SEATED ON the Victorian couch between Dirken and Newlon, Cara Ray looked like a porcelain doll, her short pink skirt revealing a long expanse of slim, tanned leg as she dished out the giggles and charm.
If I were a human person, Dulcie thought jealously, I’d have legs even nicer. And I wouldn’t be a cheap hussy. From the fence, the cats enjoyed front-row seats to Cara Ray’s brazen display—she was the center of attention. They watched, fascinated, as she drew the Greenlaw men in like ants to syrup. Only Sam, Cara Ray’s friend from the Oak Breeze Motel, sat across the room as if he didn’t much care for her company.
The half dozen big-boned Greenlaw women watched Cara Ray’s performance with quiet anger. The dozen Greenlaw children who hunkered on the floor between the chairs of their elders watched their mothers, watched Cara Ray, and smirked behind their hands. The children, Dulcie thought, were amazingly obedient and quiet tonight, nothing like the way the little brats shouted and pushed and broke things in the village shops. Near the hearth, beside old Pedric, Lucinda sat quietly, too. The cats couldn’t read her expression.
Of those on board ship when Shamas drowned, only Winnie and George Chambers were not present. Harper had told Clyde he talked with them twice. Their answers to his questions were the same as they had given Seattle police, that they had not awakened that night, that they were heavy sleepers, had slept through the storm, did not know that Shamas had drowned until the next morning.
But tonight was story night and the cats forgot questions and police business as Dirken rose to tell his tale, standing quietly before the fire waiting for silence to touch the crowded room. But outdoors, around the cats, the breeze quickened. Wind whipped the parlor curtains and a gray-haired Greenlaw woman rose to shut the windows.
A series of slams, the windows were down, and the cats could hear nothing; Dirken’s voice was lost.
“Come on,” Dulcie hissed, “before they shut the back door, too. Maybe the screen’s unlatched.”
“And get shut in with that bunch?”
But he dropped from the fence and was across the weedy grass ahead of Dulcie and in through the screen, leading the way through the kitchen behind two stout Greenlaw women who stood at the sink rinsing dishes.
In the shadows of the dining room beneath the walnut buffet, they gained a fine view of table and chair legs, of human legs and a child here and there tucked among their elders’ feet. Neither Joe nor Dulcie liked the assault of so many human smells and so much loud talk and louder laughter; but who knew what the evening might offer?
Before the fire, Dirken looked smug and full of himself. His red hair hung over his collar in a shaggy ruff; his blue shirt fit tight over muscles that indicated he worked out regularly—prompting Dulcie to wonder if he had installed, in his travel trailer, some sort of gym equipment, to keep in shape while he took his little jaunts.
All the clan lived in new and luxurious trailers or RVs when they were on the road, which, Dulcie gathered from Lucinda’s remarks, was more than half the year. What these people did for a living wasn’t clear. If they traveled on business, what kind of business? Some kind of sales, Lucinda had told Wilma. But that was all she told her.
When the Greenlaw clan first arrived at the Moonwatch Trailer Park, the dozen nearly new travel vehicles checking in as a group, the proprietor had spoken to Max Harper, and Harper had checked them out. Since then, Dulcie had seen the police cruising that area on several occasions. She didn’t know what such a large traveling group might add up to, to alert Max Harper, but she didn’t laugh at him.
Standing before the hearth, Dirken waited. The parlor was hushed. The family, usually so violent and loud, so rude, was quiet now, and gentle—as if the tradition of story time touched powerful emotions, drawing them together.
“What shall it be?” Dirken said. “What will you hear? ‘Paddy’s Bride’? ‘The Open Grave’?”
“Tell ‘Drugen Jakey,’” Lucinda said softly. “Tell ‘Drugen Jakey’ again?”
“Yes,” said old Pedric, laying his hand on hers. “‘Drugen Jakey’ fits these hills.”
Dirken looked at them with annoyance.
But then he masked his frown, whatever the cause. His voice softened, his manner and stance gentled, his voice embracing the old-country speech. “That tale be told twice before,” he told Pedric.
“Tell it,” a young nephew spoke up. “That tale belongs well to these coastal hills.”
“Ah,” Dirken said. “The green, green hills. Do they draw you, those rocky hills?” His laugh was evil. No one else laughed. Lucinda looked startled. Pedric watched quietly, clasping his wrinkled hands together, his lined face a study in speculation.
