Cat on a Blue Monday

by Douglas, Carole Nelson

  "Not in this rotten world."

  "What about . . . love and sex?"

  "What about it? I told you my father was gone as quick as he had come, no pun intended. My mother walked herself to a rail to feed us four. She always said I take after my father more than somewhat, but he took off before he even knew my name."

  "Sure, it is a mewing shame, but that is the way it is, kid. I know my old man only from hearsay, too. And you must admit that our mothers are A-one."

  "Yes, but they dare not spare we kits more than a few weeks, because some other guy on the run comes through, makes like Dracula in heat, and more kits are on the way. Plus, if the old man sticks around, he gets jealous of the babies and might break their necks some night so Mama will go back into heat. I do not much cotton to persons of the male persuasion."

  "So I notice," I note with alarm. Most of the ladies I have known considered a dude a necessity of life. This little lady seems to have sworn off a lot of things formerly considered necessities by the general population. She is one scary little doll, although as cute as hell.

  "You say they called you 'Caviar' in captivity?" I ask for lack of anything sensible to say. I am more than somewhat shook.

  She retracts her last set of claws and licks her front mitt into the sheen of a black-satin glove.

  "Yeah, but that is not my street name. Actually, I am named after my missing, unlamented father, who appears to have made quite an impression on my deluded mother."

  "You are?" I ask to gain time and collect my wits. Could this little doll be on the level with all this?

  "Yes." She pauses in her elegant grooming to lift her head and regard me with the icy disdain she apparently extends to all of the male persuasion. "My real name is Midnight Louise."

  I would pale, if that were possible.

  Chapter 30

  Willy~nilly

  Temple, Peggy Wilhelm and Sister Seraphina stood outside the Tyler house, eyeing its impressive bulk with an awe much resembling Dorothy and her friends regarding the Emerald City of Oz.

  Temple was guilty of a lifelong identification with Dorothy, at least from the Judy Garland movie: she was a Midwestern girl with an inborn optimism in everything to be found over the rainbow; she really dug those ruby-red slippers;

  and now she had--instead of Toto--a black cat named Midnight Louie as she ventured and adventured into evermore exotic terrains personal, professional and quasi-professional, if you count crime-meddling as a quasi-profession.

  "You say that Lieutenant Molina okayed our going through the house?" Temple asked Sister Seraphina again.

  "Cleaning the house," Sister Seraphina modified scrupulously. "It seems that there is no hard evidence of foul play.

  The injuries that killed poor Blandina could have been received in a fall. The police have gathered what physical evidence there was, in case new information turns up, and the house with all these cats in it is a white elephant. If we don't deal with it, it will be declared a public health hazard, and Our Lady of Guadalupe is morally obligated to do something positive about the cats, having benefited from the will."

  "And if we find anything . . . interesting in the house?" Temple prodded.

  Sister Seraphina winked through her trifocals. "Then we give it to Lieutenant Molina and reopen the case."

  "Forget it," Peggy said. "Sure, some flaky things happened at the fringes of Aunt Blandina's death, but there were no more incidents at the cat show. I bet a competitor just wanted to ruin poor Minuet's chances. She was a prime contender. And this phone and lights stuff--you know the way kids in this neighborhood act up."

  "What about Peter?" Seraphina reminded her in a suddenly sober voice.

  "How is he?" Temple asked, for she had delivered the cat, hot-pink bandages wrapping each front paw, to the convent the day before.

  "Fine, but he won't be wandering for a while. Sister Rose is keeping him close to home." Sister Seraphina smiled at Peggy. "I know this is hard on you, dear. You've taken responsibility here from the first, with no hope of personal gain. I can't say I approve of your aunt leaving you out of her will, even if the church benefits. You will know you did your duty, as years go by, and that will be a comfort."

  Peggy nodded sudden gratitude at the nun, and then glanced around through tear-glazed eyes. "There's a lot of history in this house."

  "And cats," added Temple, pushing up the sleeves on her CATS! sweat shirt.

  Peggy glanced at her sweat-shirt logo, as did Sister Seraphina.

