Douglas Nelson - Cat On A Blue Monday

Light blotted up the darkness slowly, hardly seeming to win, but sure to.

Temple had more to think about than old women and cats, but she kept looking for Something.

She found magenta-flowered oleander bushes burning bright against the indomitable dawn, scrub cactus and strange flowers, sluggish lizards hissing away in the underbrush.

The backyard was large, and fenced in with stone five Feet high. The sky was blushing pink. She walked back toward the house, thinking of feeding the cats, even though it was early. It would save a trip later.

She came to the back door, and the light was just enough that she saw what they all had missed seeing on the way out.

She didn't think that she screamed, but the other two were there in what seemed to be too long an instant.

"My God!" said Matt.

"Peter!" Seraphina said in shock, then repeated the name in a voice of distraught love.

Temple saw what Blandina had seen, in her own backyard, on her own back door: the beige convent cat, half of Peter and Paul, nailed--crucified--by his outstretched front paws to the heavy wooden back door.

Chapter 14

Cat Crime

"He's not dead," Matt said, coming into the kitchen's bright fluorescents. "Can you find a towel?"

Temple and Sister Seraphina scattered in shocked relief - Temple for the terry-cloth dish towels that she had spotted yesterday under a stack of unused foil roaster pans in the pantry, Sister Seraphina upstairs for parts unknown.

Both women had scurried into the house--averting their eyes from the open door---as soon as they had found the claw hammer Matt had asked for in the shed at the back of the garden. Temple felt guilty about failing to rise to the occasion while she comforted Sister Seraphina in the kitchen, but--after all-----Matt had spent his summers on a farm and was better prepared to deal with animal tragedies.

Temple was a city girl through and through. She had to avert her eyes from road kill, even if it was a bird or a squirrel or a rat, although she noted the exact location and invariably called animal control to pick up the remains, hoping they would do so before she had to drive that way again. In fact, she would often change her route for a while to make sure the road was clear. If everyday traffic fatalities upset her that much, a crucified cat was more than even a good Girl Scout should have to cope with when there was (thank God for the small favors of long-institutionalized sexism) a man around to see to it.

So, still feeling guilty when Sister Seraphina leaped over cats to hurtle down the stairs with a bath towel, Temple manfully offered to take the towels out to Matt.

The cat lay on its side on a wooden bench, unconscious, Matt said.

"Are you sure?" she asked, handing him the towels.

"I think it's in shock. We may be too late. But the . . . foot injuries weren't enough to kill it. Do you know of a vet?"

"Yes, and---" Temple checked her watch. "They've just opened, thank God." She instantly blanched, wondering if invoking the deity over a cat was disrespectful.

But Matt didn't notice. He was wrapping the cat up like a baby in swaddling clothes.

"I'll drive; you carry," Temple suggested briskly, heading back into the house to collect her tote bag.

Sister Seraphina was waiting in the kitchen, white-faced. "I'll feed the cats," she said as they came in. She peeked gingerly into Matt's bundle. "Will he--"

"We'll try."

"It's too bad you couldn't stay for seven-o'clock Mass. I'd like you to meet Father Hernandez."

Matt didn't look at all sorry, just worried. "I'll have to pass on that."

"Of course," Sister Seraphina murmured.

"And we'll call with news," Temple promised, jingling her car keys.

She and Matt rushed out, avoiding cats, and into the Storm as fast as she could unlock it.

Temple barely noticed the morning warming up and brightening all around her; she was just glad she could drive in daylight as she pushed the Storm around corners and down lightly traveled streets at forty miles an hour, getting a slew of dirty looks from more moderate drivers.

"Hold the bundle up," she suggested to Matt. "Maybe they'll think it's a sick baby."

He obliged; the cat was too unconscious to care.

"That's the most awful thing I've ever seen in my life," Temple said by way of small talk. Her knees were inclined to shake, she noticed, and so had her voice on the last sentence.

"Quite a night," Matt answered in his usual understatement.

She wondered what it would take to jar his composure. She just may have seen it. She had a feeling that the cat's plight had restored Matt's equilibrium, even as it had almost tipped her totally off the scale of sanity.

"Who would do such a thing?" she asked, knowing the question was expected, and useless, and unanswerable, but needing to ask.

"I don't know. Someone sick is the obvious answer. But in what way?"

"And why the convent cat on Miss Tyler's door? Who was the target of this act?"

"Usually the kind of people--or kids----who torture animals aren't too fussy about the targets. They just want to find someone who cares, who'll be hurt and shocked and frightened."

"It could be kids, couldn't it? That's even creepier."

"Adults don't normally do this sort of thing. If they're inclined to atrocity, they've graduated to abusing people by the time they're all grown up,"

Temple shivered at Matt's cynicism, new from him. It bespoke a darker world view than she had suspected he glimpsed.

She spun the Storm around the last corner and pulled into the lot, relieved to see only a sprinkle of cars for staff members. She ran around the car to open the door for Matt and clattered ahead to open the vet's door.

An empty waiting room, Good, Temple thought as she stormed the desk.

"We've got an emergency, a terribly abused cat."

The woman on duty looked up, her face struggling to blend an expression of anger with sympathy. "Take it right in. I'll buzz Dr. Doolittle."

"Dr. Doolittle?" Matt mouthed in amazement as he followed Temple into the first examining room.

She shrugged and watched him lay the bundle on the tabletop, then reached out to stroke the cat's forehead.

Energy and a rush of air came in with the vet. "What happened?" she asked, peeling back the towels to reveal Peter's inert form.

Temple and Matt consulted each other with a glance. Matt spoke. "We found him nailed to a door. He's not dead, but I don't know how bad--"

"Your cat?" Dr. Doolittle asked. She knew Temple had Midnight Louie.

"No," he said quickly. "A . . . friend's. An elderly lady's."

Dr. Doolittle made a sound of disgust as she put on a stethoscope. An assistant hurried in. "You two had better wait outside until we get a good look at him."

They edged out into the antiseptic hall, then into the waiting room, where they could read dog and cat magazines or peruse free literature from manufacturers of dog and cat products--Yummy Tum-tum-tummy or Free-to-be-Feline. Not easy to forget where you were in a veterinarian's waiting room, Temple mused. Not easy to forget what brought you there. . . .

She and Matt sat on adjoining free-form plastic chairs and stared at the vinyl-tiled floor.

"Reminds me of the hospital emergency room," Temple said finally.

"Yeah."

"At least Lieutenant Molina isn't here."

"She might have to be here yet."

"What do you mean?"

"It's not homicide, but it's pretty close."

"A tortured cat is not the kind of thing the police can deal with," Temple objected, for the idea of Lieutenant Molina being drawn into her life again was just too awful to contemplate. "Animals are legally viewed as property. That poor cat is worth what somebody would pay for it, period, and you know that's not much."

"Still," Matt said, "the police Gang Unit might be interested, especially if they've got Satanist activity in the area, and they usually do."