Shirley Murphy - Cat Laughing Last

The ad read, five bedrooms and five baths, five custom-built fireplaces plus two sunny, legal basement apartments. The word legal should mean not only that the land was zoned for two apartments, but that every water fixture on the premises had a proper permit.

All over Molena Point there were unobtrusive apartments tucked into a hillside basement or over a garage, some legal, some not. All were in demand as rentals. Molena Point's water code mandated an official permit for any household fixture that used water in its functions, from a king-sized shower to a bar sink. New credits were not an option; your house had just so many. If you wanted another washbasin, you had to give up a fixture in exchange.

"There's plenty of parking space," Susan said. "Three-car garage and this nice wide drive. And the front planting, between the fence and the street, is nice, where the dogs don't play." That wide area was lush with native bushes, succulents, and large volcanic boulders. Susan's Lamb, though he, too, had a fenced yard, had in his poodle dignity allowed Susan's garden to flourish and even the lawn to present a respectable green carpet.

The front door was open. They saw no one inside. Entering, they formed a divergent group, Mavity in her maid's uniform, Wilma in jeans and a red T-shirt, Gabrielle wearing a linen suit and heels, and Cora Lee in stretch pants and the oversized shirt that hid her bandage. Susan wore a calf-length denim jumper over a white T-shirt, and leather sandals. They moved into the foyer.

"Oh, my," Mavity said.

"Oh!" Cora Lee whispered.

They stood in a wide entry, its tile floor and skylight bathing them in brilliance. Potted plants filled the corners. Through a door to their left, they saw a young couple in the large, light kitchen, talking with realtor John Farmer. Glancing up, he waved to Wilma. A stairway rose to their right. Passing it, they moved ahead into a large living room dominated by a fireplace of native stone.

The gray-blue walls wanted paint, and the carpet still showed stains despite an apparently recent cleaning. But the ceiling was high, with tall windows, a spacious room very different from what the exterior implied.

The three bedrooms on the main level, two to the right of the living room and one to the left past the dining room, were all large. Each had a private bath, and two had raised fireplaces.

The oversized kitchen was done in cream-and-white tiles. Opening off this were an ample laundry and storeroom, before one entered the garage. All the walls needed paint, and some needed patching. The doors were marred with claw scratches, made, apparently by a very large dog. Returning to the entry hall, they climbed the stairs.

The upstairs cubicle, that looked so small from without, offered a large master suite with another raised fireplace, a private deck, an ample study that would do for another bedroom, and a view straight down into the canyon. Three levels of decks overlooked the canyon. The ladies glanced shyly at each other, but no one spoke. They hurried down again, to the basement apartments.

Both apartments were fusty and needed work. But both had their own small kitchens. Either would do for a housekeeper, a caregiver, or as rental income.

Returning to the living room, they could see John Farmer still in the kitchen with the young couple. Farmer was in his forties, a man with surprisingly round cheeks, a pink-and-white complexion, a slim, sculpted nose, and dark hair in a military cut. He sat at the dining table with the blond young woman and the slim, red-haired young man. Their voices were low, their conversation solemn, the couple's expressions excited and serious.

"They're too young to afford this house," Mavity whispered.

"And whose BMW is that at the curb?" Susan said softly.

The sight of the young man making out a check wilted the ladies. When the couple had left, shaking hands with John Farmer and tucking away a deposit receipt, Farmer joined them.

"Did they offer full price?" Wilma asked.

John Farmer nodded, and put his arm around Wilma. "You folks were serious."

"We were," Wilma said. "Very serious. Are they requesting an inspection?"

"Yes. And the sale, of course, is contingent upon their getting their loan. If you'd come half an hour earlier…"

Wilma looked at the others; she didn't know what had come over her, she wasn't ready to sell her house, but they couldn't let this one go. Maybe the loan would be refused. Maybe the inspector would find some disastrous seepage problem that the couple wouldn't want to bother repairing.

"You can make a second deposit," John said. "Contingent upon their not completing the sale."

An hour later, after walking around the outside and inspecting the furnace and the ducts and wiring as best they could, and writing in several contingencies to their deposit, the checkbooks came out. The ladies split the deposit five ways and called their attorney to help set up the venture. The legal work seemed tedious, but they were caught up in the thrill of the purchase and in the trauma of not knowing whether they had actually made a purchase.

While Wilma and her friends agonized over their hunger to own this particular house, across the village in Wilma's guest room, Joe Grey and Dulcie were pawing a few scattered cat hairs from the dresser, where they had left a brown, padded envelope. They had placed a computer-printed note on top, weighting it down with Cora Lee's bracelet so it couldn't be missed.

Cora Lee,

The letter in this envelope belongs to you. You bought the white chest at the McLeary yard sale. Richard Casselrod took it from you by force, even if he did shove some money at you. He took the chest apart and removed this letter from the false bottom, so it should be legally yours, to keep or sell.

A friend

The letter had been Dulcie's longest effort at Wilma's computer. Her paws felt bruised, and her temper was still short. It took a lot of squinching up to hit only the right keys, and took far more patience than patrolling the most difficult mouse run.

They had gotten Catalina's valuable letter out of Joe's house before Clyde might, in fact, decide to pack up and move. Before he fell prey to the hunger for change that had gripped the ladies of the Senior Survival club. At least three of those women seemed fairly itching to box up their belongings.

Now, following Joe out through her cat door, Dulcie said a little prayer for him, a plea that Clyde wouldn't sell their house, that there would be no move for the tomcat, that Clyde and Joe would stay where they belonged, and Joe could quit worrying so foolishly about homelessness and displacement.

The front page of the Molena Point Gazette was deeply shocking to citizens who knew nothing of recent events. But to Joe Grey and Dulcie and to the Molena Point police, the headline was satisfying, the indication of a job completed. The national noon news on TV and radio may have scooped the Gazette, but still the paper sold out in less than two hours. Every daily across the country carried the story.

AUTHOR ELLIOTT TRAYNOR MURDERED VISITING AUTHOR AN IMPOSTOR

The handsome gray-haired author living among us while his play, Thorns of Gold, was being cast, has turned out to be an imposter. The man whom villagers assumed to be Elliott Traynor is, in fact, a New York fry cook from Queens bearing an uncanny resemblance to the author. The real Traynor died six weeks ago on the New York streets, in a drama more bizarre than any of Traynor's many works of fiction.

The debonair and charming fry cook who impersonated Traynor was able to deceive the entire village, including director Samuel Ladler and musical director Mark King. Only Traynor's wife, Vivi, seems to have known the truth.