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  She wanted Joe to join the Pet-a-Pet program out of kindness, not because he couldn't resist a mystery. If she told him what little old Mae Rose had confided to her, he'd be all over those old folks, be up there like a streak, pawing and snooping around.

  No, she wanted him to join Pet-a-Pet out of compassion.

  She'd longed to be a part of Pet-a-Pet from the minute she read about it. The half dozen magazine articles she'd found had her hooked-the idea of cat therapists for the elderly and for disturbed children seemed a truly wonderful venture, a way to do some real good in the world.

  The trouble with Joe, the only fault he had, was that he didn't give a damn about doing good. Telling him of the cats she'd read about, who had helped people, had no effect but to make him laugh.

  She'd told him about the cat who helped Alzheimer's patients recover some of their vanished mental capacity 'through his unconditional love and by spurring fond associations in their minds,' and Joe scoffed. The therapist cat, Bungee, had a special magic, a real curative power for those old people, but when she told that to Joe, he had collapsed with laughter, rolling against a rooftop chimney, shouting with high amusement.

  "I don't see what's so funny. The article told how patients who practically never spoke would talk to Bungee, and how several old folks who had to be spoonfed began to feed themselves, and how the agitated ones were calmer if they could pet and stroke Bungee."

  Joe had swatted idly at the roof gutter, dislodging a wad of leaves. "You can't believe that drivel."

  "Of course I believe it. It was a legitimate magazine article; it had pictures of Bungee with the old people."

  "Hype, Dulcie. Nothing but hype."

  "Hype for what? The cat isn't running for president."

  "Is he making a movie?"

  "Of course he's not making a movie. Can't you understand anything about helping those less fortunate? It must be terrifying to grow old, not to have a strong body anymore, not be able to leap or storm up a tree."

  "Since when do humans leap and storm up trees?"

  "You know what I mean. Don't be such a grouch. It must be terrible to feel one's joints stiffen and have pains and aches and bad digestion." Her own digestion, as Joe's, was efficient and diverse. Mice, rats, caviar, lizards, Jolly's imported cheeses and pastrami, all were enjoyed with equanimity and no tummy trouble. "I just mean, it's terrible to get old. If we could-"

  "So it's terrible to get old. So are you alone going to save the world?" He opened his mouth in a wide cat laugh. "One small tabby cat-what are you, Bastet the mother goddess? Healer of mankind?"

  "Just a few old people," she had snapped. "And who are you to say I can't help? What does a mangy tomcat know?"

  That ended with claws and teeth and a fur-flying scuffle across the roof. Fighting, they rolled so near the edge that Joe nearly fell to the pavement below. As he hung swinging, and then crawled up again, they'd stared at each other, shocked; then they'd raced away across the roofs, dodging the flue stacks and chimneys.

  But no matter how she flirted and teased him, he hadn't changed his mind about visiting Casa Capri. She felt so frustrated she'd been tempted to tell him Mae Rose's story. That would get him up there in a minute.

  But then he'd be all fake purrs, fake wiggles, snooping around, caring nothing for the old people, caring for nothing but Mae Rose's little mystery that might, after all, be only a figment of an old woman's twisted imagination.

  Mrs. Rose was a tiny woman, a little miniature human like an oversize doll, the kind of life-size old-lady doll you might see in the Neiman-Marcus windows at Christmas. There was no Neiman-Marcus in Molena Point, but Wilma did her Christmas shopping up in the city, returned home to describe the wonders of the store's Christmas windows. Dulcie could just imagine Mae Rose in one of those elegant displays, the little old lady sitting in a rocking chair, her bright white hair all wispy and glowing like angel hair on a fancy Christmas tree, her round face with too much pink rouge on her cheeks, her plump little hands, her twinkling eyes as bright blue as the blue eyes of the finest porcelain doll.

  But Mae Rose wasn't all fluff. Not if you could believe the old lady's stories about what went on behind the closed doors at Casa Capri.

