Free Me, Myself and Why? by MaryJanice Davidson Page A

second story.
    I let myself in—no need to use my key today; she was shockingly casual about home security—and hollered, “Cath? Where are you?”
    Frantic scrubbing was my only answer—ah! The kitchen.
    I walked through the living room into her kitchen, where the noise of scrubbing increased. Unfortunately, I couldn’t see her, only hear her, which meant—“Cathie, you stop that right now!”
    “Stop what?” her voice filtered back, as innocent as a newborn. “Catch any bad guys today?”
    “Stop scrubbing that tile with a toothbrush.” Have I mentioned that in addition to being a bit bipolar, she also had obsessive-compulsive disorder? “He’s your brother, not the pope.”
    “I wouldn’t clean for the pope,” she replied—Cathie was that most common of creatures, a lapsed Catholic. “That balding misogynist.”
    “Nah, I think the new one has plenty of—jeepers, stop scrubbing!”
    Cathie slashed at the tile a few more times, but her heart wasn’t in it now that I was confronting her, so she stood and dropped the toothbrush in the sparkling clean sink. Her knuckles were pink from pressure, and so were her knees.
    It was September, of course, and Cathie would wear shorts or skirts until December 15. Kind of a thing with her. She said winter came only because people believed it would. She was always trying to get other people to dress like it was the Fourth of July during Christmas season. So far, it hadn’t worked. The only thing that happened to me was a mild case of frostbite. (Cathie said it was because I wasn’t a believer, which is when Shiro told her it was because we were in the Northern Hemisphere during one of the coldest months of the year. And nearly slapped her.)
    Cathie Flannery was a coppery redhead, as the name might have suggested, with fair freckled skin and brown eyes. She was slender and short—she barely came up to my chin. What she lacked in body mass, though, she made up in vitality. Her hugs alone could knock anyone off their feet.
    “The house is perfect,” I assured her, hoping she wouldn’t decide to clean all the bricks with a toothpick dipped in grout. “He’ll love it.”
    “I don’t care if he does,” Cathie replied, tossing her head so that her hair flew out of her eyes. “I’m cleaning for me, not him.”
    Sure you are . But I knew better than to say so out loud.
    “So!” She perched on the counter and waved her small feet—recently pedicured with orange nail polish, ugh—back and forth. “Anything weird at work? Weirder than usual, I mean. Did your boss julienne potatoes during the morning meeting?”
    I giggled. “No, she put it off until the afternoon. I had to help with prisoner transport, and then I caught a crime scene this afternoon, and then I had a session with Dr. Nessman. Shiro did, I mean.”
    Cathie’s eyes went big. “Shiro showed up at work?”
    “Adrienne, too,” I admitted, glum. No use trying to keep it from Cathie; she always got everything out of me at the end.
    “My God! Both in one day! That must have—” We could hear the doorbell echo through the house and she hopped down. “That must have sucked,” she said over her shoulder as she rushed to the door. “I want all the gory details later.”
    I stayed in the kitchen, guessing she’d want privacy to greet the brother she so rarely saw. He was quite a bit older, knew how to bake, and ran his own business—that was all I knew about him.
    “Cade, I want you to meet my big brother, Patrick. Patrick, this is my friend, Cadence.”
    Oh, my. I now knew something else about him, too. He was gorgeous .
    His hair was such a dark red that it was almost black—you could see the reddish glints if he was standing beside a light source. His eyes, like Cathie’s, were a rich chocolaty brown, and he towered over her; I put him at about six foot three. He was dressed in khaki knee-length shorts and a button-down white oxford shirt; his big hairy feet were jammed into a pair of