The Cat Sitter's Nine Lives (11 page)

I showed her my book and flipped it open to the back. “It’s the one I bought from Mr. Hoskins last night. It’s missing a whole section in the end. I just stopped by to tell him.”

She said, “Hmm,” and then seemed to get lost in her own thoughts. “Well, call me if anything comes to mind.”

“Detective McKenzie, I’m worried about those chocolates.”

“What about them?”

“Well, they’re toxic to cats.”

She nodded. “I understand. I’ll remove them myself before we leave today.”

For a second I wondered what she planned on doing with them. Surely she wouldn’t just throw them away … I toyed with the idea of offering to “remove” them myself, but then a mobile forensics unit pulled up and I snapped back to my senses. Sometimes I really do wonder if I shouldn’t join the local chapter of Chocoholics Anonymous.

McKenzie signaled for two of the deputies to follow her back in the bookstore and then held out her hand. “Let me know if you remember anything else?”

I nodded and then watched her disappear into the bookstore as the lab techs opened up the side door to the truck and unpacked their gear.

When I was a deputy, which hadn’t been that long ago in the grand scheme of things, a mobile forensics unit had consisted of a couple of oversized tackle boxes, but in the past year an anonymous donor had given the department almost half a million dollars. That was enough to buy a new state-of-the-art mobile crime truck, complete with sophisticated evidence collection systems, lab chemicals, computers, and satellite Internet, not to mention two full-time lab technicians to drive it around.

I would have liked to see the inside of it, but I figured those techs had better things to do than give me a private tour. As I made my way back to the Bronco, a van pulled up. I imagined it was probably a photographer, called in to take pictures of every inch of the bookstore. A photographer is standard procedure at any crime scene. No matter what happened afterward—even if the entire place burned to the ground—there’d always be a detailed photographic record of exactly how everything looked at the scene of the crime. That way they wouldn’t have to rely on anybody’s memory to re-create it.

Which was good, because I planned on forgetting the whole thing as quickly as possible.

10

According to
Cosmopolitan
magazine, I am a woman in the prime of her life—physically, sexually, and mentally. Physically, I’d say my daily jogs with Billy Elliot keep me in relatively good health. Sexually, well, that’s in progress; I’ll report back later. Mentally? Well, for argument’s sake let’s just say yes.

Still, I misplace things all the time. I lose my car keys at least once a month. I’ve found them at the bottom of my dirty clothes hamper, I’ve found them in the washing machine, and more than once I’ve found them in the freezer, tossed in next to the ice cream and the frozen corn. Sometimes my mind just starts wandering and I forget what I’m doing.

Mr. Hoskins may have been a lot of things, but he was clearly not a man in the prime of his life. It seemed perfectly reasonable to me that he could easily have misplaced his keys somewhere. In fact, I distinctly remembered him patting his pockets and looking around as if he’d lost something, and that would explain why the door was left unlocked overnight.

It was simple. He couldn’t find his keys and it was the end of the day, he was tired, and he wanted to go home—who would rob a bookstore anyway? It’s not like they’re known for having lots of cash on hand, especially not in this day and age when anybody with half a brain and an Internet connection can sit around in their underwear all day and buy every book their little heart desires with just the click of a key. So Mr. Hoskins probably decided the store was perfectly fine and he’d just look for his keys in the morning, but to be on the safe side, he had emptied out the register and taken the cash with him. It all made perfect sense.

Except none of that explained the bloody prints on the counter, not to mention the fact that he hadn’t come home the night before … and he
had
seemed a little nervous …

I shook my head. There was nothing I could do about it, and it wasn’t my business anyway. I had already let myself get mixed up in plenty of things I shouldn’t in the past, and with Ethan, my life was already busy enough. I didn’t need any more things to distract me.

By the time I pulled into the covered carport at Julie Caldwell’s condo, I’d made up my mind. Whatever had happened in that bookstore after I left the night before had absolutely nothing to do with me. Yes, Detective McKenzie was a little odd, and yes, she made me feel like a child on the first day of kindergarten, but she was also about the smartest person I’d ever met, and if anyone could figure out what had happened to Mr. Hoskins, it was her.

