Read Raining Cat Sitters and Dogs Online
Authors: Blaize Clement
Raining Cat Sitters and Dogs
Raining
Cat Sitters
and Dogs
ALSO BY BLAIZE CLEMENT
Curiosity Killed the Cat Sitter
Duplicity Dogged the Dachshund
Even Cat Sitters Get the Blues
Cat Sitter on a Hot Tin Roof
Cat Sitters
and Dogs
A Dixie Hemingway Mystery
BLAIZE CLEMENT
MINOTAUR BOOKS
A Thomas Dunne Book
New York
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS
.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
RAINING CAT SITTERS AND DOGS.
Copyright © 2009 by Blaize Clement. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.minotaurbooks.com
Grateful acknowledgment is given for permission to reprint the following:
“Nothing Twice” from
View with a Grain of Sand,
copyright © 1993 by Wisława Szymborska, English translation by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh © 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clement, Blaize.
Raining cat sitters and dogs : a Dixie Hemingway mystery / Blaize Clement.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Thomas Dunne Book.”
ISBN 978-0-312-36956-9
1. Hemingway, Dixie (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women detectives—Florida—Fiction. 3. Pet sitting—Fiction. 4. Sarasota (Fla.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3603.L463R35 2010
813'.6—dc22
2009039814
First Edition: January 2010
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to the “Kitchen Table Writing Group”—Linda Bailey, Greg Jorgensen, Madeline Mora-Summonte, and Jane Phelan—for their support and encouragement. Watch for those names. You’ll soon be seeing them in your local bookstores.
A huge thank-you to Suzanne Beecher of
DearReader.com
, who has generously introduced Dixie to her thousands of book club members. Suzanne’s generosity in helping writers is matched only by her lavish distribution of chocolate chip cookies. I’m honored to have her friendship.
Many thanks to homicide detective Chris Iorio of the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department, who always patiently answers my law enforcement questions. Thank you.
A big thank-you too to the Siesta Key Chamber of Commerce for their support, to all the deputies who keep Siesta Key its calm, laid-back self, and to Siesta Key residents for not minding that I add fictional neighborhoods and businesses to the real ones. I appreciate that.
Many thanks also to Marcia Markland and Diana Szu at Thomas Dunne Books, along with all the terrific production, promotion, and marketing people. Their efficiency and hard work make it possible for writers and readers to connect.
I’m also deeply grateful to readers who share their pet stories and tell me how much Dixie means to them. Thank you from my heart!
And to my expanding family, you continue to fill me with joy and pride.
Even if there’s no one dumber,
if you’re the planet’s biggest dunce,
you can’t repeat this course in summer:
this course is only offered once.
—Wisława Szymborska, from
“Nothing Twice” (1957)
Raining
Cat Sitters
and Dogs
E
very now and then you meet somebody you like on sight, even when everything about them says they’re bad news. Jaz was like that. The first time I saw the girl, she was sobbing hysterically and rushing across Dr. Layton’s parking lot with a towel-wrapped bundle in her arms. A large man trailed behind her with reluctance making heavy weights on his feet.
She looked about twelve or thirteen, with beginner breasts making plum-sized bulges under a stretchy tube top, and the thin, coltish awkwardness of adolescence. She had cocoa-colored skin and a long mop of tangled black curls. Her cutoffs were frayed and had the mulled look that clothes get when they’ve been slept in.
The man was around fifty, with pale jowls beginning to sag, and graying hair that looked more mowed than barbered. He wore a navy blue suit and a paler blue tie, both too unwrinkled to be anything except polyester. With his pulled-back shoulders and drip-dry shirt taut across his
chest, he looked like a junior high school principal who had learned too late that he hated kids.
I’m Dixie Hemingway, no relation to you-know-who. I’m a pet sitter on Siesta Key, an eight-mile barrier island off Sarasota, Florida. I used to be a deputy with the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department, but something happened almost four years ago that caused me to go howling mad-dog crazy for a little while, so I left with the department’s blessing. I’m still a little bit tilted, I guess, but not more than the average person. Like they say, a person who’s totally sane is just somebody you don’t know very well.
Now that I’m more or less normal, I have a pet-sitting business that I enjoy, and I end every day feeling like I matter to the world. I mostly take care of cats, with a few dogs and an occasional rabbit or hamster or bird. No snakes. I refer snakes to other sitters. Not that I’m snake-phobic. Not much, anyway. It just gives me the shivers to drop little living critters into open snake mouths.
I had come to the vet’s that morning to pick up Big Bubba, a Congo African Grey parrot who had seemed under the weather when I’d called on him the day before. When a bird sneezes and looks lethargic on his perch, I don’t take any chances. As it turned out, Big Bubba had merely been having a bad day. Dr. Layton had called the night before to tell me I could pick him up that morning, so I was there to take him home.
The crying girl and the man went in ahead of me. When I got to the reception desk, one of Dr. Layton’s assistants was taking the bundle from the girl, and the receptionist
was making sympathetic sounds and patting the girl on the shoulder. She was crying so hard that her words came out slurred and broken.
The only thing I could clearly understand was, “He hit him!”
The receptionist and assistant looked up sharply at the man, who heaved a great sigh.
“It’s a wild rabbit,” he said. “It ran in front of my car. It was an accident.”
The girl turned and screamed at him. “But it
matters
! It may just be a rabbit, but it
matters
!”
Now that I could see her face, she was older in the eyes than I’d expected, and they a surprisingly pale aquamarine. With her tawny skin and wild black curls, the improbable eyes testified to ancestors from all over the world, a coming together of genes that can either be a societal blessing or curse. From the set to her jaw that was both defiant and desperate, I guessed in her case it had not been a blessing.
Everything about her said,
I’m young, I’m pissed, and I’m miserable
.
The man said, “Okay, okay, okay,” and looked around with jittery uneasiness.
Dr. Layton bustled out from the backstage labyrinth of examining rooms and boarding areas. A comfortably plump African-American woman roughly my age, which is thirty-three, Dr. Layton has the ability to soothe and command at the same time. With a quick glance at the injured rabbit lying suspiciously limp in its towel covering, she turned briskly to the man.
“It ran in front of your car?”
“It was an accident. I wasn’t going more than ten miles an hour. It wasn’t like I was speeding.”
The girl seemed close to a complete meltdown. She buried her face in her hands, her whole body quivering with the intensity of her sobbing. The receptionist and the vet’s assistant looked like they might cry at any minute, just in sympathy, and people and animals in the waiting area stretched their necks to look at her.
Dr. Layton said, “What’s your name, dear?”
She said, “Jaz.” At the same time, the man said, “Rosemary.”
The girl shot him a hostile glare, and Dr. Layton studied him.
She said, “Are you this girl’s father?”
Too firmly, he said, “Stepfather.”
Dr. Layton put a calm hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Jaz, go sit down while I check the bunny. I’ll let you know if I can do anything for it.”
To me, she said, “Dixie, do you mind waiting a few minutes? I want to have a word with you.”
I nodded mutely and followed the man and girl to the waiting area. His hammy hand was wrapped around her upper arm in a tight vise, while she continued to heave with sobs. When she felt the edge of the chair against her legs, she shrank into it and drew her knees up to her face, sobbing as if she had lost her closest friend.
I took a seat across from her. Around the room, a handful of people and their pets were looking at her with sympathetic eyes. Two seats away from her, Hetty Soames was there with a new puppy. She gave me a quick smile and
discreet wave, the way people do when they see somebody they know at a funeral, and then turned her attention back to the crying girl.