The house was completely quiet. This time when I opened the door, the alarm panel didn’t beep, and Charlotte wasn’t waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs. I called out to announce my presence, expecting Charlotte to come slinking around the corner to give me the stink-eye, but no one answered. I went into the living room, where there was a half-empty liquor bottle and a couple of glasses on the coffee table, but no Charlotte. For the first time, I had a funny feeling that something wasn’t quite right.
Every house has a particular scent to it, a very subtle mixture of the people and animals that live in it, as unique as a fingerprint. The Harwick house had a clean, earthy scent: a combination of cooking aromas from the kitchen, chlorine from the pool, the salty air off the ocean, and a note of lavender, perhaps Mrs. Harwick’s perfume. But now, something was different. I told myself that the Harwicks had been gone for almost two days, and it was only natural that the scent of the house would change in their absence.
But I couldn’t find Charlotte anywhere. She wasn’t in the kitchen or the dining area. I even looked under the couch in the living room and behind the dryer in the laundry room off the kitchen, both popular feline hiding spots, but she was nowhere to be seen. I went up the marble staircase and tiptoed down the main hall toward the master suite. The doors to Becca’s and August’s bedrooms were both closed, and I didn’t think it would be right to go snooping around in there. At least not yet, especially since I wasn’t completely sure they weren’t home and I didn’t want to barge in on them if they were. Hell hath no fury like a teenager awakened at dawn.
The pillows on the big bed in the master bedroom had the same indentations where Charlotte had slept the night before, and the bedspread was a little mussed. Maybe she had slipped under the bed when she heard me open the front door. I felt around the pillows for signs of warmth, but there was nothing. I looked under the bed anyway, hoping I’d see her emerald eyes sparkling mischievously at me, but there were only a couple of dust bunnies and the foil wrapper from a piece of chewing gum.
I was beginning to get a little concerned as I made my way down the short hall toward the master bathroom. As grumpy as Charlotte was, it didn’t make sense that she would hide—especially since cats are such inquisitive animals. She would have at least been curious enough to find out who was in the house before she gave them the cold shoulder, and it certainly wasn’t possible that anyone else had fed her this early in the morning. I tried to form an image in my mind of where I might be if I was a snarky queen in a sprawling mansion, and that turned out to be quite easy: that peach velvet bench in the bathroom opposite the aquarium, next to the gold-plated telephone.
I flicked on the light switch by the doorway, and the overhead chandelier lit up to reveal the bathroom in all its over-the-top glory, but no Charlotte. There was a damp towel draped over the counter next to the sink, but otherwise everything looked normal.
I leaned into the little alcove and peered behind the velvet bench just in case Charlotte was hiding there and thought, This is getting serious. I was out of ideas. I sat down on the bench and put my hand on the gold-plated phone, wondering if it wasn’t time to call the Harwicks and ask them if there were any other places she might be hiding. That’s when I had a feeling I was not alone.
I looked up at the aquarium, fully expecting to see the mermaid staring serenely back at me, and instead locked eyes with a bloated hedgehog, floating motionless in the middle of the tank. It took me a couple of seconds of shock to realize that it wasn’t a hedgehog at all but a porcupine fish.
Porcupine fish are pretty cute in their natural state. They have gloppy, rounded bodies with drooping eyes and a goofy smile, like drunken Pillsbury Doughboys with fins. But when frightened, they fill their bodies up with water, pumping to twice their normal size and extending their sharp, quill-like scales out in every direction. If that’s not enough to scare off a would-be predator, a naturally occurring chemical in their body that’s about a thousand times more poisonous than cyanide usually does the trick.
While the porcupine fish and I stared blankly at each other, my mind did a little wheelie inside its skull. The alarm was off. Charlotte was hiding. The porcupine fish was in a full state of alarm. I glanced about the room looking for anything else out of place. I could hear myself telling Michael and Paco how valuable the fish were, and then I could see Mrs. Harwick pointing at the painted dragon eel and whispering, “Priceless!” I looked back at the tank. Now there were two pairs of eyes on me: the porcupine fish’s and the mermaid’s. She was staring directly into my eyes, like she was trying to tell me something, and I suddenly thought, A burglar is in this house and I’ve just interrupted him.
I was still sitting on the velvet bench. I tried to look as casual as possible. I shrugged my shoulders.
“Well, Charlotte,” I said out loud, “you’re not hungry, and I don’t have time to look for you all day.”
I walked out of the bathroom, flicking the light switch off with a trembling hand as I passed, and steadily made my way downstairs to the front door, talking to myself the entire way, certain I was about to be jumped by an intruder.
“Charlotte, you’ll just have to wait and have breakfast later, because I have other things to do and I don’t have time to go looking around every nook and cranny whenever it’s time to eat. You’ll just have to learn that if you want your breakfast, you have to eat it when it’s served. So I’ll just be back after lunchtime, and maybe you’ll decide you’re hungry by then.”
I pulled out my ring of keys and jangled them loudly so whoever was in the house, if they were still there, would hear them and know I was leaving.
“See you later, Charlotte!” I yelled and pulled the front door closed behind me. I walked down the winding driveway on rubbery legs, feeling like there was a target on my back. As soon as I was in the Bronco, I put the key in the ignition with one hand and pulled my cell phone out with the other. I rolled down to the front gate, and by the time I’d pulled out onto the road I had already dialed the number. Not 911, as I probably should have, but the number of my old superior when I was a deputy, that of Sergeant Woodrow Owens.
As shaken as I was, I had to smile when he answered the phone. Sergeant Owens and I have a long history together. I served under him when I was a deputy with the sheriff’s department, I cried in his arms when Todd and Christy were killed, and when I laid down my gun and my badge, it was on Sergeant Owens’s desk. Since then I’d stumbled across more than my share of crime cases, and I was beginning to feel like an adjunct private investigator for the local law. Sergeant Owens had once told me I was too fucked up (his words) to carry on as a police officer, but I imagined he had an entirely different opinion of me now. Or at least, that’s what I hoped.
Even when he’s being his official police self, Owens can’t keep from sounding like he’s about to sit down to crisp catfish and hush puppies that his mama just fried up for him and thirty-nine of his closest kinfolk. Owens is six-three, slow and lanky to look at, but lightning fast when he thinks. He sets high standards for himself and his subordinates, and he’s quick to let you know when you’re being a dumb-butt. Believe me, I know.