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

“Maybe,” said the kit. “Maybe I will see him again, and I can learn his smell. I will watch. I will follow him, and I will find his scent. If the others? if they don’t chase me away for being with you, for talking to you.”

Joe Grey leaped down to the boulders and looked around him. He could feel the clowder watching.

“If any cat,” he growled, “any ragged mangy vermin among you touches this kit, if any moldy creature among you does this kit harm, you willallof you wish you had never come to this hill. You willalldie, slowly and painfully, by the force of my claws.”

His eyes blazed into night.“I have your scents. I will track you wherever you go, and I will leave you bleeding and immobile. I will watch the gulls swoop down, to pick meat from your living bones.”

The kit pressed close to Dulcie.“If they try to hurt me, I will go deep in the cave. They won’t come there; they fear the cave. They long for it, they want to go where it leads, but they fear it.” She looked brightly at Dulcie. “I will find the man who hurt Pedric. I will find him, and I will lead you to him.”

18 [????????: pic_19.jpg]

MAN KILLED, ONE INJURED, IN FALL DOWN HELLHAG HILL

Newlon Greenlaw, nephew of the late Molena Point resident Shamas Greenlaw, was found dead shortly after midnight, his body lying in the rain on Highway One at the base of Hellhag Hill. A California Highway Patrol unit spotted the body as they answered a 911 call to an accident victim higher up the hill, where just below the Moonwatch Trailer Park elderly Pedric Greenlaw lay injured in a fall. The two men may possibly have been victims in a bizarre double accident.

Relatives had no explanation as to why the men were out on the hill during the midnight storm. Newlon and his uncle were staying in their campers at the trailer park with other members of the extended Greenlaw family, gathered here for Shamas Greenlaw’s funeral. Shamas died earlier this month in a drowning accident during a cruise off Seattle. His rosary and funeral will not be scheduled until additional family members arrive.

Pedric Greenlaw is under observation at Molena Point Hospital. His condition, doctors told reporters, is stable. He will be hospitalized for several days.

Pawing open the morning paper and glimpsing the headline, Joe saw that theGazettehad been swift and efficient. Last night’s death and injury filled the front page above the fold, displacing whatever local news the paper must have already set up. He imagined the last-minute bustle, late into the night, as editors worked to change the front page.

If the paper were printed out of town, as some small papers were, they’d never have made it. Probably the ink was still wet when the truck delivered its stacks ofGazettesto the pickup stations.

As for theGazette’stake that Newlon’s death had been an accident, Joe didn’t believe it for a minute.

He had arrived home in darkness, long before the newspaper hit the porch. Soaking and cold, he had gone directly through the kitchen to the laundry and snuggled down on the lower bunk against old Rube’s stomach, absorbing the doggy warmth.

Rube slept alone or with the cats. Selig slept on the back porch in a huge TV shipping carton that Clyde had lined with old flannel shirts and a blanket-a far cry from the cold wind on Hellhag Hill. There was barely enough room for two, though, when Hestig was there and not with Charlie.

Snuggled against Rube, Joe had dozed until just before seven, when he heard the morning paper hit the front porch. Galloping through the living room and out his cat door, he had dragged theGazettethrough the house and onto the breakfast table; ripping off the plastic, rainproof cover, he’d heard Selig pad across the back porch, whining, to paw at the plywood barrier of the dog door. Of course that woke Clyde. Joe heard him stamp across the bedroom, then heard the shower running. He had barely finished reading the article when Clyde schlepped into the kitchen and began to fill the coffeepot in a sleep-drugged morning ritual. A shower alone was not enough to transform Clyde Damen from sleeping zombie to reallive person.

Soon bacon was sizzling in the pan, and the animals were lined up, eating. Clyde had spoken no word. His one glance at Joe was a deep scowl. Before he broke the eggs into the skillet he moved to the table. Standing behind Joe, loudly sipping his coffee, he read the front page. For some time, he said nothing.

Then he breathed a sigh and turned away. Joe glanced up to see a relieved, and puzzling, smile.

So what’s with you?Joe wanted to say; but some errant wisdom kept him silent.

Possibly Clyde, knowing nothing about last night’s excitement on Hellhag Hill, had been prepared for a humorous front-page story at his expense, a comic piece about the arrest of the village’s best-known auto mechanic and his two pups. Not encountering such an expose, he seemed far more pleased with the morning. It was not until Clyde noticed the muddy pawprints leading across the kitchen from the living room that he sat down at the table, giving Joe a long, direct look

“So where were you last night?”

“I was hunting.” Joe considered that his trek up Hellhag Hill and the information he had painstakingly gathered was the most difficult kind of hunt. “Why do you always ask me where I was at night? I don’t ask where you’ve been. I’m not some teenage kid you have to keep track of, afraid I’ll wreck your car or get arrested. You have absolutely no cause to-”

“You were on Hellhag Hill last night.”

“If you don’t turn the bacon, it’s going to be charcoal.”

Clyde rose and flipped the bacon, then picked up the paper, reading the lead article with more care. Joe waited patiently for Clyde’s inevitable and long-winded lecture.

“Do you want to tell me why, Joe, that the minute the paper hit the porch, you were into it?”

Joe looked at him blankly.

“You knew about this accident, that’s why. And the only way you could have known, is if you were up there yourself last night. Certainly you were not hunting rabbits in the rain.”

“Actually, rain makes for good rabbit hunting. If it floods their holes, the rabbits come right on out. Disorients them. I enjoyed, some time before midnight, an unusually fat young rabbit. If you ever-”

“Can it, Joe. You want to tell me how you just happened to be on Hellhag Hill when Pedric Greenlaw fell and Newlon Greenlaw died? I presume Dulcie was with you. Dare I ask if you were there before the cops arrived?”

“How could we have been?” Joe fixed a shocked yellow gaze on Clyde. “You can’t think we had anything to do with the accident? Why in the world would we, two little cats?”

“Give it a rest, Joe. What were you doing on Hellhag Hill in the middle of the night, in the pouring rain? How did you know about the accident?” Clyde was pale with anger. Joe didn’t want to be the cause of a coronary. With the way Clyde ate, his arteries were probably lined with gunk thickerthan transmission oil.

“If you must know,” he said softly, “if it’s really any of your concern, Lucinda called Wilma from the hospital. I just happened to be there at Wilma’s house, eating cookies, so of course she took Dulcie and me with her. Lucinda asked her to go out to Hellhag Hill and meet with the police, to find out what had happened.”

“And Wilma took you with her? Why would? Why would she??”

“She made us promise to stay in her car, out of the way.”

“And of course you did that. Stayed in her car, warm and dry and minding your own business. Never touched a paw outside the car, never went near the body and the police.”

“You really don’t think we would get in the way of the police. The fact that?”

“Please, Joe. It’s too early.”

“Bacon’s burning,” Joe said helpfully.

Clyde leaped to rescue the charred slices. As he tried to scrape the black off-which worked better with toast than with bacon-Joe pawed through the paper, wondering if theGazettehad had a front-page piece on Clyde and the pups, before the accident replaced it. Such a humorous story was exactly the land of local interest that theGazetteloved for page one.

Clawing out Section B, Joe began to smile.

There it was, right on the front, where no one in Molena Point would miss it.

He read the article with quiet satisfaction. Reporter Danny McCoy had been able to get a photograph, too. The shot showed the two rookies impounding the Harley as Clyde tried to coral the pups. The picture was taken at some distance, so it was a bit blurred-but still effective. Joe wanted to roll over laughing.“First-class circus,” he said, addressing Clyde’s back.

Clyde turned to stare at him.“The death of a man and the injury of a second man is a circus?”

“Not what I meant. That was certainly a tragedy. But this-” He stared pointedly at the page with Clyde’s picture. “Tell me, how did they treat you in jail? I expect everyone in town got to enjoy the event-except yours truly. I hate when I miss your really illustrious moments.”

“You want eggs and bacon and toast this morning? Or do you want that cut-rate brand of cat food that you said tastes like secondhand snuff mixed with floor wax?”

Joe subsided. He said nothing more until he had finished his burnt bacon and scrambled eggs. Completing his meal, he sat comfortably on the table, washing his paws and whiskers, cutting only an occasional glance in Clyde’s direction. Clyde had not offered any gourmet embellishments this morning, no smoked kippers or a little dab of Beluga caviar or even a slice of Tilsit, to create a memorable dining experience.

Clyde finished his eggs without speaking. You wouldn’t think that a little friendly ribbing would make him this mad. But maybe he wasn’t feeling well. Joe studied him, looking for some sign of illness.

He saw only a deep, dark fury.

Finished eating, Clyde laid down his fork and gave Joe his full attention.“I really appreciate your alerting Danny McCoy to this choice bit of news.” He looked Joe over coldly. “With your thoughtfulness, you have treated the entire population of Molena Point to a long and sadistic laugh at my expense.”

“I didn’t call Danny McCoy! Hey, I might enjoy the joke, but I wouldn’t have given it to a reporter. Don’t lay this on me, Clyde. Everyone saw you-and heard you, shouting at those rookies on the street. Shouting at the pups. McCoy heard the story the way he gets all of his information, probably two dozen shopkeepers called theGazette.Why do you always think I have something to do with your self-inflicted misfortunes! That is so tacky. If you-”

“Of course you had something to do with it. Look at the smart-assed grin on your face. You hardly took time to feel sympathy for those poor Greenlaw men. Talk about cold-hearted. You couldn’t wait to paw through the rest of the paper, find McCoy’s story. You were grinning wide enough to make the Cheshire cat look like a death-row inmate.”

“How could you see if I was grinning. You had your back to me. And wouldn’t you smile, ifI got arrested accosting a police officer?”

“I was not accosting Officer McFarland. I was rescuing the pups-your pups, if I might remind you-from a cruel incarceration at the dog pound.”

“My pups?I was the one who wanted to take those two to the pound.I wanted to let the pound feed them and find homes for them. But not you. Mr. DoGooder. No, you couldn’t bear the thought. ‘Look at the poor babies, Joe. Look how they’re starving. How could you lock them in cages? Oh, just wook at the oootsy wootsy doggies.’ And now look at them; you’ve already spoiled Selig rotten.”

“Well, at leastI? ” Clyde stopped, looked again at the paper. Picked it up, jerking it from under Joe’s paws. “What’s this?”

“What’s what?”

“The Letters-to-the-Editor column. You didn’t read it?”

“How could I read it? You’ve been picking at me all morning. When did I have time to read it?” Leaping to Clyde’s shoulder, he balanced heavily, scanning the three columns of letters.

SHOPLIFTING LOSSES TRIPLE IN RECENT WEEKS

What is Captain Harper doing to prevent the sudden increase in crime in our village? Molena Point relies heavily on the tourist trade, on its reputation for a slow, people-friendly, low-crime environment. We don’t need shoplifters and petty thieves. The sudden outbreak of such crimes seems to have received no response from Police Captain Harper. Local businesses are losing money, our visitors have been approached by confidence artists, and the police are doing nothing to arrest and detain the lawbreakers.

Joe snorted.“Who wrote this? Some guy who doesn’t like Harper. Probably some clown who lives on the wrong side of the law himself. Some cop-hater with an ax to grind.” He dropped from Clyde’s shoulder to the table and ripped his claws down the letters column. “TheGazettehas no right to print such trash. If I paid for this paper, I’d cancel the damn subscription.”

And he left the house, stopping to rake the livingroom rug, then shouldering out through his cat door.

But, trotting quickly up the sunny street, he forgot the petty letter-writer, and fixed again on the tragedy of last night, on the dark, rainswept hill, on the swinging lights of the police torches.

Whoelsehad been on Hellhag Hill last night, before the cops arrived? Who would want to kill Newlon Greenlaw and hurt Pedric? And Joe Grey wondered, would the little, wild tortoiseshell kit succeed in picking out the attacker?

But even if she did identify the man, still they needed proof. They couldn’t drop a killer in Harper’s lap without some hard facts, without enough solid physical evidence for Harper to take to the grand jury and for a prosecutor to take to court.

And Joe Grey moved on into the village, turning over in his sly feline mind every possible method he could think of for snaring the murderer.

19 [????????: pic_20.jpg]

THE TORTOISESHELL kit stood high up Hellhag Hill, above the cave, atop the pale rocks that flanked it. Joe and Dulcie saw her at once as they came up from the village onto the grassy verge along Highway One. The moment she spied them she lashed her bushy tail as if she had been impatiently waiting. The two cats, watching her, hurried across the empty two-lane highway and started up the hill. After the rain, the tall grass through which they padded was fresh and sweet-scented, alive with insects buzzing and rustling. Over their heads, sparrows and finches zoomed, diving low in the watery sunshine.

“Do you suppose,” Dulcie said, slitting her eyes, “do you suppose it was Dirken on the hill last night?”

“Why Dirken?”

“He’s the one doing all the digging and tearing the house apart. Whatever he’s looking for, did Newlon and Pedric find it? And Dirken went after them? And did he think he’d killed Pedric, did he leave Pedric for dead?”

Pedric was still in the hospital, while Newlon waited in the morgue, duly tagged and examined by forensics. The official word was that he had died from a blow to the head, not from an accidental fall. Fragments of Molena Point’s soft, creamy stone, which was used all over the village for fireplaces and garden walls, had been found in Newlon’s abraded scalp, deep in the wound. The specific piece of stone that killed him had not been retrieved. The natural outcroppings on Hellhag Hill were granite.

“Interesting, too,” Dulcie said, “that Cara Ray buttered up Newlon, then dumped him, and now he’s dead.”

She paused, glancing at Joe.“Maybe Dirken’s looking for a will, to override Shamas’s trust and leave the house to him? If he is, he wouldn’t want Newlon and Pedric snooping around.”

“Not likely there’s a will,” Joe said, “with the trust. Not in California, not according to Clyde. He says it isn’t needed-unless you’re disgustingly rich, as Clyde puts it.”

“Well, but Shamas could have written one?”

“I suppose. What are you thinking?”

Dulcie flicked her ears.“Could Shamas have been fool enough to write Cara Ray into a will-and stupid enough to tell her?”

Joe smiled.“And to hurry the process along, she slips out on the deck of theGreen Ladythat night and pushes him in the drink.”

“Possible,” she said. “Would Cara Ray be strong enough to push a man overboard?”

“So someone helps her; she say’s she’ll cut him in.”

“Newlon,” Dulcie said. “Or Sam. Take your pick.”

She glanced up to where the kit waited.“Sheisimpatient.” The dark kit was fidgeting from paw to paw, her ears back, her yellow eyes gleaming. The cats broke into a gallop, leaping through the grass; they were nearly to the cave when they crouched suddenly, low to the earth.

They felt the vibration first through their paws, like an electrical charge. At the same instant the insects vanished, and all around them flocks of birds exploded straight up into the sky.

The jolt hit. Shook them hard. As if the world said,Iam the power.They saw the kit sprawl, clinging to the boulder.

Then the earth was still.

The three cats waited.

Nothing more happened. The insects crept out and began to chirp again. The birds spiraled down and dived into the grass, snatching up bugs. An emboldened house finch sang his off-key cacophony as if he owned earth and sky.

And the cats saw that someone was on the road below them. Down on the black ribbon of asphalt, two small figures were rising-Wilma helping Lucinda up, dusting themselves off.

The two women stood talking, then climbed quickly toward the outcropping where they liked to sit-where the kit had been poised. Where, now, the rocks were empty.

The two cats moved away, intent on finding the kit-they hadn’t gone far when the little mite was right before them, stepping out of the grass.

“I found him,” she said softly. “A white trailer with a brown door.”

“How do you know it’s the killer’s?” Joe said.

“He left his shoes on the stoop. I can smell the blood. He wiped them with something wet, but I can still smell it. He washed his shirt and hung it on a chair, where the sun shines in through the screen.Itstill smells of blood.”

They rose and followed her up the hill, across the trailer park’s brick walks, across a narrow, scruffy bed of poppies and beneath half a dozen trailers, trotting between their greasy wheels.

“This one,” the kit said, slipping underneath, losing herself among the shadows.

Joe sniffed at the wheels and then at the little set of steps, flehming at the man’s scent. “It might be Fulman; I never got a good smell of him. He’s always with other people.”

“He was alone with Cara Ray,” Dulcie said.

“In the middle of a geranium bush, Dulcie, everything smells like geraniums.”

“Well, if-” she began, then hushed as footsteps drummed overhead. They heard water running, heard a man cough.

Padding up the narrow steps, Joe peered in through the screen men backed away.

“It’s Fulman,” he said. “In his undershirt and shorts, eating a salami sandwich.” He turned to look at the kit. “You sure it was that man?”

“That man. He hit the old man. He makes my fur bristle.”

“Well, we can’t toss the trailer with him in it. Have to hope he goes out.”

Moving back down the hill, the three cats settled in the grass some way above Wilma and Lucinda. The two women had brought a picnic lunch; the cats could smell crab salad. Licking whiskers, they watched Wilma unwrap a small loaf of French bread and take a bottle of wine from her worn picnic basket.

Softly, Dulcie said,“Tell us why the other cats are so shy-and so angry.”

“Angry because they can’t go home,” the kit said. “Because the shaking earth drove them out. Afraid to go down again.”

Joe frowned.“Down again, where?” He looked toward the cave. “You didn’t come from-in there?”

“From a place like it. I was little, I hardly remember. The earth shook. The clowder ran and ran-through the dark-up onto hills like these. That way,” she said, gazing away south where the coastline led wild and endless along the ragged edge of the continent.

“We were in a city when I was little. Somewhere down the coast. We ran from packs of dogs at the edge of a city. I remember garbage in alleys. I could never keep up. My mother was dead. The big cats didn’t care about me, but I didn’t want to be alone. I knew we were different from other cats,and I didn’t want to be in those alleys alone.

“We went away from the garbage place and through the city to the hills. The others would never wait for me. I ran and ran. I ate grasshoppers and lizards and bugs, and sometimes a butterfly. I never learned to hunt right; no one wanted to show me.

“Then the world shook again, and we ran again. We came here. I was bigger then, I could keep up. Or I’d find them the next morning when they stopped to sleep.

“Hungry,” she said. “Always hungry.” She glanced down the hill at the picnickers, sniffing the sweet scent of their luxurious meal.

Dulcie licked the kit’s ear.

“Well, that was how we came here. Along that cliff and these hills. They told me, home is here, too. They mean the cave. They mean it will lead to the same place the other cave did. They said we could go home again into this hill if the earth would stop shaking. They want to go in, and down to that place, but they are afraid.” She placed her black-mottled paw softly over Dulcie’s bigger paw. “I do not want to go there; it is all elder there.”

“Elder,” Dulcie said. “Elder and evil, as in the old stories.”

And at that instant, as if the small cat had summoned demons, another quake hit.

First the quick tingling through their paws as the world gathered itself. Then the jolt. It threw Dulcie and the kit against a boulder, knocked Joe sideways. Dulcie kicked at the air and flipped over. The kit crept to her, and she gathered the little one close, licking her.

Below them, Lucinda was sprawled, and Wilma crawling on hands and knees to reach her-and still the earth shook and rocked them, the hardest, longest surge the cats had ever known. Clinging tight to the traitorous earth, they refused to be dislodged; fear held them, as fear freezes a hunted rabbit, turning it mindless and numb.

Then all was still.

The earth was still.

They stood up, watched Wilma rise and lift Lucinda to sit against a boulder. The only movement in all the world, then, seemed the pounding of the sea beating through their paws.

And the tortoiseshell kit, who, before this day, had hidden each rime Lucinda brought food, who had never shown herself to any human, padded down the hill.

She stood looking at Lucinda, her round yellow eyes fixed fiercely on Lucinda’s frightened face.

Lucinda’s eyes widened.

Wilma remained very still. Joe and Dulcie were still.

Lucinda asked,“Are you all right, kitten?”

The waif purred, her thin sides vibrating. She stepped closer.

Lucinda put out her hand.“The quake didn’t hurt you? Poor, poor kitten.”

The kit tilted her little face in a question. She moved closer still, her long bushy tail and thick pantaloons comical on that thin little body. Lucinda said later that her black-and-brown-mottled coat was as beautiful as hand-dyed silk. The kit went to Lucinda and rubbed against her hand.

And Dulcie, watching, felt a sharp jealousy stab through her.Oh,she thought,Idon’t want you to go to Lucinda. I want you to come to me.

But what a selfish thought. What’s the matter with me?

The kitten had turned, was staring at Dulcie. The expression on her little streaked face changed suddenly, from joy to alarm. And she fled. She was gone, flying down the hill, vanishing in the long grass.

“Oh,” Lucinda said. “Why did she run? What did I do to frighten her?”

But behind Lucinda, Wilma looked accusingly at Dulcie. And Dulcie hung her head: something in her expression or in her body language had told the kit her thoughts, as surely as if she had spoken.

