Cat on a Hyacinth Hunt

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  "No note, just this."

  "Silver dollars are ... collectibles these days, worth more than face value."

  Matt shrugged and pulled out some other envelopes. Each one contained a silver dollar.

  "Bizarre."

  "Just like the veiled lady who came to pay the bill," Temple noted. "Veiled lady! Can you imagine anyone but a funeral director swallowing that?"

  Matt chuckled. "They do thrive on ceremony."

  "The Lady in Black has forestalled us," Temple observed as the last visitors plodded toward the exit.

  "Yes. The veiled lady in black. Oh, no!"

  Matt made himself focus on his surroundings and the unconsciously observed guests. The trio of nuns were just trailing out the double doors.

  Trio?

  Matt's memory counted wimples, pared-down contemporary wimples, but wimples nevertheless. Only two when they came in.

  "Come on!" He grabbed Temple's black-knit-swathed arm at the wrist.

  Outside, the sun blared like rock radio music but the temperature was only a steady sixty degrees. Two nuns were getting into an ancient Toyota compact.

  The third was nowhere to be seen.

  Chapter 36

  Madder Music and Stronger Wine

  They left the funeral home with the addition of the guest book, thanks to another rescue mission by the assistant. The lined pages were empty except for the names of the pair of nuns and a couple of strangers.

  "It looks like a wedding photo album," Matt observed, tucking the padded cover embossed with designs of doves, crosses and lilies under his arm.

  Temple used both hands to carry the heavy cardboard box of offering envelopes, the ones stuffed with silver dollars that shifted with every motion, clinking dully through the muffling paper.

  `Matt was glad that Temple usually let him drive the Storm. He needed to go through the motions right now; any motions. Driving back to the Circle Ritz, going to her place. It had been easier to see Cliff Effinger's bare body in the morgue than tricked out at a funeral visitation.

  The mockery and mystery of the event had put him into the numb withdrawal the shell-shocked must feel after a long battle.

  Matt also felt the underlying weight of death, and the death of his old life. So, he imagined, a long-term penitentiary inmate would feel to know the hated place had been razed at last: a numbing sense of triumph, freedom and resentment at this loss of an institutionalized object of fear and loathing. And, perhaps, the loss of a negative motivation toward seeking a better life.

  "You're quiet," Temple commented in the car, the shimmying box of envelopes chiming on her knees like a tambourine.

  Matt only nodded, lost in thoughts that shifted like a kaleidoscopic image.

  He finally glanced at her. Not surprisingly, she wore the black cat necklace he had given her as a late Christmas present. For the perennially thoughtful, wearing someone's gift in their presence as a sign of appreciation is second nature. And the necklace, subdued enough to befit a visitation, complemented her long black-knit dress; also sober enough for funeral duty.

  Temple seldom wore black, he realized. He had found himself watching her sober silhouette against the funeral parlor's determined pastel palette. The dress hung like a ballerina's costume in a fifties musical fantasy, graceful and girlish. The round neckline didn't crowd the throat, but circled two or three inches below, a perfect setting for the necklace.

  The simple black dress reminded him of an old-time nun's habit. It reduced Temple's normally busy appearance to a James Whistler study in chalk-white, black and rusty red.

  He wondered if the black dress, or unplumbed emotions in the face of Effinger's death, made her look so pale today. Who could blame her for rejoicing in the elimination of a tormenter? Yet Matt doubted that Effinger's attack on Temple had stirred any strong personal feelings against him. His blows had been a lightning bolt from a virtual stranger. To her, Effinger was first-cousin to a random mugger, a bad experience to be forgotten.

  The silence between them was contented, rather than awkward. They knew where they were going, although not what they were going to say or do when they got there, but that didn't bother them by now.

  Temple's rooms held a tranquilizing familiarity for Matt. He felt relief, even sanctuary, here when Temple admitted them.

  She put the box on the coffee table. "Drink?"

  "It's only--," wearing the watch his mother had given him made her a silent witness to Effinger's end, even if by proxy "-- one o'clock."

