Cat on a Blue Monday

by Douglas, Carole Nelson

  "They told us so little then, it was still the fifties! Do you know how long ago that was? I used to read the New Testament, after the angel told Mary she would bear the Christ child, when she visited her cousin Elizabeth, who knew already and said, 'Hail, Mary, full of grace. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.' I used to have to say the rosary over and over, those 'Hail, Mary' words, but the fruit of my womb was sin. They kept using those words in church on Sunday, they even gave them a name, the Magnificat, Mary's rejoicing in her miraculous motherhood--'My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior."

  "She said 'His mercy is from generation unto generation,' but I read the words and heard the words and felt only shame. There was no mercy for me and my child--not from the church or my family or any of you now who will be so quick to judge."

  Peggy Wilhelm's troubled face searched their features and then lowered. She wiped her fingers across the corners of her eyes, which were dry. Her voice as she continued was even dryer, almost dead of expression.

  "I was sent to stay with Aunt Blandina until it was over. Not even to a 'home.' Too public. A midwife was more discreet than a doctor, and whatever came, would be whisked away. I hardly remember. I wasn't supposed to. Nobody was unkind, they were just so shamed. We never spoke of it in the family afterward. Never. I was sent out of state to finish high school, and then to college. I grew up, I tried to forget, like I was ordered to.

  "When my parents died, of broken hearts, I suppose, I moved to Las Vegas, I don't know why. To be near my only living relative. My aunt. She had started keeping cats by

  then, and I did, too. Beautiful, loving cats, who could not know. That's what I wanted, cats. I didn't want . . . men. I didn't want . . . children. And I didn't want strays. I wanted planned, beautiful purebred cats, all my own. I fed Aunt Blandina's creatures. No room, no time, no memory for me and mine. But cats everywhere. I love them, and sometimes I hate them."

  "What about the money?" Molina prodded.

  "Money? I don't need their money. They paid money to him to go away. Money to the midwife. Money to the people who took my baby. They never gave money to me." Peggy eyed Father Hernandez and Sister Seraphina with dull, judging eyes. "The church said money should go only to the good. I was bad. The church would get all the money, from my parents, from my aunt." Peggy frowned and rubbed her chunky hands over her forehead. "Except, the old will that

  Temple found. Once upon a time, my aunt remembered me, and that was written after . . . everything. I don't understand."

  Everyone looked on, appalled and speechless. Except Molina.

  "We're still trying to trace the last, legitimate will. From the versions we've found so far, we believe that your aunt left her estate equally: to the church, to the cats and to you."

  Peggy Wilhelm started sobbing into the hands that covered her face. Defiantly, Temple rose and went to stand behind her, her hands on her shoulders.

  Sister Seraphina glanced from Lieutenant Molina to Father Hernandez, then crouched beside the sobbing woman to take hold of her hands.

  Matt found himself staring at Molina, demanding silent justification for this public revelation.

  "Did you ever try to find that lost child?" Molina asked.

  "No!" Peggy almost retched between sobs. "It had to be forgotten. Everyone wanted it forgotten. I had to forget it. I couldn't, but I had to."

  "And no one tried to contact you?" Molina was cool, an interrogative machine.

  Even distraught, Peggy Wilhelm responded to that authority as she had always responded to authority throughout her fifty-one years.

  "No," she said. "Who would? The family was Catholic, infertile and delighted to take my . . . sin."

  "What about your son?"

  "Son?" Peggy looked up from her hands. She had never even known the sex.

  "He looked for you when he grew up," Molina said. "He went to college and got a degree. He did very well for himself. And then he did a birth-parent search. Of course no one would contact you without your consent. And no one did, because he withdrew his request, but not before he had used his special knowledge to get the information he craved: your location. He was a lawyer by now, he knew who you were, and he knew you had lived with Blandina Tyler during your pregnancy. He discovered how rich Blandina Tyler was, and he came to hate her church and her cats and her money that wasn't coming to him. He deserved it, and he came to the parish years ago, intending to get it."

