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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 tom 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 thatdrifted, 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,