Douglas, Nelson - Cat with an Emerald Eye

Temple was all the way through the courtyard and at the front door before she realized that she had no key to get in with, and even if she had, it took two hands (and on her, both arms) to handle a whopper.

Not to worry.

The wide wooden door swung silently open on the dark within. Max--or someone apparently knew she was coming.

Creepy.

She edged inside, bearing her hot cardboard box before her.

Gandolph? Or even ... Orson?

The door hushed shut behind her, and only when it had whooshed closed--heavy-duty, light-blocking, sound-deadening rubber weather-stripping no doubt--did a light arise. This light came on softly, on the turn of a rheostat.

"Supper, I take it." Max nodded at the box.

"You can take it." She handed it over, smiling. She liked the word "supper," so Midwestern, so unassuming, so cozy. Uh-oh. "Thanks," she added as she followed him into the house's still-dark and twisted bowels.

Few lights were on in the front rooms, but a faint one led them to the kitchen.

"Pepe's," Max read aloud from the box's garish top. "You remembered."

Temple shrugged. Pepe's had been their favorite take-out pizza place. Some things don't change.

"Can we let it cool for a minim?" he asked. "The big oven will reheat it in a flash."

"It could cool for a millennium and still be roof-of-the-mouth-scalding hot," Temple answered.

Minim . British for "minute." She'd always thought Max's use of the odd foreign expression reflected his magicianly travels. Now it reminded her of his mysterious past. "What's up?"

"First tell me what you've learned of those who commune with the incommunicado."

Temple duly reported her adventures in psychic land to Kinsella, who leaned against Gandolph the Great's travertine kitchen countertops and tented his daddy-longlegs fingers. Bad romance novels usually featured heroes "without an ounce of fat" upon their entire bodies. Max didn't have an ounce of fat on his fingers, which Tempe found infinitely sexier.

"While you've been communing with psychics, I've been getting around some myself," he said when she was through. "I want to show you something. Wine?"

He opened one of the many tall, built-in doors of stainless steel facing the kitchen. A small wine cellar, bottles resting on wrought-iron cradles, lurked behind this one.

".Wine's fine, as long as you don't wall me up in your cellar and try to decide if you can get me to reappear on the cooktop."

"You got the usual?" he asked over his shoulder.

"Everything on it."

"So a slightly nutty but refined white would honor the veal sausage, but a boisterous country red would wed with the pepperoni. Then again, an ambitious but ambidextrous rose would compliment everything."

"Max, you know that I don't care about wine pedigrees."

"Then the full-bodied red it is," he said, flourishing a bottle and grinning at her a bit too personally over his shoulder.

Yes, much too tall to be the dark, dangerous, romantic man from Agatha's tea leaves.

Absolutely. Temple would stake her Midnight Louie shoes upon it.

Temple was also perfectly happy letting him worry the cork out. Some things in life men were truly better equipped to accomplish. She was perfectly happy to let him pour, especially since the wine glasses were in a narrow, under-ceiling cupboard above the range hood that only a second-story man could reach.

The glasses were oversize and hand-blown with a faintly iridescent glaze that made her feel she was holding a soap bubble. Magician's glasses. A soap bubble filled with blood-red wine. A dead magician's glasses, maybe. Maybe even a murdered magician's glasses.

"I rented the house furnished," Max said from a distance.

The distance was hers. She'd been staring into the bowl of the glass as if into a crystal ball, and he'd read her mind as if her head were just as transparent. Then she wondered if he had bought the house furnished, and the glass was an artifact from the late Orson Welles.

Temple managed a smile, then followed him down the dim hall, supporting the glass with a hand under its foot.

All the light in the house was concentrated in one room: the office. Yet only the peripheral lamps were lit, on low, for the central light was not the overhead fixture, but the muted glow of the computer screen. Bright tropical fish schooling in a screen-saving program made her think of the Mirage tanks. No sharks here, though; she hoped.

Max had stepped back like a showman after entering the room; indeed, it had changed remarkably since she'd left it last. Not for the better.

Books were piled everywhere, and papers spewed from the printer lay on the desk, on chairs, on the floor.

A phone now perched on a chair seat pulled up to the office chair. Alongside the desk sat a tower of trade paperbacks with garish yellow and black covers.

Temple bent to read their spines, which were all in the same style and bore variations on the same title. "Modesty becomes you," she commented, straightening.

He refused to let her needle him, but waited behind her with an air of... what? Kid showing off his first magic trick? Santa holding Christmas two months early? Someone knowing she was about to stumble upon the Midnight Louie shoes at any minute?

"Have a seat." He indicated the chairman-of-the-board-size leather chair before the cluttered desktop. "Let me put down your wine " Indeed. "Here." He had found the one relatively bare spot just big enough for the silver-dollar-size foot of the glass.

All right. If Pepe's pizza could cool in the kitchen, Temple could take her time here and find out what was going on. She bent to peer at the tower of books again . Windows 95 for Dummies. The Internet for Dummies. Object-moving for Dummies. Were these computer books, or magic books? Or were computer books this age's magic books?

"I don't get it," Temple admitted. The only sure way to weasel information from a magician was to profess bewilderment.

"What about this?" Max leaned over her right shoulder to tap some keys on the board with his long arms.

The screen-saver image winked away; instead of fish there were rows of typed words taking their place, with a graphic loading into the empty rectangle above them. Nothing artistic about this image. Some kind of... form. An employment form, maybe. Date. Name. Age. Occupation--

The image was filling top to bottom, black and white. A photograph.

"Well?" Max was still hanging over her shoulder, his face next to hers; when he moved she felt a slight sandpaper brush and looked at him. He hadn't shaved, and Max was always preternaturally groomed, without her having seen the process, she recalled a bit bitterly, which was why she had never seen his blue eyes made green.

Max had eyes only for the screen; he never noticed her perusal, her abrupt retreat into hurt memory.

"Well?" he asked, narrowing his eyes at the image as if the most stupefying magic act in the world were going on right in front of them

Temple looked back to the screen, a good move considering the slight sting in her eyes. It took her a moment to focus through her own despair. The photo was filled out now, not nearly as sharp as a good portrait, but pretty focused for a computer screen.

"Well?" Max repeated.

And then she finally saw... "Oh, my God! It's... one of them."

He nodded, not noticing that they were practically cheek to cheek and that his cheek was scratching hers. Men! she wanted to exclaim, in her smart single-woman exasperation with the species; they always rub you the wrong way. But the usual single-female ham-on-wry wasn't ringing true for her anymore. It wasn't Men! and that they'd forgotten to shave or walked out of her life. It was that she didn't have any skin left anymore. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa . For the first time, she really understood something religious that Matt had said.