Cat With An Emerald Eye

Chapter 29

Behind Door Number One

Mynah Sigmund, wouldn't you know (Temple told herself), was a native talent and a local act.

She lived in an older area of residential homes, not nearly as nice as the one Max owned (Temple also told herself) . During the psychic fair, she was available at home for one precious hour a day, and Temple had brazenly booked it. For some people, five of an afternoon was the cocktail hour. For Mynah (rhymes with Car-o-lin-a), it was the withdrawing hour.

"Be there at five," she had instructed Temple. Her eyes--blue, clear and cold--had wordlessly emphasized the importance of obeying directions to the letter. "I always meditate at three P.M. for an hour, then . . . collect myself. You may let yourself in."

"I'm not to knock?"

"Knock? No. Rapping is a phenomenon I neither stimulate, nor tolerate, in my vicinity. You'll see."

Mynah smiled then, a Mona Lisa pristine-madonna smile probably intended to drive men mad. Most women would describe it as supercilious big-sister smug. But Temple had noticed that men usually fell for what most women disdained, and vice versa. It was too bad that the sexes didn't develop an anonymous cross-gender warning service.

Now Temple parked her' Storm in the semicircular driveway that aped the semicircular poured-concrete fence comprising the front of Mynah's address. Other neighborhood houses lay exposed, crowded by Joshua trees and various tall, spiky and pale desert growths. Mynah's establishment was ringed by this contradictory and virginal wall, both fluid and rounded in form, like a wave of supernaturally white sand, yet discouragingly solid and opaque. It was a wall that begged for breaking.

Against this soft/hard cold/hot white wall, and the bleached stones that covered the ground, and the uncompromisingly spotless cocaine-bright concrete that formed the driveway, the Storm's soft aqua silhouette looked strangely apropos. A blob of Southwest paint, perhaps, torn from the sky, dropped on a blank canvas and about to be smeared into an approximation of the native precious stone, turquoise.

That was the trouble with the whiteness of Mynah. Like the whiteness of the whale Moby Dick, it was unnatural, despite the naturalness of its environment. It existed to set off the color of everything else, and everything else usually suffered by comparison. Oh, the Storm looked its ordinary spirited self: blue and white are the eternal partners of peace. But Temple's red hair; now that would be an intrusion here.

Also her color-blocked linen pants suit, chosen perhaps unconsciously as a gauntlet to throw down before the anemic Mynah. And her purple, orange and Kelly-green high-heeled J. Renee pumps.

On the other hand, five was also the Sunset Hour in some parts of the country, worldand time zone. Temple straightened her gaudy padded shoulders and prepared to ring the bell, since knocking was prohibited.

But the gateway (a double-doored expanse of milk-stained mesquite) was merely arched doors split by the obvious line of separation. No knocker to drop. No practical, round period of a built-in bell to ring.

Beyond the wall and the gate, water fell in a talkative turquoise lament upon pale stones.

Village women weeping and washing in this vale of tears.

What women? What village? This was a one-time tract house, for God's sake, Temple reminded herself. She hated spells of any kind, unless they were uttered by grandmotherly women with wands, who could bring forth dazzlingly different shoes with every wave.

Glass would not be welcome in this place of stones, which were the raw material of unfired glass. Here was cool earthen removal. Withdrawal. Here was Western asceticism. Here was high-toned hokum incarnate.

While Temple searched for some implement with which to announce her arrival--a car horn, perhaps, rudely tapping out "Happy Days Are Here Again"? A single stick, scratching on the untouched-by-human-hands-except-to-buff-it wood? The sound of one foot kicking ... ?--the gate split into two sections and silently swung inward.

Temple searched for the Cyclopean eye of a security camera, but found none.

A bell rang. A single bell. One of those tony Sonoran desert bells designed by a monkish architect building a modem City of Cibola in the Land of the Peyote Sun, Temple just knew.

One of those bells that just one of cost a fortune through the very best (the most quiet, discreet, verbose) catalogs: Found at a Spanish Mission forgotten since Frey Junipero Serra first boogied down the Baja . ..

Temple's travel-brochure meanderings never grew so thick as when she was feeling on foreign ground, so she cut the mental chatter and stepped onto the (get this!) clear glass paving stones set into pure-white cement.

The fountain she had heard suffered postnasal drip in a corner of the courtyard. One lugubrious drop of water after another fell from endless levels of copper-leaf ladders to vanish among the wan blades of bloodless plants massed at the fountain's bottom.

