He knew, Of course. Seraphina would consider it only right that he know. "You mean the implication of blasphemy?"
The pastor nodded solemnly, "Most disturbing. We are used to graffiti on the school walls, obscenities scratched into the rest-room doors, but then the vile phone-calls to Sister Mary Monica, and now . . . this."
"You think that they're related? Miss Tyler was receiving bizarre phone calls as well."
Father Hernandez laughed, the sound's harshness as disturbing as the sight of a crucified cat. "Miss Tyler's cats and calls and health and will! I'm tired of such . . . unworthy speculations on Miss Tyler. Something worse may be abroad, eh Matthew, was it?"
"It was Matthias; now it's Matt."
Father Hernandez spread his hands to show calm acceptance, the gesture as broad as a blessing. Veteran priests often assumed the unconscious mannerisms of the vocation;
Matt saw that now, as he saw residual gestures in himself. He was surprised that anyone would be shocked that he had been a priest, given the signs, but Temple certainly had been.
"Sister Seraphina tells me you mentioned Satanism."
The question's directness sent Temple flying to the farthest fringes of Matt's mind. "I meant that only in the sense of misguided individuals playing at the trappings of satanism, Father. Not a . . . serious . . . outbreak."
"Hmm," Father Hernandez balanced his chin on his tented fingertips. The dark eyes that regarded Matt grew suddenly haunted. "It wouldn't surprise me if it were the real thing, Matt. Not with the unholy mischief that's been happening around Our Lady of Guadalupe lately."
"What do you mean?" Sister Seraphina interjected.
The pastor's eyes avoided hers. "I . . . haven't told you everything."
"There's more?"
He shrugged. "I found the holy-water fonts in the church filled with red liquid before six-o'clock Mass last week."
"Red--?" Sister Seraphina couldn't bring herself to ask more.
"Dye," he answered quickly, "In the holy water. Red food coloring. Disposing of it properly will be quite a challenge. And the communion wine was also colored water."
Sister Seraphina's lips foided. She said nothing, but her eyes held such a look of disapproval that Matt could imagine her saying, "And was that too great a disappointment, Father?"
Still, the tricks around the church tugged at his interest. No wonder a sober and steady priest might find his grip slipping. Matt imagined himself celebrating Mass again, concentrating on the ritual and the prayers, achieving a recognizable spiritual state and then, at the most sacred, sacramental moment for priest and congregation, saying, "This is my Body, This is my
Blood," and sipping from the gloriously gilded chalice--thin, colored water, not wine. Transubstantiation indeed.
Add other, more brutal harassments, such as a convent cat crucified, and Matt could understand that a priest might need more than meditation to steady his nerves.
"Maybe your friend could help us," Sister Seraphina said into the lengthening silence.
It took Matt several long moments to realize that she addressed him and finally look up. His face remained blank.
"The plucky Miss Barr," she prodded him. "You mentioned that she has had some involvement in detection."
Temple came winging from the back of the beyond with a fiery crown of red hair and a shining sheriff's badge in the palm of one hand, like a pixyish saint.
Matt laughed. "She handles public relations, and happened to have murder rear its ugly head at a couple of events she stage-managed, that's all. She's no professional, although----"
He stood up, hands jammed in pockets, stunned. "Although . . . the reason she was working the cat show this weekend is that there's been some funny-business there. Miss Tyler's niece had entered some cats, and one of them was shaved."
"Shaved," Father Hernandez echoed in complete confusion.
Matt nodded. "To disqualify it from competition, they thought. It was done with animal clippers, down the length of the body from head to tail and around the middle."
"My God--" Father Hernandez's warm-toned skin, as dark as a George Hamilton tan, turned sallow. "Don't you see? Remember the legend of how the donkey's back was marked at Jesus' birth for all time?"
"A cross," Matt heard his own hoarse voice say. "The cat was shaved in the shape of a cross. Then it's related!"