  Dulcie told herself, when she was feeling sensible, that probably the disappearance of certain patients was the old woman's imagination. Mae Rose said that six patients had vanished, that when a patient had a stroke or became severely ill, sick enough to be transferred from the Care Unit over to Nursing, that was the last anyone ever saw of them. When Mae Rose's friend Jane Hubble was sent to Nursing, Mae Rose claimed she was not allowed to see Jane anymore. Jane had no family to care that she had vanished or to try to find her. Mae said that none of the six who had disappeared had a family.

  As Dulcie lay curled on Mae Rose's lap, with Mae Rose tucked into her wheelchair, Mae told her about Lillie Merzinger, too, and about Mary Nell Hook, both of whom had gone to Nursing and were not seen again. Mary Nell Hook, who had cancer, was moved to Nursing where she could be on pain medication. Mae said if Mary Nell Hook had died of the cancer, then why didn't the staff tell them all, and maybe take them in the van to Mary Nell's funeral.

  Mae Rose said Lillie Merzinger had owned a cocktail bar when she was younger, and when she came to Casa Capri she brought her record collection from the forties, that she played the old records in her room, and they all liked to listen. But when Lillie had the heart attack and was taken to Nursing, no one ever heard her music anymore. Well of course Lillie was too sick to play her records. But couldn't they have played her music for her, over in Nursing?

  Dulcie couldn't point out that there might be reasons for them not to play music in a sick ward, that maybe it would disturb the really ill patients. Sometimes it was all she could do to remain mute. She couldn't argue with Mae Rose that there might be reasons for not letting everyone go visiting over to Nursing, where people would be disturbed; she couldn't say anything. All she could do was purr, hold her tongue and purr.

  Mae Rose never mentioned her wild tales to Wilma; probably she thought Wilma wouldn't believe her. The sensible thing to think was that Mae's stories were only an old lady's crazy imaginings, tales woven to keep from getting bored.

  But try as she might, Dulcie couldn't leave it at that. She kept wondering how such stories got started in Mae Rose's mind, from what crumb of truth they might have grown. The stories picked and nipped at her as persistent as a hungry flea nibbling.

  Lashing her tail, she stared out through the dark library windows, past the knotted oak branches, where the lifting moon beckoned. Midnight was near-hunting time. She needed no clock-her sense of time was far better than the ticking white clock hanging on the wall above the checkout desk; a cat knew when the mice and rabbits stirred. Leaping down, she trotted through the shadows into Wilma's office, hurried past Wilma's desk and out her cat door to the narrow village street.

  Moonlight brightened the shop windows and flower boxes and sheltered doorways, sent long shadows stretching out from the potted trees and the tubs of flowers, and from the old oaks that shaded the sidewalks taking up part of the street, narrowing the flow of daytime traffic. Oak branches reached across rooftops and fingered at balconies; and between the knotted limbs the moonlit clouds ran swiftly. The hunting would be fine, the rabbits giddy and silly in the racing light.

  She felt giddy herself, felt suddenly moon silly. Felt like rolling and playing.

  And, though both cats and rabbits play and dance in the moonlight, that did not prevent her from hungering for rabbit blood. Heading south through the village, she was wild with conflicting emotions-the hunger to hunt, but hunger as well for things she could hardly name. She stopped every few doors to stand upright and stare into a lit shop window.

  The little coffee shop kept baked breads and cookies piled in baskets just behind the glass; the scent was heady and sweet. But she stopped for a longer look into the dress shop, admiring a red silk cocktail sheath. For strange and mysteriou
s reasons, the richly draped garment made her little cat heart beat double time.

  To the casual viewer Dulcie was only a plain tabby cat. Yet beneath her sleek dark stripes, beneath those neat, peach-tinted ears, fierce yearnings stirred. Longings that had never belonged to an ordinary feline.

  Ever since she was a small kitten she had coveted silk stockings, little silky bras, black lace teddies, soft gauzy scarves and the softest cashmere sweaters. By the time she was six months old she had taught herself to claw open any neighbor's window screen and to leap at a doorknob, swinging and kicking until she had turned it and fought the door open. Wilma's neighbors for blocks around were used to Dulcie's thefts. When they missed a silk nightie, or a pair of panty hose which had been hung over the bathroom rack to dry, they had only to walk up the block to Wilma's house, rummage through the wooden box that Wilma kept on her back porch, and retrieve their lost garments. Neighbors, heading for Wilma's porch to look for stolen undies, often ended up in pleasant little social gatherings.

