Joe just looked at him. Sometimes all these human problems were too much; sometimes he thought the household animals were the lucky ones. All they had to do was nap on their soft beds, gobble their three squares, enjoy lots of petting, and no worries over humankind's disasters.
Except he remembered too clearly that other life, before he realized his ability to speak. He wouldn't want to return to that. He'd been bored out of his tomcat mind.
As a young cat, it had been a big deal to invent some simple new entertainment-find some new diversion in one of the several shabby apartments he'd lived in, a new way to tease some human in one of the interchangeable families who'd taken him in. Stupid kitten stuff. He'd never had a real human friend until he met Clyde. Or he'd find some smaller, skinnier kitten abandoned in an alley, someone weaker than he, that he could tease and torment.
When he moved in with Clyde, he'd graduated to intimidating Clyde's lady friends. How amusing, to terrorize those lovely young women, faking lethal claws, treating them to loud snarls and flashing teeth-all because life could get so yawningly, nerve-deadeningly, mind-numblingly dull.
But now, with his newly discovered skills, there was no time to be bored. He hardly had time for a nap or a good rabbit hunt-the sleuthing life took every claw-clinging ounce of creativity he could muster.
And now, as a pattern of clues was forming in the Marner murders, a morass as intriguing as a crisscross of fresh rabbit tracks, he had no time for discontented thoughts-except in terms of the final retribution for this killer.
This case was more than a fascinating puzzle. This time, he wanted not only justice, he wanted revenge. Sweet, sharp-clawed revenge. This time, he was out for blood.
19
DRESSED IN the oversized T-shirt she'd slept in, Charlie Getz stood on a ladder in her small bathroom, removing the vent fan from the ceiling. She had gone up on the roof last night, removed the fresh-air grid and wiped out a quarter-inch of accumulated dirt from inside the vent pipe. The four-inch tunnel didn't allow much room-peering along its length at a small circle of sky, she went queasy at the tight quarters through which the cats must push. Six feet of claustrophobia leading from her apartment out to the village rooftops. She guessed Dulcie and the kit could slither through, but Joe Grey had better not try.
Coming down the ladder, glancing in her bathroom mirror at the reflection of her milk-white legs, she had a sharp vision of Molena Point's pretty, tanned blondes in their tennis shorts. The only tan she had was what her grandmother had called a farmer's tan, brown only on her neck and hands and lower arms. Not a body to bring the men flocking.
Not the face, either, she thought. But I have a warm heart. And I have nice hazel eyes, if anyone bothers to look.
She wished Max Harper would bother.
Lifting the disconnected ceiling fan from atop the ladder, she nodded to Dulcie and the kit where they crouched in the doorway peering up.
"That should do it. Your own private tunnel. I'll leave the ladder for you to climb.
"But I warn you, Dulcie. If a rat or a bat comes in through that vent-if so much as a wool moth comes in-you're dog meat."
Dulcie smiled. Lashing her tail in reply, she leaped up the ladder into the hole and was gone through the ceiling. Charlie imagined her slipping along above the bathtub, popping out of the wall above the roof like a swallow from its hole. The kit followed her, her fluffy tail twitching as it disappeared, probably to race madly across the rooftops.
She'd done a drawing once of Dulcie and Joe running across the roofs. But it wasn't a cheerful piece, it was dark and frightening. Though it hung in a prominent place in the Aronson Gallery, still it disturbed her.
Clyde had brought Dulcie and the kit over last night, like a father bringing his children to stay with a favorite aunt. Clyde had treated her like an aunt, too, making it obvious that he knew how she felt about Harper. When he left, she'd been really down. Had she hurt him terribly? She'd queried Dulcie, but Dulcie had little to tell her.
"He's… would the word be stoic?" Dulcie had said. "Understanding?"
"Stoic, Dulcie?"
"Max Harper is his best friend. You are, in a different way, his best friend. He's so caught up in Harper's problems just now…" Dulcie, sitting on the end of the daybed, had looked up quizzically at her. "You are asking me, your friendly neighborhood cat, about your love life?"
"Come on, Dulcie. You sound like Joe."
"What can I tell you? He loves you both. He knows Harper needs someone just now."
"You're saying he's glad to dump me on Harper."
"No, he-"
"He's seeing someone else."
"No! But-but when Kate called him that night, when she got into town…"
Charlie had sat back against the pillow, hugging herself. Kate. Kate Osborne. That beautiful blonde. It seemed a hundred times harder to lose a man to a beautiful woman than to some pig. If her rival were ugly, she could tell herself Clyde didn't have any taste. But Kate Osborne…
But why did she care? She'd been mooning over Max, feeling guilty that she was longing for him, that she was hurting Clyde.
And now here she was green with jealousy because Clyde wanted someone who was more beautiful than she could ever hope to be.
"Perfidy," she had told Dulcie. "Perfidy and capriciousness."
Dulcie had smiled and turned away to wash.
"It is all very well, Dulcie, to have a nonchalant wash-up when you want to end a discussion. But such behavior isn't very informative."
Dulcie hadn't answered.
The bottom line, Charlie told herself, was that she wanted what she couldn't have.
And that didn't say much for her depth of character.
And through this conversation, the kit had prowled the one-room apartment poking into every box and cranny-making herself immediately and totally at home. Taking over just as she had taken over Wilma's house and, before that, Lucinda and Pedric's luxurious RV Claiming every surface-Charlie's few pieces of furniture, the kitchen counters, the packing boxes Charlie used for cupboards, as her own feline territory. Leaving little face rubs and tufts of black-and-brown fur as fine as silk, to mark her conquests. Clyde said the kit was the greatest feline opportunist ever born, and Charlie believed it.
But who could blame her? The kit had never had a home. Always on the move, tagging along behind a clowder of cats that didn't want her, never sleeping in a warm, safe house or knowing the friendship of a human, until she went to live with Lucinda and Pedric Greenlaw.
Charlie smiled. The kit had learned pretty fast.
Stashing the ceiling fan in the cabinet beneath the bathroom sink, she put her tools by the front door with her purse, nuked her cold cup of coffee, and sat down to finish her sweet roll, using her paper napkin to wipe Dulcie's and the kit's pawprints from the table. This business of having cat houseguests was like living in a dream straight from Lewis Carroll. It was one thing to take your meals with cats who could carry on a dinner conversation, one thing to go to bed at night with two kitties who said, "Good night, Charlie," like some feline version of The Waltons. But cats who peered over your shoulder at the pages of the latest Dean Koontz, one trying to learn to read while the other offered off-the-wall opinions of Koontz's writing style and baroque setting, was a bit too much.
At least Dulcie was well read-and her opinions of Koontz, though wild, were always, upscale and positive.
Finishing her breakfast, Charlie pulled off her T-shirt, showered, dressed quickly in jeans and a clean shirt and tennis shoes, and headed out the door. She had two houses to clean today, a garden fence to repair, and a roof to mend.