Nor had Dillon and Mae Rose invented this story together. The two hadn't met each other until today, yet both were possessed with this fixation that Jane Hubble had met with foul play.
"I want to help her, Joe. Somehow I'm going to help her."
"Dulcie, we're cats, not social workers. We weren't born to help little old ladies, we were born to hunt and fight and make kittens."
"Fine. You go make some kittens." She lashed her tail, her green eyes blazing. "You do what you were born to do, act like a stupid tomcat. And I'll do what I think is right."
"Dulcie-"
"You were eager enough to solve Samuel Beckwhite's murder."
"But there hasn't been a murder."
Her ears went flat, her whiskers tight to her face, her tail lashing. "And you're anxious enough, now, to spy on that harmless woman burglar just because she loves pretty things."
"Come on, Dulcie. The woman is stealing." Dulcie's logic-female logic-drove him crazy.
"I suppose," she said, "it makes no difference that Jane Hubble isn't the only one who's missing. That there are five other patients who were moved to Nursing and haven't been seen again."
"That old woman ought to write for Spielberg. And you heard what Eula said, that some of those people have been seen-the one with the cataract operation, and the man who spent all afternoon with his attorney."
She gave him a dark look. She didn't have an answer; but that didn't change her mind. Exasperated, he stared down the hill toward the lights of the village.
She said, "If I can help you stalk the cat burglar, which I think is stupid, then you could help me search for Jane Hubble."
"If it's so stupid, why did you read all those news clippings? Why…?"
"Will you help me look? It's safer with two," she said softly.
Joe knew he was defeated. She always knew how to push some vulnerable button.
"For starters, I want to search the Nursing wing." She assessed his mood through narrowed eyes. "If we can get into Nursing," she said softly, "we can see for ourselves if Jane and those other old people are there. And that should settle it." She lay down in the grass watching him, all gentleness now, quiet and submissive.
He was beaten. She wasn't going to let go of this; when she got her claws in like this, and then turned gentle, she'd hang on until her quarry-him-was reduced to shreds. "All right," he said, ignoring the uneasy feeling in his belly. "Okay, we'll give it a try."
She smiled and rolled over, and leaped up. Sooner than he liked they had licked the last dribbles of mouse blood off their whiskers and were headed across the hills for Casa Capri.
Trotting across the grassy slopes between scattered houses, as he looked past Dulcie, down the hill, watching the tiny lights of a car leave the police station, heading away toward the beach, he thought about Dillon Thurwell.
Dillon had joined Pet-a-Pet so she could look for Jane Hubble; she had dyed her hair so the nurses wouldn't recognize her. And maybe because of Dillon more than any other reason, he'd let himself get hooked into a predawn break-and-enter that could get plenty hairy. He thought of getting locked into that hospital wing among half a dozen antagonistic nurses, nurses who could wield a variety of lethal medical equipment, and he could almost feel the needles jabbing.
The doll lay in a small dark enclosure just large enough to accommodate her eight-inch height. Her blond hair was matted. Her blue eyes, dulled by grime, stared blindly into the blackness. Her little hands were raised as if she reached but there was no one to pick her up and cuddle her or to examine the knife slit across her belly beneath her little dress.
Her porcelain skin, which had once been clear and translucent, was grayed with dust. Her flower-sprigged blue-and-white frock, made of the finest sheer lawn, and her white lacy slip, all hand-sewn with tiny, even seams, now hung yellowed and limp. And beneath her pretty dress, where her cloth body had been ripped, the three-inch gash had been sewn up again with ugly green thread in large, ragged stitches jabbing any which way into her white muslin body, and the thread knotted with a heavy, lumpy closure.
The walls around the doll were of thick oak, and the container bound outside with brass corners. Someone had hidden the doll well. If anyone had ever loved this doll, she lay forgotten, abandoned. If someone should find her there, they might have no notion of her significance-she was simply a grimy old doll ready for the trash or the Goodwill. Very likely, if she had a tale to tell, no one would know or care. No one would question who had ripped her apart and sewn her up again, or question why. And if there were significant fingerprints remaining on her porcelain face or arms, who would think to look for such a thing? She was not, at this juncture, a clue to any known crime.
17
As the cats crouched on the moonlit hillside, above them the high grass stems thrust black and sharp as knives against the moon. Through the grass they looked down onto the rooftops of Casa Capri, the sloping tiles struck into patterns of curving shadow. Far down beyond the retirement villa and beyond the village roofs, the moon's path cut like a yellow highway across the dark Pacific.
Nothing moved. No wind. The night was still and bright.
Just above the main building of Casa Capri, the rows of small retirement cottages climbed up toward them, their moonlit roofs gleaming pale, their little streets lit at intervals by the decorative lamps spaced along the winding lanes. But the cottages themselves were dark. No light shone, no curtain stirred where retirees slept. The time was 4:00 A.M.
The main building of Casa Capri was dark at the front. Along the sides, a thin glow from the softened hall lights seeped out from the residents' rooms. At the back of the building, in the Nursing wing, bright lights burned. One imagined sleepless patients suffering late-night changes of IV bottles, or perhaps restless with pains and discomforts and with the fears which can accompany old age.
Glancing at each other, the cats slipped on down through the grass, down between the dark cottages, and across the little narrow streets. Pausing in a geometrically neat bed of pansies, they studied the Nursing wing.
The windows in Nursing were high and securely closed, as if perhaps those shut-in patients disliked the cool night air. There was no access there, through those windows. They had crossed the last street into the shadow of the building when suddenly a clashing explosion of sound hit them, loud as the crash of wrecking cars. Metal clanging against metal. They crouched belly down, staring wide-eyed, frozen to the earth, ready to run.
But then they identified the harsh metallic music of a radio booming out from the Nursing wing, a blare of Spanish brass, of trumpets blasting and snorting, and they crept on again, ears tight to their heads, slinking.
The next instant someone turned the volume down, and the noise subsided to a nearly tolerable decibel level.
Eight cars stood in the parking lot, their metal bodies pale with dew from having been parked most of the night. Not a car among them was more than two years old, and they were all top-of-the-line Buicks, Chevys, even two Mercedeses. Skirting the parking lot, the cats headed for the Care Unit, and there, slipping in through the wrought-iron fence that guarded the little terraces, they searched for an open glass door, for access to a bedroom and the hall beyond.
Most of the glass doors were closed. The two that had been left open a few inches were secured in place by a bar, and the screens were latched. As if the occupants worried seriously about human intruders scaling the six-foot fence and strangling them in their beds.
The cats could hear the soft breathing of the shadowy sleepers, but some of the occupied beds looked hardly disturbed, the covers nearly flat and only a small, thin mound where the sleeper lay. Other occupants had tangled their covers and twisted them or thrown them on the floor. One old man, wrapped in a cocoon of blankets, snored like a bulldog with bad tonsils.