"What a memory for detail! And checking out an animal isn't that arcane as long as it isn't big enough to kick you."
Matt leaned forward to adjust the air-conditioning fan. "The farm was my grandparents'; we went there almost every weekend when I was a kid, but I lived in the city, the old, inner city."
Temple nodded and eyed the neighborhood the Storm's headlights revealed in bright snatches. "Funny, I was here just today on an errand of mercy; I guess you'd call it."
"Errand of mercy?" He sounded struck by the phrase.
Temple took her right arm off the wheel and flexed it weight-lifter style, while
declaiming:
"Cat feeder for the world,
Litter-lugger, stacker of Tender Vittles,
Player with kittens and the nation's pet-sitter . . ."
Matt's laughter was relaxed for the first time that evening. Temple knew that her impromptu paraphrase of Carl Sandburg's poem "Chicago" wouldn't amuse him if he hadn't told the truth about growing up there. She sighed. Here she was, expecting every word to be a lie, like Molina, just because Molina had proved that Max Kinsella was living a lie. All men did not lie just because Max had, and besides, Max's sins were of omission more than commission. What were Matt's sins? Maybe she'd find out tonight, Temple thought with interest.
"Turn here," he said tersely.
"Are you sure?"
"Yes, why?" "I can't believe it! I was just on this street a few hours ago, yesterday evening. l could have found my way here solo, even in the dark. The Cat Lady I visited lives near here. Does your old teacher keep cats, by any chance?"
"Only two, Peter and Paul,"
"Peter . . . ? A pumpkin-colored--"
"There she is! She shouldn't be waiting outdoors at night in this neighborhood," Matt hissed under his breath, opening his door and bounding out of the car before Temple had fully stopped it.
She followed as soon as she could wrestle her tote bag from the backseat, where it had fallen to the floor and wedged itself behind the driver's seat. Then she remembered Matt's concern and locked the Storm. By now he was conferring intensely with a woman whom the streetlight etched in pale grays.
She eyed Matt's former teacher with interest: tall and white-haired, she was leading Matt down the block at a rapid pace. "it was easier to tell you to come here than to direct you to a new address," she was explaining in the breathless voice of one who's been handling a crisis alone for too long.
"Fine, Seraphina," he said, turning to make sure Temple was all right. "This is a neighbor, Temple Barr."
The woman turned to give Temple a glance that took her in from top of the head to tippy-toes. Then she bustled on down the overgrown sidewalk, a bag like a doctor's swinging against her leg. Temple wondered if the woman was a doctor--or a nurse--and if so, why did she need Matt? And what kind of name was "Seraphina" and why just that?
"We look in on this elderly neighbor lady," Seraphina was explaining to Matt. She turned right at a walkway leading to the shadowy bulk of a house. "She's a bit . . . eccentric, and sometimes confused. She isn't always the most reliable person, cries wolf, but she called tonight again in a very credible panic. When I came over, I couldn't decide if her distress was physical or mental, but it was distress--"
"Then you didn't send for an ambulance?" Matt demanded, almost accused.
"I thought we'd decide about that . . . after." Seraphina had stopped at the front door to grope in her pocket for a key.
Temple reflected on how only elderly women came equipped with routine pockets nowadays. Her own jumpsuit had none, no doubt to preserve its sleek, wrinkle-free modern lines; too bad people didn't come with the same guarantee.
"None of this may be necessary--" Matt was saying with an impatience new to him "----me, Temple's car and Temple, this . . . entire emergency."
"It is necessary!" Seraphina retorted fiercely. "Do you think I would call on you if it weren't an extreme matter?"
Matt didn't answer for a moment. "You might think you were doing it for my own good," he said at last.
"For her good, I gave up on you when you graduated grade school; you're on your own, Matthias," she answered, then pushed a key into the lock and worked the heavy door open.
"I left Rose with her," she added, to Temple's mystification, if not Matt's.
Temple could only follow along like an unneeded comma, a trailing, expendable body tacked to the end of the mysterious rescue party. Her floppy shoes had made a disgraceful racket on the walk outside; they were no more discreet on the interior tile floors. But after four steps into the house, she stopped dead.
