Cat Laughing Last. Cat Seeing Double. Cat Fear No Evil

“You spoil her,” Cora Lee said sleepily, watching Wilma set Dulcie’s plate on the blotter. “What about the kit? Can she have some?” She stroked the kit, who, at the sound of knife on plate, had come wide awake. Cora Lee was dressed in a creamy velvet robe, loose and comfortable, covering her bandages.

“Both cats will feast,” Wilma said, preparing a second plate, “while you and I wait politely for our guests.”

Cora Lee shivered, pulling the afghan closer around her. “A week in the hospital, and I still feel weird and disoriented.”

“It’s the residue of shock, from the surgery,” Wilma said. “Plus the shock of what happened-of someone intentionally hurting you, and of seeing Fern dead.”

Dead, Dulcie thought, after maybe Cora Lee had idly wished something of the kind for Fern. That wouldn’t be easy to live with.

Certainly Cora Lee was still pale, her color grayish, her ease of movement, and lithe ways replaced by stiff, puppetlike gestures, though already she had begun a regimen of exercises designed to strengthen her injured muscles. Very likely painful exercises, Dulcie thought, stretching her own long muscles, extending her length with ease and suppleness. She thought of the distress Cora Lee must be experiencing-and was ashamedly thankful suddenly for her own lithe feline body.

“Growing up in New Orleans,” Cora Lee said, “murder wasn’t uncommon. It was ugly, but we accepted it. Even as a child, street murder, gang murder, drug-related killings, we were well aware of them.

“But here, in the village that I chose for its small-town gentleness and safety, murder and violent attack seem to me far more shocking.” Cora Lee smiled. “I guess I haven’t come to terms with that yet,” she said lightly.

“We should not have to come to terms with it,” Wilma said. “And if you hadn’t been bringing the kit home-”

“I would have gone by the Pumpkin Coach anyway. You know I stop every Tuesday morning to see if anything in the window is worth getting in line for.” She looked solemnly at Wilma, her thin, oval face drawn and serious. “I should have driven away when I saw the window was broken, when I saw Fern lying there.

“I got out to see if she’d fallen. I had this silly notion that she had been decorating the window-you know how they do, different volunteers taking a turn each week. Fern worked for Casselrod’s Antiques; I assumed she’d be a natural one to ask. I was so focused on the idea that she had fallen and hurt herself that I didn’t think at all to close the car door, to shut the kit in. I felt guilty afterward.

“When I was close to the window and saw the blood, saw the terrible wounds, I knew I should get away. Like a dummy I stood there trying to see back inside the shop, looking for whoever had hurt her. So foolish�

“Then when I turned to the car to phone for an ambulance, there was the pack of letters on the sidewalk. I didn’t know what they were but something, a twinge of excitement, made me snatch them up-and then that man leaped out of the window, from nowhere�”

“And you ran�” Wilma encouraged. It was good for Cora Lee to talk about it, try to get rid of the trauma. “The letters� Old paper, you said�”

“Old and yellowed. The ribbon was faded and sort of shredded.

I got only a glance-the handwriting like old copperplate. Then he was after me. I ran, I got up that little walkway and around the corner before he grabbed and hit me and snatched the letters. The pain in my middle was so bad I knew I’d pass out.

“It’s strange. Once I thought the kit was there with me. Then later when I woke in the hospital I thought about leaving the car door open and I worried about her.

Cora Lee smiled. “Detective Garza didn’t know how I could outrun the guy as far as I did, could get clear around to the back street-I told him I run at the sports center. When the guy did catch me, when he grabbed me, I really don’t remember all of that clearly. I don’t remember how I got into the alley where the police found me.”

She looked at Wilma, frowning. “Just� him hitting me, grabbing the letters, twisting my hand. I remember falling, doubling up with the pain, and I heard a car take off. I don’t know who called the police. A woman, they told me. They said she made two calls. I suppose it was someone in one of the upstairs apartments, but no one knows who. I’d like to thank her.”

On Cora Lee’s lap, the kit rolled over purring and looked up at her with a little curving smile. And Dulcie thought,Careful, Kit. Be careful.She watched Cora Lee with apprehension.

If Cora Lee, in her deepest mind, remembered that the kit was there with her, licking her face, did she remember, in some lost dream, the kit speaking to her? Remember three cats crowding around her, talking about her? Did unconscious people hear and remember what was said in their presence? Some people thought so, even some doctors thought they did-but Cora Lee mustn’t. Enough people already shared their secret, they didn’t need anyone else knowing, even a person they liked as much as Cora Lee French.

Besides Wilma and Clyde and Charlie, Kate Osborne knew about them. They didn’t see Kate often; and Kate would never ever tell their secret, one that was so close to her own. But one other person knew, as well-a sadist now locked in San Quentin, a man who had broken out once and followed Kate, surely meaning to kill her just as he had wanted to kill Dulcie and Joe.

Dulcie watched the kit, on Cora Lee’s lap, licking the last specks of cake and cream from her whiskers.

“I’m surprised she doesn’t make herself sick.” Cora Lee said. “She ate like that at my house, too.”

Wilma laughed. “Nothing seems to bother her. Apparently she has the same cast-iron constitution as Dulcie and Joe.”

“Maybe they’re a special breed.” Cora Lee stroked the kit. “Certainly this little one is more intelligent than most cats, she seems to know everything I’m saying.”

The kit glanced up at Cora Lee, then looked at Dulcie guiltily. Cora Lee seemed unaware of having said anything alarming; her expression was completely innocent. Watching her, Dulcie started when the doorbell rang.

Wilma rose to answer it, hurrying Mavity and Susan in out of the cold fog. Mavity’s uniform of the day sported pink rickrack around the white pant cuffs and collar. Over this she wore a zippered green sweater, and her frizzled gray hair was covered by a pink scarf damp with mist.

Susan Brittain was snuggled in a brown sweatshirt over her jeans, and a tan jacket, her short white hair curly from the fog. Gabrielle came up the walk behind them, her smart cream pants suit well tailored, probably fashioned by one of her seamstresses. The three women crowded around the fire and around Cora Lee, making a fuss over her, though they had visited her in the hospital only the day before, taking her flowers and the latest magazines that Wilma had good-naturedly carted home again this morning. On the way home, Wilma had driven Cora Lee by the police station to talk with Detective Garza again. Then at home, she had had a nice lunch waiting. Dulcie herself had curled up on the afghan with the kit while Cora Lee had a long nap.

Gabrielle helped Wilma serve the coffee, then sat down at the end of Cora Lee’s chaise. “Did the doctor say whether-say when you can go on with the play? I’ve started your costume.”

“Will there still be a play?” Cora Lee said, surprised. “But they won’t want me, they’ll put out a call for new tryouts. Truly,” Cora Lee said, “with Fern dead, in such an ugly way, I feel ashamed to think about the play.” Coloring faintly, she looked up at Susan, where she stood before the fire. “Ashamed that I would still want to do Catalina,” she confessed softly.

“Feeling guilty?” Susan said.

“I suppose. Because I did so want that part.”

“You’re not responsible for Fern’s death,” Susan said.

“I can’t help feeling guilty, though, because I surely wished her no good the night of the tryouts.”

“Wishing didn’t kill her,” Wilma said sharply.

“And whatever debt the Traynors owed Fern Barth,” Susan told her, “to make them give her the lead, that’s over now.”

“Well, they won’t want me,” Cora Lee said. “Vivi Traynor won’t.”

“What did the doctor say?” Mavity asked. “How soon will you feel right? How soon can you sing again?”

Wilma said, “There’s a lot of muscle tightening around the incision. She’ll be stiff for a while, and hurting, and fluids will collect there. The doctor wants her to be careful so it doesn’t go into pneumonia. He’s told Cora Lee not to take any fill-in restaurant jobs until she’s completely healed.”

Cora Lee touched her side. “If anyone wanted me-if Sam Ladler wanted me bad enough to arrange it, I’d be ready. Two or three weeks, I could be ready to rehearse. But I�” Her face reddened. “That won’t happen.”

Gabrielle said, “Were you able to help the police? To give them information that would be useful?” She fiddled nervously with her napkin. “I hope Detective Garza doesn’t feel that you were involved in Fern’s death in some way?”

“Why would Garza say that?” Wilma asked. “Though, in fact, he has no way to know at this point. Until he’s sorted through the evidence, he has only Cora Lee’s word. He has to wait for the lab tests, has to remain detached.”

“I suppose,” Gabrielle said. “But Captain Harper knows Cora Lee.”

“That really doesn’t matter,” Cora Lee said. “Wilma’s right.”

“But,” Mavity said, “what exactly did happen? The part you can talk about? It was all so confusing. The paper said there were blood splatters in the back room and on those three wooden chests, that there was a fight back there. I don’t-”

Wilma put her hand on Mavity’s. “Cora Lee doesn’t need to talk about this anymore.”

“I’m sorry,” Mavity said contritely. “Of course you don’t.”

“In fact there’s very little that Cora Lee is free to discuss,” Wilma added.

“But those three carved chests,” Gabrielle began, “Catalina Ortega-Diaz’s letters�”

“No one knows,” Wilma said, “if any of the letters have survived all these years. Those letters could be nothing but dust.”

Gabrielle put her hand on Wilma’s. “I� have something to tell you.” She looked shy and uncomfortable. “I didn’t before because� Well, I hadn’t intended to do anything about it-I didn’t do anything about it, so I didn’t think it mattered.”

They all looked at her.

“When I was in New York and stopped to see Elliott, he was more than cordial. He fixed lunch for me-Vivi had gone out-and he wanted to talk with me about Molena Point.” She sipped her coffee, looking down as if finding it hard to tell her friends whatever was bothering her.

“Elliott told me about the Spanish chests, about the research. He said he had been corresponding with a museum that had one of the chests, and that it had contained three of Catalina’s letters. He thought there might be other chests still around, with letters hidden in them-a false bottom, something like that. He told me they would be worth ten to fifteen thousand dollars each.

“He wanted me to look for similar chests when I got back to the coast. He said that if I found any, he would handle selling them to the highest bidder, and we could split the money-that I would be acting as his agent.

“I didn’t like the idea. The more I thought about it, the less I wanted to do that. I told him I’d think about it, but when I got home I wrote him a note, said I wasn’t interested, that I was sorry he had told me.

“I was up front with him, I told him about Senior Survival and that we were shopping on our own for antiques. I said it wouldn’t be fair to you if I were to be shopping for someone else.

“He never answered my letter. And then when they arrived he didn’t get in touch. I felt awkward about it, but what could I do. I feel awkward about doing the costumes, about working with him. And I suppose I ought to talk with Captain Harper. Just� to fill him in?” she said, looking at Wilma.

“I think you must,” Wilma said.

Gabrielle twisted her napkin. “Well, there it is. I knew all along that Elliott could be connected somehow to the theft of that white chest and to your breakin, Susan, though I’m sure Elliott wouldn’t do anything violent. That had to be someone else.”

The kit’s eyes had grown so wide as she listened that Dulcie leaped at her, landing on the arm of Cora Lee’s chaise, licking the kit’s face until she had her full attention. The kit subsided, tucking her face under her paw.

“With all the violence these last weeks,” Mavity said, “I’m not sure I’ll go to any more sales. That Iselman estate sale, that should be grand. But if the Iselmans had those old carved chests, what else might they have that would cause trouble?”

“I’m going,” Susan said. “I’m not letting Elliott Traynor, if he is involved, or anyone else frighten me. We can make some money out of that sale, if we buy carefully. I think we should all go.”

“And carry our pepper spray,” Mavity said, laughing. Pepper spray was the one legal weapon a woman could carry without any kind of permit. After Susan’s breakin, Wilma had bought vials for all of them, and taught them the safety procedures-including careful awareness of which way the wind was blowing.

“Why not with pepper spray?” Susan said. “I carry mine all the time. I don’t like to be intimidated. If I’d been at home, with that little vial in my pocket, my house wouldn’t have been trashed. I’d have given them something to think about, and so would Lamb.” She looked around at her friends. “I’ve been selling on eBay all week. I’ve sold nearly everything on our shelves that wasn’t destroyed. If we mean to go on with this, to keep putting money in the bank, we need to start buying again.”

“Are we smart to go on with this?” Gabrielle asked hesitantly. “Or are we only fooling ourselves? Are we going to make enough money to do this? And is it going to work?”

“We’ve been over the numbers,” Susan said. “We’ve already put ten thousand in the bank from our sales, and we’ve only been at it six months. If we do this for a couple of years, plus the money from our own houses� mine and Mavity’s�”

“And mine,” Wilma said, “if I’m ready to throw in with you.”

“And the profit from my two rentals,” Cora Lee added. “And from that lot you own, Gabrielle�”

“I hope it will work,” Gabrielle said uncertainly.

“It will work,” Wilma said.

“We’ll all have our privacy,” Mavity said, “and our own space-maybe as much as I have now, in that little house. Plus a nice big living room and kitchen and a garden, maybe a nice patio.

“But then, it’s different for me. I have to move.” She looked around at her friends. “I got the notice this morning. The official condemnation. Thirty days. The letter said they made it such a short time because it’s been talked about so long, because we all knew it was coming.”

“You’ll move in with me,” Wilma said, “until you decide what to do. There’s plenty of room for your furniture in the garage.”

“By the time you’re ready,” Cora Lee said, “I’ll be home again, and Wilma’s guest room will be yours.”

“We can move you,” Susan said. “Rent a truck, maybe hire one of Charlie’s guys to help us-make a party of it, go out to dinner afterward.”

And on Cora Lee’s lap, the kit was looking back and forth again, from one to the other, paying far too close attention. Dulcie tried to distract her. When the kit ignored her, she swatted the kit as if in play, forcing her off Cora Lee’s lap and chasing her through the house to the kitchen.

Excusing herself to refill the cream pitcher, Wilma followed them, shutting the kitchen door behind her.

Backing the kit into the corner behind the breakfast table, Dulcie hissed and spat at her. “You didn’t see yourself. You were taking everything in, looking far too perceptive and interested.”

“But no one would guess,” the kit said. “No one�”

“Cora Lee says you seem to understand everything she tells you. They could guess, Kit! Charlie did! How do you think she found out?”

“I thought-”

“Charlie figured it out for herself. She watched and watched us. She figured out that we were more than ordinary cats, and those ladies-especially Cora Lee-could do the same.”

“Oh, my,” said the kit.

“Charlie would never tell,” Dulcie said. “But those other ladies might, without ever meaning any harm. You be careful! If you’re going back in there to sit with Cora Lee, you practice looking dumb! Dumb as a stone, Kit! Sleepy. Preoccupied. Take a nap. Play with the tennis ball. Have a wash. But don’t look at people when they talk!”

The kit was crestfallen, her yellow eyes cast down. She looked so hurt that Dulcie licked her face. “It’s all right. You’ll remember next time,” she said, giving the kit a sly smile. “You will, or you’ll be licking wounds you don’t want.”

Wilma looked at the kit a long time, then picked up the two cats and carried them back to the living room. She gave them each another piece of cake, lathering on the cream, setting their plates side by side on the blotter. Watching the kit guzzle the rich dessert, Wilma was torn between frustration at the willful little animal and love and amusement. But always, she was filled with wonder, with the miracle of these small, amazing beings.

If the cats would only leave police business alone. Theft, armed robbery, murder, Joe and Dulcie were in the middle of it all, refusing to back off. And the kit was becoming almost as bad. The cats’ intensity at eavesdropping among questionable characters and their diverse ploys when digging out hidden information left her constantly worried about them.

But maybe, this time, what appeared to be a tangled case would turn into nothing. Maybe Fern’s death wasn’t connected to Susan’s breakin or to the carved chests. Maybe Fern had happened on some gun-happy youth looting the store and in panic he had shot her.

Maybe,Wilma thought. But how, then, to explain the three chests pulled out of the window, and, days earlier, Richard Casselrod snatching the white box?

Dulcie watched Wilma, half amused and half irritated. They’d been together a long time, she knew how Wilma thought. Wilma was hoping right now that this case would turn out to be a dud. Just as Clyde seemed to be hoping. What was it that so disturbed them? The fact that a famous personality was involved? Both Clyde and Wilma seemed to want present circumstances to go away. And that wasn’t going to happen.

For one thing, neither Wilma nor Clyde had all the facts. Neither knew that Joe had called New York this morning, setting in motion a whole new string of events. Nor did they know that Joe had found Augor Prey and found the gun that may have killed Fern, or that Joe’s subsequent phone call had prompted Harper and Garza to stake out Prey’s room.

And no one, not Wilma nor Clyde nor the police, knew that a second stakeout had been set up on the roof next door to Prey. A twenty-four-hour observation post with instant communication to Molena Point PD. A surveillance operation, Dulcie thought, that was soon going to need a nice hot dinner-a little sustenance for a cold and hungry tomcat.

26 [��������: pic_27.jpg]

Where a steep roof rose from a flat one, the space beneath the slanted overhang formed a small, triangular cave protected from rain and from the sea wind, and from the eyes of curious pedestrians. One last ray of the setting sun shone in, where Joe Grey lay on the warm shingles looking down at Augor Prey’s windows. Clyde’s cell phone was tucked on the roof beside him-a real mouthful to carry through the village for five blocks, during the dark predawn hours, and to drag up the pine tree and across the slippery shingles. Before he left home, at 4:00 this morning, he had turned the ringer off to avoid alarming any late-night pedestrians or street people. And certainly, here on the roof, he didn’t want a shrilling phone to announce his presence. He’d been here all day; it was twilight now and he was hungry.

Peering down into Prey’s room, he could see the bed and dresser and a pair of jeans thrown over the armchair whose back served as a hanger for Prey’s shirts. Prey had just gone out, walking, leaving his car parked on the street. Joe had watched one of Harper’s rookie cops, a young man dressed in jeans and T-shirt, idle along a block behind him, appearing as aimless as any tourist.

After Joe’s call to Harper, the captain had made no move to take Prey in for questioning or to search his room for the gun, but he had put a tail on Prey. Maybe he and Garza didn’t want to tip Prey too soon. Or were they not willing to take the word of their unknown informant that this guy was, in fact, Augor Prey?

Certainly when they did arrest him, if the guy’s prints matched those in the Pumpkin Coach and in Susan Brittain’s breakfast room, they had more than enough to hold him. The delay in making an arrest had Joe digging his claws into the shingles wishing they’d get on with it.

But impatience wouldn’t cut it. All he could do was wait, and back up Harper’s surveillance by observing Prey from the roof, where a cop could hardly remain unnoticed. Crouched in the chill evening, he was hungry as a homeless mutt. He wished Dulcie would show up, before he had to snatch some sleepy bird from its nest. Tonight, with the cold wind parting the fur along his back and shoulders, sending its icy breath clear through him, he’d really rather have a nice hot, home-cooked supper.

By the chimes of the courthouse clock, it was nearly 7:00. During the fifteen hours he’d been on the roof, with only a few short breaks down to the garden, he’d followed Prey to breakfast and then to lunch, shadowing him from above. After lunch he had watched Prey as he sprawled on the bed entertained by a series of mindless sitcoms, snacking on candy bars and a Coke. He couldn’t figure out why Prey was hanging around; why, if he killed Fern, he hadn’t skipped.

And if Prey hadn’t killed her, Joe didn’t know who to look at next, among the several candidates. Besides Prey, who had attacked Cora Lee and whose scent was all over the charity shop, Vivi had been in the shop, sucking on frozen cherries. And quite possibly others. Scent detection in that medley of furniture and old clothes and shoes was no easy matter.

When Prey headed out again, likely for dinner this time, Joe tucked the cell phone deeper under the overhang, and followed across the roofs to the same restaurant where Prey had enjoyed his previous repasts, a plain box of an eatery that looked like it belonged not in Molena Point but beside some central California freeway catering to the camper trade. Prey’s restaurant of choice had no garden blooming in front, no murals or elegant paintings on the walls, no potted plants inside. The harsh lighting illuminated a plain room with bad acoustics, chrome-and-plastic furniture, and the thick smell of a menu heavy on fried foods. No light California fare of the interesting combinations that Dulcie loved, but that, in Joe’s opinion, was like mixing the garden flowers with the mousemeat.

Across the street and half a block away, the rookie cop who was following Prey stood huddled in a doorway trying to keep out of the wind. Joe, from his own high vantage, wondered who was watching the back door. Likely no one; Prey’s shadow had him in plain sight.

