Douglas, Nelson - Cat with an Emerald Eye

Despite the stretchy modern fabrics, at close view Mynah's tent revealed itself as an albino chapel to the ghost of Art Nouveau. This was a pale, calm oasis amid the color and hullabaloo, a moon suspended over the gaudy rainbow.

Sickle-shaped mirrors hung against the flimsy curtains. An old trunk gaped open in the middle of the booth, with an artistic tidal wave of glittering fabrics. Vintage kaleidoscopes and stereopticons peeked from between pallid folds. On the booth's long front table, glitter-dotted white cotton batting played backdrop for moonstone jewelry in sinuous silver settings.

Mynah presided over this Winter Wonderland like the Snow Queen from Hans Christian Andersen's most savagely cynical fairy tale.

"The moonstones!" was all Electra could say.

Fanned, Mynah's long fingers and nails passed over the array as if hesitating above the keys of a musical instrument. Temple could almost see the drops of lucent moonstone tremble to her not-quite-touch.

"My miniature scrying mirrors," Mynah commented. "I sell them, and you buy them to find out what can be seen in mirrors, if anything."

"There are no price tags," Temple noted.

Mynah was unperturbed. "No, I establish prices on the spot, depending on how I like the purchaser." She tilted her head. Her eye-brows were dark but unpenciled, her eyes ice-crystal blue, her makeup as subtle as snow, if she even wore any. "You like something? Want me to price it for you?"

She had the air of a lazing Big Cat, a white tiger napping before deciding to pounce. Temple didn't want to give the woman the edge of instantly evaluating her by setting a price too low, or too high, to be real.

"There's too much to see," Temple said. I'd need time to pick one. They're all so exquisite.

Do you make them yourself?"

"No. I only ... touch them to activate their hidden properties, rather the way I conduct stances. The one last night was not a seance, but a show," she added with quick disdain.

"A bad show," Electra put in over Temple's shoulder. "I'd really love these earrings, how much?"

"For you?" A smile, wider than it was warm. "Forty-seven dollars."

Electra didn't wince as she pulled out her checkbook.

Mynah reminded her to present her driver's license, then wrote down the number on the check. "Remember, once I touch them, these mini-mirrors of mineral might show you anything."

"Just so it isn't my crow's-feet." Electra laughed earthily.

Crow's-feet, apparently, did not intrude into Mynah Sigmund's world. She answered with utter seriousness. "The moonstones do not show the present, or the superficial. They reflect deep, and delve both past and future."

Oh, goody galoshes , Temple thought, were back in seance mode: no contractions and portentous predictions.

Electra pocketed her package and ebbed behind Temple, leaving her to begin a disingenuous interrogation of someone who had probably been born calculating odds and memorizing state income tax tables.

"Mynah, babe!" The man's voice came from behind Temple and Electra.

"Why, Big Mike." Mynah's face tilted so she could eye him from-under her black lashes. Her pale lips produced a Mona Lisa slice of sickle moon. "There's room just for you. Go around the side curtain and come into my parlor. You can sit a spell."

From her lips, the word "spell" sounded like a sinister enchantment rather than a colloquial expression for "a while."

Temple glanced significantly at Electra. She had not seen such a blatant case of Phony Female since junior high school.

The man seemed oblivious to the invitation's artificiality. He stomped around the booth's side, bulled through the delicate fabric and plopped down on a gray folding chair next to Mynah.

"Where you been so long?" the White Witch asked in tones syrupy enough to drown pancakes.

Her eyes were only for the new arrival. Temple and Electra could have been wooden Indians, for all she cared.

Temple wasn't used to being erased from any woman's consciousness merely upon the Arrival of a Man. She checked Electra, who was also suffering a sudden case of invisibility.

The Man in Question was a big beefy guy in his forties, genus rancher. He stuck cowboy-booted feet out from the chair and hitched his thumbs in his Levi's pockets. A bolo tie with an art gallery Native American slide added a regional touch of formality to his Western-cut shirt. He returned the same knowing look-for-two that Mynah gave him.

"How's the fair doing?" His brusque manner indicated that he didn't care much one way or the other.

"Fine, now that the inane semipublic seance is done. We had ourselves a double apparition, one of them in triplicate, did you hear? And a small death."

He was nodding and smirking. Words were unimportant. What mattered was the music playing under them, the separate and se-cret language of expressions that made this conversation a duel of innuendo and taunt.

"Mynah!" The next man who arrived behind Temple and Elec-tra was tall, but as well stuffed as a teddy bear sagging at the mid' die. "Do you need me to cart away the empty boxes now?"

Mynah's husband, what's-his-name, was as indifferent to Tern* pie's and Electra's presence as the other man, but behind his mock tortoiseshell eyeglass frames, Temple spied a dull resentment, a cowed fury. Ah, yes, this was the Nowhere Man pointed out last night as the Snow Queen's heavyweight husband. Then who was yon frowsy middleweight parked in the folding chair?

William Kohler, that was his name! The husband's, not the rancher's.

"I just shoved them all under the tablecloths myself." Mynah's careless wave of one white hand implied William had been derelict in his duty, so the brave little woman had done it all alone.

Sour William still needed something to fuss about. "They can't all fit under there."

"They did." Her lake-blue gaze had iced over.

Mr. Mynah was not wanted here, nor was Temple, who had not bought, nor Electra, who had.

The New Man watched with smug contempt as William tightened his lips. "All right," he muttered. "I'll check again later."

It sounded like a threat rather than a promise, but not much of either. He lumbered off, still muttering.

Mynah sighed, shifted, let herself remain the focus of all eyes. "He really is a dear."

She might just as well have said, "He really is a bear," for the emotion in her tone.

"So who have you knocked dead with your smile now?" the oaf in the chair asked.

She shrugged. "A hermaphrodite, apparently." A practiced trill masqueraded as a laugh. "A man dressed as a woman, can you believe it? Came to expose us fraudulent mediums."

"Seems like he ended up well done." The guy pulled out a Navajo pocketknife to jab at the grime beneath his nails.

Temple was repulsed beyond staying to do her duty as an inquiring mind. She turned to Electra and lifted both eyebrows.

Electra nodded.

"Well come back after we check out the other booths," Temple announced pointedly.

Mynah's demi-smile widened, but she didn't look at them; her gaze was only for the guy on the chair. "Take your time, ladies," she mocked, making "ladies" sound like Victorian biddies on an expedition to buy bell jars.

By the time the two were beyond hearing distance, both were too miffed to speak.

"What a... phony broad," Temple finally managed to spit out. "I thought that kind of billboard-obvious man-hunting went out with Scarlett O'Hara."

"Scarlett was never that obvious. I'd forgotten about that," Electra reminisced fondly.

"About what?"

"What it felt like to become instantly invisible when a woman you were with wanted to concentrate on a man."

"You were used to that?"

Electra widened her eyes. "We all did it then. It seemed logical."

"To the men too, I bet."