Cat On A Hyacinth Hunt

Chapter 48

Carmen Miranda Warning

Matt watched Kinsella and Molina amble away like coconspirators.

"What's this about?" He turned to Temple, seeing she was suddenly shivering.

He whipped off his velvet jacket and wrapped her in his borrowed body heat. She still shook like an aspen leaf, and when he was about to say something, she silently threw her arms around him.

He looked up the track. Molina and Kinsella moving away, tall and deliberate, their steps deceptively casual.

Matt clasped Temple to him, covered the only reachable part of her with kisses, the hair on her head.

"It was ... so awful," she said.

He felt like he was holding a blender set at "grate," her shudders were so sudden and rough.

"Temple. You're all right. Cold and scared, but all right."

"What's she doing?" Temple asked, like a child caught in fretful fever. "What does she want?"

"Answers. You heard her. That's her job."

"I can't believe those men from last summer are here. I guess I'd wanted to believe that they were dead."

"They hurt you. You wanted them to disappear. That's normal."

"But I'm so disappointed that they're still alive. It's like Max promised--"

"Max can't promise anything about other people's lives and deaths."

"Oh, I don't know--"

He crushed her closer. He didn't want to know what Kinsella could and could not do, in any arena--life and death, life and love.

But he also knew these moments for a respite from reality. A few stolen moments. Molina was no accessory drawing Kinsella away, but a cop doing her job.

Matt watched them talk with apprehension, Kinsella leaning against the trailer side. Easy, always easy for him. Molina moving left, then right. Their profiles backlit by the garish bulbs outlining the stalled tractor. Their words a mystery. Their momentary absence a blessing.

Matt became aware of something sanding his trouser legs; looking down, he saw Midnight Louie rubbing back and forth, back and forth.

"Poor Louie," Temple said. "He's had a terrible ordeal too. How did he end up in the same dead-end box I did? Who'd want to hurt a cat? Poor thing. I've upset him with my rotating residences." She was suddenly silent and then she stiffened as she pulled away from him. She let the jacket ebb down her shoulders like a shawl, then handed it back.

She wasn't trembling any more.

The two figures down the road were coming back, slowly, still talking.

"Thanks," Temple said. "I'll pick up Louie and that'll keep me warm the rest of the way."

Matt bent to lift the hefty cat into her arms.

The tomcat actually honored Temple with a lick on the cheek and a burst of purring.

"You'd better get in the car," Molina instructed Temple. "Yes, with the cat."

The trio walked away toward Kinsella's Taurus like a mockery of the Holy Family: man, woman and cat.

Matt watched them go.

Molina still stood facing him, as if she had something to say.

When he finally gave her his attention, she was staring past his shoulder. Her voice was the muted drone of an officer reading the suspect's Miranda rights.

"Infatuation," she said in her best official monotone, "is a predictable chemical process. It floods the brain with feel-good serotonin. Gives a sense of overpowering optimism and shattering insecurity. It lasts about eighteen months at the outside. In primitive times this was long enough to beget a child and let it grow big enough to stay with its mother while both parties repeated the infatuation process elsewhere. Another heat wave, another inheritor of the race. The notion that love has anything to do with it is a medieval artificiality that has been elevated into an obsession in modern times."

She glanced at him once. Eye to eye. "Get over it."