Cat In An Aqua Storm

A petite, dark-haired woman huddled against the wall, hands over her face, shivering, as well she might in her black spangled T-back bikini bottom and strapless bra.

“Pm sorry,” Temple apologized. Nothing was more embarrassing, for both parties, than finding a stranger crying.

The woman shook her head, too distraught to speak.

“Is there anything I can do—?” Expecting a negative answer to that inanely ineffective question, Temple retreated, prepared to tiptoe out again.

A hand left the face and then seized her wrist. “Is he still out there?” the woman asked. Her voice was strangely low and hoarse for such a small woman, choked with emotion and something else. Fear.

“He?” Temple repeated.

The hand tightened painfully on Temple’s wrist bone. “The man! A man. Any man. Is he out there?”

Temple shook her head. “No one was around but me. And a cat.”

Relief allowed the woman’s hunched shoulders to drop two inches, but she kept her face and body pressed to the wall. One hand still covered her eyes, as if to keep them from seeing something horrible.

“Hey,” Temple said gently, “I sometimes look pretty awful in the mornings, but I’m really not a scary person. Come on out. It’s just us two down here, honest.”

The woman laughed tentatively, peeking at Temple through spread fingers, like a child. “You’re not... with the show.”

“I’m doing public relations for it.”

“Why are you down here?”

“I came to check out the murder scene,” Temple admitted sheepishly, her eyes flicking to the far wall. “I’m congenitally curious.”

“Oh.” The woman sighed instead of sobbed this time and turned around to put her back to the wall.

She may have been tiny, Temple noticed, but she had a dynamite hourglass figure. Her vivid coloring suggested the Hispanic, or Italian.

“What’s your name?” Temple asked.

The woman’s long dark lashes fanned up and down behind her hand as she studied Temple’s linen suit, tote bag, high heels and, finally, her face.

“K-Katharine,” she said in a subdued, shy tone.

“All right, Katharine, why don’t you come out of there? Those ruffle sequins must scratch! I’ll prove that there’s no one here but me.”

Katharine edged out like a child from a closet, a bizarre image when combined with her seminaked, fully female form.

“Those are downright awesome shoes,” Temple said with sincere admiration. “I’ve got a cat with big green eyes almost as bright as those rhinestones.”

“Thanks.” Katharine turned one foot so Temple could admire the shoes fully—see how cleverly the shape mimicked a cat stretching. The high heel was its hindquarters raised in the air, the sole its ground-touching belly. The toe formed its extended front legs. A twining ankle strap mocked a tail.

“Darling outfit!" Temple pronounced. “Did you think that up yourself?”

Katharine nodded solemnly. “You’re sure no one’s out there anymore?”

“Swear to God on Ginger Rogers’s dancing shoes. Did”—Temple eyed the far wall, the suggestively empty hook.—“did remembering the murder scare you? Were you suddenly afraid that the murderer might still be around?”

Katharine shook her head of naturally wavy dark hair, as lush as Counselor Troi’s Cretanesque hairpiece on the new Star Trek spin-off. Temple wasn’t often jealous, but this tiny, ultra-zorchy woman made her feel a pang. In junior high she would have traded all of her record-setting Girl Scout cookie sales for some blatant sex appeal like this any day. It wasn’t fair: this brunette bombshell wasn’t even tall.

“I didn’t even remember that—the murder,” Katharine was saying. “It happened so fast, but then it always does.”

“What? What happened?” Temple demanded a bit impatiently.

Katharine’s shoulders twitched hopelessly, then she lowered her hand from her face.

“Oh, my God.” Temple saw reddened eyes of Swiss-chocolate brown, tear-smeared mascara, those Daddy Longlegs lashes, and natural, too! It had taken her a few more seconds to notice the subtle swelling of Katharine’s cheekbones, the bruises beginning to congeal around her lovely eyes.

“Someone hit you! The man you were asking about. Who?”

Katharine shrugged. “Don’t do no good to say. It’s done. It did what he wanted. I—I can’t compete, not looking like this.”

“You don't know how you look—it’s not so bad....” Brown eyes turned bitter black. “I know how I will look, like a three-D sunset by competition Saturday. He knows how it'll look, too. Like shit. Knows just how much to hit, and how hard.”

“Ice! I'll get some from the machine down the hall—I saw it yesterday! We’ll put ice on your face. Don’t move, I’ll be right back.”

Temple sprinted away, grabbing her clutch purse from the tote and clawing out quarters in transit. The soft-drink machine stood only twenty-five feet away. She congratulated herself on remembering it while waiting for a paper cup to pop down, lopsided. She straightened the cup just before a mother lode of crushed ice crashed into it, then jerked it away, letting the clear liquid Sprite dribble down the drain.