“Dixie, I wanted to let you know our crime units are pulling out of the Harwick house now.”
I said, “Oh, okay. I guess I can bring the cat back?”
“That’s why I’m calling. Mrs. Harwick isn’t coming home yet. She’s afraid to sleep in the house until the killer has been caught. She’s asked if you could continue to feed her fish for a little while longer.”
I could tell by the tone in McKenzie’s voice that Mrs. Harwick was probably still in a state of shock. If it were me, I don’t think I’d ever want to go home again.
The last time we had talked, McKenzie mentioned that a doctor had been called in for Mrs. Harwick, probably to prescribe some sort of sedative to help her sleep. I wanted to know if that had helped at all, but I knew it wasn’t my place to ask.
McKenzie said, “Still no word from Kenny Newman?”
I closed my eyes and silently shook my head. “Oh, no.”
“What? I’m assuming you’ve not heard from him?”
I sighed. “Detective McKenzie, he showed up at my apartment late last night. I’m sorry I didn’t call you. He promised he was turning himself in as soon as he left. I just assumed he was telling the truth.”
There was a slight pause on the line, and then she said, “We need to talk. Where’s convenient for you?”
* * *
We agreed to meet near the pavilion at Siesta Key Beach. We were alone except for a group of teenagers in swimming trunks and bikinis, huddled around their soft drinks and eating hot dogs at one of the picnic tables. They were tearing little pieces of their hot dog buns and tossing them to the sparrows that were pecking around under the tables.
Detective McKenzie was waiting for me at one of the benches that face the beach. In her plain tan skirt and navy blue blazer, she stood out like a sore thumb. I got the feeling she didn’t spend a lot of time on the beach, and she had probably never worn a bikini in her life. She was wearing a pair of big-framed sunglasses, and her frizzy sorrel hair was pulled under a wide-brimmed straw hat, which provided some protection for her pale, freckled skin from the hot afternoon sun.
When I walked up, she stood and shook my hand firmly.
“Thanks for meeting me, Dixie. It’s much easier to talk in person than on the phone.”
I muttered something vague like “Sure is,” but the truth was I didn’t want to talk to her at all. For some insane reason I still felt a lingering loyalty to Kenny, some inexplicable desire to protect him, even though he’d given me his word that he would turn himself in to the police as soon as he left my apartment. Apparently he’d had other plans.
As I sat down she said, “First of all, does he have Becca?”
I shook my head sadly. “No. He says he has no idea where she is.”
“Alright. And I don’t suppose he told you where he’s staying.”
I shook my head again. “No.”
She smiled uncomfortably. “Well, now that we’ve got that over with. Tell me everything that happened last night.”
I told her the entire story, including how Kenny had asked me not to let the police hear the message he’d left on my answering machine. She pulled her clipboard out of her bag and made a few notes as I talked, but she didn’t say a word until I got to the part where Kenny said he was Mr. Harwick’s son.
She held up one hand to stop me. “Wait a minute. He’s been working in the Harwick house for months.”
“I know. He was going to tell them who he was, but I think he was scared.”
“So he never told them?”
“He did. He called Mr. Harwick.”
“When?”
“The night before I found him in the pool.”
“Does Mrs. Harwick know about this?”
I said, “I don’t think so. Mr. Harwick was whispering on the phone, so Kenny got the impression he was trying to hide it from her. They agreed to meet at the house, and Mr. Harwick drove back from Tampa that night. They met alone. He told Kenny he was sorry, and he wanted to make it up to him. He said he would buy Kenny a house and give him money and put him in his will, but Kenny didn’t want anything to do with it. He told Mr. Harwick that he wasn’t there for money. He just wanted his father to tell him to his face why he had run away.”
She took off her sunglasses and looked me squarely in the eye. “Dixie, let me get this straight. It’s the middle of the night. This man who’s been missing since Mr. Harwick drowned shows up at your door out of nowhere. You know the police are looking for him. You’re all alone. Why in the world would you let him in your house?”
