Carole Douglas - Cat in a Midnight Choir

She looked like Little Orphan Annie disguised as a bag lady. Or maybe Typhoid Mary. Matt had seemed distracted lately, and he did work late hours and travel out of state for speaking engagements. He was semifamous now. Guess Mr. Midnight no longer had time to hobnob with the locals.

She shifted the bags to one side as she prepared to grab the door handle and shoulder her way into the cool darkness beyond.

It opened of its own invisible accord, like the eerie door at Max’s house. Temple dodged inside before her bags slipped and she found them lifting out of her arms.

“Sorry,” Matt said, scanning the parking lot behind her as the door swung shut. “I was busy thinking about tonight’s show and I didn’t notice you out there. Is that a new car or something?”

“Ye-es! Thanks. You like the car?”

“Fine,” he said, juggling grocery bags. Not the kind of tribute that the new owner of a racy red convertible expected. Matt still seemed in a hurry. “Can you press the elevator button? Thanks.”

“Well,” Temple commented, “everyone around here was switching cars — Electra with your Elvismobile and you with her Probe, so I thought I’d trade the Storm for a Miata.”

He nodded, looking over her shoulder, then at the bronze pointer above the door that showed what floor the elevator was on.

Forget about Matt not paying proper attention to her new car, Temple thought. He wasn’t paying any attention to her !

What was she today, a poor cousin of Typhoid Mary, Miss Poison Ivy?

Before she could say anything, the elevator door ground open and Matt leaped aboard. “Hit the floor button, would you?” he instructed.

No, she was Miss Elevator Operator.

They both seemed stunned into silence on the brief ride up one floor.

But once the elevator doors parted, Matt was again peering up and down the hall like a wary Doberman.

It was like he was afraid to be seen with her.

Surely he didn’t think that her resumed relationship with Max meant she couldn’t have male friends? That was the problem. She didn’t have a clue as to what was going on with Matt these days. Something had come between them, and she didn’t know what or why, only that she felt horribly left out on all fronts: with Lieutenant C. R. Molina, the Mystifying Max Kinsella, and now Mr. Midnight Matt Devine.

Temple was the youngest of a family of five brothers and the only girl. She ought to be used to feeling left out by now, but in fact the older she got the worse she felt about it. Would she never count? Was she always “too little” to tell, to take along, to trust, to treat like a mature adult?

“Temple?”

Matt was looking down at her, peering into her face as if reading some of her distress. Professional PR lady couldn’t allow that!

“Yeah, what?”

“Uh, could you take your keys and open the door before I drop these jam-packed bags.”

“Oh. I guess I overdid it at the store. I was…distracted.”

“You? Buy groceries when you’re distracted?”

“Well, you’ve been pretty distracted yourself lately.”

“Busy,” he said quickly.

“Right. Me too.”

She still didn’t move toward the door, but he started to brush past her as if expecting it to open on its own. Open sesame , wasn’t that the formula? But Temple didn’t think any magic phrases would work anymore, certainly not on her door, and maybe not on her, ever again.

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The grocery bags ended up crushed between them so they actually had to look each other in the eye — eyes, which were so evasive and edgy and anxious that Matt took a giant step backward against the opposite wall and stood there like the boy with his finger in the dyke keeping out all the floodwaters of the North Sea, except he looked more like a carry out boy from Lucky’s.

“Put…the…bags…down,” she paraphrased Gene Wilder from Young Frankenstein .

Matt just looked bewildered. It was a vintage movie and Temple imagined one didn’t see many movies in a Roman Catholic seminary unless they were about Lourdes or Joan of Arc.

But he put the bags down on the floor, propped up by the wall, and he put his hands in his pants pockets. And stood there, looking Brad Pitt-adorable if Brad Pitt had been really, really good-looking.

Temple leaned against her opposite wall and looked away. “It’s been a bad day.”

“I got that.”

“First I had to listen to Molina tell me the sky was falling and then my new car decided it wouldn’t even hold my groceries.”

“Groceries? There won’t be that many groceries if you return to your usual ways. You’re not exactly Wolfgang Puck, you know.”

“You mean Martha Stewart.”

“If I was referring to your whole domestic mise-en-scène, yes, I would have meant that.”

“‘Mise-en-scène’? That is giving my life way too high a profile. How about misery-en-scène?”

“Temple, what’s wrong?”

“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.