  They all three linked elbows and skipped up to the gates of this feline Emerald City.

  Emerald eyes greeted them at the door, and meows and upturned bewhiskered faces pleading not just for food, but for attention. The cats were obviously missing the daily ministrations of Blandina Tyler.

  Temple marveled at the dead woman's stamina. She was like the Old Woman in the Shoe with her flock of children. Temple was already wondering if she could handle two cats, and here Blandina had opened her door to dozens of hungry mouths and hearts.

  The trio soon found that Blandina Tyler had been a collector of all sorts of things. String, for instance. Balls of it occupied the kitchen drawers. Temple threw them down for the cats, which schooled like piranha around the playthings.

  "Look at this!" Peggy pulled a fistful of what looked like a limp tan octopus from the bottom vegetable drawer of the refrigerator.

  Temple blinked, while Sister Seraphina came over with a puckered face, then grabbed the booty and laughed. "Support stockings! you know, those cast-iron things that require girdles and garter belts that old ladies wear. These things are as

  stiff as rubber bands." She looked suddenly demure. "I think the best invention in the past thirty years was pantyhose."

  "Amen," said Peggy Wilhelm. "I remember wearing this awful little garter belt that put welts into my skin, and in the early seventies, shorter skirts were always pulling up to show everything, until pantyhose came along."

  "Early seventies," Temple repeated. "Gosh, I never got to wear long stockings in those days. My problem was socks that sagged around my ankles and those over big toes that made wrinkles in my tennies and hurt my feet."

  "Now you wear high heels and hurt your feet," Sister Seraphina reproved, sounding rather motherly.

  "They hurt less than those tennies jammed with oversized socks," Temple protested. "Besides, I'm wearing tennies now."

  "Yeah, hot metallic-pink," Peggy jeered in good humor. "You wouldn't recognize low-profile shoes if they tripped you."

  ''Everybody has to have a hobby," Temple said in her own defense. "I also like to explore. Let's 'clean' some more."

  By eleven-thirty they had rooted out six thirty-three-gallon garbage bags of support hose.

  "Where do old ladies get these things?" Temple demanded as she opened a tempting, hard-sided suitcase from the forties in a back bedroom and spilled out another cornucopia of support hose.

  Sister Seraphina laughed and shook her head. "It's the Depression mentality, which I'm depressed to admit I'm old enough to understand: save everything in case it might somehow be of use later. Save, save, save."

  Temple shook her head and began exploring a 1930s' dressing table she would love to have: big round mirror, pillars of drawers bridged by a low shelf. Paint it white or silver and--wow! Maybe there'd be an estate sale. . . .

  The shallow drawer in the bridge piece was filled with ancient tortoise plastic hair combs, hairnets, wads of thin, gray-brown hair, safety pins, and a plastic box filled with buttons, all of it resting on a yellowed piece of cockatoo wallpaper serving as a drawer liner. Temple removed everything, figuring the dressing table might bring some money in a sale--if she couldn't buy it beforehand.

  Then she pulled up the lining paper.

  Something lay beneath it. Something long and white and made of paper that would be folded four times. . . .

  Oh, my seldom-sensible shoes! Temple peeled the elderly paper out from the drawer. A will, an old will.

&n
bsp; She sank onto the tapestry-covered stool in front of the dressing table and read. I, Blandina Tyler, etc. To wit, etc. Sound mind, etc. She was quiet for so long that Sister Seraphina peeked in to see if Temple was still working.

  Temple glanced at her with wide eyes, then went back to reading. Seraphina came and read over her shoulder.

  "What is it?" Peggy Wilhelm asked from the doorway, her hands trailing more of the stockpiled support hose.

  Temple jumped. "I found--"

  "It's a will, Peggy," Seraphina said. Peggy moved into the room, her face flushed from hours of housework. "A will?"

  "An old will," Temple said gently. "From the sixties." She held it out to Peggy

  Peggy took and read it by the dim light of the single ceiling fixture. Temple and Sister Seraphina waited, having no right to say anything until Peggy knew what they already did.

