Joe rose. He needed something.

He needed some kind of nurturing that home no longer offered.

Frightened at his own malaise, he gave Rube a last lick and bolted out through his cat door. Trotting up the street, then running flat out, he flew across the village, across Ocean, past the closed shops, past the little restaurants that smelled of pancakes and bacon and coffee, fled past the closed galleries and the locked post office.

From a block away he saw that Wilma's kitchen light was on, reflected against the oak tree in her front yard. He could smell fresh-baked gingerbread, too, and he raced toward that welcoming house like some little kid running home from schoolyard bullies.

Galloping across Wilma's front yard and up the steps, he shot straight for the bright glow of Dulcie's plastic cat door and through it, into Wilma's friendly kitchen. The aroma of gingerbread curled his claws and whiskers.

Dulcie stood on the breakfast table looking down at him, startled by his charging entry. She watched him with amazement, her green eyes wide and amused, her muzzle damp from milk and flecked with gingerbread crumbs. "You look terrible-your ears are drooping, even your whiskers are limp. What's wrong? What's happened?"

"It's Barney. Clyde took him to the vet."

"But-not a car accident? He's never in the street."

"He's sick, something in his middle, hurting bad."

"But Dr. Firreti will…"

"He's old, Dulcie. I don't know how much Dr. Firetti can do." He leaped to the table and pressed against her for comfort. She licked his ear and laid a soft paw on his paw. Around them, Wilma's blue-and-white kitchen shone with warmth and cleanliness.

Above the tile counter, the rising morning light through the clean windows lent a pearly glow across the blue-and-white wallpaper and the blue cookie jar and cracker jars. Behind the clean glass of the diamond-paned cupboard doors, Wilma's blue pottery sparkled. Wilma's homey touches always eased him, eased him this morning right down to his rough cat soul. He sighed and licked Dulcie's ear.

She nosed the gingerbread toward him and bent her head again, nibbling gingerbread and lapping milk from her Chinese hand-painted bowl. Hungrily, he pushed in beside her. Whoever said cats don't like freshly baked treats didn't know much about cats. Not until every crumb had vanished, and every drop of milk, did they speak again. His whiskers and his teeth were sodden with gingerbread crumbs and milk, and he felt infinitely better.

He knew there was nothing he could do for Barney but wait and hope. He wasn't used to praying, but he did wonder if a cat prayer would be accepted by whatever powers-if indeed there were any powers existing beyond the pale.

He looked at Dulcie, sitting so regally in the center of the table delicately washing her face. "I thought you took your meals on the rug. When did Wilma start sharing the table?"

She glanced at her bowl, and grinned. "When I told her you ate on the table. She's not about to let Clyde spoil you more than she spoils me."

"The house looks nice," he said, leaping down. He didn't usually notice domestic details, unless Dulcie called them to his attention, but Wilma had recently redecorated. Her niece Charlie had helped her paint the walls white and replace the lacy curtains with white shutters. Wilma had sold the thick rag rugs, too, and bought deep-toned Khirmans and Sarouks that were luxurious to roll on. A dozen of Charlie's animal drawings, framed in gold leaf, graced the front rooms, several of Dulcie and even one of himself, of which he was more proud than he let on. The couch had been re-covered in a deep blue velvet as silken as Dulcie's rich fur, and Dulcie's blue afghan lay across the arm just where she liked it; the three upholstered chairs had been re-covered in a red-and-green tweed. And over the fireplace hung a large oil landscape of the Molena Point hills and rooftops, all vibrant reds and greens, done by Janet Jeannot some years before she was murdered.

He trotted into the living room, following Dulcie, and leaped to Wilma's desk, where the early light flooded in through the white shutters.

Beneath their paws lay a map of Molena Point, unfolded and spread out flat.

"Wilma left this for us?"

Dulcie smiled. Beside the map lay a stack of newspaper clippings about the cat burglar, machine copies of papers Dulcie had read in the library.

Joe scratched his ear. "If Clyde knew Wilma was leaving out maps and news clippings for us-aiding and abetting-he'd have a royal fit." Clyde did not take easily to Joe's playing detective. For a hard-nosed macho type, Joe's housemate worried too much.

"A few measly clippings and a map," she said. "That's hardly aiding and abetting. And Wilma's never helped us before-not that I wanted her to. She didn't have a clue that we were into the Beckwhite murder."

"Maybe she didn't, but she knew about Janet. She told you afterward she was worried."

"But she stayed out of it-she's sensible, for a human." Dulcie stretched, and curled up on the blotter. "You have to admit, Wilma tolerates our interests better than Clyde does."

"She couldn't spend her whole career working criminal cases without getting some sense of perspective."

Some of the clippings were about the local burglaries, but most of them chronicled the cat woman's thieving progress as she moved up the coast from San Diego, working ever farther north as the summer progressed.

"As if the old gal prefers cooler weather," Joe said. "Southern California in the winter, San Francisco for the summer."

Studying reports of the local burglaries, they inscribed a claw mark on the map at each location but found no pattern. The woman seemed to travel back and forth at random, across the wealthier neighborhoods, perhaps picking out whatever house she passed where people were working outside.

"I like this one," he said, pawing at the newspaper clippings. "Shell Beach. She goes right on in while the guy's sleeping.

"Guess she thought, if he'd been to a bachelor party, he'd be so drunk nothing would wake him."

The cat burglar, slipping upstairs into the prospective groom's bedroom on the morning of the appointed wedding, had lifted the matched gold wedding rings, laid out for the ceremony, from the dresser.

She took the rings out of the box, left the closed box on the dresser with two coins stuck into the slots, presumably to give the box some weight. The groom, probably hung over and in a hurry, or dazed with the thought of his coming nuptials, didn't have a clue until he opened the box at the church, to give the ring to the best man, and found instead, two nickels.

Dulcie smiled. "The woman's brazen."

"And she's afraid of cats. When she sees me watching, I scare the hell out of her." He rubbed his whiskers against the shutters, staring out through the glass.

The morning was turning golden, the windows across the street reflecting tiny suns mirrored all in a row. He narrowed his eyes against the glare. "We need a lookout; I've about worn out my pads following false leads, when the cat burglar never did show. The roof of Clyde's shop isn't high enough. I can't see half the hills."

His plan, so far, had been to watch from the roof of the automotive shop as the cat burglar drove around choosing her mark, then nip on over to where she'd parked. Trouble was, she ditched her car blocks away, and sometimes she didn't return to it. And that one time, when he thought she was inside a laundry room, she'd slipped away, or maybe had just outstubborned him. He'd waited what seemed hours, until he was faint from hunger, had left at last in a huff, not sure if she'd given him the slip or was still in there, and so hungry he didn't care. Then the next day, sitting on the breakfast table, he'd read the Gazette article with a list of what she'd stolen, including a miniature cat painting worth a cool two hundred thousand. He'd really muffed that one-he'd felt stupid as dog doo.