Cat Sitter Among the Pigeons (16 page)

The living room was equally charming, with Oriental rugs and paintings that looked as if a decorator had chosen them to match the color scheme. Staying well back from wide windows veiled in sheer curtains, I took in a ceiling with pecky-cypress beams. The brick on the fireplace looked old. Myra had probably robbed it from some medieval castle.

Scuttling through the living room as fast as I could, I raced through a slew of richly decorated downstairs rooms, then took heart-pine stairs to the second floor. The house was shadowy and quiet, the way an empty house would be. But I didn’t believe the house was empty. I believed a young Latin American woman was in it. Perhaps willingly, perhaps as a prisoner.

Careful not to let the soles of my Keds squeak on the wooden floors, I walked as quickly as I could down a central hall with doors on each side, some closed, some open. I sped down the hall looking first into every open door, then retraced my steps to check the rooms with closed doors. It was deathly quiet, and a nugget of doubt began to work its way into my brain. Maybe I’d been wrong, maybe the young woman I’d seen wasn’t here.

One closed door led to a bedroom in which a satin dressing gown was tossed over the foot of the bed, and the scent of expensive perfume hung in the air. I guessed it was Myra’s, but I didn’t take time to investigate. Another door led to a guest room with a king-size bed, gender-free maroon bedspread, a long dresser, and two club chairs. It smelled of furniture polish, and had a private bath with rolled stacks of maroon towels. Another led to a no-frills bedroom with a beige tailored spread on a double bed. The bedspread was rumpled, as if something had been moved around on it, and the wooden floor had the kind of detritus that falls out of opened purses or luggage—tiny shreds of tissue, bits of foil from chewing gum wrappers, a broken rubber band. This bedroom also had a private bath. The towels were white and not as plush as the maroon ones. A damp washcloth had been carefully folded over the lip of the sink.

In my imagination, I saw the young dark-haired woman pack a cheap suitcase she’d laid on the bed, saw her wash her face and hands, saw her take time to fold her washcloth before she hurried from the room. She hadn’t had time to smooth the bedspread or pick up what the luggage had shed when she’d opened it.

I had been wrong about the young woman being in the house, and I had to get out before Myra returned. Downstairs, I skittered through the living room and into the kitchen. At the side door, I reached to turn the knob. The crunch of approaching footsteps on the gravel path made me jerk my hand away.

Like a cornered rat, I ran back into the kitchen, my eyes darting back and forth for any hiding spot. The side doorknob rattled, and I dived for the lower doors on the baker’s cabinet. The angels that protect idiots must have been with me, because that base section was empty and big enough for me to wedge myself into. I pulled the doors closed and held my breath while footsteps clattered from the laundry room.

Of all the pin-headed, numb-nutted, dumb-assed things I’d ever done, this one was the star on the tree. My chin dug into my knees, my fingers gripped my tight-folded legs, and I didn’t dare take a good breath for fear the person who’d just come in would hear me. If I sneezed or coughed, I was done for.

Four feet away from my hiding place, Myra’s voice said, “Tuck? Where are you? Why aren’t you answering your cell?”

She waited a beat and then grew more shrill. “Vern scared Angelina and she ran away. Went out on the highway and some woman picked her up and brought her to a bodega on Clark Road. You have to drive her back there. Call me as soon as you get this.”

A softer voice said, “I will not stay in house with that man.” She spoke with an accent, and with a Latin rhythm.

With daggers in every word, Myra said, “Angelina, do you remember what I told you would happen to your mother if you broke your promise?”

“That man say if I don’t do what he wants, he will give me to those alligators. Big alligators, both sides of the road.”

Myra muttered, “Son of a bitch.”

A cell phone beeped, and Myra snarled an answer. “Tuck, you’ve got to take control of that damned man! He stayed in the house with Angelina and threatened her.”

A pause, and then, “What do you mean, you can’t take her back? You have to! I can’t take the time to drive forty miles to that house! I have a million things to do before the trial starts.”

Another pause, and Myra made a groaning sound of pure fury. I imagined she had bared her teeth.

Silence stretched, and Myra heaved an exaggerated sigh. “All right, I’ll drive her! But you have to take care of Vern!”

Another silence. “Okay. Okay. When your meeting is over, call me.”

She must have closed her phone, because her next words were to Angelina. “Mr. Tucker says for you to be a good girl and keep your promise so nothing bad will happen to your mother. I’ll drive you back to the house, and you must not leave again.”

