Kit knew, too well, that Charlie was sometimes sorry she knew. Such knowledge had to be awkward for a police chief’s wife, when the cats in question were the chief’s prime informants-and when they spent so much time on Max Harper’s desk pretending to be simple little freeloaders. The worst of it was, the cats had no idea how long they could keep up their charade before even that hard-nosed cop guessed the truth.
Everyone moved upstairs into the big, raftered living room, and Lucinda lit a fire and turned on the Christmas-tree lights. The house smelled of ginger and vanilla and that sweetly scorched smell of cookies that had browned around the edges. While Clyde and Pedric walked through the rooms to be sure the woman hadn’t gotten in there, too, Ryan, sitting down at the dining table, put on a pair of Lucinda’s cotton gloves and shook out the contents of the two envelopes. Lucinda fetched her own take-out container of shrimp bisque and warmed it, and set Kit’s late-supper snack on the dining-room windowsill. Kit, wolfing down her good supper, watched Ryan examine the photos from the yellow Kodak folder.
“A roll of twelve,” Ryan said, “processed through the Village Drugstore.” She shook her head. “Under the name Jane Jones.” She looked up at Lucinda. “Are you going to call the station?”
“I’d like to wait a bit. Let’s have a look at these, first. The woman’s long gone, by now.”
Ryan looked at her, frowning, but said nothing. Lucinda sat down beside the younger woman, studying the individual photos as Ryan laid them out. All twelve shots were of the neighbor’s house, all with the same distorted perspective produced by the telephoto lens, the house and figures sharp enough, but the trees in the foreground looking flat and out of focus. Two pictures showed a man inside at a window. Three showed a woman at another window. Six showed two different men outside the house, two of those with the woman as well. The last shot was of a car coming down the drive, the woman at the wheel. When Clyde and Pedric joined them, Pedric picked up Kit from the windowsill and held her in his arms as he sat down so she could see better. It was the nine-by-twelve pages from the larger envelope that made them all uneasy.
Ryan lined them up. Each sheet of slick white paper was printed with four color photographs. The twenty pictures were all of a different location. Lucinda’s hand trembled as she reached out for the nearest page. Ryan stopped her, taking her hand, and offered the older woman the package of cotton gloves.
“Those are pictures of the Patty Rose Home,” Lucinda said, pulling on the gloves, so upset she’d forgotten about fingerprints. She brought the sheet closer. “What does she want with pictures of the Anna Stanhope estate-pictures of the children?” And already, within herself, Lucinda feared the answer.
Two of the twenty pictures were of the Stanhope mansion with its appealing Tudor design, its dark timbers incising their strong patterns across the pale plaster walls. Three pictures were of different angles of the artist’s small home and studio, a simple stone building constructed in the early part of the previous century. The other fifteen photos showed the buildings at more distance, with the children in the foreground running and playing in the tree-shaded garden and on the playground. Five of those were close-ups of individual little girls, all distorted by the telephoto lens, which flattened the perspective and made the pictures seem even more immediate and threatening. All five little girls had pale skin and black hair, and it was this detail that brought Kit sharply alert and made her shiver. All five little girls resembled, in coloring, the child she’d seen huddled against the dead man.
“Max needs to see these,” Ryan said. “Now, tonight. And you need to report the break-in to him, before that woman comes back.”
Lucinda looked at her uncertainly.
“When she finds the pictures and camera missing,” Ryan said, “she’ll do one of two things. Either she’ll run, or she’ll come up here to take these back. Possibly take them back, armed.”
“I…If she were armed,” Lucinda said, “she would have drawn on us downstairs.”
“You don’t know that. We don’t know what she’ll do. She might have a gun hidden somewhere else, in a car maybe. Bring it back with her.” Ryan looked hard at her. “Call the station, Lucinda. Or I will.” And she glanced through to the kitchen, to the phone that stood on the counter.
Pedric put his arm around Lucinda. “Ryan’s right.”
Lucinda nodded, rose, and headed reluctantly for the phone. Kit watched her, puzzled, and didn’t understand what held Lucinda back. This was not like her. As Lucinda talked with the dispatcher, Ryan looked at Clyde. He was scowling, and silent.
“What?” she said, laying her hand over his.
He shrugged. “I guess…Just that we don’t need this stuff at Christmas.”
But Clyde was thinking far more: Joe Grey and Dulcie and Kit were already in stalking mode, drawn into last night’s murder. And whatever the cats were into made huge waves in the lives of their three families and Charlie. Now here was another involvement, which, no matter how valuable the cats’ contribution might turn out to be, would keep their human friends totally uptight for the rest of the Christmas season, keep everyone on edge waiting for unseen complications-or for disaster. Would increase everyone’s stress level at a time that should be restful, restorative, and filled only with Christmas joy.
For some reason, Clyde thought, laughing at himself, he had innocently imagined a quiet Christmas this year. Lowkey suppers and relaxed parties with close friends. He and Ryan snuggled before the fire on Christmas Eve sipping eggnog and opening small, personal gifts while the tomcat dozed idly beside the hearth, content with the season and with his own Christmas eggnog.
Well, hell, Clyde thought. Living with Joe Grey, he should know that kind of holiday was not to be.
But then, when he glanced at the kit, expecting to see the wild flame of challenge that crime always generated blazing in her yellow eyes, he saw, instead, only a puzzled frown. Kit’s full and suspicious attention was keenly on Lucinda. And when Clyde looked into the kitchen where Lucinda was talking with the dispatcher at Molena Point PD, it was Lucinda’s eyes that burned with challenge-Lucinda Greenlaw looked as excited, and as sly and secretive, as the tortoiseshell kit ever had.
15
J OE GREY DIDN’T learn about the Greenlaws’ intruder until Clyde got home late that night. When Clyde ’s car pulled in, the tomcat was asleep in his tower, among the cushions, lying on his back with his four paws in the air. The reflection of moving car lights flashing across the tower’s conical ceiling woke him. He blinked and flipped over among the pillows, his nose to the glass, looking down to the drive to make sure that it was really Clyde pulling in.
Joe’s private, cat-size tower, rising four feet above the roof of the second floor, with its unique hexagonal shape and operable, full-length windows, was a masterpiece of luxury and, Dulcie said, ostentation. Joe disagreed about that-the tower was, in his mind, simply a utilitarian source of comfort, unimpeded view, weather control, and fast and easy access to the rooftops. To hell with ostentation.
As he listened to the purr of Clyde ’s antique roadster, wild barking erupted from the back patio, where Ryan’s big Weimaraner had spent the evening. Joe rose and stretched, then lay down again, listening as Clyde and Ryan let Rock in the house, laughing and greeting him. He listened to kitchen noises as they made coffee and fixed a snack, and soon the smell of coffee rose up to him. Outside his tower, the night wind increased, fitfully shaking the glass and hustling the oaks and pines against the shingles, and smelling sharply of rain. He didn’t head downstairs-as lonely as he felt at that moment and as fond as he was of Ryan, he could not talk in front of her. If he went down, as out of sorts as he was, the enforced silence would leave him even more irritable.