Fortunately Peter had returned and could see the last of her patients.

She paused only to call Mount Court and cancel the afternoon's practice, and within minutes was driving across town, trying not to let her imagination run wild. Nothing like this had ever happened to her before, not during her growing-up years in the kind of wealthy suburb thieves loved, nor during her school years in the city. The last place she would have thought it could happen was in Tuckersmall, friendly, law-abiding Tucker.

But it had. Someone had entered her house uninvited.

Drawers had been rifled, books removed from book shelves and set aside, papers and magazines fanned.

Pieces of clothing lay on the closet floor, seeming less I thrown there than inadvertently dropped, but that made the violation no easier to swallow.

A neat intruder was an intruder nonetheless.

Only the medicine chests showed no sign of trespass, suggesting that the search hadn't been for drugs.

Nothing appeared to have been taken except kitty, who was nowhere in sight. While Norman and his deputy dusted for fingerprints, Paige ran to the Corkells'. She took Sami in her arms and held her tightly, then carried her back to the house and went from room to room.

"Kitty? Kitty? Where are you, kitty?"

She made a second round of the rooms, this time shaking a box of kitty treats, usually a surefire way of drawing kitty from hiding. But there was no small furball scampering out, and Paige grew frightened.

She returned to the front hall to find Norman talking with none other than Noah Perrine.

"I heard you'd canceled practice," Noah said by way of explaining his presence, but Paige's mind was on a single track.

"I can't find my kitten. She must have run out of the house while the door was open." She slipped past, out the door to the front porch, calling, "Kitty? Come here, kitty!" She ran down the steps and began a search of the perimeter of the house, looking behind bushes, into trees, down the window wells of the basement. "Where are you, kitty?

Here, kittykittykitty! " Noah met her at the garage. "I don't see her."

Paige was close to tears. "She's just a baby.

She isn't used to being outdoors. She can't possibly protect herself against other animals, and if she wanders too far, she'll never find her way back." Still holding Sami, she set off for the neighbor's yard and searched it the way she had her own. Jill was searching, too, and Betty Corkell, and before long i the search had spread down the street.

Paige's shoulders were aching by the time she returned home.

She sank doun on the front stairs, propped Sami on the lower step between her legs, and buried her face in her hands. } She didn't have to see to know that it was Noah who settled beside her. The solidness of him was a tangible thing, and that was before he began to rub her shoulders. His hands were masterful. They knew just where she ached.

"She'll show up, Paige. She can't have gone far."

"But she doesn't have a collar. I was just keeping her for a little while, only until I found a permanent home for her, and since she was staying inside all the time, I didn't bother with a tag, but now no one will know where she belongs."

"Maybe someone will find her and keep her.

Isn't that what you want?"

"No!" She shot him a glance. ill want to find a home for her myself.

A good home. Not just some place she wanders into. Do you know what people do to cats they take on the spur of the moment and then tire of?"

"Don't assume the worst."

"She was abandoned once. Now she's probably wandering around, thinking it's happened again. She was so sad then. She may be bigger now, but she's just as helpless."

"Cats aren't helpless. They can fend for themselves."

"This one doesn't know how."

"It's instinct."

"But she's just a baby," Paige said, and put her chin in her palm. On one level she knew she was being foolish. On another she was feeling devastated.

111 put signs up. Someone must have seen her."

Assuming whoever had broken into the house hadn't taken kitty in a car and dumped her far away.

Noah's fingers continued their work. After several minutes, leaving one hand on her arm, he slid to the step below. "Hey," he said softly, studying Sami. To Paige he said, "She's getting bigger. Looks none the worse for the excitement around here."

Paige shifted Sami to her lap. The little girl didn't belong to her any more than kitty did, but the worry was there. "Thank God she and Jill weren't home." Her throat grew tight with emotion. She forced words past it. "If anything had happened to either of them, I don't know what I'd have done."

"Do you have any idea who might have broken in or why?" Noah asked.

She shook her head.

"Nothing's missing?"

"Nothing obvious. Television, stereo, CD player they're all there.

Same with my parents' silver, which would have brought in a bundle on the black market."

"Do you keep any patient records, confidential reports here, that someone might have wanted?"

"None."

"Then robbery wasn't the motive, at least not robbery in the traditional sense. Stealing your peace of mind is something else. Do you have any enemies who may be out to give you a scare?"

"Enemies? In Tucker?"

"A difficult case that may have upset a parent? Maybe an unstable parent?"

"I have several, but I can't imagine they'd do this. Small-town doctors have a kind of protection. You might disagree with something they say, but you can't tell them to go to hell, or next time you get sick, you're out in the cold." She stood suddenly and went down the stairs. "Kitty?" She looked back up at Noah. "I thought I heard something." She moved aside a rhododendron branch. "Kitty?" But there was neither movement nor noise.

Discouraged, she returned to the stairs. She leaned heavily against the wood railing and looked up at the house. Inside, Norman was making notes on a pad. She had a sudden sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

"Are you okay?" Noah asked.

"I guess. It's just the thought of a stranger going through my things.

The intrusion. The violation." Her imagination took her further, to an image of kitty mutilated and left to die, meowing piteously but with fading strength.

Noah left the stairs and started thrashing through the rhododrendron.