The Cat Sitter’s Cradle (20 page)

I reached over and opened the drawer under my bed. When I left the force, I turned
in my department-issued gun, a 9 mm SIG SAUER, but every law enforcement officer keeps
a backup, and I still had mine: a Smith & Wesson .38. I keep it inside a specially
made case next to Todd’s 9 mm Glock, which hasn’t been touched since he died. I pulled
the .38 out of its black velvet niche and slid the drawer closed.

Ethan’s eyes widened. “Uh, is that really necessary?”

I whispered, “You’re the one who said Corina could be mixed up with some bad-ass thugs.
What if they’re here looking for her? I’ll see who it is. You stay here.”

His jaw dropped open. “What? Fuck that! No way in hell am I staying here. I’m coming
with you.”

Suddenly my sweet man that never cussed was developing the mouth of a drunken sailor,
but I decided to address that later. We tiptoed into the living room. Standing at
the French doors was a dark shadow in the shape of a man, silhouetted by the light
from the porch. As I crept forward, my gun raised at the ready, the man knocked again,
very lightly. I felt a shiver go down the entire length of my body. Ethan had pulled
out his phone and was about to call 911 when the man stepped back a bit to look down
the stairs and the porch light illuminated his face. I recognized him immediately.
It was Kenny Newman.

I made a motion to Ethan to wait before he called the police and crept closer to the
door.

I said, “What do you want?”

“Dixie, it’s me, Kenny.”

“I know, Kenny. What do you want?”

“Please, I need to talk to you.”

“What you need to do is turn yourself in to the police.”

I looked over at Ethan. He still had the phone poised to dial and was staring at me
wide-eyed.
This poor man,
I thought.
He has no idea what he’s getting himself into hanging out with me.

He whispered, “Who is Kenny?”

“It’s okay. He works for me, but he’s got himself in some trouble.”

Ethan threw his palms open. “What kind of trouble?”

Kenny said, “Dixie, please. I’ll go to the police. I’ll do whatever you want me to
do. I just need to talk to you first.”

I said, “Okay, Kenny. I’m going to open the door, but I’m not alone, and I have a
gun.”

Ethan whispered, “Dixie! You sure about this?”

I turned to him and took a deep breath. “Thursday morning I found one of my clients
drowned in a swimming pool. Kenny was his pool man, and the police have been looking
for him ever since. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to talk about it for our
whole date. I know Kenny didn’t do it. At least I’m pretty sure he didn’t. He had
other reasons to run away, which I can explain later. Okay?”

Ethan’s eyebrows were raised halfway up his forehead, and his arms were hanging limply
at his sides. He nodded slowly and sighed. “Okay. I’ll have to trust you on this one.”

He switched on the lamp by the couch, and I reached out and unlocked the door, keeping
my gun down but in plain view so Kenny would see it right away. I nodded at Ethan,
as if to say “Ready?” and he smiled feebly and nodded back. I swung the door open.

Kenny stood in the doorway, his shoulders slumped forward, a complete and utter mess.
He wore a wrinkled plaid work shirt and scuffed cargo pants that were rolled up at
the ankles. His beachy good looks seemed to have been worried away, and he looked
like he’d aged ten years. His eyes were bloodshot and swollen.

He glanced down at the gun hanging at my side. “You think I killed him, too.”

As his eyes welled with tears, I said, “Kenny, I don’t know what to think anymore,
but I do know that you need to turn yourself in to the police.”

“I know it. I just needed to talk to you first.” He looked over my shoulder at Ethan.
“I’m sorry.”

Ethan nodded. “It’s okay, man.”

I said, “Come in and we’ll talk, but then you’re going straight to the police.”

Ethan pulled a chair over for Kenny and sat down on the couch with me. Kenny slumped
down in his chair.

I said, “First of all, is Becca okay?”

“I don’t know. We had a fight, and I haven’t talked to her in days. I was going to
ask you how she was.”

“Kenny, Becca’s been missing since we found Mr. Harwick’s body.”

