Murder, She Barked

Eleven

I didn’t have to pretend. I truly didn’t have the first clue who she was. The woman obviously didn’t like me for some reason. If I said I didn’t know her she would surely perceive it as an insult, and her ire would escalate. She’d already wounded me in the worst possible way, though, by causing me to lose my darling dog.

And who would have a reason to be angry with me?

Not a single wrinkle or errant gray hair marred her appearance. Late twenties? Large rings encrusted with stones sparkled on her fingers but I didn’t see a wedding band. I sighed. I was at a complete loss. Of course, if I had known her when I was fifteen and she was eight or ten, I probably wouldn’t have paid much attention to her. Even one or two years made such a big difference at that age.

“Don’t you have caller ID?” She said it in a prissy, flippant way.

Aha. She had to be the woman who’d answered my call about the explosion and fire the night before. Perhaps I had offended her when she asked for my phone number and I impatiently asked if she had caller ID.

“I didn’t mean anything by that. The situation put me on edge.” But as soon as I said it, I wondered why I was apologizing to this horrible woman who intentionally caused my cute dog to run away and hadn’t been in the least bit remorseful other than an amused sorry. “You did that on purpose! You took her to the door and pinched her so she would run out. What is wrong with you?”

She leveled a torturous gaze at me. “They run away when they don’t love you.”

The nerve! This woman had some serious issues. I didn’t need that kind of nonsense. I left the store in a huff. My adorable dog was lost because of her. I couldn’t even put the dog’s picture on a flier because I didn’t have any photos of her.

Still barefoot, I hobbled over to a shoe store.

A painfully thin woman about my age admired a pair of pink ballet slippers. Her clothes hung on her, a couple of sizes too large.

I browsed in the sale section of the store and found a pair of black leather thong sandals on sale.

When I bent over to try one on, I saw the thin woman deftly slip a ballet slipper into a deep pocket on each side of her voluminous skirt.

I looked around for the sales clerk. A portly woman pushed back graying hair. She caught my glance, frowned, and shook her head horizontally ever so slightly. The thief paused on her way out of the store and gazed longingly at a pair of four-inch heels with a leopard pattern before moseying out.

The much more sedate and boring sandals I had found fit me perfectly. It was too late in the season for them, which was undoubtedly the reason they’d been marked down so much, but I wanted to go back to the road where my dog had last been seen before more time passed. They were practical and inexpensive.

I took them to the cash register. “What was that with the ballet slippers?”

“Hazel Mae? She and her husband, Del, have a passel of kids. I’d have given them to her for free but she’s too proud to ask.”

Somehow I didn’t think allowing her to steal was sending the right message. There must be a better way. Leaving the ballet slippers on their doorstep during the night? But what did I know?

When I left the store, I watched Hazel Mae amble along, window-shopping. Carrying my bag from the drugstore, I ventured back to Oak Street, hoping against all reason or logic that the dog might show up. She didn’t. The rabbit had left, too.

I whistled and called until every dog in the neighborhood barked. Did I hear high-pitched yapping? Somewhere, one howled, long and sad.

I listened, not daring to breathe. Dogs barked all around me. It was probably wishful thinking to imagine I had heard my dog. I had to pull myself together. Okay, so I didn’t have a photo of her. I could still put up lost fliers. Maybe Wagtail had a community website or a little newspaper where I could place an ad.

My teeth clenched, I tried to focus. Buy clothes, work up fliers, find out about newspapers and web communications, and, in between all that, trick Oma into revealing what was wrong with her.

Relieved to have a plan, I returned to the walking zone and found a store called Houndstooth. My temporarily unemployed budget weighed on me, but I found some summer items that had been marked way down. Three cotton tops, a pair of jeans, khakis, and two summery dresses that I couldn’t pass up at the drastically reduced prices. Remembering my mom’s travel advice, one to wash, one to wear, and one to spare, I added two lacy bras and a couple pair of panties and was set.

I’d just stepped out of the store, bags in hand, when I heard my name. My heart thudded like a drum in my chest at that voice—deep and masculine, yet as soft and comforting as a cuddle.

Holmes Richardson loped in my direction. All I could think was why hadn’t I worn one of the new outfits out of the store?

I hadn’t seen Holmes in ages. Not since he went to college. Summers at Wagtail hadn’t been the same after Holmes and my cousin, Josh, graduated from high school and pursued other interests. Although I was a couple of years younger, the three of us had spent countless hours together working at the Sugar Maple Inn.

Oma had always hired Holmes, Rose’s grandson, to work with Josh and me. She hadn’t differentiated between sexes, either. We all did the same tasks, whether it was carrying luggage to rooms, washing dishes, weeding, clearing trails, or doing laundry and making up the beds. We’d had a lot of fun, though. Taller than Josh, sandy-haired Holmes had always pulled the role of Han Solo to espresso-haired Josh’s Luke Skywalker. As Princess Leia, I had wielded my share of fallen branches as light sabers.

