him with scrub rags and disinfectant.

As Ryan made the call, Kit watched Clyde pack a duffel bag to take to Pedric’s hospital room. She showed him where Pedric kept his robes and pajamas, his shaving things. She watched Kate put fresh sheets on the bed, throwing the used ones and the bed pad in the washer, with Clorox that made the whole house smell. Ryan brought Lucinda a bed tray with coffee and some lemoncake, helped her change into a nightie and tuck up under the covers. It had been a long morning, Lucinda was yawning and already half asleep; everything was hard for her, with the use of only one arm. When she was settled in bed with the tray and her snack, Kit lay down close beside her, daintily accepting small bites of icing; and only now did Kit let herself think about Pan again, let the whole sorry episode fill her heart.

She told herself that maybe Pan never thought about danger. Maybe, traveling all over Oregon and down the California coast, cadging rides with strangers, maybe he’d just done what he wanted, fought when he needed to, and then gone happily on his way again undeterred by worries. So now, he expected her to do the same, to follow him on what he said would be the greatest adventure of a cat’s life. She tried to think about it from his viewpoint, but lying close and safe beside Lucinda, Kit’s anger burned anew when she thought about the fiery pit that Kate had approached, the flaming mouth of hell itself, and about the beasts that had crawled out of it to attack anything mortal. She loved Pan, but she was sickened that he blithely expected her to go there, into that dark and deathly realm.

How is itthat when I was younger I would have leaped at such a journey, would have longed to go there—how close I was to venturing down into Hellhag Cave and, later, down alone among the dark Pamillon caverns—how is it that now I’m so afraid?

She told herself she was grown up now, that she wasn’t so foolhardy anymore, but all she really knew was that Pan wouldn’t give in, and she wouldn’t give in, and his shortsighted stubbornness hurt her clear down to her very cat soul, to her frightened and uncertain soul.

22

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IT TOOK VIC a while to hide the Lincoln. On leaving the Greenlaw house he had detoured past the village market, parked on a side street, and walked back. Bought a jar of peanut butter, a box of crackers, and a cup of machine coffee that tasted like boiled sawdust. The market wasn’t two blocks from the PD, and that gave him a thrill of fear. But who was going to recognize him, all shaven and cleaned up? The cops had never even seen him, all they knew was what that old couple told them: two men, shaggy hair, old wrinkled clothes, and him with a ponytail. No one was going to look at him twice now, dressed all proper like some village shopkeeper on his way to open up the store.

He’d eaten in the car parked under some low-hanging eucalyptus trees, then headed for Debbie’s place. Passing Emmylou’s, he’d checked for her green Chevy. Just as he’d hoped, it was still gone as if she hadn’t returned from the hospital, had stayed there all night worrying about that little wimp, about her friend’s baby brother.

Easing on by, he turned down onto the cracked streets of the neighborhood below among the small, ragged cottages, expecting the streets to be empty as they usually were. Not so. Here came a fat woman walking a skinny old dog and, overtaking them, a pair of joggers dressed in tight black spandex like earthbound skin divers, and from the other direction a young boy in a blue jacket cruising on a bike, the whole damn neighborhood suddenly crowded with people. He circled through, parked on a side street. Waited until the streets were empty again, then headed back to Debbie Kraft’s place. Her station wagon was gone, and that annoyed him.

Passing on by, he turned into the drive of the place he’d spotted earlier, house and narrow garage sat way at the back, all secluded back there, bushes rangy and tall; the dirt-crusted Lincoln looked almost at home there. He pulled clear on back to the garage. Cracked gray paint, heavy wooden garage door hinged at the side. Getting out, he tried to open it but it was securely locked. He moved around to the side. That door was locked, too, but this was one of them old-fashioned skeleton-key jobs, older than dirt. Fishing out his pocketknife, it didn’t take him long, he had it open. The power to the place was shut off, and with no windows it was dark as hell in there. Moving to the big door, he turned the knob for the lock and pushed it open, lifting where the door wanted to sag and scrape on the cracked cement drive. Jury-rigged kind of arrangement, only one door and not two, even if this was just a one-car garage. Good thing he hadn’theisted astretch limo to hide here, he’d be flat out of luck.

By the time he’d finessed the Lincoln inside and had the door closed again, he was sweating like a pig. Shutting the big door, leaving the place looking as deserted as he’d found it, he’d walked on over toward Debbie’s place hoping she’d got home, meaning to give her the money and talk her out of her car. But when he came in sight of the house, the drive was still empty. Walking on up her drive like he belonged there, he looked in the garage window.

Garage was empty except for some boxes of junk, kids’ broken toys, some dried-up paint cans. If she was out “shopping,” light-fingered and involved, she might be gone for hours. Turning away, he headed on up the hill, past Emmylou’s. Her car was still gone. He moved on up the stairs of the stone house thinking to pick up the sleeping bags, stash them somewhere up the hill in the bushes, clear the place out before them cops showed up. Maybe even wipe the place down of fingerprints, he thought, amused. Like some big-time criminal. When all he ever did this time was borrow a car and lift some money that wasalready stolen, for Christ’s sake.

PAN AND JOE, having raced away from Lucinda’s house as their human friends moved on inside, were wandering the rooftops above the center of the village, Pan still grousing about Kit’s stubborn nature, when they saw Debbie Kraft walking down Ocean Avenue wheeling her empty baby stroller. The interior, as usual, was swaddled with a concealing pink blanket. They watched her approach the drugstore and wheel her “baby” inside; they had watched this routine before, they knew too well what she was up to. Joe, pausing on a shingled peak, his paws in the damp gutter, looking down at Debbie, wanted badly to nail her. This was the first time in his life he had turned his back on a thief, the first time he hadn’t called the department the minute he saw a crime coming down. Shoplifting might seem like a minor offense, but even in their small village hundreds of thousands of dollars of merchandise vanished every year. The local shopkeepers were having a hard enough time, with the sharp failure of the economy. They didn’t need any light-fingered visitors trashing their livelihood; he itched to snatch her up like a struggling mouse, and turn her over to the law. He didn’t like Debbie anyway. He had bristled at her nervy attitude when she’d moved in with Ryan and Clyde uninvited and had disliked her even before she first arrived in the village just from her pushy letter. It would be a real treat to see her cooling her heels in Max Harper’s jail—but if he turned her in, what would happen to Tessa? To both her little girls?

Beside him, Pan had already tuned Debbie out; all his anger, for the moment, was still directed at Kit, at her puzzling disdain for adventure.“Even my pa never explored such a land. If Misto ever once set paw there, he’d be bragging about it, rambling on so you’d never shut him up.”

Joe said nothing. The Netherworld made him nervous, he knew exactly how Kit felt. What was so inviting about a dark world that had decayed and fallen to ruin? No wayhe’d venture down there into those crumbling caverns. Maybe their heritage did have its roots among the ancient Celts, and maybe some strain of those raceswere down there beneath their own coast, emigrants from an ancient time, but so what? That didn’t mean he had to launch himself into some nightmare encounter with a world that should be left to complete its own destruction. The very thought made his paws sweat.

They watched Debbie emerge from the drugstore, tenderly arranging the pink blanket over her baby, taking care that the little tyke was warmly covered. She smiled sweetly at two uniformed officers coming out of the coffee shop, heading for their black-and-white. The younger officer smiled back at her, but Officer Brennan was busy brushing crumbs from the ample front of his uniform.

“She’s going to get caught,” Pan said softly, finally paying attention. “Caught without any help from us. Are those guys taking a second look at that stroller? Did you see Brennan glance back? Maybe,” the red tom said, smiling, “Debbie’s little operation is going to hit the fan. But then,” he said, dropping his ears, “where does that leave Tessa? If Debbie’s arrested and goes to jail and has to do prison time, what will happen to Tessa?” He didn’t mention Vinnie, he didn’t give a mouse’s ear what happened to that little torturer. Too many times up in Oregon Vinnie had poked and teased him, tormented him until he raced out of the house, often into the snow and rain, and it would be a long time before he came creeping back—only to be with Tessa, with his own small human.

“The girls have one aunt,” Joe said. “Debbie’s older sister. I guess by law they’d go to her, if she’d even take them. That would be a pity for Tessa. Sour woman, no use for kids.” They watched Debbie move on up the street leaning over the stroller, whispering tenderly to her baby. “Tessa has a half brother,” Joe said, “but Billy’s only twelve. He’d take her if he was older, just like he adopts stray cats and cares for them.”

Billy Young had lived with Charlie and Max since his grandmother died, an arrangement they’d made when his father went to prison for the murder of Billy’s mother and, later, of Sammie Miller. Billy was a caring boy and dependable. Ever since his mother died when he was eight, he’d worked on the neighboring ranches, he was trusted with their horses, and proud to help in his own support, as boys did in past generations, taking pride in doing a man’s work. Then when Billy’s grandma died shortly after Christmas, and neither Debbie nor her sister wanted him—not that Billy wanted to live with either of them—he had moved up to the Harper place. Had gone where he was wanted,had taken over the Harpers’ stable work before and after school in exchange for his room and board and “a little to put aside in the bank,” Max had told him. But now, for the Harpers to take in two little girls as well, both with emotional problems, would be, in Joe’s view, an exercise in calamity.

The two officers still sat in their black-and-white, Brennan in the right seat filling out paperwork, the rookie in the driver’s seat talking on the radio, both men watching the street only casually, barely glancing at Debbie as she passed. Whether Brennan’s instinct alerted him was hard to say, neither Debbie’s amateur ruse nor her body language seemed to touch the older man. The cats, trotting away over the roofs,followed Debbie’s progress on the sidewalk below, watched her looking covetously into the shop windows. Over the cool rooftops, they moved through shafts of sun and through pools of shade, beneath twisted oak limbs and splayed pine branches that overhung the shops. When Debbie turned into the little village market they eased down a bougainvillea vine, deftly avoiding its thorns, dropped to the sidewalk and followed her. They had, looking back, seen the black-and-white move away from them, heading toward the shore.

The village grocery kept two cats of their own, assigned to rodent control. The customers were used to seeing them wander among the shelves, so why would they be surprised at a visitor or two? Slipping along through the aisles, and through the shadows at the base of the produce bins, they found Debbie in the canned goods, dropping one can of soup or beans in the little basket she’d picked up, and easing two more in under the pink blanket. By the time she headed for the checkout, the padded vehicle was so full she had a hard time pushing it along between the narrow aisles.

Easing into the shortest of the three checkout lines, she arranged the purchases from her basket on the moving belt and then set the basket on the floor beneath. Pushing the stroller along ahead of her, she paid for her groceries and moved quickly on out, looking smug with the success of her morning’s venture, both in resaleable merchandise and in food for her little family. Carefully arranging the three grocery bags down onto the lower shelf of the stroller, she headed around to the small parking lot at the side of the store. The cats saw, only then, that she’d left her station wagon at the back beneath a row of low-growing pepper trees that sheltered the adjoining building. Vanishing in among these, they climbed a few feet until they were hidden beneath its foliage.

Debbie set the grocery bags on the ground by the tailgate and then opened the side door. Leaning in, she retrieved some additional paper bags from under a tangle of toys. Opening them, and rolling the stroller close, she began to unload her take from beneath the pink blanket. When the bags were full she put a few groceries, a loaf of bread and packages of chips, in on top to hide the telltale new clothes and handbags. As she opened the tailgate and folded up the stroller the cats peered in at the tangle of toys, small sweaters, and empty drink cans. Lifting the stroller in, she laid it on top, squashing a cloth bunny and a sandal caught in the folds of a plaid blanket. Even as the cats watched, the blanket moved, a thin little arm flopped out, and Tessa turned over, a hank of pale hair straggling across the plaid cover, her dark lashes shadowing her soft cheeks. Waked by the intrusion of the stroller, she looked up at her mother, groggy and flushed. Her nose was running. Debbie fished into her own pocket for a tissue, reached in as if to blow the child’s nose, but Tessa turned away, turned over again, sniffed loudly, pulled the blanket higher around her, and closed her eyes. Had Debbie left her alone in the car all the time she was shoplifting? At least the vehicle was in the shade, and she’d left the windows down a few inches, apparently unconcerned that anyone would want to bother the child.

Had she kept Tessa out of nursery school because of a cold but, because she was sick, didn’t want to leave her home alone as she so often did? That was more motherly concern, Joe thought, than Debbie would normally exhibit. When she turned away from the open tailgate the two cats dropped down onto it and slipped inside, fast and silent. Pan hid at once among the rubble, concealing himself from both Tessa and her mother. They wanted to see where Debbie was headed and, of even more interest, to see if Brennan’s patrol car might show up again, if the two officers were, indeed, watching her.

AT THE GETZ house, as Wilma slept away her midmorning nap, Dulcie sat alone on the desk in the soft glow of the computer, her restless mind too busy to let her sleep. Last night as the cats and humans crowded into the two motel rooms, the human contingent taking turns napping and one then another returning to the hospital to keep Pedric awake, Kate’s tales had filled Dulcie with such wonder that the pictures and words just crowded in. The grimness of that world had turned her incredibly sad; the pictures that filled her head grew dark, and this poem, now, was not like her usual ones, not sly and humorous verses that would make Joe laugh. She didn’t know what her tomcat would think of this effort but she didn’t care, she needed to get the words out, to make sense of what she felt for that lost land. Just as Joe was driven to slaughter the wharf rat, and catch the thief, her words must be brought to life. Needs were needs, and a sensible cat attended to those urges.

Down and down on silent paws

Deep into the earth I go

Down and down through caverns black

Stones hang like spears above me

Green light glows from granite sky

Harpies fly above me

Castles fall around me

Farms lie dead around me

Herd beasts dead around me

Bones all white around me

What was grand is lost

Twisted into ruin

Magic shattered now

Used too long for evil

What was loved is lost

Gone, that earthen magic

Gone, those magic people

Used too hard for evil

Used by greed and power

By the cold hard lust of evil

She didn’t know if it was a good poem or without value. She didn’t care, she needed to write it. She wrote quickly, changed a few words, and then sat reading the lines back to herself, her small cat being filled with sadness for that land where, now, neither she nor Kit would ever want to venture.

23

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I RAN OVER TO look at the leaky plumbing,” Ryan said, pulling into Debbie’s weedy driveway beside the station wagon. The dark-haired young woman was unloading her grocery bags, and at Ryan’s voice she turned, startled, a secretive look crossing her face, replaced at once by a too bright smile. Ryan smiled back, and killed the engine. She had, for the last few minutes, been sitting up the street in her truck beneath some overhanging juniper branches, watching Debbie haul a baby stroller out of the back, open it up and pile grocery bags into it. She had also seen, the instant Debbie opened the back of the wagon and turned away, a flash of red and of gray leap out, the two tomcats streak across the drive behind the woman and disappear up the pine tree near the front door. What was that about? Now the cats crouched on Debbie’s roof, peering over; Ryan didn’t dare look up at them, she kept her eyes on Debbie.

“You came to fix the leak now?”

“I came to look at it,” Ryan said. “To see what’s needed.”

“Go on in, then. It’s the kitchen sink,” Debbie said, turning away, busying herself with the stroller.

Ryan went in, watching through the kitchen window, pretending to be occupied with the faucet as Debbie wheeled the stroller up to the little porch. Hauling it backward up the three steps with its heavy load of groceries, she passed on by the kitchen and parked it in the bedroom. She returned with three bags of groceries, leaving the rest in the stroller. Outside the window, the two tomcats seemed just as interested as Ryan was. She watched them scramble down the pine again, to pause among the lowest branches, intently looking in. Ryan, herself, had no chance to look at the remaining bags, under Debbie’s gaze.

Returning to the truck, she let Rock out, snapped on his long line so he could roam the yard, and tied that to the pine tree. He didn’t like being tethered; but she didn’t like his propensity to take off suddenly on some track he considered too urgent to ignore. Already he was sniffing over some scent, his ears and tail up. Maybe a deer that had been in the yard, or a raccoon. Whatever had crossed the dry grass, Rock had that look in his eyes that told her she’d better keep him under control. The Weimaraner’s long generations of breeding for a powerful and single-minded hunter and tracker had produced a strong-willed individual. This, plus his lack of any early training, had produced a dog eager to outstubborn human orders in deference to his lust for the hunt.

Rock was eighteen months old when he and Ryan had found each other; he’d been roaming stray in a wild stretch of country north of Molena Point. Unclaimed and untrained, his habits already indelibly formed, he came to her defiant and headstrong, with a burning power to do as he pleased. She had worked hard to redirect his talents, sometimes with the help of the graytomcat. It was Joe Grey who had taught Rock to track on command, to heed to his handler and stay irrevocably on the scent when seeking a felon or a lost child. Joe’s method of tracking with nose to the scent himself as he gave his commands, could not have been accomplished by any human trainer. Now when the gray tomcat spoke, the big dog paid attention; though still, Ryan’s own commands were not always heeded.

As she moved on inside again, Debbie was just coming out of the bedroom. Saying nothing, Ryan stepped past her into the little room crowded with its twin beds. The loaded stroller stood against the far wall, five grocery bags lined up on the floor beside it, a loaf of bread sticking out, and boxes of crackers. Behind her, Debbie had returned nervously to the kitchen as if hoping she would follow. Ryan gave the bags a cursory look and followed her back into the kitchen where she turned her attention to the sink. She knew what was in the bags, but right now she was too tired to play games; it had been a long day, after a sleepless night.

