The Cat Sitter's Cradle

18

I opened my eyes and tried to get my bearings. It was dark, and as I looked around the room trying to figure out where I was, I realized I was holding on to something. I looked down to find Ethan’s hand in mine. We were both lying on top of the bedspread in my bedroom. Our heads were barely touching, and our bodies were laid out at almost a ninety-degree angle to each other.

Ethan was sound asleep with his legs dangling halfway off the side of the bed. He was still wearing his dinner jacket, his tie still wrapped loosely around his neck, and I, thankfully, was still wearing my purple evening dress. I raised my head up and looked down at my feet. No shoes.

Then I heard it—a very faint knock on the front door. I sat up so fast that Ethan nearly bounced right off the bed.

He said, “What! What happened!”

“Shhh. There’s someone knocking at the door.”

“Jesus, what time is it?”

I looked at the clock on my bedside table. “It’s three in the morning.”

All kinds of thoughts flew through my head. It might have been Michael getting home from his shift. He might have seen Ethan’s car in the driveway and gotten worried, although it would have been unlike him to just come up the stairs and knock on the door. He was bound to know that would scare the living daylights out of me. He would have tried to call first. The other thought I had was: What if there actually were some bad-ass thugs out looking for Corina, and what if they’d talked to that doctor and gotten my name and tracked me down and were here to either collect Corina or their ten thousand dollars or both?

I reached over and opened the drawer under my bed. When I left the force, I turned in my department-issued gun, a 9 mm SIG SAUER, but every law enforcement officer keeps a backup, and I still had mine: a Smith & Wesson .38. I keep it inside a specially made case next to Todd’s 9 mm Glock, which hasn’t been touched since he died. I pulled the .38 out of its black velvet niche and slid the drawer closed.

Ethan’s eyes widened. “Uh, is that really necessary?”

I whispered, “You’re the one who said Corina could be mixed up with some bad-ass thugs. What if they’re here looking for her? I’ll see who it is. You stay here.”

His jaw dropped open. “What? Fuck that! No way in hell am I staying here. I’m coming with you.”

Suddenly my sweet man that never cussed was developing the mouth of a drunken sailor, but I decided to address that later. We tiptoed into the living room. Standing at the French doors was a dark shadow in the shape of a man, silhouetted by the light from the porch. As I crept forward, my gun raised at the ready, the man knocked again, very lightly. I felt a shiver go down the entire length of my body. Ethan had pulled out his phone and was about to call 911 when the man stepped back a bit to look down the stairs and the porch light illuminated his face. I recognized him immediately. It was Kenny Newman.

I made a motion to Ethan to wait before he called the police and crept closer to the door.

I said, “What do you want?”

“Dixie, it’s me, Kenny.”

“I know, Kenny. What do you want?”

“Please, I need to talk to you.”

“What you need to do is turn yourself in to the police.”

I looked over at Ethan. He still had the phone poised to dial and was staring at me wide-eyed. This poor man, I thought. He has no idea what he’s getting himself into hanging out with me.

He whispered, “Who is Kenny?”

“It’s okay. He works for me, but he’s got himself in some trouble.”

Ethan threw his palms open. “What kind of trouble?”

Kenny said, “Dixie, please. I’ll go to the police. I’ll do whatever you want me to do. I just need to talk to you first.”

I said, “Okay, Kenny. I’m going to open the door, but I’m not alone, and I have a gun.”

Ethan whispered, “Dixie! You sure about this?”

I turned to him and took a deep breath. “Thursday morning I found one of my clients drowned in a swimming pool. Kenny was his pool man, and the police have been looking for him ever since. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to talk about it for our whole date. I know Kenny didn’t do it. At least I’m pretty sure he didn’t. He had other reasons to run away, which I can explain later. Okay?”

Ethan’s eyebrows were raised halfway up his forehead, and his arms were hanging limply at his sides. He nodded slowly and sighed. “Okay. I’ll have to trust you on this one.”

He switched on the lamp by the couch, and I reached out and unlocked the door, keeping my gun down but in plain view so Kenny would see it right away. I nodded at Ethan, as if to say “Ready?” and he smiled feebly and nodded back. I swung the door open.

Kenny stood in the doorway, his shoulders slumped forward, a complete and utter mess. He wore a wrinkled plaid work shirt and scuffed cargo pants that were rolled up at the ankles. His beachy good looks seemed to have been worried away, and he looked like he’d aged ten years. His eyes were bloodshot and swollen.

He glanced down at the gun hanging at my side. “You think I killed him, too.”

As his eyes welled with tears, I said, “Kenny, I don’t know what to think anymore, but I do know that you need to turn yourself in to the police.”

