The Cat Sitter and the Canary

2

You need one of those kooky, made-up words to describe Caroline’s house … like fantabulous or increderrific. It’s an old Victorian, probably built around 1920. The outside looks like an antique dollhouse, but the inside is a mishmash of modern, antique, and traditional. Somehow, though, it all fits together perfectly. A big grand piano stands court over a leather Barcelona sofa, flanked on either side by two overstuffed armchairs upholstered in brightly colored rugs from India, each accompanied by a gooseneck floor lamp with beaded shades, and then there are sculptures and paintings practically everywhere you look.

There was no sign of Caroline’s cat, though. He’s a mackerel tabby, meaning his coat consists of contrasting colors that run along his shoulders and down his sides like a pinstripe suit—except in Franklin’s case, the stripes are almost invisible. His fur is a light cream, lined with delicate bands of pale beige, like dried seagrass lying across a sand dune. Add to that his luminous avocado-green eyes and you’ve got one very handsome young man. Of course, I mostly know all this from the framed photographs on Caroline’s piano. In the dozen or so times that I’ve taken care of him, I’ve only laid eyes on Franklin about twice.

He’s a loner, which, as anyone with cats can tell you, isn’t all that unusual. Franklin, however, takes it to a whole new level. As long as he’s got fresh water and a full bowl of kibble, he’s perfectly content. His favorite place to spend the day is on the back of the couch in the living room, where he has a view out the window and can watch the activities in the front yard and the street beyond, but by the time I get there he’s already headed for one of his hiding places. If I’m lucky, I catch a glimpse of his tail disappearing around the corner down the hallway.

I’ve tried to win him over with some of my most irresistible treats—a cube of cheddar cheese, some tuna jerky—but so far I’ve failed miserably. Except for Caroline, Franklin has absolutely no use for human beings.

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

Luckily for me, Caroline still needs the services of a pet sitter, because Franklin isn’t the only furry creature living under her roof. Before we went into the family room, I kneeled down in front of Charlie and leveled him with as serious an expression as I could muster.

I said, “Now, listen. I’m not sure you’ve ever met a rabbit before, but you need to know they can be very skittish.”

He wagged his tail enthusiastically.

“So if you can’t be polite, you’ll have to wait in the car all by yourself, and nobody wants that because you’ll probably rip the whole thing to shreds.”

He looked back over his shoulder toward the front of the house and sniffed the air. I think he was still thinking Mr. Scotland was looming nearby, so I tapped him gently on the top of his snout to get his attention.

“Got it?”

He cocked one ear and then wagged his tail again.

“Okay, let’s go.”

About a year ago, Caroline called me up to ask if I had any experience catching stray cats. It was well past midnight. She’d been down at the bar at Colonel Teddy’s, and walking home she’d spotted what she thought was a kitten running across the street. She followed it around the back of the hardware store only to discover a tiny, terrified rabbit, wedged in a corner behind a stack of wood pallets and concrete pavers. By the time I showed up, the poor thing was so exhausted it practically surrendered itself. All I had to do was put my cat carrier down and it hopped right in, no questions asked.

You don’t see them that often because they’re so shy, but lots of wild rabbits live on the Key. I had just assumed Caroline’s rabbit was one of them, but one look and I knew something was wrong. It had white fur as pure as snow, with downy beige ears and chocolate patches on its head and rump—not at all like our local rabbits, whose fur more closely resembles the splintery gray wood of a fishing pier. This particular little girl was most definitely not wild. In fact, I got the distinct impression that Caroline’s new friend had probably been purchased in a pet shop for Easter and then set “free” when the novelty wore off.

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.