CROUCHED ON the back fence, Dulcie had started at the sudden barking from Clyde's house behind her. Sounded like he had a kennel full of dogs in there-big, lively dogs, shouting with canine idiocy. Probably someone visiting had brought their mutts along, and Clyde was making a fuss over them, teasing and playing with them. He could be such a fool over an animal; that was what she loved best about him.
At first when she discovered her talent for human speech, she had been wary of Clyde, wouldn't talk to him. She'd left that to Joe, who had awakened from simple cathood into their amazing metamorphosis at about the same time. From the beginning, Joe had mouthed off to Clyde and argued with him, while she had hidden her new talents, too shy even to tell Wilma.
Oh, that morning when Wilma found out. When, sitting on Wilma's lap at the breakfast table secretly reading the newspaper right along with her, that instant when she laughed out loud at a really stupid book review, she thought Wilma was going to have a coronary.
Dulcie had been worrying about how to break her amazing news; she hadn't meant to blurt it out like that. But suddenly the cat was out of the bag, so to speak. And afterward, trying to explain to Wilma how it had happened, that she didn't know how it had happened, trying to explain how wonderful it was to understand human speech, oh, that had been some morning, the two of them trying to get it all sorted out, Wilma laughing, and crying a little, too, and hugging Dulcie.
Of course one couldn't sort out such a phenomenon; one doesn't dissect miracles. The closest she and Wilma could come-or that Wilma could-was to head for the library and dive into a tangle of research. Wilma and Clyde together had dug through tomes of history about cats, through Celtic and Egyptian history and myth. When they surfaced with their notes, the implications had swept Dulcie away.
Suddenly her head was filled with ancient folklore interlocked with human history, with the mysterious Tuatha folk who had slipped up from the netherworld into the green Celtic fields through doors carved into the ancient hills. There were doors with cat faces engraved on them, sometimes in a tomb, sometimes in a garden wall. Doors that implied feline powers and led deep into the earth, into another land.
Wilma's research had led Dulcie to Set and Bast, to Egyptian cat mummies and Egyptian tombs with small, cat-decorated doors deep within. From the instant she first realized that she could understand human language, could speak and read the morning paper, then realized there were books about cats like her and Joe, the entire world had opened up, her curiosity, her imagination, her very spirit expanded like a butterfly released from its cocoon.
But Joe Grey hadn't been so charmed; he didn't like those revelations of their own history, he didn't like thinking about their amazing lineage. It was enough for Joe that he was suddenly able to talk back to Clyde and express his own opinions, and could knock the phone from its cradle, to order takeout.
Nor was Joe thrilled to encounter others like themselves, rare creatures among the world of cats. He had certainly not been impressed with the black torn and his evil voodoo ways. That cat had caused more trouble than she cared to remember; she could have done without Azrael. She was glad he'd gone back to the jungles of Central America.
She had spent the early morning perched as usual on Clyde's back fence beneath the concealing branches of Clyde's maple tree, her dark stripes blending with the maple's leafy shadows as she watched Lucinda Greenlaw, alone in the parlor, enjoying her solitary breakfast. Looking in through the lace curtains of the old Victorian house, Dulcie felt a deep, sympathetic closeness to the thin, frail widow.
She thought it strange that Lucinda's tall old house was so shabby and neglected, its roof shingles curled, its gray paint peeling, when the Greenlaws were far from poor. At least when Shamas was alive, they'd had plenty of cash.
The interior was faded, too, the colors of the flowered wallpaper and the ornate furniture dulled by dust and time. But still the room was charming, furnished with delicate mahogany and cherry pieces upholstered in fine though faded tapestries. Each morning Lucinda took her breakfast alone there from a tray before a cheerful fire; her meager meal, of tea steeped in a thin porcelain pot and a plate of sugar cookies, seemed as pale and without substance as the old woman herself.
According to the pictures on the mantel of Lucinda and Shamas in their younger days, she had been a beauty, as tall and lovely and well turned out as any modern-day model; but now she was bone thin, shrunken, and as delicate as parchment.
Lucinda Greenlaw had had her own metamorphosis, Dulcie thought. From glamorous social creature when she was younger, into a neglected and lonely wife. From the vibrant, very alive person she had been, as Dulcie's friend Wilma had known her, to a faded and uncertain little person as colorless as the fog that drifted, that morning, in wisps around the parlor windows. Watching Lucinda Greenlaw, Dulcie was gripped with a painful sadness for her; Lucinda had a talent for distressing Dulcie, for stirring in her a desire to protect, almost to mother the old woman.
