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blood, its cry was shrill, as terrified as the scream of a murdered woman. It raked her with its hind claws, slashing at her belly. She bit deeper, opening its throat. It jerked and stopped struggling and was still, limp and warm, the life draining from it.
    She carried the rabbit back to Joe, and they bent together over the kill. He did not mention her daydreaming inattention. He scarfed his share of the carcass, rending and tearing, flinging the fur away, crunching bone.
    â€œSomeday,” she said, “you’re going to choke yourself, gorging. Snuff out your own life, victim to a sliver of rabbit bone.”
    â€œSo call 911. What were you dreaming, back there?” He gave her an annoyed male look, and ripped fur and flesh from the bones.
    She didn’t answer. He shrugged. The rabbit was succulent and sweet, fattened on garden flowers. Dulcie skinned her half carefully, then stripped morsels of meat from the little bones, eating slowly. Only when the bones were clean, when nothing was left but bones and skull, did they settle in for a wash. Licking themselves,cleaning their faces, then their paws, working carefully in between claws and between their sensitive pads, they at last cleaned each other’s ears. Then, stomachs full, they sat in the moonlight, looking down upon the village, at the moonstruck rooftops beneath the dark oaks and eucalyptus.
    Because many of the village shops had once been summer cottages, the entire village was now a tangled mix: shops, cottages, galleries, and motels, crowded together any which way. But where the hills rose above the village, the houses were newer and farther apart, with dry yellow verges between. It was here that the cats hunted. Besides the rabbits and ground squirrels, the mice and birds, there were occasional large and bad-tempered rats. Both cats carried scars from rat fights; and Joe remembered too vividly the rats in San Francisco’s alleys when he was a kitten, rats that had seemed, then, as big and dangerous as Rottweilers.
    It was Clyde who had rescued him from those dark alleys. He’d had a piece of luck landing with Clyde and then the two of them moving down here to Molena Point. Though if he ever admitted to Clyde how much he really did like the village, he’d never hear the last of it.
    â€œWhat are you thinking?”
    â€œThat Clyde can be a damned headache.”
    She stared at him. “You mean about the Pet-a-Pet program? If Clyde ordered you not to go near Casa Capri, you’d be up there in the shake of a whisker.”
    â€œI wasn’t thinking of…Oh, forget it.”
    She looked at him unblinking.
    â€œYou’re going to keep at it, aren’t you? Keep nagging until I agree.”
    â€œWhat did I say?”
    â€œStaring a hole through my head.”
    â€œYou could at least try.”
    He looked hard at her.
    She smiled and licked his ear.
    He watched her warily.
    â€œThey talk to me, Joe. That little Mrs. Rose, she tells me all kinds of secrets. I feel so sorry for her sometimes.” She didn’t intend to tell him all of Mae Rose’s secret, but she’d like to tweak his curiosity ever so slightly.
    He lay down and rolled over, crushing the grass beneath his gray shoulders. Lying upside down staring at the sky, he glanced at her narrowly. There was more to this Casa Capri business than she was saying.
    She patted at a blade of grass. “Those old people need someone to tell their secrets to.”
    The cry of a nighthawk swept the moonlit sky, its chee chee chee rising and dropping as the bird circled, sucking up mosquitoes and gnats.
    She said, “Wilma tells them stories.”
    â€œTells who stories?”
    â€œThe old people. Cat stories. About the Egyptian tombs and cat mummies and Egyptian hunting cats and about…”
    He flipped to his feet, staring at her.
    â€œNot about speaking cats,” she said softly. “Just cat stories. She’s always done story