Блейз Клемент - The Cat Sitter's Cradle

There was a slight pause, and then he sighed softly before the machine beeped off. I laid my head back down on the pillow and stared up at the ceiling. My first thought was that he was running away. Becca had worked up the courage to tell him she was pregnant, they had fought, and now he was abandoning her, throwing everything away to join the deadbeat dad club. But it wasn’t like Kenny to be so dramatic. He was a pretty straightforward, shoot-from-the-hip kind of guy, and for a brief moment my nap-happy brain toyed with the notion that it was just Kenny trying to be funny.

I reached for the phone and dialed his number. By the tenth ring I knew he wasn’t going to pick up. When his voice mail didn’t kick in, I knew he wasn’t joking. I wondered if he hadn’t already had his phone shut off and had called from a pay phone. I looked down at Ella Fitzgerald, curled up and purring in the crook of my arm. I had the distinct feeling I’d been in this exact place and time before: Warm and cozy, curled up in bed without a care in the world, while dark clouds were looming all around me.

9

When I arrived at the Harwick house the next morning, I fully expected to find Becca in hysterics on the floor of the bathroom again. Kenny had probably called her the night before to say he was leaving town and she’d never see him again, or for all I knew he might have sent her a text message. That seems to be the primary mode of delivering important information for young people these days. Either way, I had a feeling Becca was going to need a lot more shoulder-crying time, and I already had a full day as it was. I certainly didn’t want her to go through this alone, but the bottom line was I barely knew her, and it wasn’t my job to shepherd her through the hazardous terrain of love and heartbreak. I decided that if she hadn’t talked to her parents by now, I’d try my best to convince her it was the right thing to do.

The house was completely quiet. This time when I opened the door, the alarm panel didn’t beep, and Charlotte wasn’t waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs. I called out to announce my presence, expecting Charlotte to come slinking around the corner to give me the stink-eye, but no one answered. I went into the living room, where there was a half-empty liquor bottle and a couple of glasses on the coffee table, but no Charlotte. For the first time, I had a funny feeling that something wasn’t quite right.

Every house has a particular scent to it, a very subtle mixture of the people and animals that live in it, as unique as a fingerprint. The Harwick house had a clean, earthy scent: a combination of cooking aromas from the kitchen, chlorine from the pool, the salty air off the ocean, and a note of lavender, perhaps Mrs. Harwick’s perfume. But now, something was different. I told myself that the Harwicks had been gone for almost two days, and it was only natural that the scent of the house would change in their absence.

But I couldn’t find Charlotte anywhere. She wasn’t in the kitchen or the dining area. I even looked under the couch in the living room and behind the dryer in the laundry room off the kitchen, both popular feline hiding spots, but she was nowhere to be seen. I went up the marble staircase and tiptoed down the main hall toward the master suite. The doors to Becca’s and August’s bedrooms were both closed, and I didn’t think it would be right to go snooping around in there. At least not yet, especially since I wasn’t completely sure they weren’t home and I didn’t want to barge in on them if they were. Hell hath no fury like a teenager awakened at dawn.

The pillows on the big bed in the master bedroom had the same indentations where Charlotte had slept the night before, and the bedspread was a little mussed. Maybe she had slipped under the bed when she heard me open the front door. I felt around the pillows for signs of warmth, but there was nothing. I looked under the bed anyway, hoping I’d see her emerald eyes sparkling mischievously at me, but there were only a couple of dust bunnies and the foil wrapper from a piece of chewing gum.

I was beginning to get a little concerned as I made my way down the short hall toward the master bathroom. As grumpy as Charlotte was, it didn’t make sense that she would hide—especially since cats are such inquisitive animals. She would have at least been curious enough to find out who was in the house before she gave them the cold shoulder, and it certainly wasn’t possible that anyone else had fed her this early in the morning. I tried to form an image in my mind of where I might be if I was a snarky queen in a sprawling mansion, and that turned out to be quite easy: that peach velvet bench in the bathroom opposite the aquarium, next to the gold-plated telephone.

I flicked on the light switch by the doorway, and the overhead chandelier lit up to reveal the bathroom in all its over-the-top glory, but no Charlotte. There was a damp towel draped over the counter next to the sink, but otherwise everything looked normal.

I leaned into the little alcove and peered behind the velvet bench just in case Charlotte was hiding there and thought, This is getting serious. I was out of ideas. I sat down on the bench and put my hand on the gold-plated phone, wondering if it wasn’t time to call the Harwicks and ask them if there were any other places she might be hiding. That’s when I had a feeling I was not alone.

I looked up at the aquarium, fully expecting to see the mermaid staring serenely back at me, and instead locked eyes with a bloated hedgehog, floating motionless in the middle of the tank. It took me a couple of seconds of shock to realize that it wasn’t a hedgehog at all but a porcupine fish.

Porcupine fish are pretty cute in their natural state. They have gloppy, rounded bodies with drooping eyes and a goofy smile, like drunken Pillsbury Doughboys with fins. But when frightened, they fill their bodies up with water, pumping to twice their normal size and extending their sharp, quill-like scales out in every direction. If that’s not enough to scare off a would-be predator, a naturally occurring chemical in their body that’s about a thousand times more poisonous than cyanide usually does the trick.

While the porcupine fish and I stared blankly at each other, my mind did a little wheelie inside its skull. The alarm was off. Charlotte was hiding. The porcupine fish was in a full state of alarm. I glanced about the room looking for anything else out of place. I could hear myself telling Michael and Paco how valuable the fish were, and then I could see Mrs. Harwick pointing at the painted dragon eel and whispering, “Priceless!” I looked back at the tank. Now there were two pairs of eyes on me: the porcupine fish’s and the mermaid’s. She was staring directly into my eyes, like she was trying to tell me something, and I suddenly thought, A burglar is in this house and I’ve just interrupted him.

I was still sitting on the velvet bench. I tried to look as casual as possible. I shrugged my shoulders.

“Well, Charlotte,” I said out loud, “you’re not hungry, and I don’t have time to look for you all day.”

I walked out of the bathroom, flicking the light switch off with a trembling hand as I passed, and steadily made my way downstairs to the front door, talking to myself the entire way, certain I was about to be jumped by an intruder.

“Charlotte, you’ll just have to wait and have breakfast later, because I have other things to do and I don’t have time to go looking around every nook and cranny whenever it’s time to eat. You’ll just have to learn that if you want your breakfast, you have to eat it when it’s served. So I’ll just be back after lunchtime, and maybe you’ll decide you’re hungry by then.”

I pulled out my ring of keys and jangled them loudly so whoever was in the house, if they were still there, would hear them and know I was leaving.