Cat Seeing Double (7 page)

She looked at Dallas. “Right then, did he decide to hitch a ride, when he knew where I lived? Did he have it all planned, weeks ago?

“And what was he doing up there? How did he get there, in the first place? And did the old man hitch too? That would make me feel really stupid, if those two were both in the truck.” Ryan shook her head. “Did I give them both a ride so they could set that bomb?”

“Soon as we get a lab report, likely we'll start checking stores in the San Andreas area—hardware, drugstores, feed and grocery. That might be where the meth supplies were coming from. We sure didn't turn up with big purchases here on the coast. That raid on the Farger shack netted us a hoard of antifreeze, iodine, starter fluid, fifty packs of cold tablets, just for starters. To say nothing of the mountain of empties buried in a
pit. But no record—or no admission—of increased sales locally. Could be they got their bomb makings up there too.”

She looked at him. “I wasn't carrying their bomb supplies! In the back of my truck!”

Dallas shrugged. “That could be hard to sort out. Ammonium sulfate, for instance. The bomb wouldn't have taken much, compared to what a farmer might use.”

“That would be sick, Dallas. If I was hauling their bomb makings for them.”

“What time did you leave San Andreas? Took you about four hours to get home?”

“About seven in the evening. Took me five hours. I stopped in town to load some stained-glass windows I'd bought from an antique dealer. He'd said he'd wait for me. Then halfway home I pulled into a fast-food place for a burger.” She imagined the kid hunkered down under the tarp, cold in the wind and nearly drooling at the smell of greasy fries and burgers. “Why didn't I see him? How could I have loaded the windows without…” She stopped, and sat thinking, then looked up at Dallas.

“When I loaded the windows, the guy had given me some cardboard to buffer them, so I didn't need the tarp. I tossed it near the tailgate, still folded. There was no one in the truck, then.”

“When you'd loaded the windows, what did you do?”

“I went back inside to give the shopkeeper a check.”

“Was there any room left in the truck bed?”

“The windows were lined up in the front, riding on several sheets of foam insulation, and tied and padded. The back half of the truck bed was empty.”

Dallas kept asking questions. Yawning, she went over every detail she could remember. The hitchhikers could easily have dropped off the back of the truck when she pulled into her drive. In the dark, she wouldn't have seen them.

“What other contacts did you have up there?”

“Lumber and building-supply people. Building inspectors. The furnace guy. A local realtor wanting me to do a remodel—a Larn Williams. Has his broker's license. Works independently.”

“You take the job?”

“He wants to talk with his clients.” She yawned. “I think I may skip that one. He seems interested in more than the work.”

Dallas rose. “You're beat. I'll cut out of here.”

She grinned up at him. “You never get tired, when you're on a case.” She got up too, and hugged him, and saw him out the door. But the moment he pulled out of the drive and headed down the hill, she turned off the light and fell into bed, dropping immediately into sleep—she was definitely not a night person.

 

But others in the world loved the night, others found the small hours after midnight filled with excitement. While Dallas and Ryan sat in her studio trying to get a fix on Curtis Farger, Joe Grey woke from his nap in the double bed beside Clyde, woke hearing Dulcie and the kit at his cat door banging the plastic flap.

Leaping down and trotting out through the living room, he found the kit on the porch slapping at the flap, and Dulcie stretched out on the mat beside her enjoying
the cool night breeze. Within moments they were racing through the village past the dimly lit shops, dodging around potted trees, streaking through sidewalk gardens. Ocean's wide median and one-way lanes were empty now and deserted, the wedding party vanished as if all the people and lights and tables of food had been sucked up by the sea wind. The cats didn't pause until they were high in the hills where the tall grass whipped in long waves—they ran chasing one another, clearing their heads of too many voices, too much laughter, too many human problems. Alone in the night racing blindly through the tangles caring nothing tonight for caution, they laughed softly and taunted one another.