She and Clyde, after leaving Lucinda’s house, had dropped Pedric’s duffel off at the hospital. Charlie was still there, waiting with Pedric for the ICU doctor, and she seemed to have everything in hand. Pedric was in better spirits, now that he was back in the village, and soon Ryan and Clyde had gone on, stopping for a bite of lunch in the hospital caf? before heading home, sitting at a small table beside the caf?’s big reflecting pond. They’d left Rock in the truck, snoring away in the backseat. The shallow water and plashing fountain shone brightly where the sun struck down through a great, domed skylight. Waiting for their order, they’d watched the red and black koi fish, as strikingly patterned as Japanese kites, dashing mindlessly through the water from one onlooker to the next, hoping for a handout. After lunch she’d dropped Clyde at the shop and headed on for Debbie’s, having promised to look not only at the faucet but at an electrical plug that had stopped working.

She had never been fond of Debbie, she hadn’t seen her since their art school years in San Francisco, then suddenly Debbie had gotten in touch. She wrote that she was moving down from Eugene, was divorced and claimed to be destitute, and was needing a place to stay. Joe Grey said, “Demanding a place to stay,” and that was closer to the truth. It was Joe who discovered Debbie wasn’t broke at all but had a nice wad of cash tucked away in her suitcase. Between Debbie’s patronizing ways, and Vinnie’s rudeness and loud tantrums, her sojourn in the Damens’ guest room had lasted one night. Neither Ryan, Clyde, nor Joe himself wanted her there. Rock, who liked most children, kept his distance from Vinnie, his lip curling in warning, though he let Tessa climb all over him.

Unwilling to put Debbie out on the street, in desperation they had offered her the empty cottage which, later in the year, they intended to remodel. She was to clean up the cottage and the yard, and do as many repairs as she was capable of, under Ryan’s direction. So far, she had pulled a few weeds, which she’d left lying in a limp pile in the driveway, and had made a poor stab at painting the one bedroom, abandoning half-used paint cans in the garage with their lids off, leaving the unused paint to grow dry and rubbery. As for any temporary plumbing repairs, the woman was sullen and evasive. “A busy mother,” she told Ryan, “with two children to support and care for shouldn’t have to be doing a man’s work.” Ryan wasn’t sure what a man’s work consisted of, but Debbie seemed to know, and the prospect of pliers and wrenches didn’t appeal.

She glanced in again at the loaded grocery bags. If they had held only groceries, one would have to wonder where Debbie had gotten the money for such a large purchase. Debbie’d said she was looking for work, and sometimes Ryan did see her go out dressed as if for an interview. But so far no job had materialized, not even the most menial employment—though Debbie didn’t think much of cleaning houses or bagging groceries, those pursuits didn’t fit her idea of a suitable lifestyle.

It was Joe Grey who had first told her about the shoplifting.“How long,” he’d said, “before someone peeks under that pink blanket, baby-talking, and finds themselves prattling on to a pile of soup cans and designer jeans?” But neither Ryan nor Joe wanted to blow the whistle on Debbie. There seemed no way to nail her and yet leave Tessa unscathed. Examining the faucet, she saw it would be better to replace it. The thing was shot, several parts loose, its joints rusting beneath the chrome. Knowing how particular her men were, she thought maybe she’d do this job herself, just a temporary fix. She and Clyde had bought the house to remodel, theyexpected to replace the ancient plumbing at some point.

The building was old but solid, its frame was good and the ceilings were nice and high. It was hard to lose money on a spec house in Molena Point, particularly in a hillside location with a view down over the village—hard to lose, she thought, once the economy turned around. She hoped thatwould happen soon. Stepping outside, she fetched her tool belt from the backseat of the truck. Moving into the garage, to the junction box, she turned off the master breaker so she could look at the malfunctioning wiring. As she stepped out again, Debbie came down the steps headed for her car. Leaning in over the open tailgate, she dragged a rumpled blanket heavily toward her. Ryan saw Tessa stir within, knuckling at her eyes as if she’d been asleep, heard her grumble as Debbie lifted the child out.

“She was in the car all the time you … shopped?” Ryan asked.

“I parked in the shade, she slept the whole time,” Debbie said innocently.

“How long?”

“How long, what?”

“How long was she in the car? She looks flushed.”

“She has a little cold,” Debbie said. Saying no more, she headed for the house carrying the child, the blanket dragging behind her along the drive. Ryan followed her into the bedroom, watched her tuck Tessa under the covers, and then move to the kitchen where she poured canned orange juice intoa glass. Moving to the bed, Ryan put a hand on the child’s forehead. She was warm from the car but didn’t seem fevered. Behind her, Debbie had set the juice on the dresser and was rooting in the closet. Turning, she threw a blanket over the stroller as if that were a handy place to put it down,letting it trail across the grocery bags.

“Shall I give her the juice?” Ryan asked.

“I’ll do it.” Debbie grabbed the glass, pulled Tessa up, propped her against the pillow. The child drank sulkily, but she drank it all. Looking past her mother, up at Ryan, her resignation was far beyond her years. When Debbie spoke to her she didn’t respond. When Debbie turned away, Ryan smoothed the child’s pale, damp hair. Tessa gave her the tiniest smile and reached to touch her hand.

But then she turned over again and burrowed down beneath the cotton spread. As Ryan stood watching her, Pan appeared at the window, looking in and glancing warily toward the kitchen where Debbie had disappeared. Deciding the coast was clear, he remained there watching the sleeping child, disappearing only when Debbie’s footsteps approached again, vibrating on the hard linoleum. Standing by the dirty window Ryan could see him below her on the brown lawn, but instead of racing away he stood frozen, looking up along the side yard to the street in front, his ears twitching uneasily.

When she looked along the side of the house, all she could see was a slice of empty street and part of a ragged cottage on the other side, crowded by overgrown cypress trees. Below her Pan turned and looked up into her eyes with a smug little cat smile, and when she looked at the street again, the nose of a squad car was slipping into view, the black-and-white moving slowly along, the young officer at the wheel scanning the driveways and cottages. Beside him she could see Officer Brennan’s heavy profile.

When she turned, Debbie stood behind her, occupying herself with the child.“It’s just a cold,” Debbie said, “she’ll be better tomorrow.” She leaned to straighten Tessa’s covers, and when Ryan looked back out the window, Pan had gone and the squad car had moved on, she could see it moving away up the hill toward Emmylou’s. She spotted Pan and Joe two roofs over, keeping pace with it as it cruised slowly along.

Turning to Debbie, she said,“I guess nursery school doesn’t want Tessa there, with a cold.”

Debbie nodded.“So much sickness.”

“She’ll be going back, when she’s well?”

Debbie looked up at her, her expression flat.“The nursery school’s too expensive, I took her out. Why doesn’t the village have a free preschool? Not everyone can afford …”

“So, you take her with you when you … shop,” Ryan said, “and leave her in the car?” Moving toward the stroller, she lifted the loaf of white bread and a box of Sugar Pops from the nearest grocery bag. Beneath, neatly folded, lay an assortment of cashmere sweaters, cherry red, turquoise, lime green, all still bearing their sales tags.

“Why would you buy so many sweaters, when you don’t have a job, Debbie? When you can’t pay for nursery school, or pay rent?”

“They were on sale, they were really a great bargain.”

“Debbie, you have a choice here. Do you think that squad car was cruising this street by accident?”

Debbie just looked at her.

“You can clean up your act, take these things back to the store, and stop any further stealing. Or you can move out, find somewhere else to live. We can’t let you stay here,” she said, trying to be gentle, “when we know you’re shoplifting, when Clyde and I are connected to MPPD. Our friendship with Chief Harper and Charlie, and the fact that my uncle Dallas is one of Harper’s detectives, doesn’t leave any choice. You will quit stealing and return every item you stole to the store it came from. You can beg them not to report you, not to press charges. If you don’t do that—andI’ll know whether you did—you will be out of here by the end of three days.

“If you do neither, I’ll report you. You’ll be arrested and most likely held, unless you can make bail. Your two girls will be taken to Children’s Services.” It broke Ryan’s heart to say that, to think of the children being taken away. She didn’t tell Debbie she meant to talk with thestore owners. She knew several of them and was hoping, if Debbie followed through, they wouldn’t press charges. Turning back to the grocery bags, she went through them all, writing down in the back of her purse calendar every stolen item, its brand, and the name of the store as it was printed on the price tag. Maybe those two officers already had that information, maybe they had already made Debbie when they’d followed her, or maybe not. Maybe they were just cruising, keeping an eye on this problem neighborhood with its empty cottages and foreclosures.

She said nothing more to Debbie. She left the house disturbed equally by Debbie’s thieving and by her neglect of Tessa—and with no idea at all how to resolve Tessa’s plight, how to prevent Debbie’s foolishness from coming down hard on the forlorn little girl.

24

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FROM HIGH ABOVE the stone cottage among the cypress trees Vic watched that woman contractor, that Ryan Flannery, back her red pickup out of Debbie’s drive and take off. He’d stashed the sleeping bags deep in the bushes, their dirty clothes rolled up inside, had pushed the bundle under the tangled branches of a deadfall. Now, the minute the pickup left, he moved on down through the woods, watching for that cop car that had pulled by Debbie’s place, half expecting it to come back.

But maybe they weren’t looking for him, were just cruising the area, a mindless routine while they sucked down their doughnuts and coffee. They hadn’t stopped at Emmylou’s, and hadn’t looked up toward the stone house—but after Emmylou called that ambulance, you could bet your bippy MPPD would show up sooner or later, nosing around.

Moving on down onto the empty streets of the small neighborhood, he turned up Debbie’s driveway, pausing beside her station wagon to look it over. Old Suzuki was ready to fall apart. He looked in to see if she’d left the keys but she hadn’t. The car was a mess inside, even to him, and he wasn’t real picky how he kept a car. He was wondering if the old heap would hold together for the few hours he needed it when movement above on the garage roof startled him and he swung around to look.

Couple of cats up there pawing at something in the metal gutter, maybe a dead bird. Nasty beasts. Turning away toward the front door, the only door, he saw a light on in the kitchen but, approaching the window, he couldn’t see Debbie inside. He didn’t knock or call out, he moved on up the three steps, tried the knob, found the door unlocked, and pushed on through.

JOE AND PAN watched the man enter. On the little fitful breeze they couldn’t catch his scent, but they looked at each other, puzzled. He was familiar, but different. He was well dressed and his clothes were familiar, too. Even from the roof they could hear the scuff of his loafers across the linoleum of the cottage. They heard him pause at the kitchen and then head forthe bedroom, his rubber soles grating across something gritty. Quickly they scrambled down the pine tree to the ground, and only then did they find his scent. “The guy from the stone shack,” Joe said, “the one with all the hair.” And, as they sniffed around the door, a mix of familiar smells hit them that made their fur stand up: the ripe male smell from the stone house overlaid, now, with the smell of lime shaving lotion and, making them hiss in consternation, the personal scent of Pedric Greenlaw, distinctive and familiar. From within, they heard Debbie yip, the beginning of a startled scream.

The man’s voice was low and flat. “It’s just me.”

Debbie’s voice was cranky. “You could have knocked,” she snapped. “What do you want? You scared me half to death.”

The cats, pushing the door in, slipped on inside, past the kitchen and into the shadows outside the bedroom door. The two stood in the middle of the bedroom, the man’s back to them. Debbie had turned from Tessa’s bed, scowling up at him. She didn’t seem frightened, just annoyed. “You have my money?”

“I got it.”

Joe studied the guy. He was wearing Pedric’s tan slacks with the spot on one cuff, Pedric’s tweed sport coat. The guy’s brown hair was newly trimmed, the skin at the back of his neck as white as a baby’s bottom. His cheeks and chin were pale, too, and he’d used too much of Pedric’s Royall Lyme shaving lotion.

“You got yourself cleaned up fancy,” she said. “What’s the occasion?”

“You like it?” he said, leaning close to her.

Debbie laughed, a squeaky little giggle.“I hope you didn’t spend my money on that fancy sport coat!”

“No way, baby. The money’s all here.” He sat down on the edge of the bed, crowding the sleeping child as if she were only another pillow. The cats, crouched beside the door, watched him remove a wad of greenbacks from his jacket pocket. Using the bed as a table, he began to count out hundred-dollar bills, fanning the stack like a deck of cards and then dealing them out across the covers. Debbie moved closer, watching greedily. Behind them, the cats slipped through the room into the shadows of the baby stroller, beside the five grocery bags—a swift flash of gray and red, their paws silent on the grainy floor. Behind the cats, the closet door stood just ajar. With a silent paw Pan eased it open, preparing for escape, watching Vic warily.

Dealing out the bills, Vic said,“Like to borrow your car.”

“Why would you need my car? Where’s your truck?”

“Just for a little while, an hour or so. Had some trouble with the truck.”

“Where is it? What kind of trouble? You wreck it?”

“It’s in the shop.”

“So why do you need my car?”

Laying down the last hundred-dollar bill and smoothing it out, he drew her close to the bed and put his arm around her.“Just for an hour or two, baby. Some errands I need to run.” He picked up the stack of bills, tapped it against his palm to align the edges, and handed it to her. “Twenty-four hundred bucks. I did pretty good. Agreed?”

“I’d hoped to get more than this,” Debbie said crossly. “Those Gucci bags …”

“Those Gucci bags were last year’s models. I did a hell of a lot better than you’d have done, trying to peddle that lot to someone here in the village or trying to sell it through some consignment shop. Or on eBay. That’d bring the cops down on you.”

Behind the stroller, Joe and Pan smiled at each other. The actual sale of the stolen luxury items put a nice footnote to Debbie’s thieving ways.

But what the cats didn’t understand was the connection. How did Vic and Debbie know each other? He and his friend couldn’t have moved here to the village just to act as her go-between, where was the profit in that?

Had they just happened on her, down in this adjoining neighborhood, and got acquainted? Maybe Vic liked her looks, started coming on to her. One thing led to another, and first thing you know, he’s easing in on her profits. They listened to Debbie argue about the amount of money he’d offered, but then rudely she snatched it up, pulled up her sweater, and stuffed it in her bra.

“What about the car?” he said. “Just for a little while, baby.”

“I don’t think so, I need it for the children, I need to pick Vinnie up at school.”

“School’s four blocks away. Vinnie can walk.” Vic hugged her close, his voice teasing. “Come on, baby. You got to have more stuff for the fence by now, with your clever ways. What’s in them grocery bags over there, under the bread and cookies? You want me to handle that lot? I will if youloan me the car.”

He argued and wheedled until at last she gave in.“On one condition,” she said, and now there was a smile in her voice. She turned, indicating the bulging grocery bags. “Load those in the back under the blankets, get them out of here until that contractor’s done nosing around.”

“And them cops,” he said. “You wouldn’t want them cops to see all this, the ones that were cruising up here.”

Debbie shrugged. As if she wasn’t worried about cops.

“Will you be going back up to the city again, when you get your truck?”

“Might.”

“When will that be?”

“Two, three days for the truck to be ready.”

“Take that lot with you, sell it for me like you said, and you can borrow the car for two hours. No more.”

In the bed, the cover stirred and Tessa peered sleepily out, watching Vic and her mother. The little girl, Joe thought, observed more than people imagined. Vic said,“When I get the truck, what if I head for the city with your stuff but don’t come back this way for a while?”

“Send me a money order,” Debbie said smartly.

“You trust me with the money, baby?”

“You brought me this much,” she said softly, picking up her car keys, looking toward the stroller.

Panicked, the cats slid into the closet. From among the tangle of shoes and dropped clothes, they watched Debbie hand Vic the bags, loading four into his arms, piling the last atop the others in the stroller, watched her wheel the stroller out, escorting him to her car.

Slipping out of the closet, Joe Grey followed. But Pan leaped up onto the bed beside Tessa, worrying over the child, sniffing at her to determine just how sick she was.

Outside, skinning up into the branches of the pine, Joe watched Vic load up the grocery bags and cover them as Debbie had instructed, watched him back the station wagon out, turning downhill in a direction that would put him on Highway One, and watched Debbie turn back to the house with a smug and self-satisfied smile. No stolen goods on the premises now, no evidence to any crime.

Was this the last of her shoplifting, had she paid attention to what Ryan had told her? Or was she thinking Ryan would get busy with other matters and forget her threat? Was it possible that Debbie, now that she’d been caught red-handed,would stop stealing and look for a job?

Not likely, Joe thought.Not bloody likely.Clawing farther up the pine tree to the roof, he watched Debbie head for the garage with the empty stroller. Maybe she meant to fold it up and stick it in the corner behind her trash and boxes, get it out of the way, too. Behind her, Pan slipped out the door and scrambled to the roof beside him.

“Why does he need her car?” the red tom said. “Has he already sold the Lincoln? Sold it with Kate’s treasure inside, with millions of dollars hidden in there just inches from his greedy fingers and he doesn’t have a clue, no idea he’s dumped a fortune for a few hundred bucks, to some scuzzy dealer?”

“You find that amusing? You think that’s funny, if he let Kate’s hoard get away where no one will ever find it, where not even the law might get a line on it?”

“I didn’t mean it that way,” Pan said contritely. “MPPD will find it. If hehas sold it, it’ll just take them longer.”

“Or maybe,” Joe said, “maybe he found the jewels before he sold it, took the door panels off himself to hide his stolen money, and found everything. Maybe right now he has Kate’s treasure stashed somewhere else. Or,” he said, “is the Lincoln still here somewhere with Kate’s treasure still in it?” He looked up the hill to the woods, where the narrow dirt drive led down to the stone shack. “Could he have gotten the Town Car down through the trees?Wouldit have fit in that narrow shed?”

“Like a rat stuck in a jam jar,” Pan said. “None of us were here to see him hide it, we were all up at the wreck. Except my dad,” he said. “Except Misto.”

“Vic’s hardly had time to sell a car,” Joe said. “Maybe everythingis in the shed, and he’s afraid to drive the Lincoln, afraid Harper’s men will spot it, maybe that’s why he wants Debbie’s car. Let’s have a look before he and his pal take off for good.”

