The Cat Sitter and the Canary

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 beach 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.

Also, it helps me forget how I got here.

There were a couple of seagulls ambling around on the deck down below where we eat dinner most nights. They were probably hunting for crumbs or leftovers, but they looked more like mall guards doing an early-morning security check. I still wasn’t completely awake, so at first I didn’t notice that the white hush of the ocean had taken on another familiar sound, sort of like distant radio static. I thought maybe I’d forgotten to turn the radio alarm off, but then I realized it wasn’t static at all: there was a car coming up the crushed-shell lane from the main road.

Tourist season doesn’t officially begin until November, but the most eager snowbirds start arriving now, around mid-October, when it’s just starting to get seriously cold up north. But it was far too early for tourists to be snooping about, and I knew Michael and Paco were both at work.

“No way,” I whispered out loud.

But then, sure enough, there was a flash of chrome through the leaves and what looked like a giant green station wagon slowly making its way around the curve in the drive. I felt like a deer in the headlights.

Or, more precisely, like a butt-naked woman on her balcony.

I don’t exactly make a habit of traipsing around outside in my birthday suit, but with Michael and Paco both gone I hadn’t given it a second thought. Now, whoever was coming up the driveway had a clear view of my front door, and it was far too late to slip back inside without being spotted.

If it was Michael or Paco, I might have been a little embarrassed, but it certainly wouldn’t have been the end of the world. Then the thought flashed across my mind: What if it was a client? Or maybe an old colleague from the sheriff’s department? Or the meter man? All of those possibilities seemed unlikely given the hour, but there was no time to think, so I did what any reasonable person would have done in the same situation.

I dove for the hammock.

It wasn’t really a station wagon. More like a tank. One of those huge suburban SUVs that people ferry kids and bags of groceries around in. Fixed to the hood just above the shiny chrome grill was a silvery logo: the letter B, with gleaming feathered wings sprouting from its sides.

The car rolled to a stop just shy of the deck, and as I snuck one hand out and grabbed the railing to steady the hammock, the driver’s side door swung open and out stepped a man in his midsixties, about six feet tall, with a nose like the beak of a hawk and eyes to match.

“Here we are!”

He was wearing standard rich-tourist couture: shorts the color of an easter egg (in this case bright yellow) and a white short-sleeved polo shirt with the collar flipped up jauntily.

The woman rose up and pivoted around on one foot like a ballerina popping out of a music box. She wore taupe jodhpurs and a white blousey dress shirt with rolled sleeves, and even at this distance, buried in pillows and peering through the ropes of the hammock, I could see the glitter of a diamond tennis bracelet on her wrist, along with matching diamond pendants hanging from her ears. Even her long, silvery blond hair looked expensive.

She said, “Garth, it’s perfect.”

“I know.” He folded his arms over his chest and looked around. “I told you it was perfect. Didn’t I say it was perfect?”

“You did.”

I rolled my eyes, thinking of Christopher Columbus, all puffed up and congratulating himself on his new “discovery.”

She said, “But then again, you say the same thing about every house we find, so you can’t blame me for being a little dubious.”

He snorted. “I can and I do.”

I slunk down a little farther in the pillows and closed my eyes, hoping it made me more invisible. I knew if they decided to come up the steps I’d be forced to reveal myself, so to speak, but they didn’t seem one bit concerned somebody might be home. While the woman stepped up on the deck between the carport and the main house, the man walked under me. I could see the white of his shirt between the floorboards of the balcony as he snooped around my car.

“Edith, look at this old Bronco. We’ve got one of these down at the club. Belonged to Hank Patterson. You remember old Hank Patterson from Crown Oil?”

“God, no.”

“Well, the story is he chatted up some girl at the bar young enough to be his daughter. Then she ended up driving him home because he was too drunk to drive. Well, don’t ask me what happened next, but guess what happened next?”

She rolled her eyes. “Please, don’t tell me.”

“He walks through the front door and his wife is there, mad as hell. She says, ‘Hank, where the hell is the Bronco?’ And the bastard says, calm as rain, ‘I donated it to the club.’ And that was that! Now they use it to bring the pheasants down to the range.”

The woman nodded as she drew a couple of stray hairs behind her ear. “That’s a beautiful story.”

He put his hands on his hips and scanned the line of the overhang that runs the length of the balcony. “Looks like they’ve got a renter up there. You know, if you tore this carport down, there’d be room for a cabana.”

My eyes widened.

The woman sighed. “You mean a guesthouse.”

“No, Edith. I mean a cabana. To go with the pool. Maybe even an outdoor kitchen—à la belle étoile. Who the hell needs a guesthouse anyway?”

She shrugged. “Well, it definitely needs a pool, but I’d say tear it all down and start over.”

The man took a few confident steps toward the main house. “I’d say this is a hundred years old at least. They don’t make ’em like this anymore. It’s got charm. We could probably get it on a list of historical homes. That could jack up the value considerably.”

The woman stepped off the deck and reached into the front seat of the car for her purse. “Ha. As far as I’m concerned, charm just means dirty. All that old wood and drafty windows. And Garth, who cares about value anyway? It’s not like we’re flipping it.”

He said, “Well, tear it down then. Either way, it’s all about location. That’s the thing to think about.”

She tipped her head to one side as she lit her cigarette with a tiny white lighter. “Well, you’ll get no argument from me on that point.”

“Refreshing.”

I had pressed my face down into the hammock to get a better view, and it was starting to feel like the ropes were burning into my cheeks. The man came back around to the car’s side and put one foot up on the runner board.

“Beachfront property, Edith. Doesn’t get any better than that.” He tipped his chin at the ocean. “Wanna go down there and check it out?”

The woman took one long drag of her cigarette and then flicked it across the driveway with a shrug. “Meh. You’ve seen one beach, you’ve seen ’em all.”

At that point, naked or not, I was one millisecond away from rising out of the hammock like Godzilla from the sea and pelting them with a few carefully chosen epithets—if not a couple of wrought-iron ice cream chairs—along with a ten-second deadline to get the hell off my property. Luckily for everybody involved, they both got back in their stupid green tank and pulled out, leaving an invisible cloud of foul-smelling exhaust in their path.

I sat up out of the pillows and blinked.

Tear it down!?

Never mind the audacity, slithering around somebody else’s house unannounced and uninvited, but the mere thought that they’d tear our house down—the house my grandparents bought when they were newlyweds, the house Michael and I grew up in after our father died fighting a fire and our mother ran off … At this point, this old house is like a member of the family. And we’ve lost enough family as it is. We’ll never sell.

Not while I’m still breathing.

I made a mental note to try to remember everything those two old fools had said so I could tell Michael and Paco all about it when they got home. I had a moment of regret I hadn’t flown off the balcony to let them know exactly what they could do with their plans for the future, but I’m sure they would have called the funny farm and reported a naked lunatic on the loose.

As it turned out, ending up tied to a bed in a mental hospital would not have been the worst thing in the world. In fact, given what was waiting for me around the corner—or should I say, behind that door to Caroline’s front hall?—a nice medicated rest would have been just what the doctor ordered.