Dulcie's housemate responded to Lucinda in the same way. Wilma, too, felt the need to protect Lucinda, particularly now that Lucinda was newly widowed, and now that she had a houseful of her husband's noisy, rude relatives to bedevil her. A crowd of big, overbearing Greenlaws filled the five bedrooms awaiting Shamas's funeral, so many big men and women that they seemed to smother Lucinda with their loud arguing and careless manners.
Still, Lucinda knew how to find her own peace. She simply walked away, left the house. She might look frail, but Lucinda had been out as usual that morning before daylight for a solitary ramble of, very likely, several miles.
Earlier, as Dulcie leaped to the fence through the dark fog, she had seen Lucinda coming up the street returning home, her short white hair clinging in damp curls, her faded blue eyes bright and happy in the chill predawn.
Since Shamas's relatives began to arrive, these early-morning walks and her solitary breakfasts seemed the only moments Lucinda had to herself. Dulcie watched her often, sometimes late at night, too, from higher in the maple tree, watched Lucinda reading in bed from a stack of well-used volumes that stood on her night table; her books of European history and folklore were all Lucinda had to keep her company, alone in the big double bed. She seemed to have every volume of Sir Arthur Bryant, who was one of Wilma's favorite authors, too.
Lucinda's beautifully appointed bedchamber, with its high poster bed and long, gold-framed mirrors, was faded like the rest of the house, the velvets as colorless as Lucinda herself, the once luxurious love chamber deteriorated as if love itself was forgotten, and only sadness remained.
Wilma said Lucinda had been a late bride, that she had met Shamas Greenlaw when she was working in Seattle as a doctor's receptionist. They had married there, where Shamas owned a machine-tool company. Soon after the wedding he sold his Seattle apartment and they moved to Molena Point, to his old family home. Wilma said the handsome, charming couple had launched immediately into a busy social life, that for nearly five years they had circled brightly among Molena Point's parties and social gatherings, its gallery openings and benefits and small concerts. But then Shamas grew restless; the limited society of the small village began to bore him.
He bought a yacht, a sixty-foot catamaran in which they could take their friends on interesting junkets. Money seemed in ample supply-both Lucinda and Shamas had new cars every year. Surely the clothes in the photographs on the mantel looked expensive. The yacht parties, Dulcie thought, must have been happy times-until Shamas's shipboard affairs became apparent.
Lucinda shared her uncomfortable memories with few people, but she trusted Wilma. Dulcie's housemate and Lucinda saw a good deal of each other, particularly since Shamas's death. The last two weeks Wilma had made every effort to be supportive, to help Lucinda through this hard time. During their quiet meals together, Lucinda had opened up to Wilma, expressing her pain at the unhappy marriage, describing how, on the yacht, Shamas would slip out of their cabin in the small hours, returning just before dawn, imagining that she slept.
Lucinda had never confronted Shamas, had never protested his affairs. She simply quit going with him, choosing to stay home alone.
"Giving up," Dulcie told Wilma. Wilma agreed. That was what made Dulcie sad. "Why didn't she fight back? Why didn't she leave him, change her life, make a new life?" Dulcie had hissed. "She just gave in-to exactly what Shamas handed her."
Dulcie didn't understand why Shamas hadn't loved Lucinda, had treated her so shabbily when she had been so beautiful, when she had such a gentle warmth. Lucinda was still beautiful to Dulcie, like an aged porcelain doll, so frail one would not want to press a paw hard against the old lady's cheek for fear of tearing her fine, powdery skin, so delicate that Dulcie would hesitate to leap hard into Lucinda's lap, for fear she might fracture a bone.
Yet Lucinda was not too frail to walk miles along the shore each morning or to climb the steep slope of Hellhag Hill. Sometimes Dulcie followed her on those lonely predawn jaunts, trotting well behind her, staying, for some reason she could not explain, warily out of sight.
Lucinda must have been miserable all those years while Shamas played fast and loose. She told Wilma she had almost left him a year ago, when he first turned down a rich offer on the old house. But she hadn't left, hadn't found the courage.
Brock, Lavell & Hicks, a local developer, had begun buying up the property on the Greenlaws' block. By the time they approached Shamas, they had purchased all the houses across the street, planning a small, exclusive shopping paseo. Eager to acquire the Greenlaws' two lots, they made Shamas a generous offer. Lucinda had wanted badly to sell, to go into an easily maintained condo, but Shamas refused, perhaps out of family sentiment, perhaps simply to thwart Lucinda. He reminded her frequently that the old house was his family home, though before they moved to Molena Point from Seattle he had rented it out for many years; there was no family nearby to use it-Shamas's cousins had long ago moved across the country to North Carolina.
