Unknown - 23_Cat_In_A_Vegas_Gold_Vendetta

She certainly hoped to find a missing nugget of a clue in the box she’d left on the coffee table.

Temple picked it up with a forbidden thrill, knowing she was acting on her nosy reporter’s “need to know” instincts. That was why she loved vintage clothes and objects. They all had a history and told a story and sometimes hid enchanting echoes of their pasts and their owners’ lives.

This box was the size of a ream of paper, but much lighter. The heavy cardboard was covered in a cream-colored textured paper, so the box was tailor-made for holding heavy cream stationery … and then mementos after the letters and notes had been used and forgotten. Temple let her fingertips caress the surface.

Nobody bought items like this except when stumped for a present for someone you didn’t know. Temple remembered being fascinated as a kid by the decorative boxes that notepaper and envelopes came in. She’d claimed them for holding her own treasures when they were empty.

Nowadays, greeting cards talked, sang, and showed minimovies, and people sent e-cards or “gifts” via online social-network sites.

Still, there was nothing like opening a sensual-feeling box, wondering why it had been kept for so long and what was inside. Poor Teresa was almost a human treasure box, hiding the last thing she’d ever seen, the image of a murderer.

Temple had already leafed through the loose photos of people she didn’t know, but now she carefully opened the two leather-bound diaries with gilt-edged pages and weighted satin ribbons for bookmarks. The first entries dated from Alexandra’s death, or, more accurately, her funeral, but they tapered off in both books after twenty pages to sporadic notations, mostly when Violet found a new stray cat.

Again and again the hard-to-read handwriting—in actual ink, probably from an expensive fountain pen bought just for these diaries—expressed love and loss and regret. Violet begged forgiveness for that “disastrous trip to Tucson,” for being “wrong.”

Temple sensed a terrible break between mother and daughter just before Alexandra’s sudden and tragic death. No event or other person was mentioned, just how, after her daughter’s sudden death, Violet had taken Alexandra’s Whisper and tuxedo cat, Rebecca, and Buttercup and her four yellow kittens back to Las Vegas, where Violet pledged to keep them together and cherished in her house until her death and beyond, so they all—cats and mother and daughter—could be together until the last one left “to go to the place you are and where I hope you are happy and getting along well.”

Later entries, Temple found, were all about adding cats to the retinue.

“I know you sent this poor homeless tabby to me.” “I love them so, as I love and miss you so.” And finally, the latest entries: “Did you come back to me as Pancake? Let me know. She is a lovely taupe stripe and so sweet and came home a day after her surgery. Sadly, she had four kittens coming, but she needed to be fixed. I hope—oh, I didn’t think! Were you one of her kittens? Oh, my darling daughter, I never dreamed you would leave me.”

Temple had to set the volume aside to avoid blotting the ink. Now that she’d read how much the cats meant to Violet, she understood why the old woman was trying such far-out ways to fend off death. That someone was already letting the cats out showed no one could be trusted to follow Violet’s wishes and keep the cats together in that house until their natural deaths, will or no will. It was an unrealistic hope.

It also showed Temple that Violet was not only surrounded by indifferent strangers or greedy hangers-on, but by someone truly mean.

Someone vindictive. Someone who wanted Violet’s last moments to be ones of repeated losses as, cat by cat, her beloved charges vanished. And she could do nothing about it. The dirty tricks were like tormenting a paralyzed person.

In pushing the diary away to save it from her tears, Temple saw something slide askew from the endpapers.

Opening the book again, this time from the back, Temple discovered three four-by-six-inch photos, printed the old-fashioned way. Two were of a beautiful blond young woman, slender and smiling, her face and hair and fingernails perfectly done, playing with a yellow-striped cat and its four tiny kittens.

The third photo was of a Barbie doll in the original box, the familiar features smiling through the cellophane window, hair blond, face perfectly made up under a cotton-candy cloud of shiny, wavy, Vegas-gold blond hair. That was the only photo with identifying writing on the back: “For My Beautiful One and Only Angel Barbie.”

Temple shuffled the photos back to the two showing Alexandra. Long neck and blond hair, blue eyes. Violet had not only started confusing her daughter with stray cats, she had always equated her to Barbie. Her own collectible precious baby doll.

Temple grabbed her netbook and did a search for “angel Barbie doll” that led her in seconds to the exact image in the third photo, the 1988 Happy Holiday Barbie. That explained the huge eighties silver bow in Barbie’s hair with its dab of red-and-green decoration. Mistletoe.

According to the Web site, this model had the “typical 1966 superstar face” and was considered the first “collectible” Barbie, setting off a buying frenzy among adult collectors, which would raise prices to incredible heights that later declined. Still, Temple saw that a 1988 Happy Holiday Barbie without the all-important Antiques Roadshow “original box” was worth two hundred dollars.

Had Violet begun collecting Barbie dolls for her baby daughter and kept collecting them, like the cats, even after her adult daughter’s death, as somehow embodiments of Alexandra, as she thought the cats were?

How crazy-sad.

That didn’t mean that someone crazy and not-so-sad didn’t have it in for Violet.

Temple rounded up possible suspects in her head.

Violet had made her money selling real estate and could have made enemies there. Someone burned in an old real-estate deal, say. Maybe the person had overpaid for the house Violet sold them, and that’s why they were haunting hers during her last days.

Or one of Violet’s spurned family members could resent not being her heir and had come secretly to Vegas to take revenge on Violet’s helpless rescue cats. Even a school rival of the impossibly pretty and perfect Alexandra, done up like a little doll from her earliest years, could harbor a hatred of the doting mother. Those folks would be hard to track … unless they had left clues.

If it was murder, the death of Pedro Gomez also seemed mean, almost childishly so, like a hard school-yard push. He was the last long-term employee loyal to Violet and her cats. So he was both a barrier for getting at Violet and another great loss during her last days. Where were the cats going?

What would be the object of killing Violet? She was already dying.

The motive had to be tormenting Violet, taking everything she had, with her knowing and hating it even in her foggy state. It had to be a personal vendetta.

That scheme would involve the moment she agreed to name an heir-executor and signed the will, which could be happening right now. And then that homicidally mean someone would lean close and tell Violet that no cat would be saved, that her house was history, an on-the-market property. That any assets would be given not to the family members she felt had betrayed her, but to the chosen person she had selected to carry on her hopes and dreams, who had been betraying her far more.

Who would that someone be, and why so vindictive? Freddie, the former great friend who’d known Violet long enough to build up a grudge? Jayden, the New Age con man who had spent several years operating in Arizona before coming to Vegas a year before, and who could have some hidden personal connection to Alexandra? Violet had come to depend on him most, so knowing he’d most manipulated her would hurt the worst.