Cat Fear No Evil (13 page)

I
n the Getz house, the kit slept safe and warm,
tucked in the blankets between Wilma and Dulcie, worn out from her grief, escaping into exhausted oblivion. The bedroom smelled of hot milk and hot cocoa and shortbread cookies, and of the wood fire that had burned down now to a few glowing coals. Outside, the rain had abated, but at four
A.M.
the cold wind still found its fitful way along the wet streets; wind shook drumbeats of water from the oak trees onto rooftops and car hoods—and on the cold and windy streets, others were about, who cared nothing for the windy cold, who cared only for adventure.

A giggle cut the night, then soft but urgent whispers as three girls moved quickly down the narrow alley that opened to the backs of a dozen shops.

Most of Molena Point's alleys were appealing lanes as charming as Jolly's alley, brick-paved byways lined with potted flowers and with the leaded- or stained-glass doorways of tiny backstreet stores. This concrete alley, however, was only a passage hiding garbage cans
and bales of collapsed cardboard cartons that awaited the arrival of a sanitation truck. It was closed to passersby with a solid-wood six-foot fence.

The gate wasn't locked. Candy pushed it open and entered the long, trash-lined walkway, followed by Leah and Dillon. They were on their own tonight; Consuela did not shepherd them. Flipping back her blond hair, Candy fitted a key into the lock of Alice's Mirror. The three slipped inside, Candy reaching quickly to cut off the alarm system, just as the shop's owner would do upon entering.

The girls were gone only a few minutes. They emerged loaded down with velvet pants, cashmere sweaters, wool and leather jackets, with plastic bags of scarves and designer billfolds and necklaces. They had known the location and distribution of the stock as well as any store employee might know it. Dillon, swaggering out with the biggest armload of stolen clothes, glanced back as Candy locked the door. She was grinning.

Piling their loot into the trunk and filling the backseat of the car they had left parked at the curb, the three slid into the front seat, the blonde at the wheel, and moved quietly away. Watching the streets for cops, or for a stray and observant pedestrian, they saw no one.

“Cops are all home in bed,” Leah announced. “Or drinking coffee at the station.”

Dillon giggled. But as the car slid past Wilma Getz's stone cottage and she smelled the smoke of a wood fire, she sobered, studying the house. The sight of that solid and inviting cottage where she had so often been made welcome filled her with a sharp jolt of shame, with a moment of clarity, an ugly look at what she was doing.

 

In the stone cottage, Wilma was not asleep. She lay in bed in the dark, beside the two cats, thinking about Lucinda and Pedric. What
had
they been doing out on the highway at night? Kit had spoken the truth, the old couple never drove at night. And there could be no emergency that would account for a late-night run. Lucinda had no family and none of Pedric's relatives lived on the West Coast to take him racing to them.

Before the kit slept, she had looked up at Wilma suddenly, her round yellow eyes opening like twin moons, and had said decisively, “They can't be dead! Pedric is so clever. Lucinda and Pedric call themselves survivors. Survivors like me, that's what Lucinda says.”

Dulcie and Wilma had exchanged a look.

Yet what Kit had said held some truth—everything Wilma knew about the Greenlaws showed how resourceful they were. She lay thinking about their well-appointed RV, where they always carried extra food, warm clothing, medical supplies, and of course their cell phone. Pedric had fitted out the RV with all manner of innovations to make life easier for them, from a bucket with a tight lid in which they put their laundry and soap and water, letting it bounce and agitate as they traveled, to locked storage compartments that could be opened from either the inside or outside of the vehicle. Pedric had grown up traveling all over the country in similar vehicles, and he was almost obsessed with self-sufficiency.

That did not explain why they were out in the storm at night. It was not as if they had been traveling to a
new campsite. They had
been
at the one site for over a week and according to the registration had not checked out. The sheriff said they had left behind a folding camp table, two canvas chairs, and a large cooler. As she lay thinking, warm beside the two cats, she heard a car slide past the house and wondered idly who was out at four in the morning. Maybe a police car.

And as Wilma drifted off again into a depressed and anxious sleep, across the village the hardtop sedan pulled into the garage of a small rental cottage that stood behind a brown-shingled house. The cottage had once been servants' quarters.

The minute the ten-year-old Cadillac sedan entered through the automatic door, the door rolled down behind it. Inside, by the light from the door opener, the three girls unloaded the clothes. Most were still on their hangers, which Leah hung in the oversize metal storage lockers that lined the garage wall. She filled five lockers and snapped on padlocks. Four other units stood unlocked.

