by John Clement
We named her Gigi, after the old movie with Leslie Caron and Maurice Chevalier, and that night Gigi slept curled up on the pillow in the curve of Caroline’s neck. We had decided the vet should probably have a look just to be on the safe side, so the next morning Caroline called from Dr. Layton’s office to report a clean bill of health and also to let me know that Gigi—she had just been informed—was a boy.
The name stuck, though. By then they were in love, and now wherever Caroline goes—restaurants, bookstores, shopping malls, you name it—Gigi goes with her, riding around in a vintage handbag with his little head and furry ears poking out the front. One thing about rabbits, though, they’re not too crazy about boat trips, so Caroline had hired me to take care of him while she was away.
Gigi’s cage—or rather, mansion—is situated on a specially built platform. The outside walls are painted to mimic the same wood-paneled facade of Caroline’s house, with the same arrangement of windows, each with a tiny pair of curtains behind real glass, and it has the same domed cupola on the peak of its tile-covered roof, in miniature of course, with a tiny widow’s walk running around it. There’s even an itsy-bitsy weather vane perched on top. And just like Caroline’s front door, Gigi’s door is lacquered a deep Chinese red and flanked on either side with little brass lamps that actually turn on. Spaced evenly along the front porch are three fluted columns that rise all the way to a balcony along the second floor.
The only difference between Gigi’s mansion and Caroline’s, other than the size, is that Gigi’s outside walls are all on hinges, so they can be folded open like louvered shutters to reveal the more conventional wire cage inside.
Of course, Gigi’s place doesn’t have a grand piano or paintings on the walls, but it has three levels, with a series of raised platforms that Gigi can play on, and there’s even a little raceway that goes right through the wall behind the cage to the sprawling pool patio outside. It’s all enclosed in a huge screened lanai, so Gigi can lounge around in the fresh air or explore the garden whenever he wants without having to worry about hawks or owls or alligators.
It’s a good life for a rabbit … or anybody for that matter.
I led Charlie up to the cage, steeling myself for what I was sure would be a tense introduction. I pulled his leash taut and whispered, “Now, remember, behave yourself.”
He gave me a wary look, as if to say, “Don’t I always?”
I had assumed that as soon as Gigi laid eyes on Charlie, he’d run and hide, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. He sat up on his hind legs, waggled his whiskers, and then hopped forward to say hi. He wasn’t the slightest bit perturbed and neither was Charlie. He acted as if he’d known Gigi for years, although I had a sneaking suspicion he was more preoccupied with Mr. Scotland than anything else. He kept glancing over his shoulder toward the front of the house.
I opened up Gigi’s cage and gave him a couple of scritches between the ears, and then moved him upstairs to his little balcony. I took out all the old bedding from his living room, wiped everything with a warm soapy washcloth, and then laid down a layer of newspaper, a sprinkling of wood shavings, and a fresh bed of timothy hay.
When I was done, Gigi came down the steps to evaluate my progress, and then I repeated the whole shebang on the upper floors while he set to work sculpting a nest-shaped bed out of the hay. Nobody had asked me to clean out Gigi’s cage, but I didn’t mind doing it. Just like humans, rabbits are a lot happier when their home is nice and tidy. We worked as efficiently as a professional housekeeping crew, and less than five minutes later the cage was as clean as a whistle and Gigi’s bed was perfectly formed.
I washed my hands in the powder room in the hall, and then we all went out to the lanai. I let Charlie off his leash so he could go exploring, and Gigi and I stretched out on one of the lounge chairs by the pool to munch on some sweet potato slices I’d brought along for the occasion.
At some point, I remembered the mail. Caroline had asked me to gather it up every day and leave it in a basket she keeps on the hall table. There’s no mailbox—everything goes through a brass-framed slot in the front door—and I remembered the last time I took care of Gigi the amount of mail that piled up on a daily basis was astounding, especially the catalogs. There must have been five or six a day, all full of the kinds of things I don’t normally give a flip about (or admit to): fancy watches, expensive designer gowns, resort spas, and priceless jewelry.
