Cat Sitter Among the Pigeons (17 page)

Now here’s the thing about secrets: Like the Big Bad Wolf, secrets have big jagged teeth and strong jaws. Kept inside, they use their sharp teeth to tear off big chunks of your tender innards, gnashing your flesh in their spring-trap jaws and ripping you to shreds. Secrets have to be told to
somebody,
just not to somebody who will repeat them or who will be personally affected by them. Somebody like a trusted psychotherapist, maybe, or a spiritual guide. I didn’t know any psychotherapists or spiritual guides, but I knew Cora Mathers, and I felt a sudden urge to get to her as fast as possible. In a feverish rush, I pulled on clothes, grabbed my keys and bag, and hurried out my front door.

I took the north bridge to Tamiami Trail, followed it around the marina where tall sailboats were anchored, and then a few blocks to Bayfront Village, an upscale retirement condo on the bay. A uniformed parking attendant rushed out to open my Bronco’s door, and double glass doors sighed open to let me pass into the big lobby. Handsome elderly people stood around in groups making dates to play tennis or golf or to go to the opera or the museum or a movie. I don’t know why it is, but rich old people seem to have more fun than young people, rich or poor. Maybe it’s because old people who are rich had to be luckier or smarter than other people to get rich in the first place, so they use the same luck and smarts to enjoy old age.

I headed for the elevators, and from her place behind a big French provincial desk, the concierge waved and picked up her house phone to let Cora know I was coming. She knew that Cora always wanted to see me, so I didn’t have to wait for permission.

Cora is in her late eighties, but she’s the youngest person I know. Cora and her granddaughter started out poor, but her granddaughter made a lot of money in ways that Cora has never suspected, and she bought Cora a posh apartment in the Bayfront Village. The granddaughter was murdered while she was a client of mine a few years back, and Cora and I became close friends. She’s not at all like my own grandmother was, but she has sort of taken her place. I’m not at all like her granddaughter either, but in many ways I’ve taken her place. Which I guess proves that friendships don’t depend on any of the things we think they do, they just happen when two people like each other a lot.

On the sixth floor, Cora’s door was already open and she had stuck her head out to watch for me. Cora is roughly the size of an undernourished middle-school child, with thin freckled arms and legs and white hair so thin and wispy her pink scalp shines through. When she saw me step out of the elevator, she waved her entire arm up and down like a highway flagman, as if she thought I wouldn’t know which door was hers if she didn’t signal.

Before I got to the door, she said, “You knew I was baking bread, didn’t you? I’ll bet you smelled it all the way across town.”

I could smell it now, and the scent drew me forward like the odor of cream to a kitten. Cora has an old bread-making machine that was a gift from her granddaughter, and by a secret recipe that she won’t divulge, she makes decadent chocolate bread in it.

I gave Cora a hug—carefully, because I’m always afraid I’ll crush her—and followed her into her pink and turquoise apartment. It’s a lovely apartment, pink marble floors, paler pink walls, turquoise and rose linen covers on sofa and chairs, and a terrace beyond a glass wall through which she has a magnificent view of the bay.

The odor of hot chocolate bread made me walk with lifted nose like a hound first getting a scent of something to chase.

Cora said, “I just took it out, so it’s piping hot.”

Habit made Cora take a seat at a small skirted table between the living area and a tiny one-person kitchen while I assembled our tea tray. Cora’s teakettle is always on, so it only took a minute to pour hot water over tea bags in a Brown Betty pot, get cups and saucers from the cupboard, butter from the refrigerator, and add the hot round loaf of chocolate bread. I put the tray on the table and took the other chair. Cora watched me lay everything out and pour two cups of tea.

We each tore off two fist-sized hunks of bread from the loaf—Cora insists that it can’t be sliced like ordinary bread—and slathered them with butter. Cora’s chocolate bread is dark, dense, and studded with morsels of semi-sweet chocolate that have not fully melted but instead gently ooze from their centers. Angels in heaven probably have Cora’s chocolate bread with tea every afternoon. If God’s on their good side, they may invite him to join them. I ate half my chunk before I said a word. Partly because it was so good, and partly because I couldn’t get the words out.

