"I don't understand why," Cora Lee said softly, "if Elliott Traynor is working so hard to finish his current novel, and he's being treated for cancer, he would come all the way out to California. Why he didn't stay in New York, not spend the time and energy to make such a move. Even if this play is close to his heart, you'd think… Oh, I don't know. It just seems strange." Cora Lee knew well the value of unbroken solitude in which to create.

Gabrielle offered no opinion. She seemed, Dulcie thought, distressed when the ladies talked about the Traynors.

Well, Gabrielle would be seeing them at the theater, as soon as they began to cast the play. She would be doing the costumes. Dulcie supposed whatever friction was between them would sort itself out then.

She knew from Wilma that Gabrielle had already bought the fabric or found costumes from other plays that she would remake.

Of course, Catalina's Spanish finery was traditional, the bride's white embroidered gowns, her white and black mantillas, her fans and lace flounces and Roman sashes, as well as the caballeros' bright ruffled silks and sombreros and serapes.

In the village library, while Gabrielle had done her research, making sketches and photocopies, Dulcie had wandered across the library tables near her, and for a while had sat on the table beside Gabrielle's books, looking at the illustrations. The library patrons were used to Dulcie; she prowled the stacks as she pleased. No one paid much attention to her except to pet her and sometimes to bring her little treats.

Often she stayed into the small hours, long after the library closed. Her access to the empty rooms, through her cat door in Wilma's office, was one of the best perks of being Molena Point's official library cat. Even Dulcie's favorite library patrons would never imagine the little cat's midnight literary excursions. They were happy just to enjoy her purring attention during library hours; and the children liked her to curl up with them on the window seat during story hour, while the librarian read to them.

But late at night, in the silent rooms, reading by the faint village light that filtered in through the library windows, Dulcie enjoyed an amazing kind of freedom. She could touch, then, any world she chose, could enter any year or century that appealed to her, could be transported away to far and wonderful places before she returned to the blood-hungry aspect of her nature and went to hunt rats with Joe, on the Molena Point hills.

And though Dulcie had been fascinated with the Spanish costumes for Thorns of Gold, imagining the soft silks and velvets, the kit was wild with enthusiasm. The little tattercoat had fallen in love with the play, with the music, with the sets. She would follow Cora Lee into the theater and watch for hours as Cora Lee painted those vivid scenes.

The kit did have a fine imagination, Dulcie thought. Look at the kit's stubborn insistence that she could slip underground through a cave or fissure into a subterranean world that waited to welcome their kind of cat; into a netherworld of green wizard light and granite sky, a country the kit described in such detail that sometimes she frightened Dulcie-but sometimes she had Dulcie dreaming, too, imagining that place as real, that land where speaking cats might have had their beginnings.

"I think we should all be careful for a while," Wilma was saying. "To avoid another break-in, or worse. Susan will be staying with me, but… We all live alone. And all of you are seen at the sales. Until we know what this is about, I think we should watch ourselves. Check our locks and windows, look around outside before we go in the house, see if any window is broken or jimmied, that sort of thing."

Wilma didn't mention that she had some defense, where the others did not. Though if they'd thought about it, surely the ladies would guess that a retired U.S. parole officer might keep a firearm at home, might like the security of being armed. Not all Wilma's parolees were far away; several had turned up in Molena Point, some with no love for the woman who had sent them back to prison.

Gabrielle said, "Wilma, you and the captain are good friends. Can't you find out the identity of the man-so we'll know what to watch for?"

"It's too early for the department to know that," Wilma said. "Even if they have a lead, it's too early to share that with a civilian, even with me."

There was a little silence as their waitress brought their breakfasts. Then after some moments, over pancakes and omelettes, the five ladies turned to quietly discussing the kind of comfortable Molena Point house they would like to find, with many bedrooms and baths, a home big enough to accommodate a housekeeper and caregiver when the ladies grew frail-which none of them was, yet-and maybe an extra bedroom or two that could be rented out to pay upkeep and taxes. The women had it all worked out. A private, do-it-yourself retirement home where they would share all expenses and all profits.

Only Wilma remained somewhat removed from their plans. Dulcie's housemate wasn't nearly ready yet for a change in lifestyle. She liked doing her own housework and gardening. She worked out at the gym twice a week and walked two miles a day, intending to hang on as long as she could to her independence. But Wilma said the ladies were to be admired, that too many women couldn't bear to leave their own homes despite better alternatives, that these ladies were making their own options, and she respected that adventuresome turn of mind.

Though Mavity had no choice, Dulcie knew. She'd have to move when the city condemned her house. As for Cora Lee and Gabrielle, with both their husbands gone, they seemed eager to throw in together. And Susan, too, was a widow, living in the two-apartment home she had bought from her daughter just recently when the daughter's job took her to Portland.

The thought of Wilma moving was unsettling to Dulcie. Moving was easier for a human than for a cat. When people changed to a new home, they took all their familiar possessions with them, all the things that gave their daily lives resonance. A cat couldn't take her treasures. A cat's hoard was places, a nook in the garden wall, the shade beneath a favorite bush, a tree branch that suited her exactly, the best mouse runs. All these formed a cat's world, affording her security and comfort, giving her own life structure. A cat's treasures could not be carried with her.

That was why, when humans moved with their cat, the cat wanted to return. The humans took their belongings. The cat was forced to leave hers. That was why, when sensible folk moved to a new home, they kept their cat inside for a month, gave her time to establish new indoor haunts, discover new pleasures, wrap that new world around herself. They didn't let the cat bolt out the door and head straight for the old homestead-a matter of a mile away, or maybe hundreds of miles. Distance didn't matter to a cat, all she wanted was to be among her belongings.

Well, whatever Wilma did in the future, Dulcie thought, the two of them were together. Just as were Joe Grey and Clyde.

Besides, she and Joe and the kit had ties to the whole village; their treasured haunts were scattered all over the square mile of Molena Point-and no one ever imagined that Wilma or Clyde would move away from the village.

The kit's own situation was not quite so secure. Her real home was with elderly newlyweds Lucinda and Pedric Greenlaw, but she had moved in with Dulcie and Wilma on an almost permanent basis. Shortly after the Greenlaws were married they had succumbed to travel lust, had begun driving up and down the coast and through Arizona and Nevada and Oregon in their comfortable RV. The kit had a special bed in the RV, where she could look out the windows; she should, with her wild enthusiasms, have relished such traveling. But all that driving caused her to throw up, made the little tattercoat as sick as a poisoned hound dog.