Dropping to a low overhang above an art gallery, Joe hit the sidewalk, crossed the street among the feet of wandering tourists, and galloped half a block down to the alley behind the restaurant.

The kitchen door was ajar to let in fresh air amidst the hot smell of onions and frying meats. Trying not to drool as he pawed the screen open, he slipped in past the cook’s heels, across the kitchen, and under an empty booth at the back.

At a front table, Prey was just ordering, glancing repeatedly toward the window. Did he know he had a tail? Watching him, Joe tried to figure out where he’d hidden the packet of letters that he snatched from Cora Lee. Earlier in the day, while Prey ordered his lunch, Joe had returned to his room to toss it again, checking all his pockets, slipping a paw between the mattresses and crawling in as far as he could reach without smothering himself. He had fought the dresser drawers open again and climbed in behind them, and peered up at the undersides of the drawers. He’d found nothing more valuable than a rusted bobby pin and an old gum wrapper.

So maybe Prey had the letters on him. Maybe they’d been under the pillow along with the gun, and he’d missed them. There was a limit to how familiar the searcher could get without waking the searchee and getting one’s tail in a knot.

Or had Prey given the letters to Richard Casselrod, maybe to sell and split the take? Joe was yawning with boredom by the time Prey paid his bill and rose to leave. Jerking awake, Joe rose to follow. Slipping beneath the tables and around assorted pant cuffs and stockinged ankles, he left the restaurant by the front door directly behind Prey’s heels; but dropped back when the rookie fell into line.

Prey stopped at the market to pick up a six-pack, then headed back to his room. Could he be waiting for someone? Was that why Harper was watching him and not making an arrest? Back at their mutual destination, as Joe scorched up the nearest pine tree to the roof, Prey’s room light and the TV came on. Joe watched him pop a beer and settle down on the bed, again not bothering to remove his shoes or to pull the shade. Joe could still taste the meaty cooking smells from the cheap cafe. Crouched in the wind, his stomach rumbling with hunger, he began to worry about Dulcie. He kept peering over the edge of the roof to the sidewalk below and to the scruffy patch of garden that ran between the houses, but there was no sign of her. Every time he glanced up into Prey’s dismal room, he felt like he was peering in at a captive. Prey had, for all intents and purposes, made himself a prisoner, or nearly so-watching him had become as boring and tedious as watching paint flake from a rusting car.

Joe thought about the comfort of his own home, about his soft easy chair clawed to furry perfection, and the big, well-stocked refrigerator, and the wide, warm bed he shared with Clyde-but then his fear of Clyde’s selling the house returned to haunt him. The idea of abandoning his home and going to live somewhere unfamiliar was totally depressing, the idea of a strange house filled with the unfamiliar smells of departed strangers and departed animals, where nothing fit just right or smelled right. The thought of moving and of starting over dropped him right down into a black well of dejection.

“You look limp as a fur rug.”

He jumped, startled. Dulcie stood behind him dangling a paper bag from her teeth. He could smell pot roast, he could tell that it was still warm and succulent. She dropped the bag on the shingles, nosed it open, and clawed out a Styrofoam dish. It took her a moment to undo the little clasp, revealing a heap of sliced roast beef, crisp string beans, and au gratin potatoes.

“Hot from Wilma’s microwave. Dig in. I had my share, didn’t want to carry it all.”

“Wilma puts up the best leftovers in the village.”

“Not leftovers, really. She cooks a big roast, all the fixings, then portions it out for future meals.”

“The blessings of a woman’s touch.”

“That’s very sexist. Is that why you want Clyde to get married?”

“It couldn’t hurt,” Joe said with his mouth full. And when he came up for air, slurping and purring, he said, “Frozen suppers, ready for the microwave. We could do that when the rabbits are out by the hundreds, bring home a brace, portion them out into little dishes�”

Laughing, she lay down on the shingles, soaking up warmth from the vanished sun. “Not even Wilma and Clyde would dedicate their freezer to our hunting kill.”

“Does Wilma know why she fixed supper for me? Does she know I’m up here?”

“Of course. I had to tell her something. She didn’t say a word, except did you have Clyde’s cell phone up on the roof because Clyde’s pitching a fit, trying to find it. He thought maybe he’d left it at her house.” Curled up in the shadows of the overhang, she began to wash her paws. “You could call Clyde and put his mind at rest-so he won’t think he lost it and someone’s going to run up a big bill.”

“He doesn’t need the phone.”

“So call him. He’s not going to come up here on the roof to get his phone back.”

“I wouldn’t count on it. He’s been so grouchy lately-and nosy. But what’s happening at the station? What did you find out? Did you get in all right?”

Dulcie smiled. “I’m a permanent fixture. The day dispatcher’s just as much a cat person as the lady on second watch. She made all kinds of fuss over me, made a bed for me on her sweater. All the officers stopped to scratch my ears and chuck me under the chin like some hound dog. They’re so funny. Don’t they know how to pet a cat?”

“Harper doesn’t think it strange we’re suddenly showing up there?”

“He gave me a look or two. Said maybe I was getting bored with being the library cat. But what would he suspect? A cat could shout obscenities in his face, and Harper wouldn’t want to believe it.”

Joe shrugged and licked the Styrofoam one more time in case he’d missed a drop of gravy.

“Clyde stopped by the department,” she said. “Asking Harper about Fern’s murder. Didn’t even wait until they went out for coffee, just started asking questions. I think he’s worried about you-about us. Maybe it’s all this business of trying to decide whether to sell the house, maybe he’s feeling insecure.”

“Clyde’s feeling insecure, so he takes it out worrying about us.”

“Maybe, for humans, that’s the way it works. Life gets uncertain, and every little frustration becomes a big problem. But listen to this,” she said, her green eyes gleaming. “Garza brought the Traynors in.”

“On what charge?”

“No charge. Just to talk to them. He couldn’t hold them. Elliott was totally silent, didn’t even complain about the inconvenience. You’d think he’d pitch a fit. You can bet Vivi whined; she said this would throw Elliott behind schedule, that he had to finish his book. She ranted on while Elliott sat there saying not a word and looking miserable.”

“So how did the questioning go?”

Dulcie looked abashed. “I tried, Joe. I thought it would be a snap, that I could sit on the dispatcher’s counter and watch the interrogation on her monitor, but I should have known better. Garza just took them into his office. And shut the door. Practically in my face. I lay down on my back against the door playing with my tail, but I got only part of it. Those doors are thick, maybe bulletproof. Garza asked about their leaving New York, about their movements just before their flight. Vivi sounded surprised, but then she got really mad.”

Joe smiled. “Sounds like Adele McElroy did talk to the New York detectives. But why would Garza ask questions and alert Vivi? If there is anything to my theory, they’ll pack up and skip.”

“My thought exactly. But I really didn’t hear enough to make sense of it. Garza drove them back to their cottage himself.

“But he put a tail on them,” she said, grinning. “So maybe that’s his idea, too, to catch them skipping.”

“Who did he send?”

“Davis. She’s good, but I can find out more than she can. I can look in the windows to see if they’re packing, and I can slip inside.”

“Watch yourself, Dulcie. Don’t forget Elliott has that ‘target pistol’ as he calls it.”

“I don’t think he’ll use that again.” She gave him a whisker kiss, and left him, leaping into the pine tree and scrambling backward down the rough trunk carrying the empty Styrofoam dish in its paper bag. She dropped it beside the steps of Prey’s landlord, next to the trash can.

Prey had turned the light off; only the glow of the TV remained. Across his windows the evening sky reflected in a glut of slow-moving clouds. Joe could smell rain. He hoped it would hold off. Even under the two-foot overhang, a sudden downpour would splash up from the shingles, drenching him and playing hell with Clyde’s cell phone.

He watched Prey pop another beer, sitting on the bed leaning against the pillows. Playing with the remote, Prey began to channel-hop, producing a staccato of jolting squawks and flashing light. As the evening deepened, the pine tree that rose beside the roof turned from separate green needles to a black and shapeless mass, and the house walls darkened to nondescript shadows blending with the ragged bushes. Only the pale sidewalk directly below retained its sharp edges, the concrete empty now except for a scattering of dead leaves skittering in the wind. Stretching out, Joe rested his chin on the metal roof gutter, looking down, half dozing, his bored gaze fixed on Prey.

He stiffened.

Something dark was sliding among the bushes; a figure was approaching Prey’s windows noiselessly from the street, Joe caught a glimpse of jeans and a dark shirt. Was it the rookie that Garza had sent to tail Prey? Had he pulled a heavier shirt on over his pale T-shirt, and put on a black cap? The man moved along beside the shrubs below the window, making no sound at all.

At nearly the same moment, Prey flicked the overhead light on again. As the harsh glow struck the bushes like a searchlight, the guy ducked away. Joe picked him out of the blackest shadows, crouching, watching the window above him. He looked bigger than the young cop. Inside the room, the glow of the single bulb shattered across the dresser’s oval mirror, picking out Prey as he opened a third beer, the scar across his forehead angry in the artificial light. Staring at himself in the mirror, he moved to the bathroom and rinsed out a washcloth.

Returning to the TV, he lay down and folded the cool compress across the healing wound. Outside the window the silent watcher waited. Above the dark treetops, the clouds lowered and extended, cutting away the last of the fading daylight, casting the village into darkness. The watcher moved closer, peering in through the glass.

Snap,his shoe broke a dead twig. He crouched, frozen, as Prey swung up from the bed and switched off the light.

Prey stood for some time peering out, picking nervously at the scar, glancing behind him around the room.

When he pulled the blind, Joe could hear him moving, could hear drawers opening. Nipping across the roof, Joe dropped to the branch outside the bathroom window.

In the lighted bathroom, Prey was sweeping razor and toiletries into his jacket pockets, along with a pair of socks that he snatched from the shower rod where apparently he had hung his laundry. When he left the bathroom, Joe slid the window open. In a moment he heard Prey punch the phone, and listened to him ordering a cab.

Leaping back across branches to his own roof, Joe pawed at Clyde’s phone, hitting the on button and the redial, the way he had set it up. In seconds he was speaking to the dispatcher.

“Augor Prey is getting ready to split, packing clothes and shaving gear in his jacket. He just called a cab.”

“Will you repeat your message?”

“Prey’s ready to skip. Tell Detective Garza, now! I don’t know where the tail is. There’s a guy watching him, but I don’t think it’s your man.” Joe watched Prey lift the mattress, shouldering it up high enough to reach clear to the middle, deeper than Joe had been able to search without smothering himself. “Well, I’ll be damned,” Joe said. “I think-tell Garza that I think Prey has the letters.”

He watched Prey carefully stuff a little packet wrapped in clear plastic, into his inside pocket. It looked like letters; he thought he could see a ribbon wrapped around the small bundle.

Garza came on the line. He was as matter-of-fact as Harper had been lately. As if maybe Harper had talked to him about this snitch, had told him this informant was eccentric but reliable. “Is Prey’s car still there?”

“It’s there,” Joe said. “He’s called a cab. Guess he means to leave the car, and leave his bag in the room, just walk away as if he’s coming back. He’s armed. If that is your man right outside Prey’s window, he’s too close for you to risk your calling him.”

“There is no officer on duty.”

“You’ve had a tail on him all day.”

Garza hesitated as if not sure how much to trust this stranger.

“That officer is back at the station,” he said at last. “We have not sent a replacement. You say someone is watching Prey?” Garza’s voice was sharp.

Joe leaned over the gutter, peering down. The guy was still there. “You have no tail on him now?”

“No tail. If you’d give me your name�”

Joe watched the squarely built, darkly dressed figure, caught a glimpse of a pockmarked cheek.

“That’s Richard Casselrod,” he hissed suddenly. “Casselrod’s tailing him-black sweatshirt, black cap and shoes.”

Prey left his room and in a moment came out the back door of the house, looked around him, and quickly crossed the side yard.

“He’s making for the back street,” Joe said softly. “He’s standing in the shadows of a cypress tree. I can hardly see him under the low branches. Casselrod’s following him, moving in behind him.”

Casselrod made not a sound. Nor did Garza. The phone sounded like it had gone dead.

“Are you there?” Joe whispered.

No one answered; Garza was gone. Joe watched a cab turn into the street, its lights reflecting across darkened house windows. As Prey started toward the taxi, Casselrod lurched out of the night and grabbed him, swinging Prey around and shoving a gun in his face.

Jerking Prey’s jacket back over his shoulders to confine his arms, Casselrod took Prey’s own gun. Joe watched him pat Prey down and remove the plastic-wrapped packet from Prey’s shirt pocket.

Holding his gun on Prey, Casselrod backed toward the cab. At the same moment, police cars moved in from both corners, parking diagonally to block the narrow street. Detective Garza swung out, followed by three uniforms. They grabbed Prey, and Garza was on Casselrod. Kicking him toward the cab so he went off-balance, Garza swung him around, taking his gun and forcing him against the vehicle.

Within seconds, Prey and Casselrod had been searched and cuffed and secured in the backseat of a squad car. Garza had their guns, and he had the plastic-wrapped package. Joe Grey sat on the roof smiling with satisfaction as the black-and-whites pulled away, taking the two to their new accommodations. He hoped MPPD could offer them a long, extended visit.

27 [��������: pic_28.jpg]

Thesetting moon painted a line of brilliant light along the clouds’ ragged edges, a display so spectacular that up on the hills the two cats paused from devouring their freshly killed rabbit and sat looking toward the heavens, held by that burning stitchery.

It was only a few hours since Augor Prey and Richard Casselrod had been arrested, a positive event in an ongoing scenario that seemed, to Joe Grey and Dulcie, far more nebulous than the clouds shifting above them. The department had Prey’s.38 revolver. By tonight or tomorrow the ballistics report should be in. With that thought to cheer them, the cats fell to again, sharing their warm, bloody kill.

They ate in silence, making a leisurely meal, then washed up, licking gore from their whiskers. Around them the tall grass shivered in the predawn wind. What concerned the cats at the moment was that Vivi and Elliott had been released.

They had no idea on what grounds Garza had picked up the Traynors and brought them in for questioning; but the thought that they were free again was not encouraging. They had no notion, either, what Adele McElroy might have learned from NYPD about the Traynors.

“If this comes down the way I think,” Joe said, “Vivi and Elliott could split any minute-get edgy and pack a bag the way Prey did, and they’re gone. Well, Harper and Garza will be expecting that.” But still, he began to pace, looking restlessly down the hills toward the Traynor cottage.

“Relax,” she said complacently. “You know Harper has an officer in place. And they weren’t packing earlier. I watched until they went to bed.”

“A tail won’t know until they get in the car and take off.”

“So, the law will pick them up.” She licked blood from her paw. But then she rose, with a little half-smile. “You’re not going to rest until we have a look.” And she took off down the hills. Galloping through the forest of tall grass, the two cats could not be seen-only the thrashing line of their flight wildly tossing the grass heads.

Dropping down off the hill, they raced beneath a rail fence and through a garden that had been decimated by grazing deer, its roses nibbled away until only ragged fragments of petals remained, scattered like potato chips. Down through the village gardens they sped, as the courthouse clock struck five, then swiftly across empty side streets. Approaching the Traynor cottage, they passed the department’s surveillance car, an old blue Plymouth Rent-A-Wreck parked four doors away, its engine and tires still warm, the smell of coffee perfuming the air around it, though no driver was visible.

The Traynors’ black Lincoln was gone. The house was dark. Scorching up the oak tree to the high livingroom windows, they looked down through the glass.

“They haven’t moved out,” Dulcie said. “Vivi wouldn’t leave that tangerine satin robe, it’s too gorgeous. She wears it every morning.” The room was its usual mess, the robe tumbled across a chair under Vivi’s red sweater, a pair of sandals tossed on the coffee table next to an empty cup and a torrid-looking paperback romance, the heroine with enough cleavage to hide a sheep dog.

Dropping to a lower branch, they looked into the study.

The computer still reigned on the desk like a small electronic god. The stack of research was still on the shelf. Only the new chapter was missing; there were no freshly printed white pages aligned neatly beside the blotter. The cats waited for what seemed hours, and no sign of the Traynors. The sun was pushing above the hills when Charlie’s old Chevy van pulled into the drive, its bright blue paint glistening, its rebuilt engine purring. Last year Clyde had completely rebuilt the engine and fixed the rusting body, pounding out dents, applying filler and primer, then expertly sanding before it was painted-a labor not of love but in return for Charlie’s carpentry work on the neglected apartment building that Clyde had purchased. Their exchange of work had been a fair trade all around.

They watched Charlie swing out of the van, hauling her caddy of cleaning supplies to the back door, to disappear inside. Soon they heard her loading the dishwasher, then opening cupboards.

But soon the study light came on, and she wheeled the vacuum in. Standing at the desk, she bent to try the drawers, her kinky red hair falling loose from its ribbon. Was she looking for the manuscript? All the drawers were locked.

“If the Traynors have skipped,” Joe said, “maybe they mailed the manuscript to Elliott’s agent, maybe hoping when they surface again the second half of the advance will be waiting?”

Dulcie sneezed. “Could they really believe that?”

When Charlie hastily turned on the computer, the cats hurried along the branch where they could see the screen, watching her bring up chapter 1 ofTwilight Silver,then move to the final pages. They were so fascinated that when a mockingbird flitted boldly past their noses, they hardly noticed its rude taunting.

Taking a floppy disk from her pocket, Charlie put it in the computer and went through the steps to make a copy.

Glancing out toward the drive, she dropped the disk in her pocket, then went through the little ritual of shutting down the machine. “Nice timing,” Joe said. The computer was chuckling its closing noises when the Lincoln turned into the drive.

Vivi got out of the car alone; Elliott wasn’t with her.

“He’s not in the house?” Dulcie said, glancing through the study door to the empty hall.

The moment the car turned in, Charlie snatched up Traynor’s research from the bookshelf and slipped it into the waistband of her jeans, tucking it out of sight under her sweatshirt. By the time Vivi crossed the drive and turned her key in the back door, Charlie was vacuuming the hall. And the cats learned nothing more until that night when Charlie and Harper, Dallas Garza and his niece showed up at Clyde’s for sandwiches and a few hands of poker.

Harper and Garza were in a gala mood, their expressions as smug as Joe had ever seen. Clyde looked at them patiently, waiting for whatever big news they were holding back. When the officers said nothing but simply began to count out chips and shuffle cards, Clyde glanced at Joe, as frustrated as the tomcat. Couldn’t people just come out and say what was going on with them, couldn’t they simply tell a person why they were grinning? Ryan and Charlie remained expressionless, waiting to see what would develop.

The kitchen smelled of salami and onions, and echoed with the clink of poker chips. Harper dealt, fanning the cards with a thin, practiced hand. The cats, to keep a low profile, retreated to the laundry and cozied down on the bottom bunk next to Rube. The old Lab was sound asleep, softly snoring. Harper said, “That’s a nice car, that Lincoln the Traynors drive. I understand they picked it up from the Ford dealer when they got off the plane, ordered it months ago, before they left New York.”

Clyde looked at Harper, puzzled. “Are we supposed to be impressed?”

Harper shrugged. “I don’t know. You wouldn’t expect a multimillion-copy best-selling author to drive a ten-year-old Mazda.”

Joe couldn’t figure out where this was leading. Apparently, neither could Clyde, and he was not amused. He sat staring at his cards, scowling darkly. Well, he’d been touchy all week. Joe knew that he’d called Kate several times and that he kept leaving messages but she hadn’t returned his calls. At one point, worried about Kate, Clyde had called the designer’s studio where she worked. She was there, they told him, but very busy.

At the poker table, Clyde said, “If Traynor’s so rich, why did he opt for a Lincoln instead of a Jag or BMW?”

“You mean, why didn’t he buy from Beckwhite’s?” Harper said, laughing. “What, you’re getting a percentage from the showroom now? I’ll take two cards.”

Clyde flipped cards around the table. “Second-rate car. And a wife young enough to be his granddaughter.”

Ryan and Charlie were silent, glancing at each other.

“Forty years younger,” Garza said, his square, Latino face not changing expression. “He and Vivi were-have been married three years.” Garza slid two chips to the center. “His fifth wife. But the first time around for her-first time for a legal relationship.” He glanced at Harper again, the faint gleam of humor sparking between them.

