Her brief visit hadn’t changed anything. When she left, we didn’t know where she went and she didn’t make any effort to stay in touch, not even when the next loss threatened to pull me under to dark oblivion. I don’t think of her much anymore. Or at least I try not to.
Pushing the remote to raise metal hurricane shutters, I climbed the stairs to the covered porch that runs the length of my apartment. The porch has a small glass-topped table, two ice-cream chairs, ceiling fans to stir the air, and a hammock in one corner for napping and daydreaming. French doors open to a minuscule living room furnished with my grandmother’s green flower-printed love seat and easy chair. A one-person bar separates the living room from a narrow galley kitchen, where a window lets in light over the sink and allows a view of treetops. The bedroom is barely big enough for a single bed pushed against one wall, a nightstand, and a dresser holding a photograph of my husband and child. In the photograph, Todd is thirty and Christy is three. If they had lived, Todd would be thirty-three now, same as I am, and Christy would be six.
One day I will be forty, fifty, sixty, perhaps ninety or a hundred, but Todd will remain thirty and Christy will always be three. I imagine them in a different universe, eternally the same age they were when they were killed.
The air was humid and stale, and I flipped the switch to turn on the air-conditioning unit set high on the bedroom wall. On the way to the shower, I tossed my clothes and white Keds in the stacked washer/dryer in an alcove in the hall outside my tiny bathroom. With the morning’s fatigue and cat hair washed off, I fell naked into bed and slept a couple of hours, then padded barefoot to my closet. The closet is the most spacious room in the apartment, big enough to serve as an office as well. A desk sits against one wall, and shelves for my shorts and T-shirts and Keds fill the opposite side. Between them, on the back wall, there’s a floor-to-ceiling mirror and a short rack of listless dresses and skirts reaching toward the floor like banyan rootlets hoping to acquire greater purpose.
I pulled on clean shorts and a knit top and went to the kitchen to get a bottle of water from the fridge. I wanted cookies, but I didn’t have any. I switched on the CD player to fill the apartment with Patsy Cline’s voice—there’s something about Patsy’s steady tumtee-tum-tee, tumtee-tum-tee rhythm that helps organize my brain—and went back to the closet-office to take care of the business side of pet sitting.
I’m very meticulous about keeping records and sharing them with pet owners. I list times I arrived and left, what I did while I was there, and anything out of the ordinary that I noticed. It can be important to know exactly what date I felt a tiny lump under a cat’s skin, or when I noted that a dog’s eyes were pained or dull. I keep a record of everything, maybe more than I need to, but it makes me feel better to know I’m doing the very best job I possibly can.
When I finished, I still wanted cookies and I still didn’t have any. A furtive peek over the porch railing revealed that Michael and Paco had put away the painting supplies, and Michael’s car was gone. Which meant they had gone off on some errand. Which meant they wouldn’t know if I snuck down to their kitchen and stole cookies. Not that they’d care, but it was sort of exciting to think I could get away with something they didn’t know about.
Michael always has cookies, cookies that he personally makes in his big commercial oven, cookies that are so good you have to be strict with yourself or you’ll whimper when you eat them. I was out like a flash, thumping down the stairs to go filch some of his cookies.
Michael is the cook of the family. He’s also the cook at the firehouse. If he could, he would travel the world cooking for anybody who was hungry or lonely or downtrodden. He would cook for happy people too, but it gives him a great sense of satisfaction to feed needy people, and if he thinks their lives are improved because of it, that absolutely makes his day.
Except for Ella Fitzgerald, Michael and Paco’s kitchen was empty. Ella is a true Persian-mix calico—meaning she has some Persian in her ancestry and her coat has distinct blocks of black, white, and red—and she makes funny scatting sounds like Ella Fitzgerald. Left on my porch by a woman departing the country, Ella had liked me well enough, but the first time she sniffed the air in Michael’s kitchen, she knew she’d found her true love. Lots of human females feel that way about Michael too. Fat lot of good it does them.
When I came in, Ella jumped down from her perch on a bar stool at the butcher-block island and came to twine her body around my ankles. I knelt to stroke her hair and kiss her nose.
She said, “Thrrripp!”
I said, “I totally agree.”
She trotted beside my feet when I went to inspect the cookie jar. Just as I’d expected, it was full of freshly baked cookies. Coconut and chocolate chip and oatmeal raisin. I made a small stack on a paper napkin while Ella flipped the tip of her tail and watched me. Cats have too much dignity to beg for table goodies like dogs do. They just give you unblinking stares until you break down and give them something.
I got a couple of kitty treats from her special canister with the design of a cat on the front and added them to my stack. Then I scooped Ella up in one arm and pushed through the kitchen door to the wooden deck and the beckoning redwood chaise. With Ella happily sitting on my stomach, we both munched our treats while the surf made gurgling noises at the shore and seabirds swooped and called to one another above us.
Ella finished her treats, licked her paws, and stretched out to purr, her warmth comforting against my body. All my cookies were gone too, and for a little while I closed my eyes and enjoyed the aftertaste of cookies, the warmth of a kitty on my tummy, the fresh clean scent of the sea, and the familiar sound of seabirds circling overhead. There was a time when I was numb to moments of pleasure like that, so I was not only floating on a tide of bliss, but aware that I was. I suppose we have to experience the loss of pleasure to truly appreciate it when it comes back.
It was almost time to make my afternoon rounds, so I finally roused Ella and stood up to go inside. I stopped when a dark blue Blazer crunched down the lane and stopped next to the carport.
Oh, noodles, it was Lieutenant Guidry.
If Michael and Paco came home and found him here, Michael would have a cow. Just the sight of Guidry reminded Michael of all the times I’d been in mortal danger because of some murder investigation I’d got myself involved in.
As Lieutenant Guidry of the Sarasota County’s Homicide Investigative Unit got out and started toward me, I tried to convince myself that Michael’s distaste for Guidry was the only reason my heart had started jiggling.
Guidry is fortyish, with skin eternally bronzed, dark short-cropped hair showing a little silver at the sides, gray eyes bracketed by fine lines, a beaky nose, and lips that are never indecisive. As always, he looked as if he had come from a fashion shoot rather than a crime scene. Woven leather sandals, pleated linen trousers the color of wet clay, a dark gray shirt, and an unstructured linen jacket in an expensive shade of wine red. No tie, but something told me he’d recently worn one and removed it. Oh, man, he’d probably gone to church that morning. Probably had rosary beads in his pocket.
Feeling very heathenish, I noted how his jacket hung from his square shoulders without any pretension, but somehow it managed to look like something an Italian count would slip on before he went out to inspect his estate. From the elegance of his wardrobe and the casual ease with which he wore it, I knew he had grown up with money. A lot of money. But Guidry’s past was none of my business, and I had no intention of ever asking him about it.
Still, I wondered for the millionth time what his background was. What was it that made him walk with such aristocratic confidence? What was it that made him wear the kind of clothes you see in films where Italian playboys are hanging out in sidewalk bistros on the Riviera? All I knew about the man had been dropped in bits and pieces that I’d collected like a starry-eyed groupie. I knew he was from New Orleans and that he’d been a cop there, but New Orleans cops are probably no more elegant than cops in any other city.