The Cat Sitter's Whiskers (11 page)

I had to stop and screw the heels of my palms into my eye sockets to stave off the waterworks, but then the next thing I knew Michael's big arms were folding around my shoulders. Instinctively, I tried to draw away, but he held on.

I said, “What are you doing?”

“I'm hugging you.”

I snuffled, drawing the back of my hand across my nose. “Yeah, I know that. But
why
?”

His voice was steady as he hugged me a little tighter. “You know exactly why.”

*   *   *

Long before any of us were twinkles in anyone's eye, my grandfather, Jesse Napoleon Hemingway, found himself on a business trip in Florida. He was twenty-two years old, newly engaged, and it was the first time he'd ever stepped foot out of his hometown of Manhattan, Kansas. He'd been sent here to convince a group of local businessmen to invest in the latest craze: portable steel sandwich shops, those shiny prefab diners shaped like railroad cars that started sprouting up all over the country in the thirties and forties. They could be shipped anywhere there was a mom and a pop with some cash and a dream of opening their very own restaurant.

The way my grandmother told it, that Florida air must have gone straight to my grandfather's head like a double shot of whiskey, because she never found out how many diners he sold on that trip—they never even discussed it. The day my grandfather returned home he presented her with the deed to a plot of land facing the ocean on the southern end of Siesta Key. My grandmother was none too pleased, especially since by her calculation they'd spent at least a hundred hours strolling hand in hand along the banks of nearby Walnut Creek, dreaming about their plans for the future, choosing names for their children, and discussing in which town (within a thirty-mile radius) they would build a home and spend the rest of their lives together.

In public, at least as a young woman, my grandmother was the model wife, quiet and demure—the way a young woman was expected to be in those days—but behind closed doors she let my grandfather know in no uncertain terms that there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell she was leaving Kansas, and if he wanted to go live in a spit of a sandbox on an island in the middle of nowhere like a hermit crab, he could plumb well do it by himself.

Luckily for me and my brother, my grandfather knew a thing or two about the art of persuasion, because if he hadn't worked things out between them, not only would we not have inherited this house, we would never have even existed. Using every sales trick in the book, he finally convinced her to make the trip to Florida to see it for herself. They stood shoulder to shoulder at the water's edge, holding their shoes in their hands as the waves lapped at their toes, and watched the sun set into the sea.

The sky turned colors my grandmother didn't even know existed, and she always said it must have been divine intervention, because the beauty of that moment took her breath away. She knew it was God's way of telling her she was finally home. Of course, it hadn't hurt one bit that my grandfather had phoned ahead for the local sunset schedule. He had timed their arrival perfectly.

Now, I live in the one-bedroom apartment over the carport that was built for visiting relatives from back home—it's small but it suits me just fine—and Michael and Paco live in the main house.

While Paco unloaded the groceries and Michael put on a pot of coffee, I slumped down on one of the barstools in the kitchen and laid my head down on the big butcher-block island. I told them everything that had happened … well, almost everything. I left Dick Cheney out of the story. At that point, I still wasn't sure whether I'd fainted or not, and there was no point getting them all worked up about a home invasion or an assault with a deadly Buddha if in reality the whole thing had just been a little light-headedness on my part.

“Hold on a second.” Michael slid a cup of coffee toward me with one hand while he dropped a single sugar cube down in it with the other. “What do you mean—”

I interrupted, “Michael, I don't want to talk about it.”

“You don't even know what I'm going to say!”

“Yes, I do. You're going to say, ‘What do you mean, light-headed?'”

He blinked. “Well?”

I laid my cheek back down on the table. “Ugh. I don't know. I just blacked out for a second, and then the next thing I knew I was flat on my stomach.”

I looked up at Paco just in time to see the faint smile on his lips fade. He was looking at the bump on top of my head.

“So you hit your head when you fell?”

I nodded. “Yeah, it hurt like hell but it's feeling better now.”

He frowned slightly as he folded up a paper bag and pushed it down in the storage bin under the sink, mumbling, “You should probably get that looked at.”

