Unknown - 23_Cat_In_A_Vegas_Gold_Vendetta

“Oh, good. We’re alone.” Violet’s clawlike hand clasped Temple’s forearm with painful desperation. “They never leave me alone.”

“Who?” Temple asked in the same loud whisper Violet used.

In the kitchen, she could hear Jayden and Savannah bickering over a chorus of meowing cats. What a perfect time to interview Violet. Almost as if Savannah had engineered this moment.

“Everyone,” Violet replied. “You’re such a pretty little girl, just like my Alexandra. I can tell you. You wouldn’t believe what’s going on here.”

Temple’s eyes got bigger and she leaned closer, though Violet’s breath was very bad. Illness or Jayden’s brews?

“Every night men climb in and out of my bathroom window.”

“Aren’t your windows locked?”

“They’re very old, like the house. A child could get past them now.”

“What do the men want?”

“My fine china and sterling silver place settings. Will you look in the dining room to see that it’s still there? The burglars do stumble over the cats a lot, but they’re disappearing, too.”

“The cats? How can you tell?”

“How can I tell?” Violet’s grip grew more painful. “Whisper, Alexandra’s white shorthair, never comes to visit my bed anymore. I haven’t seen Frederick, the mackerel tabby, since Pedro deserted me.”

“Pedro didn’t desert you. He had an … accident and fell into the concrete canyon behind your house.”

Violet’s features puckered with puzzlement. “You’re not supposed to swim there.” Then came panic. “Maybe that’s where the cats are going. None of them are supposed to leave the house. That’s where they’re to stay. And where’s Alexandra’s old girl, Little Doll? Where have some of my cats gone?”

“There’re so many,” Temple said, wondering if Violet was imagining things or … right.

“Oh, I know every whisker on every one. I’ve only been bedridden for … for a day or two. Or is it a week or two? Time! It’s hard to keep track of, but I can keep track of my cats and my china.”

“How do you know Jayden?”

“Oh. He has a New Age shop. He knew Alexandra when he lived in Sedona and he met her in Tucson when he toured the southwest. Then he moved here. I went to see his shop, for crystals and magnets. I have magnets on all my cat collars. And under my mattress. They’re from Father Hell.”

“Father Hell?”

“A funny name for a priest, isn’t it? But he was a Jesuit healer. Father Maximilian Hell. He was a friend of the mesmerism man and knew how to restore your magnetic fluid.”

“Is that what you’re drinking, magnetic fluid?” Temple picked up the empty Garfield mug. Violet seemed spacey and erratic, and she was jumbling thoughts together. If her mind was going, were iffy potions helping it depart? “It sounds like something you’d put in an automobile.”

“Hardly,” came Jayden’s jarring voice from behind her. “What has our Miss Violet been saying?”

“Just telling me about mesmerism and magnets,” Temple said, pulling her arm from Violet’s death grip. She turned to him and dropped the Garfield mug into her tote bag in one smooth movement when her body momentarily blocked his vision. “Apparently, you own a shop.”

“I do.” Jayden produced a card from his pale linen pants pocket. A slightly wrinkled card reading, HEALING ARTS, MAGNETIC AIDS.

“Very interesting.” Temple studied the images of faceted gemstones and sunlike rays. “But I’d hate to sleep atop something dreamed up by a guy named ‘Father Hell.’”

“It’s more than merely interesting,” Jayden said. “Magnet therapy goes back to the Egyptians and the Greeks. By the seventeen-seventies, Father Hell could heal people with a steel plate so successfully that Franz Anton Mesmer, the German physician and pioneer in hypnosis, studied Hell’s devices and results and first identified the subtle magnetic fluid flowing through all creation and creatures. The correct placement of magnets on or near the body will restore the disruptions in the field we call poor health.”

“Uh-huh.” Temple had dropped the gaudy card into her tote bag also, where it landed inside the Garfield mug. She pulled the straps tight on her shoulder so no one could see in.

She turned to Violet. “I’ll certainly do everything I can to help care for your cats now that Pedro’s … not here.”

“Do you have any cats?”

“Just one.”

“Only one! So many need homes.”

“He’s a very dominant cat.”

“Oh, you’ll end up with more, my dear. I can tell the lone and wounded just flock to you.”

“You may be right,” Temple said, sweeping her gaze past Jayden’s unnervingly odd-eyed face. In fact, she spotted a white cat with one blue and one gold eye on the bedside chair. “Is this your missing Whisper?” she asked Violet.

“Oh.” She turned her head to view the animal. “No. That’s her sister, Becky Sharpe.”

Temple was startled to hear a cat named for the heroine of an old novel. Then she remembered that Becky Sharpe had been “two-faced.” Violet was, or had been, pretty sharp herself.

“I’m going to help Savannah put out the cat food in the kitchen,” she told Violet in farewell. “It was fascinating meeting you.”

Temple couldn’t help wondering if Jayden’s differently colored contact lenses played on odd-colored eyes sometimes showing up in animals. It would certainly give him an “in” with cat and dog lovers. Did human eyes have that possibility too? Max had worn cat-green contacts when he’d performed as a magician. She wondered if he’d ever gone with one natural blue eye and one artificial green one.

It certainly was a distraction, and magicians are all about distraction. Like right now. Temple was thinking of her returned “lone and wounded” ex, when she should be figuring out what was going on at Violet’s house.

She had to thread her way through milling cat bodies to reach the kitchen and found that the cat treats being distributed had attracted cats like a nucleus gloms on to protons. Or whatever. She was relieved to spot two other Garfield mugs on the counter. The one in her tote bag would not be missed.

“So,” she asked Sue Anna—Savannah—“who will take over Pedro’s litter-sifting and outdoor-burying duties? Surely not the devoted Jayden. And you don’t have the footwear for the job.”

“Oh, Rowdy will do it,” Savannah said, pinching her nostrils shut and waving her free hand under her nose to indicate the distastefulness of the task. “He’s been in town all these years since Alexandra died. Violet could never stand him, but she’s been forced to call on him now and then since she got ill. Not that he’ll get anything out of it but doo-doo.”

“Rowdy?” By now Temple realized her nose was already adjusting to the overpowering odor of many cat boxes in close quarters. She desperately wanted to go outside to talk and breathe.

“As someone with a cat of my own, sort of,” she started to tell Sue Anna … Savannah. She had to forget the woman’s birth names—first, middle, and last—because she would simply giggle at having unmasked the eternal starlet’s unpretentious past, and this was not the place for inappropriate reactions.

“Oh, yes.” Savannah gritted her ultrableached teeth. “I remember that rogue male well! I ended up owing my plastic surgeon a bundle for ‘fixing’ your tomcat with a vasectomy instead of a neutering. He was a very dumb doctor. And he threw in a tummy tuck for your Two-O’Clock Louser, while I certainly didn’t get any freebies. I can’t afford any more surgery with the stupid economy, and I desperately need Botox and collagen. And Violet won’t leave me anything ‘on principle.’”