The Cat Sitter's Cradle

25

I walked behind Ethan’s car a little ways down the lane until his taillights disappeared around the curve. Then I came back up with my arms wrapped around my shoulders like I was giving myself a good hug. I was halfway up the steps to my apartment when Michael poked his head out of the house.

“Hey, where’s your gentleman caller going?”

I put one hand on my hip. “He’s going home, Michael. Where do you think he’s going?”

He smirked. “I figured he’d be going right up those stairs with you, like he did last night.”

I suddenly felt like a fifteen-year-old girl caught making out with a boy on the front porch by her father. My cheeks turned red hot, and I started back up the stairs.

He pumped his fist. “Yes! Busted.”

I stopped and turned. “You know what, Michael? Grow up!”

Paco appeared in the doorway and started pulling Michael back inside, but he wasn’t giving up that easily. “Hey, if the carport’s a-rockin’, don’t come a-knockin’!”

I said, “Hilarious,” and slammed the door behind me.

I heard Paco say something, and then Michael shouted, “Oh, come on, Dixie! I’m just teasing!”

No matter how old we get, no matter how mature or well adjusted we are, we all have our own inner child hidden somewhere deep inside us. I think there’s also an angst-ridden teenager in there, too. In my case, sometimes she gets out and tears things up a bit, especially since there’s nothing better than having an older sibling around to get that inner teenager riled up. Every once in a while I turn into the haughty, emotional fifteen-year-old brat I once was, and Michael turns into my sadistic, teasing older brother.

I stretched out on the mattress, wishing I’d put the clean sheets back on earlier, and pulled the comforter over me. I fumed for a little bit, but I knew by the morning it would all be fine. I wasn’t even sure what I was so steamed about. Either I was embarrassed that Michael and Paco knew Ethan had spent the night, or I was embarrassed that I had tried to hide it from them, or I was just embarrassed that I was embarrassed.

Whatever it was, I felt like an idiot. I’d have to apologize to Michael for reacting like a pubescent diva. I knew he was thrilled that I was getting closer to Ethan, and I knew there was nothing he wanted more than for me to be happy.

* * *

That night, I dreamed that I lived on a deserted island in a grass hut, with a bed made out of bamboo sticks and palm fronds, and a little shelf over the bed made out of abalone shells. Eventually I realized it wasn’t just any island I was on. It was Gilligan’s Island, and it wasn’t a TV show, it was real. There were other grass huts all around mine where all the other castaways lived, everyone except Ginger, who lived at the other end of the island in a huge glass-and-steel football stadium with a domed roof and a huge expanse of green Astroturf carpeting.

I was standing next to Ginger in the center of the stadium. It was completely dark except for a few shafts of light cutting through the blackness and making pools of green light on the floor. There was someone climbing up one of the walls, dangerously high—he must have been almost ten stories off the ground. I turned to Ginger and said, Who is that? Her wavy red hair was cascading over her shoulders and glistening in the light. She said, Dixie, that’s Todd.

He was climbing across some kind of scaffolding that extended all the way to the top of the dome, and as he climbed higher and higher, he was poking little holes in the ceiling with the tip of a pool cue. Occasionally we would see dust and little pieces of the dome come floating down in the shafts of light.

I was just about to ask Ginger if her red hair was natural when Todd lost his footing. I watched in horror as he fell all the way down to the ground. He landed in a pool of light about thirty yards away from us. I ran as fast as I could to his side, but when I got to the place where he’d fallen, his body was gone. Lying on the bright green Astroturf was a small embroidery frame. It was oval shaped, with little pegs to hold in place a piece of fabric stretched across it. But instead of fabric in the frame, there was a paper-thin piece of balsa wood. I laid the tip of my finger on the center of the wood and felt a steady heartbeat.

I took the frame home to my hut and placed it on the abalone shelf over my bed. Throughout the night, I would wake up, reach out, and touch the thin membrane of wood to feel the heartbeat. It never stopped. At some point before morning came, Ginger snuck in and was gently nudging my shoulder. I looked up at her, and she said, Dixie, I found it!

I shot straight up in bed and said out loud, “I know where those letters are.”

