To Joe, the furnishings seemed nice enough but it was just a handsome room, large and comfortable. Beside him, Kit seemed nervous, peering out the windows, scanning the trees and bushes that flanked the dim patio. Tansy prowled among the furniture, sniffing longingly the scents she remembered. They prowled all the rooms looking for anything that seemed disturbed, for any space conspicuously empty, or for small indentations in a rug where some piece of furniture had been removed, looking for anything that Charlie might have missed. A photograph of Ed and Frances Becker stood on the dining room buffet, Ed tall and darkly handsome and smiling, Frances nearly as tall, a slim, gentle-looking woman with brown hair wound in a French twist. Frances was an accountant, and Ed worked for the California Department of Children’s Services.
“He doesn’t seem the type to be a children’s caseworker,” Dulcie said disapprovingly. “Not with those movie-star looks and that too charming smile-and his eye for other women.”
“Are all humans like that?” Tansy said.
“Like what?” said Joe, turning to look at her.
“Catting around,” said Tansy smartly. “Ed Becker and Theresa Chapman,” she said knowingly. “And Ed Becker and Rita Waterman, too, with her fancy jewelry. Do all humans do that?”
“Where did you get that expression?” said Joe sharply.
“I guess from humans,” Tansy said contritely.
Joe twitched a whisker and turned away to the hall. They had found nothing in the living room that seemed missing or out of place. He stood considering the door to the linen closet. Leaping up, he swung on the knob until he had turned it, and turned the key, and with a violent kick of his hind paws he swung the door open, revealing a deep space with shelves on three sides, all crowded with brown-paper packages and sealed boxes.
“What is all that?” Dulcie said.
“ Frances calls them accessories,” Tansy told her. “Rugs and vases and little tables. She loves to change the house all around, move all the furniture, lay out new rugs while she sends the others to the cleaners. Three times when I was here, she rearranged the whole place, even every vase, every book. He wouldn’t help her, he left the house until she was done.”
“But how did she…,” Dulcie began, then went silent, listening to a faraway sound from the hills, to the distant yodel of coyotes.
“You won’t go home tonight,” Kit told Tansy.
The scruffy little cat shrugged. “They’re far away, and the moon’s bright.”
Joe and Dulcie and Kit looked at the little mite, all thinking the same. If ever there was coyote bait, she was it. How could this small waif expect to escape a pack of hungry predators?
“They have pups,” Tansy said. “Can’t you hear them? The parents won’t wander when the pups are learning to hunt, they stand guard, I’ve watched them. Besides,” she said, “I won’t be alone, Sage will be waiting for me.” And she smiled that cocky smirk that seemed so out of place in the shy little cat.
“He’ll be mad, he was mad when I left him there by that house where they’re digging, where all the dirt is piled. But even so, he’ll wait for me,” she said with assurance.
Kit looked at her jealously. Did Tansy know Sage better than she did, even though she and Sage had grown up together? Pulling the closet door closed behind them, she followed Joe as he impatiently headed up the stairs to prowl the four upstairs bedrooms.
The cats found nothing on that floor that seemed out of order. They were thinking this was all a wild-goose chase when Joe caught that elusive scent again, that puzzling whiff that smelled like catmint.
He’d thought he smelled it in the Chapman house, but it was so faint he couldn’t be sure. And again in the Waterman house he wasn’t sure, with the lingering smell of the old dog and the scent of Rita’s perfume. They galloped back down the stairs and, having found nothing amiss, they left the Beckers’ house, slipping out into the night through the wrought-iron grid beside the front door. Sliding the glass closed, they headed for the Longley house.
“We can never get in there,” Tansy said. “I tried enough times, I even tried the attic.”
“But the Longleys have cats,” Dulcie said.
“Three,” said Tansy. “They’re kept inside when she’s gone. When she’s home, she opens a window, or sometimes the back slider for them. Then I could get in. But I was never sure when I could get out again.”
Eleen Longley taught at the local college. She was an attractive, lively woman, slim and with long, mousy, fine-textured hair that seemed to catch in every breeze. Earl was an architect; Ryan said his work was all right if he’d stick to the engineering aspects, if he didn’t try to design anything new and interesting. When Clyde suggested that her remark was sarcastic, she said, no, that was fact, that many architects weren’t talented at both creative design and engineering, and that was too bad.
“There has to be some way in,” Kit said stubbornly.
Tansy said, “If we can get in, we’ll know right away if something’s missing, I know where the treasures are. They have drawings by famous architects and books locked up in a big glass case and a whole cabinet of little glass domes with pictures inside. Pictures of humans doing things,” she said, turning her face away with embarrassment. “She calls it porn…porn…”
“Pornography?” Dulcie said. “A schoolteacher collects pornographic paperweights? Oh, my.”
“They talk about how much they’re worth. They talk a lot about money and what things are worth-when they’re not fighting. They fight a lot, and then the cats hide.”
“Come on,” Kit said, “I’ve seen a window at the back, once I watched a mockingbird pecking at the glass.” She took off around the side of the house, plunged into a bougainvillea vine, and clawed her way up between its swinging tendrils and sharp spikes. High up, she crawled out again onto a second-floor balcony that was not more than a foot wide. In the thin, shifting moonlight as clouds blew over, she was hardly visible among the balcony’s changing shadows. The others swarmed up behind her, under the decorative rail and onto the narrow ledge. Above them was a small bathroom window, maybe four feet wide but only a foot high, that made the cats smile. Joe and Dulcie and Kit had shimmied in through more than one small, high window, always feeling smug at discovering an entrance inaccessible to humans, which was innocently left unlocked.
21
THE GRAVE WITHIN the pit was finally deep enough. The earth he’d removed stood piled at one end. He climbed out, changed shoes at the edge of the pit, and, just to be safe, he put the boots and shovel against the wall where he’d found them. He’d be back soon, but what if someone came while he was gone to get the car? Moving out through the side door, he left it unlocked. Imagining that cat prowling around, he made sure it was tightly shut.
It was harder climbing back up the hill, he was worn out from digging and the climb took more out of him. The hill was darker, now, too, the moon hidden behind blowing clouds. Were those rain clouds? He didn’t like the thought of maybe a heavy rain, of water flooding down the hill into the hole he’d dug. Of water filling her grave before it rose high enough to run out through the drainpipes at either end of the pit. Earlier, he hadn’t thought of that.
Scrambling up through the woods, he tripped in the tall, tangled grass. He wondered if, trampling the grass, he was leaving a trail. But why would anyone look for a trail? Why would anyone be interested? In the morning when they entered the garage, they’d see nothing to alarm them. The pit would be just as they’d left it.
Reaching the car, he thought he could already smell the beginning of putrefaction, and that made him sick. But maybe that was his imagination, maybe that was his fear and guilt returning to taunt him.