He looked away for a second, then put his face in his hands and shook his head silently.
His ears turned beet red, and tears squeezed out between his fingers and ran down
his forearms. I looked over at Ethan, who stood up and grabbed a box of tissues off
the kitchen bar. He placed it on the coffee table in front of Kenny and then sat back
down next to me.

I said, “Tell me what’s going on.”

With his face still buried in his hands, he said, “Oh, man, I don’t even know where
to start.”

Ethan said, “Just start at the beginning.”

Kenny nodded and sat up, trying to compose himself. He let out a half-laugh and wiped
his face with the back of his arm. “Okay.”

He pulled a scallop-edged black-and-white photo from his breast pocket and laid it
on the coffee table in front of him. From my point of view it was upside down, but
I could tell it was a portrait. A young man in a white V-neck T-shirt with a crew
cut and a rugged, handsome face.

He said, “This is my father. When I was little, he used to get up every day really
early with my mom, and they would make breakfast together. She’d make eggs, scrambled
or fried or however he wanted them that day, and he would make the coffee and toast.
Then he’d come in my room and wake me up. I’d have breakfast with my mom while he
got ready for work. He was always dressed in the same thing when he left. Sandals.
A V-neck T-shirt and dark blue surfing trunks. We lived in Oceanside, California.
His work was two blocks from the ocean. So every morning on his way to work, he’d
stop and swim a couple miles. Then he’d get changed into his suit in the car and head
off to work. He did that every day for years. Then one day he didn’t show up at work.
His boss called my mom, and she called the police. They found his car at the beach,
and they found his footprints going from his car down to the water, and they found
his shirt and sandals in the sand. But there weren’t any footprints coming in. They
never found his body. Probably sharks got him. I was eight years old.”

He paused and rubbed his forehead with the tips of his fingers, like he was trying
to massage the memories away. I glanced over at Ethan. He gave me a little wink, which
normally I would have thought was completely inappropriate, but it wasn’t. It was
reassuring.

I said, “Go on, Kenny.”

He seemed to have gotten completely lost in his thoughts, and I knew what was happening.
I wasn’t sure if he’d had a hand in Mr. Harwick’s drowning or not, or even if he knew
who did, but one thing was certain: It must have tapped in to some locked-away reservoir
of emotion deep inside him.

“My mom was devastated. He had bought a huge insurance policy a couple of months before,
and he drowned the day it took effect. She got a big payout, enough to pay for me
to go to school and for her to live comfortably for the rest of her life. And then
the cops got suspicious. They said she must have talked him into getting the life
insurance policy and killed him for the money. Eventually they dropped it because
there was no proof, but my mom was never the same. One day she made a big pile in
the backyard of all his stuff and every photo of him and set it on fire. She stopped
caring about anything, starting taking all kinds of medicine for depression. Ten years
later, the first week I left for college, she killed herself. Took a bunch of pills.
They found her at the beach where my father drowned. That was in July last year. A
month later, I got this in the mail.”

He flicked the photo with one finger and it slid across the table, turning right side
up as it came to a stop in front of us. The man in the photo did look a little bit
like an older version of Kenny. But what I didn’t expect, what Kenny must have known
I would recognize right away, was that the man in the photo looked remarkably familiar.

I looked up at Kenny with astonishment.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s Roy Harwick.”

I picked the photo up and studied it closely. It was true. The man in the photo was
in fact Mr. Harwick, perhaps twenty or thirty years younger. He had a full head of
hair and a virile, ruddy complexion—nothing like Mr. Harwick now, but the expression
in his eyes and the shape of his face were instantly recognizable.

I looked up at Kenny and then back at the photo, and then back at Kenny again. I’d
never once considered that there was even the slightest similarity between them. Where
Mr. Harwick was a pudgy, balding ball of anger, Kenny was handsome and sun-kissed
and thoughtful. But now I could see it. If you clipped back Kenny’s long hair and
shaved away his scruffy beard, he looked almost exactly like a younger version of
Mr. Harwick.

I was beginning to feel like I’d been hit in the head with a two-by-four. “Kenny …
what are you telling us?”

He let out a long sigh. “I’m telling you that Roy Harwick was my father.”

