Cat Spitting Mad (4 page)

“I smelled the cougar.”

For a moment, the kit would not look at Dulcie. Then, “I couldn't smell the little girl in all the other smells. And then I lost the man-smell. But I smelled the lion and I was afraid. I hid,” she said softly. “I hid and I didn't know what to do.

“Then when I thought he was gone I slipped away and came back here again and looked at the dead bod
ies, and I was going to go home and
tell
you but then I saw you. I saw you, you were here,” she said, crowding against Dulcie.

Dulcie licked the kit's mottled face. The little black-and-brown patchwork creature with the round yellow eyes was the strangest young cat she'd ever known.

The kit lifted a dark paw to Dulcie, the fur between her claws so long and thick that it made Dulcie smile. The kit, with her furry paws and the long fur sticking out of her ears, resembled too closely some wild feline cousin—wild looks that exactly matched her unruly temperament.

Tenderly, Dulcie washed the kit's mottled face. “We will search,” she said. “Just as Harper is searching. But where were you, Kit, for three days? Didn't you think we worried? We looked and looked for you. You could have said, ‘I want a ramble, I need to go off alone.' You could have told us you were going.”

“Would you have let me go?”

Dulcie only looked at her.

Joe studied the kit, his yellow eyes nearly black, his white paws, white apron, and the white patch down his nose bright in the night. “What is that smell on you, Kit?”

“What smell?”

“Musty. Deep musty earth. I don't remember a smell like that in the ruins, even in the cellars—not
that
kind of smell.”

The kit looked innocently at Joe.

Joe fixed her with a hard gaze.

And Dulcie moved close to the kit, standing tall
over her, her own neck bowed like a tom, her tail lashing. “
Where,
Kit?
Where
were you?”

“I went down,” the kit said softly. “The deep, deep place below the cellars.” And she moved away from them, suddenly preoccupied with patting at the dry leaves.

“Pay attention!” Joe snapped. “What deep place!”

“Down under the ruin,” said the kit, flattening her furry ears and turning her face away.

“Deep down?” Dulcie said softly. “Why, Kit?” But she knew why. The tattercoat kit was keenly drawn to strange, frightening fissures. She was as obsessed with the cellars of the old Pamillon estate, and with the yawning cave-ins that dropped away even beneath the cellars, as she had been with the deep and mysterious caverns that she claimed lay below Hellhag Hill.

“I went down and down.” The kit's round yellow eyes filled with a wild delight. “Down and down under the cellars. Down and down where my clowder wanted to go. Down and down under water dripping, down long cracks into the earth, down and down until I heard voices, until…”

“You did not,” Joe snapped. “You didn't hear voices. You didn't go below any cellar. You're making it up—inventing silly tales.”

“Deep down,” said the kit. “Down and down and I heard voices.”

“It was echoes,” Joe hissed. “Echoes from water dripping or from sliding stone. You're lucky to be up in the world again, you silly kitten, and not buried under some earthslide in one of those old cellars.”

The kit looked at Joe Grey. She looked at Dulcie.
“Down and down,” she said stubbornly, “to that other place beneath the granite sky.”

And Dulcie, despite herself, despite her better judgment, believed the kit. “What was it like?” she whispered.

“You didn't go there,” Joe repeated, baring his teeth at the two of them.

“Terrible,” said the kit. “It is terrible. I ran up again, but then I lost my way. I had to go back and start over, I had to follow my own scent.”

Dulcie said softly, “Were the others from your clowder there?”

“I was all alone. I don't know where they went when they left Hellhag Hill. I don't like that place, I was afraid. But…”

“Then why did you go?” Joe growled, pacing and glaring at the kit. Half his attention was on her—his anger centered on her—and half his attention on the torchlit scene below them where the coroner and detectives were doing their grisly work.

But Dulcie, pressing against the kit, could feel the kitten's heart pounding at thoughts of another world—even if it was her imagination—just as Dulcie's own heart was pounding.