But I decided it could all wait. I wasn’t exactly sure when Caroline was coming back—she’d said it would be no longer than a week but she’d let me know. And anyway, we were all enjoying ourselves and I didn’t want it to end. Gigi was still on my lap, and Charlie was intently watching a lizard that had scampered up the outside of the lanai. I laid back and closed my eyes, listening to the sound of Gigi gently munching on his sweet potato while the birds and crickets sang the sun down.
Then I fell asleep.
* * *
One of the perks of being a pet sitter is that I can sometimes make it through an entire day without talking to a single human being. Not that I’m a social recluse or anything. Not anymore. I just feel more comfortable in the company of animals.
There’s a downside, though.
Rubbing elbows with the animal kingdom on a daily basis means life can be a bit of a minefield: you never quite know what’s around the corner (or what you might be stepping in). A perfectly well-trained dog might decide to race out the door for an impromptu meet and greet with the neighborhood, or an otherwise rationally minded feline might decide the living room curtains would be much nicer with a little fringe at the bottom. It keeps me on my toes, and it’s never boring, and most of the time I feel like I’m pretty good at avoiding surprises.
But not always …
It felt like I’d only been lying there for a couple of minutes when I thought I heard someone call my name. I opened my eyes to find Gigi stretched out next to me, sound asleep, and Charlie curled up at my feet and snoring quietly. The sun had completely descended. The only light came from the swimming pool, and it took my eyes a couple of seconds to adjust to the darkness. I realized I must have been dreaming, and what I’d heard was probably just my inner voice telling me to wake the hell up.
But then I heard it again.
“Miss Hemingway?”
This time Charlie shot up and fixed his gaze on the row of tall shrubs that separates Caroline’s place from the house next door. I didn’t know what else to do, so I opened my mouth to say, “Yes?” but then Charlie barked a high-pitched yip! and the branches in the middle of the hedge parted.
A man emerged, not much taller than five feet. In the pale blue light from the pool, he looked like a shadowy apparition, which made me wonder if I wasn’t still dreaming, except a flood lamp flickered on—it must have been connected to a motion detector—and the entire patio filled with bright fluorescent light.
The man had a boyish face, with dark curly hair and olive skin. He said, “I’m sorry to disturb you, ma’am. My employer sent me.”
“Your employer?”
He was wearing black dress pants and a fitted, white dress shirt buttoned all the way up to his chin, which sported a neatly trimmed goatee.
“Are you Miss Hemingway?”
“Yes, but…”
“Ms. Kramer wishes to speak to you.”
I sat up and shook my head. “Sorry. I’m a little confused…”
He looked back behind him and pointed to the house over the hedge. “I work next door. She asked me to speak to you about a pet-sitting position.”
I was wondering how he knew my name or that I was even here, but before I could ask, Charlie hopped off the chair and scampered over to the side of the lanai, his tail wagging like a whirligig. The young man knelt down and put one hand up against the lanai screen. Charlie stood up and gave him some enthusiastic high fives from the other side.
The man chuckled. “Hello there, little man. What kind of dog are you?”
As I
’ve said before, I don’t care much for surprises, but I figured I needed to be as polite and professional as possible. I said, “He’s a Lhasa apso. His name’s Charlie.”
He said, “Charlie! What a good boy. Are you a good boy?”
Charlie looked back at me and then danced a little jig on his hind legs as if he hoped to answer before I could.
I said, “When he wants to be. We just met the gentleman that’s visiting across the street, and he didn’t get near as nice a greeting as you are.”
The young man stood up and nodded curtly, almost as if he’d suddenly remembered he was still on duty.
He said, “Ms. Kramer would like to speak to you if you have a moment. She wants to know if you are only a cat sitter, or do you take care of other animals as well?”
I hesitated. I hadn’t ever met the woman who lived next door, but just like most people within a hundred miles of the Key, I knew her name …
Elba Kramer.