  "Feels like five," Temple said, coming back. Two glasses of red wine shimmered against her servant-black bodice with its fussy row of tiny, shiny, round black buttons from collar bone to hemline.

  She sat down and kicked off her black pumps.

  Matt's tense muscles welcomed the wine, but he could have wished for a drink less reminiscent of his ceremonial priestly past than red wine. No funeral mass for Cliff Effinger. Not with Matt officiating. Dust to dust and ashes to ashes quite truly. The ashes in their tasteful receptacle suitable for any location would be mailed to him, he had been told, though the funeral home would have preferred to present them in person with appropriate ceremony. Matt thought not; mailing would do fine.

  What the hell he would do with them was his business.

  Temple shuffled through the odd collection of envelopes. "I suppose we should turn these over to Lieutenant Molina, along with the news of the expensive outpouring of hyacinth plants and the mystery woman who paid for the whole thing."

  "I'll contact her." Matt's head lolled against the cushy sofa pillow while he stared at the snowy arched ceiling dappled with light like not-quite-still water.

  He felt Temple settle into the adjoining cushions.

  "Visitations are exhausting, even when hardly anybody comes," she said. "I haven't figured out yet what all this means. Hyacinths and silver dollars."

  "Somebody's playing with us. Or Effinger."

  "After he's dead? That's such a ... carnivorous thing to do. Like a cat with a mouse or a bird."

  "Or a catnip toy," he reminded her. "Louie's not around?"

  "He's in a wandering mode. In and out. I noticed the topping on the Free-to-be-Feline went down since we left."

  "Why do you bother to set that stuff out for him? He'll never eat it."

  "It's good for him, and maybe he accidentally gets some when he goes for the gold on top."

  "I doubt it." Matt laughed softly. "You're such an optimist." He turned his head without lifting it; mental lassitude now made his entire body leaden.

  Temple slouched on the sofa cushions too, her face only inches from his own, he realized with a shock. As if they sat with their backs to the same tree someplace peaceful, near a running brook.

  The moment was a million miles away from everyday Las Vegas and the regular rituals of their relationship.

  "I was wondering," Matt said, "at the visitation, if your face still hurt from Effinger's attack. If you still felt the aftereffects. If he went to his grave with someone, somewhere, still hurting from his violence."

  She shrugged and smiled. "I'm almost as good as ever. Pain doesn't have a half-life unless it's chronic."

  He sipped wine, feeling a floodgate of blood loosening in his shoulders and arms, tension dissipating through dilated vessels.

  "It's over. Thank God it's over." He bestirred himself to set the glass on the table before he lethargically let it spill onto the paper-pale cushions.

  Temple looked equally exhausted--white, black and red against the ivory cushions, her mouth glossed by a deep burgundy lipstick, a mere brush stroke on the white-linen canvas of her face. No bruises shadowed her features. Even her freckles seemed to have paled and winked out, like twilight stars. They dusted her cheeks and just-visible collarbones, but not one touched her bare neck.

  "I'm sorry I ruined New Year's for you," he found himself blurting. "You did it all for me, and I was an ass about it."

  "Women hiding hurts pushes your buttons. I should ha
ve known you can't protect anyone from the truth, least of all yourself."

  "I was so ... up about everything that night, and it seems to have evaporated. Why? It's more than Effinger striking back. It's like something between us turned into smoke and blew away. You remember how high I was when I called you from Chicago a couple days after Christmas? It was like I'd solved the family mysteries. I'd confessed my nonpriestly state. I knew who the villains were and I could finally start forgiving them. I was ready to look into a new life, a new job, ready to--"

  Temple was listening, as she always did, attentively, intelligently. Somehow that calm, accepting presence irritated him, frightened him.

  "Temple. What happened?"

  "You were on a holiday high," she suggested, "and then the post-holiday reality hit."