Even in the dark of night, even distracted by the emergency and the puzzling, unspoken byplay between Matt and this Seraphina woman, Temple knew where she was. Her nose told her so. Her nose said "Cats ahoy!" Cats to bow and port, and cats amidships. Cats high. cats low, cats large, cats small. Cats in hats, maybe, but most certainly cats in litter boxes, oh my.
A light switch flashed on at the older woman's sure touch, illuminating a staircase rising into the dark of a second story. Sure enough, cats were sprawling on the treads and balancing on the wrought-iron handrail and playing patty-cake through the bars of the decorative bird cage.
Matt and the old woman were working their way upward, stepping around cats as called for. He had taken the bag from her and from the rear, looked like a doctor making a house call.
Temple rushed to catch up with the pair, even though she felt redundant to their drama. The upstairs hall led to a bedroom, of course, where another old woman sat beside an even older woman who lay on the bed, her head tossing, her hands wringing. Blandina Tyler looked waxen and harried at the same time. Her eyes roamed the room's perimeter as if seeking escape---or an unseen enemy trying to enter.
"Noises again," she was murmuring in a monotone. "Betrayed by noises and lights and hisses. And Peter could not be found. They were coming for the Lord, and Peter could not be found . . . . Has the cock crowed yet?"
"Hush, Blandina." Seraphina rustled over like a veteran nurse and passed a calming hand over the woman's brow.
"The neighborhood roosters will be screeching soon enough." She glanced at the attendant. "Any change?"
The woman named Rose shook her grizzled head. "She may have hyperventilated while you were gone, but her condition got no worse, just the nonsensical ravings--"
Temple watched the two women, puzzled. They were past seventy, bespectacled, plain and rather clumpy, yet both radiated an air of cheerful competence polished to a high gloss, like retired nurses. Matt, she saw, watched the woman in the bed as if hypnotized by her. Did he know Blandina Tyler?
"They want me to die." Miss Tyler wailed suddenly.
"They will take all I have and draw lots for the rest. For the cats, I was in the garden when they came, with noise and lights--and where was Peter? Run away. I wasn't going to struggle, but then--oh, it's horrible, horrible, Profanity.
'Pray for us now and at the hour of our death--' I don't want to die that way!"
Her clutching fingers reached for the women trying to calm her agitated body. She clung to their hands as if to sanity.
"She's no better," Seraphina judged. "Call the ambulance, Rose," As her friend rushed from the room. Seraphina bowed close to the stricken woman. "I've brought the sacrament, Blandina. You needn't worry about dying untended."
"Not . . . Father Hernandez!" Blandina both begged and ordered. "Not . . . him. He wants me in heaven without my cats, and I won't have that. I'd rather go to hell!"
"Now, you don't mean that, and it won't happen, and not Father Hernandez, Someone else."
"I won't have it from you!" Blandina Tyler said with a trace of her earlier sharpness. "You go too far, with your short skirts and bare heads. Sacrilege, Profanity, and so cruel--" Her face contorted as if seeing a nightmarish vision.
"Not Father Hernandez," Seraphina said firmly, stepping aside to reveal Matt, looking like an angel of the Lord, all golden-haired and as handsome a
s a prince in a fairy tale.
The sight of him struck Blandina silent for a moment.
Then she looked him up and down with the old suspicion that Temple recognized; she had been its recipient only hours before. "He's not wearing-"
"I called him in the dead of night," Seraphina reminded her.
"Isn't it . . . dawn yet?" the old woman asked in a sudden pathetic, trembling tone. "The nights have been so long lately."
Matt drew a side chair to the bed and sat on it. Sister Seraphina lifted the black bag onto the bedside table she had emptied of clutter. She opened the bag and drew out a shining length of pale satin as long as an albino snake, wider than a ribbon but not as broad as a scarf.
Matt took it and put it around his neck. Temple had a momentary vision of a World War I pilot with his silk scarf . . . but that was off-key. She kept trying to place this scene into some context she could recognize, and failed utterly.
