Cat Spitting Mad Read online

  Cat Spitting Mad

  Shirley Rousseau Murphy

  A double murder leaves feline sleuth Joe Gray hopping mad as Max Harper, Molena Point's dedicated chief of police, stands framed for murder, and Joe and his sidekick Dulcie are the only creatures who can save him. Reprint.

  Shirley Rousseau Murphy

  Cat Spitting Mad

  The sixth book in the Joe Grey series, 2000

  The sleek, supple… cat lowered itself slightly, cocked the short, rounded ears on its smallish, intelligent-looking face, and with a flowing ripple seemed to almost float up into the tree. Fifteen vertical feet up it landed with a fluid grace…

  The puma… reaching over nine thousand miles, from the tip of South America into isolated pockets of southern Alaska… is an intelligent, highly adaptable predator that, along with the wolves and the bears, adds an excitement to the U.S. wildlands that simply would not be there in their absence.

  – Tom Brakefield, Kingdom of Might: The World's Big Cats

  1

  IT WAS the tortoiseshell kit who found the bodies, blundering onto the murder scene as she barged into every disaster, all four paws reaching for trouble. She was prowling high up the hills in the pine forest when she heard the screams and came running, frightened and curious-and was nearly trampled by the killer's horse as the rider raced away. Churning hooves sent rocks flying. The kit ran from him, tumbling and dodging.

  But when the rider had vanished into the gray foggy woods, the curious kit returned to the path, grimacing at the smell of blood.

  Two women lay sprawled across the bridle trail. Both were blond, both wore pants and boots. Neither moved. Their throats had been slashed; their blood was soaking into the earth. Backing away, the kit looked and looked, her terror cold and complete, her heart pounding.

  She spun and ran again, a small black-and-brown streak bursting away alone through the darkening evening, scared nearly out of her fur.

  This was late Saturday afternoon. The kit had vanished from Dulcie's house on the previous Wednesday, her fluffy tortoiseshell pantaloons waggling as she slid under the plastic flap of Dulcie's cat door and trotted away through the garden beneath a light rain, escaping for what the two older cats thought would be a little ramble of a few hours before supper. Dulcie and Joe, curled up by the fire, hadn't bothered to follow her-they were tired of chasing after the kit.

  "She'll have to take care of herself," Dulcie said, rolling over to gaze into the fire. But as the sky darkened not only with evening but with rain, Dulcie glanced worriedly toward the kitchen and her cat door.

  Wilma, Dulcie's human housemate, passing through the room, looked down at the cats, frowning, her silver hair bright in the lamplight. "She'll be all right. It isn't raining hard."

  "Not yet, it isn't," Dulcie said dourly. "It's going to pour. I can smell it." A human could never sort out such subleties as a change in the scent of the rain. She loved Wilma, but one had to make allowances.

  "She won't go up into the hills tonight," Wilma said. "Not with a roast in the oven. Not that little glutton."

  "Growing kitten," Joe Grey said, rolling onto his back. "Torn between insatiable wanderlust and insatiable appetite." But he, too, glanced toward the cat door.

  In the firelight, Joe's sleek gray coat gleamed like polished pewter. His white nose and chest and paws shone brighter than the porcelain coffee cup Wilma was carrying to the kitchen. His yellow eyes remained fixed on the cat door.

  Wilma sat down on the couch beside them, stroking Dulcie. "You two never want to admit that you worry about her. I could go look for her-circle a few blocks before dinner."

  Dulcie shrugged. "You want to crawl under bushes and run the rooftops?"

  "Not really." Wilma tucked a strand of her long white hair into her coral barrette. "She'll be back any minute," she said doubtfully.

  "Too bad if she misses supper," Dulcie said crossly. "The roast lamb smells lovely."

  Wilma stroked Dulcie's tabby ears, the two exchanging a look of perfect understanding.

  Ever since Joe and Dulcie discovered they could speak the human language, read the morning paper, and converse with their respective housemates, Dulcie and Wilma had had a far easier relationship than did Joe Grey and his bachelor human. Joe and Clyde were always at odds. Two stubborn males in one household. All that testosterone, Dulcie thought, translated into hardheaded opinions and hot tempers.