Leaving the car and letting themselves out the side door, which Candy locked behind them, the three girls headed away in separate directions, each to her own home. As Candy and Leah melted quickly into the night, Dillon, hurrying toward her own home, kept well away from the shadows. She didn't like being out in the small hours alone, though she would never let the others know that. Her girlfriends were about the only family she had now that she could count on. Her mother was zilch, a zero. And her dad had caved. He didn't fight back, he didn't do anything. He was just very quiet, turning away even from her—so patient and tolerant with Helen that he made Dillon retch. If she'd been her dad, she'd have
packed up and hauled out of there, the two of them. Leave Helen to ruin her life any way she wanted.

Or she'd have booted Helen out and changed the locks, let her move in with what's-his-name.

But he wasn't doing either; he wasn't doing anything. Moving quickly along the dark streets, she was just a few blocks from home when she started thinking about that contractor, Ryan Flannery; when she saw suddenly a flash of green eyes and heard again the woman's rude comments, there in the Harper kitchen.
Bitch
.

Except, hearing Ryan's voice, for a moment Dillon was drawn beyond her anger. Ryan's retort had been almost exactly the same as Captain Harper's angry words.

And a small still voice down inside Dillon asked, what was she going to do about Ryan Flannery's challenge?

K
ate Osborne didn't learn about Lucinda and
Pedric's deaths until Sunday evening as she waited for the elderly couple to arrive for their visit. Lucinda had called two nights before, to say they'd be there by late afternoon, that they would be driving down from somewhere near Russian River, some little out-of-the way campground. And Kate had to smile. She was sure Lucinda hadn't had this much fun in all her adult life before she married Pedric. Her earlier marriage to Shamus, while busy with social functions and exciting for the first few years, had deteriorated as Lucinda aged, Lucinda staying home ignoring the truth while Shamus played fast and loose.

“I thought we'd eat in,” Kate had told her. “That you might be tired, so I'd planned a little something at home. I make a mean creole, if you'd like that.”

“That sounds like heaven,” Lucinda had said. “A hot shower and a good hot creole supper. Couldn't be better. We'll plan to take you out the next night.” Kate thought that maybe, with Lucinda and Pedric there, she
could get her head on straight, maybe could look at her own problems more objectively. This last week had been so strange and unsettling.

All week she had felt reluctant to go out after dark, and that was so stupid. Of course she'd had to work late, if she were to finish with her present clients in a timely manner. The work week would have been satisfying if she hadn't kept watching nervously for the man who had followed her to reappear.

At least she had found her extra keys in the drawer where she sometimes kept them; they had fallen down between the folds of her sweaters. That had eased her mind; and nothing in the apartment had, again, been disturbed. The windows had remained locked, and she saw no one lingering down in the street.

But still she was nervous. And then this morning, having gone into the office to do some paperwork, she saw him when she started out of the building, standing across the street in a shadowed doorway; and she stepped back inside the entry.

She couldn't tell if he was watching her, couldn't really be sure it was the same man. She had remained inside the glass door until he left the mosaic of shadows, ambling on down the street in plain view, a perfectly ordinary man wearing nondescript jeans and a brown windbreaker—but his face had been turned away.

She wanted to see his face. In spite of common sense, her fear had so sharply escalated that she arrived home cold and shivering. And then getting out of her car in the little parking garage, did she imagine a shadow slipping away behind the building? Steeling herself, she had gone on up the closed stairway, her
pepper spray in her sweating hand. She was coming into the apartment when she'd heard a series of thuds, either inside or on the roof.

Gripping the pepper spray, and sick with fear, she had made the rounds of her familiar rooms. She found two desk drawers protruding, not pushed in all the way. And the couch and chair cushions were awry, and a kitchen cabinet door ajar. Then she found a wad of short black hair on the kitchen counter. She stood staring, filled with anger and fear, before she flushed it down the toilet and Cloroxed the countertop. She had no idea how the cat was getting in. No lock had been disturbed, and she had found her lost keys, though she supposed they could have been copied, then returned to her. But what was the purpose? Consuela knew by now that the jewels were not here; she must have learned that the first time she searched the apartment.

