The Cat Sitter's Nine Lives (20 page)

I was a little worried about being seen going into the bookstore. I didn’t want to have to answer any questions about what I was doing there, or what had happened to Mr. Hoskins. Since Mrs. Silverthorn had asked that I not tell her husband about our arrangement or what I was doing, I was pretty sure she didn’t want me telling anybody else either.

Also, I was a little scared.

Even though I knew Detective McKenzie would have ordered a cleanup crew to get rid of the blood on the counter, just the fact that something terrible could have happened inside the store made me a little wary of going in alone. I took a walk down to the end of the block just to calm my nerves, but I didn’t want to linger on the sidewalk too long. The more I hung around the more likely it was that I’d run into somebody I knew.

As I passed the butcher shop I saw Butch in the back, wearing a bloody apron and a white chef’s hat. I wondered if it was possible he’d seen that cat again. If he’d gotten a good look at it and could confirm it was Cosmo, maybe I wouldn’t need to go in the bookstore at all. I half hoped he’d tell me that he’d caught the cat he’d seen and taken it to the Kitty Haven, but that was probably asking for too much.

I pushed the door open, and a blanket of cool air wafted over me, mixed with the pungent smell of raw meat and bleach. The whole place was probably about the same size as the bookstore, but the front area, the part for customers, wasn’t much bigger than my kitchen. It had a white tile floor, with chalkboards on the walls listing prices and the day’s specials, and a long refrigerated display case separating it from the back, where all the meat was prepared for sale.

The display case was filled with row upon row of fresh, glistening meat, lined up with artistic precision in neat, parallel rows. There were turkey breasts, ground beef, sirloin, pork chops, sausage, thick-cut bacon, Cornish hens, sliced ham, roasting chickens, and a whole slew of other cuts of meat I didn’t even recognize. I don’t much like going in butcher shops—all that raw flesh just reminds me that my hamburger patty used to be a living, breathing thing walking around in a field and munching on grass and dandelions. I like it much better when it’s laid out in front of me on a plate already cooked, and preferably by somebody else.

Butch was behind the case, standing over a worktable and expertly sharpening a butcher’s knife that looked at least fifteen inches long. He was holding it out in front of him and slicing its edge along a honing steel, his hands flying with such speed and precision that he looked like a mad conductor leading an orchestra in the final frenzied moments of a symphony. The shimmering ring it made was so loud I didn’t think he heard me come in, and it turned out I was right, because when he finally saw me standing there he looked momentarily shocked.

I said, “I was just in the neighborhood. I thought I’d stop in and see if maybe you’d seen that cat again?”

He put the knife down and came over to the counter, wiping his hands on his apron. “Yeah, yeah, they found him already.”

I said, “What? They did?”

“Yeah. A lady came in here this afternoon asking if I’d lost a cat. She said they found him hiding in the alley out back. Big orange fella, right?”

“Yes, that’s him! Did she say where she was taking him?”

He shrugged and cocked his head to the side. “Nope. I told her about you, but since you didn’t give me your number…”

I was relieved that someone had found Cosmo, but I could have kicked myself. If I’d given Butch my number when he asked for it I could have been halfway back down the Key by then, with Cosmo in a cat carrier in the seat next to me. I could just see the delight on Mrs. Silverthorn’s face when I delivered him into her arms not more than an hour after she asked me to find him.

Butch was unrolling his sleeves. “Well, I guess you don’t gotta worry about finding him now.”

I pulled one of my business cards out of my backpack and handed it to him. “I guess not. But could you do me a favor? If you happen to see that woman again, would you mind giving her this and asking her to give me a call?”

He grinned. “Sure thing.”

I winced as he pushed my card down in the front pocket of his apron, imagining it getting stained and soggy. I guess when you work with dead meat for a living, you get used to things being bloody, just like I get used to being covered with fur all day long—it just comes with the job.

