Cat In An Alphabet Soup (Catnap)

Temple back-shuffled as silently as she had entered, and slipped out the front door, never turning her back to the room. Once in the hall with its feeble wall sconces and dull rose carpeting, she raced flat-footed for the elevator and hit the Up button.

It took forever to come. She’d never noticed before how the gears clanked and squealed, how blasted loud the ancient mechanism was! It arrived empty. Temple darted in and pushed the P button. Inside, the car was richly paneled, like the exterior of a coffin. It jerked upward with the unholy racket of an unoiled guillotine being hoisted for the fatal drop.

A clanking stop almost persuaded Temple’s heart to imitate it. She tore for the coffered double doors opposite, pounding them with both fists.

They sprang open. Electra Lark stood there with her hair in stiff peaks resembling properly beaten egg whites. Little papers pressed onto her scalp. One egg-white peak was stained blood-red.

“Temple! What is it? I’m doing my hair.”

“God! I thought you were being scalped.” Temple scampered over the threshold and shut the penthouse doors behind her. “Someone’s in the building—or was. My apartment air- conditioning is off, one French door is wide open and the cat’s gone.”

Electra whipped the hand towel from around her neck, thinking. “The maintenance man is gone for the night. It’s too bad that nice Matt Devine isn’t here.”

“He isn’t?” Temple hadn’t considered that there might be advantages to being a damsel in distress.

“Works nights.” Electra sighed. “We’ll have to be liberated ladies and do it ourselves. I’ll get a flashlight. We don’t want to give the intruder any more to see by than necessary, if he’s still there.”

Temple nodded, and Electra vanished into her kitchen. Temple had never explored the inner depths of Electra’s quarters, but she glimpsed an odd green crystal ball on a huge claw-footed brass tripod in the living room—atop a blond TV cabinet from the fifties. A shadow flitted away as Temple strained to see into the half-glimpsed rooms; probably a phantom of her unsteady nerves.

“This oughta do it.” Electra reappeared, waving an old- fashioned, silver-metal-barreled flashlight that reminded Temple of ancient Eveready battery ads. She just hoped a black cat of her acquaintance, her brief acquaintance, had the same nine lives the Eveready cat always did.

They rode down the three floors in silence; the elevator did not. Temple had left her door unlocked, so they entered immediately on a well-oiled hush of hinges. Electra switched on her beam; the click sounded like a cocking revolver in the silence. A sickly circle of light piddled on the parquet.

Electra and Temple followed the yellow ick road to the French door.

“Oh!” Temple’s gardenia plant lay roots up, its terracotta pot smashed. Otherwise, the patio was untouched and deserted.

“Better check out the other rooms,” Electra ordered. “I hold the flashlight out to the side, see, in case they’re armed. That way, they shoot at the light, but they don’t hit the torso or anything vital.”

“No, just me,” Temple hissed, walking as she did to the right and behind Electra.

Each room proved empty, even when Temple put on the overhead lights and they inspected corners and the shower stall.

“I’ll check these closets,” Temple said quickly as Electra was about to jerk the Mystifying Max poster into the hard glare of her flashlight. Temple poked the light into the interior nooks and crannies.

“Sure a lot of shoes in there,” Electra noted.

“But not much else. No Midnight Louie, either. Electra, he’s gone!”

“Now, now.” Electra Lark left it at that. She was not a believer in false sentiments.

Temple checked her watch. Only 10:27 p.m. She could hardly call the police about a door they would say she’d left unlatched, or an air-conditioner they’d assume she’d left off. Or a missing cat who’d never been domesticated in the first place.

Some of her belongings looked vaguely disarranged, but who was to say that wasn’t the vanished Midnight Louie doing some creative nesting? Who was to say that the wind hadn’t blown the door ajar, and that the vagabond cat had leaped out when opportunity knocked?

“What a shi—shazam of a day.” Temple locked the errant French door.

“Will you be able to sleep, dear? I mean alone.”

“I’ve managed it so far,” Temple said ungraciously, “although I turned down an offer tonight that begins to look better by the millennium.”

“You keep this flashlight tonight. I’ll have Mr. Marino check your thermostat and the door in the morning. We can reach you at the convention center these days, I suppose.”

“Not until almost eleven,” Temple said. “I’ll be running an errand first.”

Compared to this unsettling night, a rendezvous with a catnapper was beginning to sound like the answer to a maiden’s prayers.

16

The Ultimate Sacrifice