At the end of each summer, Josh and I had been shipped back to our parents, while Holmes remained in Wagtail and rode the bus down the mountain to school. But I never forgot about the first boy I had ever kissed. I’d written Mrs. Holmes Richardson in my grade-school notebooks over and over again.

I straightened my blouse, painfully self-conscious.

An ever-so-slightly-crooked smile spread across his face. “Holly?”

A good foot taller than me, he had no problem literally sweeping me off my feet in a bear hug.

He set me down, beaming at me. “What are you doing here? I can’t believe it’s really you.”

“I came to check on Oma.” He looked great. A little bit older and more polished, but the smiling blue eyes and genuinely happy grin were as inviting as ever.

“I heard what happened to her. How’s she doing?”

“Stubbornly pretends nothing is wrong.”

Holmes laughed. “That’s probably a good sign. I’d like to stop by to see her while I’m here.” He glanced around. “Is Josh here, too?”

That sucked the wind out of my sails. For a few seconds, romantic notions had danced in my head. With a huge sigh, my lofty visions crashed back down to earth. Holmes lived in Chicago, and he was engaged to be married. We weren’t in grade school anymore. I consoled myself with the fact that my cousin Josh had been Holmes’s best friend growing up, so it was only natural that Holmes would ask about him. “No. Just me.”

Holmes glanced at a gold watch on his wrist that exposed the works underneath the crystal. “I’m on my way to a meeting. Walk with me so we can catch up?”

“Pretty snazzy watch, sir,” I teased.

“A gift from my fiancé. My folks warned me that some chump is stealing gold over at Snowball and thought I should leave it at their place. But I feel naked without a watch and this is Wagtail, you know? That incident with Oma last night has to be a fluke.”

He held his hands out for my bags. “They don’t have stores in Washington?”

I explained my haste to come to Wagtail while we walked. “And now I don’t know if Oma is sick or not. I asked your grandmother this morning, but she wouldn’t tell me.”

“That’s strange. If she called because of the accident, then it seems like she would have said so.” Two worry wrinkles appeared between his eyebrows. “I don’t like the sound of that. Will you let me know what you find out?”

I nodded. We strolled along Pine Street, where elegant white Victorian-style houses nestled under towering trees. Whitewashed fences surrounded cute bungalows. It seemed each house had a front porch.

“You have a meeting in Wagtail?” That was odd for someone who lived in Chicago. “Are you planning to move here?”

Holmes stopped dead in his tracks. He winced. “Not really.” He scuffed the toe of his elegant brown loafer against the sidewalk. “My fiancé would never move here. I . . . I can’t.”

It was totally inappropriate, and I never would have asked if I hadn’t known him and his family so well. “Then why the meeting?”

“My family owns a piece of property that they want to develop as rental cabins, but Jerry Pierce, the mayor, is blocking them.”

“And they brought you in to find out why?”

“We think we know why. Jerry is a real estate agent who rents out his own properties in and around Wagtail. He doesn’t want the competition.”

“So you’re supposed to be big, bad Holmes and beat him up a little bit?” I suppressed the urge to giggle. Holmes might have the physical size to appear imposing, but he didn’t have a mean or vicious bone in his body.

“Something like that. He doesn’t have a leg to stand on. He’s just being a bully and throwing his weight around by refusing to give them the permit. You know my family—they don’t want to make a fuss or go to court over it.”

I did know. My family was much the same way. And from what I’d seen of Jerry that morning, he could be obnoxious. We walked on, and Holmes stopped in front of an old white house with a turret. I couldn’t determine the style. A cross between Victorian and Italianate? Most likely the original architecture was hidden under layers of modifications, but the turret certainly made it stand out among the other more modest homes.

“Your meeting is in his house?”

“I’m told he has an office on the first floor where he entertains his subjects. Rose calls him King Jerry, but he sounds more like a dictator to me.” Holmes grinned at me when he handed over my purchases. “Wish me luck with the curmudgeon.”

With a light, agile gait, he jogged up the stairs and onto the front porch. I watched him, still engulfed in the warmth of a Holmes-induced euphoria.

I turned away. What was wrong with me? I had a perfectly nice boyfriend. Just yesterday I had been worried about Kim making moves on him. Yet it had taken me only seconds to fall back into a childish crush. I wasn’t usually so . . . fickle. That’s what I was! Fickle. And silly.

I hadn’t taken two steps when I heard a stifled yelp and the screen door slam shut. Had Jerry already thrown him out? I looked over my shoulder. Holmes stood on the porch, his back to the door, his face ashen.

“Holmes? Are you all right?”