Cat In The Dark. Cat To The Dogs. Cat Spitting Mad. Cat On The Money

Clyde stiffened; Joe saw his jaw clench. He did not look in Joe’s direction.

“The brake line was burst, not cut,” Harper said.

Clyde cast a look of rage at Joe Grey.

“I took some photographs of the surround, though. Infrared light and that new film. Shot some footprints that my men may have missed-the few they didn’t step on,” Harper said uneasily.

“What are you talking about?” Clyde said.

Harper shrugged.“Maybe someone messed with the car. Maybe someone switched brake lines. If so, it would be nice to have some evidence, wouldn’t you say? I have a crew down there now, working it over.”

Clyde closed his eyes.

It must be hard, Joe thought, working a crime scene when the uniforms had already been over it, under the impression it was an accident. And, washing his paw, he hid a huge feline grin. At his word, Harper had not only gone down Hellhag Canyon, he had called in the detectives.

Harper’s detectives were good; they’d probably remove the jagged shards of the driver’s window, see if the lab could find cloth or leather fragments along the broken edges, probably try for fingerprints around the brake line.

Harper’s confidence in the phantom snitch pleased Joe Grey so much that he almost leaped on the table to give Harper a purr and a face rub. But he quickly thought better of that little gesture.

He could see, beneath the table, Clyde’s toe tapping with irritation; choking back a laugh, he turned his back and washed harder.

“Good linguini,” Harper said. “Reminds me of that Italian place in Stockton, down from the rodeo grounds. So tell me about these dogs, Damen. Pups, you said? The way they’re banging on the door, I’d say a couple of big bull calves lunging at the gate. Strays, you said? You plan to keep them?”

“If he keeps them,” Charlie said, pushing back her wild red hair, “he’s-we’re taking them to obedience school.”

Clyde did a double take.“We’re what?”

She stuck out her arm, exhibiting a dozen long red scratches where the pups, in their excitement at having new and wonderful friends, had leaped up joyfully raking her.

“Obedience school,” she said. “You can work with the happy, silly one. I’ll take the solemn pup; I like his attitude.”

Joe looked at Charlie, incredulous. There was no way she was going to get Clyde involved in dog-training classes. She’d as easily get him into a tutu and teach him to pirouette.

Well, she’d learn.

And Joe Grey sat grinning and washing his whiskers, highly amused by Charlie, and immensely pleased at his rise in stature with Max Harper. Harper had moved fast and decisively on Joe’s phone tip, had beat it down Hellhag Canyon posthaste, and that made the tomcat feel pretty good. Made him feel good, too, that Harper was back from the canyon in one piece.

Though he would never let Harper know he cared. Stretching out on the cold tile, he gave the captain his usual sour scowl.

Harper returned his frown in spades. The two of them got along just fine with an occasional hiss from Joe, and Harper grousing about cat germs; anything less would spoil the relationship.

6 [????????: pic_7.jpg]

TWO NIGHTS later, as Clyde fetched the cards and poker chips and began to lay out a cholesterol-rich array of party food, Joe was all set for an evening of imbibing the fatty diet necessary to his psychological well-being and picking up interesting bits of intelligence courtesy of the Molena Point PD, when Clyde dropped the bombshell.

“You are not invited, Joe. You are not wanted in this house when my friends are here playing poker. No more snooping. You’re done listening to private police business.”

“You have to be kidding.”

“Not kidding. No cats on or near the poker table. No cats in the house tonight.”

“You’re making crab-and-olive sandwiches, you know that’s my all-time favorite. And I’m not invited to the party?”

“You can take a sandwich with you. Brown-bag it.”

Joe looked at Clyde intently.“You’re serious. You are turning me out of my own home.”

“Very serious. No more eavesdropping.” Turning his back, Clyde resumed spreading crab and green olives.

“I see what’s wrong. You have your nose out of joint because I was right about that wreck in Hellhag Canyon.”

“Don’t be silly. And even if therewassomething strange about that wreck, whatever Max Harper might, in the presence of his officers and closest friend, find fit to discuss in this house, will be restricted to those human listeners, and to no other. No tomcats. No lady cats. No snooping.Comprende?”

Joe drew himself up to his full, bold, muscular height, his growl rumbling, his yellow eyes blazing.“For your information, if that wreck turns out to be a murder, I’m the one who put Harper onto it. Me. The tomcat you’re booting out of his own home for no conscionable reason. Without yours truly, without the information that I tipped to Max Harper, the killer would go scot-free.”

Clyde turned from the counter to glare at him.“You don’t have much respect for the abilities of our local law enforcement. You don’t seem to think that Harper is capable of-”

“I think Harper is very capable. Why should I expect one of your limited reasoning to understand that if the brake linewasswitched, and the billfoldwasremovedbeforethe police got to the scene of the accident that morning, and if the wreck looked in every other way like an accident, and Harper hadno information to the contrary, he would have no reason to search for evidence.

“That is a dangerous curve,” Joe explained patiently. “There has been more than one wreck there. The morning was foggy. Thick as canned cream. Without my help, Harper would have no reason to think the wreck was any more than an accident.”

“I’ve had enough, Joe. I don’t intend to argue with you. You are out of the house. Don’t come home until Harper leaves. Go now. Go hunt. Go hang out on Lucinda’s fence with Dulcie. Get out of here.”

Joe leaped down, so incensed that, stalking through the living room, he paused long enough to deliberately, maliciously rake his claws down the arm of Clyde’s new leather chair, leaving long, deep indentations just short of actual tears.

And, shouldering out through his cat door in a mood black and hateful, within three minutes-never reentering Clyde Damen’s pokey little cottage-he was set up to listen to every smallest whisper from Clyde’s sacrosanct poker game.

He, Joe Grey, would miss nothing.

Dulcie discovered Joe’s hideaway when she came along the fence from Lucinda’s. The night had turned chill, and Dirken had closed the windows. Annoyed at being shut out, she had left the Greenlaws, galloping along the fence top to see if Joe wanted to hunt.

Clyde’s kitchen lights were all burning. She smelled cigarette smoke and heard Max Harper laugh. She was about to go on, knowing Joe wouldn’t budge on poker night and miss some juicy bit of police gossip, when she saw the two pups behaving so strangely that she stopped to watch them.

Instead of pawing at the back door to get inside and join the party, the pups were down in the dirt beside the back porch, teasing at a vent hole, a little rectangular opening in the foundation that should have had a screen over it but was yawning, the screen cover pushed aside.

Both pups were crouched, heads down, their backsides high in the air, their tails wagging madly as they tried to push in through the small space. Dulcie, leaping down and racing across the lawn, slipped in between their noses-and caught Joe’s scent, over the reek of damp earth.

Peering into the musty blackness, she saw a flash of white-two white paws and white chest, where Joe Grey crouched atop a furnace duct, just below the kitchen floor.

A blanket of fiberglass insulation hung down, as if Joe had clawed and torn it away to bare the floor joists. Atop the heat duct, he stared up toward the kitchen, his ears cocked, his expression sly and triumphant. The voices came clearly to Dulcie.

“I’ll call,” Harper said. They heard the clink of poker chips dropped on the table.

Lieutenant Brennan said,“I’ll raise you two.” Dulcie could imagine Brennan sitting back a little from the poker table to accommodate his ample stomach. A woman’s voice said, “No way, Brennan. I fold.” That would be Detective Kathleen Ray, the darkhaired young detective who had worked the Winthrop Jergen case.

Not all men liked to play poker with women. Not many male cops liked women on the force. Well, these guys were okay. But just for eveners, Dulcie hoped Kathleen Ray went home a huge winner-cleaned them out, even if they were only playing penny ante.

A loud groan announced a pot won. Clyde laughed, and they heard chips being raked in.

“Why are you down here?” Dulcie whispered. “Did you and Clyde have a fight?”

Joe cut her a scowl as sour as yesterday’s cat food. “Clyde shut me out.”

“He what? You can’t be serious. Out of the house? But why?”

“Said he didn’t want me spying on Harper.”

Dulcie stared at him.“What’s the matter with Clyde?”

“The minute I left, he went right out to the living room and slid the plywood cover into my cat door. Talk about cheap? I could claw the plywood off, go on in the living room, and listen, but I’m not giving him the satisfaction.”

“I can’t believe he did that. Maybe he isn’t feeling well,” Dulcie said softly.

“He feels just fine. His usual bad-tempered self. Earlier, when I first got down here, Harper said something about fingerprints. Clyde interrupted him-just in case I was listening.” Joe gave her a narrow-eyed leer. “Well, Clyde can stuff it. I’m hanging in here until I know what Harper’s found.”

Dulcie snuggled next to Joe on the warm, softly insulated heat duct, settling down to listen to endless rounds of poker talk punctuated with scattered gems of police intelligence. Only when the pizza delivery guy arrived, to augment the crab sandwiches, did the ringing doorbell trigger a round of frantic barking from the backyard, and some of the conversation was lost. But then, soon, Harper’s dry, slow voice seeped down through the kitchen floor again, along with the scent of pepperoni pizza.

Besides the infrared photos that Harper had taken the night he went down Hellhag Canyon, and some casts of partial footprints that Detective Ray had made, the department had one fingerprint, which Detective Ray had lifted from the engine near the brake line.

The department, contacting Landrum Antique Cars in L.A., had learned that the Corvette had been purchased only a few days before, a cash sale to a Raul Torres.“Torres,” Harper said, “gave them a Portland, Oregon, address that turned out to be a vacant lot. Very likely the name is just as fake. We’re waiting for the fingerprint ID. State lab’s weeks behind as usual, even for a possible murder investigation.”

The information should have cheered Joe; he remained dour and silent.

Clyde’s poker games had been one of his best sources of information. Four or five cops playing stud poker could do a lot of talking. Clyde was the only civilian, but Harper trusted him like another cop. Maybe, Joe thought, that was why Clyde felt embarrassed to let him sit in. If Joe was lying on the poker table nibbling at the chips and dip, Clyde could hardly halt the conversation, could hardly tell Harper and his officers not to talk in front of the cat.

“So what the hell,” Joe said softly but angrily, as the poker game resumed. “All I’ve ever done is help Harper. Without the evidence you and I turned up, several of those no-goodniks sitting in state prison right now would be out on the street, to say nothing of Troy Hoke cooling his heels for murder in the federal pen.”

Dulcie curled closer to Joe and licked his ear. She had never seen him and Clyde at such odds.

But it was when Harper mentioned Lucinda Greenlaw that Dulcie’s own temper flared.

“Your neighbor,” Harper said. “In the old Victorian house behind you. You know her very well?”

“Lucinda? Not really,” Clyde said. “Wilma sees her pretty often.”

“She’s an early-morning walker,” Harper said.

“I don’t really know. What’s the interest?”

“Houseful of relatives right now gathered for Shamas’s funeral. Pretty loud bunch, I’m told.”

“They don’t bother me. I don’t hear them.”

“Had a talk with Lucinda yesterday,” Harper said. “Asked her to come down to the station, give me a few minutes away from the family.” There was a pause. The cats could smell cigarette smoke.

“She walks on Hellhag Hill a lot. I asked her if she’d happened to be up there the morning that Corvette went over into Hellhag Canyon.”

“And?” Clyde said shortly.

“Said she hadn’t been, that she’d stayed home that day. You? didn’t happen to notice her that morning? Happen to see her go out?”

“What the hell, Max? No, I didn’t happen to notice. What is this? What time are you talking about?”

“Around six-thirty. The 911 call came in, from someone in the trailer park, about that time.”

“At six-thirty I’m in the shower,” Clyde said testily. “Or just getting out of bed. Not staring out my back window at the neighbors.”

Harper said no more. The talk from that point was limited to poker. The game ended early. The cats, dropping down from the heat duct, slipped out through the vent, forcing the pups aside, and headed for the open hills.

They hunted most of the night, until the first gray of dawn streaked the sky. Joe’s mood brightened once they’d killed a big buck rabbit and shared it. Settling back to wash blood and rabbit fur from his paws, he said, “Do you think she might have seen something that morning? Maybe saw one of Shamas’s relatives down there, around the canyon, and didn’t want to tell Harper?”

Dulcie shrugged.“I don’t think she cares enough about any of Shamas’s relatives to protect them-well, maybe she cares about Pedric and Newlon. But would she lie for them?”

Joe looked at her intently.

“What are you thinking? That’s stretching it, Joe, to look for a connection between the Greenlaws and that wreck”

“Whydoesshe walk so early?”

Her green eyes widened.“You’re as bad as Harper. She likes to be alone. You’re a cat, you should understand that kind of need.” She rose. “Fog’s blowing in. She’ll walk this morning. Come see for yourself.” And she spun away at a dead run across the hills, perhaps running from a nudge of unease, from the faint discomfort that Joe’s questions stirred.

Down two valleys and across open hills they ran, through a little orchard and a pasture and up Hellhag Hill-to find Lucinda already there. They paused when they saw her, and went on quietly through the tall, concealing grass, watching Lucinda climb through the drifting fog to the outcropping of boulders where she liked to sit.

Dropping her small blanket and her jacket, she moved on beyond the rocks some twenty feet to a stand of broom bushes. There, producing a package from her canvas tote, she arranged its contents on an aluminum pie plate; the cats caught the scent of roast beef, probably leftovers from last night’s supper. Setting the plate among the bushes, she pushed it deep enough in so it was sheltered, but she would be able to see it.

“The wild cats,” Dulcie whispered. “They’ll come through the bushes from deeper in.”

Among the boulders, Lucinda made herself comfortable on her folded blanket. Quietly turning, she looked up behind her in the direction of the trailer park. The cats didn’t think she could see the trailers from that angle, nor could the occupants see her. There was no one else on the hill, yet she scanned the empty slopes expectantly, looking across the grassy rises and down toward the sea.

“She’s watching for the wild cats,” Dulcie whispered-but she wasn’t sure. Lucinda seemed unusually tense, to be watching only for the cats she fed.

“Why do you follow her, Dulcie?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes? sometimes when she’s here on the hills, she seems almost to be listening.” She glanced at Joe. “Almost as if she hears some sound, something-”

“What kind of sound?” he said irritably.

“Some? something? stirring within the hill.”

Joe scowled and flattened his ears; he didn’t like that kind of talk. She said no more, not mentioning that one day she had seen Lucinda lie down in the grass and press her ear to the earth.

Maybe Lucinda had only been feeling the beat of the sea throbbing through the hill? Could Lucinda feel that vibration, as a cat could? Or had she simply been resting, comforted by the earth’s solid warmth?

It had seemed a very personal moment. Dulcie had felt embarrassed watching her.

“Maybe she thinks she hears the ghost,” Joe said.

“Maybe.” The local yarns that had given Hellhag Hill its name described a crazy old man, living a hundred years ago in a shanty atop Hellhag Hill, who spent his rime throwing clods at trespassers, and who had been stoned, in turn, by a band of village boys; two days later he had died from the wounds to his head and chest. The story said that his spirit had entered inside the hill, and, even to the present day, he haunted the cave that yawned higher up Hellhag Hill-an angry and possessive ghost drawing the winds to him and screaming out at strangers; sometimes you could hear his shouts andcurses.

Early-morning joggers claimed to have seen the ghost, but in the coastal fog one could imagine seeing anything. Tourists came to look for the hag, and spun wonderful stories to take home.

Lucinda waited patiently, they supposed for any small sign of the stray cats approaching the food she had left. The shy animals didn’t show themselves. Only when she rose at last and headed back, the hill now bright with sun, did the strays come out.

They appeared swiftly behind her, thin, wary, dark-faced cats crowding around the pie plate, snatching up the old lady’s offerings. Dulcie and Joe remained very still, watching them. The fog had blown away, the ragged cliffs below emerging dark and wild, the sea black and heaving, the narrow ribbon of highway glistening wet-only the crest of the hill seemed to be warmed by the rising sun. A scream startled Joe and Dulcie. They leaped for shelter. The strays vanished. Lucinda, halfway across the hill, stopped and turned, looking below her.

The yelp came again: It was a dog, one of the pups. The cats knew that voice. A pup yowling with pain and fear. They reared up in the grass to see.

There was no car on the highway to have hurt a puppy. Stretching taller, they saw Clyde and Charlie standing at the edge of the road staring back toward the village. Charlie held the bigger pup on a leash-that was the pup she had named Hestig. The pup fought his lead, lunging and trying to bolt away, his feet sliding on the asphalt as he tried to join his brother, who raced madly toward the village, yipping and screaming.

Clinging to Selig’s back was a small animal, a dark little creature yowling and clawing, its fluffy tail lashing with rage. When Selig swerved from the road, the little animal rode him like a bronc-buster; they vanished among the houses.

Joe stared after them, torn between amazement and a huge belly laugh.“So that was what the pups were afraid of-a mangy little cat. That’s why they didn’t want to come up Hellhag Hill.”

Below them, down the hill, Clyde stood on the road, staring at where the pup had vanished.“Whatwasthat thing? What kind of wild-”

“Cat,” Charlie said, doubled over laughing, and trying to hold the plunging Hestig.

“No, not a cat. It was some kind of wild animal. No cat would? My God. A cat?”

“A very small cat,” Charlie said. “And very, very mad.” She knelt and pulled Hestig close to her, stroking him and speaking softly until he became quiet. “A cat, Clyde. A tiny, angry little cat.” She watched Clyde take off jogging, hoping to round up Selig. “They never,” she told Hestig, “cats never cease to surprise me.”

“I hope,” Dulcie whispered, “that little cat finds her way back.” She imagined the little stray leaping off Selig’s back in the middle of the village, confused among so many cars and people, not knowing where to run.

“Those cats might be wild and shy,” Joe said, “but they haven’t survived without being clever. She’ll be okay. Why was Clyde walking the dogs here? The highway’s no place for those two.”

“Do you think he came to follow Lucinda, after Harper’s questions about her?”

“After he raggedmefor being nosy? That would be more than low.”

They watched Lucinda, across the hill, hurrying down to join Charlie; Charlie had slowed, waiting for her. Lucinda fell into step, smiling as if she had enjoyed the spectacle of runaway Selig, as if she had liked seeing one of the wild, shy felines show some unexpected spunk.

Lucinda and Charlie had known each other only casually, through Wilma, until Shamas’s death drew Wilma, herself, to see Lucinda more often. Then Charlie, with her usual warmth, had taken a deeper interest in the old woman. Gently, Charlie put her arm around Lucinda, gave her a hug. “Did you see poor Selig? Was that one of the little cats you’ve been feeding?”

“I believe it was,” Lucinda said, laughing. “Wild is the word for that one.”

“How many cats are there, Lucinda? Are they all that wild? Where did they come from?”

“I think there are six or seven. They appeared a few days after the quake. I only get glimpses of them, usually one at a time. Only that dark little cat-the one that just rode away on the back of Clyde’s dog-only that one has had the nerve to approach me.”

“Cat the color of charred wood,” Charlie said with interest. “Black and brown swirled together on the palette.”

“Tortoiseshell,” Lucinda said.

“They must be glad of the food you bring. Though surely they are hunters.”

“I’m sure they are. They’re most likely feral cats, they’re far too shy to be simply strays.”

The old woman was silent a moment. Joe and Dulcie slipped quickly through the grass, following close behind the two women.“Maybe,” Lucinda said, “Pedric would have some knowledge about feral cats. Pedric is Shamas’s first cousin. He seems to have some interesting theories about-feral animals.” She hesitated. “Strange theories, maybe. But these cats strike one as rather strange.”

“Is Pedric the thin old man? The one of slighter build?”

“Yes, that’s Pedric.” She glanced at Charlie. “He’s? very kind. He’s one of Shamas’s relatives that I? feel comfortable with. He and Newlon Greenlaw. Newlon? tried to save Shamas, you know.”

Charlie nodded.

“Pedric is? perhaps not as harsh as the others. Perhaps he has more of the old-country ways,” Lucinda said shyly. “Pedric Greenlaw might have stepped right out of his own myths, out of the same dark and shadowed worlds that shape his folktales.”

“He sounds interesting,” Charlie said, pushing back her windblown red hair. “I’ve always loved storytellers. It’s a wonderful art: the skill to draw you in, make you see and live a tale as if you were there, to truly wrap you in the story.”

“Pedric? I think he looks at life through the lens of his stories? through the lens of dead ages. He clings to the old myths just as Shamas did, to the Irish beliefs and folklore woven through their family. That history was very important to Shamas.”

“I didn’t know that about your husband.”

Lucinda smiled.“All the Greenlaws live to some extent a strange double existence. I think that in many ways they truly believe the old tales-believe in the old-world magic.”