“She's making up stories,” Joe said, his eyes slitted, his ears flat to his head, his scowl deep and irritable. He didn't want to think about that other place, if there was such a place. Didn't want to imagine other worlds, didn't want to dwell on his and Dulcie's ancestry. If their dual cat-and-human natures had risen from some strain of beings among the ancient Celts, who had
come, then, to this continent, he didn't care to know more about it.

Joe wanted only to
be
. To live only in the moment, fully alive and effective, in this life that he had been dealt.

And Dulcie loved him for that. Joe was his own cat, he felt no need to peer into the lives of his ancestors like some voyeuring genealogist longing for a time before his own.

Joe spoke the human language, he read the morning paper—with a sharply caustic slant on the news. Dulcie considered him smarter than half the humans in the world. But Joe Grey valued what he had here and now, he wanted nothing more. Any additional mysteries about himself would be an unnecessary weight upon his tomcat shoulders.

With tender understanding, Dulcie licked his ear, ignoring her own wild dreams of other worlds and even more amazing talents. And she snuggled the kit close, too, wondering about the skills that this small cat might show them.

She was washing the kit's splotchy black-and-brown face when they saw Clyde striding up the hill between the swinging spotlights. Immediately Joe and Dulcie ducked, dragging the kit lower behind the boulders.

“Why?” whispered the kit. “Is he not your human, Joe Grey? Why are you hiding from him?”

Joe gave her a slant-eyed look. “He hates finding us at a murder scene. All he does is shout. It's bad for his blood pressure.” He watched from between the boul
ders until Clyde turned away again, to where Officer Ray was cataloging the scene. Standing outside the cordoned-off area, Clyde said, “Is Harper out looking for her?”

Kathleen Ray nodded. “The captain, and five search parties.”

“I'll swing by Harper's place, see if the mare came home. No word from Charlie? Is she down there?”

“No word. She said she'd be there. The captain asked her to see to the mare.”

Clyde turned, heading down the hill.

“Move it, Kit,” Joe whispered. “Stay close.”

Racing down ahead of Clyde, staying in the heavy grass and dodging torchlight, the three cats covered the quarter mile, scorched between cars parked along the narrow dirt road, and leaped into the seat of Clyde's antique roadster.

Before Clyde was halfway down the hill, they had slipped up behind the seat and beneath the car's folded top. Stretching out nose to tail, warm beneath the layers of leather, they were ready to roll.

Clyde wouldn't have a clue—unless he saw their muddy pawprints. But in the dark, with only the dash lights, he likely wouldn't see the mud on the seat—not until morning.

The kit, warm and comfortable between them, rumbled with purrs—until Dulcie poked her with a soft paw. “Hush, Kit. Here he comes, he'll hear you.”

But the kit had fallen sound asleep.

A
week
before Ruthie and Helen Marner were killed, a hundred miles north in San Francisco, someone else was considering the Pamillon estate, thinking of the overgrown grounds exactly as Dillon Thurwell might have done, as a place to hide, to escape a killer.

To Kate Osborne, an invitation to view the Pamillon mansion was a welcome excuse to get out of the city and away from the danger that, perhaps, she only imagined.

Whatever the truth, the stories in the papers had fired her fear until she couldn't sleep at night, until she had put a bolt on the inside of both the front and the bedroom doors, until she was afraid to walk, except in the middle of the day, or even to take the bus or cable car. She was losing all sense of proportion, and that terrified her.

She had vowed, before ever she fled the city, to make herself visit the Cat Museum, to lay to rest that part of her fears. She would not leave until she had made that short trip up Russian Hill.

Last year, when she'd moved up from Molena Point to the North Beach apartment, she'd been eager to see the museum. Pictures of the gallery had so intrigued her, the lovely Mediterranean buildings tucked among their sprawling gardens, beneath the old, magnificent oaks. She'd been so eager to study the museum's amazing collection of cat paintings and cat sculpture. How strange that she'd lived in the city when she was younger and had known about the museum, but had never bothered to go there.

Well, she hadn't known, then, all the facts about herself. Anyway, she'd been so busy with art school. Her museum visits, then, had been school related, to the San Francisco Museum and the de Young.

