The Cat Sitter’s Cradle (6 page)

She was leaning in the doorway to the kitchen now, and for the first time I noticed
she was really quite beautiful. With one hand resting on the side of her neck, she
looked like she was posing for the cover of
Cosmopolitan
magazine. She had silver hair piled casually on top of her head, and her body was
long and graceful like a dancer’s. I said a little silent prayer that I looked half
as good as she did when I was her age.

I wasn’t sure if Mr. Harwick’s teasing banter was just a game they played—you can
never really know what goes on in the vast world of two people in love—but she seemed
genuinely hurt by his joke. She was watching him out of the corner of her eye, and
I could tell she was trying to come up with some stinging retort. Mr. Harwick, on
the other hand, seemed to barely notice her.

He said, “The password is Tiger. Every window on both floors is tied into the system
as well, so if you open anything while you’re here you have to make sure you close
it before you go. The lanai is wired, too. We keep the alarm on at all times when
we’re not here. You should do the same. The only people that know the code and the
password are the housekeeper and the pool man. And the kids, of course.”

“The kids?”

“Becca and August, but I doubt you’ll see them very often.”

“Oh, they live here?”

“They do,” he said, “but Becca’s started her freshman year at college, and August
just got a job at the golf club, so they won’t be in your way.”

I wrote both their names down in my notebook and tried not to look mystified as to
why Becca and August couldn’t just take care of the pets themselves.

“You may be wondering what the hell we need you for when we have two grown, perfectly
capable adults living in our house.”

“Oh, no.” I blushed. “I completely understand.”

“Good,” he said. “Perhaps you can explain it to me one day. They came as a package
deal with Mrs. Harwick, so my DNA’s got absolutely nothing to do with it.” He handed
me the files. “The pool boy’s name is Kenny Newman. His number is there should you
need him.”

A little too excitedly, I said, “Oh, I know Kenny! I mean, I used to look after his
cat.”

I didn’t say it, but Kenny also worked for me sometimes as an overnight dog sitter.
We had met when he hired me to take care of his elderly orange tabby, Mister T, who
was a very sweet old guy. I was the first person Kenny called when Mister T died,
and we had been friends ever since.

And now I knew exactly why Mrs. Harwick might think it was a special occasion to whip
up a snack if the pool man was hungry. Kenny looked like he fell off the cover of
a men’s fashion magazine. He was tall and broad shouldered, with long sandy-blond
hair and eyelashes any woman would kill for. A bit scruffy, perhaps, and a little
rough around the edges, but that only made him even more irresistible to women. He
lived in a rickety old houseboat behind Hoppie’s Restaurant on the south end of the
Key. In exchange for doing odd jobs around the place, Hoppie let him live on the boat
for free. The occasional dog-sitting gig at night was perfect for him—it provided
a comfortable bed and a decent shower every once in a while. He parked his small truck
in the client’s driveway, which was a good signal to would-be burglars that somebody
was home. It was great for me because he provided company for the dogs at night, and
he fed and walked them before he left in the morning, saving me a trip.

Mrs. Harwick was studying me closely. She had a curious look on her face. “Kenny never
mentioned he had a cat. What kind of cat is it?”

“An orange tabby, but unfortunately it passed away a while ago.”

“Oh, no. What was his name?”

“Honey,” Mr. Harwick said, “I think Miss Hemingway probably has better things to do
than stand around talking about the pool boy’s cat.”

Before I could answer, there was a loud clumping sound from upstairs. I turned around
half expecting to see the chandeliers over the kitchen island shaking.

Mrs. Harwick said, “Oh, that’s our daughter.”

She went out to the front foyer and called up the marble staircase.

“Becca,” Mrs. Harwick called. “Come and meet the cat sitter.”

There was a short pause, and then the clomping sound started again, growing louder
and louder until finally a young woman dressed almost entirely in black appeared at
the top of the stairs. From the sound of it I had expected her to be a linebacker-sized
Amazon, but instead she was a petite wisp of a thing. She wore a short black shawl
wrapped around her narrow shoulders, with a faded pink T-shirt and a tight black miniskirt
over black tights, and black lace-up army boots with two-inch-thick rubber soles.
Her hair was jet black, too. It fell across her forehead, half hiding her face. She
looked like every sullen, angry teenager in the world, and I wondered if Christy would
have gone through a similar stage had she been given the chance.

