Setting down her groceries on the hall table, she snatched the vial of pepper spray from her purse and walked slowly through the apartment opening each door, pushing back the two shower curtains, checking the window locks and looking in the closets. She even opened the wall bed in her office.
There was no one; the rooms were empty, the windows locked as she had left them. Quickly she put away her groceries, all the while listening.
Returning to her study where she'd left the wall bed down, she opened a package of new white sheets and made it up, although Lucinda and Pedric wouldn't arrive until Sunday evening. Covering the taut sheets with a thick, flowered quilt, she cleared off her oversize wicker desk, stashing papers and samples in her bedroom. She always brought work home, room layouts, catalogs and price lists, and the heavy books of fabric and carpet samples.
In the living room she cleared away the week's newspapers that she'd hardly had time to look at, then tossed the pillows from the window seat into the dryer for a good freshening. A few short, dark hairs clung to one of the pillows.
A friend had brought her poodle over a few weeks ago, a small black toy that had snuggled on the window seat. She hadn't thought that poodles could shed, but maybe she was wrong. She removed the hairs with a damp sponge and tossed the pillow in with the others.
On her way to the trash with the papers, an article caught her attention. Pulling that section out to read later, she laid it on the kitchen counter-something about a jewel robbery. Shoving the rest of the papers in the trash and straightening up the kitchen, she thought how good it would be to see Lucinda and Pedric.
How excited the old couple had been, planning their tour through the Cat Museum's gardens and galleries. Picking up the phone, she made lunch reservations for Monday at an elegant Chinese restaurant near the museum, a small place that she thought would please them. She was so looking forward to their visit, this elderly couple with their twinkling eyes and dry wit, this pair of eighty-year-old newlyweds with their Old-World knowledge about cats that made her want to know them better. And she had to smile. How thrilled the kit was that the Greenlaws would soon return to the village to stay. Lucinda and Pedric were the kit's true family, and now at last she would have a home with them, in a brand-new house atop Hellhag Hill.
The cave within the hill that frightened Joe Grey seemed not to have dampened the resolve of the Greenlaws to live there. They connected that dark fissure in some way to the ancient Celtic tales they collected, to the myths that had been handed down from their ancestors. The day after they were married they had bought the entire hill, some twenty acres.
Kate had, when she first saw the cave, been as intrigued as the kit, wanting to go down into it. But then she had grown frightened, and had ended up leaving quickly. On later visits to the village she had stayed away from that part of the hills.
When she had the apartment in order for the Greenlaws, she made a cup of tea, then pulled on a warm sweater over her jeans and walked up Russian Hill to the Cat Museum, wanting one more look at her grandfather's diaries. Maybe to winnow out some overlooked clue to her heritage. The afternoon was cool and sunny, with a brilliance one could find, she thought, only in San Francisco, the sky a clear deep blue behind a scattering of fast-running white clouds. When she looked down the hill behind her, the shadows of the crowded buildings angled crisply across the pale sidewalks; the dark bay was scattered with whitecaps, the bridges glinting with afternoon sun. The breeze off the bay tugged at her like a live thing. She kept thinking about the dark hairs on the cushion of her window seat; she had found, when she cleaned out the lint catcher of the dryer, a wad of straight, black hairs, not really like poodle hairs.
Had Consuela brought that cat to the city? Joe Grey had said only that Azrael had been the instigator of the bizarre effort-the dismally failed effort, she thought with satisfaction. Why would Consuela have brought the cat here?
Entering the wrought-iron gates of the Cat Museum, she stepped into a world that seemed totally removed from the city. Between the various gallery buildings, its gardens were as lush and mysterious as the secret garden of her favorite childhood book. The cats who lived there watched her from where they sunned themselves lying on the low walls or atop various pieces of cat sculpture. Today, she did not linger in the gardens, but went directly to the desk to sign out McCabe's diaries.
She spent several hours in the reading room but found nothing she'd missed before. From his early years as a stevedore, then as a building contractor and newspaper columnist, through his marriage, to the weeks just before the earthquake in which he died, he had written what he observed of the city but offered no fact about himself. Kate could not even find his wife's name. Several entries mentioned their baby girl, but nowhere did McCabe write her name. Had he had some superstition, some objection to setting down the names of those close to him? Or had there been deletions in the journals, pages removed? With such short entries, that might be easy to do, and sometimes the flow did seem disjointed. The passages to which she kept returning were vague: McCabe's occasional offhand mentions of the other place, or those grim kingdoms, and one day till I make that journey? These, and mentions of not liking to be shut in, not liking a low, heavy sky-and of dreams that disturbed him in the small hours when he prowled sleepless.
But those were dreams, perhaps nightmares. Not facts about his life. I dreamed last night of a granite sky lit by a green haze … I have dreamed of caverns falling, and of the echoing cries of beasts in a world I have never seen…
Kate left the museum frightened. She must give up the search. Whatever lay in the tangle of her heritage was not for her, she had learned nothing about her parents and she was only upsetting herself.
Arriving home, she meant to put on her robe, fix herself a drink, have a light supper, and tuck up on the couch with a book. When she turned into the kitchen, the newspaper she had left on the counter had slid to the floor. She picked it up, puzzled.
A stain of grease darkened the article that had interested her, grease smeared across the account of a downtown jewel robbery. Frowning, she wiped the counter more thoroughly where she had earlier prepared some chicken, and wiped the paper as best she could.
The robbery had occurred ten days ago as the owner was locking up to go home. When he stepped outside and turned to lock the door, two men pinned him against the building demanding to be let in. He grabbed one of them, and there was a fight. Apparently someone, perhaps a neighbor, called the police. The store owner, James Ruse, said it was just seconds until he heard sirens. He told reporters that as the cops belted out of their car, grabbing one man, the other seemed to go insane, jumping on Ruse and beating him. Ruse grabbed the brick he used to prop open the door on hot days and hit the man hard in the head. That didn't stop the burglar; he beat Ruse again, injured one of the cops, and escaped. Police captain Norville said it was likely the man was on drugs, that he had been almost impossible to subdue.
The article unnerved her, the city was getting so violent. She didn't understand why the police didn't shoot the man, when he had almost killed an innocent shopkeeper, had been trying to kill him. She didn't turn on the kitchen TV for the news as she usually did when she fixed her dinner, but put on a CD while she made her salad.
When she went to the refrigerator for the bowl of chicken, she saw that it was empty.
Someone had been here. Had eaten the chicken, apparently while reading the newspaper.