* * *

When I backed out of the carport, I was still reeling a little bit from the dream, which was about the strangest, most surreal dream I’d ever had. I rolled down the lane with the headlights off. Michael and Paco are pretty heavy sleepers, but I didn’t want to take any chances, so I drove as slowly as I could until I got to the end. I didn’t switch on the headlights until I was heading north on Midnight Pass. It was the middle of night, and there was nobody on the road but me.

I drove through the deserted village in the center of town and past the park where Joyce and I found Corina. At Jungle Plum Road, I made a left and drove at a snail’s pace along the trees lining the street where the Harwicks’ house was. As I pulled through the gates and up the long driveway, I breathed a sigh of relief. There were no cars in the parking area.

I pulled my ring of keys out of my backpack and unlocked the door. The alarm system beeped when I went in, and with a trembling hand I punched in the security code to disarm it and then closed and locked the door behind me. It was pitch dark inside, but I was a little reluctant to turn on any lights. I told myself that technically I wasn’t really doing anything wrong. Nobody had told me I couldn’t come and check on the aquarium in the middle of the night, but still I didn’t want to arouse the suspicions of any of the neighbors.

I fished out the little flashlight I keep in my backpack and made my way across the foyer and up the marble stairs to Mr. and Mrs. Harwick’s bedroom. Even though I knew the house was totally empty, I was terrified. It seemed like every time I thought I was alone in this house, I was dead wrong.

I passed through the bedroom suite and made my way slowly down the short hall toward the master bathroom. Very gently, I pushed the door open and waited just in case there was someone hiding inside, which of course there wasn’t. Still, I could literally feel my heart pumping in my chest. I tiptoed across the marble floor directly to the little alcove with the peach-colored velvet bench and sat down.

I took a deep breath and slowly raised the flashlight. I followed the pool of light as it slid across the floor to the tank, to the edge of the mermaid’s tail fanned out across the aquarium floor, then up her glittering turquoise body. As her face came into view, her pouting red lips, her pale porcelain skin, and her deep violet eyes, I knew I was right.

She had been moved.

On that morning I had searched the house looking for Charlotte, the same morning I found Mr. Harwick at the bottom of the pool, I had sat in this exact same place. I distinctly remembered looking up and seeing two pairs of eyes staring directly at me: the porcupine fish’s and the mermaid’s. But earlier today, after Mrs. Harwick left, I sat here and imagined the mermaid was looking out the window and fantasizing about some faraway land. At the time I didn’t think anything of it, but now I knew I was right. She had definitely been moved, and recently. She wasn’t looking at me at all. She was gazing off at least three feet to the right, directly at one of the stained-glass windows.

My eyes floated down to the black-and-gold treasure chest she was sitting on. I wasn’t one bit happy about what I was about to do, but at the same time, I felt like I didn’t have a choice.

I needed to see what was inside that chest.

I slid one of the large pocket doors open and stepped through the hidden pathway and around to the back of the aquarium. The nets and poles with hooks on one end were hanging in a row on the wall behind the tank, and the fish were all drifting about aimlessly in the darkened water. When I switched on the overhead light, they all darted around a bit, and I whispered an apology for waking them up and intruding into their silent world. I rolled up my sleeves and slid my arms down into the tank. I was worried the mermaid would be too heavy to move by myself, but she must have been hollow, because it was surprisingly easy.

As all the fish retreated to the far corners of the tank, I put both my hands on the back of the mermaid’s head and tilted her forward. I felt a momentary jab of pity when I saw the lid of the treasure chest lift up with her. I thought, No wonder she just sits in here all day. I’d do the same thing if I had the lid of a treasure chest fused to my butt.

I brought her up a little farther so that she was balanced on her own against the front wall of the aquarium, and then I pointed my flashlight down into the open treasure chest.

Inside was a black rectangular package, wrapped in what I thought at first was twine but then realized were rubber bands. I reached behind me and brought one of the wooden poles off the wall and lowered it down into the tank. As carefully as possible, I looped its hook under one of the rubber bands and then gently drew the package up out of the water.

The whole thing had taken less than a minute. I spread a towel on the floor and laid the dripping package down on top of it. It was light, about half a pound. The rubber bands were wrapped around what looked like a black plastic garbage bag, and I thought of Kenny and how he had described his father wrapping a change of clothes in a plastic bag and carrying it into the ocean.