Lucinda looked after the kit with longing.“Such a tiny little mite. And all alone. So thin and frail.”

Wilma helped Lucinda to stand up and brush off, and supported her until she was steady on her feet. She picked up the picnic things, and as they started down the hill again, Wilma looked up sternly at Joe and Dulcie.

“Come on, you two.”

Chastened, Dulcie followed her. Joe, watching them, fell into line. Lucinda seemed too shaken by the quake and by her encounter with the little wild cat to wonder at Joe and Dulcie’s willingness to trot obediently home beside Wilma.

Reaching the village, they found shopkeepers and customers standing in the streets among broken glass, broken shingles, shattered roof tiles. The cats could see no fallen walls, no buildings that looked badly damaged-only one small section of broken wall where a bay window jutted over the street. Bricks had fallen out, but the window glass itself was still in place.

Everyone on the street was talking at once, giving each other advice, recounting what life-threatening objects had fallen narrowly missing them. Wilma, glancing down at the cats, led her little entourage quickly across Ocean’s grassy median, away from the crowd and debris. Lucinda remained quiet. Not until they were half a block from her house did she make any sound.

Stopping suddenly and staring ahead, she let out a startled gasp.

Lucinda’s Victorian home stood solidly enough. But her entire parlor seemed to have been removed, by the quake, onto the front lawn. Delicate settees and little tables stood about in little groups. A circle of needlepoint dining chairs accommodated eight Greenlaw women chatting and taking their ease.

As they approached, Dirken and his cousin Joey emerged from the house carrying the dining table. Behind them, three of the bigger Greenlaw children appeared, hauling out cans of food, stacks of plates, and a potful of silverware-whether to prepare an emergency meal or to cart away Lucinda’s possessions wasn’t clear. Beside the drive, a mattress lay tilted against a tree, and at the edge of the lawn, a pile of bedding and pillows beckoned to the tired and weary.

Lucinda approached stiffly-and suddenly she flew at Dirken. He dropped the table as her fists pounded his chest.

“What have you done, Dirken? What is this about! What are you doing!”

“There was an earthquake, Aunt Lucinda.” Dirken put his arm around her. “A terrible jolt. I’m so glad you’re all right.”

Lucinda slapped his arm away.“All of this, because of anearthquake?”

“Yes, Aunt Lucinda. One has to?”

“Take it back. All of it. Every piece. Do it now, Dirken.Take it back inside.”

“But you can’t stay in the house when there’s been?”

Her faded eyes flashed.“Wipe the grass off the feet of the furniture before you put it on the carpet. And place it properly, just as I had it. What on earth did you think you were doing?”

Dirken didn’t move. “You don’t understand about these things, Aunt Lucinda. It’s dangerous to stay inside during a quake. You have to move outdoors. The house could fall on you.”

She fixed Dirken with a gaze that would petrify jungle beasts.“Youare outside, Dirken. I am outside. My furniture does not need to be outside. If my possessions are crushed by a quake, that is none of your concern. Take it back. You are not camping on my lawn like a pack of ragtag?” She paused for a long, awkward moment. “Like ragtag hoboes,” she shouted, her eyes blazing at him.

Dulcie twitched her whiskers, her ears up, her eyes bright. She liked Lucinda better when she took command, when she wasn’t playing doormat. “But what is that?” she whispered to Joe, looking past the furniture to where Clyde’s two pups lay, behind the Victorian settee, chewing on something white and limp.

The cats trotted over.

The pups smiled, delighted to see them, then growled to warn them off their treasure. It was strange, Dulcie thought, that the only cat they feared was that tiny waif up on Hellhag Hill.

Dodging Selig, she swiped out with a swift paw and hauled the rectangular piece of canvas away from them. It was as heavy as a buck rabbit, and wet from their chewing: a big canvas bag with a drawstring top.

It smelled most interesting. The cats sniffed at it, and smiled.

They could see, behind the pups, broken concrete scattered from a wide crack in the foundation, where the bag must have lain, just beneath the fireplace.

Driving the pups out of the way with hisses and slaps, Joe pawed the canvas bag open. Dulcie stuck her head in.

The bag was empty, but the cloth smelled of old, musty money.

So the Greenlaw menhadbeen searching for money. How very prosaic. No one buried money anymore.

Except, perhaps, someone who didn’t like the IRS,she thought, smiling. The cats were still sniffing the bag when Joe nudged Dulcie, and she looked up at a crowd of trousered legs surrounding them, and a ring of broad Irish faces, all intent on the empty bag.

All seven Greenlaw men swung down, snatching at the bag. Dirken was quickest, jerking it away.

He pulled open the bag and peered in, then looked around the lawn as if expecting to see scattered greenbacks blowing across the grass like summer leaves.

The men were all staring at the empty bag and shuffling their feet when Lucinda pushed between them, put out her hand, and took it from Dirken.

“Were you expecting something more, Dirken? Were you expecting the bag to contain something you’ve been looking for?”

She didn’t wait for his answer. She turned and walked away, folding the bag neatly into a square, as if she were folding freshly washed linen. A huge silence lay behind her.

Only slowly did the Greenlaw men disperse, moving away, bewildered. Even the pups were subdued, trotting from one solemn figure to another, then away again when no one paid attention to them.

But when Sam Fulman appeared, coming out of the house, Selig raced to him leaping and whining-then backed away snarling, as if uncertain whether to kiss Fulman or bite him.

Hestig dropped to his belly and ran-straight to Clyde, who came hurrying around the corner toward the crowd, evidently summoned by the loud barking. Grabbing Hestig’s collar, Clyde knelt to put a leash on.

Selig was still leaping at Fulman, alternately growling and licking. Fulman, tired of the furor, gave the puppy a hard whack across the face. When Selig yelped, Fulman hit him again on his soft ear. Selig screamed and spun around, plowing into Clyde, pressing against Clyde. The cats, close to Fulman, got a good whiff of him, over the scent of dog.

They would not forget that sour smell. Glancing at each other, they ran for Joe’s place. They’d had enough-too many people, too many dogs, too much to sort out. They needed space, time to think. They needed a square meal.

Pushing in through the dog door, they pawed open the refrigerator.

Wilma’s larder boasted far superior offerings. She kept a shelf for Dulcie stocked with Brie, imported kippers, rare steak, and custards. In Joe’s house, they simply had to make do; there was no time to call Jolly’s Deli, with Clyde sure to barge in. The half-empty box offered cold spaghetti and aslice of overripe ham. This, with a bag of kitty kibble hastily clawed from the cupboard, completed their meal. Crouched on the kitchen floor lapping up spaghetti, they wondered how long Lucinda had had the money, how she came to find the bag, and where the money was now.

“Maybe in a safe-deposit box?” Dulcie said, pawing at an escaped strand of spaghetti. “One thing’s sure, that poor old house might survive, now, with Dirken done tearing it up.”

Finishing their dull repast, they left the spaghetti-stained dish in the middle of the kitchen floor, like the receptacle of some bloody sacrifice, and curled up on Clyde’s bed for a nap. They slept long and deeply. But as dusk fell, dimming the bedroom, they trotted out to sit on the back fence.

They wanted to be sure Fulman was there for dinner, to be sure the coast was clear.

They had no idea what they would find in Fulman’s trailer, what additional piece of the puzzle. Hopefully, something that would tie Fulman to Raul Torres and maybe to Chambers’s stabbing. As for last night’s double “accident,” they already had a witness. Though she could never testify. What they wanted now was hard evidence.

They waited until the clan had gathered at the table for a heavy meal of roast beef and potatoes, but Fulman didn’t show. Nor was Lucinda present. Though often, when there was a heavy meal, Lucinda would appear toward the end, for a salad and dessert.

“Surprised Cara Ray isn’t there,” Joe said. “She’s there often enough.”

Dulcie narrowed her eyes.“Maybe she and Fulman are at the motel having a little party.”

“You have a low mind. But I hope you’re right. I don’t relish being trapped in a trailer with Sam Fulman; he looks as if he’d as soon squash a cat as swat a fly.” Joe thought for an instant about waiting to toss Fulman’s trailer until they knew he was absent. But what the heck. They were only cats. Who would suspect them? He dropped down from the fence, beside Dulcie, and they headed for Hellhag Hill.

20 [????????: pic_21.jpg]

THE EVENING was dark in human terms. But to Joe and Dulcie the cliffs and the sea and the house trailers that rose above them were as indistinct and faded as an old, worn movie projected with a failing bulb.

Beneath the looming trailers, wind soughed between the greasy wheels.

They saw no light in any trailer except far down at the end, where a lone square of yellow spilled onto the asphalt; thin voices came from that direction.

They had not found the tortoiseshell kit.

Approaching Sam Fulman’s trailer, they studied its black panes and tightly closed door. The wind shook and rocked the big, wheeled home, snapping its white metal sides. Above the sporadic rattling, they listened for some sound from within.

Only the wind.

Leaping at the doorknob, grabbing it between raking claws, Joe swung, twisting it. Kicking the door open, he dropped inside.

Crouched on the dirty linoleum, they listened again. The dark, chill interior had a hollow, empty feel. Joe sniffed at a shirt that hung over a chair, its wide, red and green stripes resembling a circus tent-a shirt they had seen Fulman wear. And now they knew his smell, from their encounter in Lucinda’s yard.

“Ease the door closed,” Dulcie whispered. “Someone’s out there; I can hear him walking.”

Joe pushed the door-he didn’t mean to latch it. But the wind took it, and the sudden slam sounded like thunder. Leaping away, the cats looked for a place to hide.

There was no space under the couch or under the bed, both were built atop drawers. Every inch of the trailer was filled with cupboards and drawers made of dark, wood-grained plywood, with here and there a dead panel. The footsteps approached, stopped just outside.

No use trying to conceal themselves in the shower; the curtain was transparent. They fought the closet door, but couldn’t open it. As the visitor came up the steps, they dived behind the bed’s bolsters. Crouched among the dusty upholstery, they were gently rocked as the trailer, itself, was rocked precariously in the twisting wind-they felt as if they were adrift at sea.

They heard the door open and peered out from behind the bolster as Dirken stuck his head in.

“Sam? Sam, you there?”

When no one answered, Dirken entered.“Fulman? You here?”

Receiving no reply, Dirken walked the length of the trailer, looking into the bathroom, the bedroom, and the closet; he moved warily, as if he had heard the front door close.

At last, deciding he was alone, he began to snoop. There was no other word for his stealthy prodding, as he opened the closet and rummaged among Fulman’s clothes; turning away, he left the door ajar. Returning to the kitchen, he pulled out drawers and opened the cupboards, examining the contents of each; every few minutes he stepped to the window to look out. He seemed to find nothing of interest in the kitchen except some small cellophane packets. Tearing off the wrapping, he stood munching; the cats could smell peanut butter. He picked up a magazine from the table and leafed through it, grinning-then from somewhere down the row of trailers, a door slammed.

Dirken left the trailer quickly, shutting the door without a sound.

“What was he looking for?” Dulcie said. “Not the money; he knows Lucinda has that.” She sneezed from the dust in the bolster.

Joe turned to look at her.“What if Fulman and Lucinda made off with the money together-to keep it from the rest of the family? Or to hide it from the IRS? Maybe Dirken thinks they stashed the money here?”

Dulcie looked back at him, her eyes gleaming like black moons.“But what about Cara Ray? Did they cut her out?”

“Why not?” Joe shrugged. “What if Cara Ray’s not what we think? What if she came here to get the goods on Fulman? Maybe from the start was working with Torres on his investigation?”

“But the way she talked-as if she-” Dulcie sighed.

“This stuff makes my head ache. Come on, Joe, let’s toss this place and see what we can find.”

Fighting the ornate latches that had been designed to keep the cupboards and drawers closed when the vehicle was in motion-and apparently designed to keep out nosy cats-they pawed into every inch of the trailer, looking for money, for bloodstained clothes, possibly for the crude weapon that had killed Newlon. The gold-and-black linoleum beneath their paws, the gold alligator couch and thick maroon carpet and cloth-of-gold drapes amused Dulcie.“I wonder-did he plan the decor himself?”

Springing to the kitchen counter, she pawed through the dish cupboard, through canned goods and a small stack of clean shirts and underwear. She found nothing to interest the police.

Joe, investigating the clothes hanging in Fulman’s closet, leaped to the high shelf, where the laundry was wadded. Flehming at the sour, musty stink, he gave a raggedmrrrowrof discovery.

Dulcie sprang up beside him. Pawing through Fulman’s dirty clothes, they smelled human blood.

“Here,” Joe said, fishing out a plaid flannel shirt.

The front and sleeve smelled of blood and, hardly visible in the red-and-brown squares, were tiny splashes of dried blood.

With a clever paw, Dulcie began to fold the shirt into a packet small enough to carry in her mouth.“Better leave it,” Joe said. “For Harper to find, where the killer left it.” He leaped down, among a tangle of shoes.

“What if Fulman comes back? What if he has second thoughts, decides to get rid of it?”

“Leave it for the moment, Dulcie. Look at this.”

She dropped down beside him.

At the side of the closet, a bottom panel was loose, the screw holes in the plywood enlarged so they were bigger than the screws; the panel appeared secure until you looked closely.

Sliding and lifting the plywood between them, the cats pulled it off, easing it down onto the carpet.

Its dusty surface recorded pawprints as Joe slipped into the dark recess.

There was a long silence. Soon he peered out at Dulcie, flicking his whiskers in a broad grin.

He backed out dragging a cardboard folder, one of those rust-colored accordion numbers meant for the organization, by the neatniks of the world, of their paid bills and canceled checks. Behind Joe, in the gloom, loomed four white shoe boxes.

The cats dragged the boxes out into the little hall where faint starglow seeped down through the trailer windows. They opened the folder to find bank receipts that were, at the moment, of little interest to them. The first box they clawed open held letters that did not seem pertinent. But under these lay a small black ledger, each page headed by a proper name, above columns of dates and numbers-Fulman had kept careful financial records. But of what?

“Records of his scams?” Dulcie said. Pawing through the box, they were aware of increasing sounds beyond the trailer, of women’s voices. Clawing open the last bundle of letters, their eyes widened.

The return addresses were all the same: Shamas Greenlaw, at a Seattle Post Office box. The letters were addressed to Sam Fulman, and had been written over a period of approximately ten years.

Sharing out the envelopes between them, they read each letter, looking for clandestine financial deals or for any hint of a scam-leaving, unavoidably, a few innocent tooth and claw marks.

The missives contained nothing more exciting than discussions of family affairs-though it did seem out of character for Shamas to be so concerned about the health and welfare of his great-aunt Sarah. In each communication to Fulman he had apparently enclosed a sizable check, each letter mentioning the amount of the check that was to be deposited to his aunt’s account at her nursing home. At the bottom of each letter Fulman had noted the amount received and the date deposited.

All very efficient.

All displaying a degree of unselfishness that did not seem natural to Shamas Greenlaw.

“And,” Dulcie said, “if he was supporting his aunt, why didn’t he send the money directly to the nursing home?”

The cats looked at each other, and smiled.

“Nice,” Joe said. “Very nice.”

“It’s only conjecture,” she said.

“Yes,” he said, pawing through another box. “And here are the receipts. Valencia Home for the Elderly. Greenville, North Carolina.” He compared the first few receipts with the letters, and with the ledger. The dates and amounts matched. He looked at Dulcie, his yellow eyes as keenly predatory as if the two cats had a giant rat cornered. “Any bets that no such home exists?”

Dulcie grinned; then stiffened as they heard a car pull away and a trailer door slam.

Then silence.

In the next box was a stack of purchase orders from Bernside Tool and Die Works in Spokane, Washington, to a variety of customers. Payments to this company had been made directly by the purchasers. No name appeared more than once. These payments, too, were entered in Fulman’s ledger. Each date coincided, within a few days, with the gifts to Aunt Sarah.

“So,” Joe said, “it was Shamas’s company, and he was donating his income to Aunt Sarah.”

“Sure. Right.” Dulcie fished a letter from the stack, a statement and the matching purchase order. Setting these aside, they pawed the rest of the papers back into their boxes. The cats were inside the closet, maneuvering a shoe box back into the cubbyhole, when the trailer was jolted as if someone had burst through the front door. Glancing around the door as a second jolt hit, they saw the dining chairs flying on their casters, banging into the walls. The closet door slammed closed. Something crashed against it. They heard dishes fall and breaking glass.

When the earth was still again, they felt as if all air had been expelled from the trailer, leaving a gigantic vacuum. As Joe fought the doorknob, they heard, from the far end of the park, scattered cries of distress and amazement.

They worked at the door until they were hissing at each other, but couldn’t open it. When they heard the front door bang open, they thought it was another quake-then wished it had been a quake.

“Fine,” Fulman snarled, stomping in. “Go on back to your suppers. A little jolt never hurt nothing.” The door slammed and a light flared through the crack beneath the closet door-and Fulman’s papers lay scattered, in plain view, up and down the hall.

21 [????????: pic_22.jpg]

“WHAT THE hell!” Fulman shouted. The cats heard him heaving broken glass or china, as if into a metal container. “Damned quake! Damn California quakes. I’ll take a North Carolina tornado any day.”

Cara Ray giggled, a high, brittle laugh.

Crouched on the closet shelf beneath Fulman’s dirty clothes, Joe and Dulcie listened to his heavy step coming down the hall.

“And what the hell’s that!”

He stood just outside; they imagined him looking down at the scattered letters and invoices, then they heard him snatching up papers. He stopped once, perhaps reading some particular letter.“Damn it to hell. The quake didn’t do this. Someone’s been in here.”

“Who, lover? What is it? What’s happened?”

He was quiet again, shuffling papers. Outside among the trailers the excited voices had quieted, as if those residents alarmed at the quake had taken Fulman’s advice and returned to their suppers.

“Don’t look like they took nothing,” Fulman said. “Maybe the quake scared ‘em off. Check the windows, Cara Ray. See if one’s open or unlocked. Get a move on.” He jerked the closet door open; light from the kitchen blazed in through the rumpled shirts and shorts, beneath which the two cats crouched, as still as two frozen cadavers.

From beneath a fold of laundry, they could see Fulman kneeling below them, pushing papers and boxes back into the hole, his brown hair rumpled, his thin shoulders stringy beneath a thin white T-shirt. Sliding the plywood panel onto its screws, he turned away from the closet but did not close the door. They heard, from the kitchen, a drawer open, and in a moment he returned, carrying a hammer, his thin lips pursed around a mouthful of nails.

Kneeling again, he nailed the panel in place tighter than the surrounding wallboard had ever been secured.

When he had gone, the cats burst forth, panting for fresh air, and peered out where he’d left the door cracked open.

A sickly yellow light burned over the kitchen sink. They could see one of the shoe boxes and the small black ledger on the kitchen table; they watched as he fished a white-plastic grocery bag from a kitchen drawer and shoved the ledger and papers inside.

Dropping the bag on the table beside the empty box, Fulman fetched a bottle of vodka from the cupboard, with two glasses and a can of orange juice.

The cats remained in the closet for the better part of an hour. If the great cat god had been smiling down on them tonight, he’d have provided them with a tape recorder-or an electronic bug hooked directly into Molena Point PD. If ever a murder confession was thrown in their furry faces, this was the moment.

As Fulman mixed the drinks, Cara Ray prowled the trailer. Instead of her little pink skirt, she was wearing form-fitting tights printed with Mickey Mouse, an item she had apparently picked up in some children’s department, maybe as a lark, little-girl clothes that looked far more fetching on Cara Ray than on any child they were made for. Above Mickey Mouse, she was snuggled in a huge chenille sweater the color of raspberry ice cream. Her long blond hair hung loose. Her face was scrubbed clean of makeup, making the tiny blonde look vulnerable and innocent. If she were to appear in court like that, she’d snow any jury.

Sipping her drink, wandering down the narrow hall, she moved into the bedroom, trailing her fingers along the walls and molding, prompting Dulcie to wonder if she had already tossed the cupboards and drawers at some earlier time, and was now pressing for less obvious hiding places. She opened the closet door, her head inches below the cats, stood looking down at the wall where Fulman had nailed up the plywood.

But what was she looking for? Certainly she’d heard from Fulman about the empty canvas bag. But maybe she didn’t believe that Lucinda had the money.

Sitting down at the table, Cara Ray’s glance scanned the ceiling, as if imagining the dead spaces above the thin plywood.

Fulman’s expression was dryly amused. “You won’t find any money in here, Cara Ray.”

She did not look embarrassed, only startled. She looked back at him evenly.

“What I want to know, Cara Ray, is how did she get into that concrete wall? When that wall cracked, in the quake, well, hell, you saw it. That whole wall-as thick as the wall of a federal pen.”