Michael sat down in the stool opposite me. “Dixie, I still don't get it. You find out somebody didn't get their morning paper, so you race over to Levi's house?”

I said, “Not
somebody.
A whole bunch of people. Nearly half the people in the diner said their paper never came, and you know Levi, he hasn't missed a day of work in twenty years.”

“Okay, but still, I don't understand how you knew something was wrong. You said yourself you thought he was having car trouble. Wouldn't that explain it right there? I mean, it just doesn't add up.”

I turned to Paco for help. I can usually count on him to take my side in these kinds of things. He knows as well as I do that Michael tends to worry too much, but he just shrugged. “Do you want to tell him, or should I?”

I said, “Tell him what?”

He cocked his head to the side and grimaced slightly. “Sorry, kid.”

“Okay, first of all, don't call me ‘kid,' and second of all, I have no idea what you're talking about.”

I could feel my cheeks getting hot. Paco is an undercover agent with the Sarasota Investigations Bureau, which means he helps catch drug dealers and smugglers and all kinds of assorted bad guys. Technically I'm not supposed to know, but I figured it out a long time ago and now it's just a house rule that we don't talk about it. Sometimes he disappears for days or even weeks, during which time Michael and I walk around on eggshells chewing our fingernails. It's a dangerous job. He's fluent in at least five languages (including Korean), and his IQ is probably higher than my checking account balance.

In other words, he's smart.

As Paco and I stared each other down, Michael was looking back and forth between us like a spectator at a tennis game. “Okay, what's going on?”

I rolled my eyes. “I give up. You tell him, if you think you know so much.”

He sat down next to Michael and put one hand on his shoulder, as if to steady him. “Somebody broke into the Kellers' house and hit her over the head. That's why she blacked out.”

I bolted upright as Michael's jaw fell open and we both said, “What?”

Michael said, “Dixie, what the hell?”

I said, “Paco, you really think so?”

He nodded. “And I was just reading in the paper, there's been a string of break-ins on the island the past few weeks. They've been targeting vacant houses.”

Michael sawed both his hands in the air like a referee on a football field. “Whoa, whoa, whoa! What the hell are you guys talking about?”

Paco shrugged. “I can tell by that bump. When people faint, they usually just keel straight over, so lots of times they'll have a bloody nose, or an injury to the back or the side of the head.” He turned to me. “I don't know how you could've hit the very top of your head unless you were doing somersaults or backflips when you fainted.”

Michael's eyes narrowed. He pursed his lips to one side and with a slow, sarcastic edge to his voice said, “Dixie, were you doing somersaults or backflips when you fainted?”

I looked at Paco and then back at Michael, and then reached up and gingerly touched my walnut-sized bump.

I said, “Huh.”

 

13

It's probably only a couple hundred feet, but the walk from Michael and Paco's kitchen to my front door felt like a hundred miles, mainly because my head was spinning all over again—not because I was dizzy, but because I was completely lost in thought as I ambled across the courtyard.

Paco had admitted he was really only making an educated guess about how I got my bump, but he'd also said he was beginning to recognize all the little telltale signs I exhibit when I'm not telling the entire truth … something I sometimes do to protect Michael. Being my older brother hasn't always been a bed of roses, and he's got a light sprinkling of gray hair on his head to prove it.

I made a mental note to figure out exactly
which
telltale signs Paco was referring to, but for now I knew he was on to something: When I woke up and found myself on the floor of the Kellers' laundry room, I was flat out on my stomach with my cheek smashed into the floor, which Paco said would indicate that I'd fallen straight forward. But if that was the case, why was there a bump on the very top of my head and not a gash on my cheek? Or a black eye? Or, at the very least, a bloody nose?

I didn't want to jump to conclusions, but if Paco was right, it could mean only one thing: I wasn't hallucinating when I saw Dick Cheney. And it wasn't just a dream that he bonked me on the head with a small stone figurine. As for the lit candles on the coffee table and the open doors in the living room—well, it was anybody's guess. After a blow like that it was a wonder I hadn't seen a halo of stars and yellow tweety-birds flying around my head.