Joe stretched and curled up with his chin on Rube’s golden flank. Beside him, Dulcie closed her eyes. They listened with keen interest; they’d never before heard Harper and Garza amuse themselves at Clyde’s expense.

When Harper raised the bet, Garza slid two chips to the center. “Vivi’s first marriage,” Harper said, “after a long line of live-ins and one-night stands. She’s been busy for a girl of twenty-five. Apparently she’s lived off rich men since she was fifteen.”

Garza said, “I wonder if Elliott knew, when he married her, that she would be his last.”

Clyde came to full alert. And in the laundry, Joe’s and Dulcie’s ears cocked sharply forward.

Clyde watched Garza raise the bet, then folded. Garza took the pot. No one said anything more, the table was silent, Harper and Garza stonefaced and ungiving. Joe wondered if a cat could expire from unfulfilled curiosity.

The poker players ran three more hands, talking only in monosyllables. “Raise you two.” “Three cards.” “I fold.” Twice Clyde glanced across the kitchen at Joe, at first with the same unfulfilled curiosity, a moment of mutual sympathy-before he gave Joe thatnone-of-your-business, why-don’t-you-go-out-and-play-like-a-normal-catlook that made Joe hunker down harder against Rube, stubbornly waiting for Harper’s punch line.

28 [��������: pic_29.jpg]

Harper raked in the largest pot of the night, stacking his chips in neat rows. “That would have been tight,” he said, “keeping a twenty-four-hour surveillance on the Traynors, pulling men off patrol.”

Garza nodded. “Better off in custody. New York is sending Vivi’s case file?”

Clyde stared at his cards and said nothing. And from the bunk in the laundry, Joe and Dulcie watched with slitted eyes, pretending to be asleep.

Harper said, “Homicide put it in the mail this morning. No wonder Traynor’s agent was upset.”

“All right,” Clyde said, “that’s enough. Let’s hear it.”

“If not for Traynor’s agent,” Garza said, ignoring Clyde, “hassling NYPD, they might never have identified the body.”

Joe had sat up, staring at the two cops so intently that Dulcie nudged him. He lay down again, tense with interest. At the poker table, Charlie and Ryan were quiet, watching Harper feed the story to Clyde piece by puzzling piece, the captain loving every excruciating minute.

And Joe and Dulcie looked at each other, buzzing with questions. Had the case come down like Joe thought? Was that what Garza and Harper were saying? Had Adele McElroy and NYPD found the missing piece? Did Harper and Garza have to be so damned oblique? They were not only teasing Clyde, they were driving two poor innocent cats nearly crazy.

“You’re not saying,” Clyde snapped, “that Elliott Traynor is wanted in New York? For homicide? You’re saying he killed someone? This guy is famous. You’re saying he-”

“He didn’t kill anyone,” Harper said mildly.

“Vivi?” Clyde said. “Vivi killed someone?”

Harper shrugged.

Clyde laid down his cards. “No more poker. No more beer. Nothing more to eat until you guys lay out the story.”

The officers began to laugh.

Ryan said, “� he and Viviweremarried three years?Weremarried�?”

Charlie repeated what Harper had said earlier.“DidElliott know that she would be last? That she would be Elliott’s last wife, Max?”

Clyde said softly, “Elliott Traynor is dead. When did this happen?”

“Before we ever met him,” Garza told Clyde.

Joe Grey felt his heart pounding, and felt Dulcie’s heart pounding against him. He’d been right. A wild guess, a shot in the dark, and he’d pounced on the big one. Had nailed his quarry right in the jugular.

Clyde looked hard at Harper. “This is not Elliott Traynor, this guy in the Traynor cottage who’s the spitting image of Traynor, who looks like Traynor’s picture on his book jackets, who is supposed to be suffering from terminal cancer? Who is overseeing the production of Traynor’s play and finishing up Traynor’s novel?”

“Fry cook from Jersey,” Garza said. “Dead ringer for Traynor.”

Clyde shook his head. “And Traynor’s agent was worried because his work was so bad? A fry cook is writing Traynor’s book? And is Vivi a fake as well?”

“That’s Mrs. Traynor,” Harper said. “They came close to pulling it off.”

“They killed him?”

“Not sure yet,” Harper said. “New York’s working on that.”

“How did you�?

“Someone knew,” Garza said. “Or suspected. Someone blew the whistle. Called the agent, told her it was time to take her problem to NYPD, to talk to the detectives.”

Clyde shuffled the deck. “I’m getting lost here. It would be nice if you guys would start at the beginning.”

“Talk about chutzpah,” Harper said. “Fry cook with no literary talent, impersonating one of the country’s top writers.”

“And you have them in jail.”

“Brought them in late this morning,” Garza said. “They were packing up, getting ready to skip. We’re holding them on illegal disposal of a body, until New York decides if it was homicide.”

Garza counted his chips, then looked up at Clyde. “Elliott Traynor died six weeks before they were to fly out here. No one knew, there was no report made of his death. For all intents and purposes, Elliott boarded the plane with Vivi.”

“No one might have known,” Harper said, “except that Traynor’s book wasn’t finished when they left New York. When they got out here, the writing suddenly turned inept. Apparently this fry cook can’t write worth a damn.”

“What did they do with the body?” Clyde asked. “You can’t just-”

“Seems Vivi dressed him in old ragged clothes, old shoes. Elliott had lost weight, didn’t look well, and that fit right in. She left him in an alley-a dead John Doe, one of New York’s homeless.”

“Agent got concerned,” Garza said, “because Traynor’s last chapters were so bad. She started poking around, then called Max.

“Agent was waiting for us to check on Traynor, when someone from Molena Point called her. Suggested she get over to NYPD and talk to the detectives, take them a picture of Traynor.”

Clyde didn’t ask who called the agent. Under the table, his foot was tapping. He eased back his chair as if he found it hard to sit still.

“The agent’s visit paid off,” Garza said. “One of the detectives remembered a John Doe that looked like Traynor. Body was tucked away in the morgue waiting to be ID’d. The detective took the photo and ran with it. Got the agent to bring him some manuscript pages-some that Traynor sent before they left New York, and some later chapters that were sent from here.”

Harper said, “Prints on the chapters Traynor wrote before they left the city matched the John Doe. The other set, on the chapters sent from Molena Point, are Vivi’s, most of them. One or two that match up with the fry cook. And,” he glanced at Charlie, “some prints where the housekeeper had moved the manuscript, when she dusted the desk.”

“You had Vivi’s and this guy’s prints?” Clyde asked.

“We were able to lift them from the house,” Harper told him, “sent them overnight to New York.”

“Another few weeks,” Garza said, “and Elliot might have been buried in a pauper’s grave to make room for new bodies.”

“But why would Vivi� How did Traynor die?”

Harper shook his head. “The body was found by a garbage collector behind a row of trash cans. Unshaven, dirty, shaggy hair. Nothing visible to indicate the cause of death. Usually, whether the coroner suspects murder or not, on a John Doe they’ll take blood and tissue samples for later investigation.

“Even though he was really too clean, no thick calluses on his feet, no sores or signs of prolonged ill health, New York thought Traynor was homeless. They’re a busy department. Overworked, backed up on investigations, as is the medical department. They didn’t take samples. Tucked him away hoping they’d get an inquiry, someone looking for him.”

“But why didn’t they run his prints?”

“They ran his prints,” Harper said. “No record. Even if he’d had a driver’s license, New York DMV doesn’t take prints. Only a picture. Could be, they would never have made the connection except for Traynor’s agent and whoever tipped her. I talked with her this afternoon. She’s not taking this too well-they were close friends. She’s convinced it was murder.

“She said Traynor had plotted a smashing ending to the book, a finale that fit the story yet would blow the reader away. Said Traynor plotted carefully before he began to write, and that he always adhered to his outline. She said the plot was followed in the last chapters, but the writing was not like Traynor’s work. She thought for a while that it was the medication.

“She said that for several weeks after he sent the first chapters, while he was still in New York-when the writing first turned bad-Vivi wouldn’t let her talk with Traynor when she called. Vivi claimed he had a bad cold, on top of the cancer and his treatments, that his condition was pretty serious, so McElroy didn’t push it. Said she was leaving town for a week’s conference. When she got back, Traynor did finally return her calls but he was forgetful and his voice muted, like the cold was hanging on. What upset her was that he didn’t want to talk about the book, didn’t seem able to talk intelligently about it. She wondered if he’d had a stroke, but Vivi denied that.

“Then,” Harper said, “Traynor decided to come to California to oversee the play and finish the book, despite his illness. McElroy said she was worried about him doing that.”

“But,” Clyde said, “if Traynor died naturally, from the cancer, if Vivi didn’t kill him, why wouldn’t she have a bang-up funeral and collect his estate?”

“If the book wasn’t finished,” Harper said, “she might have to give back his advance. And the guy had four previous wives. Maybe he didn’t leave much to Vivi.”

“Then you’re saying she had no motive to kill him? That he died a natural death, but she didn’t want anyone to find out?”

“That remains to be seen,” Harper said.

Joe and Dulcie exchanged a glance of smug satisfaction. But they lowered their eyes when they saw Clyde watching them, and began diligently to wash-the age-old ritual of pulling a little curtain of disinterested preoccupation around themselves.

Garza said, “Apparently she met this fry cook some six months ago. Willy Gasper, working in a little hole-in-the-wall in Queens.” That made Joe swallow back a laugh. This tall, well-dressed, elegant-looking man that everyone thought was an author of international fame-this guy’s name was Willie Gasper?

“Think about it,” Garza said. “She discovers a dead ringer for Elliott. Elliott’s ill, she assumes he’s terminal somewhere down the line. She knows that when he dies, the writing income is reduced, and that very likely four ex-wives could have some claim on his assets. Willie presents a ready-made way to keep Elliott in the picture, convince everyone that he’s still alive. Not hard, she thinks, if she offers Willie the right deal.

“She’ll have to take over Elliott’s writing, but she has his research, and this book’s three-fourths finished. She figures she can do that.”

Garza smiled. “Apparently it didn’t occur to Vivi that she might not be able handle the literary side of the matter. The opportunity was too good. How could she pass it up?”

Harper said, “The New York medical examiner should have an answer in a day or two as to whether she killed him or he died of natural causes. Meantime, the two of them are in jail raising all kinds of hell.

“When we get this sorted out,” Harper continued, “we may find a link between these two and Augor Prey. We picked Prey up last night. Prey and Casselrod.”

“On a tip,” Garza said quietly. “From this phantom snitch of Max’s, that no one has identified.

“Last night,” Garza said, “I’d pulled off the officer I had watching Prey. We had a party to break up south of the village, a free-for-all fight-kids-and someone fired a few shots from a twenty-two. We had everyone down there. Maybe Prey knew the officer had been pulled back. Maybe not. But whoever called in was close enough to Prey to see him packing up-and to see Richard Casselrod follow him.”

Garza frowned, aligning the cards into a neat stack. “I’d like to find this informer. See what other information he might have-see what his interest is in all this.”

Harper was quiet. Clyde was quiet. Charlie rose to refill the plate of cold cuts. And in the laundry, crouched on the lower bunk, Joe Grey smiled.Don’t waste your time,he thought, glancing at Dulcie, and he put his head down on Rube’s leg, feeling pretty good about life.

If he hadn’t called Adele McElroy, she might not have gone to the New York police until it was too late, until the body had been disposed of-if he hadn’t had that niggling little itch that wouldn’t let him rest. Cop sense, Harper called it.

And apparently Harper, too, had felt that a big piece of the puzzle was right there, looking him in the face.

Though Harper, constrained by certain ethics and codes, might not have been able to take the freewheeling approach that a cat could employ.

Joe knew it wasn’t smart to get smug about a case until there was an arraignment, a court date, and the wheels of the law were grinding, but he couldn’t help it. Dropping off the bunk to accept a plate of snacks from Clyde, he found himself rumbling with purrs. And when he looked up into Clyde’s eyes, the two shared a rare moment of perfect understanding. Clyde was proud of him, and that made Joe want to yowl.

All he and Dulcie had to do now, he thought, giving Clyde a purr and a head rub, was wait to see whether Vivi, maybe with Willie Gasper’s help, had indeed killed Elliott. Or whether she simply took advantage of the situation at hand.

Or, Joe thought suddenly, had Elliott himself done the deed? Had Elliott Traynor, following the philosophy of some other terminally ill folks, unwilling to deal with increasing pain and weakness, taken his own life? Had he stepped out of the sickness, perhaps with the expedient use of some powerful and legally prescribed pain medication? Joe was thinking so hard about this possibility that he didn’t wonder until later about Willie Gasper’s “target pistol,” about the.38 with which Willie had killed the raccoons. He didn’t wonder until late that night if Garza had searched the Traynor cottage and found the weapon.

As he curled down on the pillow beside Clyde, he knew there must be more to the story that Harper and Garza hadn’t yet told, and he began to wonder, anew, what the two officers were holding back.

Maybe there was something they were feeling edgy about, not yet certain how the facts were unfolding? Well, if Harper and Garza wanted to play that hand close to the chest, that was their call. Maybe they knew where the gun was, and weren’t spilling that part just yet.

29 [��������: pic_30.jpg]

The ladies of the Senior Survival club met early Saturday morning to stand in line for the Iselman estate sale and ended the day falling in love. To their great dismay, the object of their affections was not available, but was spoken for by another. The day was breezy, streaks of clouds blowing so low over the hills that, high up where the Iselman house rose, they seemed to catch on the rooftops. Mavity and Gabrielle and Susan waited in line at the door for the tickets. The house stood on a steep street of expensive residences at the east side of the village, a large two-story structure of stucco and rough-hewn timbers, with multiple wings and patios, and angled tile roofs. At precisely 7:00 A.M. John Tharp, manager of Tharp Estate Sales, opened the front door from within and, holding a large roll of blue tickets, began passing out numbers to be presented three hours later for admittance. Already the line snaked to the street and half a block along the sidewalk. The three ladies took their numbers and greeted Clyde and Ryan, who stood behind them some ten places.

“Will you join us?” Susan asked. “We’re having breakfast at La Junta.” La Junta Hotel’s patio breakfasts were a village favorite.

“Wilma and Cora Lee are meeting us. After the sale, we’re going to look at houses.”

Clyde raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t know you were that far along in your plan.”

“Neither did we,” Susan said, “but the marsh houses are being evicted since the city finally made up its mind. Mavity has thirty days to get out, so we thought we’d have a look.”

“Well, it’s a buyer’s market,” Clyde said. “But we’ll take a raincheck on breakfast, we’re going to the state park-deli picnic, and a hike before the sale begins.” He moved up beside Ryan to accept their tickets and the ladies turned away to Susan’s car.

They read the real estate ads over breakfast, and marked the most desirable houses.

Walk to the village from this charming five-bedroom home� One-of-a-kind design, separate guest quarters� Secluded setting, large house delightfully crafted� Bathed in sunshine, four bedrooms, two baths, and large office� Spectacular ocean views. Solarium. Two fireplaces�

It would take a lot of looking before they found the house that suited, and in their price range. The ladies lingered over the ads, enjoying their breakfast, then hit Iselman’s estate sale shortly before 10:00. Shopping for only an hour, they covered the ten rooms that were open to the public carrying away cloisonne bowls, Haviland china, ebony carvings, and some nice old brass pieces that should do well in the eBay auctions. Packing their purchases into Susan’s and Gabrielle’s cars, they unloaded them in Susan’s garage with only faint unease. With both Augor Prey, aka Lenny Wells, and Richard Casselrod out of circulation, their purchases would be perfectly safe. The first open house was a residence so immaculate, with its creamy fresh paint and white carpets, that they all were afraid to set foot inside. The garden was equally well manicured, each tree and rosebush trimmed to a perfection seldom found in nature. The house had five large bedrooms and four baths, and a kitchen to die for; but no one felt comfortable.

“Too picture perfect for me,” Mavity said. “I’d be afraid to breathe.”

“And me,” Susan agreed. “Not a home for a dog, even as well mannered as Lamb.”

“I like it,” Gabrielle said, imagining herself in the largest, front bedroom, the one with the fireplace. Neither Wilma nor Cora Lee showed much interest. The house was beautiful, with its large living room and sunken seating area, its white satin draperies and white tile fireplace; but it wasn’t the home they wanted. Anyway, the price was out of their reach. They moved on to the next open house, and the next, traveling in two cars in case Cora Lee should grow weary.

Some of the houses were elegant. Some showed the love marks of hard wear by large families. Some had good space, an appealing kitchen, or a welcoming garden, but none quite fit. Not enough bedrooms. Rooms too small. And of course the universal complaint: too much money.

Mavity, at the end of thirty days, would receive a cash payment, the city taking out a low-interest loan for its investment. The council had voted to turn three-fourths of the land back to the marsh as a bird and wildlife refuge, and to sell the remaining acre at a profit for a small, tasteful condominium in the heart of the sanctuary. The “nature” units would be much in demand. Mavity made no comment about the city’s intentions. She walked through the open houses with little enthusiasm, caught in the trauma of dislocation, feeling insecure and off-center and frightened. Wilma put her arm around her friend, knowing that when her own time came to move, she’d feel the same.

Wilma didn’t intend to leave her stone cottage anytime soon, but it was nice to have a plan for the future, a place to go if she should become ill. And now, driving to the next open house, she couldn’t get her mind off Dulcie and Joe Grey.

The cats had made a point of asking when Cora Lee might be going home, but they wouldn’t tell her why-only a sly little smile from Dulcie. They were preparing some surprise. Knowing those two, she remained uneasy. As she pulled up in front of the last open house on their list, two cars were leaving, and a black BMW was parked at the curb.

This was probably the ugliest house in the village, a brown wooden box with a flat roof, cracked siding, and peeling trim, the fascia boards pale and discolored. On top of the large main floor stood a second, smaller cube, apparently a single room, resembling nothing so much as the wheelhouse on a Mississippi riverboat. The structure was, in fact, very much like Mavity’s little fishing cottage, in a larger and more sprawling version and without the stilts that held Mavity’s home above the muddy marsh.

The house backed on one of the wild canyons that bisected the Molena Point hills. Maybe, Wilma thought, the view from the back would be nice, out over the canyon and across Molena Valley to the low mountains that edged the rocky coast. These fissures that cut through the hills had, eons past, been deep sea canyons, this whole neck of land lying beneath the ocean. It was the canyons, in part, that kept Molena Point from becoming overpopulated. One couldn’t build in them, and the lush terrain, with wild bushes and grasses, offered food and shelter to deer and coyotes, to occasional bobcats, and, just this last spring, to a large male cougar. How interesting that the house stood between the two worlds, the rear decks forcing out into the wild land, the front of the house solidly a part of manicured human civilization.

The front yard was enclosed by a tall wooden fence and belonged apparently to one or more large dogs that were not at the moment in residence. The earth was trampled bare beneath a few sickly bushes and dotted with their chewed rubber toys. At least the owners had cleaned up the dog do; and probably they had taken the dogs away for the day-the sight of canine pets could cause a prospective buyer to look twice as hard for interior damage, for chewed door moldings, scratched floors, and stained carpet. The ladies gathered in front, beside the “Open House” sign.

“I don’t think�” Gabrielle began, looking the house over, “I don’t think this one�”

Wilma took her arm. “Come on. It won’t hurt to look, it’s the last one on the list. Nearly four thousand square feet, Gabrielle, and it has enough water credits to start a hotel.”

The adread, five bedrooms and five baths, five custom-built fireplaces plus two sunny, legal basement apartments.The wordlegalshould mean not only that the land was zoned for two apartments, but that every water fixture on the premises had a proper permit.

All over Molena Point there were unobtrusive apartments tucked into a hillside basement or over a garage, some legal, some not. All were in demand as rentals. Molena Point’s water code mandated an official permit for any household fixture that used water in its functions, from a king-sized shower to a bar sink. New credits were not an option; your house had just so many. If you wanted another washbasin, you had to give up a fixture in exchange.

“There’s plenty of parking space,” Susan said. “Three-car garage and this nice wide drive. And the front planting, between the fence and the street, is nice, where the dogs don’t play.” That wide area was lush with native bushes, succulents, and large volcanic boulders. Susan’s Lamb, though he, too, had a fenced yard, had in his poodle dignity allowed Susan’s garden to flourish and even the lawn to present a respectable green carpet.