The single ponderous bell, now curiously mute, still trembled from its recent attempt at sound.

Beyond the fountain and the white stone garden and the copper-and-verdigris-colored leaves hung a curtain of glass beads, winking back the white, with no visible split in its surface.

Temple waited, knowing by now that some effect was forthcoming, that petal by bloodless petal the portal would part, and Mynah would choose to show herself lurking at its pale heart.

But the wall did not part, because it was not glass. It was running water. The waterfall sheet broke into individual drops as fat as glass beads, then thinned to harpstrings and finally dispersed to a mist that vanished except for an occasional drip in counterpoint to the fountain's steady tympanum beat.

Mynah stood beyond the absent barrier, dressed in a white gi. Her belt was black, and its dramatic charcoal slash matched her aggressive eyebrows.

"Come through," she suggested, "unless an occasional drop of rain frightens you."

Water, Temple recalled, could make vivid colors run. She clicked like a beetle over the glass flagstones dewed with moisture.

Once inside the room sound fell in tinkling sheets of digitally recorded New Age music, as random as rain and not nearly as refreshing. Mynah had not moved, but the window of water was in smooth place again, falling so perfectly it seemed plate glass, albeit a little wavy.

"Reminds me of the seance room," Temple commented.

"Seance room? In that ... joke of a haunted house? Please, you're talking about a cartoon."

"A cartoon didn't kill Edwina Mayfair."

"Edwina Mayfair. Such an obvious pseudonym."

"Obvious?"

Mynah cocked her wiry eyebrows and sank onto an arrangement of cotton-covered pillows.

" 'Edwina.' A feminized version of a man's name. Check the man's birth certificate and you'll probably find 'Edwin' is his middle name, or his father's name. And 'May-fair.' A pun on 'Playfair,'

do you think? No doubt he felt that true psychics didn't 'play fair' because they achieved their successes by intangible means. A master of the Tangible, our Gandolph the Great."

"Our?"

"I speak of the situation. He perished at our seance, cheesy and insincere as it was; therefore his death is 'ours.' "

"You take credit?"

"Credit... no! My dear Miss Barr, you have been severely affected by this ... melodrama, haven't you?" Blue eyes piercing through the rain of everyday appearances. "Don't! It was foreordained. Who was there, when or where it was held, is immaterial. He was doomed to die.

Somewhere. With somebody."

"By murderous means?"

"Murderous means? Well, we don't know that, do we? I think ... heart trouble is a suitably sentimental diagnosis for such occasions, don't you? Poor Edwina. Poor Gareth, the kitchen boy.

Such Arthurian names, so Pre-Raphaelite! So Victorian! We are modern, to our cores!" She pounded her fists, knuckles white as baroque pearls, upon the harp-bones of her chest. A gi can gap open or shut, depending on its wearer's bent. Again Mynah eyed Temple as if her vision were a threat, or an instrument. "Is that why you are troubled, why you seek psychic healing?

You obsess about death?"

It was as good an excuse as any. Temple looked down, trying to get up the nerve to feign nerves. Her very indecision did the trick.

"You poor girl!" Mynah's clasped fist uncurled, stretched out to Temple. "I read your confusion. You are torn between two--convictions."

"Yes!" Temple said, relief at Mynah's benign conclusion sounding overemphatic.

"What are they? You must tell me."

When Temple hesitated, Mynah pulled a small unbleached-muslin bag from one turned-back cuff. Six or seven tiny colored stones poured into her palm.

"Pick one. Only one. Quick! You must choose with your reflexes, like a master of martial arts, not with your head."

Temple never chose unthinkingly; that was all the fun. Not amethyst or garnet or pearl, they meant something common, she remembered. Something uncommon, to confuse the seeress in her lair. Temple snatched at a facet of light bright as a lizard's eye.

"Peridot," Mynah pronounced. "How unusual." The cold blue eyes flicked to Temple's hair.

"Perhaps not for one of your coloring and temperament.

"You are... impulsive." Ridiculous, Temple answered internally. "High-tempered." Stable.

"With buried psychic talents." Rubbish. Mynah leaned nearer, across the gulf of white marble floor tiles. "Passionate." Weeeeell, about the truth. "Imaginative, to a fault." Tell that to the nightly news. "You worry too much," she added soothingly. Bingo! Like, what am I doing visiting a manipulative, lying snake like this? "Nothing is wrong, my poor, impulsive, imaginative, frightened girl!"

