Douglas, Nelson - Cat with an Emerald Eye

There he sits in his tattered, tiger-striped sweater that is all baggy at the elbows and hocks, his yellow eyes amber with satisfaction, acting as if he owned the occult.

"I am not sure," I say, "that I wish to sit in on a stance run by a bunch of amateurs."

"Amateurs? Louie, you do not know our pedigrees." He nods over his tacky shoulder.

Ears and whiskers pop out around the chair sides, mostly on tuxedos and spotteds and stripes.

I snort. "And how many Blacks do you have?"

"Two, including you."

"Two?" I think of Midnight Louise and stiffen.

Instead, the face that peeps around another chair is none other than that of my esteemed sire. I am surprised the old man would stick around for some New Age folderol, and tell him so.

"Well, lad," he says, leaping to the floor so as to be better seen and to project his voice further. What an old ham! "Me years on the sea have taught me a respect for Nature in her most whimsical ways. And just last night on this very site, I, too, witnessed a human now dead sending back a shade of itself. It seems to me that with our species' special psychic powers we can concoct an even more impressive parade of ghosts, and I owe my fellows the benefit of my wider travels and insights."

Methinks the sire has absorbed a bit of pomposity while abroad and aboard. Nor does he mention seeing any of the other visiting apparitions, which I find curious.

I see it is too late. I have been lured into this truly hair-brained enterprise. So I leap upon the nearest empty chair and say no more. In moments we assume our positions, moving atop the seance table, facing outward and linking tails. There is nothing our kind cannot accomplish while atop a table. Of course, in this position, the forelimbs do not know what the hind limbs are doing, but that is always the best stance to take in a seance, anyway.

I thrill as that communal hum begins anew. A sympathetic thrum vibrates through the conjoined tails. This is the true purpose of these elegant extremities, and one no human would ever guess just from looking at us waving them back and forth like elegant inkwell appendages.

In fact, if humans were to see us now, they would be so blind as to our true potency that they would simply shout at us to get down from the table.

Now our kind's purr is unique in the animal kingdom. We purr for many reasons: we purr in pleasure and we purr in pain. Consider the purr a variety of audible tranquilizer. So it also affects humans. My kind purrs in kitten birth, and kits purr as they suckle. We purr when we are sleeping, we purr when we are awake. We purr by ourselves and we purr together. We purr when being petted, we purr when being played with. For a few of us, there is one more purr, a secret purr. When we combine our secret purrs, we produce the Purr of Power. And that is simply the amplified amity we feel as furred and purred beings.

In that state, on occasion, we can lure the unusual. The out of the ordinary. The out of this world. Ghosts. Apparitions. Revenants. Spooks.

That is what we see when we peer so intently into a shadowed corner. That is what we hear when we sit atop the grandfather clock and cock our heads at the ceiling. That is what we sense when we run swift and intent to a night-darkened window. The human who comes after us may see, hear, sense nothing. Or the human may see, hear, sense a mouse or a cricket. But many times, we have glimpsed the unseeable, the unsensible.

What do we do with this inestimable gift? Most often, nothing. One of the great pleasures of not being a dominant species is the right to ignore our potential.

But this is a signal occasion. This is a deliberate calling-together, aimed at a specific specter.

I wonder why Karma wishes to participate in the resurrection of the escape artist known as Houdini. I wonder what vision we will raise today. For we will see something. I wonder if it will see us?

Chapter 21

Wild Black Yonder

Temple was too tired to worry about an innocent suspect that evening, even if Electra was willing to stake her life on her acquaintance's innocence. The real hidden suspect in this case was hardly innocent of anything in the broadest sense of the word and had a long history of taking care of himself only too well; but Max's relationship to Gandolph gave Temple the willies.

If Molina should find out--! She shuddered. And Max, expert mysteriarch that he was, probably would scorn her pitiful efforts to help.

What was Temple supposed to be anyway, a gumshoe?

She contemplated that as she pulled off her clothes and tumbled into bed, sweet bed, pausing only to rear up in the covers to turn the shoe phone's ring control to "off." A gumshoe, come on! Evidently the proverbial gumshoe was a predecessor of the rubber-soled tennis shoe, back in the days when gum trees (and not synthetics) provided the raw material. Gumshoe.

Sneaker.

There was one shoe she would never, ever covet. So clunky. So terribly unchic. So cliched.

Sleep came like a sledgehammer.

So did waking. She had been dreaming--not about black panthers, and not about gumdrop trees--but about gumshoe trees: metal tree limbs dripping blossoms of tennis shoes in every color of the rainbow. Temple (wearing her new Midnight Louie Austrian-crystal heels) was standing under this footwear umbrella, waiting for gaudily ripe shoes to plummet into her hands.

She awoke with a sense that she had lost something, or that it had been stolen. The bedroom was utterly dark. What had wakened her was a hand around her upper arm. It remained there yet.

"Shhh," came next, then a finger against her mouth.

She bit it, hard and with feeling.

The following smothered but creatively obscene remarks revealed the identity of her intruder beyond a doubt.

"How did you get in?" she whispered back.

"Someone left one of the French doors ajar," Max said. "Is that what you learned in martial arts class?" he asked in the aggrieved tone of the recently bitten.

"No, it's what I learned wrestling with an arsonist. And I didn't leave the French door ajar either ... though I didn't check on it tonight."

"Why not?"

"I was thinking about the psychic fair at the Oasis, where the police took D'Arlene Hendrix downtown to interrogate her about Gandolph's death. Or murder."

"They're wrong." Max was so shocked that he spoke in a normal tone. "I guess we can speak up; no one here but us, is there? I haven't checked the other side of the bed."

"Louie is not in residence," Temple said firmly. "But I can't swear to the rest of the rooms. I didn't search the place. Too tired. And you were gone when I got back from the living room Max, what are you doing here? Again? So soon? I thought you were going to knock in future."

Her eyes struggled to decipher the darkness, especially the black-clad man within it. She felt the bed shift as he rose, and could sense him moving toward the bedroom door on hush-puppy feet.

"These are not knocking times, I'm afraid. I'll make sure that French door is locked, and that no one else is in the condo; then I'll make coffee again while you get dressed."

Temple groaned. "Max, why?"

"I want you to break into a house with me."

"Whose house is it?"

"Mine."

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

"Gee, Kinsella, we never did fun things like this when we were together before," Temple observed as she stumbled on a sprinkler spigot and went sprawling face down on the thick, dead-brown Bermuda grass.

"Hurry, the moon is bright."

"And you never used to sweet-talk me like that either," she added as he jerked her upright.

Temple wasn't sure where they were, except it was a posh gated suburban development, and they had breached a remote section of stucco wall. Actually, Max had breached it; she had been hauled up after, ever the lot in life of the vertically challenged.