“I not stay in house with that man.”

“Mr. Tucker promises the man won’t bother you again.”

Angelina made mumbling noises of reluctant assent.

Cowering in my tight quarters, I listened to Myra’s high heels clicking to the side door along with Angelina’s soft padding. The door opened and closed.

I waited until I was sure they weren’t coming back, then eased my cramped self out of the baker’s cabinet and limped to the side door. When I stuck my head out, I didn’t see anybody. I slipped out the door, pulled it closed, and sauntered to the Bronco as nonchalantly as I could manage. The deputy’s car was still at the curb. The neighborhood looked the same. The only thing that had changed was me.

In the Bronco, a surge of adrenaline caused me to grip the steering wheel and tremble for a while. When the shakes passed, I started the motor and drove away in a state of euphoric frustration. I had learned some valuable information, but I wasn’t sure what it was.

Neither Myra nor Angelina had mentioned a baby. But I would have bet my entire collection of white Keds that Vern had taken Opal and Angelina to a house somewhere forty miles away where Vern had scared Angelina so much she’d run away. If I was right, she had left Opal alone with Vern.

With my head pounding from exhaustion, stress, and hunger, I headed home, where the carport looked bleakly empty and the shorebirds walking along the edge of the surf seemed sad and dispirited. In my bathroom, I was shocked when I saw my reflection in the mirror. My skin was streaked with a greasy film of gray smoke, my eyes were red-rimmed and pink-veined, and my hair clung to my scalp in heavy dull strands. I not only felt like hell, I looked like hell.

Peeling off my smoke-stinking clothes, I stuffed them in the washer. Cupcake’s wrinkled card fluttered to the floor, and I retrieved it and put it in my bag. Just knowing it had been in Cupcake’s big warm hand gave the card a peculiar kind of power I wanted to hold on to.

As I got into a hot shower, I heard my cell phone’s distinctive ring reserved for Michael, Paco, or Guidry. I let it ring. I was too tired and too nasty to talk to anybody. As blessed hot water sluiced over my skin and hair and washed away the odor and fatigue, I realized that I was still shaking. Fine tremors seemed to be emanating from my bones, traveling through my flesh and jittering my skin in a combination of adrenaline, exhaustion, fear, and shame.

When I was sure I was free of the stench and grime from smoke, I stepped out of the shower, toweled off, and pulled a shaky comb through my hair. Walking like a feeble old woman, I shuffled to my bed and crawled under the covers, already halfway into the oblivion of sleep.

I dreamed I was in some cavernous place where shadowy forms moved around me. I knew they carried important information, but none of them would come close so I could find out what it was. When I chased them, they dissolved, and when I stood still and begged them to come to me, they turned into hard boulders that couldn’t move.

A banging at my french doors pulled me from the dream. Guidry was on the porch yelling my name. I groaned. There are times in a relationship when you are ecstatic to see the other person, and there are times when you just want to be left the hell alone.

Louder, Guidry yelled, “Dixie?”

I groaned again and slid out of bed. I was halfway to the door when I remembered I was stark naked, so I detoured to the closet and grabbed a sleepshirt. Not that Guidry hadn’t seen me naked before, but answering the door wearing nothing but skin seemed just wrong. Decently covered, I yanked open the french doors. In the next instant, Guidry was holding me close and I was blubbering all over his nice linen jacket.

He said, “Owens called me and told me about the fire.”

I sobbed, “They took Opal.”

“The baby?”

I rubbed my face up and down against his chest. “Uh-huh.”

“Who? Who took her?”

I opened my mouth to answer him, and the little male secretary in my brain who zips around opening file drawers to retrieve information when I need it came to a screeching halt. Whirling to a specific filing cabinet, he whipped out a file marked “Officers of the Law Are Required to Report All Crimes of Which They Have Knowledge.”

Once again, I was faced with the partnered-person’s dilemma. I had good reason to believe that Vern had taken Opal and put her in a house forty miles away. But I had to choose between gut instinct, which was to share my awful secret with Guidry, and the knowledge that his integrity as an officer of the law would compel him to take actions that might lead to Opal’s death.

Pulling away from him, I wiped away tears with both hands. It gave me an excuse not to look up at Guidry.

“It may have been Vern. Or it could have been a cleaning woman who was at the Stern house yesterday.”

My little brain secretary smiled and replaced the file.

“Owens said the fire was arson.”

“That’s what Michael said, too. He saved Cheddar.”

