Cat Laughing Last

2

Like a colony of pack rats," Joe Grey said. "Such an appetite for other people's possessions, it's enough to make a possum laugh." He turned to look at Dulcie. "Humans are as bad as you, when you steal the neighbors' silk undies."

If a cat could blush, Dulcie's furry face would be red. She didn't like him to laugh at her. But it was true, she'd been driven by a longing for cashmere and silk, for soft, pretty garments, since she was a kitten. Such a keen desire that she would slip out of the house in the small hours, and into her neighbors' homes, pressing in through a partially open window or swinging on the knob of a back door left unlocked. Slipping toward the bedroom, she would depart moments later dragging a silk teddy in her teeth or a sheer stocking or a bright, soft sweater, taking each lovely item home to roll on, to sleep on, to rub her face against. And how else was she to have the lovely garments that she so coveted, except to borrow them? She was a cat. She couldn't indulge in shopping sprees at Lord & Taylor's or I. Magnin's. She only wanted to enjoy those treasures for a little while before the neighbors came to retrieve them. Well, she had kept Wilma's good watch for over a year, hidden under the claw-footed bathtub.

As the sun rose beyond the cats' leafy treetop, the crowded roofs of Molena Point caught gleams and flashes of light. Shingled roofs and red tile, sharp peaks and slanted were soon all aglow. The time was not yet 7:00. In the distance a dog barked, an insistent staccato against the soft pounding of the sea. The morning air smelled of pine, and iodine, and of multitudes of small, dead shell-creatures. Out over the Pacific, dawn was reflected from the sea like burnished metal. But beyond lay black rain clouds-they might blow away north toward San Francisco or might creep in over the village and rain on the McLearys' sale.

Slow-moving traffic filled the narrow street as new arrivals tried to find parking places, so many eager shoppers that the lane was choked with vehicles. And the lawn was crowded with folks wandering among borrowed church tables piled with toys and clothes and baby garments, with bent silverware, outdated golf clubs, tarnished jewelry, with dented cookpots and old handbags and faded Christmas decorations. Between the tables stood scarred dressers, beds, breakfast tables, and toy chests.

Watching folks argue over prices or haul away chairs and tables and broken toys, jamming their newly acquired treasures into cars and SUVs and pickups, watching all the little dramas, Joe and Dulcie, replete with a breakfast of wharf rat and young rabbit, were of much of the same frame of mind as a human couple who, after a satisfying supper, had settled down in a front row at the theater to be entertained.

"The McLearys must have cleaned out not only their own attic," Dulcie said, "but the houses of all their cousins and uncles." Indeed, the Molena Point McLearys were a large clan. "An anthropological treasure trove, an artifactual record of four generations of McLeary family history."

"Four generations of bad taste. A microcosm of useless human consumerism."

She stared at him.

He shrugged his sleek gray shoulders. "Look around you.

Abandoned projects, thrown-away intentions, broken dreams, soured ambitions. Relics of human disenchantment."

Easing his position on the branch, he looked at her with tomcat superiority. "You don't see a cat going off on a dozen projects-golf, snooker, Chinese checkers, paint by numbers, needlework, photograph albums. You don't see a cat tossing away one craze after another. Look at the wasted time and effort, to say nothing of the wasted money. And then they have to get rid of it all. And their neighbors grab and snatch, until their own closets are bulging."

"You're in an ugly mood. What happened to live-and-let-live?"

Joe Grey shrugged.

"What you see down there," she told him, "is a lifetime of magnificent intentions. An incredible richness of human endeavor and imagination. You're looking at dreams down there-at the products of creative human energy. At happy, vital, and endlessly diverse moments in McLeary family history."

Joe Grey snorted, his ears and whiskers back in a derisive cat laugh.

She widened her green eyes, but kept her voice low. "I've never seen you so sour. Are things not good at home? What, Clyde's messed-up love life is making you cross? Or," she said, "is Clyde still thinking of selling the house? Is that what's eating you?"

"My mood has nothing to do with the house, or with Clyde's love life. I am not driven by Clyde Damen's vicissitudes. I am simply making an observation about the confusion of the human mind. You don't see a cat throwing out the living-room furniture every year and buying all new stuff. Look around you. Why would-"

"Cats don't have living-room furniture."

"I have an easy chair." His tone was so pompous that they both laughed. Joe's upholstered chair, which sat in the Damen living room by the front window, was so ragged and faded it resembled nothing as much as the hide of an ancient and molting pachyderm. "You don't see me tossing my good chair away at some yard sale."

"If that chair's a prototype of the quality of your life, that clawed-to-rags, fur-matted, stained and smelly horror, then you, my dear tomcat, are in trouble."

