But then seeing her appear at the far side and swarm up a tree to the rooftops, he spun away, never questioning the kit's warning. Not daring to question, not this small cat. Never daring to question her any more than he would question Joe Grey…
Moments earlier, Dulcie had been licking blood from her paw where she'd cut herself on a thorn of the lemon tree. She sat among the branches licking at her pad and looking across the garden into the church, admiring the big meeting room with its high, dark-raftered ceiling and white plastered walls and its two long rows of glass doors looking out on the front and back gardens. Vases of white flowers were massed at both ends of the room, and someone had tucked a gift down inside the lectern. She could see a corner of the silver paper, maybe something special to be presented at the ceremony, though that did seem odd.
Imagining the ritual of the wedding, she was filled with purring happiness. No matter what ugliness might happen elsewhere in the world, no matter what hideous events occurred outside their own small village, here, today, human love ruled.
Behind her Joe Grey hissed, "What's she doing?"
She turned on the branch, never doubting from Joe's distraught tone that he was talking about the kit, this kit to whom disaster clung like needles to a magnet.
He was staring across the street at a dark-shingled roof. Dulcie could just see the kit crouched on the edge of the roof beneath overhanging branches.
There was a boy on the roof. The kit watched him intently, rigid with anger-and the next instant she leaped, clawing the boy and raking him. He swatted at her and ran. The kit rode his back, scratching and biting, forcing the boy off the roof, riding him down then leaping away to race across the street.
The kit hit Clyde, flying up clinging to his shoulder. They could see her poke her nose at his ear, whispering… lashing her tail and whispering…
In the church office provided for her use, the bride dressed slowly and carefully in her simple linen gown, trying not to fall apart with nerves. In the mirror her freckles looked as dark as paint splatters across her pale cheeks.
Charlie's kinky red hair was pulled back and smoothed, as much as it could be smoothed, into a handsome chignon and clipped with a carved ivory barrette loaned to her by her aunt Wilma. Wilma, tall and slim and white-haired, stood behind Charlie buttoning her dress. The starched-lace wedding veil and crown of white flowers sat on a little stand, on the office desk.
For something blue, Charlie wore blue panties and bra printed with white roses, a private joke between her and Max. Over this, a white lace half-slip and camisole. The "something old" was her mother's wedding ring, one of the few mementos she had from her dead parents. The new something was her long white linen gown with its low embroidered neckline and embroidered cap sleeves. Charlie's calloused and capable hands shook both from nerves and excitement and from a sense of the unreal. Time seemed out of kilter, as if in some strange fantasy, the wedding preparations of the preceding few days swirling around her, each moment warped in time and place by her own disbelief.
She was no child bride. At thirty-something she had almost abandoned the idea of falling truly in love and being married. Now that it was happening, and seeming so inevitable, she felt as if she had stepped into a different world and different time, or maybe stepped into someone else's life.
For a while she'd thought Clyde was the one, and that they might marry, but she'd never had this totally lost and committed and ecstatic feeling with Clyde. She and Clyde had ended up no more than good friends, the best of friends. Her feeling for Max was totally different. Her love for Max was the kind of nervous oneness that made her hands shake, made her tremble sometimes, and turned her terrified because he was a cop, terrified that he would be hurt, that she would lose him.
"Is that a tear?" Wilma said, watching Charlie in the mirror. Wilma was dressed in a long, pale blue shift, her gray-white hair done in a bun bound low at her neck.
"Of course it's not a tear. I'm not the weeping sort. Steady as a rock." She knew she'd have to get over her fear for Max, that a cop's wife couldn't live like that or she would perish; but right now it was all she could do to keep herself together and get to the altar with Wilma's help and not collapse in a fit of uncontrollable nerves.
"You're not steady at all. Are you this nervous on the firing range?"
"I'm not on the firing range. I'm getting married." She stared at her aunt. "This is different than the firing range. Tell me it's different. Tell me…" She collapsed against her aunt, shivering, her head on Wilma's shoulder.
Wilma hugged her and smoothed Charlie's hair. "It's different when you're marrying someone like Max Harper. You're having a perfectly normal case of nerves. And maybe second thoughts?" She held Charlie away, looking deeply at her, then grinned. "A simple case of premarital hysteria. I expect Max is having the same. You'll be fine."
"Not second thoughts. Not ever. It's just that… If I worried about him before, what will it be like after we're married?"
"He's sharp enough to have lasted this long," Wilma said brusquely. "If something were to happen… just give him everything you can. Just fill what time he has-what time we all have. You must not fear the future, no one can live like that."
Wilma looked deeply at her. "You know what to do-you prepare as best you can for the bad times- then live every moment with joy." She touched Charlie's cheek. "Law enforcement and protecting others, that is his life, Charlie. You can't change what he wants from his life."
"And there's Clyde," Charlie said, her perverse mind wanting to dredge up every vague cause for unease. "No matter what he says, I feel…"
"Guilty."
"As if I dumped him. But he…"
"Not to worry," Wilma said. "Not only is he bringing Ryan Flannery to the wedding, he's still pursuing Kate Osborne, trying to get her to move back down from San Francisco. I don't think with two women to sort out, trying to pay attention to both, that Clyde is going to spend much time grieving."
"Well, that's not very flattering," Charlie said, grinning. She smoothed the tendrils of her hair that would keep slipping out from the carefully arranged chignon.
"Quit fussing. You look like an angel, a curly-haired, redheaded angel. Now hold still and let me finish fastening. Where are your shoes? You didn't forget your shoes?"
"On the desk. Now who's fussing?"
"It isn't every day my only niece gets married-my only family." Turning to fetch the shoes, Wilma moved to the window and slid the drapery back a few inches to look out into the garden where their friends were gathering. The afternoon was bright and serene. "What a lovely crowd. And people still arriving. Even…" Wilma held out her hand. "Come and look."
They stood together peering out, two tall, slim women, the family resemblance clear in their strongly sculpted faces. "Look in the lemon tree. Two of your most ardent admirers, all sleeked up for the occasion."
They could just see Joe Grey and Dulcie peering out from among the leaves, watching something across the street, Joe's white paws bright among the shadows, Dulcie's brown tabby stripes blending into the tree's foliage so she was hardly visible.
"What are they up to?" Charlie said. "They look…"
"They're not up to anything, they're waiting to see you and Max married. They have a perfect view, they'll be able to see, above the crowd, right in through the glass doors."