Even Cat Sitters Get the Blues Read Online Free Page B

and stopped at double doors painted glossy lipstick red. I had seen so much Christmas stuff that morning that I caught myself thinking a tasteful pinecone wreath would have looked good on the red door, but it was bare.
    Looking over his shoulder to make sure I was still with him, Sergeant Owens jabbed one bony finger at the bell, and then we both took a step back and gawked through the glass like people in a department store staring at whatever dumb show is being flashed across a row of TV screens. The living room was decorated in low-slung,honey-hued , leather-steel-and-polished-stone furnishings like you see in Architectural Digest, the sort of room that makes me want to run amok flinging cat hair and peanut shells.
    The back wall was dominated by a fireplace big enough to roast an ox, with a wide hearth and a bunch of brass and black iron tools for poking and shoveling fire stuff. Good-sized flames were leaping in the thing right now, which was downright bizarre. I mean, the weather was chilly but not that chilly. Even having a fireplace that size was an anomaly on Siesta Key, since we have maybe two weeks a year when a fireplace is inviting. The rest of the time it makes you feel sweaty just to look at one. People on the key who can’t resist the nostalgic feel of a fireplace keep them small and unobtrusive, little hollows where they can grow bromeliads
or ferns, but this baby was meant for serious roaring fires.
    A woman came streaking past the fireplace toward the front door, and Sergeant Owens and I got our faces into neutral expressions.
    The woman who opened the door took the term “drop-dead gorgeous” to a whole new level. She was the kind of woman who makes me remember that my split ends need trimming, my eyebrows need shaping, I need a manicure, and a facial wouldn’t hurt. Not that she looked like she tried to be gorgeous, it was just how she was. Pale-gold Eurasian skin, almond-shaped topaz eyes, masses of long red curls carelessly caught up at the top of her head to cascade around a graceful neck. Sweeping eyelashes a foot long. Naturally rosy full lips, with a tiny dark beauty mark beside them, as if the angel who’d made her had been so carried away by the perfection he’d created that he’d taken a little brush and added a coded signature. Her hands were in thin latex gloves like surgeons use, and instead of a Miss America sash draped shoulder to hip she wore wrinkled blue-green surgical scrubs and white running shoes.
    She smiled at Sergeant Owens, revealing even white teeth like the dentist uses as the ideal when he’s telling you it’s time to bleach yours. From the corner of my eye, I could see Sergeant Owens suck in his skinny stomach and straighten his sloping shoulders. I could only imagine what other male responses he was having.
    Sergeant Owens said, “Ma’am, the pet sitter is here.”
    He said it so smoothly that anybody would have thought he gave a gnat’s ass that I had arrived. He was up to something, I just didn’t know what.

    She looked at me with a harder expression in her eyes than she’d shown Sergeant Owens.
    “I do not understand.” She spoke with an accent—not Caribbean, not French, not South American, but something I couldn’t place—and enunciated each syllable carefully, the way people do when English isn’t their first language.
    Sergeant Owens said, “The pet sitter that Mr. Kurtz hired. She’s here to do her job. So if you’ll just show her the …”
    He turned to me with a look that said Help me out here, so I said, “Iguana.”
    She drew back a bit as if I had threatened her, and her big eyes got even wider. Considering that a murder had been committed not fifty feet away, I wasn’t surprised that she was jumpy. What surprised me was that she seemed suddenly scared of me.
    “But no, he did not. Is impossible. No. He did not call.”
    I decided her accent was fake and opened my mouth to tell her how I felt about being called a liar. Sergeant Owens