Kristin did a disappointed pout with her bunny mouth. “I know Marilee Doerring from the yacht club. People don’t like her much. Well, men like her, but women don’t.”
I put a protective finger over Fred’s sensitive spine and combed in short parallel strokes on each side. Fred gave a warning flick of his tail, and I went back to his neck and throat, making sure I was keeping the teeth of the brush comfortably pointed straight at his skin and not tilted to the side.
“I think it’s because Marilee’s so flashy,” said Kristin. “Lately she’s been wearing an enormous square-cut diamond that’s soooo ostentatious. The thing just screams zircon!”
My experience with diamonds being limited to the small kind that nobody would mistake for a zircon, I continued combing Fred and stayed quiet.
Kristin gave a little self-deprecating laugh. “God, I sound catty, don’t I?”
I don’t know why people say they’re being “catty” when they make unkind remarks about other people. Cats are never like that.
Kristin shifted in her chair and said, “It’s not because she’s pretty that I don’t like her. I’m not afraid of pretty women. And it’s certainly not because she has money! It’s that you always get the feeling Marilee’s trolling for men. If a man’s anywhere in her vicinity, you can almost hear the music from Jaws playing.”
I thought of Olga Winnick and said, “Predatory music?”
“Exactly! Marilee is a predatory woman.”
I was imagining Kristin and Olga Winnick together talking about how predatory Marilee was, when Kristin’s eyes settled on my wedding band.
“You’re a widow. Why do you still wear a wedding ring?”
The question caught me off guard, causing my hand to jerk so the bristles of my slicker brush bit into Fred’s skin. He growled a warning and waved his tail, and I quickly went back to his throat to placate him. I’ve never thought of myself as a widow. Widows are old women with blue hair and a lifetime of memories. I don’t belong in that group, I’m just a formerly loved.
Kristin looked up at me as if she’d suddenly had an attack of sensitivity. “I hope you don’t mind my asking.”
I didn’t answer, but just to scare her, I turned Fred so that his anus faced her while I brushed the hair around it. She watched with pale dread, so hyperalert for bits of cat poop that she forgot her question. Fred whipped his tail back and forth to let me know his patience was wearing thin. To reward him for not jumping down, I combed his neck and throat again.
He pushed his head up against my hand and purred his thanks. I picked him up and set him on the floor, packed my slicker brush away, spritzed the table with my handy-dandy water–Clorox mix, and wiped it dry with paper towels.
“I’ll let myself out,” I said. I had been there only about five minutes.
Kristin looked disappointed. She would have paid me another twenty dollars just to stick around and dish dirt about Marilee. Fred stuck his left back leg into the air and curved around to enthusiastically lick the inside of it. He didn’t even say goodbye.
Seven
It was one o’clock when I put my grooming equipment in the back of the Bronco and started home. The sky was a clear Crayola blue, with a relentless white sun that lasered the top of my head. Something was nagging at me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I’d been up since 4:00 A.M. and my brain wasn’t working on all cylinders.
The lane leading to my apartment is covered with oyster shells that have leeched lime and become hardened by rain into a concrete-hard surface. Australian pines, mossy oaks, sea grape, and palms line one side of the drive, and the other side edges the sandy beach. It’s a private drive with a sign at its entrance proclaiming it not for public access, but people turn into it anyway and nose down to see what lies at its end.
On most of Siesta Key, a private road like ours will take the curious to a multimillion-dollar house whose owners are readily recognizable from movies or book jackets or TV talk shows. Our road leads to a weathered two-bedroom house where my brother and his partner live, and to a detached four-slot carport with an upstairs apartment where I live. My grandfather bought the house from Sears, Roebuck in the fifties for a thousand dollars, now the house and garage apartment together are worth about fifty cents. The beachfront property they sit on is worth about five million. Or at least that’s what we’ve been offered for it. We wouldn’t sell at any price, so it doesn’t matter.
Michael and Paco were in the carport putting away fishing gear, both with the bleezy, sun-blasted look that men get when they’ve happily spent arduous hours sweating and squinting at a blazing sea. Michael is thirty-four, blond and blue-eyed like me, but a lot taller and wider. He’s a fireman, and when he’s suited up in his fire-fighting gear he’s roughly the size of Sasquatch. Women fling themselves at Michael the way mating lovebugs splat themselves on car windshields in the spring. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them bear razor scars on their wrists at the futility of it, because he and Paco have been together for over twelve years and counting.
As slim and dark as Michael is blond and broad, Paco is with the Sheriff’s Department’s SIB—Special Investigative Bureau—which means he gets involved in cases that require him to take on disguises his own mother wouldn’t recognize. Cases that we don’t question him about. Michael is my best friend in the whole world, and Paco is my second-best friend. When I lost Todd and Christy, Michael and Paco sort of sandwiched me between them and kept the world out until I was ready for it.
Michael works twenty-four/forty eight at the firehouse, which means a twenty-four-hour shift on, followed by forty-eight hours off. He usually spends his off-time fishing. Paco works mysterious hours that nobody can predict, many of them after midnight. When he isn’t working or sleeping, he goes out in the boat with Michael. I never do. I love to look at the Gulf and I love the sound and smell of it, but I don’t like being on it. It’s too big and willful for me. I don’t much like things I can’t control, at least a little bit.
I got out of the Bronco and shaded my eyes against the glare. Out in the Gulf, sunlight sparked diamonds off glittering waves undulating toward the beach where they gently exploded into lacy white froth. A few gulls half-heartedly squawked and spiraled overhead, but most of them had retreated to shady nooks for a siesta.
I said, “What’d you get?”
“Some nice pompano. A couple of snapper.”
“There was a dead man in one of my houses this morning.”
They both stopped what they were doing and stared at me with identical expressions of shocked concern. I felt like a kid with a great Show and Tell.
“Marilee Doerring’s house,” I said. “I found him in the kitchen with blood on the back of his head and his nose taped in the cat’s water bowl. I’m not supposed to tell the part about the water bowl yet.”
Michael said, “Well hell, Dixie. What’d you do?”
“Called nine one one. Sergeant Owens came out, and a detective I never heard of before. Paco, do you know a guy named Guidry?”
“Nope, must be somebody new.”
Having delivered my impressive news, I said, “Well, I’m going to go take a nap,” and left them staring after me as I dragged my weary butt upstairs to my little private world.
I have a wide covered porch, a living room with a one-stool breakfast bar and galley kitchen at the side, and a bedroom barely big enough for a single bed, a nightstand, and a double dresser. Photographs of Todd and Christy sit on the dresser. They’re the last things I see before I turn off the lamp, and the first things I see when I get up in the morning.