"I'll carry Louie." Temple bent down to scoop up the cat in her blanket and almost didn't unbend again.
What a mistake. Even freshly oxygenated, Louie weighed as much as a potbellied pig.
"Wait!" Temple cried, remembering. "My tote bag's in that house."
"Your purse?" The officer frowned again.
"In the bedroom where the fire was started."
He nodded. "I'll check. If we don't need to impound it for evidence, you can have it."
"Evidence? Impound? My daily organizer is in there, my apartment and car keys. I'll be helpless."
"I'm sure something can be worked out--" he glanced uneasily at Seraphina, than back to Temple "--Sister, Ma'am."
"Oooh!" Temple protested as he walked away. "Do I look like a nun?" she demanded of Sister Seraphina.
"You look like a slightly scorched madonna-and-cat right now," Sister Seraphina said with a chuckle. "Come on.
We'll get you some nice hot tea."
"I could use a nice hot toddy," Temple corrected.
Waiting in a convent visitors' room for Lieutenant Molina was not her idea of how to recover from severe physical and emotional stress. Carrying Midnight Louie wasn't an antidote, either.
She started to slog along the sidewalk with Sister Seraphina, her curiosity temporarily stanched and her stamina quashed. Another vehicle with a light on the top cruised to a stop by her car--a Whittlesea Blue cab.
Matt Devine took one look at her car and began running toward the Tyler house. The uniform stepped into his path; for an instant, it looked like a confrontation brewed.
"Matt, over here!" Sister Seraphina caroled. "We're all right."
He glanced at the Tyler house's ashen facade, which radiated red emergency lights, then started for them at a trot.
"Temple?" He anxiously searched her face, which was probably pale and smoke-smudged. "No one said you were here. And Midnight Louie! Are you okay? Really?"
"Well, I may have broken a nail or two--and Louie a claw, too."
"Let me take him."
Temple sighed relief when the nineteen-pound burden was lifted from her arms, which were shaking with strain for some reason possibly having to do with fighting off an arsonist--and maybe a murderer--only half an hour earlier.
Matt wasn't too enamored of Louie's bulk, either. He set the cat down as soon as the party was inside the convent door.
A yellow cat came to investigate--Peter or Paul--and the pair suspiciously sniffed noses, but no fireworks threatened.
"Come sit down, dear," Sister Rose urged in the kindly tones of a great-aunt, escorting Temple as if she were Belleek china.
Sister Seraphina was soon on their heels, but not Matt. At Temple's questioning look, she leaned near.
"I sent him to the rectory to see about Father Hernandez."
Temple let herself be shepherded into the overbearing visitor's chair. Sister Rose even scooted a needlepoint-covered stool under her feet, which naturally failed to reach the floor, then darted out of the room.
"Sister Seraphina," Temple beseeched, protesting as a needlepoint pillow--this one a tasteful scene of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane--was inserted behind her back. She shrugged off the smothering blanket. "I'm fine."
"No, you are not. You've had a dreadful shock. As much as Matt might be reassured by your offhand remark about only breaking a fingernail, I can see that you've been through a good deal more than that."
"Well, yes, actually," Temple admitted, intimidated by Sister Seraphina' s air of stern concern. "The awful man inside the house had Louie chloroformed and in a sack-- God knows what he intended to do with him--and he had set the bedroom dresser on fire and I tried to stop the fire, and stop him, and I really put some good moves on him. I'm new at this, but I think I had him cold before the firemen came."
"So that's what Mary Monica saw," Sister Seraphina said with a sigh of relief, sitting heavily on a nearby chair. "I was a bit afraid for her sanity. She said she saw the Devil dancing with an imp in Blandina Tyler's bedroom while the fires of Hell burned around them."
"I was the . . . the imp?" Temple demanded.
"Apparently. Her eyesight is not the best, and you do look a bit disheveled. When Rose and I looked out the window, we saw only the fire, but we called nine-eleven from Monica's room-phone right then. Poor Mary Monica. She has been sorely tried these last few weeks." The nun's softened glance sharpened again. "Did you see the intruder?"
