Shirley Murphy: Cat Spitting Mad

They looked and looked at the two women, at their poor, torn throats, at their pooled blood drying on their clothes and seeping into the earth.

The cats knew them.

"Ruthie Marner," Dulcie whispered. The younger woman was so white, and her long blond hair caked with blood. Dulcie crouched, touching her nose to Ruthie's icy arm, and drew back shivering. Blood covered the woman's torn white blouse and blue sweater. She had a deep chest wound, as well as the wide slash across her throat. So much clotted blood that it was hard to be sure how the wounds might have been made.

Helen Marner's wounds were much the same. Her blond hair, styled in a short bob, was matted with dirt where she had fallen. She was well dressed, much like her daughter, in tan tights, paddock boots, a tweed jacket over a white turtleneck shirt, her clothes stained dark with blood. A hard hat lay upside down against a pine tree like a sacrificial bowl.

No horse was in sight. The horses would have left the fallen riders, would have bolted in panic, the moment they could break free.

Dulcie backed away, her tail and ears down. She'd seen murders before, but the deaths of these two handsome women made her tremble as if her nerves were cross-wired.

The cats could see no weapon, no glint of metal near the bodies. They did not want to pad across the footprints and hoofprints, to destroy the tenuous map of what had taken place here.

But something more terrible, even, than the sight of the double murder held both cats staring.

A jacket lay on the ground beside the bodies, trampled by the horses' hooves, a creamy fleece jacket with a strand of red hair caught in the hood, a jacket the cats knew well. They sniffed at it to make sure.

"Dillon." Dulcie's paws had begun to sweat. "Dillon Thurwell's jacket."

Dillon always wore that jacket when she rode, and she'd been riding every day with the Marners. Dulcie looked helplessly at Joe. "Where is she? Where is Dillon?"

Joe looked back at her, his yellow eyes shocked and bleak.

"And Harper," he said. "Where's Max Harper? It's Saturday, Harper always rides with them on Saturday." He backed away from the bodies, his angled gray-and-white face drawn into puzzled lines.

Police Captain Harper had taught Dillon to ride. These last two months, the foursome had been seen often riding together, as Dillon and Ruthie trained for some kind of marathon.

Leaping up the stone ledge, Dulcie stood tall on her hind paws, staring around her into the night, looking for another rider.

Nothing stirred. There was no smallest whisper of sound- every insect and toad had gone silent. High above her in the forest she could see the kit, peering out from among the rocks.

Trotting up to join her, Dulcie began to quarter the woods, as Joe searched below, both cats scenting for any trace of Dillon.

Circling ever wider, rearing up to sniff along a clump of young pines, Dulcie caught a hint of the child, well to the north of the bodies. "Here. She was here-she rode here. I can smell her, and smell a horse."

But Joe was assessing the hoofprints that raced away from the scene tearing up the trail.

"Four horses." He looked up solemnly at Dulcie. "One with small, narrow hooves. That would be Ruthie's mustang. And a big horse, heavy-wide hooves. The other two sets seem ordinary."

Dulcie looked at Joe. "The big horse-big hooves, so deep in the earth. Like Max Harper's gelding."

"But Harper couldn't have been with them. They wouldn't have been harmed if Harper was with them." Joe's yellow eyes blazed, the muscles across his gray shoulders were drawn tight. "Four horses. The Marners. Dillon. And the killer. Not Max Harper."

The prints of the big horse showed a scar running diagonally across the right front shoe, as if the metal had been cut by a hard strike, maybe from a stone.

Warily the kit came down out of the rocks to press, shivering, between Joe and Dulcie. She was usually such a bold, nervy little morsel. Now her eyes were wide and solemn.

Helen and Ruthie Marner had lived in Molena Point for perhaps a year. Joe's housemate, Clyde, had replaced the brake linings on Mrs. Marner's vintage model Cadillac. Clyde ran the most exclusive automotive shop in Molena Point, and he was as skilled and caring with the villagers' imported and antique cars as a master jeweler with his clients' diamonds.

Clyde hadn't liked Helen Marner much; he called her stuck-up. It had amused him that Max Harper encouraged Helen's friendship, but they all knew why. Harper had refused to ride with Dillon alone and put himself in a position that might attract slander.

Harper had gotten to know Dillon during a grisly murder investigation at Casa Capri, an upscale retirement home. Joe and Dulcie had begun their own investigation before anyone else suspected foul play. But Dillon had come into the act soon after- before anyone had a reason to call the police. She, too, had sensed something wrong. And her stubborn redhead's temperament had kept her prying, despite what any grown-up said. Of course she'd been right, just as Joe and Dulcie had been, all along.

Max Harper had been very impressed with Dillon-had, during the surprising investigation, grown to respect and admire the child.

When Dillon told Harper that she longed to learn to ride, the captain had volunteered some lessons, if Dillon's parents agreed and providing someone else came along. An ever resourceful child, Dillon had recruited the Marners, as well as Clyde Damen's girlfriend, Charlie, as an occasional backup.

"And now they're dead," Joe said, looking down the nightdark hills, his ears and whiskers back, his yellow eyes blazing.

"Maybe," Dulcie said softly, "maybe Dillon got away."

"On that little, aged mare? Not hardly. Escape a killer on a big, heavy horse, a rider bent on stopping her?" He turned to look at Dulcie. "If Dillon saw him murder Helen and Ruthie, he'd have to silence her."

She sighed and turned away.

He crowded close to her and licked her face and ear. "Maybe she did escape, Dulcie. She's a spunky, clever kid."

That was what he liked about Dillon. Thinking of Dillon hurt made him sick clear down to his tomcat belly.

The cats could see no bike tracks along the trail, and the path was too narrow for a car. Staying on the bracken, studying the dirt and the surround, they could find no boot or shoe prints leading in to indicate someone had followed the riders on foot. Joe imagined a stranger on horseback pulling Helen Marner from her horse, grabbing Ruthie's horse, and pulling her off, knifing them as Dillon escaped, whipping Redwing to a dead run.

Why? Why had someone done this? What had they gained?

"Robbery?" he said softly. "How much money would people carry, out for a Saturday ride? And their horses weren't valuable, just common saddle horses." He knew that from hearing Harper and Clyde talking.

He wanted to shout Dillon's name, bawl her name into the night until the child came running out of the bushes, safe.

He tried again to catch the smell of the killer but could detect nothing beyond the stink of human death, and the sweeter perfumes of horse and of the pine woods.

To look upon a human person brutally separated from life by another human never ceased to sicken the tomcat. This kind of death had no relationship to his own killing of a rabbit or squirrel for his supper.

Dulcie had left him; he could hear her up in the forest padding through the pine needles, and he caught a glimpse of her sniffing along, following Dillon's scent. Calling the kit, he leaped up the hill, watching for the predators that would soon come, drawn by the smell of blood.

He didn't like to leave the bodies alone, to be ravaged by hunting beasts-both out of respect for the sanctity of human creatures and because evidence would be destroyed. But the highest urgency was to find Dillon.