“Gotcha.”
Then a hiss and a playful growl, humanlike voices no louder than a whisper.
“Not me, you can't catch me.” “Alley cat! You're an alley cat!” “Last one up the tree is dog meat!”

Dulcie scorched up the branches of a huge oak that stood on the crest of the hill, a venerable grandfather flinging its black twisted arms out across the stars. Racing and leaping within the great tree, riding its wind-tossed branches like sailors clinging to a rocking masthead, the cats looked down the hills that fell away below them. Ancient curves of land that, just here, were still totally wild, empty of human civilization. And out over the sea the new moon hung thin as a blade. The stars among which the moon swam were, Dulcie liked to imagine, the eyes of spirit cats who had passed from the world before them.

The wind died. The cats paused, listening.

The night was so still they could hear each other breathing; and in the new silence, another sound.

Something running the hills, trampling the dry tall grass. A big beast running; they could hear him panting.

High above the ground, they were safe from dogs and coyotes. But cougars could climb. And now in the faint moonlight they could see the shadow running, a beast as big as a cougar, large and swift, dodging in and out among the hillside gardens.

It did not move like a cougar.

“Dog,” Joe hissed. “Only a dog.”

But the plunging beast ran as if demented, and it was a very big dog. Was it tracking them? Following the fresh scent of cat? In the still night, its panting implied a single-mindedness that made them climb quickly higher among the oak's dark foliage.

Contrary to common perception, some dogs could climb quite handily up the sprawling branches of a tree such as this. They had seen such picures, of coon hounds on a passionate mission. Dulcie glanced at the kit worriedly because the kit was young and small.

But she wasn't small anymore,
Dulcie realized.

The little tattercoat wasn't a kitten anymore. She was as big as Dulcie herself and likely was still growing. And Dulcie knew too well, from their mock battles, that this kit was as solid as a rock. Beside her on the branch the kit sat working her claws into the rough bark, staring down at the racing dog with eyes burning like twin fires. As if she couldn't wait to leap on that running back clawing and raking.

It seemed only yesterday that Dulcie and Joe had found the kit up on Hellhag hill, a little morsel of fur and bone so frightened, so bullied by the bigger cats that she never got enough to eat. Such a strange little
cat, vastly afraid one minute, and giddy with adventure the next, filled with excitement and challenge.

But that had been a year ago. A year since Joe saw that car plunge over the sea cliff and found the driver dead inside, a year since Lucinda Greenlaw buried her murdered husband and fell in love with his uncle Pedric. A year since Lucinda and Pedric married, and adopted the kit and set out traveling with her. The kit had been so excited, setting off to see all the world, as the kit put it—only to turn home again very soon, the little cat dreadfully carsick. Three times the Greenlaws had tried, three journeys in which the Kit became deathly ill.

Nearly a year since Lucinda brought the little tattercoat back for good, to stay with Wilma while the elderly newlyweds traveled.

She's grown up
, Dulcie thought sadly. That fact, coupled with the kit's wild and unruly temperament, made Dulcie feel not simply lonely suddenly, but sharply apprehensive.

Once the kit realized that she was a grown-up cat who need not necessarily obey her elders, what might she do then?

Crouching among the branches watching the big pale hound racing along with his nose to the ground eagerly following their scent, Dulcie's head was filled with a cat's natural fear of the unfamiliar beast, and filled as well with all the fear that had accumulated during this strangest of days. With the terrible tragedy that might have been. And with the kit's boldness in preventing that disaster.

And suddenly life seemed to Dulcie overwhelming.
She felt totally adrift, she and Joe and the kit. Alone in the vast world, three cats who were like no other—not totally cat, and not human, but with talents of both. Were they, as Joe had once said, the great cat god's ultimate joke? Three amusing experiments invented for His private and twisted amusement?

She did not believe that.

And why, tonight, did her thoughts turn so frightened?

That terrible explosion had upset her more than she'd imagined.