Cora said, “You look like you’ve been wrung dry. What’s wrong?”

I don’t know how she does it, but she always knows.

I sipped tea and put my cup back in its saucer. “A baby I know has been kidnapped. She’s about four months old. Her name is Opal, and she’s beautiful. I’m sure I know who took her, but if I tell, it could cause her to be killed.”

Cora tilted her head toward the light coming in from the glass sliders at the back of her living room so that the fine lines that etched her skin seemed to shimmer.

“You’re sure you know?”

I took a bite of bread and chewed while I tried to figure out a way to tell Cora how I knew that Myra and Tucker had sent Vern to kidnap Opal.

I said, “It’s too complicated to go into all the details, but I overheard a phone conversation. There’s a man and woman who hired another man to take the baby. They did it because the baby’s mother knows things about them that can get them sent to prison for a long time. If she keeps quiet, they’ll take good care of her baby, but she’ll go to prison. If she tells what she knows, she won’t go to prison, but they’ll kill her baby.”

Cora laced her fingers together on the table. “It would take a very low person to kill a baby.”

“They’re that low. They’re about as low as a human being can get.”

“You don’t think you might have misunderstood what you heard?”

I shook my head. “I heard enough to convince me. The baby’s mother has known them a long time and she says the man has flown his plane out over the Gulf and shoved people out. She thinks he’ll do that to the baby if she talks.”

“My goodness.”

“I don’t know what to do. I’m afraid to tell what I know, and afraid not to tell.”

She took a sip of tea, her hooded blue eyes watching me.

She said, “Losing a baby is the worst thing that can ever happen to a person. You don’t ever get over it. You can think you’ve moved away from the hurt, but every time you hear about some other baby being lost, you feel like it’s happening to you all over again.”

My breath caught in my chest as if a hand had grabbed my throat, and in the next instant my face was buried in my hands and I was sobbing again, not about Opal but because my baby had been crushed to death in an insane accident in a supermarket parking lot. Cora did not get up and comfort me. She was too smart for that. She waited me out. And because I knew she was strong enough to wait me out, I didn’t try to dam my flood of tears but let them flow until they slowed to a trickle and stopped.

When I took my hands from my face, Cora handed me a stack of paper napkins. I mopped my cheeks and gave her a tremulous smile. “I didn’t expect to do that.”

She said, “Oh, you’ll always do that. It’ll catch you when you’re not even thinking about your child. It’s been over forty years since my daughter died and left me her baby to raise, but sometimes it hits me all over again that she’s gone, and I’m just laid low. I don’t guess it will ever stop, that awful pain. It just goes into hiding for long stretches.”

I said, “The baby’s mother is very young, and she already has a lot of heartache, and now this goon has kidnapped her baby. It’s just not fair.”

“I don’t know why people are always surprised that life isn’t fair. It never has been, never will be. You can’t do anything about that.”

“I guess not.”

Cora said, “Well, you have to find that baby and bring her home. Her mother’s not going to be able to help you much. Women aren’t much good at getting things done when they’re scared and grieving. Men are better at that. Seems like they can turn all their grief into action. Go bomb something, shoot somebody, start a fistfight, bust up a saloon. Half the time they make it worse, but at least they can move. At least they can do
something.
”

I said, “The baby’s father is a race car driver.”

Cora’s pale blue eyes lit with some old memory. “Race car drivers are good at taking action. They’re good at breaking hearts, too. If I was you, I’d get the dad to help you get that baby back. See if he’s got the gumption to do something besides break a woman’s heart.”

From the acid in her voice, I thought it was a safe guess that Cora’s heart had once been broken by a race car driver.

I said, “I don’t know the father very well.”

She shrugged. “You can fix that.”

As usual, Cora had oversimplified a complex situation that she knew nothing about. But for some fool reason I felt as if a huge load had been lifted from me. I even felt as if she’d given me a solution of sorts. All I had to do was figure out how to put it into action.

I put away our tea things and kissed the top of Cora’s feathery head.

I said, “Thank you. For the bread, for the tea, for listening to me.”

She patted my hand. “You’re a good girl, Dixie. You just have to stay strong.”

