Smoke and Mirrors by Tanya Huff Page B

ghosted over soft fur, but that was it. As amber eyes glanced back mockingly and four legs performed a diagonal maneuver impossible on two, he had no doubt the cat was playing to its snickering audience. At least it seemed to be moving toward the small door in the back corner of the drawing room.
    The library, he thought, as the cat slipped through the half-open door and disappeared. I’ll just close the door and the cat’ll be out of our hair. A sudden burst of static clamped his left hand to his head. Son of a bitch!
    â€œTony! We’ve got sffffft stored in there. I don’t want the cat pissssssssstnk on it.”
    Yeah, well, nothing harder to get out than cat pisstnk on sffft. He sighed and kept going.
    In spite of the rain, the two long windows to his left let in enough daylight for him to see the cat moving purposefully across the room toward the other door. He could understand why it didn’t want to linger. The empty shelves didn’t feel empty. They felt as though the books they’d held had left a dark imprint that lingered long after the books themselves were gone. The only piece of furniture in the room was a huge desk and a chair in the same red-brown wood. Tony had overheard Chris telling Adam that it had belonged to Creighton Caulfield himself. The fireplace shared a chimney with the drawing room and over the dark slab of mantel was a small, rectangular mirror framed in the same dark wood. Tony made a point of not looking in it. If there were ghosts in the library, he didn’t want to know.
    Moving out and around a stack of cables and half a dozen extra lights, he picked up the pace.
    The cat slipped out the library’s main door, Tony following it out into the main hall. His reaching hand touched tail. The cat picked up the pace, streaking toward the front doors, then turning at the last minute and heading up the stairs. Tony made the turn with considerably less grace and charged up the stairs after it. Three steps at a time slowed to two to one and at the three-quarter mark, as an ebony tail disappeared to the right, he realized there was no way in hell he was going to catch up.
    He reached the second floor as the cat reached the far end of the hall. It paused outside the door to the back stairs, turned, and looked at him in what could only be considered a superior way—no mistaking the expression even given the distance—and then disappeared into the stairwell.
    Just for an instant, he considered calling the cat to his hand, but the memory of the exploding beer bottle stopped him. While blowing up the caretaker’s cat would certainly keep it off the set, it seemed like a bit of an extreme solution. Not to mention hard on the cat. Besides, from what he knew about cats, it’d probably head straight for the food in the kitchen where it would be Karen’s problem.
    Nice to have his suspicions about that creaking sound he’d heard earlier proved right—the upper door to the back stairs had been left open.
    Mind you, that doesn’t explain the baby crying.
    The faint unhappy sound was coming from his left. He turned slowly. They weren’t using that end of the hall, so he had no idea what was down there. Gee, you think it could be the nursery? And the million-dollar question now became: Was it a new ghost or were the two teenage ghosts he’d already seen just screwing around trying to freak him out?
    â€œTony!”
    For half a heartbeat, he thought it was the baby calling his name. Apparently, the freaking-him-out part was working fine.
    â€œHaul assssssssssstkta wardrobe and pick up Maffffffffffffffffk other tie from Brenda.”
    â€œI’m on it, Adam.” He thumbed off his microphone and started back down the stairs. Investigating phantom babies would have to wait. And I’m so broken up about that. . . .
    Crossing the porch, he felt someone watching him. The caretaker’s black cat sat staring at him from one of the deep