  Now, staring up into the shop window at the red silk dress, Dulcie yearned. She thought about the feel of the silk, and about diamond earrings and about midnight suppers at lovely restaurants. Who knew what strange heritage produced such unfeline dreams? Who knew what lineage made the little cat yearn so desperately, sometimes, to be a human person. She knew there were Celtic tales of strange, unnatural cats, stories so old they were passed down and down before history was ever written; she knew folk stories that made the fur along her back stand stiff with amazement and sometimes with fear.

  Fear because she longed so sharply for things a cat did not need, longed so intensely for a life she could never know.

  Joe Grey's talents were just as remarkable as her own, but Joe was quite content to remain a cat, was totally happy to experience human perceptions and human talents but not have to bother with neckties, income tax, or vicious lawsuits.

  Leaving the dress shop, she trotted north up the sidewalk to the Aronson Gallery, and there, pressing her nose against the glass, she enjoyed a moment of pure self-indulgence. Studying the three drawings of her that were exhibited in the window, she let her ego fly, allowed her own lovely likeness, gold-framed and more than life-size, to inflate her feline ego, enlarge her self-esteem like a hot balloon threatening to sail away with her; she imagined herself dangling in the sky, unable to return to earth, hoist on her own silly vanity.

  The artist's rendering of her long green eyes was lovely; her peach-tinted paws and her peach-toned ears and little pink nose were a delight. She luxuriated in the sleek lines of her graceful form, in the curving mink brown stripes of her glossy tabby fur, and sighed with pleasure. Who needed red silk cocktail dresses? Charlie Getz had drawn her with such love, had made her so beautiful, she should long for nothing more.

  Charlie, Wilma's niece, had come to visit early last fall, moving into Wilma's guest room with her paints and drawing pads and with a monumental disappointment in her young life. A disenchanted graduate of a San Francisco art school, Charlie had discovered only after completing her courses that she couldn't make an adequate living at her chosen major, that she was not cut out for the demands of today's commercial art and that there seemed little money in a fledgling career as an animal artist.

  After a short sulk, she had started a household repair and cleaning business, CHARLIE'S FIX-IT, CLEAN-IT. In Molena Point her services were already in such demand that she was working ten and twelve hours a day and couldn't hire enough help. She loved her new business, loved the hard work, loved the success of her venture. And she gloated over the growing balance in her bank account. But belatedly, after giving up an art career, she found that the Aronson Gallery wanted her animal sketches. Dulcie knew the gallery well, and it was highly respected.

  Just last fall, she and Joe had broken into the Aronson Gallery when they were searching for clues to the murder of Janet Jeannot, one the gallery's best-known artists. Of course Sicily Aronson knew nothing of their B &E, or of their involvement in solving the crime. Who would suspect a cat of meddling?

  Smiling, remembering that night she and Joe had prowled the locked gallery searching for clues, she dropped down from the windowsill and sat a moment on the warm sidewalk, washing her paws, then headed across the village to find Joe.

  She made a little detour up Ocean, past the greengrocer's, sniffing the lingering scent of peaches and melons, then the delicious aromas which seeped through the glass door of the butcher's, but soon she crossed the westbound lane of Ocean, crossed the wide, tree shaded median and the deserted eastbound lane. Heading up Dolores toward the white cottage which Joe Grey shared with Clyde Damen, she plotted how best to soften up Joe, get him to join Pet-a-Pet. And she kept thinking about Jane Hubble and the other patients, who, Mae Rose said, had disappeared. Probably she was being silly, believing such stories; probably the old people at Casa Capri were just as safe as babes tucked in their beds, the staff kind and unthreatening-except perhaps for the owner of the care home.

  Beautiful Adelina Prior, in her lovely designer suits and her creme-de-la-creme coiffure and makeup, seemed, to Dulcie, as out of place at Casa Capri as a tiger among bunny rabbits. Why would a woman who looked like a model want to spend her life running an old people's home?

  Trotting through the inky shadows where large oaks roofed the sidewalk she thought of being trapped in Casa Capri, behind those tightly locked doors-if there was some criminal activity-and her paws began to sweat.

