Блейз Клемент - The Cat Sitter's Whiskers

As soon as she heard me on the steps, Sophie started yapping up a storm, not in a particularly menacing way, but with just enough of an edge to make it clear that I was entering protected territory. She’s a Baja terrier, which I’m not sure is an actual breed, but that’s what the Castillos call her because she’s typical of a lot of the dogs where they found her: Baja California. She’s shaped like a Jack Russell, no bigger than a toaster oven, but with a brindled coat and an attitude the size of a two-hundred-pound opera diva.

I let myself in the front door and Sophie immediately launched into her traditional dance of welcome. She stood up on her hind legs and hopped around in circles, waving her paws up and down like she was conducting a marching band, and then she crouched down low with her rear in the air and growled a rumbling, contralto rrrroooooooo!

I slipped my backpack off and answered her with a rrroooooo! of my own, but as I hung my keys on the coatrack by the door, I kept one eye on her. Sophie’s an interesting character; in fact, sometimes I wonder if she didn’t apprentice at the paws of Barney Feldman, because you have to mind your p’s and q’s when she’s afoot. Don’t get me wrong, she’s one of the sweetest dogs I’ve ever known, but occasionally she gets a mischievous gleam in her eye, and then look out.

She attacks shoes—not in the funny, playful way that Barney Feldman attacks ankles—but in a crazy, possessed, search-and-destroy, shock-and-awe kind of way. It usually only lasts about ten seconds or so, and then she’s back to her sweet, lovable self, as if nothing ever happened.

Hector found her when she was just a puppy, trotting along the road, thoroughly exhausted and filthy, wearing a ratty old collar and a tag with her name on it but nothing else. Eventually they came to the conclusion that at some point in her young life Sophie must have been kicked, and probably more than once.

Now, even after years have passed and the Castillos have showered her with all the love a soul could ever hope to have, there’s still something hidden deep inside her, some lingering sense of injustice that makes her want to lash out at the world every once in a while, maybe as payback for the lousy cards she was dealt when she was a pup.

I don’t blame her. I feel the same way sometimes.

Once I was relatively certain she wasn’t in attack mode, I headed through the living room while Sophie skipped along, giving me a breakdown of her morning so far with a series of half woofs and high-pitched yips, but when we got to the kitchen she ran ahead to her water bowl and stood over it, waiting silently.

I said, “Sophie. Really?”

Another of Sophie’s little quirks is that she’s very particular about her water bowl. It has to be absolutely spotless. No tiny specks of dirt. No dust. Not even one of her very own hairs lying innocently at the bottom. If it’s not perfectly pristine, she won’t touch it. And it doesn’t help to just fish out whatever offending object there is and call it a day. No, the bowl must be taken to the sink, emptied, thoroughly rinsed, and refilled with fresh water.

Sophie took a couple of desultory sniffs at the air above her bowl and then looked up at me with a vaguely accusing look in her eye. I knelt down to get a better look, and sure enough there was a tiny dust bunny floating on the surface of the water.

I laid the back of my hand over my forehead and cried, “Oh, the humanity!”

She trotted behind me to the sink and waited patiently while I threw out the ruined water and refilled the bowl, then as soon as it was back down on the floor she lapped at it like a dehydrated camel, pausing only to wag her tail and give me a look of grave gratitude, as if she’d just crossed the Mojave Desert and I had saved her from a slow, unthinkable death.

Hector and Elva are up and out of the house early, so Sophie gets breakfast before they leave for work, and then she goes back upstairs for a snooze until I arrive. All that’s required of me is a thorough water bowl inspection and a good brisk jaunt around the neighborhood.

We walked all the way to the end of Gulfmead Drive, which this far north isn’t really a drive at all, more like a flattened trail of sandy soil and crushed shell just wide enough for a car to fit through, dotted here and there with tufts of clover and sedge weed. Since it dead-ends at the bay, there’s hardly any traffic—just the locals and the occasional adventurous tourist—so I unsnapped Sophie’s leash and she went zigzagging ahead of me, peeing on everything in sight to let the neighbor dogs know she’d been by.

With Sophie playing on her own and nothing but the crunching sound of my sneakers on the road to distract me, I had to allow for the fact that there’d been a nagging voice in the back of my head all morning. So far I’d done a pretty good job ignoring it, but now it was getting louder and louder. It was a jumble of questions and rambling thoughts and theories, but the overriding theme was: Huh?

There was no point trying to re-create the whole scene of what had happened that morning, but I couldn’t stop myself. And even though low blood sugar was probably the most logical explanation, I just couldn’t accept the idea that I’d just fainted and dreamt the whole thing.

For a moment I even toyed with the idea of going back and seeing if I could get some answers out of Barney Feldman. He was my only bona fide witness, and I’m a firm believer in the notion that our animal friends are perfectly capable of communicating with us, even on a very sophisticated level. The only problem is that we haven’t quite figured out how to listen yet. In my opinion, if we ever do, the world will be a vastly better place.

Sophie was chasing after a swallowtail butterfly she’d roused from a spindly spice bush growing on the side of the road, and as she raced by in hot pursuit I swooped her up in my arms and cradled her like a baby.

I said, “Hey, any chance you speak Maine Coon?”

She looked up with soulful brown eyes and blinked a couple of times, which I wasn’t sure meant yes or no or Can you please put me down I’m in the middle of something?

I said, “Listen, there’s somebody I’d like you to talk to. Would you be up for that? He’s the only one that can tell me what really happened.”

She perked her ears up and tilted her head to one side, trying her best to figure out what the hell I was talking about, but I knew I wasn’t getting through to her. Without an interpreter, I didn’t think I’d get much information out of Barney Feldman. But then again, there was one other option …

Contrary to what some people might tell you, I’m no dummy, at least most of the time. The moment I hopped on my bike and pedaled away from the Kellers’ house, I knew my brain had gone into autopilot, and I could still feel it working quietly in the background, trying to connect the dots.

Maybe I’d been wrong this whole time. Maybe it hadn’t been Levi parked outside my driveway at all. It certainly wouldn’t take a genius to figure out that I have easy access to some of the island’s swankiest homes, and the idea that I might have been followed to the Kellers’ was starting to seem like a very real possibility, especially when I remembered hearing the sound of a car roll by in the street as I unlocked their front door.

I knew if Barney Feldman couldn’t shed some light on what had happened, there was one person who could: Levi Radcliff. If there’d been another car in the neighborhood, like somebody lingering around waiting for me to leave so they could follow me, Levi would definitely have noticed it.

Sophie must have sensed I wasn’t paying attention to her anymore because she squirmed out of my arms and scampered off in search of her butterfly, and by the time we got back home she had pretty much tuckered herself out. I gave her a couple of kisses on the nose and then conducted one more water bowl inspection while she headed upstairs for her midmorning nap, which at the time seemed like a capital idea. The only thing that kept me from joining her was the angry growling coming from my stomach.