"To what?" Sister Seraphina exploded. "Pranks? Except for Peter, that is all we're talking about. Childish pranks. We sit next to a building housing two hundred and sixty-five children and teenagers, after all."
Father Hernandez's eyes slid away from her again, Matt noticed. The gesture was guilty. Most good Catholics had a hang-up going back to grade school about deceiving nuns, but Matt would bet his best--and now useless--clerical collar that Father Hernandez wasn't telling anyone the full story. Maybe that was the secret he kept between himself and his most recent confessor, Jose Cuervo.
Chapter 18
Blue-ribbon Blood Sacrifice
I have been ill-used a time or two in my multitudinous lives, but nothing can quite compete with serving as a combination feline pincushion and a victim of the late great Count Dracula.
The average person would not believe the sort of ghoulish rituals that go on in the hidden back rooms of the local veterinarian's office, such as blood extraction through the victim's (me!) jugular vein.
When my little doll hands me over to the enemy, even I have no idea of the torments in store. And this indignity comes alter my debilitating day at the cat show!
No doubt the attentive reader is wondering how I escaped the cage labeled "Percy" to return to the soon-to-be site of my newest betrayal--that is, home to the Circle Ritz in time for Miss Temple Barr to scoop me up unceremoniously and hasten me oh' to see the vet.
I wish that I could say that my great strength, savage nature and wily feline brain were responsible for tripping the latch on my steel cage. Alas, these are modern times and such primitive attributes are seldom necessary. Nowadays it is who you know that counts. In this instance, it is who it is that knows me: one
Electra Lark, cohabiter with the reclusive Karma, landlady of the Circle Ritz and a bosom buddy of mine for almost three months now.
Naturally, she would know me in a darkroom, and she does almost as well across a crowded hall, even at a cat show.
"Louie!" I hear bellowed in dulcet tones.
I turn to scan the indifferent passersby. The judging is temporarily over and, yes, Midnight Louie is the last one left behind, stranded high and dry under the odious pseudonym of Percy, may his offspring have tape worms!
How could I have missed the slinky muumuu in electric shades of magenta, silver foil and chartreuse? For once I wish that I was as color-blind as certain erroneous experts insist that my kind is.
This vision bustles over, and I see that it is carrying a straw bag the size of Rhode Island. Miss Electra Lark is not the least inhibited at subjecting me to an interrogation I cannot begin to answer.
"Why. Louie," says she when finally and truly positioned before my cage. "What are you doing here?"
The answer should be obvious. so I say nothing. She fingers the ribbon affixed to my prison, then spots the paperwork and roots in her gigantic bag. Finally she draws out a pair of rhinestone-trimmed Ben Franklin glasses, pokes them up to her eyes and frowns at the news that I am "Percy."
She looks at me again, just to make sure, and I give her a one-word greeting to let her know she's got the right dude and the wrong name and number.
"You've got to be Louie." she mutters under her breath. "Percy is described as a tiger-stripe." She eyes me again and begins to speak as it I can understand every word, which I can, but this is not supposed to be generally known. I fear that Miss Electra Lark has developed some eccentricities from her clandestine association with the ineffable Karma.
"Temple must have entered you in the Household Pets category," she informs me quite incorrectly. "Then . . . she was called away by that early
morning emergency of Matt Devine's--I would sure love to know what that was about! And so she asked me to come over here and watch Peggy's cages while Peggy went to the hospital to see her ill aunt, and then . . . Temple forgot to mention in all the excitement that she'd entered you yesterday in the Household Pets contest today!"
Satisfied by her convoluted logic, she beams at me. "And look at you. Louie! You won." She leans forward to unhook the ribbon, and then hesitates. "Unless this Percy won and you somehow ended up in his cage."
I nose my ribbon fondly to tell her it is mine, all mine, and show my claws, delicately, for further evidence.
