Had Scotty been standing there listening to the cats’ stories? Listening to them speak, and had slipped away when she saw him? A thrill of amazement filled Kate, a joy that brought tears—or had she not seen him at all, was it only the breeze stirring the vines that grew up the side of the house?
If Scotty knew about the cats, why hadn’t he told her? She almost ran to find him. But no, it couldn’t have been Scotty. Why would he not tell her? Shivering, she remained crouched in the grass not looking in that direction, pretending to have seen nothing.
It was here that Ryan found Kate and the cats. She waited for a tale to end, then told the Molena Point cats that Clyde wanted them at home, that he felt Rick Alderson might be a danger to them—and that the ferals should stay away from him, too. She bundled up Kit and Pan, Pan shining golden against her dark hair. Kate settled Dulcie and Courtney on her shoulders, and they returned to the shelter to find Wilma.
When Wilma and the four cats had headed home in Ryan’s king cab, Kate turned back to the rocky meadow. She approached the back of the mansion where she thought Scotty had stood.
She paused and stepped back.
Scotty sat on a boulder, his back to her but in plain sight, talking with Willow, the faded calico comfortable on the smooth rock next to him, one paw on Scotty’s knee. Willow was saying, “Kate has known for ever so long, for many years. But how could she agree to marry you, when she thought you didn’t know? When she would, for all your lives, have to keep the secret?”
“But—” Scotty began.
“But what?” said Willow. “You only found out by accident, when you were moving those boards. When we weren’t careful, and you heard us talking.” The matronly cat looked hard at him. She had the look of the leader she was, queen of the feral band, a cat who had reprimanded and coddled generations of kittens and perhaps a human or two. “I think,” Willow said, “it’s time you two had a talk.” She patted Scotty’s knee with a soft paw, sprang from the boulder lithe and quick, and bounded away, losing herself among the walls of the old house, leaving Scotty and Kate alone.
Scotty looked at her, and took her hand, and for some time, neither spoke. A little breeze blew the tall, wild grass against the rocks. Scotty took her in his arms. If a feral cat or two watched from among the fallen walls, neither Kate nor Scotty minded.
“So now,” Scotty said, “so now that you know my secret—was this your secret, all along?”
“It was,” she said shakily.
“And now,” he said, “now that all is clear between us, will you marry me?”
She couldn’t answer, she could only nod against him, and try to wipe away her tears.
25
The four cats rode crowded on Wilma’s lap, spilling across the front seat as Ryan’s king cab headed for the highway. Dulcie and Kit dreaming of the old tales, Courtney with lingering visions of the Netherworld. Pan stretched out between the girl cats and Ryan, and who knew what he was dreaming?
“You can take us to my house,” Wilma said. “Egan’s in jail, and Randall’s in the hospital, there’s no one to bother us.” She smiled. “No reason to toss my place again, anyway. They got the book, or think they did. They know the police have it.”
“Rick and Lena aren’t in jail,” Ryan said.
Wilma was silent.
“Lena isn’t stable,” Ryan said, “but she’s clever. She might guess there was another volume, might wonder if that one was a substitute, if you still have the valuable copy. Who knows, at auction, what the original would have been worth? And if she knows the whole story, she might come after …” She glanced down at the tangle of cats. Dulcie and Kit stared up at her, wary and silent.
“No one knows if she’ll break in,” Ryan said “no one knows what she’ll do—she knows she could never catch the feral cats. And Rick, he has a long, ugly record—while they’re both still free, you’re coming home with us.”
“But what about your quarantine?” Kit said.
“Joe and Rock can stay in my studio, it’s nice and light and there’s a soft couch to share. The isolation will be over by tomorrow night, the two of them will be free. Striker and Buffin can come home, Joe and Dulcie can cuddle their kittens. Maybe, by that time, Lena and Rick will be locked up, instead of our poor animals.”
With Wilma and the cats settled in, Ryan didn’t go back up the hills to work. She thawed a pot of bean soup for dinner and made corn bread—while the four cats galloped upstairs to rub against the glass door of her study. And Joe Grey, inside, did the same, his nose and whiskers pressed against the cold door, as close as he could get to Dulcie and Courtney, to his calico child and his lady. Rock paced the length of the studio restlessly, more interested in getting out than in the cats’ familial concerns. When Clyde got home Rock barked up a storm until Clyde put a leash and muzzle on the Weimaraner and took him for a long run.
When Lucinda and Pedric Greenlaw came down to get Kit and Pan, of course they stayed for supper, for Ryan’s good comfort food and to catch up on the tangle of events. They were sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea as Clyde and Rock came storming in the back gate to the patio. Clyde brushed sand from the silver dog and wiped the sand from his feet. He fed Rock in the patio then took him upstairs to his prison. He sent the four cats down to the kitchen, knowing very well the two inmates didn’t have rabies, but obedient to John’s instructions. Pan, leaping to the table with the lady cats, had started to tell about Kate’s visit to Voletta when Kit jumped in with her usual monologue. “… and that wasn’t Egan, it was Rick Alderson with the long record and Voletta pretended she never heard them moving all those cars that night and didn’t see lights but how could she not, she’s a mean woman, I don’t like her even if she was hurt when the window broke, I don’t even like the way she smells and—”
“Slow down!” Dulcie and Pan hissed.
“And then Lena’s husband Randall called Rick and said he broke out of jail and we couldn’t hear all the conversation because Lena came in and we had to hang up the phone and hide and when they drove off to get him I wanted to jump in the car but they were too fast and Pan grabbed me and bit me hard and they were gone before I could leap off the roof and then we couldn’t call the cops because we didn’t know where they were going and …”
“Kit …” Ryan said, scooping up the tortoiseshell, snuggling Kit against her. Kit looked up at Ryan innocently, yellow eyes wide.
“They’re gone now,” Ryan said, holding Kit tight. “Long gone. Joe found them and he did call 911. Maybe the cops have them by now. Oh, Kit, do settle down.”
Clyde was silent, taking it all in, putting the pieces together from Joe’s story and Kit’s. Only when Ryan put supper on the table, steaming bowls of bean soup, cooler bowls for the cats, big slices of corn bread all around, was Kit wordless, settling greedily in to her feast.
It was after supper, when they’d gathered around a warm fire, that Ryan thought again about Kate and Scotty up at the mansion—about Scotty standing in the shadows listening to the cats’ ancient tales. She wondered what had happened after she left. Surely all the cats had seen him, but no one said a word, not even talkative Kit. Ryan started to say, “I wonder if —” when Kit interrupted.
“Now Scotty knows about us,” she said as if she had read Ryan’s thoughts, “and Kate knows that he knows and there won’t be any secrets between them now and I think they’ll get married.”
They all looked at her. She had to tell that tale, too, about sitting among the boulders with the ferals hearing the old stories—she ran on until Dulcie hushed her. Courtney wished her daddy were there with them so he could hear all Kit had to tell—but then, maybe it was better that he didn’t hear. She didn’t look at her mother, she knew Dulcie didn’t like her listening to tales of the Netherworld that so thrilled her. Dulcie didn’t like hearing that Courtney’s own pictures were there in that underground world, as Willow had told, antique paintings of a long-ago cat who looked exactly like Courtney—those visions too sharply stirred Courtney’s dreams of that magical land.