The noise echoed down the long, empty basement spaces. Immobile at last, she lay sprawled over several steps. Her tote bag sagged open three risers down, its contents trailing in forlorn clumps all the way to the bottom step.
An oncoming slap of running footsteps mimicked the pace of her runaway heart. She clasped her arms over her hollow stomach, happy to find it in the proper position.
"Oh, Miss Temple--!"
Danny Dove vaulted the railing lying askew on the bottom steps and deftly avoided her strewn belongings to race up to her two steps at a time.
While he asked her if she were all right, he expertly tested the mobility of her joints: her neck, her wrists, her... ow! . . . ankles.
"What happened?" he demanded.
"The railing just pulled off the wall. Then it knocked my feet out from under me like a bowling ball--or like a bowling baseball bat." Down the frighteningly long ripple of step rims she could have rolled over, she spied her empty shoes, both standing perfectly upright on their sleek heels.
"I don't remember my shoes coming off--"
"Of course not," Danny said, "a bad fall is like being in the funnel of a tornado, dear girl.
Well, nothing about Our Little Dorothy seems particularly damaged but That Ankle." He frowned at the offending joint. **You must sit right here and collect your crumpets whilst I rush below for some cold water. The minute you get home you must elevate and ice-pack it. Now, don't move!"
Off he went, leaping airily down the treacherous steps.
Why would she move? Temple felt several dozen numb tinglings that were trying to be bruises, and worse, she was breathless and shaky. But she didn't feel like bawling, a distinct improvement over her behavior after her last physical disaster. Perhaps Matt's martial arts training was making her into a big, brave girl.
From above her came slow, ponderous steps. A security guard was lumbering down toward her, angling over to the wall she huddled against to take hold of the remaining section of safety rail.
While she watched, he clasped it, stepped down, grabbed on, and gazed in horror when it came away in his hand. Temple, looking up, saw another runaway log en route toward her stranded body at a bouncing, unpredictable clip.
She curled into a ball protecting her head, expecting imminent collision.
Instead she was showered with a dash of cold water and surfaced sputtering.
The runaway railing was bouncing to the bottom, knocking over her upright shoes on the way down.
The guard, still vertical, made his huffing way down to her and her baptizer, Danny Dove.
Danny shrugged at her damp condition and lifted a half empty pail.
"Sorry, kiddo. It was either a bath or another beating."
"I never seen the like." The elderly guard sat on the steps above Temple to collect his breath and himself. "That there railing would have whomped you good, but this fellow just hoppity-skipped up the stairs like lightning and clipped the thing in mid-air so it bounced off the other wall. You do Kung Fu or something, mister?"
''Ballet," Danny Dove answered promptly, kneeling to plunge Temple's right ankle into the icy water. " 'Swan Lake' could train pole vaulters."
The guard twisted to regard the bare walls. Empty wrought-iron railing brackets clung to them like large, predatory flies. "What's going on here?"
"Criminal negligence," Danny Dove snapped. "Obviously the screws were loose, not only on the railing brackets, but in the head of whoever is responsible for maintaining the basement area. If this had happened a few hours later, when those stairs are used by dozens of dancers, it could have been a mass tragedy."
Temple squeaked politely. Danny looked down at her water-logged ankle again.
"Sorry, dear thing. Am I winding this too tightly? It's only some sheeting strips left over from a set-flat dutchman job, but the best bandage available.
"If you," he told the guard severely, surveying the man's Elvis-paunch middle, "can manage to crawl up and get the maintenance staff, and Miss von Rhine, we can clean up this mess and get Miss Temple on her way to some real treatment."
The burly guard nodded and worked his way upward, grabbing the occasional bracket like a mountain climber clinging to pitons.
"There, there," Danny Dove crooned as he lifted Temple's sopping foot from the bucket.
"You'll be dancing the marimba again in a day or two."
"That's funny," she said, "I sure couldn't dance it before.*'
When he laughed at her apt paraphrase of the ancient surgeon/violin joke, she added, "I don't think I could even cook it."
Chapter 18
Devine Revelations
When Nicky Fontana's silver Corvette convertible pulled up in front of the Circle Ritz, Electra and Matt were waiting by the curb that the Vette's tires came close enough to kiss.
Their identical expressions of concern took a comical turn toward other emotions as they eyed Temple's mode of transportation- Dark, dashing Nicky Fontana did not make a low profile chauffeur, either. Electra's gray eyes glimmered with speculation; Matt's looked wary.
Had Matt's troubles not been so much more serious than hers. Temple might have enjoyed his shock.
Nicky vaulted over the driver's side door without opening it--apparently he was as light on his feet as Danny Dove--and came around to release Temple via the passenger door.
Electra was poised on the curb, tsking constantly in manic Mother Hen style, to take Temple's tote bag. Nicky helped Temple exit the low-slung car, but Matt was quick to support her once she was on her stocking feet.
Being the centerpiece of such intense concern might comfort some; it might even flatter some women, since two of the solacing trio were attractive men.
To Temple it was sheer hell. She wished she could shake off their quite literal support, but her shoes were in her tote bag and her aching ankle was too quirky to rely on.
Had her current state resulted from an outright assault, it might hold a certain tawdry glamour, as it had the last time. But, no. This time she was just someone who had creamed herself while walking up the stairs--badly. A clumsy klutz. The self-description particularly stung: trotting about on her trademark three-inch-high heels had been Temple's personal declaration of independence since she was fifteen.
"Really, I'm fine," Temple insisted gamely through the throb, as she had been doing since succored by the amazingly adept Danny Dove.
As everyone had been doing since her fall, they turned a deaf ear.
She glanced at the nearest unheeding orifice, Nicky Fontana's, as it happened. Temple decided that the social necessities would remove the focus from her unreliable foot.
Introductions were in order.
"This is my landlady, Electra Lark," she said with a wave of her only free hand. **Matt Devine is a neighbor and . . . my martial arts instructor."
"And I know that ole boy from way back." Nicky nodded toward the Circle Ritz entrance. A black cat sat in the shade.
"Louie!" Temple was touched. Even the cat, watching them, looked almost solicitous.
''How do you know Temple's cat?" Matt asked.
She hastened to finish the introductions before Matt reached erroneous conclusions of his own. "Nicky Fontana owns the Crystal Phoenix, where I had my . . . mishap. That's where Midnight Louie used to hang his collar, if he ever had one. Then one day he moseyed up to the Convention Center and found a dead body and caught my eye. He's been with me ever since.
Now I'm working at the Phoenix, when I'm not falling flat on my face, and Nicky was kind enough to insist on driving me home."
Nicky nodded at Temple's friends, unintimidated by Electra's punkish hairdo or Matt's martial arts expertise. He was also unaffected by Temple's tendency to pooh-pooh her injury.
''You didn't fall on your face; you fell on your foot. A bad ankle sprain," he announced in the tone of a doctor transferring a patient's care to a new team. ''Our choreographer, Danny Dove, has seen dozens of dance injuries. He prescribed elevation and ice packs. And"--Nicky smiled at Temple with stern charm--"it was no trouble bringing Temple home. She's doing a lot for the Phoenix. Plus, I don't want any personal injury suits."