“Maybe the other guy’s too hurt to travel. Kit said the man in the wrecked truck never stopped moaning, as if he were injured real bad.”

Approaching the shed, looking up at its solid door, Joe leaped up at the padlock, striking and pawing at it. The big lock swung heavily but was closed tight. Pan tried, but with no better luck. Together they clawed at the door itself, trying to pull it away enough to see under or see through a crack at the side, but the heavy construction of bolted planks wouldn’t budge. But then when they sniffed along the molding they caught Vic’s fresh scent, and when they pressed their noses to the thinnest crack between door and molding they could smell a faint breath from within that made them smile: a distinct new-car smell, the smell of fine leather seats, thesame comforting aroma as when they’d ridden in there with Kit, the smell of the Greenlaws’ Town Car.

And when they examined the dirt apron of the drive itself, the faintest tire tracks led up to the shed door, the sharp tread of new tires just visible on the hard earth. Another set led away again to vanish where the narrow drive was covered with rotted leaves, where only vague indentations compressed the damp mulch. And only now, sniffing along the ground, did they catch Misto’s scent where the old yellow cat had indeed padded along following the track of the Lincoln.

“Did they bring the Lincoln directly here from the wreck?” Pan said. “While we were headed up the mountain with the Damens, did my pa see those two men hide it in here?” He lifted his nose from the old cat’s scent. “While you and Dulcie and I, and Rock and the Damens, were setting off to find Kit, did Misto know all along where those two men had holed up? He couldn’t know who they were or what they’d done, and he couldn’t know the Lincoln was stolen, but he knew where itwas,” he said, smiling.

“He knew they’d put a car in there,” Joe said. “But would he recognize the Greenlaws’ nice Town Car if it has heavy damage, dents and crumpled fenders, dirt and gravel from the landslide? And now,” he said, “is it still parked in there behind those plank doors, or is only the smell there, and the Town Car gone again?”

“Secrets within secrets,” Pan said as they moved away, wondering where else to look for the stolen vehicle. “This old place reeks of secrets. Only a few months ago, you and Dulcie find Sammie’s body buried right down there under her own house. Then Emmylou inherits the house and starts finding money hidden in the walls. Those two tramps come here looking for it, too. And then those same two men wreck the Greenlaws’ car or are involved in the wreck, one of them attacks Pedric and Lucinda and could as well have killed them both.”

“And,” Joe said thoughtfully, “even Sammie’s death itself might be tied in. It was her money.”

“Tied in how?

“The department’s file on Sammie says she was killed because she saw Debbie’s husband, Erik Kraft, kill Debbie’s younger sister after he got her pregnant. Killed his own wife’s little sister. But did Erik kill Sammie because of the money, too? Could he have known Sammie had hidden money? If he found out somehow, could he have tried to find it himself, tried to force her to tell him where it was? When she wouldn’t, he killed her?”

“Maybe,” Pan said thoughtfully. “I guess we’ll never know. Whatever happened, Erik Kraft is scum, I always hated him. With a father like that and a mother like Debbie, it’s no wonder Tessa has problems. Do you think,” he said, “Vic hid the Lincoln nearby, where he can get at it in a hurry?”

Both cats glanced down the hill where the little cottages stood crowded close together beneath their overgrown cypress trees.“Come on,” Joe said, “it’s worth a look, half those places are empty.” And off they went, past Debbie’s house, down among the FOR RENT signs and the neglected foreclosures, to peer into garage windows and under doors, searching for a car worth maybe twenty thousand but loaded with treasure worth many times more.

25

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RYAN DROVE HOME from Debbie’s feeling dead for sleep and out of sorts, wishing Debbie Kraft had never returned to the village, and cursing her stupidity that she’d allowed Debbie to entrench herself rent-free in the little spec cottage. She had no idea whether her ultimatum to Debbie would have any effect on the woman. If it didn’t she’d give the department a heads-up—if they weren’t already watching Debbie. She hated that this would jeopardize Tessa. Even rude little Vinnie didn’t deserve to be swept into the maw of Children’s Services. Looking at her watch, she saw it was only mid-afternoon, just after two, but she’d love to crawl under a quilt for a few hours. Last night’s desperate phone call from Kit seemed like weeks ago, a whole lifetime seemed to have passed since Kit’s lonely cry for help.

Racing up to Santa Cruz, searching the dark cliffs and then that business with the coyote, their relief at finding Kit unhurt and then hurrying to the hospital and their long vigil there, had left her limp with fatigue. Their trek home this morning behind the ambulance, getting Lucinda settled, and finding that lowlife had been in there pawing through their personal things, stealing Pedric’s clothes, that was enough without Debbie’s sour defiance to top off the long and exhausting drama. Was she getting old? she thought crossly. But no long day on the job, no amount of hard physical work on a construction project, exhausted her as these stressful hours had done. Now, pulling into her own drive and killing the engine, she glanced in her side mirror to see Clyde turning in behind her, in one of the shop’s loaner cars.

He had put in less than an hour, since she’d dropped him at work to clear up some irksome detail about Jaguar parts lost in shipping. She watched him step out of the silver Mercedes, yawning. Despite his aggravation at a delay in the repair schedule and, consequently, an annoyed client, it was nice to own your own business, to feel comfortable taking some time off when you needed to. The minute she opened the truck door, Rock bolted out and straight for the house, nearly upsetting Clyde as he unlocked the front door. When he pushed it open, swinging it wide, Rock bolted through heading for the kitchen.

Grinning, Clyde put his arm around her and they followed Rock in, found the big silver dog checking the kitchen floor for stray food. They stood watching him lick Snowball’s empty bowl clean then sniff along the countertop—whatever enticing trail he found led him out of the kitchen again and up the stairs to the master suite. They moved up behind him, Clyde carrying their duffel and backpacks, to find Rock had followed the scent of the old yellow cat.

On the love seat in Clyde’s study, Misto and Snowball woke only a little, curled together sleepily. On the desk the message light was flashing, but neither Ryan nor Clyde wanted to listen to messages. They watched Rock nose at the two cats, licking them all over. The little white cat was used to the big dog’s attention, his wet caresses made her smile. Misto batted at Rock with velvet paws, hissing halfheartedly—but then the yellow tom caught a whiff of the backpacks where Clyde had set them on the floor. He rose to investigate. He smelled the canvas with a puzzled look, then looked up at Ryan, questioning. He sniffed the ocean smells the canvas had collected, the scent of fresh pine needles, the scents of Kit and Joe Grey and Pan. He dropped his ears and backed away.

“Coyote,” he said, scowling up at them. “And blood,” he added, drawing his lips back at the metallic scent.

“The Greenlaws had a wreck,” Ryan said. “They’re in the hospital. Kit ran off and was lost and called us, and we went after her. We found her, she’s fine, but …”

Behind her, Clyde had flicked the replay on the answering machine; she paused until it had played its messages. The first two were about problems with the house she was just finishing, but nothing serious. The third call was from Dr. John Firetti; his recorded voice brought Misto to full attention. Leaping onto the desk, he nosed at the machine.

“We’re home!”Firetti said.

“We’re home,” Mary chimed in, “shall we come get Misto? We so missed him, could we—”

But Misto was already on his way, leaping up to the rafters like a young cat and through Joe’s cat door, his yellow tail vanishing as he bolted out through Joe’s tower. They heard him thudding across the roof at a dead run, his gallop soon fading and then gone; they imagined him flying across the peaks above Ocean, making for the veterinary clinic and the cottage that stood beside it,making for home.

He’d left the Damens’ without knowing much at all about the wreck or about Kit’s fearful adventure, and with no idea the Greenlaws’ car had been stolen, that the black car he’d seen pulling into the stone shed did, indeed, belong to Lucinda and Pedric. He left Ryan and Clyde equally ignorant, as well, of where the Town Car might now be hidden.

DEBBIE’S CLUTTERED AND smelly station wagon was a big change for Vic, from driving the pristine new Lincoln. He’d quickly grown used to the heavier, smoother ride, and even with the Town Car’s dents and coat of mud its interior had been better suited to his new, cleaned-up persona. Though in truth the Suzuki, stinking and littered, was more what he was used to, more like the comfortable old truck with trash on the floor, discarded socks, the smell of accumulated dust, stale crackers, and empty drink cans.

Heading for the hospital, he meant to use patient Michael Emory’s name to enter the ER through the locked doors, to be admitted without a hassle. He planned to head for Emory’s cubicle as if to visit, but then move right on by to Birely’s room. It wouldn’t take a minute to do Birely, inject the air the way the book said, bending the IV tube to keep airfrom going up into the bottle—just stick the syringe in below the bend, and push the air in. As simple as that, the air goes down through the IV, through the vein and up into Birely’s heart. Half a second and he’s dead, his life snuffed like a match in a blast of wind.

Vic knew he’d have to move fast, get out in that split second before the alarms went off and the place exploded into action, nurses and doctors running in with their expertise and their machines to bring Birely back to life; that part worried him, hoping he could escape before anyone saw him or realized he’d been in Birely’s room at all.

And who knew how long it would take before he could even be alone with Birely without them nurses going in and out? The hour he’d spent in there before dawn, when he’d followed Birely’s ambulance and pushed on in, the place had been pretty quiet. But now later in the day he imagined it might be real busy, people in scrubs hurrying every which way, phones ringing, maybe gurneys pushing by him coming or going from X-ray, white-coated doctors moving with deliberation from one cubicle to the next. If it was like that, he’d be lucky to get half a minute alone. He could hardly hang out there for hours waiting for the right moment without someone asking questions.

Pulling into the underground, he found a parking slot near the glass doors into the ER. He figured no one would take a second look at the old Suzuki, would think, just one more patient with no money and no insurance, going into the ER with the flu or a backache, going for help where the doctors wouldn’t refuse to treat you even if you couldn’t pay. The wide glass doors opened automatically. At the admitting desk, he gave his name as James Emory, told the nurse he’d come to see his cousin Michael.

“Mr. Emory has two visitors, that’s all we allow at one time. If you’ll have a seat here in the waiting room, we’ll call you when you can go in.”

“No problem,” Vic said. “You got a Coke machine handy?”

“There’s nothing on this floor. You can go up to the cafeteria, they have Cokes, coffee, and sandwiches.” She pointed down the short hall, where he could see the lower steps of a stairway leading up. “That’s the shortest way. At the top just keep going to the big central atrium.”

He didn’t know what an atrium was but he guessed he’d know when he saw it. He went up the steps into a wide, bright corridor, glass walls on his left looking out to manicured trees and gardens. Passing well-dressed people who looked like they belonged there, he felt out of place until he remembered helooked just like them now, no more shabby clothes, he was so cleaned up it took him a minute to recognize his own reflection in the tall windows. Hell, he looked pretty damn good, for a hobo.

The atrium was high ceilinged, with a towering round skylight at the top, and a big indoor fishpond with a small tree growing in the middle. He bought a Coke in the cafeteria, sat down at a table beside the pond. All kinds of space led away into bright halls and more open spaces, and he could see two more sets of stairs leading down. All so damn clean it made him uncomfortable. What kind of money did it take to build a fancy place like this? Molena Point was even richer than he’d thought.

He drank his Coke watching some kind of large, brightly colored fish swim back and forth, then got himself a sticky cinnamon bun and a cup of coffee. How long would it take for those people down in the ER, visiting Michael Emory, to get tired and leave? He felt edgy to get back down there and get this over with, and nervous, too, not wanting to go back. What time did the nurses change shift? Maybe better to wait until then, when they were hurrying to go home, others hurrying in to work, looking at records, playing catch-up to which patients had checked in or checked out or died—best to get down there when they were all distracted, do the deed, slip out to the parking garage again and vanish.

He got more coffee and settled back, watching the circling fish, checking his watch every little while. Just before four, several young women dressed in scrubs hurried out, and several others double-timed in from another parking lot that lay beyond the gardens. Young women walking fast, all businesslike, they knew where they were going and were in a hurry to be on time. Rising, he left his trash on the table.

He was headed for the stairs when he saw that woman contractor come in through the glass front doors, and he stepped back, frowning. No mistaking her, same jeans and red sweatshirt she’d had on at Debbie’s, only now she was wearing one of those backpack purses, an expensive leather model. Looked like, the way she held her head, she was talking to the damn purse, but then he saw she was talking on her cell phone. He turned away and sat down at the table again. Did she recognize him from around Emmylou’s place?

As far as he knew she’d probably never noticed him there—yet when he glanced around again, she was looking straight at him. She saw him looking, said something into the phone, and went on past the pond toward a set of stairs that descended on the far side. Well, he’d seenher for sure, around Debbie’s and up at Emmylou’s, too, helping out with the old woman’s carpentering. Were these women all friends? He didn’t rise until she had disappeared, moving on down the steps, making him wonder where she was headed, what was down there in that direction. He waited a while and then descended the other way, to the ER, trying to calm his jumpy nerves.

RYAN HAD AWAKENED in late afternoon to the ringing of the phone. Clyde, sprawled beside her on the king-sized bed, hadn’t stirred. An afternoon nap was a rare occurrence in their lives, she didn’t like being woken up. Grabbing the ringing instrument, she’d eased out from under the coverlet that she’d tossed over them.

“It’s Kate. I hope I didn’t wake you.”

“Only a little.”

Kate laughed.“I’m sorry. Pedric called, he’s feeling better, he asked if I could bring Kit over, he misses her, he wants to know if I can smuggle her in. I don’t want to leave Lucinda alone yet when she’s on the pain meds, but he sounded so forlorn. I think Kit’s ordeal up on the cliffs has left himmore upset than she was, he wants her close to him, he asked if Lucinda could spare her for a while. Could you … ?”

“Of course I’ll come, I’ll take her over there to him.” Beside her, Clyde turned over, mumbling but hardly waking; Clyde had sat up the longest last night with Pedric, he deserved to be sleepy.

“I’m just running Kit up to the hospital,” she said, “Pedric’s asking for her.”

“Take the Mercedes,” he said, waking fuzzily. “Keys are on my desk. I’ll drop the truck off at the shop before the mechanics go home, I don’t like the way it’s running.”

She thought it was running fine, he was so picky about their cars. She grinned at him, nodded, pulled on her boots, and found her purse. She dropped her keys on the desk, took the Mercedes keys, and told Rock to stay home. The Weimaraner, having hauled himself from sleep and surged off the love seat, was more than ready to go with her. She told him,“No,” and hugged him, but he looked after her ruefully. She moved on down the stairs and out, slipped into the silver Mercedes, and headed for Lucinda’s house.

When she pulled up into the Greenlaws’ drive, tortoiseshell Kit was waiting on the steps shifting from paw to paw, lashing her fluffy tail with impatience. Ryan set the emergency brake and then opened the driver’s door. Kit leaped up into her lap, her expression a strange mix of eagerness and sadness.

“What? What’s wrong? Lucinda’s all right?”

“Fine,” Kit said, snuggling down close to her, pushing her head into Ryan’s ribs.

Ryan rubbed Kit’s warm little ears, but she didn’t start the car. “Tell me.” She sat frowning down at Kit. “Is it Pan? Is it because you argued?”

“Because …” Kit pawed at a tear seeping into the dark fur of her cheek. “Because the most important things to Pan are so different from how I see things. I didn’t know that about him. We can never …”

Ryan took Kit in her arms.“You’re not opposite at all. You’re perfect for each other. You’re male and female, that’s all. That’s what makes the world work. Females go more for security, they’ll fight tooth and claw to protect their home and kittens but tomcats’ hearts are strung for adventure. They go searching for challenge, that’s the waythey protect their brood. That’s the way you’re made, you and Pan.”

Kit looked up at her and her pink tongue came out, licking at another tear.

Ryan looked down into Kit’s wide yellow eyes. She didn’t know what else to say, she didn’t know how to resolve this. Their story was as old as the very concept of male and female. “Maybe,” she said, “if you could talk without hissing and spitting at him …”

“Pan does all the hissing,” Kit said untruthfully. Ryan gave her a sideways glance, settled Kit in the seat again, put the car in gear, and headed for the freeway.

“Maybe I hissed a little,” Kit said, “but he was so—”

“If Pedric sees you all teary, you’ll make him feel worse than he does now.”

“I know,” Kit said contritely. She crept up into Ryan’s lap again, curled up in a tight little ball, shivering. She was being so dramatic Ryan wanted to scold her, but this was the way Kit reacted, the little tortoiseshell was a born drama queen. This was the way she was made, her wild littlespirit knew no compromise, her wild heart blazed with the passion of an unruly youngster, and Ryan knew she would never change. Taking the off-ramp for the hospital, she headed up the hill, made a right, and a left into underground parking. Cruising the first level for a space, she passed Debbie’s old station wagon pulled in beside a pillar. What was she doing here? Had one of the children been hurt? Or maybe Debbie had brought Tessa to emergency for some free cold medicine, that would be her style. But then when she did find a parking place, she was two cars down from an old green Chevy that was a ringer for Emmylou’s car, so much like it that, telling Kit to wait in the car, she walked back and looked in.

She could see Emmylou’s ragged tan sweater on the front seat, no mistaking the tear in the sleeve. The presence of the two familiar cars there at the hospital unsettled her. Uneasily she returned to the car, where Kit was standing on the dashboard, peering out. “Debbie’s car, and Emmylou’s?” Kit said. “What’s that about?” And neither of them could answer.

Opening her small leather backpack, Ryan watched Kit climb in and curl up at the bottom. Kit didn’t like this pack because she couldn’t see out, like the big canvas one with the net insets, but to Ryan the oversized purse seemed less obvious. She buckled the flap loosely enough so Kit could crawl out if she had to, she would never confine any of the cats beyond escape. “Smile for Pedric,” she said, “he needs you now, even more than Pan does.” She slung the pack over her shoulder. “Who knows,” she said, “maybe Pan will get some sense and change his macho mind, maybe he’ll look at your side of the argument.”

