Douglas, Nelson - Cat with an Emerald Eye

Temple's travel-brochure meanderings never grew so thick as when she was feeling on foreign ground, so she cut the mental chatter and stepped onto the (get this!) clear glass paving stones set into pure-white cement.

The fountain she had heard suffered postnasal drip in a corner of the courtyard. One lugubrious drop of water after another fell from endless levels of copper-leaf ladders to vanish among the wan blades of bloodless plants massed at the fountain's bottom.

The single ponderous bell, now curiously mute, still trembled from its recent attempt at sound.

Beyond the fountain and the white stone garden and the copper-and-verdigris-colored leaves hung a curtain of glass beads, winking back the white, with no visible split in its surface.

Temple waited, knowing by now that some effect was forthcoming, that petal by bloodless petal the portal would part, and Mynah would choose to show herself lurking at its pale heart.

But the wall did not part, because it was not glass. It was running water. The waterfall sheet broke into individual drops as fat as glass beads, then thinned to harpstrings and finally dispersed to a mist that vanished except for an occasional drip in counterpoint to the fountain's steady tympanum beat.

Mynah stood beyond the absent barrier, dressed in a white gi. Her belt was black, and its dramatic charcoal slash matched her aggressive eyebrows.

"Come through," she suggested, "unless an occasional drop of rain frightens you."

Water, Temple recalled, could make vivid colors run. She clicked like a beetle over the glass flagstones dewed with moisture.

Once inside the room sound fell in tinkling sheets of digitally recorded New Age music, as random as rain and not nearly as refreshing. Mynah had not moved, but the window of water was in smooth place again, falling so perfectly it seemed plate glass, albeit a little wavy.

"Reminds me of the seance room," Temple commented.

"Seance room? In that ... joke of a haunted house? Please, you're talking about a cartoon."

"A cartoon didn't kill Edwina Mayfair."

"Edwina Mayfair. Such an obvious pseudonym."

"Obvious?"

Mynah cocked her wiry eyebrows and sank onto an arrangement of cotton-covered pillows.

" 'Edwina.' A feminized version of a man's name. Check the man's birth certificate and you'll probably find 'Edwin' is his middle name, or his father's name. And 'May-fair.' A pun on 'Playfair,'

do you think? No doubt he felt that true psychics didn't 'play fair' because they achieved their successes by intangible means. A master of the Tangible, our Gandolph the Great."

"Our?"

"I speak of the situation. He perished at our seance, cheesy and insincere as it was; therefore his death is 'ours.' "

"You take credit?"

"Credit... no! My dear Miss Barr, you have been severely affected by this ... melodrama, haven't you?" Blue eyes piercing through the rain of everyday appearances. "Don't! It was foreordained. Who was there, when or where it was held, is immaterial. He was doomed to die.

Somewhere. With somebody."

"By murderous means?"

"Murderous means? Well, we don't know that, do we? I think ... heart trouble is a suitably sentimental diagnosis for such occasions, don't you? Poor Edwina. Poor Gareth, the kitchen boy.

Such Arthurian names, so Pre-Raphaelite! So Victorian! We are modern, to our cores!" She pounded her fists, knuckles white as baroque pearls, upon the harp-bones of her chest. A gi can gap open or shut, depending on its wearer's bent. Again Mynah eyed Temple as if her vision were a threat, or an instrument. "Is that why you are troubled, why you seek psychic healing?

You obsess about death?"

It was as good an excuse as any. Temple looked down, trying to get up the nerve to feign nerves. Her very indecision did the trick.

"You poor girl!" Mynah's clasped fist uncurled, stretched out to Temple. "I read your confusion. You are torn between two--convictions."

"Yes!" Temple said, relief at Mynah's benign conclusion sounding overemphatic.

"What are they? You must tell me."

When Temple hesitated, Mynah pulled a small unbleached-muslin bag from one turned-back cuff. Six or seven tiny colored stones poured into her palm.

"Pick one. Only one. Quick! You must choose with your reflexes, like a master of martial arts, not with your head."

Temple never chose unthinkingly; that was all the fun. Not amethyst or garnet or pearl, they meant something common, she remembered. Something uncommon, to confuse the seeress in her lair. Temple snatched at a facet of light bright as a lizard's eye.

"Peridot," Mynah pronounced. "How unusual." The cold blue eyes flicked to Temple's hair.

"Perhaps not for one of your coloring and temperament.

"You are... impulsive." Ridiculous , Temple answered internally. "High-tempered." Stable .

"With buried psychic talents." Rubbish . Mynah leaned nearer, across the gulf of white marble floor tiles. "Passionate." Weeeeell, about the truth . "Imaginative, to a fault." Tell that to the nightly news. "You worry too much," she added soothingly. Bingo! Like, what am I doing visiting a manipulative, lying snake like this? "Nothing is wrong, my poor, impulsive, imaginative, frightened girl!"

She took Temple's hand and began to uncurl her fingers from around the semiprecious peridot. Temple considered resisting, but didn't want to blow her worried-girl cover.

"See how you secretly desire to reveal all the secrets at your core. ..."

Temple gazed into her bared palm, seeing only the peridot--a truly insignificant chip of peridot, really, hardly big enough for one tiny ear stud. Ralph Fontana would spit upon this piece of measly peridot! It wasn't big enough to reveal the hidden heart of a Thumbellina! Hardly worthwhile for an ant to tote it back to the anthill

"You are making mountains out of anthills," Mynah went on, "murder out of mere natural causes. Trust me. I read more than crystals and sand paintings, you know."

Temple didn't even know about the crystals and sand paintings; why didn't she get to see the main event? What did she have to do, cross Mynah's palms with peridot? She did so, turning her hand edgeways to let the nile-green chip drop into her hostess's hand.

"Generous." Mynah's smile indicated that she was back to enumerating a litany of Temple's virtues and vices.

"Does your husband practice any psychic powers?" Temple asked.

"My husband?" Mynah's big blue eyes blinked vacantly. It was as if her attention had been rudely shifted to the inhabitant of another planet. "Why would you even mention him, when you are seeing me?"

"Well, you are married--"

"And how does that concern you?"

"Not at all. I just thought he might be ... around." Temple glanced nervously toward the hovering plant forms.

"William is a dabbler," Mynah said shortly. "He is quite separate from my work."

"Where might I find him?" Temple persisted.

"At his day job." Mynah's white-frosted lip curled.

"At--?"

She tossed her head as if being forced to reveal the mundane facts were physically restraining. "An ... office building. I don't keep track of such places, such pursuits. You'll have to ask someone else who does."

Temple nodded, slowly. A wife who couldn't be bothered to re-member where her husband works? Granted, modern married cou-pies often went their own ways, but they usually at least knew the path to their spouse's workplace. Yet Temple sensed that Mynah wasn't keeping something from her; she simply hadn't bothered to know these things.

"Why do you want to see William?" the woman in white demanded, a tiny pout puckering the lipstick rime at the corners of her mouth.

"I'm new to all this. I'm trying to get a rounded viewpoint."