Raining
Cat Sitters
and Dogs
ALSO BY BLAIZE CLEMENT
Curiosity Killed the Cat Sitter
Duplicity Dogged the Dachshund
Even Cat Sitters Get the Blues
Cat Sitter on a Hot Tin Roof
Raining
Cat Sitters
and Dogs
A Dixie Hemingway Mystery
BLAIZE CLEMENT
MINOTAUR BOOKS
A Thomas Dunne Book
New York
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
RAINING CAT SITTERS AND DOGS. Copyright © 2009 by Blaize Clement. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.minotaurbooks.com
Grateful acknowledgment is given for permission to reprint the following:
“Nothing Twice” from View with a Grain of Sand, copyright © 1993 by Wisława Szymborska, English translation by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh © 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clement, Blaize.
Raining cat sitters and dogs : a Dixie Hemingway mystery / Blaize Clement.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Thomas Dunne Book.”
ISBN 978-0-312-36956-9
1. Hemingway, Dixie (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women detectives—Florida—Fiction. 3. Pet sitting—Fiction. 4. Sarasota (Fla.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3603.L463R35 2010
813'.6—dc22
2009039814
First Edition: January 2010
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to the “Kitchen Table Writing Group”—Linda Bailey, Greg Jorgensen, Madeline Mora-Summonte, and Jane Phelan—for their support and encouragement. Watch for those names. You’ll soon be seeing them in your local bookstores.
A huge thank-you to Suzanne Beecher of DearReader.com, who has generously introduced Dixie to her thousands of book club members. Suzanne’s generosity in helping writers is matched only by her lavish distribution of chocolate chip cookies. I’m honored to have her friendship.
Many thanks to homicide detective Chris Iorio of the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department, who always patiently answers my law enforcement questions. Thank you.
A big thank-you too to the Siesta Key Chamber of Commerce for their support, to all the deputies who keep Siesta Key its calm, laid-back self, and to Siesta Key residents for not minding that I add fictional neighborhoods and businesses to the real ones. I appreciate that.
Many thanks also to Marcia Markland and Diana Szu at Thomas Dunne Books, along with all the terrific production, promotion, and marketing people. Their efficiency and hard work make it possible for writers and readers to connect.
I’m also deeply grateful to readers who share their pet stories and tell me how much Dixie means to them. Thank you from my heart!
And to my expanding family, you continue to fill me with joy and pride.
Even if there’s no one dumber,
if you’re the planet’s biggest dunce,
you can’t repeat this course in summer:
this course is only offered once.
—Wisława Szymborska, from
“Nothing Twice” (1957)
Raining
Cat Sitters
and Dogs
1
Every now and then you meet somebody you like on sight, even when everything about them says they’re bad news. Jaz was like that. The first time I saw the girl, she was sobbing hysterically and rushing across Dr. Layton’s parking lot with a towel-wrapped bundle in her arms. A large man trailed behind her with reluctance making heavy weights on his feet.
She looked about twelve or thirteen, with beginner breasts making plum-sized bulges under a stretchy tube top, and the thin, coltish awkwardness of adolescence. She had cocoa-colored skin and a long mop of tangled black curls. Her cutoffs were frayed and had the mulled look that clothes get when they’ve been slept in.
The man was around fifty, with pale jowls beginning to sag, and graying hair that looked more mowed than barbered. He wore a navy blue suit and a paler blue tie, both too unwrinkled to be anything except polyester. With his pulled-back shoulders and drip-dry shirt taut across his chest, he looked like a junior high school principal who had learned too late that he hated kids.
I’m Dixie Hemingway, no relation to you-know-who. I’m a pet sitter on Siesta Key, an eight-mile barrier island off Sarasota, Florida. I used to be a deputy with the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department, but something happened almost four years ago that caused me to go howling mad-dog crazy for a little while, so I left with the department’s blessing. I’m still a little bit tilted, I guess, but not more than the average person. Like they say, a person who’s totally sane is just somebody you don’t know very well.
Now that I’m more or less normal, I have a pet-sitting business that I enjoy, and I end every day feeling like I matter to the world. I mostly take care of cats, with a few dogs and an occasional rabbit or hamster or bird. No snakes. I refer snakes to other sitters. Not that I’m snake-phobic. Not much, anyway. It just gives me the shivers to drop little living critters into open snake mouths.
I had come to the vet’s that morning to pick up Big Bubba, a Congo African Grey parrot who had seemed under the weather when I’d called on him the day before. When a bird sneezes and looks lethargic on his perch, I don’t take any chances. As it turned out, Big Bubba had merely been having a bad day. Dr. Layton had called the night before to tell me I could pick him up that morning, so I was there to take him home.
The crying girl and the man went in ahead of me. When I got to the reception desk, one of Dr. Layton’s assistants was taking the bundle from the girl, and the receptionist was making sympathetic sounds and patting the girl on the shoulder. She was crying so hard that her words came out slurred and broken.