Blaize Clement - Curiosity Killed The Cat Sitter

I scrambled over the gate and ran to my bike. I made a diagonal cut across Midnight Pass and pulled into the parking lot of the Sea Breeze. Then I got my cell phone out of my hip pocket and dialed 911.

The operator who answered was cool. I gave her my name and location, and told her what I’d found. She kept her voice at a level monotone. “Please remain where you are,” she said. “Somebody will be there in just a few minutes. Can you describe yourself, please, so they’ll recognize you?”

That was smart. She was getting me to talk about how I looked, not how the corpse looked. She was also keeping me on the line while she sent somebody out, just in case I was a psycho who had dumped the corpse in the woods myself and was planning on pretending to be an innocent bystander when the deputies hauled it out.

“I’m on a bike,” I said. “It’s okay, I’m not leaving. I’m an ex-deputy.”

She and I both knew that could be a lie, too, but she stayed cool. “That’s good,” she said. “I’ll tell them to look for a woman on a bike in the Sea Breeze parking lot.”

Just as she said it, a green-and-white patrol car pulled in. Deputy Jesse Morgan parked and got out of the car and walked to meet me.

“Miz Hemingway,” he said. Carefully, as if I were a bomb that might explode any minute. “You’ve found another dead body.”

Eighteen

Morgan tilted his head toward the Sea Breeze. “Is the body in there?”

I pointed across the street. “No, it’s in the woods behind that gate. It’s Marilee Doerring. That’s the woman whose house the other body was in. Animals have been at her, but I recognized her.”

I was trying to be as cool as he was, but my voice cracked a little bit when I said that.

Flat-voiced, he said, “What were you doing in the woods?”

I could feel my face getting hot. “After you left, I saw some hair hanging on a key lime branch. I went back there to check it out.”

“Uh-huh.” He gave me that slow, level look again. “Can you show me the body?”

“I can show you where to find it, but I’m not going back there again.”

He looked down at me with the same coolly appraising eyes and then nodded. “Fair enough,” he said. “Let’s go.”

We walked across the street and down the stretch of road to the gate. I pointed to the hair on the lime tree. “Somebody must have been carrying her body around the end of the gate and her hair got caught in the thorns.”

“Don’t touch it,” he said. “Did you touch it?”

“Of course I didn’t touch it!” That felt better. Anger always makes me feel stronger.

I said, “Just climb over the gate and walk straight back. I’ll wait for you, but I need to get to my animals, so don’t take too long.”

He gave me another level look and climbed over the gate. His legs under his dark green shorts were muscular and tan. He walked like a man who was at home in the woods, pushing through the branches without any tensing or awkwardness. He disappeared from view and I waited, imagining him pushing through the next branches and seeing Marilee the same way I’d seen her. When he stepped back through the branches, he was calling for a crime-scene unit. He rang off, put the phone back in its holder on his belt, and fixed me with a penetrating look.

“You’ll be available later?”

“Sure. I just have to see to my animals first, and then I’d like to go home and soak in Clorox for a while.”

He grinned. He had a nice grin, he should have done it more often. “Where will you be after you soak in Clorox?”

I sighed. “I’ll be wherever Lieutenant Guidry wants me to be.”

I gave him my cell phone number again so they could get in touch with me. When I left him, he was climbing over the gate again to guard the body until the CSU people arrived.

For the rest of the morning, images of Phillip’s beaten body and Marilee’s mutilated body sprawled on the musky ground alternated in my head. I kept remembering how Rufus had barked at the wooded area every time we went walking. I should have known he was trying to tell me something. Dogs can smell dead bodies from a distance, even bodies that have been buried in shallow graves. If I had investigated the first time he barked, if I had told Guidry about Rufus barking, if, if, if…

Death has a way of forcing us to look at the ultimate question that hovers just below our consciousness. That pitiful body in the woods was no longer Marilee’s home. It was just rapidly decaying flesh, no more human than a fish carcass rotting at the edge of the sea. So where was Marilee? Where was the mind that had informed her body when its heart beat?

When Todd and Christy died, an astonishing number of people said stupid things like “They’re with Jesus now,” as if Jesus was making Christy’s breakfast in the morning and brushing her hair into a ponytail, or that Jesus and Todd were hanging out together and watching old movies on TV. I didn’t want them to be with Jesus, I wanted them to be with me. I hoped nobody would say inane things like that to Cora Mathers. Oh God, had anybody told Cora Mathers that Marilee was dead? It would be terrible for her if she learned of it on the news, but I didn’t know if Guidry even knew that Cora existed.

I called Guidry and left a message about Cora on his voice mail, giving him her address and phone number. The Sheriff’s Department has a Victim Assistance Unit staffed by the kind of people who know how to help you through those first few days when you keep thinking it’s all a nightmare that you’ll wake from any minute now but you don’t.

When I thought about Phillip, I couldn’t keep from empathizing with the pain his parents would feel when they saw him. They were bigoted idiots, but they loved their son. Maybe this awful thing would make them realize how much they loved him, and maybe when they learned the truth about why he had been out that morning, they would be so grateful he was alive that they would let all the other crap go.

The big question, of course, was why Phillip had been beaten. Oh, I knew well enough that ignorant young men who are so horrified and ashamed of their own homosexual urges go out gay bashing just for the hell of it. People who are filled with self-loathing need to find a target for their hatred, and now that lynching black men has become socially unacceptable, hurting gay men has taken its place. But the timing of Phillip’s attack made me suspicious. It seemed almost too coincidental that he’d been attacked right after he’d told me about seeing a woman leave Marilee’s house on Friday morning. I couldn’t shake the feeling that his attack had more to do with what he knew about a murder than because he was gay.

At eight o’clock, I called Guidry again and left a message for him to call me. At nine I called the hospital and asked about Phillip. The receptionist said there was no patient by that name at the hospital. They were either shielding him from publicity or he wasn’t in the system yet. At ten, I called again and got the same answer. I called Guidry again. He wasn’t available, so I left my name and number again.

Feeling cut off from the world, I pedaled home through church traffic. At the Summerhouse, I pulled my bike to a stop to allow a wedding party to spill over the walk. The bride and groom were young and laughing, the bride radiant in miles of lace and tulle, the groom tall and gallant, all the wedding guests gazing after them with the bedazzled smiles that wedding guests always have—hoping this union would live up to the fairy-tale wedding promises of happy ever after but knowing full well that nobody really lives happily ever after, not even beautiful young people who are truly in love.

One of the bridesmaids saw me waiting and gave me a little shrug and smile, meaning “I’m sorry you’re inconvenienced.” I smiled back and shook my head slightly, meaning, “It’s okay.”