“So how come it cracked?”

“Someone cracked it before the quake.” He looked at her intently. “That old woman had to have help.”

“Whatever. She has the money now.” She paused. “Doesn’t she, Sam?” Beneath the table, Cara Ray’s fist tightened. “Or maybe it was Torres; maybe he got here before he said.”

Fulman shook his head.“I searched his car that morning. He didn’t have nothing. And why would the old woman act like she had the money if she didn’t?”

“I don’t know, Sam. Could Torres’ve come up from L.A. earlier than I thought? Used a second fake name-been in another motel? Could’ve been here all along while I was down seeing my ‘sister’ like I told him? Snooped around that old house, found the money-maybe knew right where to look? Could’ve gone up into that wall from under the house?”

Cara Ray pushed back her long, pale hair.“So when I called him that morning, said that I had car trouble coming back from my sister’s, he’d already got the cash?

“He could have hid it right there in his motel room, the one at the Oak Breeze, even, and I never thought to look. Damn it to hell. I should have tossed his room, before? Before, you know. So where is it now? You think maybe the maid got it, some little bitch sneaking into the dresser drawers and feeling under the mattress? Or maybe,” she said hopefully, “maybe Torres put it in a safe-deposit box.”

Fulman snorted.“Torres wasn’t that fond of banks. And you can’t get a safe-deposit box, Cara Ray, without having a bank account, not in California.”

“So he had a bank account. Hetraveledup and down this coast! If you’d done some phoning to the banks, you could’ve found out. You had plenty of time, Sam.”

“Don’t snap atme,Cara Ray. I didn’t know the old woman had gotten the money. You’re the one who didn’t toss his room. You’re the one who said the money was in the house wall. Said it was the last thing Shamas told you. If you’d found out exactlywherein the damn wall?”

He gulped down a shot of vodka.“Dirken thought it was there. All those repairs. Who knew that old woman could be so sneaky? And then those two damn dogs find the empty bag!”

She held out her glass.“You never even suspected the old woman.”

He slopped vodka into her glass.“Why would I? Her acting like she was about out of it, like she didn’t know nothing about what Shamas did.”

He sat down at the table.“Maybe she didn’t know-until that old fool Pedric told her.”

“That why you tried to do him, Sam?”

“I never thought he’d tell her about the money.”

“So why did you-”

“The Seattle stuff, Cara Ray. He knows about that, from Shamas. I don’t need her prying into that.”

“And now, the old man can still tell her. Thanks to your messing up.” She sucked at her drink. “And probably he will.”

“Well, he doesn’t know about the other.”

“Unless Newlon told-”

“Newlon can’t testify now. And what did he know? Newlon was the one who searched for Shamas, who went down in the sea for him. Newlon was the one who found him, hanging there with his foot tangled in the line-Newlon didn’t have a clue.”

Cara Ray’s face colored with a blush of guilt.

“What the hell? What did you tell him, Cara Ray?”

“I didn’t tell him. He knew there was something, all that scuffling before you shouted that Shamas was overboard. Newlon looked right at me, said, ‘No one would trip over them dogs, Cara Ray. Not Shamas. Shamas was sure on his feet.’”

Fulman shrugged.“Well, he can’t say nothing now.”

Cara Ray’s heart-shaped face fell into a pouting scowl. “I still don’t see why you made all that fuss, hustling those dogs off the boat before you called Harbor Patrol. Seems to me-”

“Because, Cara Ray, they were driving me crazy. I didn’t think I could stand the damn dogs another minute, jumping all over me-cops all over the place, and them dogs underfoot every time you turned around.”

“All the more reason for the cops to believe Shamas fell over them. I still don’t see why you changed your story at the last minute, why you were in such a hurry suddenly to get the dogs out of there.”

“Because, Cara Ray, the cops might think we were all drunk or crazy on drugs, letting those dogs run on deck at a time like that. Who knows, cops might try to slap a manslaughter charge or something on us, for carelessness.”

“That’s a crock, Sam. You don’t believe that.”

But then her eyes widened. She fixed a cold look on him.“Did Shamas have a stash with him? Big money, hidden on the boat somewhere? Is that why you left before the cops got aboard? Is that why you took the dogs off-used them for an excuse? So you could get into Seattle and hide the money before we called the cops?”

She stared hard at him.“Is that it, Sam? The dogs covered for you, while you took the money off?”

Dulcie cut a look at Joe, mirroring his disgust. These people were beyond sick. No matter how big a womanizer Shamas Greenlaw had been, he hadn’t deserved being pushed overboard by these scum.

“Here it is,” Joe whispered, “the whole scene laid out for us, and what are we going to do with it?” He sat up tall on the closet shelf, his yellow eyes burning with frustration.

“Shamas was stupid anyway,” Cara Ray said. “Dogs don’t belong on shipboard. I told him?”

“Well, Cara Ray, they-”

“Filthy beasts, doing their mess all over. I told Shamas I wasn’t cleaning it up.” She widened her eyes at Fulman. “You cleaned up plenty of dog crap. Cleaned it up all the way from Seattle back to San Francisco.”

She looked puzzled.“You get all the way back here with those mutts, then you turn ‘em loose. Why did you do that, Sam?”

“Getting too big to handle. Got loose the morning I-the morning Torres wrecked his car. They were wild, jumped out of my car, ran down the road. I figured to hell with ‘em, let ‘em go. They’d make their way, someone down in the village ‘ud feed ‘em-and someone did,” he said. “Anyway, I decided I didn’t want to be hauling them around, right in Newlon’s face. Keep reminding him, keep him all shook up. Not too swift, was Newlon.”

“And that old couple, Sam. That George Chambers. You botched that one, too. Don’t you think the cops-”

“Someone was coming, Cara Ray. Right up the street headed right for me. I thought-Chambers didn’t move. Went limp as a rag. Ithoughthe was dead, Cara Ray.”

“Trouble with you, you try to do someone, and you panic. Decide they’re dead when they’re not. Why do you do that, Sam? We could’ve just skipped. Now you’ve got two men dead and two wounded, and don’t you think the cops-?”

“You do one man, Cara Ray, you might as well go for it. The ones after that don’t count. Besides, the Fulmans and Greenlaws never get caught. Well, caught maybe once in a while, but we always walk. Worst that can happen, the family goes bail and we skip, lose the bail money.”

Fulman smiled.“It’s in the family, Cara Ray. Luck. Plain Irish luck”

Cara Ray watched him nervously. Her scrubbed face was not glowing now; she looked pale, as if she was having doubts about Fulman, as if she was losing her nerve.

But then her eyes narrowed.“I want my share of the money, Sam. I don’t need all this grief for nothing.” Her gaze widened. “Are you sure there ever was any money in that bag? Or was the old woman making an ass of you?”

“Shamas always buried money, Cara Ray. Everywhere he lived. The other women never knew-you’re the first he told.”

“Maybe he was getting senile,” she said, laughing. “I would have sworn Lucinda never knew.”

Cara Ray rose, poured herself another drink, found a box of sugar, and stirred two heaping teaspoons into the vodka-laced orange juice.“You never make it sweet enough.”

She turned on him suddenly.“Maybe Shamas took itallwith him on shipboard. Maybe you have it all, Sam.” Leaning over the table, she pushed her face close to his. “How much money did you get, Sam? How much of Shamas’s tax-free stash, as he called it?”

“Don’t be stupid, Cara Ray, you know I wouldn’t cut you out.”

She sat down again, ran her hand down her leg, smoothing her Mickey Mouse tights.“Far as that goes, maybe Pedric and the old woman and their sweet little early-morning walks, maybe they carried the money away then, a little at a time.”

“And hid it where, Cara Ray? In Pedric’s trailer? He’s not that stupid.”

She shrugged.“Maybe buried it, maybe down the hill somewhere, under those rocks.”

She lifted an eyebrow.“And why not his trailer? Brought it right on up here and hid it somewhere in there that even you wouldn’t think to look-maybe inside a wheel? In the water tank or something.”

“I don’t know, Cara Ray, that’s-”

“And now with the old man in the hospital, and his trailer empty, I’d think you’d-”

Fulman rose.“He wouldn’t hide it there, Cara Ray. He’d know we’d all look there. Me, Dirken, Newlon?”

He stood watching her.“But I guess it wouldn’t hurt to smoke it over-now, while he’s out of the way.”

Snatching his jacket from the chair, he headed out the door. Cara Ray gulped her drink and followed him.

And Joe and Dulcie abandoned the closet, intent on their own hurried agenda.

22 [????????: pic_23.jpg]

FULMAN HAD left the kitchen light burning; it cast a greasy yellow glow across the gold-and-black decor and the fake mahogany paneling. The plastic bag was no longer on the table; only wet rings remained where Fulman and Cara Ray had set their glasses. Sniffing at the glasses, Dulcie lifted her lip in disgust.“Take the paint off a fire truck.”

“It’s here,” Joe said from beneath the table. He backed out, pulling the bag. Peering inside to be sure the papers were still there, he left it in the middle of the floor and galloped to the bedroom, where he had seen a cell phone on a shelf beside the bed.

“Joe, Cara Ray left her purse, they’ll be coming back.”

Joe paid no attention. Pawing open the phone, listening for the dial tone, he punched in the number. The phone’s small buttons made it hard for a cat to hit the right digit. These manufacturers that called their products user-friendly didn’t have a clue.

Lieutenant Brennan answered, evidently relieving the dispatcher. Brennan didn’t want to put the call through; he said Harper could not be reached.

“This is really urgent. There’s no time-”

“He’s on a missing person call-possibly a drowning. That is extremely urgent,” Brennan said coldly, and he again refused to contact Harper.

Well, he needn’t be so surly. But maybe he’d had a bad night. Maybe he had stomach gas, with all the fried food he ate. Hanging up, Joe dialed Harper’s cell phone. He hadn’t memorized Harper’s several phone numbers for nothing; though sometimes the connection on the cell phone wasn’t too good.

Harper answered; he sounded gruffer than usual, short-tempered and preoccupied. Joe described the papers and ledger they had found that linked Fulman to Shamas Greenlaw’s scams and maybe to his death. “Most of the papers are in a hole behind his closet, you have to pull the wallboard off. But the ledger and the most important letters, Fulman put in a plastic bag-meaning to take them with him. He’ll be back here any minute, to get them.”

“What do you mean, linked to Shamas Greenlaw’s death?”

“Fulman and Cara Ray Crisp pushed Shamas overboard; I heard them talking about it. And with Cara Ray’s help, Fulman killed Raul Torres-caused the accident that killed him.”

“You’ll have to give me some facts,” Harper snapped. Joe could picture the captain in his squad car, scowling at the phone as he drove. Joe would not, at one time, have made so bold as to expect the police captain to act on his word alone, without proof. But since the first murder that the cats had been involved with, all the information they had passed to Harper had resulted in arrests and convictions. Every phone call Joe had made had helped the department; he and Dulcie had furnished Harper with information from conversations that thepolice would not be in a position to hear, discussions the police had no reason to listen to, and for which they would have had no legal right to employ sophisticated electronic equipment-yet conversations that held the key to solving the crimes in question.

“I can’t give you any proof, Captain. From what I overheard tonight, Shamas Greenlaw didn’t pitch over the boat’s rail unassisted. Fulman and Cara Ray did the job; then, because Raul Torres grew suspicious, Fulman set Torres up to die. Fulman stabbed George Chambers and left him for dead. He killed Newlon Greenlaw-hit Newlon with a rock, and he injured Pedric Greenlaw, went away thinking he’d killed Pedric.”

“That’s a long list. Who is this? I can’t run an investigation on anonymous tips like this,” Harper said irritably.

“My tips have been useful in the past, Captain.”

“Will you give me your name, give me a number where I can reach you?”

“You know I can’t do that. Never have, never will. But I just witnessed, in Sam Fulman’s trailer, a direct confession that incriminates both Fulman and Cara Ray Crisp. You’ll have to take my word.

“However,” Joe said, loving to play Harper along slowly, “there is a bit of proof. Fulman’s shirt, a red-and-brown plaid flannel, that is wadded up in his laundry on the closet shelf, is spotted with tiny flecks of dried blood. I’m willing to bet it’ll turn out to be Newlon Greenlaw’sblood.

“Right now, Fulman and Cara Ray are searching Pedric’s trailer, looking for hidden money that they think was lifted from under the Greenlaw house. Two dogs-those dogs that Clyde Damen keeps-dug out an empty bag this afternoon, evidently found it just after the quake, in the cracked foundation.

“Fulman is convinced that it had contained money buried by Shamas. He told Cara Ray that Shamas always buried money, that Shamas called it his tax-free account.”

Harper was silent for so long that Joe thought he’d lost the connection. But then, in a dry, tight voice, “I’m on my way up there. Why don’t you hang around?”

“I’m taking the grocery bag with me, Captain, before Fulman comes back. But the laundry is in the closet, the plaid shirt and, under it, one sample letter and one receipt.

“The bag I’m taking contains ten year’s worth just like them. I’ll leave it in the cave, say, twenty feet back from the entrance, in whatever crevice is handy. White-plastic grocery bag. Should be easy to spot.”

Joe hung up before Harper could accuse him of tampering with the evidence. He stiffened as a ripping noise exploded in the bathroom.

“They’re coming,” Dulcie hissed. “We can’t use the front door. Come on-I ripped the screen off.”

He started to drag the bag toward the bathroom, then leaped back to the bed, took the phone clumsily in his mouth, nearly unhinging his jaws, and shoved it in with the letters. Hauling the heavy bag toward the bathroom, he left it in the hall long enough to slip into the closet and rub his shoulder back and forth across the dusty plywood panel where their pawprints were incised. It was possible Harper would send forensics up here to get fingerprints, depending on what came down. If the officers picked up pawprints, so be it-but he hoped they didn’t. That had been a professional hazard as long as he and Dulcie had been at this clandestine business.

Dragging the bag into the bathroom, he saw that Dulcie had gotten the glass open. It was a tiny little window. Pulling the plastic bag between them, up onto the sink, they barely got it through. As they squeezed through after it, Dulcie caught her breath.

“Look,” she breathed, staring away down the hill.

Down on the highway, two black-and-whites were parked along the shoulder. The cats could see officers moving along the lower cliff.“What are they doing?” Dulcie said softly. “They can’t be here already to answer your call. What’s happening?”

But Joe’s mind was on the package. On the ground below them, its stark white plastic reflected light where there was no light. If Fulman came around behind the trailer, he couldn’t help but see it.

They heard, behind them, the trailer door open. They flew out the window as Cara Ray’s soft tread came down the hall. Landing hard in the darkness, grabbing the bag, they hauled it underneath the trailer, against a rear wheel.

They were crouched beside the wheel, trying to punch in the number for North Carolina information, when Joe saw, standing between two trailers, a dark figure nearly hidden: a tall, slim man, his dark jacket and pants fitting neat and trim-a uniform. A cop. And the man’s lean, easy stance was unmistakable.

Every hair down Joe’s spine stood at attention. Harper couldn’t be here so soon-he had barely hung up the phone from talking to Harper. “Dulcie, Harper’s out there-”

But Dulcie was busy speaking to an operator three thousand miles away. He listened to her make several calls, then she looked up at him, her green eyes wide and dark.“I got a disconnect for Bernside Tool and Die. No such number.”

“Shh. Keep your voice down. Dulcie?”

“The special operator couldn’t tell me how long it might have been since that was a good number, if ever.” She licked her paw. “Those Bernside Tool and Die invoices were dated just a few months ago.”

“Dulcie, Harper’s here.” Joe crouched, watching Harper’s feet coming toward them, up the brick walk, the police captain moving swiftly and silently in the shadows. But Dulcie was dialing again, speaking in a whisper, asking information for the number of Valencia Home for the Elderly.

“I can’t speak any louder. Please listen.” She asked the operator several questions, then looked up at Joe.

“No listing. Not in Greenville, North Carolina.”

Before he could stop her, she had dialed again, and asked for a special operator, and was laying out a long list of questions. She hung up at last, dropped the phone into the plastic bag.“There is no Valencia Home for the Elderly,” she whispered. “Not in Greenville, South Carolina, either. Not in any nearby city.”

“Dulcie, Harper’s standing just on the other side of this wheel, at the bottom of the steps.”

She paid attention at last, creeping out to look. Above them, they could hear Fulman and Cara Ray arguing-the floor must be thin as paper.

“Harper’s going to knock on that door,” Joe said, “and we-”

“We, what?” she hissed. “No one knows we’re under here. And if they did?? We’re cats, Joe.Cats.“She dialed again, and asked for the number of the Greenville, North Carolina, PD.

She asked several questions, and hung up, grinning.

“They never heard of Valencia Home for the Elderly. They suggested I try Greenville, South Carolina. I told them I’d already done that, that it was the same story.” She began to purr. “Fake nursing home, fake machine-tool business. I can’t wait for Harper to find these letters.”

“He isn’t going to find them if we don’t hike them out of here and stash them. I don’t?”

There was a knock at Fulman’s door, then soft, sliding footsteps above their heads, as if Fulman had slipped off his shoes, approaching the door quietly. They heard Cara Ray mumble.

“Don’t be stupid,” Fulman hissed. “Why would a cop-?”

“They know something, Sam. Oh my God-”

They heard rummaging from the area of the dinette.“Where is it? Where the hell is it, Cara Ray? What’d you do with the papers?”

“Forget the papers. I don’t have them. I want out of here.”

“Where did you put them? What the hell-?”

“I didn’t touch the damned papers!”

“Keep your voice down. What the hell! Has that damn cop been inside? He can’t do that. What about my rights!”

“I want out, Sam. I don’t-”

“And how would you suggest we do that without walking right into him? Go out through the roof?”

“A window-the bathroom window’s open.”

“It’s the only window on that side, Cara Ray. Except the kitchen window. They’re both dinky. You might squeeze through, but I can’t. Go on if that’s what you want.”

From between the wheels, the cats could see, on the little porch, Max Harper’s size eleven police-issue black oxfords. They heard Cara Ray in the bathroom, fiddling with the window. But suddenly right above them came a sharp, metallic click. The kind of businesslike double click of heavy metal, as when someone slips a loaded clip into an automatic.Thunk, click.

Joe leaped at the phone and slapped in Harper’s number, praying he’d answer.

He got the little recording that informed him the phone was not in use at this time. Harper had turned it off, to avoid it ringing as he stood watching outside Fulman’s door.

But maybe Harper had heard the click, too. He had moved off the porch fast, backing against the wall. The door was flung open.

Stepping out onto the porch, Fulman looked down at Harper. The cats didn’t see a gun. Fulman’s hands hung loose.

“You remember me, Fulman. Captain Harper, Molena Point Police. I’d like to talk with you.”

Fulman stepped back into the trailer. Harper moved in behind him. The door closed.

No sound came from within. The cats strained to hear. Joe made one more hasty call, whispering, then they fled down the hill, dragging the grocery bag, the plastic shining stark white in the darkness-it would look, to a casual observer, as if it was hurrying down under its own power; the cats would be only shadows. Backing down the hill, hauling it along together like a pair of bulldogs, their teeth piercing the plastic, the thin plastic tearing on rocks and bushes, they got it down at last between the boulders and into the mouth of the cave.

In the wind they heard no sound from up the hill, not Harper’s voice or Fulman’s. Whether the silence portended good, or signaled that Harper was in trouble, they had no way to know. Hauling the bag into the cave, they tried to gauge twenty feet, then to find, in the blackness, a crevice or niche in which to stash the evidence. Joe didn’t like being so far beneath the earth. As they moved deeper still, all sounds from without faded to silence.

23 [????????: pic_24.jpg]

JOE GREY’S paws began to sweat. He’d rather fight a dozen hounds than creep down into the earth’s dark belly. He might be a civilized tomcat, might be well informed on many matters, but he was not without his superstitions, not without some deep feline fears. And he did not like anything about Hellhag Cave.

Behind the cats, wind swirled into the cave, snatching at their backsides like a predatory beast, making the fur along Joe’s back stand straight up; his every muscle felt as taut as wire cable.

“This deep enough?” he growled around a mouthful of plastic.

“Not yet,” Dulcie said, dragging at the bag, and she pushed deeper, into darkness so profound that even their night vision couldn’t penetrate; they had only their whiskers to guide them, and their sensitive pads to feel the way, to keep them from pitching over a ledge into empty space. He said not another word until at last she stopped, dropping her corner of the bag.

“Here. In this crevice. Help me lift the bag. Push it here.”

“You seem to know the cave very well.”

“I’ve been down here once or twice,” she said casually. “There’s a narrow slit here. I’m going to crawl in, push it farther back.

“Wait, Dulcie.”

“I’ll only be a minute. I know this little niche. When the sun’s out, in the afternoons, you can see it well enough.”