"Yes, but not without a burlap mask. The firemen are sure it's a he, though. I wasn't, not even when we 'danced.' I thought of Peggy--"
"
"Peggy? Rummaging through her aunt's house in the dark, in disguise? Why?"
"Well . . . the will we found. She might have been looking for another version, a later one that left her everything, too."
Sister Seraphina shook her head. "Not Peggy."
"You don't know Peggy like I know Peggy."
"What do you mean?"
"I can't say, but I had good reason to suspect her."
"Apparently good reason to suspect Father Hernandez as well."
"If the intruder was a man, he wore black."
"Lots of men wear black, not just priests. And would a priest up to no good wear the clothes of his calling?"
"He would if he were a little . . . demented."
Before Sister Seraphina could answer--and her face was full of doubt, even outrage, at Temple's suggestion--Sister Rose tiptoed back into the room with a small silver tray upon which sat a tall glass of iced tea.
Temple's heart sank. What she definitely didn't need now was iced tea. Sister Rose's watery eyes were too solicitous to refuse, however, and she braced herself to take a swallow of the dreaded, cold beverage while bravely repressing the shivers of aftershock that were threatening her composure.
She took a ladylike sip, then her eyes widened. This iced tea packed quite a kick.
Sister Rose leaned near. "We keep a little something in the brandy line for the bishop in case he might call."
"How much of a little something?" Temple whispered back in a raw voice.
"Well, I didn't know how much for tea, so I put in a juice-glassful."
"Oh," said Temple, who began to think that she might make it through this night, no matter how long and dreadful, after all, thanks to Sister Rose's heavy hand with the bishop's brandy. At least it wasn't the pastor's tequila. Temple couldn't stand tequila outside of a margarita.
"I thought Matt would be along by now," Sister Seraphina commented to the room at large. She glanced at the schoolroom clock mounted on the wall.
Temple was startled to see that it read only ten-fifteen. She felt as if midnight was long since past.
Sister Rose settled on a side chair and they all regarded one another nervously.
"Those are . . . wonderful robes," Temple said, for lack of anything else to offer.
She was pretty sure that Father Hernandez wasn't coming, for the simple reason that he was under police custody in the house next door. But . . . why? The church had received the Tyler estate, lock, stock and barrel of cats. Yet the pastor had seemed little pleased and not at all relieved by that fact. Whoever had done whatever had been done--and Temple was not at all sure of the extent or intent of it--would have interesting reasons.
Sister Seraphina picked at the satin rope tie of her robe, looking chagrined.
"A gift from a Well-to-do woman in my last parish. She insisted that we old nuns must need something, and when I told her robes, she was ecstatic. She purchased twelve."
"Twelve." Temple was impressed by the parishioner's generosity. In lamplight, she was even more impressed by the robes' sober but lush quality.
Sister Seraphina shrugged. "She got them on sale. At Neiman Marcus."
Temple frowned, then started to laugh.
Sister Seraphina began chuckling. "They are very useful and quite durable, and probably cost the moon originally."
"What's Neiman Marcus?" Sister St. Rose of Lima i
nquired brightly.
"Just a department store," Seraphina said.
"Like Mott's Five and Dime?"
"Exactly," Temple said, shaking her head. She took a stiff sip of her tea and let her toes wiggle. Her pantyhose toes, she saw, were sprouting runs like weeds. "My shoes!" she wailed. "I forgot about my Italian-leather shoes. They're over there, too. The firemen probably soaked everything with water."
Sister Rose tsk-tsked in bewildered sympathy. Her faded pink terry-cloth scuffs were washable and had weathered several cleanings. Of course they were not Italian.
Sister Seraphina swiveled alertly to the hall. A moment later, Matt appeared in the doorway.
No one dared ask anything. He read their anxiety--at least Temple's and Seraphina's--but he could not guess the cause.
"Father Hernandez wasn't in the rectory," he said.
Temple and Seraphina settled back into their chairs with a mutual sigh and a significant look.
"Is it important?" Matt asked.
"It may be," Temple said. ''Someone was in the Tyler house. Someone had captured Louie and chloroformed him and stuck him in a burlap bag."