Kate was not afraid of Consuela. And she
should
not be afraid of the black tomcat. Badly shaken, but with Lucinda and Pedric due to arrive, she got herself in hand at last; she showered, and dressed comfortably in a velour jogging suit and scuffs. She wanted dinner preparations finished early, as they would be there before dark. She boiled the shrimp and made the creole sauce and measured the rice to be cooked. She set the table in the little dining room with her new paisley place mats, and put together a salad with all but the two ripe avocados she'd selected from her hoard on the windowsill. She set an amaretto cheesecake out to thaw. The scent of the freshly boiled shrimp and of the creole sauce filled the apartment, stirring her hunger. She filled the coffeepot, using a specially ground decaf, and curled up on the couch near the phone with a
book, waiting for Lucinda's call that they were about to cross the Golden Gate. From the bridge, it was only ten minutes.

She read for some time Loren Eiseley's keen observations of the world. Strange that they were so late; it was growing dusky. Traffic must be heavy; not a good time to come into the city, with people returning from the weekend. When it was nearly dark, she rose to pull the draperies. Before closing those on the east, she stood a moment looking out toward East Bay, watching the lights of Berkeley and Oakland smear and fade in the gathering fog. She hoped Lucinda and Pedric arrived before the fog grew thick. Making a weak drink, she returned to her book. Only belatedly did she pick up the phone to see if they had left a message on the service before she ever got home.

She no longer used an answering machine; three power outages with the resultant failure of the machine had prompted her to subscribe to the phone company's uninterrupted reception even when the phones were out.

There was no beeping message signal. There was no sound at all from the receiver, no dial tone.

How long had the system been out? This happened every now and then, particularly in bad weather. As her apartment had not been disturbed, she didn't think anyone had tampered with the line.

Lucinda didn't have the number of her cell phone. Anyway, she realized suddenly, she'd left that phone in the car, plugged into the dash, the battery removed to keep it from turning to jelly. She had meant to bring it up with her; now she did not want to go out in the night
to get it. She was disgusted that she had forgotten it when all this last week she had carried the phone even when she walked.

It was nearly seven thirty when she poured herself another mild drink and decided to fix a plate of cheese and crackers to calm her rumbling stomach. Lucinda had said they'd been up around Fort Bragg, poking along the coast. They did love their rambling life. For a pair of eighty-year-olds, those two folks were remarkable. Slicing the cheese, she reached to turn on the little kitchen TV that had been a birthday present to herself. She didn't watch much TV, but she liked to have the news on while she was getting dinner. Shaking out the crackers, she caught something about an accident in Sonoma County. An RV and a tanker truck. She glimpsed a brief shot of the wreck, the vehicles so badly burned you couldn't tell what they had looked like. Fire trucks, police cars, and ambulances filled the screen. She stood at the kitchen counter unmoving.

When had this happened? This couldn't be…

She relaxed when the newscaster said the collision had happened late last night. This had happened while Lucinda and Pedric were safely asleep in their RV, or in some cozy inn up the coast—not at a time when the Greenlaws would have been on the highway.

She didn't like to look at the TV pictures. It was a terrible wreck, those poor people hadn't had a chance. She had reached for the remote, to turn to another channel, when a cut of the newscaster came on, interviewing the Sonoma County sheriff. She paused, curious in spite of herself.

“Now that the nearest relatives have been notified,
we are able to release the names of the deceased. The tanker driver, Ken Doyle of Concord, is survived by a wife and two young children.” There was a still shot of a dark-haired young woman holding a little boy and a fat baby. “The occupants of the RV were residents of Molena Point. Lucinda and Pedric Greenlaw had been…”

She couldn't move. Suddenly she couldn't breathe.

“…vacationing up the Northern California coast. The eighty-year-old newlyweds, who were married just last year in a Molena Point ceremony, were returning home to the central-coast village…”

She needed to sit down. She stood leaning against the counter, holding on to the counter, staring at the TV.

She had seen Lucinda and Pedric only a few weeks ago. She had spent the evening with them. She left the kitchen, making her way to the living room and the couch, which seemed miles. Sat with her head down between her knees as she had been taught as a child, until the nausea passed.

Why would Lucinda and Pedric be on the road late at night?

A long time later she rose to put the shrimp and creole sauce and salad in the refrigerator. Standing in the kitchen with her back to the TV and the sound turned off, she made herself a double whiskey and took it into the living room.

But there, she couldn't help it, she turned on the larger TV mindlessly changing channels looking for more news, though she did not want to see any more. The wreck had happened Saturday night while she lay sleeping. Today she had gone about her pointless af
fairs while Lucinda and Pedric lay dead. She had stopped at the grocery, buying shrimp, flowers for the table, imagining the thin, wrinkled couple tooling along in their nice RV, stopping at antique shops, stopping to eat cracked crab…Staring at the TV, she didn't know what to do or what to think. She simply sat.

