Carole Douglas - Cat in a Midnight Choir

“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.”

“Molina has no personal interest in all this.”

“Are you sure?”

“Molina? She’s the Great Stone Mountain of the Metropolitan Police Department.”

“Are you sure?”

Matt let his mind pull back, start wondering.

“Why is she so down on Max? Why does she never let up? Does she need a fall guy? Why does she try to use you to split Max and me apart? Does she really want Max? You? You’ve been thinking of her as a job, a function, a career, not as a human being. As a woman. Maybe she has agendas you haven’t even imagined.”

“And if she does, what was her agenda in showing you the ring? Now?”

They both paused, breathless, to consider their own charges.

“‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave,’” Temple quoted Sir Walter Scott.

“‘When first we practice to deceive’? That’s not what we have here. I don’t think anyone wants to deceive,” Matt said. “But to protect.”

“Protecting means you put yourself above the protected. You know better.”

“It’s a parental role, yes.”

“Or a priest’s?”

“Or an undercover operative’s?”

“Or a policewoman’s?” Temple, laughed, not happily. “I guess lowly PR flacks are stuck being the protectees. Nothing noble and elevating about my job.”

“Temple.”

“I am tired of being protected by people meddling in my life for my own good. It’s my life. I’m allowed to mess it up all by myself.”

“But not to lose it.”

“That’s what you’re really worried about?”

He nodded, unable to speak, to voice the anxiety.

She relaxed a little.

“There’s something you’re not telling me, too. Just like Max and the lieutenant. Join the club. I hate what people do to you for your own good. I hated it when I was five years old and I hate it worse now.”

“It’s worse when they think about doing something to you for their own good, and not yours.”

Her eyes grew suddenly shrewd. “That’s what almost happened a little while ago with you, didn’t it?”

He nodded miserably.

That seemed to cheer her up considerably. “You were being selfish, really?”

“Irresponsible,” he admitted. Almost lethally irresponsible.

“So it wasn’t my own good you were thinking of?”

“For a few, unforgivable seconds, no.”

Temple let out a huge breath. “Well. At last! Somebody who’s acting like a human being around me. What a relief!” Her voice grew mischievous, if not quite flirtatious. “We’ll have to try it again sometime.”

Matt bent to pick up her groceries.

“I’ll take the stuff in. Just go while you’re ahead. That’s what they say at the craps tables.”

He did.

He had never been so close to the perfect end of the fairy tale, but he realized that the witch would have been waiting to extract her price anyway. Temple wasn’t his way out, no matter that she was the most tempting way out. He’d have to find another one.