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Raining

Cat Sitters

and Dogs

ALSO BY BLAIZE CLEMENT

Curiosity Killed the Cat Sitter

Duplicity Dogged the Dachshund

Even Cat Sitters Get the Blues

Cat Sitter on a Hot Tin Roof

Raining

Cat Sitters

and Dogs

A Dixie Hemingway Mystery

BLAIZE CLEMENT

MINOTAUR BOOKS

A Thomas Dunne Book

New York

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS.

An imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

RAINING CAT SITTERS AND DOGS. Copyright © 2009 by Blaize Clement. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.thomasdunnebooks.com

www.minotaurbooks.com

Grateful acknowledgment is given for permission to reprint the following:

“Nothing Twice” from View with a Grain of Sand, copyright © 1993 by Wisława Szymborska, English translation by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh © 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Clement, Blaize.

Raining cat sitters and dogs : a Dixie Hemingway mystery / Blaize Clement.—1st ed.

p. cm.

“A Thomas Dunne Book.”

ISBN 978-0-312-36956-9

1. Hemingway, Dixie (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women detectives—Florida—Fiction. 3. Pet sitting—Fiction. 4. Sarasota (Fla.)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3603.L463R35 2010

813'.6—dc22

2009039814

First Edition: January 2010

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Cover

Title

Copyright

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to the “Kitchen Table Writing Group”—Linda Bailey, Greg Jorgensen, Madeline Mora-Summonte, and Jane Phelan—for their support and encouragement. Watch for those names. You’ll soon be seeing them in your local bookstores.

A huge thank-you to Suzanne Beecher of DearReader.com, who has generously introduced Dixie to her thousands of book club members. Suzanne’s generosity in helping writers is matched only by her lavish distribution of chocolate chip cookies. I’m honored to have her friendship.

Many thanks to homicide detective Chris Iorio of the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department, who always patiently answers my law enforcement questions. Thank you.

A big thank-you too to the Siesta Key Chamber of Commerce for their support, to all the deputies who keep Siesta Key its calm, laid-back self, and to Siesta Key residents for not minding that I add fictional neighborhoods and businesses to the real ones. I appreciate that.

Many thanks also to Marcia Markland and Diana Szu at Thomas Dunne Books, along with all the terrific production, promotion, and marketing people. Their efficiency and hard work make it possible for writers and readers to connect.

I’m also deeply grateful to readers who share their pet stories and tell me how much Dixie means to them. Thank you from my heart!

And to my expanding family, you continue to fill me with joy and pride.

Even if there’s no one dumber,

if you’re the planet’s biggest dunce,

you can’t repeat this course in summer:

this course is only offered once.

—Wisława Szymborska, from

“Nothing Twice” (1957)

Raining

Cat Sitters

and Dogs

1

Every now and then you meet somebody you like on sight, even when everything about them says they’re bad news. Jaz was like that. The first time I saw the girl, she was sobbing hysterically and rushing across Dr. Layton’s parking lot with a towel-wrapped bundle in her arms. A large man trailed behind her with reluctance making heavy weights on his feet.

She looked about twelve or thirteen, with beginner breasts making plum-sized bulges under a stretchy tube top, and the thin, coltish awkwardness of adolescence. She had cocoa-colored skin and a long mop of tangled black curls. Her cutoffs were frayed and had the mulled look that clothes get when they’ve been slept in.

The man was around fifty, with pale jowls beginning to sag, and graying hair that looked more mowed than barbered. He wore a navy blue suit and a paler blue tie, both too unwrinkled to be anything except polyester. With his pulled-back shoulders and drip-dry shirt taut across his chest, he looked like a junior high school principal who had learned too late that he hated kids.

I’m Dixie Hemingway, no relation to you-know-who. I’m a pet sitter on Siesta Key, an eight-mile barrier island off Sarasota, Florida. I used to be a deputy with the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department, but something happened almost four years ago that caused me to go howling mad-dog crazy for a little while, so I left with the department’s blessing. I’m still a little bit tilted, I guess, but not more than the average person. Like they say, a person who’s totally sane is just somebody you don’t know very well.

Now that I’m more or less normal, I have a pet-sitting business that I enjoy, and I end every day feeling like I matter to the world. I mostly take care of cats, with a few dogs and an occasional rabbit or hamster or bird. No snakes. I refer snakes to other sitters. Not that I’m snake-phobic. Not much, anyway. It just gives me the shivers to drop little living critters into open snake mouths.

I had come to the vet’s that morning to pick up Big Bubba, a Congo African Grey parrot who had seemed under the weather when I’d called on him the day before. When a bird sneezes and looks lethargic on his perch, I don’t take any chances. As it turned out, Big Bubba had merely been having a bad day. Dr. Layton had called the night before to tell me I could pick him up that morning, so I was there to take him home.

The crying girl and the man went in ahead of me. When I got to the reception desk, one of Dr. Layton’s assistants was taking the bundle from the girl, and the receptionist was making sympathetic sounds and patting the girl on the shoulder. She was crying so hard that her words came out slurred and broken.

The only thing I could clearly understand was, “He hit him!”

The receptionist and assistant looked up sharply at the man, who heaved a great sigh.

“It’s a wild rabbit,” he said. “It ran in front of my car. It was an accident.”

The girl turned and screamed at him. “But it matters ! It may just be a rabbit, but it matters !”

Now that I could see her face, she was older in the eyes than I’d expected, and they a surprisingly pale aquamarine. With her tawny skin and wild black curls, the improbable eyes testified to ancestors from all over the world, a coming together of genes that can either be a societal blessing or curse. From the set to her jaw that was both defiant and desperate, I guessed in her case it had not been a blessing.