She took Temple's hand and began to uncurl her fingers from around the semiprecious peridot. Temple considered resisting, but didn't want to blow her worried-girl cover.

"See how you secretly desire to reveal all the secrets at your core. ..."

Temple gazed into her bared palm, seeing only the peridot--a truly insignificant chip of peridot, really, hardly big enough for one tiny ear stud. Ralph Fontana would spit upon this piece of measly peridot! It wasn't big enough to reveal the hidden heart of a Thumbellina! Hardly worthwhile for an ant to tote it back to the anthill

"You are making mountains out of anthills," Mynah went on, "murder out of mere natural causes. Trust me. I read more than crystals and sand paintings, you know."

Temple didn't even know about the crystals and sand paintings; why didn't she get to see the main event? What did she have to do, cross Mynah's palms with peridot? She did so, turning her hand edgeways to let the nile-green chip drop into her hostess's hand.

"Generous." Mynah's smile indicated that she was back to enumerating a litany of Temple's virtues and vices.

"Does your husband practice any psychic powers?" Temple asked.

"My husband?" Mynah's big blue eyes blinked vacantly. It was as if her attention had been rudely shifted to the inhabitant of another planet. "Why would you even mention him, when you are seeing me?"

"Well, you are married--"

"And how does that concern you?"

"Not at all. I just thought he might be ... around." Temple glanced nervously toward the hovering plant forms.

"William is a dabbler," Mynah said shortly. "He is quite separate from my work."

"Where might I find him?" Temple persisted.

"At his day job." Mynah's white-frosted lip curled.

"At--?"

She tossed her head as if being forced to reveal the mundane facts were physically restraining. "An ... office building. I don't keep track of such places, such pursuits. You'll have to ask someone else who does."

Temple nodded, slowly. A wife who couldn't be bothered to re-member where her husband works? Granted, modern married cou-pies often went their own ways, but they usually at least knew the path to their spouse's workplace. Yet Temple sensed that Mynah wasn't keeping something from her; she simply hadn't bothered to know these things.

"Why do you want to see William?" the woman in white demanded, a tiny pout puckering the lipstick rime at the corners of her mouth.

"I'm new to all this. I'm trying to get a rounded viewpoint."

"No!"

Temple politely raised her eyebrows. Mynah's dark brows were drawing together as if a stitch had been taken between them.

"You are... generous, as the peridot says, but also have another side of the peridot in your character, a flawed side."

Temple waited. A recitation of her supposed virtues had gotten boring; perhaps the flaws would be more insightful.

"You are envious. Unmarried, you seek after my husband." Temple would have protested this extreme conclusion, but Mynah was in full pronouncement. "But you are also envious of the powers of others, such as myself. Oh, you pretend to be seeking enlightenment, but your purpose is very different. Keep the small cyst of green poison--" She dropped the grain back into Temple's palm before she could draw back, and rolled her fingers shut on the sharp stone.

"I see everything, you know. You came here hoping to learn my powers, to find powers of your own, and you have learned only of your own limitations."

"What do you mean?" Temple felt honestly indignant. Information, yes; but a "powers" thief she was not.

Mynah stood. "Don't you know I can read every ignoble thought? You seek my secret."

"Secret? I haven't even asked to see the sand paintings."

Mynah tossed her Loving Care #88 sterling silver mane over her shoulders. "You envy my power over men. You, who are ignored by men. Who live alone, like an old maid with her cat--"

"What about my cat?" Had Midnight Louie been in the neighborhood? What had he done now?

"See how defensive, how pathetic you are? And you admit you have a cat. This meeting, an excuse! Deny it if you can."

Temple couldn't.

"You care for nothing but the adoration you see me turning away. You are consumed by the flames of jealousy. You covet paranormal powers only for base and futile reasons. Go, college girl! Dream your feeble dreams. Show your true colors. The simple purity of true ability will never be yours."

That "college girl" did it! Did this dame think she was dealing with some raw amateur?

Temple (impulsively) considered unleashing (with high temper) a few apt observations of her own, which were far more on target than this mumbo-jumbo attack.

But that would be blowing her cover, wouldn't it? Temple reflected (generously). Her buried psychic powers revealed that it was better to let a suspect stew in misconceptions than to set her straight (passionately) and ruin the interview.

No, she was better off continuing with her psychic interrogations, then reporting the results to Max, or Matt, whichever one of her psychological or magical experts was better suited to restore her battered self-esteem, especially when she repeated the charge about having nothing better to share her life with than Midnight Louie! Come to think of it, Louie would be most solicitous himself at news of this rank slander.

