Unknown - 16_Cat_In_An_Orange_Twist

Tall vases sprouting vivid orange tiger lilies flanked the … urn, Orange Bowl.

Temple bit her lip. Giggling did not seem to be the proper ceremonial reaction here.

Amelia Wong’s black eyes noted her arrival. A flick of her lashes ordered Temple to a position behind the table. Perhaps it was an altar.

She edged closer to Baylee Harris. The tall blond young woman seemed the most realistic of the bunch, maybe because she was such a physical opposite to their grand dame, Amelia Wong.

“What’s going on?” Temple whispered.

Baylee squinched down so Temple could hear the answering whisper. “She is about to do the Three Secrets

Reinforcement.”

Temple stood at attention. She had never seen a Three Secrets Reinforcement before, although she had a few secrets of her own.

Amelia Wong stood as straight as a tin soldier behind the bowl heaped with oranges.

“Twenty-seven oranges,” Baylee managed to whisper before falling silent.

Amelia Wong cradled one hand in another, then began chanting what sounded like Sanskrit: ” Ga-tay ga-tay, para ga-tay, para sum ga-tay, bhodi swaha.’ “

New Age was the trail mix of culture. Nine times she repeated the mantra.

Then she lifted an aluminum pitcher and poured water into the bowl until it was three-quarters full.

Systematically, her long, lacquered fingernails tore the rinds off the piled oranges, letting them sink into the water.

The oranges themselves were cast into a plastic trash bag at her Manolo Blahnik-clad feet.

Lifting the heavy wooden bowl, Amelia moved ceremonially toward the front door.

“Isn’t this all sort of futile?” Temple asked Baylee. “I mean, the windows are blasted away. You could walk through them.

Where’s the protection?”

“It’s the why, not the where,” Baylee said solemnly. “This blessing is best used on a place where security has been compromised. That’s the cool thing about feng shui. It works in the past, present, and future.”

Temple thought about it. Like all mystical things, feng shui was in the eye of the believer.

She nodded, feeling the same about it as she did about religious and superstitious gestures in general: what the heck. It

couldn’t hurt.

Amelia folded the middle fingers of her right hand into her palm, leaving only the pinkie and the forefinger erect.

Behind her back, Temple tried this position and found her muscles rebelling. It must take practice, like bullfighting. Or bull throwing.

Rapidly, Amelia flicked her folded fingers outward. Temple counted nine times. It was a bit like the shoulder-dusting gesture of yoga, designed to release tensions.

Next, Amelia cradled the fingers of her left hand in her right, her thumb-tips touching.

Then she performed a two-handed finger weave. Temple blinked. She saw the curled little fingers touched by the thumbs, the ring fingers straight up, the middle fingers crossed and touched by the index fingers.

This was an amazingly complicated position. Temple felt her knuckles ache just to witness it.

Cradling the bowl of orange peels in one crooked arm, Amelia Wong marched right to the store’s entrance doors. With the same flicking motion, she sprinkled the water on the hard-surface floor.

Temple watched Kenny Maylord’s brow morph into pale corrugated cardboard. Water droplets would be as lethal to upholstery in an interiors store as they were to Wicked Witches in Oz.

Amelia Wong was busy chanting some new mantra: ” ‘Om ma-ni pad-me hum.’ “

It reminded Temple of the classic kid’s trick: getting some innocent to chant, syllable by syllable, “0 wah to goo Siam.”

Temple concluded that children’s games often carried over to adult life.

Beside her, Baylee chanted her own descriptive mantra in a discreet whisper. “She is cleansing the area. The Six True Words will remove all the bad luck and negative chi, or life force here. The finger flicking is called an Expelling Mudra. It would help if we all joined in to visualize the evil being removed.”

Temple flowed into the procession that followed Amelia Wong as she sprinkled and chanted her way through the store, watering every model room.

Kenny Maylord looked dazed, no doubt wondering if orange spots would soon be busting out all over his showroom.

Temple flowed into visualizing the water spots drying and leaving no trace. That was the only kind of positive chi she could imagine as the outcome of this ritual, so vaguely religious in nature.

It took almost an hour for Amelia Wong to return to the front entry and the table, or altar. Plenty of time for all the videographers to shoot their hearts out.

“Next,” she announced, “the Three Secrets Reinforcement.” She turned to place the bowl on the table, and froze in midgesture, frowning.

Temple was perfectly situated to see her glowering profile and follow her stare right to the gleaming bitter-orange Murano.

A car, Temple supposed, was a sort of room, and it had not been blessed with water spots.

Amelia Wong was clearly about to take care of that omission. First she walked solemnly around the vehicle, chanting and sprinkling. ” ‘Om ma-ni pad-me hum.’ “

Temple couldn’t help hearing that as “Oh Ma, no pat my bum.”

Having completed her ceremonial circuit, Amelia pulled the driver’s door open with her sprinkling hand, keeping the water

bowl lifted in the other.

Something came tumbling out from inside the deep black tinted window glass and painted orange steel. It fell to the beige

travertine tiles, a sack of pale laundry.

Amelia Wong’s tiny high-heeled feet stuttered backwards like a Yorkshire terrier’s: click, click, click.

The falling body, for it was exactly that, settled lumpily on the hard shining floor.

The bowl fell beside it, flooding the area with orange peels and water.

Apparently the Murano’s bad chi had been more thoroughly expelled than expected.

Chapter 21

Feng Shui Can Be Mudra

Videographers surrounded the huddled corpse like technobuzzards.

Their rush to tape the scene squeezed Amelia Wong outside the circle of T-shirt-and-jeans-clad ghouls.

She stood back stunned, her complexion gone ghost white. A stray orange peel had washed up on the toe of her beige-silk pump.

Temple nodded to the nearest Wong associate, Pritchard Merriweather. “Call nine-one-one, right away.”

Kenny Maylord stood helplessly witnessing the lurid discovery from the fringes.

“Get your security people,” Temple told him. “Someone needs to try CPR. And if it’s too late for that, these media people are messing up what may be a crime scene.”

“M-may be?”

“We can’t even tell the gender of the person yet, much less the identity.” Temple turned to the six people hunched over their shoulder-held cameras like hyenas.

“Back, you camera goons!” she ordered in the gruffest basso she could produce. “This person may need air!”

Before she’d finished, two Maylords security guys and Amelia Wong’s shade-wearing bodyguards, all attired in dark suits, were grabbing T-shirts and manhandling men, women, and machines out of their way.

The body curled into a fetal position on the floor looked lonely. Temple knew how to demand order, but she wasn’t quite up

to exploring the condition of the fallen figure.

One of the suits went down on one knee and slowly lifted a shoulder off the floor.

Temple glimpsed blond hair, short blond hair and a smudge of features … forehead, chin.

For a second she was sure it was Matt, and her heart stopped.

Then she saw it was Simon.

She thought she made a tiny sound of denial, but it could have come from someone else.

The scene turned instantly surreal.