The Cat Sitter's Whiskers

by Blaize Clement

  Morgan and Beane had followed me through the whole house looking for any indication that there might have been a robbery, and they’d been right. There was nothing missing. And just like Morgan had said, Mrs. Keller’s jewelry box was sitting on top of her dresser, practically spilling over with what looked to me like some very expensive jewelry, including one ring with a ruby the size of a dimestore gumball. I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure it was probably worth more than my entire earthly possessions put together.

  The final straw, however, had been good ol’ Dick Cheney, hanging there on the wall and looking down at me with that smug, teasing scowl, as if to say, What are you lookin’ at? I’ve been here all morning. The problem wasn’t so much that Mrs. Keller’s prize Tibetan mask hadn’t been stolen—in fact I was relieved it was still there; I’m sure Mrs. Keller would have been absolutely heartbroken if it was gone—but the fact that it was hanging exactly where it was supposed to be was just downright … well, I don’t know … bizarre.

  Even if my attacker had had no intention of stealing it, why would he have carefully hung it back on the wall before he made his getaway? And what exactly was he getting away from?

  At the end of the Kellers’ block, there was an empty lot with a few scrub oaks and a couple of squat palm trees. I parked my bike in the patchy grass by the road, dropped my backpack, and sat down Indian-style next to the stop sign. There were a few cars going by on Canal Road, so I knew there’d be some raised eyebrows—I must have looked like a half-drunk party girl who didn’t quite make it home the night before—but I didn’t care.

  I leaned my head against the post and sighed. I tried to remember what it had felt like, that time I’d fainted at church. My grandparents had taken us all to the annual Christmas party, and I was hovering around the buffet table, happy as a conch in my new pink taffeta dress, munching down on what for all I knew was my hundredth gingerbread cookie.

  I had just taken a giant swig of Coca-Cola when all of a sudden there was a strange, tingling sensation in the tips of my fingers. It started slowly, traveling over my hands, but then it picked up speed as it moved up my arms and shoulders and across my chest. Meanwhile, the room had started to spin, and I could feel a bead of sweat rolling down the side of my neck.

  I remember thinking if I could just find a chair, everything would be okay, but there was nothing nearby. My only choice was to plop down right there on the floor, but I was at the ridiculous age when the idea of making a scene seemed like the most appalling thing in the world, so instead I managed to make it over to the far end of the buffet table where there were a couple of bushy plastic trees in chocolate-brown pots shaped like giant elephant’s feet. As discreetly as possible, I lowered myself down to the floor behind them, and the last thing I remember was watching the party through the dusty plastic leaves as I tried to keep my breathing as steady as possible.

  When I finally woke up, I was all alone and curled up in a ball. Apparently I’d crawled behind the red paper cloth that was spread across the buffet table and slept through the entire party, not to mention the Christmas concert after, and the whole congregation was out scouring the neighborhood for me, including the preacher.

  My poor grandmother had been so upset she’d worried dime-sized holes in both pockets of her sweater, and after that she monitored my sugar intake as if it were her life’s mission and I was her own personal science project. Whenever she made one of her famous key lime pies, I was only allowed the tiniest little hint of a sliver, much to my brother’s delight, I might add, since of course that just meant more for him. As a result, to this day I can easily eat a whole pie in one sitting if left to my own devices.

  I didn’t remember feeling any tingling in my fingers at the Kellers’, and I certainly hadn’t noticed anything spinning or getting blurry. I was totally fine. But I could still feel the adrenaline that shot through my body when I turned and saw that wild-eyed mask looming in front of me, its jagged teeth and flaring nostrils, its arm raised in the air, that little stone statuette poised and ready to come barreling straight down on top of my skull.

  And that was another thing. If it was a dream, wouldn’t the details have been a little more … normal? I could understand if I’d imagined my mystery attacker coming at me with a baseball bat or a tire iron, or maybe even one of those wooden sticks you see in kung-fu movies, but a naked, bald she-Buddha with huge, bowling-ball breasts and painted toes?

  Really?

