There was nothing lamblike about the big dog. A standard poodle was not a cuddly playtoy Her daughter had called him Lamb when he was six weeks old, a small bundle of fluff then, and the name had stuck. Now, Lamb's long aristocratic head and his muscular body beneath his short-clipped, tightly curled black coat showed clearly his power and dignity. Susan felt bad, sometimes, that he had never been taught the formal rituals of retrieving, of gathering in game birds, working with a human hunter on California's lakes and rivers, that he had never been allowed to develop the instinctive art that ran so powerfully in his blood. He was a companion dog, forced to trade his wild yearnings for home and fireside.
Around them as they headed home, the village was waking, cottage lights popping on behind curtained windows, the smell of freshly brewed coffee warming the damp sea air. She never tired of the village's diverse architecture, the small houses and shops an amazing and congenial mix of Bavarian, Swiss, Mexican adobe, California contemporary, Mediterranean, Victorian, all softened by the richly flowering gardens for which Molena Point was known, and by the dark and sprawling oaks and cypress trees that stood guard over the crowded rooftops. Somewhere ahead, a dog barked counterpoint to the sea's steady thunder. She'd had a lovely, quiet ramble with Lamb along the empty shore, looking away where sea and sky stretched forever, and she felt at peace. She had no clue that when she arrived home, her life would be precipitously altered.
Hurrying up Ocean between the shops, she saw only a few other dog walkers, saw none of her dog-owning friends; nor did she encounter the quiet New Yorker, Lenny Wells, and his sad-faced dalmatian. The young man was new to Molena Point; she had stopped with him for coffee several times, sitting at a sidewalk table, their two dogs lying quietly by their feet. She had suggested several congenial groups that Lenny might join, to get acquainted. He seemed so shy and uncertain; that was little enough that she could do to help him get settled. He was years her junior, quiet and respectful, very gentle with the young dog.
By the time Susan and Lamb reached home they had done two miles, a distance that Lamb considered trifling, little more than a warm-up. They were back at the house at 6:40, the sky cream and silver above them over the Molena Point hills. Starting in through the side door of the garage, Lamb growled and lunged through ahead of her, his ears back, his teeth gleaming as fierce as the fangs of an attacking wolf.
Alarmed, she pulled him back forcefully, shut the door, and moved away, speaking softly to Lamb. Someone was there, or had been-the big dog was not given to flights of fancy. Snatching up a sturdy, five-gallon plastic pot that had come from the nursery, she turned it over beneath the garage window and stood on it to peer in.
She no longer kept her car parked inside; it had sat out on the drive since she'd converted the double garage into a neat and efficient workroom for the storage and shipping of yard sale purchases. Looking in, she caught her breath.
The three big work tables had been overturned, and one of the legs broken. Shelves were ripped from the wall, cupboard doors torn off-and all the carefully cataloged treasures that she and her friends had purchased at countless yard and estate sales lay broken and scattered across the concrete.
Stepping down from the makeshift stool, feeling more angry than afraid, she retrieved the short-handled shovel from where she'd leaned it against the wall last evening when she'd finished planting some lavender bushes in the side yard. Holding the shovel like a battering ram, and speaking quietly to the growling poodle, she flung open the garage door.
2
Like a colony of pack rats," Joe Grey said. "Such an appetite for other people's possessions, it's enough to make a possum laugh." He turned to look at Dulcie. "Humans are as bad as you, when you steal the neighbors' silk undies."
If a cat could blush, Dulcie's furry face would be red. She didn't like him to laugh at her. But it was true, she'd been driven by a longing for cashmere and silk, for soft, pretty garments, since she was a kitten. Such a keen desire that she would slip out of the house in the small hours, and into her neighbors' homes, pressing in through a partially open window or swinging on the knob of a back door left unlocked. Slipping toward the bedroom, she would depart moments later dragging a silk teddy in her teeth or a sheer stocking or a bright, soft sweater, taking each lovely item home to roll on, to sleep on, to rub her face against. And how else was she to have the lovely garments that she so coveted, except to borrow them? She was a cat. She couldn't indulge in shopping sprees at Lord & Taylor's or I. Magnin's. She only wanted to enjoy those treasures for a little while before the neighbors came to retrieve them. Well, she had kept Wilma's good watch for over a year, hidden under the claw-footed bathtub.
As the sun rose beyond the cats' leafy treetop, the crowded roofs of Molena Point caught gleams and flashes of light. Shingled roofs and red tile, sharp peaks and slanted were soon all aglow. The time was not yet 7:00. In the distance a dog barked, an insistent staccato against the soft pounding of the sea. The morning air smelled of pine, and iodine, and of multitudes of small, dead shell-creatures. Out over the Pacific, dawn was reflected from the sea like burnished metal. But beyond lay black rain clouds-they might blow away north toward San Francisco or might creep in over the village and rain on the McLearys' sale.
Slow-moving traffic filled the narrow street as new arrivals tried to find parking places, so many eager shoppers that the lane was choked with vehicles. And the lawn was crowded with folks wandering among borrowed church tables piled with toys and clothes and baby garments, with bent silverware, outdated golf clubs, tarnished jewelry, with dented cookpots and old handbags and faded Christmas decorations. Between the tables stood scarred dressers, beds, breakfast tables, and toy chests.
Watching folks argue over prices or haul away chairs and tables and broken toys, jamming their newly acquired treasures into cars and SUVs and pickups, watching all the little dramas, Joe and Dulcie, replete with a breakfast of wharf rat and young rabbit, were of much of the same frame of mind as a human couple who, after a satisfying supper, had settled down in a front row at the theater to be entertained.
"The McLearys must have cleaned out not only their own attic," Dulcie said, "but the houses of all their cousins and uncles." Indeed, the Molena Point McLearys were a large clan. "An anthropological treasure trove, an artifactual record of four generations of McLeary family history."
"Four generations of bad taste. A microcosm of useless human consumerism."
She stared at him.
He shrugged his sleek gray shoulders. "Look around you.
Abandoned projects, thrown-away intentions, broken dreams, soured ambitions. Relics of human disenchantment."
Easing his position on the branch, he looked at her with tomcat superiority. "You don't see a cat going off on a dozen projects-golf, snooker, Chinese checkers, paint by numbers, needlework, photograph albums. You don't see a cat tossing away one craze after another. Look at the wasted time and effort, to say nothing of the wasted money. And then they have to get rid of it all. And their neighbors grab and snatch, until their own closets are bulging."