Cat Sitter Among the Pigeons (20 page)

She licked dry lips. “You think she’s the one they got to take care of Opal?”

“I think it’s possible.”

The hope in her eyes was pitiful. “And she seemed kind?”

“She did.”

Stumbling backward, she sank to the edge of the hotel bed.

Even though I knew it might not be true, I wanted to tell her that her husband and I were going with Cupcake to rescue Opal. Instead, I said, “You’re a strong woman, Ruby. You’ll get through this.”

Ruby closed her eyes and rolled onto the bed with her back to me. I touched her ankle lightly and left her. There was nothing else for either of us to say.

The sun was about three hours higher in the sky than usual when I got home. Paco’s truck was in the carport and Ella wasn’t in my apartment. Michael wouldn’t be home until the next morning.

As soon as I was inside my apartment, I called Guidry.

“Could we do supper early? I’m really beat, and I need to go to bed early.”

He didn’t exactly jump at the idea, but he agreed. I told him I’d be at his place in an hour, and stepped into a hard-driving warm shower. I let the spray unsnarl some of the kinks in my muscles. I shampooed my hair and shaved my legs. I used a buffing thing on my heels and elbows to make my skin silky smooth. That’s another thing about having a man in your life. You make sure nothing will snag on any of your corners. Besides, I might get killed that night, and I didn’t want to leave life with stubble on my legs.

With a quick slide of lip gloss and a touch of blush, I hurried to my closet-office, pushed stuff around, and chose a short khaki skirt and a crisp white shirt. With a cool raffia belt and the shirt sleeves rolled partway up, I looked casual but a little dressed up. I added a string of pearls to peep from under the shirt, a couple of slim silver bracelets, and stepped into linen espadrilles with tall heels. If I say so myself, I looked damn good.

I’d never been to his house before, but I knew Guidry lived in a small stucco bungalow a stone’s throw from Siesta Key’s business district. The yard had the look of being cared for by efficient professionals who trimmed with more haste than love. A small front porch needed sweeping, and a spiderweb stretched across the front door in a sure giveaway that Guidry entered and exited the house through a door in the attached garage.

I rang the bell. Guidry opened the door with the web hanging between us like an unreliable lifeline. He swatted it away, and I stepped inside.

The house had the same easy elegance Guidry has: polished concrete floors the color of old copper, a wall of books, black leather furniture, Mission-style tables, big plush pillows in rough textured fabric, standing swing-arm architect lamps, and a sound system playing soft jazz. No window coverings except wooden louvered shutters. Pure Guidry.

The only surprise was that Guidry wore jeans and a T-shirt. The jeans were plain worn Levi’s and the T-shirt was ordinary white cotton. Seeing him in faded jeans was like seeing him naked, only I’d already seen him naked and he’d looked as elegant without clothes as he did in designer linen. Jeans were something else. Jeans erased an invisible line that had been drawn between us. Jeans said he was on my team.

We stood and looked at each other for a long moment, then came together like two magnets drawn by forces preordained. Have I mentioned that Guidry is a great kisser?

Oh, yes, he is.

When we finally came up for air, he rubbed his thumb across my jawline and smiled down at me. I’m always shocked at those moments of seeing him vulnerable. Shocked and a little scared. I don’t want another person’s happiness in my hands. It’s too much responsibility. I might fail.

I said, “What brought on this urge to cook?”

“I know how much you like to eat, so I thought I’d better start feeding you. Besides, I want to talk to you about something.”

There it was again, that something he wanted to talk to me about. I caught a glint of apprehension in his eyes that scared me. Whatever he wanted to talk to me about was something he dreaded.

“Is it about Opal?”

“Who?”

“The baby that was kidnapped.”

“No, nothing like that.”

“Then what?”

“Later. First we have to cook.”

We?

I followed him into a kitchen that was bigger than mine, but looked the same—a room where not much cooking got done. On the countertop, he had assembled a stack of lasagna noodles, some cheese, some cans of tomatoes and sauce, and several jars of seasonings. My brother would have looked at that collection and felt the thrill of challenge, a zippy bubble in the blood that comes from delight. I looked at it and saw tomato spatters, pasta paste, cheese gunk, a huge mess to clean up.

For a few seconds, we stood staring at all the ingredients, suddenly awkward as two people who’d somehow landed on the moon at the same time.

Guidry said, “I’ve never asked, but do you cook?”