I wasn’t sure how to respond, but I suddenly felt my cheeks turning red. “Well … I wasn’t alone, actually.”
She waved her hand like a teacher erasing a chalkboard. “Okay, forget that. Why would you let him in your house at all?”
I thought for a moment, but I couldn’t come up with a good answer. “It was stupid. I shouldn’t have let him in. I guess I trusted him.”
She put her sunglasses back on. “Yes, I’m beginning to see that. So how did their meeting end?”
“Kenny told Mr. Harwick he didn’t want anything from him, including his money. And to prove it, he gave him an envelope with all the letters that Mr. Harwick had ever sent him, including checks that he never cashed.”
I paused for a moment. I knew that what I was about to say was not going to sound good, but I also knew I didn’t have a choice. “He also said that he told his father he could take his money and rot in hell. Then he left.”
Detective McKenzie frowned. “This packet of letters, did he say where it was?”
“No. He said he gave it to Mr. Harwick before he left.”
She nodded. “That’s interesting. There was no packet of letters in that house when we searched it.”
The teenagers had gone down to the beach and were running in and out of the waves and laughing in that carefree way kids do. A small brown sparrow perched on the table next to ours and pitched a couple of bossy chirps at us. I think he was checking to see if we had any hot dog buns for him.
It was hard to tell what Detective McKenzie was thinking. She had laid her clipboard down in her lap and was resting her hands on it.
“Dixie, tell me what you know about Becca.”
“I’ve only met her a couple of times, but she seems like a sweet girl, just a little in over her head.”
“Mrs. Harwick tells me that Becca can be emotional. Does that sound right to you?”
“Yeah, I would say she definitely has a flare for the dramatic.”
“And that day you found her crying on the floor in her parents’ bathroom, did you wonder why she was there, instead of her own room?”
“No. It’s a pretty nice bathroom, and the aquarium is kind of soothing, so I got the impression she spent a lot of time in there.”
“Did anything seem strange about her?”
I said, “Other than that she was totally freaking out?”
“I understand she was upset, but the way you described it made me wonder if there wasn’t something else going on, something that might have been influencing her behavior.”
“You mean … like drugs?”
She nodded.
“It’s possible. Like I said, I didn’t know her before all this, so I couldn’t say if the way she was acting was normal for her or not. But she did say her brother had been involved with drugs. That’s why he got a job at the golf club, because the Harwicks cut him off when they found out.”
She nodded. “Mrs. Harwick mentioned that. She also told me she overheard an argument between Becca and August. Apparently something was missing from August’s room, but Becca denied having anything to do with it. Do you know what that might have been about?”
“No. She didn’t say anything about that to me.”
“Alright, one last thing. I keep going back to your porcupine fish. You didn’t notice if it was alarmed that morning you talked to Becca?”
“No, definitely not, I would have remembered that for sure
.”
“Do you think a loud noise could have caused it to puff up like it did?”
“Definitely. Especially if the noise was nearby.”
Detective McKenzie pursed her lips together. I could tell she was making an effort to choose her words carefully.
“Like a scream, for example. Could a scream have set off that kind of reaction?”
I nodded slowly. “I think any loud noise could have set it off.”
“Okay. That’s helpful.”
I looked down at my hands. “Detective McKenzie, do you think Becca is still alive?”
She looked at the water for a long time. Eventually I figured out that she wasn’t going to answer me, which was fine. Her silence was answer enough. No matter what had happened the night Kenny met with Mr. Harwick, the fact that Becca had been missing ever since was not a good sign. If she had witnessed what had happened, it was possible that she had been discovered hiding in the bathroom. Becca was tough, but she was still just a teenager and probably not more than a hundred pounds. I don’t think she would have been able to defend herself. Whoever killed Mr. Harwick that night might have taken her. Or worse.
