Curiosity Killed The Cat Sitter

Seventeen

Thunder woke me in the night. Hard rain was pelting the roof and making drumming music on the storm shutters. It was a comforting sound. I love sleeping in a storm, safe and dry while a deluge rages outside. I went back to sleep, and when the alarm sounded at 4:00, I smacked it off and groped my way to the bathroom to splash water on my face. I estimated that I’d had all of two hours’ sleep, tops.

The rain had stopped, so I left the Bronco at home and took my bike, riding out into a glorious Sunday morning. On the lane to the street, I stirred up a flock of wild parakeets in the damp treetops, and their chattering brought answering cello tones of mourning doves from their hiding places. The temperature was around seventy degrees, the humidity low enough to be tolerable, and the air had a fresh, just-washed smell. Even with a sluggish brain from last night’s fear and sleeplessness, I loved the feel of the day.

With the Graysons back home, I only had Billy Elliot to dog walk. The rest were all cats, which was good. Cats are a lot easier than dogs, and I needed an easy day. My plan was to wait until eight o’clock and call Guidry with last night’s information, see to all the cats, and go home and sleep. Michael would come home this morning, which meant we’d have a good dinner at home tonight. Maybe Paco would be home, too, and I could catch them up on everything that had happened.

Tom Hale was asleep when I went into his condo, but Billy Elliot met me at the door. We went outside and ran like idiots, and then I kissed Billy Elliot goodbye inside the condo and panted my way back to my bike. It was still dark, but the sky was taking on a vanilla tinge of false dawn, and birds were beginning to wake in the trees and call sleepily to one another.

My next stop was at the home of twin calico tabbies named Stella and Marie. If they had been humans, they would have been lounge singers. Stella spent her time on the windowsill, looking longingly at her reflection in the glass, and Marie lolled on the sofa, waiting for somebody to come do her nails. When I groomed them, they preened and posed with delicious self-absorption, and when I ran the vacuum to pick up hair they had flung on the carpet, they both turned their heads and gave me languid looks of total disinterest.

I cleaned their litter box while they ate, then washed their food bowls and put out fresh water for them. “I’m leaving now,” I said. “I hope you won’t miss me too much.”

From the windowsill, Stella lowered her eyelids to half-mast in grudging acknowledgment of my existence, but Marie merely flicked the tip of her tail and yawned. I was still grinning when I got on my bike and started to the next stop. A pale coral tint was washing over the sky by then, gilding the eastern edges of puffy little clouds with a darker salmon pink. In another hour, the sun would be fully up and traffic would get thicker.

As I pulled onto Midnight Pass Road, a bakery truck coming back from making a delivery of breakfast croissants and bagels sped by, barely swerving enough to avoid hitting me, and sending a fine spray of puddle water onto my legs. Unnerved, I jerked onto the shoulder and planted my soaked Keds on the ground. I was in the entrance to the old abandoned road leading into the woods behind Marilee Doerring’s house. Muttering words that would have made my grandmother wash my mouth out with soap if she’d heard, I took some deep breaths to get my heart quieted down.

A faint sound caught my attention and I looked toward the rusty metal gate stretched across the old road. The road had once been paved with crushed seashells, but time and weather had taken its toll, and now weeds and low-growing vegetation covered most of the shell. The sound came again, low and urgent. Thinking an animal had been hit by a car and had crawled into the bushes, I got off my bike and walked down the road.

As I got closer, I glimpsed a flash of blue fabric, and realized it wasn’t a hurt animal moaning in the bushes, but a person. I stopped. The odds were against it, but this could be somebody pretending to be hurt and I might be walking into a trap.

I called, “Is someone there?”

The moaning sound came again. I went closer, and then rushed forward. Phillip Winnick, caked with blood and dirt, lay sprawled in the tangled wet underbrush. Somebody had worked him over good.

I knelt at his side. “Phillip? Phillip, it’s me, Dixie. I’m going to call for help. It’s okay now. Phillip?”

His bruised lips struggled to form a word, but it was so faint, I couldn’t hear. I leaned close to his face and said, “Tell me again, Phillip. I didn’t hear you.”

Weakly, he breathed a prayer into my ear. “Please don’t tell my mother.” Then he passed out.

I called 911 on my cell and gave them the location. Then I sat cross-legged beside Phillip and talked to him while I waited for the ambulance. I wanted him to have a voice to hold on to for the moments that he floated to awareness.

“This is a shitty thing somebody did to you, Phillip, but it’s not the end of the world. You’ll get over this, and you’ll be good as new.”

A surge of alarm went through me and I looked quickly at his hands. They didn’t appear to be injured, and I sent up a silent thank-you for that.

“Your hands aren’t hurt, Phillip, and you’ll be playing the piano again soon. I know this is a terrible experience, but you’ll get through it. People get through these things, and you will, too. I’ll help you, and so will a lot of other people.”

I babbled on, as much for myself as for him, until the ambulance came. Two EMTs jumped out and lifted Phillip onto a stretcher so quickly and so gently that I wanted to hug them both. A deputy’s car was just behind the ambulance, and Deputy Jesse Morgan came and stood beside me while the EMTs eased the stretcher into the back.

“Miz Hemingway,” he said. I wondered if he had talked to some of the other deputies about me.

I said, “Can I ride to the hospital with Phillip?”

“You know him?”

“He’s Phillip Winnick. He lives next door to Marilee Doerring, where the man was murdered Friday.” I was trying to be as cool as he was, but my voice cracked a little bit when I said that.

He gave me a slow, level look. Oh yeah, somebody had been talking to him about me.

