Table of Contents
Title Page
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Acknowledgments
Also by
Praise for Blaize Clement and DUPLICITY DOGGED THE DACHSHUND
EVEN CAT SITTERS GET THE BLUES
Copyright Page
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 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.
There are other keys off Sarasota, but they tend to look down their proper noses at Siesta. She’s the slightly rebellious daughter whose conservative family is always afraid she’ll do something to embarrass them. Nubile maidens dance on her beach while drummers sound down the sun, tourists young and old shed their inhibitions and thread her streets with bemused smiles on their faces, and the natives don’t overly concern themselves with the histories of some incredibly wealthy residents who have no discernible talents.
I wouldn’t live anywhere else.
Judge and Mrs. Hopewell Powell had just left for their annual three-week vacation in Italy, putting Mame, their elderly miniature dachshund, in my care. Mame had a more formal official name, but when she was a puppy she had been such an inquisitive little snoop that Judge Powell—he wasn’t a judge anymore, but he’d sat on the Florida Supreme Court so long that everybody still called him Judge—had begun to sing, “Put the blame on Mame, boys, put the blame on Mame,” and the name had stuck. They still sang the song to her, and until lately Mame would stand on her hind legs and wave her front paws in the air as if she were dancing.
Siesta Key only has one main street, Midnight Pass Road, so you either live on the Gulf side or the bay side. The Powells lived near the north end, in an exclusive bayside neighborhood called Secret Cove. Secret Cove is actually a onelane bricked street that traces an irregular north-south ellipse squeezed between Midnight Pass Road and the bay. Mossy oaks, pines, sea grape, bamboo, palm, and palmetto hide it from Midnight Pass Road, maintaining the illusion of an area unspoiled by human habitation. Live oaks form a canopy over the lane, and frequent signs warn that the street is for residents only; outsiders will presumably be drawn and quartered. In the event two cars meet, occasional bulges in the street allow the less expensive car to back up and pull aside.
A thick wild preserve fills the inside of Secret Cove’s oval, and more wild thickets separate its dozen or so houses. Narrow inlets intrude on the bay side, where scattered houses have boat docks and spectacular water views. The Powells lived on the waterless front side near the southern end where the street loops back on itself. The house was modest for the area: two-story pinkish stucco, red barrel-tile roof, attached double garage facing the street, a front door the color of eggplant, and a yard full of pebbles and tropical foliage growing so fast you could almost see it move. On the key, the unwritten rule is that the more green stuff you have surrounding your property, the less of it you have covering your yard. Places that are practically in a wilderness therefore have pebble or shell instead of grass.
Mame was behind the glassed front door watching for me. She barked to let me know that while I might have a key to her door, it was still her house.
I love those little dogs. Every miniature dachshund I’ve ever known has been affectionate and up for anything. You want to go for a walk? A miniature dachshund will head for the door with his tail wagging. You want to sit and watch TV? He’ll sit with you and look hard at the screen. You want to play Fetch-the-stuffed-Wal-Mart-toy? He’ll run after it as many times as you throw it. Except for a tenacious streak that makes them determined to explore anything that takes their fancy no matter how much you may try to talk them out of it, dachshunds are among the most amenable pets in the world.
Mame was an auburn longhair with a face blanched by age. In people years, she was pushing ninety, which made it problematic to leave her alone. But the Powells were pushing ninety too, in people years, and there comes a time when you have to make hard choices, and they’d made theirs. They wanted Mame to be at home, not in a boarding kennel, and they didn’t want anybody staying in the house with her.
I squatted to talk to her through the glass before I unlocked the door.
“Hey, Mame, can I come in?”
She stopped barking, but that’s all. In times past, she would have reared up on her hind legs and excitedly waved her front paws at me. Now arthritis and sadness made her simply watch me unlock the door and punch in the access code.
When I was growing up, nobody ever locked their doors on the key. But as more people moved here and we learned to be afraid, we began installing dead bolts and night latches. Now, thanks to slick salesmen and a general uneasiness about the world, a lot of people have security systems. After I’ve unlocked a door with my key, I have to hurry inside and punch the appropriate code on the keypad or an alarm will go off at the security company. If I’m too slow, they will call, and I have to give them my name, my security code name, which differs at each house, and my security code number.