The front door was open. They saw no one inside. Entering, they formed a divergent group, Mavity in her maid’s uniform, Wilma in jeans and a red T-shirt, Gabrielle wearing a linen suit and heels, and Cora Lee in stretch pants and the oversized shirt that hid her bandage. Susan wore a calf-length denim jumper over a white T-shirt, and leather sandals. They moved into the foyer.

“Oh, my,” Mavity said.

“Oh!” Cora Lee whispered.

They stood in a wide entry, its tile floor and skylight bathing them in brilliance. Potted plants filled the corners. Through a door to their left, they saw a young couple in the large, light kitchen, talking with realtor John Farmer. Glancing up, he waved to Wilma. A stairway rose to their right. Passing it, they moved ahead into a large living room dominated by a fireplace of native stone.

The gray-blue walls wanted paint, and the carpet still showed stains despite an apparently recent cleaning. But the ceiling was high, with tall windows, a spacious room very different from what the exterior implied.

The three bedrooms on the main level, two to the right of the living room and one to the left past the dining room, were all large. Each had a private bath, and two had raised fireplaces.

The oversized kitchen was done in cream-and-white tiles. Opening off this were an ample laundry and storeroom, before one entered the garage. All the walls needed paint, and some needed patching. The doors were marred with claw scratches, made, apparently by a very large dog. Returning to the entry hall, they climbed the stairs.

The upstairs cubicle, that looked so small from without, offered a large master suite with another raised fireplace, a private deck, an ample study that would do for another bedroom, and a view straight down into the canyon. Three levels of decks overlooked the canyon. The ladies glanced shyly at each other, but no one spoke. They hurried down again, to the basement apartments.

Both apartments were fusty and needed work. But both had their own small kitchens. Either would do for a housekeeper, a caregiver, or as rental income.

Returning to the living room, they could see John Farmer still in the kitchen with the young couple. Farmer was in his forties, a man with surprisingly round cheeks, a pink-and-white complexion, a slim, sculpted nose, and dark hair in a military cut. He sat at the dining table with the blond young woman and the slim, red-haired young man. Their voices were low, their conversation solemn, the couple’s expressions excited and serious.

“They’re too young to afford this house,” Mavity whispered.

“And whose BMW is that at the curb?” Susan said softly.

The sight of the young man making out a check wilted the ladies. When the couple had left, shaking hands with John Farmer and tucking away a deposit receipt, Farmer joined them.

“Did they offer full price?” Wilma asked.

John Farmer nodded, and put his arm around Wilma. “You folks were serious.”

“We were,” Wilma said. “Very serious. Are they requesting an inspection?”

“Yes. And the sale, of course, is contingent upon their getting their loan. If you’d come half an hour earlier�”

Wilma looked at the others; she didn’t know what had come over her, she wasn’t ready to sell her house, but they couldn’t let this one go. Maybe the loan would be refused. Maybe the inspector would find some disastrous seepage problem that the couple wouldn’t want to bother repairing.

“You can make a second deposit,” John said. “Contingent upon their not completing the sale.”

An hour later, after walking around the outside and inspecting the furnace and the ducts and wiring as best they could, and writing in several contingencies to their deposit, the checkbooks came out. The ladies split the deposit five ways and called their attorney to help set up the venture. The legal work seemed tedious, but they were caught up in the thrill of the purchase and in the trauma of not knowing whether they had actually made a purchase.

While Wilma and her friends agonized over their hunger to own this particular house, across the village in Wilma’s guest room, Joe Grey and Dulcie were pawing a few scattered cat hairs from the dresser, where they had left a brown, padded envelope. They had placed a computer-printed note on top, weighting it down with Cora Lee’s bracelet so it couldn’t be missed.

Cora Lee,

The letter in this envelope belongs to you. You bought the white chest at the McLeary yard sale. Richard Casselrod took it from you by force, even if he did shove some money at you. He took the chest apart and removed this letter from the false bottom, so it should be legally yours, to keep or sell.

A friend

The letter had been Dulcie’s longest effort at Wilma’s computer. Her paws felt bruised, and her temper was still short. It took a lot of squinching up to hit only the right keys, and took far more patience than patrolling the most difficult mouse run.

They had gotten Catalina’s valuable letter out of Joe’s house before Clyde might, in fact, decide to pack up and move. Before he fell prey to the hunger for change that had gripped the ladies of the Senior Survival club. At least three of those women seemed fairly itching to box up their belongings.

Now, following Joe out through her cat door, Dulcie said a little prayer for him, a plea that Clyde wouldn’t sell their house, that there would be no move for the tomcat, that Clyde and Joe would stay where they belonged, and Joe could quit worrying so foolishly about homelessness and displacement.

30 [��������: pic_31.jpg]

The front page of theMolena Point Gazette was deeply shocking to citizens who knew nothing of recent events. But to Joe Grey and Dulcie and to the Molena Point police, the headline was satisfying, the indication of a job completed. The national noon news on TV and radio may have scooped theGazette,but still the paper sold out in less than two hours. Every daily across the country carried the story.

AUTHOR ELLIOTT TRAYNOR MURDERED VISITING AUTHOR AN IMPOSTOR

The handsome gray-haired author living among us while his play,Thorns of Gold,was being cast, has turned out to be an imposter. The man whom villagers assumed to be Elliott Traynor is, in fact, a New York fry cook from Queens bearing an uncanny resemblance to the author. The real Traynor died six weeks ago on the New York streets, in a drama more bizarre than any of Traynor’s many works of fiction.

The debonair and charming fry cook who impersonated Traynor was able to deceive the entire village, including director Samuel Ladler and musical director Mark King. Only Traynor’s wife, Vivi, seems to have known the truth.

The body of the real Elliott Traynor was identified late yesterday by New York police after it had lain for six weeks in cold storage in the New York City morgue, tagged as a John Doe. Molena Point police are holding Vivi Traynor and the fry cook, Willie Gasper, for transport back to New York where they will face murder charges. Until this morning, Traynor’s death was considered a possible suicide. Police now have a witness to the murder.

Traynor was found dead in early March, in an alley frequented by the homeless. There was no identification. He was dressed in rags. The fingerprints lifted could not be matched in any New York State or federal records. On Friday, Traynor’s widow and Gasper were arrested and held for possible illegal disposition of a body, but early today a witness was located claiming to have seen the author’s wife smother him with a pillow and dump him in the alley.

Early this month, Elliott and Vivi Traynor were thought by Traynor’s publisher and his New York agent to have flown to the West Coast, where Traynor meant to complete his latest novel and oversee the production of his play. According to New York police, Traynor died the night the couple’s flight left John F. Kennedy Airport. Gasper, impersonating the world-famous author, accompanied Mrs. Traynor on the flight to California using Traynor’s identification, then posed as Traynor, even acting as consultant on the production of Traynor’s only known play.

New York medical examiner Holland Frye told reporters that Traynor’s body contained a large dose of Demerol laced with alcohol, a potentially lethal combination. Traynor had a legal prescription for Demerol, which is a powerful pain reliever. The pillow with which Traynor was smothered was hidden by the witness to his murder. Subsequently turned over to police, it was booked as evidence and sent to the state crime lab for identification of hairs clinging to the fabric and DNA testing of possible saliva stains.

Max Harper and Dallas Garza watched the evening newscast while standing in Clyde’s living room. The three cats lay on the back of the couch behind Charlie and Ryan, pretending to doze but Joe was so interested he could hardly lie still. Both theGazetteand the newscasters had mentioned only one New York witness.

So, Joe thought, smiling, NYPD had been able to keep some of the details under wraps.

Besides Marcy Truncant, the bag lady who had awakened to see Vivi kneeling in the alley holding a pillow over Traynor’s face, a neighbor of the Traynors, living upstairs from them in their mid-town apartment building, had come forward. She had told detectives that she saw Vivi and Elliott leave the building early the evening of his death, five hours before the Traynors’ flight. She remembered the date because it was her wedding anniversary, the first since her husband had died. She saw the couple go out the front door of the building and down into the parking garage, then in a few minutes saw their car pull out of the garage. She told police she saw both of them inside the car as they turned into traffic and sat waiting for the traffic light.

She said that approximately twenty minutes after the Traynors left the building, Elliott returned, coming into the lobby through the front door, and that he was dressed differently. He had left the building dressed in a suit and tie and had returned wearing chinos, a T-shirt, and a frayed denim jacket, attire devoid of the meticulous care that Traynor always exhibited. She didn’t see their car return, but an hour later when she went down to the garage, the Traynors’ black Jaguar was in its slot.

Joe imagined a scenario where Vivi and Elliott left in the Jaguar, then Vivi had somehow gotten Elliott into Willie’s car, maybe had feigned car trouble. She had gotten some liquor into him and perhaps additional Demerol. When he passed out they had changed his clothes and dumped him in the alley, and apparently smothered him to make certain he was dead. Crude, Joe thought. But effective.

Willie had driven the Jaguar back to the building and put it away, so it would appear that Elliott and Vivi were at home. In Elliott’s place, he had gone up to the apartment. He had changed clothes, called a cab, and headed for the airport to meet Vivi, to catch their red-eye flight out of JFK. Willie’s car had not yet been located. Joe wondered what they’d done with Elliott’s dress clothes. Had they been stained or torn when Vivi dispatched Elliott?

When the TV news switched to tensions in the Middle East, Harper turned the volume down. Joe could hear Clyde in the kitchen tossing the salad and stirring the spaghetti sauce. The house smelled of Italian sausage and garlic. Elaborately, Joe stretched, trying to get the kinks out. His whole body felt tense. He’d rest easier when the two detectives had arrived from New York, and had taken Vivi and Willie Gasper away with them. He kept thinking, without any logic, that all the confusion with the Spanish chests and Catalina’s letters wouldn’t end until Molena Point had seen the last of Vivi Traynor-as if Vivi’s switch-and-bait game had somehow contaminated everything she touched in the village.

Catalina’s hidden letters, if the ladies of Senior Survival had been able to buy all the chests and found all the letters in them, would have contributed nicely to their future security. But that hadn’t happened. Too many people knew about the letters. Of the seven chests that Marcos Romero had carved for Catalina, five were now accounted for. The white chest that Casselrod took from Gabrielle, in which he found the hidden compartment; the three chests that the Iselman estate gave to the Pumpkin Coach; and the chest that Susan Brittain had bought on eBay. Susan had examined it carefully, but had found nothing inside.

Five chests. And nine letters-the one Casselrod found in the white chest and that Joe and Dulcie had returned to Cora Lee, and the eight letters taken from one of the chests donated by the Iselman estate, that Augor Prey took from the smashed chest in the Pumpkin Coach. Those would remain with the police as evidence until after Prey’s trial, then would be returned to the Pumpkin Coach to sell. Eight letters, each valued at some ten thousand dollars, though both the curator at the museum of history where Susan inquired, and an official at Butterfield’s, thought that at auction they would bring more. Forty to eighty thousand clams, Joe thought, for the boys and girls clubs, the Scouts, and Meals for the Elderly-and maybe the local Feline Rescue. That would be nice, to see some of it go for indigent cats. After all, without a cat or two, Augor Prey might have slid out of Molena Point with the letters, as slick as a greased rat.

When Joe heard Clyde dishing up the spaghetti, he dropped off the couch and melted into the kitchen, rubbing against Charlie’s ankles, then leaped to the far end of the counter beside Dulcie and the kit.

Curled up on the cool tile, impatiently awaiting their turn, the cats watched Clyde serve the plates. Charlie unwrapped garlic bread hot from the oven, as Ryan popped cold beers. The Italian feast smelled like the cats’ idea of heaven, making them drool with greed.

Humans wind their spaghetti between spoon and fork, but cats slurp it-in this case while listening guiltily to Rube whining at the back door. The old dog’s digestion could no longer handle spicy food. Clyde fed him a special diet about as appealing as tom burgers.

But hey,Joe thought,the stuff is good for him.He watched Charlie and Harper at the table, observing the sense of shared sympathy between them. And he had to smile, that Clyde and Ryan seemed to be hitting it off. Certainly Clyde was scrubbed and neatly dressed in a V-neck sweater over a white turtleneck and freshly washed jeans, and he hadn’t grouched once-he was, in fact, observing impeccable behavior. That never hurt, Joe thought, amused.

“When is Augor Prey’s arraignment?” Charlie asked. “Are you sure he’ll be indicted?”

“Time and patience,” Harper said. “You can never be certain of anything, but I see no reason why the grand jury won’t hand down an indictment. We have the gun that killed Fern, with Prey’s prints on it.”

Charlie nodded. “Along with Willie Gasper’s prints, and Vivi’s?”

Harper nodded. “It was apparently Willie’s gun or hers. There was no registration. And no way to know if that gun killed the raccoons. It was the same caliber weapon, but with a hollow point that spreads all over, you’re not going to see any riflings. If it was the same gun, Gasper apparently wiped off the trigger. It showed only Prey’s prints.

“Prey’s story is that, the morning Fern died, Vivi followed Fern in through the broken window, into the back room, and pulled the gun on them while they were fighting over the wooden chests. That he snatched it from her and it went off, killing Fern. We have evidence that Vivi was in the back room at some point.” Joe thought about the cherry pit that Garza had picked up, and about Prey’s sworn statement putting Vivi there. The cats, playing up to the night dispatcher, had found a copy of Prey’s signed statement that Garza had left for Harper. Easing the door of Harper’s office closed and flipping on the desk lamp, they had crouched on the blotter, reading.

Not only had Fern tried to grab the chests from Prey-a real fistfight, as Prey had described it-but Prey said that one of the chests had been smashed, and that Fern managed to snatch up the letters that fell out of it.

Joe assumed there had been some gentle pressure from Garza or Harper to obtain the rest of Prey’s statement. Prey said that when Fern ran toward the window he lost his head, went kind of crazy, as he put it, and shot her again, firing at her in a fit of confusion.

He said that Vivi had disappeared; and that when he saw he’d likely killed Fern, he jammed the gun in his pocket and ran for the back door, jumped in his car, and took off. He said that, driving away, he wanted to go back and talk to the police, that he heard the sirens and wanted to tell them what had happened, but he was afraid to. That had made the cats smile. Anyone who thought Prey was trying sincerely to make amends for an innocent mistake ought to think again. For one thing, both shots had been from behind, entering Fern in the back.

“It’s interesting,” Garza said, “that Vivi saw him shoot Fern, but didn’t try to blackmail him. Likely she didn’t want to call attention to herself at that point. Apparently she just went home and laid low, but then she got nervous and started to pack.”

Harper leaned back in his chair. “Not too nervous to send those chapters she was writing off to New York before she and Willie tried to sneak out. Maybe she hoped that in the next few weeks, New York would dispose of Elliott’s body and no one would ever know he was dead. She may have planned for Willie to keep right on being Elliott Traynor, she may have really believed that Elliott’s publisher would think that what she wrote was Elliott’s work. It takes,” Harper said with a lopsided grin, “some kind of talent to write like Elliott Traynor.”

The shadow of a smile touched Charlie’s face; and she rose quickly to dish up more spaghetti. The cats watched her with interest; but it was not until the next morning that Joe was certain of what he suspected.

It was just after ten when Joe trotted in through Dulcie’s cat door; she met him in the kitchen, her green eyes bright, her tabby tail lashing with excitement. He’d seen Charlie’s van out front, and Gabrielle’s and Mavity’s cars. In the living room, Charlie and all the ladies of Senior Survival were gathered; all seemed to be talking at once. Joe sniffed the good smells of coffee and chocolate and sweet vanilla, and twitched an ear toward the animated female voices.

“They’re celebrating,” Dulcie said. “They got the house. They really got it, they’re so happy they’re almost purring.”

“What house?”

“The last one they looked at, the one they’ve all been talking about, the one above the canyon. Don’t you listen? Tomcats,” she said, flattening her ears with annoyance. “It has a bad water problem, so that young couple didn’t get their loan. Anyway, they didn’t want to do the repairs. The ladies are so thrilled.”

“Right. That’s just what they need, a huge house with a water problem. Plumbing? Leaking basement? What? Do you know how much it costs to-”

“Ryan looked at it. She said she can fix it.”

Joe narrowed his eyes. “Saying something and doing it are not always the same. The drainage on those hills-”

“Come on, Joe. They’re so happy. It’ll be all right-let’s stay for a little while. Charlie’s here. She will be one of the trustees. But she’s-I don’t know what’s wrong with her. She’s acting as nervous as a mouse at a cat show.”

Heading for the living room beside Dulcie, Joe glanced up at the buffet. “Is that the chest Susan bought, the one that was in her car during the breakin?”

“Wilma’s keeping it for her.”

“Out in plain sight?”

“Since Augor Prey and Casselrod went to jail, why not?”

“I wouldn’t leave it lying around. You don’t know who else�” Exasperated with Susan and Wilma, he leaped up to have a look.

The box smelled just like the others, of old, seasoned wood. The geometric carvings were primitive and handsome, each side with a rosette in the center. Pawing the top open, he sniffed at the empty interior.

The walls and bottom seemed too thin for a false compartment. Likely this was just a nice collector’s piece that would bring maybe four or five hundred dollars, he thought, dropping to the floor. Heading for the living room, the two cats slipped into the cave beneath Wilma’s desk beside the kit, where she lay on her back playing with one of Cora Lee’s slippers, holding it between her front paws, killing it violently.

Moving deeper in beside her, Joe and Dulcie listened to the ladies’ plans, to Susan’s decision to put her house on the market, and to their discussion of the legal aspects of a joint purchase that their attorney had outlined. All the numbers and percentage points made the cats’ heads reel. Curled up together, they were almost asleep when Charlie’s cell phone rang.

Answering, her face colored. She glanced around at her friends, then rose, heading for the kitchen, cradling the phone to her ear, her sudden excitement seeming almost to send sparks. Quickly the three cats slipped out to follow her, pushing through the kitchen door before she closed it. Leaping to the table, they crowded around her. The voice at the other end reached them like a bee buzz. Charlie listened for some time, going pale; absently she petted Dulcie.

Slipping close to her, Joe put his face next to Charlie’s. She didn’t push him away. The woman’s voice at the other end was husky and familiar. “� totally unprecedented. There are a lot of well-known writers who would like to step into this contract. I can’t make any kind of promise, but I have to say, I like this very much. Really, I find it difficult to separate your work from Elliott’s. I’m hoping Elliott’s editor will feel the same.

“I’m taking it over to her this afternoon. This whole thing has been upsetting to everyone-and you can imagine that several writers’ agents have already contacted Kathleen Merritt and called me.”

Nervously, Charlie hugged Joe.

“If she does like it, can you meet the August tenth deadline?”

“Yes,” Charlie said, looking with panic at the cats.

“You said you’re not a writer by profession?”

“I’m an artist. I do animal drawings. I’m represented in Molena Point by the Aronson Gallery. And I� I own a cleaning and maintenance company.”

“So you work full-time?”

“I can meet the deadline. I have reliable crews. My time is my own.” She didn’t mean to sound defensive. Beside her, Joe and Dulcie were smiling and purring. The kit looked wide-eyed and puzzled. When Charlie hung up the phone, she grabbed the cats in a huge hug.

“Our secret,” she said softly, glancing toward the living room.

Joe listened to the faint sound of the ladies’ voices, preoccupied with loan points and interest rates. Strange, he thought, that loud, giggling Vivi Traynor, when she brought her ugly little secret to Molena Point, might have launched Charlie into a new and exciting venture.

Though if Charlie hadn’t been so nosy, as curious as a cat herself, even Vivi’s subterfuge wouldn’t have made that happen. And it was Charlie’s love of Traynor’s work that had truly set her on this path.

“Not even Wilma,” Charlie whispered. “Don’t even tell Wilma. Not yet. Not until I see if this will fly.”

“It will fly,” Dulcie said softly.

Charlie looked at them uncertainly. “Maybe. And maybe this is all foolishness, maybe I’ll fall on my face.” She grinned. “But I’ve done that before, and gotten up again.”

Joe twitched a whisker. He could imagine Charlie sitting up late at night, into the small hours, in her little one-room apartment, working on a borrowed computer at her breakfast table. Stopping work sometimes to stand at her window looking down on the rooftops as she formed, in her thoughts, her own kind of magic for the last chapters of Elliott Traynor’s novel. And he rubbed his face against Charlie’s, raggedly purring.