Matt glanced at her briefly, the first time he had acknowledged her presence since introducing her to Seraphina, then lifted one end of the satin length to his face and kissed it.
Seraphina handed him a small glass bottle holding clear liquid, leaning near to whisper something in his ear.
"We are gathered," Matt said, "at the side of our friend Blandina to bring health and healing to her spirit and body." He stood, and with several ceremonial shakes, sprinkled the bottle's contents on the bed and around the room. When a strong sprinkle came in Temple's direction, she started as if it was acid, but Matt no longer noticed her, not anyone in the room but the sick woman.
"She attended daily Mass," Seraphina murmured to Matt, adding with a smile, "despite Father Hernandez, and made her confession every Saturday."
He nodded, then leaned forward with great concentration and almost visible compassion, to place his palms on the old woman's head. She sighed deeply, and then the tortured tossing of her head subsided.
Seraphina took another small glass bottle and some cotton balls from the bag. Curiouser and curiouser, thought Temple.
"Should I leave?" a voice asked. Temple was startled to find it had been hers.
Matt did not look up, but Seraphina smiled and shook her head. Temple backed up until a piece of furniture stopped her, and set her heavy tote bag on the floor as slowly and quietly as she could.
Matt pressed his thumb to the bottle, then tilted it. His thumb-tip glistened as it reached toward the sick woman, touched her forehead and made a mark there. He repeated the ritual, anointing the palm of each hand.
Temple squelched a wild wondering if that gesture tickled. Clearly, it did not. Blandina Tyler calmed even more as Matt intoned: "Through this holy anointing may the Lord in His love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit.
Amen. May the Lord who freed you from sin save and raise you up. Amen."
Matt then leaned forward and spoke intently, in a low tone, wishing Blandina peace of mind and body, true serenity of soul and spirit. Temple couldn't absorb all the words, just as she could barely absorb the meaning of this scene, but she absorbed the same calm that visibly quieted Blandina moment by moment.
"Our Father," Matt began, "Who art in Heaven . . ."
Seraphina joined in, and Temple was surprised that she still knew the words as well as she did--okay, an Our Father was like the Pledge of Allegiance or riding a bicycle; once you learned to do it, you never forgot--except that she alone charged ahead at the end with her favorite, thundering, dramatic line, "For thine is the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory--" The others stopped, even Rose, who had returned to the room and stood in the doorway watching and nodding with a solemn look on her round, woebegone face.
Temple sat down on what was behind hers-an old-fashioned trunk, she saw as she turned--and caught Blandina's cane, which had been propped against the trunk, before it fell to the floor. When she reinstated it, she noticed that the
rubber tip was damp and dotted with curds of fresh dirt.
Blandina had been out in the garden, Temple realized. Maybe that's where the ravings about a garden, the Garden of Gethsemane, had risen to haunt her mind; and that comment about Peter and betrayal and cocks crowing . . . obviously, the woman was very religious. Obviously, Temple was attending a religious rite. Obviously, Matt had presided here at Seraphina's behest.
Except that nothing was obvious to Temple beyond the incomprehensible obvious. Who was who and what was what--and did she really want to know?
She heard Matt's voice murmuring again, and this time she didn't listen. She was beginning to feel like an eavesdropper, after all.
Then she heard the thin, pale wail of a nearing emergency vehicle and felt relieved that something, something she understood, was coming to take charge of this situation that was so perplexing and even, in its way, frightening and disturbing.
When the heavyset man and woman pounded up the stairs--the siren had apparently banished all cats--with their equipment and their gurney and when Blandina Tyler was checked fore and aft and was being noisily bounced down the stairs. Temple finally looked up from her front-row- center seat on the trunk.
The black bag was shut. Matt was silent and scarf less. Seraphina was looking much relieved and toward Temple, then to the person referred to as "Rose."
"Forgive me for forgetting introductions," Seraphina said. "I am Sister Seraphina O'Donnell and this is Sister Saint Rose of Lima. This is Matt's friend. Temple--"
"Barr," Temple was proud to find herself reporting. Sister Seraphina O'Donnell. Sister Saint Rose of Lima. The words made no sense. "Rose" did. She smiled at the woman, who beamed back.