She glanced at Charlie.“And yet another part of them-except perhaps Pedric and Newlon-is as cold and selfish as it is possible to be. That? that is the way Shamas was.”

Charlie turned to look at her.

“Well, I’m not grieving for Shamas,” Lucinda said softly. “If I am grieving, it is only? for myself, for what I have? missed.”

And,Dulcie thought,grieving for a life wasted.She thought about what Lucinda had told Wilma, in a moment like this when Lucinda seemed to feel the need to talk, perhaps to bare a bit of her soul.

Lucinda had come to have tea with Wilma; Dulcie had been lying in her favorite spot on the blue velvet couch pretending to nap. Lucinda told Wilma that when the police came to her door that morning to tell her that Shamas was dead, she’d felt a drop of emotion straight down into panic, and then, almost at once, she’d been swept by a surge of relief so powerful that she’d tried to hide it from the officers, such a sense of freedom, of elation that the painful burden had gone from her life, that Shamas’s lies and cheating were ended. That she could, at last, know some peace. Her words had seemed to spring from such a strong need to unburden herself; and when Wilma put her arm around her, Lucinda wept helplessly.

She told Wilma that she should have walked away from Shamas years before, should have taken the responsibility to change her life, but that she’d never been brave enough. Had never had the courage to walk out on Shamas Greenlaw.

But Charlie was saying,“Wherever those wild cats came from, the little creatures are lucky to have you, Lucinda.” Gently, Charlie shortened Hestig’s leash, to make him walk by her heel.

“Maybe with time,” Lucinda said, “they’ll grow tame, and I can find homes for them. The strange thing is,” she said, glancing at Charlie, “how powerfully those wild cats draw me. I don’t usually think about stray animals; the world is full of strays, and I can’t change the world. But these cats?” Lucinda shrugged. “Maybe they’re something to hold on to, just now. Something outside myself, to love and care about.”

Charlie smiled at her, and nodded.

“Perhaps,” Lucinda said, “it’s their freedom, too, that draws me-and the mystery of why they appeared so suddenly on Hellhag Hill, where, in all my years of walking there, I’ve seldom seen any creature.”

The two women turned down Ocean onto the grassy median, Hestig walking sedately at Charlie’s side, watching his manners now, as if the spectacle of a cat attacking his brother had made a lasting impression. If the pup was aware of Joe and Dulcie slipping through the shadows behind him beneath the eucalyptus trees, he gave no sign other than to twitch an ear back, once, and wag casually. And soon Lucinda turned away, not toward her own street as she usually did, but in the opposite direction, into the heart of the village, leaving Charlie and Hestig to cross to Charlie’s apartment above the shops on Ocean.

None of the shops was yet open, but the little cafes were busy. The cats followed Lucinda, padding along behind, dodging joggers and dog walkers. The old lady was just passing the post office, watching a yardman across the street watering the planter beds in front of Cannady’s, that nice Western shop that Dulcie loved, which had such beautiful embroidered denim and leathers. Cannady’s front garden was brilliant with impatiens and lilies, behind its low wrought-iron fence. Lucinda had stopped to admire the garden when Dirken and Newlon Greenlaw came around the corner-and immediately Lucinda drew back into the shadows, stood very still, watching them.

The two men were walking slowly just at the curb, so close to the line of parked cars that the cats heard Newlon’s jacket brush against a rearview mirror. Both men walked hunched, their heads bent as if looking into the car windows.

It took only a second. The two were quick; they paused, the cats heard a little click as if a car door had opened, another click as it closed again, and the men moved on, Newlon shoving something into his jacket pocket, some small item he had snatched from the seat of the car. A camera? A purse? Perhaps a cell phone.

Lucinda stood staring, a look of shock and anger on her face-a look as if she had been personally affronted.

Then she turned away and hurried into the Swiss House, taking refuge in the first empty booth, busying herself with the menu. The cats, leaping up onto the window box among the flowers, watched her ordering, watched her settle back sipping her coffee. Lucinda was more than usually pale, and her thin old hands were shaking.

7 [????????: pic_8.jpg]

DINO’S HAD the best fish and chips in the village. Max Harper, having picked up an order of takeout, sat in his king cab pickup eating his dinner and watching, through the lighted motel window across the street, Cara Ray Crisp skinning out of her sweatshirt. Cara Ray hadn’t bothered to pull the blinds. She was only a slip of a thing, tiny and thin, but well endowed, the kind of delicate creature who would have appealed exactly to Shamas Greenlaw.

Harper had backed his truck into a narrow drive between Harren’s Gallery and Molena Point Drugs, a lane so overgrown with jasmine that the vines trailed across the truck’s roof and down the side windows. For some time Cara Ray had talked on the phone, lying nude on the bed, propped against the pillows, sipping on a canned drink; and now she was tying on abikini top. As he watched her roll her long blond hair into a knot and secure it, and pull on the bottom half of her bathing suit, Harper had no notion that he, in turn, was watched, from the backseat of the king cab.

Sitting on the cab floor behind Harper, peering up between the bucket seats, Joe Grey could see through the windshield the little pantomime in Cara Ray’s lighted motel room, and he had to smile. Max Harper, spying on Cara Ray’s strip act like some cheap voyeur, would be enjoying every rousing minute-free entertainment served up with his takeout dinner, all in the line of duty.

The fish and chips smelled so good that Joe was tempted to slash out with a quick paw and snag a nice warm chunk of fried cod. Maybe Harper wouldn’t miss just one piece. Why was it that, so often when he did a bit of surveillance, the watchee enjoyed a nice meal, while the watcher ended up faint with hunger?

As Cara Ray stepped to the window, Harper drew back behind a lifted newspaper. She stood looking down at the street, then turned away again, a towel over her shoulder as if she were headed for the pool: a little break between her callous and bad-mannered visits to Lucinda Greenlaw. She’d been to see the old woman three times in three days, the last encounter stretching into dinner and on to midnight-Dulcie said the sleek little blonde had made herself very much at home among the male Greenlaws, drawing the cousins and nephews to her like flies to honey, despite the fact that the Greenlaw clan didn’t take quickly to strangers. She said Newlon and Dirken had been all over Cara Ray. “No queen in heat, with a dozen toms raking around her, has any more nerve than that one.”

Cara Ray had pulled up at Lucinda’s that first day in a gleaming new Jaguar, wearing a fur wrap against the chill of Molena Point’s ocean breeze. The mink and the car, Dulcie said, were very likely gifts from Shamas. Lucinda had answered the door wearing a voluminous apron and wiping flour from her hands.

“I’m Shamas’s friend, Mrs. Greenlaw. From the boat. I was there the night Shamas died.”

Talk about brass. And Lucinda too polite to send her packing. The older woman had asked Cara Ray in and even made tea for her. Dulcie had watched, disgusted, as they settled down before the fire. But the day was chill, and through the closed windows, she couldn’t hear a word; it wasn’t necessary, though. From their expressions and Cara Ray’s body language, even a dunce could see that the little blonde was buttering up Lucinda shamefully.

The moment Lucinda rose to make fresh tea, Cara Ray had gone into action.

She was swift and thorough, riffling through Lucinda’s desk and through her checkbook. She had begun on the books that lined the fireplace, reaching behind the lower rows to feel along the walls, when she heard Lucinda return.

Lucinda entered the room to see Cara Ray sitting innocently cuddled in her chair beside the hearth.

Of course Dulcie couldn’t leave that little episode alone; since Cara Ray’s arrival, Dulcie had hung on the fence every waking moment. If Molena Point Library had a resident cat, she was not currently in residence; she hardly went home for meals. Cara Ray returned the next day and the next, and Dulcie was there. Again on the third day Cara Ray stayed until midnight.

Now, with Joe and Dulcie’s “meddling,” as Clyde would put it, with Dulcie’s anonymous suggestion to Harper, the captain was-pardon the pun-taking a good look at Cara Ray. It had begun earlier that afternoon, when Harper had stopped by Clyde’s and mentioned he had a make on Raul Torres, and Joe and Dulcie decidedto take a ride.

It was Saturday, and at Harper’s suggestion, Clyde planned to take Selig up to Harper’s pasture to work on the pup’s obedience training in a large, open area. The two pups were impossible together; Charlie had taken Hestig home to her apartment. She and Clyde couldn’t even attend the same obedience class; the pups did nothing but taunt each other, play on each other’s foolishness. Joe had been shocked out of his claws when Clyde actually signed up for the class at the community center.

Surprisingly, both pups had learned toSit,toComeon command, and, sometimes, to take the sitting position atHeel-except when they were together. Then they were oblivious, had never before heard those words, had no notion what they meant.

So that afternoon Harper, still in uniform, had taken a few hours off, left his unit parked in front of Clyde’s, and he and Clyde had headed up the hills in Clyde’s ‘29 Chevy, the convertible top folded down, Selig securely tethered in the rumble seat-and Joe and Dulcie concealed on the little shelf behind the seats, beneath the folded leather top.

It was hot as sin in there, but, crouched just behind the men’s heads, they could hear every word.

“You started to tell me about this accident victim,” Clyde said, turning up Ocean. “Torres, you said?” He seemed far more willing to talk with Harper about the case when he thought Joe wasn’t around.

“Raul Torres. He did give the antique car agency his right name. Torres was a PI working out of Seattle. I don’t know why he used the fake address. Maybe he used that routinely, for security reasons.” Even Max Harper, Joe thought with interest, seemed more comfortable relating information in a supposedly cat-free environment.

“I called Torres’s office a dozen times before I got his secretary. She was closemouthed until I identified myself. Said she’d call me back While I waited, she called the station, checked me out. Called me back to say Torres was on vacation, that she didn’t expect to hear from him for maybeanother week She’d gone in to do the billing.

“I told her Torres was dead. Took her a few minutes to take that in. When she felt like talking again, she said she’d made reservations for Torres at the Oak Breeze, in Molena Point, beginning last Saturday. That he’d gone down to L.A. on a case, had planned to leave there Saturday, was meeting someone in Molena Point Saturday night, a woman-girlfriend, she said.”

“You find a motel registration?” Clyde asked as he turned up the long dirt road leading to Harper’s acreage.

“Nothing under Torres, not in Molena Point. But the fact he was a PI keeps me digging.”

“So he was a PI,” Clyde said. “That doesn’t mean he was murdered.”

“Of course not,” Harper said, amused. “But it does make me wonder.”

The house at the end of the lane was white clapboard, with a four-stall barn behind and an open, roofed hay shed. The stable yard was shaded by three huge live oak trees, the garden weedy and neglected since Harper’s wife died. They pulled up beside the barn, and while the two men were occupied tying a long, thin line to Selig’s choke chain, the cats, panting from the heat, slipped out from under the folded leather top and beat it for the hay shed.

Scorching up the stacked bales to crouch high beneath the shadowed roof, they watched Harper head for the house and return carrying two cans of Coke. The slam of the screen door started Selig barking, and Clyde couldn’t shut him up.

One word from Harper, and the pup was silent.

Clyde scowled at Harper and led Selig out into the pasture; the puppy pressed his nose immediately to the ground, jerking on the lead, ignoring Clyde, snuffling deeply at the delicious scent of horse manure.

Dulcie made herself comfortable on the baled hay, raking her claws deep.“Torres died Sunday morning,” she said softly.

Joe rolled over, slapping at straws, and turned to look at her.

“If Torres drove up from L.A. Saturday,” she said, “and if he was with a woman in the village on Saturday night, as his secretary told Harper, then what was he doing driving south again, before dawn on Sunday?

“And who was the woman?” Her green eyes narrowed. “Cara Ray told Lucinda she arrived Saturday. Don’t you think it strange that Torres and Cara Ray would come to Molena Point on exactly the same day?”

“Dulcie?”

“Torres worked in Seattle. Shamas still had a business there.”

“So?”

“Lucinda told Wilma that when Shamas went up to Seattle she was sure he took a woman with him, not someone from Molena Point but someone he’d meet at the San Francisco airport-Lucinda did keep an eye on his phone bills.”

Dulcie smiled smugly.“Cara Ray lives in San Francisco, not too far from the airport. Shamas flew to Seattle, out of that airport, about once a month.

“So?” Joe said.

“Cara Ray was Shamas’s lover. But was she Torres’s lover, too? Did she see Torres, as well, when she was in Seattle? She must have been busy.”

Joe rolled over again, scratching his back against the rough straw; he looked at her upside down.“Say you’re right, Torres was in Molena Point to meet Cara Ray. What was he doing on the highway, Sunday morning?”

“Maybe they had a fight. Maybe he drove off mad, and that’s why he skidded.”

“What about the other car-the second car I heard, just before the crash?”

“Could someone else have known he was here? Cut his brake line, then-maybe phoned him, brought him out on some wild-goose chase, maybe something to do with the case he was working on in LA? That might explain why he was headed south again. Then they followed him, in the heavy fog, and honked to confuse him?”

“That’s really reaching for it, Dulcie.”

“Whatever the truth, there’s a connection. Cara Ray and this Torres didn’t just happen to arrive in the same town, on the same day. And why was Cara Ray snooping through Lucinda’s papers?”

Joe sighed at the monumental tangles that female logic could weave.“Even if there was a connection, we can’t pass on that kind of shaky guesswork to Harper.”

“Maybe no one’s mentioned Cara Ray to him. Maybe he has no reason to be interested in her. If he doesn’t know about the Seattle connection?”

“Dulcie?”

“We’d only be telling him the name of the woman Torres may have met. What harm in that?”

“Maybe. But we can’t call Harper from here.”

“Why not? There’s a phone on his belt.”

“Do you see a phone in this hay shed?”

She gave him a sweet, green-eyed smile.“There in the dinette, you can see it through the bay window; the phone’s right there on the table.”

Joe sighed.

“Go up on the shed roof, Joe. Where I can see you from the house. Signal me if he heads that way.” She leaped down the baled hay and was gone, streaking for the screen door.

Joe rose and shook the hay off. Sometimes Dulcie was impossible. He swarmed up a post to the roof of the shed. Impossible, clever, and enchanting.

Clyde thought that he, Joe Grey, got rabid over a robbery or suspicious death. But Dulcie set her teeth into a murder case as if she were fighting rattlesnakes.

Keeping low, out of the men’s view, and trying not to let his claws scritch on the galvanized roof, Joe slipped to the edge, where he could see the house.

Behind the bay window, a small shape moved, padding across the table.

Watching her paw at the phone, he remembered the night they’d memorized Harper’s various phone numbers from Clyde’s phone file. Clyde had pitched a fit because they’d left a few tooth marks in the cards; he could be so picky. It was a huge stroke of luck that Pacific Bell had recently offered free blocking for that insidious caller ID service that so many phones had subscribed to-including Molena Point PD.

Harper had caller ID blocking for his own phones, and with a little encouragement Clyde had come around-it was free, wasn’t it?

Wilma, always sensible, had subscribed at once. Wilma told Clyde there was no way he could stop Joe using the phone. She said if Clyde wanted to save himself acute embarrassment, he’d better go along with the blocking.

Out in the field, Clyde stood fifty feet away from Selig, his arm raised in an exaggerated signal, shouting“Sit! Sit, stay.”

Selig grinned at him and bounced around, playing with the nylon line that was supposed to control him.

Max Harper stood looking on, trying not to laugh. Faintly, Joe heard Harper’s phone buzz.

Harper picked up, and listened. An irritated look spread across his lean face. His replies were brief. But he didn’t hang up.

Harper might not like these anonymous phone calls, might not like the unsettling and impossible suppositions that they stirred, but he didn’t ignore them.

Behind Harper, Clyde walked across the field to Selig. With a lot of pushing, he made the pup sit. Then backing away, holding the line, Clyde didn’t take his eyes from the pup. The object was to get maybe fifty feet from Selig, making sure he remained sitting, to wait for a little while, then call him. The trainee was supposed to sit still until summoned by the trainer, then run directly to him and sit again, facing the tall human god.

What actually occurred was that the pup kept moving his butt around, only barely remaining in the sitting position, wild to lunge and run, and when Clyde did finally call him, Selig ran around Clyde, circling until Clyde’s legs were wrapped in the line. Harper, scowling into the phone, couldn’t help a lopsided grin as the pup hog-tied Clyde like a roped calf.

So far Clyde had made five attempts at this maneuver. During the first four lessons, Selig, when he was called, had run in the opposite direction, his nose to the ground.

Harper still had the phone to his ear, his expression sour but thoughtful. Dulcie would be telling him that Raul Torres arrived in Molena Point the same day as Cara Ray Crisp. That Cara Ray was staying at the Oak Breeze Motel. Dulcie wouldn’t elaborate on that point She’d probably say something like,I know it’s not really police business. Yet. Unless, of course, Shamas Greenlawdidn’tdie naturally.Joe could almost hear her whispering into the phone,Don’t you wonder, Captain Harper, why a PI from Seattle-where Shamas used to live, where Shamas still had a business-would plan to meet Shamas’s lover in Molena Point just two weeks after Shamas was drowned?

Joe watched Harper tuck the phone into his belt and cross the field to Clyde. If Harper had paid attention to that phone call, and if he meant to head back to the village to check on Cara Ray, he’d have to take either Clyde’s car or his own pickup; he’d left his police unit parked in front of Clyde’s place. Harper hadn’t made a call after Dulcie hung up, as if to send one of his officers to check on Cara Ray.

Harper and Clyde stood talking, then Harper headed toward the house. Joe, flattening himself against the metal roof, was about to signal Dulcie when Harper turned toward the stable, where his pickup was parked.

Joe beat him there. As Harper stepped into the cab, Joe had slid behind him into the back section of the king cab-avoiding the slamming door by a split second. There’d been no time to get Dulcie, she was still in the house.

He’d hoped she wasn’t snooping around Harper’s place, prying into the police captain’s personal life. She was so nosy. Oh, that would be too low.

Joe had liked the feel of the big truck careening down the hills, had listened to Harper calling the motel office, asking the location of Cara Ray Crisp’s room and if she had anyone with her. Not until Harper had stopped for takeout did Joe realize how hungry he was. The aroma of fish and chips had been almost more than he could stand. Then Harper was backing into the alley, Joe drooling for a bite of fried cod.

But now the cod was gone. And Cara Ray Crisp had turned out her light and left her room. Joe listened to Harper wad up the sack and napkins and stuff them in the trash bin. Wind swirled into the cab as Harper opened the door.

And Joe was alone, shut into Harper’s pickup, the door slammed practically in his face.

Leaping to the back of the front seat, he watched Harper cross the street into the patio of the Oak Breeze and move on past the pool toward the manager’s office, never glancing toward Cara Ray as she descended the stairs and chose a chaise by the pool. Dropping her towel across it, she stretched out.

Cara Ray was not the only sunbather. Half a dozen other greased bodies reclined like oiled sardines laid out on grids to dry. The sun was low, but the evening was still warm, the pool as blue as the eyes of a rutting Siamese.

The police captain, moving on into the office, would quickly find out when Cara Ray had checked in, what name and credit card she had used, if she had arrived in a car, if Raul Torres had been registered, if Cara Ray had registered for a single or double, if she had been seen with anyone.

But, Joe wondered, if she had come here to meet Torres, and Torres came up missing, why hadn’t Cara Ray gone directly to the police? Why wasn’t she looking for the guy?

With questions buzzing in his head as thick as flies on stale cat food, he watched a young man come around the corner from the direction of the parking lot, wearing loose swim trunks, flipflops, and an open shirt, heading for the pool. Choosing a chaise near Cara Ray but facing the opposite direction, he adjusted the back to a moderate recline, made himself comfortable, and opened a newspaper.

Behind the paper, he spoke; he didn’t look around at Cara Ray. He was a big-boned, wide-shouldered guy. Square jaw, sandy hair, and freckles-If this guy isn’t a Greenlaw,Joe thought,yours truly is a ring-tailed gorilla.

And was he staying at the Oak Breeze? Or had he parked in the visitors’ lot behind the motel? As far as Joe knew, none of the Greenlaws was staying in a motel; they were all too tight with their cash. Had this guy met Cara Ray at Lucinda’s and made a date with her? Or were they old friends? And why the secrecy?

Dropping down onto the front seat of the king cab, Joe fought the door handle, pawing and pulling at it-but even his considerable tomcat strength was almost no match for General Motors. He got the door open at last, bruising his paws. Within seconds Joe was across the street crouching in the geraniums that bordered the wide tile patio, looking out at Cara Ray reclining on her chaise beside the long, blue pool.

