Because many of the village shops had once been summer cottages, the entire village was now a tangled mix: shops, cottages, galleries, and motels, crowded together any which way. But where the hills rose above the village, the houses were newer and farther apart, with dry yellow verges between. It was here that the cats hunted. Besides the rabbits and ground squirrels, the mice and birds, there were occasional large and bad-tempered rats. Both cats carried scars from rat fights; and Joe remembered too vividly the rats in San Francisco's alleys when he was a kitten, rats that had seemed, then, as big and dangerous as Rottweilers.
It was Clyde who had rescued him from those dark alleys. He'd had a piece of luck landing with Clyde and then the two of them moving down here to Molena Point. Though if he ever admitted to Clyde how much he really did like the village, he'd never hear the last of it.
"What are you thinking?"
"That Clyde can be a damned headache."
She stared at him. "You mean about the Pet-a-Pet program? If Clyde ordered you not to go near Casa Capri, you'd be up there in the shake of a whisker."
"I wasn't thinking of… Oh, forget it."
She looked at him unblinking.
"You're going to keep at it, aren't you? Keep nagging until I agree."
"What did I say?"
"Staring a hole through my head."
"You could at least try."
He looked hard at her.
She smiled and licked his ear.
He watched her warily.
"They talk to me, Joe. That little Mrs. Rose, she tells me all kinds of secrets. I feel so sorry for her sometimes." She didn't intend to tell him all of Mae Rose's secret, but she'd like to tweak his curiosity ever so slightly.
He lay down and rolled over, crushing the grass beneath his gray shoulders. Lying upside down staring at the sky, he glanced at her narrowly. There was more to this Casa Capri business than she was saying.
She patted at a blade of grass. "Those old people need someone to tell their secrets to."
The cry of a nighthawk swept the moonlit sky, its chee chee chee rising and dropping as the bird circled, sucking up mosquitoes and gnats.
She said, "Wilma tells them stories:"
"Tells who stories?"
"The old people. Cat stories. About the Egyptian tombs and cat mummies and Egyptian hunting cats and about…"
He flipped to his feet, staring at her.
"Not about speaking cats," she said softly. "Just cat stories. She's always done story hour for the children at the library. This is no different. Both our visits, after the cats and dogs were all settled down in the old people's laps, when everyone was yawning and cozy, she told stories.
"She told the little milkmaid cat. You know, There was a little cat down Tibb's Farm, not much more'n a kitten-a little dairy maid with a face so clean as a daisy but she wanted to know too much… And all was elder there and there was a queer wind used to blow there …"
"Boring. Boring as hell. Probably the old people love that stuff."
But her look iced him right down to his claws.
"And why do they need animals to visit them, if Wilma tells them stories? Isn't that excitement enough? You don't want to overtax those old folks."
She sighed.
"Get her to read that story by Colette, the one where the cat gets pushed off the high-rise balcony, that ought to grab them."
She shivered and moved closer to him in the tall grass. They were quiet for a while, listening to the nighthawk and to the far pounding of the sea. But, thinking of Casa Capri, she felt like the little milkmaid cat. She wanted to know too much. She was certain, deep in her cat belly, that she was going to find, like the little milkmaid, that there was summat bad down there.
She could hardly wait.
5
Mae Rose had her good days, when she was able to walk slowly out onto the patio, holding on to the back of the chairs, when she could sit out there enjoying the flowers and the warm sun. But there were days when she was so shaky, when she looked back at herself from the mirror white as flour paste.
Those days she felt vague and afraid, those days she was too weak to walk at all, and had to be helped not only from her bed and to get dressed, but even into her wheelchair. Those bad days, a nurse wheeled her into the social room and through it to the dining room and helped to feed her, and she felt 120 years old.
But the times when she woke feeling strong and happy and ready for the day, she felt as good as she had at fifty. Those times she could even sew a little. Of course, she still made the doll clothes-that was nearly all she had left. All her life she'd made doll clothes, even when she was so busy working in wardrobe before the children were born. After the children came she'd left little theater, and that was when she hit on making a business of designing doll wardrobes. James had laughed at her- James had always patronized her-but she'd had a brochure printed up with pictures of her dressed dolls, and she sent carefully stitched samples of her little doll coats and dresses, too. It didn't take long before she was making enough money from her exclusive toy-store customers to dress herself and their three girls and buy the little extras they wanted. James said she spoiled the children. James thought her impossibly childish just because she loved the little, pretty details of life. If that made her childish, she couldn't help it. James said she would have fit better in the Victorian era, when a woman could be admired for choosing to deal only with the minute and the pretty.
Well she'd raised three children, and not a lot of help from James. He had died when their oldest, Marisa, was only twelve. It wasn't her fault that she hadn't been able to deal with the passions of those children; they were James's children, born and bred. When they got into their teens, and she was trying to raise them alone, it seemed impossible that the little beasts could be her own. The girls' puberty had been a terrible time: she had suffered from too many sick headaches during those years.
But the girls all got married off at last, and whatever went on in between she had wiped from memory. Now, of course, all three girls lived so far away that they could seldom visit, two on the East Coast with their husbands, and Marisa in Canada on a farm and already five children of her own to worry over. Now that she didn't see the girls except every few years, and now that Wenona, her one good friend, was dead these long years, and Jane Hubble wasn't here anymore, the doll wardrobes were all she had.
She missed Jane. She missed Wenona. Years ago, when Wenona died, before she, Mae, ever came to live here at Casa Capri, she had known she would spend the last years of her life alone. Wenona had been her only real friend. In little theater all those years together, Wenona in charge of scenery and publicity, and they'd had such lovely times. Their long walks through the village, and shopping together, going up to the city. Wenona had loved to look at fabrics for the doll wardrobes though she didn't sew. Wenona couldn't really love the dolls, not like she cared about cats.
She had to laugh, the way Wenona always had to go feed the stray cats down at the wharf. As if that were her sole responsibility. And the way she spoiled her own cats, putting in cat doors, buying special food, tramping the neighborhood calling if one of them didn't come home. Always worrying over her cats.
But then Wenona went on down to Hollywood with a wonderful chance to work in the MGM prop department. She'd thought Wenona would be back, that she really wouldn't like Hollywood, but she had stayed. She came up once a year, and they had a few days together, but then the cancer, very quick, and Wenona was gone.