“He's leaving,” Joe said, peering down the hill where the dog had swerved away. They watched the animal disappear between cottages, causing housebound dogs all along the street to bark. Block by block, barking dogs marked his progress until all across the village, dogs bored with their dull lives chimed together delighted at any new excitement.

When the dog had vanished and the barking died, the cats dropped out of the tree and headed across the slope to hunt. Prowling in the still night, it was no trick to start a rabbit among the tall grass, to corner and dispatch it. Wedding party food was lovely, but it didn't stay with one like a nice fresh rabbit. At three in the morning, by the chimes of the courthouse clock echoing across the hills, they were crouched in the grass sharing their third rabbit when two gunshots cut the silence.

Distant shots echoing back and forth across the hills.

The cats stopped eating.

The noise could have been backfires, but they didn't think so. They hadn't heard a car purring along the
streets. And when they reared up to look above the high grass, they saw no reflection of headlights moving through the dark village. And the sounds had been sharper, more precise than the fuzzed explosion of a backfire—the cats knew too well the sound of a handgun, from listening outside the police station to cops practicing on the indoor range. And Joe and Dulcie knew, from being shot at themselves, an experience they didn't care to repeat.

The echo bouncing among the houses had made it impossible to pin the exact location, even for sensitive feline ears. But certainly the shots had come from the north end of the village. Watching the few scattered lights in that direction, looking for a house light to go on or to be extinguished, they saw no change.

When no further shots were fired, the cats headed down the hills toward home and safety. They might love adventure, but they weren't stupid. But then as they crossed the little park above Highway One, they heard a car somewhere off to their right, its progress muffled among the cottages.

Racing up a pine tree they spotted a lone car, its lights glancing across buildings and through the trees' dark foliage, shafts of intermittent light bright and then lost, then appearing again. They heard it gear down, heard it rev a little as if it had turned in somewhere. Then silence. And the moving glow was gone. They waited for some time but it did not reappear.

It had vanished maybe ten blocks to the north. They couldn't tell which street. Climbing higher up the pine they watched the dark configurations of cottages and dividing streets. No light came on in any house. The car
didn't start out again but they heard a car door open and close, the soft echo bouncing along the quiet streets.

They waited a long time, sprawled uncomfortably in the pine tree. The thin, prickly branches were not as accommodating as the easy limbs of a eucalyptus or oak; and the pine was sticky too, its pitch clinging in their fur in hard masses that couldn't be pulled out and that were impossible to lick out. The only thing to do about pine pitch was to let Wilma or Clyde cut away the offending knots, an operation the cats abhorred. The darkness seemed lonely and frightening, now, to these cats who loved the night. Over on Ocean, where only hours before the streets had burned with candlelight and rung with music and laughter, now all was deserted and still and, after the two shots, the silence seemed laced with threat.

Quickly Joe backed down the rough trunk. “That car's in for the night. Probably had nothing to do with the shots—if they
were
shots.” Yawning, he watched the sleepy kit above them turn to make her way down headfirst. “Wake up, Kit! Don't do that.” How many times did they have to tell her. “Watch what you're doing! Turn around. Dig your claws in.”

The kit came down in a tumble, clawing bark and leaping to the sidewalk. She might be grown big, but she still pummeled out of a tree like a silly kitten. Righting herself, she looked at the older cats with embarrassment.

Dulcie winked at Joe and glanced away in the direction of Jolly's alley. She had meant to part from him and head home with the kit, to a warm bed beside
Wilma. But maybe a few minutes behind Jolly's Deli would cheer the kit and smooth away her fears.

Joe twitched a whisker, grinning, and headed for Jolly's.

But, padding up the sidewalk staying close to the kit, Dulcie's skin twitched at every shadow and at every patch of darkness. Things were not right, tonight. What
were
those shots? One culprit was already at large, his bombing attempt gone awry. And now, gunshots? What if the attempted bombing was just the tip of the iceberg? One move in some larger criminal entanglement—a tiny lizard tail that when seen in full, would turn out to be a rattlesnake?