"No need to get testy about it! All right, here goes the ribbon, pinned to my shoulder, and here goes my back--"
With which mysterious comment she swings open the cage door and lifts me up, and onto, her capacious bosom. I told you that we were buddies. A scent of gardenia nearly gags me, but I control my distaste.
After all, I am being borne out of the cat show with my Best of Class blue ribbon in plain view of all and sundry by my own personal bearer.
It is not a bad exit, it I do say so myself.
Chapter 19
Confidence Game
At four o'clock that afternoon, Temple found Matt waiting for her by the pool, sitting cross-legged in his gi on the blue mats, meditating.
Only twelve hours had passed since he had received the frantic call from Sister Seraphina. Temple marveled at his cool, collected calm. He did not look frazzled, worried or weary.
Temple, on the other hand, felt all of those things, and was sure that she looked it. At least the mirror over the bathroom sink had told her just that after she had slipped on her gi and paused to drag a brush through her thick ted curls. She resembled a Raggedy Ann doll with a blank, bloodless, white-muslin face. Shock, she thought, and aftershock.
The last thing she felt like was a lesson in self-defense, but--from what Matt had implied--the martial arts had been his sanctuary even before the church. She sensed that learning--and teaching----kept that cool of his impeccably in place, and that his hard-won tranquility was a shield.
"How is Miss Tyler?" she asked abruptly, breaking his reverie.
He looked up and nodded reassuringly. "She's home from the hospital already, with her niece. She was simply showing the effects of being terrorized at her age. What about Louie- and the other cat?"
"Dr. Doolittle says they're both resting comfortably."
"Do cats ever rest any other way?"
"No, I guess not. Louie can come home at six. Peter will have to stay a couple more days."
"How are you doing?" he asked next.
"Too tired to give in to it, I found the strangest thing on my living-room sofa. A blue ribbon. Do you suppose a good fairy is giving me a commendation for doing good deeds?"
"Maybe it's a reward for progress in your self-defense lessons."
"Hardly, I asked Electra to watch Peggy Wilhelm's cats at the show as long as needed; maybe she left me a ribbon to cheer me up. But she's not back yet. That's really odd."
"Minor League compared to what we've been involved in lately. Let's get to work." Matt rose with the supple ease that always surprised her. She had associated martial arts with kicks and grunts, not control and serenity.
Feeling far from serene herself, Temple kicked off her slip-in wedgies and stepped barefoot into the shade with Matt and back in time to their first lesson. The plastic of the mats was slick and cool on the soles of her feet. For a moment, the stress of the past few hours seemed a lifetime ago. Then Temple reminded herself that the reason they stood here doing this was that two men had assaulted her with their fists only a couple of weeks ago. She wondered if the blows she suffered then were any less stunning than the gantlet Matt had recently run through the byways of his hidden past--only, he had been forced to drag along an unwanted witness: her.
She pushed these distracting thoughts from her mind. Matt was serious about teaching; she must be serious about learning.
"Did you find the pepper spray I left in your mailbox?" he asked.
She nodded. "A couple of days ago, Where did you get it?"
Matt shrugged. "At a gun show at the Convention Center." His mouth tightened. "If I had known, I would have bought some for Sister Seraphina and Miss Tyler's niece."
"Gun show? You?"
"That's where you readily get that stuff. It's legal. The point is, use whatever defensive weapons you carry---and you know what they can be?"
She nodded. "The pepper spray, ah . . . the wheel-lock device in my car, my car keys, a rolled-up newspaper--"
"Right, Whatever you can lay your hands on is fine, but in the end, you are your own best defensive weapon. You have to be prepared to resist with nothing more than yourself."
Temple sucked warm desert air between her teeth. "That's just it. There's so little 'self' when it comes to me. I wouldn't intimidate a gerbil."
"That's not the point. Intimidation may not be the weapon you need; on the other hand, if it is, you can do it. Say you're attacking me--"
Temple quashed any smart remarks. He was an ex-priest, after all, and she found it horrifying how much that new knowledge inhibited her usually flagrant imagination.
