Curiosity Killed the Cat Sitter by Blaize Clement Read Free Book Online Page A

with Guidry before I phoned. Now I’d given her a heads-up that a detective would be calling her.
    “The reason I’m calling is that Marilee’s out of town, and I’ve taken Ghost to a day-care center. I expect he’ll be there for a day or two, and I just wanted to make sure that was okay with you.”
    “You’ve left who?”
    “Ghost. Her cat.”
    “Hell, I don’t care. I don’t know why she left my number.”
    “You don’t happen to know where she went, do you?”
    She laughed uneasily. “I didn’t even know she was gone. What did you say your name was?”
    “Dixie Hemingway. If you should hear from Marilee, I’d appreciate it if you would have her call me.” Before she could ask any more questions, I gave her my number and thanked her, then punched the disconnect button.
    “That was really dumb,” I muttered to myself. “Really, really dumb.”
    Before I backed the Bronco out, I slid Ghost’s velvet collar off my wrist and put it in my backpack. It was 11:55. I should have been at Kristin Lord’s house an hour ago. A murder really screws up a work schedule.
    When I got to the traffic light at Beach Road, I automatically turned my head to look at the fire station. I’ve done that all my life. Once when I was about seven years old, my father was in the driveway with some other fire-fighters polishing the fire truck when my mother and Michael and I drove by. My mother honked at him, and he gave us a big grin and waved. It’s one of my favorite memories.
    Kristin and Jim Lord were the kind of people who prove the theory of karma and reincarnation—they had less sense than a pair of sand fleas but were filthy rich, so they must have been really, really good in a former life. I’d known them since high school, but we’d never been friends. They’d run with the kids who knew the difference between Polo and Izod—and cared—and I’d run with the kids whose idea of making a fashion statement was not wearing yesterday’s T. Kristin had a huge crush on my brother for a while, and I don’t think she ever forgave him for rejecting her.
    Kristin met me at the door of their multimillion-dollar mansion with a smile frosty at the corners. “You’re a little late, aren’t you?”
    Kristin was slim, with glossy brown hair cut to curvearound her square jaw, and heavy dark eyebrows that made straight slashes above beautiful hazel eyes. Her nose was out of a plastic surgeon’s catalog, but her lips were naturally full and wide. Her upper lip was thicker in the middle, giving her a slightly rabbity look. If she were so inclined, she probably gave her husband great blow jobs—further proof of a previous life of good deeds, at least for him. She was wearing a pair of wrinkled white cotton capris and a free-hanging pink-and-white-striped shirt that covered her newly bulging tummy.
    “I got tied up,” I said. “Sorry.”
    She made a little snuffing sound with her perfect nose to show her displeasure, and spun around to walk ahead of me, her raffia flip-flops making sucking noises on the cool Italian tile.
    Kristin was four months pregnant and she had developed an acute case of Fear-Of-Cat-Poop. Specifically, she was afraid of catching toxoplasmosis from her cat’s litter box. Cats can only get toxoplasmosis from eating a diseased rodent, and a pregnant woman can only get it if she touches the diseased cat’s feces and then eats something without first washing her hands. Kristin’s cat had probably never even seen a rodent, much less eaten one, and what woman doesn’t wash her hands after changing a litter box? But it was Kristin’s fear and her cat and her money, so I allowed her to pay me twenty dollars a day to groom her cat and change its litter box.
    The cat was an American Shorthair named Fred. Shorthairs are low-maintenance cats, so it was almost a crime to take money for what little I did. Fred’s litter box was in a guest bathroom, and I kept the door closed because Kristin was so spooked about