Ryan woke
before dawn, but woke not eagerly looking forward to her day as had been her habit lately, not leaping up to turn on the coffeepot and pull the curtains back to look out at the first hint of morning. Instead, an unnatural heaviness of spirit pressed her down; a sense of ugliness made her want to crawl into sleep again. Darkness and depression filled her. And an inexplicable fear. She felt as she had so many nights waking in the small hours to see Rupert's side of the bed still empty, to wish wholeheartedly that she was somewhere else, in some other life.

But now, she
was
somewhere else. This
was
another life. She was free of Rupert.

So what was wrong?

The pale room rose pleasantly around her, its high, white beams just visible in the near-dark. On the west wall the white draperies over the long bank of windows were starting to grow pale with the first promise of dawn. Before the draperies, her new desk, her drafting table and computer stood waiting for her just as she had arranged them for ultimate efficiency and pleasure. She
was here in her private nest. Nothing could be wrong. Squeezing her eyes closed, she tried to get a fix on her powerful but unfocused dread.

A cloud of swirling smoke and churning flying rubble. Black, angry eyes staring at her. People running and screaming. The side of the church gone, the sky above filled with flying pieces of broken walls and with white petals falling, falling. Senseless fragments, borne of senseless hatred.

She lay shivering, seeing the black, hate-filled eyes of that boy. She sat up in bed, driving his image away. Deliberately she brought into vision the lovely bridal procession in the cool night, down the narrow grassy carpet between hundreds of friends all holding up fairy lights, or so it had seemed to her, ephemeral candles burning to mark the bride's way. Charlie approaching her groom stepping to the rhythm of the sea's music and to the rustle of the giant trees that stood guard over her.

Nothing,
nothing
could have been more filled with joy and closeness. No ceremony could have better demonstrated Charlie's and Max's and the villagers' stubborn defiance of evil.

Rising, she pulled on her robe and padded into the kitchen to fill the coffeepot, dumping out the grounds from last night. As the coffee brewed, she opened the draperies that ran the length of the studio.

Out over the sea, dawn's light was somber. Impatiently waiting for the coffee, she imagined Charlie rising this morning to let in room service, or to fetch in the elegant breakfast cart herself, where it had been left discreetly outside the door of the St. Francis bridal suite. Charlie and Max were safe. They were safe.

Ryan poured her own first cup of coffee not from a silver server into thin porcelain, as Charlie would be doing, but into an old earthenware mug, breathing in its steamy aroma. She was deeply soothed by the absolute seclusion and calm of her own quiet space. And after two weeks of hot weather, of eighty-and ninety-degree temperatures in the California foothills, she was pleased to see a heavy mist fingering in from the sea, to chill the day. Opening the window, she breathed in the cool, damp breeze that smelled of the sea at low tide. Only as she turned did she imagine someone stirring in the apartment behind her.

But how silly. Moving into the empty studio, she could see into the bath and dressing room, could see from their mirrors' reflections that she was quite alone. Her head must be muzzy from the late hours. Certainly her mind still rang not only with the explosion and the sirens and with her friends' frightened cries, but with the forties music and laughter that had come later.

Strange how sounds stayed with her. When she was working a job, her dreams would ring, each night, with the endless whine of the Skilsaw or with the incessant pounding as she drove nails in a rhythm which, even in dreams, was so real that she would wake to find her arm twitching with tension. Or in her sleep she would hear the repeated
thunk, thunk
of the automatic nailer like a gun fired over and over. Those measured
bangs
were with her now, a delayed but strangely insistent residue from days ago, from her long hours' work on the San Andreas job.

