Free Cat Telling Tales by Shirley Rousseau Murphy

to cheer up your poor beleaguered cat.”
    Ryan returned, sliding a white deli bag into the backseat of the king cab. Joe could smell the crab salad mixed with the aroma of ham and other delicacies. Winking at him, she headed for the veterinary clinic. “What I don’t understand,” she said, making a left onto Ocean, “is why Billy was living with Hesmerra, when she drank so heavily, why Children’s Services hadn’t stepped in, if his own aunts refused to take him. Was she his legal guardian?”
    â€œI think everyone who knew him, their one neighbor and the ranchers he worked for, kept the situation under wraps. The boy is stubbornly independent, he wouldn’t have tolerated a foster home. I’m guessing everyone pretended things were just fine. Hesmerra was his grandmother, she was family. She was working steady, too. She seemed to be one of those drunks who hides it pretty well. Apparently she gave no one, including the school authorities, any real reason to interfere.”
    Clyde shrugged. “You might say a lot against Hesmerra, but I think she would have fought as hard as Billy himself to prevent him being taken into custody. Who knows, maybe Kraft intervened, too. He’d have pull enough.”
    An interesting tangle , Joe thought. Billy’s one willing guardian turns up dead, his one defender is out of town for an undetermined length of time, and what’s going to happen to Billy now? How much can even the chief do? He imagined Max butting heads with a cadre of county do-gooders, and that made him smile. If I were a gambling cat, my money would be on Max Harper.
    Ryan turned off Ocean to the next block and parked before the clinic against a tall border of Mexican marigolds that made the air smell like cat pee. Both Ryan and Clyde went inside to haul out the carriers.
    The two cottages that formed the clinic had been joined together by a tall solarium, its glass walls rising above their dark roofs. The complex housed boarding and hospital rooms, large kennels, examining rooms, offices, and surgery. On the roof of the front cottage, beneath the shadows of a cypress tree, Kit and Misto sat looking down at Joe. Dulcie wasn’t with them. This was story morning at the library, she’d be curled up with the children on the big window seat, their little hands stroking her as the librarian read to them. Tourists were enchanted when they found the pretty tabby hanging out at the library and learned she was the official library cat. Many made a special effort to visit her, as, of course, did all the cat-loving locals. As Joe sat thinking of Dulcie, and looking up at Kit and Misto, a leap of recognition hit him, a moment as startling as a lightbulb blazing on.
    Rearing up to get a better look, he studied Misto’s shoulder, the pattern of swirling stripes. The configuration of pale cream and dark yellow was a dead ringer for the circular pattern on Debbie Kraft’s lost, red tomcat. Even their long faces showed a likeness, and the way both cats’ ears were set at the same jaunty angle.
    Joe never did believe in coincidence. So what the hell was this? Eugene, he thought. Misto had left his grown kits in Eugene, where they had all lived. A tom and two girl cats, all three as red, Misto told him, as fresh rust on a paintless fender. He looked up as Ryan and Clyde came out hauling five cat carriers and loaded them in the back of the truck. “What about Rock?” he said. “You leaving him home alone?”
    â€œI called my dad,” Ryan said. “He’s taken him to run the beach. I didn’t want him to scare Billy’s cats.” Rock didn’t do well by himself in the Damens’ small yard; the big Weimaraner, high-strung and full of energy, didn’t like being left alone, and was inclined to tear up Ryan’s garden. He wanted to be out and busy, wanted to be tracking felons as Joe himself had taught him, or out running with the