31 [��������: pic_32.jpg]

It was opening night ofThorns of Gold. Among the shadows above the dimly lit theater, Joe and Dulcie lay stretched out along a rafter, watching the crowd streaming in below them laughing and talking, the seats quickly filling up. The villagers were dressed all in their finest, in coats and ties, and long gowns. Dulcie was wide-eyed at the lovely jewelry and elegant hair arrangements. Despite Elliott Traynor’s death, despite the fact that Vivi Traynor and Willie Gasper were back in New York and had been arraigned for murder, the producers had moved on with the play-finding Elliott’s agent far easier to deal with than Vivi in matters of production and casting.

Elliott’s move, in making Adele McElroy recipient, in trust, of his works, had been a surprise to everyone. In Joe’s opinion, considering the number of ex-wives in the picture, that had been very wise. He wondered, when Traynor set up the trust two years earlier, if he’d guessed how soon it would take effect. One thing was certain: Vivi hadn’t known about the arrangement.

Joe and Dulcie had watched as Vivi and Willie Gasper were marched from Molena Point jail handcuffed, and locked into the backseat of the New York detectives’ rented car, for the ride to the airport, and they had witnessed her vile language. There were no giggles now, nervous or otherwise. Certainly the New York grand jury’s ruling indicting Vivi for murder had set off enough national headlines and prime-time news to be heard even by Elliott himself wherever he was in heaven’s high realms.

Joe supposed that if the New York police hadn’t had an eye witness to Elliott’s murder, Adele McElroy herself, because she was trustee and partial heir, might have been a suspect.

In Molena Point, Augor Prey had been convicted for breaking and entering and vandalism. That had netted him two years in county jail and two thousand dollars restitution to be paid to Susan Brittain. Though very likely, Susan wouldn’t see much of the money. Prey’s upcoming trial for Fern Barth’s murder should, if all went well, put him behind bars and out of the workforce for some time to come. Joe Grey smiled, feeling greatly at ease with the world, feeling much the same as when a brace of fat mice lay lined up before him-a nice finish to a day’s hunting.

Butthe kit, though pleased that justice had prevailed and that Vivi was behind bars, wasn’t nearly finished with related matters. Nor was she up among the rafters, tonight, with Joe and Dulcie, watching the house fill with eager theatergoers.

Sprawled across Cora Lee’s dressing table, her black-and-brown tattered coat looking like nothing so much as a ragged fur scarf, the kit watched the star of the play button her satin gown for the first act. They could hear from the audience tides of hushed voices echoing back to them where folk were laughing and greeting friends. The proximity of a real audience excited the kit so much it made her paws sweat.

Sitting down at the dressing table, Cora Lee drew on eye makeup and applied mascara while leaning over the kit, and blushed her cheeks brighter than the kit had ever seen. When she slipped on her wig of long, shining black hair, those sleek Spanish tresses curling around her shoulders, she wasn’t Cora Lee anymore.

She rose from the dressing table as a young, vibrant Spanish woman, splendid in cascading folds of pale ivory satin. Catalina stood stroking the kit, her hands shaking.

“You bring me luck, Kit. You are my luck.” Her fingers were so cold that the chill came right through the kit’s fur, making the little cat shiver. Cora Lee stood still for only a moment, then began to pace the small dressing room, singing softly the lines of her opening number-whether to calm her nerves or to warm up, the kit didn’t know. She sang part of a song from the second act, the verses so hurt and lonely they made the kit want to yowl-Catalina’s lament touched the kit so strongly that she mewled, lifting her paw to her friend.

“Does that number make you sad, Kit?” Cora Lee tilted the kit’s chin up, looking into her eyes. “Say, ‘Break a leg,’ Kit.”

The kit’s eyes widened with alarm, making Cora Lee laugh.

“That’s what theater people say, for good luck. Break a leg. If you could talk, that’s what you could say to me.” Careful of her costume, Cora Lee picked up the kit and hugged her. “I’m so nervous. I haven’t done this since New Orleans-not a musical. Well, it’s not a musical. Experimental, Mark calls it. But for so long, I’ve only done speaking parts. And then I used to sing sometimes in small clubs. It still hurts to sing, Kit-like a knife in my middle. I don’t care, this is Catalina’s night, Catalina is alive, tonight, and she will be wonderful.”

She will be wonderful,the kit thought.You are Catalina, and you are wonderful.

The music began. There was a knock at the door. Cora Lee set the kit on the dresser. “Stay here, Kit. Think good thoughts.” And she left the dressing room, heading backstage behind the sets.

The kit waited only a moment, then followed her. Staying among the shadows, she hid herself in the wings behind the long curtains where she had a good view of the stage. Above her in the rafters, high over the gathered audience, Joe and Dulcie saw her. Dulcie smiled, but Joe Grey tensed. “What’s she doing?”

“She’s just watching,” Dulcie said quietly. “She loves Cora Lee. And she loves the play; the songs seem really to charm her. She’ll just sit there purring,” she said complacently.

But Joe’s yellow eyes shone black in the shadows, burning with unease.

“Not to worry,” Dulcie said. “What could she do? She’s a sensible little cat.”

“She’s too close to the stage. Why doesn’t she come up here?”

“She wants to be close to Cora Lee, she wants a front-row seat.” She gave him a sweet look. “It’s opening night, everyone’s talked about opening night. Of course the kit’s excited.” She peered down over the rafter below them, where Clyde and Ryan were taking their seats. Clyde was dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and tie, and was holding Ryan’s hand. Ryan wore a long emerald green dress. Dulcie loved all the pageantry and elegance. It would be no good to have a play, if the audience didn’t dress up, too.

To the cats’ left sat Wilma and Susan, and Gabrielle and Mavity, all wearing long dresses and whispering among themselves. Three rows in front of them, Max Harper and Charlie were finding their places.

“Can you believe that Harper sprang for front-row seats?” Dulcie whispered. Harper was dressed in a well-tailored, dark sport coat, tan slacks, pale shirt, and tie. Charlie wore a long, rust-toned skirt and a brocade jacket in orange and turquoise that was, Dulcie whispered, “stunning with her red hair.”

The house lights dimmed and the orchestra shifted from a soft tango to the opening strains of Act 1. The curtain opened to the patio of the Ortega-Diaz hacienda, filled now with angry, arguing rancheros-with Don Ortega-Diaz and a dozen of his contemporaries, resplendent in Spanish finery, discussing with Latin passion the sudden foreclosure on their lands. Not until the American, Hamilton Stanton, appeared in their midst offering to pay Ortega-Diaz’s commitments, did the mob quiet. What was this? What a fortunate turn of events, that their friend could marry off the eldest of his five daughters to a rancher of obvious means and, at the same time, save his lands.

But when Catalina’s hand was promised, she stepped from the shadows fiery with rage against her father; the angry violence of her song shook the audience. When the lights came up at the end of Scene 1, the theater was silent. Applause, when it broke, was like sudden thunder.

It was Scene 2, as servants locked Catalina in her room, that her saddest lament rose-and that a small movement in the shadows drew Cora Lee’s attention. The cats saw her glance into the wings though her singing didn’t falter. Dulcie caught her breath. Joe Grey crouched, ready to leap across the rafters and down, to haul the kit off the stage.

Dulcie stopped him, her teeth gently in his shoulder. “Wait, Joe. Watch-look at the audience.”

Catalina’s voice faltered for only a second as she reached out to the dark little cat that had slipped up onto her couch beside her. As Cora Lee’s song held the audience, she drew the kit to her in a gesture natural and appealing. Singing with a broken heart, she cuddled the kit close. Every person present was one with them, not a sound in the darkened theater. Cora Lee and the kit held them all.

The kit appeared in two more scenes, both times when Cora Lee glanced into the wings to draw her out again, the two seeming perfectly attuned to one another. Cora Lee might be amazed at the kit’s behavior, but she was a child of the theater. And the audience loved the small cat. When Cora Lee glanced into the wings at Sam Ladler, he was smiling-Cora Lee played the kit for all she was worth. When Catalina was fed on bread and water, the kit slipped in through the window grate to keep her company. The kit disappeared after the wedding and did not return until Catalina’s lover, in desperation, began to ravage the Ortega-Diaz lands, stealing cattle and burning the pastures. Now again the kit was there, with exquisite timing, as Catalina herself set a trap for her lover.

In the last scene, when Marcos escaped Hamilton Stanton’s vaqueros and came to take Catalina away, and when Stanton was there in her stead, Catalina stood in her chamber holding the kit in her arms, weeping for Marcos, for her part in his death, as the curtain rang down.

Among the cats’ closest friends, response to the kit’s theatrical adventure was frightened and guarded. While everyone in the village raved about Cora Lee’s performance and about the wonderful part the little cat played, and the kit had front-page newspaper coverage, her friends worried for her and wanted badly to put a stop to her foolishness.

“You’re racing too close the edge,” Dulcie told her. “Don’t you think people will wonder?”

“But no one-” the kit began.

“Kit, this scares me. Don’t you understand what could happen?”

The kit looked at Dulcie sadly, filled with misery.

“You’re lovely in the play, Kit. You’re exactly what the play needed. Everyone loves you. But, Kit, you know that not all humans can be trusted. Even if they believe you’re no more than a trained cat, the way Wilma and Clyde have tried to convince people, don’t you know how many no-goods would steal such a cleverly trained kitty and try to sell you.”

“But they wouldn’t hurt me. And I would escape, I would get away.”

Dulcie just looked at her. Life before the kit had been so peaceful and predictable-and, compared to lifewiththe kit, seemed in retrospect deadly dull. “If we stick with Wilma’s plan,” Dulcie said, “maybe it will come right.” It broke her heart to scold the kit, the kit took such joy in the play. But when she licked the kit’s ear, the kit brightened.

By the next morning, Wilma and Charlie and Clyde had convinced Cora Lee that it would be best to tell admirers that she and Wilma, together, had trained the kit. They set up a scenario for the remainder of the play that included Wilma taking the kit to the theater each night, standing in the wings with her, and giving her hand signals like a trained dog. Cora Lee followed the plan, understanding quite well the danger to the kit-as far as she knew it.

But the wonder of the kit’s creative performance didn’t pale. To Cora Lee and to her audiences, the kit was a four-legged angel, a magical creature.

Wilma told Sam Ladler that onstage, when Cora Lee’s emotions built through song, the young cat was naturally drawn to her in a powerful response. She said that was how she trained the kit. Ladler said the kit’s appearance had been a nice surprise, that the kit added just the fillip the play needed. “This couldn’t have happened,” he said, laughing, “if Vivi had been present. She would have pitched a fit.”

The play was to run for six weeks. Dulcie told the kit, “Except for performances, you’ll stay in the house. When the play’s over, you’ll stay in the house until, hopefully, people forget about trained cats.”

“If they ever forget,” Joe said darkly.

“I will stay in the house,” the kit said dutifully, her round amber eyes glowing with the magic of the theater, with a wonder and dimension that stayed with her each night long after the last curtain had fallen, so it was hard for her to fall asleep. She prowled the house worrying Dulcie, prompting Wilma to rise and warm a pan of milk for her then stroke her until she slept. If Wilma began to look haggard, people put it down to her demanding cat-training regimen.

Thorns of Gold,with the kit’s added magic, contributed to the village of Molena Point a warm and glowing experience; and maybe the magic spilled over to anoint others. It was a week after opening night that Charlie made her announcement, at the engagement party at Clyde’s house in honor of her and Max.

Ryan came early to help Clyde lay out plates and glasses on the seldom-used dining table. Mavity and Susan arrived just before Charlie and Max, bringing trays of canapes. Wilma and Gabrielle and Cora Lee of course were at the theater. Mavity had dressed in a powder blue pants suit that was not a uniform. Susan wore a long skirt and a hand-knit sweater. Soon after Detectives Garza and Davis arrived, loaded down with ice buckets and champagne, and before the engagement announcement, Charlie broke her news.

“Looks like the last chapters of Elliott Traynor’sTwilight Silverwill be published after all,” she said quietly.

Garza frowned, “How did that happen? I thought Vivi couldn’t write her way out of a paper bag. That’s what alerted her agent in the first place.”

“Vivi won’t be writing the last chapters,” Harper said.

“Who, then?” Garza said, waiting for the punch line. “Not Willie Gasper?”

“Charlie will be writing them,” Harper said. “She talked with Traynor’s editor yesterday. They like her work very much, they’re sending her a contract.”

“And,” Charlie said tremulously, “I guess I have a literary agent. If I� if I decide to write something more.”

Dulcie glanced at Joe, remembering how frightened Charlie had been when she first learned that her drawings had been accepted by the Aronson Gallery, how nervous she had been before the gallery opening-then how bubbly with excitement when everyone loved her work.

She was just as frightened now. But that didn’t matter. Charlie did fine under pressure.

Harper put his arm around her, grinning down at her, then looking around at their gathered friends. “We’ve set the wedding date-four months from today, then we’re off to Alaska. When we get back, maybe I can talk Charlie into supervising Charlie’s Fix-It, Clean-It from her studio at the ranch, and spend the rest of her time working on whatever projects she maps out-provided she makes spaghetti once a week, and helps me with the horses.”

Champagne corks were popped, toasts offered up, and the party food was attacked with enthusiasm. A dozen more officers arrived, some with their wives, and most of the librarians who worked with Wilma, and soon other friends began to straggle in. With the party in full swing, people crowding in wall-to-wall, the two cats, having eaten their fill, retired to the bedroom. It was perhaps half an hour later that Clyde appeared to ask Joe’s advice. He shut the door behind him.

“You want my advice?” Joe said. “You’re asking for my opinion? What’s the catch?”

“Just be quiet and listen. Do you always have to be so sarcastic?” Clyde stood scowling down at him. “What would you think, if I didn’t sell the house?”

Dulcie mewed softly. But Joe’s heart gave a leap as violent as if he’d swallowed a live mouse.

“What would you think if Ryan added a second-story bedroom and office, with a view over the village-so we could see the ocean? And redesigned the backyard into a walled Spanish patio with those outdoor heaters, and a raised barbecue and fireplace?”

“Be okay, I guess,” Joe said noncommittally. He didn’t dare glance at Dulcie for fear he’d lose his cool. He wanted to do back flips, to yowl with happiness. “With, say, one of those cupola things on top of the new bedroom, a sort of cat tower? Could she do that?”

“She could do that,” Clyde said. “But of course we’d have to live with a restaurant next door, with all the traffic, and people going in and out.”

“We would,” Joe said carefully, keeping the conversation low-key. He looked hard at Clyde. “Let’s give it some thought. Think about our options.” And for the first time, the idea of moving didn’t seem like the end of the world. If he had options, and if Clyde was including him in on the decision making, then it wasn’t like being thrown out homeless, back into the alleys. For the first time, the various possibilities held such interest for the tomcat that he couldn’t help but purr.

Amazing what a difference it made when Clyde softened up a little and asked his advice. Joe felt like he’d fallen right back into his secure and comfortable life, as cozy as his own easy chair. Smiling up at Clyde, and then at Dulcie, he was caught in a warm froth of family sentimentality. “After all,” he told Clyde, “if we did decide to move, we have the whole village to choose from.”

Clyde grinned and picked Joe up, setting him on his shoulder, then tucked Dulcie under his arm. “You two did all right with the Traynor case. That phone call to Adele McElroy was, I have to say, a stroke of genius.”

He looked down at Joe. “I don’t want to know how you knew about her, or how you two softened Max Harper up to the point of allowing you in the station. The dispatchers seem quite taken with Dulcie.

“And Harper doesn’t want to know, ever,” Clyde said, “why there were gray and white cat hairs in the window of the Pumpkin Coach, among the broken glass.” And he headed back for the party, dropping the cats on the couch beside Charlie. Harper, sitting close to her, turned to look at the cats, his expression stern and withdrawn-but there was, deep in the captain’s eyes, something uneasy, something questioning.

Joe looked back at Harper as blankly as he could manage, and kneaded Charlie’s knee, keeping his claws in. Charlie looked down at him, her eyes filled with amusement, and reached over him to hold Max’s hand. And Joe thought, no matter how many thieves and deadbeats there were in the world, there were far more good folks. No matter how many tarty little murderers like Vivi Traynor, with her frozen cherries and her giggles, there were many more humans who were totally okay, folks a cat could count on.

All a cat had to do was right a few wrongs when he could, ignore the human transgressions he couldn’t change, love his true friends, and always, always have the last laugh.

8. CAT SEELING DOUBLE

1

Ryan Flannery had no idea, when she dressed for the wedding of Chief of Police Max Harper on Saturday afternoon, that she would soon face the police not as a wedding guest among friendly uniformed officers, but as a prime murder suspect. No notion that the tentative new friendships she’d made within the department would turn without warning to that of investigators and possible offender.

An hour before the ceremony, half-dressed in a slip and scuffs and the first skirt she’d had on in weeks, she stepped into the kitchen alcove of her studio apartment to nuke a cup of coffee. Through the wide front windows the dropping sun blinded her, reflecting from the village rooftops and repeated as hundreds of brilliant signals across the surface of the sea, as if all the sea creatures held up little mirrors attempting to communicate with the land-bound before evening descended. Nearer, just below her balcony, the mosaic of rooftops among the oak trees was as serene as a storybook hamlet where all promises ended happily-ever-after. No smallest twinge of unease touched her, no sixth sense that early the next morning uniformed attendants to a murder would fill her garage stringing yellow crime tape, the coroner working on poor Rupert taking care not to disturb any evidence among the stack of broken windows with which the body was entangled-her ex-husband lying white and lifeless among shards of colored glass. And Ryan herself facing Detective Dallas Garza answering her uncle’s questions as, cold and detached, he recorded her formal statement.

Pouring a cup of cold coffee left from breakfast, a brew that at 3:00 in the afternoon closely resembled crankcase oil, she stuck the cup in the microwave. She needed something to keep her awake. Even at what she considered the tender age of thirty-two she could no longer stay up until 1:00 in the morning and feel human the next day.

She’d driven down late last night from the mountains after paying off her carpenters and wrapping up a construction job, wanting to be back home and have her work squared away in plenty of time for the wedding. She’d pulled into her drive well after midnight dead for sleep, had unloaded the precious stained glass windows she’d found in a junk shop in San Andreas, locked her garage and truck and come upstairs. Pulling off her boots and jeans, she had fallen into bed-wondering only briefly why her tarp, folded behind the stack of windows, had what looked like cracker crumbs and half-a-dozen Hershey wrappers among the layers when she unfolded it.

Someone had been in the truck bed, but she wasn’t sure when. Maybe one of the kids hanging around the job site, up there. Well, nothing was missing. Too tired to care, she’d rolled over and known nothing more until nearly dawn.

Waking, she’d lain in bed staring out at the black September sky, then dropped into sleep again like diving into deep, silky water. Awakening again at 9:00 feeling dull, she’d showered, unpacked her duffel, dumped her laundry in the washer, made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for breakfast, and spent the middle of the day cleaning out her truck, putting away tools and stacking the antique windows more securely in the big double garage. Seven beautiful old windows she’d bought for a song, with wonderful designs of birds and leaves. It was amazing what you could pick up in the little back hills junk shops even today when every tourist was a bargain hunter.

Clyde had left a message on her phone tape, that he’d pick her up at 3:30 for the wedding. The ceremony was scheduled for 4:00 with a casual reception afterward in the garden of the village church. Ryan had helped Charlie pick out her wedding dress, and Charlie’s aunt Wilma and several friends had handled the arrangements and the caterer and informal invitations, all of which had given Charlie a prime case of nerves. Charlie Getz, inclined to be a loner, was better at the easel or the typewriter or at housecleaning and maintenance repairs than at sorting out the details of a social function that would change her life as she knew it.

Because Charlie’s parents were dead and she had no close male relatives, Ryan’s uncle Dallas would give her away. And Clyde Damen, Max Harper’s lifelong friend, would be best man. She wondered if he’d show up for his official duties dressed in sweatshirt and jeans.

Never one for polish, Clyde was as unlike Ryan’s philandering ex-husband as it was possible to be, and that made her like him quite a lot.

As she reached to open the microwave, a scratching sound at her window made her start. Turning, she caught her breath then swallowed back a laugh..

Two cats crouched on the sill peering in at her: Clyde’s big gray tomcat and his lady pal, dark-stripped Dulcie. Two bold freeloaders who, before she left for San Andreas, had been at her door every morning.

