She was alone in someone else's deserted house. Someone else, who was dead. Yet she could think of a half-dozen perfectly ordinary explanations for why another person--a concerned individual like herself, a neighbor, a caretaker, a cat lover, a congenitally curious idiot with a suicidal streak--would be in the house.
Perhaps Sister Seraphina had noticed the power failure and come over to investigate.
This theory seemed even more likely when Temple realized that the scuffling sounds were coming from below. Sure, a good old-fashioned Midwest basement! The house was old enough for one. And someone had gone down to check the electrical box because of the power outage.
It would be a bit embarrassing to explain her unannounced presence, but not impossible. She was glib in awkward situations--most of them, anyway. She could talk her way out of anything; what else was a P.R. person if not convincing?
Temple was not convincing herself.
She edged quietly closer to the sounds, down a back hall jammed, she remembered, with brown-paper grocery bags full of newspapers. And support hose.
Hadn't there been a door there, another back door? Or a door to the basement?
Now she heard a voice.
Singing.
Okay. Must be a repairman. Who else would sing in a basement in the dark?
"Heav-y dev-il," came the first lyric.
Singing heavy-metal music?
"Up and up we go, where we stop nobody knows but Jesus."
Temple cocked her head to interpret the singsong voice and the odd words. Jesus? Must be a nun from next door, checking on the house, but what kind of song--psalm?--was that? "Nobody knows but Jesus ..." Familiar. An old spiritual. Nobody knows but Jesus-- Nobody Knows the Trouble I Seen! Odd song for a Catholic nun.
Then the song changed, and was even odder for a Catholic nun to sing . . . unless she was an exceedingly odd Catholic nun.
"That old black devil got me in its spell, that old black devil that I know so well."
The voice was closer, but Temple couldn't tell the sex or the age any better. And the last words and melody were so familiar, too, but from another side of the compact disc to the first familiar phrase. Old black magic!
A streak of white magic suddenly outlined the door, edging it in a thin frame of light.
Temple retreated to the refrigerator, rounding its side to seek shelter just in time.
The basement door swung open until it smashed into the paper bags. Bright light bobbled around the back pantry in nervous shafts--a flashlight. A repairman would need a flashlight in a house with no power, she told herself. So would a burglar, herself talked back. Or a killer.
"Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool?
No, sir, no, sir, only old bags full."
The voice was so near, and it panted between the lines of the old nursery rhyme. Something thumped at the singer's rear.
Temple peered around the edge of the refrigerator.
The flashlight's erratic beam illuminated the pantry. A figure, humped and twisted, hunkered before the closed basement door. A big burlap bag lay on the floor, obviously filled with something.
Temple's horror-movie mentality filled in the blanks. Dirt from a basement grave? A pod person left by aliens? Dead cats?
No, live cats. The bag had moved, though the semi-human silhouette was turned away and did not see.
"Heav-y dev-il," came the singsong voice again as the figure turned to lift its burden. "You'll swing for it from the church door. Pox vobiscum." A chuckle punctuated the gibberish.
Whoever it was bent over farther to hoist the bag up on a shoulder, straighten to human height . . . and spot Temple.
Like a rabbit, she took off, through the dark and the cats, feeling things fly from her milling feet--tinfoil food dishes, water dishes (she felt her ankles splashed), surprised cat bodies.
She heard equipment--flashlight, bag, bowie knives, boomerangs, bullwhips, whatever--thump to the floor, and heard the softer thump of running shoes behind her. Like a jogger downtown, yeah, coming up from behind on the poor ordinary walker.
Temple's ankle crashed painfully into a barrier that would not give, twisting her foot until the high heel slipped sideways. A step. She didn't want to climb, but had no choice. Maybe she could find Sister Mary Monica's window and heave a brick through it; all right, heave her tote bag through it. Then she could scream out the open window, and by the time anybody came, the bogeyman from the basement would have ground her bones to powder.