“You don’t know what it’s like since the last earthquake.”

She paused, was so still he could hear her breathing.

“Oh my God,” she said softly. “I could have lost the whole package in there.”

“I could have lost you in there. Did you think of that?”

She backed out, pushed close to him, and licked his nose. Turning back, they found a ledge partly concealed behind a rough outcropping, and dragged the package up onto it among scattered rocky debris. Harper should find it there, should see its curve of white between the stones.

Their errand completed, Joe raced for the cave’s mouth, unashamed, leaving Dulcie to take her time. His paws were sweating; his fur felt prickly all over. He was soon sucking fresh air again beneath the open sky, reveling in the sky’s vast and endless space. Dulcie came out laughing at him and gave him a whisker kiss.

Above them, up the hill, there was no sound from Fulman’s trailer. They could see no movement, no shadow within the yellow square of the kitchen window. Had Harper arrested Fulman? Arrested him without any sound of battle reaching them in the night?

“Look,” Joe said, rearing up. Beyond Fulman’s trailer, a large, dark shape was slipping along between the wheeled houses; soon the cats could make out the pale markings of a squad car: the backup that Joe had called. It stopped behind Fulman’s trailer. Two officers emerged, silent and quick.

Down the hill, the first two police units were still parked at the edge of the cliff.

“Brennan mentioned a missing person,” Joe said. “Maybe those units are part of the search.”

“Wonder who’s missing,” Dulcie said softly. “I hope not a little child.” Beyond the patrol cars, to the south, they could see two officers searching below the road along the lower cliff, appearing and disappearing, their flashlight beams swinging through the shrubs; and where a tiny steeproad led down toward the sea, the cats caught the gleam of another car, parked among the scrub oak, and saw a flash of light and hints of other dark figures moving. Dulcie started down the hill, wanting to see more-then she stopped suddenly, staring away where the grass whipped tall and concealing.

Something small and dark lay among the blowing stems. It lay very still, no sign of movement, something blackish brown and limp. Dulcie plunged to reach the still little form, letting out a frightened mewl.

She reached in a tender paw to touch the unmoving lump.

She went limp, too, as if all the starch had gone out of her. Joe sped toward her.

Moving to press against her, he saw that it was not a cat at all, not the little stray that Dulcie had surely imagined; it was only a purse, a woman’s purse. An ordinary leather purse with an open top, lying in the tall grass.

“Cara Ray’s purse?” Joe said, wondering how it had gotten down here.

“No, not Cara Ray’s. It’s Lucinda’s. I thought-”

“I know what you thought,” he said, rubbing his cheek against hers. “It’s not the little waif. But, Lucinda’s purse?” He stood up on his hind paws, looking around them, searching the windy, empty night for a sign of the thin old lady. “She doesn’t come up here at night, Dulcie.”

Dulcie stretched tall, scanning the grassy verge.“Well, she wasn’t at dinner. But even if she was here somewhere, why would she leave her purse?”

“Are you sure it’s hers?”

“Oh yes, it’s hers. I recognize it, and that’s Lucinda’s scent-but there’s another smell, too.” Puzzled, she pushed deep into the handbag, her rear sticking out, her tail lashing, her voice muffled.

“Musty smell. Like mildew.” She nosed around, pawed at something-and backed out with a thin packet of hundred-dollar bills clutched in her teeth. Dropping the musty bundle, she held it down with her paw.

“It was tucked into the side pocket. Smells just like the canvas bag.” A reflection of starlight gleamed in her dark eyes. “Is this part of the buried money? Is it Lucinda who’s missing? Has she run away, taking the money? Or did someone-?”

“Dulcie, Lucinda’s not some baby to run away or be lost.”

“Then what is her purse doing here?” She looked at him intently-then glanced up toward the cave, her eyes widening, searching the shadows at the cave’s mouth.

“There was no one in there, Dulcie. We’d have caught her scent.”

“Would we? Over the reek of damp earth?” She looked down the hill at the searching officers, their fights sweeping and flashing, and at the car parked below the road. “Is that Lucinda’s car?” She leaped away, was yards down the hill, making for the half-hidden vehicle, when shouting erupted from the trailer above them; she stopped to look back They heard thudding, as if men were fighting-and the crack of a shot. Dulcie dropped, belly to ground.

“Come on,” Joe hissed. She crept to him. They slid behind a boulder as, above them, Fulman burst around the end of the trailer, running, swerving downhill straight at them, dodging between the dark bushes.

They didn’t see Harper or the other officers. Fulman fled for the rocks where they were crouched and on past them. He careened into the cave as if he knew exactly where to run. Joe sprang to follow him-if Fulman went deep enough, and if he had a light, even if he only lit a cigarette lighter to find his way, he was sure to see the gleam of white plastic.

But Fulman stopped just inside the cave. Hunkered down, he watched the road below, watching the four officers race up the hill, heading for their cars, summoned by that single shot.

As the two black-and-whites spun U-turns and headed around the hill for the road that led up to the trailer park, Fulman slipped an automatic from his hip pocket.

The cats, crouched six feet from him, had turned to creep away, when Dulcie whispered,“Look”

Down on the road, another car came around the bend from the village, Clyde’s yellow convertible, the top up but the rumble seat open, where the pups rode wagging and panting. Before Clyde had stopped, Selig leaped out, tumbled tail over nose, then danced around the car, barking. Clyde parked on the narrow verge above the sea; immediately Hestig jumped out, sniffing at the air, his tail whipping.

“What the hell is Clyde doing?” Joe hissed. “Why would he bring the pups, with all this confusion?”

The passenger door opened, and Wilma stepped out.

“They’re looking for Lucinda,” Dulcie whispered. “When she wasn’t at dinner, I thought she just? Oh my. What’s happened to her?”

Clyde was trying uselessly to corral the two dogs, as they ran circles around him. He gave up at last and moved along the verge, looking down the cliff, dangling the empty leashes. But Wilma headed straight up Hellhag Hill, hurrying for the cave where Lucinda liked to sit-straight toward Sam Fulman, crouched in the blackness, cradling his automatic. The cats flew to meet her.

Dulcie leaped into Wilma’s arms, nearly choking as she tried to get out the words. “Go back. Fulman’s in there. He has a pistol. He shot-he shot at Harper.”

Wilma dropped behind the nearest bush and slid downhill, rolled twice, and fetched up behind a boulder out of the line of fire-her reactions as sharp as when she had worked parole cases; Dulcie supposed the body didn’t forget; like snatching a fast mouse, the habit was with you forever.

The cats crowded close to Wilma. Shielded by the rocks, they could barely see the cave; but they could see, high above it, Fulman’s trailer, where Harper and an officer were easing Cara Ray into the backseat of a squad car, Cara Ray fighting and swearing.

“What happened?” Dulcie whispered to Wilma. “Where’s Lucinda?”

“She hasn’t been home since just after the quake, when the Greenlaws hauled her furniture out of the house.”

“Mightn’t she have gone out to eat by herself, because she was angry? Why did they call the police?”

“She and I had an appointment with the priest-she was upset about Dirken’s plans for the funeral. When she was an hour late, I went by the house.”

Above them, Harper and two officers moved down the hill on foot, keeping low, were soon lost among the dark bushes.

“With all that’s happened,” Wilma whispered, “with the Greenlaws knowing that Lucinda had found the money, Harper thought it best to look for her. Probably she just got in her car and left for a while, left them to their haggling.”

The three officers crouched above the cave among the granite boulders; they would not be able to see into the cave, as Wilma and the cats could. Fulman had moved deeper in, hidden among the inky shadows.

“Fulman,” Harper said, “you’re trapped. You’d do best to come on out.”

Fulman appeared suddenly at the mouth of the cave, his pistol drawn, facing uphill in a shooter’s stance.

“Look out,” Wilma yelled.

The officers dropped. Fulman fired. Three shots flashed in the darkness. The officers rose and circled fast, down either side of the cave, returning fire. Fulman had disappeared. Wilma and the cats lay flattened, Joe wondering if this was the last night in his and Dulcie’s lives-and if they had any lives left, for future use. Watching Lieutenant Wendell slip down beside the cave, Joe’s eyes widened at the metal canister in Wendell’s hand.

“Come out, Fulman,” Harper shouted. “Hands on your head. You have ten seconds, or that cave’s so full of tear gas, you’ll sell your soul for air.”

“My god,” Dulcie said, staring at the canister.

“It could save a life,” Wilma snapped at her. “Run-get down the hill. If the wind picks up a whiff of that stuff?”

But before Wendell could throw the canister they heard a scuffle in the cave, heard a woman scream and Fulman swearing. Another scream, and Fulman loomed in the entrance, pushing Lucinda before him.

“See what I have, Harper. Go on, throw your little bomb.”

The officers drew back. Fulman dragged Lucinda out of the cave, staying behind the thin old woman, moving down the hill using her as a shield. Lucinda was limp and obedient.

“She was in the cave all along,” Dulcie whispered. “She was there when we went in. Why did she let him see her?”

Fulman had backed a third of the way down toward the highway, dragging Lucinda, when the pups raced up at them, barking, half in play, half with confused anger. Fulman spun, kicking at them, the old lady stumbling. Selig and Hestig leaped and snapped at him. He kicked them again, and forced Lucinda across the road to the edge of the cliff, where it sheared away to the breakers. Lucinda made no effort to fight him; caught between the sea crashing below and the gun he held against her, she was very still.

Clutching her arm, he faced the ring of officers that had followed them.“Get the hell away, Harper. Get your men away-the whole mess of you. Or you’ll be picking her out of the ocean.”

The officers drew back But at the rage in Fulman’s voice, the pups went wild. They charged him, Hestig low and snarling, grabbing his ankle as Selig leaped at his chest, hitting him hard; at the same instant Lucinda came alive. Clutched against Fulman, she twisted violently, biting his arm. He hit her in the face. She kneed him where it had tohurt, and when Fulman doubled over, she clawed his face and jerked free. Maybe all the anger she had stored, unspent for so many years, went into that desperate bid for freedom. Certainly the violence enraged the pups. They tore at Fulman. Fighting the dogs and fighting Lucinda, Fulman lost his balance. He fell, dragging Lucinda. They were over the cliff, the pups falling with them clawing at Fulman-humans and pups falling?

Officers surged to the edge, and began to ease themselves down. Fulman was sprawled on a ledge some ten feet below, lying across Lucinda, tangled with the pups. Lucinda had his gun. As Fulman lunged for it, she twisted away. He hit Lucinda hard, snatched the gun, took aim at the officers crowding down the cliff.“I told-”

Joe Grey leaped.

He didn’t think about getting shot or about falling a hundred feet into the sea or about how Max Harper would view his unnatural response or about Dulcie following him, he was just claw-raking, snarling mad: he didn’t like Fulman harming Lucinda; he didn’t like Fulman’s gun pointed up at all of them. Only as he clung to Fulman’s face, digging in, did he realize that Dulcie was beside him, raking Fulman’s throat.

Their weight and the shock of their attack sent Fulman sprawling on the crumbling edge. They felt Lucinda struggle free, saw her grab a rock. Crouching, she swung, her face filled with rage. She hit Fulman in the stomach, pounding him, pounding.

Only then did Joe Grey face the fact that he and Dulcie might have been blown to shreds by one shot from Fulman, exploded into little bits of cat meat. He watched Officer Wendell swing down onto the ledge, his weapon drawn, covering Fulman-the sight of Wendell’s automatic was mighty welcome.

Fulman drew back against the cliff. Lucinda huddled at the edge, staring down at the heaving sea.

As Wendell cuffed Fulman, the cats scrambled up the cliff, past him. From above, they watched Wendell put a leg chain on Fulman, then tie a rope around Lucinda, making a harness, preparing for the officers above to hoist her to the road.

Clyde and two officers lifted her to safety. Her face was very white, her pale hair clinging in damp curls. She said no word. She kept her eyes closed until she was again on solid ground.

The next moments, as the paramedics took over, examining Lucinda and Fulman, Joe and Dulcie fled into the tall, concealing grass.

Pity,Joe thought,that Fulman didn’t crash on the rocks and die. Pity Lucinda didn’t shoot him, be deserved shooting;she would have saved the state of California a good deal of trouble, to say nothing of the money they’d spend prosecuting this scum.

“What is it with humans?” he asked Dulcie, watching Clyde clip leashes on the chastened pups-chastened not from any scolding Clyde had given them. How could he scold them for their wild behavior, when they had helped to capture Fulman? But chastened from the fall; the two dogs were very quiet, the whites around their eyes showing. It was an amazement to Joe that no one, in that ten-foot slide and fall down the cliff, had any broken bones.

What Max Harper would have to say about his and Dulcie’s part in Fulman’s capture did not bear considering. Joe guessed he’d better come up with a good story-coach Clyde on it, and fill Wilma in. Set up a scenario about how these two cats got along so well with the pups, that when the pups got excited, the silly cats got excited, too, went kind of crazy-feline hysteria.

Sitting hidden in the grass, out of the way of the police, Joe and Dulcie watched the first rescue unit pull away, transporting Sam Fulman to the hospital. Two police guards rode with him.

“Look at the damage Fulman’s done,” Joe said. “Shot Harper in the arm, and Lucinda’s lucky she isn’t dead. Three menaredead at Fulman’s hands-and for what? To line his greedy pockets. But the paramedics took care of him just like he was worth saving.”

“Civilized,” Dulcie said. “The result of thousands of years of civilization.”

“I don’t call that civilized, I call it silly. And if humans are so civilized, how come all the crime-the rise in murder statistics? Rape statistics, robbery, you name it.” He looked at Dulcie intently. “If you think there’s been progress, then how come the jails are so full?”

But Dulcie only shrugged; she was too tired to express an opinion on matters as complicated and diverse as human ambiguities.

Sitting close together, the cats watched Wilma hurry to retrieve Lucinda’s car, preparing to follow the second ambulance, which was taking Lucinda to Emergency. Suddenly Dulcie crouched to race down the hill, to go with her.

But she stopped, turned to look at Joe.“Come on-don’t you want to be with Lucinda?”

Joe licked her ear.“You go. I want to be sure Harper finds the bag-see you in Jolly’s alley.” And he was away after Harper, racing up through the grass as Harper climbed toward Hellhag Cave. Joe paused only once to look back, as Wilma pulled away behind the rescue unit; when he and Dulcie had faced danger together, he never liked to be parted from her.

But what could happen? He watched Clyde’s yellow roadster spin a U-turn, following Wilma. The pups rode as sedately, now, as a pair of middle-aged sightseers; he wondered how long that subdued frame of mind would last. Only Harper’s squad car remained, beside the highway, where one of the officers had put it after retrieving it fromthe trailer park. It looked lonely there, strangely vulnerable. Quickly, Joe followed Harper on up the hill.

As the captain stepped into the darkness of Hellhag Cave, Joe glimpsed a movement among the rocks.

Maybe it was only a shadow cast by the light from Harper’s swinging torch, as the captain disappeared inside. Joe didn’t wait to see. Swallowing back his fear of the place, he followed Harper.

24 [????????: pic_25.jpg]

JOE WATCHED the light of Max Harper’s torch move quickly into Hellhag Cave, its bright arc slicing through the darkness. Joe took a step in, and another. Swallowing his distaste, he followed Harper, slipping along close to the wall, his whiskers brushing cold stone.

Harper moved slowly, studying each crevice until, ahead, a flash shone out between the stones as icy white as snow gleaming in the torchlight.

Before Harper touched the bag, he slipped on a pair of thin gloves. Carefully lifting out a letter, he held it by a corner, bright in the beam.

In a moment, as he read, that lopsided grin lit Harper’s dour face, that smug, predatory smile that made Joe Grey smile, too.

Glancing around the cave, Harper bundled the bag inside his jacket. Instead of leaving, he moved deeper in, swinging his torch so the cave floor was washed in moving rivers of light. Joe could hear loose stones crunching under the captain’s shoes. He remained still until Harper turned back, his beam seeking the mouth of the cave again.

Harper stopped before a narrow shelf. Joe heard him suck in his breath.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Harper said softly.

Sliding closer, Joe reared up to look, cursing the great cat god who had given him white markings. If Harper flashed the torch in his direction, his white parts would shine like neon.

And even when he stood on his hind paws, he couldn’t see what Harper had found; Harper’s broad-shouldered, uniformed back blocked Joe’s view. Slipping close behind Harper’s heels, he peered around the captain’s trouser legs.

Harper, bending over the stone shelf, was studying two small, dark objects. Barely touching them, he lifted one, placing it in a paper evidence bag. The billfold was thick and bulging, made of dark, greasy leather.

The black plastic tubing smelled like ether-laced pancake syrup. As Harper bagged it, and his light swung around, Joe slid into blackness, lowering his face over his paws and chest.

He didn’t move until the light swung away, leaving a pool of night behind it. He looked out covertly at Harper.

Harper was grinning as if he’d just won the lottery. Folding the tops of the evidence bags and tucking them into his jacket beside the bulge of Fulman’s letters, he was still smiling as he headed back for the entrance. Joe hurried out behind him, as pleased as Harper-but deeply puzzled.

There had been nothing on that shelf when he and Dulcie dragged the plastic bag into the cave. He remembered pausing there. The shelf had been empty. And certainly they couldn’t have passed the stink of brake fluid without smelling it.

Stopping in the shadows of the cave’s entrance, Joe watched Harper descend Hellhag Hill to his police unit.

Had Fulman hidden those objects in the cave, maybe been afraid to throw them in the ocean, afraid they’d wash up on the shore again, or someone would fish them out? Maybe Fulman didn’t want to take time to bury them, and was wary of dumping them in some trash can-you read about that stuff, some homeless guy finding the evidence in a trash can.

So Fulman had stashed the brake line and the billfold in the cave?

But not in plain sight, not on that shelf.

Frowning, Joe stood up on his hind paws studying the dark, grassy hillside around him. Turning, he stared back at the mouth of the cave.

He trotted in again, listening and scenting out, studying the velvet dark. When nothing stirred, he hurried deeper in, forgetting his fear, sniffing along the cave walls, sniffing at the ledge where Harper had found the evidence.

Nosing at the stone shelf, he smelled not only Harper’s familiar tobacco and gun-oil scent, and the sharp whiff of brake fluid, but, besides these, a yeasty, sweet kitten smell.

Looking deep into the cave, Joe Grey called to her.

There was no answering mew, no small voice coming out of the dark.

He was greatly amused and impressed that the kit had found those items. But where did she find them? And how did she know they were important?

What fascinating worlds of thought, Joe wondered, ran in that small, wild mind?

Again he called to her. Why was she so shy? When a third time he called and nothing stirred, when the blackness of the cave lay around him empty and still, he pressed back toward the cave’s mouth, hungering for open space.

And there she was.

A small silhouette, black as soot, against the starry sky. A tiny being stretching as tall as she could against the sky’s jeweled glow.

“Hello, Kit.”

The kit purred.

He sat down beside her, at the cave’s mouth. “What did you do back there, Kit?”

The kit’s eyes widened, she cringed away from him.

“It’s all right,” Joe said. “You did just fine. Are you hungry?”

“Always hungry,” said the kit.

He wanted to know where she had found the evidence and why she had put it on the ledge. He guessed his questions would wait.“Come on, I’ll show you something to please you.”

The kit followed him slowly at first, slinking along behind. Joe felt protective of her; he wanted to pat and wash her-and was deeply embarrassed at such maternal thoughts. Joe Grey, macho tomcat, wanting to mother some scruffy little hank of cat fur.

“Comeon,Kit. Don’t dawdle.” He turned to wait for her. The kit was so small and thin, but so bright-eyed and alive. Her gaze at him was as brilliant as stars exploding. She galloped up and trotted happily beside him, her head high, her long, bushy tail waving.

Down into the village they wandered. Joe Grey couldn’t hurry her. She had to stop at every new scent, had to look into every shop window, examine every tiny patch of garden.

“I was here before,” she said. “When I rode that dog. I jumped off and ran. This is not like big-city streets. Not like the alleys where I was before.”

She stood up to peer in through the glass at a display of brightly painted pottery, yearning toward it, lifting a paw as if to touch it, much as Dulcie would do. She stopped to sniff a hundred smells, and to pat a hundred shadows.

Down the oak-shaded, flower-decked streets she and Joe Grey walked, dawdling, creating endless delays, until they arrived at last at the small, brick-paved alley behind George Jolly’s Deli.

Despite the late hour, a light burned in the deli kitchen, and Joe could hear cooking sounds, a spoon scraping a bowl; George Jolly was working late preparing his delicious salads and marinades and sandwich spreads.

Jolly must have just set out fresh plates for the village cats; the nicely presented feast had not yet been sampled. No other cat was present.

The kit said,“This is not for cats to eat.”

“Thisisfor cats to eat.”