How could they have known she was home? Or had they come every day for two months, expecting the handout they’d grown accustomed to? Oh, surely not. No cat was that tenacious, and certainly these cats never went hungry-though at the moment, with their noses close to the glass, their whiskers drawing delicate patterns through the dusty surface, they presented the picture of ultimate greed and impatience.

And the tomcat had brought her a gift.

From the gray cat’s sharp white teeth dangled a dead mouse.

Joe Grey held his kill securely by its rear, its fur matted and wet from mauling. She stared at it, and looked into the burning yellow eyes of the self-satisfied tomcat, and choked back a laugh. Joe remained staring at her, his expression growing to deeper impatience. He began to shift from paw to paw.

Did he think he was going to bring that thing in the house? Was the mauled mouse a gift? An offering to human gods?

Knowing Joe Grey, she didn’t think so. If that cat considered anyone a god in his relationships with humans, the god would be Joe himself.

Both cats cocked their ears, watching her. The tom’s short fur was as sleek as gray satin clinging over strong muscles, the white triangle down his nose and his white paws and chest looking freshly scrubbed-no tinge of mouse blood. His yellow eyes were fierce. Clearly he expected her to hurry to the door and to formally accept his treasure.

His tabby lady was more demure. Her brown curving stripes, catching the light of the dropping sun, were as rich as silk batik. Her pink mouth was open in a plaintive little mew that sounded through the glass as thin and wavering as a cry from another dimension. Ryan reached to crack open the window.

“As happy as I am, Joe, to see you kill the mice, as grateful as I am for your efforts, you’re not bringing that thing in here.”

Joe Grey glared as if he understood, as if this was not an acceptable response.

The tomcat’s avid commitment to ridding her garage of mice, an undertaking that had begun several months ago, had left her both puzzled and amused.

Having complained to Clyde about the vermin, about the voracious little beasts that had burrowed into her brand-new rolls of insulation and were nibbling on the electrical cords of her power tools, she hadn’t expected Clyde to offer up his own private feline exterminator. She’d have poisoned the mice, but she had feared for the neighborhood pets; and Clyde had insisted that Joe Grey would eradicate them. Of course she hadn’t believed him. “Why should they hunt in my garage when they have all the wild hills? You can’ttella cat where to hunt, Clyde. I’ve seen them hunting up the hills. I’ve seen those two killers dragging rabbits through the grass.”

“You feed them when they show up, give them a little snack, and install a cat door into your garage, and I guarantee they’ll catch the mice.”

“But that’s silly.”

“Try it. I promise.”

“A cat door will only let in more mice.”

“The mice are already getting in somewhere,” he had pointed out, “despite the fact that you and Charlie went over the garages of both duplexes and patched all the holes. What difference is one more opening? Trust me. Cut the door, and leave a little snack.”

Build it and they will come, she’d thought, wanting to giggle.

“Just do it. Joe and Dulcie will clear the place.”

Out of desperation she’d followed his instructions, visualizing extended families of mice marching in through the newly cut cat door to set up housekeeping, vast generations of rapacious rodents settling in to gnaw the cords off drills and saws and droplights. Reluctantly she had put in the cat door and then had gotten on with the job at hand, which was the renovation of Clyde’s backyard, transforming his weedy garden and scruffy lawn into a handsome outdoor living area.

After a week, all signs of mice in her garage had vanished.

Maybe this mouse that Joe dangled was the last one.

Maybe, she thought giddily, Joe Grey had brought this last mouse to her to receive her final stamp of approval.

Or her final payment? Would he present a bill? Or was this extermination job in partial exchange for Clyde’s yard renovation? Well, Clydehadbeen pleased with the renovation.

Months earlier, when a small, exclusive shopping plaza was built behind Clyde’s house, it had turned the property line at the back into a two-story concrete wall that destroyed Clyde’s view of the eastern hills. She’d pointed out the virtues of the new wall, how it could be turned from what Clyde considered a negative feature to a positive asset. In the plan she submitted, she’d made every effort to replace the loss of a view with satisfying architectural interest, enclosing the outer limits of the yard with six-by-six pillars that met the smoothly plastered wall and supported a heavy overhead latticework in a simple Spanish style. This structure framed the maple tree and enlarged deck, the new southwestern style fireplace, wet bar, and outdoor grill. Beneath the trellises she had constructed a series of raised planters arranged in different heights among plastered benches. They’d installed tile decorations for the high wall, and had arranged interesting, bold-leafed plants against it.Voila,an eyesore turned into a handsome private retreat.

Soon, now that she was home from the San Andreas job, she would begin the second phase of Clyde’s renovation, a second-floor addition, jacking up the attic roof to create the walls of a new master bedroom and study. Here in this small, lovely village of Molena Point, with its high demand for real estate, Clyde’s upgrading was well worth the investment. The third phase of his project would complete the transformation as she opened the kitchen to the small dining room, then nudged the face of the Cape Cod cottage into a more contemporary aspect with a Mexican accent. Some people might call that bastardization. Ryan called it good design.

In the five months since she moved to Molena Point, she’d accomplished a lot. Had gotten her local contractor’s license and the necessary permits to launch RM Flannery, Construction, had put together two good crews, and had finished three jobs beside Clyde’s: a drainage project for four ladies who had just bought a home together for their retirement, the addition in San Andreas, and the far more complicated Landeau vacation cottage here in the village, which waited now only for the new handwoven carpet that had been ordered from England. The rug wasn’t part of the architectural work but was the province of her sister Hanni, who had done the interior design. All in all a satisfying beginning for her new venture.

She had escaped San Francisco for Molena Point the night she finally decided to leave Rupert, had packed her personal possessions into cardboard boxes, loaded them into a company truck and taken off in a cold rage-in a move that was long overdue. Heading south along the coast, for the village she loved best in all the world, for the little seaside town where she had spent her childhood summers, she was filled not only with hurt anger at Rupert but with excited dreams for a new beginning-her own business, totally hers, completely free of Rupert.

But she fully intended to receive in cash her share of Dannizer Construction, which she had helped Rupert to build.

Her sudden decision to leave-when she found another woman’s clothes in her closet-had been bolstered by the fact that her uncle Dallas and her sister Hanni had already moved to Molena Point, that both would be nearby for moral support. Dallas had taken a position as chief of detectives for Captain Harper in the smaller and more casual police department, shaking off the heavy stress of San Francisco PD for his last few years before retirement. And early this spring Hanni had opened a design studio in the village, leaving the large city studio where she had worked under too much pressure. Maybe this sudden midlife bid for new directions, this need to pull back and be more fully one’s own boss, was in the blood.

When she looked again at the window, the gray tomcat was still staring.

“That’s very good, Joe Grey. I’m proud of you. It’s a fine mouse. But youcan’tbring it inside.” What did he want her to do, fry it up for supper? At her words, his yellow eyes narrowed with defiance, his stubborn look so droll that she cracked open the door a couple of inches to see what he would do.

The sight that met her made her choke.

On the mat lay five dead mice lined up as neatly as the little toy soldiers she’d marshaled into rows, as a child.

The instant she cracked the door open, the tomcat dropped the sixth mouse precisely beside the others. He didn’t try to bring it in; he simply laid it on the mat perfectly aligned, and looked up at her.

Was he grinning? The cat was definitely grinning.

She studied the tomcat, and the six dead mice presented for her review. This was some trick of Clyde’s. He must have slipped up the steps and set up the dead mice as a joke. Now he would be watching her, hidden somewhere, like a kid glancing around the corner of the building. Except, what had made the tomcat drop the sixth mouse there?

She looked along the street for Clyde’s car and up the side streets as far as she could see. Maybe he’d parked the yellow roadster up the hill on the back street.

But where did he get the mice? How could he have made the cat take part in such a ruse? Make the cat look in the window at just the right moment, dangling another mouse in his jaws, and then lay it on the mat?

Certainly Joe Grey was no trained cat, she thought, smiling. Clyde wasn’t even able to train a dog effectively. She’d heard about the fiasco with the two Great Dane puppies that Clyde had raised, a pair of huge adolescent dogs with no hint of manners, two canine disasters until Max Harper and Charlie took over their training.

She wondered idly if Max and Charlie’s romance actually began up in the hills at his ranch as they taught two misbegotten puppies some manners and trained them to basic obedience. Charlie had never said. But if that was the case the pups really should be ring bearers, she thought, amused, imagining the two big dogs trotting down the aisle with little satin pillows tied to their noses bearing matched wedding rings.

She had to get hold of herself. She really hadn’t had enough sleep.

Charlie had stopped by this morning on an errand despite the fact that it was her wedding day, and they’d had a short, comfortable visit. Ryan had liked the freckled redhead from the moment they first met, had liked that Charlie didn’t talk trivia and that there was no friction between them because Charlie had recently and seriously dated Clyde and now Ryan was seeing him.

She admired Charlie for starting her life over after a false beginning, chucking an unsatisfactory career as a commercial artist at which she’d realized she’d never be tops, tossing away four years of art school education. Moving down to Molena Point to stay with her aunt Wilma, Charlie hadn’t wasted any time in putting together an upscale housecleaning and repair business, a service that Charlie now ran so efficiently she found time not only to do her wonderful animal drawings, but had launched herself into a brand-new venture writing fiction for a national publisher.

Charlie took the attitude that if you were hungry to do something, give it a try. If you fell on your face, try something else. They’d laughed about that because Ryan had been hungry for such a long time to be free of Rupert and on her own. Charlie’s understanding had been very supportive, had sustained her considerably as she established her own firm.

Cracking the door wider for a better look at Clyde’s practical joke all laid out on her doormat, she didn’t protest when the tomcat immediately shouldered past her into the kitchen-sans mouse. Both cats strolled in with all the pomp of a well-dressed couple stepping from their Rolls-Royce in response to her formal invitation to tea. Even the cats’ glances were unsettling, Dulcie’s green eyes and Joe’s yellow gaze far too imperious and self-possessed. Were all cats so self-assured and bold? Padding past her into the big studio room they lay down in the center of the Konya rug, the most beautiful and expensive furnishing she owned, and simultaneously, as if on cue, they began to wash.

Watching them, she decided the two cats added warmth to the room, as well as a sense of whimsy.

The studio was large and airy, its white walls bathed with late afternoon sun. Only on the north side of the twenty-foot-square room did the ceiling drop to eight feet where one long barrier wall defined the kitchen, bath, and closet-dressing room. The studio’s sleek, whitewashed floor showed off to perfection the rich colors of the Turkish Konya rug that she and Clyde had found at an estate sale, its thick pile and primitive patterns glowing in vibrant shades of deep red and turquoise and indigo.

That shopping spree had been their first date. Clyde had brought a fabulous deli basket for an early, presale picnic breakfast along the rocky coast. Sitting on the sea cliff where the salty spray leaped up at them, he had served her wild mushroom quiche, thin slices of Belgian ham, strawberry tarts, and espresso-a very sophisticated meal for a guy who often seemed ordinary, even cloddish. That morning, teasing her about being a lady contractor, he had made her laugh when she’d badly needed to laugh.

After breakfast, returning to the handsome villa, they were among the first group to tour the estate. They’d found wonderful bargains that they loaded into her truck. Her few furnishings had all come from that sale except her new drafting table. The desk that faced her front windows was a handsome solid oak unit with a dull, pewter stain and an ample wing for her computer. The two tomato-red leather chairs occupied the back of the room facing a wide wicker coffee table, and a wicker daybed covered with a handwoven spread and an array of tapestry pillows-all were from the sale, even the carved, multicolored Mexican dining table and four chairs that were tucked into the kitchen alcove. She’d brought nothing with her from the San Francisco house but her clothes and files and books, had wanted as little as possible from her old life, had wanted to start with everything new after what seemed an endless term of enslavement.

Nine years with Rupert. Why had she stayed so long? Cowardice? Fear of Rupert? The forlorn hope that things would get better? Chalk it up to ennui, to lack of direction-to stupidity. She felt, now, that she could whirl in circles swinging her arms and shouting and there was no barrier to force her back into that confining cage-a cage wrought of Rupert’s vile rages that burned just on the edge of violence, and of his drinking and womanizing.

No more barriers in her life.

Except that this morning when she ran her phone tape she’d had not only the welcome message from Clyde saying he’d pick her up for the wedding, but a tirade from Rupert, a communication she had not expected, hadn’t wanted and didn’t understand.

You didn’t think you’d hear from me, Ryan. I can’t condone what you did running off and trying to take half my business that 1 owned before we were married.

Ican’t condone what you did to Priscilla but I feel obligated to tell you�

That had made her smile. Whatshedid toPriscilla?That day before she left him she’d arrived home from a week in north Marin County finishing up an apartment job, had opened the garage door and found, in her half of the garage, a little red Porsche parked next to Rupert’s BMW. She’d thought, thrilled and amazed, that Rupert in some uncharacteristic fit of generosity or guilt had bought her an anniversary present two weeks early.

But, opening the unlocked door of the Porsche, she had smelled the stink of cigarette smoke and perfume and seen another woman’s clutter in the backseat-hairbrush, pink fuzzy sweater, wrinkled movie magazine. Checking the registration, she’d tried to recall who Priscilla Bloom might be.

And then in the house she’d found the woman’s belongings all over the conjugal bedroom, Priscilla’s clothes in the closet jamming her own garments to the back. That was the moment she ended the marriage.

Hauling out every foreign item from the bedroom, all of it reeking of cigarette smoke and heavy perfume, she had dumped it all in the little red car. Seven trips from house to garage, then she had backed her truck up the drive, hooked her heavy-duty tow chain to the back bumper of the Porsche, and pulled it out into the middle of the street blocking both lanes and seriously slowing traffic. What she’d wanted to do was move her truck up behind the Porsche and push it right on through the front garage wall, effectively wrecking the structure and the car in one move. Only the legal aspects of such an action had deterred her. She didn’t need any further court battles.

The car sat in the middle of the street until the police came to issue a ticket, impound the vehicle, and haul it away. She hadn’t answered the door when the officer rang; she’d been busy cleaning out the room she used as an office. When at last she came out to load her truck, the police and the Porsche were gone. Smiling, she’d locked the house and taken off for Molena Point.

The message she’d listened to this morning had badly jolted her�tell you that someone’s been asking questions about you� about your plans this weekend. Are you going to some wedding? As little feeling as I have left for you, Ryan, I have to say be careful. I don’t want anything on my conscience�

There’d been a long pause, then he’d hung up. She’d sat at her desk staring at the phone trying to figure out what he was talking about. Did his call have something to do with Priscilla Bloom getting back at her? But surely not. Why would the opportunistic Priscilla or any of Rupert’s female friends have any connection to Max Harper and Charlie’s wedding or even know about it? How would she know them at all?

Maybe Rupert had heard about the wedding and wanted to upset her by implying there was some kind of danger. That would be like him. Innuendo was just the kind of meaningless warning that would highly amuse him. She was so tired of his stupidity. Even the court battle now in process, that Rupert’s attorneys had managed to delay endlessly as she fought for her rightful half of the business, even Rupert’s testimony in court had been all hot air, all fabrication and lies-silly delaying tactics.

She’d worked hard to help build that business into what it now was. She wasn’t dumping it all and walking away from what she’d earned. The Molena Point attorney she’d contacted had recommended an excellent San Francisco firm, and they were handling the case with minimum fuss for her despite the antics of Rupert’s slick lawyers.

She rinsed her empty cup and lay it in the drain rack, glancing in at Joe and Dulcie, treating the two cats to a string of rude remarks about Rupert Dannizer. Then she went to finish dressing.

Ryan didn’t see behind her the two cats’ response to her longshoreman’s description of Rupert, didn’t see Joe Grey’s yellow eyes narrow with amusement, and Dulcie’s green eyes widen with laughter at her characterization of the man she so despised.

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She wasreaching for her suit jacket when she remembered she’d have to change purses, that she couldn’t dress up for a wedding and carry a canvas backpack. Crossing the studio in her slip, Ryan glanced again at the two cats sprawled across the blue-and-garnet rug, admiring Dulcie’s chocolate stripes and Joe’s sleek silver gleam. Quietly they stared up at her, Joe’s gaze burning like clear amber, Dulcie’s eyes as bright green as emeralds. But the intensity of their concentration forced her to step back. And as she moved away toward the dressing room she was certain that behind her they were still watching.

Strange little cats, she thought. Why was their interest so unsettling?

“Strange little cats,” she had once told Clyde.

“How so? Strange in what way?”

“There’s something different about them. Don’t you notice? I’ve never had cats, only dogs, but�”

“All cats are strange, one way or another. That’s what makes them appealing.”

“I suppose. But those two, and the black-and-brown one you call the kit, sometimes they behave more like dogs than cats. The way they follow you around. And all three cats seem so intense, their glances are so� I don’t know. The way they look at a person, the way the kit looks at you, they’re not the way I think of cats.” She had watched Clyde, frowning. “Neither Wilma nor you finds your cats odd? Doesn’t Wilma ever comment on how different they seem?”

Clyde had shrugged. “I don’t think you’ve observed cats very closely. Catsarestrange, catsstareat you, and every cat is different in some way. Unpredictable,” he’d said. “Dogs are more alike, easier to understand.”

“I see,” she’d answered doubtfully, wondering why he sounded so defensive.

Glancing in the dressing room mirror, she slipped on the beige linen suit without a blouse. The deep V of the neck set off the best of her tan-perfect for cleavage if she’d had any. Well, her tanwasgood. No one could tell it was a farmer’s tan, ending where her shirt collars and sleeves began. With jacket and skirt in place, and pantyhose, most of her little bruises and cuts from working construction were well enough hidden.

The thought did nag her that she ought to do something about her general appearance, the most pressing item being her hair, which badly needed cutting. Two months on the job without stopping to get a haircut had left it longer than she liked, and ragged. Her nails were rough too and her skin felt as dry and leathery as an old carpenter’s apron. What she could have used was a week at some cushy spa with luxurious daily massages, perfumed oils, professional hairstyling, steam baths, manicure, pedicure-a complete overhaul guaranteed to put all emotional and physical parts back into working order.

It amused her to wonder what those high-class masseuses and beauty specialists would make of her calloused, torn hands and cut thumbs and assorted body bruises-little marks of hard labor earned by toting heavy lumber and plumbing fixtures, and leaning into two-by-fours to hold them in place as she nailed them solid. At least her fancy masseuse could have admired her slim butt and super muscle tone, even if the skinny package was as full of bruises as the dents in an ancient farm pickup.

Fastening on an ivory pendant, she brushed back her dark hair into some semblance of order and sprayed it, and applied lipstick. So much for elegance. She’d leave the pizzazz to her sister. Hanni would arrive at the wedding dressed in something that caught all eyes, something almost too wild, too far out, but that would look great on Hanni, with her prematurely white, wildly curling coiffure, her long lean body and her total self-assurance. Hanni was the show-off of the family, the onstage personality, the wouldbe model, Ryan thought warmly. She’d missed Hanni and Dallas, just as she constantly missed her dad. She hadn’t seen much of him since she left the city, but she missed him more now, knowing he was so far away, on the East Coast. He’d been gone for nearly a month, conducting training sessions; she’d be glad when he was home again.

She found herself looking forward eagerly to the wedding, to a bit of social life, to being with friends, and with at least two members of her family. And looking forward too, to the quiet and meaningful ceremony.

Just because her own marriage had been ugly didn’t mean she had to rain on others’ bliss.

The marriage of Max Harper, that wry-witted police captain who, Clyde said, had seemed so very alone after his wife died, was a cause of celebration for the entire village-or at least for all those who didn’t hate Harper, who didn’t fear Harper’s thorough and effective response to village crime.

To see Charlie and Max marrying pleased Ryan very much. The two were just right for each other. Two no-nonsense people who, despite their down-to-earth attitudes, were each in their own way dreamers. Though you’d never know that about Max Harper; he’d never let you know that.

Charlie and Max had wanted a small, private wedding that better fit their approach to life and was in keeping with Max’s low-key style as chief of police. But the villagers were so excited about the occasion, everyone wanted to be a part of the wedding. The couple had settled for a ceremony in the small village church with the wedding guests mostly police officers and their wives and a few close friends, but with all the village crowded around in the adjoining rooms of the church and in the garden, and at the open patio doors where they could hear the couple’s vows. The garden buffet afterward would be for the whole village.