  It was one thing to pry into the crimes she and Joe had solved earlier this year, where they could escape through windows and unlocked doors and over rooftops. But to be confined within Casa Capri, where the doors were always bolted, made a chill of fear clamp her ears and whiskers tight to her head, made her cling low to the dark sidewalk, in a wary slink.

  But yet she wanted to go there. And she knew, if something was amiss, she'd keep digging at it, clawing at it until the mystery was laid bare.

  4

  In the hills high above the village a miniature world of tiny creatures crept through the grass, vibrating and humming, a community whose members were unaware of any existence but their own, of any needs but their own to kill or be killed, to eat or be eaten. The two cats, poised above this Lilliputian landscape, waited motionless to strike. Around them the grass stems had been pushed aside to carve out little mouse-sized trails, but some of the paths were wide enough for rabbits, too, major lanes winding away, dotted with pungent droppings. One pile of rabbit scat was so fresh that grass blades still shivered from the animal's swift flight. The cats, leaping to follow, panted with anticipation.

  Above them the clouds drew apart, freeing the moon's light, and the moon itself swam between washes of blowing vapor; the dark hills caught the light, humping between earth and sky like the bodies of sprawled, sleeping beasts.

  All night they had worked together stalking cooperatively, not as normal cats hunt but as a pair of lions would hunt, hazing and driving their prey. Dulcie's eyes burned toward the trembling shadows, her smile was a killer's smile, her paws were swift. She was not, now, Wilma's cosseted kitty rolling on stolen silk teddies.

  But yet as they hunted, a poetry filled her, and she began to imagine she was Bast, stalking among papyrus thickets, clutching live geese in her teeth. Racing through the grass, she was Bast, hunting beside Egyptian kings, Bast the revered cat goddess, Bast the serpent slayer leaping to the kill…

  The rabbit spun and bolted straight at her and beyond her, exploded away, was past before she could strike. She jerked around streaking after it, hot with embarrassment. Joe had flushed the creature nearly into her paws, and she had missed it. It sped away, kicking sand in her face, dodged, zigzagged, showed her only its white fluff tail, and disappeared into a tangle of wild holly. Her nostrils were filled with its fear and with the smell of her own shame.

  But then it swerved out again, and she dodged after it. As it doubled back she sprang, snatched it in midair, clamped her teeth deep into its struggling b
ody.

  Its scream cut the night as she tasted its blood, its cry was shrill, as terrified as the scream of a murdered woman. It raked her with its hind claws, slashing at her belly. She bit deeper, opening its throat. It jerked and stopped struggling and was still, limp and warm, the life draining from it.

  She carried the rabbit back to Joe, and they bent together over the kill. He did not mention her daydreaming inattention. He scarfed his share of the carcass, rending and tearing, flinging the fur away, crunching bone.

  "Someday," she said, "you're going to choke yourself, gorging. Snuff out your own life, victim to a sliver of rabbit bone."

  "So call 911. What were you dreaming, back there?" He gave her an annoyed male look, and ripped fur and flesh from the bones.

  She didn't answer. He shrugged. The rabbit was succulent and sweet, fattened on garden flowers. Dulcie skinned her half carefully, then stripped morsels of meat from the little bones, eating slowly. Only when the bones were clean, when nothing was left but bones and skull, did they settle in for a wash. Licking themselves, cleaning their faces, then their paws, working carefully in between claws and between their sensitive pads, they at last cleaned each other's ears. Then, stomachs full, they sat in the moonlight, looking down upon the village, at the moonstruck rooftops beneath the dark oaks and eucalyptus.

  Because many of the village shops had once been summer cottages, the entire village was now a tangled mix: shops, cottages, galleries, and motels, crowded together any which way. But where the hills rose above the village, the houses were newer and farther apart, with dry yellow verges between. It was here that the cats hunted. Besides the rabbits and ground squirrels, the mice and birds, there were occasional large and bad-tempered rats. Both cats carried scars from rat fights; and Joe remembered too vividly the rats in San Francisco's alleys when he was a kitten, rats that had seemed, then, as big and dangerous as Rottweilers.