Detective McKenzie turned to me and said, “When my husband died, I felt like I was instantly a member of a secret club, where only people who’ve lost a husband or a wife before their time can understand me. Do you ever feel that way?”
I waited a couple of moments before I answered. “Yeah. I know exactly what you mean. It’s like a club you wish you weren’t in, but you’re glad it’s there all the same.”
“Yes. That’s exactly it. I don’t know what it’s like to lose a child, Dixie, but I imagine it must be that same feeling, multiplied a million times over.”
I nodded. That felt about right.
We sat for a while longer, not talking, just watching the kids play on the beach. I think we were both thinking the same thing: For every hour that Becca was missing, the odds that she was alive got smaller and smaller.
It was bad enough that Mrs. Harwick was now a card-carrying member of Detective McKenzie’s secret club. I hoped with all my heart that she wasn’t about to be a member of mine.
I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.
22
After Detective McKenzie left, I stayed a while longer and watched the waves crashing in on the beach. Our meeting had left me reeling, and I just needed to sit and rest for a while. There was something about that woman that always made me feel like I’d just lived through a hurricane or run a ten-mile marathon. She was drab and plain on the outside, but on the inside her mind was spinning at about a hundred miles an hour.
I bought a hot dog from the food stand at the beach pavilion and slathered it with hot mustard and relish. By the time I got halfway to the car I’d already downed it, so I went right back and bought another one.
Sitting in the Bronco in the parking lot, I chewed on my second hot dog and tried to sort everything out in my head. McKenzie had hinted that August wasn’t the only one in the Harwick family with a drug problem. If Becca had been high on something, I wasn’t sure I would have recognized it. I never did drugs when I was a kid, and neither did Michael. Not that I was a goody-two-shoes or anything; it’s just that living by the ocean was a good enough high for me. Plus, I’m sure my grandmother would have taken a belt to my backside if she’d ever caught wind of drugs under her roof. My grandmother was a pretty strict guardian, but she never spanked me with a belt, and I wanted to keep it that way.
There was something else bothering me, though. When I mentioned the packet of letters that Kenny had given his father before he left, Detective McKenzie seemed genuinely puzzled, and I didn’t think it was some kind of trick she was trying out on me. She had probably known right away what was just now trickling into my brain: Either Mr. Harwick had hidden that packet somewhere in the house before he was killed, or someone had taken it.
Of course, there was one more possibility: that Kenny had made the whole thing up and was playing me. He knew I would report everything he said to the police.
My second hot dog wasn’t nearly as satisfying as the first, but I ate it all anyway. Sometimes my stomach doesn’t listen to my brain. At Beach Road, I turned left and took the long route around the Key toward the Harwick house. To be honest, I wasn’t looking forward to being in that house alone. Up until now it had been filled with crime-scene technicians and police every time I’d gone over, but now it would be empty.
On the way, I called the Kitty Haven. Now that the investigation at the Harwick house was over, I wondered if Charlotte might be happier at home, even if it meant staying there alone. Being in a strange place with so many other cats can be stressful, especially for a cat as grumpy as Charlotte, and sometimes grumps like to be left alone. Believe me, I know that from firsthand experience.
Marge said, “No, she’s doing just fine. Not nearly as jittery as she was when you first brought her in. Jaz has been spending lots of time with her, and cats always pick up on the energy of the people around them. You know Jaz, she’s always happy.”
That was welcome news, not just for Charlotte but for Jaz as well. When I’d first met her, there were a lot of things you might have called Jaz, but happy was not one of them. It seemed working with Marge at the Kitty Haven was doing her a world of good.
I thanked Marge and told her I didn’t think it would be much longer before Charlotte could go back home, even though I really didn’t know if that was true or not. Detective McKenzie had made me wonder if Mrs. Harwick would ever go back home again. I figured August might be moving back in at some point, but it was entirely possible that he’d be staying with his mother until she was back on her feet.