"Why?" Matt asked.
She went on wearily. "I don't know. Someone had started the house on fire in Blandina's bedroom."
Another voice added to the narrative. "Someone stopped him."
Lieutenant Molina appeared in the hall behind Matt, who quickly eased into the room to allow her entry.
Molina eyed the room's occupants, her glance pausing appreciatively on the nuns' robes before it rested on Temple and her libation.
"Apparently Queen Victoria here has been practicing her marital arts' p's and q's. She stopped him from setting the house afire and perhaps committing other violence." Molina sank down in one of the brocaded side chairs. "I could use some tea myself."
"We all could." Sister Seraphina nodded at Sister Rose, who scurried out like a dormouse on a secret mission.
Matt leaned on the edge of the desk near the door and watched them all, thoroughly perplexed.
"What exactly has happened?" he asked.
"My question precisely." Molina pulled out her notebook.
"We have a rather . . . distraught . . . suspect in custody."
"Suspect?" Seraphina emphasized.
Molina nodded neutrally. "We have the professional detective's bane, Miss Temple Barr, on the scene and heavily involved. We even have an unauthorized cat on the premises, the equally baleful Midnight Louie. Where is he now?"
"Somewhere in the convent," Temple supplied.
"We found a burlap bag somewhat . . . damaged, and a cloth soaked in chloroform. Apparently it had been used on the cat."
"Peter!" Sister Seraphina sat up. "That's how someone captured him for that horrible attack; they chloroformed him. Was it satanists, Lieutenant?"
"You tell me. We found a satchel of . . . tools near the bag. Hammer. Spikes. Looks like more of the same was on the schedule."
"Louie was a candidate for crucifixion?" Temple shuddered with a sudden chill and reached for the fallen blanket.
"Possibly."
"Has your prisoner said anything about that?" Matt asked.
Molina's blue eyes regarded him with the clear, emotionless stare of a Siamese cat. "Nothing . . . sensible. Yet."
The eyes returned to Temple. "I hesitate to ask this. I am not in the mood for original answers, but yours surely will be more coherent than his at this point. Why were you
there?"
"Well," Temple began, "it was the state of Midnight Louie's Free-to-be-Feline that first made me uneasy ..."
Molina shut her eyes, and Temple continued, glossing over the obituary page tented over Louie's dish and concentrating on her great specific and general concern for cats singular and plural, on her impulse to check on the Tyler cats, on her shock at finding an intruder and a fire in the house, and especially on her amazement on finding Midnight Louie in the bag.
"So it was all a wild coincidence," Molina summed up in a deadpan voice.
At that moment, Sister Rose appeared beaming on the threshold, a tray full of tall, iced-tea glasses in her hands, with Midnight Louie massaging her ankles as if begging for catnip.
"Sometimes things happen that way," Temple said as Sister Rose distributed the glasses.
They were accepted with distraction. Sister Seraphina took a large sip of her tea, then her lips puckered, but her face seemed not to register anything except the secret worry she carried for Father Hernandez. Lieutenant Molina's closed-mouth attitude to the identity of the man apprehended next door did nothing to allay her anxiety.
Molina let her glass sit on a side table as she poised her pen over the notebook but wrote nothing down, which was rather unsettling.
Matt sipped his tea politely, then braced it on one slack-covered thigh. "So Temple nailed the bad guy. Personally."
"Yes," Molina said in her disconcerting tone that was half-bored, half-mocking. "Do tell us about it."
"He found me in the kitchen," Temple began. "I didn't know he was there. The lights were off when I came in, and I was trying to find a light switch that would work when he came up from the basement--I didn't even know there was one!--dragging a bag. At first I thought he was someone from the neighborhood, or a repairman or something. Then he dropped the bag and went for me. I didn't want to go upstairs, but I ran into the stairs and was forced up. I tried not to get cornered in a bedroom, but there was nowhere else to go. I managed to drag a trunk in front of the bedroom door, and then I saw the dresser on fire. I threw a table through the window--"
"Good thinking!" Matt said approvingly, sipping his tea absently.