8 [????????: pic_9.jpg]

THE GERANIUM thicket was dense and tall enough to conceal a dozen tomcats, but the long stretch of tiled paving beyond it, between Joe Grey and his quarry, offered no cover. Away across the open patio, Cara Ray and the man behind the newspaper were speaking quietly. Cara Ray, stretched out on her chaise on her stomach, had untied her bikini bra to avoid strap marks, her well-oiled body highlighting a golden tan. Joe, watching her lips moving, tried to tell what she was saying, but he wasn’t any good at lipreading. He supposed, like most things in life, that skill took some effort to master. Near him under the geranium leaves, a sparrow was hopping, picking up seeds, forcing Joe to exercise every ounce of self-control not to snatch the dumb little morsel and chomp him.

The flowers were so pungent and spicy that his fur would smell like geraniums for the next week. Beneath his paws, the earth was damp; as he sauntered out onto the patio he left a trail across the tiles of dark, wet pawprints.

Cara Ray had her eyes closed. Joe lay down beneath her chaise, behind her visitor, stretching out on the warm tile paving. His view up through the webbing was of Cara Ray’s cheek and a lot of her anatomy. She smelled like coconut oil. He couldn’t see her companion’s face, only the breadth of his shoulders, and his legs and feet, which were indecently hairy, for a human. Dark, curly hair, though the hair on his head was light. His body had the kind of tan that, once it has peaked, begins to look dull and flaking. Compared with Cara Ray’s blond radiance, he looked like a dust-covered mannequin that someone had dragged from an attic and posed on the chaise with an open newspaper.

“Are you sure you didn’t find anything, Cara Ray? Where were you looking?”

“Sam, you’d know if I did. It’s only been three days. Sitting in that old woman’s stuffy parlor drinking tea until I think I’ll throw up-and at night, listening to their boring stories. Grown men and women, telling fairy tales.” She raised her head to look at him.“Youmade yourself scarce enough.” Glancing down, she saw Joe under her chaise, and caught her breath. Snatching up her towel, she flapped it at him. “Shoo. Shoo.”

Joe rose and moved away, out of her line of sight.

“Wha’d you want me to do, Cara Ray, jump up and throw my arms around you? Anyway, who’d have the chance, with Cousin Dirken all over you?”

Cara Ray laughed.“Farting around repairing that house. What a joke.” She glared under the chaise, didn’t see Joe.

Sam sniggered.“Pulling off the siding, chopping holes in that old cement and filling ‘em up again.” He fished a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, carefully selected one from the center, where it presumably wasn’t crushed, and lit up. “Dirken tags me around every minute I’m at the house, won’t let me out of his sight. Nearly has palsy if I head out into the yard.”

She half rose, holding the bra.“If he watches you so close, then how do you thinkIcan do any better? He tags me, too-as bad as Newlon.”

“When Dirken watches you, Cara Ray, his mind isn’t on what you’re looking for. More likely on what he’swantingto look for.”

She bellowed out a laugh, an alarming bray for such a sleek, petite lady.

“And the old woman?” he said. “She suspect anything?”

“Not a clue. Dim as a blind deacon passing the collection plate.” She rolled over on her back, clutching her untied bra to herself, revealing more white skin than tan. “What about Torres?”

He lowered the paper and raised up, looking around at the other sunbathers.“Torres died in an accident, Cara Ray. His brakes failed.” He half turned, his face in profile behind the raised newspaper. “It’s time you got some results out of that old woman.”

She sat up, straddling the chaise, tying on her bra.“I’m working on it. You think I can just waltz in there and make nice to hiswidow,right away we’re bosom buddies? You think that dry old biddy is going to trust me? Share all her girlie secrets, right down to what Shamas was like in bed-if she can remember that far back. You think she’s going to cozy up to me the way she does to Pedric? And we don’t need that buddy-buddy stuff, either, between those two. I think?”

“Well,I have to be careful, Cara Ray. You know my old parole officer lives in this burg.”

“Not likely you’ll run into him. Why would you? If you stay out of jail.”

“It’s a her. And I damn sure might run into her. She and Lucinda are thicker than cats in a bowl of cream. All I need is for that bitch to get on my case. She sent me back twice, always hassling me. Sent me right damn back to federal prison.”

“So? You’re clean now. You told me you were clean.”

He glanced back at her and smiled.

She laughed.“If you?” She stopped speaking, rolled over suddenly onto her belly, hiding her face.

Joe, stretching up to see what had startled her, backed deeper under the chaise as the uniformed captain swung out of the motel office. Harper didn’t seem to notice Cara Ray, not a blink as he headed across the patio toward the street. Joe kept his head down, hiding the white strip on his face and his white paws, muttering a little cat prayer that Harper, watching Cara Ray out of the corner of his eye, wouldn’t notice one small, gray, immobile hunk of cat fur crouching in the shadow under the chaise.

Leaving the patio, Harper walked right on past his king cab, never glancing at it. Probably he’d leave the truck parked between the buildings under the jasmine vine until Cara Ray and her friend had left the pool area. It was just after Harper left that the conversation turned even more murky. Sam, turning the newspaper page as if he were reading, said, “I need to move on, Cara Ray. Before the funeral. I’ve details to tend to.”

“You leave before the funeral,” she snapped, “don’t you think someone will wonder? The funeral’s what you came for. And as to the machine sales, that little adventure was your idea, not mine.”

“One road leads to the other, Cara Ray.” “What about the boat? The cops been back on it?” “Why would they? They got no reason. And what would they find? There’s nothingtofind.” He snapped the newspaper irritably. “It was an accident, Cara Ray.” “One road leads to the other, Sam,only if you make a track between them.” Cara Ray rose; her look was as brittle as broken glass. Heading for the stairs, her blue eyes and delicate features shone as cold as an arctic ice field.

9 [????????: pic_10.jpg]

THE TEA tray, on the coffee table before the fire, was set with Wilma’s hand-thrown ceramic cups and saucers and arranged with an assortment of lemon bars, scones, and fruit-filled custards. The blazing fire cast bright reflections across Wilma’s deep-toned oriental rug and across the blue velvet couch and love seat. Above the mantel, a rich Jeannot painting of the Molena Point hills lent further richness to the cozy room. Behind Wilma’s cherry desk, the white shutters were open to the stormy afternoon, framing the old oak trees that twisted across her tangled flower garden. Wilma had put on a CD of Pete Fountain, the bright clarinet jazz filling the house with its happy sound. Dulcie sat on Wilma’s desk, her green eyes deeply amused. They were waiting for Lucinda.

“It was a cat,” Dulcie was telling Wilma. “A tiny little cat, riding that big pup. You should have seen Selig racing away with the littlest, scruffiest kitten you can imagine raking his backside. Kitten the color of charred wood, and fierce-angry as a tiger.”

It seemed to Dulcie that all her world suddenly was filled with young animals, both exasperating and lovable. She had spent the morning sitting on Clyde’s back fence beside Joe, watching as Clyde tried to train Selig. Selig had accepted the command,Sit.He knew what it meant, and he obeyed when the mood struck him. ButDownseemed a position with which he was not conversant. Clyde might be a fine auto mechanic, but as a dog trainer he was about as effective as a declawed cat in a room full of Rottweilers.

Wilma adjusted the quilted tea cozy and glanced across at Dulcie.“Where do you suppose those cats came from? You always told me the hill wasn’t inviting to cats, that the village cats didn’t like to go there.”

“Sometimes it does seem a frightening place,” Dulcie said. “But that young cat doesn’t seem to mind; she acts as if the whole hill belongs to her.”

Dulcie licked a bit of scone and custard that Wilma had put on a small flowered plate for her.“I saw those cats, the first time, a week after the earthquake, slipping across the hill like shadows. I couldn’t get close, I could hardly see them except the little dark one. She stopped and looked back at me, stood for a long time, staring, before she raced away. I thought she wanted to comenearer, but then she’d glance behind her almost as if the others didn’t want her to get friendly.”

Dulcie smiled.“She’s a terrible little morsel, with that dirty blackish-and-brown fur all matted and sticking out every which way. No more than skin over bones, and she can’t be four months old.”

“Do you suppose they lost their home in the earthquake?” Wilma asked.

“Maybe,” Dulcie said. “Maybe they’re a small feral colony that fled up the coast when the quake hit.” The epicenter of the earthquake had been some eighty miles to the south of Molena Point. “Maybe they’re from one of those managed colonies that you read about.”

Occasionally, Dulcie’s favorite cat magazines would do a story about feral-cat colonies that were fed by groups of volunteers, people who trapped the cats to treat them for illnesses or injuries and give them their shots, then turned them loose again, to live free.

“Little feral kittens,” she said softly.

Wilma stopped fussing with the tea tray and gave her a long look; but something in Dulcie’s tone kept her from pursuing the subject.

That little feral kitten,Dulcie thought.So bold and wild.She ate a bit more scone, lapped up her custard, and watched through the window as Lucinda Greenlaw’s New Yorker drew to the curb. Wilma’s purpose in asking Lucinda over for tea, that day, was not simply social, but to find out about Cara Ray Crisp, a favor for Max Harper. Harper didn’t often ask his friends for this sort of snooping.

Of the five people on the boat when Shamas drowned, Newlon had come directly from docking theGreen Ladyat Molena Point harbor, to be with Lucinda. Winnie and George Chambers had made their condolence call a few days later; Winnie Chambers had been sympathetic and gentle, but her husband George had seemed stiff. Dulcie had watched him fidget, definitely ill at ease-as if tenderness and excessive emotion were not in his nature. Sam Fulman had come sauntering in two days after Newlon arrived, saying he’d had to run up to the city on business.I’ll just bet,Dulcie had thought. Lucinda had not, of course, expected to see Shamas’s mistress at her door at any time, come to make condolences.

The six members of the sailing party had all performed the duties of crew on the three-cabin vessel, though Dulcie had her doubts about how much work Cara Ray undertook. More likely her contribution was in bed.

In Seattle, where theGreen Ladyhad gone into port after Shamas drowned, the police had put the death down as a drinking accident; Shamas’s blood alcohol had been high enough to easily account, under the midnight-storm conditions, for a fatal error of judgment and balance.

With Dulcie’s phone tip, Captain Harper had become increasingly curious. He had no real grounds, however, to question Cara Ray-hence Wilma’s conversation with Lucinda.

Dulcie, curling down on the desk as Lucinda settled comfortably before the fire, watched Wilma pour out the tea and serve the little plates and listened through the small talk about Wilma’s garden and the weather, as Wilma gently moved the conversation toward Cara Ray’s visits.

“I suppose Cara Ray drove down to Molena Point alone?”

“Oh, I’m sure she’s here alone. Well, at least she hasn’t mentioned anyone else. She doesn’t drive over, except that first time. She walks the few blocks from her motel. The second time she came, Dirken drove her home. The next night, too, because it was late, nearly midnight.” Lucinda raised an eyebrow. “I expect Newlon and his cousins would all have liked the opportunity.”

“She didn’t mention anyone she might have driven down from the city with? Or perhaps someone she knew here in Molena Point?”

“No, she didn’t. The woman is not that free with information about herself. What is it, Wilma? Why the questions?”

“Nothing,” Wilma said. “Simple curiosity. If she is such a beauty, as you say, I thought perhaps? one would wonder if there’s a? gentleman friend.”

Lucinda went silent, drawing into herself.“You mean another gentleman friend, since Shamas.” She looked at Wilma helplessly.

This was not, Dulcie thought, easy for either of them.

“She spent a lot of time with you,” Wilma said. “I suppose she talked about the accident.”

Lucinda nodded stiffly.“She did. On her first visit. But she said nothing that the Seattle police didn’t tell me, if that’s what you’re after.”

“She seems,” Wilma said smoothly, “to have made herself very much at home.”

Lucinda flushed.“She? made no bones that she was Shamas’s ‘good friend,’ as she put it.”

Lucinda sipped her tea nervously.“She has no shame. She told me how she had loved to sit on shipboard in the evenings listening to Shamas tell his wonderful tales.”

“That first visit-what else did she talk about?”

“What is this, Wilma? What are these questions? Why are you doing this?”

“I’m trying to understand,” Wilma said quietly. She did not mention Max Harper, nor would she. What she was doing for Harper, Dulcie knew, put Wilma almost in the category of a police snitch. And a snitch didn’t reveal her role; that did not make for good law enforcement.

“I’m trying,” Wilma said, “to understand why Cara Ray came here. And why you’ve allowed her in, Lucinda. Not once, but three times. What could she possibly?”

“It was the Greenlaws,” Lucinda said crossly. “Dirken, Newlon-they made her very welcome; that first day, they asked her to stay the evening.”

“Did you? show her around the house?”

Lucinda flushed.“She said? that Shamas had bragged so about it.”

Dulcie felt her tail lashing. She couldn’t believe that even Lucinda would be so spineless. She could just imagine Lucinda taking that woman on a nice little guided tour of Shamas’s home, pointing out all the valuable antiques.

Was that what Cara Ray was looking for? Small items she might steal, valuable pieces that perhaps Shamas had mentioned? His old and valuable chess sets, for instance, which had been written up once in theGazette.Or the authentic scrimshaw and carved-ivory collection that Shamas had liked to show visitors. Had Lucinda showed them all to Cara Ray? What was it in human nature that made people so trusting?

“Why do you allow it?” Wilma said gently. “Why don’t you send her packing?”

“I truly don’t know. Partly, I suppose, a false sense of good manners. It’s hard to break habits instilled in you so severely as a child. The same hidebound manners,” Lucinda said with uncharacteristic boldness, “that keep me from sending the whole Greenlaw tribe packing.

“Well,” she said, smiling, “at least the Greenlaw women have begun to do the cooking. Not that I like their heavy meals, or like them in my kitchen. But I don’t have to cook for that tribe.”

Ibet you still have to buy the groceries,Dulcie thought with a catty little smirk.

“The rest of the clan will arrive in a few more days,” Lucinda said. “Then the funeral, and they’ll be gone again, and Cara Ray, too.

“Oh, I dread the funeral, Wilma. His family is going to turn it into a regular dirge of moaning and weeping and showmanship. I don’t think they cared a fig about Shamas, but they’re planning all manner of things for the wake, weepy poetry readings, flowery speeches-I’d rather havenoceremony.”

“Certainly,” Wilma said, “this Cara Ray won’t have the nerve to show her face.”

“She has bought a new dress for the occasion. ‘A little black dress,’ she told me.”

Wilma’s eyes widened. “She wouldn’t actually?”

Lucinda’s face flushed. “She intends to be there. She’s a whore, Wilma. Nothing but a common whore.”

Dulcie stared-she had never heard Lucinda speak so plainly. Maybe there was more grit to Lucinda Greenlaw than she had ever guessed.

“Lucinda, send that woman packing,” Wilma said. “Back to San Francisco. Don’t let her take advantage of you.”

“I? have a feeling about her, Wilma. That? that she knows things about Shamas I should be privy to.”

“What sort of things?”

“Something important. Something? I don’t know. Not personal things, but something to do with the estate, with his businesses. I want? to keep her around for a while.

“She’s buttering up Shamas’s nephews shamefully, but-well, they were all on shipboard together. I just? don’t want to send her away, yet, Wilma.”

Dulcie washed her paws, puzzling over Lucinda. All the pieces she knew about Lucinda Greenlaw never seemed quite to fit together. Lucinda seemed so shy and docile, yet sometimes she was surprisingly bold.

Dulcie was still wondering about the old lady that evening, as she and Joe peered through the lighted window into the crowded parlor-as they watched Cara Ray make nice with the younger Greenlaw men, the little blonde flirting and preening, drawing cold looks from Lucinda.

10 [????????: pic_11.jpg]

SEATED ON the Victorian couch between Dirken and Newlon, Cara Ray looked like a porcelain doll, her short pink skirt revealing a long expanse of slim, tanned leg as she dished out the giggles and charm.

If I were a human person,Dulcie thought jealously,I’d have legs even nicer. And I wouldn’t be a cheap hussy.From the fence, the cats enjoyed front-row seats to Cara Ray’s brazen display-she was the center of attention. They watched, fascinated, as she drew the Greenlaw men in like ants to syrup. Only Sam, Cara Ray’s friend from the Oak Breeze Motel, sat across the room as if he didn’t much care for her company.

The half dozen big-boned Greenlaw women watched Cara Ray’s performance with quiet anger. The dozen Greenlaw children who hunkered on the floor between the chairs of their elders watched their mothers, watched Cara Ray, and smirked behind their hands. The children, Dulcie thought, were amazingly obedient and quiet tonight, nothing like the way the little brats shouted and pushed and broke things in the village shops. Near the hearth, beside old Pedric, Lucinda sat quietly, too. The cats couldn’t read her expression.

Of those on board ship when Shamas drowned, only Winnie and George Chambers were not present. Harper had told Clyde he talked with them twice. Their answers to his questions were the same as they had given Seattle police, that they had not awakened that night, that they were heavy sleepers, had slept through the storm, did not know that Shamas had drowned until the next morning.

But tonight was story night and the cats forgot questions and police business as Dirken rose to tell his tale, standing quietly before the fire waiting for silence to touch the crowded room. But outdoors, around the cats, the breeze quickened. Wind whipped the parlor curtains and a gray-haired Greenlaw woman rose to shut the windows.

A series of slams, the windows were down, and the cats could hear nothing; Dirken’s voice was lost.

“Come on,” Dulcie hissed, “before they shut the back door, too. Maybe the screen’s unlatched.”

“And get shut in with that bunch?”

But he dropped from the fence and was across the weedy grass ahead of Dulcie and in through the screen, leading the way through the kitchen behind two stout Greenlaw women who stood at the sink rinsing dishes.

In the shadows of the dining room beneath the walnut buffet, they gained a fine view of table and chair legs, of human legs and a child here and there tucked among their elders’ feet. Neither Joe nor Dulcie liked the assault of so many human smells and so much loud talk and louder laughter; but who knew what the evening might offer?

Before the fire, Dirken looked smug and full of himself. His red hair hung over his collar in a shaggy ruff; his blue shirt fit tight over muscles that indicated he worked out regularly-prompting Dulcie to wonder if he had installed, in his travel trailer, some sort of gym equipment, to keep in shape while he took his little jaunts.

All the clan lived in new and luxurious trailers or RVs when they were on the road, which, Dulcie gathered from Lucinda’s remarks, was more than half the year. What these people did for a living wasn’t clear. If they traveled on business, what kind of business? Some kind of sales, Lucinda had told Wilma. But that was all she told her.

When the Greenlaw clan first arrived at the Moonwatch Trailer Park, the dozen nearly new travel vehicles checking in as a group, the proprietor had spoken to Max Harper, and Harper had checked them out. Since then, Dulcie had seen the police cruising that area on several occasions. She didn’t know what such a large traveling group might add up to, to alert Max Harper, but she didn’t laugh at him.

Standing before the hearth, Dirken waited. The parlor was hushed. The family, usually so violent and loud, so rude, was quiet now, and gentle-as if the tradition of story time touched powerful emotions, drawing them together.

“What shall it be?” Dirken said. “What will you hear? ‘Paddy’s Bride’? ‘The Open Grave’?”

“Tell ‘Drugen Jakey,’” Lucinda said softly. “Tell ‘Drugen Jakey’ again?”

“Yes,” said old Pedric, laying his hand on hers. “‘Drugen Jake’ fits these hills.”

Dirken looked at them with annoyance.

But then he masked his frown, whatever the cause. His voice softened, his manner and stance gentled, his voice embracing the old-country speech.“That tale be told twice before,” he told Pedric.

“Tell it,” a young nephew spoke up. “That tale belongs well to these coastal hills.”

“Ah,” Dirken said. “The green, green hills. Do they draw you, those rocky hills?” His laugh was evil. No one else laughed. Lucinda looked startled. Pedric watched quietly, clasping his wrinkled hands together, his lined face a study in speculation.

“All right, then,” Dirken said, “‘Drugen Jakey’ it will be. Well, see, there was a passel of ghosts down the village coomb, and worse than ghosts?”

Standing tall before the fire, his red hair catching the flame’s glow, his booted feet planted solidly, Dirken seemed to draw all light to himself.

“No man could graze his beasts down there for fear of th’ underworld beings. Th’ spirits, if they rose there and touched his wee cattle, wo’d send them flop over dead. Dead as th’ stones in th’ field. Devil ghosts, hell’s ghost, all manner of hell’s critters?”

In the silent room, cousins and aunts and nephews cleaved to Dirken’s words, as rapt as if they had never before heard the ancient myth.

“Oh yes, all was elder there?” Dirken said, and this was not a comfortable tale; Dirken’s story led his listeners straight down into a world of black and falling caverns that, though they excited Dulcie, made her shiver, too. Joe Grey didn’t want to hear this story; it made him flatten his ears and bare his teeth, made him want to scorch across the room and bolt out the nearest window.

