Douglas Nelson - Cat On A Blue Monday

then, and I did, too. Beautiful, loving cats, who could not know. That's what I wanted, cats. I didn't want . . . men. I didn't want . . . children. And I didn't want strays. I wanted planned, beautiful purebred cats, all my own. I fed Aunt Blandina's creatures. No room, no time, no memory for me and mine. But cats everywhere. I love them, and sometimes I hate them."

"What about the money?" Molina prodded.

"Money? I don't need their money. They paid money to him to go away. Money to the midwife. Money to the people who took my baby. They never gave money to me." Peggy eyed Father Hernandez and Sister Seraphina with dull, judging eyes. "The church said money should go only to the good. I was bad. The church would get all the money, from my parents, from my aunt." Peggy frowned and rubbed her chunky hands over her forehead. "Except, the old will that

Temple found. Once upon a time, my aunt remembered me, and that was written after . . . everything. I don't understand."

Everyone looked on, appalled and speechless. Except Molina.

"We're still trying to trace the last, legitimate will. From the versions we've found so far, we believe that your aunt left her estate equally: to the church, to the cats and to you."

Peggy Wilhelm started sobbing into the hands that covered her face. Defiantly, Temple rose and went to stand behind her, her hands on her shoulders.

Sister Seraphina glanced from Lieutenant Molina to Father Hernandez, then crouched beside the sobbing woman to take hold of her hands.

Matt found himself staring at Molina, demanding silent justification for this public revelation.

"Did you ever try to find that lost child?" Molina asked.

"No!" Peggy almost retched between sobs. "It had to be forgotten. Everyone wanted it forgotten. I had to forget it. I couldn't, but I had to."

"And no one tried to contact you?" Molina was cool, an interrogative machine.

Even distraught, Peggy Wilhelm responded to that authority as she had always responded to authority throughout her fifty-one years.

"No," she said. "Who would? The family was Catholic, infertile and delighted to take my . . . sin."

"What about your son?"

"Son?" Peggy looked up from her hands. She had never even known the sex.

"He looked for you when he grew up," Molina said. "He went to college and got a degree. He did very well for himself. And then he did a birth-parent search. Of course no one would contact you without your consent. And no one did, because he withdrew his request, but not before he had used his special knowledge to get the information he craved: your location. He was a lawyer by now, he knew who you were, and he knew you had lived with Blandina Tyler during your pregnancy. He discovered how rich Blandina Tyler was, and he came to hate her church and her cats and her money that wasn't coming to him. He deserved it, and he came to the parish years ago, intending to get it."

"He . . . never wanted to see me?" Peggy asked through her tears.

Molina shook her head. "He was obsessed with his own losses, not yours."

"That's why he called Sister Mary Monica!" Temple said. "She reminded him of his great-aunt, her age and her cane! That also clouded the harassment of his aunt. And he attacked the cats because they had usurped his inheritance, and because they made everything seem madness without a method. But he honestly would have cheated his own mother out of her aunt's money?"

"From what I can determine," Molina said, "he was roughly reared. His adoptive parents always reminded him that he was the product of sin. He found only obligation, not love, in his new family. He found them and the church harsh and unforgiving, and he became so himself. In a way," she added, eyeing Father Hernandez, "I agree with him.

"We've traced what records there are; we've found his parent search request. But it wasn't a parent he wanted; it was revenge and restitution. He is responsible for every bit of harassment that has plagued this parish, and he spent ten years worming himself into everybody's trust to do it.

`"I'm sorry," she told Peggy Wilhelm. "It will all have to come out at the trial. I believe that your aunt's friends at Our Lady of Guadalupe can help you to deal with it. Truth is cleansing, at least I think so. If you have any questions, or need to know anything more, just call me."

Peggy nodded, her head still bowed.

"Would you like to see him?" Molina asked.

"I don't know. In all those years, I never met him. I no longer went to church; I certainly didn't attend Our Lady of Guadalupe."

"After today, you will be seeing his picture and reading about him in the newspapers. After today, the news circus will put him in the center ring." Molina was silent for a few seconds. "You could do worse than to confront the past with friends present; everyone here was his target, in a sense, because they stood between him and his deepest desire."

Peggy looked around at those who had met her son; some had known him--or thought they did--for years. Some, like Temple and Matt, had just met him, and thought nothing of him at all. She nodded and lowered her head again as Sister Seraphina rose on stiff knees and resumed her chair.

The office was crowded now, Matt thought; could it absorb the added force of such an explosively angry personality?

Molina used an intercom to instruct that "the prisoner" be brought in.

He came in handcuffs, wearing a set of City Jail Clark County jailhouse baggies and escorted by a blue-uniformed corrections officer. His round, plastic-framed glasses and short yuppie haircut gave him the look of a vintage prisoner-- an escapee from a forties' crime movie.

Molina indicated the last empty chair. "Sit down."

He did so awkwardly, perching forward on the seat so that his manacled hands weren't jammed against the back of the chair.

Peggy peeked at him like a shy child, from between the fingers fanned over her eyes. He regarded her impassively.

"I ... I don't see a resemblance," she said. "Do you know who I am?"

"Good!" he answered. "I don't want any relatives. They sent me away. And, yeah, I looked you up when I got to town. I know where you live. I know you coddle those stupid, fancy cats, just like your aunt was looney over her army of lousy strays. You people should have had cats instead of children."

Peggy winced at his derisive tone. "Maybe we were trying to make up for our loss, in some way."

"You would have made up for it in spades if I had managed to have my way."

"Peter." Sister Seraphina spoke soberly but not unkindly. "You did much good for the church. You helped the elderly widows with their financial affairs, you donated all your legal work for the church . . . was that all a sham?"

"Yes." His eyes narrowed. "You sent me away to that horrible house. It probably was no worse than what I would have had if I hadn't been bundled off like dirty laundry.

Always the same lousy litany, 'the church says this' and 'the church says that,' and my mother was a whore and my father worthless."

"I wasn't here at the time," Sister Seraphina reminded him.

"You were. Or someone like you. You were all alike, you holier-than-thou types, whether you wore black habits and white collars or sat at home under paintings of the Sacred Heart and mumbled endless rosaries."

"That was a long time ago," Father Hernandez said. "I was reared under the same strict standards. Yes, they were intolerant and unforgiving, but the times and the church and the people in the church have changed, Peter. Why can't you change, too?"

"Because I don't want to, Father." He spat out the honorary address like an obscenity. "I don't have a father. I don't have one listed on any birth certificate and I don't have a Holy Father in Rome and I don't have you. You're just a freak, a freakin' drunk, and you think I didn't enjoy watching you all flounder and fall to pieces? I was in control. I pulled strings and you danced, even the old bag in the convent. I know what hypocrites you all are; she didn't hurry to hang up on my naughty phone calls, did she?"