Carole Douglas - Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit

The mental picture of a flock of courtly Fontana brothers gathering around her elfin mother stopped Temple’s fantasy scenario cold.

Matt hoped he didn’t look as dazed and white-faced as Roger Barr did at the moment. Both men sipped bourbon and kept their mouths shut.

“Too expensive,” Temple said with a sigh.

“Too exhausting,” her mother added.

The women sat silent also, mulling over reality.

After Temple’s brothers left at 7:30 p.m., Karen and Temple cleared up the picnic table while Matt and his future father-in-law tidied the popcorn and beer-can strewn recreation room on the lower level.

“I suppose we’re expected to have a man-to-man talk,” Roger said, shoveling the mess into a huge garbage bag.

“Do you have any questions?” Matt said.

“Nope. I know what you do for a living, what you’re maybe gonna do. What you did do.” The already well-marked furrows on Rogers’s forehead deepened. “I’m a little uneasy about this stalker thing.”

“That’s a fluke. That person is now out of the country and in the hands of the law.” Well, Matt thought, Max Kinsella was certainly a law unto himself.

Roger nodded. “Then I don’t need to know anything else, except getting to know you better. And finding out what kind of folderol the women will be putting us through.”

He dragged the trash bag through a door to the garage and then led Matt up the stairs, where Temple and Karen were back on the couch, curled up with their shoes off.

Karen rose. “We’ll all need our rest for tomorrow with the entire crew, guys, and then you take off, too soon. Our master is thataway, but you’re going thisaway.” She pointed to a hall leading left off the living room. “Tom put your luggage in the foyer.”

Temple and Matt nodded without comment.

“We did somehow manage to have four boys and one girl,” Karen said, “so there are now three empty bedrooms and two baths in that part of the house. Take your pick of the accommodations.”

Whew , Matt thought, diplomat Karen saved us all from the awkward moment of anyone declaring to sleep together or apart.

“Maybe,” said Temple with a wicked eyebrow lift, “we’ll just do progressive bedrooms.”

Of course, Matt knew, negotiating the sleeping arrangements at the old homestead with Karen’s daughter would be a lot trickier.

19

In Dublin’s Fair City

It may have been a long way to Tipperary in the old Irish song, but Belfast was only a two-hour drive from “Dublin’s fair city, where girls are so pretty”. In terms of “the Troubles” time, it was a centuries-long journey of political and personal pain and suffering.

Max hankered for the drive through tranquil green countryside to lull him, to make up for the sleep he’d lost while traveling with Kathleen. He must have learned his current self-hypnotic drone state during his counterterrorism work. With it, he could function automatically, yet snap out of it at the first sign of a threat.

Kathleen’s toe nervously tapped the floorboard as their rented Honda maneuvered the city’s eternal gridlock and narrow streets. He knew where he was going and hoped to find a precious parking space. Then a jolt of adrenaline zinged his senses like an inhalation of Chinese mustard as he spotted a blot of familiar bright red ahead, near the river Liffey.

At the same instant, Kathleen finally broke the silence. “So is a visitation to my daughter the first step in your Pilgrim’s Progress program?”

“It would seem logical.”

Kathleen burst into laughter. “You sounded like the late, great Mr. Spock just then. If you’re expecting me to provide you with a weepy reunion, you can forget it. I excised her and my abuser’s DNA from my life when she was an infant. This is pointless. You should book yourself a flight back to the U.S.”

“And leave you ‘a lone wolf’ ticking time bomb out there somewhere?”

“How are you going to ensure that I’ll not be that no matter what you do? Ah, such an unexpected sentimentalist you turned out to be. What convinces you that seeing my grown daughter will make me a changed woman?”

“Nothing,” Max said, fully engaged now that they were quarreling and because he’d been driving through the Dublin streets with Garry Randolph’s ghost fighting for possession of the left passenger seat. He faced Kathleen square on for an instant. “I’m curious to see how she turned out.”

“You seem to share that abnormal curiosity about other people with the Cinderella-footed Temple Barr, she of the whole wardrobe of tiny glass slippers. God, she wears a size five! Even I need a six. Was that what drew you to her?”

“How do you know her shoe size?”

“The Circle Ritz is easy to break into. Poor little Cinderella. I made a contribution to your rival’s mother’s wedding at that attached chapel weeks ago. You know the drill. Brides require something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. ‘Something stolen’ was an amusing addition to the list. I “borrowed” the mate to one of tiny Miss Temple’s intended wedding shoes.”

“I heard about the wedding, but really, Kathleen. Petite shoe-size envy? Women compete over the most trivial things.”

“Like you?” She slid him a knowing glance. “No. I just let her know I’d been the culprit and gave that shoe back. I wasn’t as stupid as the wicked stepsisters, to maim myself over her shoes, or her. You haven’t answered what the attraction was.”

“These things aren’t programmable, Kathleen. That’s why they’re natural wonders, unless we ruin it by too much analysis. Maybe, mostly her…energy and honesty.”

“I’m energetic.”

He laughed. “Yes, you are. Tireless, I’d say.”

“I was born amid lies.”

“Yes, you were.”

“Do you think I can become honest, an ‘honest woman’?”

“Only if you become honest with yourself.”

“Bollocks!”

“Then don’t ask me. I will note you’re wearing aqua today. That hardly matches the ‘honest’ color of your eyes, blue.”

“Your color as well. A magician is the most dishonest creature on the planet.”

“More of a juggler of the truth.”

“You used colored contact lenses in your performances and posters. ‘The Mystifying Max’, green-eyed huckster selling illusion for more than a hundred dollars a ticket. Where were your blue eyes then?”

“I was on the run too.” He pursed his lips. “If I gave you a hundred thousand dollars as a delayed donation to the IRA, would it be used for victim reparations?”

“ This victim would keep it as reparation. Besides, you never paid for our rendezvous in Sir Thomas and Lady Dixon Park.”

His look was chiding. “You never asked. But I think I’ve paid plenty.”

Driving on the left was an easy switch for Max. His brain had retained automatic reflexes, he noticed, better than memory of emotions.

“We’re parking here?” Kathleen sounded a bit panicky. “What’s here?”

He went around to the left side to let her out. “Tourist overload. We walk from here.” He took her arm, firmly, and guided her over the rough cobblestones until she jerked her arm away.

And spied a bright red façade labeled in bold gold letters, crammed with patrons.

“‘Temple Bar,’” she sneered. “You are so predictable. You fly in the face of irony. That’s where your local spy got the photos of Iris. It’s a tourist trap.”