  The advent of the two cats' sudden metamorphosis from ordinary cats (well, almost-they had after all always been unusually good-looking and bright, she thought smugly) into speaking, sentient felines had disrupted all their lives, cats and humans. Joe's relationship with Clyde, which had already been filled with good-humored conflict, had become maddening and stressful for Clyde. Their arguments were so fierce they made her laugh-a rolling-over, helpless cat laugh. Were all bachelors so stubborn?

  And speak of the devil, here came Clyde barging in through the back door dripping wet, no umbrella, wiping his feet on the throw rug, then pulling off his shoes. His dark, cropped hair was dripping, his windbreaker soaking. Dropping his jacket in the laundry, he came on through to the fire, turning to warm his backside. He had a hole in his left sock. Violent red socks, Dulcie saw, smiling. Clyde was never one for subleties. As Wilma went to get him a drink, Clyde sprawled in the easy chair, scowling.

  "What's with you?" Joe gave him a penetrating, yellow-eyed gaze. "You look like you could chew fenders."

  Clyde snorted. "The rumormongers. Having a field day."

  "About Max Harper?"

  Clyde nodded. The gossip about his good friend, Molena Point's chief of police, had left Clyde decidedly bad-tempered. The talk, in fact seemed to affect Clyde more than it did Harper. To imply, as some villagers were doing, that Harper was having an affair with one of the three women he rode with-or maybe with all three-was beyond ridiculous. Twenty-two-year-old Ruthie Marner was a looker, all right, as was Ruthie's mother. And Crystal Ryder was not only a looker but definitely on the make.

  But Harper rode with them for reasons that had nothing to do with lust or romance. The cats couldn't remember the villagers- most of whom loved and respected Harper-ever before spreading or even tolerating such gossip.

  Clyde accepted his glass from Wilma, swallowing half the whiskey-and-water in an angry gulp. "A bunch of damned troublemakers."

  "Agreed," Wilma said, sitting down on the end of the velvet couch nearest the fire. "But the gossip has to die. Nothing to keep it going."

  Clyde glanced around the room. "Where's the kit?"

  "Out," Dulcie said, worrying.

  "That little stray's twenty times worse than you two."

  "She's not a stray anymore," Dulcie said. "She's just young."

  "And wild," Clyde said.

  Dulcie leaped off the couch to roam the house, staring up at the dark windows. Rain pounded against the glass. The kit was off on another scatterbrained adventure, was likely up in the hills despite the fact that now, more than ever before, the hills were not safe for the little tortoiseshell.

  Returning unhappily to the living room, she got no sympathy. "Cool it," Clyde said. "That kit's been on her own nearly since she was weaned. She'll take care of herself. If Wilma and I fussed about you and Joe every time you went off…"

  "You do fuss every time we go off," Dulcie snapped, her green eyes filled with distress. "You fuss all the time. You and Wilma both. Particularly now, since…"

  "Since the cougar," Clyde said.

  "Since the cougar," Dulcie muttered.

  Wilma grabbed her raincoat from the hall closet. "Dinner won't be ready for a while. I'll just take a look."

  But as she knelt to pull on rubber boots, Dulcie reared up to pat her cheek. "In the
dark and rain, you won't find her." And she headed for her cat door, pushing out into the wet, cold night-and Joe Grey was out the plastic door behind her.

  He stood a moment on the covered back porch, his sleek gray coat blending with the night, his white paws and the white strip down his face bright, his yellow eyes gleaming. Then down the steps, the rain so heavy he could see little more than the dark mass of Dulcie just ahead, and an occasional oak tree or smeared cottage light. Already his ears and back were soaked. His empty stomach rumbled. The scent of roast lamb followed the cats through the rain like a long arm reaching out from the house, seeking to pull them back inside.

  Along the village streets, the cottages and shops were disembodied pools of light. They hurried uphill, their ears flat, their tails low, straight for the wild land where the cottages and shops ended, where the night was black indeed. Sloughing up through tall, wet grass, along the trail they and the kit usually followed, they could catch no scent of her, could smell only rain. They moved warily, watching, listening.