But as the tale rolled over them all, painting the deep netherworld, Lucinda looked increasingly excited. Soon she seemed hardly able to be still, drinking in the nephew’s words as he led his listeners down and down among lost mountains and ragged clefts and enchanted fields that had never seen the sun, never known stars or moon.

Speaking the old words, Dirken seemed caught, himself, in the story, though he might have told it perhaps a hundred times-his broad Irish face gleaming as he painted for them a Selkie prince who, taking the form of a ramping stallion, charmed three human girls and led them down from this world through a clear, cold lake to waters that had never reflected earth’s sky. He spoke of griffons, of harpies, of a lamia rising from the flames of hell; he described so convincingly the hellbeasts that soon Dulcie, too, wanted to escape. Dirken spoke of upper-world fields and hills quaking and opening to that cavernous land. The stories made Joe Grey swallow backa snarl, made Dulcie back deeper beneath the buffet, hunched and tense.

It’s only a story,she told herself.Even if it were true, this place and this time are safe. Those stories, those times are ancient, they are gone. Whatever might once have lain beneath these hills, that was olden times, that isn’t now. Whatever strange tie that Joe and I might have to such a place, it can’t touch us here in this modern day, can’t reach us now.

And that knowledge both reassured and saddened her. Crouched in the shadows beneath Lucinda’s buffet, she felt a sense of mourning for her own empty past.

She had no certain history such as the Greenlaws knew. No real, sure knowledge of the generations that had come before her. The stories she had adopted as her own, from the Celts and Egyptians, were tales she had taken from books. She could not be certain they were hers, not the same as if the mother she had never known had given them to her.

If you don’t know the stories of your own past,Dulcie thought sadly,what can you cling to, when you feel alone? If you don’t have a family history to tell you who you are, everything flies apart.

It was when the storytelling had ended and trays of sandwiches were brought out from the kitchen with pots of tea and coffee, and everyone was milling about, that the cats saw Cara Ray rise and move away through the crowd, through the kitchen, and out to the backyard. They followed her, winding between chair legs and under the kitchen table and swiftly out through the screen door.

Crouched beside the back porch, they watched Newlon come out, too, furtively looking about. He saw Cara Ray, a dark shadow standing by the far fence, and approached her through the weedy yard. Cara Ray turned away stiffly, not as if she were waiting for Newlon, but as if she didn’t want him there. When he moved close to her, she pushed him aside so hard he lost his balance and half fell against the fence.

“Leave me alone, Newlon. Stay away from me.”

“What did I do, Cara Ray? You were all sweetness, there in the parlor.”

“Only in front of the others, so they wouldn’t? Stay away, Newlon. And stay away from Lucinda. You didn’t need to come here.”

“Of course I needed to come. On the boat, you? Shamas is dead, Cara Ray. Now we can?”

“I told you, Newlon, leave me alone. I don’t want to see you. Do you want me to go to the police?” she said, glancing toward the house. “Do you want me to tell them how Shamas died?”

“What would you tell them, Cara Ray?”

“You might be surprised.”

The cats, crouched in a tangle of dead weeds, listened with interest but drew back when the back door opened again and Dirken stepped out, moving through the dark yard as if he knew exactly where Cara Ray would be standing.

“Go on, Newlon. Dirken won’t like to find you here.”

“But I? But Cara Ray?”

“Go on, Newlon.” And, watching Newlon slip obediently away, Cara Ray smiled as lethally as a pit viper coiled to strike.

11 [????????: pic_12.jpg]

“I DON’T like to give you advice,” Joe told Clyde from atop the back fence, “but dogs really don’t respond very well to?”

Clyde looked up from the ragged lawn where he was trying to make Selig sit at heel.“Of course you like to give me advice. When have you ever been shy about laying your biased feline opinions on me?” Selig, in response to Clyde’s command, lay on his back, waving his paws in the air.

“So do it your way,” Joe said, amused.

Clyde turned his back, giving the pup his full attention.“Up-Sit,” he told Selig.

Selig wriggled and whined.

Clyde jerked the lead. Selig flipped over onto his feet and danced in a circle around Clyde, leaping to slurp his tongue across Clyde’s nose.

Silently Joe watched the little display of superior human intelligence.

Clyde turned to glower at him.“Shut up, Joe, and go away.”

“I didn’t say a word. But I can see that you’re right. You don’t need my advice. Anyone can tell you’re doing wonders with that puppy. I’d say you have absolutely no peer as a dog trainer. In fact-”

“Can it, Joe. The truth is, he’s just too young to train. He’s still a baby. In a few months when he’s older, he’ll-”

“In a few months when he’s older, if he keeps on playing with you and ignoring your commands, he’ll be a hundred times harder to deal with.”

Clyde sighed.

“For one thing, he’ll be twice as heavy, twice as hard to lift when he pulls that stuff. What you ought to do, is-”

“You’re going to hand out advice whether I want it or not. You can never keep your opinions-”

“You’re losing him, Clyde. You’re losing him before you have a good beginning. You can’t train a puppy like this-you’re going to make him untrainable.”

“And how do you know so much? What makes a mangy tomcat an authority on dog training?”

“I’m an animal. I know how an animal’s mind works. Cat or dog. You’re not thinking like a puppy. You just-”

Clyde stepped closer to the fence, fixing Joe with an enraged stare.“You are an expert in every facet of life. You not only read the editorial page and treat me to your learned interpretations, you are now a dog-training expert. To say nothing of your unmitigated conceit in furnishing the law-enforcement officers of this community with your invaluable consultation.”

“Can’t you move on past that incident? You’ve been chewing on it for days.” Joe glanced around at the neighbors’ houses. All the windows were blank, the yards empty; but he kept his voice low. “What was I supposed to do? The guy’s lying dead in his car, brake fluid dripping all over the place from a brake line that was cut as straight as if it had been sliced with a meat cleaver, and I’m supposed to walk away and say nothing?

“I hear a second car on the highway, hear it honk its horn just before the skid, and there are no other witnesses that I know of, and just because I’m a cat, I’m supposed to withhold that information from the law.

“Well, thank you very much, Clyde, but I don’t think so. And as to the dog training, if you’re so stiffnecked you can’t accept a little friendly advice when it’s offered in a kindly manner, then screw it. Go ahead and ruin a good dog!”

Selig, driven to madness by the lack of attention and his need to play, reared up against the fence, drawing his claws down the wood in long gouges-knowing that if he kept at Clyde long enough, Clyde’s ridiculous attempt at lessons would end and they’d have a nice roughhouse, rolling in the grass. Leaping at Clyde, raking at his arm and cheek, Selig left four long red welts down the side of Clyde’s face, narrowly missing Clyde’s eye, all the time barking with excitement into Clyde’s left ear. Joe imagined Clyde’s eardrum throbbing and thickening from the onslaught of those powerful sound waves. Clyde whacked the pup across the nose with the folded leash, his face red with pain, anger, and embarrassment, and his cheek bleeding.

Joe said no word.

“All right,” Clyde shouted, tossing the leash at the tomcat. “If you’re so damned smart, you train him!” And he spun around and slammed into the house.

Joe stared down at the leash lying in the grass. Selig began happily to chew it, working the good leather into his back incisors and gnawing with relish, his brown eyes rolling up to Joe, filled with deep satisfaction.

Joe considered taking the leash away from the pup and settling him down to a lying position with a sharp command and a few claws.

But he’d only make Clyde more angry, and more out of control.

And what good, for Clyde, ifhe,Joe Grey, trained the pup? What would Clyde learn?

A cat had to balance his willingness to help humankind with the knowledge that people must learn to do things for themselves.

After all, Clydehadbought a highly recommended dog-training book, and had actually read it. He had registered for, and attended two sessions of the dog-training class that Charlie insisted on-though so far, nothing seemed to have sunk in.

All Clyde did was baby the pups, laugh when they acted silly, and get mad when they didn’t mind him. The trouble with Clyde was, he was a pushover. He wanted the puppies to love him, he wanted to play with them and have fun.

If he’d just figure out how to make learning the best game of all, he could teach them anything. If he could make those babies love their obedience routines, he wouldn’t have a problem.

Trotting along the top of the fence to the maple tree that had become Dulcie’s second home, Joe stuck his nose in among the leaves.

Dulcie, curled up atop the fence, was glued to the scene at the Greenlaw house like ticks to a hound’s ear. The sporadic hammering he’d been hearing all afternoon came from a second-story dormer, where Dirken, perched on a tall ladder, was replacing some siding, nailing on the boards none too evenly. Joe nudged her. “You want to hunt? It’s getting cool. The rabbits?”

She shook her head, watching Dirken.“He ripped the siding off and looked all around inside with a flashlight. There’s a dead space in there, I think it goes under the attic. Those boards he took off, they’re maybe a little bit soft, but not really rotted. I had a look-until he chased me away.” Dulcie smiled. “I don’t think Dirken likes cats.

“Anyway, that siding’s no worse than the rest of the house.”

She glanced at Joe, saw his expression, and her eyes widened.“Okay, so I’m hanging out here too much. So come on,” she said softly. “Let’s hunt. Whatever he’s looking for, I guess he didn’t find it.” She gave him a sweet, green-eyed smile. “Come on, Joe. Let’s go catch a rabbit.” And she fled along the fence, dropped down into the next yard, and led Joe a chase through the village and up the tree-shaded median of Ocean, slowing at the cross streets, racing across the park above the Highway One tunnel and up into the hills.

There, among the tall, dense grasses, they killed and feasted, reveling in warm blood-for a few hours, indulging their wild, pure natures, forgetting the tedious intricacies of civilization and the trials of the human lives that touched them. Racing across the hills, madly, deliriously dodging and leaping, they came to ground at dusk in the ruins of an old barn and curled up together for a nap, daring any fox or raccoon to approach them.

But just before dawn they shrugged on again the cares of civilized life. Trotting home, they indulged in a detour up the roof of the Blankenship house and heard, through the open window, Mama talking to black-and-white Chappie, whom Dulcie had brought to her when he was a kitten. Chappie was grown now and handsome. Mama talked, but Chappie didn’t reply; nor could he, except with soft, questioning mews.A good thing,Dulcie thought,that he’s just an everyday cat. If hecouldtalk, Mama wouldn’t let him get in a word.Leaving the Blankenship house, they fled through the village to Jolly’s alley-a lovely example of civilization, the brick paving regularly scrubbed, the stained-glass windows of the little shops all polished, the jasmine vine neatly trimmed and sweet-scented, and the gourmet offerings always fresh, set out for village cats.

There they breakfasted on Jolly’s cold prime rib, leftover shrimp cocktail, and a dab of Beluga caviar; and it was not until the next night that Joe’s opinion about dog training was vindicated, that Max Harper gave Clyde exactly the same advice, word for word, that Joe Grey had given him.

Joe was sauntering up the back steps to the dog door when he heard dog claws scrabbling inside, on the linoleum, and Harper’s angry voice. “Get down! Stop that!” There was ayip,and puppy claws skidded across the kitchen floor.

Pushing inside to the heady smell of broiling hamburgers, Joe paused in the laundry, where old Rube and the three cats were taking refuge.

The kitchen was alive with the two gamboling pups rearing and bouncing like wild mustangs crazy on loco weed. Max Harper sat at the kitchen table, his long legs tucked out of the way, observing the enthusiastic youngsters in much the same way he might watch a gang of hophead street kids tearing up his jail.

Harper did not hate dogs. Harper loved dogs. When his wife, Millie, was alive they always had several German shepherds around their small ranch.

But Harper’s dogs, like his horses, were well mannered, carefully and patiently trained. As Joe stepped into the kitchen, Harper was saying, “I don’t mean to tell you your business, Damen. But these young dogs need a bit of work.”

Joe turned away, hiding a grin.

“They’re growing pretty fast,” Harper said. “The bigger they get, the harder they’re going to be, to-”

Clyde turned from the stove. His expression stopped Max.

“You don’t want my opinion?”

Clyde said nothing.

“Well, of course you’re right. They’re your pups, you don’t need to be told how to handle them.” He gave Clyde a long, droll stare. “I’m sure you’ll work it out-find homes for them before they tear down the walls.”

“They’re only puppies, Max. Don’t be so critical. You sound just like-likeCharlie”Clyde said hastily, glancing down at Joe. “Charlie says that stuff.” He took a long swallow of beer. “They’re just puppies. The vet says they’re only four or five months old. Give them time, they’ll settle down.”

“You’re saying they’re too young to train.”

“They’re just babies!” Clyde repeated.

“And already as big as full-grown pointers. If you don’t do something now, before they get any larger, they’ll be completely out of hand. If you don’t mind my saying, what you ought to do is?”

Clyde banged a plate of sliced onions onto the table, slammed down bottles of catsup and mustard, and dropped two split buns into the toaster.

Joe dared not make a sound. Laughter stuck in his throat like a giant hair ball. He watched Hestig rear up to smell the grilling hamburgers, watched Clyde drag the pups out to the backyard and shove the plywood barrier across the dog door. Clyde turned to look at Harper.

“Wilma says you were asking her some questions about Shamas Greenlaw’s relatives. What are you working on?”

“Simple curiosity,” Harper said shortly.

Clyde raised an eyebrow.

“For the last week or so, we’ve had a rash of shoplifting. Petty stuff.”

“The past week,” Clyde said.

“About the same length of time that Shamas’s relatives have been camped up at the Moonwatch. I’m just a bit curious.”

“Same kind of curiosity that took you sliding down Hellhag Canyon the other night.”

“What’s this, some kind of cross-examination?”

Clyde just looked at him.

“That trip down the canyon was well worth the trouble,” Harper said.

Clyde said nothing.

“I got a phone tip. Okay?”

Clyde’s gaze flickered.

The toaster popped the buns up. Clyde snatched them out and began busily to butter them.

Harper sipped his beer, watching Clyde.“Maybe I didn’t give you all the details. The night I went down the canyon, I get down to the wreck, my torchlight picks out a couple of scrape marks in the earth, where my men hadn’t stepped.”

Clyde dished up the burgers and put them on the table. Harper reached for the mustard.“There were pawprints on top of the scrapes. Big pawprints. And a small set of prints, like maybe a? squirrel.”

“You saw animal prints,” Clyde said.

“On top the animal prints was the clear print of a jogging shoe.”

“So someone went down the canyon. People go down there to hike. Naturally a hiker would be curious, seeing a wrecked car, particularly a vintage Corvette. Pity, to wreck a nice car like that.”

“To say nothing of getting dead in the process,” Harper said dryly.

“So you found a shoe print,” Clyde said with less rancor. “And??”

“Portions of the same print leading to the brake line, and two going away from it. Fragments, but enough to show a grid.”

Clyde put down his hamburger and paid attention.

“Several of the prints had been stepped on by the diamond pattern of my men’s boots-both those men wear the same brand of boots. Someone besides my men was down there,” Harper said, “just after the wreck. First, some kind of animals came prowling, directly after the wreck. Then a man wearing jogging shoes-those sets of prints were laid down before my men arrived-and my men were on the scene not ten minutes after the accident.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

Harper looked hard at Clyde.“I’m saying that the brake line could have been switched after the wreck. That there’s evidence it may have been switched. Why are you so defensive?”

“Why would I be defensive?”

Harper shrugged and sipped his beer.“Maybe those two pups belonged to the dead man. That would explain why they were roaming around Hellhag Hill where you said you found them. Or maybe they belonged to the guy in the jogging shoes, maybe they followed him down the hill, were milling around while he switched the brake line.”

“That’s a lot of conjecture. I’ve never heard you-”

“All conjecture, so far. All bits and pieces. I’m simply playing with the possibilities. Say the pups wouldn’t follow him back up the canyon, say they got silly and ran off the way pups will, and later wandered up Hellhag Hill, where you found them.”

“So what does that prove? What does that have to do with the brake line?” Clyde looked hard at Harper. “For that matter, what about the dead man? What have you got on him?”

“I thought I told you. Raul Torres was a PI working out of Seattle.”

“That’s all you told me.”

“Hotshot PI. Irritated the hell out of Seattle PD.”

“Hotshot in what way?” Clyde asked, popping another beer.

“In the way he ran his investigations. Always mouthing off, Seattle tells me. Making people mad.”

Clyde shrugged.

“Seattle’s interested in what Torres might have been working on, down here. Torres’s secretary said he was meeting a girlfriend, but Seattle thinks he was on a case.”

“You have a line on the girlfriend?”

“A Seattle girl, living in San Francisco. Had a connection in Molena Point, a friend down here.”

Joe watched Harper, puzzled. Was Harper not telling Clyde everything? And what, exactly, did that mean?

“Seattle says she’s something of a high roller. Particularly likes yacht cruises.”

“Cara Ray Crisp?” Clyde asked.

Joe relaxed. Harper was just stringing it out.

Harper nodded, and busied himself arranging sliced onions on his burger.

Clyde rose, fetched a jar of horseradish from the refrigerator, and behind Harper’s back cast a scowl at Joe that was deep with meaning, that said,Get out of here. Now. Go out to the backyard, Joe, and catch a mouse.

Joe leaped to the counter and settled down, glaring.

Clyde looked as if he might wring a little cat throat. But he turned back to Harper.“Do you suppose Cara Ray was seeing Torres while Shamas was alive? What kind of case was Torres working?”

“We think it’s possible he was running an investigation on Shamas.”

Clyde couldn’t help but glance at Joe. “What kind of investigation? Women? You mean Lucinda actually-”

“No, Lucinda didn’t hire him. He had apparently been checking into a Seattle machine-tool manufacturer, for some company that got stung on their products. It’s possible Shamas was involved. The secretary wasn’t too sure what it was all about, she said she only does a few letters and the billing. She thought it was some kind of lawsuit.” Harper busied himself with his second burger.

Clyde was quiet.

Joe Grey sat very still, pretending to look out the window into the dark backyard. But beneath his sleek silver fur, every muscle twitched. Max Harper’s words had fired every predatory cell; he was as wired as if Harper had waved a flapping pigeon in his face.

12 [????????: pic_13.jpg]

THE NIGHT was fading. A thin moon hung low over the sea, and a sharp wind whipped across Hellhag Hill, pushing at the scrawny, half-grown kitten, flattening the grass around her where she crouched sucking up a meager meal, licking up bits of kibble mixed with dirt, a thin scattering left from the previous day after the bigger cats had fed. A woman had brought the food.

Always she wanted to approach the woman, but the other cats would never let her; they hazed her away, wanting nothing to do with humans except to take their food-and they took it all. Hunkering down, belly to the earth, she gulped the last crumbs, shivering.

The kit was fierce enough when she was alone; certainly she had no fear of dogs. Many days earlier, when the two huge puppies had jumped and barked at her, she had attacked one of them as wildly as a bobcat-had been greatly amused to ride it right among the village streets. Oh, that had been a wild race, all her claws digging in.

But she feared her feline peers; she feared the vehemence of the clowder leaders, their fierce circling and hissing and striking out. She wouldn’t challenge that hierarchy of big, mean cats. Not many cats ran in a clowder like a pack of dogs, but feral cats often lived together in such a clan-the pack leader had told her that-for strength within their own territory and for protection. He said her own group ran in a clowder because of whothey were, because they were not like other ferals.

The dog had found that out. Found out that she was not simply another frightened kitty.

The woman had been on the hill when she rode that dog; the woman must have laughed. The clowder cats didn’t like the woman, but the kit liked to slip close to her, unseen. She liked to see the woman take pleasure in the fog and in the dawn. The woman loved the hill and loved the sky and the sea, and so did the kit love those things. Nor did she think it strange to have such thoughts, any more than it was strange to be always hungry. Her thoughts were part of her, her hunger was part of her-hunger was a beast’s natural condition. What else was there but this wary and hungry existence-and then her private thoughts to warm her?

Yet therewassomething else. Therewasmore in life than hunger and fear and cold-more, even, than her own excited musings. But what that something was, she hadn’t worked out. She knew only that somewhere food was plentiful and delicious and that one could be warm and there were soft beds to sleep on-the kind of sleep where a cat needn’t doze with one eye open, jerked awake by the slightest sound.

Finishing the crumbs, and finding no homely wisdom scattered among them through the dirt, she crept out of the grass into the gusting wind and leaped atop a boulder, stood up bold in the blow, surveying the hill that tossed and rippled around her. Grass lashed and ran in silver waves, and beyond it the sea crashed and surged like a gigantic and sensuousanimal spitting its foam white against the sky.