“I know it. I just needed to talk to you first.” He looked over my shoulder at Ethan. “I’m sorry.”

Ethan nodded. “It’s okay, man.”

I said, “Come in and we’ll talk, but then you’re going straight to the police.”

Ethan pulled a chair over for Kenny and sat down on the couch with me. Kenny slumped down in his chair.

I said, “First of all, is Becca okay?”

“I don’t know. We had a fight, and I haven’t talked to her in days. I was going to ask you how she was.”

“Kenny, Becca’s been missing since we found Mr. Harwick’s body.”

He looked away for a second, then put his face in his hands and shook his head silently. His ears turned beet red, and tears squeezed out between his fingers and ran down his forearms. I looked over at Ethan, who stood up and grabbed a box of tissues off the kitchen bar. He placed it on the coffee table in front of Kenny and then sat back down next to me.

I said, “Tell me what’s going on.”

With his face still buried in his hands, he said, “Oh, man, I don’t even know where to start.”

Ethan said, “Just start at the beginning.”

Kenny nodded and sat up, trying to compose himself. He let out a half-laugh and wiped his face with the back of his arm. “Okay.”

He pulled a scallop-edged black-and-white photo from his breast pocket and laid it on the coffee table in front of him. From my point of view it was upside down, but I could tell it was a portrait. A young man in a white V-neck T-shirt with a crew cut and a rugged, handsome face.

He said, “This is my father. When I was little, he used to get up every day really early with my mom, and they would make breakfast together. She’d make eggs, scrambled or fried or however he wanted them that day, and he would make the coffee and toast. Then he’d come in my room and wake me up. I’d have breakfast with my mom while he got ready for work. He was always dressed in the same thing when he left. Sandals. A V-neck T-shirt and dark blue surfing trunks. We lived in Oceanside, California. His work was two blocks from the ocean. So every morning on his way to work, he’d stop and swim a couple miles. Then he’d get changed into his suit in the car and head off to work. He did that every day for years. Then one day he didn’t show up at work. His boss called my mom, and she called the police. They found his car at the beach, and they found his footprints going from his car down to the water, and they found his shirt and sandals in the sand. But there weren’t any footprints coming in. They never found his body. Probably sharks got him. I was eight years old.”

He paused and rubbed his forehead with the tips of his fingers, like he was trying to massage the memories away. I glanced over at Ethan. He gave me a little wink, which normally I would have thought was completely inappropriate, but it wasn’t. It was reassuring.

I said, “Go on, Kenny.”

He seemed to have gotten completely lost in his thoughts, and I knew what was happening. I wasn’t sure if he’d had a hand in Mr. Harwick’s drowning or not, or even if he knew who did, but one thing was certain: It must have tapped in to some locked-away reservoir of emotion deep inside him.

“My mom was devastated. He had bought a huge insurance policy a couple of months before, and he drowned the day it took effect. She got a big payout, enough to pay for me to go to school and for her to live comfortably for the rest of her life. And then the cops got suspicious. They said she must have talked him into getting the life insurance policy and killed him for the money. Eventually they dropped it because there was no proof, but my mom was never the same. One day she made a big pile in the backyard of all his stuff and every photo of him and set it on fire. She stopped caring about anything, starting taking all kinds of medicine for depression. Ten years later, the first week I left for college, she killed herself. Took a bunch of pills. They found her at the beach where my father drowned. That was in July last year. A month later, I got this in the mail.”

He flicked the photo with one finger and it slid across the table, turning right side up as it came to a stop in front of us. The man in the photo did look a little bit like an older version of Kenny. But what I didn’t expect, what Kenny must have known I would recognize right away, was that the man in the photo looked remarkably familiar.

I looked up at Kenny with astonishment.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s Roy Harwick.”

I picked the photo up and studied it closely. It was true. The man in the photo was in fact Mr. Harwick, perhaps twenty or thirty years younger. He had a full head of hair and a virile, ruddy complexion—nothing like Mr. Harwick now, but the expression in his eyes and the shape of his face were instantly recognizable.

I looked up at Kenny and then back at the photo, and then back at Kenny again. I’d never once considered that there was even the slightest similarity between them. Where Mr. Harwick was a pudgy, balding ball of anger, Kenny was handsome and sun-kissed and thoughtful. But now I could see it. If you clipped back Kenny’s long hair and shaved away his scruffy beard, he looked almost exactly like a younger version of Mr. Harwick.

I was beginning to feel like I’d been hit in the head with a two-by-four. “Kenny … what are you telling us?”

He let out a long sigh. “I’m telling you that Roy Harwick was my father.”