Temple stumbled upward on her shaky heels, tripped and banged her knees on the steep steps. She was upright and running again before the pain registered. When her foot lifted and came down on level ground, she almost jolted herself into losing balance. Teetering on her high heels, she glanced back.
Darkness was rushing up the dark stairs. A shape like wind incarnate, as black as the night around it. No pale pattern of face or hands, just darkness.
Temple rushed down the hall, not wanting to bottle herself in a room but having little choice. She felt an open doorway and dashed through. She slammed the door shut behind her, knowing it wouldn't lock, and felt for something to drag across it.
At her back, the subconscious warmth of light beckoned. She found a trunk and push/pulled/kicked it in front of the door. It was heavy: maybe there was a body in it. Then she had to turn and see the light. Now there was a phrase for religious revelation-- She recognized Miss Tyler's vintage dressing table, saw it clearly . . . fire was creeping across its dusty surface, up behind its round mirror, around its twin columns of drawers.
Fire! And in a house full of cats. Temple grabbed a small round rag rug from the floor and began beating at the dresser--top, bottom, behind. Flames flared from the wind, then sank at the first blows. The dark returned, and so did the sounds. The scrape of the trunk as it groaned across the wooden floor. Wooden floor--oh, no! The floor would catch like tinder and drop into the rooms below and turn this place into an inferno, and she was stuck on the second floor. Forget cats! What about her?
Temple cast away the smoky, charred mat and caught up another of the pesky rugs. They worked pretty good as fire dampers. The dresser, made of old, tough mahogany, was slow to catch flame. Temple continued to beat the flames down into the dark from which they sprang, thinking. The fire had not been meant to flare until the person who set it was out of the basement and the house.
Now that person was up here, with her. What to fight first? Fire, the unknown intruder or her own fear? She ran to the window, a blotch of gray beside the bed, grabbed the bedside table--a spindly, old-fashioned model that would probably splinter, she remembered--and hurled it at the window glass. Once, twice, three times until they shattered together,
glass and wood.
In the dark of night, the sound was small, liable to be mistaken for a pint of whiskey dropped in an alley, or dogs overturning garbage cans again. In neighboring houses, television sets were blaring and windows were shut against the heat, air conditioners humming away and muffling all exterior sounds.
But some people in this neighborhood were too poor for central air conditioning, and their windows stayed open on a pleasantly cool, early autumn night--
"Fire!" she yelled, as instructed to do in case of rape. "Fire!" It really is!
Her answer came from behind, a white, suspended object that closed in on her face like a wisp of cloud smelling of hospitals.
At first the wet coolness was a balm to her overheated face. Then the sickly odor seeped into her nostrils and some force kept it pressed there. Chloroform. And a fire. If she passed out now, she was French toast.
Lessons. Do the unexpected. Don't tense, relax.
She went limp, let herself sink, against all her instincts, into the unseen person behind her. Air, blessed air, slipped between her face and the encompassing cloth.
It was enough. She ducked, half falling, and spun to face her attacker, grabbing her tote bag by the handles and swinging it in an arc over her shoulder. At the same time
, she kicked a heel into what she hoped was the right height for a knee.
Her bag connected with a solid something.
"Jesus Christ!" hissed a voice that was neither man nor woman, neither brute nor human. Jesssusss Chrissst. The caller! No face to recognize, only a burlap-sack mask over the head, glaring at her as expressionlessly as Freddie Kreuger's sinister hockey mask.
Temple's left hand was digging in her bag for the big brass ring and came up with keys bristling between every knuckle.
A strong hand grabbed the bag from her grasp, but she had ducked to the floor and now she felt with her right hand until it closed over a smooth wooden pin--one of the table legs.
She struck again at the shadow closing on her. Struck for the side of the neck and the carotid artery underneath the thin skin. Hit right, hit hard enough, and cause instant unconsciousness.