With her mottled black-and-brown coloring, her blazing yellow eyes, and the long hair sticking out of her ears in two amazing tufts, the young cat resembled a small bobcat more than a domestic feline. Her thin body seemed too long for a normal cat, and she was far more swift and agile.

She hadn’t a bobcat’s tail, though, but a long, fluffy plume, an appendage of amazing length lashing as importantly as a flag of national significance; and though her coat was dense and short, she had longhaired pantaloons like furry chaps, her fluffy parts so bushy that one had to wonder if God, in some temporary absentmindedness, had fashioned this cat from leftover and mismatched parts.

Perhaps God had been in a joking mood when he made her? He seemed, as well, to have filled her with more imaginings than any proper cat could contain. The very look in her round yellow eyes and the set of her little thin face implied teeming and impatient dreams, wild and untamable visions.

This cat had no name. She had made for herself a dozen names as ephemeral as the wildflowers that came and went across the hillside. But if she had a real, forever, and secret name that belonged to her like her own paws and tail, she didn’t know what it was.

Standing in the wind atop the boulder, she speculated about the mice that burrowed beneath the stone, that she could never catch, and about the songs the wind whispered and the habits of the cottontail rabbits she had scented in the grass(I’m faster than any rabbit. Why can’t I catch them?),and about the nature of the gulls that wheeled and screamed above her. And, filled to bursting with questions, in her fierce small presence shone a power far bigger than she, a power that glowed from her yellow eyes, and of which she had little understanding.

But now, far below her along the highway, another cat came trotting, leaped into the grass at the foot of the hill, and started up toward her. This cat was not one of her clowder.

But it was not a stranger, either. She had seen this one before, this brown tabby with the peach-tinted nose and ears. The cat disappeared suddenly, into the whipping tangles. She waited for it to appear again, her yellow eyes wide, her pink mouth open in a soft panting.

The cat poked her head out, looking up toward the boulders, her gaze so intent that the tortoiseshell kit took a step back. The two remained frozen in a staring match not of confrontation but of curiosity. Intense, wary, excited. Diffidently, the scrawny kit waited for the older cat’s lead-but suddenly the adult cat backed away again and vanished into the grass as if uncertain in her own mind.

The stray fascinated Dulcie but filled her with a peculiar fear. Even at this distance, she could see in the kit’s eyes a difference, a bright wildness.

How thin the kit was, all frail little bones, but with that balloon tail and those huge pantaloons. When Dulcie drew back out of sight, the kit, shifting nervously from paw to paw, opened her pink little mouth.

She yowled.

Three shrill, demanding yowls, amazingly loud and authoritative for such a small morsel, an imperative command. Fascinated, Dulcie was about to show herself again and approach closer when the kit crouched, staring away past Dulcie, wide-eyed, and suddenly she spun and fled like a feather sucked away in a whirlwind.

She was gone. The hill was empty. Dulcie reared up to look behind her and saw Lucinda Greenlaw coming up the hill, and with her, stumbling along at a hurried and uneven gait, came Pedric.

But perhaps it was not Lucinda who had startled the kit, nor even Pedric, because at the humans’ approach, a half dozen cats reared up in the grass staring at Lucinda and Pedric, then leaped away like terrified birds exploding in every direction, vanishing wild and afraid. These were surely a part of the kit’s clowder, surely she had run at their cue.

Dulcie thought it strange that Lucinda would bring Pedric on her solitary walk, that she would bring anyone-though she did seem to trust the old man; she seemed to have a closeness to Pedric as she had with Newlon.

Her friendship with Pedric was new and tentative. She had not met Pedric or most of the Greenlaw family until they arrived for the funeral, while she had known Newlon longer, Wilma said; and it seemed to Dulcie that Lucinda had some sort of quiet understanding with Newlon.

When Pedric and Lucinda headed in her direction, Dulcie slipped beneath a tangle of dense-growing broom bushes. How very much at home old Pedric looked as he climbed Hellhag Hill, almost as if he belonged there. Watching the two approach, she glimpsed the tortoiseshell kit again creeping down the hill toward the two humans, her yellow eyes bright with curiosity.

“Such a peaceful hill,” Pedric said, sitting down with his back to a boulder, very close to where Dulcie sat unseen.

Lucinda made herself comfortable on the little folded blanket she always carried.“I’ve come here for years. I like its solitude.”

Pedric looked at Lucinda strangely.“Solitude. That puts a kinder shape to loneliness.”

She looked at him quietly.

“The loneliness of living with Shamas.”

“Perhaps,” she said.

Pedric’s lean old body cleaved easily to the lines of the hill. “It is a fine hill, Lucinda.”

“Do you sense its strangeness?”

He inclined his head, but didn’t answer.

“I come here for its strangeness, too.”

They were silent awhile; then he turned, looking hard at her, his thin, wrinkled profile fallen into lines of distress.“Why didn’t you ever leave him? Why, Lucinda? Why did you stay with him?”

“Cowardice. Lack of nerve. When he began with the women, I wanted to leave. I tried to think where to go, what to do with my life. I have no family, no relatives.”

She picked a long blade of grass, began to slit it lengthwise with her thumbnail.“I was afraid. Afraid of what Shamas might do-such a lame excuse.”

She looked at him bleakly.“How many women have wasted their lives, out of fear?

“I never really believed that I could sue Shamas for divorce and get any kind of community property-there was so much about his various ventures that seemed peculiar. I did snoop enough to know he did business in a dozen different names, and I? it was all so strange to me, and frightening.

“Shamas said that much of the income was from bonds, stocks, investments that would bore me. I thought, if I left him, there would be a terrible legal muddle trying to sort it all out.”

She looked down, then looked up at him almost pleadingly.“I was afraid of Shamas. Because he controlled the money, and? that he might harm me. He was so? demanding. Autocratic. He would not tolerate being crossed.”

“Not an easy man to live with.”

“Not at all. So instead of leaving, I went off by myself for a few hours at a time-returned to care for the house and make the meals.”

Pedric shook his head.

“It helped to get away alone, take long walks and lick my wounds.”

“And now that he is dead?”

“Now I’m free,” she said softly.

Pedric nodded.

“With Shamas gone, slowly I am healing. The stress and anger are easing. One day, they will be gone.”

Lucinda sat up straighter.“I mean to take charge now, where I never did before. It may seem mercenary, Pedric, but I’m going to think, now, about my own survival.

“There’s more than enough money for my simple tastes. Money can’t make me young and pretty again, but it can bring me some small pleasures. I have retained a financial advisor. There’s so much I don’t know, records I haven’t found.”

Dulcie watched Lucinda, puzzled. She sounded as if she had planned for a long time what she would do if she outlived Shamas.

“The trust was the one thing Shamas did that? has been of benefit. He did it not for me, but simply to avoid probate taxes. Shamas hated any kind of taxes.”

Lucinda looked at Pedric intently.“The things I don’t know about how Shamas made the money-I really didn’t want to know. I could have snooped more efficiently, found out more. I? didn’t want to get involved in knowing, in deciding what to do if Shamas’s ventures were? illegal.

“Cowardice,” she said softly, and her face colored. “I just? I just wanted out.”

“You were married late in life,” Pedric said gently. “Shamas grew into certain ways long before you met him. Ways that were not always respectable.” A wariness crossed Pedric’s face. “Family ways,” he said, “that I cannot condone, that I have tried to remain free of, though I have lived all my life near the family. Tell me-what did you know about Shamas, when you married?”

“He let me know that he was well established in his Seattle enterprises, but he was vague about what they were. He said he wanted our time together to be filled with delight, not with mundane business affairs.”

“And you never questioned that.”

“Not in the beginning. The longer I waited to press him for answers, the more difficult that was. He took care of the banking and gave me a household allowance. He didn’t offer any information. That rankled. But I didn’t do anything about it.

“There was plenty of money for trips, for new cars every year-until I said I didn’t want a new car, that I liked the one I had.” She looked at Pedric. “I was afraid to ask him the important questions. I grew afraid of where the money came from. The longer we were married, the more secretivehe was. I knew he spent a lot on his own. At first on clothes, and on business lunches, he told me. Then, later, it was obvious that he was with other women.

“Yet as miserable as I was, I was too cowardly to change my life.”

“So you escaped into your long, lonely rambles.”

“They never seemed lonely-only soothing. From where we’re sitting you can’t see the village, not a single rooftop, and in the wind, you can’t hear the occasional car. I would sit up here imagining there was not another soul for hundreds of miles, that this little piece of the world was all my own.”

“Yes,” Pedric said, “I understand that.”

She looked at him quietly.“I have continued to come here for that kind of aloneness, so very different from being lonelywithsomeone.”

She smiled.“The hills are so green, the sea so wild. It is easy to imagine that I am in the old world, somewhere on the sea cliffs of Ireland.”

Pedric turned to look above them. From where Lucinda had chosen to sit that day, they could see the trailers lined up, each in its own little patio. The wind had overturned deck chairs and whipped the laundry on a clothesline. A trailer door, left on the latch, banged and slammed. Above the trailers and RVs, the eucalyptus trees that shaded the park crackled in the wind as loud as the snapping of bonfires.

Above the trailer park, Hellhag Hill rose another hundred feet, its bulk seeming to press the narrow shelf with its frail trailers, far too close to the edge.

“I seldom look up there,” Lucinda said. “Usually I sit where I can’t see any sign of civilization. From the first time I came here, the hill has put me in mind of the wild, empty hills in the old, old tales that Shamas told me.

She looked shyly at Pedric.“That was what first drew me to him. The stories. I loved his stories, and the caring and passion with which he told them.”

She sighed.“This hill gave me back that sense of magic. Gave me back that quality in Shamas that I found so appealing-and that he took away from me.”

Pedric gave her an odd look.“This is not the old country, Lucinda. Not the old world, where such tales are a dear part of one’s fife. In this modern world, magic-if such ever existed-most surely does not happen.”

She looked at him quietly.“That is not how you make me feel, when you tell your stories.”

He shook his head, looking around him.“The hill is delightfully wild, but it is only a hill, an ordinary California hillside-probably with poison oak growing beneath us, right where we’re sitting.”

Lucinda laughed. She looked up at the trailers and RVs.“Which of those is yours, Pedric?”

“The green trailer, there at the end.”

“Right at the edge,” she said softly. “So that, every morning when you wake, and every night before you sleep, you see not the other trailers, but the open hill dropping away below you.” She smiled. “Why did you park just there, where the view must be vast and empty? Don’t tell me you’re not touched by a sense ofothernessabout this place?”

He simply smiled.

After a moment, she said,“And why have all these frightened animals come to the hill so suddenly? The strange, wild cats that I feed, and those two thin, uncared-for puppies that Clyde Damen has taken in? Why did they appear all at once? No one abandons that many animals all at one time.” She watched him intently.

“I can tell you where the pups came from,” the old man said. “All very ordinary. But yon cats,” he said, falling into the old speech, “th’ cats be a band of strays that wandered here, that’s all.” He looked hard at her. “You are not imagining th’ cats are anything other than common, stray beasties? Why, th’ world be full of such, Lucinda.”

She laughed at him, and touched his hand.

“Not imagining th’ hill be full of burrows?” Pedric persisted. “Not imagining th’ bright eyes looking out?” He smiled and raised a shaggy eyebrow.

Pedric’s gentle teasing made such a notion seem silly even to Dulcie; though she was certain the hill was not ordinary.

And when Dulcie looked up, the little kit was hunched not a yard away from her, crouched deep in the bushes, peering out, her yellow eyes round and amazed, her fluffy tail twitching with curiosity.

“Maybe Iampicturing that old tale of the cats beneath the hillside,” Lucinda said to Pedric. “Who is to say what is possible?” She fixed an intense look on the old man. “Thereissomething strange about Hellhag Hill. You will not admit it, but I think you see it. And I am not the only one who has noticed.”

“So,” Pedric asked softly. “And what about th’ yon cat watching us? Th’ yon beastie half-hidden in the grass? Is there something strange about that little cat?” Looking into the tangles, he watched Dulcie with interest. He did not see the kit. “Wo’d that little beastie, who is spying on us, rise up and speak to thee as do th’ cats in the old tales? Wo’d this cat maybe bid thee good morning?”

He can’t see the kit,Dulcie thought.He means me. Why is he staring at me?

Lucinda looked to where Dulcie sat beneath the bushes, and came to kneel there, pulling away the heavy growth.

“What a sweet little cat, curled up in a bed of leaves.” She looked up at Pedric. “I believe this is Wilma’s cat-my good friend, Wilma. Same dark stripes and peach-colored ears and nose. Yes, the same green eyes. Oh, Wilma would not want her roaming way out here. What brought her out to this wild place? Do you suppose she has followed us?” She reached to pick Dulcie up.

When Dulcie moved away, Lucinda drew back.“This little cat,” she said diffidently, “comes to sit on the back fence behind my house. I think she hunts for birds among the maple branches. Sometimes she seems to be looking right into my parlor.” She laughed. “Maybe she watches reflections in the glass, the movement of clouds and birds.

“Won’t you come out, kitty?” Lucinda asked softly. “ItisWilma’s kitty. We won’t hurt you. Whatever are you doing up here? Come on out, puss. Puss? Puss?”

Dulcie came out reluctantly. She hated to be called puss. She leaped atop the boulder before Lucinda could pick her up. Stretching, she curled down on the smooth granite, out of Lucinda’s reach, and slitted her eyes as if to nap again.

“Come away, Lucinda. The little cat doesn’t want to be taken home. Well, there’s nothing here to hurt her. You can tell Wilma where you saw her.” And he began to ask Lucinda questions about Shamas and their years together.

Lucinda’s answers made Dulcie sad. Pedric asked about the sale of the house, but made no comment as to whether he thought Lucinda should sell the old family home. As the two sat talking, watching the sea brighten, the tortoiseshell kit drew closer again to Dulcie, listening to every word. What a nosy little creature she was. What did she make of this conversation? What a bold, inquisitive,interestingscrap of cat fur.

And as both cats eavesdropped on the two humans, up the hill where the trailers and RVs cast their shadows long beneath the rising sun, another watcher sat, looking down, observing Pedric and Lucinda, frowning and tapping his closed fist against his lean, tensed thigh.

13 [????????: pic_14.jpg]

“I DON’T want a dog,” Charlie told the pup. Hestig looked up at her sadly, pressing against her leg, as she stood at her apartment window sipping her first cup of coffee. Beyond the window, the village rooftops, the library and shops, and the eucalyptus trees that shaded Ocean’s wide median, all were muted by the fog, as indistinct as an oriental watercolor. Putting her cup on the table beside her sweet roll, she sat down to her quick breakfast, petting Hestig when he pushed close to her chair and laid his head on her shoulder.

“You know I can’t keep you,” she said softly. “Or do you just want my breakfast?” She laughed at his sad expression. “The housing arrangement’s temporary, my dear. Three or four days, maybe a week, and back you go to Clyde.” Already the apartment looked as though Hestig had moved infor good, his folded blanket in the far corner comfortably matted with dog hairs, his water and food bowls taking up most of the floor in the small kitchenette; a huge chewbone occupied the center of the rag rug beside Charlie’s cot, his leash and choker lay on the table beside her coffee cup.

She had to admit, his manners were improved without his brother to distract him; he minded her most of the time, was turning into a solemn and loving companion. He was beginning to put on weight, too, his ribs resembling far less an ancient washboard.

But when she imagined keeping him, she shook her head.“Look around you. I’m living in one room, here. No yard, no deck, not even a balcony.”

Hestig whined.

“And in case you hadn’t noticed, I’m a working girl.” She scratched under his chin. “I can’t take you on the job. What, tie you to the bumper all day? I can’t take you into the houses that I clean and repair.” She looked deep into Hestig’s brown eyes. “Clyde will find a nice home for you, just you wait and see.”

The pup sighed, his eyes sad enough to melt concrete, his black ears drooping. Gently, she touched the thick black scar that ran jagged across the top of his head.“How did that happen? What-or who-struck you so hard as to leave a scar like that?” She stroked the ropy wound. “You must have been very small; you’re not very old now, and it takes a while for such a thing to heal.”

Hestig’s tail whipped so hard it nearly toppled a dinette chair.

“Who would hit a little puppy like that? I’m surprised the blow didn’t kill you.”

Hestig smiled and wagged and snuggled closer, leaning into her shoulder with all his fifty pounds. She tried to imagine taking him to work with her. Surely, when he grew older and had more training, he would behave with impeccable manners.

But common sense prevailed.“I really can’t. I can’t keep you.”

He nuzzled her hand, finding no joy in such solemn pronouncements.

She pushed back her kinking red hair. The fog made it curl so tight.“I have a business to tend to, it takes all my time. You’ve been around on the jobs with me.” She took his long canine face in her hands. “Did you like being shut in the van all day with the ladders and mops and tools?”

Hestig’s sigh said that he’d loved it because he was near her.

“I don’t have time for a big, active dog, not and clean for people, do their household repairs and their yard work, and build up a really nice service.” She stroked his long black ears. “You should be on a ranch somewhere, like up with Max’s horses.” She sipped her coffee. “Maybe I can talk Harper into giving you a try. How would you like that?”

Hestig gazed at her sadly.

“Look at it this way. Burying bones and digging them up is top priority for you. Charlie’s Fix-It, Clean-It is top priority for me.”

He laid his head on the table, sniffing at the last bite of sweet roll. She tapped his nose gently, and he drew back. The time was six A.M., time for their walk. In half a week, Hestig had the routine down to perfection.

Picking up his leash, she triggered an explosion of ungainly leaps and pirouettes. She stood waiting for him to calm so they could leash up, then made him stay by her heel going down the steps to the little front foyer, between the antique shop and the jewelry store, and on out to the sidewalk. Stepping out into the wet, chill fog and turning south toward the sea five blocks away, she expected Hestig to dance and try to pull ahead; usually he could hardly contain himself until he reached the sand, where he could run free.

This morning he didn’t dance.

He didn’t pull the lead but moved slowly and warily ahead, pressing against her thigh. She could see nothing in the fog. He lunged suddenly into the mist, his bark a bold challenge,wooo, wooo, wooo.She had to turn sideways and pull the leash taut across her upper legs to hold him; he was so strong and lunging so hard that if he’d jerked her straight on, he’d have pulled her over. She could see no one, no gray shadow waiting in the fog, nothing to alarm him, only a few parked cars along the curb, barely visible. But the pup saw something, and was barking and straining.

Again she pulled him back to her and ran her hand down his shoulder, trying to calm him-and trying to see through the mist, listening for any scrap of sound over his barking. He lunged again, and she heard a car start-saw a dark smear move away from the curb, its tires hushing on the wet pavement. At the same moment, she saw Lucinda Greenlaw just a few feet from her, walking along the median toward the shore, her tall thin figure wavery and insubstantial-a mysterious early-morning wanderer. Later in the day Lucinda would appear perfectly ordinary, doing her errands among the village shops as sedately as any elderly lady-but now she seemed ghostlike and exotic.

Hestig had quieted; Lucinda passed them, not glancing in their direction, seeming totally lost in her own thoughts, perhaps aware only of a dog walker out in the foggy morning. Charlie knelt and hugged the pup, feeling the tension of his thin body. He was still shivering.

Who had frightened him like that? Who had been there and driven away? Rising, she tightened his lead and hurried toward the shore. Already, Lucinda had disappeared.

Hestig was quiet and obedient again, until she passed the contemporary wooden building that held the public rest rooms, an attractive redwood-and-stone structure, appealing on the outside but dank and cold within, as were most such seaside facilities, its wet concrete floor strewn with wadded paper towels and damp sand. The building stood at the edge of a small seashore park of sand dunes and cypress trees and was flanked by a variety of handsome native bushes. Hestig shied at these and backed away, staring at a pair of legs stretched out behind a bush, a newspaper over them as if for warmth-one of Molena Point’s few homeless, she supposed, sheltered within the dense foliage. Or maybe some late-night drunk sleeping it off. Like Hestig, she quickly moved away. As she turned toward the rolling breakers, she saw that Lucinda had reached the other side of the park, a thin vague shadow walking swiftly.

Heading across the soft, dry sand to where the shore was wet and hard, and turning south, Charlie let Hestig off his leash. He looked behind them once, then trotted ahead, sniffing at the sand but not straying far from her. Even when they reached the southerly beach, where the waves crashed among dark, rising boulders, and half a dozen dogs were running the shore or playing ball with their owners, Hestig remained near her. She sat on a rock watching him. She was so happy to be living in that quiet village, away from the bustle and heavy traffic of San Francisco where she’d gone to art school.