Envious, hah!

Temple left without waiting for the water-curtain to be drawn.

She emerged, somewhat wet, into the tranquil courtyard and a dusky, cool evening not suited to running through walls of water. Walking on water, maybe, with her hidden powers, but not running through...

Shivering, Temple scooted into the Storm, pushing the heat level to the max. Onward, she told the car as the engine stuttered in sym-pathetic cold. She dropped the peridot into her glove compartment.

But before she showed the house of Mynah Sigmund the smoke from her tailpipe, she drove around it once more for good measure. That was when she spotted the glossy black rear fender of a Viper protruding from a plumy stand of pampas grass.

Either a Fontana brother was calling on Mynah while her husband was off working who-knows-where, or somebody else who drove a flashy car was. Darn, too bad Temple was such a wimp of a vamp; otherwise she could sweet-talk Watts and Sacker into running a license check for her.

Temple sat up in her seat. She didn't want to drip on the vinyl. Maybe the detectives wouldn't check on a dog license for her, but what had Max been doing all day? Sitting safe at home, cracking into computers. He was a quick learner; maybe he could track down the right Viper, in a manner of speaking.

Temple kicked her feet out of soggy (sigh) shoes (cursed be Mynah and all her waterworks!), then gunned it hose-footed to her next appointment. Maybe Mynah had murdered Gandolph the Great for providing too much competition with the hat. A long black veil will outdraw bridal illusion every time.

********************

From the sublimely ridiculous to the ridiculously substandard: all in a day's work for the unsanctioned investigator. Temple's next appointment was at the Hi-Lo-Motel.

"Sorry," she told the Storm, as she wriggled out and left it in its humble parking space. "We sleuth types must go where even Vipers dare not leave tread marks."

Las Vegas had always offered its visitors a full buffet of entertainment options, from bargain basement to penthouse pizzazz.

And that was exactly how to tell low-rent district from high-rent district: height. The cheapest motels were one-story high; less cheap ones were two or three stories; moderate places hit ten or twelve stories, and the really, really ritzy outfits lit up the sky as well as their patrons' credit-card balances.

Temple personally had always resented that low was a sign of lesser luxe in this town.

D'Arlene Hendrix occupied room 223, which meant a climb with her luggage, but less access from street-level intruders. The place was well lit and clean, but frills had been given the cold shoulder. Temple mounted the concrete exterior stairs to the second floor, then cruised the gallery until she reached the right room.

A knock brought the TV-buzz within to a sudden halt. D'Arlene Hendrix opened the door on its security chain to check Temple out, then closed the door to release the chain and admit her.

She wore blue jeans, scuffed tennis shoes and a T-shirt that advertised a Lexington, Kentucky, landscaper. Her bifocal spectacles on their pearl safety chain bounced against a lofty elm tree on the T-shirt.

"Nice of you to see me," Temple began.

"I never did understand why you were present at the seance." She gestured to the plainly upholstered desk chair opposite the bed, then sat on the paisley spread.

"As a sightseer. I'm working for the Crystal Phoenix hotel and casino. We plan a similar attraction, and I was there to see what was what."

"You certainly didn't do that." D'Arlene shot the silent television screen dead with one punch of a remote-control button.

Remote control, Temple thought. The Hi-Lo-Motel wasn't totally no-frill.

"Have you been to Las Vegas before?" she asked,

D'Arlene's grizzled permanent remained unruffled as her head shook a firm "no."

"If I'd have realized what a charade this so-called seance was, I'd have never come."

"What do you mean 'charade'?"

"I guess I was lured by the promise of Oscar Grant's participation."

"Really?" Temple didn't peg D'Arlene Hendrix as the kind of woman who would find Oscar Grant promising in any respect.

D'Arlene laughed ruefully. "I hear you, Miss Barr, even if I haven't the slightest idea who you are. You don't see me as an Oscar Grant groupie. I'm not, but I do recognize the large viewership of his program, and I always hope that something I do will raise the respect level authentic psychics need if we're to help with this horrendous crime problem, especially against children."

"So you weren't interested in Houdini at all; only in drawing attention to your work?"

"Houdini, it strikes me, was well able to take care of himself. The cases I'm asked to assist with usually involve the most helpless persons in society: innocent children snatched from the streets or even their very own houses; grieving families who feel that the hunt-and-peck of police work is not enough."