“Becca, this is Dixie. She’ll be taking care of Charlotte while we’re away.”

Becca came stomping down the stairs in her boots and shook my hand limply, mumbling
something that sounded like “hello.” Her green eyes were framed in magenta eyeliner,
and her lashes were thick with black mascara. She had her mother’s thin figure and
pale skin, but where Mrs. Harwick was polished and confident, Becca was all sharp
angles and angst-ridden. I immediately liked her.

I leaned toward her and said, “Love your boots.”

Becca peered up from behind her curtain of black hair and smiled, but before she could
say anything Mr. Harwick handed me the stack of files and said, “Thank you for coming
by, Miss Hemingway.”

I nodded. “Well, it’s been a pleasure meeting all of you. If there’s anything else
you think of, please feel free to give me a call, twenty-four/seven. I keep my cell
phone with me at all times.”

I extended my hand to Mr. Harwick, but he stood still with his arms folded over his
chest. “No questions?”

Mrs. Harwick smiled tensely and said, “Roy…”

He shot her a look. “No, I’m just curious. Not a single question? We’ve given you
a lot of information here, Dixie. I’m a little surprised you wouldn’t have at least
one or two questions for us.”

Becca was standing motionless at the bottom of the staircase looking down at the floor.
I know men like Mr. Harwick. I had encountered a lot of them in the police force.
He was the kind of man that liked to be in charge, and he liked to be in charge
all the time,
especially around women. In extending my hand to him, I had basically signaled that
our meeting was over, and that had obviously made his testicles shrink up a couple
of sizes. Had I been a little bit more on my toes, I would have made up a couple of
lame-ass questions just to stroke his ego. He was, after all, a client. But I’d had
a long day, and I didn’t feel like playing along.

“Mr. Harwick,” I said, “I’ve been pet sitting for quite a while, and I’m pretty good.
I promise you there won’t be anything to worry about. Charlotte and I will have a
great time while you’re away. She’s in good hands.”

He frowned slightly. “So not one question.”

With a sweet smile, I said, “Nope. If I had a question I would ask it. Was there something
in particular you were thinking of?”

He paused, but his expression didn’t change. “Good for you. And no, I think that about
covers it.”

He shook my hand firmly and walked back into the living room with a nod at Mrs. Harwick.

She said, “I’ll see you out.”

We walked to the door in silence. I looked back to wave good-bye to Becca and caught
her staring at me in awe. I don’t think she’d ever seen a stranger stand up to her
father. I had to admit it was not the most professional thing to do, but when a kid
has an asshole for a parent, it sometimes feels really good to point it out to them.

Outside on the winding cobblestone driveway, Mrs. Harwick brightened. “Oh, Dixie,
I almost forgot!”

She pulled a notecard out of her pocket and handed it to me. It was written with the
most precise, miniature handwriting I’d ever seen.

“It’s the feeding schedule for the fish, and there’s also instructions for checking
the water chemistry. I doubt you’ll need to adjust it, but it’s important that you
check it at least once a day. Fish are funny creatures, you know. They seem so strong
and invincible, but introduce just the slightest chemical imbalance and the next thing
you know they’re belly up at the bottom of the tank. When my Reggie died, I thought
I’d never get over it.”

“Oh, what kind of fish was Reggie?”

She frowned and looked off in the distance. “That’s funny. Reggie was my first husband.
I have no idea why I just said that.”

As I pulled my Bronco out and headed down the driveway to the front gate, Mrs. Harwick
watched from the porch. I wasn’t sure if it was the day or the Harwicks’ craziness
or both, but my head was swimming and I felt a little more loopy than usual. I waved
as I turned south to head home, and Mrs. Harwick waved back and went inside the house.
I felt such a rush of sympathy for her, an almost immediate bond. I glanced over at
Mr. Harwick’s files stacked neatly on the passenger seat.

If I had known what was good for me, I would have tossed the whole stack right out
the window and never set foot in that house again.

