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THE TORTOISESHELL kit stood high up Hellhag Hill, above the cave, atop the pale rocks that flanked it. Joe and Dulcie saw her at once as they came up from the village onto the grassy verge along Highway One. The moment she spied them she lashed her bushy tail as if she had been impatiently waiting. The two cats, watching her, hurried across the empty two-lane highway and started up the hill. After the rain, the tall grass through which they padded was fresh and sweet-scented, alive with insects buzzing and rustling. Over their heads, sparrows and finches zoomed, diving low in the watery sunshine.
“Do you suppose,” Dulcie said, slitting her eyes, “do you suppose it was Dirken on the hill last night?”
“Why Dirken?”
“He’s the one doing all the digging and tearing the house apart. Whatever he’s looking for, did Newlon and Pedric find it? And Dirken went after them? And did he think he’d killed Pedric, did he leave Pedric for dead?”
Pedric was still in the hospital, while Newlon waited in the morgue, duly tagged and examined by forensics. The official word was that he had died from a blow to the head, not from an accidental fall. Fragments of Molena Point’s soft, creamy stone, which was used all over the village for fireplaces and garden walls, had been found in Newlon’s abraded scalp, deep in the wound. The specific piece of stone that killed him had not been retrieved. The natural outcroppings on Hellhag Hill were granite.
“Interesting, too,” Dulcie said, “that Cara Ray buttered up Newlon, then dumped him, and now he’s dead.”
She paused, glancing at Joe.“Maybe Dirken’s looking for a will, to override Shamas’s trust and leave the house to him? If he is, he wouldn’t want Newlon and Pedric snooping around.”
“Not likely there’s a will,” Joe said, “with the trust. Not in California, not according to Clyde. He says it isn’t needed-unless you’re disgustingly rich, as Clyde puts it.”
“Well, but Shamas could have written one?”
“I suppose. What are you thinking?”
Dulcie flicked her ears.“Could Shamas have been fool enough to write Cara Ray into a will-and stupid enough to tell her?”
Joe smiled.“And to hurry the process along, she slips out on the deck of theGreen Ladythat night and pushes him in the drink.”
“Possible,” she said. “Would Cara Ray be strong enough to push a man overboard?”
“So someone helps her; she say’s she’ll cut him in.”
“Newlon,” Dulcie said. “Or Sam. Take your pick.”
She glanced up to where the kit waited.“Sheisimpatient.” The dark kit was fidgeting from paw to paw, her ears back, her yellow eyes gleaming. The cats broke into a gallop, leaping through the grass; they were nearly to the cave when they crouched suddenly, low to the earth.
They felt the vibration first through their paws, like an electrical charge. At the same instant the insects vanished, and all around them flocks of birds exploded straight up into the sky.
The jolt hit. Shook them hard. As if the world said,Iam the power.They saw the kit sprawl, clinging to the boulder.
Then the earth was still.
The three cats waited.
Nothing more happened. The insects crept out and began to chirp again. The birds spiraled down and dived into the grass, snatching up bugs. An emboldened house finch sang his off-key cacophony as if he owned earth and sky.
And the cats saw that someone was on the road below them. Down on the black ribbon of asphalt, two small figures were rising-Wilma helping Lucinda up, dusting themselves off.
The two women stood talking, then climbed quickly toward the outcropping where they liked to sit-where the kit had been poised. Where, now, the rocks were empty.
The two cats moved away, intent on finding the kit-they hadn’t gone far when the little mite was right before them, stepping out of the grass.
“I found him,” she said softly. “A white trailer with a brown door.”
“How do you know it’s the killer’s?” Joe said.
“He left his shoes on the stoop. I can smell the blood. He wiped them with something wet, but I can still smell it. He washed his shirt and hung it on a chair, where the sun shines in through the screen.Itstill smells of blood.”
They rose and followed her up the hill, across the trailer park’s brick walks, across a narrow, scruffy bed of poppies and beneath half a dozen trailers, trotting between their greasy wheels.
“This one,” the kit said, slipping underneath, losing herself among the shadows.
Joe sniffed at the wheels and then at the little set of steps, flehming at the man’s scent. “It might be Fulman; I never got a good smell of him. He’s always with other people.”
“He was alone with Cara Ray,” Dulcie said.
“In the middle of a geranium bush, Dulcie, everything smells like geraniums.”
“Well, if-” she began, then hushed as footsteps drummed overhead. They heard water running, heard a man cough.
Padding up the narrow steps, Joe peered in through the screen men backed away.
“It’s Fulman,” he said. “In his undershirt and shorts, eating a salami sandwich.” He turned to look at the kit. “You sure it was that man?”
“That man. He hit the old man. He makes my fur bristle.”
“Well, we can’t toss the trailer with him in it. Have to hope he goes out.”
Moving back down the hill, the three cats settled in the grass some way above Wilma and Lucinda. The two women had brought a picnic lunch; the cats could smell crab salad. Licking whiskers, they watched Wilma unwrap a small loaf of French bread and take a bottle of wine from her worn picnic basket.
Softly, Dulcie said,“Tell us why the other cats are so shy-and so angry.”
“Angry because they can’t go home,” the kit said. “Because the shaking earth drove them out. Afraid to go down again.”
Joe frowned.“Down again, where?” He looked toward the cave. “You didn’t come from-in there?”
“From a place like it. I was little, I hardly remember. The earth shook. The clowder ran and ran-through the dark-up onto hills like these. That way,” she said, gazing away south where the coastline led wild and endless along the ragged edge of the continent.
“We were in a city when I was little. Somewhere down the coast. We ran from packs of dogs at the edge of a city. I remember garbage in alleys. I could never keep up. My mother was dead. The big cats didn’t care about me, but I didn’t want to be alone. I knew we were different from other cats,and I didn’t want to be in those alleys alone.
“We went away from the garbage place and through the city to the hills. The others would never wait for me. I ran and ran. I ate grasshoppers and lizards and bugs, and sometimes a butterfly. I never learned to hunt right; no one wanted to show me.
“Then the world shook again, and we ran again. We came here. I was bigger then, I could keep up. Or I’d find them the next morning when they stopped to sleep.
“Hungry,” she said. “Always hungry.” She glanced down the hill at the picnickers, sniffing the sweet scent of their luxurious meal.
Dulcie licked the kit’s ear.
“Well, that was how we came here. Along that cliff and these hills. They told me, home is here, too. They mean the cave. They mean it will lead to the same place the other cave did. They said we could go home again into this hill if the earth would stop shaking. They want to go in, and down to that place, but they are afraid.” She placed her black-mottled paw softly over Dulcie’s bigger paw. “I do not want to go there; it is all elder there.”
“Elder,” Dulcie said. “Elder and evil, as in the old stories.”
And at that instant, as if the small cat had summoned demons, another quake hit.
First the quick tingling through their paws as the world gathered itself. Then the jolt. It threw Dulcie and the kit against a boulder, knocked Joe sideways. Dulcie kicked at the air and flipped over. The kit crept to her, and she gathered the little one close, licking her.