She looked narrowly at the cats. “They weren’t sampling your supper?”
Max laughed. “Not as far as I can see. Sometimes…” He frowned at Charlie. “Sometimes these three make me uneasy, for no reason.” She just looked at him. “Their stares,” he said, “are more piercing than any judge I ever faced.”
“Piercing?”
“Haven’t you ever noticed? Don’t they look, sometimes, more aware than a cat should be?”
Charlie laughed. “I never noticed that. They’re sweet and smart, but I don’t see anything unusual. What was the phone call?”
“Jim Cahill. The CHP found Becker, dead. He went over the cliff and into the ocean north of Santa Cruz. Driving a brown RV, with the stolen goods in it, maybe the whole lot. Everything’s soaked through.”
“Oh, Theresa’s paintings. Oh, I’m sorry.” She couldn’t feel sorry for Ed Becker. He was a thief and a killer. Was she supposed to grieve for him?
“They had to get heavy equipment up there, to pull it out of the water. I don’t know what happened to the guy before he went over, Cahill said his face was covered with deep scratches, something that happened before the wreck because he was already bandaged.”
Charlie glanced at the cats before she could catch herself. Joe looked away, Dulcie glanced down, and Kit blinked. “They’re looking at your plate,” she said. “Poor things. I’ll get them some supper.” She turned away to the table, certain that the cats had been at the man, or some cats had. She could hardly wait to hear the rest of that story.
Max watched her filling a plate of delicacies for the cats with the attention most people gave to their children. He picked up his own plate and headed into the living room, making for the one empty chair, Joe Grey’s clawed and fur-covered easy chair that was the last anyone wanted to occupy. He was happily enjoying his buffet supper, hoping to keep the cat hairs out, when Charlie appeared, followed by the cats. She set their plate on the mantel, watched them leap up and tuck into their supper. She did have a way with cats, an empathy he admired-but that sometimes made him as uncomfortable as did the cats themselves.
Across the room, the gray Weimaraner watched Charlie and the cats every bit as keenly as did Max-though only with greed. To Rock there was nothing startling about the three cats, he’d learned early on that these were not ordinary cats. Being only a dog and not driven by the complications of human logic, he had no reason not to believe what, to him, was perfectly obvious. These cats were different. He’d learned to live comfortably with their bossing him and expecting him to mind them.
Bringing her own supper, Charlie sat down on the arm of Max’s chair. He was relaying to the little group what Jim Cahill had told him. The Chapmans didn’t want to believe that Ed Becker had been a liar and a thief, that he had turned on people who’d been his close friends, that he could ever have been vicious enough to kill Frances.
Theresa said, “To break in like that, break into our houses where he’d made himself at home and was always welcome. They were friends with everyone on the street…Or we thought they were. They were always there for us, they babysat for people’s children…” She looked sadly at Max. “He killed her? Because she found out he planned to steal from us?” A tear slid down her cheek. Quietly Carl put his arm around her.
Max said, “A lot of questions still unanswered. We have, apparently, no one to prosecute, but that doesn’t mean we won’t still dig for answers. For one thing, Becker’s MO could fit a whole string of similar unsolved burglaries, we’ll be working on that.”
On the mantel, the cats looked so satisfied at the resolution of the case and at the death of Ed Becker that Clyde glared at them, and Ryan raised a warning eyebrow. Turning away, they wiped the smug little cat smiles off their faces and leaped down.
But as Joe went to sit behind Clyde ’s chair, out of sight, a look of triumph returned to his gray-and-white face. Dulcie, as she leaped to the arm of Wilma’s chair, was purring. Only Kit, as she snuggled on Lucinda’s lap, looked not quite at ease with herself, looked as if she was still filled with questions.
LATER THAT NIGHT, when Dulcie and Wilma were home again by themselves, Wilma told her, “You cats are getting careless, you looked way too interested tonight. When you learned that Becker was dead, all three of you looked much too alert, far too pleased.”
Dulcie said nothing. She watched Wilma turn back the bedcovers and kneel to light a fire in the woodstove. As Wilma tucked herself up under the quilt with her book, Dulcie jumped up on the bed beside her, but still she said nothing.
“Do you want to spoil everything?” Wilma asked, stroking her. “You want to blow this exciting life you’re living? You want to spend the rest of your lives trying to be no more than clueless housecats, not daring to do anything interesting?”
“We don’t want that,” Dulcie said contritely.
Wilma opened her book, and held up the comforter. Quietly Dulcie slipped in under it, and put her head on the pillow beside Wilma’s where she could clearly see the pages of the new mystery they were reading. Why was it that these fictional characters could get away with outrageous behavior? But an innocent little cat, just because she could speak, had to watch herself every waking minute?
IT WAS LATER that night that Kit, at home with Lucinda and Pedric, left her warm nest on the bed between her two companions and trotted off, alone, to her tree house. As the older couple slept, Kit pushed out through the dining room window and onto the oak limb, and padded along the branch among the shadows to curl down in her cozy lair among her cushions, looking out at the starstuck sky.
The tree house had belonged to the children of the previous owners. It was, in fact, one of their main incentives in choosing this particular house. Now it was Kit’s own, a secluded aerie in which to dream and to become a part of the night. She lay listening to the little sounds from the garden, to the rustle of a mouse far below scurrying among the dry leaves, to the shrill voice of a brown bat high above, banking and diving to catch his supper. She thought about Tansy and Sage, up in the hills among the clowder. She thought that last night when they had all attacked that man together, that something had changed in Sage. Afterward, the look in his eyes was different. As if he had learned, suddenly, what it meant to take decisive action and stand up for himself. She thought Tansy had looked at Sage differently, too. Maybe, Kit thought, all would be well with them now. The two seemed stronger now, as if their indignant response to that man’s brutality had strengthened them and brought them closer together.
Smiling, Kit rolled over on her back, looking up from her tree house at the sky. The stars gleamed at her, the cool air rippled her fur, and for that one perfect moment, all was right with the world.
UP IN THE hills among the Pamillon ruins, Tansy knew that life was different. In the shadow of a broken wall, the pale cream female sat close to Sage, watching him devour the rabbit he’d caught. He’d caught two, and he’d given her the first one. Now as he greedily ate his own supper, Tansy smiled and purred. The decisive way he’d hunted, and the way he tore into the rabbit, told her that he was strong again and that the pain was gone-certainly he’d been stronger last night when they attacked the killer, when Sage clung to that man, kicking and ripping his face. Something had awakened in Sage last night. The cold cruelty of that human had stirred alive something new in him, something fine and bold, had awakened a keen and indignant ferocity within the tomcat’s soul. She looked around them at the fallen buildings and crumbled walls of the old estate, at the dense cover of overgrown bushes, at the tumbled trees hiding tunnels deep beneath their fallen trunks. This was a fine world for cats, here were a hundred places to hunt, a hundred more where a cat could hide from danger. Here, the cruelest predator of all seldom ventured-there were no twisted humans here to bedevil them. This world, abandoned by humans was, Tansy thought, a finer world than she, as a kitten, had ever imagined. Certainly it was a fine world in which to raise a family.