But Joe Grey hadn't been so charmed; he didn't like those revelations of their own history, he didn't like thinking about their amazing lineage. It was enough for Joe that he was suddenly able to talk back to Clyde and express his own opinions, and could knock the phone from its cradle, to order takeout.

Nor was Joe thrilled to encounter others like themselves, rare creatures among the world of cats. He had certainly not been impressed with the black torn and his evil voodoo ways. That cat had caused more trouble than she cared to remember; she could have done without Azrael. She was glad he'd gone back to the jungles of Central America.

She had spent the early morning perched as usual on Clyde's back fence beneath the concealing branches of Clyde's maple tree, her dark stripes blending with the maple's leafy shadows as she watched Lucinda Greenlaw, alone in the parlor, enjoying her solitary breakfast. Looking in through the lace curtains of the old Victorian house, Dulcie felt a deep, sympathetic closeness to the thin, frail widow.

She thought it strange that Lucinda's tall old house was so shabby and neglected, its roof shingles curled, its gray paint peeling, when the Greenlaws were far from poor. At least when Shamas was alive, they'd had plenty of cash.

The interior was faded, too, the colors of the flowered wallpaper and the ornate furniture dulled by dust and time. But still the room was charming, furnished with delicate mahogany and cherry pieces upholstered in fine though faded tapestries. Each morning Lucinda took her breakfast alone there from a tray before a cheerful fire; her meager meal, of tea steeped in a thin porcelain pot and a plate of sugar cookies, seemed as pale and without substance as the old woman herself.

According to the pictures on the mantel of Lucinda and Shamas in their younger days, she had been a beauty, as tall and lovely and well turned out as any modern-day model; but now she was bone thin, shrunken, and as delicate as parchment.

Lucinda Greenlaw had had her own metamorphosis, Dulcie thought. From glamorous social creature when she was younger, into a neglected and lonely wife. From the vibrant, very alive person she had been, as Dulcie's friend Wilma had known her, to a faded and uncertain little person as colorless as the fog that drifted, that morning, in wisps around the parlor windows. Watching Lucinda Greenlaw, Dulcie was gripped with a painful sadness for her; Lucinda had a talent for distressing Dulcie, for stirring in her a desire to protect, almost to mother the old woman.

Dulcie's housemate responded to Lucinda in the same way. Wilma, too, felt the need to protect Lucinda, particularly now that Lucinda was newly widowed, and now that she had a houseful of her husband's noisy, rude relatives to bedevil her. A crowd of big, overbearing Greenlaws filled the five bedrooms awaiting Shamas's funeral, so many big men and women that they seemed to smother Lucinda with their loud arguing and careless manners.

Still, Lucinda knew how to find her own peace. She simply walked away, left the house. She might look frail, but Lucinda had been out as usual that morning before daylight for a solitary ramble of, very likely, several miles.

Earlier, as Dulcie leaped to the fence through the dark fog, she had seen Lucinda coming up the street returning home, her short white hair clinging in damp curls, her faded blue eyes bright and happy in the chill predawn.

Since Shamas's relatives began to arrive, these early-morning walks and her solitary breakfasts seemed the only moments Lucinda had to herself. Dulcie watched her often, sometimes late at night, too, from higher in the maple tree, watched Lucinda reading in bed from a stack of well-used volumes that stood on her night table; her books of European history and folklore were all Lucinda had to keep her company, alone in the big double bed. She seemed to have every volume of Sir Arthur Bryant, who was one of Wilma's favorite authors, too.

Lucinda's beautifully appointed bedchamber, with its high poster bed and long, gold-framed mirrors, was faded like the rest of the house, the velvets as colorless as Lucinda herself, the once luxurious love chamber deteriorated as if love itself was forgotten, and only sadness remained.

Wilma said Lucinda had been a late bride, that she had met Shamas Greenlaw when she was working in Seattle as a doctor's receptionist. They had married there, where Shamas owned a machine-tool company. Soon after the wedding he sold his Seattle apartment and they moved to Molena Point, to his old family home. Wilma said the handsome, charming couple had launched immediately into a busy social life, that for nearly five years they had circled brightly among Molena Point's parties and social gatherings, its gallery openings and benefits and small concerts. But then Shamas grew restless; the limited society of the small village began to bore him.

He bought a yacht, a sixty-foot catamaran in which they could take their friends on interesting junkets. Money seemed in ample supply-both Lucinda and Shamas had new cars every year. Surely the clothes in the photographs on the mantel looked expensive. The yacht parties, Dulcie thought, must have been happy times-until Shamas's shipboard affairs became apparent.

Lucinda shared her uncomfortable memories with few people, but she trusted Wilma. Dulcie's housemate and Lucinda saw a good deal of each other, particularly since Shamas's death. The last two weeks Wilma had made every effort to be supportive, to help Lucinda through this hard time. During their quiet meals together, Lucinda had opened up to Wilma, expressing her pain at the unhappy marriage, describing how, on the yacht, Shamas would slip out of their cabin in the small hours, returning just before dawn, imagining that she slept.

Lucinda had never confronted Shamas, had never protested his affairs. She simply quit going with him, choosing to stay home alone.

"Giving up," Dulcie told Wilma. Wilma agreed. That was what made Dulcie sad. "Why didn't she fight back? Why didn't she leave him, change her life, make a new life?" Dulcie had hissed. "She just gave in-to exactly what Shamas handed her."

Dulcie didn't understand why Shamas hadn't loved Lucinda, had treated her so shabbily when she had been so beautiful, when she had such a gentle warmth. Lucinda was still beautiful to Dulcie, like an aged porcelain doll, so frail one would not want to press a paw hard against the old lady's cheek for fear of tearing her fine, powdery skin, so delicate that Dulcie would hesitate to leap hard into Lucinda's lap, for fear she might fracture a bone.

Yet Lucinda was not too frail to walk miles along the shore each morning or to climb the steep slope of Hellhag Hill. Sometimes Dulcie followed her on those lonely predawn jaunts, trotting well behind her, staying, for some reason she could not explain, warily out of sight.

Lucinda must have been miserable all those years while Shamas played fast and loose. She told Wilma she had almost left him a year ago, when he first turned down a rich offer on the old house. But she hadn't left, hadn't found the courage.

Brock, Lavell & Hicks, a local developer, had begun buying up the property on the Greenlaws' block. By the time they approached Shamas, they had purchased all the houses across the street, planning a small, exclusive shopping paseo. Eager to acquire the Greenlaws' two lots, they made Shamas a generous offer. Lucinda had wanted badly to sell, to go into an easily maintained condo, but Shamas refused, perhaps out of family sentiment, perhaps simply to thwart Lucinda. He reminded her frequently that the old house was his family home, though before they moved to Molena Point from Seattle he had rented it out for many years; there was no family nearby to use it-Shamas's cousins had long ago moved across the country to North Carolina.