Joe nudged her playfully; but soon they peered down again, fascinated by the bargain hunters. The locals were dressed in jeans and sweatshirts, some folks freshly scrubbed, some still uncombed as if they'd just rolled out of bed. The conviviality of neighbors brightened the morning with friendly talk and wisecracks. Here and there a weekender wandered, just as eager for a bargain, a tourist dressed in brand-name shorts, starched shirt, and Gucci sandals, or golf or tennis attire. Some shoppers carried nonspill coffee mugs that they had brought from their cars. Two were munching on breakfast rolls, wrapped in squares of waxed paper, that they'd picked up at one of the bakeries on the way over. At events such as this, one saw a true cross-section of the village. Besides the rich and comfortable, and the famous, who "did" the yard sales for a lark, one saw clearly the Molena Point residents who lived on limited funds, people trying to stretch every dollar. The inveterate bargain hunters, rich or poor, showed up at every such event. The cats watched a portly, bleached blond lady in walking shorts, a blue sweatshirt, and red tennis shoes try to fit a six-foot wicker bookcase into a small Jaguar sports car. She had wrapped the bookcase carefully in blankets-whether to protect her ten-dollar bargain or protect the hundred-thousand-dollar Jag wasn't clear.

Nearer to the cats' oak tree, two women stood arguing over a glass-topped patio table that both claimed to have spoken for first. And directly below, a huge-bellied man, stripped to the waist, carried a ruffled, flowered chaise lounge over his head, in the direction of a battered pickup truck. The cats watched a tiny little old lady precariously juggle a glass punch bowl of such proportions that she could have used it for a sitz bath. Maybe that was her plan. Fill it with champagne, and voila, just like the old Harlow movies. The sight of her prompted Dulcie to quote to herself, When I am old, I will wear purple, and bathe in French champagne. She caught her breath when the lady nearly dropped her gleaming treasure, and before she thought, Dulcie reached down a paw as if to offer assistance-but drew back quickly, glancing at Joe with embarrassment.

No one looked up to wonder what that cat was doing. No one had seen the two cats in the tree or, if they had seen them, no one would imagine their conversation, or dream of the thoughts churning through those sleek feline heads. Their human neighbors would never imagine that cats might discuss human frailties-though they might allow that cats didn't give a damn about human foolishness.

Of the residents of Molena Point, only four people knew that Joe Grey and Dulcie could speak, that the two cats read the Molena Point Gazette far more perceptively than some human subscribers, that they liked to frequent the village news racks perusing the front page of the San Francisco Examiner, and that when there was nothing more interesting at hand, they watched prime-time TV Only four people knew that Joe Grey and Dulcie were not your ordinary, everyday kitties or that they had, during various criminal investigations by Molena Point PD, not only pointed a paw at their share of killers and thieves, supplying critical evidence to convict the miscreants, but that they had spied as well on any number of villagers, in the comfort of the villagers' own homes. No one knew that, posing as stray kitties, the two were adept at passing on sensitive information to police detectives. Not even Max Harper's own cops, nor Captain Harper himself, knew the identity of their best informants; Joe Grey and Dulcie were far too smooth to blow their own cover.

But the two cats had other human friends besides the four who shared their secrets. Peering down, they watched three of their favorite senior ladies making their yard sale selections with careful judgment-and with huge dreams. These three women weren't shopping for fun, they were searching out purchases to secure their own futures.

Mavity Flowers, small and sturdy in her threadbare maid's uniform, perused a display of china and crystal about which, through necessity, she had come to know quite a lot. Cora Lee French, a head taller than Mavity, a lovely, slim Creole woman with graying hair, slipped lithely among tables of needlework and linens, touching the stitching with gentle, experienced hands. And tall, blond Gabrielle Row checked over the clothes that hung on long metal racks, looking not only for resalable bargains, but for anything useful to the little theater costume department.

Gabrielle was still elegant, despite her sixty-some years. Her short-clipped gray hair was skillfully colored to ash blond, and the cut of her cream blazer was long and lean over her white slacks. Working full-time as seamstress in her own shop, she had for many years been wardrobe director as well for Molena Point Little Theater. And now, frequenting the yard sales, she was not only hunting for costume material but was planning, too, for a time when she would be less active.

Five ladies made up the Senior Survival Club: Mavity, Cora Lee, and Gabrielle. And Susan Brittain, who was not to be seen this morning, though Susan hardly ever missed a sale. Susan's garage was headquarters for wrapping and shipping the items the ladies sold on the Web. She handled, on her computer, all their eBay sales. The fifth member was Wilma Getz, Dulcie's housemate, retired parole officer, gray haired, in her late fifties. Wilma might be called a silent partner, agreeing with the women's plan, meaning to take part at some future time, but not totally committed.

The ladies were looking toward buying a communal dwelling that would accommodate them all plus a housekeeper and a caregiver when that time arrived. All of them had some savings, or home equity. And the cats were amazed at how much money they had set aside by hitting the yard sales and selling at auction. So far, it amounted to over ten thousand dollars.

Senior Survival's plan for mutual security and comfort, in a world of dwindling incomes, increasing taxes, and the possibility of deteriorating health, seemed to Dulcie infinitely courageous, a bold alternative to the ladies' separate interments in retirement or convalescent homes-a plan of mutual cooperation but individual responsibility. These ladies didn't like conventional institutions.

