The rainclouds were gone; a silver smear of light gleamed behind the eastern hills as the hidden sun began to creep up. The cats heard no sound beneath the dim, pearly sky, only the drip, dripping from the pine boughs. Backing down the forty-foot pine, the two cats went to hunt.
A wood rat and a pair of fat field mice filled them nicely, the warm meal lifting their spirits. With new strength and hope, they hurried north toward the old Pamillon estate, where the kit liked to ramble.
Entering among the crumbled walls and fallen, rotting trees and dark cellars, they prowled the portion of the mansion that still stood upright, but they found no sign of the kit.
The Pamillon estate had been, in the 1930s, an elegant Mediterranean mansion standing on twenty acres high above Molena Point, surrounded by fruit trees, grape arbors, and a fine stable. Now most of the buildings were rubble. Gigantic old oak trees crowded the fallen walls, their roots creeping into the exposed cellars. The flower gardens were gone to broom bushes and pampas grass and weeds, tangled between fallen timbers.
And the estate was just as enmeshed in tangles of a legal nature, in family battles so complicated that it had never been sold.
Some people said the last great-great-grandchildren were hanging on as the land increased in value. Some said the maze of gifts and trusts, of sales and trades among family members was so convoluted that no one could figure out clear title to the valuable acreage.
The kit had discovered the mansion weeks earlier. Newly come to that part of the hills, she had been as thrilled by the Pamillon estate as Magellan must have been setting anchor on the shore of the new land, as new wonders and new dangers shimmered before her.
Joe and Dulcie searched the hills for three days, taking occasional shelter in a tiny cave or high in the branches of an oak or pine, where they could leap from tree to tree if something larger wanted them for supper. They had never before given such serious thought to being eaten. Among the dense pine foliage they blended well enough, but on the hills, on the rain-matted grass, they were moving targets. And all the while they searched for the kit, running hungry and lean, the village was there far below them, snug and warm and beckoning, filled with the delicacies provided not only at home but in any number of outdoor restaurants.
It was late Thursday afternoon, as the two cats pushed on into new canyons and among ragged ridges, that they saw Clyde's yellow antique roadster climbing the winding roads, going slowly, the top down, Clyde peering up the hills, looking for them. Dutifully Joe raced down to where the road ended, causing Clyde to slam on the brakes.
Leaping onto the warm hood, he scowled through the windshield at Clyde. "The kit come home?" A delicious smell filled the car.
"Not a sign. I could help you look."
Joe lifted a paw. "We'll find her."
"I brought you some supper." Clyde handed over a small bag that smelled unmistakably of Jolly's fried chicken.
"Very nice. Where's the coleslaw and fries?"
"Ingrate."
Taking the white sack in his teeth, Joe had leaped away to join Dulcie. He hadn't told Clyde how despondent he and Dulcie were growing. And there was really nothing Clyde could do to help.
By Saturday evening the sky was heavy again, and the wind chill. If the kit was already home, slurping up supper and dozing warm and dry before the fire, Clyde would have come back; they'd see his car winding up the hills or hear the horn honking. One more day, they thought, and they'd give up and go home. And on sodden paws they moved higher into the lonely pine woods. They were well up the forested ridges, far beyond their usual hunting grounds, and the afternoon was graying into evening when they heard horses far below, maybe a mile to the north, and the faint voices of women.
Five minutes later, they heard screams. Terrified, angry, blood-chilling.
Joe was rigid, listening, his yellow eyes slitted and intent. He turned to look at Dulcie. "Human screams."
But the screams had stopped, and faintly they heard horses bolting away crashing into branches and sliding on the rocks.
Hurrying down out of the mountain, and racing north, it was maybe half an hour later when on the rising wind they caught a whiff of blood.
"Maybe the cougar made a kill," Dulcie whispered, "and frightened the horses, and the women screamed."
"If the cougar made a kill, we'd hear him crunching bone. It's too quiet." And Joe shouldered her aside.
But she slipped down the hill beside him, silent in the deepening evening, ready to run. They were just above a narrow bridle trail when a slithery sound stopped them, a swift, slurring rush behind them that made them dive for cover.
Crouched beneath a stone overhang, they were poised to run again, to make for the nearest tree.
A rustle among the dry bracken. They imagined the cougar slipping through the dead ferns and pines as intently as they would stalk a mouse-and something exploded out of the woods straight at them, bawling and mewling.
The kit thudded into Dulcie so hard that Dulcie sprawled. She pressed against Dulcie, meowing loud enough to alert every predator for twenty miles-"Yow! Yow! Yow!"-her ears flat, her tail down. She couldn't stop shivering.
Dulcie licked her face. "What is it? What happened to you? Shh! Be still!" Staring into the woods, she tried to see what had chased the kit. Above them, Joe moved up into the forest, stalking stiff-legged, every hair on end.
"No! Down there," the kit said. "We have to go down there. It was terrible. I heard them scream and I smelled the blood and…"
Dulcie nudged her. "Slow down, Kit. Tell it slowly."
The kit couldn't be still. "The horses bolted nearly on top of me. I ran. I don't want to go back, but…"
"Start at the beginning," Dulcie said softly.
"I went back afterward, after that man was gone. I went back there just now and they're dead." The kit stared round-eyed at Dulcie. "Two women, one young and pretty. So much blood. They're all over blood."
"Show us," Joe said, slipping down beside them.
"I don't want…"
"Show us, Kit," Joe Grey said, towering over her.
The kit dropped her head obediently, this kit who was never obedient, and padded slowly down the hills where the black pines reached in a long and darkly forested peninsula. Slipping along through the edge of the forest, the two cats stayed close beside her. Down three steep, slick shelves of stone, dropping down among the dry ferns and loose shale, then onto the bridle trail and that was walled, all along, by the forest. The night was filled with the smell of blood and with the stink of death, mixed with the scent of the kit's fear.
2
THE NIGHT was alive with the tiny noises of other creatures, with little rustlings and scurryings and alarm-cries where small nocturnal browsers fed on the forest's vegetation, prey to nocturnal hunters and to each other. The kit led Joe and Dulcie down through the forest over the jagged ridges toward the sharp, metallic smell of blood-but then the kit drew back.
Warily, the two older cats approached the bridle trail and the two dark heaps that lay there. The smell of death forced their lips in a deep flehmen; that stink would soon bring predators crouching unseen in the night.
But no four-legged predator had done this terrible deed.
Where was the person who had stabbed and torn his fellow humans? Was he hidden in the forest, watching? Might he be listening, so that if they spoke, he would know their secret?