The relatives were all returning now, flocking to Molena Point to quarrel over Shamas's leavings-while Shamas himself waited, dead and cold, tucked into a vault at the Gardener Funeral Home, for his family to bid him a last farewell. A few more arrived each day, strident, demanding, all alike in their brashness.
But they had charm, too. Loads of charm, Dulcie thought, amused. Big, cheerful Irishmen and women: loud laughing, loud arguing, never able to simply be quiet. Ruddy-faced, sandy-haired folk, ill-mannered, noisy, irritating, and endearing.
Dulcie was certain that none of them had really cared about Shamas, that they had come only to lick up the leavings. So far, more than a dozen cousins and nephews and nieces had descended, the first arrivals moving into the Greenlaws' unoccupied bedrooms. The remainder of Shamas's kin were living in their campers and trailers, in which they had driven out from the East Coast, taking over the Moonwatch Trailer Park south of the village, on the crest of Hellhag Hill. Shamas's funeral would be scheduled when all relatives were present.
Well, the Greenlaws hadn't let Shamas's body cool before they'd begun harassing Lucinda about his estate, pressuring her not to sell the house. Dirken Greenlaw was the worst: Shamas's twenty-year-old nephew had been the first to arrive, moving into the largest guest room. Dirken was louder and more brash than his cousin Newlon.
It was Newlon Greenlaw who had tried to rescue Shamas when he fell overboard in the storm. Newlon had remained on board with their cousin Sam Fulman and two other passengers, to bring the Green Lady back to Molena Point harbor. They had docked first in Seattle for two days, where they were questioned by Seattle police, then sent on their way. Newlon, thinner and slighter than most of the Greenlaw clan, was somewhat quieter, too, and perhaps kinder; surely he was gentler with his uncle's widow than was Dirken.
And speak of the devil, here came Dirken down the stairs, stamping and yawning, his red hair curled over his collar, his teal green polo shirt straining tight over sleek muscles. Settling into a chair beside the fire, treating Lucinda to his charming Irish grin, Dirken was all Gaelic magnetism: testosterone and guile. For Dulcie, Dirken Greenlaw's appeal grew less each day, with each successive argument.
"Any coffee, Aunt Lucinda?''
"In the kitchen, Dirken. It's freshly brewed."
He didn't move, but eyed her, waiting. She smiled back at him, but didn't rise, and Dulcie wanted to cheer-Lucinda was no longer leaping up to fetch Dirken's morning brew.
Immediately after Shamas's death, Lucinda, in an uncharacteristically decisive move, had begun arrangements to sell the house; the papers had been drawn by the time Dirken arrived.
Dirken had put a stop to the sale. Dulcie had watched him pace the parlor alternately cajoling and intimidating Lucinda, playing on her uncertainty, telling her she would throw away hundreds of thousands of dollars if she didn't keep the house and let it increase in value as all real estate was increasing along the California coast.
The house was in a living trust, with Lucinda as her own trustee. If she sold it, the proceeds would go into the trust, and she could spend them as she liked.
Apparently Dirken thought that Lucinda, in some bizarre change of character, would throw away the money in wild debauchery, leaving no cash for the clan-for Dirken, himself, to squander.
Of course Lucinda could revoke any part of the trust; but she was not often so quick to take action as she had been to try to sell the house; generally, the old lady had a hesitant nature. Maybe, Dulcie thought, Dirken was banking on that, hoping Lucinda would die before she changed anything about the trust. He argued, he harassed, and if Newlon was not around to stand up for her, Lucinda would grow very quiet, then soon slip away alone-sometimes these human complications were enough to give a cat fits.
Get some spine, Dulcie would think, feeling her claws stiffen. Don't let Dirken bully you! Send him packing, send the whole tribe packing. Oh, she wanted to shout, get a life, Lucinda. Don't just roll over for them! Sell the house, do something wild and extravagant with the money! Go to Europe. Spend it on diamonds. Don't leave a cent to that clan! Lucinda was so docile that Dulcie wanted to snatch her up and shake some sense into her; if their roles had been reversed, if Dulcie were bigger than Lucinda, she'd have done it, too.
"You're up mighty early, Aunt Lucinda."