“Of course I cook.”

“What?”

“Are you going deaf?”

“I meant what do you cook.”

I felt a little panicky. I boil eggs. I scramble eggs. I heat soup. I make salads, both green and tuna. I can even make pancakes from scratch. But with a brother who’s not only a great cook but loves to feed everybody he knows, I’ve never been
called
to cook much.

I said, “What were you planning?”

He looked as if he’d caught my panic. “Ah, I got this stuff for lasagna. You like lasagna?”

“Sure.”

“My mother makes it with sweet Italian sausage and ground turkey, so I got some. Also some ricotta cheese, parmesan cheese, and mozzarella cheese.”

He waved a hand at the assemblage on the counter. “I got lots of stuff.”

I had a sudden image of him calling his mother in New Orleans and asking her how to make lasagna. I doubted he had ever made it in his life. I doubted he had ever even
watched
anybody make it. That made two of us.

I took a deep, measured breath. I smiled. “You have wine?”

“Good Chianti.”

“Okay then. Let’s do this.”

I felt a surge of confidence. We were going to be okay, Guidry and I. We were going to make dinner together. We were going to work smoothly together the way happily married couples do. We were going to join our talents and our energies and produce something wonderful.

It’s a wonder bluebirds didn’t pick up the dish towels and fly around the kitchen with them. Or that rose petals didn’t drift from the ceiling and settle on my shoulders. I was that goofy.

25

Twenty minutes later, the sweet Italian sausage was sizzling in a big pot on the stove and Guidry no longer looked like a way fine homicide detective. He looked like a man with a shiny forehead and a T-shirt with a meat-juice stain across the chest. Personally, I was chopping onions at the narrow counter beside the sink while holding a bleeding finger well away from the knife blade. I had wrapped a paper towel around my nicked fingertip to soak up the blood, but it was still a little oozy. I suspected I’d smeared blood on my face when I wiped away onion-chopping tears. And all the time I chopped and wept, my mind kept going to Opal, with quick awful glimpses of terrible things that could be happening to her.

Guidry was equally subdued. No easy banter like the kind in Michael’s kitchen while he cooked. We worked like convicts in a prison kitchen.

While the sausage fried, Guidry consulted scrawled directions—I’d been right, he’d called his mother—and then brought all the jars of spices to the counter where I worked.

He said, “I was supposed to get fresh basil, and I got dried.”

With my eyes streaming tears from the onions, I looked up at him and forced my hand not to wipe at my face. “I think dried would be okay.”

“Yeah, but how much? What’s the dried equivalent of a half cup of chopped basil?”

It was downright pathetic that he thought I’d know that.

A burning odor caught our attention, and we turned to see billows of dark smoke rising from the big pan where the sausage fried. Guidry swore and ran to jerk the pan from the heat while I ran around opening cupboard doors. I think I left some blood smears on some of them.

He said, “What are you doing?”

“Looking for a fire extinguisher.”

“It’s not a fire, it’s just smoke.”

I wrapped a clean paper towel around my bleeding fingertip and came and stood beside him. We looked at blackened links of sausage in the skillet. The oil they’d been burning in was black too.

I said, “I think you’re supposed to take the casings off the sausage before you fry it.”

“You sure?”

“That’s what Michael does. Then while it fries he sort of mashes it around to break it up.”

“Well, we can’t use this burned stuff. Do you suppose the sausage part is vital?”

We looked at the package of uncooked ground turkey waiting on the countertop. At the rate we were going, it would be midnight before we got all those layers of noodles and cheese and meat stacked in a pan. It might be even later before we managed to make a decent sauce. I had appointments I couldn’t do later. I pushed my folded shirtsleeves higher on my arms. Somehow both sleeves had acquired black marks. Also some mystery stains that might or might not be my own blood.

I said, “I don’t think cooking lasagna is our thing.”

Guidry had burned a finger. The burn looked as if it would soon blister. He blew on it and looked glum.

He said, “Let’s do what we should have done in the first place. You call the pizza place while I clean up this mess. We’ll talk in the living room.”

I gave him a grateful smile, but behind my smile I was scared. He wanted to talk about something important, and I was afraid of what he wanted to say. He’d said it wasn’t about Opal, but I couldn’t think of anything else that would make his eyes get that wary look, like he didn’t want to tell me something that had to be told.

