Unknown - 23_Cat_In_A_Vegas_Gold_Vendetta

“Rebecca,” Matt echoed. “I guess I should read it?”

Temple lifted an eyebrow. “It’s a dark, romantic novel but way less sloshy than Wuthering Heights.”

“It’s on my iPad,” Matt said. “Or will be in a heartbeat, if the great Max Kinsella says it’s relevant.”

“‘The great,’” Max mocked himself.

“Legendary, then,” Matt said. And grinned. “It’s quite a … kick to be more together than you are at the moment, even if that won’t last. I’m sure your memory loss will fade as you follow the leads you got in Ireland. You’re right. We should unite to exorcise this female demon whose venom has touched all our lives.”

“I applaud your gutsy imagery,” Temple said. “I don’t think female transgressors should be spared a thing just because they’re women.”

She noticed Max’s face looked both bitter and rueful.

“What if they’re transgressors because they’re women?” he asked.

So Max told them what he’d briefly mentioned to Temple, that Garry Randolph had tracked gorgeous-but-lethal IRA moll Kathleen O’Connor to her roots.

Temple couldn’t watch Matt’s face during Max’s terse recital, keeping her eyes on Louie, who looked back and forth between the two men as if watching a tennis game. He didn’t want to miss a nuance. Cats are always masters of subtlety, their own or their neighboring human’s.

“A Magdalen asylum?” Matt repeated, unbelieving.

He obviously knew about these Church-run industrial institutions that incarcerated supposed “fallen women,” including girls, for life. Many were put to hard labor in these places, named after Mary Magdalene, and there they lost their real names and became “lost” to society.

“Holy Mother of God,” Matt murmured. “Those places were hellholes of Old World ‘discipline,’ otherwise known as mental and physical and even sexual abuse. Ireland’s and Scotland’s were notorious and operated until late in the twentieth century. No wonder a young woman labeled ‘unholy,’ as Kathleen was, would come out twisted. The motives were cultural; they go back centuries and aeons and appear in all societies and religions. It’s why the human animal is so hard to defend. Hypocrisy. Bred in the bone and soaking the soul until it drowns.”

“Beautifully stated, prosecuting attorney,” Max said. “But no.”

“No?” Matt was on a righteous roll. “We shouldn’t pity Kathleen as victim as well as our personal villain? The young women were incarcerated for life—for life—and considered unholy creatures unworthy of the smallest kindness or sympathy, not even allowed their own names.… Why wouldn’t anyone strong enough to evade that fate be a monster?”

“You don’t understand,” Max said in a mild tone.

Matt’s fists were bunched, white-knuckled. “That’s my job, to understand.”

“You don’t have all the facts,” Max said.

Temple stayed out of it. This was where the rubber hit the road. For all her desire to negotiate a decent truce between the two men who were rivals for her in their own minds, they had to throw it all out there and learn this was about them, not her.

And about Kitty the Cutter, above all.

“Then tell me all the facts,” Matt said, demanded.

Max smiled slightly. He had played this to get Matt going in one indignant direction then another. He was testing the level of passion and commitment Matt would bring to the hunt for the real Kathleen O’Connor.

Temple knew he’d be surprised, but she was thinking of the old Max, not the maimed man before them. She eyed how he angled his stretched legs across the central space of the limo “living room.” He needed to take the pressure off his body so his mind was up to handling a tricky situation.

His eyes found her fascinating—as a missing piece of his past. They no longer held the look of love. So she breathed a sigh of relief even as the two men jostled in the closeness of the limo compartment for position, a place they each could stake out without losing face.

Not an easy “guy” thing.

“Listen,” Max said, talking only to Matt. “You’re a good guy, by intention. I hear I was a quasi-good guy, always trying to undo my past by hunting the future in the form of Kathleen O’Connor. Gandolph the Great. There’s where the word great really comes in. I was always just the ‘Mystifying.’ He was my mentor, my father in absentia, my ‘great’ friend. Garry Randolph. A second-class magician, maybe, but a first-class human being.”

“Don’t you blame Kathleen O’Connor for his death?”

“I blame myself. She’s been an easy out for my entire life, I’m thinking now. Yeah. She needs to be stopped, for her own sake, maybe. That much hate, even justified, is ultimately self-corrosive.”

“What do you mean by ‘that much’ hate?” Matt asked.

“You see, she wasn’t just put in a Magdalen institution as a teenager. Her mother was.”

“Her mother? Who was that?”

“Who knows?” Max said. “I saw the mass graveyard of unmarked, unnamed burial sites at one such place near Dublin. The point is that the woman who called herself Kathleen O’Connor and then Rebecca, our mutual enemy who won’t die, was born in a Magdalen asylum. Her mother had been consigned there. And there Kathleen grew up to have her own child.”

“Child?” Temple couldn’t contain herself. “Kitty the Cutter has a child?”

“She had one,” Max said, eyeing her for the first time in several minutes. “She ran away as an unwed mother, one of very few who had the will to escape.”

“To become the femme fatale who seduced you in Belfast?”

“I wasn’t her first, but she was mine, my aching bones tell me that much. And my instincts.”

“She must have been incredibly damaged.” Matt shook his head.

“She is,” Max said. “Beyond what any of us can imagine.”

“The rings,” Temple said.

Both men eyed her.

“Matt. She forced you to wear that big ugly snake ring for a while.”

“Not a snake. The worm, Ouroboros,” he said, looking unhappy to share the incident with Max. “It’s an ancient eternity symbol. A ‘worm’ or Medieval dragon eating its own tail.”

“Rather like Kathleen herself,” Max said. “What about such a ring, Temple? She forced it on Matt?”

“When she was stalking him.”

“After the razor attack?” Max wanted to know.

Matt spoke for himself. “Yes. She’d marked my skin. She wanted to mark my mind and soul. I had no option, but she finally stole the ring back, as if she’d tired of the game. She’d threatened Temple. Every woman I came in contact with.” Matt hesitated. “I was counseling a call girl who fell to her death. I never knew if Kitty the Cutter had done that or not.”

Max drew back to coddle his glass of Scotch. “She’s really put you through the ‘Guilt Gavotte,’ too, hasn’t she?” He looked at Temple. “You’re being quiet. Am I right to think that’s not typical?”

“The ring business is beyond … eerie. I found the Ouroboros ring in my scarf drawer not long ago, and I don’t know where it came from.”

“Your scarf drawer?” Max drawled. “Is this a place of pilgrimage? An inner sanctum? Who has a scarf drawer these days?”

“Temple collects vintage clothing,” Matt explained. “She stores shoes, gloves, hats. And scarves.”

“Any of my magician’s unending rainbow of linked chiffon scarves?” Max asked with a fluid gesture that almost made that hokey trick seem visible in his hands for a moment.

“You didn’t do the scarf trick,” Temple said. “Way too expected. No, the fact is I’m not good with scarves. Some women are. I’m not the drapery sort of woman. Too short.” She looked down. “So is Louie.”