Sipping her coffee, she decided to take herself out to breakfast before she tackled her mail and some phone
calls, give herself a little treat. Maybe breakfast at the Miramar Hotel, sitting on the terrace watching the sea and enjoying a Spanish omelet—a small celebration to welcome herself home. She was never shy about tendering herself fancy invitations. Seven weeks in a cramped trailer sharing that tiny space with her two carpenters, and she deserved a little pampering. Particularly since their nights had been purely platonic, about as exciting as curling up with the family picture album. Scotty was one of her two second fathers. And young Dan Hall was happily married, his wife coming up every weekend, further crowding the cramped, two-bedroom rig. On those nights when Dan needed a place of his own rather than bunking with Scotty, she had given him her room, and she had slept in the main house among stacks of lumber and torn-out walls. Dan Hall was a hunk, all right, and so was his beautiful wife, a slim girl with a body to kill for. Dan had lived from weekend to weekend in a haze of sickening longing, a yearning so palpable it was at times embarrassing.

It must be very special to know that your husband wouldn't cheat on you, to be absolutely certain that he lived only to be with you, and would never play around or lie to you.

Ryan sighed. She had never believed for a minute that Rupert wouldn't cheat. She had known better.

Why she had stayed with him so long was just as much a mystery to her as to everyone else. Both Scotty and Dallas, and certainly her dad, had been more than pleased when she left him. Through all the years she procrastinated, they had stood by her—and most of the time they had kept their mouths shut.

Scotty, her father's big, redheaded brother, had inherited all the bold, blustery genes of the Flannery family. Her dad was quiet and low-keyed, his humor far more subtle—a little quizzical smile, and crow's feet marking his green eyes. Michael Flannery enjoyed the world fully, but with little comment. Her uncle Scott Flannery took hold of life with both hands and shook it, and laughed when life banged and rattled.

But her dead mother's brother, Dallas, was the rock. You had to know the stern, silent cop for a long while to enjoy the warmth and humor underneath.

She refilled her coffee mug and sat at the kitchen table, her bare feet freezing. The fog was moving in quickly, the sky turning the color of skimmed milk; she could hear the waves pounding the shore and the seals barking from the rocks, but the ocean itself was hidden in fog. Too restless to be still, she tied her robe more securely and went out along the front deck and down the long flight to get the paper.

The wooden steps were rough under her bare feet, the chill dampness of the fog stroking her ankles. The concrete drive was icy, the Sunday paper damp where it had been tossed against the bushes.

The church bombing covered the front page. A montage of pictures, the ragged, torn-out wall. The more severely wounded, the pictures taken at angles that magnified the seriousness of cuts and the size of bandages. She didn't need to look at this. Refolding the paper, she turned back up the drive.

But, brushing by her pickup that Dallas had gone over last night collecting evidence, she stopped, frowning.

She had left the truck relatively clean yesterday, much to Dallas's chagrin. Now it wasn't clean, but smeared with mud and with huge paw prints.

She'd had the truck only a month, had traded in the old company model for this reliable baby that made her work so much more fun. It had everything, king cab, lockable toolboxes down both sides, a bull-strong overhead rack. At this particular time in her life, no husband or lover could have given her the same ego trip, the same sense of self-worth, as that shiny new truck.

But now, the vehicle was filthy. Some dog as big as a moose had been all over it, some bad-mannered neighborhood beast had hopped up into the truck bed and apparently walked along the tops of the lockboxes too, rendering her shiny red paint a mess of dried, flaking mud and paw marks. Circling the truck, she headed around the side of the garage to the pedestrian door to fetch some rags and the hose. She didn't realize until she was through the door that she'd left it unlocked last night, that, preoccupied with Dallas's search for evidence she'd forgotten to punch the lock.

Switching on the light she dug under the sink for the box of rags she kept there, pulling out a handful of threadbare towels. Rising, she turned toward the frail, vintage windows that she'd brought down from the foothills, glad the mutt hadn't been able to get into the garage to trash the antique stained glass.

She caught her breath and stepped back, banging into the sink.

The windows stood leaning away from each other, each set of four supported by a heavy box of plumbing
fixtures, leaving an empty V space between. A man lay there, jammed between the windows, his face turned away.

The side of his cheek was very white, the blood on his neck and cheek dark and dry. His black hair was tossled and scattered with broken glass, as was the black stubble on his jaw and the black hair on his arm. His blood splattered the broken window and his shirt.

