Shirley Murphy - The Catswold Portal

A miniature chest of drawers stood beside the hat-boxes, a little, perfect piece of furniture no taller than her shoulder. She nosed at it, and with a careful claw she pulled out one of the drawers—and she raised her paw to strike, her eyes blazing.

But these were not mice. In the small drawer, the furry bodies looked, in fact, more like dead caterpillars lying fuzzy and still.

Some were gray, some brown, some nearly white. They did not smell like anything that had ever lived. Puzzled by the lifeless fuzzy creatures, she shoved the drawer closed and opened the next.

She froze, staring.

Eyeballs. The drawer contained human eyes.

There’s a bad new cat in sleepy little Molena Point: a renegade tom with a penchant for robbery, a scorn for his fellow felines, and a disdain for human laws. And this Cat in the Dark is masterminding a crime spree that’s quickly headed toward murder most foul. Dulcie and Joe Grey both know the score—they’ve seen Azrael in action. But how can they expose the criminal without letting ordinary, untrustworthy humans in on the secret that certain select cats think—and talk? Cats like them…

It was not until the next morning that Joe, brushing past Clyde’s bare feet, leaping to the kitchen table and pawing open the morning Gazette, learned more about the burglary at Medder’s Antiques.

“What are you reading?” Clyde picked Joe up as if he were a bag of flour, so he could see the paper.

Joe dangled impatiently, twitching his tail, as Clyde read.

Clyde sat down at the table and dumped pepper on his eggs. “So this is why you’ve been scowling and snarling all morning, this burglary.”

“I haven’t been scowling and snarling. Why would I bother with a simple break-and-enter? The police can handle the simple stuff.”

Clyde raised an eyebrow.

“So there’s a new cat in the village. So are you satisfied? It’s nothing to worry you, nothing to fret over.”

Clyde was silent a moment, watching him. “I take it this is a tomcat. What did he do, come onto Dulcie?”

Joe glared at him. Stupid humans could be all too perceptive at the wrong times.

Ever since the earthquake, things have been going from bad to worse in Molena Point, usually the most tranquil little town on the Northern California coast. It started with that suspicious “accident” on Hellhag Hill. In Cat to the Dogs , the police might write off the deadly accident to the night fog, but Joe Grey knows a cut brake line when he sees it—he may be a cat, but he’s solved more murders than your average police detective!

Frowning, the white strip down his gray face pinched into puzzled worry lines, the big tomcat padded along a fallen sapling between the upturned wheels.

What had he heard?

Dropping down on the far side of the wrecked car, his mind played back the crash in a quick rerun: the squeal of brakes, then the skid just about where Deadman’s Curve began. Hellhag Hill was famous for that double twist. If a driver lost control on the first bend, he was hard put, when he hit the second one, to regain command. The too-sharp turn was on him, the canyon dropping straight down away from his front wheels. The locals took that road slowly. The warning signs were numerous and insistent—but in the fog a driver wouldn’t see them. Even a local might not realize just where he was on the hairpin road.

Had he heard another sound before the squeal of brakes? Had he heard a horn farther away, muffled in the fog? The faint, quick stutter of a warning horn?

He squinched closed his eyes, trying to remember.

Yes. First a faint triple beep, then the skid and the crash and the car careening down at him—but had that earlier honking come from a second car, or had this driver honked at something looming out of the fog? Had there been one car or two, moving blindly along that narrow road?

He thought he remembered the hush of two sets of tires; but had they been coming from opposite directions? Then the faint stutter of the horn, then the scream of brakes and the heart-jolting thunder as the car came careening over.

The other car must have gone on. Why hadn’t it stopped? Hadn’t the other driver heard the wreck?

While Joe Grey has played tricks on Max Harper, Molena Point’s head lawman, he’s never had anything but respect for the dedicated sheriff. Now Harper’s in trouble, suspected of murdering two friends, and the only witness, a young girl named Dillon, has disappeared. Both Dulcie and Joe know Harper is innocent, and Joe is a Cat Spitting Mad, determined to prove his pal’s innocence—and find Dillon.

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.

It’s bad enough that Molena Point has been invaded by a famous writer and his suspiciously rude wife. Now the local yard sales have set off a host of puzzling thefts. In Cat Laughing Last, Joe and Dulcie take the case and soon discover that those sales hold a secret treasure someone will kill to possess. But before the fur can fly, these talented cats will unmask a murderer—and unearth a few other surprises along the way.

Since their arrival, Elliott Traynor had kept largely to himself as he finished the last chapters of Twilight Silver, the third novel in his historical trilogy. But Vivi had made herself known around the village, and not pleasantly—as if she enjoyed being rude to shopkeepers, as if she took pleasure in being abrupt and demanding.

The Traynors had not wanted a staff for the cottage they were renting, but had hired the cleaning service provided by Wilma Getz’s redheaded niece, Charlie. Charlie tended the Traynor house herself, early each morning, then left the couple to their privacy.

Molena Point’s residents, numbering so many writers and artists, were not put off by Elliott’s reclusive ways. They talked among themselves about his books and about the play, waved when occasionally they saw him on the streets or in the black Lincoln, as they headed to the theater; otherwise they left him to his own devices. The presence, alone, of the prestigious writer, seemed adequate enrichment to their well-appointed lives.

But no one had warmed to Vivi.

Traynor’s previous wife had died three years before. Six months later, he married Vivi, a woman forty years his junior. Besides her loud, rude ways, something else about her made the cats want to back away, hissing, a chill that perhaps only a cat would sense. Whatever reason she had for appearing this morning in the McLeary garden could only, in Joe Grey’s opinion, mean trouble.

Romance is in the air in the charming seaside village of Molena Point, California. Everyone is excited about the upcoming wedding of chief of police Charlie Getz, even cool feline detective Joe Grey. But the festivities are interrupted when two uninvited guests try to blow up the church. Then one of the bride’s good friends, building contractor Ryan Flannery, lands in a heap of trouble when her philandering husband is found dead. In Cat Seeing Double, Joe and his feline sidekicks sign on to the case, finding themselves in the biggest cat fight of their lives—a bare-clawed battle with a prey who is as cunning as he is deadly…