  It was hard to imagine that a mountain lion roamed their hills, that a cougar would abandon the wild, rugged mountains of the coastal range to venture anywhere near the village, but this young male cougar had been prowling close, around the outlying houses. Nor was this the first big cat to be so bold. Wilma had, on slow days as reference librarian, gone through back issues of the Molena Point Gazette, finding several such cases, one where a cougar came directly into the village at four in the morning, leaving a lasting impression with the officer on foot patrol. Wilma worried about the cats, and cautioned them, but she couldn't lock them up, not Joe Grey and Dulcie, nor the wild-spirited kit.

  "Those big cats see every flick of movement," Dulcie said, pushing on through the wet grass.

  "That kit's as dark as a piece of night, that mottled black and brown coat vanishes in the shadows. Anyway she'd hardly be worth the trouble, to a cougar-not even a mouthful."

  Dulcie hissed at him and raced away through the rain.

  The cougar had been on the Molena Point hills since Thanksgiving, prowling among the scattered small ranches, a big male with pawprints the size of Joe's head. He'd been spotted on Christmas Day, high up at the edge of the forest. Since Christmas two village dogs had disappeared, and four cats that Joe and Dulcie knew of; and huge pawprints had been found in village gardens.

  Mountain lion. Cougar. Puma. Painter. The beast had half a dozen names. Late at night in the library, Dulcie had learned about him on the computer, indulging in a little clandestine research after the doors were locked and she had the reference room to herself.

  She was, after all, the library cat. She might as well make use of her domain. Wilma had taught her the rudiments of the computer, and her paws were quick and clever. And of course no one among the staff would dream that, beyond her daytime PR activities of purring and head rubbing for the pleasure of the patrons, their little library cat followed her own agenda.

  But what Dulcie had read about cougars hadn't thrilled her.

  California had always had mountain lions. They'd been hunted nearly to extinction, then put on the protected list. Now, as their numbers increased, their range was growing smaller- more houses being built, more people moving into their territory. It took a lot of land to support a 120-pound carnivore.

  The residents of Molena Point expected an occasional coyote to venture down from the coastal range; Joe and Dulcie were ever on the alert for the beast called God's dog. And there were sometimes bobcats and always bands of big, vicious racoons hunting in packs. But a mountain lion was quite another matter. When the two cats had first found the cougar's prints high up among the hills, a thrill of terror and of awe had filled them.

  This was the wild king roaming their hunting grounds. His magnificent presence made them prowl belly to the earth, ears and tail lowered, their senses all at alarm, their little cat egos painfully chastened.

  But it had been a strange year all around. Not only the appearance of the cougar, but the odd weather. Usually, fall in Molena Point was sun-drenched, the cerulean sky graced by puffy clouds, the night sky clear and starry or scarved by fog creeping in off the sea to burn away again in early dawn. But this fall had been wet and cold, a cruel wind knifing off the Pacific beneath thick gray clouds, pushing before it sheets of icy rain. Then people's pets began disappearing, and lion tracks appeared in the gardens.

  A horrified householder had called police to report that the lion had entered his carport and had, in trying to corner his cat, slashed the tires of his black Lincoln Town Car, beneath which the cat had taken refuge: four flat tires, two badly scratched bumpers, a ruined paint job, lots of blood, and one dead Siamese.

  And now the kit was headed alone into the black hills. And as the two cats moved higher, searching, they had only the brush of their whiskers against sodden grass and wet stone to lead them, and their own voices calling the kit, muffled in the downpour.

  The kit had been staying in Dulcie and Wilma's house since her adopted human family, elderly newlyweds Pedric and Lucinda Greenlaw, left Molena Point for a jaunt in Pedric's travel trailer. The kit had refused to accompany the pair again. She loved Pedric and Lucinda and was thrilled to have a home with them, after being on her own tagging after a clowder of vagrant cats that didn't want her. But she couldn't bear any more travel. The old couple's drive up the coast to Half Moon Bay had made her painfully carsick, and on their weekend to Sacramento she threw up all the way.