As I rode down in the elevator, I told myself Cora was absolutely right. I needed to stay strong. And maybe, just maybe, Zack Carlyle was the person who would help me find Opal.

Before the elevator came to a stop on the lobby level, I had pulled out Cupcake’s card. By the time the valet brought my car to me, I had called Cupcake and asked to meet with him. He seemed to have been expecting my call. We agreed to meet in thirty minutes at the Daiquiri Deck on Siesta Key. When I rang off, I almost felt as if I’d accomplished something.

22

A favorite meeting place for both locals and tourists, the Daiquiri Deck is a raised veranda restaurant on Ocean Boulevard. Partly a young people’s pick-up joint, partly a viewing platform to watch passing foot traffic, and partly just a place to get tasty food and drinks, the Deck is the spot where everybody who comes to the Key eventually ends up.

I took an umbrella table where I could watch for Cupcake, ordered an iced tea, and scanned the menu while I waited. Cora’s chocolate bread had helped, but I needed more food in me before I left for afternoon pet rounds. I asked for an order of buffalo shrimp with bleu cheese sauce, and had just dunked a crispy fried shrimp into a bowl of sauce when Cupcake appeared at the top of the steps. Zack was with him, looking suspicious and unhappy.

I waved at them and took a bit of pleasure from the way men’s heads turned to watch them walk to me. I had been invisible before, but now every male on the Deck looked at me with new appreciation. Not because I had suddenly become a guy magnet, but because I knew Zack and Cupcake. One or two men actually stopped Cupcake and Zack to ask for autographs, and the others gazed at them with such shining eyes you would have thought the hottest chick on the planet had arrived.

Cupcake and Zack pulled out chairs and sat down without speaking to me. Not in an unfriendly way, just all business. Cupcake eyed my buffalo shrimp and beckoned to a waitress. “Bring two more orders of that, and a Corona on draft. Zack, what do you want?”

Zack looked startled. “Um, I’ll have a Corona too.”

The waitress scurried away, and Cupcake watched me lay a shrimp tail on my plate.

“You don’t eat the tails?”

“I just use the tails as handles.”

“Where I come from, people think the tails are the best part.”

I opened my mouth to ask him where that might be, but Zack interrupted us.

“Why did you call?”

He sounded like a man who’d been tricked into making an appearance before, only to discover that somebody had merely wanted to be seen with him.

I said, “Zack, I just want to help you find Opal.”

Zack fell silent, as if listening to some other voices inside his own head. I guessed some of the voices belonged to his father. A beat passed, and he spoke as if he’d been contemplating speech for a long time.

“It’s hard to know what to do, you know? When to give a woman what she wants, and when to be a man and hang tough.”

Cupcake visibly tensed.

I said, “Maybe being a man
is
giving a woman what she wants.”

Zack moved his lower jaw back and forth as if he needed to line up his teeth.

“Before she died, my mom had to prop her head up with her hand. For two or three years she went around with one hand on the back of her head holding it up. She even drove like that. You’d see her going past, one hand on the steering wheel and one hand holding up her head.” He stared into the hot sky. “My dad didn’t do a thing to stop her. Not one thing.”

“Was there a medical problem that made your mother’s neck weak?”

“Nah, she just wanted Dad’s attention.”

He seemed to be comparing himself to the kind of husband his father had been and finding himself superior. I wondered if he thought Ruby’s involvement with Myra had been like his mother’s weak neck. Maybe he believed he’d been more of a man because he’d turned against Ruby because she’d worked for Myra.

His lips tightened into a mirthless smile. “The Thanksgiving before she died, she asked Dad if he couldn’t say something nice about the big dinner she’d cooked. He said he didn’t intend to thank her just for doing her job.”

It occurred to me that he was a younger version of Mr. Stern, which was probably why Ruby had been drawn to him. She was familiar with men who couldn’t show emotion or give affection.

I said, “Every woman in the world wants attention and praise from her husband, Zack. And by the way, Ruby didn’t marry you for your money. She truly loved you.”

Zack looked shocked and suspicious, as if he’d caught me trying to put one over on him.

Cupcake heaved a sigh that seemed to have a lot of history with Zack’s distrust of women behind it. “When you called, you said you had information. What is it?”