"My, he is massive," Father Hernandez commented.
"That's right. Father." Sister Seraphina had come over, trailing television cameraman behind her. "You didn't see him the night of the fire alarm. This poor cat almost met the same fate as poor Peter."
"No!" Father Hernandez was shocked, as anyone would be when reminded of how the convent cat had been nailed to Miss Tyler's back door. Peter had survived nicely, but Temple doubted that the clergy at Our Lady of Guadalupe would ever get over such perverse violence.
''Then he must have a special blessing."
Father Hernandez's hand reached for Louie's forehead, while the big tomcat wriggled in Temple's arms.
He was slipping through her grasp, all nearly-twenty pounds of him, his shiny black fur licorice-slick. Temple bent her knees to prop Louie's weight on her thighs, feeling his hind claws curl into the folds of her crinkle-cotton skirt for purchase. In a minute she was going to look as if she'd been tattooed by a staple gun.
"I'll take him."
Matt Devine's voice came out of the blue like a miracle. Although he had driven here with Temple, he had vanished after their arrival, she had assumed to confer with Father Hernandez.
But Matt was here now, almost as magically as the Mystifying Max had always managed on stage, cradling Midnight Louie like a fussing four-footed baby, and holding him out to Father Hernandez.
Mariah Molina stared up at Matt, who was a stranger to her, not because he was movie-star-handsome, or as blond as she was dark. Mariah wasn't quite old enough to fixate on either attribute. What she did notice--Temple knew with sudden sympathy--was that Matt might be old enough to be her father. Her apparently absent-without-leave father.
Temple was a bit miffed to observe that mother was as transfixed by Matt as daughter, and Lieutenant Carmen Molina was darn well old enough to know better.
Father Hernandez murmured and waved his right hand. Louie struggled fruitlessly in the grasp of a martial arts expert, scowling with flattened ears as if he were being cursed instead of blessed.
If beasts could talk . . .
But not even Midnight Louie could do that. Matt returned him to the carrier with no more incident than a parting yowl. Then Matt opened a smaller, powder-blue carrier and brought out a small shadow of Louie.
"Midnight Junior?" Father Hernandez joked.
"Midnight Louise," Temple put in. She was always fast on her feet with a quip.
Everyone gave this one the obligatory lip-quirk it deserved.
"The Humane Society people, called her Caviar.'' Matt stroked the little cat's fine, fluffy fur.
"Welcome, Caviar," Father Hernandez intoned in high-priest solemnity, before returning to the Latin litany he was bestowing on all the animals.
Sister Seraphina leaned near to Temple. "He should do it in English, or he could do it in Spanish, but he's old-fashioned. He says the ancient Latin soothes the animals."
It soothed Temple, who liked the long, Latin names of healing herbs and drugs. Father Hernandez's Latin blessings had hummed around the gathering all afternoon, like the drone of lazy, overeducated bees. Behind him, the camera's Cyclops eye focused on cat and company.
Then the vignette dissolved. Matt turned away to whisk Caviar back to her carrier. Father Hernandez and bracketing boys moved on to the old lady with her rooster. The television camera clung close behind, its lens leering over his white-garbed shoulder.
"We'd better get our booty home, Mariah," Molina was saying briskly, hefting the heavy cage back to the Humane Society table and handing one young cat to her daughter while cradling the other.
Tiger stripes. Wouldn't you know. Temple thought, that Molina would go for a critter that wore prison garb?
"Awkward age," Seraphina murmured at Temple's elbow, "When I see these kids, I get such an itch to teach again. But . . . I'm too old."
''You're not too old," Temple said automatically, watching Matt Devine approach Molina and child. He patted the two cats, smiled at Mariah and began talking seriously to Molina. What about?
''Besides," Temple absently reminded the nun beside her, "think of what stalks even grade school kids nowadays. Gangs. Drugs. Weapons."
Sister Seraphina glanced at the trio that Temple studied, her benign face puckered with uneasy memory. "Our grade schools were haunted in the old days; we were just too innocent to know it."
"What do you mean?" Sistet Seraphina's self-accusing tone brought Temple's attention back to the conversation at hand.
Seraphina's expression grew both more guarded and more thoughtful. "Some youngsters have always grown old before their time. It's not the street, or the playground, that damages them, but what they grow up with at home. At least nowadays we admit it."
"You mean . . . drugs, even then?"
Sister Seraphina's head with its clumsy curlicue of permanent waves shook a definite "No."
"Cigarettes and alcohol then, mostly harmless stuff to be sampled in secret and forgotten afterward, after the dare was done. No, in the old days the poison was the secrets themselves, only then the Family was sacred, untouchable. You didn't dare suspect, and you certainly did not dare interfere."
"You're talking about child abuse," Temple said.
"I often wonder," Seraphina said, staring at the charming tableau of children and animals with priest and altar boys moving methodically among them, "how much damage we did by being so innocent. We made ourselves into hypocrites before all those children who knew what life was really like, or what their lives were really like. We prattled of saints and suffering and mortal sins. Sometimes innocence is a greater sin to atone for than guilt."
"Have you ever questioned being a--?"
"Being a nun? My vocation?*' Sister Seraphina's wry, amused eyes pierced Temple's confusion, then melted into the ineffable content Temple had always sensed in her. "Never."
Her mouth hardened. "But I do question innocence when it is a shield for the evil-doer. And there are evil-doers among us, Miss Temple; all around us."
The nun's darker tone carried more weight than Father Hernandez's lulling Latin murmurs.
Temple glanced around the sunny playground, feeling an internal shiver. Here, too? That kind of evil? But Peter Burns was in jail. It was over, wasn't it?
She saw that Molina and daughter had left. Now Matt was standing sentinel by the two cat carriers, under the green and fuchsia dapple of the oleander, watching Father Hernandez with an expression Temple couldn't name: part vigilance, part anger, part bleak hunger.
Matt had worn robes like that once, had blessed, if not in Latin, at least in English, and perhaps not animals, but people. Temple herself had seen him bless Miss Tyler when she lay ill.
The Anointing of the Sick, which used to be called by the more dire name. Extreme Unction.
What did it feel like to wield such invisible power, to assume a position of arbitrating between God and man or woman? Or had Matt always seen himself as a mere intermediary? Now there was a long Latin word for you.
She watched him with concern, remembering how unwilling he, the ex-priest, had been to judge Father Hernandez's odd behavior during the uncertainty of Miss Tyler's death. She remembered even more strongly how uncertain Matt Devine was about being judged by Father Hernandez, who was not an ex-priest.
"It's never easy, dear," Sister Seraphina was saying encouragingly. "Judging situations.
Judging people. I've made my mistakes," she added, a bittersweet twist to her lips as if she had just sipped sour lemonade.
Temple glanced at Matt again. He had made his mistakes, too. Was he still making them?
Chapter 3
Grim Pilgrimage
Matt was accustomed to institutional decor--plain, functional and eternally dingy no matter how well scrubbed.
The Las Vegas county jail had one additional attribute: an enigmatic air of sordid doings just beyond reach.