  "He . . . never wanted to see me?" Peggy asked through her tears.

  Molina shook her head. "He was obsessed with his own losses, not yours."

  "That's why he called Sister Mary Monica!" Temple said. "She reminded him of his great-aunt, her age and her cane! That also clouded the harassment of his aunt. And he attacked the cats because they had usurped his inheritance, and because they made everything seem madness without a method. But he honestly would have cheated his own mother out of her aunt's money?"

  "From what I can determine," Molina said, "he was roughly reared. His adoptive parents always reminded him that he was the product of sin. He found only obligation, not love, in his new family. He found them and the church harsh and unforgiving, and he became so himself. In a way," she added, eyeing Father Hernandez, "I agree with him.

  "We've traced what records there are; we've found his parent search request. But it wasn't a parent he wanted; it was revenge and restitution. He is responsible for every bit of harassment that has plagued this parish, and he spent ten years worming himself into everybody's trust to do it.

  `"I'm sorry," she told Peggy Wilhelm. "It will all have to come out at the trial. I believe that your aunt's friends at Our Lady of Guadalupe can help you to deal with it. Truth is cleansing, at least I think so. If you have any questions, or need to know anything more, just call me."

  Peggy nodded, her head still bowed.

  "Would you like to see him?" Molina asked.

  "I don't know. In all those years, I never met him. I no longer went to church; I certainly didn't attend Our Lady of Guadalupe."

  "After today, you will be seeing his picture and reading about him in the newspapers. After today, the news circus will put him in the center ring." Molina was silent for a few seconds. "You could do worse than to confront the past with friends present; everyone here was his target, in a sense, because they stood between him and his deepest desire."

  Peggy looked around at those who had met her son; some had known him--or thought they did--for years. Some, like Temple and Matt, had just met him, and thought nothing of him at all. She nodded and lowered her head again as Sister Seraphina rose on stiff knees and resumed her chair.

  The office was crowded now, Matt thought; could it absorb the added force of such an explosively angry personality?

  Molina used an intercom to instruct that "the prisoner" be brought in.

  He came in handcuffs, wearing a set of City Jail Clark County jailhouse baggies and escorted by a blue-uniformed corrections officer. His round, plastic-framed glasses and short yuppie haircut gave him the look of a vintage prisoner-- an escapee from a forties' crime movie.

  Molina indicated the last empty chair. "Sit down."

  He did so awkwardly, perching forward on the seat so that his manacled hands weren't jammed against the back of the chair.

  Peggy peeked at him like a shy child, from between the fingers fanned over her eyes. He regarded her impassively.

  "I ... I don't see a resemblance," she said. "Do you know who I am?"

  "Good!" he answered. "I don't want any relatives. They sent me away. And, yeah, I looked you up when I got to town. I know where you live. I know you coddle those stupid, fancy cats, just like your aunt was looney over her army of lousy strays. You people should have had cats instead of children."

  Peggy winced at his derisive tone. "Maybe we were trying to make up for our loss, in some way."

  "You would have made up for it in spades if I had managed to have my way."
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br />   "Peter." Sister Seraphina spoke soberly but not unkindly. "You did much good for the church. You helped the elderly widows with their financial affairs, you donated all your legal work for the church . . . was that all a sham?"

  "Yes." His eyes narrowed. "You sent me away to that horrible house. It probably was no worse than what I would have had if I hadn't been bundled off like dirty laundry.

  Always the same lousy litany, 'the church says this' and 'the church says that,' and my mother was a whore and my father worthless."

  "I wasn't here at the time," Sister Seraphina reminded him.

  "You were. Or someone like you. You were all alike, you holier-than-thou types, whether you wore black habits and white collars or sat at home under paintings of the Sacred Heart and mumbled endless rosaries."

  "That was a long time ago," Father Hernandez said. "I was reared under the same strict standards. Yes, they were intolerant and unforgiving, but the times and the church and the people in the church have changed, Peter. Why can't you change, too?"

