Cat to the Dogs (10 page)

“That's a lot of conjecture. I've never heard you—”

“All conjecture, so far. All bits and pieces. I'm simply playing
with the possibilities. Say the pups wouldn't follow him back up the canyon, say they got silly and ran off the way pups will, and later wandered up Hellhag Hill, where you found them.”

“So what does that prove? What does that have to do with the brake line?” Clyde looked hard at Harper. “For that matter, what about the dead man? What have you got on him?”

“I thought I told you. Raul Torres was a PI working out of Seattle.”

“That's all you told me.”

“Hotshot PI. Irritated the hell out of Seattle PD.”

“Hotshot in what way?” Clyde asked, popping another beer.

“In the way he ran his investigations. Always mouthing off, Seattle tells me. Making people mad.”

Clyde shrugged.

“Seattle's interested in what Torres might have been working on, down here. Torres's secretary said he was meeting a girlfriend, but Seattle thinks he was on a case.”

“You have a line on the girlfriend?”

“A Seattle girl, living in San Francisco. Had a connection in Molena Point, a friend down here.”

Joe watched Harper, puzzled. Was Harper not telling Clyde everything? And what, exactly, did that mean?

“Seattle says she's something of a high roller. Particularly likes yacht cruises.”

“Cara Ray Crisp?” Clyde asked.

Joe relaxed. Harper was just stringing it out.

Harper nodded, and busied himself arranging sliced onions on his burger.

Clyde rose, fetched a jar of horseradish from the refrigerator, and behind Harper's back cast a scowl at Joe that was deep with meaning, that said,
Get out of here. Now. Go out to the backyard, Joe, and catch a mouse.

Joe leaped to the counter and settled down, glaring.

Clyde looked as if he might wring a little cat throat. But he
turned back to Harper. “Do you suppose Cara Ray was seeing Torres while Shamas was alive? What kind of case was Torres working?”

“We think it's possible he was running an investigation on Shamas.”

Clyde couldn't help but glance at Joe. “What kind of investigation? Women? You mean Lucinda actually—”

“No, Lucinda didn't hire him. He had apparently been checking into a Seattle machine-tool manufacturer, for some company that got stung on their products. It's possible Shamas was involved. The secretary wasn't too sure what it was all about, she said she only does a few letters and the billing. She thought it was some kind of lawsuit.” Harper busied himself with his second burger.

Clyde was quiet.

Joe Grey sat very still, pretending to look out the window into the dark backyard. But beneath his sleek silver fur, every muscle twitched. Max Harper's words had fired every predatory cell; he was as wired as if Harper had waved a flapping pigeon in his face.

T
HE NIGHT
was fading. A thin moon hung low over the sea, and a sharp wind whipped across Hellhag Hill, pushing at the scrawny, half-grown kitten, flattening the grass around her where she crouched sucking up a meager meal, licking up bits of kibble mixed with dirt, a thin scattering left from the previous day after the bigger cats had fed. A woman had brought the food.

Always she wanted to approach the woman, but the other cats would never let her; they hazed her away, wanting nothing to do with humans except to take their food—and they took it all. Hunkering down, belly to the earth, she gulped the last crumbs, shivering.

The kit was fierce enough when she was alone; certainly she had no fear of dogs. Many days earlier, when the two huge puppies had jumped and barked at her, she had attacked one of them as wildly as a bobcat—had been greatly amused to ride it right among the village streets. Oh, that had been a wild race, all her claws digging in.

But she feared her feline peers; she feared the vehemence of the clowder leaders, their fierce circling and hissing and striking
out. She wouldn't challenge that hierarchy of big, mean cats. Not many cats ran in a clowder like a pack of dogs, but feral cats often lived together in such a clan—the pack leader had told her that—for strength within their own territory and for protection. He said her own group ran in a clowder because of who they were, because they were not like other ferals.

The dog had found that out. Found out that she was not simply another frightened kitty.

The woman had been on the hill when she rode that dog; the woman must have laughed. The clowder cats didn't like the woman, but the kit liked to slip close to her, unseen. She liked to see the woman take pleasure in the fog and in the dawn. The woman loved the hill and loved the sky and the sea, and so did the kit love those things. Nor did she think it strange to have such thoughts, any more than it was strange to be always hungry. Her thoughts were part of her, her hunger was part of her—hunger was a beast's natural condition. What else was there but this wary and hungry existence—and then her private thoughts to warm her?