  "But . . . this names me as the sole heir. To everything. I don't understand. I was ... in my twenties then."

  Temple rose to go to her, but Sister Seraphina's staying hand held her in place.

  Peggy shook her head, then sat down on the edge of the nearby bed, onto which Sister Seraphina's steadying hand guided her.

  "My parents had died," Peggy added with dawning insight. "I was alone by then. I--I didn't know Aunt Blandina ever cared that much."

  "She did," Sister Seraphina assured Peggy. "And here's proof."

  "She didn't have the cats then--" Peggy said slowly.

  "She was a lot younger," Seraphina reminded her. "Perhaps more sensible. As we age, we get . . . peculiar. It's true.

  My dear, Pilar was making us a lunch. Let me run next door and get it. You read this over. It's a gift, Peggy, A gift from the past. Accept it, and let it go."

  Sister Seraphina left, an obvious believer in the efficacy of food easing shock. For Peggy Wilhelm was in shock; Temple saw that, and seeing that, she wished that the will was dated nineteen ninety-four. Apparently, Peggy had never accepted being left out of her aunt's will as philosophically as she had pretended.

  Temple, however, was now alone with the stunned woman, not a comfortable position for a public-relations specialist who liked to put the best face on things.

  "Sister is right," she found herself saying. "Here's proof that your aunt didn't discount her only living relative. She just got caught up in caring for the stray cats and became obsessive."

  Peggy scanned the pages of the will again and again. Then her face crumpled like old support stockings. "Oh, Temple, you don't understand--you can't understand what this means to me."

  "I understand that you realize you were not always left out."

  "No!" Peggy squeezed Temple's hand, forcing her to knee beside her. "I can't tell Sister Seraphina, but--" Her free hand stroked her forehead, as if to install order within her cluttered mind. "Temple--! Oh, this is astounding. You don't know, and Sister Seraphina can't, she wasn't anywhere near this convent then. I lived with Aunt Blandina in 1969, for almost a year. Here, in this house, before the . . . cats."

  "You came to stay with her?"

  Peggy nodded.

  "You attended Our Lady of Guadalupe Church?"

  Peggy nodded. "Yes, for a while."

  "A while?"

  "Until it was a scandal," Peggy said in bitter tones. Her muddy brown eyes met Temple's. "I was pregnant," said this fifty-year-old woman with grizzled gray hair. "I was fifteen years old and pregnant. I was sent to Aunt Blandina's by my parents, so no one around home would know. Another city, a scandal twice removed: me and the baby."

  "Oh, Peggy, I'm so sorry."

  "You don't know what it was like back then. So hush hush, So much shame." Peggy pursed her lips as she folded the will shut, "Such grim business, Clandestine arrangements.

  I even had the baby in this house to avoid a public record, to quash suspicion. A Mexican midwife." She smiled weakly at Temple's shocked face. "It was an easy birth, I was only fifteen. The baby was fine--and whisked away to some clandestine adoption process. A good Catholic home was promised. Infertile parents who ached for a baby.

  Mine."

  "Peggy--!"

  "It had to be. They were all so disappointed. I was such a good girl, such good grades in school. They didn't want to know who, or why. I was such a good girl."

  "You are," Temple said blindly, wishing for Sister Seraphina back, for Matt, for someone who knew how to talk to broken hearts, yet understanding that her very own age difference and religion gap made this confession, this release, possible.

  "Now people are more realistic about it," Peggy said. "Then was the Dark Ages. It must be kept quiet at all costs. I was to forget it. My . . . my baby."

  Temple had never felt more inadequate. She had never had a baby. She had not got religion. She was talking to Peggy from the dark side of the moon as far as experience was concerned. The only loss she knew was Max's disappearance.

  "Did you . . . ever try to find the baby?" Temple whispered.