Did Wilma know? She ought to call Wilma. Should she call Clyde, ask Clyde to tell Wilma? Clyde was closer to Wilma than she was, they were like family. If they knew, why hadn't they called her?

And she couldn't call out; the line was dead.

She'd have to go down and get her cell phone. How stupid, to have left it in the car. Fetching her keys, she pulled on her coat, snatched up the pepper spray, locked the door behind her, and went down the stairs, hating this sense of fear. Reaching the garage she moved quickly, watching between other cars. Unlocking her Riviera she snatched up the phone, hit the lock, and slammed the door. She was up the stairs and in the apartment again before fear had immobilized her. This was crazy; she couldn't live like this. On a hunch, she tried the apartment phone again—and got the insistent beeping of the message service.

Sitting down on the couch with the now functioning phone, she started to play back her messages, then decided first to call Clyde. She needed, very much, to hear his gruff and reassuring voice.

 

The downstairs rooms of the Damen cottage were dark, but upstairs behind the closed shutters the bedroom and study were bright, the desk lamp lit, a
warming fire burning in the study where Clyde sat at his desk filling out parts orders. Or trying to, working around the prone body of the sleeping gray tomcat where he lay sprawled across the catalogs. Far be it from Joe to move. Far be it from Clyde, who found the tomcat as amusing as he was exasperating, to ask him.

Ryan had left half an hour ago, after an early supper in the big new kitchen: takeout from their favorite Mexican café. Impatiently waiting for the building permit for the Harper place, she had gone home to her blueprints, anxious to finish putting together a design proposal for a remodel at the north end of the village. “I want to get that wrapped up, so I can concentrate on the Harper job.”

“You are not,” Clyde had said, “going to get so busy that you keep pulling men off one job to work on another, like most contractors? Delaying all the jobs?”

“No fear.” She had grinned at him, flipping back her short dark hair. “I can manage my work better than that.” She had given him a warm, green-eyed smile and laid her hand over his; her closeness led him, more and more lately, to imagine her always there with him. He sat at his desk now thinking about Ryan sharing the house, comfortable and warm and exciting.

Clyde's view of women had changed dramatically since the time, a few years back, when every conquest was exciting, when every new looker was a challenge even if he couldn't stand her as a person. Joe Grey had chided him more than once about bringing home some airhead. Well, that life was not for him anymore; the idea of bringing home some bimbo now disgusted him.

The change had started when Kate left her husband
and came to him for help. He had been so smitten with her, and for so long, but after that night when he had hidden her from Jimmie, he had been so confused by her bizarre nature.

He had mooned over Kate for a long time after that, but she had distanced herself. She had known better than he that with the difference between them a relationship would never work; she had seen too clearly his fear of her impossible talents.

The night she left Jimmie and came running here to him, he would not believe what she told Clyde about her alternate self, although her feline nature was part of the reason Jimmie wanted to kill her. In order to prove to Clyde what she could do, she had done it. Standing before him, whispering some unlikely spell, she had taken the form of a cat. A cream-colored cat, sleek and beautiful, with golden eyes like Kate's and marmalade markings.

His fear had been considerable. He had charged into the bedroom and slammed the door and wouldn't open it. He did not want to see her again in either form. The next day he'd been better, although the concept still shook him. He became civil once more; but he would never get over it.

And yet even after that shattering incident, he had longed for her, had tried every way to get her to come home again after she moved to San Francisco.

Neither Joe nor Dulcie could take human form. Nor did Joe Grey want to; the tomcat said he liked his life as it was, that the talents he
had
were plenty. Well, the upshot for Clyde was that he had begun to look at a woman as a
person.
To want to know who she was and what she thought about life.

While pining over Kate, he had dated Charlie, a woman as honest and real as anyone he'd ever known. It was then he had let himself realize, as he had known deeply all along, what the real values were. It was then he put away his shallow philosophy and turned, as Max had done years before, to look at what a woman believed deep down, what she cared about in life.

Joe Grey would say, big sea change. The tomcat had ragged him plenty about his earlier lifestyle. Clyde stared down at Joe now. The tomcat seemed to make himself twice as big when he sprawled across a desk where a person was working. “You wouldn't consider rolling over, so I can finish this order?”