Unknown - 22_Cat_In_An_Ultramarine_Scheme

Temple had to wonder if he still visited here, and visited Midnight Louise, here. The female cat had not been in sight when Temple entered. She’d looked the place over.

Temple studied the closed door to the hallway. It didn’t look completely closed, but she had drawn it fully shut.

Someone had let the cat in after she arrived.

Midnight Louise was the house cat now; maybe she’d made a deal with the house ghost. The suite was always on the chilly side, and now was no exception. Goosebumps stippled Temple’s arms.

She picked up her tote bag and walked out the slightly open door into the hall. She turned back to see Midnight Louise curled up on the (warmed-up) chair seat she’d left. The blinds seemed slanted at a more-open angle to allow light to stripe Louise’s languid form. The gray satin drapes on the left where the blind cords would be were stirring, almost taking shape as if someone was hiding behind them… .

Temple pushed the suite door almost shut, just enough for a cat to paw ajar and get out.

Five steps down the hall, she heard the gentle click of it closing.

Not her business.

Merciless Tenders

“Woo,” Max mocked as he stretched to full length outside the Mondeo’s driver’s side door and took a long look around. “ ‘I dreamt I went to Manderley again.’ ”

He smiled at Gandolph, who got the Daphne du Maurier reference right off.

“So you remember the creepy manor house in that forties suspense movie? When I see iron gates and red brick grandeur, I always wonder, mansion or prison?”

Max studied the place.

“The Convent of the Little Flower looks more forbidding than one would think from the quaint name. Good thing we stopped for lunch and a chance to fill our bladders with ale and empty them. I bet the nuns inside could make a hardened felon piss his pants, if I recall my fleeting memories of the good sisters in grade school.”

“You once told me the grade-school nuns were Old World, even in Wisconsin. And that the Christian Brothers ran a tight ship in your high school too.”

“Apparently they did, if Sean and I graduated as virgins. He died one too. Poor bastard.” Max sighed. “That was the purpose of Catholic same-sex education. Worked for quite some time, until the free workforce dried up.”

Max momentarily shut his eyes. Behind his studied cynicism, an image was assembling in pieces like a torn photograph. Gaptoothed twelve-year-old grin, a freckled face growing angular with hints of a man’s strength. Sean. As redheaded Irish as a leprechaun. Max was Black Irish. Dark hair, no freckles sprouting in sunshine as freely as mushrooms do in the shade for him. Always a flat-black dark seriousness beneath any age-appropriate banter. Temper. An icy vengeful temper that gives nothing away, and no quarter. And never forgets, without the intervention of amnesia … even now.

That surge of teenage memory and emotion shook him. If he was getting pieces of himself back, he couldn’t control them as he’d probably learned to by age thirty-four, the hard way. He’d have to recall and reclaim every stupid, vain, idiotic, maybe crazy puzzle piece and subdue it again. Apparently Michael Aloysius Xavier Kinsella had been that obsessed. Apparently Garry Randolph, Gandolph the Great, cared enough to do his very best to fulfill that man’s crazy boyish bequest.

Max clapped the old man on the back. “You’ve teased your audience-of-one’s attention to the breath-stopping point, Gandolph. Show me the payoff behind the facade.”

Sister Mary Robert Emmet was older than God, who was older than Earth.

She wore a long black gown, and fanciful arrangements of starched white linen surrounded her face and shoulders, but the “penguin” look framed features worn with incalculable worry.

“Perhaps Mr. Randolph told you, Mr… . ?”

“Kinsella.”

A slash of sunshine flickered on the shadowed terrain, a smile.

“Irish, then. But American too, by your accent. I am something of a museum curator here at the convent. I am the ‘media liaison,’ God help me. I don’t even know what media is—are?—these days. Mr. Randolph swore to me on the tenets of his Lutheran faith, sadly disused, that what I have to impart is key to the salvation of your soul.”

Max wanted to blush. This situation was quite impossible. Damn Gandolph and his sometimes almost-Irish way with words. Max wasn’t sure he had a soul, or that it could be saved. This ancient nun, for all her weary sorrow, had a tried sort of innocence he found impossible to dismiss with mockery.

“I’d be honored if you’d suspend your rules for my benefit,” he said with a courtly bow. He was tall enough to pull off a bow even nowadays. And magician enough. “I can’t guarantee a saved soul, but perhaps a soothed one.”

“Very wise, young man. Salvation is not up to us. Only the effort. Well, what I am going to show and tell you was mostly before my time and place, thank God, and there is much denial even to this day. No institution—political, military, or religious—seems free of the cardinal sin of pride.”

Max was glad she wasn’t a priest, because he’d have to confess that he was jogging partners with that particular sin. He’d detected it in himself several dozen times in the week or so he remembered in detail. It had tempted him to sleep with a woman, fornicate, they’d call it here. Pride had helped him survive, though, and now it urged him to control his remaining slight limp as their footsteps echoed down a long wood-floored hall.

Sister Mary Robert Emmet, named for the Virgin and a long-ago “martyred” Irish patriot hung for his freedom fighting, led them down halls paneled in coffered, worm-eaten wood, then over tiled floors, through echoing rooms barren as very old buildings are, so that even antique luxury seems penitential.

Max felt panic rising, as if he were tunneling into a burrow of old-fashioned confession boxes or torture chambers. Even without much of a memory, he’d considered himself a modern man, a strong and clever man, a man who could cope. All that bracing outer ego was melting away. He was a kid again, facing the clawed fingers skittering from under the bed, the darkness in the corners of the closet, the King Kong in the basement, the mouse gnawing at his brain while he dreamed… .

Sister Mary Robert Emmet led them to a walled exterior garden, devoid of everything but the green moss that cloaks every stone in Ireland.

“This is where they found the bodies,” she said in her lilting Irish croon, as if reciting playwright Sean O’Casey at a wake. “Almost a hundred and fifty in unmarked graves. All women and girls. Ireland has long been a killing ground, and this is one of our hidden holocaust sites. The other wing of the … house … was the orphanage.

“Who knows where those unwanted babes went, into what situations, good or bad? Here the unwed mothers and the girls who were thought to be ungovernable were buried alive for years and then buried in unmarked graves when their eternal sentence to Mother Church was done. They were considered sinners or bound to be such. Their names were changed; they were lost to kith and kin, and they served God as scullions and laundresses, paid almost nothing and punished for merely being, while the convents thrived on the labor of their salvations, until these lost ones died, unrecognized even then.

“These grounds, of which there were many in Ireland and all over Europe, were called Magdalen asylums or houses or laundries, and they persisted until the current century, Mr. Kinsella. Until past the millennium. Certainly until you, Mr. Randolph says, came here as a boy in search of the troubled but colorful legendry of the Auld Sod.”

“Oh, my God,” Max said.

Sister bowed her head. “Mr. Randolph said you are afflicted with memory loss, that you have forgotten much of your personal past and even some of the world’s. I pray you may forget or at least forgive this piece of our common world.”