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  "Hi," Charlie said, joining them, balancing Kit as she took a piece of bread and reached for a beer.

  "Where have you been?" Clyde said. "Where's Dulcie?" He saw how pale she was, her freckles a dark spill across ashen cheeks. "What happened to Dulcie?" he said quickly.

  "She's fine," Charlie said, clutching Kit to her. "I have to talk to you. Can we go somewhere? It's…Ryan, you come, too."

  Clyde picked up Joe, looking deep into the tomcat's yellow eyes but seeing no answers, only that same innocent stare. They headed down the hall to the guest room-this had been Clyde 's bedroom before Ryan added the new upstairs master suite. It had now been redone for guests in a far more luxurious manner than Clyde had ever wanted. Ryan's sister, Hanni, forgoing her designer's markup, had chosen golden oak and wicker furniture and three of the bright Oriental rugs that she imported. The bedcover was a puffy patchwork of East Indian prints nearly as rich as the rugs. The white plantation shutters, in the daytime, would reveal the twisted branches of the oak trees outside the window. Mike Flannery's leather bag stood on the floor beside the open closet, where a few of his clothes hung at one end of the otherwise empty rod. His leather briefcase lay open on the wicker desk, revealing half a dozen file folders stamped MOLENA POINT PD.

  "Looks like Dad can't wait to get rid of us," Ryan said, laughing, "and have the house to himself." Mike had moved in with Clyde a day early, to get acquainted with the animals and learn their habits.

  He would not, of course, learn all their habits. Joe Grey had been lectured several times about his behavior around Mike Flannery, about his tendency to tease and create problems-about what would happen to him if he made trouble.

  Shutting the door behind them, Clyde dropped Joe on the bed, and he and Charlie and Ryan sat down at the wicker card table before the window. Kit slipped from Charlie's shoulder to the table, and Joe leaped up to join her. Both cats looked nervous and wrung out.

  "Dulcie's fine," Charlie repeated. "She and Wilma are…doing a favor for a friend."

  "What friend?" Clyde said suspiciously. He hadn't seen Wilma leave the crowded house.

  "A cat," Charlie said. "One of the wild band. He came to me tonight at the ranch; I was just ready to leave, and there was Willow hiding at the back of the barn, crouched and frightened. She…they…" She wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her sweatshirt.

  Clyde reached for the box of tissues from the desk, surprised to see Charlie cry. Charlie never cried. She seemed surprised herself.

  "They've left the ruins," Kit interrupted, "Willow's clowder…They're going back with the wild band, there was a terrible battle and Cotton and Coyote killed Stone Eye, and the whole band is free again, Cotton and Coyote will rule now but Sage was hurt bad…" Kit was so worked up she was shifting from paw to paw. "…wounded and bleeding and in pain and Willow took him to Charlie and Charlie doctored him and then took him and Willow to Dr. Firetti and he-"

  "He had to operate," Charlie cut in. Kit could run on. "Firetti needed blood." She looked intently at Clyde. "He said it had to be special blood. From a special kind of cat."

  That got Clyde 's attention. Beside him, Ryan was silent, her green eyes turning from Charlie, to Clyde, to the cats. Sometimes lately she felt as if she'd been dropped into Neverland.

  Charlie put her hand over Ryan's hand. "Dr. Firetti said, 'I think you know what I mean. I will need special blood.'"

  "He knows," Clyde said, swallowing. "All this time? Taking Joe in for shots…? Oh, my God."

  "He's known since he was a boy," Kit interrupted, "and his father who was the vet before him knew, someone brought speaking cats here from Wales and started to sell them and the cats hadn't agreed to that and they escaped and that was the beginning of our clowder and…"

  Listening to Kit's high-speed monologue, Ryan felt seriously unbalanced. She was barely used to Joe's acerbic comments, was still startled every time the tomcat spoke to her-was barely used to the fact that the cats could talk, and now here was Kit rattling on at a speed that left her giddy.

