Temple took her mug before the handle got too hot for him to hold. She moved quickly into the living room to set it down on the sofa table.
"I'm not spooked. Maybe I'm jaded. But... Gandolph didn't die brutally. Just slipped away.
One of the other women swooned, so I wasn't surprised to see 'her' slumped over after the Houdini routine. It took everyone there a while to realize he was dead."
She sat on one end of the couch, Max coming toward her. Midnight Louie jumped up to stretch out full-length on mid-couch. Max paused, then sat on the opposite end.
"I'm not much for house pets."
"Louie is not a pet."
"What is he, then?"
"An old friend who wanders in and out. He had his haunts, excuse the expression, before I ever brought him home, and he likes to visit them."
"Not the haunted house, though?"
"I don't know. He could have shown up there before."
"Does he always follow you somehow?"
"No, sometimes he asks to ride along. Other times he's there before me."
"He 'asks' to ride along?"
She sipped and nodded. "Cats ask for things, just like dogs. Only they don't bark."
"That's an advantage," Max admitted. He leaned back into the sofa. "This would feel like Sunday morning if we had the funny papers."
Temple nodded, not trusting herself to deliver the next line and afraid what it might lead to.
Aw, heck, why not find out what it might lead to? They both admitted that they were still monogamous. The morality police had other crimes of the libido to pursue. ...
The doorbell rang. Max jumped up. Louie didn't.
Max was in the bedroom before Temple could say, "Three, four, open the door."
In that many seconds, she did, still carrying her mug.
Matt stood there.
Saved by the bell and Devine intervention, Temple thought with a rueful smile.
Chapter 19
Double-talk
"You look surprisingly chipper," Matt said, meaning it and trying not to stare at the gauzy grass-green robe that underlined Temple's rusty coloring. "After hearing Electra's harrowing version of your Halloween seance in the laundry room, I thought I'd better rush up to see if you required spiritual counseling."
I'm fine." Temple stepped back to admit him. "I'm just hung over from a reversed sleep pattern. Just got up. You know how that is."
"And Midnight Louie was there too?" Matt eyed the lounging cat with respect, but then, he always had.
"In the fur. He was the least of our apparitions."
Matt sat in the only spot on the sofa Louie left him, the corner opposite Temple. She regarded him a bit edgily, as if she saw a ghost of someone else sitting there.
"I was on my way to ConTact," he added, feeling a sudden need to justify his presence.
"Do you have time for coffee?" She lifted her own mug. Matt's glance fixed on the steaming, full mug on the coffee table right in front of his place.
"Oh!" Temple looked flustered. "I had my cup in the bedroom when you rang. I must have been so dopey I'd made another one, set it down out here and forgot about it. You like it? Its yours."
"Thanks."
He picked up the pottery handle. Still too hot to hold for long. Temple, he noticed, had quickly set down her own mug for the same reason, obviously. Why would an abandoned and forgotten extra mug still be so piping hot? Matt dismissed that line of thought. He was starting to think like a detective.
Or a jealous lover.
"Want to tell me about the seance?" he asked.
"Where to begin?"
She actually paused to gather her impressions, unlikely behavior in rush-ahead Temple. The green gown madly complemented her raucous red hair, an attractive collision of curls. Even without the light makeup she used, Temple would never give morning a bad name.
"You must be on my hours today," he remarked.
She nodded. "Without being used to them. But, back to the skullduggery at the Hell-o-ween Haunted Homestead."
"I still can't believe they named the place that."
"Indeed. In a nutshell, the woman next to me--who was really a man, but who, I'm told on good authority, was not normally a cross-dresser, or abnormally a cross-dresser--fainted after the last apparition. No one thought anything of it until we noticed her picture hat had slipped and he had a bald head."
Matt laughed at Temple's patented rat-a-tat delivery of the facts, which always sounded jumbled but also always added up to exactly what had happened. He could see why the methodical Carmen Molina had no patience with Temple's communication style.
"Still, death next door is traumatic," he said sympathetically.
"It was more traumatic to find out the motherly woman who'd been squeezing my hand all night was really a man."
"Why the disguise, if not for dysfunctional reasons?"
"Well, not everyone is sure transvestites are dysfunctional. Most are otherwise straight-arrow heterosexuals. I have found a hint, however. The dead man is ... was ... a retired stage magician named Gandolph."
Matt nodded.
"You don't find that name strange? Don't tell me you've read The Lord of the Rings! "
"Several times, why?"
"I haven't. Am I way out of the loop! Can you loan it to me?"
"Sure, in paperback. But it's really three books, three long books." I'm up for it. Anyway, the dead man was not named after that Gandalf, at least overtly. He spelled it G-a-n-d-o-l-p-h, as in Rudolph et cetera, and his hobby was exposing false mediums."
"Uh-oh. Then any false medium present would have motive to kill him."
"Don't you mean 'every false medium present'?"
"I'm trying to keep an open mind, but you keep slamming the door shut on me. So the night's special effects were disappointing."
"More like puzzling, I'd say. The fellow who turned up before we actually saw an image of Houdini was more interesting. At least he went though some ghostly metamorphoses."
"Such as?"
"We first saw him as a boy, maybe six years old. Then he popped up in different windows, which were actually glass walls with wall-paper patterns etched into them, but he was older each time. Bigger. Way bigger. At the end, he was this sad, massive old man with a raging face, but we couldn't hear any of the words. Kind of reminded me of a pantomime King Lear, actually."
"The play?"
"No, the part. This guy would have been a natural, in his last incarnation, that is. Seeing him made me feel so ... sorry. That was the only spooky part of the seance, these visions of this sad man from virtually boyhood to old-coothood. He wanted to communicate so much, but something was holding him back."
"What about Houdini?"
"Gross! Grotesque. The others say the image duplicated a photograph of him nearly naked and chained into a crouch. It gave me the creeps!"
"Better drink some hot coffee; your arms are growing a record batch of goosebumps."
She shot him a glance that was both flustered and flattered before he realized that he had been observing her too closely again, like a detective. Or like a jealous lover.
He finished the coffee and set it down. Temple nervously noticed his action, rubbing her chilled forearms, then glanced behind him. To her bedroom. She looked nervous.
In the silence, the uncertainty was catching. He became acutely aware of the bedroom. He'd been in it briefly once, to help her put on some pierced earrings before the Gridiron show. Now it loomed at the back of her mind for some reason, which he could either interpret as embarrassing or flattering.
Would-be detective or would-be lover, which part was he playing today? No matter, he was what Temple would call a "bloody amateur" in both roles. Matt stood.
I'd better go."
She didn't argue. She didn't rush him, but she stood also. "Thanks for stopping by. When I find out more, I'll let you know."