"Kit's not home. And Wilma's still gone. I think she said there was some kind of lecture tonight on the changing tax picture."
"Sounds deadly. Why does she go to those things?"
"To reduce her taxes, so she can buy gourmet food for us." She nosed at the array of delicacies that he had arranged on the blue linoleum. "I wish the kit would come home."
But the kit did not appear. Joe and Dulcie feasted, then Joe retired to Wilma's desk to call Harper. He punched in the number but there was no answer. He tried again half an hour later, and again.
"The phone's turned off," Dulcie said. "Leave a message."
Joe didn't like to use the phone's message center, but he did at last, then curled up on the blue velvet couch beside Dulcie and fell quickly asleep. Curled next to him, Dulcie lay worrying. The kit's propensity for trouble seemed so much worse at night, when Dulcie imagined all kinds of calamities. She dozed restlessly, jerking awake when Wilma came in, and again at 6:00 in the morning when she heard her cat door flapping.
She leaped up, fully alert as the kit galloped into the living room, her tail high, her yellow eyes gleaming. Above them, the windows were growing pale. Hopping to the couch, Kit nosed excitedly at Dulcie. "I found the old man. I found where he lives. I smelled chemicals so maybe it's where he made the bomb. I found where he dumps his trash. Why does bomb-making leave all that trash?"
'Trash?" Joe said, sitting up yawning. "What kind of trash?"
"Boxes and cans that smell terrible of chemicals."
He rose to stand over her. "Where, Kit? How much trash? Where did you find it?"
The kit looked longingly back toward the kitchen where she had raced past the empty plastic dishes. "Is there anything left to eat?"
"We left a custard in the refrigerator," Dulcie said, "and some chicken."
The kit took off for the kitchen. Following her, they watched her jump up to force open the heavy door. The minute it flew back she raked out the cartons, fighting open the loosely applied lids, and got down to the serious business of breakfast. She ate ravenously, gobbling more like a starving hound than a cat, making little slurping noises. She didn't speak or look up until the custard and the chicken had disappeared and the containers were licked clean.
"All right," Joe said when the kit sat contentedly licking her paws. "Let's have it."
"I need to use the phone," the kit said softly. "Right now. I need to call Detective Garza."
Joe and Dulcie stared at her. "Come in the living room," Joe said. "Come now, Kit."
Cutting her eyes at Dulcie, the kit headed obediently for the living room and up onto the blue velvet couch.
"Start again," Joe said, pacing across the coffee table. "From the beginning."
"I found where the old man lives. Up the hills above the Pamillon estate in a shack on the side of a cliff above that big gully and a chicken house hanging-"
"Kit. How did you find him?"
"I hid in his car. A black Jaguar with the top down. He drove so twisty it made me carsick again. An old shack and the chicken houses hanging on the edge of the cliff and I could smell chemicals and there weren't any chickens, maybe the chemicals killed them all. He filled his car with stinking garbage bags and went away and then I saw his car far down in the old ruins and-"
"Kit," Joe said, "slow down. This is all running together. What are you leaving out?"
The kit stared at him.
"For starters, where did you find his car?"
"At the police station. After he talked to that boy. He drove like fury. I didn't know why he had such a nice car or why he would load it down with garbage. I-"
Dulcie licked Kit's ear. "Go slower. Tell us slower."
The kit started over from where she had slipped into the old man's black Jaguar. She described the shack and how she had gone inside. How he had loaded up his trash and driven down into the Pamillon estate. "I went there. I ran and ran."
The hills had loomed below her black and silent, and her head was filled with unfriendly beasts hunting for their supper. She ran listening for every sound, watching for any movement among rock and bushy shadow. Ran flying down the hills as night fell, trying to make no noise herself in the dry grass, ran terrified until the half-fallen mansion loomed against the darkening sky, and ancient dead trees rose up with reaching arms.
Slipping into the ruins among the old oaks she had padded among fallen walls into the empty mansion with its rooms open to the stars. She could smell where the old man had walked, his scent thick, his old-man stink mixed with the nose-burning chemical odors. His trail led through the half-fallen parlor and through the kitchen and down into the cellars, his sour trail clinging along the walls.
The cellars were too black even for a cat to see. She had to travel by her whiskers alone, by the little electric messages telegraphed from muzzle and paws. Warily jumping at every imagined movement, she drew deep beneath the mansion. A thinnest light came at last seeping in from a great crack in the cellar wall. And smells exploded suddenly, as loud as a radio blaring on. She could barely make out, ahead in the blackness, a looming form like a huge misshapen beast. It was silent and still, and it stunk: the garbage bags, black and lumpy. Imagining the old man standing there too, she spun and ran again back and up through the tunnels until at last she could see starlight once more, above the open rooms.
Hiding behind fallen stones panting and staring out at the night sky, she had crept up the broken stairs to the nursery and into the old chest beside the fireplace where once her friend Dillon Thurwell had hidden. There, hungry and frightened and very tired, she had curled up in a tight ball trying to comfort herself, and soon she slept.
She had awakened when the first hint of dawn shone in one long pale crack beneath the lid of the chest. Pushing up the lid with her nose, and crawling out, she had padded across the second-floor nursery to where the wall fell away. There she stood looking down at the heaps of rock and dead oaks that bristled like some gigantic devil's garden, stood looking past the ruins to the hills that dropped away below her. Wanting to be home right then, right that minute, wanting breakfast, wanting most of all to telephone Dallas Garza and tell him where that old man was, who had tried to kill half the village. Was she the only one in the world who knew where that old man was hiding? Consumed by her need she had leaped down the ragged stairs flying over heaped stones and through tangled bushes running for home, running.
"And here I am," said the kit, licking a last smear of custard from her whiskers. "No one else knows where that old man is. No one but the boy because the boy's clothes were in the shack but that boy will never tell anyone." And she sailed to the desk and pawed at the phone, her ears and whiskers sharp forward, her long fluffy tail high and lashing-this kit who was scared of the phone but who, right now, was more full of herself and more eager to confide in the law, or at least to confide in Detective Garza.
18
"Very smooth," Joe said, leaping on the breakfast table, landing inches from Clyde's plate.
"What's smooth?" Clyde said, wiping up the last of his fried eggs. "Where've you been? Your breakfast's getting cold."
"Up on the roof, watching them put up the platform and stairs. Pretty fast workers."
"Scaffolding. It's called scaffolding." Clyde glanced at his watch. "They got here before seven, one of the carpenters had the lumber on his truck. They're expecting another delivery at eight."
"I gather Ryan's not a union member. She'd never get away with starting work so early." Already Joe's ears felt numb from the thunder of hammers and the rasping scream of the electric saws. He might boast superior knowledge and skills, for a tomcat, with none of the normal feline fears, but the sound of a Skilsaw or an electric drill still sent shivers up his furry spine.