Unknown - Cat_In_A_Midnight_Choir-spaces_ru

“Wrong? Nothing. Max is in trouble so deep he won’t talk to me about it, though Molina will, but nothing’s wrong. You’re running around with a sketch artist and won’t talk to me, or even look at me, but nothing’s wrong. Molina’s gloating like a vampire at a blood bank and she won’t tell me anything except that I’m moving in all the wrong directions, but nothing’s wrong.

“There.” Temple folded her arms and stared sullenly at her grocery bags slumping against the opposite wall next to Matt’s khaki-clad legs. “Nothing’s wrong.”

He was silent for so long she was almost tempted to look up at him, but resisted. She felt very rebellious all of a sudden.

“I can see,” he said finally, “why you’d think I was avoiding you, but it’s just that late-night schedule of mine and the travel.”

“That’s a lie, Matt. You don’t lie well. You want to avoid me.”

“I don’t want to —”

“Listen, you’re free to do whatever you need to. I just thought that we were friends —”

“No.”

She paused, startled into looking up.

“We might have been friends once, we might be friends once again. But now. Friends. We are not friends.”

The wave of disbelief, of unallayed hurt that struck like the opposite wall moving and smashing her between it and the plaster at her back, was a tsunami.

Nothing, she saw, was what she had thought it was.

Lives were being lived apart from her, separate from her, and they were not what she assumed them to be.

Molina was right. She knew nothing.

Signals Received

Matt watched Temple’s usual wall of blithe good cheer crumble into a shimmer of plaster dust around her.

He suddenly realized that of all of them, she knew nothing of the pervasive threats of Kitty the Cutter. He had confided in Molina. He had confided in Max Kinsella, of all penances the most painful. He had not breathed a word to Temple.

It was in the name of her own protection, but it had isolated her, infantalized her. His enemies and acquaintances he could tell. Temple, whom he most feared and most feared for, he had kept in the dark. And she knew it, sensed it, felt it.

“I’m sorry,” she muttered. “I’ll open the door. I can get the groceries in myself.”

“We are not friends —”

She looked away again, in that heartbreakingly unfocused way too proud to show distress.

“— because we are too close to being something else. You know that. It’s always been true.”

Now she didn’t dare look at him, and he found his hopeful, craven brain thinking, thinking…here, this tiny hallway. Not even she would, could have it bugged. Here. Now. Up against the wall. It would solve every dilemma but sin, and sin seemed such a small fault when hearts and souls were at stake.

“Not friends,” she was saying faintly. “Oh, that’s part of it, you know.”

“I do know. Know more than I ever did before. And now I know that friends is not enough.”

She stared at him, against her better judgment.

He understood he had the power. Just had to use it. He stepped forward, brought himself close to her. She didn’t blink, didn’t flinch, couldn’t.

She’d always known, but had hoped he wouldn’t, because then there’d be no one to say stop. No. The known norm is better than the imagined nirvana.

She knew more than he about what could be. He felt it, though, as he never had before, and his own self-interest was so strong, both subjugated to her and dominant over her, it was like sensing a hurricane in his heart.

His fingertips touched her shoulders.

Just that.

It seemed they stood in some still center while an electric dervish whirled around them.

Impulse mattered, not thought. Feeling, not fear.

He bent his head to hers.

She turned away.

He turned away.

They were closer than ever.

He turned.

She turned.

They couldn’t avoid each other.

Always, always, turning, turning until they came round right.

Temple closed her eyes.

Anything, anything could happen. He could make it happen.

Suddenly the magnetism reversed itself. Or he did. He could make anything happen now, and he chose reversal.

They drew apart, leaned against their separate walls, said nothing.

“I don’t understand,” Temple said, her always dusky voice hoarse now. “But I will someday, won’t I?”

“I hope so.”

“Will I —” She hesitated, almost braced herself for something. “Will I ever understand why you knew that Molina had found my lost ring at a crime scene, and she told you and not me? And why you never told me that she had it?”

If she had wanted to throttle a moment and its aftermath, she had committed bloody murder right now.

“Ring?” he repeated, suddenly remembering the loathed object on his key ring: his own crime-scene memento. Only that crime scene had been his apartment.

“My ring. You know, the gorgeous opal-and-diamond-studded band Max got me in New York, that you both saw me wearing when you went together to the Opium Den to see Shangri-La perform.”

“That ring.”

“You make it sound so…common.”

“I don’t mean to. It was police business. Molina told me in confidence. She wanted me to distrust Kinsella more than I did already, maybe use it against him. I wouldn’t be manipulated to hurt you. And then, the circumstances…it was a professional confidence. I didn’t feel I could pass it on.”

“The privilege of the confessional! Great. You were already with Molina that evening. Hand in glove. Why should I ever think you owed anything to me, even honesty?”

“She browbeat me into going with her that night. You know how she’s always dogged both of us about Kinsella, trying to get us to crack, betray him. It was all part of her game plan.”

“That Dragon Lady magician calling me up on stage and then making my ring disappear wasn’t part of Molina’s game plan.”

“No, neither was your complete disappearance from the onstage chamber right after that.”

“The one time I get to be part of audience participation at something,” Temple went on bitterly, “and it turns out to be a kidnap attempt.”

“Maybe worse,” Matt said, his voice darkening. “Nothing we’re talking about is anything to underestimate. You were abducted and that magician and her whole crew vanished. Then your ring was found later near where a woman had been strangled, an ex-magician’s assistant, no less. Molina’s games are not for the heck of it. She’s trying to close down a lot of unsolved cases, and, like it or not, Max Kinsella seems to be at the heart of most of them.”

“So. You’re so busy now, with your own life and times, you should care about any of this, about me?”

“I care more than I can —”

“Wait. Let me finish. Or you do care, hallelujah, you care so much you’d like to see Max slapped in irons and taken away to death row, because then he’d be out of your way.”

“No, Temple. What I care about or don’t care about doesn’t matter. It’s what I’d do. I’d never hurt anyone for my own gain. But I can’t betray a confidence either. Molina told me a piece of police business. I didn’t want to know it. I understood that she was using me, that she was hoping I’d tell you and undermine your confidence in Max, don’t you see? But I didn’t do that. I honored her confidence and by doing that, I avoided being manipulated by her.”

“You didn’t avoid betraying me!” Temple’s eyes burned with anger. “If we really were friends, you wouldn’t try to protect me by concealing things from me. Maybe Molina was trying to drive you and me apart. Telling one person a secret that leaves another person out is a pretty time-tested way to do that.”