This morning when she’d told Billy about the trapping operation, driving down from the ranch, he’d asked a lot of questions about how the trapping was done, about the people who were sheltering the cats. He was an animal-oriented kid, good with horses and dogs as well as the cats he’d taken in. Before they’d left the ranch, he’d shown her their new home—he was touchingly proud of his little brood and really happy with their cozy new accommodations.
But then when he’d gotten in the truck and they were headed down the hills, he was quiet again, and looked so sad. She knew he was grieving for his gran, but thought there was something more. “What is it?” she’d said softly.
He’d looked at her helplessly. He didn’t say anything for a long time, then, “I just hung up from talking with my aunt Esther. Why would she call me? How did she know I was there at the Harpers’?” He went silent, looking down at his hands, then looked up at her, his dark brown eyes questioning. “I don’t want to live with her,” he said angrily.
“She asked you to live with her?”
“No, she didn’t ask me. But what else could it be? She said she wanted to come up and see me. Why would she want to see me, she never has before. She never came to see Gran, even right after Mama died. She never came when Mama was alive, either, not that I know of.”
“You must see her around the village?”
He nodded. “She acts like she doesn’t know me, never speaks to me or looks at me.”
“This morning, did she say anything else?”
“No, but she had something on her mind. She asked about the fire, asked if everything was gone, if we’d saved anything.” He was quiet, then, “She sounded real caring and friendly. She said twice that she’d be coming up to see me.”
“What did you say?”
“I said I couldn’t talk any more, I had to go to work, that my ride was waiting, and I hung up,” Billy said, his cheeks coloring.
Hanni laughed.
Billy looked at her, frowning. “Can she make me live with her? She is my aunt. Does she have some kind of . . . claim? Some legal way to make me live there? Why would she want me? Except to work, maybe, like in the old days when kids were adopted out to do farm work. But people don’t do that anymore.”
Hanni reached over, took his hand. “You see that on TV?”
“We don’t have TV. I read it.”
She smiled. “Esther won’t do that, this isn’t the eighteen hundreds. Max Harper wouldn’t let her do that.”
“If I don’t go there, will I have to go to a foster home?”
“What do you want to do?”
“I can take care of myself.” But then he looked at her shyly. “What I really want?”
She nodded.
“I want to stay with the Harpers.”
“And they want you there,” she said. “They both do. Max knows a few people,” she said lightly, “he has a little pull.” She smiled wickedly, gave him a wink that made him blush. “I know enough dirt myself about some of the folks working in Children’s Services, enough to pull a few strings.”
Billy looked at her, surprised, and then laughed. “Can you do that?”
“Try me.”
He looked as if he wanted to hug her, and then as if he wanted ask something more. Instead he looked away, out at the dropping hills and the village roofs below. And that was where they left it, with Billy’s worries eased, but Hanni wondering just what Esther Fowler had wanted.
The three cats were crowded together on the roof of the house across the street from Hanni’s, shivering in the cold; the wet wind was dying now, giving way to colder, misty rain. They were watching Officers McFarland and Crowley load seven large cartons from Hanni’s garage into the back of the police van, when Dulcie let out a low hunting cry and took off across the roofs where a thin figure was slipping away behind a sagging fence. Joe and Kit saw little more than a shadow, an impression of jeans and faded T-shirt. Emmylou? Dulcie meant not to lose her again; she’d followed her, lost her twice, seen her trying to get into Alain Bent’s house, and then lost her yet again. Now there she was appearing suddenly out of nowhere, but then gone again. She glanced back to see Joe following, pushed along by a last gust of wind, but behind him, Kit had paused.
Lifting her paw uncertainly, Kit watched Joe and Dulcie race away in pursuit of the hurrying shadow, then turned to watch the interesting activity around Hanni’s cottage, and she shivered with indecision. But she was caught even more powerfully in her own agenda. Leaving all the human excitement to play out below her, she spun around and streaked down the dropping rooftops for the center of the village, her head full of the medieval painting that so fit Misto’s stories, full of lost centuries and ancient dreams, and she raced away to tell the old tomcat about the wonderful mural.
It was too early for the ferals’ feeding time, but maybe he’d be there, the day was growing cold and dark and maybe John Firetti would feed early. She was only vaguely aware that something else, besides those ancient times, might be drawing her so powerfully; she raced down across the roofs like a wild thing, her own urgency startling and puzzling her.
Joe caught up with Dulcie two blocks above the Damens’ cottage, as she paused to look over the roof’s edge down into a scrappy yard: brown earth, bare beneath overhanging branches, the narrow house made of rough brown boards, an old house, dour and neglected. “Emmylou vanished in there,” Dulcie said. “Maybe she broke in, I heard glass break.”
He moved close to her, in the cold drizzle. “Could she mean to camp in there? Break into a stranger’s house to get out of the cold? Is that what she was doing, all along, poking around up here, looking for the best empty house to crash in?” The dark brown house was sheltered from its neighbors, jammed in between two huge cypress trees, their heavy branches sweeping the roof like the tails of giant beasts. A tentlike acacia stood at the back, hiding the house behind. The yard itself was thick with broken cypress branches fallen across the cracked cement walk. Backing down a rough trunk, they paused among the browning cypress fronds that were wet now in the mist. On the little cement porch, a stack of wet newspapers lay moldering. Lace curtains, limp and gray, hung crookedly over the windows. The cats could just detect Emmylou’s trail, overridden by the fresh scent of a man, a nervous smell and fearful.
“Was that a man I saw?” Dulcie whispered. “So thin and tall, so like Emmylou?” They followed his scent in silence, watching the shadows—and nearly plowed into him standing among the multiple trunks of a spreading cypress, his clothes as dark as the rough branches, his face in shadow; they leaped away, startled, then, gathering their wits, they crouched dumb and innocent, looking up at him.
He was dressed as a gardener, but he didn’t have a gardener’s tan, his face was pasty white. Slim, dark jeans, heavy shoes, faded brown T-shirt, and, slung low on his thin hips, a leather carpenter’s belt holding clippers and gardening tools, and who knew what else? When he turned to look at them, his eyes were so cold that the two cats slipped away again, frightened.
When they glanced back, he hadn’t moved. But he was paying no attention to them, he stood watching, down the hill, the activity around Hanni’s remodel, watching the cops and Detective Davis. “Could he be from the meth house?” Dulcie whispered. “One of the men they missed, who disappeared before they raided it?”
“One way to find out,” Joe said softly. “Why don’t you slip on up to the roofs and keep an eye on him?”
Dulcie smiled and vanished, scrambling up to the shingles, as Joe streaked down through the tangled yards for the Damens’ cottage, to find a phone. He was headed for the open front door when he saw Clyde in the backyard and veered in that direction, leaping to Clyde’s shoulder.