There are only nineteen cats the day I visit "Connie" (not her real name) on the suggestion of a local shelter worker. Only, that is, down from a recent twenty-five, before the predations of some local coyotes. This is before the arrival of the three from Maine that are being dropped off by a concerned cat lover who knows that their owner, a visiting professor, is returning to Europe without them.

Only one cat greets me, a gray tiger who looks both glossy and well-fed as he rubs against my ankles. I have already circled the house, a big, shambling summer cottage, but could find no doorbell on any of the three doors. As I stand back, considering the closed-off porch, the little tiger finds me, and following his friendly greeting, leads me without hesitation to one dark entrance on the side of the house. It is dinner time, clearly, and the late autumn afternoon is growing both cold and increasingly wet. I knock and we are both welcomed in by the equally compact, somewhat stout, gray-haired woman who has brought all these cats together.

Once inside, I get a better sense of what the shelter worker had warned me about. Although we are in New England, on the last day of October, flies buzz about as if it were midsummer. In the drafty chill, the odor of litter box is not too bad, but the dry food spilling off the cats’ big serving platter crunches underfoot. And everywhere, everywhere, there are cats. "This is Radcliffe," she introduces me to a large black-and-white longhair curled regally on the kitchen counter. "And here’s Buzzy." A small orange adolescent skims by my legs. On the stovetop — the flat, electric kind — a marmalade longhair turns and looks at us, scratches for fleas, and then curls his legs under him to nap. Connie ushers me off to the right, to a small sitting room where four more cats sleep or recline on a sofa; another darts up the stairs.

"This is Ashley, and here’s his brother." Connie reaches around a cushion to scoop up the siblings of the marmalade longhair on the oven, the other now-adult littermates who share the luxuriant orange and white fur. Holding the compliant bundles, we retire back to the kitchen. There was one more in that litter, Connie tells me, settling into one of the few unoccupied chairs. Her voice grows harder. Drunks killed her, she says.

"I heard them out there, drinking and throwing bottles." Connie and her husband live down a dirt road, but their woods are surrounded by suburb and it is easy to see how a woman like Connie could come to be the local scapegoat, the entertainment for rowdy teens. "I found her in the morning," Connie continues. "She was slit open."

More than coyotes prey on the cat lady’s cats: people fear what they do not understand. Even I, a cat lover, remember the frisson of nervousness as I circled her dark house in search of a lit door, the faint desire that she would not — even after our phone conversation — let me in. Not all her neighbors are cruel, however. Some, such as the couple who called the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to investigate the elderly couple’s feline haven, have the welfare of the animals in mind.

Not that Connie saw the intervention in quite that light. "They stole my cat," she protests, allowing the shaggy orange-and-white to jump down from her lap as she turns again to the cat on the counter behind her. She had thought this cat, Radcliffe, had gone missing, and for days searched the neighborhood for signs of his black-and-white bulk. She spotted him, finally, sitting in the window of a neighbors’ house, but when she was able to confront them, later that day, they seemed nonplused by her outrage. "We’re going to adopt him," they told her, informing her that they had already taken the animal to the vet. "You can’t do that. He’s my cat!" Connie had replied, and after paying the vet’s bill — $200 to treat an abscess — she had taken him home. That’s when the ASPCA was called, and the inspector ("Who was very polite," Connie notes) began coming around.

He told her he was there to inquire about why she had not taken the cat for his follow-up treatment, to remove the wick that the vet was using to drain the deep, infected wound on the cat’s head. "I told him, I’ve been taking care of cats all my life." She seems affronted by the memory. "I pulled it out, and it healed cleanly." Her cats are all spayed or neutered, she says, but after that she sees no need for a vet, especially one who charges "Saks Fifth Avenue prices."

Over several visits he could find no reason to remove her cats, she tells me proudly. I make the mental note that he must have been looking for more obvious signs of abuse or neglect. She had even recently switched from supermarket brands to the healthier Iams food, although she complains about the prices. "I’m feeding them less these days," she confides in me, her voice lowering. "So there’s less waste."

Maybe the inspector had been told the same story I had; the one that made me nervous about seeking her out that afternoon. "She thought one of her cats was lost," a friend, a shelter worker, had told me. "She looked everywhere for him." Two weeks later, the friend told me, the missing pet had been found — dead, and trapped behind Connie’s husband’s bed. "Couldn’t you tell?" the friend had asked. "Well, you know me and housekeeping," was Connie’s reply.