  The kit was special to Lucinda and Pedric, more special than any ordinary cat. Steeped so deeply in Irish folklore and Celtic history, they had quickly guessed her carefully guarded secrets, and they treasured her.

  Brought to Wilma's house, the small furry houseguest had chosen for her daytime naps a hand-knitted sweater atop Wilma's cherry desk, beside the front window where she could watch the village street beyond the twisted oaks of Wilma's garden. The kit loved Wilma; she loved to pat her paw down Wilma's long hair and remove the clip that held her ponytail in place, to race away with it so the thin older woman would laughingly give chase. At Wilma's house, the kit dined on steak and chicken and on a lovely pumpkin custard that Wilma made fresh each day. Wilma said pumpkin was good for hairballs. The kit had nosed into every cupboard and drawer, investigated beneath every chair and chest and beneath the clawed bathtub, and then, having ransacked the house and found nothing more to discover, she had turned once more to the wider world beyond the cottage garden. The kit had grown up wild-who could stop her now?

  Around midnight, on that Wednesday, the rain ceased. Joe and Dulcie found a nearly dry niche among some boulders, and napped lightly. It was perhaps an hour later that they heard a scream, a chilling cry that brought them straight up out of sleep, icing their little cat souls.

  A woman's scream?

  Or the cougar?

  The two sounded very alike.

  Another scream broke the night, from farther down the hills. One cry from high to the north, the other from the south, bloodcurdling wails answering each other.

  "Bobcats," Joe Grey said.

  "Are you sure?"

  "Bobcats."

  She looked at him doubtfully. The screams came again, closer this time, answering each other. Dulcie pushed close to Joe, and they spun away into the forest and up a tall pine among branches too thin to hold a larger predator.

  There they waited until dawn, soaking wet and hungry. They did not hear the cries again, but Dulcie, shivering and miserable, spent the night agonizing over the little tattercoat, the curious little scamp whose impetuous headlong rushes led her into everything dangerous. By dawn, Dulcie was frazzled with worry.

  The rainclouds were gone; a silver smear of light gleamed behind the eastern hills as the hidden sun began to creep up. The cats heard no sound beneath the dim, pearly sky, only the drip, dripping from the pine boughs. Backing down the forty-foot pine, the two cats went to hunt.

  A wood rat and a pair of fat field mice filled them nicely, the warm meal lifting t
heir spirits. With new strength and hope, they hurried north toward the old Pamillon estate, where the kit liked to ramble.

  Entering among the crumbled walls and fallen, rotting trees and dark cellars, they prowled the portion of the mansion that still stood upright, but they found no sign of the kit.

  The Pamillon estate had been, in the 1930s, an elegant Mediterranean mansion standing on twenty acres high above Molena Point, surrounded by fruit trees, grape arbors, and a fine stable. Now most of the buildings were rubble. Gigantic old oak trees crowded the fallen walls, their roots creeping into the exposed cellars. The flower gardens were gone to broom bushes and pampas grass and weeds, tangled between fallen timbers.

  And the estate was just as enmeshed in tangles of a legal nature, in family battles so complicated that it had never been sold.

  Some people said the last great-great-grandchildren were hanging on as the land increased in value. Some said the maze of gifts and trusts, of sales and trades among family members was so convoluted that no one could figure out clear title to the valuable acreage.

  The kit had discovered the mansion weeks earlier. Newly come to that part of the hills, she had been as thrilled by the Pamillon estate as Magellan must have been setting anchor on the shore of the new land, as new wonders and new dangers shimmered before her.

  Joe and Dulcie searched the hills for three days, taking occasional shelter in a tiny cave or high in the branches of an oak or pine, where they could leap from tree to tree if something larger wanted them for supper. They had never before given such serious thought to being eaten. Among the dense pine foliage they blended well enough, but on the hills, on the rain-matted grass, they were moving targets. And all the while they searched for the kit, running hungry and lean, the village was there far below them, snug and warm and beckoning, filled with the delicacies provided not only at home but in any number of outdoor restaurants.