“Jared …”
“And you won’t let Benny play outside alone?” Jared sounded, Kit thought, as bossy as his mother. He said, “I’ll play ball with Benny when I get home from work or classes. The car lot isn’t far, just around the edge of the bay, a ten-minute drive. I’ll be glad when we’ve moved your things into the studio, when you can get your car in the garage, can come directly into the house.”
“Jared, this is silly. I promise I’m in no danger.”
He looked at Maudie, frowning. “You were in danger when that truck nearly hit you. And you mentioned to Mother something about boxes being shifted around in the garage? And a silent phone call where the line was open but no one spoke, and no caller ID on the screen?”
“I’m sure that was some glitch in the phone system, maybe one of those electronic political messages that didn’t go through. I wish I hadn’t told her those things, I should have known better, Carlene can get so excited. I’m sorry Benny mentioned the truck. Well,” she said, “you’re here and it’s nice to have you. I know I must be putting you out, but we’ll make it a good visit.” She smiled. “There’s some lemon pie. Shall I cut us each a slice?”
“Pie would be great, then I’d better get some sleep. My first class is at eight. Go on down, I’ll just hang up a couple of shirts.”
Maudie left the room, heading for the stairs, and in a minute the kitchen lights brightened as if she’d turned up the dimmer. Kit turned to look at the yellow tom. “Why did you follow us?”
His eyes looked deep into hers. “My name is Misto.”
“Are you with them, with those two in the motel who robbed and hurt that woman?”
“Would I tell you if I was?”
“I guess not,” she said, half wary, half amused.
“I came with him,” Misto said, cocking an ear toward the guest room where Jared was hauling underwear and books out of his duffel.
“With Jared? From Maudie’s sister’s house? You live with them?” Kit said, amazed.
Misto dropped his ears. “I wouldn’t live in that house.”
“What do you mean, then, that you came with Jared?”
“I came from the prison at Soledad. I hitched a ride when Jared and Kent visited their brother. I knew they were from this village.”
Kit looked at him, puzzled. “Why did you want to come here? What were you doing in the prison?” Soledad was where Lori went to visit her pa, where her pa was serving time for murder. “Didn’t they see you in their car?”
“It was a hot day. I banked on their putting the top down when they parked, the guards watch the parking lot pretty carefully. They did put it down, and when they returned I was hidden under a blanket behind the seat.”
“But what made you want to come here?” she repeated.
Misto smiled. “I knew about you three, I heard some of the prisoners talking.”
She felt as if her heart had stopped. “No one in prison would know about us.” But then she realized someone would know, there were prisoners in Soledad that she and Dulcie and Joe had helped send there, men they had followed and spied on and snitched on to the cops. Some of those men did know about them, or knew about cats like them.
“You lived there?” she said softly.
“I came there to the prison grounds two years ago. There are fields around Soledad; a lot of cats live there, feral cats, but not like us. There was no other like me, no other cat to talk to.”
“Lonely,” she said.
“I’ve lived a lot of places where I was lonely. Only once in a while have I come on another speaking cat. It was there in the prison yard that I heard two men talking about Molena Point and about the strange unnatural cats they’d found there.”
She didn’t like this, they didn’t need anyone talking about unnatural cats, telling where they were.
“The prison ferals live on the grounds and in the surrounding fields, but I hung out with the humans,” he said. “I was hungry to hear human talk. I followed the trustees who did the gardening, they talk a lot when they work together. I made friends with some, they liked to bring me food. One morning, two of them started swapping stories about strange cats that were more than cats. The redheaded one said he’d trapped speaking cats near this village. You can bet I hung around to hear more.”
“Tommie McCord,” she said softly. “The redheaded one. They did trap cats, he and his friends did, but we freed them.”
“They laughed about trapping them,” Misto said. “The redhead—McCord?—swore he and his partner had had them in a cage and had heard them talking. When he said, ‘Those cats are loose somewhere in the village,’ I knew I had to come here, I longed to find others like myself. It’s been a long time, so many years since I had other cats to talk to, since I parted from my wife and kits.”
“There is a band of speaking cats, wild in the hills. Those are the ones McCord and his friends trapped, they were going to sell them. That frightens me, that he’s telling people about us. But of course he would, wouldn’t he? Scum like that,” Kit said, hissing.
“Not to worry, the other prisoners didn’t believe him, they made jokes about him, called him crazy. Though later,” he said more solemnly, “I saw one of the men watching the feral cats in a puzzled way, watching too intently.
“But in a prison there are a lot of tall stories,” he said quickly. “No one really believes them.” The old cat placed a paw softly on Kit’s paw. “That redheaded one’s still in prison where he can’t hurt us. No one likes him much. Who knows,” he said hopefully, “maybe he won’t leave Soledad alive.”
They both went silent at a rustle of leaves above them. The next instant, Dulcie looked down at them, her dark stripes blending into the dark foliage, only her green eyes sharply defined. She dropped to the roof beside them, looking worriedly from one to the other, having heard enough to be just as upset as Kit by Misto’s remarks about the prison.
But the next moment she was even more concerned about what she observed of Maudie.
From the roof of the garage wing, the cats could see not only into the guest room, but also into the kitchen below. As Kit and Misto had talked softly, Maudie had gone downstairs. Now alone in the kitchen, her expression had changed. She was no longer smiling as if with pleasure at having company. Glancing above her toward the guest room, she was scowling as if filled with dismay, as if she did not want Jared there.
“What’s that about?” Dulcie said softly, sitting down beside Kit. “She’s mad as a caged raccoon.”
But Kit’s attention, and Misto’s, were on Jared, where, within the softly lit guest room, he stood looking down at the little boy who slept so innocently. He looked for a long time; they couldn’t read his expression, and then at last he turned away, leaving Benny to his dreams. Reaching into the closet, into the inside pocket of the jacket he had hung there, he removed a lumpy, zippered black folder. Patting it as if to make sure the contents were all in place, he slipped it into the duffel beneath his folded jeans. Zipping the duffel, he snapped a little padlock to secure it and set it in the closet. Whether the folder contained innocent, private business or something more interesting, the cats had no way to know; maybe it was just something he didn’t want Benny to play with.
27
HAVING CALLED THE night dispatcher about the canvas-covered car, Joe left Wilma’s house and hurried back to the motel through a haze of fog, a mist drifting in from the sea to dampen his fur and blur the rooftops around him. Below him, already parked in front of the motel, was a gratifying response to his phone tip: a squad car stood at the curb, along with Dallas’s tan Blazer. From below, from the front office, he heard Officer Crowley and a strange voice, maybe the desk clerk. When he didn’t hear Dallas, he trotted across the roof to the small parking lot. Where the hedge met the wall, where he’d reported the black Cadillac covered by the tarp, Dallas stood surveying the scene.