  "No, it's more than that. It goes back farther than that. What happened? We were . . .

  getting together, you were taking me through all the high-school hoops I missed. That . . .

  wonderful dance on the desert, the times we kissed ourselves silly. When did it stop? It all seems like fifteen years ago. Like it really was high school."

  Something stirred her placid features. Puzzlement in the eyes maybe. Now that Temple no longer wore glasses, Matt could see the true shape of her features. She looked almost stranger-like at times when he glanced at her and noticed a plane of cheek or forehead he had never seen before.

  In a way, it intimidated him. In another way, this made her attractive to him as she never had been before, though she had always been attractive to him.

  He needed to touch that blurred Impressionist-painting face, to make sure the oils were still wet, that the image might yet change under his fingers.

  He touched the black opal cat figure at her throat instead.

  "You should wear black more often. It becomes you."

  His other hand stretched to test the right side of her face. "The bruises are gone." But he wasn't really playing doctor, he just wanted to feel the subtle hollow beneath her no-longer obscured cheekbone.

  Temple kept as still as a rabbit on an endless swath of lawn, suddenly aware of the mixed emotions that were overflowing in him. Uncommitted, waiting, yet completely complicit. Wary and waiting. Anxious. Yet excited.

  Matt trembled on the brink of expressing an intimacy he had never dreamed of, so earth-shaking that he avoided her eyes, studying her instead as a disjointed Cubist portrait broken into isolated planes and features: the notched curve above her lip; the hollow of her throat that cradled the black cat charm; her long, white and graceful neck, which he had found himself noticing at the funeral home.

  He could still taste the shock of fresh blood in her mouth on New Year's Eve. Maybe it was behavior modification, but he shied away from her mouth. Not for him the traditional lover's kiss. He wanted to touch, to kiss, to taste her neck and throat.

  And there was nothing to stop him, except wondering if this was weird. So he did what he felt, swept up by an odd wave of overwhelming desire and . . . reverence.

  He leaned forward until his lips touched her skin, and then he placed a phantom circle of kisses around the base of her throat. His lips found the faint, fast pulse of her carotid artery and caressed it. This was the kiss of life far more than the neighborly ritual of greeting in every mass celebrated.

  His sense of smell sharpened: he could taste the tang of green apple in her shampoo or soap; her skin was satin-velvet to his lips and fingertips. He wanted to devour it, soothe it, seal every centimeter of it as his; the ridges of her collarbones required tracing with kisses. Her hands suddenly twining in his hair agreed with him. Then there was no stopping him.

  His fingers found and fussed with the slippery beads of buttons, releasing them from confining loops and kissing the hidden hard escarpment of her chest bone. How could bone be so sexy, highpoint and hollow? It was. What was he doing? Who was he becoming? Vampire.

  Cannibal. Lover. Devourer. Worshiper. What was he making of her? Icon. Object. Aphrodisiac.

  Emotion and desire were building to a pitch that vibrated in the very fork of his being, achingly physical yet as correspondingly spiritual as any meditation in which he had striven to penetrate the mystery and touch the face o( God.

  The buttons were parting before him like gateways. His lips followed the trail his fingers had forged until his cheek brushed the soft bare swell of what he knew must be breast.

  The piercing jolt of pleasure stopped him cold. Primal memory? Or just too many years celibate? Matt pulled his face back, saw the sexy chasm of skin he had exposed between the gaping buttons and loops, the pair of hard hidden buttons beneath the fabric.

  Fascinated, he dragged his palms lightly across them.

  Her torso surged upward like a body revived by electrical current. Her low moan echoed through his nerves.

  A concurrent shock through his own system pulled him back even further, to hover above her and finally dare look at her face.

  It was a face he had seen on dozens of billboards around town, the quintessential sexy female face thrust back on an exposed neck above an exposed chest, the eyes mostly closed, the lips parted and slack.

  Now he understood the power of the image and also its utter poverty. Its mean, commercial, pornographic parody of the full physical and emotional range of eroticism.