“Cheddar?”

“Mr. Stern’s cat. Cheddar was in the bedroom with Opal, and he hid under the bed. Michael found him and brought him out to the EMTs and they gave him oxygen. He’s at the animal hospital now, but they think he’s going to be okay.”

Guidry smoothed my damp hair back from my forehead. “What about you? Are you going to be okay?”

I burst into sobs again. Stood there and bawled like a two-year-old. “I’m hungry, and Michael’s at the firehouse and I don’t have anything to eat.”

Guidry chuckled and pulled me into his arms again. “Tell you what, I’ll cook dinner for you tonight at my place.”

I wailed, “I’m not crying because I’m hungry.”

“I know.”

“I didn’t know you could cook.”

“You still don’t. It’s only a theory.”

He squeezed me in a hug, kissed the top of my head, and released me. “You need to sleep. I’ll see you tonight.”

Crying, hiccuping, and sniffling, I watched him walk across my porch. I watched him go down the stairs until his head disappeared from view. Then I pulled the french doors closed, pushed the button to lower the folding metal hurricane shutters, and shuffled back to bed, sobbing all the way. I was still crying when I fell asleep. Maybe I even cried while I slept.

21

My nap lasted only about fifteen minutes, way too short, and I woke feeling headachy and depressed. The headache was a no-food-since-last-night dullness. The depression was a crushing weight made from worry about what was happening to Opal, wondering where Vern had taken Opal, and guilt from being partially responsible for the sheriff’s office including in its list of suspects an innocent cleaning woman already torn by grief over losing a baby.

I padded to the kitchen and put on water for tea. I thought about going downstairs to Michael’s kitchen and raiding his refrigerator, but I couldn’t dredge up energy for more than pouring water over tea bags. While I drank a cup of under-brewed tea, I wondered how long it would take Sergeant Owens to remove the cleaning woman from his suspects.

When I couldn’t stand it any more, I pulled out my cellphone and dialed his number. It was engraved in my memory from my days as a deputy.

When Sergeant Owens answered, I said, “This is Dixie. I just wondered if you’d got any leads about the kidnapped baby.”

He sounded surprised. Not at my curiosity, but that I’d called him.

Carefully, as if he didn’t want to hurt my feelings, Owens said, “I know you’re concerned about the baby, Dixie. We all are. But it may take time to find her. We’ve put out an Amber Alert, and we have people searching the neighborhood. We also have the cleaning woman’s full name. Doreen Antone. We’ve tracked down her address, but nobody’s home and her car’s gone. We’ve talked to Doreen’s boyfriend, and he said she might have gone to her sister’s in Alabama. He’s thick as a board, doesn’t know where the sister lives, like what town, but he knows Doreen is from Alabama and that she has a sister there. We’ve alerted airports and bus stations and put out an APB to be on the lookout for an overweight young Caucasian woman with a four-month-old baby. We’re checking high school records, DMV records, everything we can. We’ll find her.”

My chest felt as if a trapped eagle were inside flapping its wings against my heart in a desperate search for truth that would lead to freedom. But the terrible truth was that Myra and Tucker had more money than all the law enforcement agencies in the country. Money is power, and Myra and Tucker were ruthless in their use of it. If I told Sergeant Owens that following Doreen Antone was a useless expenditure of department energy and money, I’d have to tell him the truth about Opal being held in a house forty miles away. That could lead to Tucker learning he was a suspect. If he did, Opal could be dead and disposed of in an hour. I couldn’t jeopardize Opal’s safety by telling Owens the truth. Like Ruby, I had to swallow my honor and accept the unacceptable.

I thanked Owens, apologized for taking his time, and rang off with more worry and remorse than I’d felt before I called. Knowing about Ruby’s tacit agreement with Tucker and Myra had given me the ability to see the future with an awful clarity. At Myra’s trial, Ruby wouldn’t remember a single offshore account where Myra had stashed millions in stolen money. In exchange, Kantor Tucker would keep his part of the agreement and fly Opal and Angelina to another part of the country where they would be discreetly installed in a nice house and given a plausible cover story. Angelina would be supplied with all the papers necessary to pose as Opal’s mother, and nobody would suspect that Opal had been kidnapped. In ten years or fifteen or twenty, whenever Myra was released from prison, she and Tucker would collect the offshore accounts. If Ruby was out of jail by that time, they might permit her to be reunited with Opal, but Opal’s love and allegiance would be to the woman who had raised her.