The kit smelled each individual serving-salmon, caviar, an assortment of cheeses.

“Go on, Kit. You’re not hungry?”

The kit gave him a questioning look, then set to gulping and smacking, sucking up the feast with a fine, robust greed.

She came up for air with cheese on her nose and chopped egg in her whiskers.

And now, her first hunger sated, she looked around her at the little shops that faced the alley, admiring their mullioned doors and stained-glass windows. Her round eyes widened at a bright red-and-blue rocking horse, at the little potted trees beside the shop doors, at the decorative wrought-iron lamps that lit either end of the cozy alley, at the tall jasmine vine heavy with yellow blossoms. She smiled. Then she ate again, rumbling and shaking with purrs.

Dulcie found them there, Joe Grey washing his whiskers and guarding the sleeping kit. The kit lay sprawled on the bricks, softly snoring, her little stomach distended, her face smeared with chopped egg, one paw twitching now and then as if, in dream, she still pawed at the delectable morsels of salmon and sliced Brie.

“Guess what she did,” Joe said, as proud as a parent.

“Made a pig of herself.”

“Besides that. Something-incredible. She found the brake line and the billfold. Harper has them.”

“She didn’t!” Dulcie began to wash the kit’s face. “Oh, she is clever.”

The kit woke, yawning.

“Did you really find those things, Kit? How did you know??”

“In a crevice,” the kit said. “They smelled of that man that came running, the man that hurt Pedric. He was there before. A long time ago he hid those things. Then he hurt the old man, and I didn’t like him.

“Then today you hid that white bag. It smelled of him.” The kit looked up at them with round yellow eyes. “When he came running into the cave, I thought he would see the bag. But the woman was there. He saw her instead. He hurt her; he hurt that kind woman.”

“She’s all right,” Dulcie told her. “She’ll be all right.”

“I saw her go in that big car.”

“Ambulance. That’s an ambulance. The paramedics took good care of her. But why??”

“After the loud noises and blood and he dragged her over the cliff and everyone was shouting and those dogs barking, I went to the cave. Then the man came and”- she looked at Joe-“you were behind him. He was happy to find the bag. And you looked happy. So I quick brought those things out of the crevice and put them for him to find.”

“You were in the cave the whole time,” Joe said.

The kit purred.

“You have done more than you can guess,” Joe told her. “But what was Lucinda doing in there?”

“She likes the cave. She is peaceful there. She likes to be quiet there.”

The kit swished her long, bushy tail.“I never knew a human. The others say humans are bad. Out on the hill, where the others could see, I stayed away from her. But in the cave, when she came today, I went close to look at her. She petted me.”

“Did you-talk to her?” Dulcie asked.

“Ohno.“The kit looked shocked, her yellow eyes widening. Neither Dulcie nor Joe had ever seen a cat with eyes so round; the kit’s little thin face was vibrant with life, with the deep, shifting lights of amusement and intelligence.

“Why do the others haze you?” Dulcie said.

“I don’t know. I don’t care; they will go away soon. They don’t like the quakes. They will go where the earth doesn’t shake.”

“And where would that be?” Joe said.

“They don’t know. They mean to search until they find such a place.”

“And will you go with them?” Dulcie asked softly.

The kit was silent.

“Will you stay here alone, then? On Hellhag Hill?”

She didn’t speak.

Dulcie was very still. A terrible longing filled her.“Would you go home with me?” she whispered.

But still the little, mottled kit did not reply.

“Oh,” Dulcie said. “You will go to Lucinda?”

“I will go-with the one who needs me,” said the kit. “With the lonely one who needs me.”

Dulcie turned away and began to wash, trying not to show her disappointment.

The kit patted at Dulcie’s paw. “I can’t be with humans the whole time. Humans can’t climb and hunt.” She snuggled close to Dulcie. “I have no one to teach me to hunt.”

Dulcie brightened. She sat up straighter, lashing her tail with pleasure.

Joe Grey was embarrassed to hear himself rumbling with purrs.

“And when will you go there, to Lucinda?” Dulcie said.

“When the other humans are gone. Those people that, she says, fill up her house. And when that old man comes back from the hos-hospital, and they are together.”

“Together? What do you mean, together?”

“Of course, together.” The kit glanced up the hill to the Moonwatch Trailer Park. “Maybe together there in that little house with wheels.”

Dulcie stared at her, puzzled.

“They are friends,” said the kit. “They need one another. The time is now for them to be together. To start new,” she said, “just like me.

“The time is now for me to go away from the clowder. I have been with them long enough. The time is now for me to start another new way to live.”

“Then you had best come home with me,” Dulcie said in a businesslike manner, “until it’s time for you to go to Lucinda.”

The kit rubbed against Dulcie’s shoulder, extravagantly purring.

And so the nameless kit joined the great and diverse community of Molena Point cats who had fallen, in this one of their nine lives, into an earthly heaven; so the tattered kit was brought home to Molena Point’s bright and nurturing village; now she had only to find herself a name, and find her true calling in the world.

25 [????????: pic_26.jpg]

THE FUNERAL was finished. Shamas Greenlaw lay, at last, in his grave. Whether he rested at peace, no one on this earth could say. His cousin Newlon lay next to him, and the family had made a great event of the double funeral. They had ordered matching headstones carved with angels strumming harps, their wings lifted, their eyes cast toward heaven-whether smiling up at the two departing souls, or conveying their regrets as the deceased were cast out in the opposite direction, was equally uncertain.

The funeral had not, as Lucinda feared, been an embarrassing display of bad taste.

She had told Wilma she was afraid Dirken would take over the rosary arrangements, would create a loud, drunken Irish dirge, with loud weeping and louder music, to bid farewell to Shamas. That was why she had planned to meet with Wilma and Father Radcliff the night that she disappeared.

On her way out of the house that evening, to keep the appointment, she heard Dirken calling to her to get a move-on, that it was time for the two of them to leave.

She’d had no intention of taking Dirken. Quickly, she’d slipped out the kitchen door, got in her car, and took off in the opposite direction from the church. She didn’t have time to call Wilma or call the rectory. “I just wanted to be away-from Dirken, from the whole family.”

After Lucinda was released from the emergency room of Molena Point Hospital, the two women had sat at Wilma’s kitchen table late that night. Dulcie, curled up on the rug, had tried to imagine the kind of colorful Irish wake that worried Lucinda, and that the Greenlaws seemed to want, tried to envision the long-winded and drunken eulogies, as Lucinda described to Wilma.

“All I want is to get the funeral over,” Lucinda said. “A traditional, solemn rosary and mass and burial, and then to be done with it. As cold as it sounds, Wilma, all I want is to be done with Shamas.

“Funerals aren’t for the dead anyway,” Lucinda said. “They’re for those left behind. And I don’t need it.

“For that matter, what good will a mass and a rosary do Shamas? Shamas made his bed with the Lord. Nothing in Heaven or earth is going to change that.”

Dulcie had been both shocked and amused.

“The empty money bag,” Wilma had said, gently changing the subject, “the bag the pups dug out. I’m surely curious about that.”

Lucinda laughed.“Oh, I knew about that money, long before Dirken came snooping.

“It started several years ago, when Shamas repaired the foundation. Shamas never did a lick of work around the house. His sudden, unexpected project so puzzled me that I snooped into the garden shed.

“I found the sledge he used to break the concrete, the bucket and trowel with which he’d repaired it; and after that day I watched him more closely, paid attention to the musty-smelling money that Shamas brought back from the bank a time or two. To the way, when he returned from Seattle after abusiness trip, he always had some excuse, early in the morning, to putter in the yard. And I’d get home from my walk, find he had done a load of laundry. Washed the clothes that, I suppose, he’d worn to crawl under the house. He’d say he had brought so much laundry home from his trip, he didn’t like to burden me with such a lot of work.”

Lucinda smiled.“He must have thought little of my reasoning skills. Must have thought I would never crawl under the house myself, but I did. The next time he left for Seattle I put on some old clothes and took a flashlight and went under there.

“I found a patched place about two feet wide, and a little square in the middle of it, maybe six inches across, where fresher concrete had been troweled in. He must have made the big hole the first time, and then just the smaller one, after that-enough to stick his hand in. I got the sledge from the garage and gave it a whack.

“I was surprised it took so little effort, five or six blows, and the smaller patch of concrete fell right out. When I shined my light in, there was a big canvas bag.

“I didn’t understand why he hadn’t put some kind of screw-plug in the foundation, maybe that looked like a cleanout for ashes, something he didn’t need to cement over each time. I suppose he thought a workman might believe it was a cleanout and try to use it, or that someone else might findit and be curious.

“Well, I didn’t like reaching into that dark place, but I could feel the drawstring. I got it open, and I could feel money, that greasy feel of money and the right size. The bag was filled with packets of money. My heart was pounding, I didn’t know if it was from excitement or if I was scaredstiff.

“When I pulled out a packet, I had a whole fistful of hundred-dollar bills! Counting those bills made me feel a little faint. I kept twenty of them and stuffed the packet back into the bag. I was afraid to take more.

“He’d left the box of patching cement in the garage.” Lucinda laughed. “It had directions printed on it just like a box of biscuit mix.

“Well, from that time on, when I wanted extra money, that’s where I got it. When Shamas never caught on, I grew bolder, took enough to set up a new bank account in my name, in a bank Shamas didn’t use, as far as I knew. I had the statements sent to a post office box-I guess I did learn something from Shamas.

“I always knew when he put cash in the bag. I could hear him down there tapping-he would leave the radio or TV on in the living room to mask the sound. And he would either have just arrived home from a trip, or have come directly from the post office or from UPS.

“Well, then Shamas died and Dirken was here poking around. I took all the money out of the bag, put some in my account, but most of it in a pillow slip. Left the empty bag in there for Dirken to find-my little private joke.”

Lucinda smiled.“With Dirken sneaking around telling me those silly stories about how the house had dry rot, I found his backbreaking work with the pick and hammer most entertaining.”

Dulcie, too, was highly entertained. She wanted to cheer for Lucinda. Well, she thought, the funeral had come off all right. The Greenlaw clan hadn’t turned the mass into a loud and abandoned display, or turned the rosary into a dirge of unseemly weeping. Nor was there any unchurchly music at the gravesite, such as the marching band Dirken had favored tramping through the cemetery tootling on horns and beating drums; the mass and burial ceremonies had been restrained and tasteful.

If a number of ushers of severe countenance stood in strategic locations about the church and cemetery, scowling at any show of wildly unleashed emotions, that fact may or may not have contributed to the solemnity that prevailed among the worshipers. If those ushers looked like cops in civilian attire, that, too, may have added to the sober atmosphere, as did Captain Max Harper’s presence, where he sat at the back of the church. The Greenlaws, every one, moved through the ceremony as quietly as a gathering of nuns, their bowed heads and clasped hands a solemn credit to Shamas and Newlon Greenlaw.

The Church of the Mission of Exaltation of Molena Pinos, with its lovely eighteenth-century Spanish architecture-its heavy beams and antique stained-glass windows, its hand-decorated adobe walls and whitewashed plank ceilings painted with garlands of age-faded red roses, its thick clay floors-and its ancient traditions, embraced the Greenlaws in their parting ceremony as generously as it had embraced, over the centuries, any number of murderers, confidence men, and horse thieves, whenever such deaths occurred among the general populace.

Cara Ray Crisp did not attend Shamas’s funeral; nor did Sam Fulman. One could only imagine Cara Ray there among the mourners, dressed in the form-fitting little black dress that she had bought for the occasion, her eyes cast down with maidenly grief.

In point of fact, Cara Ray, like Sam himself, spent the hours of Shamas’s leave-taking sitting on a hard steel bench behind the bars of Molena Point City Jail, Cara Ray attired in a gray wraparound dress two sizes too big for her, and prison-made tennis shoes without stockings, and Sam sporting a regulation prison jumpsuit dyed bright orange.

And while the funeral and wake might have been circumspect, the party that followed was another matter. Held in the dining room of the Seaside Hotel, just up the coast, flowing with rich food, Irish whiskey, and loud with Irish music, and paid for with moneys contributed unknowingly by shopkeepers and car dealers across the U.S., the party would have made Shamas proud.

Though Shamas’s ghost, if he had attended this parting event, would have been chagrined at the triumph apparent in the eyes of his grieving widow, would have been shocked at Lucinda’s high color and contented smile. Shamas’s ghost would have boiled like swirling smoke at the sight of Lucinda and Pedric Greenlaw standing close together, their eyes meeting warmly, their hands lightly touching.

Nor would Shamas have liked the ceremony that occurred three weeks later, on the crest of Hellhag Hill.

Not that Lucinda cared what Shamas would think, any more than she cared if the whole village gossiped about her for making such a commitment so soon after her husband’s death, and so very late in her life.

This was her and Pedric’s private moment. People could say what they liked. This was a union that carried no load of past expectations, and none of the face-saving that she had tried to maintain while Shamas was alive. The slate, in short, was wiped clean. Lucinda didn’t give a damn.

Max Harper, avoiding the wake, did attend with pleasure the gathering atop Hellhag Hill-as did Wilma Getz, Clyde Damen, Charlie Getz, and the three cats.

Only the pups were not invited. They had been confined in a box stall in Max Harper’s stable, where they couldn’t tear up anything but the stable walls.

The wedding was held on a bright Saturday afternoon three weeks after Shamas’s funeral. Now was the time for the Dixieland band and champagne and laughter. The party delectables were catered by George Jolly. The ceremony was performed by a local justice of the peace, a jovial man fond of unorthodox weddings, Dixieland music, and cats; the site of the ceremony was the small, grassy plateau just below Hellhag Cave. The nuptials were simple, and brief. The moment Pedric kissed the bride, the band burst out with a marching number that accompanied the guests as they climbed the steep hill to the reception, held on what had been the site of the Moonwatch Trailer Park.

The trailers were gone; the ledge was empty save for one green vehicle of some age, standing at the edge, with a view down Hellhag Hill to the sea.

On the abandoned concrete trailer pads between the brick walkways, small tables and umbrellas had been set up, surrounding George Jolly’s sumptuous buffet table and the bar. The bride and groom sat at a table with Wilma and Clyde, and Charlie and Max Harper. On the table next to them, the three cats took their ease, Joe and Dulcie nibbling from their own party plates, the darkly mottled kit sitting up straight and wide-eyed, watching every amazing activity, hearing every astounding word, looking this way and that, her ears flicking in a dozen directions, trying to take it all in.

From George Jolly’s alley, the kit had gone home with Dulcie. She liked living in a house. She liked life within warm rooms where one was allowed to sleep on soft furniture. She liked the wonderful smells and the surprising, whisker-licking food. She liked this new, loving relationship with humans.

Everything was new and wonderful and amazing to the small, ragged kit. There were no cold winds to bite her. No snarling, cold-hearted cats to haze and snipe at her, to slap her and drive her away from some small nest she had tried to make her own.

She had new friends. She would soon have a new home. Far more adaptable than a human, perhaps, she had launched herself into this new life with all claws grabbing.

But now suddenly she was all tired out. Too much ceremony. Too much talk. Too many new things happening. Surfeited with amazements, the kit curled up on the table and fell immediately and deeply asleep. She slept stretched out with great and trusting abandon, her long bushy tail hanging down over the side of the table, her whole being relaxed into a mass of ragged fur. She looked, with her black-and-brown fur sticking out every which way, more like a moth-eaten fur scarf lying across the table than anything alive.

Lucinda reached quietly to pet her. To Lucinda, the kit was a wonder, a sweet charmer who soon would be their own, hers and Pedric’s. Stroking the kit, and looking around her at the shelf of land that would hold their new home, Lucinda felt deeply content.

The hillside setting would accommodate very nicely a small, rambling structure designed to fit their needs, just herself and Pedric and the kit and the feral cats they hoped they might care for.

Lucinda did not know that the tattered kit’s clowder had moved on; it didn’t matter, there would be other cats.

The house would be designed so the kit would have her own aeries and tall perches among the rough-hewn beams, and of course she would have soft couches to nap on.

Lucinda had not needed the cash soon to come from the sale of her house to Brock, Lavell& Hicks to buy this land; she had used other money for that. Money, she told most people, that she had saved, over many years, from her household allowance. And who was there to say different?

Max Harper listened with some interest to the couple’s plans for their new home; but he was quiet. He seemed, to Joe Grey, particularly withdrawn. Ever since the capture of Sam Fulman-except for that grin of discovery and triumph that Joe had seen when Harper found the evidence in Hellhag Cave-Harper had seemed unusually edgy and stern.

Is that my fault?Joe wondered.Mine and Dulcies? Have we pushed Harper too far? Did we come close to the limit with Harper, leaping in Fulman’s face the way we did? Have we gone beyond what Harper can accept?

Harper had once told Clyde that when a cop stumbled across facts that added up to the impossible, such a thing might put him right around the bend. That if a cop started believing some of this far-out stuff, he could be headed for the funny farm.

Harper’s late wife, Millie, a detective on the force when she was alive, had handled the nutcases, the saucer sightings and souls returned from the dead. Harper said that when Millie got a case that she couldn’t explain away rationally, it gave them both the creeps.

Clyde and Wilma had passed off the cats’ attacking Sam Fulman as animal hysteria, triggered by the wild leaping and barking of the two pups: the frantic pups had gotten the cats so keyed up that their adrenaline went right through the roof. The two cats went kind of crazy.

Harper might believe them. And he might not. Harper knew animals, he knew that the overexcitement of one creature could infect the animals around him.

He had appeared to buy the story.

But with Harper, one never knew.

The cats watched the bride and groom depart in a flurry of confetti and rice, with tin cans tied to the bumper of Lucinda’s New Yorker, setting out for a few weeks traveling up the California and Oregon coasts.

George Jolly served another round of champagne to a handful of lingering guests. Max Harper settled back, watching Clyde and Wilma and Charlie. The three were filled with questions.

“Long before Shamas drowned,” Harper said, “Torres had gotten friendly with Cara Ray, as a source of information in his investigation of Shamas’s swindling operations. Of course he was investigating Fulman, too, on the same cases.

“Somewhere along the line Torres, checking on Shamas’s bank accounts in half a dozen names, must have realized that Shamas was taking in far more money than he was depositing or laundering, stashing it somewhere. Very likely he knew about Shamas’s reputation among the Greenlaw family for burying money.

“Torres got pretty tight with Cara Ray, picking up bits of information from her. When he heard, from Seattle PD, that Shamas had drowned, he called her.

“Maybe he thought she knew about the money, knew where it was, maybe thought they could join up. That’s the way we read it. If so, that was the moment he stepped over the line from investigation to the other side, thinking how to get his hands on Shamas’s stash. What Torres didn’t know was that Cara Ray was also seeing Sam Fulman.”

Harper paused to light a cigarette.“Assume Cara Ray knew about the money and played Torres along. There’s some indication that she thought Torres was tight with Seattle police, that he might suspect she and Fulman killed Shamas. Say she gets scared. Couple that with the fact that Fulman knew Torres was investigating him along with Shamas, and you have two people wanting Torres out of the way.

“When Torres takes off for L.A., on an investigation and to pick up the antique Corvette he’d bought from a dealer down there, they figure he’ll make a little detour into Molena Point to look for the money. They decide to do him.

“Cara Ray honeys Torres up and makes plans to meet him in Molena Point on his way back from his LA. investigation, have a few romantic days together.

“That early morning, the motel took a phone call to Cara Ray’s room. Operator heard a man answer. The call was from a woman, at about four A.M. There’s no record of the caller’s number; it was local. We have a witness who saw Torres leave the motel at four-thirty, in the Corvette.

“None of the maids had seen Cara Ray for maybe twenty-four hours. We found a note in her room: ‘Honey, my sister’s sick. Going to run down to Half Moon Bay. Back late tomorrow night.’

“She has a sister there, but she hadn’t been sick, hadn’t seen Cara Ray for several months. She lied at first to cover for Cara Ray, but then decided she didn’t want her own neck in a noose.”

Harper smiled.“So much for family loyalty.

“Very likely Cara Ray went up to Fulman’s trailer, called Torres from there, said she had car trouble, wanted him to come get her.

“Say Fulman is down on the highway in the fog, waiting for Torres’s Corvette. He’s sitting there ready to hit a blast on the horn, or maybe parks his car across the road-something to make Torres put on the brakes hard at that curve, squeezing out the brake fluid.

“There were skid marks on the road, but not enough other markings to make much of a picture. However,” Harper said, “we have the cut brake line, with Fulman’s prints on it. We have Torres’s billfold, which was removed from the Corvette along with the brake line, before my men got there that morning.

“The lab found, along the broken edge of glass from the car window, particles of leather from the wallet. Besides Torres’s own prints on the leather and plastic, we have a good partial print for Fulman.”

