Curiosity Killed The Cat Sitter

Suddenly, the room was filled with people running past me. In a daze, I turned toward the doorway where Guidry was holstering his Sig Sauer.

“Your brother called us,” he said. “When you didn’t answer your cell, he knew you were in trouble.”

His gray eyes were calm, watching me closely.

“I had it under control,” I said, but my voice warbled.

“You had it under superb control, Dixie.”

The next thing I knew, my face was buried in his chest, and his arms were holding me close. Except for Michael and Paco, I hadn’t felt a man’s arms around me since Todd died. I hadn’t thought I wanted a man’s arms around me, but this felt very familiar and comforting.

Thirty-Four

Sunlight glittered on the sailboats rocking at anchor in Sarasota Bay. A few seagulls strolled along the sidewalk, hoping for handouts. Phillip and I sat quietly, the way people do when there’s too much to say to trust yourself to speak. Phillip’s forehead still bore an ugly channel from the bullet he fired with the intention of killing himself. If he hadn’t jerked his head back just before he pulled the trigger, he would have hit the frontal lobe of his brain. If he’d jerked it forward instead of backward, he would have hit the cortex. As it was, he was physically and neurologically intact. Psychologically, he had a lot of healing to do.

A bold seagull stepped forward and pecked at Phillip’s shoelace. Phillip waggled his foot and the gull fluttered its wings in a show of sassiness and then took flight, sailing out over the boats in a graceful swoop.

I said, “How do you like living with Ghost?”

The corners of his mouth twitched in something close to a smile. “He’s funny. He curls up in Greg’s violin case while he practices. I never was around a cat before, but I think I’ll actually miss him when I leave.”

“Did you get things squared away with Juilliard?”

“They said I could enroll next year.”

“That’s good. You’ll be completely healed by then.”

“Yeah.”

We both heard the lie in our voices and fell silent. Plastic surgeons were going to try to smooth the deep groove in his forehead, but he would always bear the emotional scars of his parents’ actions.

Do any of us ever escape those scars?

Keep reading for an excerpt from the next

Dixie Hemingway novel

DUPLICITY DOGGED

THE DACHSHUND

Coming soon in hardcover from

St. Martin’s Minotaur

1

It was a few minutes past six when I got to the Powells’ house on Monday morning. A pinkish-gray sky was beginning to be brushed with apricot plumes, and wild parakeets were waking and chattering in the branches over the street. It was the last week of June, a time when everybody on Siesta Key was slow and smiling. Slow because June is so hot on the key you may keel over dead if you hurry, and smiling because the snowbirds had all gone north and we had the key to ourselves. Not that there’s anything wrong with snowbirds. We like snowbirds. We especially like the money they spend during the season. But the key goes back to being a quiet laid-back place when they leave, and we all go around for weeks with sappy smiles on our faces.

I’m Dixie Hemingway, no relation to you know who. I used to be a deputy with the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department, but something happened a little over three years ago that made the department afraid to trust me with certain parts of the population. Now I take care of pets while their owners are away. I go in their homes and feed them, groom them, and exercise them, which works out well for all of us. They don’t ask a lot of questions, and I don’t run the risk of doing something I’ll regret.

Siesta Key is an eight-mile barrier island that sits like a tropical kneecap off Sarasota, Florida. Running north and south, it lies between the Gulf of Mexico on the west and Sarasota Bay on the east. Our powdery white beach is made of quartz crystal that stays cool even when the sun sends down lava rays, and it magnetizes poets and painters and mystics who believe it’s one of the planet’s vortexes of energy. Lush with hibiscus, palms, mangrove, bougainvillea, and sea grape, Siesta Key is home to about seven thousand sun-smacked year-round residents and just about every known species of shorebirds and songbirds and butterflies. In the bay, great bovine manatees with goofy smiles on their faces move with surprising grace, eating all the vegetation in their path and keeping the waterways clear. In the Gulf, playful dolphins cavort in the waves, and occasional sharks keep swimmers alert.