Yet there
was
something else. There
was
more in life than hunger and fear and cold—more, even, than her own excited musings. But what that something was, she hadn't worked out. She knew only that somewhere food was plentiful and delicious and that one could be warm and there were soft beds to sleep on—the kind of sleep where a cat needn't doze with one eye open, jerked awake by the slightest sound.

Finishing the crumbs, and finding no homely wisdom scattered among them through the dirt, she crept out of the grass into the gusting wind and leaped atop a boulder, stood up bold in the blow, surveying the hill that tossed and rippled around her. Grass lashed and ran in silver waves, and beyond it the sea crashed and surged like a gigantic and sensuous animal spitting its foam white against the sky.

With her mottled black-and-brown coloring, her blazing yellow eyes, and the long hair sticking out of her ears in two amazing
tufts, the young cat resembled a small bobcat more than a domestic feline. Her thin body seemed too long for a normal cat, and she was far more swift and agile.

She hadn't a bobcat's tail, though, but a long, fluffy plume, an appendage of amazing length lashing as importantly as a flag of national significance; and though her coat was dense and short, she had long-haired pantaloons like furry chaps, her fluffy parts so bushy that one had to wonder if God, in some temporary absentmindedness, had fashioned this cat from leftover and mismatched parts.

Perhaps God had been in a joking mood when he made her? He seemed, as well, to have filled her with more imaginings than any proper cat could contain. The very look in her round yellow eyes and the set of her little thin face implied teeming and impatient dreams, wild and untamable visions.

This cat had no name. She had made for herself a dozen names as ephemeral as the wildflowers that came and went across the hillside. But if she had a real, forever, and secret name that belonged to her like her own paws and tail, she didn't know what it was.

Standing in the wind atop the boulder, she speculated about the mice that burrowed beneath the stone, that she could never catch, and about the songs the wind whispered and the habits of the cottontail rabbits she had scented in the grass
(I'm faster than any rabbit. Why can't I catch them?)
, and about the nature of the gulls that wheeled and screamed above her. And, filled to bursting with questions, in her fierce small presence shone a power far bigger than she, a power that glowed from her yellow eyes, and of which she had little understanding.

But now, far below her along the highway, another cat came trotting, leaped into the grass at the foot of the hill, and started up toward her. This cat was not one of her clowder.

But it was not a stranger, either. She had seen this one before, this brown tabby with the peach-tinted nose and ears. The cat disappeared suddenly, into the whipping tangles. She waited for it to
appear again, her yellow eyes wide, her pink mouth open in a soft panting.

The cat poked her head out, looking up toward the boulders, her gaze so intent that the tortoiseshell kit took a step back. The two remained frozen in a staring match not of confrontation but of curiosity. Intense, wary, excited. Diffidently, the scrawny kit waited for the older cat's lead—but suddenly the adult cat backed away again and vanished into the grass as if uncertain in her own mind.

 

The stray fascinated Dulcie but filled her with a peculiar fear. Even at this distance, she could see in the kit's eyes a difference, a bright wildness.

How thin the kit was, all frail little bones, but with that balloon tail and those huge pantaloons. When Dulcie drew back out of sight, the kit, shifting nervously from paw to paw, opened her pink little mouth.

She yowled.

Three shrill, demanding yowls, amazingly loud and authoritative for such a small morsel, an imperative command. Fascinated, Dulcie was about to show herself again and approach closer when the kit crouched, staring away past Dulcie, wide-eyed, and suddenly she spun and fled like a feather sucked away in a whirlwind.

She was gone. The hill was empty. Dulcie reared up to look behind her and saw Lucinda Greenlaw coming up the hill, and with her, stumbling along at a hurried and uneven gait, came Pedric.

But perhaps it was not Lucinda who had startled the kit, nor even Pedric, because at the humans' approach, a half dozen cats reared up in the grass staring at Lucinda and Pedric, then leaped away like terrified birds exploding in every direction, vanishing wild and afraid. These were surely a part of the kit's clowder, surely she had run at their cue.

Dulcie thought it strange that Lucinda would bring Pedric on her solitary walk, that she would bring anyone—though she did seem to trust the old man; she seemed to have a closeness to Pedric as she had with Newlon.

Her friendship with Pedric was new and tentative. She had not met Pedric or most of the Greenlaw family until they arrived for the funeral, while she had known Newlon longer, Wilma said; and it seemed to Dulcie that Lucinda had some sort of quiet understanding with Newlon.