Temple decided that only good Girl Scout behavior would save her. "I . . . urn, was supposed to come in the morning and help Miss Tyler feed her cats. I suppose if I stopped at your house--" she carefully included both women in her glance "--you could let me in. There are . . . an awful lot of cats."
"We know." Rose chuckled a little. "You're a darling girl to suggest it," she added with a tinge of Irish brogue, "but we can do it. We're used to Miss Tyler's fascinating felines. In fact, we adopted a couple of them."
Temple didn't try to argue. A person lost in space, time and sense does not argue. as Alice in Wonderland had proved long ago.
"I'll ride with her to the hospital," Sister St. Rose of Lima told Sister Seraphina, who nodded and retrieved the black bag from the bedside table.
Mart did not offer to help her with it, Temple noticed, and Matt was always polite beyond belief.
"What about her cane?" Temple asked with belated concern, hefting the colorful stick.
"She won't need it until she comes home," Sister Seraphina assured her, following Rose out into the hall.
Temple nudged Matt, who had not yet moved, then went out in turn.
Downstairs, the rooms glowed with the silent red strobe of the ambulance light outside the open front door. Cats' eyes gleamed in the dark, as green as Christmas foil.
"Apparently she has a lot of cats," Matt said when he came downstairs, still sounding dazed.
Temple was able at last to have something in common with the odd old women named "Sister"--wry laughter.
"That's an understatement," Temple said. "Do you know how many there are?"
Sister Seraphina answered while Sister St. Rose of Lima---what a long name; no wonder it was shortened to "Rose"---went out to the ambulance.
"We think seventy-three."
"Aren't there laws?" Matt asked.
"City regulations," Seraphina corrected in a voice that was pure schoolteacher. "Her cats keep her happy. Who's going to complain about how many she keeps?"
"Maybe . . . somebody," Temple said.
Both of them looked at her, the Silent Woman through all of this.
"Miss Tyler was getting odd phone calls," Temple began, thinking. "No wonder she ended up so hysterical tonight.
That's a lot of pressure for an old lady living alone to take, with nothing but watch cats around."
"Phone calls?" Matt was sudd
enly incisive, as he had not been all evening, but just as he had been when Temple had limped home after being assaulted in the Goliath parking ramp a few weeks before. "What kind of phone calls? Obscene?"
Sister Seraphina, in shock, which seemed foreign to her, sat down on a shapeless easy chair"-and half-rose when a sleeping cat rocketed oil' the cushion and into the darkness.
"Obscenely weird," Temple said. "Hissing sounds. Maybe wheezy breathing. And when I was over here feeding the Cats this evening, she mentioned sounds and lights outside the house."
Seraphina shook her head. "She was always calling the police about that, but they never found anything. They finally stopped coming."
Matt lifted a tiny, but adult, white cat from the third step of the stairs and sat down. The harsh hall light above painted his face with deep shadows of strain, or of thought.
"I got a call at the hotline from an elderly woman not long ago . . ."
"That must have been Blandina," Sister Seraphina said. "She called us at the convent at least twice a day."
After a silence, Temple spoke. "She was old, she was alone and frightened, she cried wolf to everyone who would listen. What if there really is a wolf?"
"Why?" Matt demanded.
"Well, the reason I'm here---" Matt looked alarmed as Sister Seraphina's expression grew alert, but Temple wasn't about to tattle on Matt's missing driver's license to old Teacher Seraphina, no way. The generations had to stick up for each other, no matter what "_is that Miss Tyler's niece, Peggy Wilhelm--"
"Darling girl," Seraphina interrupted enthusiastically.
"Never abandoned her aunt,"
"Anyway," Temple went on for Matt's benefit, "she raises purebred Birmans, and is exhibiting them at the cat show downtown this weekend. And one was shaved."
"Shaved?" The question came simultaneously from both listeners.
Temple, assured of a rapt audience now, nodded solemnly. "Shaved from head to tail, and around the body."
Cat on a Blue Monday Page 11