Joe and Dulcie couldn’t help smiling-and could hardly help laughing at the expression on Clyde’s face. They didn’t have to whisper,We told you so.Clyde looked suitably ashamed.

“We have a pair of Fulman’s shoes from the trailer,” Harper said, “and casts of the same shoes at the scene. Enough,” the captain said, easing back in his folding chair, “to prosecute Fulman for Torres’s murder. And maybe enough to prosecute for Newlon Greenlaw’s death. And enough hard evidence, as well, to take Fulman to court on several counts of fraud. Both Washington State and the Feds want him for the machine-tool scams he and Shamas were working.”

“But what about George Chambers,” Clyde said. “Was it Fulman who stabbed Chambers?”

“No prints on the knife,” Harper said. “And Chambers didn’t see his attacker. There may not be enough there to make anything.” Harper didn’t seem to want to talk about Chambers.

Joe and Dulcie glanced at each other, wondering if Chambers had seen Fulman and Cara Ray kill Shamas? If he had not been asleep in his cabin, after all? If Harper might be protecting Chambers as the only remaining witness to the murder of Shamas Greenlaw?

“But then,” Charlie asked, “did Fulman try to kill Pedric because he knew about the bag of money?”

“I’d guess the whole family knew there was stash hidden somewhere. That they just kept out of Dirken’s way, that it was Dirken’s call, and that they knew they’d get their cut. No, I’m guessing he tried to kill Pedric because Pedric was getting too friendly with Lucinda.

Tubman might have been afraid Pedric would clue Lucinda in on the scams they were running, and that she would come to us, turn him in.

“When Fulman attacked Pedric, he most likely thought he’d killed him.”

Joe and Dulcie looked at each other and turned away smiling. Harper would never know that the one witness to that attack and Newlon’s murder slept on the table only a few feet from him-a witness who would never face a jury in a court of law.

Joe, licking his shoulder, caught a glance from Clyde, a pitifully chastened look that made Joe want to roll over laughing. Clyde’s misjudgment and embarrassment provided a frame of mind that, if Joe played his cards right, should be good for several weeks’ worth of gourmet dinners from Jolly’s, to say nothing of an improved breakfast menu.

Wilma, on the other hand, had the same smug, I-told-you-so look as the cats. She and Harper had nailed nine members of the Greenlaw clan, including Dirken, on fraud charges across the country from Molena Point to North Carolina. The fact that her old, unreformed probationer was behind bars, as well, and likely to stay there, didn’t hurt her mood, either.

Wilma had terminated her investigative position at Beckwhite’s, laying all future problems back in the lap of Sheril Beckwhite, and had returned to the library, along with Dulcie. Joe had to say, the moods of both were improved. Dulcie, in fact, was wildly cheerful. Whatever problem she’d had, to make her so moody, seemed to have vanished when the little tattered kit came to stay with her and Wilma-though even the pups had driven away some of Dulcie’s scowls and tail-lashings.

It might be, Joe thought, that the pups had found a permanent home. At least maybe Selig had. Selig’s silliness seemed a challenge to Max Harper. The pup got along very well with Harper’s three horses, too, running and playing with them in the pasture.

Charlie seemed reluctant to part with Hestig. She’d said twice, that week, that she might look for a house with a yard.

Joe knew he had been staring at Charlie. She rose, reaching to stroke Dulcie.“Come on, cats. Come and walk with me.”

The three cats dropped down from the table and galloped after her, racing past her as she climbed the steep hillside.

Sitting high atop Hellhag Hill like any four friends out for a walk, Charlie and the cats looked down at the little tables and umbrellas below them, where the last wedding guests lingered, all so small they looked like dolls arranged from a child’s toy set. Beyond the umbrellas, out upon the sea, a billion suns winked and danced across the whitecaps.

To the north shone the rooftops of the village, muted red and pale, drawn together by the dark oaks, then the green hills rolled away toward the low mountains, their emerald curves punctuated with tree-sheltered houses, with little gardens and pale stone walls.

Among the hills, the cats could see Harper’s acreage, his white house and barn and the roof of the hay shed, the fence lines as thin as threads. Three dark shapes moved slowly across the green field where Harper’s gelding and two mares grazed. Two smaller, pale shapes were busy beyond them-deer foraging among the horses.

They could see, down in the village, Joe’s own street, Clyde’s dark roof that always needed shingles, and, across Ocean past the courthouse tower, Wilma’s pale new shake roof and a glimpse of her stone chimney. They could see the red tile roofs of Beckwhite’s Automotive Agency and Clyde’s repair shop, marking the spot where thecats had tracked their first killer-and where they’d had to dodge bullets. They’d been mighty glad to be alive when that party ended. A lot had happened since they saw Samuel Beckwhite struck down in the alley behind Jolly’s Deli.

Below Harper’s home lay the old Spanish mansion with its little cemetery, and farther to the north the old folks’ home. Beyond these, nearer the village, they could see where painter Janet Jeannot had died, where her studio had burned, and had been rebuilt long after Janet’s killer was prosecuted.

Swift movement pulled them back to Harper’s pasture. The two deer were running full out, as if something had startled them.

But they moved strangely, for deer. Too low to the ground, and no leaping.

“The pups,” Charlie said. “They’ve broken out of their stall.”

The cats pictured solid wood walls shredded, perhaps a door latch broken. Running, the pups vanished in a valley. It was only a moment until they came flying up over the rise below Hellhag Hill. Perhaps they were drawn by the music and by the human voices and laughter.

Racing up the hill, they made straight for the reception, crashing in among the tables, overturning empty champagne bottles, snatching food from the buffet. Clyde and Harper moved fast to corral them.

“What a mess they are,” Charlie said, looking at Dulcie and Joe. “What made them attack Fulman like that? Confusion? Selig was terribly confused by that man-he wanted to be friends, then he growled and barked at him.”

Charlie smiled.“Hestig just growled and barked. But they’re good pups. They’ll settle down. They’ll grow up to be good dogs.”

As good as a dog can be,Joe Grey thought, cutting Dulcie a glance.

“Well,” Charlie said, “the pups helped save the day for Lucinda.” She grinned at Joe Grey. “You cats did fine work. All those letters from Fulman’s trailer. The letters, the ledger, and the shirt. And, with the pups, I know you saved Lucinda’s life.”

The cats did not reply. They were still shy with Charlie. No need to tell Charlie that it was the kit who had found the two crucial pieces of evidence, or that it was the kit who had identified Fulman as Newlon’s killer.

Charlie might learn, one day, the talents of the tortoiseshell kit; Charlie was so open-minded for a human, so eager to understand. But she didn’t need to know right away.

And the kit? Dulcie had the feeling that this bright-eyed, ragtag, bushy-tailed kitten might have huge wonders to show them all. To show her and Joe, and show those humans like Charlie-show the innocent and uncorrupted of the world, who had the courage and heart to believe.

6. CAT SPITTING MAD

1

IT WASthe tortoiseshell kit who found the bodies, blundering onto the murder scene as she barged into every disaster, all four paws reaching for trouble. She was prowling high up the hills in the pine forest when she heard the screams and came running, frightened and curious-and was nearly trampled by the killer’s horse as the rider raced away. Churning hooves sent rocks flying. The kit ran from him, tumbling and dodging.

But when the rider had vanished into the gray foggy woods, the curious kit returned to the path, grimacing at the smell of blood.

Two women lay sprawled across the bridle trail. Both were blond, both wore pants and boots. Neither moved. Their throats had been slashed; their blood was soaking into the earth. Backing away, the kit looked and looked, her terror cold and complete, her heart pounding.

She spun and ran again, a small black-and-brown streak bursting away alone through the darkening evening, scared nearly out of her fur.

This was late Saturday afternoon. The kit had vanished from Dulcie’s house on the previous Wednesday, her fluffy tortoiseshell pantaloons waggling as she slid under the plastic flap of Dulcie’s cat door and trotted away through the garden beneath a light rain, escaping for what the two older cats thought would be a little ramble of a few hours before supper. Dulcie and Joe, curled up by the fire, hadn’t bothered to follow her-they were tired of chasing after the kit.

“She’ll have to take care of herself,” Dulcie said, rolling over to gaze into the fire. But as the sky darkened not only with evening but with rain, Dulcie glanced worriedly toward the kitchen and her cat door.

Wilma, Dulcie’s human housemate, passing through the room, looked down at the cats, frowning, her silver hair bright in the lamplight. “She’ll be all right. It isn’t raining hard.”

“Not yet, it isn’t,” Dulcie said dourly. “It’s going to pour. I can smell it.” A human could never sort out such subleties as a change in the scent of the rain. She loved Wilma, but one had to make allowances.

“She won’t go up into the hills tonight,” Wilma said. “Not with a roast in the oven. Not that little glutton.”

“Growing kitten,” Joe Grey said, rolling onto his back. “Torn between insatiable wanderlust and insatiable appetite.” But he, too, glanced toward the cat door.

In the firelight, Joe’s sleek gray coat gleamed like polished pewter. His white nose and chest and paws shone brighter than the porcelain coffee cup Wilma was carrying to the kitchen. His yellow eyes remained fixed on the cat door.

Wilma sat down on the couch beside them, stroking Dulcie.“You two never want to admit that you worry about her. I could go look for her-circle a few blocks before dinner.”

Dulcie shrugged.“You want to crawl under bushes and run the rooftops?”

“Not really.” Wilma tucked a strand of her long white hair into her coral barrette. “She’ll be back any minute,” she said doubtfully.

“Too bad if she misses supper,” Dulcie said crossly. “The roast lamb smells lovely.”

Wilma stroked Dulcie’s tabby ears, the two exchanging a look of perfect understanding.

Ever since Joe and Dulcie discovered they could speak the human language, read the morning paper, and converse with their respective housemates, Dulcie and Wilma had had a far easier relationship than did Joe Grey and his bachelor human. Joe and Clyde were always at odds. Two stubborn males in one household. All that testosterone, Dulcie thought, translated into hardheaded opinions and hot tempers.

The advent of the two cats’ sudden metamorphosis from ordinary cats (well, almost-they had after all always been unusually good-looking and bright, she thought smugly) into speaking, sentient felines had disrupted all their lives, cats and humans. Joe’s relationship with Clyde, which had already been filled with good-humored conflict, had become maddening and stressful for Clyde. Their arguments were so fierce they made her laugh-a rolling-over, helpless cat laugh. Were all bachelors so stubborn?

And speak of the devil, here came Clyde barging in through the back door dripping wet, no umbrella, wiping his feet on the throw rug, then pulling off his shoes. His dark, cropped hair was dripping, his windbreaker soaking. Dropping his jacket in the laundry, he came on through to the fire, turning to warm his backside. He had a hole in his left sock. Violent red socks, Dulcie saw, smiling. Clyde was never one for subleties. As Wilma went to get him a drink, Clyde sprawled in the easy chair, scowling.

“What’s with you?” Joe gave him a penetrating, yellow-eyed gaze. “You look like you could chew fenders.”

Clyde snorted.“The rumormongers. Having a field day.”

“About Max Harper?”

Clyde nodded. The gossip about his good friend, Molena Point’s chief of police, had left Clyde decidedly bad-tempered. The talk, in fact seemed to affect Clyde more than it did Harper. To imply, as some villagers were doing, that Harper was having an affair with one of the three women he rode with-or maybe with all three-was beyond ridiculous. Twenty-two-year-old Ruthie Marner was a looker, all right, as was Ruthie’s mother. And Crystal Ryder was not only a looker but definitely on the make.

But Harper rode with them for reasons that had nothing to do with lust or romance. The cats couldn’t remember the villagers-most of whom loved and respected Harper-ever before spreading or even tolerating such gossip.

Clyde accepted his glass from Wilma, swallowing half the whiskey-and-water in an angry gulp.“A bunch of damned troublemakers.”

“Agreed,” Wilma said, sitting down on the end of the velvet couch nearest the fire. “But the gossip has to die. Nothing to keep it going.”

Clyde glanced around the room.“Where’s the kit?”

“Out,” Dulcie said, worrying.

“That little stray’s twenty times worse than you two.”

“She’s not a stray anymore,” Dulcie said. “She’s just young.”

“And wild,” Clyde said.

Dulcie leaped off the couch to roam the house, staring up at the dark windows. Rain pounded against the glass. The kit was off on another scatterbrained adventure, was likely up in the hills despite the fact that now, more than ever before, the hills were not safe for the little tortoiseshell.

Returning unhappily to the living room, she got no sympathy.“Cool it,” Clyde said. “That kit’s been on her own nearly since she was weaned. She’ll take care of herself. If Wilma and I fussed about you and Joe every timeyouwent off…”

“You do fuss every time we go off,” Dulcie snapped, her green eyes filled with distress. “You fuss all the time. You and Wilma both. Particularly now, since…”

“Since the cougar,” Clyde said.

“Since the cougar,” Dulcie muttered.

Wilma grabbed her raincoat from the hall closet.“Dinner won’t be ready for a while. I’ll just take a look.”

But as she knelt to pull on rubber boots, Dulcie reared up to pat her cheek.“In the dark and rain, you won’t find her.” And she headed for her cat door, pushing out into the wet, cold night-and Joe Grey was out the plastic door behind her.

He stood a moment on the covered back porch, his sleek gray coat blending with the night, his white paws and the white strip down his face bright, his yellow eyes gleaming. Then down the steps, the rain so heavy he could see little more than the dark mass of Dulcie just ahead, and an occasional oak tree or smeared cottage light. Already his ears and back were soaked. His empty stomach rumbled. The scent of roast lamb followed the cats through the rain like a long arm reaching out from the house, seeking to pull them back inside.

Along the village streets, the cottages and shops were disembodied pools of light. They hurried uphill, their ears flat, their tails low, straight for the wild land where the cottages and shops ended, where the night was black indeed. Sloughing up through tall, wet grass, along the trail they and the kit usually followed, they could catch no scent of her, could smell only rain. They moved warily, watching, listening.

It was hard to imagine that a mountain lion roamed their hills, that a cougar would abandon the wild, rugged mountains of the coastal range to venture anywhere near the village, but this young male cougar had been prowling close, around the outlying houses. Nor was this the first big cat to be so bold. Wilma had, on slow days as reference librarian, gone through back issues of the Molena PointGazette,finding several such cases, one where a cougar came directly into the village at four in the morning, leaving a lasting impression with the officer on foot patrol. Wilma worried about the cats, and cautioned them, but she couldn’t lock them up, not Joe Grey and Dulcie, nor the wild-spirited kit.

“Those big cats see every flick of movement,” Dulcie said, pushing on through the wet grass.

“That kit’s as dark as a piece of night, that mottled black and brown coat vanishes in the shadows. Anyway she’d hardly be worth the trouble, to a cougar-not even a mouthful.”

Dulcie hissed at him and raced away through the rain.

The cougar had been on the Molena Point hills since Thanksgiving, prowling among the scattered small ranches, a big male with pawprints the size of Joe’s head. He’d been spotted on Christmas Day, high up at the edge of the forest. Since Christmas two village dogs had disappeared, and four cats that Joe and Dulcie knew of; and huge pawprints had been found in village gardens.

Mountain lion. Cougar. Puma. Painter. The beast had half a dozen names. Late at night in the library, Dulcie had learned about him on the computer, indulging in a little clandestine research after the doors were locked and she had the reference room to herself.

She was, after all, the library cat. She might as well make use of her domain. Wilma had taught her the rudiments of the computer, and her paws were quick and clever. And of course no one among the staff would dream that, beyond her daytime PR activities of purring and head rubbing for the pleasure of the patrons, their little library cat followed her own agenda.

But what Dulcie had read about cougars hadn’t thrilled her.

California had always had mountain lions. They’d been hunted nearly to extinction, then put on the protected list. Now, as their numbers increased, their range was growing smaller-more houses being built, more people moving into their territory. It took a lot of land to support a 120-pound carnivore.

The residents of Molena Point expected an occasional coyote to venture down from the coastal range; Joe and Dulcie were ever on the alert for the beast called God’s dog. And there were sometimes bobcats and always bands of big, vicious racoons hunting in packs. But a mountain lion was quite another matter. When the two cats had first found the cougar’s prints high up among the hills, a thrill of terror and of awe had filled them.

This was the wild king roaming their hunting grounds. His magnificent presence made them prowl belly to the earth, ears and tail lowered, their senses all at alarm, their little cat egos painfully chastened.

But it had been a strange year all around. Not only the appearance of the cougar, but the odd weather. Usually, fall in Molena Point was sun-drenched, the cerulean sky graced by puffy clouds, the night sky clear and starry or scarved by fog creeping in off the sea to burn away again in early dawn. But this fall had been wet and cold, a cruel wind knifing off the Pacific beneath thick gray clouds, pushing before it sheets of icy rain. Then people’s pets began disappearing, and lion tracks appeared in the gardens.

A horrified householder had called police to report that the lion had entered his carport and had, in trying to corner his cat, slashed the tires of his black Lincoln Town Car, beneath which the cat had taken refuge: four flat tires, two badly scratched bumpers, a ruined paint job, lots of blood, and one dead Siamese.

And now the kit was headed alone into the black hills. And as the two cats moved higher, searching, they had only the brush of their whiskers against sodden grass and wet stone to lead them, and their own voices calling the kit, muffled in the downpour.

The kit had been staying in Dulcie and Wilma’s house since her adopted human family, elderly newlyweds Pedric and Lucinda Greenlaw, left Molena Point for a jaunt in Pedric’s travel trailer. The kit had refused to accompany the pair again. She loved Pedric and Lucinda and was thrilled to have a home with them, after being on her own tagging after a clowder of vagrant cats that didn’t want her. But she couldn’t bear any more travel. The old couple’s drive up the coast to Half Moon Bay had made her painfully carsick, and on their weekend to Sacramento she threw up all the way.

The kit was special to Lucinda and Pedric, more special than any ordinary cat. Steeped so deeply in Irish folklore and Celtic history, they had quickly guessed her carefully guarded secrets, and they treasured her.

Brought to Wilma’s house, the small furry houseguest had chosen for her daytime naps a hand-knitted sweater atop Wilma’s cherry desk, beside the front window where she could watch the village street beyond the twisted oaks of Wilma’s garden. The kit loved Wilma; she loved to pat her paw down Wilma’s long hair and remove the clip that held her ponytail in place, to race away with it so the thin older woman would laughingly give chase. At Wilma’s house, the kit dined on steak and chicken and on a lovely pumpkin custard that Wilma made fresh each day. Wilma said pumpkin was good for hairballs. The kithad nosed into every cupboard and drawer, investigated beneath every chair and chest and beneath the clawed bathtub, and then, having ransacked the house and found nothing more to discover, she had turned once more to the wider world beyond the cottage garden. The kit had grown up wild-who could stop her now?

Around midnight, on that Wednesday, the rain ceased. Joe and Dulcie found a nearly dry niche among some boulders, and napped lightly. It was perhaps an hour later that they heard a scream, a chilling cry that brought them straight up out of sleep, icing their little cat souls.

A woman’s scream?

Or the cougar?

The two sounded very alike.

Another scream broke the night, from farther down the hills. One cry from high to the north, the other from the south, bloodcurdling wails answering each other.

“Bobcats,” Joe Grey said.

“Are you sure?”

“Bobcats.”

She looked at him doubtfully. The screams came again, closer this time, answering each other. Dulcie pushed close to Joe, and they spun away into the forest and up a tall pine among branches too thin to hold a larger predator.

There they waited until dawn, soaking wet and hungry. They did not hear the cries again, but Dulcie, shivering and miserable, spent the night agonizing over the little tattercoat, the curious little scamp whose impetuous headlong rushes led her into everything dangerous. By dawn, Dulcie was frazzled with worry.

The rainclouds were gone; a silver smear of light gleamed behind the eastern hills as the hidden sun began to creep up. The cats heard no sound beneath the dim, pearly sky, only the drip, dripping from the pine boughs. Backing down the forty-foot pine, the two cats went to hunt.

A wood rat and a pair of fat field mice filled them nicely, the warm meal lifting their spirits. With new strength and hope, they hurried north toward the old Pamillon estate, where the kit liked to ramble.

Entering among the crumbled walls and fallen, rotting trees and dark cellars, they prowled the portion of the mansion that still stood upright, but they found no sign of the kit.

The Pamillon estate had been, in the 1930s, an elegant Mediterranean mansion standing on twenty acres high above Molena Point, surrounded by fruit trees, grape arbors, and a fine stable. Now most of the buildings were rubble. Gigantic old oak trees crowded the fallen walls, their roots creeping into the exposed cellars. The flower gardens were gone to broom bushes and pampas grass and weeds, tangled between fallen timbers.

And the estate was just as enmeshed in tangles of a legal nature, in family battles so complicated that it had never been sold.

