Half sitting on his desk, Harper picked up. He was just inches from where Joe lay. Joe could hear the deep timbre of the male dispatcher’s voice-Mabel had gone home at shift change. “She is?” Harper said. “When did she get in?� Tell her� Yes, that should be fine. Hold on.” He glanced at Garza. “Patty’s secretary just landed, she’s calling from the terminal. You want to talk with her first thing in the morning?” He handed the phone across to Garza.
Joe listened as Garza was put through to Patty’s secretary; the detective made an appointment for seven the next morning. “No, not a bit too early. Yes, the tearoom’s fine. At that hour, we’ll have it to ourselves.” The tearoom of Otter Pine Inn, which wouldn’t be open until midafternoon, might offer, Joe thought, a less traumatic environment than Patty’s suite or office, where Dorothy had spent so much time with her employer and friend.
“No,” Garza said gently into the phone. “Apparently she didn’t. She died in just a few seconds, she couldn’t have felt pain for more than an instant.” They talked for a few moments longer, Garza quiet and attentive, asking about Dorothy’s new grandchild. Beside him, Harper waited.
“Tired,” Garza said when he’d hung up. “And hurting. Sounded wrung out. She tried to talk about Patty, but she couldn’t say much.
“Said her daughter had a long labor, fourteen hours. A little girl, seven pounds. They named her Patty. Patty Rose Street Anderson. Dorothy plans to go back down, help take care of the baby if she can get the preliminary work on Patty’s affairs in order, put her assistant in charge.”
Harper nodded. “She worked for Patty, what? Over twenty years. Patty was her daughter’s godmother.” He looked at Garza without expression. “You did check that Dorothy was in L.A.?”
“Talked with the daughter’s doctor around dinnertime. Dorothy was there all yesterday, last night, and the night before. He heard her calling her travel agent after she was notified of the murder, making plane reservations. You plan to be there in the morning?”
Harper shook his head. “She’ll be more comfortable one-on-one.”
A quiet, private interview, Joe thought. Just Detective Garza and Dorothy Street-and one gray tomcat dozing among the shadows.
Garza moved down the hall toward his own office. Harper, turning off the light, headed up the hall for the front door. In the dark behind the two men, Joe Grey dropped from the bookshelves to Harper’s desk.
He’d meant to trot on out, but now he paused.
He could hear Harper speak to the dispatcher on his way out, then heard the front door open and close. Lifting a silent paw, Joe knocked the headset off Harper’s phone, selected Harper’s private line, which didn’t go through the switchboard, and with squinched-up paw punched in a number.
The phone rang and rang. Wilma didn’t answer. He heard Harper’s truck pull out. Cutting off the call, he tried Lucinda.
She answered muzzily, coming out of a deep sleep.
“It’s me,” he said carefully. “Has Kit come home?”
“Not home yet,” Lucinda said after a moment, only slowly realizing it was Joe Grey. “We’re worn out.” She sounded sad, flat, both discouraged and angry. “The middle of the night, alone in places she shouldn’t be. We’ve walked the streets everywhere, called and called her. Pedric’s so hoarse he can hardly talk. We’ve been into every alley and yard. Where is she, Joe? Why is it that she’s always, always into trouble!”
Joe’s heart sank at her desolation. But he had to smile, too, at Lucinda’s temper. Even if it was only anger to hide her fear and worry. And the old lady was right, Kit did gravitate toward trouble. A brand of trouble that made everyone despair-yet made them love her all the more.
“So headstrong,” Lucinda said. “Look for her, Joe. We’ll be out again as soon as it’s light.”
Pushing the headset back onto Harper’s phone, Joe thought how simple life had been before the kit arrived in Molena Point with her insatiable curiosity and all four paws taking her where she shouldn’t be.
He didn’t remind himself that Kit had been a great help to the law in a number of cases. He only remembered that several times she’d nearly gotten herself hurt or killed. Now he told himself she was all right, that she was out there somewhere in the night having a ball while all her friends were sick with distress over her.Damn cat,Joe thought, just as on other occasions Clyde or Wilma had thought the same of him and Dulcie.
He left Harper’s office and the department stubbornly determined to hit the sidewalks and roofs again to search for Kit-yet certain that if he didn’t get another hour’s sleep, he’d drop on the spot like a limp cat skin. That short nap on the dispatcher’s desk had only left him yawning. Heavy with worry and exhaustion, Joe headed home, dragging his poor, tired paws.
16 [��������: pic_17.jpg]
By one in the morning the wind had scoured the village streets clean, scuttling odd bits of paper and debris against cottage steps and bushes; wind battered the gardens, sucking away dead leaves and bright flowers indiscriminately to pile them against fences and shops and in recessed doorways. Lori, in her concrete lair, listened to the wind slapping against the building and didn’t much want to go out, wanted to stay huddled in her cold bed. Even through the thick concrete walls, the wind moaned and cried. She thought about the times she had gone to the shore in the predawn dark, when the wind had swept the sand clean of footprints, the prints of humans and dogs, and the little forked prints of birds. All swept away, leaving the sand as smooth as if no living creature had ever passed there. As if she were the only one remaining in an empty world.
When she reached out beneath the blanket to silence her alarm, the damp cold pushed right into her, its icy fingers reaching to her bones. During the night she had thought about going up into the dark library to see if someone might have left a sweater or coat, but it was too cold even to do that. Mama used to say she could feel the cold right to her bones. That was after she got the cancer. She would huddle under the blankets shivering with cold that, she said, was not like any cold she’d ever known.
Lori thought about before Mama got sick, Mama tucking her in under their warm, thick quilts and snuggling close when it was snowing outside. She thought about Mama so hard that she thought she could smell Mama’s lavender soap and the scent of her tomato plants on Mama’s hands, and the sleepy scent of her nightie. She would never smell those smells again.
But she wouldnevergo back to Pa. So angry and silent and then shouting and swearing at her and smelling of whiskey. And if he didn’t smell of whiskey, he was just real quiet. She never knew if he was mad at her or so mad at someone else that he just had to shout. Maybe mad at the whole world. That’s what Mama said, that Pa hated the whole world and Mama didn’t know why. After Mama died, when child welfare brought her back to Pa, she thought it had to be better than those foster homes in Greenville but it wasn’t. When he got up in the mornings he didn’t talk to her; he drank coffee and locked her in the house and told her to eat peanut butter for lunch and not dare to go outside. She’d started school, but Pa made her stop. And their house was hot all the time. No way to open a window, he’d nailed them all shut.