Kit didn’t answer.

“Maybe,” Ryan said, locking the Mercedes, “if Kate describes her journey in more detail, if she tells him more graphically exactly why she will never, ever return to the Netherworld, maybe he’ll listen. Maybe,” she said, “he’ll think a little more about the dangers to his beautiful lady.” Heading for the elevators, stepping in and pushing the button for the main level, she took her phone from her pocket so she could talk with Kit in public looking perfectly natural. Stepping out of the elevator onto the open terrace, she crossed to the glass doors, moved inside into the vast, airy court with its sun dome and pond, its information desk and cafeteria, its light-filled corridors leading away to the various hospital wings. The hospital walls were made of white concrete in a bas-relief pattern that made her think of Aztec monuments, the occasional paintings hanging against them offering rich islands of color, oils and watercolors by well-known local artists, dating back into the last century. The smell of coffee and of onion soup rose sharply from the cafeteria kitchen. A man stood beside the pond half turned away seeming to watch the red, black, and white fish swimming aimlessly, but in fact he was watching her, a furtive sideways glance. Did she know him? The back of his neck was so white he must have only recently decided to change his hairstyle. Pale cheeks and chin, too, when he turned.

But he was no one she knew, and she headed past the fishpond, for the far stairs that descended to the ICU, hoping shecould slip Kit into Pedric’s room without getting caught. The nurses in the ICU stuck pretty close to their patients. They’d pushed their luck enough, up in Santa Cruz. Their own Peninsula Hospital, being larger, seemed somehow more intimidating. Who knew what contempt a furry feline visitor, discovered in the ICU against all bureaucratic regulations, would stir among the medical staff—what lack of sympathy that would generate for a needful patient?

26

RYAN DESCENDED THE stairs, not talking to her hidden passenger even with the ruse of her cell phone. The scrutiny of that man by the pond had made her edgy. Light from the main pavilion shone from behind her down the wide stairs; she imagined Kit peering out beneath the leather flap at the sunny vistas and at the paintings spaced along the walls, oils and watercolors, many of the bright California coast. At the bottom of the stairs she followed the signs through a long waiting room; three women sat at a little round table at the far end, all talking at once. Passing them, she moved on down the hall to the ICU. As she entered, no one paid any attention to her, the nurses were all busy with patients or at the computers. When she found Pedric’s glass cubicle, the clear doors and the canvas curtain were wide open. His hospital bed was empty, the white covers neatly turned back. When she turned, a slim, dark-haired nurse stood behind her, green scrubs, gold earrings, hair sleeked into a bun at the back.

“Where’s Pedric? Mr. Greenlaw? I thought he was in room 7.”

“You are …”

“Ryan Flannery,” she said. “I’m a friend, I’m on his health care directive.” Did they keeplists of those permitted in the ICU? The nurse moved to a desk within the open nurses’ station, peered into a lighted screen and pushed a few keys, then glanced up at Ryan. “Mr. Greenlaw is having an MRI. Later today, sometime after he returns, he’ll be moved over to the west wing, into a room there.”

“Why is that? He’s not worse?”

“Oh, no, his own doctor wants a few more tests, that’s all. And he wants the surgeon to go ahead with the arthroscopy on his knee, for the torn meniscus. That’s usually an outpatient procedure, but with the other complications, Dr. Bailey wants it done while he’s here, wants him to stay forat least a day or two.”

“Can you tell me where the new room will be? What number?”

“We don’t have a number yet, they’re still cleaning the rooms. If you want to come back in, say, an hour, we should know.”

Ryan nodded, and left the ICU, glancing in at the rows of bedridden patients, each tethered to their iron bed like a prisoner, she thought dourly. Heading for the waiting room, she thought that Pedric must not have known he would be having another scan and then would be moved, or he wouldn’t have called the house asking for Kit.

In the lounge she chose a love seat as far from the three noisy women as she could. The room was furnished with dark rattan chairs, small rattan tables, and three leather love seats. Potted schefflera plants the size of small trees cast the room in gentle shadows. The place smelled of coffee, from an urn sitting on a console against the longer wall. Paper cups, a basket full of artificial creamer and fake sweetener, all the accompaniments a health-conscious hospital would want to furnish. Setting the backpack down beside her on the cushion of the love seat, she fished out her cell phone. The pack shifted only slightly as Kit peered out the top, scowling at the boisterous women, at their frantic exchange as each tried to get in one more word.“Why do women go on like that,” Kit whispered, “tearing their husbands apart?You don’t do that, none ofmy human friends do that.”

Ryan shrugged, holding her cell phone to her ear.“You said a few things about Pan,” she pointed out.

Kit said nothing. Inside the pack, she curled up again, closed her eyes, and tucked her nose under her paw. Maybe, Ryan thought, after her long and arduous night she would sleep now, would drift off into happier dreams and would wake less angry. Ryan closed her own eyes, but the women’s too-loud voices racketed into her thoughts as sharp as hail on a metal roof; when she did doze off, her dreams were filled with fog and craggy cliffs, with the gleam of a coyote’s eyes and the sharp smell of gunpowder, with regret at the kill but with deep satisfaction that Kit was safe.

WHEN VIC CAME down from the cafeteria into the ER, the nurses were too busy to pay attention to him. He moved on past the nurses’ station glancing into each glass cubicle trying to look like he knew where he was going. He walked the entire square, all four sides, but Birely was not in any of the rooms. At last, revving up his nerve, he asked a nurse.

“I’m his neighbor, I stopped in to see how he’s doing.”

The little blonde was young, her hair tumbled up atop her head like a bird’s nest and secured with a strip of white bandage. “Mr. Miller just returned from surgery, he’s over in the ICU. They repaired his nose. It’ll be some time, after that heals and his breathing’s steadier, that he’ll be ready for surgery to remove the spleen.”

This had to be more than the nurses were supposed to tell a stranger, and Vic smiled at her in a friendly way.“Sounds like he’s getting good care. I’ll stop over there a little later, then, when he’s feeling stronger.”

Leaving the ER, he had a time finding his way to the ICU. The halls led every which way, and many of the heavy double doors were locked. By the time he found Birely his hands were sweating with nerves. The layout was pretty much the same as the ER, big room maybe fifty feet square, nurses’ station in the middle fenced off by open counters with their ever-present computers.

Big chrome machine on the counter near him with spigots for hot and cold water, another machine for brewed coffee, regular and decaffeinated, just like a fancy caf?. Again he circled the nurses’ station but when at last he found Birely there was too much traffic around him, nurses moving in and out of the other rooms. Beneath the white blanket, Birely looked small and weak. He had a white bandage across his nose, a tube sticking out of each nostril so he could breathe, and the usual IV tube attached at his wrist, held in place by heavy tape. His eyes were closed, as if he slept. Even as Vic watched, a nurse moved past him and inside followed by a white-coated doctor. Vic glanced at them casually and stepped on along as if heading for a room around the corner. Damn place was crawling with doctors and several of them glanced at him, looking him over as if he had no business there. He moved along paying no attention to them, as businesslike as he could manage, until an older nurse stopped him, an overweight redhead in blue scrubs, braces on her teeth, asked what patient he was looking for. He gave her Michael Emory’s name. She carried a trench coat over her arm, and a brown leather purse as if she were headed home. Stepping to a computer, she said Michael Emory was over in the ER, and she told him how to get there. She was pretty nice, she didn’t treat him like scum. It had paid to get cleaned up and wear expensive clothes. It was nearly five, and he was sure the shift had already changed. Eight to four, four to twelve, midnight to eight, that was the way most places broke up their time. He waited until he saw the redhead leave, hurrying down the hall carrying her trench coat and jingling her car keys. When he was sure no one was looking, he slipped into an empty room where he could see they hadn’t cleaned up yet, bedsheets wadded in a heap in the middle of the mattress, trash can overflowing with blue plastic pads of somekind and lengths of used tubing. Metal table cluttered with pieces of bloody gauze and used tape, and two used syringes with no needles in them.

He found the rubber-glove dispenser on the wall beside the door, pulled a pair from the section marked LARGE, worked one onto his right hand, and dug into the trash. When he couldn’t find a syringe he turned to the hazardous-waste bin, which was also attached to the wall.

The first three syringes were useless, just the blunt plastic end. Digging deeper, he found one that someone hadn’t broken off the needle. Retrieving it, he hoped to hell he wouldn’t pick up some kind of lethal disease that’d puthim in the ER or leave him sick and helpless.

Well, hell, if he didn’t pull this off he’d be looking at worse than a hospital bed, looking at a lumpy metal cot behind steel bars. If the cops went nosing around Emmylou’s after she’d called the ambulance, if she told them she’d had a breakin and they were camping up there, and the cops came up here to the hospital asking Birely questions, and the dumb little twerp started talking about the money, that would put him on the hot seat. Cops picked up even one fingerprint in that stone shack, ran it through the system, they’d have his whole damn record.

Dropping the syringe in his pocket, he left the ICU still trying to look casual. Made his way out to the stairs, thinking to wait a while until maybe there was less action in there and until people forgot they’d seen him looking in the rooms. He was passing the waiting room to the ICU when he saw her again, that dark-haired woman contractor sitting right there only a few feet from him, and he stepped back out of sight.

She sat in there drinking a cup of coffee and talking on her cell phone. Sounded like she was talking to a carpenter, going on about door sizes and the delivery of some kind of flooring. She sat turned away from him, and silently he slipped on by. What was she doing here?

Well, hell, people got sick. Birely didn’t have a corner on the market. He moved on down a long hall to another part of the hospital thinking to wait a while until people forgot about him, then go back and take care of Birely. He knew he was putting it off, he told himself he was being cautious, that he wasn’t scared. He wandered thehalls until he’d got himself thoroughly lost again and began to feel shaky.

Finally, passing a big, glassed-off garden right in the center of the building, he saw the cafeteria ahead, and knew where he was. He stopped off there, had himself another cup of coffee to steady his nerves, and another one of them cinnamon rolls. Jangled nerves always made him hungry. That garden he’d passed, big as a city lot, hospital rooms and glassed hallways facing it on all four sides, garden had a big rock formation with a waterfall, three stories of rooms looking out on it. Pretty damn fancy, he wished he had half the money it’d taken to build this place. What couldn’t he do with that kind of cash?

Finishing his coffee and sticky roll, he headed back to the ICU. Moved on in past the nurses’ station and across to Birely’s room. He was about to step inside when he saw a nurse in there and another doctor. He moved on by, glancing around, and into the room next door. The patient was sleeping, snoring softly. Slipping past him to the connecting wall, he stood listening.

The doctor’s voice was deep, it reached him easily, he must be standing right there on the other side. The glimpse Vic had had of him, he was a big man, his shoulders rolled forward as if maybe he had a weak back. He was talking about the IV, giving the nurse instructions. “Keep him on fourteen milligrams of Demerol every three to four hours, until his nose is less painful. I want him to lighten up a little now, not so deep under. I want only nurses in here, no trainees, I want him handled with care. I don’t want any pressure on the abdomen. None. Do you understand?”

Vic couldn’t make out what the nurse said, her voice was too soft. He was so intent, listening, he almost missed seeing Emmylou pass by, he barely glimpsed her through the crack between the curtain and the wall as she turned into Birely’s room.

Had she seen him out there, coming into the ICU? But hell,she didn’t know him, either. He was too edgy. Just because he recognized someone didn’t mean they knew him. If Emmylou’d ever seen them and knew they were living up there, she’d have called the cops long ago. And with his change in looks, his long hair gone, why would she recognize him now? The doctor was telling her that when Birely’s nose had healed some, he’d go back into surgery and they’d take out his spleen, same as that nurse had said.

“If the spleen doesn’t rupture,” Emmylou said, “before you get him back into surgery?”

“We’re taking the best care we can,” the doctor said coldly. “You have no idea what happened to this man?”

“None,” she said. “I found him hurt like that, lying in a sleeping bag half-conscious and moaning.”

“Found him where?”

“In an old vacant house at the back of my property, no one was supposed to be in there.”

“You reported it to the police?”

“I called the ambulance. I don’t plan to file a complaint, so why call them?”

There was a long silence. The doctor said no more. Emmylou said,“I’ll come back in a while, see if he’s awake. He … I’d like a word with him, when he wakes.”

Vic watched through the crack as she left. Soon the doctor left, and then the nurse. He watched the nurses’ station as personnel moved back and forth, going about their business, all so damned organized. The ward grew quieter, some of the nurses disappeared into patients’ rooms, the pace seemed to slow. Vic moved out of the room past the sleeping patient, his rubber-gloved hand in his coat pocket, caressing the syringe. He was about to slip into Birely’s room when two nurses came around the corner wheeling a gurney, came straight toward him. He stepped away, looking with curiosity at the patient, his head all wrapped in white like a turban, his face white as death itself. They turned into aroom two doors down, both nurses looking up at him. He smiled at them and nodded, annoyed that they looked right at him, that they could identify him in a damn minute entering Birely’s room. Angrily he moved on out of the ward, down the hall and out of sight. He’d wait a while and go back. Or come back tonight after another change of shift, when maybe the ward would be quieter?

Right, and when every visitor would stand out all the more. Best to walk the halls a while and then go back again, get it over with, this time, before he lost his nerve altogether. Strolling the hall pretending to look at the pictures on the walls, he stopped at a picture of boats in a stormy harbor, the water wild with whitecaps that made him cold just looking at them. He walked on, feeling shaky, and at last headed back to the ICU. Passing the waiting room, he saw that carpenter woman was still in there, and Emmylou had joined her, she sat right there beside her, talking earnestly. Moving on beyond the open door past the big leafy plant beside it, he paused in the shadows to listen.

27

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KIT WAS SO warm inside the backpack she couldn’t help but squirm, she had to poke her nose out for one breath of cool air. She ducked back when Emmylou appeared in the doorway. What was she doing here? “Come sit,” Ryan said, moving Kit’s leather pack off the love seat, setting it on the floor. “Have you come to see Pedric?”

Emmylou crossed the room with a soft scuffing sound, and sat down.“Pedric Greenlaw’s here? Oh, my. What happened? What’s wrong?”

By the time Ryan had explained about the wreck, Kit had crawled halfway out of the backpack again, listening. Ryan explained how Kit had run off from the wrecked Lincoln, which was the natural thing for a frightened cat to do, and how they had gone to search for her.

“Poor little thing,” Emmylou said. “How lucky that you found her, up in those dark woods. She must have been terrified.”

I was terrified.And ready to bloody those damned coyotes.

“She came to us,” Ryan said. “She had the good sense to do that.”

Well, of course I did.

“And you spent the rest of the night at the hospital up there? You must be dead for sleep. And they’re here, now, in the hospital? Pedric and Lucinda?”

“Pedric is,” Ryan said. “They brought him down in an ambulance. They’ll be moving him over to the other wing for a few days, but Lucinda’s at home. Our friend from San Francisco is staying with her. Lucinda’s happy tobe home, and so is their little cat.”

“I’m sure of that,” Emmylou said. “Cats don’t take well to that kind of stress. But now they’re both safe in their own place, and that will help to heal them.” Emmylou had a special fondness for the concept ofhome,for a safe haven of one’s own, having recently lived homeless in her old car, and before that in a wind-riddled, one-room shack from which she had been evicted. Her work on her snug house, as she remodeled, was thoughtful and loving. Was, in its own way, deeply restorative to the lone woman, a home at last that no one could take from her.

But,Kit thought, we’re not all home, Pedric’s not home yet. And I feel like I’ve spent half my life in hospitals hiding under the covers having to be quiet and still and my very fur smells of hospital. Pedric has to feel just as trapped, all the bandages, the needles stuck in his arm, the nurses doing things tohim he’d rather do for himself. We’re not all home yet, we’re not all three of us back together yet. The brush of a footstep in the hall, the silence as it paused startled her. She rose up out of the leather pack, to look.

Beyond the open door a shadow shifted where someone stood listening, his shadow half hidden by the big floppy leaves of the schefflera plant that hid, as well, most of the hallway. Emmylou was saying,“… squatters. Two sleeping bags, empty cans of beans, beer cans, trash. They left a mess. Well, this man that I’ve come to visit, he was in there in his sleeping bag on the floor, and he was hurt real bad. I don’t know what happened but he was all alone, moaning and bleeding, the minuteI saw him I hurried down to my place and called the ambulance.”

Listening to Emmylou, trying to make sense of what she was saying, Kit watched the shadow shift again, and when she breathed deeply she picked up the sweet smell of sugar and cinnamon, and then … What? What was that she smelled?

Pedric? The faintest scent of Pedric? But then even stronger, over Pedric’s scent and the smell of sugary cinnamon, came a familiar odor that made her swallow back a growl. It was all she could do not to bolt out of the bag and leap at him, slash him as she had up on the mountain when he’d hurt Lucinda. Why was that man here at the hospital? The same hospital where Pedric was. What did he want, what did he mean to do?

“Well, to make a long story short,” Emmylou was saying, “the hurt man is Sammie’s little brother, Birely. Can you believe it? Her homeless brother who came around once or twice a year. Birely who never admitted to being among the homeless, who called himself a hobo. Whenever he showed up, she’d take him a sandwich or a hot supper from the deli. Sometimes I went with her, we’d sit under the Valley Road bridge, the three of us like homeless folks, having our picnic.”

“Was Birely here for her funeral? I don’t …”

“No,” Emmylou said. “He probably didn’t know she’d died, until now. Came back all these months later, after Sammie was buried, came up to the property but didn’t tell me he was here. Broke into that stone shack with one of his cronies. How long have they been there, and I didn’t have a clue? Not until I heard some noises up there last night, and went up to see and there was Birely, lying there only half alive.”

