As Wilma sipped her coffee, Ryan looked across the table to the Greenlaws. “When do you want to go over plans for your remodel? I can come by any day, but better if it rains. We’re just starting a new house, so it’s all outside work, and rain will give me some free time. We’ve finished both the current remodels-both couples wanted to be settled back in by Christmas.” She grinned. “They’ll have to hustle. We did the best we could, but Christmas is almost on us.”

“What about now, tonight?” Lucinda said eagerly, glancing at Pedric.

The old man nodded. “Sooner the better. But if you’re starting a new job…”

“Just for a look?” Lucinda said. “A general idea, maybe enough to give us a rough estimate?”

“Enough,” Ryan said, “so I can draw a rough plan of the space and some tentative sketches, and can suggest some materials you could look at. The only thing that will hold me up is when we get the permit for the children’s home. Then it will be all-out, until it’s finished.”

“I still say,” Gabrielle said darkly, “it’s the public-school children who were allowed to transfer up there that has the city so riled and reluctant to issue the permit. I don’t see why those children did that.”

“Because the school is better,” Wilma said shortly. “Because those kids were bored out of their minds in public school.”

Gabrielle huffed impatiently, as if Wilma knew nothing about children or about learning.

The small exodus of students from public school up to Patty Rose had created a deep anger among some of the village teachers. Both Lori and Dillon had transferred, both girls rebelling when Lori was told by her principal that she was not allowed to attend the school of her choice. Lori Reed did not take well to being told that she could not do what she longed to do-not without a logical reason, not by strangers, certainly not by a county bureaucracy. “What do they mean, I can’t?” Lori had ranted. “When did this country turn into a slave state!” The girls said that a few teachers were so dull, they put everyone to sleep, that they weren’t learning anything, that all they did was follow workbooks like robots, so why shouldn’t they turn to a school that challenged them? Dillon’s parents and Cora Lee had fought the school officials for months to make that happen.

“Our remodel,” Lucinda was telling Ryan, “is pretty straightforward, if we can turn the half bath into a small kitchen. And it’s all inside work, so maybe you could work on rainy days when you can’t be on the new job.”

“The way the weather’s been,” Ryan said, “an inside job for rainy days will be a big help, if you can live with the delays. It could be a very long delay, for the Orphans’ Home, and that could be frustrating for you.” That was the biggest complaint Ryan heard about contractors, that they would juggle several jobs at once, pull men back and forth, and prolong all the work. Some clients were demanding penalty agreements from contractors, a hundred dollars a day off the bill, for not meeting the finish date.

“We don’t mind delays,” Pedric said. “One thing, though. First day you have free, could you take a look at the plumbing? There seems to be a leak somewhere. Sometimes for short periods we hear water running, but then it stops. We’ve checked inside and out, but we can find nothing.”

“Could you come tonight?” Lucinda said again, eagerly.

Ryan glanced at her watch. “It isn’t too late for you?”

“Ordinarily, it might be,” Lucinda said, laughing. “I think, tonight, we’re too energized, our heads too full of the ballet, to go right to bed, even to read. And too full of ideas for the apartment.”

Ryan nodded, glancing at Clyde. “We’ll meet you up at your place, then.”

Above them on the roof, the kit moved nervously. She wanted to be home before Ryan got there and they all went downstairs to those empty rooms.

Kit, too, had puzzled over the strange behavior of the water pipes. And prowling the backyard, she’d thought she caught the scent of a stranger. Though sometimes the neighbors crossed there, coming down from the street above rather than going around the block, so she couldn’t be sure-but now suddenly as she thought about her old folks and Ryan and Clyde entering those dark rooms, a shock of unease gripped the tortoiseshell cat. And her fear sent her spinning away toward home, racing across the rooftops, wanting to have a look before her humans entered that empty downstairs apartment.

R ACING HOME OVER night-dark rooftops, Kit crossed high above the many-colored Christmas lights of the shop-lined streets, leaping from peak to peak and then spanning above the shadowed streets on spreading oak limbs. At last on her own block she scrambled down a pine trunk into a dense cover of dry needles, and raced through a tangle of gardens toward home, stopping only when her own house towered high over her, its plaster walls pale in the night, its two stories of decks looking down over the village. From the front, the Greenlaw house faced the end of a quiet cul-de-sac, and appeared to be one story. But here at the back, on the downhill side, the windows and decks of the main floor and the daylight basement looked out over the lower street to the far, tree-shaded cottages and shops of the village.

Lucinda and Pedric had bought the house for its view of the village and the open green hills beyond. The real-estate ads had said it provided, as well, “a glimpse of the sea,” but Pedric said you’d throw your neck out trying to see the ocean from that vantage. Their plan was to convert the downstairs rooms to a separate apartment so that at some future time they could have a live-in, personal caretaker. But one of the biggest selling points was not a part of the house at all.

On the west side of the house stood five old twisted oak trees, and tucked among their highest branches, half hidden, was a sturdy tree house. It had been built for the previous owner’s children-and it was now Kit’s own. A private retreat that Kit considered nearly as elegant as Joe Grey’s rooftop tower, a shingled aerie that she could reach from the dining-room window across a thick oak branch or, of course, up the trunk from the garden below. The day they moved in, Pedric had installed a cat door in the bottom of the dining-room window.

Tonight the old couple had left lights on in the dining and living rooms, and Kit, approaching the warmth and smells of home, began to purr a happy rumble-but suddenly she froze, listening.

That sound. The pipes again. Water running in the house. And this time, in the night’s silence, without competing neighborhood noises, she knew that it came from the downstairs bath.

Slipping in among the bushes beside the lower floor, she could hear someone there, all right, in the unoccupied downstairs bathroom. Someone moving softly about, an intruder where no human should be. She approached the lower deck stealthily, and across it to the sliding-glass door that served as the outside entry.

The downstairs was dark. She could see down the hall, but no light burned, not even a flashlight. Crouching on the little entry deck, she was peering through the glass doors into the black interior of the empty family room when, inside, someone coughed. Kit backed away into the shadows.

She waited for some time, but hearing nothing more, she slipped closer and reared up against the glass. A cold wind nipped at her backside, ruffling her fur and tugging at her tail, carrying with it the smell of a new storm, smell of rain approaching, smell of ozone. Pressing her nose to the cold surface, she tried to see in.

She could discern no one inside, no movement down the dark central hall. Examining the lock, she didn’t think it had been broken or tampered with, she could see no scars or scratches on it, nothing bent, no screws removed. And no one could have come down from upstairs. Months before, one of Ryan’s carpenters had sealed off the inner stairway with timbers and plywood, so there was no access. The only way in was here, through this six-foot glass door, which was reached from the upper level by the outside stairs to this deck.