"Come toward me," he advised, "as if you meant to do me harm."
Temple charged gamely.
Matt's stance changed to braced feet and slightly extended arms. "No!" he bellowed in a deep voice, straight from the gut of a Marine drill sergeant.
Temple was so shocked that her heart nearly stopped. It resumed with cumbersome, heavy beats.
"Jesus!" she said, clapping her hands over her throbbing organ. She felt like a hero in a romance novel. Then she realized that her expletive had its origins in the sacrilegious and should have been deleted. "I mean, oh, my goodness---"
Matt waved away her apologies. "Authoritarian rage can give even a rapist pause. The loud 'No!' brings back that scared three-year-old inside everyone who's ever confronted a parent. You try it."
"Me? Bellow like a wounded bull? I don't think so."
"Weren't you P.R. director for the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis? Didn't you say that you acted in school drama productions? Aren't you an ex-TV reporter? You must have some dramatic instincts--"
Goaded, Temple answered all those questions with a wrenching, growling, basso, Greek-tragedy "No!"
Matt jumped, unprepared for the little girl with the big voice, and Temple almost scared herself. Then he smiled.
"You ever heard that a gun looks scarier in a woman's hands because they're smaller than men's, and the gun looks bigger?"
"No, I can't say that I have, but then, I don't frequent gun shows," Temple answered with great virtue.
Matt only shook his head. "Well, from you, a rock- bottom 'No!' sounds much more definite precisely because you are so petite. Surprise is your best weapon. Use it."
"The mouse that roared."
"Exactly."
"What else can you teach me?"
"Well, the human body has two vulnerable areas. Can you guess what they are?"
Temple was at a loss. She felt vulnerable everywhere, especially since the attack.
"What's covered and protected in professional sports?" he prompted her in the approved style.
"For women? Nothing, unless they play men's contact sports. For men . . . heads, I guess. Faces."
"Good."
Temple paused. What she had to say next would not be polite. Especially to a priest, Jesus. Should she be a good student or a sensitive friend?
"What else?" Matt prodded.
Temple sighed. "Groins," That was better than balls, at least.
"Right," he said, not the least nonplussed.
He was all instructor now, and Temple saw that naked wasn't the best disguise; distance was.
"The human body has its limitations, because it's erect," he went on. "We can either lunge forward or retreat backward."
Matt mimicked those motions, making a mock dive for Temple an
d then retreating. "What happens?"
"If you attack . . . you drive forward and your face is vulnerable."
"And if you attack my face?"
She pantomimed his suggestion, her fingernails going for his eyes, and watched his upper body flinch away.
"You can step in," he prompted, "and--"
She stepped in, lifted a knee, jabbed with it, and then froze the motion. He was right. An attacker exposed either his face or his groin; he could not protect both. All Temple had to master was the willingness to attack one or the other with all the skill and power at her command.
Self-defense, she realized, was a dirty business. Almost as dirty as having no defenses at all had been.
After learning another dozen ways of turning an attacker into creamed corn, Temple retreated to her apartment to take a shower. She wasn't accomplishing a lick of work, but she had never been so busy.
Matt had insisted on getting to work in his usual fashion, so Temple dashed out again in the Storm solo, this time to the vet's to pick up Midnight Louie.
Dr. Doolittle was gratifyingly positive about Peter's prognosis.
"He's such a mild little guy," she said by the front counter, where Louie, looking as unhappy as Nero Wolfe on a forced outing to a five-and-dime, lay in lackluster disarray after he had been retrieved from the place's mysterious private regions. "What a shame someone had to sneak up on such a good-natured cat and commit mayhem."
Louie yowled plaintively at that, no doubt identifying with the injured Peter now that he had been shanghaied into blood-donor duty.
"As for this big galoot, give him lots of meaty food, maybe kidney and liver," Dr. Doolittle advised. "He'll need to rest and recuperate for a while."
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