“Yes, I do. You’re going to say, ‘What do you mean, light-headed?’”
He blinked. “Well?”
I laid my cheek back down on the table. “Ugh. I don’t know. I just blacked out for a second, and then the next thing I knew I was flat on my stomach.”
I looked up at Paco just in time to see the faint smile on his lips fade. He was looking at the bump on top of my head.
“So you hit your head when you fell?”
I nodded. “Yeah, it hurt like hell but it’s feeling better now.”
He frowned slightly as he folded up a paper bag and pushed it down in the storage bin under the sink, mumbling, “You should probably get that looked at.”
Michael sat down in the stool opposite me. “Dixie, I still don’t get it. You find out somebody didn’t get their morning paper, so you race over to Levi’s house?”
I said, “Not somebody. A whole bunch of people. Nearly half the people in the diner said their paper never came, and you know Levi, he hasn’t missed a day of work in twenty years.”
“Okay, but still, I don’t understand how you knew something was wrong. You said yourself you thought he was having car trouble. Wouldn’t that explain it right there? I mean, it just doesn’t add up.”
I turned to Paco for help. I can usually count on him to take my side in these kinds of things. He knows as well as I do that Michael tends to worry too much, but he just shrugged. “Do you want to tell him, or should I?”
I said, “Tell him what?”
He cocked his head to the side and grimaced slightly. “Sorry, kid.”
“Okay, first of all, don’t call me ‘kid,’ and second of all, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
I could feel my cheeks getting hot. Paco is an undercover agent with the Sarasota Investigations Bureau, which means he helps catch drug dealers and smugglers and all kinds of assorted bad guys. Technically I’m not supposed to know, but I figured it out a long time ago and now it’s just a house rule that we don’t talk about it. Sometimes he disappears for days or even weeks, during which time Michael and I walk around on eggshells chewing our fingernails. It’s a dangerous job. He’s fluent in at least five languages (including Korean), and his IQ is probably higher than my checking account balance.
In other words, he’s smart.
As Paco and I stared each other down, Michael was looking back and forth between us like a spectator at a tennis game. “Okay, what’s going on?”
I rolled my eyes. “I give up. You tell him, if you think you know so much.”
He sat down next to Michael and put one hand on his shoulder, as if to steady him. “Somebody broke into the Kellers’ house and hit her over the head. That’s why she blacked out.”
I bolted upright as Michael’s jaw fell open and we both said, “What?”
Michael said, “Dixie, what the hell?”
I said, “Paco, you really think so?”
He nodded. “And I was just reading in the paper, there’s been a string of break-ins on the island the past few weeks. They’ve been targeting vacant houses.”
Michael sawed both his hands in the air like a referee on a football field. “Whoa, whoa, whoa! What the hell are you guys talking about?”
Paco shrugged. “I can tell by that bump. When people faint, they usually just keel straight over, so lots of times they’ll have a bloody nose, or an injury to the back or the side of the head.” He turned to me. “I don’t know how you could’ve hit the very top of your head unless you were doing somersaults or backflips when you fainted.”
Michael’s eyes narrowed. He pursed his lips to one side and with a slow, sarcastic edge to his voice said, “Dixie, were you doing somersaults or backflips when you fainted?”
I looked at Paco and then back at Michael, and then reached up and gingerly touched my walnut-sized bump.
I said, “Huh.”
13
It’s probably only a couple hundred feet, but the walk from Michael and Paco’s kitchen to my front door felt like a hundred miles, mainly because my head was spinning all over again—not because I was dizzy, but because I was completely lost in thought as I ambled across the courtyard.
Paco had admitted he was really only making an educated guess about how I got my bump, but he’d also said he was beginning to recognize all the little telltale signs I exhibit when I’m not telling the entire truth … something I sometimes do to protect Michael. Being my older brother hasn’t always been a bed of roses, and he’s got a light sprinkling of gray hair on his head to prove it.
I made a mental note to figure out exactly which telltale signs Paco was referring to, but for now I knew he was on to something: When I woke up and found myself on the floor of the Kellers’ laundry room, I was flat out on my stomach with my cheek smashed into the floor, which Paco said would indicate that I’d fallen straight forward. But if that was the case, why was there a bump on the very top of my head and not a gash on my cheek? Or a black eye? Or, at the very least, a bloody nose?
I didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but if Paco was right, it could mean only one thing: I wasn’t hallucinating when I saw Dick Cheney. And it wasn’t just a dream that he bonked me on the head with a small stone figurine. As for the lit candles on the coffee table and the open doors in the living room—well, it was anybody’s guess. After a blow like that it was a wonder I hadn’t seen a halo of stars and yellow tweety-birds flying around my head.
During my deputy training, we were subjected to a lecture by a retired medical examiner visiting from Orlando who had made a name for herself in the field of forensic osteology. With me wincing the entire time, she had gone down a list of practically every bone in the human body, along with a corresponding list of all the various ways in which each of those bones is most typically broken. When it came to injuries to the top of the skull, she said in nearly every case it was the result of either a physical attack or, strangely enough, falling debris.
It had stuck with me all these years mainly because one of her cases had involved a man who’d been mysteriously killed while taking a stroll all alone in an open field. He had died of a cerebral hemorrhage, and the only sign of injury was a curious dent in the top of his skull. To everyone’s utter horror (including my own) it was later proven that a tiny frozen chunk of wastewater, dropped from an overpassing plane, had landed right on top of him. Ever since then, whenever I hear a plane overhead, I don’t exactly run for cover, but I keep my eyes open.
“Mreeep?”
Just as I was about to unlock the front door, I felt something furry brush up against my ankle and looked down to find Ella Fitzgerald gazing up at me. Ella is technically my cat, but it didn’t take her long to figure out all the good stuff comes out of the main house, so she spends most of her time hanging out with Michael and Paco. She’s a true Persian mix calico—meaning she’s got some Persian in her bloodline and her coat has distinct patches of black, white, and red. She earned her name by the funny scatting sounds she makes.
I said, “Oh, my goodness, Ella! Fancy meeting you here!”
She said, “Thrrrip mrack!” and then walked her paws up my legs, being careful to keep her claws in, and arched her long body as she flicked her snow-white whiskers at me. I handed her the little piece of smoked salmon that I’d snatched out of Michael and Paco’s fridge and winked at her.
“Thanks for coming up with me. I could use a little company right now.”
She downed the salmon in one quick gulp and then squinted her eyes, which in cat language means, I love you. Or it means, I love salmon. Either way, I knew it was a dirty trick on my part, but I didn’t feel like being alone and I knew Ella would follow me upstairs if she sensed I was hiding something yummy. When I handed it over I expected her to go right back down, but instead she waited while I opened the door.