She said, "He did that, once, to me. It was like sticking my head in a hot shower." She rose. "Barney knows we miss him. Maybe he knows we're talking about him." She nudged him until, at last, they left the porch, Joe walking heavily as if he were very tired.

Ignoring the little side streets and alleys where they sometimes liked to prowl, she led him straight for the open hills. They passed the little tourist hotel, where an elegant Himalayan presided over the clientele, a cat whose picture was featured on the hanging sign and in the inn's magazine ads; they could smell her scent on the bushes. The inn's clients liked to have the Himalayan in their rooms at night to warm their feet and sleep before the fire, and perhaps to share their continental breakfast. She, and all Molena Point's cats, were as revered in the little village as were the felines of Italy, taking the sun atop a bronze lion or stalking pigeons across Venice's ancient paving.

"She's a snob," Joe said.

"Not at all. She just fell into a good thing. If she knows how to milk it, more power to her." She nudged him into a trot, and soon they had crossed above Highway One and into a forest of tall dry grass that rustled overhead, casting weavings of shadow across their faces and paws.

It was much later, after several swift chases, after feasting on half a dozen mice and a ground squirrel, that Dulcie, too, began to feel uncertain and morose. Pausing in her elaborate bath, she flicked her pink tongue back into her mouth, licked her whiskers once, and stared at him.

He stopped washing, one white paw lifted. "What? What's with you?"

"I was thinking. About Mae Rose."

"Don't start, Dulcie. Not tonight."

"Mae Rose thinks maybe Jane Hubble ran away. That the home didn't look for her, that they didn't want to tell the police that someone ran away."

"Mae Rose is bonkers. How could an old woman run away from that place, an old woman who'd had a stroke? How far would she get before she collapsed somewhere, or someone brought her back?"

"Mae Rose says Jane got better after her first attack, that she was getting really restless. Then she had the second attack, and they moved her over to Nursing."

He just looked at her.

"She might have run away. I read once about an old woman who-"

"Probably she couldn't even get out of bed, let alone out of the Nursing wing." He gave her an impatient glare. "If the doors to Nursing are all locked, as Dillon says, and with nurses all over thick as a police guard, you think Jane Hubble got out of bed by herself, got dressed by herself, picked up her suitcase, and walked out."

She lowered her ears and turned away.

Joe sighed. "She's there. In Nursing. Safe and sound. Too sick to have visitors. Mae Rose has latched onto one fact, that they won't let anyone visit Jane, and she's turned it into a disaster."

The moon behind them had dropped below the clouds, turning the tomcat into a silhouette as dark and rigid as an Egyptian statue. "Mae Rose is full of fairy tales. Old people get childish, they imagine things."

"But she isn't childish, she's still very sharp. She's told me all about her life, and she isn't imagining that. She showed me her albums, she remembers every play she sewed for, every costume, she showed me the pictures, told me the characters' names and even the actors' names, she remembered them all. She-"

"She showed her albums to a cat? She showed pictures to a cat, told her life history to a cat?"

"No one else is interested; they're tired of hearing her."

"Dulcie, normal people don't talk to cats, not like the cat can really understand."

"But we do understand."

"But no one knows that." He hated when she was deliberately obtuse. "Mae Rose doesn't know we can understand her. Anyone-except Clyde and Wilma- who thinks a cat can understand human speech is bonkers. If Mae Rose thinks you can understand her, that old lady is certifiably round the bend."

She crouched down, deflated. "I'm all she has to talk to; everyone else treats her like she's stupid."

"Dulcie, the old woman is in her second childhood. For one thing, what sane, grown woman would carry a doll around with her? Does she talk to the doll, too?"

"She makes doll clothes; that was her living. If she still has dolls of her own, if she still sews for them, I don't see anything strange. She supported herself doing that, the clothes are all silks and handmade lace. She said Jane Hubble loved her dolls."

"Dulcie…"

The moonlight caught her eyes in a deep gleam, her pupils large and black, the thin rim of green as clear as emeralds. "No one understands how she feels; she's so terribly alone, and Jane was her only real friend. We could at least try to help her-try to find Jane."

"Can't you understand that she's making this stuff up? That no one is missing?" He moved away through the grass, irritated beyond toleration, so angry that he didn't want to talk about it.

He didn't want to admit his own unease.

Mae Rose was not the only one who thought Jane Hubble was missing. Whatever the truth turned out to be, he didn't think little Dillon Thurwell was bonkers.

Nor had Dillon and Mae Rose invented this story together. The two hadn't met each other until today, yet both were possessed with this fixation that Jane Hubble had met with foul play.

"I want to help her, Joe. Somehow I'm going to help her."

"Dulcie, we're cats, not social workers. We weren't born to help little old ladies, we were born to hunt and fight and make kittens."

"Fine. You go make some kittens." She lashed her tail, her green eyes blazing. "You do what you were born to do, act like a stupid tomcat. And I'll do what I think is right."

"Dulcie-"

"You were eager enough to solve Samuel Beckwhite's murder."

"But there hasn't been a murder."

Her ears went flat, her whiskers tight to her face, her tail lashing. "And you're anxious enough, now, to spy on that harmless woman burglar just because she loves pretty things."

"Come on, Dulcie. The woman is stealing." Dulcie's logic-female logic-drove him crazy.

"I suppose," she said, "it makes no difference that Jane Hubble isn't the only one who's missing. That there are five other patients who were moved to Nursing and haven't been seen again."

"That old woman ought to write for Spielberg. And you heard what Eula said, that some of those people have been seen-the one with the cataract operation, and the man who spent all afternoon with his attorney."

She gave him a dark look. She didn't have an answer; but that didn't change her mind. Exasperated, he stared down the hill toward the lights of the village.

She said, "If I can help you stalk the cat burglar, which I think is stupid, then you could help me search for Jane Hubble."

"If it's so stupid, why did you read all those news clippings? Why…?"

"Will you help me look? It's safer with two," she said softly.

Joe knew he was defeated. She always knew how to push some vulnerable button.

"For starters, I want to search the Nursing wing." She assessed his mood through narrowed eyes. "If we can get into Nursing," she said softly, "we can see for ourselves if Jane and those other old people are there. And that should settle it." She lay down in the grass watching him, all gentleness now, quiet and submissive.

He was beaten. She wasn't going to let go of this; when she got her claws in like this, and then turned gentle, she'd hang on until her quarry-him-was reduced to shreds. "All right," he said, ignoring the uneasy feeling in his belly. "Okay, we'll give it a try."

She smiled and rolled over, and leaped up. Sooner than he liked they had licked the last dribbles of mouse blood off their whiskers and were headed across the hills for Casa Capri.

Trotting across the grassy slopes between scattered houses, as he looked past Dulcie, down the hill, watching the tiny lights of a car leave the police station, heading away toward the beach, he thought about Dillon Thurwell.