Carefully, I took the rubber bands off one by one and laid them in a neat pile on the floor next to the towel. Before I looked inside the bag, I glanced up at the tank. The porcupine fish was floating aimlessly in the middle of the tank, puffed up like a beach ball and covered in sharp white quills.

I whispered, “Sorry about that.”

Slowly, I opened up the package and pulled out two clear plastic bags. They were the gallon-sized type with watertight zippers across the top.

Inside one of the bags was a collection of envelopes, exactly as Kenny had described them. They all had a post office box here in Siesta Key for the return address, and they had all been sent to the same person: Daniel Imperiori—Kenny’s real name. There were probably about ten envelopes total. The other bag had only two things in it. One was a piece of paper, like a receipt, and the other was a small, amber-colored plastic bottle with a white label.

I brought the plastic bag up closer and squinted at the tiny print on the bottle. It read BUTORPHANOL, 40 ML.

I should have known.

I never aced a chemistry test in high school, and I don’t have a medical degree, but I have spent a lot of time around animal clinics, so I know a thing or two about animal medications. Vets use butorphanol every day. It’s powerful and relatively tasteless. It’s mostly used for sedating animals before surgery, but I had a feeling it might come in handy in other situations as well. For example, if you needed an animal to be quiet for a few hours. Like, during a plane ride.

It all started falling into place. Those drugs Mr. and Mrs. Harwick had found in August’s room—he wasn’t using them on himself, and he wasn’t dealing them, either. He was using them to sedate the birds he was smuggling into the country, to keep them quiet so they wouldn’t be discovered. That was why the bird Joyce and I found in the park had been knocked out. It hadn’t flown into a window. Corina had drugged it.

I knew it didn’t take long for a narcotic like butorphanol to take effect. Corina had probably squeezed it into the bird’s mouth with an eyedropper in the taxi or the bus on her way to the airport in Guatemala. By the time she boarded the plane, the bird would have been out like a light, sleeping away in a drug-induced stupor inside her handbag.

I turned the bag around and read the faint blue machine-printed text on the receipt inside: ALLIED TAXI, $79. At the bottom of the receipt was a Tampa address, written with a purple felt-tip pen in round, childish handwriting, followed by a short sequence of numbers and letters, “230A1P.”

Calmly, I folded everything back together with the rubber bands and slid the package down into my backpack. I switched off the light in the hidden closet and pulled the sliding door closed. My mind was racing at about a thousand miles per hour. I was so distracted that it wasn’t until I’d gotten back in my Bronco and was rolling down the cobblestone driveway that I realized I’d forgotten to put the mermaid back down on her treasure chest, and I had left the wet towel lying on the floor in the access closet behind it.

But it didn’t matter. I had more important things to do.

First, I dialed Detective McKenzie. She answered as if it was the most normal thing in the world to get a phone call in the middle of the night.

“Dixie, thanks for returning my call. I have a question about when you tried to revive Mr. Harwick.”

I interrupted. “You want to know if a large amount of water came out of his lungs when I pressed on his chest.”

“Uh, yes. How did you know that?”

I said, “Because if he drowned, there would have been water in his lungs, but there wasn’t. That means he was already dead or had stopped breathing before he went into the pool. And they found a massive amount of narcotics in his body, right?”

“Yes, they did.”

“I know. It was butorphanol, wasn’t it?”

“Dixie, what the hell is going on?”

“Detective McKenzie, I think I know who killed Mr. Harwick. I don’t have hard proof of it, but I think I know how we can get it. I’m on my way to Kenny’s boat at the dock behind Hoppie’s Restaurant right now. Can you meet me there in ten minutes? I can explain everything then.”

There was a long pause on the other end, and for a second I thought the call had dropped.

I said, “Hello?”

McKenzie said, “Okay. Listen to me. I don’t know what you’re up to, and I’m not sure I like it, either. But I’m going to meet you at Hoppie’s in ten minutes, and I don’t want you to do a goddamn thing or talk to anyone else until you’ve explained everything to me first. Understand?”

I gulped. “Yes.”

She sounded relieved. “Thank you. I’m on my way now.”

Before she hung up, I thought about the gun that August carried in his glove compartment and said, “Oh, Detective McKenzie?”

“Yes?”

“Bring backup.”