The shadow had moved closer, pressing against the door, Kit could see the flap of his jacket now, through the crack between the wall and the open door. His smell came stronger again, hiding Pedric’s scent. Emmylou said, “Days earlier, Ihad wondered, when Misto started watching the place, sitting in the yard, looking up there. And then when I saw your Joe Grey and little tabby Dulcie up there, saw them come down off the windowsill as if they’d been inside. I thought, then, there were rats up there, there are wood rats all over these hills. I decided they were hunting in there, and I thought no more about it.”

In the shadow of the love seat, when Ryan turned away, Kit slipped on out of the backpack, to the floor. Ryan said,“When he learned Sammie had died, why didn’t he come to you? Was he too shy, did he move in there out of loneliness but was too shy to let you know he was there? But then,” she said, “what happened? How did he get hurt?” Behind her Kit fled belly down across the dark tile floor and into the shadows of the potted schefflera tree. “Last night,” Ryan said, “when you called the ambulance, why didn’t you ask for the police, too?”

“Those two hadn’thurt anything,” Emmylou said. “They were trespassing, but nothing more. My concern was all for Birely.”

“Emmylou, you don’t know anything about the other man, or, in fact, about Birely …”

“Oh, Birely isn’t mean, just irresponsible. Maybe a little dim. Sammie always tried to take care of him. She was nine when Birely was born. She said he was always shy and rather slow, that the other kids teased and harried him. Their parents did their best to see he wasn’t bullied and to teach him to fend for himself, but then their father was killed. Birely was seven, Sammie sixteen. After that, I guess they all had a hard time.

“When Sammie died she left me everything she had, the house and the money. She asked me to take care of him if I could, so of course I feel responsible for him, I couldn’t betray Sammie, I have to help Birely.”

“She left you money? I hope enough to pay the taxes and insurance.”

Emmylou smiled.“Oh, my, yes. She …” She glanced down the room at the three women, but they were still talking all at once, as frantically energized as sparrows on a pile of bread crumbs. “She left money hidden in the house,” Emmylou said softly. “Quite a lot of money.”

“I’m glad of that,” Ryan said. “That helps with the refurbishing, too. I hope you have it safe in the bank, now. But, Emmylou, if Birely’s friend knew he was hurt, why didn’the get Birely to the ER? He just went off and left him? Doesn’t that tell you something?”

Kit, hidden among the leaves of the schefflera, wasn’t six inches from the man who’d hurt Pedric and Lucinda, who’d gone into their empty house and trashed it. He looked different now, smooth shaven, with short, neater hair—having left his pigtail scattered across their bathroom floor, she thought, twitching a whisker. He was wearing Pedric’s sport coat, the missing tweed sport coat, and Pedric’s missing Rockports that, when she sniffed them through the crack, still smelled of the Molena Point hills, of bruised grass and damp leaves. He had used Lucinda and Pedric’s house key to steal Pedric’s clothes, and now he was here at thehospital. Come to visit his hurt partner? Or to nose around Pedric’s room? For what reason?

Emmylou said,“Maybe Birely’s partner didn’t have any money to take him to the hospital, maybe he left Birely to go for medicine, to help him the only way he could, maybe—”

“You know better than that, Emmylou. Medicine, for a smashed nose? Everyone knows you can check yourself into the ER with no money, that, by law, they can’t refuse to treat you. Whereis this friend, who couldn’t bother to bring Birely here?”

The man beyond the door had turned away, moved silently, heading down the hall toward the ICU. Silently Kit followed him. Bellying out from under the schefflera and out the door, she hoped no doctor or nurse came along the hall and made a fuss, called security to chase that cat out of the hospital. Behind her the voices faded as Kit streaked across an intersecting hallway close behind the man’s heels. The floors were no longer dark so he blended in; the linoleum was white now, against her black-and-brown coat as she followed him into the big, open expanse of the Intensive Care Unit.

IN THE WAITING room, Ryan knew she should be returning to the ICU, to see if Pedric was back in his bed. She imagined Kit sound asleep in her backpack, worn out from last night’s excitement. Emmylou was saying, “I read Sammie’s letter over and over. I kept it for only a few days and then I burned it. I was afraid someone might find it, and find the money. Sammie had invested some of it, and she did all right, enough to live on, and to work only when she wanted to. She kept most of the original money at home, she said her uncle’d taught her never to trust banks.

“After he left the states, Sammie thought he was afraid to write or call, afraid that might put the Mexican Guardia on his trail, afraid of being extradited back to the U.S. He must have been a tough old guy; he was one of the last legendary train robbers, a man right out of the Old West, and he was a real hero to Sammie. She prayed he’d come back, but he didn’t, not until she was nearly thirty. Came back to California to die.

“She was living up in the Salinas Valley then, working as a bookkeeper, when the uncle showed up again. He was real sick, lung disease. He was bone thin and weak, and could hardly breathe, she was surprised he had made it up from Mexico, came by train all the way. She got him into the hospital,” Emmylou said, “but he only lasted a week, lying there white and helpless, she said, and then he was gone. Dead from emphysema and pneumonia.

“Her letter was with her will. I was surprised she had a lawyer, she lived such a simple life, was so reclusive.” Emmylou laughed. “Like me, I guess. Well, the lawyer gave me the sealed letter, and the newly recorded deed in my name, a check for what little she had in the bank, and the letterhe’d sent her with the money some years before he died.”

“That’s why you were tearing into the walls,” Ryan said, “that’s why you’re remodeling, looking for the money. Oh, my God, Emmylou. What if there’d been a fire?”

“It was wrapped in sheets of asbestos,” Emmylou said, “some kind of insulation, maybe what they used to use in houses before the laws got so strict.”

Ryan closed her eyes, imagining packets of old, frail treasury bills, wrapped in asbestos that probably wouldn’t help much if those ancient, dry studs went up in a hungry blaze. She wondered if, in those simpler days when every crime was more newsworthy, that robbery had been in the California papers. She wondered if the case was still open, perhaps, was still on the books after all these many years—and if the feds would still like to get their hands on those old bills? It was only after Emmylou had left, and Ryan reached down to pick up her backpack and head for the ICU, only when she felt the pack swing up too light, light and empty, that she panicked.

28

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MAKING SURE HE had the rubber glove, Vic patted the syringe, safe in his pocket. At the door to the ICU he tried to look casual, walked on in past the chrome coffee machine, scanning the glass-fronted cubicles. His plan was to use patient Michael Emory as his cover, pretend to be visiting him. The nurse had said he was being moved over there from the ER. With luck he’d be there already and maybe asleep, sick people slept a lot. If the wife wasn’t in there he could sit in there himself, like a visitor, could watch Birely’s room from there until the coast was clear. It would take only a second to do Birely, bend the tube, inject the air, and get the hell out—and talk about luck! There shewas, that Mrs. Emory, coming out of number 15, the same small dumpy woman with the round, wrinkled face and yellowed fuzzy hair. Congratulating himself on his perfect timing, he watched her leave Emory’s room pulling the canvas curtain halfway across as if maybe Emorywas sleeping. As she passed the nurses’ station and moved on out the double doors he stepped over to the coffee urn, filled a white foam cup with coffee, added sugar and cream. Carrying this, he headed on around the nurses’ station to the other side. If anyone questioned him, he was here to visit with Michael Emory. He smiled and nodded when one or another of the nurses glanced up at him. They were all busy, no one paid much attention to him, busy doing their routine chores of one kind or another, oblivious to Vic’s purpose there.

STALKING THE MAN was an exercise in fast judgment and heart-thumping panic. Kit made it down the hall and around the corner into the ICU having to dodge only twice into open doorways, where she barely missed being seen. Slipping behind his heels into the ICU, she was engulfed by the smell of alcohol, adhesive tape, disinfectants, and human urine. The ward was brightly lighted, and on the white linoleum she stood out like a raven on a white bedsheet. There was not one dim recess near her in which to hide, to camouflage her dark coat, not one shadow except, yards away, where the occasional cart or wheeled cupboard was parked against the open nurses’ counter. Twice she dodged behind rolling electrical equipment that looked like it could shock her straight into cat heaven.

If this man was visiting his wounded friend, wasn’t it a little late? Why would he care about Birely after leaving him to suffer and maybe die all alone? Her sense of Birely, after listening to Emmylou, had softened, had left her feeling only sorry for Sammie’s pitiful brother. It wasn’t Birely who had hurt Pedric and Lucinda and stolen their car, it was Birely’s visitor.

The soft pad of a nurse’s approaching footsteps sent her behind a stainless steel machine with a cord hanging down like a noose. Next to it against the counter stood three rolling storage cabinets, polished steel carts with doors and drawers, with who knew what inside them? Towels and warm blankets? Or lethal and radiating medications that could sear a cat’s very liver at this close range? The carts stood on casters, four inches off the floor, leaving narrow, bone-bruising spaces beneath. Flattening herself, she crept under.

Squeezed against the cool linoleum floor, concealed within the cupboard’s shadow, she peered out at the man in Pedric’s sport coat. He stood with his back to her looking in through a partially open glass door, the canvas curtain drawn halfway across. She watched him move on in, to disappear inside. Whatever he was up to, his body language and his nervous smell made the fur along her back stand stiff.

But this wasn’t Pedric’s room, his was around the corner near the double doors, she’d seen it earlier from Ryan’s backpack. Relieved but curious, she looked both ways as if crossing a busy street, and slipped behind him across the wide walkway to the open glass door. She crouched there frantic to hide herself before a nurse spotted her, but she was afraid to push inside wherehe’d see her.

The canvas curtain didn’t reach the floor; whoever had designed the flimsy barrier hadn’t envisioned anyone interested enough to peer underneath from a four-inch vantage. When she looked under, his back was to her. She crawled under and crouched against the glass beneath the curtain’s edge.

The patient was either asleep or unconscious. He lay unmoving, his eyes closed, his nose covered with a thick white bandage. A thin plastic tube snaked out of each nostril, she could hear him breathing through them. The man she’d followed stood over him. She had to force her tail to be still, not switch with anger. He stood looking down at the tube that ran from a vein in Birely’s wrist up to the hanging jar that was the IV dispenser. He reached to examine the tube and then looked up at the screen, watching its moving graph and changing numbers. When he fished a syringe from his pocket, she shivered at the long needle.

He took the IV hose in his other hand and bent it double, stopping the flow of liquid. She watched him lay the needle along the tube as if preparing to stick it in—for what purpose? All Emmylou’s sympathy for Birely hit her, and all her own hatred of the man who had hurt her humans. She leaped screaming at him, landed on his shoulder clawing hard.

He hit and grabbed at her trying to pull her off, then swung around as if to run. She clawed down the side of his face, down his neck. When he raised the needle to jab her she dropped off and dove under the bed, up onto its heavy metal stand. He leaned over, looking. He kicked at her, swearing. Even as she dodged away, she saw him drop the needle, straighten up, and draw back his fist over the patient.

His fist struck straight down with all his weight, into Birely’s stomach. Birely screamed a gurgling cry and then was still. Bells went off on the monitor, the graph of Birely’s heartbeat went flat, the gauges blinking in distress. An alarm shrieked from the nurses’ station. Birely’s attacker was gone, racing away, dodging nurses who came running. He shouldered through them shouting, “Help, someone help … Get a doctor, call the doctor.” Pointing and shouting, he fled through the open double doors and vanished. Kit flew through behind him, flicking her tail away as they swung closed.

Racing past the surprised clerk at the admittance desk, she could see him out beyond the glass doors running through the dim parking garage, nearly trampling three children coming in with their heavily pregnant mother. His running feet echoed on the concrete, heading for an old brown station wagon. Debbie’s car? Puzzled, she raced for it. The instant he jerked the door open she streaked behind him into the back, into the dark tangle of Coke cans, mashed food, and little stray shoes. As he started the car, grinding the engine, she barely heard, behind them, a little child’s voice, “A cat, Mama… a cat chasing …” He took off with a squeal of rubber, the concrete roof passing over them, but at the entrance he slowed, easing sedately out of the covered parking into daylight.

Turning left on the tree-lined highway, she knew he was headed toward the freeway. She braced into the right turn, up onto the south on-ramp as if heading back toward the village. She heard no siren behind them, and there’d been no one in the parking lot to note his frantic flight, no one she’d seen except the woman and three children. She couldn’t believe he’d escaped past the running nurses without alarming any of them. Couldn’t they see what he’d done? Crouched behind him among the litter of toys, she scared herself thinking she could have been crushed in the slamming ICU door and then in the slamming car door. She scared herself even worse, knowing she was alone with this man whom she’d twice attacked and bloodied, who might do any terrible thing to her if he got his hands on her.

29

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EMMYLOU HAD HEADED back to the ICU when Ryan reached down to her backpack, found it empty, and panicked. She stared around the lounge, rose to look behind the two chairs in the corner, behind the other three love seats, all unoccupied, behind the green scheffleras that spread out as lush as small trees. She studied the three loud women down at the end, scanned the shadows around their feet, but there was no darker shape, and why would Kit be there? She looked out to the hall, and with an uneasy feeling she headed for the ICU. She was halfway up the hall when she heard women shouting ahead, heard some kind of alarm go off. She ran, saw someone roll a machine across the ICU to a cubicle on the far side where nurses were crowding in.“He’s flatlined …” Two white-coated doctors pushed inside, shouldering Emmylou away where she was stretching up trying to see over the crowding nurses.

“Birely,” she was crying, “let me in, let me by.” Ryan saw a running man disappear out through the open double doors and—her stomach sank—a dark cat chasing him, leaping through the closing doors behind him. She ran. They disappeared in the direction of the admittance desk, the closing doors clicked together in her face even as she fought to open them. Had they locked down automatically, like prison doors? She remembered a nurse touching the wall earlier, just there where that little black hand was painted. Maybe an electric eye? She hit the wall.

Slowly the doors swung out again, so slowly. She threw her weight against them, squeezed through, raced across the reception room startling a red-coated volunteer pushing an empty wheelchair. Dodging him, she was out through the wide glass doors into the dim underground parking garage, nearly falling over a woman and three children. They stood staring after him, the taller girl pointing and shouting,“A cat! Look, Mama, a cat chasing that man.” Tires squealed, she saw Debbie’s station wagon pull out fast and then slow as it moved up the ramp, as if the driver didn’t want to attract attention. Dodging past the children, racing for the Mercedes, Ryan barely glimpsed the man driving. Whatever he’d done back there had enraged Kit. She had no notion what happened or why he had Debbie’s car, only that something violent had occurred and Kit didn’t mean to let him get away. Had she leaped inside his car? Yes, a pair of pointed ears were visible for an instant, then gone again. Starting the Mercedes, she followed, glad she didn’t have her truck. A red pickup with a ladder on top wasn’t so good as a tail. The Suzuki turned onto the freeway. She entered the heavy traffic two cars behind, sliding into a narrow slot. Whatever emergency had brought the nurses running, the patient in trouble had to be Birely Miller, the way Emmylou was yelling.

Was this man Birely’s traveling partner? What had he done to Birely? Had he stolen Debbie’s car? She tried not to think about Kit in there with him, she could picture her hiding in the back among the children’s castoffs, and she was sick with fear for her. She was angry as hell, too. After they’d searched forher half the night up among the cliffs thinking she was dead, why did the crazy little cat have to launch into another crisis? Moving in and out of traffic, changing lanes while following the Suzuki, she was needled by too many questions. Had Kit gone back to the ICU looking for Pedric, seen the commotion, was startled by the cries of distress, saw the man running headlong and guilty, and had impetuously given chase?

Ryan played back Emmylou’s talk about Birely that had made her feel sorry for him and would have made Kit pity him, too. Or did Kit already know the man, and maybe know Birely? Was this the man who had broken into Lucinda’s house? Kit would know him by smell, if nothing more. She thought about Birely camping in the stone house. Was this his partner? Were they, and the men at the wreck on the cliffs, the same? Was this the man who had hurt Pedric and Lucinda, and who now had apparently hurt Birely? No wonder Kit was angry. Up ahead a car pulled out of her lane moving to the left, and she was right behind the Suzuki. She looked for a lane to dodge into, but already he was watching her, studying her in his rearview mirror, glancing ahead and then back at her. She was still trying to cut into another lane, away from him, when a siren whooped behind her.

She tried to nose over into the right lane to let it pass but horns honked and no one would let her in. Easing precariously near the car on her right, she barely let the emergency van squeeze past, giving her an angry blast of siren. Ahead, the Suzuki managed to swerve across, nearly hitting a blue convertible; tires squealed and a horn blasted as the station wagon spun off onto Carpenter Street. The traffic surged on, bearing her with it, she couldn’t get over to turn and follow. By the time she managed to change lanes she was at Ocean. She swung off there, knowing she’d lost him. Nothing ahead of her now but a green panel truck. Taking a chance, she made a right onto a small, wooded street, heading for a tangle of narrow, twisting lanes where it might be easy for the driver of the battered old station wagon to get lost among a maze of similar cars tucked into every narrow drive and wooded crevice. Moving as fast as she dared on the little residential streets, she scanned every side street, every hidden drive, praying for Kit and shaky with fear for her.

ROCKING ALONG IN the back of the station wagon, crouched in between a dozen loaded grocery bags, Kit peered out between them watching the driver. Earlier, coming down the freeway, she’d watched him look repeatedly in the rearview mirror at the cars behind him as if he were being followed. She could only hope he was, and hope it was a cop. She couldn’t creep up again to look, he’d be sure to see her—but when he’d swung fast off the freeway almost getting them creamed, she’d glimpsed a silver Mercedes and the driver was a dead ringer for Ryan. But then, screeching off the freeway onto Carpenter, he must have lost her.

Still, though, he checked behind him as he negotiated the narrow and twisting residential lanes, and at last he pulled over onto the shoulder beneath a clump of eucalyptus trees, the car hidden by the overhanging branches of the dense trees in front of the small, crowding cottages.

