Curiosity Killed The Cat Sitter

I got up feeling flushed and swollen and went inside and stood in front of the open refrigerator and glugged an entire bottle of cold water. I carried another bottle to my closet office, and put in a call to Lieutenant Guidry. He wasn’t in, so I left my number. Then I called Shuga Reasnor.

She answered the phone on the first ring, and her voice had that mix of desperation and annoyance that people get when they’ve been hovering around a phone for a long time hoping it would ring.

I said, “It’s Dixie Hemingway, Ms. Reasnor. I just wanted to ask you something. Do you know Dr. Coffey?”

She waited so long to answer that I thought for a moment she might have laid the phone down and walked away. Then she said, “Why do you ask?”

“I saw him in the Village Diner, and I asked him if he knew where Marilee might have gone. I thought since they were engaged, he might have some idea. He got very angry. Wouldn’t even talk to me. It seemed odd.”

“He’s odd. He’s mean and he’s odd. Stay away from him. Don’t talk to him about Marilee.”

“Do you think he’s dangerous? Do you think he might have been the one who killed the man in Marilee’s house? Jealous, maybe?”

“Gerald Coffey’s too big a coward to kill anybody. He might hire somebody to do it, but he wouldn’t do it himself.”

“But you think he might do that? Hire somebody?”

“I didn’t say that. I just said he didn’t have the balls to kill anybody himself.”

“If you think of anything that the Sheriff’s Department ought to know about Dr. Coffey, I hope you’ll tell them.”

“Yeah, I’ll do that.”

We said our goodbyes and hung up. I knew she wasn’t going to tell Guidry about Coffey. Shuga Reasnor didn’t sound like a woman anxious to help in the investigation. In fact, she sounded like a woman with something to hide.

I spent the next hour attending to business. I called the people who wanted to know my rates, which is twenty dollars a day to make a morning and afternoon visit. If they want a sitter in the house overnight, it’s forty dollars. For twenty-four-hour care, the fee is sixty dollars. Most pets are accustomed to being home by themselves during the day, but I have a crew of retirees who do sleepovers and round-the-clock care.

All my fees are spelled out in a contract I have my clients sign, along with our respective responsibilities. If a pet becomes ill and needs medical care when the owners are gone, I pay for it. If some disaster happens that causes water to be shut off or the pet to have to be evacuated, I supply whatever is needed, including new quarters. When the owners return, they reimburse me for my expenses. Taking on the care of a beloved pet while its owners are away is like taking on the care of a child. I have to trust the owners, and they have to trust me.

The first woman said she had found somebody else, and the next one slammed down the phone when I told her my rates, as if I’d said something obscene. The other woman said she thought they were extremely reasonable.

Everything is relative. I made an appointment to stop by the approving woman’s house to meet her cat and get the pertinent information, then spent the rest of the hour entering the morning’s visits into my client records.

I keep meticulous records, recording the date and time I arrived, the time I left, and what I did while I was there, along with notes about anything a pet needed or did that was out of the ordinary. If a pet has a medical condition that requires medications or vitamins or treatments, that’s recorded. I have the history of illnesses, injuries, and pregnancies, along with the dates of all immunizations, the number on the animal’s ID tag, and whether it’s been declawed, spayed, or neutered. I know each pet’s preferences in food, toys, TV programs, and music. I’m probably too compulsive about keeping all that information, but I’d rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it. Someday it might be important to know precisely when I gave a bath or a vitamin or a prescription medication.