Molina watched him, and did likewise.
Nobody batted an eye. Sister Seraphina sipped her tea frequently and nervously, her face reflecting worries other than the specifics of Temple's ordeal.
Actually, it felt more like an adventure in the telling. Temple warmed up to her tale, or perhaps to her tea. She took a throat-soothing sip. "Well. There I was, caught between the devil and the deep blue sea." Here she glared at Molina. "He looked like a demon, all in black with a burlap mask over his face, only his eyeless eyeholes staring at me."
''His eyeless eyeholes'?" Molina queried, her pen skipping over the lined notepad.
"You know what I mean! And then, while I was fighting the fire with a rag rug--"
"A rag rug," Molina repeated in a tone of utter disbelief, her pen moving. She buttressed herself with a long slug of tea.
"--he got me from behind with a chloroform-soaked cloth."
"A chloroform-soaked cloth," Sister Rose repeated in awe, nodding and sipping tea with a broad smile. "You are a brave girl."
"I was smothering, and I knew that if I passed out ... so I gave him his ground--" she looked at Matt, who nodded approval "--and it surprised him, just like it was supposed to. The cloth lifted enough for me to twist away and slug his upper torso with my tote bag while I jammed a heel into his kneecap."
"Sounds . . . quite athletic," Sister Seraphina commented, guzzling more tea.
Temple refreshed herself as well.
"Then ..." she hadn't had as rapt an audience in years "... I picked up a table leg and when he charged me again, I hit him hard on the carotid artery."
"Carotid artery?" Sister Rose repeated the phrase as if it were Latin. "Is that something nice girls should do?"
"Definitely not," Temple said. "He went down for the count of--say, six. That was long enough for me to get out of the bedroom and down the stairs. He tried to follow, but then the door opened and this huge, helmeted figure blocked the exit and the whole Las Vegas Fire Department came in--my knights in shining slickers bearing battle-axes--and saved me and snagged him and even gave Midnight Louie the breath of life."
After a pause, Molina said, "You realize that none of this makes sense."
"No," Temple agreed demurely, "but it's a hell of a tea party story."
In the silence, Sister Rose giggled. "Poor Midnight L
ouie. Poor kitty. He should have some restorative tea." She poured part of her remaining half-glass into a huge glass ashtray--no doubt kept for the bishop's cigar if and when he came--and placed it on the floor before the cat, who was grooming himself within an ounce of his overweight.
"Cats don't drink tea, Rose," Sister Seraphina advised her.
Louie stopped his compulsive licking and tapped a paw in the dark amber liquid. He jerked his paw back and licked it experimentally. He cleaned his long, white whiskers of every last trace. Then he lowered his head and trailed his long, red tongue in the substance. He slowly settled into his haunches and began lapping rapidly at the tea, glancing up once at Temple but never pausing in his imbibing.
Everyone laughed, even Molina. In fact, Molina was looking a lot more mellow. Then she flipped her notebook shut and regarded them.
"This comedy of errors will prove to be more terror than error by tomorrow, I think. You all should know that the person I have in custody is someone who is intimately connected with this parish and has been for some time. You all will be shocked by the suspect's identity. I can't say exactly what's been going on here--I have a feeling some of you could say more, but won't. I can say I know the suspect's identity only because I am a member of this parish. Perhaps I suffer from conflict of interest on this case, but so do the entire lot of you."
She stood up. "I've got work to do. I suggest you all go home and examine your collective consciences. I'll be in touch. Count on it."
After Molina left the room, they were silent for a few seconds, staring at the floor and clinging to their damp-sided glasses of brandy-laced tea.
"Sister," Seraphina ordered, her voice grim but stalwart. "Get some more tea."
Sister Rose leaped up, ever ready to serve.
"No!" Temple's voice croaked like a thirsty frog's. "No more . . . tea."
"Don't worry," Sister Rose chirped. "I would never waste the bishop's tea."
With that, she poured the rest of her almost-empty glass into Midnight Louie's ashtray, which he eagerly emptied to the last, strong, delicious drop.
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