Raining Cat Sitters and Dogs (2 page)

If Hetty weren’t so busy raising future service dogs, she could be an Eileen Fisher model. An ageless take-charge woman, she has sleek silver hair and looks elegant in loose linen pants and tunics that would look like pajamas on any other woman. The new pup with her was the latest in a series of pups she raises for Southeastern Guide Dogs. Raising future service dogs isn’t like raising other puppies. They need the same love and attention, but they have to be socialized differently. Those little guys will one day need to focus solely on doing their job and not get sidetracked by things other dogs might explore out of curiosity. Raising them takes thousands of hours of patient work, not to mention a heart big enough to pour out lots of love on a puppy and then hand it over to somebody else. Hetty has been doing it for years, and the only way you can tell she’s sad when a young dog leaves is that the spark in her eyes dims for a few weeks, only to come back when a new pup comes to live with her.

The girl’s distress obviously bothered Hetty. It bothered her new pup too. A three-month-old golden Lab-shepherd mix, his little ears were up and he was watching the girl with concentrated attention. We all were.

Jaz was like the mutt you see at a shelter, the one that reason tells you is not a good choice to take home, but the one that tugs at your heart. Huddled as she was in the chair, we could see that the golden sparkles had mostly worn away from her green rubber flip-flops. Her toenails were painted black, and several of her toes wore gold or
silver rings. Her ankles were amateurishly tattooed with flower bracelets, but a well-done black tattoo in the shape of a dagger ran several inches up the outside of her right ankle.

If I’d got a tattoo when I was her age, my grandmother would have sanded it off with a Brillo pad.

The man kept making uneasy shushing sounds, as if the girl’s despair embarrassed him. Teenage angst affects people the same way that a pet peeing on the furniture does—it brings out basic traits of either patience or meanness.

Hetty’s pup must have decided that since no human was going to do anything constructive, it was up to him. He darted away from Hetty’s feet, reared on his hind legs, and pawed at one of the girl’s toes. She took her hands away from her face, looked down at him, and laughed. Her laughter was a rusty, croaking sound, as if it had been jerked from her throat.

Hetty leaned forward in an anxious moment of hesitation, but the girl bent down and scooped the pup into her arms. With no hesitation whatsoever, he proceeded to lick the tears from her cheeks and to wriggle as close to her as he could get. She giggled, and everybody watching gave a collective out-breath of relief at hearing that normal adolescent sound. Jaz wasn’t so far gone that she couldn’t laugh, then, not so damaged that she couldn’t respond to love. I think we had all been unconsciously afraid she might have been.

Hetty said, “Looks like you’ve found a new friend. His name is Ben.”

As if to make sure Jaz understood, Ben gave the tip of her nose a wet kiss, which made her giggle again.

Dr. Layton came from the treatment rooms and walked to stand in front of the girl. “I’m sorry, Jaz. There was nothing we could do for the rabbit. I think he died instantly. I don’t believe he suffered.”

That’s what they always tell you. That’s what they told me when Todd and Christy were killed. I never knew whether I could believe them, and I could tell the girl wasn’t sure she could believe Dr. Layton, either.

She pulled Ben closer, took a deep shuddering breath, and nodded. “Okay.”

The man came abruptly to his feet, digging in his hip pocket for a wallet. “How much do I owe you?”

Dr. Layton said, “There’s no charge.”

As she turned to walk away, a loud male voice yelled from the vet’s inner sanctum.

“Get that man!”

The man swiveled toward the sound with his right hand diving under his suit jacket toward his left armpit.

Instinctively, all my former law enforcement training made me leap to my feet with my arm stiffened and my palm out like a traffic cop. “Hey, whoa! No need for that!”

In the voice of one who hopes to defuse a tense situation, Dr. Layton said, “That was a bird. An African Grey.”

As if on cue, Dr. Layton’s assistant came out with Big Bubba inside one of my travel cages. Big Bubba hated little cages, which is probably why he swiveled his head toward me and hollered again, “Get that man!”

With an embarrassed twitch of his hand to the girl, the man said, “Come on, Rosemary.”

Jaz and Ben exchanged a long sad look, which may
have been the final impetus that caused Hetty to do something that made my mouth drop.

