This was not, Dulcie thought, easy for either of them.
"She spent a lot of time with you," Wilma said. "I suppose she talked about the accident."
Lucinda nodded stiffly. "She did. On her first visit. But she said nothing that the Seattle police didn't tell me, if that's what you're after."
"She seems," Wilma said smoothly, "to have made herself very much at home."
Lucinda flushed. "She… made no bones that she was Shamas's 'good friend,' as she put it."
Lucinda sipped her tea nervously. "She has no shame. She told me how she had loved to sit on shipboard in the evenings listening to Shamas tell his wonderful tales."
"That first visit-what else did she talk about?"
"What is this, Wilma? What are these questions? Why are you doing this?"
"I'm trying to understand," Wilma said quietly. She did not mention Max Harper, nor would she. What she was doing for Harper, Dulcie knew, put Wilma almost in the category of a police snitch. And a snitch didn't reveal her role; that did not make for good law enforcement.
"I'm trying," Wilma said, "to understand why Cara Ray came here. And why you've allowed her in, Lucinda. Not once, but three times. What could she possibly…"
"It was the Greenlaws," Lucinda said crossly. "Dirken, Newlon-they made her very welcome; that first day, they asked her to stay the evening."
"Did you… show her around the house?"
Lucinda flushed. "She said… that Shamas had bragged so about it."
Dulcie felt her tail lashing. She couldn't believe that even Lucinda would be so spineless. She could just imagine Lucinda taking that woman on a nice little guided tour of Shamas's home, pointing out all the valuable antiques.
Was that what Cara Ray was looking for? Small items she might steal, valuable pieces that perhaps Shamas had mentioned? His old and valuable chess sets, for instance, which had been written up once in the Gazette. Or the authentic scrimshaw and carved-ivory collection that Shamas had liked to show visitors. Had Lucinda showed them all to Cara Ray? What was it in human nature that made people so trusting?
"Why do you allow it?" Wilma said gently. "Why don't you send her packing?"
"I truly don't know. Partly, I suppose, a false sense of good manners. It's hard to break habits instilled in you so severely as a child. The same hidebound manners," Lucinda said with uncharacteristic boldness, "that keep me from sending the whole Greenlaw tribe packing.
"Well," she said, smiling, "at least the Greenlaw women have begun to do the cooking. Not that I like their heavy meals, or like them in my kitchen. But I don't have to cook for that tribe."
I bet you still have to buy the groceries, Dulcie thought with a catty little smirk.
"The rest of the clan will arrive in a few more days," Lucinda said. "Then the funeral, and they'll be gone again, and Cara Ray, too.
"Oh, I dread the funeral, Wilma. His family is going to turn it into a regular dirge of moaning and weeping and showmanship. I don't think they cared a fig about Shamas, but they're planning all manner of things for the wake, weepy poetry readings, flowery speeches-I'd rather have no ceremony."
"Certainly," Wilma said, "this Cara Ray won't have the nerve to show her face."
"She has bought a new dress for the occasion. 'A little black dress,' she told me."
Wilma's eyes widened. "She wouldn't actually…"
Lucinda's face flushed. "She intends to be there. She's a whore, Wilma. Nothing but a common whore."
Dulcie stared-she had never heard Lucinda speak so plainly. Maybe there was more grit to Lucinda Greenlaw than she had ever guessed.
"Lucinda, send that woman packing," Wilma said. "Back to San Francisco. Don't let her take advantage of you."
"I… have a feeling about her, Wilma. That… that she knows things about Shamas I should be privy to."
"What sort of things?"
"Something important. Something… I don't know. Not personal things, but something to do with the estate, with his businesses. I want… to keep her around for a while.
"She's buttering up Shamas's nephews shamefully, but-well, they were all on shipboard together. I just… don't want to send her away, yet, Wilma."
Dulcie washed her paws, puzzling over Lucinda. All the pieces she knew about Lucinda Greenlaw never seemed quite to fit together. Lucinda seemed so shy and docile, yet sometimes she was surprisingly bold.
Dulcie was still wondering about the old lady that evening, as she and Joe peered through the lighted window into the crowded parlor-as they watched Cara Ray make nice with the younger Greenlaw men, the little blonde flirting and preening, drawing cold looks from Lucinda.
10
SEATED ON the Victorian couch between Dirken and Newlon, Cara Ray looked like a porcelain doll, her short pink skirt revealing a long expanse of slim, tanned leg as she dished out the giggles and charm.
If I were a human person, Dulcie thought jealously, I'd have legs even nicer. And I wouldn't be a cheap hussy. From the fence, the cats enjoyed front-row seats to Cara Ray's brazen display-she was the center of attention. They watched, fascinated, as she drew the Greenlaw men in like ants to syrup. Only Sam, Cara Ray's friend from the Oak Breeze Motel, sat across the room as if he didn't much care for her company.
The half dozen big-boned Greenlaw women watched Cara Ray's performance with quiet anger. The dozen Greenlaw children who hunkered on the floor between the chairs of their elders watched their mothers, watched Cara Ray, and smirked behind their hands. The children, Dulcie thought, were amazingly obedient and quiet tonight, nothing like the way the little brats shouted and pushed and broke things in the village shops. Near the hearth, beside old Pedric, Lucinda sat quietly, too. The cats couldn't read her expression.
Of those on board ship when Shamas drowned, only Winnie and George Chambers were not present. Harper had told Clyde he talked with them twice. Their answers to his questions were the same as they had given Seattle police, that they had not awakened that night, that they were heavy sleepers, had slept through the storm, did not know that Shamas had drowned until the next morning.
But tonight was story night and the cats forgot questions and police business as Dirken rose to tell his tale, standing quietly before the fire waiting for silence to touch the crowded room. But outdoors, around the cats, the breeze quickened. Wind whipped the parlor curtains and a gray-haired Greenlaw woman rose to shut the windows.
A series of slams, the windows were down, and the cats could hear nothing; Dirken's voice was lost.
"Come on," Dulcie hissed, "before they shut the back door, too. Maybe the screen's unlatched."
"And get shut in with that bunch?"
But he dropped from the fence and was across the weedy grass ahead of Dulcie and in through the screen, leading the way through the kitchen behind two stout Greenlaw women who stood at the sink rinsing dishes.
In the shadows of the dining room beneath the walnut buffet, they gained a fine view of table and chair legs, of human legs and a child here and there tucked among their elders' feet. Neither Joe nor Dulcie liked the assault of so many human smells and so much loud talk and louder laughter; but who knew what the evening might offer?
Before the fire, Dirken looked smug and full of himself. His red hair hung over his collar in a shaggy ruff; his blue shirt fit tight over muscles that indicated he worked out regularly-prompting Dulcie to wonder if he had installed, in his travel trailer, some sort of gym equipment, to keep in shape while he took his little jaunts.
All the clan lived in new and luxurious trailers or RVs when they were on the road, which, Dulcie gathered from Lucinda's remarks, was more than half the year. What these people did for a living wasn't clear. If they traveled on business, what kind of business? Some kind of sales, Lucinda had told Wilma. But that was all she told her.