Rupert.
It was Rupert
.

Involuntarily she reached out a hand, but then drew back.

Not quite believing that this was her husband, not quite believing that anyone at all lay there, she moved around the windows to an angle where she could see his face, and stood looking down at him.

His skin was too white even for Rupert. He looked, in death, no more solemn than he had in life. His eyes were open and staring, his face grayish, like the melted paraffin that her mother had used long ago to seal jelly glasses.

The wound in his chest was dark around the edges, the hole in his forehead dark and ragged. Surely both were gunshot wounds.

When was he killed? She had heard no shots. Staring at the bone of his skull, her stomach turned. She badly wanted to heave.

The drying blood that had run down his face and stained his blue polo shirt was so dark it must surely be mixed with the black residue of gunpowder. His ear against the shattered glass was covered with tiny blue fragments. His dark hair was so mussed he looked almost boyish, though in life Rupert had never looked
boyish. His broad gold watchband shone from his pale wrist pressing the white skin, nestled among thick black hairs. She thought of Rupert naked, the black hairs on his arms and chest and belly over the too-white flesh. She'd come to hate hairy men. She leaned to grab his feet to drag him out of there, get him away from the frail windows before his weight shattered them further but then, reaching, reality took hold and she backed away, chilled.

But the next moment she knelt. She felt compelled to touch him, though she knew he was dead. Reaching to his thigh, she jerked her hand away again at the feel of lifelessness, at the icy chill that shocked her even through the cloth of his chinos.

Kneeling over him, she didn't know the fog was blowing away until the newly risen sun shot its rays in through the small high window at the back of the garage, a bolt of morning light that lay a glow across her hands and, gleaming through the colored glass, threw a rainbow of colors across Rupert's shattered face. She rose, needing to be sick.

Getting her stomach under control, she stood staring down at the man she'd spent nine years alternately loving and hating until the hate outdistanced all else. And she realized that even in death Rupert had the upper hand.

That even in death, he had placed her in an impossibly compromising position.

She had no witness. He was dead in her garage. She would be the first, prime suspect. Maybe the only suspect.

Dallas could vouch for her until one o'clock this
morning. No one could speak for her after Dallas left. She'd seen no one; no one had been in her house. What time had Rupert died? How could he have been killed here in the garage, not ten feet from her, and she had not heard shots?

And what was he doing in Molena Point? Why had he come down here from San Francisco? He had no friends here.

Had he come to confront her in person over the lawsuit where she was claiming her half of the business? She'd started proceedings five months ago. And who had been with him, to kill him? Even if the shooter had used a silencer, why hadn't she at least heard glass breaking when Rupert fell? That sound should have waked her, occurring just beneath the floor where her bed was placed.

She glanced at the unlocked side door, trying to remember if she
had
locked it last night. Moments ago it had been unlocked. And she realized that when she turned the knob she had very likely destroyed fingerprints or perhaps a palm print.

She had to call Dallas.

The thought of calling the station, of calling for the police, of calling for Detective Dallas Garza, both comforted and sickened her.

She needed Dallas; she needed someone.

Dad would be out of town for two more weeks. And Scotty—big strong guy that he was, she was afraid that Scotty would do nothing but worry.

She needed Dallas. Needed, even more than Dallas's comforting, the facts that he would put together. Fin
gerprints. Coroner's report. Ballistic information. Cold forensic facts that would help her understand what had happened.

She wondered what the neighbors had seen. Her nausea had fled, but she felt shaky and displaced. Nothing made sense. Staring at Rupert, she found herself swallowing back a sudden inexplicable urge to scream, a primitive gutteral response born not of pain for Rupert or of empathy, but an animal cry of fear and defiance.

What had someone done? What had someone done not only to Rupert but to her?

Glancing to the back of the garage, into the shadows around the water heater and furnace she realized only then that the killer might still be there, perhaps standing behind those appliances silently watching her.