The first time I’d heard of her was about seven years earlier, when I was still a sheriff’s deputy. A call had come in reporting a disturbance on the south side of the bay, just a little ways down from the dock at Hoppie’s restaurant. There was a very fancy yacht moored there, and a couple of tourists had snuck up and started taking pictures of it, which normally wouldn’t have been a big deal, except the tourists weren’t so much interested in the yacht as they were the mostly naked couple that was canoodling on its upper deck.
The couple turned out to be local celebrities of sort. The man was Morton Cobb, a well-respected politician who’d made his fortune in computer software. He was in the middle of his second term in the Florida state senate, and the woman was his much younger wife, an attractive brunette who mostly stayed out of the limelight. Once they realized they were being photographed, Mrs. Cobb hid her face behind a sun hat and escaped to the yacht’s lower cabin, but Senator Cobb jumped off the boat and ran up the dock with nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist, threatening the tourists with all kinds of bodily harm and legal action if they didn’t hand over their cameras immediately, which of course they didn’t. They just kept shooting away.
It was an ugly scene. When I arrived, the senator demanded I confiscate the cameras myself, and when I refused, telling him I had no legal right to do so, he was furious. I can still see his face, scorched red and breaking out in beads of perspiration, calling me all kinds of names I can’t repeat in polite company. He even threatened to have me kicked off the force, and for a while I worried he might actually do it. But in the end, it was just an idle threat from a desperate man backed into a corner. The whole thing would probably have ended right there were it not for the fact that the next morning, strategically pixelated photos of the senator groping his topless wife were splashed all over the local newspaper.
Everybody had a good snicker about it, and the senator held a press conference later that day to denounce the shoddy morals of the tourists and decry the slipping standards of the local law enforcement, but it certainly didn’t look like it was the end of his political career.
That came later.
About three hours later, to be precise, when a local television reporter spotted Senator Cobb’s wife in Pensacola, where she’d been for two days, visiting her mother. Of course, that didn’t make any sense, because Pensacola is a seven-hour drive away, and if the senator’s wife had been there for two days, then who in the world was that topless brunette with the senator? Hiding her face behind a sun hat on the front page of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune…?
Yep, you guessed it … Elba Kramer.
She’d been a well-known model a decade earlier, so of course that just added fuel to the fire. The affair made headlines not just here but all over the country, effectively putting an end to the senator’s dreams of one day living in the White House. From that point on Elba Kramer’s name popped up in the news regularly: she was spotted at a Hollywood party on the arm of a married rock star, she was thrown out of a nightclub in Berlin for public indecency, she’d been accused of shoplifting in a tony jewelry store in London, and now she was married to a man forty years her senior, who just happened to be filthy rich.
All the locals followed the trajectory of her life with sanctimonious disapproval, which is why it wasn’t long before the name Elba Kramer became synonymous with scandal. She was, as a letter to the editor later dubbed her, the Scarlet Woman of Siesta Key.
“Miss Hemingway?”
I blinked. Elba Kramer’s assistant was still standing just outside the lanai, looking at me with raised eyebrows.
“Oh, sorry,” I said. “What was the question?”
“Ms. Kramer wanted to know if you are only a cat sitter. She has a bird she would like your help with.”
“Sure. I take care of all kinds of pets. What kind of bird is it?”
He tipped his chin up. “An intense yellow lipochrome.”
I said, “An intense yellow who?”
“Lipochrome. Nonfrosted.”
His demeanor was all business, and I got the distinct impression that Elba Kramer took her bird very seriously. He glanced over his shoulder and then lowered his voice. “Perhaps you could follow me now. Ms. Kramer can give you the details.”
I glanced down at my wrist, which was ridiculous since I haven’t worn a watch in years. I said, “You know, I wish I could, but I didn’t realize how late it is. I need to take Charlie home before his owners start wondering where he is. I’d be more than happy to come back any time.”
“Perhaps tomorrow afternoon then? Ms. Kramer is available after five.”
