The Cat Sitter and the Canary

by John Clement

  “I did. I felt the wrist. It was her right arm. She was stiff, and there was no pulse and the skin was stone cold, so I knew right away. And everything happened so fast I didn’t have time to do anything else, and I had Charlie with me. He was still on the porch, so I closed the door and locked it. And then I put Charlie in the car and called 911.”

  “Why did you lock the house?”

  I thought for a moment. “I have no idea. I just did.”

  “Okay. Let’s go have a look, but first…”

  She stepped aside, and just behind her was the lanky boy I’d seen earlier. He had taken off his red baseball cap and was hugging it to his chest, smiling meekly. I realized he must have been standing there the entire time. I’d been so riled up I hadn’t even noticed.

  McKenzie said, “Dixie, this is Matthew.”

  He was dressed in a white oxford button-down a couple sizes too big for his skinny frame, tucked into a pair of faded blue jeans that were practically threadbare at the knees. His mop of white-blond hair was parted neatly to one side, falling across his forehead and shading his eyes. He had a moody, almost sad expression on his face, and before he spoke I would have put his age at somewhere around sixteen and a half.

  He put his hand out. “I’m Detective Carthage. Nice to meet you.”

  His voice was deeper than I had expected, and despite the fact that he seemed rather meek and more than a little awkward, his grip was firm and confident. As I shook his hand, McKenzie absentmindedly adjusted the thin scarf around her neck.

  She said, “Yes. Detective Matthew Carthage. I promise I’ll stop doing that eventually. We’re very lucky to have him on our team. He’ll be working with me on a few cases, beginning with this one.”

  I said, “Oh, I thought you were a neighbor … or something.”

  I was about to say neighborhood kid, but luckily I stopped myself in time.

  He blushed. “I’ll be following Detective McKenzie for a few weeks. Learning the ropes, so to speak.”

  McKenzie reached into her shoulder bag. “Well, now that we’ve all met each other…”

  She pulled out an aluminum clipboard with a yellow lined notebook attached, bulging with Post-its and miscellaneous papers folded inside, and as she flipped through the top pages I noticed every square inch from top to bottom was filled with tiny blue handwriting. When she finally came to a blank page, she flipped the whole mess over and secured it to the clipboard with a green rubber band, and then looked me straight in the middle of my forehead.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  At that point, I felt like my brain was swimming in a jar of formaldehyde, but I took a deep breath and did the best I could. I told her everything, starting with my arrival at Caroline’s house the day before, and how Charlie had immediately torn through the living room and scratched the parlor door trying to get to the front foyer. I told her how Caroline had gone on a boat trip with her new boyfriend, and how I’d already tried to call her but she hadn’t answered, and I told her how I’d fallen asleep on the lounge chair by the pool with Gigi on my lap, and how the woman who lives in the house next door had sent a young man over to find me.

  The entire time I was talking she didn’t say a word, and even though her pen was poised over her notepad, she didn’t write anything either. She just watched and listened, occasionally dropping her chin and tilting her head to the left, as if she were conferring with an imaginary bird on her shoulder, but as soon as I mentioned the young man next door, she stopped me.

  “Which house did he come from?”

  I pointed at the big mansion next to Caroline’s. “This one here. It’s…”

  “Elba Kramer. Yes, I know.”

  “He said he was her assistant.”

  Detective Carthage glanced at McKenzie. I imagined he was probably impressed she knew right off the bat who lived next door. He was taking notes on his cell phone, the glow from its screen illuminating his face as his thumbs fluttered over the keyboard with a speed only a teenager could master. His eyes were pale green, his skin clear and smooth, and I wondered whether he was old enough to drive a car, much less be a homicide detective for the Sarasota Sheriff’s Department. He’d probably never even heard of Elba Kramer.

  If McKenzie noticed his reaction, she didn’t let on. “Have you spoken with Ms. Kramer recently?”

  I said, “No. I know who she is, of course, but we haven’t spoken.”

  “And yet she knew you were here. Any idea how?”

  I shook my head. “I just assumed Caroline must have mentioned I’d be here taking care of Franklin and Gigi while she was away. Or maybe she saw my car in the driveway.”

  “And this young man that came over, what did he want?”

  “He said Ms. Kramer wanted to know if I took care of birds and if I could come over and meet with her when I was done.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Short. Boyish face. Dark hair and olive skin, kind of Middle Eastern looking … or maybe Indian?”

  “And did you?”

  “Did I…?”

  She sighed impatiently. “Did you go over and talk to her?”

  “No. Like I said, I’d fallen asleep. It was late and I needed to get Charlie home, so we made plans to meet tonight. In fact, I need to go over there now and let her know what’s happening.”

  “In fact, no.” Without skipping a beat, she turned to Detective Carthage, “Matthew, put somebody on Ms. Kramer’s house until I get a chance to speak to her and her husband. If they want to leave, have somebody get me immediately.”

  He just stood there, staring at his screen with his thumbs paused in midair.

  After a moment, McKenzie said, “Right,” and then raised one hand like she was hailing a taxi.

  Deputy Morgan trotted over. “Ma’am?”