  "And shaved our front legs," Kit was saying, thrusting out her own naked forearm for all to see, "and stuck needles right in under our skin into our veins and drew out so much blood I felt weak and fainty and then Dr. Firetti gave us broth and custard and roast beef that Mrs. Firetti sent over and then Wilma brought us chicken soup and party food and we felt stronger," she said, sucking in a breath, "but our poor fur, Joe's beautiful silver coat and my dear black-and-brown fur that I groom every day all spoiled and our skin all naked and cold and will it ever grow back again?"

  "It's only a small shaved spot," Charlie said softly, taking Kit in her arms.

  Ryan, with a sense of walking on quicksand, reached to gently examine Kit's shaved forearm, the dark veins showing boldly beneath the paper-thin skin. "I've had dogs shaved like this," she told Kit. "It doesn't take long to grow back. A few days, it will already be bristly. But how is Sage? How is the patient?"

  Clyde put his arm around Ryan, hugging her. She was so cool, was fitting right in with this madness.

  "He's doing fine," Charlie said. "Wilma's up there with Dulcie, in case they need more blood. She'll call when he's fully awake, when they know how the surgery went. Dulcie will stay there overnight. Dr. Firetti plans to sleep in the surgery, on a cot, but he wants another speaking cat near when Sage wakes, a cat he knows, to reassure and calm him. Being inside a building, in a cage, will terrify him until he's fully conscious-a wild little animal like Sage, with no other cat to talk to…"

  "We have to tell Lucinda and Pedric," Clyde said. "They-"

  "I…," Kit began, crouching on Charlie's shoulder, ready to drop to the floor, ready to race through the house searching for her humans, to be the first to tell them. Hastily Charlie grabbed her and held her securely.

  "I'll find them, Kit," Charlie said. "You stay here. You can't talk to them out there." Setting Kit firmly on the table and giving her a threatening look, Charlie went in search of the Greenlaws. Behind her, Kit fidgeted. Clyde and Ryan rose to follow, Clyde promising to bring the cats a plate of party food.

  "Heavy on the shrimp," Joe said, "and the ribs."

  "And some of those little quiches," Kit said, reluctantly settling down. "Nice and fresh from the oven."

  Clyde gave the two a long look, then moved down the hall with Ryan, shutting the door behind them, Ryan pressing her fist to her mouth to keep from collapsing into uncontrolled laughter.

  "Am I dreaming?" she asked him softly. "Am I making this up? Have you lured me into some alternate world?"

  He paused in the hall, drawing her close and kissing her. "Does that feel made up? If you think you're dreaming, come on upstairs…"

  She laughed and kissed him back, then slipped out of his arms and headed back to the party, holding his hand. But all the rest of that evening she wasn't really certain they hadn't slipped, together, through Alice 's looking glass or through some other innocent-seeming portal into a startling new universe. The kaleidoscopic events, since the morning that Joe Grey had spoken to her for the first time-Christmas morning, the morning Clyde proposed to her-had left her waking suddenly in the night laughing out loud and then seriously questioning her sanity.

  But then she thought, trying to steady herself, Tomorrow we'll be married, and that's real. How many women marry, for life, into the family of a talking cat?

  8

  C HARLIE FOUND LUCINDA in the kitchen setting out a plate of homemade cookies on one side of the round table that was loaded with party food. The tall, older woman was so thin that when Charlie put her arm around her, she could feel every bone-but bone covered in lean muscle. Even at eighty-some, Lucinda Greenlaw was healthy and strong; she did most of her own housework and walked several miles a day. "I need to talk with you," Charlie said softly.

  Lucinda looked at her, startled.

  "Nothing bad," Charlie breathed, "only private. Kit will tell it later, but she's-"

  Lucinda laughed. "So impetuous you can't get in a word.
Come on, Pedric's in the laundry." And Lucinda headed across the kitchen, away from the crowd. Charlie, following her, heard through a tangle of laughter Dallas 's raised and angry voice from the living room and Mike's sharp retort.

  What was that about? Mike and Dallas never had words. Glancing across the room, she caught Ryan's eye. Ryan shook her head almost imperceptibly before she turned away.