"I'm always up early, my dear. And what brings you down at this hour?" Lucinda poured fresh tea for herself and sat cradling her cup, looking quietly into the fire as if attempting to hold close around her the tranquility of her early-morning solitude.
"About an hour ago," Dirken said, "I thought I heard noises outside. I went out, tramped around. Did you hear anything?"
"Not a thing, my dear. What kind of noise?"
"You must have been dead to the world. When I came in, I knocked at your bedroom door, but I guess you didn't hear me. Why do you lock your bedroom, Aunt Lucinda?"
Lucinda's eyes widened. "Why would you try my bedroom door, Dirken? I lock it because I don't want someone barging in unannounced, certainly not before daylight."
"A bedroom lock with a key," Dirken said. "So you can go out and lock it behind you." He hadn't the decency to apologize for his snooping, or even to look embarrassed; he simply turned his face away, scowling with anger.
"I expect you'll be working on the house again this morning, Dirken?"
The young man rose, heading for the kitchen and his coffee. In the doorway he turned, watching Lucinda, the firelight catching at his red hair. "I must work on it, Aunt Lucinda. The house needs so much repair. So much to do, if we're to save this old place-save your inheritance."
His tone implied that if he didn't undertake such refurbishing, the house would collapse within weeks, its remains sinking tiredly into the weedy yard, and Lucinda would be out on the street.
Lucinda, Dulcie thought, must not know much about houses. Dirken's repair and replacement of some of the lap siding had been grossly shoddy work. And Dulcie had observed with considerable interest his curious method of patching the concrete foundation. It did not appear to her that that little project had anything to do with strengthening the decrepit structure.
She had learned, from watching Clyde and Charlie fix up Clyde's recently purchased apartment building, a good deal about such repairs-though Clyde limited his work mostly to tear-out. But Dulcie had seen how siding should be applied, and how a crumbling foundation looked; she had spent hours lying on the sunny brick patio beside Joe waiting for mice to be dislodged by the workers and observing just such reconstruction operations.
And how arrogant Dirken was about the supposed repairs. His attitude had been, ever since he arrived, not one of tenderness toward his newly widowed aunt, but of confrontation. Not the behavior of a nurturing young relative caring for his uncle's frail old widow, but of a selfish young man out for his own gain.
Nor did the rest of the Greenlaw clan spend any time comforting Lucinda; they were either harassing her or prowling the village on endless sightseeing excursions, rudely fingering the wares in Molena Point's expensive shops, leaving grease stains and torn wrappings, their loud complaints seeming to echo long after they had departed. And in the evenings, in Lucinda's parlor, they were no more pleasant, quibbling about the sale of the house, turning the prefuneral gathering into a bad-tempered brawl.
Send them packing, Dulcie would think, crouching on the fence, her ears back, her tail lashing. She'd hardly been in the public library in two weeks, where usually she spent several hours a day greeting the patrons and playing with the children. She meant to do better; she was, after all, the official library cat, but she couldn't stop racing across the village to Lucinda's, to watch the drama unfolding there. Some force was building, she thought. A confluence of emotions and events that was just the beginning of a larger drama, she was certain of it. And she didn't want to miss a minute. Whatever lay in Lucinda's immediate future, Dulcie wanted to know about it.
But the most puzzling twist of all was that, while the Greenlaws were so prickly and unpleasant to Lucinda, on the rare evenings that they settled in for a round of Irish storytelling, filling Lucinda's parlor nearly to bursting, something strange happened: their attitudes were totally different. Suddenly the frail parlor seemed no longer in danger of collapse under their fierce emoting. On storytelling nights a kind of magic sprang alive among the Greenlaws. They seemed gender, easier with one another, nurturing, and warm.
And Lucinda was easier, too. The old woman seemed drawn to the family, clasping her hands at their tales, weeping or laughing with them. They seemed a family, then, this obstreperous clan, and Lucinda no longer an outsider against whom they were solidly ranked.
Wilma said it was the old family stories and family history, which Shamas had told so well, that had first drawn Lucinda to him, that Shamas's commitment to the old ways was perhaps the only real thing about him, that surely this had been the strongest tie between the mismatched couple. Every marriage, Wilma said, must have a fabric of shared philosophy to tie it together. Wilma truly believed that. For Shamas and Lucinda, that richness had come from the old myths that had been handed down for generations through the Greenlaw family.
And oh, those tales drew Dulcie. On warm evenings when the parlor windows were open and she could hear the stories, she would slip across the yard and up a half-rotten rose trellis to cling beside the screen, listening.
