"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.
When the Greenlaw clan first arrived at the Moonwatch Trailer Park, the dozen nearly new travel vehicles checking in as a group, the proprietor had spoken to Max Harper, and Harper had checked them out. Since then, Dulcie had seen the police cruising that area on several occasions. She didn't know what such a large traveling group might add up to, to alert Max Harper, but she didn't laugh at him.
Standing before the hearth, Dirken waited. The parlor was hushed. The family, usually so violent and loud, so rude, was quiet now, and gentle-as if the tradition of story time touched powerful emotions, drawing them together.
"What shall it be?" Dirken said. "What will you hear? 'Paddy's Bride'? 'The Open Grave'?"
"Tell 'Drugen Jakey,'" Lucinda said softly. "Tell 'Drugen Jakey' again?"
"Yes," said old Pedric, laying his hand on hers. "'Drugen Jake' fits these hills."
Dirken looked at them with annoyance.
But then he masked his frown, whatever the cause. His voice softened, his manner and stance gentled, his voice embracing the old-country speech. "That tale be told twice before," he told Pedric.
"Tell it," a young nephew spoke up. "That tale belongs well to these coastal hills."
"Ah," Dirken said. "The green, green hills. Do they draw you, those rocky hills?" His laugh was evil. No one else laughed. Lucinda looked startled. Pedric watched quietly, clasping his wrinkled hands together, his lined face a study in speculation.
"All right, then," Dirken said, "'Drugen Jakey' it will be. Well, see, there was a passel of ghosts down the village coomb, and worse than ghosts…"
Standing tall before the fire, his red hair catching the flame's glow, his booted feet planted solidly, Dirken seemed to draw all light to himself.
"No man could graze his beasts down there for fear of th' underworld beings. Th' spirits, if they rose there and touched his wee cattle, wo'd send them flop over dead. Dead as th' stones in th' field. Devil ghosts, hell's ghost, all manner of hell's critters…"
In the silent room, cousins and aunts and nephews cleaved to Dirken's words, as rapt as if they had never before heard the ancient myth.
"Oh yes, all was elder there…" Dirken said, and this was not a comfortable tale; Dirken's story led his listeners straight down into a world of black and falling caverns that, though they excited Dulcie, made her shiver, too. Joe Grey didn't want to hear this story; it made him flatten his ears and bare his teeth, made him want to scorch across the room and bolt out the nearest window.
But as the tale rolled over them all, painting the deep netherworld, Lucinda looked increasingly excited. Soon she seemed hardly able to be still, drinking in the nephew's words as he led his listeners down and down among lost mountains and ragged clefts and enchanted fields that had never seen the sun, never known stars or moon.