“All right, then,” Dirken said, “‘Drugen Jakey’ it will be. Well, see, there was a passel of ghosts down the village coomb, and worse than ghosts…”
Standing tall before the fire, his red hair catching the flame’s glow, his booted feet planted solidly, Dirken seemed to draw all light to himself.
“No man could graze his beasts down there for fear of th’ underworld beings. Th’ spirits, if they rose there and touched his wee cattle, wo’d send them flop over dead. Dead as th’ stones in th’ field. Devil ghosts, hell’s ghost, all manner of hell’s critters…”
In the silent room, cousins and aunts and nephews cleaved to Dirken’s words, as rapt as if they had never before heard the ancient myth.
“Oh yes, all was elder there…” Dirken said, and this was not a comfortable tale; Dirken’s story led his listeners straight down into a world of black and falling caverns that, though they excited Dulcie, made her shiver, too. Joe Grey didn’t want to hear this story; it made him flatten his ears and bare his teeth, made him want to scorch across the room and bolt out the nearest window.
But as the tale rolled over them all, painting the deep netherworld, Lucinda looked increasingly excited. Soon she seemed hardly able to be still, drinking in the nephew’s words as he led his listeners down and down among lost mountains and ragged clefts and enchanted fields that had never seen the sun, never known stars or moon.
Speaking the old words, Dirken seemed caught, himself, in the story, though he might have told it perhaps a hundred times—his broad Irish face gleaming as he painted for them a Selkie prince who, taking the form of a ramping stallion, charmed three human girls and led them down from this world through a clear, cold lake to waters that had never reflected earth’s sky. He spoke of griffons, of harpies, of a lamia rising from the flames of hell; he described so convincingly the hell-beasts that soon Dulcie, too, wanted to escape. Dirken spoke of upper-world fields and hills quaking and opening to that cavernous land. The stories made Joe Grey swallow back a snarl, made Dulcie back deeper beneath the buffet, hunched and tense.
It’s only a story, she told herself. Even if it were true, this place and this time are safe. Those stories, those times are ancient, they are gone. Whatever might once have lain beneath these hills, that was olden times, that isn’t now. Whatever strange tie that Joe and I might have to such a place, it can’t touch us here in this modern day, can’t reach us now.
And that knowledge both reassured and saddened her. Crouched in the shadows beneath Lucinda’s buffet, she felt a sense of mourning for her own empty past.
She had no certain history such as the Greenlaws knew. No real, sure knowledge of the generations that had come before her. The stories she had adopted as her own, from the Celts and Egyptians, were tales she had taken from books. She could not be certain they were hers, not the same as if the mother she had never known had given them to her.
If you don’t know the stories of your own past, Dulcie thought sadly, what can you cling to, when you feel alone? If you don’t have a family history to tell you who you are, everything flies apart.
It was when the storytelling had ended and trays of sandwiches were brought out from the kitchen with pots of tea and coffee, and everyone was milling about, that the cats saw Cara Ray rise and move away through the crowd, through the kitchen, and out to the backyard. They followed her, winding between chair legs and under the kitchen table and swiftly out through the screen door.
Crouched beside the back porch, they watched Newlon come out, too, furtively looking about. He saw Cara Ray, a dark shadow standing by the far fence, and approached her through the weedy yard. Cara Ray turned away stiffly, not as if she were waiting for Newlon, but as if she didn’t want him there. When he moved close to her, she pushed him aside so hard he lost his balance and half fell against the fence.
“Leave me alone, Newlon. Stay away from me.”
“What did I do, Cara Ray? You were all sweetness, there in the parlor.”
“Only in front of the others, so they wouldn’t…Stay away, Newlon. And stay away from Lucinda. You didn’t need to come here.”
“Of course I needed to come. On the boat, you…Shamas is dead, Cara Ray. Now we can…”
“I told you, Newlon, leave me alone. I don’t want to see you. Do you want me to go to the police?” she said, glancing toward the house. “Do you want me to tell them how Shamas died?”
“What would you tell them, Cara Ray?”
“You might be surprised.”
The cats, crouched in a tangle of dead weeds, listened with interest but drew back when the back door opened again and Dirken stepped out, moving through the dark yard as if he knew exactly where Cara Ray would be standing.
“Go on, Newlon. Dirken won’t like to find you here.”
“But I…But Cara Ray…”
“Go on, Newlon.” And, watching Newlon slip obediently away, Cara Ray smiled as lethally as a pit viper coiled to strike.