When I pulled up to the Harwick house, the first thing I noticed was that all the yellow police tape was gone. Luckily for me, the gang of reporters that had been hanging out on the street had finally picked up shop and moved on, too. Until the coroner’s report on Mr. Harwick was made public, there wouldn’t be anything new to report. They were probably all camped out at Mrs. Harwick’s hotel, hoping to get a shot of the fabulously wealthy grieving widow.
When I opened the front door, my heart did a little skip. The alarm didn’t make its familiar beeping sound, which meant someone had turned it off. I immediately had that same creepy feeling I’d had the morning I found Mr. Harwick—that someone was in the house.
I rolled my eyes and said out loud, “Oh, get over it!”
I dropped my ring of keys into its pocket on my backpack and went over to the marble staircase and called up. “August?”
There was nothing but silence.
Then I realized, of course the alarm wasn’t on. The crime-scene units had only finished their work today. I doubted they even knew the code to set the alarm.
I let out a big sigh of relief and told myself I needed to stop being so dramatic. But just to be on the safe side, I went back over and locked the front door. That’s when I smelled it. Cigarette. Something moved in the corner of my eye. I walked through the main entry where the two Roman statues were standing guard and saw the back of someone’s head.
Mrs. Harwick was sitting on the couch in the living room, staring out at the pool. A plume of white smoke was trailing up from a cigarette perched on the edge of the coffee table.
I stepped lightly up to her side. “Mrs. Harwick?”
She turned her head in my direction but didn’t look directly at me. “Oh, Dixie. I didn’t hear you come in.”
“I’m so sorry to interrupt you. I didn’t realize anyone was home. I just stopped by to check on the fish.”
“Oh, good.” She stared blankly ahead, her eyes fixed on the pool area. “The police left a little while ago. I came by to get a few of my things. I was going to send the driver in to get them for me, but at the last minute I changed my mind. I told him to leave me here and come back in an hour.”
Her voice was small and distant, as if it were locked away inside a safe.
“Mrs. Harwick, I’m so sorr
y.”
“Oh, thank you, Dixie. I’m sorry, too. That must have been a terrible ordeal for you.”
She tilted her head to the side and closed her eyes.
I suddenly realized that I’d completely intruded on her quiet, and more than likely she just wanted to be left alone.
I said, “Well, I’ll just check on the fish and then I’ll be out of your way.”
As I turned to leave, she stopped me.
“It’s so odd, isn’t it? You think you know people. I’ve never been very close to my son, August. He’s always been a little distant, even when he was a baby. People say that’s just the way boys are. Maybe it’s true. It’s always been Becca that was there when I needed her. But not this time. Not now. Becca’s gone. To be honest with you, I think she’s gotten herself mixed up with drugs, and now it’s August taking care of me. All the paperwork, the police, everything. I don’t know what I would do without him.”
My first instinct was to tell her I was sure that if Becca could be here she would, which of course was about the dumbest thing I could possibly have ever said. Sometimes my mouth starts running before my brain has any idea what’s going on. As my grandmother liked to say, “The wheel is spinning but the gerbil ain’t home.”
Luckily this time I caught myself. Mrs. Harwick was in a state of deep shock. She knew Becca was missing, but she’d somehow managed to avoid considering what everybody else feared: that Becca might have witnessed something that night, and right now could be in very grave danger.
I said, “I know Becca’s been going through a lot of things in her life. When you’re a teenager, sometimes you think the world revolves around you. You shouldn’t take it personally.”
She was sitting perfectly still, her back ramrod straight, staring numbly out at the swimming pool.
She said, “Becca and I were riding bikes one morning. She couldn’t have been more than five or six, because I remember her bike still had training wheels. We were coming around a curve, and I rolled over a stick that had fallen in the path. It popped up and got stuck in the bicycle chain. The next thing I knew I was flying over the handlebars. I landed flat on my face. It nearly knocked me out. Becca saw me fall, but she just kept on riding. I remember her little legs just pumping away on the pedals.”
The Cat Sitter's Cradle Page 18