Cat In An Alien X-Ray

Temple heaved a five-foot-nine sigh, drew the paper near, and folded her arms on the table to study it some more. After an intense minute or so, she said, “I know what this reminds me of.”

“We’re all ears.” Max fanned his fingers behind said appendages.

Temple mock-frowned. “This is how my dad laid out the Christmas tree light strands before he put them on the actual tree. He didn’t wrap them around the tree, three-dimensionally. He laid them on in a zigzag pattern for each viewable ‘side.’”

“There must have been some crazy overlay.” Max squinted his eyes to visualize the method.

“Not much,” Matt said. “That’s how we did it for the big tree at the church. Wrapping those twelve-foot balsam firs would have required altar boys on skateboards at the bottom.”

Temple giggled at the mental image. “I hope I never see you on a skateboard,” she told Matt.

“I promise,” he said ardently. “Maybe a Segway, but never a skateboard. I see what you’re getting at with this sketch. This might not be a full three-D image, but a skeleton. Like the pine tree and its branches.”

“Which is thinking within the box,” Max added. “I did a lot of that in my career as a magician.”

“Wait a minute.” Temple turned the drawing left and right and then upside down. Then she lifted it up against the ceiling light.

“That would be backwards,” Matt pointed out.

“That would be a mirror image,” Max said. “The basis of numerable illusions.”

“And,” Temple finished, “exactly where the magic-oriented person like Jeff Mangel would turn if seeking to create confusion.” She frowned at the image again. “I know the Strip pretty well. And, gentlemen, I think this is a ‘tree’ of Las Vegas Boulevard and some famous off-Strip attractions, and if you drew an outline around the dots, you’d have the ‘house’ image of the major stars in Ophiuchus.”

Max was so stunned, his forefinger slid the paper to his side of the table. “You mean that it’s a drawing of the inside of the box. Brilliant!”

“I don’t know,” Temple said, “whether to be miffed by your takeover move or flattered.”

“Maybe that was always your problem with Kinsella,” Matt murmured.

“Charity,” Max answered him. “The first of these is charity, Devine. He’s right, Temple. I’m being possessive of this clue. But I wanted to check if there was any invisible writing on it. It looks straightforward.” He lifted it to the ceiling and the light again, like a priest elevating the host, Temple thought, remembering attending Mass with Matt, as she would be again.

“Stop it,” Matt ordered.

Temple wondered if he’d made the same connection and was offended. Max sure was.

“I’m the magician here,” he told Matt. “If there’s anything hinky about this paper and the scrawling on it, I’d be the one to figure it out.”

“No,” Matt ordered. “Put it down. We need to lay it over something before we can see anything in the light.” He turned to Temple. “You took custody of the stuff from Mom’s fireproof file chest in Chicago.”

“Yeah. I have a safe place to store it.”

“You mean your scarf drawer,” Max said sarcastically.

They stared at him.

“You said that like you remembered it.” Matt sounded accusing.

“No, you or Temple mentioned that fascinating depository … or do I remember it?”

“Maybe,” Temple said, “and maybe you’re remembering the safe you had built in the bedroom closet side wall. I have my own fireproof file box in the same closet.”

She turned to Matt. “You should invest in one too. I keep the sketches Janice Flanders, the police artist, made for us there, along with my Table of Crime Elements.”

“Let’s get that file.” Matt stood, heading for the bedroom, and Temple did likewise.

Behind them, Max cleared his throat. “Don’t be too long, kiddies.”

*   *   *

“We really need tracing paper,” Matt suggested as Temple crouched to dig through the file folders in her closet. “You’re usually uprooting shoes in there.”

She stood, flourishing Effinger’s detailed drawing of the constellation Ophiuchus, man versus giant snake. Those Greeks, so imaginative. Those Synth members, so bewitched by conspiracies and their trappings.

They charged back to the living room and presented the prize to Max. “You can get this closer to the light,” Temple said.

He stood and elevated the two sheets of white paper together, spinning the Ophiuchus drawing around the stripped-down “tree” skeleton from Professor Mangel’s box.

“Hmm.”

Matt gazed up, rapt, and nodded.

“What?” Temple was almost jumping up and down in frustration at being too low to see. She kicked off her shoes and hopped up on her chair seat. “What?”

Matt turned and lifted her up on the table, though she had to squinch down to keep her head from hitting the ceiling.

“It doesn’t jibe,” Max was saying, already lowering the papers.

“No,” Matt said, “flip the snake over. I think there’s some convergence.”

“They’re a different scale,” Temple suggested.

“Scale? Snake?” Max mocked.

“Get me down from here, and I’ll use my copier to enlarge and reduce the map until this Ophiuchus image either matches somehow, or doesn’t.”