It was that story I’d been thinking of as I followed the directions up the rutted road, and although I anticipated the smell and the disarray, I didn’t expect the sadness. First, as any experience with a cat hoarder makes clear, because of the condition of the cats, although the ones I see seem reasonably well-fed despite their scratches and scars. Sad also because as Connie’s perhaps mild case makes clear, those who hoard have no concept of the mistreatment to which they are subjecting their cats. Although these women are clearly the basis for much anti-cat bias, they suffer without understanding. These are the women who gave our society the image of the witch: the "crazy cat ladies" who are ostracized and isolated to a degree that must surely aggravate their mental states. To women like Connie, those calls to the animal inspector were a personal attack on her family. The possibility that Radcliffe might have been better off with a family of his own, two people to love him as their house pet, could not be imagined.

Cats had always been around during Connie’s childhood. Indeed the question of when she got her first cat seems to surprise her. "I’ve always had cats," she tells me. But these first pets, under the supervision of her mother and father, came singly into her life. "One cat at a time," she says, although that cat would often be supplemented by a dog or another pet in their Manhattan apartment. "When I got married, I thought, I can finally have all the cats I want." As a newlywed living in Paris, she began with two Siamese. Fifty-three years later, she hasn’t satisfied that craving yet. She still wants more, and nobody is stopping her.

How does her husband feel about the animals here? I ask her, not wanting to mention the shelter worker’s story. "He’s out of his gourd," she responds, and I think she means over the cats. "He’s a grump. But when I get the cats, he doesn’t want me to give them away. He just doesn’t want any new ones. After all, I’m the one feeding the cats. I sit and look at television and clean the cats’ ears."

"He’s half-assed," she says again later, when I ask her again about her husband of five decades. "Like this house. We bought it for the cats," she explains. "It was a summer cottage and he never finished insulating it. A half-assed job. It’s cold; it’s always cold." Her home does have some heat, so she does not fall into the significant percentage of cat hoarders with nonfunctional utilities. But it is drafty this afternoon, and as we sit there she pulls her sweater around her. I point out the cat curled on the table beside her. "These fellows must keep you warm," I say. "I sleep with five of them," she replies. "With the five who won’t wake me up."

Her husband, Bob, makes his way slowly down the stairs. "Too many cats," he calls out to me. Since he’s now nearly deaf, Connie had yelled an explanation of my project to her spouse. "Too many cats!" he repeats, in the overloud voice of the hearing-impaired. He shakes my hand and walks out.

I find myself sympathizing with the old man, as much as with his wife. Do I want to meet the five who live in her bedroom? No, I tell her, I cannot. It is getting dark, I say. It is getting late, and I would like to get back to the city before traffic becomes unbearable. In truth, the claustrophobia of the small kitchen and adjoining parlor has begun to get to me, and I do not want to enter a smaller space, particularly where more cats live exclusively. I begin to make my farewells, but Connie doesn’t acknowledge them. Instead, she pulls a homemade calendar off the wall. Each month boasts a picture of a different cat, several of the ones I have met and also some of those that have been killed. There are Mermaid and Gray Stray and Priscilla, found on the rocks at Priscilla Beach. There is Adolph, "because of his moustache," she says, flipping to another month, and Duxbury. "The coyote got him." Lovely, I respond, as the photos begin to repeat, and start to move toward the door. She follows, with more photos, and I can do nothing else but look and praise the somewhat blurry shots of cats living and dead. "This is Hawthorne," she says. The black-and-white in the photo was clearly labeled as Radcliffe. "He’s three years old." She has already told me his age, which is nearly three times that. We reach the end of the photos and I walk out the door. It is raining and windy by then, but she follows me, wearing only her cardigan.

Did I see the cat cemetery? She points out a circular area right off the driveway, bordered by stones and with many larger stones that seem to serve as markers. "More than thirty of my babies are here," she says. I mutter something that I hope sounds comforting and pull my keys from my pocket. The wind has picked up and it is almost fully dark. I reach my hand out to take hers. "Goodbye," I say. "You won’t make it back to Boston," she replies, and I wait for her to finish, to say "by sunset" or "before rush hour." She doesn’t. "Well," I laugh, feigning a jauntiness I do not feel, "I will eventually!" I fairly dive into my Toyota and drive down the unpaved road much faster than is good for my suspension. Although she has my sympathy, it is dark and stormy and it is also Halloween. For the fifty miles home, I clutch the steering wheel tightly and ride the brake on every turn.

The Feline Mystique: On the Mysterious Connection Between Women and Cats (www.felinemystique.com) will be published by St. Martin’s Press in August. Clea Simon reads from the book on August 20, at 12:30 p.m., at Borders Books & Music, 24 School Street, in Boston; on August 22, at 7 p.m., at WordsWorth Books, 30 Brattle Street, in Cambridge; and on August 29, at 7 p.m., at Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Avenue, in Brookline. Clea Simon can be reached at cleas@earthlink.net