Douglas Nelson - Cat On A Blue Monday

My dear, Pilar was making us a lunch. Let me run next door and get it. You read this over. It's a gift, Peggy, A gift from the past. Accept it, and let it go."

Sister Seraphina left, an obvious believer in the efficacy of food easing shock. For Peggy Wilhelm was in shock; Temple saw that, and seeing that, she wished that the will was dated nineteen ninety-four. Apparently, Peggy had never accepted being left out of her aunt's will as philosophically as she had pretended.

Temple, however, was now alone with the stunned woman, not a comfortable position for a public-relations specialist who liked to put the best face on things.

"Sister is right," she found herself saying. "Here's proof that your aunt didn't discount her only living relative. She just got caught up in caring for the stray cats and became obsessive."

Peggy scanned the pages of the will again and again. Then her face crumpled like old support stockings. "Oh, Temple, you don't understand--you can't understand what this means to me."

"I understand that you realize you were not always left out."

"No!" Peggy squeezed Temple's hand, forcing her to knee beside her. "I can't tell Sister Seraphina, but--" Her free hand stroked her forehead, as if to install order within her cluttered mind. "Temple--! Oh, this is astounding. You don't know, and Sister Seraphina can't, she wasn't anywhere near this convent then. I lived with Aunt Blandina in 1969, for almost a year. Here, in this house, before the . . . cats."

"You came to stay with her?"

Peggy nodded.

"You attended Our Lady of Guadalupe Church?"

Peggy nodded. "Yes, for a while."

"A while?"

"Until it was a scandal," Peggy said in bitter tones. Her muddy brown eyes met Temple's. "I was pregnant," said this fifty-year-old woman with grizzled gray hair. "I was fifteen years old and pregnant. I was sent to Aunt Blandina's by my parents, so no one around home would know. Another city, a scandal twice removed: me and the baby."

"Oh, Peggy, I'm so sorry."

"You don't know what it was like back then. So hush hush, So much shame." Peggy pursed her lips as she folded the will shut, "Such grim business, Clandestine arrangements.

I even had the baby in this house to avoid a public record, to quash suspicion. A Mexican midwife." She smiled weakly at Temple's shocked face. "It was an easy birth, I was only fifteen. The baby was fine--and whisked away to some clandestine adoption process. A good Catholic home was promised. Infertile parents who ached for a baby.

Mine."

"Peggy--!"

"It had to be. They were all so disappointed. I was such a good girl, such good grades in school. They didn't want to know who, or why. I was such a good girl."

"You are," Temple said blindly, wishing for Sister Seraphina back, for Matt, for someone who knew how to talk to broken hearts, yet understanding that her very own age difference and religion gap made this confession, this release, possible.

"Now people are more realistic about it," Peggy said. "Then was the Dark Ages. It must be kept quiet at all costs. I was to forget it. My . . . my baby."

Temple had never felt more inadequate. She had never had a baby. She had not got religion. She was talking to Peggy from the dark side of the moon as far as experience was concerned. The only loss she knew was Max's disappearance.

"Did you . . . ever try to find the baby?" Temple whispered.

Peggy shook her head. "I tried to forget, like they all told me to. I thought they hated me. I thought they never forgave me. I even grew angry with Aunt Blandina, my keeper, and her cats. She couldn't keep my baby, but she could take in cat after cat in the years afterward. We never spoke of it, and my parents had died so soon after, only seven years. They left everything to her, to Aunt Blandina, at their deaths. I thought that was . . . punishment. I didn't want to speak of it, think of it, find anybody! But . . . cats. Eventually, I created cats, bred cats. I don't know why."

"Maybe the cats were your aunt's way of making up for letting that child go," Temple said. "Maybe they're your way of having something that depends on you." Maybe Midnight Louie was a Max substitute, right?

"She did care about you, even after it was all over," Temple forged on. "Look, Peggy, this will is dated after you said all of this happened. You were her sole heir then. She did care. Only, like Sister Seraphina said, she got old and . . . queer."

Peggy folded the will against her breast, like a baby. "Can I . . . keep this?"

"Sure. But let me copy it first. I guess we've got to keep a record. I'll get it back to you."

Peggy's troubled face threatened rebellion, and then subsided as Temple gently tugged the will from her grasp.

"Don't tell Sister Seraphina," Peggy begged her. "Don't tell anyone."

"No," Temple promised. "I won't."

But she was almost as troubled as Peggy. Somehow, she was sure, this discovery of the old, forgotten will altered every assumption anyone had made about Blandina Tyler's death, including those of Lieutenant C.R. Molina.

Chapter 31

Curious Confession

Louie still wasn't home when Temple checked in again, but Caviar was reclining on the sofa looking especially pleased with herself.

Temple untied and kicked off her metallic sneakers and settled beside the cat, stroking its silky head. Caviar had longer, finer hair than Louie, but her wise silence made her as good a thinking companion as the larger cat.

"Louie isn't boycotting us, is he?" Temple ruminated aloud. "I hope I didn't send him over the edge by bringing you home."

Caviar's purr was soft and steady, unlike Louie's sometimes rough and rowdy one. It made an ideal background of "black noise" for Temple's darkening thoughts.

What a quandary! Should she inform Lieutenant Molina of the newly found will, which was far too old to affect the current will, but which might point a suspicious finger at Peggy? It proved, at the least, that at one time Peggy had been the principal heir. Despite Peggy's gratified and even touching surprise at the discovery, it did not escape Temple that Peggy could have playacted that reaction, that she could have known years ago that she was an heir. That would mean that she might not have accepted her aunt's new resolve to endow the cats--at least not with the equanimity she apparently displayed.

Then there was the matter of Peggy's forgotten past. Temple twirled her finger into a lock of Caviar's ruff and frowned. Unwed motherhood still was not something to shout from the rooftops, but such young women today had many more options: they could keep their child and finish school. They could have an abortion, depending on where they lived and if parental consent was required, and if required, was given. They could bear the child and give it up to adoption.

In Peggy Wilhelm's day--the end of the fifties--unwed pregnancy was such a scandal, particularly in religious families, that she'd had only one choice: bear the child in shame and as much secrecy as possible, then give it up and forget it as quickly as possible.

Temple kicked her sock-clad foot against the sofa base, startling the droning Caviar, who flattened her ears back and moved down the sofa.

No avoiding it, Temple thought. Peggy Wilhelm could have been nursing a thirty-year-plus grudge against the aunt who helped her parents stage-manage the situation. Did she resent being forced to give up and give away the child? What about an aunt who now felt no responsibility to anyone or anything but her stray cats? Had Peggy come to resent her so bitterly, along with her devotion to the cats, that she attacked her own Birman to divert suspicion and eventually caused her aunt's "accidental" death? She was in the house that night. Motive and opportunity, as they say on TV.

Temple sighed again, driving Caviar a few inches farther down the sofa seat.