He must have taken a cell phone from his pocket, must have punched 911, she listened to him describe a silver Mercedes four-door,“Moving south on the freeway,” he said, “headed for Ocean or maybe on beyond. A woman driving. Dark, short hair, red sweatshirt. I saw her pick up a man running out of the hospital, looked like he was being chased. I thought … Looked like there’d been trouble in there, that maybe he’d robbed someone. He jumped in the backseat of the Mercedes, ducked down so you couldn’t see him. The way he acted, I thought maybe you’d be looking for him …” He paused, listening.

“A sport coat, I think. Maybe brown, sort of rough … like tweed …” He listened again, but then abruptly he hung up. Maybe the dispatcher had asked for his name, maybe asked him to stay on the line. He sat looking around him into the wooded neighborhood as if planning what to do next. She wondered if he’d borrowed the car from Debbie, or stolen it? Swiped it before she had a chance to unload her groceries, Kit thought, amused. But when she nosed at the paper bags, she realized they didn’t smell like groceries, no scent of cereal boxes or fresh fruit. Maybe everything was canned, that would be Debbie’s style. Feed the kids on cans of soup and beans. She tried not to think about being trapped in there with him, tried not to scare herself. Trapped until he opened the door, or until she opened it herself behind him, fought the handle down, leaped out and ran like hell.

But she wasn’t ready to do that, she wasn’t finished with him yet, she wanted to know where he was headed. If he’d killed Birely she meant to see him pay one way or another. Maybe he’d hole up somewhere for a while. Then, when he thought he was safe, she could slip out, find a phone, and call the department. She just hoped he didn’t take off for good, putting long fast miles between him and the cops—and between her and home.

She wasn’t sure why she cared so much that he’d hurt Birely. Except she’d felt bad when they’d found poor Sammie’s body, and now it didn’t seem fair Sammie’s little brother would be murdered, too. Not fair the killer would get away with it, just as Sammie’s killer had almost gone free. She didn’t like when human criminals didn’t pay, she wanted to see them face their accusers and squirm, wanted to see them suffer due consequence.That’s the way the world’s supposed to work, that’s the right balance,she thought angrily. If youhave to live among the dregs and put up with their evil ways, then you should see some retribution.

30

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HAVING LOST BIRELY’S attacker, Ryan still didn’t call the department. She wanted Kit out of there first, and safe, before the cops descended on him; they wouldn’t be polite in taking down a killer, if in fact Birely was dead. They’d run his attacker off the road if they needed to, fire at him, do whatever necessary to take him into custody, and Kit would be right in the middle.

She could keep on cruising the village backstreets looking for the Suzuki among the winding, wooded residential lanes, which would, she thought, be an exercise in futility. Or she could go back to Debbie’s, park the Mercedes out of sight, and watch. See if he showed up there—perhaps to return the car, if he hadn’t stolen it. If Debbie had let him use it, then did Debbie have a role in this, whatever it was? Was she into more than shoplifting? Ryan thought angrily. Moving on through the village and up the hill, she parked two blocks above Emmylou’s on a narrow backstreet roofed over with its giant cypress trees, their lower branches reaching out across the street half covering the Mercedes. Getting out and locking the car, she walked on down to Emmylou’s.

The Chevy was still gone, Emmylou would still be at the hospital. Maybe she was being questioned by the police, or maybe she was asking questions of her own. Was she mourning poor Birely now? Ryan wondered. Moving up the back steps, she tried the door but found it locked. She sat down on the top step, in the shadows where she could see down across the street into Debbie’s scraggly yard. Intoher scraggly yard, that Debbie had never bothered to clean up. She could see the full expanse of Debbie’s empty drive but no sign of Debbie, no light on in the kitchen. Was Tessa still in there alone, tucked up in bed?

Watching the shadowed bedroom, she began to make out a silhouette, a small figure looking out. As if Tessa were kneeling up on the bed, looking out watchfully at the neighborhood, much as she herself was doing.

She was scanning the empty streets, the empty yards, when Debbie’s station wagon came into view slipping slowly along a side street. The driver didn’t turn onto Debbie’s street, he paused at the corner and then turned, circling back, moving down along a stand of pines. She watched him turn into a narrow, overgrown property two blocks to the south. He pulled down the long, weedy drive to the back, where a one-car garage stood beside the forlorn gray house. Parking at one side of the drive, two wheels on the yellowed grass, he nosed the Suzuki into a pile of scrap lumber, gray with age. The minute he opened the driver’s door a dark streak exploded out behind him, fled across the lumber pile and up into a pine tree. Ryan eased back with a sigh of relief. Among the dark foliage, she could barely see Kit slip out onto a branch, to peer down.

Stepping out of the station wagon, the man moved to the old-fashioned garage door and stood fiddling with the lock. She could imagine the hinges rusted, the cracked driveway beneath stained with scrape marks where the old door swung out. With his attention diverted, Ryan moved on down the stairs, had started down the hill, heading in his direction, when she heard the ratcheting squeal of wood on concrete as he eased the door open. Within, beyond the open door, something dark loomed. The hood of a dark car, its lines sleek but its narrow chrome and its headlights dulled as if with dirt; they were the smooth lines of the Lincoln. Snatching her phone from her pocket, she punched in 911.

She ended the call just as fast, clicking off.

She didn’t want the law there, taking over the stolen car, declaring it out of bounds to everyone but the department, impounding it for evidence. Not with what was there—what she hoped was still hidden there behind the door panels. Instead, she hit Clyde’s number.

When she got no answer she left a message, irritated, and clicked off. Turning away among Emmylou’s trees, she headed back to the Mercedes, through the overgrown yards. Slipping in behind the wheel, she hoped he wouldn’t hear the engine start, or would think it was just some neighbor pulling out. Easing down the street and onto his street, she couldn’t see the garage now, it was on the other side of the forlorn gray cottage; not until she was level with the house did it come into view again.

As she turned into the drive, the dropping sun was in her eyes, it was hard to see inside past the Lincoln. She could sense him watching her, as if maybe he stood deeper in, where the shadows were dense. Letting the engine idle, she hit Clyde’s number again.

Still no answer. She eased on down the drive toward the garage, glancing up toward the pine tree where Kit crouched among the thin branches.Stay put, Kit, just stay where you are. He came out of the garage fast, heading for her car as if he meant to jerk the door open. She didn’t kill the engine, she let it idle. As she hit the master lock she dropped the phone, felt frantically along the seat for it. When she looked again he had moved to the edge of the drive. She watched him grab up a short length of two-by-four, and turn. He came at her fast, swinging at the window,his pale eyes flat and mean. She ducked, fishing under the seat for some weapon, maybe a wrench left by one of the mechanics. She found nothing, but then scrabbling deeper she found the phone. He swung his makeshift club, and she covered her face. The window shattered, crazing into a pattern like snowflakes. She gunned the engine, put it in gear, gave it the gas again as if to back away from him up the drive.

Instead she sent the Mercedes leaping forward, braking only as her front bumper rammed the back of the Town Car, solidly blocking it. He came at her again, striking at the broken window, glass flew around her in a cascade of particles. He hit it again and reached through, grappling for the lock. She snatched up the phone, brought the end of it down hard on his wrist. He yelped and drew back and then lunged at the door. He had reached in, grabbing for her, when darkness exploded from above him from the roof—and the world was filled with cats, a tangle of clawing, screaming cats.

EARLIER IN THE day, having searched the neighborhood for the Lincoln, Joe and Pan had given up at last and headed away into the village. Their fur smelled of juniper bushes, every garage they’d investigated stunk with overgrown foliage crowding its old walls. Where they’d been able to find a thin crack beneath a tight-fitting door, they’d detected only the smells of empty oil cans, caked dirt, and mice. When they’d leaped up at dirty garage windows they’d seen nothing within but a broken chair, old cardboard boxes filled with who knew what refuse, and a rat-eaten couch, the cotton stuffing leaking out across the concrete. They’d searched for the Lincoln until both were cranky and hissing at each other, then they hit the rooftops hoping to see the Town Car parked on some farther-off, out-of-the-way lane. But soon, growing discouraged even with that futile effort, they simply ran, working off their accumulated frustration. In the center of the village they raced up the stairs of the courthouse clock tower, to the parapet high above.

Leaping to the rail, they had prowled along it looking down at the rooftops and crowded streets, focusing on each long black car they spotted, but knowing that this, too, was an exercise in futility. They were circling the rail yet again when Dulcie came racing up the stairs, looking up at them. She paused on the little tile balcony.

“There’s been a murder,” she said, “at the hospital. Those men staying up behind Emmylou’s, looks like one killed the other. Killed him right there in the ICU. Emmylou’d found the one man hurt, lying in that stone house behind her place, she called the ambulance and …”

The two toms dropped down to the tiles beside her, giving her their full attention.

“Pedric heard it all from Emmylou when they took him back to the ICU before they moved him to his new room. He got a glimpse of the man from his gurney, he was just being tucked up in bed again when the whole place exploded in an uproar and Pedric saw him running out. Pedric swore the guy was wearing his sport coat, the tweed one. He and Emmylou called Lucinda, she called and told Wilma, and I came to find you. Emmylou said Ryan ran out chasing the guy, that a nurse just coming back from her break saw them, she knew Ryan, she said the man took off in a battered brown station wagon. Debbie’s car? The nurse said Ryan chased him in a silver Mercedes, I don’t know where she got that car but the nurse swore it was Ryan. If he has Debbie’s car and goes back there, and Ryan follows him there, if that’s where he was headed, and Ryan’s all alone …”

“Come on,” Joe said. He leaped down the stairs hitting every fourth step, but halfway down the last flight, before he hit the street, he sailed onto the adjoining roof. The three cats, racing away over the peaks, their heads filled with questions, made straight across the village and up the hill toward Debbie’s hoping hewas going there, where they could help Ryan if she needed help, and where they could summon the law. They were a block from Debbie’s cottage when they saw, between the pines, Kit crouched on the edge of a roof looking over, precarious and intent.

Leaping the chasms between cottages, they gained the roof beside her, to the accompaniment of breaking glass below as the man in the tweed coat swung his crude club, then yelped and drew back, then lunged at the door, reaching in grabbing for Ryan. The cats sprang, exploding down on him in a whirlwind of teeth and claws.

He twisted, shouting and flailing, and dropped the two-by-four. Fighting them off, reaching down for it, he lost his balance. Ryan was out of the car, pounding at him. He went down under her blows. She snatched the two-by-four away, and kicked him in the groin. He curled into a ball, whimpering. She yelled at the cats to back off, but Kit kept at him, raking and biting, she stopped only when Ryan pulled her away, forcing her clinging claws out of his arm.

Kneeling, Ryan held the end of the two-by-four hard against his throat as she frisked him. He looked at the four cats crowding over him growling, their teeth bared, and he lay still. She had pulled two packets of hundred-dollar bills from his pockets, stuffing them into the front of her zipped jacket, when he struck out again, hit Ryan in the face, and struggled to his feet. He ran—but not to the Lincoln, it was useless to him, blocked by Ryan’s car. He headed for the station wagon, jerked the door open, Ryan could see the keys dangling in the ignition. She grabbed Kit away as he swung in. Clutching Kit, she moved away fast as he gunned the engine, dodging the car as it shot backward burning rubber, careened the length of the drive, racing backward into the street, and took off.

Ryan held Kit tight against her, both of them shaking with rage. He was gone, but the Lincoln was safe. Her heart pounding, Ryan flipped open her phone.

This time, Clyde answered.“Sorry,” he said, “I was talking to the supplier, he thought he had the part, but he doesn’t.”

“You’re at the shop?”

“Just leaving.”

“I’m a couple of blocks south of the cottage, down from Debbie’s. Old gray house with the garage way at the back? Can you bring me those two tools your body guys use, to take the panels off a car door?”

“You found the Lincoln.”

“We did.”

“You okay?”

“Fine,” she said.

“You call the department?”

“Not until you bring the tools.”

“On my way.”

“Pick up some gloves,” she said.

He laughed, and hung up. It wasn’t twenty minutes until he pulled into the drive in her king cab. The cats, crowding into the dim garage behind them, peered up into the Lincoln as Clyde, putting on a pair of cotton gloves to prevent leaving fingerprints, removed the door panels. Lifting them off one at a time and reaching in, he began to remove the small white boxes, and he lifted out the little plastic containers of coins, too, all tightly sealed. Ryan placed each item carefully in a stained paint bucket that she’d taken from the back of her truck.

But it was Joe and Pan together who, leaping up into the backseat of the Lincoln, rooting among the tightly packed bundles, found the scent of the old musty bills. Sniffing at bolts of fabric, at boxes and bags scented of far places, the two tomcats rooted down under the Greenlaws’ diverse and expensive purchases, and came up grinning.

“Try here,” Joe told Clyde.

Pulling packages away until he was able to examine the center console beneath, Clyde pulled down the armrest, revealing the small black tray with its cell phone connections.

“There,” Joe said, sniffing at the small square hole in the front. “Musty. The money’s there. Take the screws out.” Already Ryan was headed for the truck. She returned with a Phillips screwdriver, which she handed to Clyde. He unscrewed the tray and lifted it out.

There it was, the rest of the money, thick packets of hundreds stuffed tightly into the small space. He handed them out to Ryan, she packed them in the stained bucket atop the little boxes, filling it to the dented edge. Turning away to the king cab, she locked the bucket in one of the metal tool compartments along the side, arranging heavy coils of electric drop cords in front. Only then, locking the compartment, did she call the dispatcher.

She told Mabel they’d found the Greenlaws’ stolen Lincoln, and gave her the location. But as they talked, she watched Kit and Pan, up on the roof again sitting near but not looking at each other, both staring away into space—looking as if theywanted to make up, but both still too stubborn. She could see only a touch of Kit’s superior “I’m right, you’re wrong” expression. Pan, though he glanced sideways at Kit, sat tall and macho, still with a “I’m not changing my mind” look in his amber eyes. Both cats so hardheaded, Kit refusing to understand Pan’s hunger for new adventure, Pan just as obstinate, wanting Kit to thrill tohis view of the world. Neither cat, even after their bold and concerted attack on the thief, willing to understand the other. And Ryan could only watch, disappointed with them both.

31

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KIT LAY SPRAWLED on the dining table among the last pieces of jewelry that Kate and Lucinda had not tucked away in one bank or another, the gold and sapphires and emeralds reflecting bright shafts of light where the setting sun slanted in through the oak trees. With a soft paw she patted at the brooches and pendants, feeling like a queen counting her wealth, though it wasn’t hers at all. Lucinda was in the bedroom napping, Kate in the kitchen making a light supper, filling the house with the scent of grilled cheese on rye and herb tea.

It had taken Ryan and Clyde only a few minutes, yesterday, to strip the jewelry and money out of the Lincoln before they called the department, before the police were all over the car, lifting fingerprints, taking blood samples, and impounding the vehicle itself for closer inspection. But it had taken the two women all this morning and most of the afternoon to rent seven safe deposit boxes, each requiring them to open an accompanying bank account, to take the necessary cards and papers up to Pedric at the hospital to sign, and then return them to the banks. And then at last to retrieve the treasure from the Greenlaws’ padlocked freezer and tuck it securely away where, they hoped, the banks would keep the gold and jewels safe.

It was last evening after the police arrived to meet Ryan and Clyde at the small garage and go over the Lincoln, that Kit had trotted home shaky from their attack on Vic, and had made a follow-up call to the department. Talking to Max Harper himself, she had laid out in every smallest detail Vic’s murder of Birely Miller there in the hospital. She had hung up abruptly, of course, when Max asked for her name, as he always asked. Both knew he didn’t expect an answer to that question. Secrets upon secrets, she thought, pawing at the mysterious jewelry, and smiling.

Kate and Lucinda, after finishing with the banks, had kept back just this handful of antique pieces that lay scattered around her, now, each one featuring a cat or some mythical creature in its design. Patting at those Netherworld images, Kit thought about Pan’s hunger for that world, and she wondered if he would go there without her. But, then she wondered, would his attachment to Tessa keep the tomcat from leaving, after all?

That very morning when Ryan returned to Debbie’s, to put in the faucet herself, Tessa had whispered to her all about the man with the black car. It was the morning after the cats’ attack on Vic, and Tessa had told Ryan all about that, too, she had seen it all from the window above her bed. She had, much earlier in the day, seen him hide the Lincoln, too. The child had seen more than anyone guessed. “I didn’t tell Mama,” she whispered.

“Why didn’t you?” Ryan had asked her.

“She’d say I was lying. I’m not, that’s what I saw, that’s what happened. My Pan and those other three cats attacked that man to save you. My Pan is back,” she had said, smiling. “But, where is he now? When will he come to live with me again, to be my cat again?”

To that, Ryan had no answer.

No one owns a cat, and yet Kit knew that Pan, in his secret spirit, was indeed Tessa’s cat, just as Tessa was his person.Maybe, she thought,maybe Panwill stay here for Tessa, if he won’t stay for me.

But how will I feel about that? she thought, and she wasn’t sure.

She lay watching as Kate set the table around her, arranging the jewelry in a wicker basket that she put on the buffet. Kit watched her bring in the teapot and cups, watched her go to call Lucinda and help her get up; Lucinda’s cast was heavy and cumbersome, and was tiring to haul around. Walking out with Lucinda, Kate seated her in her own chair and brought in the sandwiches, steaming hot and oozing pale cheese with slices of salami peeking out.

Kate cut Kit’s sandwich in small bites and set the plate on Kit’s own place mat. Over supper they talked about Pedric’s knee surgery, a noninvasive laser technique that was scheduled for early the next morning; they discussed Birely Miller’s simple burial, which would also take place in the morning. Not until after supper did Kate read to them from her mother’s diary, from the later pages that she had found hidden among the moldering Netherworld volumes in the library of a fallen palace, the long passage disconnected from whatever the previous pages had told, from whatever had gone before or after those faded lines.