Not to mention the fact that I was no longer with the sheriff’s department. For some reason I had to remind myself of that little fact every time I turned around. I had a whole new career, and I had just embarked on a whole new life with a smart, handsome man who didn’t know it yet but was about to start serving me breakfast on a regular basis.

I shut off the ignition and gave myself a little nod in the rearview mirror, as if to say,
Good for you.
It’s unlike me to just let things go, but I can recognize a good decision when I make one, and forgetting about Mr. Hoskins and whatever had happened in that bookstore was one of the best decisions I’d made in a very long time.

Then a little voice in the back of my head said,
Yeah yeah yeah, but what about the cat?

I ignored it and grabbed my backpack.

Julie Caldwell is a cosmetologist. Originally I thought that meant she could tell me what my moon-sign says about my love life, but turns out I was wrong. Her specialty is hair color. Her clients, mostly doyennes of old Sarasota or young movie stars, pay up to eight hundred dollars for a single appointment. She’s got four chairs in her salon, and they’re usually all booked months in advance.

She gave me highlights once for free as a birthday present. As I sat in one of the chairs in her salon while she moved from client to client, I did the math:

4 appointments an hour × 8 hours a day
=
Julie is filthy rich

If I’d known I could have been a millionaire just by coloring people’s hair, I’d have gone to beauty school myself.

Julie had called me up the week before to ask if I could take care of her “cat” while she was in Miami for a few days. I say “cat” with quotation marks because Esmerelda is in no way an ordinary house kitty. She has a deep tawny coat splashed all over with chocolate brown spots, long graceful legs that ripple with lean muscle, and big cupped ears perched on top of her head like two furry satellite dishes. She clocks in on the scale at a whopping (for a cat at least) twenty-six pounds, and from the tip of her nose to the end of her tail, she’s four and a half feet of pure feline awesomeness.

Esmerelda is what is known in the cat world as a Savannah—a cross between a regular domestic house cat and a wild cat from Africa called a serval. Servals hunt at night, dining on everything from mice and crickets to frogs and fish, but they’ve been known to take down bigger animals, too, even the occasional deer, The first time I met Esmerelda, I took one look into her deep, yellow eyes and saw the wisdom of generations of proud, free-roaming cats. I got the distinct impression that she took one look at me and saw dinner. She had that same sparkle in her eyes I have when you slide a plate of bacon in front of me.

For walks, she wears a soft leather harness. It’s pink, studded up and down with little rhinestones, and probably costs more than my entire wardrobe. Julie says she chose it for several reasons. First, Julie wears a lot of rhinestones herself. She’s kind of flashy that way, and pink is her favorite color. In fact, over the years it’s become her trademark. Every time I see her, she’s dyed her hair a new color, but it’s always a variation of the same thing—
pink.
Second, people tend to get a little alarmed when they see her walking down the street with Esmerelda. They usually think she’s some crazy person who’s busted a small leopard out of the zoo, but once they see the matching pink outfits and all the rhinestones—not to mention Julie’s pink hair—they just assume she’s with the circus.

Almost a hundred years ago, the Ringling Brothers made Sarasota their hometown, so there are all kinds of clown schools and circus performers in the area. It’s completely normal to see clowns in full makeup in the drive-through at the bank or on line at the coffee shop, so stands to reason you might see a circus handler with an exotic animal or two every once in a while.

Esmerelda greeted me at the door and let me know she was happy to see me by fluffing her big tail out like a feather duster and butting her head into my ankles. It can take an hour just to walk her around the block, mainly because everybody that goes by wants to stop and meet her, but also because her favorite thing is to crouch low in the grass and watch the birds and squirrels play in the trees. If you let her she’ll stay there for hours, still as a statue, watching with complete and utter rapture. I always imagine she’s tapped into some deep ancestral memory, which makes me smile, but it also makes me a little sad. She’ll never get to run free in an African savannah, even though that’s where half her genes are telling her she belongs.