6

I drove down Midnight Pass at about twenty miles per hour. Nobody honked or drove
right behind me shaking their fists and yelling at me to drive faster. They were all
driving slowly, too. It was the time of year when clouds of lovebugs swarm the air,
and the more slowly you drive, the more gently the lovebugs splat into your car. The
more gently they splat, the easier they are to clean off.

Lovebugs are small black flies with long, narrow wings. They come out of their vegetative
hiding places every May and September with an urgent need to copulate. They give the
term “hooking up” a meaning even the smallest child can understand. The male attaches
to the female, and then they fly around crazily in a cloud of other copulating lovebug
couples until they fall dead of exhaustion or smash into a moving vehicle. They leave
the windshields smeared with gunk, corrode the paint on the cars, and occasion many
a raunchy schoolboy joke. On the other hand, birds like to snack on them, and a lot
of car wash businesses would go bankrupt if they disappeared, so we just leave them
alone and drive at a snail’s pace a couple of times a year.

Siesta Key is long and narrow, eight miles north to south. On a map, it looks like
a fish skeleton, with Midnight Pass Road running down its center like a spine, and
smaller lanes like fish bones leading off at regular intervals to the Gulf on the
west side and Little Sarasota Bay on the east. The head is at the wider, northern
end of the Key, where the main village of shops and restaurants is, and the southern
end of the island tapers off like a fishtail. Only about seven thousand people make
their home on the Key year-round, but another seventeen thousand or more come here
during “season.” People with homes on the bay have boat docks, but there are no docks
on the Gulf side, just gentle surf lapping onto a crystal white sandy beach.

I live on the more deserted tail end of the Key in a two-story frame house that faces
the Gulf. My grandfather ordered it out of the Sears, Roebuck catalog when he was
a young man and land here was cheap. It’s a weathered two-bedroom house at the end
of a meandering drive of crushed shell, surrounded by palms, sea grape, pines, and
mossy oaks on which night-blooming cereus twine to the top like secret floodlights.
Flocks of parakeets nest in the treetops, and wild rabbits forage through the grasses.
The drive ends at the Gulf’s edge, so I’ve gone to sleep almost every night of my
life with the whispering sound of the surf kissing the shore. That pulse of the sea
is like a lover’s heartbeat to me.

When I rounded the last curve in the drive and pulled into my slot in the four-car
carport, a huge orange sun was already sliding down the sky toward the horizon. My
brother, Michael, and his partner, Paco, were on the deck with their tanned legs stretched
out in sturdy Adirondack chairs my grandfather built decades ago. Ella Fitzgerald
was with them, sitting in Paco’s lap. Ella is a true calico-Persian mix originally
given to me as a kitten, but it didn’t take her long to realize that the good stuff
was in Michael’s and Paco’s kitchen, not mine. She likes me well enough and stays
with me when the guys are working, but her heart belongs to them.

When I joined them on the deck, Michael took one look at me and said, “You need a
beer.” He got up and went into the kitchen, and I dropped into the chair next to Paco.
He raised his beer in greeting and gave me a lazy grin.

He said, “Long day?”

“Is it that obvious?”

Paco is the kind of man that women fantasize about turning straight. He’s of Greek
American descent, but with his dark good looks and facility with languages he could
pass for any nationality in the world. In his line of work with the Special Investigative
Bureau, that comes in handy. His family name is Pakodopoulos, but nobody in the world
can pronounce that, so he’s called Paco.

Michael returned with a beer for me and a plate of cheese twists still hot from the
oven. Michael is blond and blue eyed and just as handsome as Paco. He’s a fireman
like our father was and also the firehouse cook. To Michael, food is almost holy,
and to feed people is second only in importance to saving their lives. Our mother
didn’t have a domestic bone in her body, but he’s made up for it in spades. He’s been
feeding me and taking care of me since I was about two years old and he was four.
When I was nine, not long after our father died in the line of duty putting out a
fire, our mother ran off, so we moved in with our grandparents in the house that Michael
and Paco live in now. I live in the garage apartment above the carport. Michael has
created our own kind of domestic bliss here. Funny how life curves in on itself like
that sometimes.