  She lowered her chin. “Would you please put somebody on the house next door until I get a chance to speak with them?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And…”

  Detective Carthage had gone back to typing on his phone, but without looking up he said, “And if they want to leave, have somebody come get us right away.”

  Morgan said, “Yes, sir,” and crossed the sidewalk to one of the deputies standing at the bottom of the driveway.

  McKenzie flipped the pages of her notebook over and closed it. “This assistant, did you get his name?”

  I said, “He gave me his card. It’s an unusual name … Rajinder.”

  “And do you know if Caroline and Elba Kramer are friendly?”

  “No. I mean, Caroline’s never mentioned her.”

  “Alright, then.” She dropped her notebook back down in her shoulder bag and then glanced briefly at Detective Carthage. “One more thing before we go in. Other than Caroline and the people next door, does anyone else know you’re here?”

  I thought for a moment. “Not that I know of. Caroline might have told her boyfriend, but other than that…”

  “No one? You’ve not told anyone else?”

  “No.”

  “You told me when you arrived you thought something was wrong.”

  “Yes.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Why is that?”

  “Nothing happened in particular, but as soon as I got out of the car, I just had a weird feeling. I didn’t really think much of it at the time, but yesterday when I was here, we went in the side door, and Charlie ran straight through the house to the parlor. By the time I got there he had scratched up the door to the front foyer.”

  She frowned. “Why did you go in the side door?”

  “Because…”

  I’m not sure why I hadn’t thought of it before, but now it seemed completely obvious. Everything had happened so fast, and I’d been so worried about Gigi and Franklin and Caroline that I hadn’t stopped to put all the pieces together.

  I said, “Mr. Scotland!”

  She tilted her head to one side. “I’m sorry?”

  “There was a man here. I completely f
orgot. He was on the porch when I drove up yesterday. He was standing on Caroline’s porch, and he had a big suitcase. He thought I was somebody else … he called me Ingrid.”

  I had a view of the house across the street just over Detective McKenzie’s shoulder, and the entire time I was talking I was staring at its darkened windows. It dawned on me that Mr. Scotland might very well be in there now, watching.

  I lowered my voice. “I’m pretty sure he had knocked on Caroline’s door, because he told me nobody was home. He said he was here on vacation, I think from Scotland because he had a really strong accent, and I think he had just arrived, but I didn’t see a cab or anything. He said he was renting a house here, but he got confused because he lost his glasses at the airport. He showed me the piece of paper where he had the address written down. It said number seventeen. This is number fifteen. So he had the right number, but the wrong house.”

  Without turning around, McKenzie drew her notepad back out of her bag. “We’re talking about the house across the street, yes?”

  I nodded.

  “And after he showed you the address, what happened then?”

  “We talked for a little bit, but Charlie was barking at him pretty bad. That’s why I went in the side door because it’s faster and I was trying to get him inside so he wouldn’t bark any more.”

  “And what did this Mr. Scotland look like?”

  “Handsome. Tall, with curly hair sprinkled with gray. He had a suit on, white shirt and tie. His shoes were really shiny and black. Clean shaven. Black eyes.”

  “Did you get his name?

  “Rupert. Rupert Wolff.”

  She clicked the tip of her pen and made a few notes on her notepad while Detective Carthage typed into his phone.

  I said, “With two f’s. He said the second f was for friendly.”

  Neither of them looked up when I said that, but almost in unison they each raised an eyebrow.

  “Oh, and the address was written on a page from a prescription pad, or at least that’s what it looked like.”

  Detective McKenzie said, “And did you notice anything unusual about this man. Did he seem nervous or upset?”

  I thought for a moment and shook my head. “No. The opposite actually.”

  “How so?”

  “He was real smooth, kind of flirty. I got a little creeped out by him, actually.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, he called me … I think his exact words were ‘pretty little thing’ and he made a comment about my ‘booty,’ but I snipped that in the bud right away.”

  “And did you tell this Mr. Scotland your name?”

  “I think I did. Why?”

  She nodded. “So, you showed him which house was number 17, and then you went inside.”

  “Yeah.”

  Her gaze swept across the yard to the front door of Caroline’s house, and her eyes grew suddenly vacant.

  I said, “What is it?”

  She took a deep breath. “It doesn’t add up.”

  “What?”

  “Is there anyone upset with you?”

  “Upset? With me?”

  “Yes. Or anyone you can think of who might have reason to hurt you?”

  I shook my head slowly. “No, but…”

  Detective Carthage looked down at his feet, and just then I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. McKenzie flagged down another deputy.

  She said, “As discreetly as possible, let’s get somebody on the house across the street.” Then she brought her hands together like she was closing a prayer book, and that tight smile reappeared on her lips.

  She gestured toward Caroline’s front porch.

  “Well,” she said. “Shall we?”

  9

  When I was a little girl, I found a baby bird.

  Well, to put it more accurately, it found me. I was in the fifth grade. It was the end of the school year, right before summer break. I’d just gotten out of my last class of the day—Mrs. Bell’s Reading and Writing—and I was skipping down the hall minding my own business, making my way with the other kids to the circular driveway where all the school buses were lined up.

