Douglas Nelson - Cat On A Blue Monday

Seraphina nodded. "You're quite right, but we didn't discover . . . the animal until Blandina had left in the ambulance."

Father Hernandez tented his long fingers and shook his solid sterling head, bishop material if looking the role had anything to do with it. Matt envied the man's air of churchly charisma, of an attractiveness untainted by movie-star good looks. Why should such a man--and Matt had seen the type before, the kind who could charm money out of a cuckoo clock and make it seem a privilege to the donor worry so much about a fund drive that he risked everything: Career, parish, fund drive, and even his priesthood, which was quite a different matter than a mere career, by diving into a bottle? Perhaps Seraphina had jumped to conclusions there.

"The cat," the pastor was musing with impressive melancholy. "Poor . . . Peter, did you say? I could never tell him and Paul apart, but then, I'm not much of a cat person. It must," he added with a mahogany glance at Matt from under bristling pewter eyebrows, "have been traumatic to take him down, given your situation, Mr. Devine."

He knew, Of course. Seraphina would consider it only right that he know. "You mean the implication of blasphemy?"

The pastor nodded solemnly, "Most disturbing. We are used to graffiti on the school walls, obscenities scratched into the rest-room doors, but then the vile phone-calls to Sister Mary Monica, and now . . . this."

"You think that they're related? Miss Tyler was receiving bizarre phone calls as well."

Father Hernandez laughed, the sound's harshness as disturbing as the sight of a crucified cat. "Miss Tyler's cats and calls and health and will! I'm tired of such . . . unworthy speculations on Miss Tyler. Something worse may be abroad, eh Matthew, was it?"

"It was Matthias; now it's Matt."

Father Hernandez spread his hands to show calm acceptance, the gesture as broad as a blessing. Veteran priests often assumed the unconscious mannerisms of the vocation;

Matt saw that now, as he saw residual gestures in himself. He was surprised that anyone would be shocked that he had been a priest, given the signs, but Temple certainly had been.

"Sister Seraphina tells me you mentioned Satanism."

The question's directness sent Temple flying to the farthest fringes of Matt's mind. "I meant that only in the sense of misguided individuals playing at the trappings of satanism, Father. Not a . . . serious . . . outbreak."

"Hmm," Father Hernandez balanced his chin on his tented fingertips. The dark eyes that regarded Matt grew suddenly haunted. "It wouldn't surprise me if it were the real thing, Matt. Not with the unholy mischief that's been happening around Our Lady of Guadalupe lately."

"What do you mean?" Sister Seraphina interjected.

The pastor's eyes avoided hers. "I . . . haven't told you everything."

"There's more?"

He shrugged. "I found the holy-water fonts in the church filled with red liquid before six-o'clock Mass last week."

"Red--?" Sister Seraphina couldn't bring herself to ask more.

"Dye," he answered quickly, "In the holy water. Red food coloring. Disposing of it properly will be quite a challenge. And the communion wine was also colored water."

Sister Seraphina's lips foided. She said nothing, but her eyes held such a look of disapproval that Matt could imagine her saying, "And was that too great a disappointment, Father?"

Still, the tricks around the church tugged at his interest. No wonder a sober and steady priest might find his grip slipping. Matt imagined himself celebrating Mass again, concentrating on the ritual and the prayers, achieving a recognizable spiritual state and then, at the most sacred, sacramental moment for priest and congregation, saying, "This is my Body, This is my

Blood," and sipping from the gloriously gilded chalice--thin, colored water, not wine. Transubstantiation indeed.

Add other, more brutal harassments, such as a convent cat crucified, and Matt could understand that a priest might need more than meditation to steady his nerves.

"Maybe your friend could help us," Sister Seraphina said into the lengthening silence.

It took Matt several long moments to realize that she addressed him and finally look up. His face remained blank.

"The plucky Miss Barr," she prodded him. "You mentioned that she has had some involvement in detection."

Temple came winging from the back of the beyond with a fiery crown of red hair and a shining sheriff's badge in the palm of one hand, like a pixyish saint.

Matt laughed. "She handles public relations, and happened to have murder rear its ugly head at a couple of events she stage-managed, that's all. She's no professional, although----"

He stood up, hands jammed in pockets, stunned. "Although . . . the reason she was working the cat show this weekend is that there's been some funny-business there. Miss Tyler's niece had entered some cats, and one of them was shaved."

"Shaved," Father Hernandez echoed in complete confusion.

Matt nodded. "To disqualify it from competition, they thought. It was done with animal clippers, down the length of the body from head to tail and around the middle."

"My God--" Father Hernandez's warm-toned skin, as dark as a George Hamilton tan, turned sallow. "Don't you see? Remember the legend of how the donkey's back was marked at Jesus' birth for all time?"

"A cross," Matt heard his own hoarse voice say. "The cat was shaved in the shape of a cross. Then it's related!"

"To what?" Sister Seraphina exploded. "Pranks? Except for Peter, that is all we're talking about. Childish pranks. We sit next to a building housing two hundred and sixty-five children and teenagers, after all."

Father Hernandez's eyes slid away from her again, Matt noticed. The gesture was guilty. Most good Catholics had a hang-up going back to grade school about deceiving nuns, but Matt would bet his best--and now useless--clerical collar that Father Hernandez wasn't telling anyone the full story. Maybe that was the secret he kept between himself and his most recent confessor, Jose Cuervo.

Chapter 18

Blue-ribbon Blood Sacrifice

I have been ill-used a time or two in my multitudinous lives, but nothing can quite compete with serving as a combination feline pincushion and a victim of the late great Count Dracula.

The average person would not believe the sort of ghoulish rituals that go on in the hidden back rooms of the local veterinarian's office, such as blood extraction through the victim's (me!) jugular vein.

When my little doll hands me over to the enemy, even I have no idea of the torments in store. And this indignity comes alter my debilitating day at the cat show!

No doubt the attentive reader is wondering how I escaped the cage labeled "Percy" to return to the soon-to-be site of my newest betrayal--that is, home to the Circle Ritz in time for Miss Temple Barr to scoop me up unceremoniously and hasten me oh' to see the vet.

I wish that I could say that my great strength, savage nature and wily feline brain were responsible for tripping the latch on my steel cage. Alas, these are modern times and such primitive attributes are seldom necessary. Nowadays it is who you know that counts. In this instance, it is who it is that knows me: one

Electra Lark, cohabiter with the reclusive Karma, landlady of the Circle Ritz and a bosom buddy of mine for almost three months now.

Naturally, she would know me in a darkroom, and she does almost as well across a crowded hall, even at a cat show.

"Louie!" I hear bellowed in dulcet tones.

I turn to scan the indifferent passersby. The judging is temporarily over and, yes, Midnight Louie is the last one left behind, stranded high and dry under the odious pseudonym of Percy, may his offspring have tape worms!

How could I have missed the slinky muumuu in electric shades of magenta, silver foil and chartreuse? For once I wish that I was as color-blind as certain erroneous experts insist that my kind is.