“She was creative tonight,” Ryan said with admiration.

Kit purred for Ryan, watching her with interest. Ryan Flannery, Kit thought generously, had simply never been around cats. Ryan had never, she decided smugly, had the opportunity to deal with the amazing feline mystique.

Behind Ryan, Clyde and Pedric were looking exceedingly uneasy. Lucinda, not wanting Ryan to become too interested in the abilities of certain cats, said almost cloyingly, “She sure did hear something, poor little thing. But to be fair, maybe she wasn’t warning me at all. Maybe she ran to me for protection. I think,” she said, “that we often misread our animals.”

“Maybe,” Ryan said doubtfully-she might not know cats, but she knew animal body language, and Kit’s behavior had been a sharp warning, not a panicky bid for help.

In the dark and empty family room, Pedric switched on the lights and he and Clyde examined the windows, quickly finding the jimmied panel. Moving on down the hall, they turned on the lights in each empty room. Ryan and Lucinda followed them, Lucinda still cuddling Kit-they found nothing until they reached the back bedroom.

There, in the far corner, propped against the wall, stood a black canvas backpack. There were marks on the windowsill near it, where the thin coat of dust had been disturbed, as if something small had lain there. And Ryan found, half hidden behind one closed venetian blind, an empty film cartridge, carelessly abandoned or forgotten.

Using a tissue, she picked up the little plastic cylinder, wrapped it, and tucked it in her pocket. “Thirty-five-millimeter. Strange thing for a burglar to leave in a house. Unless…” She looked at Pedric. “Did you have a camera down here? Any camera equipment?”

“Nothing,” Pedric said. “There was nothing at all to take, these rooms were all just as you see them, bare as old bones.” Taking a clean linen handkerchief from his pocket, he covered his hand, knelt a bit stiffly, and opened the backpack. Touching the items within as little as possible, he lifted them out one by one and lined them up on the floor. Binoculars. A thin plastic grocery bag that contained candy bars and a dry cheese sandwich, two unopened boxes of film, and an expensive-looking camera with a telephoto lens.

Clyde and Ryan moved to the window together, looking away down the hill between the Greenlaws’ oak trees to where the next house loomed, surrounded by woods. Three windows were faintly lighted behind drawn shades.

“Not much to take pictures of,” Ryan said.

“That’s a rental,” Lucinda said. “New neighbors, they just moved in.”

Pedric was examining the film. He handed it to Clyde. “Regular thirty-five-millimeter. Fast, four hundred speed.”

Behind Ryan, Lucinda looked down at Kit, questioning. The tortoiseshell, forced to remain silent, twitched her ears and flicked her tail in a clear gesture: I don’t know any more than you do, Lucinda! Kit had hardly noticed the new neighbors, and that embarrassed her. She was supposed to be the spy in the family, and now she knew no more about those tenants than she knew about the black-clad, sour-faced woman who had invaded their home. All this going on unheeded, right in plain sight, right under her supposedly sleuthing paws.

“I remember,” Clyde said, “seeing a moving truck over there, a week or two ago.”

“Two men and a woman,” Lucinda said. “A big woman, tall, not fat. Sturdy-looking. Shoulder-length dark hair. There wasn’t much in the moving truck that I could see, some cardboard boxes, only a few pieces of furniture, old and tacky. I think that house rented furnished.”

Ryan cut a look at her, and laughed, and Lucinda grinned at her. “Nosy neighbor-nosy old woman.”

“Not old. And not nosy,” Ryan said, putting her arm around Lucinda. “Just observant. But I couldn’t resist.” They stood a moment, Lucinda counting back the days.

“It was about a week before they moved in that I saw a Pine Tree Rental Agency car over there, saw an agent go in and out a couple of times.”

Outside, the wind was coming stronger, rattling the old windows and driving the scent of rain in around the glass. Again Pedric examined the marks on the sill. “Looks like she balanced the camera here. What’s so important that she would break in, with the purpose of taking pictures of that house or of its occupants?”

Clyde said, “You haven’t met the neighbors, don’t know anything about them?”

Pedric shook his head.

Ryan, kneeling over the camera, studied its cumbersome telephoto attachment, then carefully searched the nearly empty backpack, slipping her tissue-covered hand into its inner pockets.

The last pocket yielded a large manila envelope and a smaller yellow envelope that bore the Kodak emblem, the kind one would pick up at the drugstore photo counter. She glanced into the brown envelope, then slid both inside her jacket. “Let’s get out of here. We can look at these upstairs, and call the department.” Replacing the camera and binoculars and plastic bag in the backpack, Ryan did not see Lucinda’s look of hesitation at the mention of calling the dispatcher.

They took the backpack with them. They left the jimmied front window ajar, as they’d found it, and locked the sliding doors behind them. Lucinda carried Kit, talking softly to her, though Kit wasn’t free to answer.

“You scared that woman bad,” Lucinda said, stroking Kit. “I wish I could make you understand how wonderful you were.”

Kit purred and snuggled against her.

“When you leaped and screamed like that, you very likely saved me from a far more violent attack, Kit.” Lucinda scratched Kit’s ears. “You’re way smarter than any watchdog, my dear!” Lucinda gave her a wink that no one saw, and Kit didn’t dare even smile. She hid her face against Lucinda’s shoulder to keep from giggling. Clyde cut them a half-warning and half-amused look, and turned away. Pedric had moved on ahead; if he was smiling, no one saw. Everyone but Ryan knew the truth about Kit, it was only Ryan Flannery who didn’t have a clue.

Kit wouldn’t mind Ryan knowing her secret-hers and Joe’s and Dulcie’s secret. Ryan was a good person, and certainly the cats trusted her. But so many people knew already that it really wasn’t smart to tell anyone else. Despite the best intentions, important secrets had a way of escaping as quickly as mice slipping from a cracked barrel.

Charlie had figured it out, as had Lucinda and Pedric. As had more than one of the criminals who the cats had helped send to prison-and that was more than enough people knowing. Ryan, being Detective Garza’s niece, might find it very hard indeed not to let their secret slip-look how hard it was for Charlie.

Kit knew, too well, that Charlie was sometimes sorry she knew. Such knowledge had to be awkward for a police chief’s wife, when the cats in question were the chief’s prime informants-and when they spent so much time on Max Harper’s desk pretending to be simple little freeloaders. The worst of it was, the cats had no idea how long they could keep up their charade before even that hard-nosed cop guessed the truth.

Everyone moved upstairs into the big, raftered living room, and Lucinda lit a fire and turned on the Christmas-tree lights. The house smelled of ginger and vanilla and that sweetly scorched smell of cookies that had browned around the edges. While Clyde and Pedric walked through the rooms to be sure the woman hadn’t gotten in there, too, Ryan, sitting down at the dining table, put on a pair of Lucinda’s cotton gloves and shook out the contents of the two envelopes. Lucinda fetched her own take-out container of shrimp bisque and warmed it, and set Kit’s late-supper snack on the dining-room windowsill. Kit, wolfing down her good supper, watched Ryan examine the photos from the yellow Kodak folder.

“A roll of twelve,” Ryan said, “processed through the Village Drugstore.” She shook her head. “Under the name Jane Jones.” She looked up at Lucinda. “Are you going to call the station?”