Yet the art collection at the Cat Museum included work by Gauguin, Dubuffet, Picasso—fine pieces, housed in that lovely complex at the top of Russian Hill.

It was only now, after going through a divorce and returning to the city—and after learning the shocking truth about herself—that she had a really urgent reason to visit there. Yet she'd procrastinated for over a year, unable to find the courage, unable to face any more secrets. Each time she'd tried to make that short journey, she'd become all nerves, and turned back.

So they keep real cats, too. Of course they do. Everyone says those lovely cats wandering the gardens add a delightful charm to the famous collection.

Well, but what
kind
of cats?

That doesn't matter. No one will guess the truth—not even the cats themselves. And what if they did?
What do you think they'd do? Come on, Kate. You're such a coward. Can't you get on with it?

And on Saturday morning she woke knowing she would do it. Now. Today. Put down her fear. No more hedging. The morning was beautifully foggy, the way she loved the city, the wet mist swirling outside her second-floor windows, the muffled sounds of the city calling to her like a secret benediction. Quickly she showered and dressed, letting herself think only of the perfect morning and the beauty of the museum, nothing more. Debating whether to have breakfast at the kitchen table, enjoying her view of the fogbound city, or go on to her favorite warm, cozy coffee shop two blocks up Stockton and treat herself to their delicious Swedish pancakes and espresso and homemade sausage.

Hardly a choice. Pulling on her tan windbreaker over jeans and a sweatshirt, fixing the jacket's hood over her short, pale hair, she hurried down the one flight and into the damp breeze that had begun to swirl the fog. Only once, striding along Stockton, did her thoughts skitter warily again, forcing her to take herself in hand.

Slipping in through the glass door of the Iron Pony, she settled in her favorite booth, where she could look out at Coit Tower, fog-shrouded and lonely.

From the kitchen, Ramon saw her, and brought her a cup of freshly brewed espresso, greeting her in Spanish and laughing. She returned his
“¿Buenos días. Cómo está?”
laughing in return. Ramon's English was impeccable, but, he'd told her solemnly, he spoke only
Spanish when a patron angered him. He'd told her he had a violent temper, that he found it imperative sometimes to hide a sudden anger behind the barrier of language to avoid calling some customer names that would get him, Ramon, fired. If he pretended not to understand the insults, he need not confront them.

A strange young man. Maybe twenty-five years old. Very quiet. And except when he'd been insulted, which she'd never witnessed, a content young man, she thought, seeming totally pleased with the world. Maybe he shifted as quickly as a cat from cool satisfaction to raking claws.

Did she have to drag in the simile of a cat? She sipped her espresso crossly. Couldn't she think of some other description?

She had the notion that Ramon's alabaster-pale skin offered a clue to the quick temper he described, that such bloodless-looking skin and slight build were signs of a person capable of deep rage. She had no notion where she'd gotten such an idea. Of course it was silly. Ramon's obsidian hair and black Latin eyes simply made him look paler—as did the birthmark that splotched his left cheek, the rust-colored deformity spreading from his eye to the corner of his mouth as dark as dried blood, in the shape of the map of India.

She had never dared ask him, in the months she'd been coming here, if it was indeed a birthmark or was perhaps a burn scar—though the skin looked smooth.

She enjoyed chatting with Ramon; she didn't have many friends in San Francisco except her boss, Hanni, and Hanni's uncle, Dallas Garza, a detective with San Francisco PD. She hadn't tried hard to make other
friends, because of her situation. She felt uneasy with other people—as if they might be able to tell what she really was. Her casual acquaintance with Ramon allowed her to walk out of the coffee shop and that was the end of it, no social obligation, no secrets shared, nothing more expected.

“The pancakes and sausage as usual, señora?”

“Yes, and orange juice if you please, Ramon, it's such a beautiful morning.”

He seemed to understand that a beautiful morning called for orange juice. “The fog is going quickly—like a watercolor washing away. Look how the sun makes jewels.”