When Pedric and Lucinda headed in her direction, Dulcie slipped beneath a tangle of dense-growing broom bushes. How very much at home old Pedric looked as he climbed Hellhag Hill, almost as if he belonged there. Watching the two approach, she glimpsed the tortoiseshell kit again creeping down the hill toward the two humans, her yellow eyes bright with curiosity.

 

“Such a peaceful hill,” Pedric said, sitting down with his back to a boulder, very close to where Dulcie sat unseen.

Lucinda made herself comfortable on the little folded blanket she always carried. “I've come here for years. I like its solitude.”

Pedric looked at Lucinda strangely. “Solitude. That puts a kinder shape to loneliness.”

She looked at him quietly.

“The loneliness of living with Shamas.”

“Perhaps,” she said.

Pedric's lean old body cleaved easily to the lines of the hill. “It is a fine hill, Lucinda.”

“Do you sense its strangeness?”

He inclined his head, but didn't answer.

“I come here for its strangeness, too.”

They were silent awhile; then he turned, looking hard at her, his thin, wrinkled profile fallen into lines of distress. “Why didn't you ever leave him? Why, Lucinda? Why did you stay with him?”

“Cowardice. Lack of nerve. When he began with the women, I wanted to leave. I tried to think where to go, what to do with my life. I have no family, no relatives.”

She picked a long blade of grass, began to slit it lengthwise with her thumbnail. “I was afraid. Afraid of what Shamas might do—such a lame excuse.”

She looked at him bleakly. “How many women have wasted their lives, out of fear?

“I never really believed that I could sue Shamas for divorce and get any kind of community property—there was so much about his various ventures that seemed peculiar. I did snoop enough to know he did business in a dozen different names, and I…it was all so strange to me, and frightening.

“Shamas said that much of the income was from bonds, stocks, investments that would bore me. I thought, if I left him, there would be a terrible legal muddle trying to sort it all out.”

She looked down, then looked up at him almost pleadingly. “I was afraid of Shamas. Because he controlled the money, and…that he might harm me. He was so…demanding. Autocratic. He would not tolerate being crossed.”

“Not an easy man to live with.”

“Not at all. So instead of leaving, I went off by myself for a few hours at a time—returned to care for the house and make the meals.”

Pedric shook his head.

“It helped to get away alone, take long walks and lick my wounds.”

“And now that he is dead?”

“Now I'm free,” she said softly.

Pedric nodded.

“With Shamas gone, slowly I am healing. The stress and anger are easing. One day, they will be gone.”

Lucinda sat up straighter. “I mean to take charge now, where I
never did before. It may seem mercenary, Pedric, but I'm going to think, now, about my own survival.

“There's more than enough money for my simple tastes. Money can't make me young and pretty again, but it can bring me some small pleasures. I have retained a financial advisor. There's so much I don't know, records I haven't found.”

Dulcie watched Lucinda, puzzled. She sounded as if she had planned for a long time what she would do if she outlived Shamas.

“The trust was the one thing Shamas did that…has been of benefit. He did it not for me, but simply to avoid probate taxes. Shamas hated any kind of taxes.”

Lucinda looked at Pedric intently. “The things I don't know about how Shamas made the money—I really didn't want to know. I could have snooped more efficiently, found out more. I…didn't want to get involved in knowing, in deciding what to do if Shamas's ventures were…illegal.

“Cowardice,” she said softly, and her face colored. “I just…I just wanted out.”

“You were married late in life,” Pedric said gently. “Shamas grew into certain ways long before you met him. Ways that were not always respectable.” A wariness crossed Pedric's face. “Family ways,” he said, “that I cannot condone, that I have tried to remain free of, though I have lived all my life near the family. Tell me—what did you know about Shamas, when you married?”

“He let me know that he was well established in his Seattle enterprises, but he was vague about what they were. He said he wanted our time together to be filled with delight, not with mundane business affairs.”

“And you never questioned that.”

“Not in the beginning. The longer I waited to press him for answers, the more difficult that was. He took care of the banking and gave me a household allowance. He didn't offer any information. That rankled. But I didn't do anything about it.

“There was plenty of money for trips, for new cars every year—until I said I didn't want a new car, that I liked the one I had.” She looked at Pedric. “I was afraid to ask him the important questions. I grew afraid of where the money came from. The longer we were married, the more secretive he was. I knew he spent a lot on his own. At first on clothes, and on business lunches, he told me. Then, later, it was obvious that he was with other women.

“Yet as miserable as I was, I was too cowardly to change my life.”

“So you escaped into your long, lonely rambles.”

“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.”