  On the closed laundry door hung a little sign: PLEASE DO NOT OPEN, which Clyde had posted to give the three household cats some semblance of quiet and privacy-none of the three liked loud parties. Two were elderly, and the younger, Snowball, had always been shy. Slipping the door open, they found Pedric sitting hunched on the bottom bunk, his head ducked beneath the upper bunk of the animals' bed, petting the three cats. Snowball lay in his lap, and Scrappy and Fluffy were snuggled in the blankets next to him. The cats had shared the two-bunk bed with the two old dogs until Barney, the golden, and then Rube, the black Lab, had passed away. Snowball was still grieving for Rube.

  Against the party noise beyond the closed door, Charlie told the Greenlaws about Willow and Sage, then about John Firetti knowing the cats' secret. Neither of the two tall, thin, eighty-year-olds seemed too surprised; it took a lot to amaze Lucinda and Pedric.

  "I always thought," Lucinda said, "that John Firetti acted a bit strange around Kit. When we first took her in for her shots, he looked at her for a long time without saying anything, and then he seemed to expect her to lie still and behave herself. He asked if she'd had her kitten shots, and when I told him we didn't know, that she was a stray, he asked where we'd found her," Lucinda recalled. "When we said Hellhag Hill, there was a sudden light in his eyes, a gleam of excitement, then he quickly looked down."

  "But," Pedric said, "mostly it was his assuming Kit would lie still. Why would he think he could just look at her and tell her it would hurt more if she wiggled, and she would hold stone still for him? I thought at the time that it was his tone, that he had a unique understanding of a cat's nature, that his voice and inflection somehow told his patients he expected them to behave.

  "But later," Pedric said, "we wondered."

  "Apparently he does have a unique understanding," Lucinda said, smiling. "More understanding than I ever guessed. We did think it strange, though, that he never suggested spaying her. He never brought up the subject. And of course we didn't."

  "Well," Charlie said, stroking Snowball, "looks like I'm more shaken by this than you two. I never imagined…"

  But when she looked at the older couple, who had recently been through a frightening kidnapping that could have cost them their lives, who had escaped unharmed with great resourcefulness, she knew there wasn't much that would shock the Greenlaws-until she mentioned the hidden book.

  When she told them more about the battle at the ruins, and described the old volume the ferals had found, Lucinda's eyes brightened with excitement. "Where is it, Charlie? What did they do with it?"

  And Pedric was burning with even more excitement. "More tales of speaking cats! Do you think…Are there stories we've never heard?" Charlie could imagine the old man avidly reading those tales, and memorizing every word.

  ***

  B EYOND THE LAUNDRY room's closed door, as the three discussed the mysterious volume, Mike Flannery and his daughter had left the crowd, heading up the open stairs to the new second floor, to the construction project that had marked the beginning of Ryan's romance with Clyde. On earlier visits Mike had seen the impressive addition Ryan had built for Clyde when they'd first met; now Ryan wanted to show him how she would add her own studio. Carrying fresh cans of beer, leaving behind the sounds of the party, neither father nor daughter glanced back to see the gray tomcat pad watchfully out of the kitchen to follow them, they didn't see him slink up the stairs behind them to the master suite and into the shadows beneath the king-size bed.

  Joe ignored a twinge of guilt at spying on his friends. At breaching father and daughter's privacy. Dulcie would have said, "Can't they have a few minutes alone, the evening before Ryan's to be married? Do you have to be so nosy?"

  But of course he was nosy, he was a cat. Cats were driven by nosiness, they were masters of curiosity. The investigative instinct was their finest mark of uniqueness, and who was he to go against basic feline nature? He followed. He hid under the bed. And he listened. And if the stab of guilt continued to accompany the tomcat's eavesdropping on his about-to-be housemate, Joe thought Ryan wouldn't really mind, that he could talk his way around her annoyance.

  ***

  T HE NEW ADDITION had a high ceiling of open rafters, where Ryan had raised the hip roof of the old one-story cottage to form two walls of the new second floor, then added new window walls. Mike admired again the stone fireplace she had built in the master bedroom, the compartmented bath and dressing rooms, and Clyde 's cozy study. When Ryan was little, she'd loved to draw floor plans and elevations. Every minute she wasn't riding or working with the dogs, or going out on construction sites with her uncle Scotty, she was inventing her own house designs. Mike had only smiled when her teachers complained that all her school papers and notebooks had little floor plans or architectural details in the margins, sketches quickly made to record some fleeting idea.