  "Because I don't want to, Father." He spat out the honorary address like an obscenity. "I don't have a father. I don't have one listed on any birth certificate and I don't have a Holy Father in Rome and I don't have you. You're just a freak, a freakin' drunk, and you think I didn't enjoy watching you all flounder and fall to pieces? I was in control. I pulled strings and you danced, even the old bag in the convent. I know what hypocrites you all are; she didn't hurry to hang up on my naughty phone calls, did she?"

  "She's nearly deaf," Sister Seraphina pointed out.

  That seemed to shock him, the notion that someone he had persecuted was unreachable because of a physical failing. While his face was slack and surprised, Molina pounced.

  "Why were the canes such a trigger? You hated Blandina's, even broke it after her death. And you called the only nun in the convent who used a cane."

  "Canes." His face hardened with an old, hurtful memory. "There was a grandmother in my adopted family. She used to jab her rotten cane at me, easier than saying my name. 'You, there.' And they used to hit me with it when I'd been bad. I was bad a lot--but I made something of myself anyway. Good grades in school, law school on my own; I even had to fix my rotten teeth myself. I may look good, but I'm still bad, only now other people are paying for it."

  "No." Sister Seraphina shook her head. "You're paying for it, only you don't see it."

  "What about--" Temple had been thinking again"--what about the hissing phone calls to Peggy and Miss Tyler? I thought he did it, because I realized he had the right equipment. Did he?"

  Molina's melancholy face lit up like a contestant's on a game show. "That was ingenious. Yes, Mr. Burns made those calls, and here's how." She pulled a manila envelope across the desk. "We had to confiscate this; prisoners are allowed very little in the county jail; anything might be turned into a weapon."

  Molina pulled a piece of pale, translucent plastic from the envelope and exhibited it on the palm of her hand like a shell. A thin silver wire glinted at its front.

  "He had braces," Temple remembered, "and I realized they would make it easier to whistle when he talked, if he wasn't careful."

  "You only met him--?"

  "A couple of times," Temple said.

  "Very observant, Watson." Molina's smile was almost mischievous. "But not braces. What you saw was the front portion of a dental appliance used to keep teeth that have had braces in line after the procedure." She eyed the sculpted hump of plastic shell sitting on her hand. "It's familiarly known as a 'turtle' because it's made from a mold of the wearer's upper palate, which is shell-shaped. If Mr. Burns let his turtle slip slightly out of position and spoke, he produced strange whistling, hissing sounds. A perfect way to disguise a voice. I know about turtles because

  I have a preteen daughter who may soon require such costly objects."

  Molina returned her exhibit to the envelope. "Anything else you wish to say, Mr. Burns?"

  "Your murder case is built on a shell of circumstantial evidence, Lieutenant." He relished his own taunts. "The prosecutor will have a cat when he finds the evidence so thin. Who is to say she didn't fall, even if I was on the premises that night? Only God, and He isn't talking. I plan to defend myself, and I will blow your case to smithereens!"

  "Maybe." Molina nodded to the officer, who assisted Burns to his feet. "But the prosecutor is used to winning her cases."

  As the handcuffed man left, Peggy Wilhelm spoke with some wonder. "He's an angry stranger. I don't know him. What happened all those years ago hurt me, and him, but separately. Sometimes I'm angry about it, but not that angry."

  "You need to heal," Sister Seraphina urged. "What was done to you was wrong, but it was done by people who meant to do the best they could, according to their lights.

  You need to resolve the fact that good people can do terrible things to those they purport to love."

  "You need to go to group," Temple said briskly. "I do, too. We can go to group together."

  Peggy blinked at Temple. "What do you need to go to group for?"

  "Oh, this and that." She leaned forward with mock confixdentiality. "You'd be surprised who in this room needs to go to group."

  Peggy bit. "Who?"

  "Everybody," Temple pronounced triumphantly, and had the last, and only uncontested, word of the afternoon.