… all along. We have done our best to battle the royal families that would bring this world down. Inconceivable that the very rulers who benefit most from the labor of the peasants are now destroying their only source of food and goods, of the labor to produce what they need. Hatred, not logic, drives them. Hatred and greed. An evil drives them that comes straight from the hell pit and, in the end, will drag them down into the pit themselves. Soon we must get the baby out of here, must make the journey up into the surface world and find a home for Kate. I pray our one friend there, with Netherworld connections, can watch over her until she’s grown. Will there be any Netherworld left, when Kate is grown? I cannot bear to leave her, but we must return here and rejoin the battle, we must keep fighting.

There Melissa’s journal pages ended, the last page torn at the bottom as if whatever came after had been ripped away. “Maybe buried somewhere among the rubble of the palace,” Kate said, “buried in a world where no one reads books anymore or hardly knows what they’re for.

“Do you remember, Kit, the year I was given that other jewelry, by the old lawyer, the pieces he’d held so long for me in his office safe? That big old walk-in safe, the box hidden way at the back containing my mother’s journal, too? Do you remember how excited you were when you first learnedof another world, how you had dreamed of such a place?”

“I remember,” Kit said quietly. “But that world was bright and happy, not crumbled and cold, it was not a dead world, then.”

Kate said,“You remember, Lucinda.”

Lucinda said,“Most of the earlier entries in your mother’s journals were bright. There was destruction even then, failure of the magic, but the world still held much of wonder. That was only the beginning, the failure of that magic that your parents tried so hard to prevent.”

Supper ended in sadness, which none of them had intended. Kate rinsed the dishes, and they sat for a long while in the living room before the fire, Kit curled in Lucinda’s lap. She looked up often at Kate, still caught and grieving in the remains of that sad world where her parents had died.

BIRELY MILLER’S FUNERAL, early the next morning, was indeed simple, only a few words spoken by a funeral director who had never known Birely nor, if he had, would have approved of him. A few words and then without further ceremony Birely’s casket was lowered into the ground next to the grave of his sister, Sammie. Only a handful of people attended: Max and Charlie Harper, the Damens, Emmylou Warren, and Kate Osborne. Lucinda was at the hospital with Pedric. Those were the human mourners, if one could call their solemn attendance a kind of mourning. The five cats sat at attention, exhibiting varied degrees of pity, sat concealed behind a headstone featuring the image of a praying angel with lifted wings. Six humans and five cats silently attending Birely Miller’s last contact with the souls of this world. The day had turned heavy, with a wet, gray overcast that made the women’s hair curl willfully, and made the cats lick their fur to try to dry it. What Joe Grey wondered, as he watched Emmylou drop a handful of dirt onto the casket, was,Where’s Birely’s old uncle buried, old train robber Lee Fontana?Where did he end up, carrying with him the secret of that final robbery—escapingwithout restitution and most likely without remorse?

But maybe now Fontana would make restitution of a kind more valuable than the U.S. courts demanded. Emmylou, like Kate and the Greenlaws, had decided to give some of her newfound wealth to CatFriends, their local rescue group that Ryan and Charlie and a raft of volunteers had helped to start. Money to pay for cat food and supplies, to pay Dr. Firetti, who so far had donated all his services and all the needed medications. There’d be money, too, to build a central shelter where volunteers could care for the abandoned animals that were brought to them. Joe thought about the starving cats the group had trapped when, at the first downturn in the economy, so many householders left their homes with back rent or mortgages overdue, and left their pets behind.

What would Lee Fontana think of this use of his stolen money? Maybe, from the stories Misto told of Fontana—if Joe could bring himself to believe Misto’s tales—maybe the old train robber would like that choice just fine. If the old yellow cathad been Fontana’s ghostly confidant as Misto liked to say, guiding Fontana safely through his self-inflicted troubles, then Fontana must have a warm place in his spirit for a cat, maybe he’d be pleased and amused by his unwitting gift to catdom.

VIC HAD FLED from Ryan badly shaken by the attack of the cats. Headed for open country, he had parked the Suzuki on the berm of the narrow dirt road, as far under a drooping willow tree as he could get it without tilting over into the drainage ditch; the willow was already shedding its small yellow leaves down onto the hood and, in the light evening breeze, its stringy branches dragged back and forth across the metal, scraping annoyingly. It was nearly dark inside the car, shaded by the tree and with the windows blocked by his makeshift curtains; bright-colored cashmere sweaters with their store tags attached hung down from the two lowered visors, and along the driver’s side he’d secured a blue sweater into the crack of the rolled-up window. He sat sprawled in the back where he had pushed the clutter aside, no room to put the backseat up, the whole seat was in one piece, but at least the resultant platform was low, giving him some headroom. He sat bare to the waist, his bloodied shirt wadded up, the ripped tweed sport coat already discarded, resting ten miles back in the trash can of a FastMart where he’d stopped for a dry sandwich, some salve for the scratches, a bag of corn chips, and a Coke.

He’d parked, for that quick shopping trip, at the back of the FastMart building among some scraggly trees. That area up along Molena Valley road was a mix of scattered fields, sad old houses and new ones, pastures with horses, scraggly woods, weedy unused land all mixed together. He’d got in and out of FastMart as quickly as he could, keeping his head down just a little and the collar of his ripped coat turned up. He’d bought a brown sweatshirt, too, off a rack by the refrigerator. There’d be a BOL out on him, with Birely lying dead back there and probably, by this time, Debbie Kraft hollering up a fuss that her old car’d been stolen.

Leaving FastMart after making his purchases, a caf? two doors down had smelled so good he’d been tempted to chance it, go on in there for a hot meal. But even as he paused, looking down that way thinking about scrambled eggs and potatoes and sausage, wondering if it was worth the risk, a pair of sheriff’s cars pulled up right in front, coupleof deputies got out, moved into the restaurant hardly looking around them. Midmorning snack, he guessed. They didn’t glance his way, didn’t make the Suzuki or they’d have skipped their meal and come after him. As soon as they disappeared inside he’d hightailed it to the Suzuki and got on out of there. As he turned out onto the two-lane highway a cat ran across, he gunned the car but missed it. He’d like to cream every damn cat he saw, his back still stung like holy hell. He’d driven on watching the side roads, looking for a place to get out of sight, to stop and smear some of thesalve on, see if that would help. He wasn’t far from Molena Point, maybe only ten miles, he knew he should get on over the grade to Highway 68, head for Salinas and onto the faster freeway.

But then again, maybe not. Maybe not hit the freeway until full dark when the cops couldn’t make him so easy. Maybe hole up until then close to the village where they wouldn’t think to look for him. Lay low for a few hours and then move on. He could use some sleep, catch a couple hours before he headed for the 101, if he planned to drive all night. Up through Eureka, on up to Bremerton, he knew a guy up there he could stay with, place way back in the boonies. Dump the Suzuki, pick up some decent wheels.

Now, bending awkwardly, he smeared salve on his bare back, on the scratches and bite wounds. Damn friggin’ cats jumping down on him like that, as vicious as that cat up at the wreck. He never had liked cats, sneaky and mean. The bloody wounds stung, but then in a few minutes the salve began to ease the pain and burning. And why would that catchase him, there in the parking garage? Dark, ugly cat, just like the others. He’d never have seen it except for that kid shouting. He’d got one glimpse of the cat racing across the concrete right at him, piled in the car, slammed the door, and when he looked back the damn thing was gone. Shivering, he’d started the engine and peeled out of there, then slowed so as not to call attention to himself.

And then when that contractor woman got in his way blocking the Lincoln and them cats jumped him for no reason. Twice attacked by cats, and chased by another one. Spooky as hell, still made him sick to think about it, unnatural, bloodthirsty beasts. Pulling the brown sweatshirt on over his salve-smeared wounds, he lay down in the space he had cleared. The bed of the station wagon was hard as hell. He pulled an old, torn blanket over him that smelled of peanut butter and sweaty kids. He wondered if Debbie had ever had the backseat down all the time she’d owned the heap. The sun had set now, the car dim under the tree and under his jerry-rigged curtains. He lay there a long time, he didn’t sleep until heavy darkness drew in around him.

32

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IT WAS EARLY evening, nearly eight hours since Pedric’s knee surgery. He sat up in bed, a blue cotton robe pulled over his skimpy hospital gown, his bandaged leg propped up on two pillows. The general anesthetic had worn off. The bandage around his head had been removed. The red scar across his forehead looked raw but clean, the four stitches standing out like four little fly legs, Kit thought. Bruises still marked his forehead and down his cheek, but his short gray hair was neatly trimmed and brushed, and he looked bright, happy to have his surgery over with. Kate sat on a built-in daybed by the window, Lucinda sat in a folding metal chair beside Pedric’s bed, holding his hand with her good, right hand, comfortable to be close to him.

The room was spacious and quiet, a great improvement from the crowded little cubicle in the noisy ER. The view through the wide wall of glass had sent Kit bolting to the windows, forgetting that a nurse or orderly might come barging in. She had returned only later to Pedric’s amused embrace—he was mending, he was safe and happy and she loved him, but right now she wanted to be out there in the amazing garden that rose up the hill just beyond the glass.

The two huge windows were framed by heavy white pillars jutting out into the room, part of the superstructure of the strongly built hospital. The big garden beyond was softly lit, and was enclosed at some distance by the glass walls of the three-story hospital. Kit crouched on the wide sill, her nose to the glass, her heart lost to the garden, to its cascading waterfall that tumbled down beneath the trees and past the flowering shrubs. Bright plashes of water fell and were lost within the rough escarpment of granite blocks—giant, rough-cut stones piled one on another, towering high above her looking as natural as nature’s own casual toss of rocky elements; the water fell down the stone in clear cascades, she wanted to dabble her paw in, to splash at the little pond below where the last rays of the sun reflected,she wanted to leap up the rocks, race up the little trees, she wanted to play out there in that small Eden.

The big windows were fixed in place, there was no way to open them. It would not be until later, as night fell, that Kit would discover, down beyond the end pillar, a narrow, hinged pane with a hinged screen and with handles that would open both. Now, Pedric watched her from his bed and watched the closed door, wary of a nurse’s intrusion. Kit would find the opening later, he thought, smiling, find it sometime in the dark hours and would slip out there in a wild bid for freedom just as Alice had once finessed her way through the first locked door into Wonderland. Watching her, he and Lucinda exchanged an indulgent smile.

This was Lucinda’s third journey out of the house since they’d arrived home, but she was pale still and felt weak. Yesterday’s banking transactions had tired her, as had standing for even that short time at Birely’s funeral. The aftermath of the wreck and attack, the theft of their car and the intrusion into their home, had left her feeling incredibly fragile and vulnerable, quite unlike herself. But now, with Pedric’s surgery behind them, the torn meniscus in his right knee repaired, and with his head injuries healing, she was beginning to feel easier. Pedric’s blood work showed normal levels ofsugar, the swelling in his brain had subsided, and he would come home in the morning. The anticipation of having him home so lifted her spirits that when Max Harper and Charlie knocked at the door and peered in, Lucinda’s smile was bright and she was filled with questions.

Both the Harpers were dressed in jeans, boots, frontier shirts, and smelled comfortably of horses. Maybe Max had taken off early, and they’d had a late-afternoon ride. Even before the tall couple stepped in, Kit had hidden herself in the carryall, not sure what Max would think of her there. She peered out for one look as Kate tucked an edge of the brocade down, hiding her from the police chief.

Charlie’s curly red hair was tied back with a leather thong. Leaning over the bed, she hugged Pedric. “Glad the surgery’s over with, and that it went so well.”

Max grinned down at Pedric.“Glad all this mess about the car is pretty much over, too. We’ve impounded it at Clyde’s place, locked up in one of the back shops. As soon as forensics finishes, Clyde’s crew will clean it up and start work on the scratches and dents. Forensics will be going over your packages, too, for fingerprints and to see if any stolen items are mixed in with your own things.” He looked at Lucinda. “Could you give us an inventory, and then come down later, to identify what’s there? Make sure it’s all yours, and maybe go through some of the packages?”

Lucinda nodded.

“Clyde thinks the blood stains should come out of the leather all right,” Max said. “He hopes not to have to reupholster. Blood type matches Birley’s blood in the wrecked pickup, and that on the sleeping bag up at Emmylou’s place. Forensics has particles of paper from the old bills, from the cubbyhole beneath the back console where Ryan and Clyde found Emmylou’s money.”

There had, in the end, been no way for Emmylou to avoid reporting the stolen money, reporting at least part of it when forensics found part of a torn wrapper and two musty hundred-dollar bills that had slipped down among the packages. Emmylou had told Max the money was hers, that it had been left to her by Sammie with the house, and had given Max a copy of the will, leaving her,“All contents within the house or on the property,” and she had told him about Sammie’s letter. Some recluses were like that, Max had said, guy lived in poverty all his life, he died and was discovered to have been worth several million, usually with a handwritten will leaving it all to a favorite charity, Salvation Army or animal rescue or a church that had been kind to him.

Pedric said,“Birely Miller is dead, but no sign of the other man, of Vic Amson?”

“Not yet,” Max said. “We have a BOL out on him. He’s wanted for Birely’s murder, for his attack on you two, for theft of your vehicle, and leaving the scene of the wreck. There are several old warrants for him, including a person of interest in a murder over in Fresno.

“Both Vic and Birely have records,” Max said. “Though Birely’s didn’t amount to much, most of his offenses the result of overenthusiastic bad judgment. Going along with one pal or another, and then left holding the bag. Acting as lookout during a gas station robbery, and he’s still sitting there watching for cops when the other guy slips away. By the time Birely realizes he’s all alone, two sheriff’s deputies are pulling in, to cuff him and book him. Maybe just born a loser,” Max said with a shrug. “Poor guy just couldn’t get it together.”

“If Vic Amson escaped in Debbie Kraft’s car,” Lucinda said, “then was she involved with them?”

“Not sure, yet,” Max said. “Except for what we know from the child.” He smiled. “Debbie’s little girl ratted her out.”

“Vinnie?” Lucinda said, surprised.

“No, Tessa. The little, quiet one. Detective Garza stopped by the house, wanted Debbie to come down to the station to file a report on her missing car. She’d made enough fuss about it, called the department three times since she reported it stolen, wanting to know if we’d found it yet, demanding faster action. Said we’d have to furnish her a loaner, claimed it wasn’t her fault the car was stolen,” he said, smiling. “Said that was due to our failure in protecting her property.

“In fact,” he said, “street patrol was about to haul her in, the day she reported her car missing. Brennan had been watching her, off and on, but he was reluctant to come down on her because of the kids, with their daddy already in prison.”

“What did you tell her when she said you owed her a loaner?” Pedric asked, grinning.

“What I told her,” Max said, “isn’t recorded in the department memos.”

Lucinda laughed.“But little Tessa, what did that shy, silent little child say? I can’t imagine her speaking up and defying her mother.”

“She said quite a lot. Debbie was reluctant to ask Dallas in, finally offered him a chair, in the kitchen. She was making up excuses why she couldn’t come into the station, when Tessa came out of the bedroom, sniffling, bundled up in an old pair of oversized pajamas, maybe her sister’s. She looked up at Dallas, and sniffled, and for some reason, she took to him. Came right to him, climbed up in his lap, snuggled right up to him. Maybe because her mother was being rude to him, maybe the kid didn’t like that.

“She told Dallas her momma loaned that man her car, and that Debbie had made him put all the stolen clothes in there before he took it. Debbie tried to shut her up, said there were no stolen clothes, wanted to know where she got that idea, said, why would she have stolen clothes? She told Tessa she had it wrong, that it was the car that was stolen, not clothes. Said, ‘You know that. You’ve got yourself all mixed up.’

“Tessa might be a quiet little thing,” Max said, “but not this morning. This morning she had her back up. I guess when she wants to let you see it, she does have a mind of her own.”

Maybe with Pan’s coaching, Kit thought, listening unseen, her whiskers curved in a satisfied smile.

“When Tessa said her momma gave the man her car, she pointed away across the neighborhood. ‘Drove down tothat house,’ she said, pointing straight in the direction of the gray house where we found the Lincoln. Dallas could see she wanted to say more, but Debbie pulled her off his lap and hauled her back into the bedroom.”

From outside in the hall they could hear the clink of metal on metal as the dinner trays were delivered, and the smell of boiled beef and overcooked vegetables seeped in under the door.

“If they pick Victor up,” Pedric said, “you have proof enough to hold him, proof he killed Birely?” Pedric rubbed gently at his knee, as if it were beginning to hurt now that the local anesthetic had worn off.

“We have Vic’s fingerprints from the rubber-glove dispenser in the adjoining room,” Max said. “Particles of cinnamon and sugar icing on the edge of the dispenser and on the floor under it. Sugar and cinnamon scattered across Birely’s blanket, where Vic punched him in the belly. Vic might have been wearing gloves, but he didn’t think to brush off his clothes, to get rid of the crumbs down his front.

“Dallas talked with the volunteers who work in the cafeteria. Two of the women remembered Amson, from our description. When Dallas took them the mug shots, once we’d run the prints and got photos, they gave us a positive ID. They said they don’t serve anything there with cinnamon icing exceptfor their cinnamon buns. They had a couple of stale ones from the day before, and forensics has those.

“And that fits in with the phone tip,” Max said. “That’s not admissible evidence in court, and we don’t know who she is, but—”

“A phone call?” Kate said innocently. Maybe, she thought, if no one asked, Max would wonder why they didn’t. Beside her, Lucinda and Pedric had stiffened only a little.