  Passion, he thought. The child had had a passion for what she loved, for what she knew she wanted to do with her life.

  She had never abandoned that drive; she had learned her carpentry skills from Scotty, had studied structural design, had never wavered from the intensity of her goal. Now, having gotten where she wanted to be, she relished the work she did.

  So many kids, Mike thought, didn't seem to feel strongly about anything, didn't have any kind of ongoing passion, any dream to follow and fight for. Did today's schools take it all out of them? Or was it the canned culture they grew up in? He thought sometimes that an entire generation had morphed into mind-numbed spectators, that their passion had so badly turned in on itself that they were able to hunger only for the quick, immediate sensation with no meaning.

  Well hell, wasn't he getting jaded. He guessed he'd worked too long among criminal types-maybe it was time to turn his back on law enforcement before he grew really bitter.

  Shaking his head, both amused and annoyed with himself, he put his arm around Ryan. "You did a great job with this house," he said, studying the details of the master suite, the deep window seat beside the stone fireplace, the Mexican-tile floor and carved doors. "And it's a perfect arrangement for a couple. Almost," he said, laughing down at her, "as if you expected to move in."

  Ryan laughed, and blushed a little. "I expected someone would. I didn't think Clyde would remain a bachelor forever, he didn't seem the type-despite his philandering ways."

  "That's in the past for Clyde," he said reassuringly. "Where will you put the new studio? You plan to enclose the deck over the carport?"

  "No, the studio will go just behind it." She crossed Clyde 's study to the glass doors that led to the upstairs deck. "We'll leave the deck, put the studio back there, over the dining end of the kitchen-if we can get the permit."

  She turned, pushing back her short, dark hair. "After the battle I had on the last job, I'm not looking forward to another hassle with city planning-to a fight that has nothing to do with standard building codes. I should be used to it, it goes with the territory. But I never will be." She looked up at him, her green eyes angry. "I understand sensible restrictions to protect the lovely setting of the village, but-"

  "But what you can't abide," Mike said, "is high-handed authoritarianism for no reason but personal power."

  She laughed. "Those people don't own the world," she said. "But they sure like to think they do." Molena Point's building codes and the patronizing attitude of its building inspectors were a sore point among most of the village contractors, except for those few who passed sufficient sums under the table.

  "What if they won't okay the studio?"

  She studied him. "We're not buying them off, if that's what you're thinki
ng. I can take over the downstairs guest room, though I'd rather not. Clyde likes having a guest room, and so do I. And I really want a studio with a view, I like to look down on the rooftops when I'm working. That's why I like the apartment.

  "If they flat-out refuse the permit," she said, "if I get tired of fighting them, and if you've found a place of your own by then, I'll keep the apartment as my studio. Not as convenient for late-night fits of inspiration, but I can have a small setup here, in a corner of the study. I really do need the apartment's downstairs garage for equipment storage. If I don't have that, I'll have to rent space somewhere."

  She pulled a blueprint from a stack of papers on Clyde 's bookshelf and unrolled it on the desk; as Mike looked over the studio's floor plan, she studied her dad. "You had a little tiff with Dallas?"

  He looked at her and shrugged. "A small difference of opinion, nothing important."

  She waited.

  "Something about the Carson Chappell cold case," he said.

  Ryan hid a smile. "Lindsey Wolf is lovely."

  Ignoring that, he studied the blueprint intently, looking over the interior elevations, nodding with approval at the high, slanted ceiling with its long skylights and the small, raised fireplace in the far corner between the glass walls, its stone matching that in the bedroom.

  "Plenty of room for my drafting table," she said, amused by her dad, "for file cabinets, computer, and a deep storage closet here for drawings and blueprints." Was he getting serious again about Lindsey? Ryan thought Lindsey was the only woman he had ever really cared about since her mother died.