Getting to her feet and taking Ben from Jaz, she said, “I need somebody to help me with this puppy. Just a few hours a week. It doesn’t pay much, but it’s easy work and I think you’d like it.”

That was probably the biggest lie Hetty Soames had ever told. Not the part about the work being easy, but the part about needing help taking care of Ben. She had simply taken a shine to the girl, knew she was in some sort of situation that wasn’t good, and wanted to give her a helping hand.

Jaz and the man spoke over each other again. He said, “She can’t do that.”

She said, “Yeah, I can do that.”

I tried not to grin. Anybody who knows Hetty knows she usually gets what she sets her mind on. I figured she would have the girl at her house within the hour, maybe sooner. Dr. Layton seemed to think so too. With a happier look on her face than she’d had before, she motioned me to the reception counter where Big Bubba waited in the travel cage.

At the counter, I looked over my shoulder at Jaz and her stepfather. He had jammed both hands in his trouser pockets and was gazing at the ceiling with the look of a man at the end of his rope. Jaz had moved to squat beside Ben and pet him while she talked to Hetty.

Dr. Layton said, “There was a touch of eosinophilia in Big Bubba’s tracheal wash, but I suspect he’s reacting to the red tide like everybody else. Keep him indoors until it’s over. If it gets worse, I can give him some antihistamines,
but I’d rather treat it by removing the allergen.”

I wasn’t surprised. A bloom of microscopic algae, red tide’s technical name is
Karenia brevis,
but by any name it’s nasty stuff that causes respiratory irritations and watery eyes for people and pets. We get the bloom almost every September when Gulf breezes begin coming from the west, but this year it had started a month early. I promised Dr. Layton I would keep Big Bubba indoors for the duration of the bloom and carried him out the door.

I don’t imagine Hetty or Jaz or the man noticed me leave. They were all too caught up in their own intentions.

Afterward, I would look back on that brief encounter in Dr. Layton’s waiting room and wonder if there was any way I could have prevented all the coming danger. At the time, all I knew was that a girl who called herself Jaz but was really named Rosemary was desperately unhappy, that her stepfather’s nerves were shot, and that he wore an underarm holster.

I
left Dr. Layton’s office with Big Bubba’s travel cage draped with a sheet and strapped in the backseat of my Bronco. The sun was knee-high on the horizon, giving the early August air a gauzy quiver that made all the lush foliage and flowers look even more beautiful than usual, like a scrim laid over the world to hide tiny imperfections.

Siesta Key is a semitropical island, so our landscape is a riot of greenery and color. It doesn’t make a lot of horticultural sense, but plants grow like crazy in our sandy soil. Gardeners on the key do more cutting back than fertilizing, and they’re always behind in keeping up with the rampant growth. Bougainvillea climbs all over the place, orchids nestle in the crotches of oak trees, hibiscus flings red and yellow flowers in every yard, ixora gets trimmed into red-blossomed hedges, and every flowering tree in the world seems to find its way here. We’re definitely a technicolor island.

The few extra minutes I’d spent at the vet’s had eaten
into my time, but I drove more slowly than I usually do so as not to throw Big Bubba off balance. The sheet covering his cage kept him from freaking out at the passing trees, but he was so upset at being away from home that every now and then he squawked “Hey!” just to let me know he wasn’t happy.

Siesta Key lies between the Gulf of Mexico and Sarasota Bay, and stretches north to south. I’m told it’s about the same size as Manhattan, which may explain why so many New Yorkers have second homes on the key. I don’t know how many people live in Manhattan, but Siesta Key has around seven thousand year-round residents, with that number swelling to about twenty-two thousand during “season,” when it’s cold in Manhattan and other unfortunate places.

Two drawbridges connect us to Sarasota, and every hour or so a tall-masted boat sails through while cars wait. For the most part, we’re a peaceable community. So peaceable that only one sworn Sarasota County deputy is assigned to handle our crimes—
sworn
meaning carrying a gun. Otherwise, for things like lost bikes or squabbles over who’s responsible for the damage done by a fallen tree limb, unsworn officers of the sheriff’s Community Policing unit keep us on the straight and narrow.

