Блейз Клемент - Raining Cat Sitters And Dogs

As I walked toward my Bronco in Hetty’s driveway, the dark sedan that had been parked at the curb pulled into the street and sped past. A trick of the late sun’s angle cast a fierce spotlight on the driver’s face. It was Jaz’s stepfather. Hunched over the wheel, he gripped it with both hands like a man who’d been driven beyond his limit. The man had obviously been watching Hetty’s house. The question was whether he had been hoping to catch Jaz there against his orders, or if he had been watching to learn more about Hetty. As in gathering information to pass along to burglars.

I pulled out my cell to dial Guidry. I got his voice mail, which was good, because my message was more anxious than informative.

I said, “Jaz hasn’t come back to Hetty’s, but I just saw her stepfather. He drives a dark sedan, but I didn’t get a tag number. He was parked on Hetty’s street watching her house, and then he drove away.”

I went back and rang Hetty’s doorbell. She opened the door looking worried. When I told her about Jaz’s stepfather, she looked even more worried.

I said, “I called Lieutenant Guidry and told him, but just be extra careful. If you see or hear anything unusual, call nine-one-one.”

I left Hetty’s house feeling glum and depressed. It wasn’t going to get any better, either. Paco was still God knew where and Michael wouldn’t be home from the firehouse until the next morning. My own cupboards were as bare as Mother Hubbard’s and my refrigerator was pitiful. If I ate out, I’d first have to go home and get cleaned up.

Any other woman would have been able to call a friend who didn’t know a thing about Jaz or Maureen, and enjoy an evening of female talk. Any other woman would have been able to forget all about Paco being off on a dangerous undercover job while she laughed at another woman’s tales of the perils of dating. Without much hope, I ran down my mental list of friends who might have dinner with me. There weren’t any. Everybody I knew either had a family or a job or a lover that took up their evenings.

I was the only woman in the entire world who didn’t have a list of friends she could call for an impromptu dinner. The only woman in the entire world who couldn’t drop in on a good friend and eat with chopsticks from cute little take-out boxes like people on TV do. The only woman in the entire world who couldn’t pick up spur-of-the-moment deli stuff to share with a close friend. Clever finger foods. Stuffed grape leaves. Delicate spring rolls. At least cheese fries.

It was flat depressing.

Thinking about the available friends I didn’t have made me think about the friends I’d once had. Which was probably why I made a sudden turn south toward Turtle Beach. I wanted to talk to my old friend Harry Henry.

Okay, maybe I really wanted to find out what Harry knew about Maureen. What are old friends for if not to talk about another friend’s kidnapped husband?

19

Turtle Beach doesn’t have the floury white sand of Siesta Beach and Crescent Beach. Instead, its sand is dark and dense, the kind that turtles love to burrow into. Turtle Beach once led to a boat channel called Midnight Pass through which boats moved from the bay to the Gulf. But in a particularly boneheaded decision, the county tried to change nature’s intention by moving the pass, with the result that now there’s no pass at all, which pisses boaters off like you wouldn’t believe.

It was near sunset when I parked the Bronco and walked out on the beach. A gray cloud cover had moved in to turn the light sepia, giving the beach and the people on it the look of an old photograph. A potbellied tourist threw bread at gulls while his companions, two women in lawn chairs they’d unfolded on the sand, looked in vain for the fabled sunset colors. The gulls squawked disdainfully at the man’s bread and circled away. Disgusted, the man flapped his arms against his square hips and glared at the women as if it were their fault his crumbs had been rejected.

No doubt accustomed to taking the blame for life, they heaved themselves out of their chairs and refolded them. Slump-shouldered with disillusionment, all three trudged through the sand to their parking place, where they made a big to-do of brushing away the beach before getting in their sedan. The minute they drove away, the cloud cover parted and gulls swooped down and pecked at the bread. Clouds that had obscured the sun minutes ago now rode above the water like sky elephants with gilded backs. The sun slipped beneath the sea, leaving the sky shot with shafts of indigo and orange. Too bad those pessimists hadn’t been willing to watch a cloudy sunset.

Harry wasn’t among the people watching the day’s spectacular end, so I walked down to the Sea Shack, an open-air seafood joint where beach bums and sun-browned fishermen drink beer and play poker.

As far back as junior high, just hearing Harry Henry’s name had been enough to send me and my girlfriends into giggling fits, and not just because he had two first names and was movie star handsome. From the time his voice changed, Harry had been a babe magnet, and some of the babes were twice his age. By the time he was sixteen, already six foot three and eminently swoonable, he was rumored to have screwed half the girls in high school. He was also said to have been the reason for a hair-pulling fight between the English teacher and the math teacher.

When he and Maureen got together, it had seemed almost inevitable to the rest of us. Maureen’s reputation for being promiscuous hadn’t been as well earned as Harry’s, but once she realized that her body caused men to grow mush-minded when they looked at her, she’d used it. Somehow she and Harry didn’t discover each other until our senior year, and after that they’d been inseparable. They were beautiful together too, with some extra quality that sets stars apart from ordinary people. All us less good-looking and less sexy classmates had expected them to stay that way, together forever, always set apart by their beauty. Somehow, the fact that they were both dumb as a box of rocks made them even more endearing to us. They were our high school’s golden couple.

Then, before the ink was completely dry on our diplomas and our mortarboard tassels were still hanging from our rearview mirrors, Maureen had stunned us all by marrying a man none of us had ever heard of. Harry had taken it like a prize fighter who’d been dealt a major blow to the head. For a long time he’d wandered around in a bewildered daze, unable to comprehend that the girl he loved had actually married somebody else.

If Harry had possessed acting talent or ambition, he might have headed to Hollywood or a career as a male model. Instead, he’d stayed on Siesta Key and worked on chartered deep-sea fishing boats. He’d never married, but lived alone on an old house boat at the Midnight Pass marina.

I found Harry at the Sea Shack. It was that peculiar quiet time when the light takes on a translucent quality and the sea seems to hold its breath waiting for the evening tide. Harry was at a back table on one of the Shack’s benches. He was leaning against the sun-bleached wall, and he had a friend with him I’d never seen before—a long-haired dog with wide whiskers and a coat patterned like a tortoiseshell cat. The dog was sitting on the bench too, and it looked as if Harry was sharing from his plastic basket of fish and fries.

I stopped a waitress and asked her to bring me the house special and a beer, and went over and sat down on the bench across from Harry, swinging my legs over and under to face him. He and the dog looked at me with identical expressions of mild curiosity.

I said, “Harry, if that dog’s hanging out with you, he must have pretty poor taste.”

He grinned. The dog grinned. The dog wagged its tail. Harry grinned some more, and I had a feeling he was mentally wagging his tail.