Outside, I made my way slowly back toward the car, dodging passersby on the sidewalk and muttering under my breath. Even though I didn’t think I had a choice, I wasn’t happy about giving Butch my card. I’d been thinking about getting a post office box for a while, but I just couldn’t justify the expense. I don’t get a lot of business-related mail, and usually people just pay me in person, but every once in a while clients want to send me something, like a check or their travel itinerary, so I’d included all my contact information on my business cards. I barely knew this man, and here I was giving him my name, my private cell phone number, and my home address. I might as well have handed him the key to my front door, too.

Then I thought of Mrs. Silverthorn and raised my hand up in the air. I said out loud to myself, “Oh, bother,” hoping no one was watching. Butch may have been a little rough around the edges, but he certainly wasn’t a criminal, and most important of all, Cosmo was safe and sound. He wasn’t lurking around in a filthy alleyway, scavenging for food in a garbage Dumpster or hiding behind a box of dusty old books, scared and alone.

That, as far as I was concerned, satisfied my contract with Mr. Hoskins.

As for Mrs. Silverthorn, all I needed to do now was give her a call and let her know that Cosmo had been found and that she didn’t need to worry any longer. Although, when I tried to imagine that conversation, I knew it might not go so easily. Mrs. Silverthorn didn’t seem the kind of woman to just leave it at that. She’d want to know who had found Cosmo. Where was he now? Was the woman planning on keeping him? Or had she put him in the pound with the hundreds of other abandoned pets, hopelessly waiting for a home …

I paused in front of the bookstore. I could see the big claw-foot table in the middle of the store, and all the boxes and stacks of books along the aisles. I smiled, remembering how Cosmo had whipped past my feet and disappeared under the counter in a flash. He certainly was fast, and he certainly knew how to hide. I should have been happy somebody had been able to catch him, but when I saw the little stack of dictionaries with its head of orange fur, I burst into tears.

Well, that’s it,
I thought. I’d finally gone off the deep end. I was becoming one of those crazy people who walk around talking to themselves and swinging from one extreme emotion to the other, laughing hysterically one minute and sobbing uncontrollably the next. I figured the next logical step would be to collect all my belongings in shopping bags and move to a cardboard box in the park.

Maybe Deputy Morgan had been right; maybe I did need to lighten up, take a vacation or something. I shook my head and dabbed at my eyes with the hem of my T-shirt, and that’s when I saw something move inside the store.

It was white, like the tip of a pointed shoe or a crumpled piece of paper or, perhaps, the very end of a fluffy cat tail. It was at the end of one of the aisles midway toward the back of the store, just around the corner of one of the bookshelves, and then it was gone.

I stepped up to the door and peered in. Everything looked completely still. I couldn’t quite see all of the countertop from the outside, but I could see the big antique cash register and all of Mr. Hoskins’s drawings arranged on the walls.

I glanced across the street at Amber Jack’s. It was strange to think there was a live camera pointed at me for anyone with a connection to the Internet to see, and I wondered who might be watching me this very instant.

You’d think I’d have known better. In the past I’ve gotten myself mixed up in all kinds of stupid and dangerous situations without the vaguest idea how I ended up there, but now … I was beginning to recognize those moments when things took a turn.

Maybe it was the way my breath quickened slightly, or the vague tingling that started at the base of my spine and inched its way up to the back of my neck. Right then, standing on the sidewalk outside Beezy’s Bookstore, I realized I had a choice. I could just walk away. I could go home and have a perfectly normal, uneventful evening. I could make some popcorn or a frozen pizza. I could fall asleep in the hammock with my new gardening book draped over my face.

I took a step back from the door and sighed.

Then, with a quick glance up and down the street, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the blue velvet pouch that Mrs. Silverthorn had given me.

19

It was completely quiet inside the bookstore except for the fading ring of the bell over my head and the steady, pounding beat of blood in my ear. There was an added note of disinfectant mixed in with the dusty smell of all the books, and the bloody paw prints that had been on the counter by the register were now completely gone.

I put my backpack down by the counter and flicked on the lights, then moved through the store slowly, aisle by aisle, carefully studying every shelf up and down. At the aisle where I thought I’d seen something move, I paused for a good long while and waited, but there was nothing.