She’d not have thought to come to Molena Point if her Aunt Wilma hadn’t retired there. She had to smile, when she remembered how she had come crawling, totally defeated after two years of failing at various commercial art jobs for which she wasn’t really prepared, or talented enough.

Well, she was glad she was there. She loved the smallness of the village, loved that she could walk from the sea up into the sun-baked hills in just minutes. And, she thought, watching Hestig, one of the hundred things she liked best was that people walking their dogs could stop at any sidewalk restaurant, have a light meal while their canine companions napped beneath the table. She would see leashed dogs in the bank, in the shops-places where, in any other town, dogs would not be allowed. And the little open-air restaurants, their courtyard tables surrounded by flowers and sheltered by the old, twisted oaks, never ceased to enchant her.“When I die,” she’d told Clyde once, “this is exactly how it will be. Charming villages all crowded among the flowers, all of them beside the sea, with the smell of the sea, the crash of breakers.”

She’d met Clyde soon after she arrived; he’d been Wilma’s friend since he was eight, when Wilma was his next-door neighbor: blond, twentysomething, and beautiful; Clyde said he’d had a terrible crush on her.

Charlie’s first date with Clyde was a trip to the wrecking yard to find parts for her old van, then to a small Mexican restaurant, where no one noticed their grease-stained clothes. They’d been dating ever since, their relationship swinging from casual and easy to sometimes very warm and loving. Once in a while she thought about marrying Clyde; more often she liked the arrangement just as it was.

Around her, the fog had thinned, the dawn brightening. She called Hestig, and as they started back she heard, over the thunder of the breakers, sirens begin to scream up in the village, their ululations growing louder as they headed for the shore. She thought of someone drowning, and her frightened gaze turned quickly toward the sea.

She saw no disturbance, no one in the water-not even one surfer, and it was far too cold for swimmers. Only when she neared the little park again did she see the ambulance and police cars, their red whirling lights staining the fog like smeared blood. She thought of Lucinda, wondered if the older woman might have fallen or maybe become ill. Hurrying up to the gathering crowd, she found Lieutenants Brennan and Wendell stringing yellow police tape around the restroom building and its adjacent bushes, out into the street and around a large portion of the sandy park.

The homeless man still lay beneath the bushes. His newspaper was gone, revealing shoes that were nearly new and looked expensive. Two paramedics knelt over him. She couldn’t see what they were doing. Three early walkers, two with dogs, stood to one side talking to an officer, answering his questions. She didn’t see Lucinda.

14 [????????: pic_15.jpg]

THEIR BELLIES full of rabbit, the cats were headed home through the mist, the village empty and quiet around them, its scents of flowers and bacon and coffee homey and comforting. Licking blood off their whiskers, ignoring the sting of various wounds inflicted by the enraged rabbit, a deep sense of well-being filled the cats. They had hunted, they had fed. All was proper and right with their world. Their territory-Molena Point village and far beyond-was suitably at peace. Except for various human affairs, which were not cat business, but which neither cat would leave alone.

“He’s cozying up to Lucinda for some reason,” Joe said of Pedric. “What’s he after?”

“He’s not cozying up at all; he’s the only one of that family who’s her friend-well, Newlon, of course.”

“And why Newlon? How does she know him so much better. I thought-”

“Wilma says he often came out to sail with Shamas; Lucinda’s known him a long time.”

“Well, I don’t trust him, or Pedric.”

She cut him an annoyed look.“I don’t know about Newlon. But Pedric’s good for her. She needs a friend just now.”

“He’s a Greenlaw.”

“You’re so suspicious.”

“Hasn’t it crossed your mind that Pedric is deliberately gaining her confidence? That while the rest of the family quarrels over her money and makes her mad, that old man with his sweetness and shared confidences is setting her up to rip her off big-time?”

Her ears flattened, her green eyes flashed.“Don’t be such a cynic. Can’t you see that he’s different from the others, that he truly likes Lucinda?” She looked at him narrow-eyed. “Don’t you believe in anything anymore?”

“Pedric is a Greenlaw. Don’t you know the police are watching the whole family? All week those Greenlaw women and kids have been a problem in the village shops-stealing, Dulcie. Shoplifting.”

He gave her a hard yellow stare.“They’re too quick for the store owners to catch. But after they leave, merchandise comes up missing-a lot of expensive merchandise. Such a shabby, greedy little crime.”

“Has anyone seenPedricstealing?” Her eyes had gone black with anger; her tail switched and lashed.

“Why would Pedric be any different? Face it, Dulcie. The Greenlaws are a family of thieves.”

“That doesn’t make sense. What kind of family-Not a whole family, stealing-”

“You think that doesn’t happen? Of course there are families of thieves-what about the Mafia. The Greenlaws are small pickings compared to that, but-”

Dulcie lowered her gaze, looked up at him quietly. Of course there were such families, she had read about them, the children were raised from babies to live outside the law.

“But,” she said softly, “even if it’s true, even if the rest of them steal, that doesn’t mean Pedric does. Hecouldbe different, Joe. If you’d watch him-in the evenings when he comes for supper, how polite he is, not just barging in like the rest, ignoring Lucinda. How pleased Lucinda isto get him settled in the softest chair, see that he’s comfortable.”

“So he’s a smooth operator. You know better than to trust how people act.”

“Lucinda wouldn’t take him walking with her if she didn’t trust him, and if they didn’t truly enjoy each other. She wouldn’t share Hellhag Hill with him, that’s her private place. They have exactly the same interests. I don’t see him using her.”

Joe laid back his ears, his yellow eyes narrow.“You’re seeing what you want to see. I’ve never known you to be so gullible. You follow them, listen to Pedric sympathizing with her, and you go all sentimental.”

She hissed, lowering her own ears, switched her tail in his face, and hurried on down the grassy median-then stopped, crouching, looking fearfully around her as sirens screamed from the direction of the fire and police stations.

A rescue unit thundered past, shaking the earth, prompting the cats to cower beneath the bushes. It was followed by three black-and-whites. Joe and Dulcie, their hearing numbed by the blast, watched the heavy vehicles heading fast for the shore.

Following, galloping down the median toward the crowd gathered beside the sandy park, their first thoughts were the same as Charlie’s had been, that someone had drowned, on this chill, foggy morning, some poor soul alone out in the dark sea. Then they saw a man lying on the ground, the paramedics bent over him-maybe a homeless man? They often slept in the park, near the rest rooms.

But as the medics lifted the victim up onto a stretcher, the cats recognized a Molena Point resident, a man they knew only by sight. White hair, baby-soft face that was usually very red, whether from sunburn, excessive scrubbing, or excessive booze, they had no idea. Now he was as pale as a bedsheet.

Trotting in among the crowd between jogging shoes, sweatpants, and bare, hairy legs, the cats stayed away from the uniforms-no need to upset Max Harper, no need to endure his puzzled glances. A confusion of comments assaulted them:

“? stabbed. He was stabbed. I saw?”

“? is he dead?”

“Still alive, can’t you see?”

“? was lying there when that lady found him, I’d have fainted? some transient?”

“No-he lives here, he comes in my shop.”

“? George Chambers. You know, the guy who?”

The cats did a double take. George Chambers? Swerving out of the crowd, they skinned up a cypress tree beside the rescue vehicle, for a better look.

George Chambers, a member of the sailing party when Shamas Greenlaw died. The man who, with his wife, had slept through the attempted rescue, had not awakened until the next morning, when theGreen Ladyput in at Seattle.

From among the thickly massed cypress trunks that rose around them like dark, reaching arms, the two cats got a good look at Chambers. He kept moving his hand, trying to press at the stab wound in his chest that the medics had bound with gauze and tape, the clean bandages already soaked with blood. One of the medics was covering him, with a pair of thick brown blankets.

So this was George Chambers. The passenger Harper had talked with twice about Shamas’s accident, the mild-mannered fellow who had given Harper no indication that either he or his wife had, that stormy night, been awake to observe anything questionable about Shamas’s death.

So why had he been stabbed?

They watched Captain Harper drop a rusty, blood-smeared butcher knife into an evidence bag. As the paramedics lifted Chambers’s stretcher into the rescue vehicle, the cats clawed higher among the arms of the cypress, up into its dark foliage, out of sight ofthepolice. Below them, Lucinda was talking with Officer Davis, a private conversation away from the crowd. The cats could catch no word; there were too many idle onlookers expressing their opinions.

The two cats remained within the branches through several hours of photographing and examination of the crime scene. Among the areas of interest to forensics was a patch of sand where someone had been digging. They watched a kneeling officer brush sand away with a little paintbrush and sift sand tediously through a strainer. Four officers went over the cordoned-off area thoroughly, inch by inch. They bagged some bits of paper, a few loose threads caught on bushes, items that might link to the attacker, or might have been exposed in the damp and rain for months or years. When the cats left the beach they dropped down to the roof of the public rest rooms and to the far side of the building, out of sight of Max Harper. They came away from the Chambers stabbing knowing very little about what had happened. It was not until that evening that they were able to fill in some blanks.

Joe woke from a nap in late afternoon hungry despite his feast of rabbit early that morning; somehow eating wild game always made him want human food to top it off. Half an hour before Clyde was due home, he called Jolly’s Deli and ordered takeout, telling them to charge it and leave the food at the door. He had told Clyde he wouldn’t do this anymore, but he hadn’t exactly promised.

Listening to the delivery truck pull away, he hauled the white paper bag in through his cat door and enjoyed, on the livingroom rug, a nice selection of smoked herring, sliced Tilsit, and cracked crab. It was these little added luxuries that made his peculiar talents well worth the trouble they caused him. When he had finished eating, he pawed the containers back into the bag, licked up all telltale crumbs from the carpet, and carried the bag through the kitchen, out the dog door, and over the back fence.

Glancing at the next-door neighbor’s windows and seeing no one looking out, he stuffed the evidence into their trash. Clyde wouldn’t know a thing until he got his deli bill-then he’d pitch a royal fit.

Clyde didn’t know a thing about the stabbing, either, when he got home from work. Only what he saw in the eveningGazette.After reading the front page he glanced at Joe, but made no offer to call Harper and glean a few additional facts. Joe wasn’t about to ask him for that kind of favor. He’d be back oncheap, cardboard-flavored kitty kibble that hadn’t passed his whiskers since his kitten days in San Francisco.

As it turned out, it was Wilma who got the particulars about the Chambers stabbing, and told Dulcie. Joe found Dulcie on the back fence in her usual perch.“You might as well move your bed and supper bowl up here,” he said, settling down beside her.

She hissed gently and lifted a soft paw as if to belt him.“Something’s going on. Dirken and Newlon are all worked up, really hassling Lucinda. You can’t hear a thing, even with the windows open, with all those women in the kitchen. Can’t they wash the dishes without so much jabber?”

Dirken and Newlon stood before the hearth looking down at Lucinda where she sat in her favorite chair, sipping her after-dinner coffee. She looked drawn into herself, tense, glaring up at them. Both men were talking at once. The cats couldn’t make out their words, but they were apparently interrogating her.

“Chambers is more or less out of danger,” Dulcie told Joe. “That rusty knife had sand from the park on it; forensics is pretty sure that’s what was buried-it might have lain there for years, maybe a dog dug it up, or a transient making his camp, and the attacker found it.”

“Harper’s not assuming that Chambers was stabbed by a transient?”

“Of course he isn’t. You know Harper better than that. Chambers was on the boat that night. Don’t you suppose Harper’s digging, don’t you suppose he’s got his teeth into this!”

“How did you??”

“Wilma happened to drop into the Iron Horse, earlier this evening. A special favor, for yours truly.” Harper often ate at the Iron Horse when he was working late.

“That’s all she found out,” Dulcie said. “It’s all the police know, so far. Wilma said Harper had that tight, preoccupied look he gets when he’s caught up in a tangle of evidence, when he’s digging for the missing pieces.”

She returned her attention to the parlor window.“Dirken and Newlon tried all through dinner to get Lucinda to talk about the stabbing, to tell them what she saw this morning.

“It was Lucinda who called 911. She told them she’d been out walking, saw the man lying there when she came across the park to use that awful rest room, that she thought he was asleep. Then she saw the blood. She ran to the phone, there between the men’s and women’s, but it was out of order. She hurried back to the village and called the station. She told Dirken that the rest is public knowledge-they could read it in theGazette.”

Joe grinned.“So why all the fuss? They think she saw something more?”

“Evidently. They’re pretty wrought up.”

“You thinktheystabbed Chambers? That they’re afraid Lucinda saw them?”

“Maybe. Or maybe they want the goods on whoever did. Well, they’ve finished with the dishes,” she said, glaring in at the Greenlaw women as they trooped toward the parlor.

Dirken and Newlon had pulled up chairs facing Lucinda; they sat forward, pressing their questions at her. The kitchen crew wandered in silently and found places to sit-an eager audience, all watching Lucinda.

“But you must have seen something else,” Dirken was saying. “And whywereyou in the park at that hour? Just to say you went walking, Aunt Lucinda, doesn’t make any sense. Who else was there?”

“Enough!” Lucinda snapped. She stood up, scowling down at them. “That is enough. Stop it, both of you. I have had quite my fill of this.”

The cats watched with amazement. All the family was quiet, shocked that Lucinda was no longer a bystander in her own home, that she had made herself the center. Standing so fiercely, glaring at them, her very frailty seemed to increase her sudden surprising power. The cats thought she was going to say something about the stabbing; but instead, folding her hands before her in the traditional stance, Lucinda prepared to tell a tale-as if putting the subject of the stabbing behind her, letting the Greenlaws know that the matter was closed.

Whether the old lady was becoming stronger in dealing with Shamas’s family, or whether this was a move of extreme desperation, to gain a little peace, was uncertain. Standing in the place of storyteller, so skillfully did Lucinda lay out her tale that soon she had drawn them all in. The stabbing seemed forgotten-and they were carried into a story that surprised Dulcie, that made her fur prickle with excitement, made the tip of her tail twitch, and made Joe Grey fidget uncomfortably.

“It is an American Indian tale,” Lucinda said, “one I have read in three sources, as told by three different tribes. I don’t believe the story springs from any Celtic telling; I don’t believe there is any connection. But yet it is the same tale that comes from the Celtic lands.

“It is peopled with the same enchanted beings, it tells of the same lost world. The Iroquois call it ‘The Tale of the First People.’

“In the beginning,” Lucinda said softly, “in the beginning of the world all living things, all beasts, all men, all reptiles and insects and birds dwelt in the netherworld that lies below our plains and mountains. All was darkness in that place save for a thin green light that glowed down from the granite sky.

“In those days the animals could speak, and many of them were shapeshifters. Human hunters would turn themselves into ponies. Great eagles flying beneath the granite skies could transmute into warriors. There were women and men who could slip from hearth to hearth in the form of cats but soon were gone again, unwilling to warm for long any hearth but their own.

“The cat folk had their own cities among the hidden mountains, their netherworld caves fashioned into soft-cushioned bowers rich with carven furnishings, their walls set with pictures made from turquoise and jade.

“One day when a princess of that people was digging at the roof of her cave, carving a new sleeping bower, she dug though into vast space. Her paw thrust out, into the upper world.

“Shining through the paw-sized hole was a blaze of light that made the cat maiden cry out in fear. All the clan came running. The bravest crouched, squinting through the hole up into a gleaming and endless sky.

“And the boldest among the cat folk dug the hole larger and slipped through, up onto the face of the earth, with only emptiness above them.

“Soon other netherworld folk gathered, creatures from the hell-pit, the bird folk and serpent folk and then the giants, all peeping out into the upper world.

“Many turned away again, too afraid to step out beneath that bright sky, but not the cat folk. They went up into that world digging and clawing their way, and not until evening came and the ball of fire rode through the sky toward the mountains, were the cats afraid.

“They watched the sun sink down behind the peaks. They saw the sky grow dark, and they thought that by entering this land they had made the gods angry. They slept close together that night, crowded beneath a rocky ledge, sure that their spirits were doomed.

“But the next morning, the sun returned. The cat people came out to preen in its warmth, and they knew that they were blessed, that this bright world welcomed them.

“They wandered away over the land in every direction, and soon made this world their own. So the folk-of-the-cat came to our world,” Lucinda told. “And so they have come and gone ever since, returning to the netherworld when they choose, living in both worlds and in both forms, sometimes cat,sometimes human.

“And if there are cat folk in the upper world who can no longer change their form, it is because they have strayed too far from their beginnings, because they have forgotten the ancient ways.”

Lucinda turned from the hearth. The Greenlaws nodded and sighed with satisfaction. As Lucinda moved away from the storyteller’s place, Pedric reached to take her hand, in a tender and personal gesture.

Dirken watched the two old people with a cold scowl. Newlon turned away, his look uncomfortable.

And on the fence beneath the maple branches, tears rolled down Dulcie’s whiskers, their wet streaks marking her dark fur. The tale filled her with excitement and it scared her; it made her feelmorethan herself. The emotions it stirred turned her giddy.

But Joe Grey leaped from the fence up into the maple’s highest branches, his ears back, his scowl deep.

He didn’t like tales of a netherworld. Didn’t like anything to do with his and Dulcie’s mysterious history. Being himself, being Joe Grey, was quite enough. He didn’t hold with some amazing and frightening past. He needed only himself and his loving lady.

Dulcie was still purring extravagantly when Dirken and Newlon came out the back door and sat down on the steps. Newlon produced a pack of Camels, and they lit up.

Newlon said,“You think she saw something more, on the beach this morning?”

Dirken shrugged.“More to the point, you think she heard anything?”

Newlon turned to look at him.“Did you do him, Dirken?”

Dirken stared at Newlon, drawing on his cigarette.“Hell, no. Didn’t you?”

“I swear.”

But Dirken kept looking.“You did him. Stands to reason.”

Newlon turned to glance behind them through the screen as two large, aproned women began moving about in the kitchen, filling the coffeepot and cutting pieces of pie. Scowling, Newlon and Dirken shuffled a little more, then tossed away their cigarettes and went back inside.

The cats, highly irritated at the vague and unfinished conversation, galloped away along the fence and headed up into the hills to hunt, Joe Grey so frustrated by the lack of solid facts that he felt like attacking the biggest granddaddy wharf rat he could find, launching into a raking, screaming battle.

15 [????????: pic_16.jpg]

WILMA LEFT her desk at the automotive agency just before noon, hurriedly smoothing her gray hair and snatching up her purse, frantic to get out of the tiny salesman’s cubicle before she started throwing heavy objects through its glass walls. Working in a transparent box made her feel like a lab specimen.

Well, the job was only temporary. She’d be glad to get back to work at the library. She hadn’t planned to use her month’s vacation working a second job, even if it was proving more interesting than she’d anticipated. She had spent the morning running a credit check on the out-of-town purchaser of a white-and-cream Jaguar XJR. What she’d found had her most interested. With her mind on the buyer’s skillfully forged IDs, she glanced across the automotive showroom, past the drive-through that separated it from Clyde’s repair shop, and she had to laugh.

Clyde had brought one of the pups to work, had left him tied just inside the glass door of the automotive-repair wing of the building, the pup all groomed and polished and sitting on a new plaid dog bed. All Clyde needed was a hand-lettered sign advertising the pup’s many virtues.

Who knew, maybe Clydewouldfind Selig a home among his customers; most of them were well-to-do; surely it would take someone with money to feed that big fellow and care for him.

Hurrying down Ocean, enjoying the sun and the cool breeze skimming in off the Pacific, Wilma puzzled over her last three loan applicants.

The first credit scams she’d investigated when she started work for Sheril Beckwhite, had occurred over a two-month period. From these, she had passed to Max Harper enough information to launch seven police investigations.

But then this past week the action had heated up. She’d had five new applicants with impeccable credit ratings; her phone calls to their home numbers had been answered by a wife or by household staff. Their social security numbers, driver’s licenses, all records corresponded to information filed in the issuing departments across the country. All were excellent credit risks. Each buyer had made a minimum down payment with a personal check, taking out the maximum loan; two had said they needed the tax write-off.

She’d turned them all down. It was after requesting hard-copy records from the archives of the various agencies, asking them not to use their computer information, but to go back to the originals, that she came up with the discrepancies. Every one was a scam.

Entering Birtd’s Grocery through the back door near the deli, she was mulling over the legality, under today’s criminal-friendly courts, of fingerprinting all loan applicants and running them through NCIC before approving their loans. The idea made her smile-too bad it would never fly.

She thought about her early days in Probation and Parole, when information was so much harder to gather-long before computers, before the statistics available through National Crime Information Center-back in the horse-and-buggy days, she thought, grinning.