"So they seek the hunt-and-peck of psychic work."

"I can't argue with you." D'Arlene Hendrix picked a cellophane bag of dried apricots from the plain-Jane bedside table and offered some to Temple. "My ... intuitions hit like bolt lightning.

Here. There. Close to the ground. Up in the air." She chewed meditatively on an apricot skin.

"I've learned to accept the ambiguous nature of my gift. The police want predictability.

Programming. Some, though, do recognize my flashes of insight, if they don't respect them."

"You sound like a latter-day Joan of Arc."

She shook her head and rolled up the apricot bag. "I'm no crusader, but my families are."

"Your families?"

"A perquisite of my often unsung work. My clients become foster families. Usually they bring me in at their own expense, much against local law enforcement preferences. I'm always unwanted. And when I do find the missing one's body, my 'success' is proof of everlasting sorrow to those who begged to have me on the case. By then I often feel it as much as they."

Temple nodded slowly. "How does your ... intuition work?"

"Like a car that was the biggest lemon you ever owned."

Temple smiled.

"It's true. All fits and starts. It's like I eavesdrop on one of those early telephone party lines.

I'll just get snatches of this and that: a place or person I see; a voice I hear; a gut feeling when I look at a map, or a mother's face."

"Do you have any children of your own?"

D'Arlene's face saddened. "No. Couldn't. I sometimes think that's why I get intuitions about missing children."

"Do you ever find them alive?"

"Yes. Yes, I do. Twice in almost eighteen years. Then the press ... oh, yeah, everyone's ready to admit the possibility of more than we know out there. After the fanfare fades, the cases come and go, the dead are buried and I'm forgotten. Until the next time."

"You sound like a burnt-out cop."

D'Arlene tilted her head toward Temple like a curious squirrel. "You must have a few

'instincts' of your own. Yes, I'm really kicking myself for coming along for this. First the police decide I'm the one person worth questioning in Gandolph's death--"

"Why?"

"Who knows? Maybe someone pointed them in my direction. But you'll notice they threw me back. Then I had booked myself into this modest motel because I'm so used to them. I never could see charging families for fancy accommodations when they're under the kind of stress that brings us together. But the show is paying my way, and I realize now I was dumb not to have taken advantage of an entertainment hotel like the Camelot. At least there I could wander the casino or the shopping arcades or the Strip. But, no, D'Arlene the Tightfisted has to stay on in Las Vegas at police say-so in the equivalent of a Nowhere, Kansas, motel. Want some wine?"

The final sentence's abrupt change of subject made Temple blink, but she nodded, more curious to see what D'Arlene Hendrix was swigging in her motel room than anything else.

Out from the bathroom sink came a screw-top brand that must match the room rate of a Hi-Lo-Motel. Certainly Temple had never laid eyes on Olde Grapevine wine before.

"Plastic glass offend you?" D'Arlene asked.

"Not at all. I do some of my best work on plastic ... plastic keyboard, plastic credit cards--"

D'Ariene laughed and propped herself up against the standard-size bed's headboard. "You didn't come here to hear about the frustrations of my job."

"Actually, I did. The frustrations of every profession or job are pretty much the same: standoffish co-workers, associates who don't recognize your talent and bosses who give you no respect. What's interesting about your gripes is the offbeat job you do. What about that seance?

I'm green, but I... sensed something going on."

"Don't get me wrong. I said it was a phony mess, but I never said something wasn't going on.

There was a lot of pain in that room." She shook her head and sipped some red. "A lot."

"Psychic pain?"

"Psychic pain, mental pain, emotional pain; that's the only kind I pick up. At least I'm not tuning in every hammer-hit fingernail."

"And this was before Gandolph died?"

"Oh, my, yes." D'Ariene set her plastic glass on the nightstand and gazed up at the opposite wall as if screening a movie there. "Maybe that's why I'm so depressed. Maybe it's not just that poor man's death, and in such a silly getup too. That seance was a Palace of Pain. My skin ...

ached just from being there."

"And your feelings were genuine?"

"You can't fake thin skin, honey, even when it's psychic skin."

Olde Grapevine had really relaxed D'Ariene Hendrix. Even her tight permanent wave seemed to be coming unsprung. Temple felt like an uneasy neighbor at a coffee klatch where the hostess was suddenly spiking the Postum with Kahlua.

"So where was all the pain coming from?"

