Блейз Клемент - The Cat Sitter And The Canary

I saw the news van first, bathed in a sea of emergency lights. There was a cameraman with his back against the hood, his handheld video camera perched on his shoulder, an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth, and the brunette reporter I’d seen on the Wincocks’ television screen was checking her lipstick in the reflection of the van’s back window.

As Deputy Marshall rolled up, I pulled in behind him and immediately jumped out, not even bothering to cut the engine. There were two sheriff’s cars on either side of our driveway, and a couple of Sarasota police officers holding traffic. I realized Deputy Marshall must have radioed ahead and requested they keep the northbound lane closed until we arrived.

I hadn’t gotten ten feet when someone grabbed me from behind. It was Michael, dressed in the same shorts and tank top he was wearing that morning, and the sight of him nearly made me collapse right there in the road. Before I could even get a word out, he stopped me.

“Okay. We’re all fine. Ethan and Paco are down at the house talking to the cops right now.”

I said, “What happened?”

“I don’t know yet. Somebody was jogging by and they almost got run down by a car coming out of our lane. That’s when he noticed something about midway down to the house … it’s a body.”

I said, “You saw it?”

“Yeah.” He paused, his eyes going glassy. “It’s a woman. Blond. Right in the middle of the lane by the magnolia. There’s blood.”

I felt pressure beginning to build in the space behind my eyes as I struggled for words. “I just … I don’t believe it. I was at a client’s house, and I saw it on the news. I didn’t … I didn’t know who it was. I thought…”

The idea that somebody might have been stalking me was hard enough to deal with, but it paled in comparison to the idea that someone might have hurt Michael or Paco or Ethan. Michael grabbed me around the shoulders and hugged me tight.

He said, “Yeah, well if you think that was bad … imagine what I thought.”

I pulled away. There were tears in his bloodshot eyes.

“Oh, Michael…”

He hugged me again. “Okay. Alright, we’re fine. Let’s just not think about it.”

“Yeah, yeah. Okay, yeah.” I could feel my body reeling as the adrenaline began to catch up with me. “I think I better sit down.”

We went over to the side of the road and found a spot in the grass opposite the driveway. They were letting a slow trickle of traffic through now, and I felt like a monkey in a cage as the cars rolled by, the passengers inside gawking at us. The sky overhead was bright blue, with two mountain-size white clouds gliding east to west, as if nothing was happening at all and everything was perfectly fine in the universe. We sat there in silence, watching the various officers milling around, coming and going up the lane from our house.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, I turned to Michael and said, “Why is this happening?”

He shook his head and sighed. “I wish I knew.”

“I mean, there’s no way, right?”

“No way … what?”

I waved my hand around. “All this. There’s no way it’s a coincidence.”

His eyes stopped on a spot across the road, and I could tell by his face he’d already been thinking the exact same thing. First, Sara Potts, with my name on her body, and now … not three hundred feet from our front door …

Michael said, “Okay. Let’s not jump to any conclusions until we know exactly what’s going on.”

I looked up to see a trio of men coming around the curve of our driveway. It was only then that I noticed the shape in the middle of the lane, about a hundred yards down. It was too far to see clearly, but there were two deputies carefully unfolding a blue tarp, which I figured was meant to protect the body until a forensics team arrived to investigate.

I could tell by his profile that one of the men coming toward us was Paco, and despite the fact that Michael had already told me he was fine, I felt a muscle in the middle of my throat let go at the sight of him. As they passed the spot where the body was, he kept his face turned. One of the men stopped, and now it was just Paco coming up the lane, along with another taller, skinnier man. It took me a second to realize who it was: Matthew Carthage, the blond boy-detective I’d met in front of Caroline’s house, wearing the same faded jeans and white oxford dress shirt. I looked around for Detective McKenzie’s unmarked SUV but couldn’t find it.

Paco had a canvas shopping bag from our local health-food store slung over his shoulder. He walked across the road and straight into my arms, hugging me as Michael mutely patted both our backs. I could tell he was struggling to keep it all together, but I tried not to let on. It’s important for Michael to feel he has things under control, especially in a situation like this.

Detective Carthage was standing a few feet back, typing something into his cell phone.

I scanned Paco’s face. “Who is she?”

He shook his head. “They don’t know yet. I didn’t recognize her at all. Middle-aged, white, nicely dressed. There’s no purse or ID or anything…”

“Where’s Ethan?”

“Looking for Ella. She’s hiding, probably just freaked out by all the activity, or by what happened here. Whatever it was…” His voice trailed away as he glanced first at Detective Carthage, then at Michael.

Michael’s eyes narrowed. “What?”

Carthage stepped forward and cleared his throat, his neck suddenly breaking out in splotches of scarlet as he leveled me with his pale green eyes.

“There’s another note.”

16

When I was a kid, my grandfather liked to tell me bedtime stories about the people who lived here before us. My grandmother would lay my pajamas out while I was brushing my teeth—sometimes posing them on the bed, their arms relaxed over the pillow and their legs all akimbo. Once I was tucked in, my grandfather would come upstairs and slide a chair over to the bed. More often than not, Michael would sneak in and lay on the rug to listen, even though he was older and much too sophisticated for such childish things.

Usually the stories began with the brave Miccosukee or the noble Seminole Indians, descendants of the indigenous people that roamed our shores long before anyone knew there would ever be a thing called Florida. He told stories of mighty battles—struggles with neighboring tribes and clashes with Europeans and Spaniards—all mixed in with woolly mammoths and wild brontosauruses grazing in the fields, cavemen throwing giant parties, and Neanderthals dancing around roaring campfires where giant tortoises grilled in their own shells.

For the longest time, I bought those stories hook, line, and sinker. I took it for granted that our European settlers rode through the dunes on the backs of saber-toothed tigers, and I’m ashamed to admit that I was nearly a teenager before I figured out it was all pure fabrication on my grandfather’s part.

But it didn’t matter. I loved the rich world my grandfather wove for us kids, and even if it wasn’t all factually true, he somehow managed to capture the strange, wild essence of Florida’s character. Sometimes, he’d skip forward a few thousand years and talk about the eccentric family that owned our little stretch of beach right before we came along. According to my grandfather, they were the distant cousins of Nelson Rockefeller, as well as the illegitimate children of a glamorous and beautiful circus performer known as Minerva, who was rumored to have traveled Europe as the “personal assistant” to John Jacob Astor.

Now, this should all be taken with a grain of salt, because as I understand it, they traveled from country to country in a convoy of hot-air balloons, held aloft with the breath of fire-breathing dragons … In other words, don’t sue me if any of this turns out to be less than accurate. But apparently Minerva and John Jacob Astor had twenty children, all of whom spent their later years living together not far from here in a giant mansion made of imported Italian marble. The eldest, Paolo, was a botanist. His particular field of interest was the Talauma plumieri, or what you and I know as the magnolia tree.