Midnight Pass Road runs the length of the island, with condos and tourist hotels sharing space with private walled estates, and narrow lanes twisting off to residential areas. We have fifty miles of waterways inside the key, so most of our streets are as meandering as the canals they follow. Our sunsets are the most spectacular in the world, our trees are full of songbirds, our shorelines are busy
with stick-legged waterbirds, and our waters are inhabited not just by fish but also by playful dolphins and gentle manatees. I’ve never lived anywhere else, and I never will. I can’t imagine why anyone would.

O
n the key, you live either on the Gulf side or the bay side of Midnight Pass Road. Big Bubba lived at the south end, on the bay side, in a quiet, secluded residential area too old to have a formal name. A swath of nature preserve separated the private homes from a plush resort hotel on the bay.

Big Bubba’s human was Reba Chandler. She had recently retired from teaching psychology at New College and was on a boat gliding down some river in the south of France. I had known Reba and Big Bubba since I was in high school, when Reba had trusted me to take care of Big Bubba while she was away on vacations. Back then, it had been a teenager’s way to make easy money. Now it was my profession. Funny how life loops back on itself like that.

Like most of the houses in Reba’s old-Florida enclave, hers was at the end of a shelled driveway with a thick wall of palms and sea grape screening it from the street. Reba called it her “bird house” because it had been built when people planned ahead for flooding, so it stood on tall stilty legs. Most people who have houses of that era have enclosed the lower part, but Reba had left hers as it was originally, with ferns growing under the house and a flight of stairs to a narrow railed porch. Built of cypress, the house had weathered silvery gray. Hurricane shutters that
had begun life a deep turquoise had become pale aqua over the years, giving the house the look of a charming woman who had become more lovely as she aged.

W
hen I pulled up to the house, my Bronco’s tires made loud scrunching noises on the shell, a sound that Big Bubba must have recognized.

From his covered cage, he hollered, “Hello, there! Hello, there! Did you miss me?”

I parked in the driveway and opened the back door to get his cage. “We’re home, Big Bubba.”

He made aaawking sounds and yelled “Did you miss me?” I grinned because that was what Reba had always said to him when she came home from school.

I carried him up the steps and unlocked the front door. Ordinarily, Big Bubba lives in a large cage on the screened lanai, but to protect him from the red tide invasion, I took him to his smaller cage in the glassed-in sunroom. African Greys are temperamental birds. When they’re upset they can take a good-sized chunk out of your finger, so I placed the travel cage so Big Bubba could hop from one cage to the other by himself. Back in familiar territory, he marched back and forth on a wooden perch, bobbing his head and giving me the one-eyed bird glare while I put out fresh seed and water for him.

Congo African Greys are the most talkative and intelligent of all parrots, and they’re strikingly beautiful. With gleaming gray feathers, they sport white rings around their eyes that look like spectacles, and they have jaunty red feathers partially hidden under their tail feathers. Like
all intelligent creatures, they bore easily. If they spend too much time without something to entertain them, they’re liable to become self-destructive and pull out their tail feathers. People who take on African Greys as companions have to be smart and inventive or they’ll end up with naked birds.

Big Bubba said, “Did you miss me?”

I said, “I counted every minute we were apart.”

He laughed, bobbing his head to the rhythm of his own
he-he-he
sound.

I said, “It’s not funny. You’re a real heartbreaker.”

Reba stored Big Bubba’s seeds in glass jars lined up on a wide wooden table next to his cage. While I exchanged witty repartee with a parrot, I poured fresh seed from the jars into his cups. Then I cleaned the sides of the jars holding the seeds. I also cleaned the table the jars sat on. I like to keep things tidy.

I tossed the paper towels I’d used for cleaning in the wastebasket. I said, “I’m going now, Big Bubba. I’ll see you this afternoon.”

He said, “Sack him! Sack him! Get that man!”

Big Bubba was a great talker, but not so hot as a conversationalist.

His TV set was on the table with the jars of seed, and I bent to turn on his favorite cop show. Big Bubba was crazy about shows where police chase killers through the streets and knock over fruit stands. I didn’t know if it was the fast cars or the flying fruit that excited him, but he couldn’t get enough of them.

Before I turned the set on, I heard a sound behind me and jerked upright. Three young men stood shoulder to
shoulder in a narrow shaft of sunlight streaming through the windows.