Cat In An Aqua Storm

“Okay,” she told the man in the bed linens. “I’ll go on with the show. It’s being held at the Goliath, isn’t it?”

He nodded.

“My favorite hotel,” Temple added darkly. The Mystifying Max had just finished an engagement at the Goliath when he disappeared.

She tried to edge inconspicuously out of the room, but Merle and daughter followed her out into the hall.

“He says he’ll be all right,” Temple repeated dutifully.

Merle nodded, her wan features slack with worry. “The heart attack was minor, although it’ll be an adjustment. The notoriety—”

“He loves it,” the teenager put in.

Temple searched discreetly for a wedding ring on Merle’s left hand and found none. The daughter’s ears dangled an intriguing array of silver scorpions, spiders and peace symbols. Her features were still blurred in her pale, blotched skin, but Temple discerned some fine bones and a future beauty peeking past the studied disdain that drew her youthful lips and eyes dolefully down.

“Quincey—!” Merle admonished her daughter. “Crawford has had some terrible shocks. Can't you forget your everlasting wrangles even in the face of illness?”

The girl looked down at her thin arms folded over her barely there breasts. She gave no answer except the unspoken “Oh, Mother...” screaming from her stance and expression.

Sweet sixteen, and stuck with Crawford Buchanan for a stepfather of sorts, Temple guessed, for this gangly, tall girl could never be his natural issue.

“Thank you, Miss Barr.” Merle ignored her daughter’s disregard. “C.B.’s spoken of you so frequently. I knew we could count on you.”

“No trouble,” Temple assured her insincerely. She glanced once more at Quincey, who was leaning against the wan wall making Kim Basinger lips, then left on the echoing click of her high heels.

A live-in girlfriend, she mused in disgust, but that didn’t prevent him making bachelor noises. Maybe this murder would scare Crawford Buchanan straight and make him stick closer to home. Not that Quincey would appreciate that.

Temple reconsidered. There was something worse than having Crawford Buchanan for a quasiprofessional colleague. Oh, to be in the Terrible Teens and have Crawford Buchanan for a stepfather!

8

Dance of Death

I have drifted off again, at which I am most adept, until I am unduly awakened by Miss Temple Barr's impetuous return.

"Oh, Louie!” my little doll cries upon finding me ensconced on her queen-sized bed in a dark lit only by the night-light.

It is not the greeting of joy and affection it should be, although she promptly sweeps me into her arms.

“My Hanae Mori silk dress!" she wails, as little dolls will when they are irked for no good reason.

I am deposited upon a cold, uncrumpled portion of the comforter while she snatches my warm, comfy resting place from the bed. She waltzes around the room holding it at arm’s length—first to the light switch, which she flicks on, the better to shrink my wide-open irises into thin, light-bedazzled slits.

While I am blinking in confusion she is brushing at the garment in question and interrogating the air. “Why did he have to lie right there? Why did he have to paw it into a ball?”

Miss Temple Barr may have her strong points, but an understanding of the masculine feline mind is not among them.

She hangs the injured dress in the closet and takes off her high heels as if sinking three inches in height mirrors an inner droop. “I know it was not intentional, Louie,” she announces with a sigh, "any more than Crawford Bloody Buchanan meant to find a body and have a heart attack. But it is aggravatingly inconvenient.”