Shirley Murphy: Cat Spitting Mad

"Don't you remember," Dulcie said, "we told you not to go there? Did you smell Dillon?"

"I smelled the cougar."

For a moment, the kit would not look at Dulcie. Then, "I couldn't smell the little girl in all the other smells. And then I lost the man-smell. But I smelled the lion and I was afraid. I hid," she said softly. "I hid and I didn't know what to do.

"Then when I thought he was gone I slipped away and came back here again and looked at the dead bodies, and I was going to go home and tell you but then I saw you. I saw you, you were here," she said, crowding against Dulcie.

Dulcie licked the kit's mottled face. The little black-and-brown patchwork creature with the round yellow eyes was the strangest young cat she'd ever known.

The kit lifted a dark paw to Dulcie, the fur between her claws so long and thick that it made Dulcie smile. The kit, with her furry paws and the long fur sticking out of her ears, resembled too closely some wild feline cousin-wild looks that exactly matched her unruly temperament.

Tenderly, Dulcie washed the kit's mottled face. "We will search," she said. "Just as Harper is searching. But where were you, Kit, for three days? Didn't you think we worried? We looked and looked for you. You could have said, 'I want a ramble, I need to go off alone.' You could have told us you were going."

"Would you have let me go?"

Dulcie only looked at her.

Joe studied the kit, his yellow eyes nearly black, his white paws, white apron, and the white patch down his nose bright in the night. "What is that smell on you, Kit?"

"What smell?"

"Musty. Deep musty earth. I don't remember a smell like that in the ruins, even in the cellars-not that kind of smell."

The kit looked innocently at Joe.

Joe fixed her with a hard gaze.

And Dulcie moved close to the kit, standing tall over her, her own neck bowed like a torn, her tail lashing. " Where, Kit? Where were you?"

"I went down," the kit said softly. "The deep, deep place below the cellars." And she moved away from them, suddenly preoccupied with patting at the dry leaves.

"Pay attention!" Joe snapped. "What deep place!"

"Down under the ruin," said the kit, flattening her furry ears and turning her face away.

"Deep down?" Dulcie said softly. "Why, Kit?" But she knew why. The tattercoat kit was keenly drawn to strange, frightening fissures. She was as obsessed with the cellars of the old Pamillon estate, and with the yawning cave-ins that dropped away even beneath the cellars, as she had been with the deep and mysterious caverns that she claimed lay below Hellhag Hill.

"I went down and down." The kit's round yellow eyes filled with a wild delight. "Down and down under the cellars. Down and down where my clowder wanted to go. Down and down under water dripping, down long cracks into the earth, down and down until I heard voices, until…"

"You did not," Joe snapped. "You didn't hear voices. You didn't go below any cellar. You're making it up-inventing silly tales."

"Deep down," said the kit. "Down and down and I heard voices."

"It was echoes," Joe hissed. "Echoes from water dripping or from sliding stone. You're lucky to be up in the world again, you silly kitten, and not buried under some earthslide in one of those old cellars."

The kit looked at Joe Grey. She looked at Dulcie. "Down and down," she said stubbornly, "to that other place beneath the granite sky."

And Dulcie, despite herself, despite her better judgment, believed the kit. "What was it like?" she whispered.

"You didn't go there," Joe repeated, baring his teeth at the two of them.

"Terrible," said the kit. "It is terrible. I ran up again, but then I lost my way. I had to go back and start over, I had to follow my own scent."

Dulcie said softly, "Were the others from your clowder there?"

"I was all alone. I don't know where they went when they left Hellhag Hill. I don't like that place, I was afraid. But…"

"Then why did you go?" Joe growled, pacing and glaring at the kit. Half his attention was on her-his anger centered on her-and half his attention on the torchlit scene below them where the coroner and detectives were doing their grisly work.

But Dulcie, pressing against the kit, could feel the kitten's heart pounding at thoughts of another world-even if it was her imagination-just as Dulcie's own heart was pounding.

"She's making up stories," Joe said, his eyes slitted, his ears flat to his head, his scowl deep and irritable. He didn't want to think about that other place, if there was such a place. Didn't want to imagine other worlds, didn't want to dwell on his and Dulcie's ancestry. If their dual cat-and-human natures had risen from some strain of beings among the ancient Celts, who had come, then, to this continent, he didn't care to know more about it.

Joe wanted only to be. To live only in the moment, fully alive and effective, in this life that he had been dealt.

And Dulcie loved him for that. Joe was his own cat, he felt no need to peer into the lives of his ancestors like some voyeuring genealogist longing for a time before his own.

Joe spoke the human language, he read the morning paper- with a sharply caustic slant on the news. Dulcie considered him smarter than half the humans in the world. But Joe Grey valued what he had here and now, he wanted nothing more. Any additional mysteries about himself would be an unnecessary weight upon his tomcat shoulders.

With tender understanding, Dulcie licked his ear, ignoring her own wild dreams of other worlds and even more amazing talents. And she snuggled the kit close, too, wondering about the skills that this small cat might show them.

She was washing the kit's splotchy black-and-brown face when they saw Clyde striding up the hill between the swinging spotlights. Immediately Joe and Dulcie ducked, dragging the kit lower behind the boulders.

"Why?" whispered the kit. "Is he not your human, Joe Grey? Why are you hiding from him?"

Joe gave her a slant-eyed look. "He hates finding us at a murder scene. All he does is shout. It's bad for his blood pressure." He watched from between the boulders until Clyde turned away again, to where Officer Ray was cataloging the scene. Standing outside the cordoned-off area, Clyde said, "Is Harper out looking for her?"

Kathleen Ray nodded. "The captain, and five search parties."

"I'll swing by Harper's place, see if the mare came home. No word from Charlie? Is she down there?"

"No word. She said she'd be there. The captain asked her to see to the mare."

Clyde turned, heading down the hill.

"Move it, Kit," Joe whispered. "Stay close."

Racing down ahead of Clyde, staying in the heavy grass and dodging torchlight, the three cats covered the quarter mile, scorched between cars parked along the narrow dirt road, and leaped into the seat of Clyde's antique roadster.

Before Clyde was halfway down the hill, they had slipped up behind the seat and beneath the car's folded top. Stretching out nose to tail, warm beneath the layers of leather, they were ready to roll.

Clyde wouldn't have a clue-unless he saw their muddy paw-prints. But in the dark, with only the dash lights, he likely wouldn't see the mud on the seat-not until morning.

The kit, warm and comfortable between them, rumbled with purrs-until Dulcie poked her with a soft paw. "Hush, Kit. Here he comes, he'll hear you."

But the kit had fallen sound asleep.

A WEEK BEFORE Ruthie and Helen Marner were killed, a hundred miles north in San Francisco, someone else was considering the Pamillon estate, thinking of the overgrown grounds exactly as Dillon Thurwell might have done, as a place to hide, to escape a killer.