Now telling her story she felt like she had felt on that stage in the bright lights; and her human friends listened and sipped their coffee and Dulcie purred. "When summer got real hot," Kit told them, "there was no more water in the hills and the grass turned all brown and more coyotes came real hungry all hunting us. We moved on then and I got so tired and so hot and hungry and thirsty. When I thought I couldn't go another step we came to a city with garbage in the alleys falling out of big metal cans and thrown away wrappers with bits of pizza and hot dogs still in them and the leaders ate and ate but they would never share. There were some empty houses with boarded-up basements, too, that we could get in when boys chased us or it rained, but once two boys shot at us with a gun and we ran and ran into a canyon and never went back there except to sneak food and run again. Arroyo Secco the canyon was called and it had bamboo jungles and broken concrete water pipes to hide in and we lived there a long time and came up among the houses at night to get food and to drink from the puddles where people watered their lawns. I was getting bigger and I learned to fight for something to eat but once I got bit and clawed real bad and that hurt for a long time so I could hardly walk."
Kit stopped for breath and for Charlie to catch up. Charlie was writing as fast as she could. When Kit looked out through the wide window, Ryan Flannery's big Weimaraner, Rock, looked in at her wagging his short tail. Beyond him across the grassy side yard, Ryan knelt on the roof of the stable tearing off the shingles, getting ready to raise up the roof the way she did on Clyde's house. Ryan would jack the roof's two sides right up to make new walls for a second floor. Kit thought that was amazing, what humans could do-what they would think of to do.
Ryan's uncle Scotty and her other carpenters would help her lift the two halves of the roof and nail them in place and then, like magic, they would put on a new roof, way high up, and there would be a whole new room up there, a big guest room right over the stable.
But right now there was just a lot of screeing and scritching as Ryan pulled out nails, and chunking sounds as she tossed the shingles down on the bed of her big red pickup.
Kit turned back when Charlie set two bowls of warm milk and a plate of shortbread down on the window seat for her and Dulcie. Everyone kept watching the side yard in case Ryan came down the ladder and headed for the house because Ryan didn't know that she and Dulcie could talk. They would be silent then like ordinary cats having a nap on the window seat. And they all watched the long drive, too, that came from the main road in case Captain Harper came home unexpectedly because he didn't know, either. How complicated life could be. Kit looked up at Charlie.
"What happened, Charlie, up on the hills? That you couldn't tell when we all had Mexican dinner?" Though she thought she already knew. She thought she knew very well what had made those scratches on the dead man's throat and sent him careening over the cliff to die crumpled under his heavy motorcycle.
Charlie looked at Kit a long time, and sipped her coffee. "I think your wild band has returned, Kit."
Kit shivered again and licked milk from her whiskers. When her wild clowder came there before to Hellhag Hill when she was little, that was when she saw Lucinda and Pedric there having a picnic and the Greenlaws knew right away that she was not an ordinary cat. They had shared their picnic with her and told her stories of her ancestors and she loved them right away, they belonged to one another right away and she left the wild band for this new life with the most wonderful people in the world. Now she looked at Lucinda and Pedric and purred and purred and they looked back at her all warm and happy. But even though she was safe with them, when she thought of the wild band so near, she trembled. Why would they come back? Why had they come here?
Oh, they couldn't want her} Why would they want her? They'd been happy to be rid of her.
But Charlie was telling how she'd freed the big tomcat from the trap, and when Charlie described him, Kit felt cold and scared. "That was Stone Eye," Kit whispered. "That big gray-and-brown tom with eyes the color of rust. He runs everything. He bosses everyone. He always slashed and bit me. He did worse to the older female kittens." Thinking about Stone Eye, Kit wanted to crawl under the pillows into the dark where nothing would find her, but of course that was silly. That was how she felt, though. She wished Charlie had left him in that cage.
But Charlie would never do that. And when Charlie said she thought maybe other cats had been trapped and taken away prisoner, Kit remembered something scary, and she hunched down deeper next to Dulcie.
"What, Kit?" Dulcie and Lucinda said together. Lucinda rose and came to sit on the window seat beside her and to stroke her. "What is it?" the thin old lady said. "What did you remember?" Lucinda always knew how she felt.
"There was a man," Kit said. "In one town, when I was little, watching us when we were eating garbage in an alley. He watched us from the back door of a shoe shop and he had canned baked beans maybe for his lunches and every day he put out some beans for us and the hungriest of us sneaked up after dark and ate but always the man was there behind the screen watching and watching us. Stone Eye told us not to go there, and drove us away. He said we had to go away from that city but we went back anyway one more time the next day and there were other men there too and they put out those big traps for us with food in, humane traps they're called but we knew what they were and we left those streets. We stayed in the ravine and didn't ever go back there again."
Kit sighed. "There were three ordinary cats that traveled with us that couldn't talk but felt safe in the big clowder and they went back, they went in the traps every day and ate the food. Stone Eye didn't drive them away. When they got caught, he said what did it matter? When those men took the bungies off and the ordinary cats got caught, Stone Eye laughed and said they were just stupid beasts, but some of us…"
She paused to peer through the window toward the main road, where a car had turned into the drive, moving way too fast toward the house. Charlie rose angrily and hurried to the door, and ran out to tell the driver to slow down. Pedric got up and stood at the kitchen window, looking out.
"A black Alpha Romeo," he said crossly. "Damn fool." They watched the car skid to a stop right in Charlie's face, and the driver's door opened.
Kit could hear Charlie through the closed window, but Pedric slid the glass open so he could hear. "You don't drive like that on my property!" Charlie snapped. "What do you want?"
The driver was dark-haired and handsome. He stepped boldly out of the car. "Your property? I thought this was Chief Harper's property."
"I am Mrs. Harper. What do you want?"
He looked past her to the stable roof, where Ryan had paused in her work, kneeling on the roof. "It's really none of your business. I came to see Ryan."
"Everything on my property is my business." Charlie looked at his license plate. "Go on over there if you have business with Ms. Flannery. When you leave you will drive slowly." Kit and Dulcie smiled. Everyone said redheads had a temper. The man looked amused. Charlie's eyes flashed as he turned away. In the kitchen, Pedric glared as if he wanted to barge out and protect Charlie. Kit thought that wasn't smart at his eighty-plus frail years. Dulcie's ears were back and her tail lashed. Kit was fascinated, her nose pressed to the glass, watching.