"Then today you hid that white bag. It smelled of him." The kit looked up at them with round yellow eyes. "When he came running into the cave, I thought he would see the bag. But the woman was there. He saw her instead. He hurt her; he hurt that kind woman."
"She's all right," Dulcie told her. "She'll be all right."
"I saw her go in that big car."
"Ambulance. That's an ambulance. The paramedics took good care of her. But why…?"
"After the loud noises and blood and he dragged her over the cliff and everyone was shouting and those dogs barking, I went to the cave. Then the man came and"- she looked at Joe-"you were behind him. He was happy to find the bag. And you looked happy. So I quick brought those things out of the crevice and put them for him to find."
"You were in the cave the whole time," Joe said.
The kit purred.
"You have done more than you can guess," Joe told her. "But what was Lucinda doing in there?"
"She likes the cave. She is peaceful there. She likes to be quiet there."
The kit swished her long, bushy tail. "I never knew a human. The others say humans are bad. Out on the hill, where the others could see, I stayed away from her. But in the cave, when she came today, I went close to look at her. She petted me."
"Did you-talk to her?" Dulcie asked.
"Oh no." The kit looked shocked, her yellow eyes widening. Neither Dulcie nor Joe had ever seen a cat with eyes so round; the kit's little thin face was vibrant with life, with the deep, shifting lights of amusement and intelligence.
"Why do the others haze you?" Dulcie said.
"I don't know. I don't care; they will go away soon. They don't like the quakes. They will go where the earth doesn't shake."
"And where would that be?" Joe said.
"They don't know. They mean to search until they find such a place."
"And will you go with them?" Dulcie asked softly.
The kit was silent.
"Will you stay here alone, then? On Hellhag Hill?"
She didn't speak.
Dulcie was very still. A terrible longing filled her. "Would you go home with me?" she whispered.
But still the little, mottled kit did not reply.
"Oh," Dulcie said. "You will go to Lucinda?"
"I will go-with the one who needs me," said the kit. "With the lonely one who needs me."
Dulcie turned away and began to wash, trying not to show her disappointment.
The kit patted at Dulcie's paw. "I can't be with humans the whole time. Humans can't climb and hunt." She snuggled close to Dulcie. "I have no one to teach me to hunt."
Dulcie brightened. She sat up straighter, lashing her tail with pleasure.
Joe Grey was embarrassed to hear himself rumbling with purrs.
"And when will you go there, to Lucinda?" Dulcie said.
"When the other humans are gone. Those people that, she says, fill up her house. And when that old man comes back from the hos-hospital, and they are together."
"Together? What do you mean, together?"
"Of course, together." The kit glanced up the hill to the Moonwatch Trailer Park. "Maybe together there in that little house with wheels."
Dulcie stared at her, puzzled.
"They are friends," said the kit. "They need one another. The time is now for them to be together. To start new," she said, "just like me.
"The time is now for me to go away from the clowder. I have been with them long enough. The time is now for me to start another new way to live."
"Then you had best come home with me," Dulcie said in a businesslike manner, "until it's time for you to go to Lucinda."
The kit rubbed against Dulcie's shoulder, extravagantly purring.
And so the nameless kit joined the great and diverse community of Molena Point cats who had fallen, in this one of their nine lives, into an earthly heaven; so the tattered kit was brought home to Molena Point's bright and nurturing village; now she had only to find herself a name, and find her true calling in the world.
25
THE FUNERAL was finished. Shamas Greenlaw lay, at last, in his grave. Whether he rested at peace, no one on this earth could say. His cousin Newlon lay next to him, and the family had made a great event of the double funeral. They had ordered matching headstones carved with angels strumming harps, their wings lifted, their eyes cast toward heaven-whether smiling up at the two departing souls, or conveying their regrets as the deceased were cast out in the opposite direction, was equally uncertain.
The funeral had not, as Lucinda feared, been an embarrassing display of bad taste.
She had told Wilma she was afraid Dirken would take over the rosary arrangements, would create a loud, drunken Irish dirge, with loud weeping and louder music, to bid farewell to Shamas. That was why she had planned to meet with Wilma and Father Radcliff the night that she disappeared.
On her way out of the house that evening, to keep the appointment, she heard Dirken calling to her to get a move-on, that it was time for the two of them to leave.
She'd had no intention of taking Dirken. Quickly, she'd slipped out the kitchen door, got in her car, and took off in the opposite direction from the church. She didn't have time to call Wilma or call the rectory. "I just wanted to be away-from Dirken, from the whole family."
After Lucinda was released from the emergency room of Molena Point Hospital, the two women had sat at Wilma's kitchen table late that night. Dulcie, curled up on the rug, had tried to imagine the kind of colorful Irish wake that worried Lucinda, and that the Greenlaws seemed to want, tried to envision the long-winded and drunken eulogies, as Lucinda described to Wilma.
"All I want is to get the funeral over," Lucinda said. "A traditional, solemn rosary and mass and burial, and then to be done with it. As cold as it sounds, Wilma, all I want is to be done with Shamas.
"Funerals aren't for the dead anyway," Lucinda said. "They're for those left behind. And I don't need it.
"For that matter, what good will a mass and a rosary do Shamas? Shamas made his bed with the Lord. Nothing in Heaven or earth is going to change that."
Dulcie had been both shocked and amused.
"The empty money bag," Wilma had said, gently changing the subject, "the bag the pups dug out. I'm surely curious about that."
Lucinda laughed. "Oh, I knew about that money, long before Dirken came snooping.
"It started several years ago, when Shamas repaired the foundation. Shamas never did a lick of work around the house. His sudden, unexpected project so puzzled me that I snooped into the garden shed.
"I found the sledge he used to break the concrete, the bucket and trowel with which he'd repaired it; and after that day I watched him more closely, paid attention to the musty-smelling money that Shamas brought back from the bank a time or two. To the way, when he returned from Seattle after a business trip, he always had some excuse, early in the morning, to putter in the yard. And I'd get home from my walk, find he had done a load of laundry. Washed the clothes that, I suppose, he'd worn to crawl under the house. He'd say he had brought so much laundry home from his trip, he didn't like to burden me with such a lot of work."
Lucinda smiled. "He must have thought little of my reasoning skills. Must have thought I would never crawl under the house myself, but I did. The next time he left for Seattle I put on some old clothes and took a flashlight and went under there.
"I found a patched place about two feet wide, and a little square in the middle of it, maybe six inches across, where fresher concrete had been troweled in. He must have made the big hole the first time, and then just the smaller one, after that-enough to stick his hand in. I got the sledge from the garage and gave it a whack.