  The only thing that kept me from deciding I wasn’t one hundred percent cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs was the bump that was still throbbing away on top of my head. I reached up and gently touched it with the tips of my fingers. Of course, all it meant was that I’d actually been hit, it didn’t exactly say how. Either I’d been attacked and the whole thing was real, or I had fainted and the whole thing was a dream.

  Wait a minute, I thought. For all I know, I’m dreaming RIGHT NOW.

  I took a deep breath. It probably goes without saying, but my imagination can get a little out of control sometimes. I decided there was no point torturing myself, and the sooner I got on with my day, the better.

  I stood up and glanced back at the scene of the crime, or—I thought with a sigh—the alleged crime. Morgan’s cruiser was still idling in the Kellers’ driveway, its emergency lights silently flashing red and blue, and Morgan and Beane were sitting inside with their heads bowed, busily filling out their reports. Practically every single move a deputy makes has to be written down and submitted to the department, and then it all gets printed out and duplicated and triplicated. The standard joke is that if you’re not going through at least a tree a day you’re not doing your job right, so I figured they’d be a while. I wondered if they were writing things down like, Hysterical woman fainted, or Hallucinating cat sitter.

  Before he’d let me go, Morgan had issued a couple of orders while I was locking up the Kellers’ house. One, I was to walk, not ride, my bike for the rest of the day, and two, I was to go to the doctor and get my head inspected as soon as possible. In return, he had agreed not to throw me in the back of his squad car and escort me to the hospital himself—in handcuffs if necessary.

  I didn’t like the thought of that one bit, so I flipped the kickstand up on my bike and walked it all the way to Canal Road until I was completely out of sight. Then, with one more quick look back, I hopped up on the seat, leaned on the pedals, and sped off as fast as I could.

  If there’s one thing I’ve learned from cats, it’s that taking orders is for the birds.

  6

  I managed to make it through the rest of my morning without fainting or hallucinating or getting attacked by any more mask-wearing mystery bandits. The Hendersons’ Siamese, Constance, had tipped over a cup of pencils that Mr. Henderson keeps on his desk—at least I was pretty sure it was her, though she adamantly denied it—and Rocky, a short-haired tomcat who shares an apartment with a couple of other bruisers from our local football team, the Millionaires, managed to slip out the door when I was coming in, but I snatched him up before he got too far.

  Looking back, considering the morning I’d had, it’s amazing I was just continuing on with my day as if nothing had happened. But I have experience forging ahead when things get rocky. It’s one of my many talents, and by the time I rolled up to Hector and Elva Castillo’s house I was actually feeling relatively normal. Luckily my hair was doing a commendable job of concealing the bump on my head.

  Hector and Elva are both science teachers at the local high school. They live with their dog, Sophie, at the top of the Key in a modest Florida-style cottage with pink siding and tall snow-white shutters. In the front, wide wooden steps lead up to a wraparound porch filled with potted bananas, sweet agave, and blooming angel’s trumpets, and if that’s not enough to make you feel like you’ve made the cover of Heaven on Earth magazine, there are four wicker rocking chairs just begging you to come and have a look at the sparkling, emerald-green waters of Roberts Bay.

  As soon as she hea
rd me on the steps, Sophie started yapping up a storm, not in a particularly menacing way, but with just enough of an edge to make it clear that I was entering protected territory. She’s a Baja terrier, which I’m not sure is an actual breed, but that’s what the Castillos call her because she’s typical of a lot of the dogs where they found her: Baja California. She’s shaped like a Jack Russell, no bigger than a toaster oven, but with a brindled coat and an attitude the size of a two-hundred-pound opera diva.

  I let myself in the front door and Sophie immediately launched into her traditional dance of welcome. She stood up on her hind legs and hopped around in circles, waving her paws up and down like she was conducting a marching band, and then she crouched down low with her rear in the air and growled a rumbling, contralto rrrroooooooo!