  When I came out the double doors on the side of the building, I heard the eighth-grade girls’ choir practicing in the gymnasium, which doubled as the music room on alternate days after school. It was a separate structure, added some time in the fifties but made of the same sandy limestone blocks as the main building, connected by a long walkway covered with corrugated tin that was painted bright fire-hydrant red.

  I knew I had at least another five or ten minutes before the buses took off, so I dropped my book bag down on the sidewalk and leaned against one of the metal poles to listen. I remember being shocked at how cold the metal felt against my neck, even though it must have been a hundred degrees out, and then something that looked vaguely like a ball of wet dryer lint fell at my feet with a plop.

  I looked up.

  At the top of the pole, where it met the awning overhead, was a metal bracket about two inches wide and six inches long. Tucked into its crook was a tiny bird’s nest made of matted twigs and pieces of string. To this day, I can still remember what the choir was singing—“Danny Boy”—and I can still hear their thin voices rising in unison as I looked down at the baby sparrow at my feet. It was lying flat on its back and staring up at me with terrified eyes …

  But come ye back when summer’s in the meadow

  Or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow

  ’Tis I’ll be here in sunshine or in shadow

  Oh Danny boy, oh Danny boy, I love you so.

  I knew right away I’d miss my bus, and I knew when I didn’t get off at my regular stop my grandmother would be worried sick, and I knew I’d get in trouble when she found out I’d missed it on purpose. But I also knew I couldn’t leave that poor bird alone. It was too young to fly, its feathers were just black downy fluff, and there was no way it could climb back into its nest.

  If I’d had a crystal ball, I’d have known right then that Mrs. Bell would eventually come out and help me put him back and that he would in fact survive, but at the time I didn’t think there was much hope. The chances his mother would accept him after contact with a human being were slim to nothing. And, even worse, it was entirely possible she’d pushed him out of the nest herself to make room for the stronger chicks. I figured all I’d get for my trouble was a dead sparrow and a broken heart.

  I know. It sounds awfully self-centered and morose for a ten-year-old girl, but in my defense, I’d had a bad year. My father had died nine months earlier in the line of duty. He was a fireman, just like my brother is today. He got trapped in a burning building—an old warehouse in downtown Sarasota that turned out to be a storage facility for an illegal cache of fireworks, although no one knew that until it was too late.

  Our mom never fully recovered. Even before, it’s fair to say she wasn’t the most nurturing mother in the world, but our father’s death pushed her over the edge. Her drinking grew progressively worse, and not three months later she decided she was due for a little vacation from life, so she packed up a couple of suitcases, drove Michael and me to our grandparents’ place, and then disappeared off the face of the earth. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen her since.

  As I knelt down with a sigh and looked into the bird’s tiny black eyes, I was naive enough to think I’d already endured enough tragedy in my ten short years to last a lifetime.

  I remember thinking, Why me?

  * * *

  I was walking along the edge of Caroline’s yard with Detective McKenzie and Detective Carthage following close behind, surrounded by flashing emergency lights and strings of police tape, and I’m ashamed to admit those very same words were lurking somewhere in the back of my mind. Why me? There’d been a group of deputies talking quietly in the road when we walked over, but now they seemed to have stepped away into the background. In fact, the entire street had grown eerily quiet.<
br />
  McKenzie said, “Dixie, if you can, try to remember the exact path you took when you arrived, and stay on it.”

  Caroline’s driveway, like most of the houses on her street, isn’t poured concrete. It’s terra-cotta pavers, set at alternating angles to form a repeating starburst pattern, so as we turned toward the house, I counted the stars at my feet in a vain attempt to keep myself from flying into a panic.

  I knew why McKenzie wanted me to follow the same path. She didn’t want me disturbing things any more than they already had been. There’s a term detectives use, mostly in private, for all the local deputies, police officers, and ambulance drivers that first arrive at a crime scene. It’s EMT. Short for “evidence mangling technician.” As EMTs move through the scene attending to victims, the likelihood that they’ll bring in foreign materials, either from clothing or equipment, is extraordinarily high. It’s just as likely they’ll take crucial evidence with them when they leave: a microscopic flake of skin stuck to the sole of a shoe or a tiny hair accidentally folded into a hospital sheet.

  Every crime is like a puzzle, and the more serious the crime, the greater the number of potential pieces that can be scattered far and wide. In the case of a murder, every single surface—every blade of grass, every stone, every crack in the floorboards—can harbor a crucial secret. It might be a droplet of blood, a piece of dirt lodged in the carpet, or a tiny sliver of foil from a packet of chewing gum. It’s all held together as delicately as the winged seeds of a thistle, and just the slightest change in the air can send pieces floating off in every direction, never to be found again. That could mean the difference between solving the mystery of what happened and leaving a murderer to roam the streets.

  When we got to the porch steps, I stayed to the right, not necessarily because I remembered how I’d gone before, but because I knew Charlie had been on his leash, and I always keep dogs to the left when I’m walking them. At the big picture window, McKenzie asked me to wait. She went over and stood in the open doorway as she pulled a pair of blue latex gloves out of her bag and slipped them on. There was a camera flash from inside the house.