Had the illness done this to Traynor? Was it slowly taking his mind as well as his body? The thought deeply distressed her.

Well, she didn't know much about how writers worked. Maybe from this draft he would construct the smooth prose that she so loved. Still, she'd thought that writers edited on screen, didn't print until they felt they had something of value. But maybe not. Surely they didn't all work the same.

That morning, aligning the pages as she had found them, she had felt a deep disappointment, almost a loss.

But now, this morning, maybe these pages would be better. Watching the driveway through the study window, she picked up the current chapter. She read hopefully, but only for a moment. His words were just as inept, just as off-putting. She read two pages, then tried again, but it was no better. She stopped when she heard a car pulling in, and laid the chapter on the desk.

But the car appeared in the next drive, parking before the house next door. Aligning the pages, she glanced up into the bookshelves-and caught her breath.

Joe Grey stepped out from behind the row of books, his yellow eyes wide with amusement. "I'm surprised at you, Charlie. I didn't dream you'd take the Traynor's money as a trustworthy professional, then pry into their personal business."

"What are you doing here? What are you up to?"

Joe smiled. "Does he always lock the drawers?"

Charlie grinned. "Why would you snoop on the Traynors?"

The tomcat shrugged, a tilt of his handsome head, a twitch of his muscled gray shoulders.

"Where's Dulcie? And what," she said, fixing Joe with a deep scowl, "did you have to do with that mess in the pantry?"

"You think I shot those beasts? That I've learned to use a pistol? Come on, Charlie."

"What did you have to do with those raccoons getting in the house?"

His gaze was innocent.

"Besides the raccoons-besides that gruesome mess that I had to clean up, what are you up to? There's not enough crime in the village? You've been reduced to idle snooping?"

"And what about you?" He lifted a white-tipped gray paw. "You sound so much like Clyde it's scary. No wonder you stopped dating him-before you turned into his clone."

"That is really very rude." She reached up to stroke Joe's gleaming gray shoulder. "Come on down. Were you looking for Traynor's research about Catalina's letters?"

Joe twitched an ear.

"I saw how interested you were, that night at Lupe's Playa. So, did you find it?"

He smiled. "It was right here in this stack. I pulled it behind the books, to read it while you vacuumed-while you snooped."

"And?"

"Catalina's letters to Marcos Romano are worth something. Two of them sold recently at Butterfield's for over ten thousand apiece."

"You're kidding me."

He pawed the sheaf of research from behind the books. "Between pages six and seven."

The auction notice lay there with Traynor's receipt. Joe showed her the notation at the bottom.

She raised her eyes to his, their faces on a level. "How many letters were there? How many did she write?"

"I don't know, Charlie. Maybe no one knows."

"If they're that valuable, why did he write a play about them- or why is he letting it be produced? Already, apparently, people are looking for them."

"Maybe he couldn't resist. Maybe, despite the wisdom of keeping them secret, the letters kept bugging him. The way you get bugged, wanting to draw something. The way you stare at a person, your fingers itching for a piece of charcoal."

"Aren't you perceptive this morning."

"My dear Charlie, cats invented perceptive. If some of Catalina's lost letters are still out there, and if Traynor thinks he can find them, maybe he figured he'd come on out to the coast and search for them while the play was still in rehearsal, before anyone saw the play, before anyone else thought of looking for them."

"But…"

"Maybe it was thinking and thinking of the letters that made him write the play in the first place. But now he's sick and dying, he's in a hurry. He wants the letters now. Once he's dead, he won't care who finds them."

He looked at her steadily, his yellow eyes wide and appraising. "What do you think of his work in progress?"

Charlie only looked at him.

"I'm no literary critic," Joe said. "But in my humble feline opinion, that stuff stinks."

Charlie laughed. She stepped to the window, to check the street, then sat down in Elliott's padded swivel chair.

Dropping down from the bookshelf to the desk, Joe patted the new chapter. "Right now, there are more questions about the Traynors than answers. Why did Vivi want to avoid Ryan Flannery? And why did she come in here early this morning and print the pages?" Joe shrugged. "Maybe he didn't feel like it last night after all the excitement. Makes you wonder how he does feel, despite what she tells people about how well he's doing with the treatments."

"She printed out his work this morning?"

"She did. And don't you wonder," Joe said, "why he packs a gun? Why he brought a gun out here from New York? He must not have declared it, must have hidden it in his luggage, with New York so strict about gun ownership."

Charlie sat frowning. "For a rotten-tempered tomcat, you come up with some interesting questions. What… Here they come."

As the Traynors' car turned in, Charlie snatched Joe from the desk, tucking him under her arm like a bag of flour, forcing an indignant snarl from the tomcat.

"Shut up, Joe. Hold still." Lifting the vacuum with her other hand, she watched the car pass the window, heading for the back.

"Wait," Joe hissed. "The research. Put it in the stack, on the bottom."

She dropped both Joe and the vacuum, hid the research, and they headed fast for the front door. "Where's Dulcie?" she whispered. "Where's the kit?"

Dulcie and the kit flew out past her as she jerked the door open. Picking up the doormat, Charlie stepped down into the yard to shake it. Already the three cats were gone, vanished among the bushes.

The tall Tudor mansion that housed Molena Point Little Theater thrust above the smaller cottages like a solemn matriarch, its old shingles gray with time. But its high windows shone clean, reflecting the midmorning sky in a deep, clear azure. Sixty years earlier, the residence had been headquarters for Hidalgo Farms, an upscale cattle and sheep operation. When, in the seventies, the outbuildings and carriage house and barns had been turned into Hidalgo Plaza, wide paseos and promenades had been added, brick-paved, and roofed with trellises to join one building to the next.

The house itself had been gutted, its inner walls torn out and replaced by heavy beams, to form the vast and high-ceilinged theater. The stage occupied what had once been the large parlor. The old formal dining room and morning room and study, now flowing together, were fitted with comfortable rows of theater seats upholstered in mauve velvet.

Three large ground-level bedrooms had become the cluttered backstage with its dressing rooms, two small baths, and the vast costume room. Other workrooms and the prop room had taken over the kitchen and butler's pantry and carriage house.

The upstairs bedrooms supplied office space and a balcony looking down on the audience, a long, narrow gallery that accommodated the control panel for the house lights and stage lighting, an area strung so densely with conduit and thick wires that it looked like a den for families of sociably oriented boa constrictors. The balcony was separated from the raftered ceiling space beyond, which yawned over the rows of seating, by a three-foot-high plastered rail. Beyond the balcony, beams and rafters stretched away in an open grid on which were hung banks of lights. The timbers, jutting across empty space, provided to the surefooted and arboreally inclined a fine series of catwalks above the heads of the audience.