N ow, as Joe Grey and Dulcie stood on the scorching rooftops looking up toward the old ruins, Dulcie frowning and wondering, up there among the fallen stone walls, they could see no creature. If they’d been nearer, an occasional small shadow might have been glimpsed flitting through the tall dry grass and brown weeds. But among the ancient oaks, no deer grazed; the deer had left in search of water. Only the wild little cats slipping stealthily among the rubble, only they knew where to find water, deep in hidden cellars and chambers beneath the fallen walls of the crumbling old estate: ten sentient cats prowling through the ruined mansion, wandering through its moldering interiors that now stood open, like ancient stage sets, the faded wall-paper curling down in long, dirty strips.

Atop a ragged wall, Willow paused in her nervous pacing, her bleached-calico coat blending into the colors of the fallen stone; thinking of Dulcie, she stared down across the dry hills, to the far village. “Something’s wrong,” she told her two companions. “Dulcie’s troubled, she is afraid and troubled.”

“Even if she was,” said the long-eared tom skeptically, “what could we do? We could do nothing.”

But the white tom said not a word; he hated the village, he had still not recovered from their entrapment there and their panicked escape.

The other seven of their small wild band had already vanished at Willow ’s mention of trouble, fleeing among the basement caverns; and soon Cotton and Coyote slipped away, too, leaving Willow alone, shivering and wondering.

And down in the village, Dulcie turned away from pacing the hot shingles, restlessly counting the hours until Wilma would be home. Her housemate had been gone only three days, but to Dulcie it could as well have been three months. She’d never felt like this before at Wilma’s absences. She thought of going home again, thought maybe Wilma would be there now. Or she could stay home and wait for her in the relative coolness of their stone cottage-but she’d been home just an hour before; the bright rooms were too empty, their cozy cottage echoed with loneliness; she had left again quickly, her skin rippling at the desolation of the empty house and the fear that gnawed at her.

Her increasing panic was wearing her into a near frenzy; she was so wired that Joe, who had lain down again, collapsing in the one small patch of shade on the hot roof, raised his sleek, silver-gray head to stare irritably at Dulcie, the white strip down his nose narrowed in a frown, his slitted yellow eyes flashing his annoyance.

“Will you calm down? What do you expect? The woman’s shopping. Give her a little slack.”

“But she might not know that Cage Jones escaped from jail this morning!” Dulcie stared at Joe, her tail lashing. “She might be wandering innocently around the shops, without a clue. Don’t you care?”

“She’s a trained federal officer, Dulcie. Even if she is retired. You don’t give her much credit. She’s armed, and she isn’t going to let some sleazy escaped con slip up on her.”

“But Jones hates her. He has to hate her now, after she testified to send him back to prison. Don’t you think he’s in a rage! That’s why he broke out, Joe! To get at Wilma!”

“You can’t know that!”

But Dulcie looked away, toward the clock in the courthouse tower; it seemed ages ago that it had struck five thirty. “She promised to be home by early afternoon, and now it’s nearly suppertime!”

“The clock struck five thirty ten minutes ago. In my book, that’s late afternoon. A woman shopping should punch a time clock? When we’re hunting rabbits, do you come home right at suppertime? How many nights has Wilma paced the cottage worrying about you?”

The kit had awakened and was listening, licking her long, mottled fur. She gave Dulcie a round-eyed gaze. “You know what shopping’s like. We dream of shopping, of being human shoppers…The silks, the cashmeres…And she’s not only buying clothes for herself, she’ll buy presents for us, and for Charlie. Wilma always buys presents.” Charlie was Wilma’s only niece, the only family Wilma had, besides Dulcie-but Wilma was Dulcie’s only family! And now, when Joe and Kit refused to understand, Dulcie turned her back on them, lay down, and closed her eyes.

Ever since Dulcie had discovered she could speak and could understand human language, she and Wilma had shared all confidences. Almost all, Dulcie thought. Some things, like teasing coyotes or leaping long distances from tree to tree, would unnecessarily worry a human. They shared most of their meals and certainly they shared the special treats from Jolly’s Deli that Wilma liked to bring home. They shared the blue afghan on the velvet couch, and they shared the big double bed in Wilma’s bright bedroom, where they curled up to read, both from the same page, while a cozy fire blazed in the small red woodstove in the corner of the bedroom. Or Wilma would read to her; that was how Dulcie had learned to read, by following the pages as Wilma said the words. She’d had no idea, when she was a kitten, that those strange papers Wilma stared at for hours could offer up such wonderful worlds for a cat to explore. Dulcie’s discovery of her latent talents, of her ability to master the human language, had opened gigantic worlds for her-just as that discovery had revealed amazing new worlds to Joe Grey; together the two cats had stepped into realms of history and myth and human endeavor far beyond their own feline world.

The kit, on the other hand, had always known she could speak, from as far back as she could remember, from the time when she was an orphaned kitten tagging, unwanted, behind a band of feral cats; though those wildly roaming cats had seldom spoken to her, keeping their conversations among themselves. Except when they said cruelly, “We don’t need that straggly weanling. No one wants a tortoiseshell around. Chase it away, there’s hardly enough garbage for the rest of us.”

Dulcie tried to think about the tortoiseshell’s precarious kittenhood, to think about anything besides Wilma, but she couldn’t. Wilma will be home in an hour, she told herself. Wilma can take care of herself, she is trained and she is armed and she is clever.

But maybe she should just go home once more. Each time she’d raced home, she’d tried to reach Wilma, leaping to Wilma’s desk, punching the speaker button and then the one-digit number for Wilma’s cell phone. Five times, the voice mail came on. Five times, she’d left the same message. “Cage Jones has escaped from jail! Have you turned on the news or seen the paper? He escaped this morning, about the time you left the city. Please, please watch out for him! Please, come home! Now! Please, please be careful!” Wasn’t Wilma checking her phone?

And why wasn’t she?

If she’d gotten Dulcie’s frantic messages, she would have replied.

If she could reply. And terror gripped Dulcie. No one had any idea what Jones would do. The ex-con would be wild with fury not only at Wilma but at her partner, too. Both Mandell Bennett and Wilma had testified before a federal judge to send Jones back, and Dulcie knew enough about that kind of offender, from Wilma herself, to know that Jones would be hot for revenge. She had left three messages on Bennett’s tape, too; though his office was in the city and he surely would have heard that Jones had walked out of jail using a false ID. Probably laughing to himself, the bastard.

This would be the second time Wilma and Bennett had helped send Jones up; the first time was ten years ago, just before Wilma had retired as a U.S. Probation Officer. This time, he had come out of federal prison in early June on conditional release. He’d stayed clean for all of a month, then been arrested the first week of July for transporting a stolen car across the state line. The judge, after looking over Jones’s files, had, in an unusual move, requested the testimony not only of Mandell, who was his present probation officer, but of Wilma, who had supervised Jones before her retirement.