  I slipped my backpack off and answered her with a rrroooooo! of my own, but as I hung my keys on the coatrack by the door, I kept one eye on her. Sophie’s an interesting character; in fact, sometimes I wonder if she didn’t apprentice at the paws of Barney Feldman, because you have to mind your p’s and q’s when she’s afoot. Don’t get me wrong, she’s one of the sweetest dogs I’ve ever known, but occasionally she gets a mischievous gleam in her eye, and then look out.

  She attacks shoes—not in the funny, playful way that Barney Feldman attacks ankles—but in a crazy, possessed, search-and-destroy, shock-and-awe kind of way. It usually only lasts about ten seconds or so, and then she’s back to her sweet, lovable self, as if nothing ever happened.

  Hector found her when she was just a puppy, trotting along the road, thoroughly exhausted and filthy, wearing a ratty old collar and a tag with her name on it but nothing else. Eventually they came to the conclusion that at some point in her young life Sophie must have been kicked, and probably more than once.

  Now, even after years have passed and the Castillos have showered her with all the love a soul could ever hope to have, there’s still something hidden deep inside her, some lingering sense of injustice that makes her want to lash out at the world every once in a while, maybe as payback for the lousy cards she was dealt when she was a pup.

  I don’t blame her. I feel the same way sometimes.

  Once I was relatively certain she wasn’t in attack mode, I headed through the living room while Sophie skipped along, giving me a breakdown of her morning so far with a series of half woofs and high-pitched yips, but when we got to the kitchen she ran ahead to her water bowl and stood over it, waiting silently.

  I said, “Sophie. Really?”

  Another of Sophie’s little quirks is that she’s very particular about her water bowl. It has to be absolutely spotless. No tiny specks of dirt. No dust. Not even one of her very own hairs lying innocently at the bottom. If it’s not perfectly pristine, she won’t touch it. And it doesn’t help to just fish out whatever offending object there is and call it a day. No, the bowl must be taken to the sink, emptied, thoroughly rinsed, and refilled with fresh water.

  Sophie took a couple of desultory sniffs at the air above her bowl and then looked up at me with a vaguely accusing look in her eye. I knelt down to get a better look, and sure enough there was a tiny dust bunny floating on the surface of the water.

  I laid the back of my hand over my forehead and cried, “Oh, the humanity!”

  She trotted behind me to the sink and waited patiently while I threw out the ruined water and refilled the bowl, then as soon as it was back down on the floor she lapped at it like a dehydrated camel, pausing only to wag her tail and give me a look of grave gratitude, as if she’d just crossed the Mojave Desert and I had saved her from a slow, unthinkable death.

  Hector and Elva are up and out of the house early, so Sophie gets breakfast before they leave for work, and then she goes back upstairs for a snooze until I arrive. All that’s required of me is a thorough water bowl inspection and a good brisk jaunt around the neighborhood.

  We walked all the way to the end of Gulfmead Drive, which this far north isn’t really a drive at all, more like a flattened trail of sandy soil and crushed shell just wide enough for a car to fit through, dotted here and there with tufts of clover and sedge weed. Since it dead-ends at the bay, there’s hardly any traffic—just the locals and the occasional adventurous tourist—so I unsnapped Sophie’s leash and she went zigzagging ahead of me, peeing on everything in sight to let the neighbor dogs know she’d been by.

  With Sophie playing on her own and nothing but the crunching sound of my sneakers on the road to distract me, I had to allow for the fact that there’d been a nagging voice in the back of my head all morning. So far I’d done a pretty good job ignoring it, but now it was getting louder and louder. It was a jumble of questions and rambling thoughts and theories, but the overriding theme was: Huh?

  There was no point trying to re-create the whole scene of what had happened that morning, but I couldn’t stop myself. And even though low blood sugar was probably the most logical explanation, I just couldn’t accept the idea that I’d just fainted and dreamt the whole thing.

  For a moment I even toyed with the idea of going back and seeing if I could get some answers out of Barney Feldman. He was my only bona fide witness, and I’m a firm believer in the notion that our animal friends are perfectly capable of communicating with us, even on a very sophisticated level. The only problem is that we haven’t quite figured out how to listen yet. In my opinion, if we ever do, the world will be a vastly better place.

