She had driven away sickened.

Wenona said that if such a cat took an interest in you, it would not be easily discouraged. Wenona's tales had made the back of her neck prickle; never since Wenona told her those stories had she been able to abide cats.

The third time she saw the cat she was just approaching her mark, a house she was sure was, for the moment, empty. Suddenly the same beast appeared two doors down, leaping to a porch rail, watching her, same deep scowl, far too intelligent. Glimpsing its yellow eyes, she had panicked.

Oh, she had gotten through her usual routine all right, stripped the house of what she could carry, but by the time she left again she was shaking. She had refused to return to her car, had gone brazenly to a neighbor's house, had rung the bell and asked if she could call a cab, had said her car was stalled.

Now, tonight, she had parked much farther from the neighborhood she had chosen, hoping she could lose the beast.

She didn't usually work at night. The middle of the day was best, on weekends when people were out in back gardening or were out around the pool, leaving the house open. She was in and out quickly, and no one the wiser until hours later.

But tonight, cruising the neighborhood, she'd seen the husband and wife raking the freshly plowed yard in preparation for reseeding the lawn, and she was pretty sure their three elementary-school children would be at the big middle-school ball game-she paid attention to such matters. Parking several blocks away, she'd hoped a change in her schedule might put the cat off.

But again he'd been waiting.

And the irony was, a cat was her alibi. A lost cat. An alibi that had served her very well.

If, in a stranger's house, she was apprehended and confronted, as she had been three times in this village, her story was always the same. She'd been traveling with Kitty, Kitty liked to ride loose in the car, she'd had her dear Kitty since he was just a tiny little ball of fluff, he'd always ridden in the car with her, but this time he'd jumped out and run away. He'd be terrified in a strange neighborhood, she lived a long way down the coast, he wouldn't know where he was, she couldn't bear to think of him lost in a strange town. The story always worked. People were suckers for a pitiful lost cat. But now…

Now her carefully prepared lie had turned on her, had begun to taunt her.

On each job she changed her "lost" cat's description just as she varied other details of her operation, but always she played the tearful, lonely woman looking for her lost Kitty; she'd say she'd heard Kitty crying inside the house, that she thought it had slipped in through an open door and was trapped and frightened, so she had gone in to find him. Her story never failed to generate sympathy, and sometimes she was offered a cup of coffee or hot tea, a slice of cake, and a promise of help in looking for Kitty. It amused her greatly to sit in someone's kitchen drinking their tea and eating their cake, her coat loaded down with her hostess's jewelry and money and silver flatware.

It was Wenona who gave her the idea of using a lost cat as cover. Years ago Wenona, if she was questioned while shoplifting along Hollywood Boulevard, said she was looking for her lost cat, that it had jumped out of her car. People always believed her; people were such fools. Wenona had a good job but she adored shoplifting, loved finding a little something for nothing. Now Hollywood Boulevard seemed very far away. Oh, she did miss Wenona. They had been closest friends, and, though Wenona was twenty years her senior, age had never seemed to matter.

From beyond the laundry room, footsteps suddenly sounded, coming down the hall, and she stiffened, ready to bolt out into the night.

But it was only one of the children crossing to the bathroom. She heard him pee, heard the toilet flush. Couldn't people soundproof their bathrooms? So easy to do-the building-supply houses carried a special sheathing board for that purpose. But maybe they didn't care.

From the kitchen the children's voices, shrill and querulous, had begun to set her on edge. All that togetherness. The smell of spaghetti sauce cooking, its thick, rich aroma, made her stomach growl. The older girl must be setting the table; she was arguing that the knives went on the left. Her small brother whined about a television movie he wanted to watch. The father scolded irritably, his voice bored and quick.

Earlier, while she was still upstairs in the master bedroom, she had glanced out the window, watching the parents working away, diligently putting in the new lawn beneath the bright outdoor lights as if following a farmer's almanac instruction to plant only beneath the light of vapor bulbs. People were stupid to try to grow a lawn on a California hillside; there were hardly any lawns in the village. With the increasing shortage of water and California's frequent droughts, any homeowner with common sense planted some hardy, drought-resistant ground cover like ivy or ice plant.

She'd still been upstairs when she heard the tiller stop and, in a few minutes, heard the couple come in, heard them down in the laundry laughing together. They had left their dirty gardening clothes there-the clothes lay in a pile behind her-had come upstairs naked and giggling. She had slipped into the little sewing room down at the end of the hall, had watched them through the crack in the door as they entered the master bedroom, had listened to them showering together, laughing in an excess of merriment.

The three children had come in soon afterward from the ball game-she'd watched from the sewing-room window as they piled out of a van packed with kids. They had come directly upstairs, the older boy grumbling about losing the game. While they were in their rooms and their parents had not yet descended to the kitchen she had come down the stairs, lifted the miniature painting from the wall in the entry, and slid toward the back of the house and into the laundry. She had her hand on the doorknob when, through the half glass of the door, she saw the gray tomcat waiting in the gathering night, his eyes blazing up at her.

She wanted not to be afraid of the cat. She was quite aware that only crazy people had fears such as she was experiencing. Last week, coming out of the Felther house up on Ridgeview, with her inner coat pockets loaded with a lovely set of Rose of Erin sterling and a fine array of serving pieces, when she saw the gray torn watching from atop a black station wagon and she faced him and swore at him, his eyes had flared with rage.

Sentient rage.

The kind of violent anger you see only in human eyes.

She shivered again and touched her coat pocket where the miniature painting rested, wondering why she had lifted it. The primitive picture of a black cat seemed, now, a very bad omen, a symbol of her luck turned awry-as if she were goading fate.

She thought of leaving the painting on top of the washer but decided against doing so. It might give too much away.

She never took large paintings, of course; she took nothing she couldn't conceal beneath her coat, but she could not resist a miniature. Her fence in San Francisco had some good contacts for stolen art, and the village of Molena Point was famous for its small private collections as well as for its galleries. There was, in fact, a good deal of quiet money in Molena Point, a number of retired movie people, their estates hidden back in the hills, though she avoided these. With a household staff in residence, who knew when you'd bump into an unexpected maid lurking in one of the bedrooms, or come face-to-face with the butler in the master's study placing cigars in the humidor as in some forties' movie.

The middle-class houses were better for her purposes, affluent enough to have some nice antiques and silver and jewelry, but not so rich as to include live-in help. And the occasional alarm systems she encountered were usually turned off when people were about the place. Her usual routine was first to slip upstairs into the master bedroom, take care of the jewelry, clean out a purse or billfold left lying on the dresser. She had taught herself well about gems, and could usually tell the real thing.