The impact jolted her arm and shoulder, even as she lurched to her braced feet. Matt would disapprove of the incapacitating high heels, but she hadn't had time to lose the shoes. She did now. The dark form had crumpled to the floor. She bent and snatched off her shoes, then glanced at the dressing table. It had flared again. The mirror, framed in
tangerine curlicues, reflected a faint image of her own figure, her face haloed by wildly disheveled red curls. She resembled a barbecued cherub. This fire was getting too hot for her to handle, even with a rag rug.
She stepped toward the door.
A hand closed around her ankle.
Temple gave. Fell, still facing the half-open door with the trunk against it.
She turned and kicked out both stocking feet, as hard as she could, then leaned inward and struck out with the table leg, again and again, until it met resistance, until it knocked on bone and her ankle was free.
She scrabbled away, eeled out the door.
In the distance, someone screamed and kept on screaming.
She was sure it wasn't her. She was running downstairs in the dark, feeling soft, furred forms fleeing at her passage, like fish in an unlit tropical sea.
Oh, poor kitties!
The screaming grew louder and sounded like a siren.
She was at the bottom of the stairs when she heard their top echo to soft-thudding feet descending in a staccato beat.
Then she tripped. On level ground, and she tripped over another of those cursed rag rugs. She pushed it away, but it was heavy and . . . warm . . . and heaving and scratching.
The big front door heaved, too, and then groaned as something hit it from without. A few more crashing blows and solid wood splintered like veneer. The door broke open, swinging against the wall on screaming hinges. More horror show effects: huge, clumsy figures filled the opening, backlit by lurid red.
Temple looked up the stairs. The shadow had stopped in the leak of red light, pinioned by the glare of the incoming firemen's powerful flashlights.
"Upstairs," Temple shouted. Two men charged past in heavy rubber boots, smelling of cinders." Careful! That's a killer."
These men weren't the police, but they were armed against a bitter, flesh-eating enemy, fire, in body armor and with axes. Two thumped past her to collect the shadow, two thundered all the way up to confront the fire; another turned and stomped out again, perhaps to radio the police.
Beneath Temple, the burlap bag writhed and hissed as if housing a dozen snakes. Then it growled. Fascinated, the returning firemen, with the shadow in custody, stopped to watch, focusing their flashlights on the bag.
A portion of the burlap was soaking wet. It proved to be torn as well when a black snake shot out of a four-inch slit.
A furry black snake, Temple squealed hoarsely and scrambled away. The black snake retreated, to be replaced by a black muzzle.
Snarling, Midnight Louie boxed the bag until his shoulders and forelegs were through, then twisted and turned until the burlap was dragging from his hindquarters like a comical train. After a few more acrobatic antics, he finished delivering his bedraggled, nineteen-pound self from confinement.
Temple watched in admiring delight. "Louie! What are you doing here?"
"Are you all right?" A fireman plucked Temple up from the floor to her feet as easily as if she were a mislaid cotton ball. "You know this cat? What's going on here?"
Boots pounded down the stairs. "Fire's out. Arson."
"Can we get some lights on in here?" another big and booted man asked.
Footsteps pounded down the basement stairs behind a beam of powerful light.
In moments, lights blinked on around the house. The refrigerator burped into a happy hum again, and the distant air conditioner hiccoughed once, then began droning dully.
At Temple's feet, Louie growled and spit and tried to walk. He swayed like a drunken sailor and sat down suddenly, looking surprised and cranky.
"I think he's been drugged," Temple told the nearest fireman. One of the men keeping the shadow in custody kicked at a white rag half out of the burlap bag. ' 'Chloroform."
The fireman who had lifted Temple looked down at Louie, then addressed his mate. "We better get this fire victim some oxygen pronto." He scooped up Louie and strode outside. Temple followed on shaky legs.
A crowd had gathered around the huge, light-flashing fire trucks. If Louie had intentions of clawing the fireman who carried him, he was foiled by the heavy, waterproofed slicker the man wore. Thump-thump, the word was passed. Thump thump, clump-clump, a medic came to the front door with the needed gear.
