Carole Douglas - Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit

Then she felt a brush of velvet fur behind her knee. Louie! His erect tail was always getting fresh with her legs when she wore a skirt, as he moved back and forth around her ankles.

Great. He could trip her and she’d lie here unfound until global warming would have caused the Pacific to rise and swamp California and the Mojave desert…and a Great White shark would be found flailing in the tide and someone in the boat following would say, “You need a bigger flashlight.”

Temple shook off her imaginative rerun of Jaws .

She took an unsteady step forward. A phantom tail brush saluted her other leg. She moved in hopes she could bend down and capture Louie, but another step brought only another unseen brush on her other leg.

Cats may not be able to see in the dark, but they do much better than a redhead with light-sensitive skin and blue-gray eyes. Temple knew. Carefully keeping her weight on a back foot before she slowly transferred it to a new step forward, she followed Louie’s weaving path ahead of her.

Until her slippered toe stubbed something large and hard, in a totally creepy way. Ouch !

Was there now another abandoned dead body in Electra’s inherited building?

The flashlight revealed a corpse, all right, a dead body of metal with a long narrow nose of shark-like saw-teeth. Why was she seeing sharks when she abhorred the species being demonized on “Shark Week” on cable TV? She recalled a PBS special that showed a sawshark, and then remembered something very insentient, something linked forever in the public mind with the word “massacre”. A chainsaw. What was a chainsaw doing in a basement storage area? And a really nasty scissors-looking tool big enough to have pulled some real sharks’ teeth?

She stepped carefully around the hardware and over the rough floor to examine one of the steel-doored storage units. Someone at some time had wanted to keep something very much under wraps in this building.

The flashlight revealed the door’s big steel combination lock hooked over a thick latch…and showed the lock’s curved neck had been cut through and was barely dangling from the latch. The flashlight beam glinted off the cut marks. They were the bright gleaming silver of new metal, unexposed to air and oxidation. She got out the big flashlight and illuminated the nearest door locks. All either had dangling cut locks, or broken locks lying on the floor below.

This damage was fresh, it was systematic, and the fact that all the doors had been breeched meant that the searcher or searchers had not found what was being sought. Temple parked the big flashlight in her tote bag again and used both hands to pull a door missing the lock entirely open enough to thrust her hand holding the tiny flashlight through.

She jumped. Huge metallic boxes taller than she stood in ranks like soldiers, light glinting off their steel silhouettes. The space seemed occupied by the mechanistic Borg from the Star Trek franchise. The “resistance is futile” aliens.

Temple backed away and was pulling out the big flashlight for a better view when she heard something from far above her, what would be a second story or attic in a house. A faint squeaking noise. Or, a desolate meow? Thumps, footsteps and maybe worse followed. Louie! She had seen Louie, only now he’d apparently gone up the back stairs. Why?

Another meow came from above, this time a puma’s caterwaul, a long fierce growl changing into a wildcat scream, followed by a desperate feminine shriek. Electra! Then a man grunted and cursed.

Temple’s imagination went wild. Following the big flashlight’s broad beam, she backtracked to the stairs, then climbed the two flights of rickety steps to the top floor. Luckily, she weighed little and her flat slippers took her up the steps like a mountain goat.

She finally stepped onto the second story at the back of the building, switching to the tiny flashlight to be less noticeable, pointing it down to the floor, squinting down the hall between the abandoned antique mall cubicles, toward a black knot of figures gathered under the grotesque chandelier maybe two hundred feet away. The guttural buzz of lowered and threatening voices drifted back to her. And one higher, pleading voice. Oh, Electra !

She started forward, crazy, but she couldn’t ignore the danger to Electra and Louie. Besides, reinforcements were coming.

As she walked on silent slipper soles, she detected motion on her left and froze, taking out Hardy Boys flashlight as a weapon. It didn’t look like plastic at first glance.

About halfway to the figures ahead surrounding a light as if circling a campfire, she saw a dark, sitting cat, licking its paw.

Louie, that relaxed?

Then she squinted harder and saw…the dark color was brown, not black This was Ingram! That was what…who…she’d felt grazing her calves and giving her goose bumps as she’d left the Thrill ‘n’ Quill. What would draw an ensconced, only-indoor cat like Ingram this far from home?

Ingram leveled a bored yellow gaze at her and switched to grooming his other paw. What! All she had on her side was this couch potato bookshop pussycat, who had probably only used its claws to work out an errant knot behind its ears?

She sighed and edged forward. Weirdly, the electrified chandelier was lit. Murky light filtered down through the dusty loops and faceted pendants of glass. It looked like a light fixture snatched from Mephistopheles in Hell.

The chandelier barely illuminated what resembled a stage set in a dark theater. Four standing men surrounding a simple worktable and chairs. Two women sat on the chairs, the most concentrated light from above falling on their pale-haired heads like the spotlights used in Film Noir police interrogation rooms. Temple recognized Electra’s Bird of Paradise design muumuu, fading to pastel in the overhead light, as did her shadow-sunken features. Oh, Lord. The other woman was blonde. Oh no, Diane ! Both of them, ex-wives of the dead man who’d dangled above this strange vignette at the top of the stairs only days ago…captives. Of whom? Why? What was happening here?

“I don’t have it, I’ve said that over and over,” Diane was telling the standing people, who must be the extortionists. Temple’s fuzzy focus indentified the silhouettes of the usual suspects, Punch and Judy, a.k.a. Punch Adcock and Katt Zydeco, Leon Nemo, and some other guy as tall and limber as Katt.

“Please let us go.” Diane was whining, pleading now. “I went through every damn thing, paper or property, relating to Jay in Dayton and gave it to my lawyer to forward to the attorney here.” Her blonde head swiveled toward Electra. “Tell them. They know you must have it. Don’t be a hero. They mean to hurt us.”

“I don’t have whatever it is. I don’t have anything from Jay,” Electra said through gritted teeth. “I tore my place apart, looking for your damn paper. I brought anything you might want. It’s all there. Let us go! Let us all go.”

“All go”? Temple thought the usage strange. Only Electra and Diane were on the hot seats. And what “paper” was so valuable?

Then Temple saw that the table held a big box of some sort. Maybe something found in one of the violated storage units below. A few white sheets of paper lay atop it.

“This is a freaking marriage license, lady!” one of the men shouted as he grabbed one paper to shake in Electra’s face. “Between you and the late Dyson. You think we give a damn about your marriage license?”

Leon Nemo’s voice had lost its forced joviality and was all anger and threat.

“No,” Electra answered, “but how would I know what you want? You won’t say what it is, it’s so secret. ‘Just the paper’, you said. Get me the right paper. It’s a license.’ What you’re holding is the only ‘license’ I have, except for four others like it.”