She thought about Rupert’s message.Someone’s asking� about your plans for the weekend� Areyou going to some wedding?� I don’t want anything on my conscience�

She shook her head. That was all talk. She was stupid to let Rupert worry her, that was exactly what he wanted. Rupert’s warped sense of the melodramatic was inappropriate and embarrassing.

Finished dressing, she decided to make fresh coffee for Clyde; he was usually early, a quality mat had at first annoyed her but that she’d come to find reassuring. Clyde didn’t like to be late and neither did she. Having not seen each other for over two months, they could sit and talk for a moment before being swallowed up in the crowd and the ceremony. The coffee was brewing when she heard him double-timing up the stairs. She opened the door eagerly, before he had time to knock, forgetting the mice on the mat.

He stood at the edge of the mat staring down without expression. She remained silent, unwilling to respond to his corny joke, and wondering again how he’d accomplished it.

Looking up at her, he started to grin. His short, dark hair was freshly cut, his shave smooth and clean, making her want to touch his cheek. She loved the scent of his vetiver aftershave. She had never seen him in a suit before, only in jeans and a polo shirt or, for evening, jeans and a sport coat. Today, as best man, hehaddressed handsomely, choosing a dark navy suit, a pale, pinstriped shirt and a rich but subdued paisley tie. He seemed truly surprised by the dead mice.

“That’s what your tomcat brought me.”

“He does that,” Clyde said casually. “He does that at home.”

“Leaves mice on the mat? Lines them up like a pack of sausages? Come on, Clyde.”

Clyde looked at her innocently. “All in a row. I haven’t been able to break him of it.” His look was blank and serious.

She didn’t pursue it. Maybe the cat had done it on his own. This was not the day to discuss the vicissitudes of Clyde’s cat.

But as she turned to pour the coffee, she glimpsed the look he shot the tomcat. A glare deeply indignant, as if the cat should have used better judgment. And Joe Grey was staring back at Clyde with amused indulgence, with me kind of silent look mat might pass between a dog and his trainer. She’d seen Dallas exchange such a glance with his pointers or retrievers, not a word spoken, or maybe a single word so soft that no one but man and dog heard it-a close, perceptive contact between man and animal.

Was such contact with a cat possible?

Well, why not? Maybe catswereas intelligent as a well-bred pointer or retriever. Whatever the case, Clyde was apparently more skilled with cats than with canines.

Stepping over the mice and into her kitchen, Clyde fetched a plastic bag from the drawer beside the refrigerator and returned to the deck to dispose of the bodies, shaking them from the mat into the bag, and carrying it down to the drive and around behind the garage to the garbage can. She heard him rinse his hands at the outdoor faucet. She listened to him come up the stairs, still wondering how many cats would line up their mice on the mat, or would think to do such a thing. Maybe she should learn more about cats. The subject might be entertaining. Clyde returned as she poured the coffee. Pulling out a chair, he glanced in once more toward Joe Grey and Dulcie. “The kit wasn’t with them?”

“No. Just the two of them.”

He shrugged. “She’s getting big, growing up. I guess she can take care of herself.”

“You and Wilma have to worry about your cats. They wander all over the village. And the hills� it’s so wild up there. I can hear the coyotes yipping at night. Don’t you-”

“How many times have you asked me that, Ryan? Yes, we worry.” He looked at her intently. “Cats are not dogs, to be fenced and leashed. I went through this with Charlie. She couldn’t believe we let the cats wander. She understands them better, now. You can’t shut them in, they’d die of boredom, their lives would be worth nothing. They’re intelligent cats. They need to pursue-whatever weird little projects cats pursue. They need to hunt. They’re careful. I’ve watched them crossing the streets; they look, they don’t just go barging out.”

“But the coyotes. And the dogs-big dogs.”

He sipped his coffee. “I’m sure they know when the coyotes are near, they can hear and smell them-and dogs and coyotes can’t climb.” He gave her a little smile. “Those three cats will chase a dog until he wishes he’d never heard of cats. I once saw the kit ride the back of a big dog, raking and biting him, rode him from Hellhag Hill clear into the village. She was only a kitten, then. I’d hate to see what she could do now.”

The tortoiseshell kit had been with Charlie’s aunt Wilma and Dulcie for nearly a year while her owners were traveling. Ryan thought she was charming, those round, golden eyes in that little black-and-brown mottled face always delighted her. The kit’s looks were so expressive that, more than once, Ryan caught herself wondering what the little animal was thinking.

“You’re tan. It was hot up in the foothills.”

“Ninety to a hundred. Surveying, laying out foundation, and putting up framing in the hot sun.”

She loved the rolling hills at the base of the Sierras, the rising slopes golden with dry summer grass beneath islands of dark green pine trees, the kind of vast grazing country that had fed millions of longhorn cattle two centuries before when California was part of Mexico, and at one time had fed vast herds of buffalo and elk.

Rising, she fetched a pack of photos from her desk, to show him the added-on great room she had just completed. “Job went like a charm. No major delays in deliveries, no really critical battles with the inspectors, no disasters. But I’m glad to be home, after living with those two in that trailer.”

Dan Hall was a Molena Point carpenter who had been willing to work on the San Andreas job providing his young wife could come up on weekends. Scott Flannery was Ryan’s uncle, her father’s brother, a burly Scotch-Irish giant who had helped to raise Ryan and her two sisters after their mother died. Scotty and her mother’s brother Dallas had moved in with them when Ryan was ten, a week after her mother’s funeral. The three men had kept up the lessons their mother had insisted on, teaching the girls to cook and clean house and sew and to do most of the household repairs. Scotty had added more sophisticated carpentry skills, and Dallas, then a uniformed officer with San Francisco PD, had taught them the proper handling and safety of firearms as well as how to train and work the hunting dogs he raised. While other little girls were dressing up, learning party manners, and how to fascinate the boys, Ryan and her sisters were outshooting the boys in competition, were hunting dove or quail over one or another of Dallas’s fine pointers, or were off on a pack trip into the Rockies.

“Guess I’m getting old and crotchety,” Ryan said. “That big two-bedroom trailer seemed so cramped, I found myself longing for my own space. The whole time, I didn’t see anyone but those two, and a real estate agent who wants me to do a remodel-and a couple of kids underfoot.”

Clyde looked at his watch and rose to rinse their cups. “Neighbor’s kids?”

She nodded. “I never did figure out where they lived. They said up the hills. Those houses are scattered all over. You know how kids are drawn to new construction.”

Clyde picked up Joe Grey, who had trotted expectantly into the kitchen. “So did you take the remodeling job?”

“I think I’ll let that one go by,” she said briefly.

Slinging the tomcat over his shoulder, Clyde scooped up Dulcie too, cradling the little female in the crook of his arm..

“You’re taking them to the wedding,” Ryan said. It was not a question. Clyde took the gray tomcat everywhere.

“Why not? It’s a garden wedding. If they don’t like it, they can leave.” He grinned at her. “Max has a thing about cats. I like to tweak him. I thought it would be amusing to bring the cats to his wedding, let them watch from the trees. Charlie will appreciate the humor.” They moved out the door and down the steps to his antique yellow roadster, where Clyde dropped the cats into the open rumble seat.

“Bring them up front with me, Clyde. You don’t want them jumping out. I’ll hold them.”

“They won’t jump. They’re not stupid.”

“Bring them up here. They’re cats. Cats don’t�” She shut up, looking intently at Clyde and at the cats. Joe Grey and Dulcie lay down obediently on the soft leather rumble seat, as docile as a pair of well-mannered dogs-as if perhaps theyhadbeen trained to behave.

“They’ll be fine,” Clyde said, starting the engine. “It’s a nice day, they want a bit of sunshine.” And as he headed down the hills, the cats remained unmoving, seeming as safe as if they wore seat belts. Ryan was sure there couldn’t be another cat in the world that wouldn’t leap out to the street or stand on the edge of the seat and be thrown out. Cats riding in open rumble seats, cats attending weddings.

Dulcie looked up at her with such contentment, and Joe Grey’s expression was so smug that she almost imagined they were proud to be riding in that beautiful vintage car.

Clyde had completely restored the ‘28 Chevy-new, butter-yellow leather upholstery, gleaming yellow paint. Old cars were Clyde’s love, the Hudsons and Pierce-Arrows and old Packards that he worked on in the back garage of his upscale automotive shop. When he got one in perfect condition he would drive it for a while and then sell it. He was paying for the remodeling of his cottage with the profits from one car or another, just as he had paid to renovate the derelict apartment building he had bought. It was clear that he took great joy in acquiring abandoned relics, in making them new and useful again. Maybe that too was why she liked Clyde Damen.

In the bright autumn weather Molena Point was mobbed with tourists, but despite the glut of out-of-town cars Clyde found a parking place half a block from the church. Swinging a U-turn he neatly parked, scooped up the two cats to keep them safe from traffic, and they crossed to the deep garden in front of the Village Church.

The garden paths were already crowded with villagers. Pausing beside a lemon tree, Clyde half-lifted and half-tossed the two cats into the branches away from crowding feet. Ryan watched them climb, as Clyde headed inside the church to his duties as best man.

She saw, across the garden, her uncle Dallas and her sister. Hanni, decked out in outrageous rags, looked like a million dollars. It was the first time in months that she had seen Dallas in uniform and not in his detective’s plainclothes. The entire police force had turned out spit-and-polish, everyone in the village was dressed up and in a party mood. In the excitement of celebration on such a lovely day she had no reason to imagine that disaster would, within moments, rock the church and the garden.

But as the wedding guests laughed and gossiped, and inside the church the groom in his captain’s uniform paced with nerves, an unexpected event began to unfold, a drama that could alter-or cut short-the course of many lives.

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At first,no one saw the lone witness. Not even Joe Grey and Dulcie, crouched high among the branches of the lemon tree, saw the tortoiseshell cat on the rooftops across the street. The two older cats had no glimpse of the tattercoat kit hunched on the dark shingles hidden beneath the overhanging oak branches; they had no hint of the panic that would, in a moment, course through the kit’s small, tensed body.

The community church was set well back from the street within its garden of flowering shrubs and small decorative trees. The nonsectarian meeting rooms of the one-story Mediterranean building were employed for all manner of village functions besides church services, from political discussions to author readings. The kit had hung around the church all morning watching the cleaning crew performing a last polish and setting up buffet tables on the back patio; and she had watched masses of white flowers being delivered and arranged within the largest meeting room. Only when the wedding guests began to arrive had she trotted across the narrow residential street, to be out of the way of sharp-heeled party shoes and the hard black oxfords of the many uniformed officers. Swarming up a jasmine trellis to the roof of a brown clapboard cottage, she had stretched out where an oak tree’s shadows darkened the weathered shingles. Here, she had the best seat of all, with a clear view across the garden and through the wide glass doors to the lectern where the bride and groom would stand, exchanging their sacred vows.

She had watched Charlie and Wilma arrive, Wilma carrying the bridal dress in a long plastic bag and Charlie carrying a small suitcase. What a lot of preparation it took for humans to get married, nothing like the casual trysting of the feral cats she had run with when she was small. The two women entered the south wing of the church through a back door, where the bride would have a private office in which to dress. The kit was watching the growing crowd when, below her, the bushes stirred with a sharp rustle, and a man spoke.

He must be standing between the close-set houses. The timbre of his gravelly voice suggested he was old. He sounded bad-tempered. “Go on. Boy. Get your ass up there, you haven’t got all day.”

No one answered, but someone began to climb the trellis, slowly approaching the roof. The kit could hear me little crosspieces creak under a hesitant weight. Padding warily away across the shingles, she crouched beneath overhanging branches out of sight, where she could see.

A young boy was climbing up. A thin dirty boy with ragged shirt and torn jeans, his face smudged, but pale beneath the dark smears. His black eyes were oblique and hard, his hands brown with dirt. One pocket bulged as if maybe he’d stuffed a candy bar in it, fortification against sudden hunger. The kit knew that feeling.

Peering over, she studied the man who stood below. He was equally ragged, his faded jeans stained, his face bristling with a grizzled beard, his gray hair hanging long around his shoulders. Both man and boy stunk of sharp scents that made the kit’s nose burn. The boy had gained the roof. He didn’t swing up onto it, but stopped at the edge, turning to look down.

“Goon,Curtis. They’ll be filling the church in a minute.”

“I don’t�”

“Just lie under the branches, no one’ll see you. Wait till Harper’s in there and the girl and them cops, then punch it and get out. I’ll be gone like I told you, the truck gone. You just slip away, no one’ll see you.”

Clinging in the vines, the boy looked both determined and scared, like a cornered rat, the kit thought, trapped in a tin can with nowhere to run.

“Just punch it, Curtis. Your dad’s in jail because of them cops.”

Swinging a leg over, the boy gained the roof, crouching near the kit beneath the oak branches. She didn’t think he saw her, he seemed totally centered on finding a vantage where he would be hidden but could best see the church.

When he’d chosen his place he removed from his pocket a small smooth object like a tiny radio, and laid it on the shingles beside him. The kit puzzled over it for some time before she understood what it was, this small, plastic, boxlike thing that the boy could hide in one hand. Wilma had one, and so did Clyde. And the old man’s voice echoed,Just punch it and get out.She didn’t understand-there was no garage door in the church to open. Why would�

Just punch it and get out�

What else could a garage-door opener do, the kit wondered, besides open the door for which it was intended? With its little battery inside, its little electrical battery, what could it do?

Just punch it and get out� Wait until Harper’s in there, and the girl�

That little electrical battery, that little electric signal�

All the wonders of electrical things that had so astonished the kit when she first came to live among humans: the dishwasher, the refrigerator, the warmth of an electric blanket, the magical lifting of the garage door while Wilma was still in the car, its signal leaping from that opener-its electrical signal leaping�

She remembered cop talk about triggering devices. She stared across the street into the church where someone had left a gift for the bride and groom, a silver-wrapped package tucked down into the lectern where Charlie and Max Harper would stand to be married. She had seen it earlier as she watched the workers, had thought it was a special present hidden just where the preacher would stand, where the bride and groom would stand, a gift all silver-wrapped with little silver bells on the ribbon�

A special present�

A gift that was not a gift,she realized with a quaking heart, and the kit exploded to life, racing at the boy, leaping on his back, raking and biting and forcing him away from that electric signal-maker, that plastic box that could send its message across the street into the church, could send its triggering message�

She might be wrong. The boy’s actions might be innocent. But�Your dad’s in jail because of them cops� Punch it and get out�Terrified and enraged, she clawed and raked and bit, driving the boy away across the roof, forcing him toward the trellis. Nearly falling, he swung away down the trellis, the kit clinging to his back.

Before he hit the ground she dropped clear and ran flashing across the street between cars�

There� there was Clyde hurrying out of the church toward his car as if he had forgotten something. As he leaned into the open convertible, reaching, she leaped to his back nearly shouting in his ear, only remembering at the last instant to whisper�

“Bomb, Clyde. There’s a bomb in the church in that oak stand, in the lectern. A boy on the roof� garage door opener to set it off� tell them to run, all to run� I chased him, but�” And she bailed to the ground again and was gone, racing back across the street causing Clyde to shout after her. The street was thick with cars letting people off.

But then seeing her appear at the far side and swarm up a tree to the rooftops, he spun away, never questioning the kit’s warning. Not daring to question, not this small cat. Never daring to question her any more than he would question Joe Grey�

Moments earlier, Dulcie had been licking blood from her paw where she’d cut herself on a thorn of the lemon tree. She sat among the branches licking at her pad and looking across the garden into the church, admiring the big meeting room with its high, dark-raftered ceiling and white plastered walls and its two long rows of glass doors looking out on the front and back gardens. Vases of white flowers were massed at both ends of the room, and someone had tucked a gift down inside the lectern. She could see a corner of the silver paper, maybe something special to be presented at the ceremony, though that did seem odd.

Imagining the ritual of the wedding, she was filled with purring happiness. No matter what ugliness might happen elsewhere in the world, no matter what hideous events occurred outside their own small village, here, today, human love ruled.

Behind her Joe Grey hissed, “What’s she doing?”

She turned on the branch, never doubting from Joe’s distraught tone that he was talking about the kit, this kit to whom disaster clung like needles to a magnet.

He was staring across the street at a dark-shingled roof. Dulcie could just see the kit crouched on the edge of the roof beneath overhanging branches.

There was a boy on the roof. The kit watched him intently, rigid with anger-and the next instant she leaped, clawing the boy and raking him. He swatted at her and ran. The kit rode his back, scratching and biting, forcing the boy off the roof, riding him down then leaping away to race across the street.

The kit hit Clyde, flying up clinging to his shoulder. They could see her poke her nose at his ear, whispering� lashing her tail and whispering�

In the church office provided for her use, the bride dressed slowly and carefully in her simple linen gown, trying not to fall apart with nerves. In the mirror her freckles looked as dark as paint splatters across her pale cheeks.

Charlie’s kinky red hair was pulled back and smoothed, as much as it could be smoothed, into a handsome chignon and clipped with a carved ivory barrette loaned to her by her aunt Wilma. Wilma, tall and slim and white-haired, stood behind Charlie buttoning her dress. The starched-lace wedding veil and crown of white flowers sat on a little stand, on the office desk.

For something blue, Charlie wore blue panties and bra printed with white roses, a private joke between her and Max. Over this, a white lace half-slip and camisole. The “something old” was her mother’s wedding ring, one of the few mementos she had from her dead parents. Thenewsomething was her long white linen gown with its low embroidered neckline and embroidered cap sleeves. Charlie’s calloused and capable hands shook both from nerves and excitement and from a sense of the unreal. Time seemed out of kilter, as if in some strange fantasy, the wedding preparations of the preceding few days swirling around her, each moment warped in time and place by her own disbelief.

She was no child bride. At thirty-something she had almost abandoned the idea of falling truly in love and being married. Now that it was happening, and seeming so inevitable, she felt as if she had stepped into a different world and different time, or maybe stepped into someone else’s life.

For a while she’d thought Clyde was the one, and that they might marry, but she’d never had this totally lost and committed and ecstatic feeling with Clyde. She and Clyde had ended up no more than good friends, the best of friends. Her feeling for Max was totally different. Her love for Max was the kind of nervous oneness thatmadeher hands shake, made her tremble sometimes, and turned her terrified because he was a cop, terrified that he would be hurt, that she would lose him.

“Is that a tear?” Wilma said, watching Charlie in the mirror. Wilma was dressed in a long, pale blue shift, her gray-white hair done in a bun bound low at her neck.

“Of course it’s not a tear. I’m not the weeping sort. Steady as a rock.” She knew she’d have to get over her fear for Max, that a cop’s wife couldn’t live like that or she would perish; but right now it was all she could do to keep herself together and get to the altar with Wilma’s help and not collapse in a fit of uncontrollable nerves.

“You’re not steady at all. Are you this nervous on the firing range?”

“I’m not on the firing range. I’m getting married.” She stared at her aunt. “Thisisdifferent than the firing range. Tell me it’s different. Tell me�” She collapsed against her aunt, shivering, her head on Wilma’s shoulder.

Wilma hugged her and smoothed Charlie’s hair. “It’s different when you’re marrying someone like Max Harper. You’re having a perfectly normal case of nerves. And maybe second thoughts?” She held Charlie away, looking deeply at her, then grinned. “A simple case of premarital hysteria. I expect Max is having the same. You’ll be fine.”

“Not second thoughts. Not ever. It’s just that� If I worried about him before, what will it be like after we’re married?”

“He’s sharp enough to have lasted this long,” Wilma said brusquely. “If something were to happen� just give him everything you can. Just fill what time he has-what time we all have. Youmust notfear the future, no one can live like that.”

Wilma looked deeply at her. “You know what to do-you prepare as best you can for the bad times-then live every moment with joy.” She touched Charlie’s cheek. “Law enforcement and protecting others, that is his life, Charlie. You can’t change what he wants from his life.”

“And there’s Clyde,” Charlie said, her perverse mind wanting to dredge up every vague cause for unease. “No matter what he says, I feel�”

“Guilty.”

“As if I dumped him. But he�”

“Not to worry,” Wilma said. “Not only is he bringing Ryan Flannery to the wedding, he’s still pursuing Kate Osborne, trying to get her to move back down from San Francisco. I don’t think with two women to sort out, trying to pay attention to both, that Clyde is going to spend much time grieving.”

