“Kit…,” Lucinda began, holding down the master lock.
“Please, Lucinda. You’ve brought us this far; we’re as safe now as we ever can be. You can’t-”
“I know,” Lucinda said sadly. “We’ve had this argument before. I can’t run your life; I’m overprotective, and you can’t live that way.”
“Let them go,” Pedric said.
Lucinda flipped the lock. Kit leaped out the door, and Cotton beside her. Only Dulcie paused, looking at the bright tears on Lucinda’s cheeks. Then she, too, was gone.
But away among the rocks Kit reared up to look back. “We’ll be fine,” she whispered. “Go home, Lucinda. Go before the uniforms see you and come asking questions.” And, spinning around, she followed Dulcie and Cotton away fast, streaking up the hill toward the jagged, fallen walls that loomed above them against the dark night sky.
On the second floor of the ruined mansion where the front wall had crumbled away, the big, old-fashioned nursery stood open to the night like the stage in an abandoned theater. Beside a broken rocking horse, Willow and Coyote crouched, looking down the black hills, watching yet another car move up the road without lights. Already, half a dozen cars were parked along the shoulder, dark and still. Police cars. The two cats watched this car stop, saw the door open and a white cat streak out beside two darker companions.
“Cotton!” Willow hissed. “That can’t be Cotton. Riding in a car? But…that’s Kit and Dulcie.” They watched the three cats race up toward them and vanish among the tumbled stones. “Cotton went to find Kit and Dulcie?” Willow whispered, ashamed that she had doubted him. “When we saw Wilma through that window, I thought he ran away to hunt, that he didn’t want to be bothered. But he-
“He went to find them,” she said. “Even though he hates humans and fears human places. He hates that village where we were captive-but he went there, all alone.” Admiration for the white tom filled Willow. Beside her, Coyote was silent; and when Willow looked at him, he was scowling. Willow’s eyes widened. Was he jealous? She had never known Coyote to be jealous.
But there was so much else to think about, so much happening, first that car going over the side and the thin young woman scrambling out and climbing up to the road and running, and then the silver-haired woman following her more slowly, and limping. The young one called Violet seemed very afraid. Her every movement sent messages of fear, like the movements of a cornered mouse. And then the cop cars had come, and parked, never turning on lights.
“There,” she said, glimpsing Violet. Spinning around, she raced through the cluttered nursery to the back where the wall still stood intact. Leaping to the sill of a broken window, she looked deeper into the interior of the ruined estate. “Violet’s headed for that old trailer, the place she goes when that man has beaten her.”
“She thinks she’s safe there,” Coyote said, “She doesn’t know he watches her go in there.”
“Here comes Wilma,” Willow said softly, “following her. We have to tell them those men know about that place, that they will find them there.”
“We can’t talk to humans!” Coyote stared at her, shocked.
“We’ll tell Dulcie and Kit, they’ll tell them…” But even as she spoke they heard a car coming from the woods along the horse trail, heard the rattle of that rusted, open car, and there was no time to find Dulcie; Willow leaped away down the broken stairs and out the back, heading for the old trailer. Behind her, Coyote didn’t move, he stood staring after her. Glancing back, Willow gave him a scornful look, and slid away into the ivy.
Wilma moved warily and painfully downhill, approaching the derelict mansion, looking for Violet’s pale, swift shape, imagining her flashing away like a ghost among the ruins to some secret hiding place. The Pamillon estate had remained without repair for more than a generation, awaiting disposition of a title so tangled among two dozen heirs that even a vast array of attorneys seemed unable to sort out the many wills and trusts in a way that would establish legal succession. Pausing to get her bearings, shielding the flashlight and switching it on just long enough to be sure she wasn’t headed for a sinkhole, she flicked it off again, startled when she glimpsed Violet’s thin white shirt vanish among the jagged walls. Quickly she followed.
In the shadows of a collapsed garden shed and tangled ivy trellis, the girl stood unmoving, as ethereal as a ghost; Wilma approached her, expecting her to run.
She didn’t run, she stood shaking, white as paper in Wilma’s shielded light. Wilma studied her thin face and then took her icy hand. “Come on, Violet. We have to hide. Show me where.”
Violet stared into the shielded light. “There’s a place, but there are spiders and-”
“If we can hide there,” Wilma said, listening to the faint rumble of a distant, ragged engine approaching from the south, “then get on with it! They’re coming.”
Violet listened to the Jeep crunching over gravel and rocks and brushing through the trees, breaking branches. She stiffened when it did not turn up the hill toward the house but continued on through the rubble, heading directly toward them.
“Move it,” Wilma snapped. “Now!”
Violet spun, and ran.
26
W illow and Coyote watched the two women slip quickly in among the vines that hid the old trailer. The shelter stood in such a tangle that only a cat might find it, prowling the rubble as they had, a hunting cat slipping through the heavy growth. They didn’t know how Violet had discovered it-but that man knew about it, too. More than once he had followed her there; months earlier he had watched her slip in there to hide, had waited for her to leave, and then he had pushed into the mildew-stinking trailer to see where she’d been.
The next time she went there the cats had expected him to go in and drag her out, but he didn’t. He watched her, then turned away smirking in a silent, ugly laugh. As if, once he knew her secret, he meant to wait until just the right time to sneak up on her and-what? Thinking about that made them shiver; they feared that sour, sneaky man.
Now they watched the two women disappear quickly beneath the ivy and the metal roof, escaping from the Jeep. Did they think they were safe? A voice behind Willow made her spin around.
“Did she get away?” Cotton said softly. “Did the silver-haired lady get away?”
Willow leaped at him, happily licking his ears. “Did you bring help? Did you bring the cops? There are cops all over, sitting in their dark cars. But how…?” Then behind him she saw Dulcie and Kit, and she leaped at them, too. “Quick, you have to tell them. Tell Wilma to run, that the Jeep is coming and those men know where they are. Oh please-” But Dulcie and Kit and Cotton were three streaks racing into the old, hidden trailer.
The trailer was dark inside and smelled of rot and mildew; the door Wilma had come through flopped on one hinge, hanging out into the mat of vines. Safely inside, she shielded the flashlight with her cupped hands and switched it on.
“Where’d you get that?” Violet said.
“In the glove compartment.” She shone the light around the tiny trailer, across surfaces heavy with dirt and rust and rat droppings, over damp wood spongy with rot and smelling sour; everything was thick with mold. Who knew how many varieties of lethal spores Violet breathed in here. If she came here often, no wonder she looked pale and sick-though more likely it was the stress of living in fear of her husband that left the girl so frail.
Going in ahead of Wilma, Violet had curled up at one end of a single bed that was built between a minuscule kitchen counter and a closet that held a smelly toilet. The bed was covered with a filthy spread and smelled sour. Wilma sat down on a narrow bench, one of a pair flanking a small table that had been folded out from the wall and was supported by a flimsy leg. The trailer, cooler than the outdoors, rang with the sounds of crickets, dozens of crickets hidden in the dark around them celebrating the hot, humid night. Wilma sat with her elbows on the table, her chin on her hands, trying to quiet her fear, ignoring the pain in her leg and hip, encouraging her pounding heart to settle to an easier rhythm. A demanding mewl brought her up startled, swinging around to the open door.