Carole douglas - Cat on a Hyacinth Hunt

"Or a duplicate," Kinsella suggested.

He grabbed the pulls centered on the pierced Oriental brass circles. Both doors swept open.

Matt glimpsed a figure inside: shadowy, still. Like a statue.

Kinsella mimicked its frozen attitude. Only his lips moved.

"Lieutenant, you better split your skirt seams again and get up here."

He stood as still as a man face-to-face with a striking snake, his tone severe. Matt turned with a swoop of the flashlight beam and ran to the truck apron to help Molina make the giant step up.

Her hand was already reaching up when he got there. Between his alarmed pull and her push she was up beside him as lightly as an acrobat.

Their feat surprised them almost as much as Kinsella's alarm.

They rushed to the rear of the trailer.

Kinsella still stood before the open doors he had forced into revealing their contents.

Matt's flashlight beam probed the open space beyond him. The demonic figure inside wore a familiar face indeed: Max Kinsella's.

The box's back wall was a mirror.

"You need to see this, Lieutenant," Kinsella said tightly, like a man afraid to move even his lips, as if something transient and shocking might melt away at too much attention.

Molina stepped past Matt to stand behind Kinsella, so close that she finally saw what he saw.

Matt watched her shoulders stiffen.

He edged next to her place, straining to see the devilishly reflected light, the mirror-refracted light.

He saw Kinsella's facade, as through a glass darkly. Saw the glass that reflected it. Saw . . .

scratches upon the glass. Sand-painting. Scrawls.

The letters were printed in a shade the flashlight illuminated as ox-blood red.

Big letters, lavishly covering on the glass. At a slight angle, up to the right.

R-e-m-e-m-b-e-r m-e

y-o-u b-a-s-t-a-r-d!

Chapter 45

Shoe Time

Matt felt a phantom cut.

This time he knew it for what it was, if not why it was.

Like all bad things that happen to supposedly good people it was swift, savage and puzzling.

Kinsella finally spoke. "Someone knew. Someone knew that I would be here to open this device."

Matt stood in the background, faintly reflected beyond the mirrored Max. Matt stood silent, knowing the words had a special, searing meaning for him. And him alone. Didn't they?

Molina's voice was clinical. Calm. "This does seem personal.

Anyone here care to confess?"

After the dead silence, Kinsella laughed.

"Confession requires specifics, Lieutenant. This is far too vague. But you're right. It is personal. With me, from now on."

An angry howl from the floor caught their attention.

Louie was pacing back and forth, his tail lashing against the tarps, thumping like a snare drum keeping background rhythm.

His next vocalization was a yowl.

He snaked back and forth against a box shrouded by tarpaulin, rubbed his nose on its corner, first left then right, like a chef honing a knife-edge.

*********************

No one wanted to articulate the message they each were getting loud and clear: Midnight Louie wanted them to open this box.

"Must be something fishy," Max said finally.

Kinsella, Matt reminded himself. The man was only a last name and an occupation: magician. He was not a person. He was not Temple's . . . sole savior.

"I don't know about you two, but I'm about ready for ouija boards," Molina said. "Open this thing."

Matt bent to strip off the tarp, anticipating Kinsella.

What they unveiled was another oblong box. Odd how every magic-show container was so coffin like, Matt thought. How the tricks all involved confinement and escape. Maybe he was missing some subtle erotic content; he wouldn't doubt it. But he was struck by the defiance of death that ran through the art: rising from the dead. No more, no less. Easter Sunday for the unthinking masses. Rolling away the stone.

"Another sword-trick box." Kinsella's voice had lightened for the first time.

They stared at him, shocked by the lilt in his tone.

"Don't you get it? There are already holes slit through, for the blades. Breathing slits."

Molina's glance crossed Matt's, like dueling foils. They were wondering where the swords were, and what they might have already done. Here, among the props of his trade, the magician was an optimist, the master of illusion.

Matt and Molina had no such expectations of defeating the obvious. They pictured the unthinkable. He, from his anxious heart. She, from her professional pessimism.

Max . . . Kinsella . . . bent over the box, checking top and bottom.

"The head and foot slides are shut. Sealed with ... duct tape!" He laughed. "We've got it! The one. That damn cat must have smelled something, or he saw her put into it." He rapped on the lid. "Temple, we're coming."

Who could demur in the face of such theatrical confidence. Matt found his eyes anchored on Molina's when they weren't darting nervously to Kinsella's delicate maneuvers to crack open the box.

If Temple wasn't here, where was she?

The top of the box lifted off in hinged sections.

They glimpsed a painted interior, something colorful in the bottom. They smelled a potent floral not quite like perfume.

Midnight Louie suddenly leaped atop the closed bottom portion.

The box was like a coffin: top ajar, bottom covered.

Fragile red silk lined the interior. In the open upper portion, next to a satin cat toy in the shape of a gaudy ice-cream cone, lay several blood-red commas, fifteen or sixteen scattered like rose petals.

They were the nail guards one might glue onto a cat's claws.

Kinsella shoved the box hard against the truck side, so the impact rang with a dull, bell-like thrum.

"The dressing room at the Opium Den," Molina said. "All that was left of Shangri-La were a few makeup tins, and the mandarin nail shells."

To Matt was left the logical pronouncement. "The cat Hyacinth was here. That's what Louie smelled."

Louie paced, and rubbed his nose against the corner of the box, like a chef honing a knife.

Max Kinsella began breaking down every cabinet left untouched in the trailer.

Matt and Molina watched as if caught on the sidelines during a sudden-death overtime.

"If she's not here," Matt said, "she must still be there. And the issue of air--"

"He's damned if he does, and damned if he doesn't. Either way we go, we risk everything."

Molina leaned against the truck side, looking weary. "I could phone in a search, but they wouldn't be able to open most of the remaining cabinets. And the company probably left behind what they did for good reason. Kinsella's got to eliminate the odds somewhere. We're here. It's most economical timewise to stay."

"That's what it comes down to? The least waste of time?"

Molina nodded solemnly. "We've committed. We've got to see it through here before we waste time going somewhere else."

"I'm glad I'm not a cop. Or a magician."

Midnight Louie, as agitated as they were, lurched back and forth from Max Kinsella to the two of them, meowing and pacing, only stopping to sniff at the uncovered cabinets.

"I had no idea," Matt said, "that so much could fit into the back of a semitrailer."

"Great smuggling device." She watched Kinsella shove a rejected cabinet aside.

"We can't help him?" Matt asked.

She shook her head. "Oh, we could shuffle furniture around, try to feel useful. But we'd just obstruct him in an attempt to soothe our own feelings. He's our drug-sniffing dog; let him work."

"Temple isn't 'drugs.' "

"She is if she's hidden in a magician's maze."

"Why can't we hear something, if she's here?"

"She could be gagged. Drugged."

"Or dead."

"Or dead."