Блейз Клемент - The Cat Sitter's Cradle

We stood there for a couple of awkward moments; then I grabbed my backpack and pulled Mrs. Harwick’s fish-feeding instructions out of one of the side pockets.

Detective McKenzie cleared her throat and handed me her card. “I’ll see you downstairs when you’re done here. In the meantime, let me know the minute you hear anything from Kenny Newman, and please ask him to call me.”

I slipped the card in my pocket. “Okay, I will.”

“And Dixie, it would be helpful if you could be as brief as possible with him.”

I knew what she meant. She didn’t want me to tell Kenny what had happened or ask him any questions about the case. A good detective can learn a lot just by observing the way people handle themselves. Kenny’s first reaction to the facts of the case could mean the difference between being a witness and a suspect, and McKenzie wanted to be there when he was given the news.

As she walked out I glanced over at the mermaid, who was staring off blissfully at some distant horizon. Stupid bitch, I thought. How nice it must be to sit on your porcelain treasure chest throne, encased in a silent wall of water without a care in the world, while fish serenely circle around your empty porcelain head.

I slid open one of the big panel doors on the side of the tank and shuffled around to the back, trying to focus in on Mrs. Harwick’s tiny handwriting. The instructions for the evening feeding were simple enough, six tablespoons each from two different cans of dried fish food. The first looked like tiny multicolored snowflakes, and the second were BB-sized pellets, half of which sank to the bottom of the tank the moment they hit the water. The fish seemed to know right off the bat which food they preferred. A few dove directly for the sinking pellets and ignored the floating flakes completely, while the rest shot straight to the surface and splashed around like a frenzy of man-eating piranhas.

I didn’t check the chemical balance in the water as Mrs. Harwick had directed me to do occasionally. I felt a little twinge of guilt about that, but I figured I’d performed my duties and then some for the Harwick family already, and frankly I was physically and emotionally spent. I wanted to get out of that house as soon as possible.

Plus, the sun was setting, and I had one more item on my to-do list before I could throw my exhausted bones into bed and put this whole day out of its misery.

15

When my grandparents moved here, the Key was a completely different world. First of all, there weren’t nearly as many houses as there are now, not to mention condos and high-rise apartment buildings and restaurants and shops and chic hotels. It was just a quiet fishing village, and what few houses there were certainly never made it onto the cover of Fancy-Pants Mansion magazine. Secondly, there was no such thing as a “private” beach. Even when Michael and I were kids, we would roam for hours on end exploring every inch of the island, and not once did we ever encounter a NO TRESPASSING sign. Back then most of the island was covered in sea grape and sugarberry trees and live oaks that towered over jungles of saw palmetto, wild olive, and creeping moonflower vines. It felt like our own personal jungle for two.

These days people like to joke that if you look away too long, the jungle starts to creep in and reclaim its stake. That definitely seems to be the case on Windy Way, where the houses peek out from behind a densely woven curtain of tree limbs and vines, and you have to carefully maneuver your car around the occasional island that’s opened up in the middle of the one-lane road, where patches of saw grass have sprouted and overly ambitious cabbage palms are poking their way through.

I pulled into the driveway of a low-slung ranch house with pale gray siding and a lipstick red front door. A huge live oak huddled over the house like a regular at the neighborhood bar, resting its leafy elbows on the peak of the roof. Mrs. Langham was sitting in a beach chair in the open bay of the garage with her feet propped up on an old ice cooler. She was stick-thin with salt-and-pepper hair and bright pink lipstick. Perched on the bridge of her nose was a pair of bifocals attached to a string of white plastic beads around her neck, and she was busily pulling a needle and thread through an embroidery frame—probably an applique for a dress she was working on. As I walked up she laid the embroidery frame down in her lap and slid her glasses off.

“Well, well, look what the cat dragged in!”

I said, “I know, I know. I’ve been meaning to call you forever.”

“Oh, don’t you worry about it. I knew you’d come sniffing around one of these days when you got desperate enough. Come on back. It’s in the sewing room.”

The last time I saw Mrs. Langham was months ago when I had dropped by on a whim. She had been my grandmother’s seamstress, so I’d known her since I was just a little girl. I remembered lying on the floor of the sewing room in this very house, playing with her black poodle while she and my grandmother talked about clothes and men and neighborhood gossip. It turned out she had made a few outfits for my mother, too. Seeing me had reminded her how stylish my mother was, and before I knew it she was measuring me for an evening dress and talking about “low cut” this and “plunging” that. I went along with it because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but when she called to let me know the dress was finished, I chickened out.

When I was nine, and my mother ran away to start a new life or hide from her old one—I’ve never been quite sure which—she left nearly all her things behind, including most of her clothes. We still have a trunk of them in the attic. I used to sneak up every once in a while and go through them, remembering how pretty she was, what she smelled like, how she looked in a particular hat or dress—a dress more than likely made in this very sewing room. So when Mrs. Langham had called to tell me the dress was ready, it set off some strange emotional reaction in me, and I just didn’t want to go back. Plus, the thought of wearing some sexy getup made me feel like I had a fur ball stuck in the back of my throat. I’m nothing like my mother. I’m a T-shirt and shorts kind of girl. Always have been, always will be.

Mrs Langham didn’t give up easily, though. She called several times over the next couple of months, and each time I made up another excuse to postpone a fitting. Finally, after a couple of unreturned messages, she just stopped calling.

I followed Mrs. Langham through the house to the guest bedroom, which had been converted to a sewing room with worktables and sewing machines in the middle, a full-length mirror on one wall, and a pegboard with hundreds of spools of colored thread on the opposite wall. Mrs. Langham swung open the doors of a huge armoire in the corner and pulled out a dress with a dramatic flourish. It was about the most hideous shade of purple I’d ever laid eyes on.

I tried my best to sound happy. “Oh wow! It’s purple!”

“No, no, no. It’s rose. Now, I know what you’re thinking. Just give it a chance. You have the same coloring as your mother. I promise you, this shade was perfect for her, and it’s perfect for you. It will look stunning with that beautiful blond hair of yours.”

I stood there speechless, racking my brain for some excuse to make a quick escape.

“Come on, Dixie,” she said, holding the dress out. “Trust an old lady.”

Reluctantly, I stepped out of my clothes and slid the dress down over my head. There was a dressmaker’s form on a stand in the middle of the room. Mrs. Langham wheeled it aside, and I stepped in front of the mirror. When I looked up, I nearly gasped out loud.

She was right. It was a good color on me. In fact, it was beautiful. It wrapped over both shoulders, crossing in the front to form a plunging neckline, but not in a vulgar way, and then gathered in very close at the waist and dropped down just above the knee.