“That’s perfect. I can be here by five thirty.”
“Excellent. Let me give you the house number.”
I opened the screen door, and he handed me a small business card, charcoal gray with fine white lettering. It read, RAJINDER LUXFORD, MANAGER followed by a telephone number.
He said, “That’s the main house line. If there should be a change in your plans, you will please let me know?”
I nodded. “Of course.”
He headed for the bushes but then stopped and looked back. “One more thing. Ms. Kramer requires the utmost discretion. I must ask that you not speak of her personal affairs to anyone, and she will require that you sign a nondisclosure agreement.”
I gulped. “Oh.”
“Will that be a problem?”
I felt a little jolt of guilty pleasure, the way you feel when someone starts to tell you a particularly juicy piece of gossip—some secret that’s none of your business that they really shouldn’t be sharing—and yet you find yourself completely incapable of telling them to stop.
I shook my head. “No. Not a problem at all.”
Rajinder bowed politely and then disappeared back through the bushes. I looked down at Charlie, who was grinning at me and wagging his tail.
I’d always wondered what life was like for the infamous Scarlet Woman of Siesta Key. Now, apparently, I was going to find out.
3
When my radio alarm went off the next morning, I didn’t get a chance to find out what song was playing. Instead, my arm shot out as if it had a mind of its own and slapped the snooze button. I was all tangled up in the sheets, and for a second I thought I’d use that as an excuse to sleep the morning away, but then I remembered I had a full day ahead of me. Normally I wouldn’t have had to worry about traffic, but with all the tourists coming into town I knew if I didn’t get a move on I’d never get to all my clients … which in my line of work would be a very bad thing.
I wriggled out of bed and padded naked down the hall. I can’t sleep with clothes on, not even a T-shirt. I don’t know why, but even a pair of ankle socks can keep me awake all night. If I’m ever forced to rush outside in the middle of the night, it’ll be scandalous, but luckily the place is pretty secluded. It’s above the detached four-slot carport next to the weathered two-story house I grew up in—the house where my brother, Michael, lives now with his partner, Paco.
We’re right on the b
each at the southern end of the Key, but the house is barely visible from the road. There’s a crushed-shell driveway that meanders through a jungle of Australian pines, sea grape, mossy oaks, and palm trees, then it makes a turn to the left and edges along the beach. There’s a rusty old sign at the entrance to let people know it’s not for public access, but people nose down it anyway.
The property sits on a little blip of sandy shore that wanes and waxes with the tide, alternately eroding and rebuilding from year to year. That wavering property line makes our land just a tad less valuable than a lot of other properties on the Gulf (and keeps the property taxes hovering just above preposterous). But still, even though the house and my apartment aren’t worth a hill of beans, the land they sit on is worth millions.
My place is tiny, which suits me just fine. There’s a galley kitchen with a breakfast bar separating the living room in the front, and then there’s a small bedroom at the end of a short hallway with a bathroom on one side, a laundry alcove on the other, and a big walk-in closet. A row of windows overlooks the balcony and the courtyard below, with metal storm shutters that I can close with a remote if there’s a hurricane looming or if I just feel like having a little extra security.
I pulled open the french doors to the balcony and stepped out into the cool morning air. The sun was just beginning to peek over the treetops to the east, sending long rays of pale lemon light through the mist off the beach down below. I’d recently put a couple of gigantic staghorn ferns up on the wood-paneled walls flanking the door, and their long fronds were reaching out to catch the dew.
I leaned against the railing and closed my eyes, listening to the waves and letting the salty air fill my lungs, feeling it move all the way down to my toes. I love it out here. It’s my favorite place in the world. There’s a yellow wrought-iron ice cream table with two matching chairs just by the door, and then in the corner facing the ocean is a big hammock filled with pillows of every conceivable size, shape, and color. At the start of each day I try to take a moment and just breathe it all in. It helps me remember to enjoy life as it comes, to live in what the “woo-woo” folk call the here and now … to just be happy where I am.