  Peggy shook her head. "I tried to forget, like they all told me to. I thought they hated me. I thought they never forgave me. I even grew angry with Aunt Blandina, my keeper, and her cats. She couldn't keep my baby, but she could take in cat after cat in the years afterward. We never spoke of it, and my parents had died so soon after, only seven years. They left everything to her, to Aunt Blandina, at their deaths. I thought that was . . . punishment. I didn't want to speak of it, think of it, find anybody! But . . . cats. Eventually, I created cats, bred cats. I don't know why."

  "Maybe the cats were your aunt's way of making up for letting that child go," Temple said. "Maybe they're your way of having something that depends on you." Maybe Midnight Louie was a Max substitute, right?

  "She did care about you, even after it was all over," Temple forged on. "Look, Peggy, this will is dated after you said all of this happened. You were her sole heir then. She did care. Only, like Sister Seraphina said, she got old and . . . queer."

  Peggy folded the will against her breast, like a baby. "Can I . . . keep this?"

  "Sure. But let me copy it first. I guess we've got to keep a record. I'll get it back to you."

  Peggy's troubled face threatened rebellion, and then subsided as Temple gently tugged the will from her grasp.

  "Don't tell Sister Seraphina," Peggy begged her. "Don't tell anyone."

  "No," Temple promised. "I won't."

  But she was almost as troubled as Peggy. Somehow, she was sure, this discovery of the old, forgotten will altered every assumption anyone had made about Blandina Tyler's death, including those of Lieutenant C.R. Molina.

  Chapter 31

  Curious Confession

  Louie still wasn't home when Temple checked in again, but Caviar was reclining on the sofa looking especially pleased with herself.

  Temple untied and kicked off her metallic sneakers and settled beside the cat, stroking its silky head. Caviar had longer, finer hair than Louie, but her wise silence made her as good a thinking companion as the larger cat.

  "Louie isn't boycotting us, is he?" Temple ruminated aloud. "I hope I didn't send him over the edge by bringing you home."

  Caviar's purr was soft and steady, unlike Louie's sometimes rough and rowdy one. It made an ideal background of "black noise" for Temple's darkening thoughts.

  What a quandary! Should she inform Lieutenant Molina of the newly found will, which was far too old to affect the current will, but which might point a suspicious finger at Peggy? It proved, at the least, that at one time Peggy had been the principal heir. Despite Peggy's gratified and even touching surprise at the discovery, it did not escape Temple that Peggy could have playacted that reaction, that she could have known years ago that she was an heir. That would mean that she might not have accepted her aunt's new resolve to endow the cats--at least not with the equanimity she apparently displayed.

  Then there was the matter of Peggy's forgotten past. Temple twirled her finger into a lock of Caviar's ruff and frowned. Unwed motherhood still was not something to sho
ut from the rooftops, but such young women today had many more options: they could keep their child and finish school. They could have an abortion, depending on where they lived and if parental consent was required, and if required, was given. They could bear the child and give it up to adoption.

  In Peggy Wilhelm's day--the end of the fifties--unwed pregnancy was such a scandal, particularly in religious families, that she'd had only one choice: bear the child in shame and as much secrecy as possible, then give it up and forget it as quickly as possible.

  Temple kicked her sock-clad foot against the sofa base, startling the droning Caviar, who flattened her ears back and moved down the sofa.

  No avoiding it, Temple thought. Peggy Wilhelm could have been nursing a thirty-year-plus grudge against the aunt who helped her parents stage-manage the situation. Did she resent being forced to give up and give away the child? What about an aunt who now felt no responsibility to anyone or anything but her stray cats? Had Peggy come to resent her so bitterly, along with her devotion to the cats, that she attacked her own Birman to divert suspicion and eventually caused her aunt's "accidental" death? She was in the house that night. Motive and opportunity, as they say on TV.

  Temple sighed again, driving Caviar a few inches farther down the sofa seat.

  She had promised Peggy not to tell Sister Seraphina but not Lieutenant Molina. Yet the suspicion was so farfetched, and Blandina Tyler's death could be so innocuous. Old people are prone to debilitating, even fatal, falls.

  The phone calls to Miss Tyler and Sister Mary Monica showed the workings of a sick mind, but anonymous callers were the least likely to act out their fantasies, whatever they were.