While Guidry made clean-up noises in the kitchen, I phoned for pizza, antipasti, and cannoli in the living room. I found Guidry’s bathroom, which was almost tragically clean and neat. Recessed lighting, round marble sinks with shiny chrome faucets arched so tall you could wash a dog under them. Not that Guidry ever would. Thick brown towels so plush that after I splashed water on my face and washed away onion and smoke damage, I patted myself dry with a tissue from a sleek brown box on the counter.

I resisted an impulse to slide open wide mirrored doors on a medicine cabinet and look for Band-Aids. Just because we were a couple didn’t give me the right to snoop. Well, it sort of did, but my finger had pretty much stopped bleeding, and I didn’t want Guidry to think I’d been in his medicine cabinet. I made a neat wrapper out of toilet paper and went back to the living room.

Two glasses of red wine sat on the big square coffee table. Candles were lit and the lamps were turned low. Soft jazz cooed from hidden speakers. I took a deep breath, slipped out of my shoes, and settled into the corner of one of the matching sofas.

Guidry brought a stack of plates to put on the coffee table, along with enough paper napkins to blot up the BP Gulf oil spill. He had cleaned up too, dried the sheen on his forehead, changed into a fresh T-shirt. He took a chair kitty-cornered from me, toed off his leather sandals, and put his feet on the coffee table. He had elegant feet. Long and slim, with smooth toenails. I wondered if he got pedicures.

I lifted my own pink-nailed feet onto the coffee table and raised my glass of wine to make a toast.

He said, “What happened to your finger?”

“I just nipped it a little bit while I was chopping onions.”

“You want a Band-Aid?”

“No, it’s fine.”

I held my glass up again. “Here’s to ordering pizza!”

He grinned and raised his own glass. “Amen!”

We sipped wine, we smiled at each other, we waited for the doorbell to ring with the pizza. And whatever Guidry wanted to tell me slinked around us with a sly grin on its sneaky face.

The pizza delivery came while we were still on our first glasses of wine. Guidry padded barefoot to the door, paid the guy, and came back balancing some big bags atop a huge flat pizza box.

He said, “What’d you do, order one of everything?”

I shrugged. “I worked up an appetite chopping those onions.”

He spread it all out on the coffee table and for a few minutes we were too busy organizing stuff on our plates to talk. Then for a few more minutes we were too busy chewing and swallowing. In spite of myself, my scatty mind went to Ruby and Mr. Stern, caromed to Opal, then looped to Zack and his uptight father. While I’d watched Ruby and Zack together that afternoon, it had been obvious they loved each other. Zack was wrong not to trust Ruby, and Ruby had been wrong to take Opal and leave him.

I said, “Ruby and Zack are both good people. They’re just young. They don’t know yet how precious every moment is. If they had played their lives differently, they could have made a good home for Opal.”

Guidry put his slice of pizza on his plate and leaned forward to set it on the coffee table. He took a sip of wine and studied my face.

He said, “You’d like to have another baby, wouldn’t you?”

I was so shocked that I had to remove my feet from the coffee table and sit up straight to stare at him. “Why do you think that?”

“Well, for one thing, we weren’t talking about the Carlyles. And for another, when you talk about babies, you get a look.”

“I do not.”

His eyes were sad. “No kidding, Dixie, would you like to have another baby? We’ve never talked about it, and we should.”

I suddenly felt the same way I’d felt several weeks before—when I’d jumped into the bay to save a woman and been under water longer than I could hold my breath. In that watery blackness, I had felt blind, clawing panic, and that’s what I felt now. I had only recently got over irrational guilt for replacing my dead husband. I certainly wasn’t prepared to talk about replacing my dead child.

I slammed my plate on the coffee table and stomped to the bathroom, where I stood panting in front of the mirror over the sink. Staring at my flushed face and blazing eyes, I had one of those out-of-context memories that carry important messages. This one was about the first crack I had seen in my parents’ marriage. I had been about five, and I remembered watching my mother dress for a Bruce Springsteen concert in Tampa. She had worn a skirt so short her legs seemed to go on forever, and she and my dad had argued about it. He thought it was too revealing and she thought he was a prude. They were still arguing when they came home hours later, and from my bed I’d heard my dad say he’d lost all respect for my mother when she took off her panties and offered them to Springsteen. The Boss hadn’t taken them, and my dad said that showed how inappropriate she’d been.