Together they watched diamonds of dazzle spark at them from the sidewalk where the sun sliced down through the vanishing fog. Ramon had a good eye; he was a student at the art institute where she herself had gone ten years before. It was so good to be back in San Francisco. Nowhere in the world, she thought, were the subtle city colors as splendid as on these hills. When soon the sun rose, every hill, with its crowding houses, would be alive with swift-running cloud shadows, the whole world seeming to shift and move. The city stirred such a fierce joy in her, made her want to race through the streets, turning flips and laughing.

Ramon brought her breakfast and the morning
Chronicle,
frowning at the story that slashed across the bottom of the front page. The lead and first details were so gruesome that all the fear rose in her again, sour as bile. Why had he brought this paper to her? She wanted to wad it up and run out of the café.

“This terrible thing,” Ramon said, setting the paper down beside her plate. “How can this be, that a man could do such a bloody deed? For why would a man do this?”

She did not look up at him. She thought she was going to be sick. She imagined far too vividly the poor dead cat hanging limp and twisted from a lamp pole, its throat constricted by a cord tied in a hangman's noose.

“That man should be hanged,” Ramon said. “
Muerto. Debe murir
.”

She looked up at him, and swallowed. Ramon wanted only to share with her his rage, share with another his own indignation.

For the last week, all over the city someone had been killing cats, hanging the poor beasts by a twisted noose, choking out their gentle, terrified lives. There had been nineteen incidents, in Haight, Nob Hill, Russian Hill, North Beach, the Presidio. Shoving her plate away, she felt her hands clench and stiffen with what she would like to do to the cat killer.

She did not want to read the accompanying article; she hated that Ramon had brought this ugly thing for her to see. She was about to toss the paper away when she saw the upper headline.

Kate looked helplessly at her breakfast. She wanted to pitch the plate away. Ramon still stood watching her, so intent she wanted to scream. Why was he staring? As she looked up angrily, he turned quickly back to the kitchen.

But he couldn't understand how upset she would be, how the articles would terrify her. He could have no concept of how powerfully the cat story would hurt her. And no idea, of course, that the prison break was, for her, perhaps even more alarming.

She was ice cold inside. She felt absolutely certain that Lee Wark had returned—to the very city where she had come to hide from him.

Ramon returned with the coffeepot and stood beside her table, speaking softly.

“Dark the cat walks,” Ramon said, watching her. She looked up at him, startled. “Dark the cat walks, his pacing shadow small.” Ramon's Latin eyes gleamed. “Dark the cat walks. His shadow explodes tall. Fearsome wide and tall.”

The shock of his words turned her rigid. Before she
could speak, abruptly Ramon left her.

She sat very still, trying to collect her emotions. Her hands were shaking.

Why had he said that? What could he mean?

Dropping the paper on the floor, she threw down some money and hurried out to the street, wanted out of there, wanted out of the city.

What was Ramon telling me?
Then,
Wark can't know I'm here.

Can't he, Kate? Remember, before, how easily he discovered your secret?

If it is Wark who's killing cats,
she thought, shivering,
Ramon's right. He ought to be
muerto. Debe murir.

Hurrying back to her apartment, she locked herself in, sliding the new dead bolt on the front door, checking the window locks. She made some cocoa and curled up with a book, a tame, quiet read that wouldn't upset her, couldn't stir any sense of threat—a soothing story that offered nothing to abrade her raw nerves.

She couldn't stop thinking about Wark.

Wasn't the Cat Museum the first place the cat killer would go?

Had he already been there, stalking the grounds? Did the museum staff not know? Or
had
museum cats been killed, and the museum had kept that out of the papers?

Had some of the poor, dead cats that were found around the city come in fact from the Cat Museum?

What kind of cats, Kate? What kind of cats is he killing?

Was Wark saving the Cat Museum for last? Last and best, in Wark's sick mind—before the cops got too close and he had to flee?

Was she imagining all this—the connection between Wark and this maniac?

She didn't think so. A sick, sadistic killer was loose in San Francisco. Lee Wark reveled in that brand of cruelty. Lee Wark had escaped from prison only thirty miles north of the city.

Coincidence? She had the terrible feeling that if she were to visit the Cat Museum, no matter when she went there, Lee Wark would be stalking those gardens.