On our way back in from the walk, I stopped and checked Julie’s mailbox. It was all junk mail, but it made me think of Guidry’s letter. I still hadn’t opened it, and I was beginning to wonder if I shouldn’t just toss it in the trash.

While Esmerelda ate her breakfast, I did a thorough check of the condo, and I wondered if my fear didn’t have something to do with Ethan. The last time I’d spoken with Guidry, he’d said that he had met someone, so I’d felt free to move on with my life. Did I really think there was something in that letter that could threaten what I had with Ethan? In the master bedroom, I paused in front of the big window and looked out at the ocean. There were two massive rain clouds looming on the horizon like lumbering giants rising out of the sea.

After Esmerelda was done eating, I washed her bowl out with soap and hot water and left it to dry on a wooden dish rack next to the sink. Julie keeps a collection of toys in the junk drawer next to the refrigerator, so while Esmerelda sat nearby and watched with rapt attention, I opened the drawer and went over the choices of the day.

“Well, of course, we always have this little stuffed mouse…”

I held it out for Esmerelda, and she nudged it gently with the tip of her nose.

“Or there’s this catnip-stuffed ball…”

She wrinkled up her nose and backed away a step.

“Okay, definitely not that one. There’s always this old standby…”

I held my hand out and showed her a purple Wiffle ball with holes all around it the diameter of a Magic Marker. She said,
“Rowwwk!”
and swiped one big paw at it.

“Alright then, we have a winner!”

I cut a couple of slices of cheddar cheese into little strips and pushed them through the holes in the Wiffle ball. Then I gave Esmerelda a squeeze and told her to be a good girl and that I’d be back in a little while. As I went out the door, she was happily chasing the Wiffle ball around the living room, not unlike a lion chasing an antelope around the African savannah.

By the time I made it back down to the south end of the Key and was pulling into my driveway, those giant clouds had moved inland and let loose with a very respectable downpour. People say our little island is semitropical, but sometimes it feels like a full-on jungle, especially when the rain comes down like a banshee, or in the summer when only us hard-core residents hang around for the stifling heat and humidity and most of the snowbirds fly back to their homes up north.

One thing we can always count on, though, is the occasional thunderstorm to come in and cool things off. It usually only lasts long enough to give everything a good rinsing, and then before you know it the sun bursts forth again, all the birds sing in praise of fresh, clean water, and all the leaves shimmer and sparkle in the sunlight like diamonds.

The carport was empty, which meant I’d been right. Michael was at work, and Paco had started a new assignment. I streaked across the courtyard and up the stairs as fast as I could, but by the time I got inside I was soaked to the bone. I didn’t care, though. The rain felt good, and it helped me forget about Guidry and Mr. Hoskins and everything else that had happened.

I stood in the shower and turned the water on full force. For a few blissful moments, I just hung there like a coat on a clothesline, and my mind went blank as the hot water streamed down my back. Once I was sufficiently renewed, I toweled off, padded down the hall to my bedroom, and collapsed stark naked on the bed. I barely had the energy to pull the comforter up around me, but the cool air from the AC felt good gently moving over my body. It wasn’t long before I heard a familiar
meep meep.

Ella Fitzgerald hopped up on the bed and pressed her nose to my cheek, purring like a miniature jackhammer. I scooped her up in my arms, and she curled up against me. I had barely closed my eyes when Mr. Hoskins’s kindly face floated into view. I thought to myself,
Where in the world have you gone off to?

It’s ridiculous, I know, but every once in a while I get it in my head that I have ESP. My great-aunt Bess always said she knew exactly when a thunderstorm was headed our way, and sometimes she was even right, so I’ve always fantasized that if I just try hard enough I can tap into my own inner psychic.

Once I had a pretty good image of Mr. Hoskins’s face, which wasn’t that easy with those big wraparound sunglasses, I tried to imagine where he was, if there was anything familiar nearby, like a street sign or maybe a building, or anything that might help identify his location. It took a little while, but slowly, his surroundings actually started taking shape. I could even see something behind him, a brick wall, or maybe a bookshelf, and then he was standing next to something metal, gold or brass, and it had little round buttons on it with …