Some people said the last great-great-grandchildren were hanging on as the land increased in value. Some said the maze of gifts and trusts, of sales and trades among family members was so convoluted that no one could figure out clear title to the valuable acreage.

The kit had discovered the mansion weeks earlier. Newly come to that part of the hills, she had been as thrilled by the Pamillon estate as Magellan must have been setting anchor on the shore of the new land, as new wonders and new dangers shimmered before her.

Joe and Dulcie searched the hills for three days, taking occasional shelter in a tiny cave or high in the branches of an oak or pine, where they could leap from tree to tree if something larger wanted them for supper. They had never before given such serious thought to being eaten. Among the dense pine foliage they blended well enough, but on the hills, on the rain-matted grass, they were moving targets. And all the while they searched for the kit, running hungry and lean, the village was there far below them, snug and warm and beckoning, filled with the delicacies provided not only at home but in any number of outdoor restaurants.

It was late Thursday afternoon, as the two cats pushed on into new canyons and among ragged ridges, that they saw Clyde’s yellow antique roadster climbing the winding roads, going slowly, the top down, Clyde peering up the hills, looking for them. Dutifully Joe raced down to where the road ended, causing Clyde to slam on the brakes.

Leaping onto the warm hood, he scowled through the windshield at Clyde.“The kit come home?” A delicious smell filled the car.

“Not a sign. I could help you look.”

Joe lifted a paw.“We’ll find her.”

“I brought you some supper.” Clyde handed over a small bag that smelled unmistakably of Jolly’s fried chicken.

“Very nice. Where’s the coleslaw and fries?”

“Ingrate.”

Taking the white sack in his teeth, Joe had leaped away to join Dulcie. He hadn’t told Clyde how despondent he and Dulcie were growing. And there was really nothing Clyde could do to help.

By Saturday evening the sky was heavy again, and the wind chill. If the kit was already home, slurping up supper and dozing warm and dry before the fire, Clyde would have come back; they’d see his car winding up the hills or hear the horn honking. One more day, they thought, and they’d give up and go home. And on sodden paws they moved higher into the lonely pine woods. They were well up the forested ridges, far beyond their usual hunting grounds, and the afternoon was grayinginto evening when they heard horses far below, maybe a mile to the north, and the faint voices of women.

Five minutes later, they heard screams. Terrified, angry, blood-chilling.

Joe was rigid, listening, his yellow eyes slitted and intent. He turned to look at Dulcie.“Human screams.”

But the screams had stopped, and faintly they heard horses bolting away crashing into branches and sliding on the rocks.

Hurrying down out of the mountain, and racing north, it was maybe half an hour later when on the rising wind they caught a whiff of blood.

“Maybe the cougar made a kill,” Dulcie whispered, “and frightened the horses, and the women screamed.”

“If the cougar made a kill, we’d hear him crunching bone. It’s too quiet.” And Joe shouldered her aside.

But she slipped down the hill beside him, silent in the deepening evening, ready to run. They were just above a narrow bridle trail when a slithery sound stopped them, a swift, slurring rush behind them that made them dive for cover.

Crouched beneath a stone overhang, they were poised to run again, to make for the nearest tree.

A rustle among the dry bracken. They imagined the cougar slipping through the dead ferns and pines as intently as they would stalk a mouse-and something exploded out of the woods straight at them, bawling and mewling.

The kit thudded into Dulcie so hard that Dulcie sprawled. She pressed against Dulcie, meowing loud enough to alert every predator for twenty miles-“Yow! Yow! Yow!”-her ears flat, her tail down. She couldn’t stop shivering.

Dulcie licked her face.“What is it? What happened to you? Shh! Be still!” Staring into the woods, she tried to see what had chased the kit. Above them, Joe moved up into the forest, stalking stiff-legged, every hair on end.

“No! Down there,” the kit said. “We have to go down there. It was terrible. I heard them scream and I smelled the blood and…”

Dulcie nudged her.“Slow down, Kit. Tell it slowly.”

The kit couldn’t be still. “The horses bolted nearly on top of me. I ran. I don’t want to go back, but…”

“Start at the beginning,” Dulcie said softly.

“I went back afterward, after that man was gone. I went back there just now and they’re dead.” The kit stared round-eyed at Dulcie. “Two women, one young and pretty. So much blood. They’re all over blood.”

“Show us,” Joe said, slipping down beside them.

“I don’t want…”

“Show us, Kit,” Joe Grey said, towering over her.

The kit dropped her head obediently, this kit who was never obedient, and padded slowly down the hills where the black pines reached in a long and darkly forested peninsula. Slipping along through the edge of the forest, the two cats stayed close beside her. Down three steep, slick shelves of stone, dropping down among the dry ferns and loose shale, then onto the bridle trail and that was walled, all along, by the forest. The night was filled with the smell of blood and with the stink of death, mixed with the scent of the kit’s fear.

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THE NIGHT was alive with the tiny noises of other creatures, with little rustlings and scurryings and alarm-cries where small nocturnal browsers fed on the forest’s vegetation, prey to nocturnal hunters and to each other. The kit led Joe and Dulcie down through the forest over the jagged ridges toward the sharp, metallic smell of blood-but then the kit drew back.

Warily, the two older cats approached the bridle trail and the two dark heaps that lay there. The smell of death forced their lips in a deep flehmen; that stink would soon bring predators crouching unseen in the night.

But no four-legged predator had done this terrible deed.

Where was the person who had stabbed and torn his fellow humans? Was he hidden in the forest, watching? Might he be listening, so that if they spoke, he would know their secret?

Tasting the damp wind, they sniffed and tested before they approached the two dead humans. When at last they slipped closer, they were skittish, ready to bolt away.

They looked and looked at the two women, at their poor, torn throats, at their pooled blood drying on their clothes and seeping into the earth.

The cats knew them.

“Ruthie Marner,” Dulcie whispered. The younger woman was so white, and her long blond hair caked with blood. Dulcie crouched, touching her nose to Ruthie’s icy arm, and drew back shivering. Blood covered the woman’s torn white blouse and blue sweater. She had a deep chest wound, as well as the wide slash across her throat. So much clotted blood that it was hard to be sure how the wounds might have been made.

Helen Marner’s wounds were much the same. Her blond hair, styled in a short bob, was matted with dirt where she had fallen. She was well dressed, much like her daughter, in tan tights, paddock boots, a tweed jacket over a white turtleneck shirt, her clothes stained dark with blood. A hard hat lay upside downagainst a pine tree like a sacrificial bowl.

No horse was in sight. The horses would have left the fallen riders, would have bolted in panic, the moment they could break free.

Dulcie backed away, her tail and ears down. She’d seen murders before, but the deaths of these two handsome women made her tremble as if her nerves were cross-wired.

The cats could see no weapon, no glint of metal near the bodies. They did not want to pad across the footprints and hoofprints, to destroy the tenuous map of what had taken place here.

But something more terrible, even, than the sight of the double murder held both cats staring.

A jacket lay on the ground beside the bodies, trampled by the horses’ hooves, a creamy fleece jacket with a strand of red hair caught in the hood, a jacket the cats knew well. They sniffed at it to make sure.

“Dillon.” Dulcie’s paws had begun to sweat. “Dillon Thurwell’s jacket.”

Dillon always wore that jacket when she rode, and she’d been riding every day with the Marners. Dulcie looked helplessly at Joe. “Where is she? Where is Dillon?”

Joe looked back at her, his yellow eyes shocked and bleak.

“And Harper,” he said. “Where’s Max Harper? It’s Saturday, Harper always rides with them on Saturday.” He backed away from the bodies, his angled gray-and-white face drawn into puzzled lines.

Police Captain Harper had taught Dillon to ride. These last two months, the foursome had been seen often riding together, as Dillon and Ruthie trained for some kind of marathon.

Leaping up the stone ledge, Dulcie stood tall on her hind paws, staring around her into the night, looking for another rider.

Nothing stirred. There was no smallest whisper of sound-every insect and toad had gone silent. High above her in the forest she could see the kit, peering out from among the rocks.

Trotting up to join her, Dulcie began to quarter the woods, as Joe searched below, both cats scenting for any trace of Dillon.

Circling ever wider, rearing up to sniff along a clump of young pines, Dulcie caught a hint of the child, well to the north of the bodies.“Here. She was here-she rode here. I can smell her, and smell a horse.”

But Joe was assessing the hoofprints that raced away from the scene tearing up the trail.

“Four horses.” He looked up solemnly at Dulcie. “One with small, narrow hooves. That would be Ruthie’s mustang. And a big horse, heavy-wide hooves. The other two sets seem ordinary.”

Dulcie looked at Joe.“The big horse-big hooves, so deep in the earth. Like Max Harper’s gelding.”

“But Harper couldn’t have been with them. They wouldn’t have been harmed if Harper was with them.” Joe’s yellow eyes blazed, the muscles across his gray shoulders were drawn tight. “Four horses. The Marners. Dillon. And the killer. Not Max Harper.”

The prints of the big horse showed a scar running diagonally across the right front shoe, as if the metal had been cut by a hard strike, maybe from a stone.

Warily the kit came down out of the rocks to press, shivering, between Joe and Dulcie. She was usually such a bold, nervy little morsel. Now her eyes were wide and solemn.

Helen and Ruthie Marner had lived in Molena Point for perhaps a year. Joe’s housemate, Clyde, had replaced the brake linings on Mrs. Marner’s vintage model Cadillac. Clyde ran the most exclusive automotive shop in Molena Point, and he was as skilled and caring with the villagers’ imported and antique cars as a master jeweler with his clients’ diamonds.

Clyde hadn’t liked Helen Marner much; he called her stuck-up. It had amused him that Max Harper encouraged Helen’s friendship, but they all knew why. Harper had refused to ride with Dillon alone and put himself in a position that might attract slander.

Harper had gotten to know Dillon during a grisly murder investigation at Casa Capri, an upscale retirement home. Joe and Dulcie had begun their own investigation before anyone else suspected foul play. But Dillon had come into the act soon after-before anyone had a reason to call the police. She, too, had sensed something wrong. And her stubborn redhead’s temperament had kept her prying, despite what any grown-up said. Of course she’d been right, just as Joe and Dulcie had been, all along.

Max Harper had been very impressed with Dillon-had, during the surprising investigation, grown to respect and admire the child.

When Dillon told Harper that she longed to learn to ride, the captain had volunteered some lessons, if Dillon’s parents agreed and providing someone else came along. An ever resourceful child, Dillon had recruited the Marners, as well as Clyde Damen’s girlfriend, Charlie, as an occasional backup.

“And now they’re dead,” Joe said, looking down the nightdark hills, his ears and whiskers back, his yellow eyes blazing.

“Maybe,” Dulcie said softly, “maybe Dillon got away.”

“On that little, aged mare? Not hardly. Escape a killer on a big, heavy horse, a rider bent on stopping her?” He turned to look at Dulcie. “If Dillon saw him murder Helen and Ruthie, he’d have to silence her.”

She sighed and turned away.

He crowded close to her and licked her face and ear.“Maybe she did escape, Dulcie. She’s a spunky, clever kid.”

That was what he liked about Dillon. Thinking of Dillon hurt made him sick clear down to his tomcat belly.

The cats could see no bike tracks along the trail, and the path was too narrow for a car. Staying on the bracken, studying the dirt and the surround, they could find no boot or shoe prints leading in to indicate someone had followed the riders on foot. Joe imagined a stranger on horseback pulling Helen Marner from her horse, grabbing Ruthie’s horse, and pulling her off, knifing them as Dillon escaped, whipping Redwing to a dead run.

Why? Why had someone done this? What had they gained?

“Robbery?” he said softly. “How much money would people carry, out for a Saturday ride? And their horses weren’t valuable, just common saddle horses.” He knew that from hearing Harper and Clyde talking.

He wanted to shout Dillon’s name, bawl her name into the night until the child came running out of the bushes, safe.

He tried again to catch the smell of the killer but could detect nothing beyond the stink of human death, and the sweeter perfumes of horse and of the pine woods.

To look upon a human person brutally separated from life by another human never ceased to sicken the tomcat. This kind of death had no relationship to his own killing of a rabbit or squirrel for his supper.

Dulcie had left him; he could hear her up in the forest padding through the pine needles, and he caught a glimpse of her sniffing along, following Dillon’s scent. Calling the kit, he leaped up the hill, watching for the predators that would soon come, drawn by the smell of blood.

He didn’t like to leave the bodies alone, to be ravaged by hunting beasts-both out of respect for the sanctity of human creatures and because evidence would be destroyed. But the highest urgency was to find Dillon.

The sky had cleared above them, enough so he could see through the treetops a sliver of rising moon, its thin light seeping in hoary patterns between the black pine limbs.

“I saw more,” the kit said softly.

Joe paused, his paw lifted.“What did you see? Did you see the person who killed them?”

“I heard the screams. I ran to see. Two horses bolted right at me and swerved away down the mountain. No riders, reins flying. Then a girl came racing, leaning over her horse, and a man riding after her, trying to catch her. He grabbed at her horse. They were deep in the trees. I couldn’t see what happened. They disappeared over the hill. The man was swearing.”

“What did he look like?”

“He looked like Police Captain Harper.”

“What do you mean, he looked like Captain Harper?”

“He was tall and thin and had a cowboy hat like Captain Harper, pulled down, and a thin face and a jacket like the captain wears. A denim jacket. I could smell the girl’s fear. I ran and ran; I didn’t go back until just now, when I found you. I came back in the dark when I heard you. I don’t…”

“Listen,” Joe said. Voices came from far down the hills, calling, calling, moving up toward them. “Ruthie! Ruthie Marner! Dillon! Helen! Helen Marner! Dillon! Dillon Thurwell!”

And below them, all across the bare slopes, lights came rising up and they could hear horses-a snort, the rattle of a bit, a hoof striking stone. Up the hills they came, their torches sweeping the slopes and shining down into the ravines. And down beyond the horses and hikers, cars moved along a winding road shining spotlights among the far, scattered houses. The red bubble of a police car rose up over the crest, then two more red-lit units searching for the Marners and for Dillon-searching too late for the Marners. Drawing slowly up the hills toward that grisly scene.

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DILLON! DILLON THURWELL!Ruthie! Ruthie Marner!” The night hills rang with shouts, and swam with careening lights that faded and smeared where scarves of fog crept up the little valleys. “Dillon! Dillon Thurwell!” Max Harper’s voice cut through the others, tense and imperative. “Dillon! Answer me! Dillon, sing out! Whistle!Dillon!”

And up the hills above the searchers, Joe Grey stood on a rock beside the bleeding bodies, wanting to shout, too, wanting to halt the cries and bring the searchers swarming to where the murdered women lay, wanting to shout,Here! They’re here! Ruthie and Helen are here. Here, below the broken pine!

Right.

He could do that.

Shout as loud as a catcanshout, bring the riders galloping to take one look at the murder scene and fan out again searching for the killer, their horses trashing every bit of the evidence in their urgent haste-to say nothing of trampling three fleeing cats.

He had to draw the searchers without alarming them into tearing up the surround.

Slipping behind the rock where he wouldn’t be seen, rearing tall behind the boulder to nearly thirty inches of sleek gray fur, Joe Grey yowled.

Opened wide and let it out, yowled-howled-caterwauled-bellowed-ululated and belly-coughed like a banshee screaming its rage and venom into the black, cold night.

Every light swung up. Torchlight illuminated the cats’ boulder as if its edges were on fire. Captain Harper pushed Bucky fast up the hill, the tall, thin officer pulling his rifle from the scabbard as the big buckskin ran sliding on the rocks. A rifle!

Joe knew that the men of Molena Point PD carried rifles in their squad cars, along with a short, handy shotgun and an array of far more amazing equipment. He’d never thought about an officer carrying a rifle on horseback. He guessed that in the wild mountains to which these foothills led, in the rugged coastal range, a rifle might come in handy-there had been times, up in these hills, when he’d wished a cat could use a firearm.

“There!” Harper shouted. “By the boulders-under the broken pine!”

Every beam centered on the rocks and on the angled tree behind them, and on the two bodies sprawled across the dust-pale bridle path. Lights scoured the boulder where the cats had been.

Crouching higher up the hill, they watched Harper’s buckskin gelding top the rise at a gallop and, behind Harper, riders flowing up like a stampede in a TV western, the pounding of their hooves shaking the earth. Crouched close together, the cats shivered with nervous excitement.

Harper held up a hand. The riders pulled up their horses in a ragged semicircle, some fifty feet below the bodies-a ring of mounted men and women, their flashlights and torches bathing the corpses in a brilliance as violent as if the light of final judgment shone down suddenly upon Helen and Ruthie Marner.

Around the grisly honor guard, the night was still.

A bit rattled. A horse snorted nervously, perhaps at the smell of blood.

Max Harper holstered his rifle and dismounted, swinging down from the saddle to approach the bodies alone. Leaving Bucky ground-tied, he stepped with care to avoid trampling any footprint or hoofprint. His long, thin face was white, the dry wrinkles deeply etched, his dark eyes flat and hard as he looked down on Helen and Ruthie, then looked away into the night, shining his light up into the forest.

When he did not see a third body among the rocks and trees, he clicked on his radio.

“Better have the ambulance up here. And the coroner.” He called in his two detectives from the squad cars below, then knelt to check for vital signs, though there could be none. Dulcie and Joe swallowed, knowing the pain with which Harper must be viewing the scene.

Before he rose, he examined the ground directly around the bodies; the cats knew he’d be committing to memory every mark or disturbance, studying every footprint and hoofprint, every detail of the position of the bodies, memorizing the way the blood was pooled, seeing each tiniest fragment of evidence-though all such facts would be duly recorded by his detectives in extensive notes and photographs.

Joe didn’t like leaving their prints at the scene-he could only hope they looked like the tracks of a squirrel or fox, though surely Harper knew the difference. Crouching, Harper studied the earth for a long time, then, rising, he looked away again into the night, shaking his head as if dismissing that wild cry that had summoned him. Maybe he thought ithadcome from some small, wild beast drawn there by the smell of blood, stopping to yowl a hunting cry, leaving its prints, fleeing at the approach of the searchers.

It was as good a scenario as any. They didn’t need Harper to be unduly aware of cats at the scene; they knew that too painfully from past encounters.

Harper, shining his torch across the ground in ever-widening arcs, turned at last, singling out Officer Wendell.

“Call Murdoc Ranch, Wendell. See if the Marner horses have come home. See if they’ve seen Dillon-or if Dillon’s mare is there.” And again he swung his torch up into the black forest, searching for a redheaded little girl whom Max Harper cared for just as he would love his own child. His light swam over the boulder beneath which the cats crouched. But if he saw them at all, they’d be no more than mottled brown leaves and rotted gray branches, their eyes tight closed, Joe’s white markings concealed behind the kit and Dulcie.

And soon, below them, the familiar routine began. Officers emerged from their squad cars on the narrow road a quarter mile below. Detective Ray and Detective Davis hurried up the hill, the two women loaded with cameras and equipment bags, Davis to shoot roll after roll of film of the victims and the surround while Ray made notes and drew a diagram of body positions. Borrowing Bucky, Davis took many pictures from horseback, to gain the higher angle. The cats thought the team would likely work all night, sifting the earth, bagging and labeling minute bits of evidence, making casts of footprints and hoofprints.

Kathleen Ray was young, maybe thirty-five, a small, slim woman with long dark hair and huge green eyes, a woman who looked more like a model for petite swimwear than a cop. Juana Davis was pushing fifty, a stocky, solid woman with short dark hair and brown Latin eyes. Harper stood watching them, going over the scene, the muscles of his jaw tight.

For the first time in many days, the cats felt safe from predators, with the entire Molena Point PD and half the village milling around the hills and forest.

Soon another squad car arrived and four officers double-timed up the hill to organize teams of searchers. Two smaller parties, of skilled climbers, headed up toward the steep mountains.

When Davis had finished photographing, Max Harper laid out for her what he knew of Dillon and the Marners’ activities that afternoon. As the detective taped Harper’s flat, clipped voice, his words stirred a strange fear in Joe Grey.

“Helen and Ruthie met Dillon and me at my place about ten this morning; they rode over from the Murdoc Ranch, where they board their horses. We headed south along the lower trail toward Hellhag Hill. Rode on beyond Hellhag maybe five miles, turned back around eleven, and stopped at Cafe Mundo forlunch. Loosened the saddles, rubbed down our horses and watered them. Had a leisurely meal.”

Cafe Mundo was located just above Valley Road, adjacent to one of the many bridle trails that bisected the Molena Point hills. It was famous for its fine Mexican dishes. The proprietor, having horses himself, liked to cater to the local horsemen, advertising a water trough and plenty of hitching racks. Cafe Mundo was always first to help sponsor overnight trail rides, charity calf roping, and rodeos.

