"Yes, both sides of a duplex." She looked at Ryan. "One is a studio, double garage underneath. The other has one bedroom, same garage arrangement."
"I'd like to see the studio," Ryan said. "Would you mind my keeping construction equipment there?"
"Not at all. It's a perfect arrangement. After dinner, you want to take a look?"
"Love to."
"So would I," said Clyde. "I haven't seen it since you painted and fixed it up."
"We're not finished with the larger one," Charlie said, watching him with interest. "Mavity's helping me. The studio side is done."
"I'd like to see the one-bedroom," Clyde said. "We're-I'm thinking of taking that offer for the house, since they built the wall of China behind me."
Joe and Dulcie exchanged a look.
"What about your own apartment building?" Charlie said.
"Those are all one-year leases, Charlie, with options to renew. You were there when I rented those units, you were still working on the outside of the building."
Charlie tried to look at him seriously, but the cats saw a sly grin creep across her freckled face, as if she could read Clyde too well. Her look seemed a mixture of jealousy, levity, and honest pleasure and relief.
How complicated humans were, Dulcie thought. A she-cat would either turn away uninterested, or would leap on her rival spitting and clawing.
But Charlie had already abandoned Clyde, he was a free agent. Dulcie watched the exchange of looks between Charlie and Harper. Charlie's leg was pressed against his under the table. Clyde didn't seem to notice, his full attention was on Ryan. He rose with her as dinner ended and as Harper and Garza headed back to the station. He escorted her out as if she were his date, handing her into his antique yellow roadster to ride the few blocks to the duplex. The kit crouched, meaning to leap down and follow, but Dulcie snatched her back.
"Let them go, Kit. We don't need to act all that eager for a car ride. No need to put too many questions in people's heads." She looked after Clyde's convertible. "Ryan Flannery is a looker. I don't think Kate will like this."
"Serve her right," Joe said, wondering how this would play out. Ryan was a beauty, all right, and apparently full of fight and determination. She seemed, in fact, the kind of human woman he most admired. Well, but so was Charlie. Determined and feisty.
But the woman he was really curious about, who sent Joe leaping from the wall and snaking away up the street between pedestrians' legs, was Vivi Traynor. Why had she practically run from the restaurant to avoid either Detective Garza or his niece Ryan Flannery?
Heading across the darkening village dodging tourists' shoes, the three cats' eyes caught light from shop windows and from passing cars. The sky above them was heavy with cloud behind the black silhouettes of oak and pine trees. Above the cats, a little bat darted over the treetops, squeaking its high-pitched sonar. Dulcie, hurrying along beside Joe, puzzled over Vivi Traynor's hasty retreat but also kept thinking about Traynor's play and about the research that Wilma had done for him.
Wilma had read her some of the research that came from the mission archives, before she sent it to Traynor. Apparently one of the priests knew about Catalina's letters and wrote about them in his journal. The Ortega-Diaz ranch wasn't far from the mission. "That priest wrote that Catalina made little paintings on the letters-of the ranch, of branding, whatever they do with cattle. How strange," she said, "the way humans collect and record history."
"How else would they do it?" Joe said sensibly.
"I don't know. All the letters and journals and all kinds of old records woven together to make a pattern of the past. To a human, that may seem dull. I think it's like making magic, to be able to bring the dead past alive."
Joe stared at her. "You're talking just like the kit," he said rudely.
Hurt, she glanced back at the kit, who had stopped to paw at a snail. "Sometimes," Dulcie said, "I feel like the kit." And she turned away from Joe.
But he pressed against her, licking her ear. "That's why I love you," he said softly. "Because you see not only the rat to hunt but also the flowers where it's crouched."
She looked at him, her eyes wide, then gave him a nuzzling purr. Sometimes this tomcat wasn't so rough and uncaring. Sometimes he truly surprised her. And in a little while, she said, "Hundred-and-fifty-year-old letters from California history with sketches of the period should be worth a bundle, Joe. Maybe Traynor's looking for them himself."
"Traynor or Vivi? It was Vivi who followed Casselrod when he snatched the white chest."
"If Traynor wants the letters, why would he put them in the play so everyone would know about them? So other people would start looking?"
"Maybe he planned to have found them already before the time the play was produced." Joe leaped to the top of a fence and down the other side. He watched Dulcie and the kit drop down beside him. "If Elliott and Vivi are still having dinner somewhere, and if we're fast, we can be inside their cottage before they ever get home." Joe's yellow eyes blazed. "I want to know more about Vivi, about both the Traynors."
10
Trotting single file along a twisted oak branch, the three cats crossed above Elliot Traynor's roof to the high clerestory windows that looked down into the living room. Within the house, no lights burned. The Traynor's black Lincoln was not in the drive where they usually parked. Peering down through the glass, the cats could see the stone fireplace and a pale leather couch and love seat, set on a richly patterned area rug. The handsomely designed room was now strewn with items of clothing as if Vivi had wandered through undressing as she went. Joe was pawing at the sliding panels trying to open one, when car lights swept the garden. As the Lincoln turned into the drive, the cats closed their eyes so not to catch the glow like a row of miniature spotlights mounted among the shingles.
Vivi got out of the driver's side carrying a large paper bag in both hands. The cats could smell enchiladas. Elliott followed her in though the back door, and light came on in the kitchen, reflecting across the drive and illuminating the flowering shrubs, burnishing their leaves like polished copper.
Soon the cats could hear water running in the kitchen, then a metallic clatter as if silverware was being taken from the drawer.
They imagined Elliott and Vivi sitting down to Styrofoam containers heaped with enchiladas and tamales. Maybe, when the cats saw them hurry out of Lupe's, they told the waiter that they'd changed their minds and that they wanted take-out, then had waited outside for their order like any ordinary villager, lurking beyond the patio wall where they wouldn't be seen.
When the clerestory windows wouldn't open, Dulcie dropped from the roof and headed for the back door to see if it might be ajar, though she didn't relish slipping into the house that close to Vivi. Trotting through the dark garden toward the back porch, she brushed through tall stands of daisies and overgrown clumps of daylilies and yellow-flowering euryops bushes, collecting their scents on her coat. Above her, up the stone walls of the cottage, the many-paned windows remained dark, there was only that light at the back, in the small bay window that extended out from the kitchen. The spicy smell of Mexican food filled her nostrils, so strong she could taste it. She heard Vivi giggle somewhere inside, that high, irritating laugh that set Dulcie's fur on edge. Elliott said something that Dulcie couldn't make out, and Vivi snapped angrily at him, her shout coming clearly enough.
"She was with two cops. Those guys were cops. That tall skinny one is the chief. What did you expect me to do?"
Elliott's muttered reply wasn't clear. It sounded like, "… other one… didn't see the… mumble mumble…"
"Well, she would remember!" Vivi said. "One wrong word in front of the law, one little wiggle… If you run into her, you be careful. You're way too casual about this."