The Cat Sitter's Nine Lives

221 Pages·2014·1.03 MB·English

by  Clement Blaize, Clement John

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For Mom
Acknowledgments
As always, deepest thanks go to my superb editor, Marcia Markland, and
everyone else at St. Martin’s Press, including associate editor Kat
Brzozowski, editorial assistant Quressa Robinson, and publicist Sarah
Melnyk. Thanks also to my friends Dana Beck, Hellyn Sher, and Mike Harder
for their priceless encouragement; to Detective Sergeant Chris Iorio and
Lieutenant David Parisi of the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department for their
expertise; to India Cooper for her extraordinary copyediting; to my agent, Al
Zuckerman at Writer’s House, for his guidance; to Ellen Thornwall and the
real Cosmo, as well as author Elizabeth Hand and the real Mrs. Silverthorn for
giving me good character names; and finally to David Urrutia, Zoe, and the
rest of my family for their undying love and support.
Contents

Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph

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

Also by Blaize and John Clement
About the Authors
Copyright
Unable are the Loved to die
For Love is Immortality.
—Emily Dickinson
1
There are lots of good things about having a boyfriend—especially a new one.
First of all, you get to do all those corny, young-love things that new couples
have been doing since the dawn of time: hold hands on the beach, watch the sun
set, make out like teenagers. Then there are the more practical advantages. For
example, you get to mention how the trash needs to be taken out, and if you have
a well-trained boyfriend, he’ll take it out. You get to look in the mirror and
mutter, “I look like warmed-over toast today,” and he’ll lavish you with
compliments. If you have a really well trained boyfriend, you might even get a
box of chocolates now and then (my own personal weakness). At the end of the
day, a boyfriend is a very good thing.
But there’s a downside.
Don’t get me wrong, Ethan is as smart as a whip, 100 percent thoughtful, and
devastatingly, bewilderingly, unrelentingly hunky. But now that I have a
boyfriend, I can’t really sit around all afternoon eating Fritos and ice cream and
watching old reruns of Golden Girls. Not that that’s the sort of thing I do on a
regular basis—at least not anymore. Ethan is under the impression that I’m the
kind of girl who listens to hip music and reads the latest thought-provoking
books in her spare time.
I’m not sure where he got that idea, but I have to try to live up to it as much
as possible.
I’m Dixie Hemingway, no relation to you-know-who. I used to be a deputy
with the Sarasota Sheriff’s Department, until my whole world came crashing
down around me and I quit the force, or to be accurate, the force quit me. I think
the official words on my discharge report were “unfit for duty.” Now I’m a
professional pet sitter on Siesta Key, an eight-mile barrier island that sits just off
the shore of Sarasota, Florida, in the Gulf of Mexico.
I’ve built a pretty good business for myself. Most of my clients are cats, but I
have a few regular dogs, too, with an occasional bird or iguana, and even
recently a giant tank full of priceless exotic fish. I draw the line at snakes,
though. Some people think snakes make a real neat pet. Those people are crazy.
It was a little after 5:00 P.M. when I left my last client for the day and pulled
my Bronco out onto Ocean Boulevard, heading south toward the center of town.
My plan was to stop by Beezy’s Bookstore on my way home and buy something
impressive to read. Beezy’s is the type of place where you can find the latest
blockbuster novel right next to an old, dog-eared copy of Gulliver’s Travels,
complete with faded yellow highlighting and scribbled notes in the margins.
I was looking forward to it. I hadn’t been there in years, but I was a regular
customer when I was a little girl. I remember sitting in the aisle with my older
brother, Michael, while our grandmother was shopping at the market across the
street. I loved the feeling of being surrounded by all those dusty thoughts and
dreams of writers from all over the world, all with their own story to tell. I
distinctly remember the moment I realized I’d never live long enough to read
every book in the world. I cried for days.
The northern end of Ocean Boulevard is mostly old houses and runs along a
stretch of beach, but as you get closer to the center of town, all kinds of shops
start popping up on both sides. Most people just assume the street was named for
its breathtaking view of the Gulf of Mexico to the west, but in fact, the man who
originally bought up all the land in this area named it after his wife, whose name
just happened to be Ocean.
I was keeping an eye out for a parking spot when something in the rearview
mirror caught my eye. It was an old, cherry red convertible sports car right
behind me, flashing its headlights and weaving from side to side. The driver was
a thin-faced man with expensive-looking sunglasses perched on top of his pale,
balding head. He had that blank, set-in-stone expression that only a true … well,
let’s just say a true jerk can muster. He was revving his engine and drawing
within inches of my back bumper, waving his hands in a frantic “Speed up!”
gesture.
Now, I’m no angel. I’ve been known to drift outside of the traffic laws every
once in a while. I even got pulled over once for going thirty miles per hour over
the speed limit, which sounds bad enough except the speed limit was seventy. In
my defense, I was twenty-one years old and dumb as a fruitcake, driving my
own car for the first time in my life, not to mention I was the only car on the
road for miles. I was midway along State Road 84, a sun-parched two-lane