“If Dillon’s not still on horseback,” Harper told Davis, “if she’s fallen, Redwing will come home. I sent Charlie down to see, maybe half an hour ago. She knows the horses, knows how to put Redwing up. They were-Dillon was going to spend the night with Ruthie, going to stable Redwing withthe Marner horses until morning. She…” Harper’s voice missed a beat. “She’s a strong, resourceful little girl.”

He cleared his throat.“When we finished lunch, Helen and Ruthie and Dillon left. That was about one-thirty. They headed up in this direction, were planning on another two hours, up into the foothills and back. Dillon and Ruthie are-were training for an endurance competition.” Harper fidgeted nervously. “Where the hell is the coroner?”

Joe watched him with interest. Harper had only called for the coroner maybe fifteen minutes earlier. It would take Dr. Bern a little while to get up the hills. They’d never seen the captain wound so tight.

But he couldn’t blame Harper. If the captain had remained with the riders, this wouldn’t have happened. Besides Harper’s intimidating presence, even on horseback he would have been armed, very likely carrying the Smith& Wesson.38 automatic in its shoulder holster-if for no other reason than against predators. No one said what kind of predators. Every cop had enemies.

It had been the habit of the foursome, lately, to take an all-day ride on Saturday, as the girls worked on their endurance skills. Charlie Getz had ridden with them until Crystal Ryder came on the scene. Crystal had been too much for Charlie. Too bubbly, too much flirting-too much all over Max Harper. With both Helen Marner and Crystal attempting to take over Harper as private property, the skirmishes had been more than Charlie could endure.

From what Harper had told Clyde, the women’s ongoing battle didn’t thrill him either. He put up with them, to have ample chaperones for Dillon.

Max Harper hadn’t dated since his wife, Millie, died several years earlier. His friendship with Helen had caused some talk in the village. But when Crystal moved to Molena Point and began to pay attention to Harper, there’d been a lot more gossip. Crystal was far more glamorous than Helen, and her persistencewas amazing. She was, in Joe’s opinion, pushy, wore too much makeup, and was always “onstage.” Not Harper’s type of woman.

Joe was no prude. And maybe his view of these matters was different from that of the human male. But he considered sleazy women totally boring-as tiresome as a perfumed Persian decked out in pink claw polish and a rhinestone collar.

Joe enjoyed a roll in the hay as well as the next guy, but he preferred his ladies with sharper claws and more fire.

“Interesting,” Joe said, “that Crystal didn’t ride with the group this afternoon-and that Harper didn’t mention her.”

Dulcie looked at him, wide-eyed.“What are you thinking?”

“Not sure. Just strange.”

“Well, whatever’s on your mind, we need to tell Harper which way that man chased Dillon. The kit said there, to the north.”

“This is one time, Dulcie, the secret snitch is not going to tip the chief. Not with every cop and half the village swarming, and no phones except in the squad cars.”

“But we have to! Dillon could be… You did it before. You called Harper from a squad car while the officers had their backs turned.”

“Not this time,” Joe said, his eyes blazing so fiercely that Dulcie drew back. “Anyway, there’s no need.” They watched Harper swing into the saddle and head Bucky away to the north, shining his torch along the trail, following those racing hoofprints. And soon the silhouette of horse and rider, backlit by the torch, melted into the night.

Dulcie stared after him, praying that Dillon had escaped, that she was out there on the dark hills hiding, and Harper would find her.

Glancing at Joe, she started to follow. But Joe, leaping away beside her, hit her with his shoulders and nipped at her until she slowed.“Don’t, Dulcie. Leave him alone. What could you do? You couldn’t keep up forever-alone in the night, you’re cougar bait. If Dillon’s out there, he’ll find her.”

She sat down in the pine needles, looking at him forlornly.

“Is nothing safe?” she said. “Is no simplest thing people do beyond danger? It was such a harmless pleasure for Dillon, having a horse to ride.”

The two cats looked solemnly at each other, and padded back through the woods to join the sleeping kit; and to watch, below them, as Detective Davis began to lift plaster casts in their little frame boxes, where the creamy liquid had hardened into boot-prints and hoofprints. As Davis worked, the mist blew thicker over the hills, veiling the moon, casting moon-shadows across the coroner’s thin face, where he stood watching the forensics team, making Dr. Bern look paler than ever. Beside Dulcie, the dozing kit woke, yawning a wide pink gape. Joe, angry at the world, it seemed, didn’t wait for her to wake fully; he fixed her with a steady yellow gleam that shocked her right up out of her dreams.

“What were you doing, Kit, all that time after he killed them and you saw him chasing Dillon? Didn’t you know something should be done? That Dillon needed help? Why didn’t you race down to find us?”

“You weren’tthereto find. You were up here on the hills.”

“But you didn’tknowthat,” Joe said impatiently. “Whatwereyou doing?”

“I ran after the man and the girl, I followed them, I didn’tknowwhat to do. Their scent led down the hills, and when I couldn’t see the horses, I could hear them. I ran and ran. So many smells. I wanted to see if she got away, and then I couldn’t smell her anymore and that was near the ruins so I thought she might hide there and I went in to look.”

“Well?”

Dulcie said more gently,“Did you smell Dillon there? In the ruins?”

“So many smells. Foxes and raccoons. A coyote. I could smellhim,and I hurried away under the rubble where he couldn’t come. I smelled all the night hunters. There is water in the cellars. The big hunters come there to drink.”

“We know that,” Joe said impatiently.

“Don’t you remember,” Dulcie said, “we told you not to go there?Did you smell Dillon?”

“I smelled the cougar.”

For a moment, the kit would not look at Dulcie. Then,“I couldn’t smell the little girl in all the other smells. And then I lost the man-smell. But I smelled the lion and I was afraid. I hid,” she said softly. “I hid and I didn’t know what to do.

“Then when I thought he was gone I slipped away and came back here again and looked at the dead bodies, and I was going to go home andtellyou but then I saw you. I saw you, you were here,” she said, crowding against Dulcie.

Dulcie licked the kit’s mottled face. The little black-and-brown patchwork creature with the round yellow eyes was the strangest young cat she’d ever known.

The kit lifted a dark paw to Dulcie, the fur between her claws so long and thick that it made Dulcie smile. The kit, with her furry paws and the long fur sticking out of her ears, resembled too closely some wild feline cousin-wild looks that exactly matched her unruly temperament.

Tenderly, Dulcie washed the kit’s mottled face. “We will search,” she said. “Just as Harper is searching. But where were you, Kit, for three days? Didn’t you think we worried? We looked and looked for you. You could have said, ‘I want a ramble, I need to go off alone.’ You could have told us you were going.”

“Would you have let me go?”

Dulcie only looked at her.

Joe studied the kit, his yellow eyes nearly black, his white paws, white apron, and the white patch down his nose bright in the night.“What is that smell on you, Kit?”

“What smell?”

“Musty. Deep musty earth. I don’t remember a smell like that in the ruins, even in the cellars-notthatkind of smell.”

The kit looked innocently at Joe.

Joe fixed her with a hard gaze.

And Dulcie moved close to the kit, standing tall over her, her own neck bowed like a torn, her tail lashing.“Where,Kit?Wherewere you?”

“I went down,” the kit said softly. “The deep, deep place below the cellars.” And she moved away from them, suddenly preoccupied with patting at the dry leaves.

“Pay attention!” Joe snapped. “What deep place!”

“Down under the ruin,” said the kit, flattening her furry ears and turning her face away.

“Deep down?” Dulcie said softly. “Why, Kit?” But she knew why. The tattercoat kit was keenly drawn to strange, frightening fissures. She was as obsessed with the cellars of the old Pamillon estate, and with the yawning cave-ins that dropped away even beneath the cellars, as she had been with the deep and mysterious caverns that she claimed lay below Hellhag Hill.

“I went down and down.” The kit’s round yellow eyes filled with a wild delight. “Down and down under the cellars. Down and down where my clowder wanted to go. Down and down under water dripping, down long cracks into the earth, down and down until I heard voices, until…”

“You did not,” Joe snapped. “You didn’t hear voices. You didn’t go below any cellar. You’re making it up-inventing silly tales.”

“Deep down,” said the kit. “Down and down and I heard voices.”

“It was echoes,” Joe hissed. “Echoes from water dripping or from sliding stone. You’re lucky to be up in the world again, you silly kitten, and not buried under some earthslide in one of those old cellars.”

The kit looked at Joe Grey. She looked at Dulcie.“Down and down,” she said stubbornly, “to that other place beneath the granite sky.”

And Dulcie, despite herself, despite her better judgment, believed the kit.“What was it like?” she whispered.

“You didn’t go there,” Joe repeated, baring his teeth at the two of them.

“Terrible,” said the kit. “It is terrible. I ran up again, but then I lost my way. I had to go back and start over, I had to follow my own scent.”

Dulcie said softly,“Were the others from your clowder there?”

“I was all alone. I don’t know where they went when they left Hellhag Hill. I don’t like that place, I was afraid. But…”

“Then why did you go?” Joe growled, pacing and glaring at the kit. Half his attention was on her-his anger centered on her-and half his attention on the torchlit scene below them where the coroner and detectives were doing their grisly work.

But Dulcie, pressing against the kit, could feel the kitten’s heart pounding at thoughts of another world-even if it was her imagination-just as Dulcie’s own heart was pounding.

“She’s making up stories,” Joe said, his eyes slitted, his ears flat to his head, his scowl deep and irritable. He didn’t want to think about that other place, if there was such a place. Didn’t want to imagine other worlds, didn’t want to dwell on his and Dulcie’s ancestry. If their dual cat-and-human natures had risen from some strain of beings among the ancient Celts, who had come, then, to this continent, he didn’t care to know more about it.

Joe wanted only tobe.To live only in the moment, fully alive and effective, in this life that he had been dealt.

And Dulcie loved him for that. Joe was his own cat, he felt no need to peer into the lives of his ancestors like some voyeuring genealogist longing for a time before his own.

Joe spoke the human language, he read the morning paper-with a sharply caustic slant on the news. Dulcie considered him smarter than half the humans in the world. But Joe Grey valued what he had here and now, he wanted nothing more. Any additional mysteries about himself would be an unnecessary weight upon his tomcat shoulders.

With tender understanding, Dulcie licked his ear, ignoring her own wild dreams of other worlds and even more amazing talents. And she snuggled the kit close, too, wondering about the skills that this small cat might show them.

She was washing the kit’s splotchy black-and-brown face when they saw Clyde striding up the hill between the swinging spotlights. Immediately Joe and Dulcie ducked, dragging the kit lower behind the boulders.

“Why?” whispered the kit. “Is he not your human, Joe Grey? Why are you hiding from him?”

Joe gave her a slant-eyed look.“He hates finding us at a murder scene. All he does is shout. It’s bad for his blood pressure.” He watched from between the boulders until Clyde turned away again, to where Officer Ray was cataloging the scene. Standing outside the cordoned-off area, Clyde said, “Is Harper out looking for her?”

Kathleen Ray nodded.“The captain, and five search parties.”

“I’ll swing by Harper’s place, see if the mare came home. No word from Charlie? Is she down there?”

“No word. She said she’d be there. The captain asked her to see to the mare.”

Clyde turned, heading down the hill.

“Move it, Kit,” Joe whispered. “Stay close.”

Racing down ahead of Clyde, staying in the heavy grass and dodging torchlight, the three cats covered the quarter mile, scorched between cars parked along the narrow dirt road, and leaped into the seat of Clyde’s antique roadster.

Before Clyde was halfway down the hill, they had slipped up behind the seat and beneath the car’s folded top. Stretching out nose to tail, warm beneath the layers of leather, they were ready to roll.

Clyde wouldn’t have a clue-unless he saw their muddy pawprints. But in the dark, with only the dash lights, he likely wouldn’t see the mud on the seat-not until morning.

The kit, warm and comfortable between them, rumbled with purrs-until Dulcie poked her with a soft paw.“Hush, Kit. Here he comes, he’ll hear you.”

But the kit had fallen sound asleep.

4 [????????: pic_5.jpg]

A WEEK BEFORE Ruthie and Helen Marner were killed, a hundred miles north in San Francisco, someone else was considering the Pamillon estate, thinking of the overgrown grounds exactly as Dillon Thurwell might have done, as a place to hide, to escape a killer.

To Kate Osborne, an invitation to view the Pamillon mansion was a welcome excuse to get out of the city and away from the danger that, perhaps, she only imagined.

Whatever the truth, the stories in the papers had fired her fear until she couldn’t sleep at night, until she had put a bolt on the inside of both the front and the bedroom doors, until she was afraid to walk, except in the middle of the day, or even to take the bus or cable car. She was losing all sense of proportion, and that terrified her.

She had vowed, before ever she fled the city, to make herself visit the Cat Museum, to lay to rest that part of her fears. She would not leave until she had made that short trip up Russian Hill.

Last year, when she’d moved up from Molena Point to the North Beach apartment, she’d been eager to see the museum.

Pictures of the gallery had so intrigued her, the lovely Mediterranean buildings tucked among their sprawling gardens, beneath the old, magnificent oaks. She’d been so eager to study the museum’s amazing collection of cat paintings and cat sculpture. How strange that she’d lived in the city when she was younger and had known about the museum, but had never bothered to go there.

Well, she hadn’t known, then, all the facts about herself. Anyway, she’d been so busy with art school. Her museum visits, then, had been school related, to the San Francisco Museum and the de Young.

Yet the art collection at the Cat Museum included work by Gauguin, Dubuffet, Picasso-fine pieces, housed in that lovely complex at the top of Russian Hill.

It was only now, after going through a divorce and returning to the city-and after learning the shocking truth about herself-that she had a really urgent reason to visit there. Yet she’d procrastinated for over a year, unable to find the courage, unable to face any more secrets. Each time she’d tried to make that short journey, she’d become all nerves, and turned back.

So they keep real cats, too. Of course they do. Everyone says those lovely cats wandering the gardens add a delightful charm to the famous collection.

Well, but whatkindof cats?

That doesn’t matter. No one will guess the truth-not even the cats themselves. And what if they did? What do you think they’d do? Come on, Kate. You’re such a coward. Can’t you get on with it?

And on Saturday morning she woke knowing she would do it. Now. Today. Put down her fear. No more hedging. The morning was beautifully foggy, the way she loved the city, the wet mist swirling outside her second-floor windows, the muffled sounds of the city calling to her like a secret benediction. Quickly she showered and dressed, letting herself think only of the perfect morning and the beauty of the museum, nothing more. Debating whether to have breakfast at the kitchen table, enjoying her view of the fogbound city, or go on to her favorite warm, cozy coffee shop two blocks up Stockton and treat herself to their delicious Swedish pancakes and espresso and homemade sausage.

Hardly a choice. Pulling on her tan windbreaker over jeans and a sweatshirt, fixing the jacket’s hood over her short, pale hair, she hurried down the one flight and into the damp breeze that had begun to swirl the fog. Only once, striding along Stockton, did her thoughts skitter warily again, forcing her to take herself in hand.

Slipping in through the glass door of the Iron Pony, she settled in her favorite booth, where she could look out at Coit Tower, fog-shrouded and lonely.

From the kitchen, Ramon saw her, and brought her a cup of freshly brewed espresso, greeting her in Spanish and laughing. She returned his”Buenos dias. Como esta?”laughing in return. Ramon’s English was impeccable, but, he’d told her solemnly, he spoke only Spanish when a patron angered him. He’d told her he had a violent temper, that he found it imperative sometimes to hide a sudden anger behind the barrier of language to avoid calling some customer names that would get him, Ramon, fired. If he pretended not to understand the insults, he need not confront them.

A strange young man. Maybe twenty-five years old. Very quiet. And except when he’d been insulted, which she’d never witnessed, a content young man, she thought, seeming totally pleased with the world. Maybe he shifted as quickly as a cat from cool satisfaction to raking claws.

Did she have to drag in the simile of a cat? She sipped her espresso crossly. Couldn’t she think of some other description?

She had the notion that Ramon’s alabaster-pale skin offered a clue to the quick temper he described, that such bloodless-looking skin and slight build were signs of a person capable of deep rage. She had no notion where she’d gotten such an idea. Of course it was silly. Ramon’s obsidian hair and black Latin eyes simply made him look paler-as did the birthmark that splotched his left cheek, the rust-colored deformity spreading from his eye to the corner of his mouth as dark as dried blood, in the shape of the map of India.

She had never dared ask him, in the months she’d been coming here, if it was indeed a birthmark or was perhaps a burn scar-though the skin looked smooth.

She enjoyed chatting with Ramon; she didn’t have many friends in San Francisco except her boss, Hanni, and Hanni’s uncle, Dallas Garza, a detective with San Francisco PD. She hadn’t tried hard to make other friends, because of her situation. She felt uneasy with other people-as if they might be able to tell what she really was. Her casual acquaintance with Ramon allowed her to walk out of the coffee shop and that was the end of it, no social obligation, no secrets shared, nothing more expected.

“The pancakes and sausage as usual, senora?”

“Yes, and orange juice if you please, Ramon, it’s such a beautiful morning.”

He seemed to understand that a beautiful morning called for orange juice.“The fog is going quickly-like a watercolor washing away. Look how the sun makes jewels.”

Together they watched diamonds of dazzle spark at them from the sidewalk where the sun sliced down through the vanishing fog. Ramon had a good eye; he was a student at the art institute where she herself had gone ten years before. It was so good to be back in San Francisco. Nowhere in the world, she thought, were the subtle city colors as splendid as on these hills. When soon the sun rose, every hill, with its crowding houses, would be alive with swift-running cloud shadows, the whole world seeming to shift and move. The city stirred such a fierce joy in her, made her want to race through the streets, turning flips and laughing.

Ramon brought her breakfast and the morningChronicle,frowning at the story that slashed across the bottom of the front page. The lead and first details were so gruesome that all the fear rose in her again, sour as bile. Why had he brought this paper to her? She wanted to wad it up and run out of the cafe.

“This terrible thing,” Ramon said, setting the paper down beside her plate. “How can this be, that a man could do such a bloody deed? For why would a man do this?”

She did not look up at him. She thought she was going to be sick. She imagined far too vividly the poor dead cat hanging limp and twisted from a lamp pole, its throat constricted by a cord tied in a hangman’s noose.

“That man should be hanged,” Ramon said.“Muerto. Debe murir.”

She looked up at him, and swallowed. Ramon wanted only to share with her his rage, share with another his own indignation.

For the last week, all over the city someone had been killing cats, hanging the poor beasts by a twisted noose, choking out their gentle, terrified lives. There had been nineteen incidents, in Haight, Nob Hill, Russian Hill, North Beach, the Presidio. Shoving her plate away, she felt her hands clench and stiffen with what she would like to do to the cat killer.

She did not want to read the accompanying article; she hated that Ramon had brought this ugly thing for her to see. She was about to toss the paper away when she saw the upper headline.

DEATH ROW ESCAPEES STILL AT LARGE

SACRAMENTO-Ronnie Cush, James Hartner and Lee Wark, the three death row inmates who broke out of San Quentin ten days ago, are still at large. None has been apprehended. This is the first escape from the maximum detention wing in the history of the prison.

The breakout occurred when prisoners overpowered a guard. All staff in that section have been replaced. Prison officials believe that Hartner may have sought family in Seattle. There is no clue to where Ronnie Cush might be headed. Lee Wark may have returned to San Francisco, where he had numerous contacts. Any witness to the escapees’ whereabouts will be kept in strictest confidence by police and prison authorities.

Kate looked helplessly at her breakfast. She wanted to pitch the plate away. Ramon still stood watching her, so intent she wanted to scream. Why was he staring? As she looked up angrily, he turned quickly back to the kitchen.

But he couldn’t understand how upset she would be, how the articles would terrify her. He could have no concept of how powerfully the cat story would hurt her. And no idea, of course, that the prison break was, for her, perhaps even more alarming.

She was ice cold inside. She felt absolutely certain that Lee Wark had returned-to the very city where she had come to hide from him.

Ramon returned with the coffeepot and stood beside her table, speaking softly.

“Dark the cat walks,” Ramon said, watching her. She looked up at him, startled. “Dark the cat walks, his pacing shadow small.” Ramon’s Latin eyes gleamed. “Dark the cat walks. His shadow explodes tall. Fearsome wide and tall.”

The shock of his words turned her rigid. Before she could speak, abruptly Ramon left her.

She sat very still, trying to collect her emotions. Her hands were shaking.

Why had he said that? What could he mean?

Dropping the paper on the floor, she threw down some money and hurried out to the street, wanted out of there, wanted out of the city.

What was Ramon telling me?Then,Wark can’t know I’m here.

Can’t he, Kate? Remember, before, how easily he discovered your secret?