Senior Survival's plan for mutual security and comfort, in a world of dwindling incomes, increasing taxes, and the possibility of deteriorating health, seemed to Dulcie infinitely courageous, a bold alternative to the ladies' separate interments in retirement or convalescent homes-a plan of mutual cooperation but individual responsibility. These ladies didn't like conventional institutions.
Slowly the sun slid higher above the hills, slashing through the oak leaves into the cats' faces, making them slit their eyes. Joe's white paws and chest, and the white triangle down his nose, gleamed like snow against his smooth gray fur. As Dulcie backed along the branch, her dark stripes cloaked in shadow, she resembled a small, dark tiger. Only her green eyes caught the light. A breeze fingered into the tree, to rattle the leaves, a chill breath that, by its scent and direction, promised not rain as the marine clouds implied, but a warm day to come. Perhaps only a cat would be aware of the message-how sad that humans, trying to assess the weather, had to read barometers and listen to the questionable advice of some book-educated meteorologist hamming his way through the morning news. Such dependence left one open to innumerable misjudgments in attire-to getting one's head and feet wet; while all a cat had to do was taste the wind and feel in every fiber of his body the changes in barometric pressure.
The sun was returning to stay, no doubt of that. No more tearing March storms with winds wild enough to jerk a cat right out of his own pawprints. Spring was settling in at last, the acacia trees exploding with brilliant yellow blooms that smelled like honey. All the early flowers were opening. Village cats rolled with abandon in the gardens, and the outdoor cafes were filled with locals and tourists-a perfect spring, in the loveliest of villages. Who needed to travel the shores of Britain and France, Dulcie thought, or trek through Spain and Africa? Molena Point was so beautiful this morning that Dulcie's purrs hummed through the branches like bumblebees.
But suddenly an unease touched the cats, a foreboding that made Dulcie stiffen and sent a chill twitching down Joe Grey's spine as sharp as an electric shock.
They studied the crowd below, puzzled and alarmed, their ears flicking forward and back, every nerve on alert, as they tried to figure out what had alarmed them. They were crouched on the branch, wary and keenly predatory, when sirens sounded: a police car leaving the station, they could see beyond the treetops its red whirling beacon heading away through the village, in the same direction where, a quarter hour earlier, an ambulance had departed.
An ambulance, alone, was not uncommon. It could mean severe illness, a heart attack, the agony of a broken hip. A squad car alone could mean anything-a strayed child, a driver ramming into a tree. But the two vehicles together, the law and the medics, were inclined to mean trouble.
The cats had crouched to leap away across the roofs to have a look when Joe saw, in the street below, the source of their sudden unease. A growl rose in his throat as a petite young woman stepped out of her black Lincoln. The cats watched Vivi Traynor cross to the McLeary yard, trampling through a flower bed, shoving a child aside as she hurried to the sale tables. She was small and curvy, her black tights, plaid miniskirt, and black sweater clinging, her black hair teased into a bird's nest around her thin face, and held back with a red bow. As she rifled through assemblages of household cast-offs, the village locals, who had not yet seen the author's wife at a yard sale, watched her with interest. A portly tourist whipped out a scrap of paper as if to ask for Vivi's autograph. Did the wife of an internationally famous novelist rate the status of autographs? Certainly Vivi always attracted attention. The couple had been in town barely three weeks, Elliott Traynor having come to oversee a little theater production of his only play, an experimental form that the Gazette called innovative and exciting.
Word had it that Elliott was fighting cancer, that this theatrical production was a project he longed to enjoy while he was still able. The play was set in this area of the California coast where Molena Point now stood, and the musical score had been written by a well-known composer who made his home in the village. The cats watched Vivi wander the garden intently searching-for what? Perhaps looking for some stage prop? Slipping between a stack of used windows and a flowered couch, she performed a theatrical little hip wiggle to ease past a rusty barbecue, then giggled shrilly as she shouldered aside a portly lady tourist. The sight of her made Joe's fur twitch.
Since their arrival, Elliott Traynor had kept largely to himself as he finished the last chapters of Twilight Silver, the third novel in his historical trilogy. But Vivi had made herself known around the village, and not pleasantly-as if she enjoyed being rude to shopkeepers, as if she took pleasure in being abrupt and demanding.
The Traynors had not wanted a staff for the cottage they were renting, but had hired the cleaning service provided by Wilma Getz's redheaded niece, Charlie. Charlie tended the Traynor house herself, early each morning, then left the couple to their privacy.
Molena Point's residents, numbering so many writers and artists, were not put off by Elliott's reclusive ways. They talked among themselves about his books and about the play, waved when occasionally they saw him on the streets or in the black Lincoln, as they headed to the theater; otherwise they left him to his own devices. The presence, alone, of the prestigious writer, seemed adequate enrichment to their well-appointed lives.
But no one had warmed to Vivi.
Traynor's previous wife had died three years before. Six months later, he married Vivi, a woman forty years his junior. Besides her loud, rude ways, something else about her made the cats want to back away, hissing, a chill that perhaps only a cat would sense. Whatever reason she had for appearing this morning in the McLeary garden could only, in Joe Grey's opinion, mean trouble.
3
The light in Susan Brittain's garage was dim. Standing in the doorway, again peering into the gloom, the first rays of sun striking in past her shoulder, she searched the shadows among the overturned shelves and tables, looking for someone perhaps still crouched there among the ripped-off cupboard doors and scattered empty shipping boxes. An unwound roll of bubble wrap lay twisted across the fallen shelf units like the cast-off skin of a giant snake. Susan could see no one standing silently, waiting for her to enter. Had the vandal been after something he imagined was secured behind the cabinets? Why else would he rip them from the wall? What could he imagine she had, of enough value for him to go to all that trouble? Her instinct was to run, to get away from the house, to call the police from her neighbor's.
Was the vandal in the house somewhere? Had he broken into her home as well?
The door from the garage to the breakfast room was closed. She couldn't see whether it had been tampered with, but when she headed further inside to try the lock, Lamb lunged into her path again, snapping at her leg and growling. She backed out of the garage, her hand on his head, grateful for his protection.
She didn't want to go around to the patio entry. If someone was inside, she would be easily seen through the glass doors of the breakfast room before she could reach the front door.
Carrying the oversized plastic nursery pot from the side of the house, she stood on it again, to peer through the high windows into her bright breakfast room.
The cupboard doors stood open, their contents pulled out in a mess on the floor among the overturned dinette chairs, her watercolors jerked from their hooks, and the glass broken, her expensive ceramic pots thrown to the floor, spilling their delicate plants in heaps of black soil. Her heart was pounding so hard she felt faint. Both anger and panic blurred her vision-and fear.