A wristwatch had been buckled securely around the cat's collar.
Even through the coating of mud she could see how heavy and ornate it was, could see a portion of the gold case flanked by two gold emblems like the wings of a soaring bird. She sniffed at it and backed away, stood looking at the pitiful remains of the white cat and at the last link in the puzzle of Janet Jeannot's death.
She shivered, but not with chill. She was hardly aware of the tunnel and the slime and the dog that still fought to crawl in, struggling to snatch her. All her attention, all her amazement, was fixed on the white cat. He had led her here, to the last clue.
And not only had the white cat sought to show her this final evidence; he had, in coming to her in dream, told her far more.
He had reached out to her from beyond a vast barrier. From somewhere beyond death he had spoken to her. When she dreamed of the white cat she had touched an incredible wonder, had sensed for a little while a small part of a dimension closed to ordinary vision. She had glimpsed what lay beyond death.
She was so engrossed she didn't realize the light in the tunnel had brightened. When she turned to look, the mouth of the culvert was empty. The dog had freed himself and had gone-or he was crouched outside licking blood from his face, waiting for her.
Feeling strong, almost invincible, she headed for the mouth of the tunnel.
Stepping from the pipe, she studied the bushes, the hills falling away below her. She reared up to look above.
The dog was gone.
She sat down just inside the mouth of the pipe, wondering. Strange that he would give up so easily. She cleaned herself up, sleeking her fur, thinking about the white cat. About Janet's death. And about the wristwatch-Kendrick Mahl's watch-that ostentatious piece of jewelry which matched exactly the watch in Mahl's newspaper picture.
How did the watch get fixed to the white cat's collar? Did Janet put it there, maybe just before she died?
The picture was taken only days before the opening; Mahl had the watch then. Did he lose it the morning of the fire? Was he waiting in the studio when Janet came upstairs? Did he let himself in as she prepared her work, laying out her welding equipment, filling the coffeemaker?
Or had he been there already, perhaps the day before, losing his watch then?
She licked the wounded tip of her tail, removing the congealing blood, smoothing the raw skin where hair had been pulled out-and puzzling over Mahl's watch. He would not deliberately have left it in Janet's studio; he had no business there.
Licking her tail, she found that none of her little vertebrae was broken. She was lucky, the way that dog grabbed her, that half her tail wasn't missing, like poor Joe's- though he seemed to get along fine with a docked tail, seemed as proud of that short appendage as if he were some kind of fancy retriever, an elegant feline bird dog.
For herself, she would be lost without her tail. She took great pride in that dark, mink-colored, silky, tabby-striped extremity. Before ever she could speak human language, she had talked with her tail as much as with her eyes and her twitching ears. Her repertoire of tail dances could convey a whole world of needs and emotions to a perceptive viewer. She'd detest some debilitating injury to that elegant appurtenance.
Well her dear tail was intact, her wound was only a scratch. It would heal, the hair would grow back.
Mahl killed her, she thought nervously. Janet's last act on this earth was to buckle Mahl's watch around Binky's collar and somehow chase him away, make him run away from the burning building.
She thought about the white cat's appearing to her in dreams long after he was dead, showing her things she could not know in any other way-extending to her a heady promise. The promise there would be something else, another life after her own small bones had shed their earthly flesh. Promise of Joy, as Wilma had read to her once, Joy, different from ordinary pleasure. The brightness of another kind of light… from within another dimension.
She rose, stepped out of the pipe to the fresh green grass, sat down in the thin wash of sun fingering down across the hills behind her. Wrapping her tail around herself, she sat looking down the falling hills and up to the mysterious sky, and a deep, pure happiness sang through her, pulsing and shaking her.
It was there that Joe found her, sitting happily in the sun rumbling with purrs.
22
Under the hill, deep within the dark and slimy drainpipe, Joe crowded beside Dulcie, looking down at the little pile of bones, the frail skull, the faded collar and its metal plate, the mud-caked watch- Mahl's watch.
He looked for a long time, said nothing. Then, "Too bad. Really too bad it can't be used as evidence."
"Of course it can." Her green eyes blazed. "Why couldn't it? Why else would it be on Binky's collar unless Janet put it there before she died, unless she buckled it on during the fire, chased Binky away when she couldn't get out herself. It has to prove Mahl set the fire, why else…"
"But Dulcie-
"If Mahl stole the paintings, he could have lost the watch then. He was in a hurry, he didn't know it was gone."
"But this is all conjecture."
"That Monday morning when Janet found the watch, she knew Mahl had been there. She had to wonder what he was doing in her studio, but maybe she saw nothing disturbed. The racks were filled with paintings. Easy not to notice the edges had thumbtacks instead of staples. It was early, she wanted to finish the fish sculpture, was anxious to start work. Maybe she dropped the watch in her pocket, meaning to find out later what Mahl had been doing there."
"But even if…"
"Let me finish. She made coffee and drank some. As she stood looking at the sculpture, she began reacting to the aspirin that Mahl had put in the pot. She didn't know what was wrong, maybe she thought she was just sleepy. Maybe she drank some more coffee, trying to wake up. She turned on her tanks to get to work.
"The minute she turned on her oxygen, it exploded. By now she was dizzy and confused. As the fire blazed up, Binky ran to her, frightened."
"But even if that's the way it happened, we can't…"
"She was weak, faint. Maybe she tried to crawl away. Maybe Binky came to her, he must have been terrified, confused by the fire. They clung together."
"Dulcie…"
"Then she remembered the watch-Mahl had been there, he was responsible for the explosion. She was so dizzy, sick, maybe hurt by the explosion, too. She dug in her pocket, buckled the watch on Binky's collar. With a last effort she chased Binky away; he fled out the window."
She paused, searched his face, lifted a paw. "It could have happened that way."
"But even if it did, we can't tell that to the police."
"Why ever not? There's no reason…"
He laid his white paw on her small, brindle paw. "How does a human informant, talking to Captain Harper on the phone, tell him that the evidence is fifteen feet inside a drainpipe-a pipe no human could get into, or could see into?"
"But I… But we can't move Binky's bones and move the watch, we'd destroy evidence."
She turned to lick her shoulder. "I could say I was walking my poodle, that he stuck his nose in the pipe and I… "
"And you-the human informant-could clearly see fifteen feet back in the dark, could see this little pile of bones."
"Maybe I had a flashlight."
"So with your light, you saw the bones. And you deduced from what you saw that this was Janet Jeannot's cat. That it was wearing the killer's watch attached to its collar, a watch invisible from the mouth of the pipe.
"With her flashlight, this human informant read the plate on the collar that isn't visible. So of course she knew it was the skeleton of Janet's lost cat.