I was about to move on when I heard a tiny rustling sound. It was coming from the end of the aisle, where there was an air-conditioning vent, with half its grille missing, cut into the baseboard at the bottom of the wall. A tiny brown mouse poked its head out and sniffed the air tentatively. When it saw me it froze, and we locked eyes for a moment; then in a blink it hopped out of the vent and disappeared through a crack between the bookshelf and the wall.

For an instant my mind flashed to my mother. I was about five years old, and we were just getting home from church. As we walked into the kitchen, she let out an earsplitting scream. There was a mouse running along the toe-kick of the kitchen sink, and at the sound of my mom’s screeching it hopped a good foot in the air and then slipped under the stove. I turned around to find a pair of white high-heel shoes, sitting perfectly still on the floor where she’d just been standing.

“Dixie, honey.”

I looked up. My mother was perched on top of the kitchen table, holding her skirt up around her knees and shaking like a leaf. She had literally jumped right out of her shoes.

“Go get your father.”

My dad was certain that poor mouse had been just as terrified of my mother as she was of it, and we laughed so hard that my sides ached for hours. There are a lot of things I inherited from my mother. Unfortunately, fear of mice isn’t the worst of them.

I waited a little while longer to see if anything else poked its head out of the vent, but nothing happened. I glanced at the AC unit built into the wall over the front door and then back at the open vent. It must have been a remnant of an old air-conditioning system, probably broken down at some point and never repaired. I moved on.

At the back of the store, I went through the low swinging door and searched every inch of the office, under the green velvet sofa with tassels, behind the big mahogany desk, even in a little broom closet, though it was closed and latched. Inside there was nothing but a tiny sink and faucet with some old mops and a stepladder. On the floor under the desk were a couple of bowls, one empty and the other with a tiny bit of water left at the bottom.

I’d expected there to be a litter box somewhere in the back of the store, but there wasn’t. I figured Cosmo must have been in the habit of being let out in the alley to do his business, but if he was locked in the store now without a litter box, he’d have found an alternative.

I brought the ladder out and used it to look on the tops of all the shelves in the store, which took a while. There was a gap of about a foot below the ceiling, but just like the rest of the store it was crammed with more books and boxes, so I had to move the ladder at least three or four times per aisle and slide things around to get a good view of everything. By the time I made it to the first aisle at the front of the store, I had lost all hope.

More than likely, the orange cat that someone had found in the alley was indeed Cosmo, and whatever I’d seen moving inside the store was either a reflection in the window or a mouse or my own imagination. The mind sees what it wants to see, and I knew I’d be much happier if I found Cosmo now as opposed to worrying about whether he’d been taken to the pound, but it didn’t look like that was going to happen. I decided I’d finish searching this last aisle and then go home and start calling shelters.

I was balanced on the very top rung of the ladder, steadying myself with one hand on the top of the bookcase. When I slid a box over to one side and peered over the top, I saw a man framed in the doorway.

He was outside. At first I didn’t recognize him, but when he pressed his forehead against the glass I realized it was Butch the Butcher. He had changed out of his white butcher’s apron and black boots and was wearing faded jeans and a black T-shirt. He cupped his hands around the glass and squinted, sweeping his eyes all around the inside of the store.

I froze. It would have been difficult to explain what I was doing in the store without betraying Mrs. Silverthorn’s confidence, especially since Butch had just told me Cosmo had been found, but it had also been Butch who told the deputies he’d seen me leaving the scene of the crime covered in blood. There’s no telling what he’d think if he caught me snooping around inside the store now.

But what was he doing here? Unless he’d been lying about someone finding Cosmo, why on earth was he looking in the bookstore? I kept myself as still as possible, hoping if I didn’t move he wouldn’t see me. Eventually he stepped back and folded his meaty arms over his chest. He looked up the street a couple of times and then walked back down the sidewalk toward his shop.

By the time I got the ladder folded up and back into its broom closet in the office, I knew what he was up to. More than likely I wasn’t the only one around here with an ego the size of a Texas bull. He probably thought his chances of figuring out what had happened to Mr. Hoskins were just as good as anybody else’s. Maybe he thought he’d notice that one detail in the shop that no one else had seen—that one tiny clue that explained everything. Either that, or I wasn’t the only person Mrs. Silverthorn had hired to find Cosmo.