Max said,“The woman described Victor, said she saw him punch Birely. Said before he hit him, he was fiddling with the IV tube, bending it, that he had a syringe, looked as if he meant to pierce the tube, plunge the needle in. Said suddenly he dropped the needle as if something had changed his mind. Instead he pulled back his fist, landed Birely a real hard one in the stomach, and ran. She said the dials went flat, alarms went off, he passed the nurses yelling at them to help the patient, ran straight through the crowding nurses shouting for someone to help Birely, and not one of them thought to nailhim.”

It was just another anonymous call,Kit thought,no different than any other, and we do have ID blocking, Pedric checks it every week to make sure it’s working. Just another phantom tip,she thought nervously,even if I was still shaky and mad, after jumping Vic, and even if I did almostyowl into the phone! Well, not exactly a yowl.

“And we have one witness,” Max said, “who was in the parking garage, who saw Vic burst out through the glass doors, running. After she got home, she caught the murder on the local TV, and she called in. Said she and her kids were just going inside, into the ER to see her sister, when a man ran out, nearly ran over them. She described Vic, described Debbie’s station wagon, saw him pile into it and take off. Dispatcher who took the call, she said the woman seemed to have more to say, but then she changed her mind. She was reluctant to leave her name and number, but Mabel talked her intoit.” Max shook his head. “People afraid to get involved. Can’t say I blame them, sometimes.”

On the windowsill, Kit breathed easier. She’d gone rigid, thinking that woman would have described the whole chase. She guessed the great cat godwas watching, to stop her from mentioning the cat or her kids’ excited shouts. Maybe that upset her, to see an angry cat chasing a running man. Maybe she didn’t want to talk about that and come out sounding like a nutcase,Kit thought, smiling. And maybe the great cat god was smiling, too.

33

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IT WAS FULL night when two hobos, dressed in dark clothes and bearing heavy backpacks, had come walking down the winding grade that cut through from Highway 68 down onto Molena Valley Road. As they turned right onto the shoulder of the dark two-lane, the light of a half-moon illuminated the surrounding bushes and trees as if ragged and ghostly figures were watching them in the night. Heading west along the dirt shoulder, moving in the direction of the ocean some twelve miles beyond, they watched for a deserted side road, somewhere to get off the highway and camp for the night, maybe a denser woods than these scraggly, stunted oaks, or maybe some deserted old house or barn where sheriff’s deputies wouldn’t come nosing around to hassle them.

They’d parted from the slat-sided farm truck they’d hitched a ride in, up at the top of the grade, the driver hauling crates of chickens, coming over from Salinas. Truck stunk real bad of caged chickens, the smell still clung to them—or maybe it was the dead chicken they carried, dangling by its feet. Riding in the back in the truck bed, they’d slid open the nearest crate, hauled out an old brown hen and wrung her scrawny neck, her squawks hidden by the rattle of the truck’s old engine and loose body. Now, by the time they’d hoofed it down the grade, they had their dinner already bled, cleaned, and plucked.

The narrow road was dark as hell, no car lights streaming by, no houselights off to the sides, and none of them fancy overhead vapor lights out here in the boonies to pick them out moving along the blacktop. In their dark old clothes, they were part of the night itself, blending into the hill that rose steeply on their right. Half a mile down, they crossed the two-lane and stepped off into the shadows of the berm, moving along beneath another stand of scraggly trees. When they came on a battered station wagon sitting there on the berm, they stopped to look it over, watching for movement within.

Nothing stirred beyond the dark, partially covered windows. They approached warily, with a keen and predatory interest. The oddly shaped curtains blocked their view through the windshield and through the driver’s window. They tried the doors but they were locked. Cupping their hands to peer into the back, they couldn’t make out much more than a long, dark lump in the darkness, a bundle of some kind, but then they snickered and pressed their ears to the glass.

“Guy asleep in there, snoring. Dead to the world.”

“Here, hold the chicken. Hell, don’t lay it down, you want gravel in our supper?” Slinging off his pack, the taller man reached down into it and fished out a long, heavy wire that he kept in the side pocket, a carefully recycled coat hanger fashioned for just such emergencies. Hauling a flashlight from his coat pocket, he shielded its light, moved to the driver’s window, peered down where the beam led, and got to work.

DEEPLY ASLEEP IN the car, Vic’s dreams carried him through scattered stirrings from a bumbling childhood, as his father moved them all from one small town to another, one sorry job to another, one miserable grammar school to another. His father was sometimes absent altogether, while he did a short stint in some two-bit jail,but mostly he was traveling, dragging the nine kids and wife behind him like cans tied to a stray dog. The dreams were always the same, of a sorry and muddled past without shape and without hope. Maybe it was the scuff of footsteps in the gravel outside the Suzuki or maybe the faint scrape of the coat hanger as it slid in through the crack in the window that stirred him, that sent his dreams careening down into the dark nightmare chasm where one twitches and moans and cries out, where one would try to pry himself awake again, if he’dknown he was asleep.

He woke feeling hands tightening around his throat. This was not part of the dream, cold hands and rough, cold air sweeping in through the open car door, and the ripe stink of an unwashed body and unwashed clothes, and a bright light blazing in his eyes so he couldn’t see.

“You got money, hand it over.” The guy had his knee on the blanket, gouging into his ribs, leaning his body full over Vic, close and threatening.

“I got no money. If I had money, would I be sleeping in this heap?”

The other door opened, second guy flashed the beam over the mess of broken toys.“Where’s your woman and kids?”

“I got no woman and kids. I borrowed the car.” He had no weapon handy, either. He’d been asleep, for Christ’s sake, peacefully minding his own business—and with what little money he had left, that that contractor woman hadn’t found, tucked deep in his pants pocket. He should have hid itbetter before he went to sleep but he’d wanted it on him in case the cops showed up and he had to leave the car, make a run for it. He tried to sit up, tried to push the guy’s clutching hands away from him, and it was then that he saw the knife. The guy with the flashlight had a switchblade in his other hand, the knife open and gleaming.

“Take the car if you want,” Vic begged. He fished in his pocket for the keys then knew he shouldn’t have done that, maybe the guy thought he had a weapon. The knife flashed in the beam, he felt it go into his throat, it went in so easy, like slicing butter. He felt nothing more for a minute, then pain exploded. He heard himself screaming and then he couldn’t scream. He felt the blood bubbling up and he couldn’t breathe …

Vic’s own scream was the last sound he ever heard, the last sound he would ever make. He lay dead in the backseat of Debbie Kraft’s battered Suzuki. Blood spurted for a minute more and then stopped, his heart no longer pumping. The bleeding subsided to a dribble like a faulty tap, and stopped. He lay in his own blood, his own bodily wastes seeping out as his killer picked up the dead chicken from the front seat, and fished in Vic’s pocket for the car keys.

BEFORE ANYONE KNEW of Victor’s death, the cats waited hopefully for the law to pick him up, for a sheriff or the CHP to spot the Suzuki and pull Vic over, cuff him, lock him behind bars, and transport him back to Molena Point for arraignment and to stand trial. None of the cats allowed that justice might go awry and that Vic might walk, cats are ever hopeful, they didn’t want to think about failures of the U.S. justice system, they expected ultimate punishment for Amson. Maybe it was the cats’ expectations, sparked by divine fate, that had prompted Victor’s own peers to deal out his retribution, to provide his last judgment in this world, in a far more decisive manner than the law would have done.

But now, at this moment, Kit wasn’t thinking of retribution. Having just heard the current police report on Amson, and sure he would soon be apprehended, she smiled with satisfaction but then set those thoughts aside as she sought a way from Pedric’s hospital room out to the waterfall.

Max and Charlie Harper had just left, heading back to MPPD where a call had come in from a horse rancher up in the Molena Valley. His teenaged boy, out riding one of the yearling colts, had come on the Suzuki in the dark, the scent of death sharp to the colt’s senses so the young horse would not approach the car. Curious, the boy remembered a TV newscaster’s description of the Suzuki, and of Amson. He didn’t pause to see if Amson was in there, he hurried his horse home and dialed 911. The county dispatcher had routed him through to the sheriff’s office and then to MPPD. At once sheriff’s deputies had moved in that direction, and now were searching again along the two-lane roads though they had driven that area the night Vic had fled. Kit prayed the sheriff would find Amson and treat him as he deserved. But once she’d wished the worstfor him she’d dismissed him and turned her attention to the garden again and to slipping out into it.

Able to prowl the room now that the Harpers had left, she had quickly followed the thin draft of cooler air that teased her from the far end of the room. Padding down to look, she found the narrow window, half concealed beyond the last pillar. Eagerly she set about opening it.

The room lights had been turned low. Lucinda and Kate sat by Pedric’s bed, the three of them deep in conversation as Kit slipped up onto the sill, finessed the hinged screen open with a soft paw, and pulled at the window handle. Yes, it flipped up. Pushing the glass out four inches, she was through and out into the night, into the damp and sweet-scented garden.

Beyond the small trees and scattered bushes the hospital building rose up on four sides, some windows dark, soft lights shining in others behind drawn shades. Did sick people prefer privacy over a glimpse of the more fascinating world? Only in Pedric’s room were the shades still up, the room as bright as a lighted stage. Pedric in his bed, Lucinda and Kate huddled close, the three of them lost in conversation. She smiled at the little tableau, then spun away, leaping up the rocky escarpment beside the waterfall. Pausing, she patted her paw in the falling water and then danced away; she spun, she bounced up the rough ledges to the very top where she crouched in shadow among the highest crags then raced away again down the rocks, ducking beneath cascades of falling water and out the other side, wet and giddy.

She played among the falls for a long time but then at last came down the escarpment again slowly, stepping daintily now, dropping from one level down to the next, quiet and thoughtful—wishing she were not alone. Where the thinnest sheet of water slid down over a little rocky cave, she slipped in through the clear curtain, into a small and secret aerie; looking down into Pedric’s room through the fall of distorting water, feeling her fur grow damper, she saw Pedric’s door swing open.

In the square of brighter light she saw Ryan and Clyde step inside to join them, they stood by Pedric’s bed next to Kate and Lucinda, Ryan talking excitedly. Clyde had placed his backpack on the floor, she watched Joe Grey slip out, heading straight for the windowsill. Leaping up, he made a dark silhouette looking out into the night, marked by his white chest and white paws. But another shadow slipped out, too, and, nose to carpet, he moved across the floor to the narrower window, where he slid through into the garden and disappeared among the bushes. Watching him, she drew back beneath the waterfall and remained still.

He stood in the darkness of the bushes looking up the little hill, taking in the wooded glade and the tall rocky escarpment and the bright, falling water. He looked intently at one part of the garden and then the next, scanning each, and lifting his nose to taste the air. Seeking her? Oh, she hoped he was.

At last he moved on, following her scent up the rough stones, up and up he went over the tumbled rocks and down again, leaping a fall of water where she had leaped but then he stopped, looking around.

Did he wonder if she was hiding and sulking, if she was still angry? The water plashing down before her sang softly; its sliding gleam distorted the garden and distorted Pan himself into a phantom image as he stood scenting out.

Suddenly he headed fast straight up the rocks to disappear above her. She listened but heard only falling water; she lay behind her watery curtain, her paws crossed, and then sat up nervously. Where had he gone? Had he given her up and turned away?

He burst in through the falling water, pounced on her like a lion capturing its prey, he cuffed her, boldly laughing. She struggled free and rolled him over and cuffed him good, too, and he let her. Battling and laughing, pushing each other out into the water, they were soon soaked.

“Let up,” he said at last, but she didn’t. “Let up! Listen! They found Amson.”

She stopped battling him.“They got him? He’s in jail?”

“No need.” Pan smiled. “He’s dead. Knife blade through his throat.”

“Oh, my,” she said. “Who did that? Oh, not Debbie?”

“Not Debbie, but they picked her up,she’s in jail. Charlie called Ryan and Clyde, and we came over to tell Pedric and Lucinda.”

“If Debbie’s in jail, what about Tessa?”

“She’s fine,” Pan said. “She’s more than fine, I’ll get to that. On the way over, we stopped by Wilma’s.” Kit imagined the homey scene as they pulled up in front of Wilma’s stone house, Pan and Joe galloping through Wilma’s deep English garden to the carved front door.

COME IN BEFORE the fire,” Wilma said, opening the door, “what can I get you? Coffee? A drink? A snack for you two tomcats?” She bent down to stroke Pan and Joe.

“Nothing,” Ryan said. “We can’t stay.” Joe leaped to the couch beside Dulcie, thinking a small snack wouldn’t take much time, but Ryan said, “We’re on our way to tell Pedric, we thought you two would want to know.”

“What?” Wilma said, pulling back her loose gray hair and tying her plaid robe tighter around her.

“They found Amson,” Clyde said. “Sheriff’s deputies found him out on Valley Road, dead in Debbie’s car, his throat cut. Looks like he was robbed. No other fresh tire tracks on the dirt shoulder, maybe someone traveling on foot, maybe some homeless person. They found grocery sacks in the car full of cashmere sweaters, upscale costume jewelry, new handbags, all with the tags still in place, and all too bulky for a person on foot to carry away.”

“They picked Debbie up at home,” Ryan said. “Her prints match those on the store tags—from four upscale village shops, and even two small pieces from Melanie’s, and their security’s pretty tight.”

“It’ll do Debbie good to cool her heels in jail,” Wilma said. “But what about the children?”

“Emmylou has them,” Ryan said. “We took the girls up to her, helped her fix them some supper. Left both girls tucked up in Emmylou’s bed, Emmylou making up a bed on the couch for herself. Every time Vinnie opened her mouth to sass her, Emmylou scolded her. By the time we left, the kid wasn’t saying a word, she’d crawled into bed and curled up around her pillow, real quiet.”

“They’ll be all right with Emmylou,” Wilma said, smiling. Though what the girls’ future held, no one could say.

It was after the Damens left, that Wilma returned to the computer to read Dulcie’s newest poem, and the lines made her very sad. But one doesn’t choose a poem, the poem chooses the writer. Dulcie couldn’t help that this one left them both filled with a dark mourning, a strange uneasy balance, tonight, to the sadness of Birely’s unfocused life that was now ended, and totheir satisfaction that Vic Amson would not torment and hurt anyone else.

A shadow in the somber stillness

Sways serenely.

The river in its roaring race

With the waning, woeful wind

Laughs loudly, luxuriously at the loser.

A mockingbird, moved by the midnight moon,

Trills tender notes

To the shadow standing silently now

Before a ruined barbican and bail

Now dead, decayed

Only the devil left within its fallen ranks.

The shadow sways,

Slumps sadly to the dark and hoary ground.

Nothing left but emptiness.

No bird sings now

No castle stands

Where ran the laughing river.

Dulcie herself didn’t know what to make of the poem. It just happened, a shadow of the lost Netherworld. Wilma put out the fire, stifling the cheery gas logs, and they tucked up in bed, Dulcie stretched out quietly on her own pillow. “What will happen to the children now? The law won’t let Emmylou keep them, anolder woman without a husband. And their aunt won’t want them.”

“If the court lets Debbie out on her own recog,” Wilma said, “and then if she gets probation, maybe Emmylou would keep the girls during the day. Debbie will have to get a job, or try to, that will be a condition of her probation.” Stroking Dulcie, Wilma smiled. “Tessa would have a little more love in her life, with Emmylou. And Pan would be there for her, too. Emmylou won’t throw him out.”

“Maybe,” Dulcie said, “if Pan has his little girl back where he can be with her, maybe he won’t long to travel so far away. He knows Tessa needs him.”

“And Kit needs him,” Wilma said. “What’s that sigh about? What are you thinking?”

“Thinking how strange life is. Still thinking about that dark world where Pan wants to go, so different from our world—and thinking about that long-ago time inour world, where Misto once lived, that was so different from today. Two strange and different places,” she said, “but each is only part of something bigger. So many centuries, so many chains of life, and each one unique and different. So much we don’t know,” she said, “and in the end, what’s it all about?”

“It’s about thewonders,” Wilma said. “That’s what it’s about.”

Dulcie looked at her, purring.

“Wonder, and joy,” Wilma said. “No matter where you are in time or place, joy and wonder are what stand between you and the evil of the world. That, and love, are all we have against our own destruction.”

AND AWAY IN the night, in the dark garden, there was wonder, too. Kit and Pan, coming out from beneath the waterfall, sat on a rock away from the mists, licking themselves dry.“Maybe,” Pan said, looking around the garden, “maybethis worldis pretty amazing, maybe what Joe Grey says is true.”

“What does he say, that pedantic tomcat?”

“That the greatest adventure of all is right here in our world,” Pan said, twitching the tip of his tail. “That the biggest thrill of all is to outsmart the bad guys right here, not go chasing off somewhere that’s already destroyed and beyond help.” He looked deeply at Kit, his amber eyesgleaming. “Maybe Joe’s right that it’s more fun to work the system right here, take down the bad guys right here. ‘Hold the fort,’ Joe says, ‘and make our own world better.’ ”

“Maybe,” Kit said. “But what if somewhere in the Netherworld, down among those dark caverns, some small portion of those lands did survive undamaged, as Kate thinks might have happened? What if thereis some small country there that’s still strong, some hidden village that managed to escape the dark?”

Pan said nothing. They sat thinking about that. Maybe it was the enchantment of the garden that made everything seem so different tonight, that made them come together in their thoughts, that helped the two resolve their conflict. Sitting close together looking around at the garden and down into Pedric’s lighted hospital room watching their human friends, they no longer bristled at each other; they sat thinking about the amazing world around them, and about their roles in it. And when, at last, they returned through the narrow window, their ears were up and they were ready to move on, to trot boldly on into whatever amazements waited, there ahead of them.

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Мерфи Ширли Руссо Cat Coming Home. Cat Telling Tales. Cat Bearing Gifts