“How long have you known him?”

I read the look in his eyes and said, “I met him that morning when I took the cat over there.”

“So he’s not a close friend?”

One of the EMTs got in the back of the ambulance with Phillip and hooked him up to oxygen and some kind of IV, while the other came back to talk to Deputy Morgan. They stepped away and spoke out of my hearing, then Morgan came back to me and the EMT got in the ambulance and drove away.

“I’ll notify his parents,” he said. “You’ll have to get permission from them to visit him in the hospital.”

Defeated, I clamped my lips together and forced myself not to yell at him. Morgan was right. Phillip’s parents were the only people with the legal right to be with him in the hospital, and they had to be notified. But the thought of how his judgmental parents might react made my heart hurt.

Morgan pulled out his notebook. “How did you happen to know he was here?”

“I didn’t. A truck almost ran me down and I pulled into the road and heard him moaning.”

“He say anything to you?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think he was conscious.”

“So you don’t know why he was out here at this hour?”

“I have no idea.”

He looked down at me with coolly appraising eyes. “You seem to be having a run of really bad luck. First finding a dead man and now finding somebody beat-up.”

“Is that a question?”

He flipped his notebook closed. “You’ll be available later?”

“Sure.”

He got into his car to go to ring the Winnicks’ doorbell and tell them their son wasn’t in bed asleep like they thought he was, but in an ambulance going to the emergency room at Sarasota Memorial Hospital. I started back down the old road toward my bike. As I did, something caught my eye at the end of the gate where a stunted key lime’s branches pressed against the upright supports. I walked to the end of the gate to get a better look.

Key limes have long, lethal thorns, and this one had a wad of black human hair snarled on a thorny limb. The hair was long and curly, and it appeared to have been left there recently. I thought of Marilee’s shiny black hair caught in the brush of her hair dryer, and a cold snail trailed down my spine.

When Christy was barely walking, I went to pick her up at the day-care center one day and found another mother raising hell because her little girl had a bald spot on her head. The day-care women were red-faced and almost in tears. They said another toddler had just reached out and grabbed a handful of the child’s hair and yanked it right out. They said he had never done anything like that before and he had done it so quickly, they hadn’t been able to stop him. The mother threatened to sue, and she was weeping when she took her child home. I didn’t blame her. Who wants their baby yanked bald-headed, even if the yanker is just a baby, too?

I leaned my elbows on top of the gate and looked into the woods, where the tracks of the old road ran about fifteen feet before they disappeared into a tangled mass of live oaks, palms, hibiscus, lime trees, palmettos, ferns, and twisting potato vines. The foliage was so thick, I couldn’t see anything except green. Steam was beginning to rise from the damp ground, and the thick foliage absorbed it and breathed it out again.

I put a foot on one of the gate’s crossbars and boosted myself up. I told myself to mind my own business and let Guidry investigate. I answered myself back that I only wanted to have a look beyond where the road became obscured. I slung a leg over the gate and scaled it. My Keds made gritty sounds as I walked down the devastated road to the spot where it disappeared into the brush. With both arms stiff, I parted the foliage hanging in front of my face. The road was visible for another few feet and then disappeared again in leafy branches. I let the branches close behind me and walked to the next barrier.

It was like being in the Amazon. Thick branches joined overhead to make a canopy that blotted out the early-morning sky, and I could feel the surrounding foliage exhaling its hot breath. An odor of decay or of something dead rose from the steaming thicket. I’ve never been claustrophobic, but this was nuts. There was nothing to see here, no reason to be here. I had to get out of this place and go take care of my pets. But first I parted the next tangle of branches and got a stronger whiff of the odor—a sweet, heavy smell that reminded me of something, but I couldn’t remember what. I pushed a branch aside and looked ahead at the exposed road. More long black hair fanned out on the shadowed ground. For a second, that’s all my brain allowed my eyes to see. But you can only hide from the truth for an instant when it’s stretched out in front of you. Marilee lay across the road. She was face-up, with her arms slung out to the sides and her legs bent in an awkwardly lewd way. She wore a white skirt and a navy shirt tied at the waist. Animals had eaten away some of the flesh on her arms and legs and the entire lower part of her face. Her eyes stared upward in horror. I gagged and covered my mouth, then turned and ran, batting at the closed branches hanging over the road and making whimpering sounds deep in my throat.

I scrambled over the gate and ran to my bike. I made a diagonal cut across Midnight Pass and pulled into the parking lot of the Sea Breeze. Then I got my cell phone out of my hip pocket and dialed 911.

The operator who answered was cool. I gave her my name and location, and told her what I’d found. She kept her voice at a level monotone. “Please remain where you are,” she said. “Somebody will be there in just a few minutes. Can you describe yourself, please, so they’ll recognize you?”

That was smart. She was getting me to talk about how I looked, not how the corpse looked. She was also keeping me on the line while she sent somebody out, just in case I was a psycho who had dumped the corpse in the woods myself and was planning on pretending to be an innocent bystander when the deputies hauled it out.

“I’m on a bike,” I said. “It’s okay, I’m not leaving. I’m an ex-deputy.”

She and I both knew that could be a lie, too, but she stayed cool. “That’s good,” she said. “I’ll tell them to look for a woman on a bike in the Sea Breeze parking lot.”

Just as she said it, a green-and-white patrol car pulled in. Deputy Jesse Morgan parked and got out of the car and walked to meet me.

“Miz Hemingway,” he said. Carefully, as if I were a bomb that might explode any minute. “You’ve found another dead body.”