19

Kenny had laced his fingers behind his neck and was staring up at the ceiling. I had
about a million questions for him, but if what he had just said was true, I couldn’t
even begin to imagine what kind of pain he must have been in. He had lost his father
at a tender age, and then his mother to suicide, and now he had lost his father all
over again. I knew what it was like to be young and lose a parent, but this was something
completely out of my league.

Softly, I said, “Kenny, I’m sorry.”

He nodded. “That picture was in the first letter I ever got from him. At first he
said he was my uncle. He said he’d read about my mother and he just wanted to know
if I was okay. So I wrote him back, even though I knew something wasn’t right. Nobody
had ever mentioned I had an uncle. Eventually I started to figure it out, and he finally
admitted who he was. It turned out he had planned his escape for months. The day he
disappeared, he drove to the beach in the morning like he always did. He made sure
he got there bright and early so nobody would see him. He parked his car and went
down to the water. He left his shirt and sandals in the sand, but this time he took
a change of clothes, wrapped up in a plastic bag and covered with tape. Then he walked
out into the water a couple feet deep and trekked three miles up the coast, staying
in the water and off the beach the whole time. When he figured he’d gone far enough,
he came up on the beach, put on dry clothes, and hitchhiked out of town. He traveled
all over the country for a couple of years, doing odd jobs and fooling around with
girls. Finally he wound up here in Sarasota, got married, and never left again.”

Ethan said, “Wow. That’s heavy.”

Kenny laughed sadly and shook his head. “I know. It’s crazy.”

“So, why did he get in touch with you?”

He shrugged. “Guilt. He felt guilty, and he wanted to make it up to me somehow.”

We sat there for a few moments in silence. I wanted to believe him, as far-fetched
as his story was, but there was still one thing I didn’t understand. I was almost
afraid to ask, because I didn’t think I was going to like the answer.

I said, “Kenny, why did you come to Siesta Key?”

He shook his head. “I wanted to see him. I wanted to know who he was. I … I wanted
to know
why.
Why did he leave us? I wanted him to look me in the face and explain it, man to man.
I mean, I get it—he wanted to run away. Everybody feels like that once in a while,
right? But how could he just leave his family like that? I felt like I couldn’t go
on with my life until I had an answer. So one day I just packed up my truck and drove
down here. I didn’t tell anybody where I was going.”

“But how did you find him?”

“It was easy. The return address on his letters was always the same—a post office
box in Siesta Key. There’s only one post office here. So I just hung out in the parking
lot until I saw somebody that looked familiar, and then I followed him home.”

He picked up the photo and slipped it back into his breast pocket. “At first he had
written that he lived like a bum, slept on the beach, jumped from job to job, didn’t
have any friends. But eventually he admitted that was a lie, too. Turned out he was
filthy rich and he wanted to make it up to me. He said his stepkids were worthless
and I could have it all. It was too late to change what he had done, but at least
he could set me up for life. He wanted to buy me a house and everything.”

I frowned. “So that’s why you’re here.”

He shook his head. “No. No way. I didn’t come here to get rich.”

“Then why did you pretend to be a pool cleaner and work your way into his home?”

“I didn’t pretend. I was broke. I started cleaning pools because I didn’t have enough
money to get back to California. So I made up some flyers saying I cleaned pools and
could do odd jobs and started leaving them around town. One day this dude calls me
up and asks if I can clean his pool, somebody had referred me. When he gave me his
address I knew right away. It was Roy Harwick.”

I said, “And you never told him who you were?”

“No. I was going to. But things got a little complicated…”

“You mean Becca.”

Kenny’s face flushed red as he looked down at his hands. “Yeah. Becca.”

Ethan turned to me and whispered, “Who’s Becca?”

“Mr. Harwick’s daughter. She’s pregnant.”

He nodded. “Ah, of course.”

I could tell Ethan was getting a little impatient with the whole story, and to be
honest so was I. Kenny must have wanted something more from the Harwicks. Why else
would he come all this way and infiltrate himself into their home, not to mention
their daughter?

“So when was the last time you saw your father?”

He looked down at the floor, struggling to keep his emotions under control. “It was
at his house. The night before you found him.”