“Debbie Kraft is Billy’s aunt,” Clyde said. “Hesmerra’s middle daughter. Somehow, I thought you knew Debbie’s mother was that old recluse. Debbie said in her letter she didn’t want to have contact with her mother, that they didn’t speak.”
Ryan looked at him, frowning. “She only told me she grew up in the village. I never cared enough to ask anything more.” She sat a moment, taking that in. Ryan had lived in the village only three years; she’d done a lot in that time, shaken off the baggage of a painful separation and then widowhood, established and run a profitable construction business, fallen in love with Clyde and begun a new life with him. But there were still a lot of things about the community she didn’t know, connections Clyde often expected her to understand because they were part of the fabric of his own life. Getting out of the truck, she gave him a shrug and a grin, and headed for the deli, the bell jingling as she slipped inside.
Drinking in the heady smells from the deli, Joe felt a sharp urge to nip around to the alley, see what leftovers George Jolly had offered today outside the back door. But, considering the purchases Ryan was making, he stayed put, watching through the big window as she picked out a selection of cheeses and meats, coleslaw, and three kinds of potato salad. “She’d better get crab salad,” he said, peering up over the dash.
“You can make life so difficult.”
“What’s difficult about crab salad? You’re so cheap. A couple of bucks for a little carton of something special, to cheer up your poor beleaguered cat.”
Ryan returned, sliding a white deli bag into the backseat of the king cab. Joe could smell the crab salad mixed with the aroma of ham and other delicacies. Winking at him, she headed for the veterinary clinic. “What I don’t understand,” she said, making a left onto Ocean, “is why Billy was living with Hesmerra, when she drank so heavily, why Children’s Services hadn’t stepped in, if his own aunts refused to take him. Was she his legal guardian?”
“I think everyone who knew him, their one neighbor and the ranchers he worked for, kept the situation under wraps. The boy is stubbornly independent, he wouldn’t have tolerated a foster home. I’m guessing everyone pretended things were just fine. Hesmerra was his grandmother, she was family. She was working steady, too. She seemed to be one of those drunks who hides it pretty well. Apparently she gave no one, including the school authorities, any real reason to interfere.”
Clyde shrugged. “You might say a lot against Hesmerra, but I think she would have fought as hard as Billy himself to prevent him being taken into custody. Who knows, maybe Kraft intervened, too. He’d have pull enough.”
An interesting tangle, Joe thought. Billy’s one willing guardian turns up dead, his one defender is out of town for an undetermined length of time, and what’s going to happen to Billy now? How much can even the chief do? He imagined Max butting heads with a cadre of county do-gooders, and that made him smile. If I were a gambling cat, my money would be on Max Harper.
Ryan turned off Ocean to the next block and parked before the clinic against a tall border of Mexican marigolds that made the air smell like cat pee. Both Ryan and Clyde went inside to haul out the carriers.
The two cottages that formed the clinic had been joined together by a tall solarium, its glass walls rising above their dark roofs. The complex housed boarding and hospital rooms, large kennels, examining rooms, offices, and surgery. On the roof of the front cottage, beneath the shadows of a cypress tree, Kit and Misto sat looking down at Joe. Dulcie wasn’t with them. This was story morning at the library, she’d be curled up with the children on the big window seat, their little hands stroking her as the librarian read to them. Tourists were enchanted when they found the pretty tabby hanging out at the library and learned she was the official library cat. Many made a special effort to visit her, as, of course, did all the cat-loving locals. As Joe sat thinking of Dulcie, and looking up at Kit and Misto, a leap of recognition hit him, a moment as startling as a lightbulb blazing on.
Rearing up to get a better look, he studied Misto’s shoulder, the pattern of swirling stripes. The configuration of pale cream and dark yellow was a dead ringer for the circular pattern on Debbie Kraft’s lost, red tomcat. Even their long faces showed a likeness, and the way both cats’ ears were set at the same jaunty angle.
Joe never did believe in coincidence. So what the hell was this? Eugene, he thought. Misto had left his grown kits in Eugene, where they had all lived. A tom and two girl cats, all three as red, Misto told him, as fresh rust on a paintless fender. He looked up as Ryan and Clyde came out hauling five cat carriers and loaded them in the back of the truck. “What about Rock?” he said. “You leaving him home alone?”
“I called my dad,” Ryan said. “He’s taken him to run the beach. I didn’t want him to scare Billy’s cats.” Rock didn’t do well by himself in the Damens’ small yard; the big Weimaraner, high-strung and full of energy, didn’t like being left alone, and was inclined to tear up Ryan’s garden. He wanted to be out and busy, wanted to be tracking felons as Joe himself had taught him, or out running with the horses.
It was after one o’clock by the time they met Charlie back at the burned house. Billy had managed to corral all seven cats and shut them in the back room of the half-fallen shanty. Slipping in with the carriers, he came out a few minutes later hauling three carriers heavy with cat, then went back for the other two, the plastic cages emitting a chorus of yowls and snarling through the mesh sides. As they loaded them into Charlie’s SUV, Ryan said, “Dr. Firetti wants you to bring them down for shots, and to make sure they’re healthy before we take them up to the ranch.”
“They’re healthy,” Billy said, bristling. “I don’t want to take them to a vet, they’re already scared half to death.” His thin face was still white with the shock of the morning, with the death of his gran and, now, with an imagined threat to the only other creatures in the world who meant anything to him.
“My cat goes up to the ranch,” Ryan told him. “So do the cats of our friends. We don’t want them to catch something that your cats might be carrying.”
“Sometimes,” Charlie said, “cats can carry a disease that they don’t have themselves, and they can pass it on to others.” Billy looked unconvinced. “Firetti’s a kind man,” Charlie said, “the cats will be fine. I don’t think we’ll need to leave them, just get their shots and bring them home again. Maybe take a little blood for testing, and he can call us later with the results.”
Billy looked at her for a long time. He’d worked for Max since he was nine, and he trusted both Max and Charlie. At last he nodded, and climbed in the back of the Blazer, crowding in among the cages. Ryan looked in at him through the window. “We’ll clean up a stall, so the cats can settle in. If we turn them loose too soon they’ll hightail it right back down the hill—to the delight of the local coyotes.”
Joe thought, when Billy and his gran were in residence, the predators might have kept their distance. He imagined Billy and Gran out in the front yard at dusk, maybe throwing rocks at the coyotes’ slinking shadows. He wondered how the old woman’s aim was, with a skin full of whiskey. He watched the SUV head away for Dr. Firetti’s, Billy wedged in among the carriers to keep his little charges calm. The seven cats were a mixed crew, all sizes, all colors, from kitten to codger. Joe knew they’d be fine at the ranch. He hoped Billy would be, too. Though a number of questions gnawed at him as he rode between Ryan and Clyde, in the deli-scented pickup, up the hill to the Harpers’.