But why was he chasing after phantoms? Why was he so fixated on some relationship between two bodies that had lain, for so many years, some five hundred miles apart?
Well, he'd have his first look at the Pamillon grave in the morning, Joe thought, drifting off to sleep. And who knew what he and Dulcie and Kit would find?
He'd barely closed his eyes when he blinked suddenly awake, staring into the first light of dawn filtering in through the accordion shades. Rolling over, he looked at the clock-and came wide awake. Six bells. Dulcie would pitch a fit. He'd said he'd meet her and Kit before daylight-it was a long run up the hills to the Pamillon estate. Padding lightly across the bed, trying not to wake Mike, and only momentarily waking Rock, who sighed and rolled over, Joe fled down the hall, up the stairs to Clyde 's study, and onto the desk. Leaping to a rafter, he was through his cat door and into his tower-and smack into the stern faces of two scowling lady cats.
There they sat, chill and austere, coolly assessing him, their paws together, their ears at half-mast, regarding him as they would a rude and misbehaving kitten.
"Overslept?" Dulcie said. Her sleek, brown-striped tabby coat was immaculately groomed, every hair in place, her green eyes piercing him. Beside her, Kit's long tortoiseshell fur was every which way, as if she'd had no time to groom. Kit looked at him just as impatiently as Dulcie had, lashing her fluffy tail.
He thought of all kinds of excuses: that he'd overslept because he wasn't used to sleeping in the guest room, wasn't used to sleeping with a stranger whose snores were different from Clyde 's. But neither lady looked patient enough to listen to the shortest explanation, their twin stares said, We've been waiting an hour. The sun's nearly up! Come on, Joe. Move it!
Sheepishly he slipped past them and out through the tower window to the shingled roof and took off fast across the rooftops, Dulcie and Kit running beside him.
At Ocean Avenue they scrambled down a honeysuckle vine, crossed the empty eastbound lane, and turned to race up Ocean's wide, grassy median beneath the dark shelter of its eucalyptus and cypress trees, heading for the open hills, heading for the unidentified grave.
12
ABOVE THE RACING CATS, the Molena Point hills rose green with new grass, their emerald curves bright against heavy gray clouds; the damp grass soaked the cats' paws and fur as they raced ever higher above the village. If a cat had wings, Dulcie thought, running beside Joe and Kit, we'd fly over the hills, we'd see all our haunts below us, see all our world laid out…The scattered gardens and the dark oak woods, the red roofs of Casa Capri where those helpless old people were murdered. Janet Jeannot's studio, burned down when she was killed. We'd see Mama's house where I played lost kitty to spy on her crooked son, we'd see all the houses we've tossed, finding evidence. And just up there, she thought, pausing and rearing up to look, I'd see the broom bushes where Joe and I first met, where the moment we stood so close, face-to-face, after I'd watched him in the village, the moment he was so close to me, I knew that I loved him. And there above us, she thought, swerving closer to Joe through the fresh, damp grass, there where the ruins rise up like broken towers, there's where Charlie shot the man who kidnapped her.
Soon their paws pounded through the rubble of broken stone walls where they'd once seen a cougar, the beautiful prowling cougar that might have eaten them. The cougar, Dulcie thought, glancing at Kit, who so enchanted the tattercoat that she touched him while he slept-and then ran like hell.
Up the last steep incline, racing up, they stopped at the foot of the first garden wall, broken and rough, a relic of jagged stone, beyond which the old house rose up among its tangles of half-dead oak trees. All three cats were thinking of what they would find, of the human body, lost and forgotten, a forgotten soul all alone among the decaying buildings.
Weeds grew tangled among old and dying bushes, crowding against the sides of the rambling, two-story mansion. At the front of the great house, where walls had crumbled away, the rooms stood open to the world like a stage, revealing peeling wallpaper and broken, moldering furniture: the hoary set of a macabre theatrical production that seemed about to begin, that waited for them, chill and silent-then the off-key blather of a house finch broke the spell, and from the fields beyond, the bright crystal song of a meadowlark. Then the lark's song was rudely hushed by the harsh cawing of a crow that perched ahead of them on the mossy roof, staring belligerently, his bright glare keenly accusing, his raucous voice scolding indignantly the presence of invading cats.
Rearing up, Joe eyed the big black bird. "You thought all the cats left here? You're telling us to go, too? Too bad, buddy. Come on down if you don't like the drill. We'll put an end to your misery."
Dulcie smiled. "Count me out. I'd as soon eat vulture." The crow cawed rudely. Kit studied him, lashing her fluffy tail as if she would surely eat him. But then, forgetting the nervy bird, she raced away toward the back of the mansion, toward the kitchen and the old cellars and the grotto that was their destination. Joe and Dulcie followed.
Paying attention to Willow 's directions as Charlie had repeated them, moving past the kitchen and around the house among tangles of broken walls and overgrown bushes, they trotted under tall, dirty windows that had once sparkled with candlelight and with flickering flames from the hearth.
Rounding a jutting wall, they came to the small terrace sheltered between two wings of the house, a space just large enough for a bit of garden, a moss-covered stone bench, and, perhaps at one time, an outdoor tea table and chairs, furniture that would long since have rusted away or been destroyed by storms. The terrace bricks were dark with decades of dirt and overgrown with moss. On two sides of the sheltered terrace were raised planting beds but on the third, against the house, a sinkhole opened into a crumbled cellar.
Nearer them, flanking the terrace, a weedy garden plot had been freshly dug into, the disturbed earth crisscrossed with paw prints.
As Joe and Dulcie stood looking, and scenting the earth, at the side of the terrace Kit looked into the house through cracked French doors, pressing her nose to the grimy glass. Within lay an old-fashioned bedchamber that had once been elegant. She could see a smooth stone fireplace, a cream-colored Victorian bed, a toppled dresser, a matching dressing table and little chair, and a carved dressing screen that lay fallen against the rotting silk bedspread. The bed's silk canopy hung in shreds as delicate as spiderwebs. Kit imagined an elegant woman wrapped in a diaphanous dressing gown, coming out into the garden to sip tea among the ferns and flowers where, now, the planter beds held only weeds, dead leaves, and an overgrown jasmine that had tangled itself over dead bushes.
Dulcie joined her, and the lady cats were still a moment, filled with dreams of being human ladies, Dulcie dreaming of silk and velvet garments and cashmere wraps, as she had dreamed all her life. Not until Joe huffed softly did the two give up their fantasies, and the cats began to dig in the flower bed where the earth had already been dug, Joe and Dulcie carefully pawing away the rotted leaves and earth so as not to disturb the frail bones that surely lay beneath-but Kit, in her enthusiasm, kicked out earth like a dog.
Joe stopped her. "You're destroying evidence. You know better."
She hung her head.
It was Dulcie, going slowly, with gentle paws, who soon stroked something small and rigid. She stopped digging, and delicately brushed away the earth until, at their feet, lay little dark bones clean of flesh and stained brown by the earth, seeming as frail as the bones of a long-dead bird.