She could have pushed right on inside beneath the loose screen. Who would wonder at a little cat coming in? But she didn't fancy wandering among those big-booted men and bad-mannered kids with too many hands to snatch at her. The Greenlaws might charm her with their stories, but she didn't trust a one of them.
But how lovely were their Irish tales, filling her with a longing for worlds vanished, worlds peopled with shapeshifters and her own kind of cat. To hear those stories whispered, hear their wild parts belted out, to hear their wonders dramatized as only an Irishman could tell a tale, those were purr-filled hours. Afterward, she would trot away to join Joe, hunting high on the hills, filled with a deep and complete satisfaction.
These were her stories that the Greenlaws told, she had read and reread them, alone at nighttime in the library, when she had the books to herself; this was her history, hers and Joe's. The Greenlaws didn't know that, and they never noticed a little cat crouched at the window.
Strangely, even the taleteller's language was different on those evenings, the loud Irishmen abandoning the clan's rough speech for the old, soft phrases and ancient words. And there was one old, wrinkled man among them who had such a beguiling way with a story.
"Semper Will," old Pedric would begin, "he were a packman, and there wadn't no carts their way, 't tracks was all mixey-mirey and yew did need a good pack-donk to get a load safe droo they moors."
Pedric, unlike his strapping relatives, was thin and bony and wizened; Pedric looked, himself, like an overgrown elven man or perhaps a skinny wizard.
"Will's track was all amuck, then, with gurt reeds a-growing up and deep holes for tha donk to fall in, yes all a-brim with muck…"
Oh, Dulcie knew that tale of the high banks full of burrows that the donkey would pass, and the strange little cats that would appear there, peering out of their small caves.
"All sandy-colored tha little cats was, and wi' green, green eyes." She knew how those burrows led down and down through dark caverns to other lands, to subterranean mountains and meadows lit by a clear green sky. And Pedric told how the cats were not always in cat form but how, down in that emerald world, a cat might change to a beautiful woman dressed in a silken gown. Oh yes, Dulcie knew those stories, and, just as she knew that at least one part of them was true, the Irishmen believed fully in their wealth of tales. They believed just as surely as they believed that the earth was round and the moon and stars shone in the heavens. The Celtic tales were a part of the Greenlaws' lives, to be loved as musicis loved but to be put aside in their everyday dealings, as a song might be put aside.
Lucinda finished her tea and cookies and rose to carry her tray to the kitchen, seeming hardly aware of the loud barking through the open windows, though Clyde's house seemed to explode with human shouting and canine bawling.
Looking through the leaves, watching Clyde's empty yard, Dulcie heard Joe yowl with rage. Half-alarmed, half-amused, she slipped out from the maple tree and hurried along the fence.
"Take them to…" Joe shouted. "Take them to the pound… That's why I brought them."
"Don't be stupid!… kill them…" Clyde yelled.
And Joe came bolting out the dog door, his ears flat, his yellow eyes slitted with rage. As he crouched to leap the gate, he turned and saw her.
He said nothing. He stood glowering, his ears back, the white strip down his gray face narrowed by anger. Dulcie, ignoring him, flicked her ears, leaped down into the yard, and trotted past him to see for herself. She hurried up Clyde's back steps, her ears ringing with Clyde's shouting and the wild baying.
Nearly deafened, Dulcie poked her head through the dog door.
The room was filled with giant dog legs, huge paws scrabbling, two giant tails whipping against the cabinets. Clyde was racing around the kitchen trying to put collars on two huge dogs, and such shouting and swearing over a little thing like a collar made her yowl with laughter, then yowl louder to get his attention.
He turned to stare at her.
"If you don't shut up, Clyde, and make those dogs shut up, every neighbor on the street is going to be down here!" And of course the moment she spoke, the two dogs leaped at her. She hauled back a paw to slash them.
They backed off, whimpering.
She paused, and did a double take. She had scared them silly; they cowered against Clyde's legs, rolling their eyes at her.
Why, they were puppies. Just two big, frightened pups-two whining pups the size of small ponies and as thin and pitiful as skinned sparrows.
She slipped in through the dog door and sat down on the linoleum.
They seemed to decide she wouldn't hurt them.
They crept to her. Two wet black noses pushed at her, two wet tongues drenched her with dog spit; they were all over her, licking and whining. Oh, what pitiful, lovable big babies. Gently, Dulcie lifted a soft paw and patted their sweet puppy faces.