Jaz and the man spoke over each other again. He said, “She can’t do that.”
She said, “Yeah, I can do that.”
I tried not to grin. Anybody who knows Hetty knows she usually gets what she sets her mind on. I figured she would have the girl at her house within the hour, maybe sooner. Dr. Layton seemed to think so too. With a happier look on her face than she’d had before, she motioned me to the reception counter where Big Bubba waited in the travel cage.
At the counter, I looked over my shoulder at Jaz and her stepfather. He had jammed both hands in his trouser pockets and was gazing at the ceiling with the look of a man at the end of his rope. Jaz had moved to squat beside Ben and pet him while she talked to Hetty.
Dr. Layton said, “There was a touch of eosinophilia in Big Bubba’s tracheal wash, but I suspect he’s reacting to the red tide like everybody else. Keep him indoors until it’s over. If it gets worse, I can give him some antihistamines, but I’d rather treat it by removing the allergen.”
I wasn’t surprised. A bloom of microscopic algae, red tide’s technical name is Karenia brevis, but by any name it’s nasty stuff that causes respiratory irritations and watery eyes for people and pets. We get the bloom almost every September when Gulf breezes begin coming from the west, but this year it had started a month early. I promised Dr. Layton I would keep Big Bubba indoors for the duration of the bloom and carried him out the door.
I don’t imagine Hetty or Jaz or the man noticed me leave. They were all too caught up in their own intentions.
Afterward, I would look back on that brief encounter in Dr. Layton’s waiting room and wonder if there was any way I could have prevented all the coming danger. At the time, all I knew was that a girl who called herself Jaz but was really named Rosemary was desperately unhappy, that her stepfather’s nerves were shot, and that he wore an underarm holster.
2
I left Dr. Layton’s office with Big Bubba’s travel cage draped with a sheet and strapped in the backseat of my Bronco. The sun was knee-high on the horizon, giving the early August air a gauzy quiver that made all the lush foliage and flowers look even more beautiful than usual, like a scrim laid over the world to hide tiny imperfections.
Siesta Key is a semitropical island, so our landscape is a riot of greenery and color. It doesn’t make a lot of horticultural sense, but plants grow like crazy in our sandy soil. Gardeners on the key do more cutting back than fertilizing, and they’re always behind in keeping up with the rampant growth. Bougainvillea climbs all over the place, orchids nestle in the crotches of oak trees, hibiscus flings red and yellow flowers in every yard, ixora gets trimmed into red-blossomed hedges, and every flowering tree in the world seems to find its way here. We’re definitely a technicolor island.
The few extra minutes I’d spent at the vet’s had eaten into my time, but I drove more slowly than I usually do so as not to throw Big Bubba off balance. The sheet covering his cage kept him from freaking out at the passing trees, but he was so upset at being away from home that every now and then he squawked “Hey!” just to let me know he wasn’t happy.
Siesta Key lies between the Gulf of Mexico and Sarasota Bay, and stretches north to south. I’m told it’s about the same size as Manhattan, which may explain why so many New Yorkers have second homes on the key. I don’t know how many people live in Manhattan, but Siesta Key has around seven thousand year-round residents, with that number swelling to about twenty-two thousand during “season,” when it’s cold in Manhattan and other unfortunate places.
Two drawbridges connect us to Sarasota, and every hour or so a tall-masted boat sails through while cars wait. For the most part, we’re a peaceable community. So peaceable that only one sworn Sarasota County deputy is assigned to handle our crimes—sworn meaning carrying a gun. Otherwise, for things like lost bikes or squabbles over who’s responsible for the damage done by a fallen tree limb, unsworn officers of the sheriff’s Community Policing unit keep us on the straight and narrow.
Midnight Pass Road runs the length of the island, with condos and tourist hotels sharing space with private walled estates, and narrow lanes twisting off to residential areas. We have fifty miles of waterways inside the key, so most of our streets are as meandering as the canals they follow. Our sunsets are the most spectacular in the world, our trees are full of songbirds, our shorelines are busy with stick-legged waterbirds, and our waters are inhabited not just by fish but also by playful dolphins and gentle manatees. I’ve never lived anywhere else, and I never will. I can’t imagine why anyone would.
On the key, you live either on the Gulf side or the bay side of Midnight Pass Road. Big Bubba lived at the south end, on the bay side, in a quiet, secluded residential area too old to have a formal name. A swath of nature preserve separated the private homes from a plush resort hotel on the bay.
Big Bubba’s human was Reba Chandler. She had recently retired from teaching psychology at New College and was on a boat gliding down some river in the south of France. I had known Reba and Big Bubba since I was in high school, when Reba had trusted me to take care of Big Bubba while she was away on vacations. Back then, it had been a teenager’s way to make easy money. Now it was my profession. Funny how life loops back on itself like that.
Like most of the houses in Reba’s old-Florida enclave, hers was at the end of a shelled driveway with a thick wall of palms and sea grape screening it from the street. Reba called it her “bird house” because it had been built when people planned ahead for flooding, so it stood on tall stilty legs. Most people who have houses of that era have enclosed the lower part, but Reba had left hers as it was originally, with ferns growing under the house and a flight of stairs to a narrow railed porch. Built of cypress, the house had weathered silvery gray. Hurricane shutters that had begun life a deep turquoise had become pale aqua over the years, giving the house the look of a charming woman who had become more lovely as she aged.
When I pulled up to the house, my Bronco’s tires made loud scrunching noises on the shell, a sound that Big Bubba must have recognized.
From his covered cage, he hollered, “Hello, there! Hello, there! Did you miss me?”
I parked in the driveway and opened the back door to get his cage. “We’re home, Big Bubba.”
He made aaawking sounds and yelled “Did you miss me?” I grinned because that was what Reba had always said to him when she came home from school.
I carried him up the steps and unlocked the front door. Ordinarily, Big Bubba lives in a large cage on the screened lanai, but to protect him from the red tide invasion, I took him to his smaller cage in the glassed-in sunroom. African Greys are temperamental birds. When they’re upset they can take a good-sized chunk out of your finger, so I placed the travel cage so Big Bubba could hop from one cage to the other by himself. Back in familiar territory, he marched back and forth on a wooden perch, bobbing his head and giving me the one-eyed bird glare while I put out fresh seed and water for him.
Congo African Greys are the most talkative and intelligent of all parrots, and they’re strikingly beautiful. With gleaming gray feathers, they sport white rings around their eyes that look like spectacles, and they have jaunty red feathers partially hidden under their tail feathers. Like all intelligent creatures, they bore easily. If they spend too much time without something to entertain them, they’re liable to become self-destructive and pull out their tail feathers. People who take on African Greys as companions have to be smart and inventive or they’ll end up with naked birds.