"They never seemed lonely-only soothing. From where we're sitting you can't see the village, not a single rooftop, and in the wind, you can't hear the occasional car. I would sit up here imagining there was not another soul for hundreds of miles, that this little piece of the world was all my own."

"Yes," Pedric said, "I understand that."

She looked at him quietly. "I have continued to come here for that kind of aloneness, so very different from being lonely with someone."

She smiled. "The hills are so green, the sea so wild. It is easy to imagine that I am in the old world, somewhere on the sea cliffs of Ireland."

Pedric turned to look above them. From where Lucinda had chosen to sit that day, they could see the trailers lined up, each in its own little patio. The wind had overturned deck chairs and whipped the laundry on a clothesline. A trailer door, left on the latch, banged and slammed. Above the trailers and RVs, the eucalyptus trees that shaded the park crackled in the wind as loud as the snapping of bonfires.

Above the trailer park, Hellhag Hill rose another hundred feet, its bulk seeming to press the narrow shelf with its frail trailers, far too close to the edge.

"I seldom look up there," Lucinda said. "Usually I sit where I can't see any sign of civilization. From the first time I came here, the hill has put me in mind of the wild, empty hills in the old, old tales that Shamas told me.

She looked shyly at Pedric. "That was what first drew me to him. The stories. I loved his stories, and the caring and passion with which he told them."

She sighed. "This hill gave me back that sense of magic. Gave me back that quality in Shamas that I found so appealing-and that he took away from me."

Pedric gave her an odd look. "This is not the old country, Lucinda. Not the old world, where such tales are a dear part of one's fife. In this modern world, magic-if such ever existed-most surely does not happen."

She looked at him quietly. "That is not how you make me feel, when you tell your stories."

He shook his head, looking around him. "The hill is delightfully wild, but it is only a hill, an ordinary California hillside-probably with poison oak growing beneath us, right where we're sitting."

Lucinda laughed. She looked up at the trailers and RVs. "Which of those is yours, Pedric?"

"The green trailer, there at the end."

"Right at the edge," she said softly. "So that, every morning when you wake, and every night before you sleep, you see not the other trailers, but the open hill dropping away below you." She smiled. "Why did you park just there, where the view must be vast and empty? Don't tell me you're not touched by a sense of otherness about this place?"

He simply smiled.

After a moment, she said, "And why have all these frightened animals come to the hill so suddenly? The strange, wild cats that I feed, and those two thin, uncared-for puppies that Clyde Damen has taken in? Why did they appear all at once? No one abandons that many animals all at one time." She watched him intently.

"I can tell you where the pups came from," the old man said. "All very ordinary. But yon cats," he said, falling into the old speech, "th' cats be a band of strays that wandered here, that's all." He looked hard at her. "You are not imagining th' cats are anything other than common, stray beasties? Why, th' world be full of such, Lucinda."

She laughed at him, and touched his hand.

"Not imagining th' hill be full of burrows?" Pedric persisted. "Not imagining th' bright eyes looking out?" He smiled and raised a shaggy eyebrow.

Pedric's gentle teasing made such a notion seem silly even to Dulcie; though she was certain the hill was not ordinary.

And when Dulcie looked up, the little kit was hunched not a yard away from her, crouched deep in the bushes, peering out, her yellow eyes round and amazed, her fluffy tail twitching with curiosity.

"Maybe I am picturing that old tale of the cats beneath the hillside," Lucinda said to Pedric. "Who is to say what is possible?" She fixed an intense look on the old man. "There is something strange about Hellhag Hill. You will not admit it, but I think you see it. And I am not the only one who has noticed."

"So," Pedric asked softly. "And what about th' yon cat watching us? Th' yon beastie half-hidden in the grass? Is there something strange about that little cat?" Looking into the tangles, he watched Dulcie with interest. He did not see the kit. "Wo'd that little beastie, who is spying on us, rise up and speak to thee as do th' cats in the old tales? Wo'd this cat maybe bid thee good morning?"

He can't see the kit, Dulcie thought. He means me. Why is he staring at me?

Lucinda looked to where Dulcie sat beneath the bushes, and came to kneel there, pulling away the heavy growth.

"What a sweet little cat, curled up in a bed of leaves." She looked up at Pedric. "I believe this is Wilma's cat- my good friend, Wilma. Same dark stripes and peach-colored ears and nose. Yes, the same green eyes. Oh, Wilma would not want her roaming way out here. What brought her out to this wild place? Do you suppose she has followed us?" She reached to pick Dulcie up.

When Dulcie moved away, Lucinda drew back. "This little cat," she said diffidently, "comes to sit on the back fence behind my house. I think she hunts for birds among the maple branches. Sometimes she seems to be looking right into my parlor." She laughed. "Maybe she watches reflections in the glass, the movement of clouds and birds.

"Won't you come out, kitty?" Lucinda asked softly. "It is Wilma's kitty. We won't hurt you. Whatever are you doing up here? Come on out, puss. Puss? Puss?"

Dulcie came out reluctantly. She hated to be called puss. She leaped atop the boulder before Lucinda could pick her up. Stretching, she curled down on the smooth granite, out of Lucinda's reach, and slitted her eyes as if to nap again.

"Come away, Lucinda. The little cat doesn't want to be taken home. Well, there's nothing here to hurt her. You can tell Wilma where you saw her." And he began to ask Lucinda questions about Shamas and their years together.

Lucinda's answers made Dulcie sad. Pedric asked about the sale of the house, but made no comment as to whether he thought Lucinda should sell the old family home. As the two sat talking, watching the sea brighten, the tortoiseshell kit drew closer again to Dulcie, listening to every word. What a nosy little creature she was. What did she make of this conversation? What a bold, inquisitive, interesting scrap of cat fur.

And as both cats eavesdropped on the two humans, up the hill where the trailers and RVs cast their shadows long beneath the rising sun, another watcher sat, looking down, observing Pedric and Lucinda, frowning and tapping his closed fist against his lean, tensed thigh.