During my deputy training, we were subjected to a lecture by a retired medical examiner visiting from Orlando who had made a name for herself in the field of forensic osteology. With me wincing the entire time, she had gone down a list of practically every bone in the human body, along with a corresponding list of all the various ways in which each of those bones is most typically broken. When it came to injuries to the top of the skull, she said in nearly every case it was the result of either a physical attack or, strangely enough, falling debris.

It had stuck with me all these years mainly because one of her cases had involved a man who'd been mysteriously killed while taking a stroll all alone in an open field. He had died of a cerebral hemorrhage, and the only sign of injury was a curious dent in the top of his skull. To everyone's utter horror (including my own) it was later proven that a tiny frozen chunk of wastewater, dropped from an overpassing plane, had landed right on top of him. Ever since then, whenever I hear a plane overhead, I don't exactly run for cover, but I keep my eyes open.

“Mreeep?”

Just as I was about to unlock the front door, I felt something furry brush up against my ankle and looked down to find Ella Fitzgerald gazing up at me. Ella is technically my cat, but it didn't take her long to figure out all the good stuff comes out of the main house, so she spends most of her time hanging out with Michael and Paco. She's a true Persian mix calico—meaning she's got some Persian in her bloodline and her coat has distinct patches of black, white, and red. She earned her name by the funny scatting sounds she makes.

I said, “Oh, my goodness, Ella! Fancy meeting you here!”

She said,
“Thrrrip mrack!”
and then walked her paws up my legs, being careful to keep her claws in, and arched her long body as she flicked her snow-white whiskers at me. I handed her the little piece of smoked salmon that I'd snatched out of Michael and Paco's fridge and winked at her.

“Thanks for coming up with me. I could use a little company right now.”

She downed the salmon in one quick gulp and then squinted her eyes, which in cat language means,
I love you
. Or it means,
I love salmon.
Either way, I knew it was a dirty trick on my part, but I didn't feel like being alone and I knew Ella would follow me upstairs if she sensed I was hiding something yummy. When I handed it over I expected her to go right back down, but instead she waited while I opened the door.

“Oh, you wanna hang out for a bit?”

She tilted her head and eyed me curiously, as if to say,
Of course. Our love is deeper than salmon
, and then trotted in.

As soon as I shut the door I started peeling off my clothes. I left one shoe on the jute rug by the front door and another in the middle of my ragtag collection of furniture—a puffy couch, an old leather lounge chair, and a walnut coffee table that once belonged to my mother—and then I left both my socks on the floor just beyond the breakfast bar that separates the living room from the galley kitchen. As I stumbled down the short hall, I threw my shorts into the wicker basket in the laundry alcove and flung my T-shirt and bra into the bedroom before making a quick right turn into the bathroom.

I grabbed a towel and draped it over the handle to the shower door while I turned the water all the way up to Niagara Falls level. Ella slinked in behind me and curled up on the bath mat, and while I waited for the water to get hot I opened the mirrored doors of my medicine cabinet and stared at my meager collection of soaps and lotions. As soon as the shower filled with steam, I stepped in with a deep sigh, sliding the door behind me like I was closing the curtain on a very bad play.

I stood there and let the warm water stream over me, imagining it washing the whole morning right down the drain. That seemed to work for a couple of minutes, but as soon as I felt my body start to relax, a lump formed in the base of my throat and my eyes started to sting with tears.

“Oh, my God, don't be ridiculous,” I said out loud as I grabbed a bottle and squirted some shampoo on my palm. “You barely knew him.”

But it was no use. As I worked my hair into a lather, I cried.

I cried like a baby.

I cried not just for Levi, but also—I'm ashamed to admit—for myself. I like to think I'm tough, but seeing Levi's lifeless body had thrown me for a loop, and now it dawned on me that even though we hadn't been close, even if he hadn't known it, Levi was something special to me. He would always be the boy who gave me my very first kiss, that first rush of breathlessness, that first taste of sex and love and deep, unquenchable need … at a time in my life when the world was simple, when life was good and innocent and never-ending.