Curiosity Killed The Cat Sitter

As I got closer, I glimpsed a flash of blue fabric, and realized it wasn’t a hurt animal moaning in the bushes, but a person. I stopped. The odds were against it, but this could be somebody pretending to be hurt and I might be walking into a trap.

I called, “Is someone there?”

The moaning sound came again. I went closer, and then rushed forward. Phillip Winnick, caked with blood and dirt, lay sprawled in the tangled wet underbrush. Somebody had worked him over good.

I knelt at his side. “Phillip? Phillip, it’s me, Dixie. I’m going to call for help. It’s okay now. Phillip?”

His bruised lips struggled to form a word, but it was so faint, I couldn’t hear. I leaned close to his face and said, “Tell me again, Phillip. I didn’t hear you.”

Weakly, he breathed a prayer into my ear. “Please don’t tell my mother.” Then he passed out.

I called 911 on my cell and gave them the location. Then I sat cross-legged beside Phillip and talked to him while I waited for the ambulance. I wanted him to have a voice to hold on to for the moments that he floated to awareness.

“This is a shitty thing somebody did to you, Phillip, but it’s not the end of the world. You’ll get over this, and you’ll be good as new.”

A surge of alarm went through me and I looked quickly at his hands. They didn’t appear to be injured, and I sent up a silent thank-you for that.

“Your hands aren’t hurt, Phillip, and you’ll be playing the piano again soon. I know this is a terrible experience, but you’ll get through it. People get through these things, and you will, too. I’ll help you, and so will a lot of other people.”

I babbled on, as much for myself as for him, until the ambulance came. Two EMTs jumped out and lifted Phillip onto a stretcher so quickly and so gently that I wanted to hug them both. A deputy’s car was just behind the ambulance, and Deputy Jesse Morgan came and stood beside me while the EMTs eased the stretcher into the back.

“Miz Hemingway,” he said. I wondered if he had talked to some of the other deputies about me.

I said, “Can I ride to the hospital with Phillip?”

“You know him?”

“He’s Phillip Winnick. He lives next door to Marilee Doerring, where the man was murdered Friday.” I was trying to be as cool as he was, but my voice cracked a little bit when I said that.

He gave me a slow, level look. Oh yeah, somebody had been talking to him about me.

“How long have you known him?”

I read the look in his eyes and said, “I met him that morning when I took the cat over there.”

“So he’s not a close friend?”

One of the EMTs got in the back of the ambulance with Phillip and hooked him up to oxygen and some kind of IV, while the other came back to talk to Deputy Morgan. They stepped away and spoke out of my hearing, then Morgan came back to me and the EMT got in the ambulance and drove away.

“I’ll notify his parents,” he said. “You’ll have to get permission from them to visit him in the hospital.”

Defeated, I clamped my lips together and forced myself not to yell at him. Morgan was right. Phillip’s parents were the only people with the legal right to be with him in the hospital, and they had to be notified. But the thought of how his judgmental parents might react made my heart hurt.

Morgan pulled out his notebook. “How did you happen to know he was here?”

“I didn’t. A truck almost ran me down and I pulled into the road and heard him moaning.”

“He say anything to you?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think he was conscious.”

“So you don’t know why he was out here at this hour?”

“I have no idea.”

He looked down at me with coolly appraising eyes. “You seem to be having a run of really bad luck. First finding a dead man and now finding somebody beat-up.”

“Is that a question?”

He flipped his notebook closed. “You’ll be available later?”

“Sure.”

He got into his car to go to ring the Winnicks’ doorbell and tell them their son wasn’t in bed asleep like they thought he was, but in an ambulance going to the emergency room at Sarasota Memorial Hospital. I started back down the old road toward my bike. As I did, something caught my eye at the end of the gate where a stunted key lime’s branches pressed against the upright supports. I walked to the end of the gate to get a better look.

Key limes have long, lethal thorns, and this one had a wad of black human hair snarled on a thorny limb. The hair was long and curly, and it appeared to have been left there recently. I thought of Marilee’s shiny black hair caught in the brush of her hair dryer, and a cold snail trailed down my spine.