Heading for the deli, she heard angry voices from the front of the store, and spotted gentle-natured Lewis Birtd near the bread display. He was arguing with an irate tourist, a darkhaired, meaty woman dressed in a sloppy Hawaiian shirt and baggy shorts, pushing a baby in its stroller and hauling a two-year-old by the arm.

Birtd’s Grocery, located among the village motels, catered heavily to the more affluent tourists. Mr. Birtd carried a fine selection of the nicer party and snack foods and good wines, specializing in the two local wineries, and a complete line of imported beers and ales. He stocked only carefully selected fruits and vegetables and the finest meats. His deli was not as extensive as George Jolly’s, but what he did provide was delicious and nicely presented. Local residents stopped by Birtd’s for dinnerparty items and for sudden whims. Though for everyday purchases-of hamburger, bulk rice, and canned tomatoes, for cat food and paper towels-village folk went up the valley to one of the three grocery chains, all of which offered discounts in a constant competition that kept prices down and the residents of Molena Point coming back

Waiting at the deli counter for her avocado-and-prosciutto-on-rye and a container of dilled coleslaw, Wilma listened with interest and then concern to the quickly accelerating argument at the front of the store; the woman seemed to be claiming that Mr. Birtd had sold her an open box of cookies and that the cookies had made her children sick The children didn’t look sick. Mr. Birtd didn’t seem to know quite what to do with the woman. Her tirade had grown so heated that Wilma wondered if diminutive Lewis Birtd was in physical danger. When a second altercation broke out near the checkout counters, a puzzled unease gripped her. She craned to see.

A woman in a bright dirndl skirt and loose black jacket had backed Frederick Birtd into a corner beside the shelves of pickles, upbraiding him so violently that poor Frederick shuffled with embarrassment.

The Birtds were never rude to customers; the Birtd family was patient, polite, gentle-mannered. The store was run by Mr. and Mrs. Birtd and their two grown sons and, like most Molena Point shopkeepers, they went out of their way to please their clientele. As the woman’s shouting increased, Frederick’s voice rose in unaccustomed rage. At the same moment, to Wilma’s right near the soft drinks, a tall, heavily pregnant woman began to yell and stamp, trying desperately to discipline three wildly screaming children. Business at the three checkout counters had ceased as checkers and customers watched the disruptions. When the three children began hitting their mother, pounding her with their fists, one of the checkers left his register to help her-at the same moment, Wilma realized what was happening.

Her first thought was,This can’tbe real! You read about this stuff in the police journals.Her next thought:It’s not only real, and they’re not only pulling it off, I know these people!

She flew for the front door, fighting her way past Frederick Birtd’s assailant and through the checkout fines. Glancing back, she saw the big woman swing her purse, hitting Frederick so hard he staggered backward against a Coke display, the cans and wire racks flying. Everything happened at once; the checkout lines were a battlefield as impatient customers tried to push on through. As she slid through between the registers, a large woman spun from the far register and ran for the street. At the next register, another big boned, darkhaired woman was scooping up handfuls of bills. Wilma tripped her and slammed the drawer on her hand, forcing a scream. The woman dropped a fistful of money and ran; hitting the street, she slid into a waiting car. When Wilma turned to snatch up the phone, she found that its line had been cut.

Hurrying to the motel next door, she stepped behind the empty counter, grabbed the phone, and dialed 911.

The black-and-whites must have been just around the corner. As she returned to the riot-filled store, two squad cars slid to the curb. At the same moment, four civilian cars pulled out of the parking lot fast, skidding to a pause by the front door. Half a dozen big, darkhaired women came boiling out, their loose coats and long skirts flapping. The cops grabbed three. Two jumped into the waiting cars. A third black-and-white coming around the corner gave chase.

Wilma returned to the checkout stands feeling as though she’d been caught in the middle of a movie shoot, a well-planned script. Except this drama had been real, and devastating. Lewis Birtd stood at the cash registers, pale with shock One of the three registers lay on the floor upside down, spilling loose change. The drawers of the other two hung open and empty. Lewis looked up helplessly.

“Cleaned out all three,” he said to Wilma, and turned to a pair of uniformed officers as his son Frederick approached, holding the arm of the woman who had hit him. Within minutes, seven arrests had been made, the women secured in three black-and-whites and driven away to the station. No man had been involved in the store riot; the only men Wilma had seen had been driving the getaway cars. All of the cars were new and expensive.

Wilma had, as the cars sped away, jotted down three license plate numbers. One of the cars was a blue Thunderbird, and as it wheeled a U-turn picking up its passenger, she got a close look at the driver.

She stared after the car trying to be sure, her anger rising-she hadn’t seen Sam Fulman since the day in San Francisco Federal Court, maybe ten years back, when she petitioned the court to revoke his probation.

She’d only had a glimpse of the driver, but she sure didn’t forget a man she’d twice tried to revoke before she was successful-a man she had hassled constantly about his lack of permanent residence, lack of a job, and the fact that he refused to pay his restitution. It seemed like only yesterdaythat she faced Fulman before the bench. She didn’t like seeing him in Molena Point. Fulman was totally bad news.

But of course he’d be in Molena Point just then.

What did she expect? With Shamas Greenlaw’s funeral pending, every shirttail Greenlaw relative in the country had made a beeline for Molena Point, looking for a share of the leavings.

She’d never told Lucinda that one of Shamas’s nephews had been her probationer; what good would it have done to tell her?

Working her way to the back of the market, stepping over fallen cans and paper goods, Wilma slipped and nearly fell on a slick spot left by spilled fruit cocktail. The floor was littered with broken glass, scattered candy and cookies. And now the aisles were crowded with uniforms talking with the remaining customers. All those present during the riot seemed eager to tell the officers their particular version.

Wilma gave Lieutenant Wendell the license plate numbers she’d noted down, then collected her lunch. Leaving Birtd’s, hurrying toward Ocean, she was just crossing the broad, tree-shaded median when she saw Clyde coming up the street, probably returning from his own lunch. He walked at an angle, leaning back, pulled along the sidewalk like an unwilling puppet by the young dog-and nearly fell over Selig when the pup stopped suddenly to sniff at the street.

Sniffing along pulling Clyde, the dog bolted away, suddenly jerking the lead from Clyde’s fist, charging along the median toward a blue Thunderbird parked at the curb.

Leaping at the car’s windows, barking and pawing, scratching the gleaming paint, he spun in circles, his wagging tail beating against the metal-then he cowered away, ducking as if with fear.

There was no one in the T-Bird. Wilma looked through the windows. In the front seat lay the same plaid jacket that one of the woman rioters had worn. Wilma glanced into the nearby shops and cafes. She didn’t see Fulman. She turned to look at Clyde.

“Tell Sheril I’ll be a bit late,” she said. “Tell her? tell her I’m chasing a loan applicant.” And she headed away, across Ocean, in the direction of the police station.

The station was mobbed with women, pale-haired women dressed in jeans or shorts, and Tshirts-not the heavily garbed brunettes she had seen in Birtd’s-all shouting. They were arguing and weeping, firing questions at the officers in some foreign language, screaming indecipherable accusations. A dozen officers were trying to sort them out. Entering, Wilma was nearly knocked flat by an energetic arrestee swinging her heavy arms and yelling.

Max Harper’s station was one large, open squad room. The counter at the front was big enough to accommodate the dispatcher and her radios, a clerk, and, behind her, a row of tall file cabinets set into the wall. Beyond the counter, a dozen officers’ desks filled the room, their surfaces invisible beneathstacks of papers and bound reports. Along the far, back wall, a credenza held a coffeemaker and assorted cups. Harper’s desk stood near it, with a clear view of the room, of the front door, and of the hall to the back door and alley. Harper, at the moment, was near the front counter in the midst of the melee, five women screaming and crowding at him, waving their arms, demanding answers to questions that seemed to have no meaning-though the women at Birtd’s a few minutes before had spoken in clear English. Wilma was backing away from a pair of enraged ladies when Harper saw her and motioned her on back to his desk.

At the credenza, Wilma busied herself making fresh coffee. Harper marched past her escorting two of the women toward the back door, taking them to the jail across the alley. He was followed by a line of officers, each with a female in tow. All blondes or sandy-haired, and one redhead, not a brunette among them.

Harper returned to his desk and poured himself a cup of coffee. Wilma sat down across from him.“How many black wigs did you collect?”

Harper smiled.“Eleven, most of them from the three cars we pulled over. Clothes, too. Big floppy coats and skirts. One of the women was in the midst of changing, Blake caught her with her skirt around her knees. Brennan and West are at Birtd’s talking to witnesses.” He settled back, sipping his coffee.

“Those are Greenlaw women.”

Harper nodded.“I’m afraid so.”

“My God, poor Lucinda. I wonder if she has any idea.”

“They were booked in with all kinds of aliases. These people have been working up and down the coast for nearly two weeks. Here in the village, they’ve kept it low-key, until today. In most instances, the store owners thought it was just a couple of annoying customers. They didn’t know what was coming down until the troublemakers left, and they found the cash drawer cleaned out.”

“One of the drivers,” Wilma said, “in the blue T-Bird, was a probationer of mine. Sam Fulman. Just a few minutes ago his car was parked over on Ocean.” She gave him the license plate number that, earlier, she had given to Brennan.

Harper motioned an officer back to the desk and sent him to impound the T-Bird and bring Fulman in for questioning.

“I haven’t seen Fulman in ten years.”

“And he’s a Greenlaw?”

“Shamas’s cousin. A real loser. There are a few darker-haired, lighter-boned members of the family.”

“We have two witnesses on store diversions up the coast that might be reliable. If we can ID the same women, here, and with your ID of Fulman, we might make something stick”

“Might?“She raised an eyebrow.

“Most of these cases walk, Wilma. You get them in court, no witness seems able to make a solid ID. Different hair color, different way of dressing, and the witness isn’t that sure. And these people turn the courtroom into the same kind of circus, shouting, mouthing off in a language you can’tunderstand.”

Harper shrugged.“A judge can charge them with contempt and lock them up, but besides disrupting the whole courtroom, they’ll trash the jail cells-those women can tear up a jail worse than a hundred male felons. And most times, the judge gets so tired of the noise and confusion in his courtroom and no solid witnesses, that he’ll do anything to be rid of them.

“I’ve never seen you so negative.”

“You’ve never seen me faced with one of these renegade families. You heard them up there at the desk, couldn’t get anything intelligible out of them. That’s the way they are in court. You can lock them up, but if your witnesses are uncertain, you’ve got nothing to hold them. Then usually,their hotshot attorney shows up and offers full restitution.” Harper shook his head.

“All the shopkeeper wants is his money and the value of the goods they stole. Lawyer puts a little pressure on him and offers plenty of cash, and he’ll drop charges.”

Harper shrugged, and lit a cigarette.“Without charges, they walk.”

He set down his coffee cup.“Your Sam Fulman-did he ever tell you anything about the Greenlaw family? Anything more than you know from Lucinda?”

“He said the clan is thick, that most of them come from one small town in North Carolina. Donegal, I think Three-story brick houses, long, curved drives, swimming pools and private woods, landscaped acreage. He claimed they practically own the town.”

Wilma watched the officers settling back to their desks, the room calm now, and quieter.“Fulman told me the families all work together, but he never would say just what kind of work-the construction trades, I remember him saying once, rather vaguely. He said they all intermarry, all adhere to the family rules. Much, I suppose, like a tightly controlled little Mafia.

“Fulman is something of a renegade among them. He didn’t knuckle under like the rest, didn’t behave as the elders dictated. He moved out when he was young, came out to the coast, set up his own operation. I had him on probation for a chop shop. Later, at the time I got him revoked, he’d gone into business with Shamas.”

“What kind of business?”

“Selling machine tools.”

“What about Shamas’s other business affairs?”

“When Lucinda and Shamas met, she told me, he was a rep for a roofing company in Seattle. Before they left Washington State, he had started the machine-tool company and entered into several related businesses-something about electroplating tools.”

Harper swiveled his chair around, reaching for the coffeepot.“When they moved down here, he kept those enterprises?”

“That’s what Lucinda told me, but she was pretty vague. Evidently Shamas didn’t like to talk to her about business, would never give her any details. Never told her anything about bank balances, just gave her an allowance.”

She looked at her watch.“Do you have anything on the Chambers stabbing? How is he?”

“He’s doing okay. Doctors got the lung reinflated and repaired-he was lucky. He should be home in a few days. He says he didn’t know his assailant, that he got only a glimpse. Said he’d stopped to use the phone, there by the rest rooms, that he was out walking and forgot he had an early appointment. The guy grabbed him from behind, a regular bear hug, and shoved the knife in his chest. Chambers fell and lay still, hoping the guy would think he was dead. His assailant heard someone coming and ran.”

“Wouldn’t that pretty well clear Lucinda? Grabbing him from behind hard enough to hold him and stab him?” Lucinda had been questioned as a matter of routine because she’d been in the area and had reported the body, but also because Chambers was on board theGreen Ladywhen Shamas drowned.

“I’d think it would clear her. Though she’s tall, almost as tall as Chambers; and the miles she walks every day, she has to be in good shape for?”

“For an old lady?” Wilma grinned. “But what would be her motive?” She glanced again at her watch. “Didn’t know it was so late-Sheril will pitch a fit, want to know if I’ve been shopping on her time.” She rose, picked up her sack lunch from his desk, looked hard at Harper. “She’ssuch a bitch to work for. You don’t know, Max, the bad luck I’ve wished on you.”

Harper smiled, and rose, and walked with her to the front. The squad room was silent now, and half deserted, only a few officers at their desks. Wilma wondered, as she pushed out the door, how long the Greenlaw women would stay in jail before someone approached the Birtds with enough cash so they would drop the charges and Harper would be forced to release them. She stopped in a little park to eat her lunch, enjoying ten minutes of solitude, then headed for work. And it was not until the next afternoon that she learned, with amazement, that Clyde, too, had been arrested, that same afternoon. That her good friend had, uncharacteristically, also run afoul of Molena Point law enforcement-that about the time the Greenlaw women were set free, and Sam Fulman was picked up for questioning then released, Clyde, too, was cooling his heels behind bars.

16 [????????: pic_17.jpg]

THE TIME was past midnight. Rain beat against Wilma’s shuttered bedroom windows; a fire burned in the red-enameled woodstove, its light flickering across the flowered quilt and the white-wicker furniture. Wilma sat in bed reading, Dulcie curled up beside her.

She had spent the evening at her desk, poring over a map of the U.S., tracking the locations of auto-loan scams across the country, using an NCIC list that Max Harper had printed out for her from the police computer. The report covered the last six months, but the operations that interested her specifically had occurred within the last few weeks.

Her map bristled with pins, but the work had gone slowly, as she had not only to locate the scams, but then to find routes according to dates, marking each route with different colored pins. Some of the trails were circuitous, moving back and forth among half a dozen cities or to several adjoining metropolitan areas.

But one, a line of red pins, delineated a well-defined series of auto-loan scams over the last three weeks-beginning in Greenville, North Carolina, half a day’s drive west of Donegal, the home of the Greenlaw clan, and leading directly across the U.S.-scams that would not have been reported so early on, if not for one fortuitous accident.

When one of the small car dealers, driving a newly purchased BMW home for the weekend, was hit by a delivery truck, the officer who answered the call ran a routine check and came up with the fake registration.

This dealer had bought four cars within a twenty-four hour period; the fake registration made him so uneasy that he asked the police to check on the other three vehicles.

All four cars had come to him with fake paper.

The subsequent investigation spread from one small town to the next; dozens of false registrations were uncovered and reported to NCIC, long before any of the dealers would have been alerted by overdue car payments.

The trail ended at Bakersfield. Police had no record of any suspicious car purchases beyond that point. The perpetrators could have traveled north up the coast or south, or turned back east again.

Wilma’s next step was to phone the car agencies that had been ripped off, compare the MOs with those she’d been dealing with at Beckwhite’s: all had very professional IDs, excellent credit records that checked out with the credit bureaus. These people had to have, within their sophisticated operation, at least one very skilled hacker.

“Presume,” she told Dulcie, laying down her book, “that the Greenlaws were notified of Shamas’s death the morning after the accident, that most of them started out within a few hours, driving across country for Shamas’s funeral. They make their first stop at Greenville, to pick up a little cash. They buy two new BMWs, two Cadillacs and a Buick convertible, all listed by NCIC as sold in Greenville within hours of one another, at three separate dealerships, and all purchased with the maximum loans.

“Half a day’s drive down the road, then, they sell the cars for cash to small, out-of-the-way dealers, or through quickly placed ads in the local paper, give the buyer a forged registration certificate that wouldn’t come to light until they were long gone.

“Maybe thirty thousand apiece,” she told Dulcie. “They pick up maybe a hundred and fifty thousand for walking-around money, for their little jaunt out here to the coast.”

“Not too bad for a few hours’ work,” Dulcie said. “Do you think NCIC could link pigeon drops the same way? Store diversions and shoplifting?”

“No,” Wilma said. “They couldn’t. Only the big stuff is reported, things that might be interstate. Like stolen cars moved from one state to another. The little crimes, if they were reported to anyone beyond a local PD, would go to that state’s crime bureau. You’d have to contact each state, see what might have been logged. The Greenlaws could have worked the local stores all across the country, picking up their groceries and a little loose change-now doing the same here while they wait for the last of the relatives to arrive for the funeral.”

“Very nice,” Dulcie said, “traveling along in their homes on wheels, stealing as they go. Just like Gypsies.”

Wilma sat looking at the little cat, taking that in.

“Have you ever heard of Travelers?” Dulcie said. “Irish Travelers?”

Wilma’s eyes widened.

“In the library books on Gypsies,” Dulcie said, “the Irish Travelers are almost exactly the same. The whole family steals; it’s how they make their living.”

“But all Gypsies aren’t?” Wilma began.

“Not all Gypsies steal, just some clans. I was reading about them late last night-the library is so peaceful at night,” Dulcie said. “Well, not all Irish are Travelers. But the Travelers’ ancestors centuries ago in Ireland-they were tinkers just like the Gypsies. Tinsmiths and peddlers traveling across Ireland in their pony carts, stopping at little farms, trading and doing repairs. According to the books, some of the Travelers would steal anything left lying loose.”

“You’re not turning into a racist?” Wilma said, raising an eyebrow.

“What? Against the Irish?” Dulcie laid her ears back. “Why would I do that? I’m telling you what I read. It’s supposed to be fact. Besides, you’re part Irish. So is Clyde.”

“And how come,” Wilma said, teasing her, “how come you, of all cats, are talking about other folks stealing?”

Dulcie ducked her head.“That was? mostly? before I knew any better.” She looked up at Wilma. “It was never for self-gain. It’s just that? Such lovely little sweaters and scarves and silky things, so pretty and soft?” She looked pleadingly at Wilma, deeply chastened. Wilma grinned at her and stroked her ears, and at last the little cat began to purr.

“But it is a touchy subject,” Wilma told her. “Many people in the East are still bitter about prejudice against the Irish. It started when Irish families came over here during the potato famine-the 1800s-They left Ireland to survive, to make a new start, their whole country was starving, people were starving by the thousands. But when they arrived in this country, there was so much bad feeling about them.”

“Maybe that’s because of the Travelers,” Dulcie said, “becausetheywere stealing.” She licked her paw and looked up at Wilma, filled with a quick, electric energy. “This Fulman that you had on probation, Shamas’s cousin. What were he and Shamas doing in Seattle?”

Wilma’s eyes widened. “For one thing, selling supposedly high-quality machine tools that were really junk. I don’t remember all the details, but it involved a switch-showing the buyer fine merchandise as a sample, then shipping him shoddy stuff. They were paid up front, of course.

“When I checked out his family, through the probation office in Greenville, the information they gave me was that the family was clean. Not a thing on the Fulmans or the Greenlaws.”

“Smooth,” Dulcie said. “And how would you know any different? Most people never think about whole families living that way, their entire lives dedicated to stealing and running scams.”

“My job was to look for these things. And Greenville had to know.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. The books say they’re very law-abiding in their own town.” Dulcie grinned. “Maybe the probation officer was a shirttail cousin.”

Wilma looked at her, torn between laughter and chagrin.“I should have thought about that kind of connection. I’ve always known there were families in San Francisco running roofing scams, asphalt-paving scams, home-repair swindles. It’s their way of life.” Wilma shook her head. “I never put that together with Fulman and Shamas-and it was my business to know.

“I hate to think how this would affect Lucinda if she should find out about Shamas. It would break her heart to know that her husband was a thief and a con artist.”

Dulcie licked her whiskers.“I think she knows. From the things I’ve heard her say to Pedric, and to Charlie, too, I think she knows very well what Shamas was.”

