"Oh." Peggy Wilhelm looked hungrily into the bag at the furry black wedge of face staring up at her. "What a great thing to do! You mean no one had taken it? How sad." Peggy's voice thickened as she turned away. "Sorry. This has been a lot of strain, with Aunt Blandina dying, and Minuet. Now I've got all of Aunt Blandina's cats to worry about ..."
Do you ever! Temple thought, remembering that the will had ignored them. It wasn't her place to inform Peggy of this latest blow, but she could confirm her suspicions in a roundabout way.
"You're sure that your aunt would have made provision for their upkeep, though?"
"Oh, positive. Aunt Blandina would have never, ever left her precious cats out in the cold, even if she did leave most of her money to the church. I mean, she would have died first."
The oddity of the expression under the circumstances made Peggy grimace as she realized what she had said. "Oh, I am exhausted silly over all of this! You know what I mean. I was happy to help her out with the cats, but she did have much too many, and couldn't stand the idea of giving up a one. Even letting the nuns take Peter and Paul was a wrench.
So she'd hardly leave her babies out of the will."
"What about you? Don't you mind being left out? Everybody assumes that you will be."
"Oh, I've got my own life and a decent job at the library. I don't have any needs, any family of my own. Spinster and overenthusiastic cat person, just like my aunt. We weren't much alike otherwise. But I do hope she didn't leave her money to the church!" Peggy added with surprising passion. "A lot of evil can be done in the name of religion, especially if it has money."
"Do you mean all religion, or just Catholicism?"
"Well, the Catholic Church isn't exactly enlightened on the matter of sexual repression, is it?" she asked brusquely, slamming sheets of cage grilling together with such energy that the clashes made her Birmans' chocolate-colored ears slant back in distress. "Or premarital sex or birth control or looking after inconvenient babies that aren't aborted."
"Then . . . you're not a practicing Catholic?"
"Not since I was old enough to move away from home. Look, maybe I sound . . . disillusioned, but the only people who slavishly toe the church line these days are old fashioned old ladies like my aunt. They wear their tiny little silver feet against abortion and send money to the missionaries and get sent tons of holy cards and cheap rosaries and requests for money. And they are courted for their money, you better believe it. Most of them need that attention so much that they'd rather leave their money to the church and the foreign pagan babies and the unborn babies than to their own kin, than to their own flesh and blood."
Peggy's hands and voice were shaking now, and she had given up stacking cage sides. The Birmans crouched in their carriers, sensitive to their owner's strange tirade. Temple's tote bag stirred as Caviar thrust out a curious and unintimidated head to see what the matter was.
"It's just been too much." Peggy said that quickly, before Temple could say anything, could back off or apologize ... or even pose more questions that might answer the suspicion that was now rising in her mind--the notion that Peggy Wilhelm was far more than what she had seemed, and had far more reason than previously suspected to commit unreasonable acts involving cats, her aunt and the Catholic Church.
'Too much," Peggy repeated. "I don't care what that damn will says, what she did. I won't let them hold their damn money over me again. It was always a trap, and it was always the church before me. I did my duty by her, by her precious cats--I paid my debt--and now my life is my own again."
"Who are you talking about--'them'?"
"You obviously didn't grow up Catholic," Peggy said with an uneasy laugh. "My parents, my parish nuns and priests, my aunt--they all ran a tight ship when I was young and couldn't do anything about it. Well, now I can, and I'm not going to let their guilt trips get to me, that's all. I'm going to take my cats home and I'll come and feed Aunt Blandina's cats as long as they need it, and then it stops. It finally stops here."
She pushed the dishwater-brown frizz off her flushed forehead, then glanced again at the quizzical black-cat face in Temple's bag. Her white face crumpled like a used Kleenex.
"Oh, just take your damn cat and go," she urged with waves of the hand that wasn't covering her mouth. "I haven't gotten much sleep and the show is over. This time it's really over. Sorry."
Temple backed away, nearly stumbling over a clutter of cat carriers at the table behind her. She had seldom seen a personality come apart like this, even among friends and family. Now she knew why Matt was so reluctant to play Father Hernandez's confidant. Confession might be good for the soul of the penitent, but it swamped the recipient in a confusing, aimless barrage of unspecified ancient wrongs and festering emotions.
In some way, Temple had innocently triggered this upsetting deluge of emotion. Now, almost as disturbed as Peggy Wilhelm, she walked through the cold, echoing, gray concrete vault of the exhibition hall, which looked like a school gym the night after the dance, when all the illusion has been stripped away.
She glanced from time to time at her docile passenger, as if to comfort it against the miasma of human emotions now churning around them both.
But the cat was calm, only the people were agitated.
What a good thing that cats couldn't really know what was happening to them! Temple hated to think that Blandina Tyler's cats might sense that they had been disinherited, or that Midnight Louie might somehow know that he was about to get an unwanted roommate before it happened.
That was the great thing about animals; they never laid any burdens on their human companions. All they asked for was food, shelter and affection.
Come to think of it, they weren't too different from your average self-sufficient human being, either.
Chapter 26
Cat Inquisition
As soon as my dear departed Miss Temple Barr is safely off to the cat show Sunday afternoon, I whisk out the French doors to do some investigations of my own. I cast one quick glance at the penthouse before I put the Circle Ritz in my wake.
I dare not let my thoughts linger on the elevated occupant of that address, for that might tip her off to my itinerary. Much as I would hate to admit it to the object of my spiritual anxiety, the Sublime Karma (as opposed to the Divine Yvette, the object of my carnal devotion), I have found the clutter of cats she was
yammering about being in danger just days ago.
I am bound--not to the animal pound, or even to the Humane Society shelter for the poor and infamous. I am headed into Hierophant territory, off to Our Lady of Guadalupe, whose name I hear bandied about in recent days by my dear soul mates at the Circle Ritz. I include Mr. Matt Devine in that group, now that I and Miss Temple Barr have been seeing more of him.
The cathouse I am in search of should not be hard to find, with three key pieces of information in place: from what I overhear, it is very near Our Lady of Guadalupe Church; the grievously attacked Peter was a next-door neighbor, which means that his sadly diminished spoor should be all over the place; and it is home to seventy-some residents of the feline persuasion, which means that the super sniffing powers of my nose alone could find it from a six-block radius.
I have overlooked a fourth tattletale clue, ring around the collar, so to speak: a yellow police tape reading "Crime Scene: Do Not Cross" circles the house and tends to give away the location just a teensy.
I slip past it like a fleeting shadow. Getting in is another trick. These feline pensioners were not intended to get out. I explore the no-man's-land between the place and a neighboring house that no doubt is the convent famed in song and story, as I have been overhearing it lately. Sister Seraphina and her calling nuns. Or called-upon nuns, to be more precise.