Slowly the sun slid higher above the hills, slashing through the oak leaves into the cats' faces, making them slit their eyes. Joe's white paws and chest, and the white triangle down his nose, gleamed like snow against his smooth gray fur. As Dulcie backed along the branch, her dark stripes cloaked in shadow, she resembled a small, dark tiger. Only her green eyes caught the light. A breeze fingered into the tree, to rattle the leaves, a chill breath that, by its scent and direction, promised not rain as the marine clouds implied, but a warm day to come. Perhaps only a cat would be aware of the message-how sad that humans, trying to assess the weather, had to read barometers and listen to the questionable advice of some book-educated meteorologist hamming his way through the morning news. Such dependence left one open to innumerable misjudgments in attire-to getting one's head and feet wet; while all a cat had to do was taste the wind and feel in every fiber of his body the changes in barometric pressure.

The sun was returning to stay, no doubt of that. No more tearing March storms with winds wild enough to jerk a cat right out of his own pawprints. Spring was settling in at last, the acacia trees exploding with brilliant yellow blooms that smelled like honey. All the early flowers were opening. Village cats rolled with abandon in the gardens, and the outdoor cafes were filled with locals and tourists-a perfect spring, in the loveliest of villages. Who needed to travel the shores of Britain and France, Dulcie thought, or trek through Spain and Africa? Molena Point was so beautiful this morning that Dulcie's purrs hummed through the branches like bumblebees.

But suddenly an unease touched the cats, a foreboding that made Dulcie stiffen and sent a chill twitching down Joe Grey's spine as sharp as an electric shock.

They studied the crowd below, puzzled and alarmed, their ears flicking forward and back, every nerve on alert, as they tried to figure out what had alarmed them. They were crouched on the branch, wary and keenly predatory, when sirens sounded: a police car leaving the station, they could see beyond the treetops its red whirling beacon heading away through the village, in the same direction where, a quarter hour earlier, an ambulance had departed.

An ambulance, alone, was not uncommon. It could mean severe illness, a heart attack, the agony of a broken hip. A squad car alone could mean anything-a strayed child, a driver ramming into a tree. But the two vehicles together, the law and the medics, were inclined to mean trouble.

The cats had crouched to leap away across the roofs to have a look when Joe saw, in the street below, the source of their sudden unease. A growl rose in his throat as a petite young woman stepped out of her black Lincoln. The cats watched Vivi Traynor cross to the McLeary yard, trampling through a flower bed, shoving a child aside as she hurried to the sale tables. She was small and curvy, her black tights, plaid miniskirt, and black sweater clinging, her black hair teased into a bird's nest around her thin face, and held back with a red bow. As she rifled through assemblages of household cast-offs, the village locals, who had not yet seen the author's wife at a yard sale, watched her with interest. A portly tourist whipped out a scrap of paper as if to ask for Vivi's autograph. Did the wife of an internationally famous novelist rate the status of autographs? Certainly Vivi always attracted attention. The couple had been in town barely three weeks, Elliott Traynor having come to oversee a little theater production of his only play, an experimental form that the Gazette called innovative and exciting.

Word had it that Elliott was fighting cancer, that this theatrical production was a project he longed to enjoy while he was still able. The play was set in this area of the California coast where Molena Point now stood, and the musical score had been written by a well-known composer who made his home in the village. The cats watched Vivi wander the garden intently searching-for what? Perhaps looking for some stage prop? Slipping between a stack of used windows and a flowered couch, she performed a theatrical little hip wiggle to ease past a rusty barbecue, then giggled shrilly as she shouldered aside a portly lady tourist. The sight of her made Joe's fur twitch.

Since their arrival, Elliott Traynor had kept largely to himself as he finished the last chapters of Twilight Silver, the third novel in his historical trilogy. But Vivi had made herself known around the village, and not pleasantly-as if she enjoyed being rude to shopkeepers, as if she took pleasure in being abrupt and demanding.

The Traynors had not wanted a staff for the cottage they were renting, but had hired the cleaning service provided by Wilma Getz's redheaded niece, Charlie. Charlie tended the Traynor house herself, early each morning, then left the couple to their privacy.

Molena Point's residents, numbering so many writers and artists, were not put off by Elliott's reclusive ways. They talked among themselves about his books and about the play, waved when occasionally they saw him on the streets or in the black Lincoln, as they headed to the theater; otherwise they left him to his own devices. The presence, alone, of the prestigious writer, seemed adequate enrichment to their well-appointed lives.

But no one had warmed to Vivi.

Traynor's previous wife had died three years before. Six months later, he married Vivi, a woman forty years his junior. Besides her loud, rude ways, something else about her made the cats want to back away, hissing, a chill that perhaps only a cat would sense. Whatever reason she had for appearing this morning in the McLeary garden could only, in Joe Grey's opinion, mean trouble.