  After leaving police headquarters, they all returned, by unspoken agreement and in separate cars, to Our Lady of Guadalupe.

  They disembarked together in front of the convent and stared at Blandina Tyler's house, seeing it for the prison it had been almost forty years ago for a frightened, confused young girl. In a sense, the happenings at the house had kept several people prisoner for much too long.

  "I wonder if Sister Rose has any more bishop's tea?" Sister Seraphina inquired.

  "Regular tea will do fine," Father Hernandez said sternly. "There are no bishops in this parish."

  Peggy Wilhelm hardly heard them. She regarded the house as if hypnotized. "Aunt Blandina remembered me in that old will. Do you think she was sorry?"

  "I'm sure of it," Sister Seraphina reassured her with a quick hug. "Why don't I go see to that tea and you can all come in and have some."

  "Better yet--" Temple nourished a key from the morass in her tote bag "--I still have a key to the house. I wouldn't give you two centivas for Lieutenant Molina and crew's search tactics. What say we hunt through the house for the latest version of the will?"

  "I'll go," Peggy said quickly. "I want to check on the cats anyway."

  Matt smiled to watch Temple entice Peggy into a treasure hunt for her own past. She was a pied piper of sorts, Temple, luring people from their heartsick ruts into a brave new world of her own imaginative construction. Who said Max Kinsella was the only magician around?

  Sister Seraphina headed for the convent kitchen, where she would no doubt keep a sharp eye on Sister Rose's tea preparations.

  That left himself and Father Hernandez standing together on the sidewalk, basking in the hot, healing sun, feeling freeof a terrible revelation. Almost.

  "I would guess," Matt said slowly, "that Peter Burns was the author of those threatening letters."

  "That's likely, but you can't trust Lieutenant Molina," Father Hernandez said abruptly. "She could have found some evidence among Burns' things."

  "Would she quash an investigation?"

  "No."

  "Then he covered his tracks. You're safe."

  "A priest is never safe."

  "Unless you are guilty of the crimes accused."

  Father Hernandez's black, Spanish-olive eyes met Matt's cautious glance head-on, sharp and salty. "I swear to God, no."

  Matt looked away. "I swore to God once."

  "You did not swear; you promised church authorities to abide by certain behaviors--poverty, chastity and obedience. If the church finds the circumstances under which you made these promises questionable, who am I to feel superior because I have so far managed to honor them?
The older I get, the less prone I am to judge, even Peter Burns. For all the ill he's done, he was a victim of an unforgiving time."

  The sun was already swelling and heading for the western horizon. It baked down upon the church tower, turning it into a blazing white finger pointing at heaven. It painted false fire on the red-tile roof of Blandina Tyler's house. Matt squinted against the late-afternoon glare.

  "If you are deceiving yourself, Father," he said carefully, "if you are a victim of denial so deep that it disguises itself as innocence even to you, I am carrying a terrible burden and taking a worse risk."

  Father Hernandez nodded. "I can only swear by all I believe in that I am not the man those letters accused."

  "It's not only your problem now."

  "You're a good priest, Matthias." Father Hernandez put his hand on Matt's shoulder. "I will not let you down."

  Chapter 38

  Slow Dance on the Hands of Time

  "I owe you dinner," Matt said over the phone.

  "For what?" Temple returned quickly, pooh-poohing any sense of obligation.

  "For the chauffeur service to Our Lady of Guadalupe, for the risk to life and limb."

  "You already taught me how to preserve life and limb pretty well. I owe you dinner."

  "Let me make the first move in this mutual-obligation society. Dinner. My treat. Someplace really nice."

  "You can't go to dinner, you work those hours."

  "Not tomorrow night. I'm off."

  "Tomorrow! That's awfully soon."

  "Why, do you have to fast three days before dinner out?"

  "Well, I should ... but okay, it's a date. What time?"

  "Why not seven? I'm used to going to work then anyway."