“Well, that’s not very flattering,” Charlie said, grinning. She smoothed the tendrils of her hair that would keep slipping out from the carefully arranged chignon.

“Quit fussing. You look like an angel, a curly-haired, redheaded angel. Now hold still and let me finish fastening. Where are your shoes? You didn’t forget your shoes?”

“On the desk. Now who’s fussing?”

“It isn’t every day my only niece gets married-my only family.” Turning to fetch the shoes, Wilma moved to the window and slid the drapery back a few inches to look out into the garden where their friends were gathering. The afternoon was bright and serene. “What a lovely crowd. And people still arriving. Even�” Wilma held out her hand. “Come and look.”

They stood together peering out, two tall, slim women, the family resemblance clear in their strongly sculpted faces. “Look in the lemon tree. Two of your most ardent admirers, all sleeked up for the occasion.”

They could just see Joe Grey and Dulcie peering out from among the leaves, watching something across the street, Joe’s white paws bright among the shadows, Dulcie’s brown tabby stripes blending into the tree’s foliage so she was hardly visible.

“What are they up to?” Charlie said. “They look�”

“They’re not up to anything, they’re waiting to see you and Max married. They have a perfect view, they’ll be able to see, above the crowd, right in through the glass doors.”

“Where’s the kit?”

“I don’t see her, but you can bet she won’t miss this ceremony.”

Charlie turned from the window, reaching for her veil. Wilma, watching her, thought that her niece seemed as close to an angel as it was possible for a flesh-and-blood person to look. She willed the day to be perfect, without a flaw, a golden day for Charlie and Max, with not a thing to spoil it. Charlie was fussing with her veil when the door flew open and Max burst in grabbing her, pushing her toward the door and reaching to Wilma. “Get out!Now!Away from the building. Run, both of you-blocks away.Go, Charlie. Bomb alert.”

Wilma grabbed Charlie, pulling her away as Charlie tried to follow Max into the garden. Charlie turned on her with rage. “Let me go. Let me go! I can help.”

Max spun back, grabbing her shoulders. “Go now! Get the hell out of here!”

She fought him, trying to twist free. “What do you think I am! I can help clear the area!” Her green eyes blazed. “I’m not marrying a cop I can’t work beside!”

He stared, then turned away with her into the garden. “That woman in the wheelchair, those women around her-get them off the block and down the street.” And he was gone among his officers, keeping order as tangles of wedding guests moved quickly out of the garden, and a few confused elderly folks milled together in panic. Charlie grabbed the wheelchair as Wilma corralled half a dozen frail ladies.

The cats didn’t see Charlie and Wilma come out. They were watching the kit where she had fled back across the street and up the trellis. The boy had climbed again too. Running across the roof, he knelt, reaching for something. But again the kit landed on his shoulders raking and biting. What was the matter with her? Then suddenly all the cops were running, fanning out across the street, staring up at the roof. The boy snatched something from the roof and spun around, racing across the shingles, trying to dislodge the kit. He slipped and fell, and seemed to drop in slow-motion, falling and twisting.

He hit the ground and an explosion rocked the garden. A sudden cloud of smoke hid the church and trees, smoke filled with flying flecks of plaster and torn wood and broken shingles-as if the church had been ground up and vomited out again by a giant blower.

The side of the church was gone. There was only a jagged, smoking hole where the wall of the church had been.

Ragged fragments of the building, and of broken furniture and wedding flowers lay scattered across the bricks and clinging to trees and bushes, and still the sky rained debris.

The two cats crouched clinging to the branches choking with smoke and dust, shaken by the impact. Had it been a gas explosion? Maybe the church furnace? But it was a warm day, and the furnace would not be running. They stared down at a young woman staunching a child’s bloody arm, at a young couple holding each other, an old woman weeping, at officers clearing the area. A bomb. It had been a bomb.

But no villager could do this, not now when the very thought of a bomb was so painful for every human soul.

They saw no one badly hurt, no one was down. “The kit,” Dulcie said. “Where is the kit?” She hardly remembered later how she and Joe reached the kit, where she clung in a pine tree across the street. She only vaguely remembered racing between parked cars and people’s legs, scorching up the pine tree and cuddling the kit against her, licking her frightened face.

Below the pine, officers surrounded the boy. Had that small boy caused the explosion? He couldn’t be more than ten. A ragged child, very white and still.

That was why the kit had jumped him! To stop him! Then she had raced to Clyde. Dulcie licked the kit harder. What kind of childwasthat boy, to do such a thing?He’s just a child,Dulcie thought, shivering. But then she saw the boy’s eyes so cold and hard, and she felt her stomach wrench.

Sirens filled the air. Dulcie looked around for Charlie and Wilma.Don’t let anyone be dead, don’t let anyone be badly hurt.What kind of sophisticated electronic equipment did this little boy have, to set off such an explosion? He seemed just an ordinary, dirty-faced kid, handcuffed now and held between two cops. Just a boy-except for those hard black eyes.

But as Dulcie and Joe peered down from the pine tree with the kit snuggled between them, the boy looked around as if searching for someone. His gaze rose to the roofs and surrounding trees-and stopped on the three cats.

He looked straight at the kit, his eyes widening with rage.

And the tattercoat kit dropped her ears and backed away, deeper among the dark, concealing branches.

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The debris’ filledsmoke twisted and began slowly to settle. The dropping sun sent its deep afternoon light streaming down through the torn roof of the church, illuminating airborne flecks like falling snow through which officers searched the rubble for wounded, and quickly moved shocked onlookers away, in case of a second blast.

No one seemed badly injured; but the miracle of escape was slow to instruct the villagers. They stood in little clusters holding one another, the shock of the deed reverberating in every face, beating in every heart.

Charlie looked around her at the white petals of the wedding bouquets scattered across the detritus-as if some precocious flower girl had thrown a tantrum flinging her pretty treasures. Near her an old woman stood with her handkerchief pressed to her bloody forehead. As Charlie moved to help her, she heard Ryan shout for a medic, and saw Ryan supporting Cora Lee French, Cora Lee’s dark arm around Ryan’s shoulder. Holding the old woman, Charlie wanted to run to Cora Lee.

Pressing her handkerchief to the old woman’s forehead, Charlie got her to sit down on the sidewalk. It was not a deep cut, only a scratch in an area that would naturally bleed heavily. As the woman rested against her, Charlie looked at the church where she and Max were to have been married. Where, if they hadn’t been alerted, she and Max, Clyde and Wilma and the minister would have been standing with nearly the whole village crowded around them.

The three standing walls of the church bristled with shards of debris embedded in the cracked plaster. The rows of velvet-padded chairs that had awaited the wedding guests lay splintered into kindling and blackened rags. One side of the carved lectern lay whole and apparently untouched, smeared black and dotted with silver-bright specks. The corner of a cardboard box lay near it, still covered with silver paper. How odd, that the center had remained nearly undamaged. Sirens screamed again in the narrow street as two more ambulances careened to the curb beside squad cars whose trunks stood open, officers snatching out first aid equipment.

No villager could have done this. No villager could have performed such an act. Not now� No one could have wanted to destroy�

Destroy Max�?

Destroy Max as someone had tried to destroy him last winter, setting him up for murder?Charlie began to shiver, she was ice-cold. She turned her eyes to Max across the garden where he stood talking with two officers. Was this what their marriage would be like, this icy internal terror? Would she go through all their life together ridden by this terrible fear, so that fear touched every smallest joy, turned all their life ugly?

Fury filled her, hot rage. She wanted to pound someone, pound the person who had done this. She looked across the street at Clyde and the officers, handcuffing that young boy. And she turned away, not wanting to think a child had done such a tiling.

She watched the two medics arguing with Cora Lee until at last Cora Lee obediently lay down again on the stretcher. She watched Max talking on his field phone as his officers cleared the street, sending people home. She walked the old woman to the open door of Cora Lee’s ambulance and saw her settled inside. As she turned away, the squad car carrying the boy passed her, the kid scowling out from behind the grid, his face all sharp angles and angry. So very angry.

The cats watched a squad car take the boy away, the child crouched sullenly in the backseat behind the wire barrier. Officer Green had taken the broken garage door opener from the boy’s pocket. The small remote had looked badly smashed where the kid had fallen on it. They could see, within the torn church, detectives Davis and Garza photographing the scene, Juana Davis holding the strobe lights down among the dark rubble so Garza could shoot close-ups of scraps of splintered wood and torn carpet and shattered plaster and bits of silver gift wrap. Dulcie shivered. That prettily wrapped box that they had glimpsed and ignored. That innocent-looking box.

She didn’t understand humans, she didn’t understand how the bright and inventive human mind could warp into such hunger to destroy. She didn’t understand how the human soul, that in its passion could create the wonders of civilization, could allow that same passion to warp in on itself and burn, instead, with this sick thirst for destruction.

Evil,she thoughtPure evil. That kind of sickness is part of the ultimate dark, the dark power that would suck all life to destruction.

“Well, therewillbe a wedding,” Dulcie said softly, lashing her tail, looking at the kit, then looking down at their human friends, at Charlie in her blood-splattered wedding dress holding two children by the hands as their mother tried to calm a screaming baby. “Therewillbe a wedding.” That boy had destroyed the wall of the church, but he hadn’t destroyed anyone’s spirit. He had not destroyed love, or human will.

She watched officers stringing yellow crime tape, securing the area. She had heard Captain Harper calling for a bomb team, she supposed out of San Jose. She knew that those forensic technicians would spend hours going over the area, photographing, fingerprinting, bagging every possible bit of evidence. But once the team arrived, when the work at hand was organized, would mere be a wedding? Surely somewhere within the village, Charlie and Max Harper would be married.

Beside her, the kit was hunkered down among the branches looking so small and miserable that Dulcie nosed at her with concern. “What, Kit? What’s the matter?”

The kit shut her eyes.

“Don’t, Kit. Don’t looksad.You saved lives. You saved hundreds of lives. You’re a hero. But how did you know? How did you know what he planned?”

“I heard them. I heard mat old man telling the boy what to do, an old man with a beard and a bent foot. He shook the boy and told him to wait until everyone was in the church, the bride and groom and minister and everyone, then to punch the opener. I didn’t know what he meant. He said to punch it and run, to get off the roof fast and get away. The boy was angry but he climbed up to the roof and the old man hobbled away. I didn’t mean for the bomb to explode, I wanted tostopwhatever would happen, I didn’t mean for a bomb to go off,” the kit said miserably.

Dulcie licked the kit’s ears. “If you hadn’t jumped that boy, then warned Clyde, then jumped the boy again, he would have killed everyone. You’re a hero, Kit. Do you understand that? Who knows how many lives you saved.”

Dulcie twitched an ear. “To those who know, to Clyde and Wilma and Charlie-to all ofus,Kit, you’ll forever be a hero.”

“Absolutely a hero,” Joe Grey said softly, nudging the kit. “But where did the old man go? Did you see where he went? Did he have a car?”

The kit shook her whiskers. “I didn’t see which way. I didn’t see him get in a car, but�” She paused, thinking. “He said to the boy, ‘The truck will be gone.’ And mere was an old truck parked down the side street, a rusty old pickup, sort of brown. And when� when I jumped the boy and the man ran, I think� IthinkI heard a rattley motor.”

Joe’s eyes widened, and immediately he left them, backing down the tree and streaking for Clyde’s open convertible. He would not, among a crowd of humans, ordinarily be so brazen as to leap into the car and paw into the side pocket, hauling out Clyde’s cell phone. But he had little choice. Looking up over the car door, seeing no one watching him, he punched in a number.

Dulcie and Kit heard Max Harper’s cell phone ringing, across the garden. How strange it was that Joe’s electronic message could zip through the sky who knew how many miles to some phantom tower in just an instant, and back again to Harper’s phone where he stood only a few feet away.

Harper answered, listened, and gave an order that sent officers racing away on foot through the village, and sent squad cars swerving out fast to cruise the streets looking for an old brown truck and for the old man who was the boy’s accomplice. And above the searching officers, Dulcie and the kit raced away too. Flying across the rooftops they watched the sidewalks below, peering down into shadowed niches and recessed doorways where a hidden figure might be missed; and soon on the roofs two blocks away they saw Joe, also searching.

For nearly two hours, as dusk fell, and as the police combed the streets and shops below, the cats crossed back and forth along balconies and oak branches and across peaks and shingles, peering into dark rooftop hiding places and in through second-floor windows looking for the bearded, crippled old man.

There was no sign of him. When at last the search ended, below in the darkening streets the entire population of the village joined to move the site of the wedding. Men and women in party clothes hauled tables and chairs from dozens of shops, carrying them for blocks, setting them up in the center of the village. And when the cats returned to the church garden, it was lined with cars again-the bomb team had arrived.

Within the barrier of yellow tape, grid markers had been laid out. Five forensics officers were down on their hands and knees under powerful spotlights working with cameras and small instruments and collection bags, carefully labeling each item they removed. The process seemed, even to a patient feline hunter, incredibly tedious. Watching from the roof across the street, the cats were overwhelmed by the work that must be accomplished. Clyde found them there, intently watching, perched on the edge of the roof like three owls in the cool and gathering dusk.

“Come on, cats. It’s time for the ceremony. Come on, or you’ll make us late.”

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In thedarkening evening, Ocean Avenue’s two lanes were closed off by rows of sawhorses; and its wide grassy median beneath spreading eucalyptus trees was filled with wavering lights; lights shifted and wandered and drew together in constellations. Nearly every villager carried a candle or battery-operated torch or, here and there, a soft-burning oil lantern retrieved from the bearer’s camping supplies.

Down the center of the median a narrow path had been left between the crowd, for the wedding procession. The long grassy carpet led to a circle of lawn before a giant eucalyptus whose five mammoth trunks fanned out from the ground like a great hand reaching to the star-strewn sky. Within the velvet-green circle ringed by wedding guests, the pastor waited, holy book in hand. Beside him, the groom looked more than usually solemn, his thin, lined face stern and watchful.

Tall and straight in his dark uniform, Max Harper was not encumbered with the cop’s full equipment, with flashlight, handcuffs, mace, the regulation array of weapons and tools; only his loaded automatic hung at his hip. His gaze down the long green aisle where the bride would approach was more than usually watchful; and along the outer limits of the crowd, his uniformed officers stood at attention in wary surveillance. This was what the world had come to, even for an event as simple as a village wedding-particularly for such an event. Harper’s nerves were raw with concern for Charlie.

She stood a block away at the other end of the grassy path waiting, apparently demurely, between her aunt Wilma and Dallas Garza, her red hair bright in the candlelight, her hands steady on the bridal bouquet of white and yellow daisies-she had chosen his favorite flowers. No stain of blood shone on her white linen dress or on Wilma’s blue gown, as if the two women had diligently sponged away the slightest hint of trouble.

Charlie did not look up along the grassy path at him but glanced repeatedly to the street watching for Clyde’s arrival. Max got the impression that the moment the best man’s yellow roadster appeared, at one of the side-street barriers, she meant to sprint down the lane double-time and get on with the wedding, before another bomb rent apart their world.

But then when Clyde’s car did race into view, parking in the red before the sawhorses, Max saw Charlie laugh. He couldn’t see what she found amusing, but among the guests who had turned to look, several people smiled.

Only when Clyde and Ryan came across the street, did he catch a flash of movement along the ground-three small racing shadows almost immediately gone again from view, among the wedding guests. He wasn’t sure whether to laugh, or to swear at Clyde. Buddies they were, but there were limits. Watching his best man push through to take his place, Max fixed him with a look that would intimidate the coldest felon.

Clyde’s sly grin told him that indeed cats were among the wedding guests; and the faintest scrambling sound behind Max told him those guests were now above his head, in the branches of the eucalyptus tree-doing what? Cats did not attend weddings, cats did not know about weddings. Max looked down the long grassy aisle to Charlie, needing her commonsense response to such matters. This business of weirdly behaving cats left him out of his element, off-center and shaky, as nothing else could do.

The instant Clyde parked, the three cats had leaped out of the open convertible and streaked across the empty eastbound lane hoping not to be noticed on the dark street. Slipping into the crowd, swerving between shoes and pant cuffs and silk-clad ankles they stormed up the far side of the giant eucalyptus. Concealing themselves among its leafy branches, they looked down on the crowd below, massed in the falling evening among the sheltering trees.

“Oh,” Dulcie whispered. “Oh,” said the kit. The faces of the villagers were lighted from beneath by candles and torches like the faces of children carrying votive candles in solemn procession. The scene put Dulcie in mind of some ancient woodland wedding performed in a simpler time, perhaps a Celtic ceremony in a far and magical past.

The minute Clyde took his place beside the groom, Wilma began her measured walk up the grassy aisle, her step dictated not by wedding music, for there was none, but by the rhythm of the sea that broke some blocks away on the sandy shore, the surf’s eternal hush deep and sustaining. Behind Wilma, the bride approached on the arm of Dallas Garza between the flickering lights, her dress gleaming white. “She’ll have sponged it,” Dulcie whispered.

Some of the wedding guests sported bandages; but only Cora Lee French was in the hospital. “For observation,” Clyde had said. Cora Lee’s lack of a spleen after her attack and surgery last spring prompted her doctor to keep close watch on her. Very likely, the cats thought, Cora Lee was fully prepared to enjoy the wedding secondhand from her friends’ eager descriptions and from the plates of wedding cake and party food that would be carried over to the hospital.

As Charlie, Wilma, and Dallas took their places, Dulcie felt a tear slide down her whiskers. The ceremony was simple. At, “who gives this bride to be wed?” when Detective Garza led Charlie forward to stand beside Captain Harper, Joe Grey muttered a little prayer that in all the confusion Clyde hadn’t lost the rings. Only when Clyde slipped his hand in his coat pocket and the ring boxes appeared, did the cats relax, watching with fascination as the traditional wordsto love and to cherishformed a deep and solemn promise. Dulcie’s eyes were indeed misty. Looking down through the branches, the cats watched Max Harper place the gold band on Charlie’s finger. As Charlie slipped Max’s ring on, another tear slid down Dulcie’s nose, a tear that no ordinary cat could shed. Joe looked at her intently. “What’s to cry about? This is thestartof their new life.”

“A tomcat wouldn’t understand. All females cry at weddings, it’s in the genes.”

But in truth all three cats were touched by this human ritual. The kit snuffled into her whiskers; and as the villagers gathered around the bride and groom kissing and hugging them, the cats moved higher up the great tree, easing out along a wide branch through the softly rustling foliage, where they had a wider view of the village street. As Max and Charlie mingled with their friends, and someone’s CD player brought alive the forties swing that Charlie and Max loved, Ryan and her Uncle Dallas left the party hurrying in the direction of the police station.

“To have a look at the boy,” Joe said. “To see if Ryandoesknow him.”

“That seems so strange,” Dulcie replied, “to think that she saw him all that far away, in San Andreas.”

Earlier, at the bombed church, coming down from the roof and allowing Clyde to carry them to the car, they had crowded gratefully onto Ryan’s lap, even Joe Grey with no show of macho independence.

“Do you mind holding them? I think they’re scared.”

“We’re all scared. They can comfort me.” Ryan had hugged the cats, crushing them gently together; they had ridden the few blocks to the wedding like three furry prizes she might have won at some carnival booth, three rag animals held tight by a fearful little girl. “Does anyone know the boy?” Ryan said. “Know who he is?”

Clyde turned to look at her. “Detective Davis thought she recognized him. I got the impression Garza might know him, but he wasn’t saying much.”

“I might know him. Or he’s a dead ringer for one of the boys hanging around the trailer, in San Andreas.”

“That would be pretty strange. I got the feeling he’s local, that he might be involved with that last bust Harper made, that meth lab up the valley. I think the guy they sent up had a kid.”

“I think it’s the same boy, Clyde.”

He looked over at her. “Was there an old man with him, up there?”

She shook her head. “I saw only the boy. Tell me again how you knew about the bomb, what made you run shouting for everyone to get out. Through aphone call?”

“I’d gone into the church with my phone in my suit pocket, and someone said it made a lump. I went back to the car to leave it. When it rang I wasn’t going to answer, I don’t know what made me pick up. It was a woman, whispering. Said there was a bomb, that a boy on the roof had the trigger, a garage-door opener.” Clyde shrugged. “You know the rest. I didn’t darenotbelieve her.”