Wilma looked at her quietly.

Dulcie looked intently back at her.“How could Lucinda live with him all those years and not know there was something wrong?”

“You’d be surprised,” Wilma said, “how thoroughly humans can deceive themselves.” She settled deeper into the pillows, sipping her cocoa-and straightened up, nearly spilling it, when they heard above the pounding rain, a thud on the back porch, then the back door creak.

The noise brought Dulcie up rigid, too, her every hair standing straight.

Wilma slid out of bed, snatching up the fire tongs, and Dulcie dropped softly to the floor-then they heard Dulcie’s cat door slap, banging against its metal frame.

“Anyone home?”

Dulcie relaxed. Her fur went flat, her claws drew back into their sheaths. Wilma sighed, and laughed as Joe Grey came swaggering down the hall, his silver coat soaked dark, dripping on the Persian runner.“I was around back, came down the hill, saw the bedroom light. Are those cookies I smell?”

Wilma trailed to the bathroom, snatched up a towel, and tossed it to the bedroom floor. Joe, giving her a sour look, rolled on the terry cloth until he was relatively dry, then leaped to the bed.

“Why are you out in the rain?” Dulcie said. “You weren’t hunting, on a night like this.”

“I took a little jaunt by Cara Ray’s motel, after you said she wasn’t at Lucinda’s for supper.” He licked a few swipes across his shoulder.

Wilma shoved the cookie plate in his direction. He took one in his teeth, crunching it with pleasure, dropping crumbs. The quilt was due for a washing; this was why Wilma liked washable furnishings, so she and the cats could enjoy, and not fuss.

“So what did you see?” Dulcie said. “Was that Sam person there at her motel?”

“No. Nor Cara Ray, either. I nearly drowned climbing up to the roof, nearly broke my neck on those wet, slick shutters, slipping down to Cara Ray’s window. Lucky someone didn’t find me smashed on the pavement below, lying in the gutter broken and my poor cat lungs full of water. All I got formy trouble was a cold bath, and a view of Cara Ray’s messy motel room.

“I waited for maybe an hour, thinking she might bring him back with her, and the rain pounding against the windows like shotgun blasts. Where would they go on a night like this? So damned wet-couldn’t get a claw into anything.”

“You haven’t been home?” Dulcie said.

“I was home for dinner. Why?”

“Clyde didn’t say anything?”

“About what?”

“Clyde was arrested.”

Joe stared at her. Stared at Wilma.“You’re joking. There’s no way Max Harper? Arrested for what? Who would arrest him? In what town? For speeding? Oh, that would-”

“Not for speeding,” Wilma said. “For creating a public nuisance.”

Joe settled down on the quilt, his yellow eyes fixed on Wilma.“What stupid thing has he done now?”

“Selig broke his collar,” Wilma said.

“I told Clyde the pups had been chewing on each other’s collars,” Joe said, “the whole time they were together.”

“Clyde was walking the pups down Ocean,” Wilma said, “when a big Harley came roaring around the corner. The pups went crazy, hit the end of their leads bellowing, and Selig kept on going, chasing the Harley and baying like a bloodhound-and Clyde chasing him, dragging Hestig through traffic, yelling and swearing.”

Joe Grey smiled, his yellow eyes slitted with pleasure.

“A squad car came around the corner,” Wilma said, “following the roar of the Harley.” In Molena Point, motorcycles were just as strictly forbidden as were unleashed canines.

“Another black-and-white screamed down Ocean, and when they got the Harley cornered, Selig and Hestig and Clyde were right in the middle, Clyde trying to hold Hestig and slip the other leash around Selig’s neck.”

Wilma smiled.“All of this in front of the Patio Cafe, and half the village looking on.” She and Clyde had been close friends forever-if she had a little laugh at his expense, he’d had plenty of laughs at hers. “My friend Nora was waiting tables and had a ringside view. Those two rookies that Harper justhired-they don’t know Clyde.”

“They arrested him,” Joe Grey said, rumbling with purrs.

Wilma nodded.“Arrested him while the pups had him tangled in the leash.”

Dulcie looked from one to the other, half amused, half feeling sorry for Clyde.

“Clyde got himself untangled,” Wilma said, “but Selig wouldn’t let the rookies near the Harley. The puppy seemed to think thathehad caught the cycle, and they had no right to it. He stood guarding it, snarling like a timber wolf, and Clyde trying to pull him away.

“One of the rookies stepped into the cafe and bought a prewrapped beef sandwich. He distracted Selig with that until his partner could lock the Harley driver in a squad car. Ordinarily, a rookie wouldn’t be assigned alone to a unit, but there was some kind of changeover at the station.”

Wilma settled back against the cushions, and for a long, perfect moment, she and the cats envisioned Clyde Damen in the backseat of a black-and-white, confined behind the wire barrier.

“Nice,” Joe Grey said. “Wait until I lay this one on him.”

“He didn’t mention it?” Dulcie asked.

“Silent as a mummy in the tomb.” He looked at Wilma. “So what happened when they got to the station? Did you talk to Harper, get a blow-by-blow?”

“When rookie Jimmie McFarland tried to get the pups out of the unit, they set their feet and wouldn’t come.

“McFarland had saved back a little of the sandwich. He bribed them out with that. But when he got them into the station, Selig took a look at all those nice uniforms and began to bark and leap in the officers’ faces, kissing everyone. And Hestig grabbed McFarland’s field book, raced around the station with it, dodging anyone who got close.

Wilma smiled.“When the dispatcher called the dog catcher, that’s when Clyde began to shout.”

Joe Grey rolled on his back, laughing.

“At about that time,” Wilma said, “Harper came in the back door, saw McFarland tackle Selig, saw Officer Blake trying to corner Hestig. Harper grabbed Selig by the nape of the neck, shook him, and turned on Clyde as if he’d shake him, too.”

Dulcie’s purr bubbled into laughter. Joe lay grinning, thinking about what he’d have to say to Clyde.

“Before Harper could get them sorted out, Selig jerked loose from him, snatched a sheaf of reports from Officer Blake’s desk, and ran off chewing on them. Three officers caught him but, without a collar, he slipped free of them-snatched Lieutenant Brennan’s ham sandwich, then grabbed the photo officer’s reflex camera. The officer tackled him, rescued his camera, stood cradling it like a baby. Harper was so mad, he told me, and was laughing so hard, that he could feel tears.”

“And I missed it all,” Joe said. “The event of the-”

A tremor shook the bed. Joe leaped up. Dulcie rose into a wary crouch. Wilma’s cup rattled in its saucer.

But then the room was still again.

They waited, but no second jolt hit. The three friends looked at each other, and shrugged. A second later, the phone rang.

Wilma picked up, listened, then pressed the speaker button.

Lucinda’s voice was weak and unsteady. “? he’s? I’m at the hospital. He’s hurt, Wilma. Broken arm, some broken ribs. He was soaking wet and so cold, shivering. I only hope? I don’t know how long he lay there, in the cold and rain.”

Wilma leaned close to the phone’s speaker. “Start at the beginning, Lucinda. Tell me what happened. Take it slowly, please.”

“The police found him-not our police,” Lucinda said. “The highway patrol. They-in the dark. Pedric was lying halfway down Hellhag Hill. Someone?” Lucinda’s voice shook “Someone tried?”

“How would they find him in the dark and rain? What were they doing? Never mind. I’ll come. Who’s the doctor?”

“Dr. Harliss.”

“I’ll be there.” Wilma slipped out of bed. “I’ll be?”

“No. Don’t come here. I’m? I’ll stay with him. Go there. Go to Hellhag Hill. Find out? Talk to the police. Find out who-what happened.”

“But?”

“Hurry, while they’re still there. Please find out what happened.”

“But they won’t be?”

“They’ll still be there. I came away in the ambulance. They were still there, seeing to Newlon.”

“Newlon?”

“Newlon’s dead. They found him lying on the highway in the rain. Please find out, Wilma.” Her voice shook. “Find out who killed Newlon, and tried to kill Pedric.”

Wilma hung up the phone and sat looking at the cats.“First, Chambers is stabbed. Now, another man in the hospital, and a man dead. And all of them,” she said, “connected to Shamas Greenlaw.”

Swinging out of bed, she snatched up some clothes and slipped into the bathroom to wash and dress. Within minutes, she and the cats were headed for Hellhag Hill, Joe and Dulcie staring out through the rain-soaked windows, shivering in the cavernous, cold car.

17 [????????: pic_18.jpg]

TWO HIGHWAY patrol units were nosed in along the shoulder, their lights shining across the rain-matted grass at the base of Hellhag Hill. Passing them on the wet black two-lane, Wilma pulled up ahead, behind two Molena Point black-and-whites. Beyond these stood the coroner’s gray sedan, its headlights shining on a makeshift tent, a green police tarp erected to keep the rain off Newlon Greenlaw’s body. Other illumination was provided by three large butane lanterns. The coroner, John Bern, a thin, button-nosed man wearing a yellow raincoat, knelt beside the body. As Wilma stepped out of the car, she saw Max Harper leave the tent and start up the hill, his torchlight bouncing off curtains of blowing rain. She saw, up the hill just below the trailer park, in the beam of other torches, two more uniforms and a gathering of onlookers.

“Up there,” Officer Davis told her, coming up to Wilma, wringing water from her uniform skirt. “That’s where Pedric Greenlaw fell, just above those boulders. Ambulance left with him about half an hour ago.” Davis was a middle-aged woman, solidly built, short dark hair, dark and expressiveLatin eyes.

“What happened?” Wilma said. “I’ve only talked with Lucinda Greenlaw, and she was pretty upset.”

“You knew Newlon Greenlaw?” Davis said, gesturing toward the body.

“I’ve met him.”

“Head cracked open. We’ve found no weapon. Apparently the two men were fighting, up around the trailers. It’s dark as hell up there at night; they’ve never had good lighting.

“People in the trailers woke up, heard thumps and scuffling, then groans. Grabbed flashlights and ran out. Someone thought there were three men, but they couldn’t be sure. We’ve not found any traces of a third man. Pedric fell maybe twenty feet, into those rocks just above the cave.

“When the people up there called 911, California Highway Patrol was just up the road. They came on down to see if they could render assistance, spotted Newlon’s body in their headlights here beside the road.

“We won’t know much until it gets light,” Davis said. “And maybe not then, with this rain. Sure makes a mess.”

Moving to the tent, Wilma watched the coroner examine the dead man’s head wound and take the temperature of the liver, a procedure which never failed to make her queasy. She flinched as the needle went into the abdomen.

She had left Joe and Dulcie in the car. She hoped they’d stay there, hoped the heavy rain would keep them confined. Knowing those two, she doubted it. A promise from either of them was subject to all manner of feline guile.

As Harper’s light moved up the hill, someone started down toward him with another torch. The rain had slacked off, but the damage to the crime scene would be significant, blood washed away, evidence destroyed. When she glanced down the road toward her car, the torch of one of the CHP officers caught four bright flashes low to the ground racing across the highway, accompanied by a gleam of white.

“Damn cats,” she muttered; but already the cats had disappeared. Joe and Dulcie were doing as they pleased, and no one was going to stop them.

The turmoil on the hill, men shouting and striding through the dark grass with lights swinging, had terrified the clowder of wild cats. Already disoriented by the heavy rain, by the jolting of the earth, and by the earlier violence of the men fighting and then the crowd gathering and the scream of the ambulance and not knowing where to escape, they had withdrawn to cower among the rocks in a state of near shock Even the bellowing mewl of the ragged kit, which they had heard earlier, had seemed terrifying, coming alone out of the night.

Still cowering against the boulders as men moved all over the hillside, they refused to go into the cave; none of them would enter the cave when the earth shook.

Long after the police cars and most of the men had left and the world grew quiet once more, they crouched in the soaking grass, belly to ground, waiting for further disaster-perhaps for the earth to open entirely, for the hill beneath their paws to crumble away.

All but the tattered kit. The ninth and smallest, she was of another mind.

The cave did not frighten her. She sat in its mouth, where the others wouldn’t go, had sat there earlier, stoically enduring the earth’s trembling. If she died, she died. She wasn’t going to run away.

After the earth stopped shaking she had stood up on her hind paws like a little rabbit, looking all around her, delighted at the brilliance of the sky. When the quake ceased, the rain had ceased for the moment, too, and a strange, thin gleam lit the sky. Not the light of dawn, but a silver glow shimmering beneath the rain clouds. Ignoring her soaking fur and the icy chill that reached down into her thin little bones, she had looked around her, thrilled with the beauty of the world.

But at the same time, too, she tasted fear. She could still smell the blood from the man who had lain among the boulders. She had seen him fall. She had seen another man die. These matters deeply distressed her.

It had happened just at midnight. She had been hunting beneath the trailers, where field mice had burrowed away from the driving rain, mice displaced and disoriented and easier to catch than most. Despite her lack of skill she had trapped two and eaten them; and as she padded along beneath the wheeled houses, hoping to find more such foolish morsels, smelling from above her the sour scent of sleeping humans, hearing through the thin trailer floors the rumbling of their ragged, crude snores, she had heard something else. Footsteps thundered overhead, and she heard a door creak open.

She stopped suddenly, spun around, and drew back against a wheel.

A man left the trailer, heading across the sodden yard to a shed where firewood was stacked; she was afraid of him until she saw that it was only the old man who came here with the lady-the lady called him Pedric. The kit was crouched to leap past him when another man came out, shutting his door so softly that only a cat would hear it.

He walked soundlessly in the rain, following Pedric. The smell of him, in the wet air, made her fur bristle. A cruel smell, and when he drew close behind Pedric, she hissed with fear.

Suddenly in the darkness the silhouettes of the two men merged. She heard a loud crack, saw Pedric fall heavily into the splattering mud.

Immediately the man who had hit Pedric grabbed him and dragged him down the steep hill. He bent over him listening, studying him, then he half threw, half pushed him. Pedric fell, rolling limply down and down, until his body lay against the boulders that formed the mouth of the cave.

The thin man climbed again. Before he reached the trailers a third man came out of the shadows, crouching low, a big, heavy human, broad as a rutting bull. The two fought, pounding and grunting, hitting one another until the big one fell and lay still; that surprised her, that the smaller man had been so clever and quick. Then she saw the rock in his hand. He had hit with that. He dragged the big man down the hill past her. She smelled the death smell.

He dragged and threw him, just as he had thrown old Pedric; how strong he was, like a fighting weasel. The big man rolled farther than Pedric had. Rolled and fell. The dun man ran after him, kicked him, threw him again so he slid down and down onto the highway; the heavy soft thuds of his falling body made her think of the mice she had crushed between her young, sharp teeth.

The thin man went away, down below the road. She crept out to look at Pedric.

The old man was alive, twisted among the rocks. Nosing at him, she could feel his breath, faint and ragged. She knew nothing to do but yowl.

For such a little thing, she had a huge, demanding cry. Leaping to the top of a boulder, she faced the trailers and bawled.

She mewed and cried until a light went on, then another light, spilling into the night like a yellow river. A woman shouted at her to shut up. A door burst open, and a man ran out, hefting a shoe. Then another man, swinging a hunk of firewood; he heaved it at her, and she dodged. Yowling twice more, she fled down the hill behind the thin man who had hurt Pedric.

Down swiftly past the dead man. There, the thin man ran across the dark highway and down again, down the steeper cliff. She was close behind him; humans were so slow. At the edge of the cliff he lifted his hand, she saw the rock and smelled the blood, the rock that had killed the big man, watched him heave the rock away into the sea.

Rain came again, beating into her face. Above her, up the hill, car lights were racing among the trailers. A siren screamed, and men shouted.

She followed the thin man up again, across the road and up the hill, and watched him vanish among the trailers. But in a minute he was back, pushing in among the crowd, crying out with surprise, and then with pain and anger, a mourning cry that, to the little kit’s ears, was as fake as the kitten-mewl of a seagull.

Galloping up the hill through the dark, she drew as close as she could to the killer and tried to catch his scent, but she could not; too many humans were crowded all together. Before, when she had followed him downhill, she had smelled only the dead man’s blood.

Frightened and puzzled at humans, the little cat went down to the dark, empty cave and sat hunched in its yawning mouth, looking out, watching the moving reflections of lights from above, and on the road below. Despite the shouting, she dozed, mewling in her sleep. She woke fearful.

Alone on the hill, she waited. It was her nature to wait, to expect something better to happen. Ragged and starving, bone-thin, outcast by her own kind and without any reason to hope, the small kit was filled with hope.

She thought of the hills her clowder had come from, hills like this one, dripping wet in the rain but, in the sunshine, bright with yellow grass, sweet and rustling above endless, sunstruck sea, and she was filled with hope. She believed that no matter what trouble came, all would be well again if only one waited and watched-and moved swiftly with a fast paw at the right moment.

Closing her round yellow eyes, she dozed. When next she woke, two shadows approached her, padding up through the dark wet grass; two pairs of long, gleaming eyes silvered by the pale sky, two pairs of eyes, watching her.

Joe and Dulcie studied two round yellow eyes peering out at them from the black and dripping grass. They could see no more than the eyes, disembodied in the blackness-until the shadows reformed themselves, turning into mottled black-and-brown fur.

The waif stepped delicately forward through the sodden grass. She was so thin that the sea wind should have blown her tumbling across the hill. Her narrow little face was all black-and-brown smudges. Her expression was not the innocent look of a normal kitten, but brighter and more intelligent, more lively and knowing than any ordinary cat. Dulcie lifted her paw, enchanted; this kit was like them. Not for an instant did she doubt the wonder she sensed in this small kitten.

But the kit made Joe uneasy.

The two experiences he’d had with cats of their own kind had badly shaken him. First, Kate Osborne, whose skill at shapeshifting had left him nervous and unsettled: to know a human woman who could become a cat, deeply disturbed him. And then Azrael, that other like themselves, black, lecherous, lording it over them, coming onto Dulcie all testosterone and gleaming claws.

Now here was this ragged kitten. Like them. And frightening in her wide-eyed yearning-but before Joe Grey knew what had happened, he had reached a protecting paw to scoop the little kit close to him. Before he knew what he was doing, he was washing her smudgy face.

She had a little, tilted nose, a dish face. How boldly she rubbed against his leg, purring so hard that the ragged rhythm shook her thin body, and shook him, too.

Dulcie came close and licked her face, purring.

But around them, hidden in the night, Joe could sense the clowder of wild cats creeping close, could sense their anger as stealthily they moved closer through the dark wet grass, the wild beasts watching them-as if they did not want the kitten to be with outsiders. The darkness around them felt brittle with feline rage.

Joe stood up tall in the night, glaring into the darkness, daring the beasts to so much as hiss at them.

He caught a startled gleam, but it was quickly gone. He scowled and leered, then licked the kitten’s face.

Dulcie said to the kit,“A man was killed tonight.”

The kit’s eyes widened, she looked up at Dulcie and twitched her long, wet tail. “How did you know to speak to me?”

Dulcie smiled.“I knew. A man was killed tonight, kit, and another man was hurt. Did you see? Can you show us who did this?”

The kit’s yellow eyes grew wide. “I saw,” she said softly. “I was hunting mice, and I saw.”

“Was it someone from the trailers?” Dulcie glanced up the dark hill. “Someone who came from there?” She looked deeply at the kit, her green eyes kind and without guile. “Can you take us to that man? Can you show us his smell?”

The kit looked at Dulcie a long time. Twice she cut her eyes around at their unseen observers. She hissed at them and glowered as Joe had done.

At last she led Joe and Dulcie uphill, passing through the invisible cats. Passing a low growl, and snarls. Beside her, Joe Grey thundered and rumbled. No cat moved to strike them.

Up through the matted wet grass, their paws sodden, then splashing through the mud under the trailers. All the trailers were dark above them; no human was abroad now. Only the scents lingered, human stinks riding on the damp air. The kit sniffed and prowled, trying to sort them out. But no cat on earth could have sorted those smells.

“Do youknowhis smell?” asked Dulcie. “If one could sort anything, would you know it?”

“No,” the kit said. “When I followed him, I could only smell blood.”

They stood in the sopping mud between the grease-coated wheels, their wet fur clinging to their shivering bodies.“Which trailer?” Dulcie said. “Where did he come from?”

“He came out from between them. There.” She cocked her ears toward the trailers. “I didn’t see where exactly. I heard a door shut, then there he was.” Again the kit moved away. They followed her.

“Somewhere here,” she said, scenting at the wheels and at shoe prints all filled with water. But she could find no certain trail.

“We’ll come back,” Dulcie told her, “when this tangle of stinks blows away and when the rain is gone. Maybe then??”