Блейз Клемент - Duplicity Dogged Тhe Dachshund

His gray eyes studied me for a moment, and then he nodded as if he’d answered his own unspoken question.

He said, “Okay. Call me if you learn anything.” He left without looking back.

I went to the French doors and locked them and lowered the hurricane shutters, leaving their accordion edges pointed outward so light could enter through the slits on the folds. It made my apartment seem like a treehouse with sunlight filtering through leafy branches. In the bedroom, an air-conditioning unit occupied a cut-out space high on the wall. Next to the ceiling were two horizontal panes of glass, four feet wide and four inches tall. They were for light, not ventilation. Nobody bigger than a lizard could squeeze through them.

I went in the bathroom and studied the jalousied glass window. To come through it, a person would have to remove the strips of glass from the frame one by one. If I was home, I was pretty sure I would hear that. I went back to the kitchen and ate a banana and looked at the window over the sink. Guidry was right. Somebody with a ladder could come through that window, and they wouldn’t make a lot of noise doing it. I needed an alarm in that window.

Grabbing the keys to Michael’s house, I went back to the French doors, opened them, and raised the hurricane shutters. With one hand in my pocket gripping the stock of my .38 and the other hand gripping Michael’s door key, I scurried across the cypress deck to his back door. I felt like one of the little anole lizards that race around in the hot sun. I wouldn’t have been surprised if my throat had turned red and ballooned out. I let myself in the kitchen door and locked it behind me, then hurried for the stairway that led to the attic. There were zillions of our grandparents’ things stored in Michael’s attic. I was bound to find something I could use as an alarm.

Half an hour later, I was cobwebby and sweaty, but I’d found the perfect alarm to hang in my window, a rusty heart-shaped iron thing with two dozen little bells on it. It had once hung outside the kitchen door to let my grandmother know when somebody came or went. Just a touch caused all the bells to clatter with a racket loud enough to wake manatees a mile offshore.

I had also found an old trunk filled with clothes my mother had left behind. I opened the trunk and inhaled that odor peculiar to clothing that has lain dormant for a long time—a miasma of faint decay and near mold that seems to grow in the absence of a wearer. Everything inside was neatly folded. My mother hadn’t been the type to fold things haphazardly, even when she knew she’d never see them again. I pulled out a soft cotton cardigan, taupe with a thin horizontal stripe. It had been twenty-three years since she left, but I remembered that cardigan. Mother wore it with a linen skirt printed with gold sunflowers. Yes, there was the skirt, along with a linen dress in a similar print but with deeper tones. I’d never realized before how often my mother chose those colors, gold and rust and deep yellow. There was another cardigan in a pale beige, a loosely knit thing I didn’t remember.

I stacked everything on the floor and tried to remember the last time I’d seen my mother dressed in any of these clothes. Before she left us, she had started living in shapeless muumuus and terry scuffs. She would slide her feet across our sand-gritty floor, a cigarette dangling from one corner of her mouth, her blond hair unkempt and straggly. Not at all the pretty woman she’d been, but a woman dissolved by grief and anger over my father’s death. I felt a flash of recognition. I had been almost the same after Todd and Christy died, and for the same reason. Not just that they’d died, but the way they’d died. For the first time, I understood why my mother had left us. Loving people is too dangerous.

I put everything back in the trunk and closed it. Some day Michael and I would have to get rid of all the memories in the attic, but not today. Today I had to put up an alarm so a psychopathic killer couldn’t crawl in my kitchen window and murder me before I shot him. With the bell thing clattering with each painful step, I went back downstairs, out the back door, and across the deck to the stairs to my apartment. I detoured into the storage closet under the carport for some screw-in hooks that Michael or Paco had neatly stored in a glass jar on a shelf.

By the time I got upstairs and let myself in the French doors, my scraped knees were screaming. Groaning and cursing, I climbed on my kitchen counter and crouched in the sink to screw the hooks to the trim above the window. Then I hung the rusted bell thing on the hooks and climbed back down. It looked like shit, but nobody could come through that window without hitting the thing and setting off a noise like a herd of belled cows on the run.

Now that I had an alarm, I took a long warm shower because standing under hot water was the only time I didn’t hurt. I was afraid to nap outside in the hammock now, so I turned on the air conditioner in my bedroom and fell naked onto my bed. I woke so chilled and achy from the AC that I took another warm shower. At this rate, I might dissolve soon, like drowned soap.

I pulled on a terry-cloth robe and padded to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. While the water boiled, I tapped the iron bell thing over the sink and grimly listened to the wild clanking sound. Yep, that would wake me, no question about it. When the teakettle whistled, I poured boiling water over a drab tea bag. I drank it while I looked through the makeshift alarm at the treetops outside the window.

I thought about what Guidry had said, that I was using grief to keep the world away. I thought about my mother running away after my father died. I’d always thought she deserted Michael and me because she was too shallow to do the hard thing and raise us alone. I’d always thought I had more courage, more character, more depth. But maybe I didn’t. Maybe my prolonged mourning was really a revolving fear, a hamster wheel I ran on because I didn’t have the courage to move forward. My mother had run away physically. Maybe I had run away emotionally. The question was, What could I do about it? The answer was, I didn’t have the foggiest idea.

With that decided, I went down the hall to the closet and got dressed for my afternoon pet visits.

I carried my .38 by my side as I went downstairs to the Bronco. I could see a few rain-blue clouds out in the Gulf headed toward shore, but the sun was fiercely hot. A pelican dozed in the carport’s shade, along with a couple of great blue herons and an entire chorus of egrets. They all turned their heads to look at me with eyes dulled by afternoon heat, too listless even to flap a feather of alarm when I started the engine.

Michael and Paco were still gone.

My Bronco still had bird shit on it.

Somebody still wanted to kill me.

14

At the Sea Breeze, Tom Hale opened his door before I knocked, his round black eyes peering up anxiously through wire-rimmed glasses. Billy Elliot stood beside Tom’s wheelchair looking a little subdued, probably because Tom was so grim. Tom spun his wheelchair out of the way and motioned me inside.

“Tell me what happened this morning, Dixie.”

I tried giving him a blank look, but he wasn’t having it.

“Everybody in the building knows somebody tried to run you down in the parking lot. Who was it?”

“If I knew, he’d be behind bars by now. It was somebody in one of those pickups with huge tires. Not anybody who lives in the Sea Breeze.”

“He drove straight at you?”

Suddenly cold, I crossed my arms over my chest. “I threw Billy Elliot’s leash aside, Tom. He wasn’t close to me.”

“Good God, Dixie, I wasn’t worried about that!”