  Sophie was chasing after a swallowtail butterfly she’d roused from a spindly spice bush growing on the side of the road, and as she raced by in hot pursuit I swooped her up in my arms and cradled her like a baby.

  I said, “Hey, any chance you speak Maine Coon?”

  She looked up with soulful brown eyes and blinked a couple of times, which I wasn’t sure meant yes or no or Can you please put me down I’m in the middle of something?

  I said, “Listen, there’s somebody I’d like you to talk to. Would you be up for that? He’s the only one that can tell me what really happened.”

  She perked her ears up and tilted her head to one side, trying her best to figure out what the hell I was talking about, but I knew I wasn’t getting through to her. Without an interpreter, I didn’t think I’d get much information out of Barney Feldman. But then again, there was one other option …

  Contrary to what some people might tell you, I’m no dummy, at least most of the time. The moment I hopped on my bike and pedaled away from the Kellers’ house, I knew my brain had gone into autopilot, and I could still feel it working quietly in the background, trying to connect the dots.

  Maybe I’d been wrong this whole time. Maybe it hadn’t been Levi parked outside my driveway at all. It certainly wouldn’t take a genius to figure out that I have easy access to some of the island’s swankiest homes, and the idea that I might have been followed to the Kellers’ was starting to seem like a very real possibility, especially when I remembered hearing the sound of a car roll by in the street as I unlocked their front door.

  I knew if Barney Feldman couldn’t shed some light on what had happened, there was one person who could: Levi Radcliff. If there’d been another car in the neighborhood, like somebody lingering around waiting for me to leave so they could follow me, Levi would definitely have noticed it.

  Sophie must have sensed I wasn’t paying attention to her anymore because she squirmed out of my arms and scampered off in search of her butterfly, and by the time we got back home she had pretty much tuckered herself out. I gave her a couple of kisses on the nose and then conducted one more water bowl inspection while she headed upstairs for her midmorning nap, which at the time seemed like a capital idea. The only thing that kept me from joining her was the angry growling coming from my stomach.

  I needed food. It seemed like days since I’d eaten, and for all I knew the thoughts coming out of my head were just the fevered ramblings of a malnourished brain. I figured before I made any decisions about what had happened that morning or what I should do next—if any
thing—I’d better get something to eat first.

  What I needed was a good, home-cooked breakfast with a healthy serving of TLC on the side, and I knew exactly where to find it.

  7

  I’m a creature of habit. Seven days a week, rain or shine, hell or high water, dogfight or fur ball, my alarm clock goes off at five a.m. and I roll right out of bed. I stagger blurry-eyed into the bathroom, splash cold water on my face, and pull my hair into a ponytail. If I think about it I dab on a little lip gloss and maybe some mascara, and then I walk like a zombie into the closet and get dressed in the dark. The order is always the same: Underwear, bra, cargo shorts, sleeveless white tee, and a fresh pair of white sneakers.

  I might do a shot or two of OJ and then I’m out the door. All my pets get at least two visits a day, one in the morning and another in the afternoon—usually about half an hour each, or more if the client wants it. I’m usually done with my morning rounds by nine or ten. Then it’s off to my home away from home.

  The Village Diner is at the heart of the Key’s “commercial” area, what we locals call the Village, thus the name. I’ve been eating breakfast there my whole life. Well, that’s not exactly true. Before Todd and Christy left, I made breakfast at home. Pancakes were Todd’s favorite. Christy was crazy for my avocado-and-mushroom omelets. You’d think it would have been the other way around, but Todd and Christy were full of surprises like that.

  I almost feel like I work at the diner, I’ve spent so much time in one of its teal pleather booths. My reserved spot is at the very back on the right. As soon as I walk in the door, Tanisha gives me a wave and a wink from her little window in the kitchen to let me know she’s already started on my order: Two eggs over easy with home fries and a biscuit.

  I normally make a detour for the restroom to wash away the cat fur and the dog slobber I’ve accumulated, then I grab the newspaper and slide into my booth, where Judy’s usually waiting for me with a pot of piping-hot coffee.