Louie was pinned to the ground and treated, though he was not fond of the plastic mask and struggled as if his tom-hood were in jeopardy. He didn't relish the flash photo that was taken of him under care, either, but he calmed down when he could sit up and breathe ordinary air again.
Temple frowned at the photographer, who wore a Review- Journal I.D. card. She wanted to know Louie's name, anyway.
"I hope I'm not in that photograph," Temple grumbled after providing the information. It did not behoove a P.R. person to irritate the press. "I must look a mess."
Fire survivors often do," the woman noted dryly, moving away to take an overall shot of the crowd.
"What about the intruder?" Temple asked the firemen once the photographer was gone. She nodded toward the house.
"We're holding him for the police," said her fireman, who was young and freckled and struck her as fearless. "As is."
"Him? Are you sure?"
The fireman was amused by her incredulity. "Yes, Ma'am."
Temple thought about the suspect that assertion eliminated--Peggy Wilhelm--and breathed free again. She leaned toward the fireman, who didn't look too alarmed by a rescued maiden offering confidences.
"Couldn't we peek behind the mask before the police get here?" Temple whispered as close to his ear as she could get without hitting the hard and inconvenient fire hat. "I'm just dying to know who it is."
Chapter 34
The Bishop's Tea
"Temple!"
Sister Seraphina separated from the crowd and enveloped Temple in a big brown blanket that she definitely didn't need after so much exertion on such a warm night.
Temple was interested to know that formerly sleeping nuns wore voluminous navy-velour bathrobes that she had not seen the like of since a fifties' television sitcom. Sister Seraphina's bathrobe, especially with its long satin rope tied at the waist, more resembled Temple's notion of a habit than anything the nun wore in the light of day.
Sister Seraphina seemed unaware of her attire's fascination.
"When I heard that someone was found in there," she said, "I feared it might be Peggy--never you." She turned briskly to the identically clad woman behind her. "Sister Rose, you had better call Peggy Wilhelm and let her know.
She'll want to tend the cats--they're all right, aren't they?" she asked Temple in sudden anxiety. "What about this one?" She eyed Midnight Louie, who was remarkably content to sit at Temple's feet and groom his own, for the moment.
"That's not a Tyler cat; that's mine. He's been given some chlo
roform, but he's fine now. Sister, where is Father Hernandez
Sister Seraphina twisted to scan the crowd. "I ... I don't know. Perhaps he was sleeping and didn't hear--"
Sleeping like Peter in the Garden, Temple thought grimly. Or perhaps he was not sleeping at all.
"Sister Mary Monica saw the flames from her bedroom window," Sister Seraphina went on, "so we called the fire department. And then we did call Lieutenant Molina. And Matt."
Temple grimaced. Sister Seraphina had mentioned the two people she least wanted to see in her current state. Fire survivors, she guessed, couldn't be choosers.
In fact, one of the firemen was stomping over. He arrived to request the same information the news photographer had: name, address, a short statement. Temple complied and then asked a question of her own.
"What about--?" she began, still seriously seeking answers, when tires squealed and an unmarked Crown Victoria pulled up behind the Storm, followed by a squad car.
Like the Red Sea parting for Moses, the crowd parted for Molina, her partner and two uniformed officers. Temple cringed when Molina's crowd-scanning glance spotted her. Molina rolled her eyes and did not pause, disappearing into the house with an escort of police and firemen.
A uniformed officer remained outside to disperse the crowd, which was reluctant to return to late-night TV talk shows when something much more interesting to talk about was happening live on their very own street. Grumbling, people straggled off.
"We live next door," Sister Seraphina objected when her turn came.
"You the nuns?" the officer asked.
Temple, still clutching her blanket, bristled, but nobody noticed.
"The lieutenant wants to speak to you later at the convent." He frowned and looked up and down the street, obviously not seeing anything that resembled his idea of a convent.
"We'll go quietly, Officer." Sister Seraphina turned Temple toward the convent.
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