"My 'impressions' don't wear name tags. I sensed a terrific anger. And will, incredible will. All these violent emotions snapped from person to person, like electricity. Didn't you feel it?"

"I felt more than I expected, that's for sure. And I saw--"

"The wildman in the chimney?"

"Sure, I saw that; I guess anyone who's read a book about Hou-dini has probably seen that photograph."

D'Arlene nodded and retrieved her plastic wine glass in a limp-fingered hand.

"So you don't believe that was Houdini either?" Temple pressed.

"Houdini wouldn't come back bare like that. Any spirits I've ever heard of that have a ghost of a chance of being genuine are always quite decently clothed. Unlike my poor victims."

Temple blanched at the reference, but blundered on.

"I didn't know about that then, ghosts preferring to appear fully dressed. But I did see another ... person. A little boy and later an old man I thought was the same boy grown up and old."

A nod. "Terrible pain, terrible rage."

"You saw those figures too?"

This time her head shook. "No. The only thing I 'see' are death sites, and nobody had died in that bizarre room ... yet. I felt the emotions, like other people hear music. A whole symphony was playing that night."

"Who played what instrument?"

D'Arlene nodded, prodded by Temple's analogy. "Each person had his or her own tone. The bassoon, that was hard to place; I never quite did. But the cello was Gandolph, deeply dark music, quite sad."

"Who else?"

"There was a whistle. A melancholy low whistle. The other man, I think, besides Oscar Grant, an obvious, and the professor."

"William Kohler."

"The women were a pilgrim's chorus, all wanting something lost quite desperately."

"Who, though, broadcast the kind of pain you were talking about?"

D'Arlene's eyes were quite unfocused now. Her whole face had deadened. Temple realized she was watching someone strip-mine her psychic senses, peel back the outer layers one by one until she dug deeper and deeper into her own protective emotional epidermis.

"You did, for one."

"Me? I'm not in pain."

D'Arlene's slack lips tried to smile. Her eyes were slits as she peered through the veil of her lashes.

"Painful confusion at least. I can still hear that agitated flute trying to calm its pulse."

"I was working, that's all, and thinking about reality and illusion."

"Illusion. Much illusion that night. Gandolph's. Yours, I think ... you are working an illusion now, you are no more simply what you say or seem, as Gandolph was not that night. And That Creature. Oh, my God. Born to give the occult a bad name, as if it weren't maligned enough without posing witches on the wing. And around you all, this slipstream of Will. Pure Will. And Anger, white-hot anger. Oscar Grant was the bassoon perhaps, though he sounded more like a tenor sax. Slippery. Tenor sex. She didn't sing, that one."

"Who?"

"Your link with the Technicolor aura. Electricity. Strange reverberations. And quite wonderfully serene, like a ... harp."

"I'm a hysterical flute and Electra's this elegant harp?"

D'Arlene's lazy eyes flicked slightly open. "It was your analogy to begin with, Miss Barr. And quite productive too. I've never had such clear psychic recall. Your gift is not always to see, but to lead others to see."

"I see."

D'Arlene laughed. "You think that is a little gift, and you loathe the little, the little in yourself, the little in other people, which is a much more serious flaw. Little people. But who is the bassoon? Such power, such waste. Such rage, such fear. And the mute rabbit, who only screams in desperation, what instrument does she play? A violin scraping out of tune. And then one last, hysterical high note, quite impressive, quite final."

The woman shook her head, still not causing a flutter among her greige curls. She sat up, putting her feet on the floor as if restoring herself to solid earth.

"I feel better. I hadn't wanted to see that seance again, but I could bear to hear it. I think you got what you wanted, Miss Barr. I think you are a satisfied client, even if you won't know it until later."

"This ... has been fascinating."

D'Arlene Hendrix didn't look at her. She sat hunched over, regarding the wall-to-wall carpet so unworthy of viewing. "It would have been, if it were faked. But it wasn't. Therefore, it's not fascinating, but sad, and you'll find that out later too."

Temple stood, set her empty glass atop the TV and went to the door. D'Arlene seemed too leaden to move, perhaps ever again.

"Oh," she said, like a dreamer remembering one last detail. "I sensed many unseen lives, some not human, but that kind of static is often present in the face of true phenomena. And one thing you must bear in mind, Miss Barr, above all others. I can swear to the veracity of the emotions I channeled, but not to their origin or any action they might have generated. It's the same as on my cases.

"I never quite know whether I'm picking my impressions up from the victim ... or the killer."