"Well, I didn't know how much for tea, so I put in a juice-glassful."
"Oh," said Temple, who began to think that she might make it through this night, no matter how long and dreadful, after all, thanks to Sister Rose's heavy hand with the bishop's brandy. At least it wasn't the pastor's tequila. Temple couldn't stand tequila outside of a margarita.
"I thought Matt would be along by now," Sister Seraphina commented to the room at large. She glanced at the schoolroom clock mounted on the wall.
Temple was startled to see that it read only ten-fifteen. She felt as if midnight was long since past.
Sister Rose settled on a side chair and they all regarded one another nervously.
"Those are . . . wonderful robes," Temple said, for lack of anything else to offer.
She was pretty sure that Father Hernandez wasn't coming, for the simple reason that he was under police custody in the house next door. But . . . why? The church had received the Tyler estate, lock, stock and barrel of cats. Yet the pastor had seemed little pleased and not at all relieved by that fact. Whoever had done whatever had been done--and Temple was not at all sure of the extent or intent of it--would have interesting reasons.
Sister Seraphina picked at the satin rope tie of her robe, looking chagrined.
"A gift from a Well-to-do woman in my last parish. She insisted that we old nuns must need something, and when I told her robes, she was ecstatic. She purchased twelve."
"Twelve." Temple was impressed by the parishioner's generosity. In lamplight, she was even more impressed by the robes' sober but lush quality.
Sister Seraphina shrugged. "She got them on sale. At Neiman Marcus."
Temple frowned, then started to laugh.
Sister Seraphina began chuckling. "They are very useful and quite durable, and probably cost the moon originally."
"What's Neiman Marcus?" Sister St. Rose of Lima inquired brightly.
"Just a department store," Seraphina said.
"Like Mott's Five and Dime?"
"Exactly," Temple said, shaking her head. She took a stiff sip of her tea and let her toes wiggle. Her pantyhose toes, she saw, were sprouting runs like weeds. "My shoes!" she wailed. "I forgot about my Italian-leather shoes. They're over there, too. The firemen probably soaked everything with water."
Sister Rose tsk-tsked in bewildered sympathy. Her faded pink terry-cloth scuffs were washable and had weathered several cleanings. Of course they were not Italian.
Sister Seraphina swiveled alertly to the hall. A moment later, Matt appeared in the doorway.
No one dared ask anything. He read their anxiety--at least Temple's and Seraphina's--but he could not guess the cause.
"Father Hernandez wasn't in the rectory," he said.
Temple and Seraphina settled back into their chairs with a mutual sigh and a significant look.
"Is it important?" Matt asked.
"It may be," Temple said. ''Someone was in the Tyler house. Someone had captured Louie and chloroformed him and stuck him in a burlap bag."
"Why?" Matt asked.
She went on wearily. "I don't know. Someone had started the house on fire in Blandina's bedroom."
Another voice added to the narrative. "Someone stopped him."
Lieutenant Molina appeared in the hall behind Matt, who quickly eased into the room to allow her entry.
Molina eyed the room's occupants, her glance pausing appreciatively on the nuns' robes before it rested on Temple and her libation.
"Apparently Queen Victoria here has been practicing her marital arts' p's and q's. She stopped him from setting the house afire and perhaps committing other violence." Molina sank down in one of the brocaded side chairs. "I could use some tea myself."
"We all could." Sister Seraphina nodded at Sister Rose, who scurried out like a dormouse on a secret mission.
Matt leaned on the edge of the desk near the door and watched them all, thoroughly perplexed.
"What exactly has happened?" he asked.
"My question precisely." Molina pulled out her notebook.
"We have a rather . . . distraught . . . suspect in custody."
"Suspect?" Seraphina emphasized.
Molina nodded neutrally. "We have the professional detective's bane, Miss Temple Barr, on the scene and heavily involved. We even have an unauthorized cat on the premises, the equally baleful Midnight Louie. Where is he now?"
"Somewhere in the convent," Temple supplied.
"We found a burlap bag somewhat . . . damaged, and a cloth soaked in chloroform. Apparently it had been used on the cat."
"Peter!" Sister Seraphina sat up. "That's how someone captured him for that horrible attack; they chloroformed him. Was it satanists, Lieutenant?"
"You tell me. We found a satchel of . . . tools near the bag. Hammer. Spikes. Looks like more of the same was on the schedule."
"Louie was a candidate for crucifixion?" Temple shuddered with a sudden chill and reached for the fallen blanket.
"Possibly."
"Has your prisoner said anything about that?" Matt asked.
Molina's blue eyes regarded him with the clear, emotionless stare of a Siamese cat. "Nothing . . . sensible. Yet."
The eyes returned to Temple. "I hesitate to ask this. I am not in the mood for original answers, but yours surely will be more coherent than his at this point. Why were you
there?"
"Well," Temple began, "it was the state of Midnight Louie's Free-to-be-Feline that first made me uneasy ..."
Molina shut her eyes, and Temple continued, glossing over the obituary page tented over Louie's dish and concentrating on her great specific and general concern for cats singular and plural, on her impulse to check on the Tyler cats, on her shock at finding an intruder and a fire in the house, and especially on her amazement on finding Midnight Louie in the bag.
"So it was all a wild coincidence," Molina summed up in a deadpan voice.
At that moment, Sister Rose appeared beaming on the threshold, a tray full of tall, iced-tea glasses in her hands, with Midnight Louie massaging her ankles as if begging for catnip.
"Sometimes things happen that way," Temple said as Sister Rose distributed the glasses.
They were accepted with distraction. Sister Seraphina took a large sip of her tea, then her lips puckered, but her face seemed not to register anything except the secret worry she carried for Father Hernandez. Lieutenant Molina's closed-mouth attitude to the identity of the man apprehended next door did nothing to allay her anxiety.
Molina let her glass sit on a side table as she poised her pen over the notebook but wrote nothing down, which was rather unsettling.
Matt sipped his tea politely, then braced it on one slack-covered thigh. "So Temple nailed the bad guy. Personally."
"Yes," Molina said in her disconcerting tone that was half-bored, half-mocking. "Do tell us about it."
"He found me in the kitchen," Temple began. "I didn't know he was there. The lights were off when I came in, and I was trying to find a light switch that would work when he came up from the basement--I didn't even know there was one!--dragging a bag. At first I thought he was someone from the neighborhood, or a repairman or something. Then he dropped the bag and went for me. I didn't want to go upstairs, but I ran into the stairs and was forced up. I tried not to get cornered in a bedroom, but there was nowhere else to go. I managed to drag a trunk in front of the bedroom door, and then I saw the dresser on fire. I threw a table through the window--"
"Good thinking!" Matt said approvingly, sipping his tea absently.
Molina watched him, and did likewise.
Nobody batted an eye. Sister Seraphina sipped her tea frequently and nervously, her face reflecting worries other than the specifics of Temple's ordeal.
Actually, it felt more like an adventure in the telling. Temple warmed up to her tale, or perhaps to her tea. She took a throat-soothing sip. "Well. There I was, caught between the devil and the deep blue sea." Here she glared at Molina. "He looked like a demon, all in black with a burlap mask over his face, only his eyeless eyeholes staring at me."
''His eyeless eyeholes'?" Molina queried, her pen skipping over the lined notepad.