Blaize Clement - Curiosity Killed The Cat Sitter

When Ghost was combed and feeling sleek again, I left my grooming supplies on the lanai table and carried Ghost through the slider before I pulled it closed. I’ve learned not to try to coax any cat through a door, because they will always get halfway in and decide to contemplate the secrets of life while you stand there like an idiot telling them to please get a move on. Instead, I carry them over the threshold like brides.

It took two hands to securely lock the slider, so I put Ghost back on the floor before I locked it. Then with Ghost trotting by my side, I went back in the kitchen and made a cup of tea. I drank it sitting at the snack bar while I imagined what was happening to Phillip at the trauma center. Doctors would be fighting for his life. There might be surgery, blood transfusions, ventilators, and all the other modern techniques that exist to preserve life. But no matter how many devices I could envision working for him, I couldn’t escape the reality of what a bullet does when it explodes inside a skull.

I washed Ghost’s food bowl and my teacup while Ghost twined in and out between my ankles, arching his back and rubbing against me with his tail held high. I was touched. Cats have tiny scent glands on their faces and at the roots of their tails. When they rub against you, it’s their way of mixing their scent with yours. You can’t get any closer to a living being than sharing odors, and Ghost was telling me that he and I were now bonded as one. He was signing on as my closest friend, my confidant, and my protector.

Even domestic cats can be vicious, and Ghost was also letting me know that if he and I went hunting together in the wild, he would pounce on a rodent, stick his dagger-like eyeteeth in it, and sever its spine for me. He would shred its flesh into bite-size chunks and share them with me. Since we weren’t in the wild, he would have to content himself with bringing me the occasional unlucky lizard caught on the lanai. All that bonding behavior made it even more imperative that I find a new owner for Ghost before he became too attached to me. He had already lost one person he loved, I didn’t want him to lose another one.

I left our dishes draining on the counter and went back to the pantry and looked at the safe again. It didn’t seem so important anymore, but I had to get my mind off what was happening to Phillip. I fingered the keyhole again. It was small, so the key would be small, too, and easily concealed. Just the thought of looking in all the possible places Marilee could have hidden it was mind-numbing. Guessing the numbers for the code would be a lot easier.

I got the numbers I’d copied from Marilee’s ruined tax return and went back to the safe to demonstrate my savvy knowledge of how people use their birth dates or Social Security numbers or house numbers for codes they commit to memory. Easy for them to remember, but also easy for a burglar to figure out. Not that I was a burglar. I was more of a protector.

Ghost watched intently while I tried the first six digits of Marilee’s Social Security number. I tried the last six digits. I tried them both backward. I tried her birth date, first by month and year, then by day, month, and year. I tried them backward, too. I tried her house address and her zip code and various parts of her phone number. Nothing worked.

I closed the wooden door over the safe, replaced the cat food on the shelf, and crawled back in bed. Ghost joined me, staying politely down by my feet but close enough to warm me. Immediately, visions of Phillip shooting himself swam before my eyes. I hadn’t seen Phillip’s injury before Deputy Morgan pulled me aside, but I had seen the gun and I knew what an exploding bullet does.

In the trauma center at St. Pete, doctors were working to save Phillip’s life. But if they succeeded, would he be Phillip or a pitiful shell without a mind? Without consciousness of his surroundings, without the ability to think or create, without the ability to live with any degree of joy? To me, such a life was not a life, but a breathing death.

I hadn’t been on speaking terms with God since Todd and Christy were killed, but now I had a little talk with him. Or her, as the case may be. I said, I’m still mad at you for taking Todd and Christy, but maybe you did that because they were hurt so badly that they wouldn’t have been them if they’d lived. They would have hated that, so I guess you did the right thing. Now Phillip has been hurt, and he would hate having to live not as himself. He would hate not being able to play the piano, not being able to have fun, not being able to love and be loved. So I just want you to know that if you decide to take Phillip, I’ll understand. I won’t like it, but I’ll understand. Not that you need me to okay what you do. But if he can have a good life in spite of what happened, then I ask you to help the doctors save him. That’s all. Amen.

It probably wasn’t much of a prayer by most people’s standards, but it was the best I could do and it made me feel better.

I slept for a little while, and when I woke, I was ready to take care of the cats and dogs on my schedule. Ghost was sunning himself on a window ledge when I left, and he blinked a couple of I love you’s when I said goodbye. We were making progress.

Thirty-Two

Tom Hale was hovering near the door waiting for me when I got to his condo. He had heard about Phillip’s suicide attempt on the news, and he was determined to find out everything I knew. I gave him the short version, but it was still a lot to condense. When I told him what I suspected about Carl Winnick, he shook his head in disgust.

“That’s always the way,” he said. “Those sanctimonious holier-than-thou types are always covering up something rotten. I hope they roast his balls over an open flame.”

“First, they’ll have to prove he did it.”

“The boy, how bad is he?”

“It was to his head, Tom.”

Tom looked down at his ruined legs. “It would be better for the kid if he doesn’t make it. Not if it’s to the head.”

I felt tears coming, so I stood up and got Billy Elliot’s leash and snapped it on his collar. Tom rolled his chair toward me and fixed me with a stern look.

“Dixie, don’t try too hard to make sense of any of this. Life doesn’t make any sense. Like they say, bad things happen to good people. It’s like chaos theory. You know chaos theory?”

I considered my options. If I was honest and said I didn’t know diddly about chaos theory, Tom would tell me everything about it twice, and I’d never get away. If I lied and said chaos theory and I were old friends, he’d catch me in my ignorance and I’d still end up hearing all about it.

I sighed. “Tom, I really have to go. I’ve got a million things happening at once and none of them make any sense, and so far as I can tell, they’re all impossible.”

He smiled and gave me a thumbs-up. “You’ve got it, Dixie! That’s chaos theory!”

When I got back to Marilee’s house, a green-and-white vehicle from the Community Policing Unit was in the Winnicks’ driveway—either to gather information or to offer the services of the Victim Assistance Unit.

I laid my.38 on the kitchen bar, and sat on a bar stool to use Marilee’s phone to call the trauma center at St. Pete. A woman told me she could not provide any information about any patient, period.

I said, “I just want to know if he’s still alive.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t tell you anything.”

I had known before I called that I wouldn’t get anywhere. To the woman answering the phone, I could be a ghoulish reporter following up a lead on a kid who’d committed suicide, or I could be the person who had pulled the trigger, checking to see if I’d been successful.