  The beauty of her face, the fact that his touch had brought that beauty there, took his breath away, made the demanding vice in his groin tauten further. To see that transformation in a face he loved, to know he could bring it so much pleasure, made him feel omnipotent in an almost blasphemous way. But everything metaphysical was also paradoxical. He had never felt so powerless.

  He bent to finally kiss her mouth without fear, tasting nothing but mutual desire and a depth unimaginable.

  He was convinced that there was only one sane way to live his life, and that would be doing this with her forever, eternally, in every way imaginable, no food, no sleep, no time, no talk, no stopping, over and over again, amen.

  Their touch would never break, their eyes would never open except to look at each other; no serpent, and no punishing god, would ever intrude on their earthly eden, and pleasure would be pure and private forever.

  She stirred as if waking from a dream.

  The first time she said his name, it was a moan, and thrilled him. The second time was a murmur.

  The third time her eyes opened, and tears covered them like crystal cataracts.

  Matt watched the serpent slither into his eden within those eyes of dawning regret. Silver-blue eyes, like sunlit water.

  She struggled upright a little, then tried to redo a button.

  But there were too many and they gaped too wide. It would have been ridiculous to sit there and do up buttons like a Victorian maid after the intense intimacy they'd shared.

  Matt watched her with dread, and a reflex of rising shame he hated, and a silly stupefied adoration.

  "You're going to be disappointed in me again," she said, her voice thick.

  "Never." He sounded besotted and liked it.

  "Yes, you will. Matt, I can't."

  He didn't need to ask what she couldn't. He started to backtrack, to preserve what had been, at least. He had to salvage some part of this.

  "I ... I don't know what came over me," he said quickly. "The stress of the funeral, maybe.

  Death makes you want to live. I forced this on you, didn't ask--"

  "There are some-things you don't need to ask, and this was one of them."

  "Is it. . . always so sudden like this?"

  "More or less." She was trying to restore normality, but her voice was shaky. "Usually less."

  "I'm... the feeling's incredible. No wonder so many people get in trouble with it."

  She smiled, faintly.

  "Temple, whatever you're going to say--"

  "I'm going to say it right away, before you go any farther in any way, and hate me worse than you will anyway."

  "Hate you--"

/>   "I almost told you earlier a couple of times, but it never seemed the right moment. Now it's the really wrong moment, but I've got to do it."

  She hugged her arms around herself, creating a subtle swell of cleavage that made him understand why a man "couldn't keep his hands off" a woman.

  Whatever she said wouldn't pierce the sensual, doting haze that wreathed him like smoke and mist.

  "Max and I are together again."

  The words were gibberish; the moving lips that said them were irresistible and he needed to kiss them.

  Her head tilted as if to find him inside his emotional and erotic maze. "Matt?"

  "Together." His voice sounded slow, drugged.

  "Not living together; we can't. But we're trying to rebuild our relationship. See if it stands a chance at being permanent."

  "Together. You're sleeping together. You can't be. This wouldn't have happened if you were."

  "Shouldn't have happened. I ought to have told you sooner. I was trying to save you a shock at a bad time, but now it's worse than ever for both of us."

  "For you and Max, or for you and me?"

  "I'm talking about us."

  "How can there be an 'us' if you're with him?"

  She didn't argue, only picked at some lint on her skirt. The stretchy fabric dipped between her legs. He had neglected undoing the buttons all the way to the bottom. Now he never would.

  "How long?" he asked. "When? How?"

  She didn't tell him it was none of his business.

  "Since after Christmas. In New York. Max showed up at Kit's to take me out to dinner. He gave me a ring. No, I haven't been wearing it."

  "After Christmas? That day I called you, was it after--?"

  She nodded in super-serious slow motion, like a naughty child admitting to eating all the cream puffs.

  "God." The timetable was driving home on hammer blows of irony. "I was so . . . high after that trip home, after settling with Effinger and declaring my independence from the past with my family. You know, I thought about flying to New York just to tell you all about it. Only it seemed kind of impolite and . . . impractical. Guess Kinsella isn't polite and practical."