The Curse Оf Hollister House

Hercules was an arrogant little pug who honestly seemed to believe that we’d been paired so that he could train me. And maybe that was what was going on. When Naomi first gave him to me to work with on simple commands such as sit and stay, I figured she was starting me off easy. Boy was I wrong.

“Why is it that when I say sit, you jump around, and when I try to walk you on the leash, you sit down and refuse to come along?”

The dog, with his huge brown eyes, just stared at me all innocent, like he had no idea what I was saying. At first, I’d thought the dog somewhat daft, but the longer we worked together, the clearer it became that he was just messing with me.

“I don’t outweigh many things, but I outweigh you; now come along.” I took several steps toward my goal, dragging the little dog along with me.

“You know that dragging isn’t the preferred way of getting a dog to walk on a leash,” one of the other trainers said.

“I assumed as much, but this dog is defective. He sits when I tell him to heel and jumps around when I tell him to sit.”

The woman laughed. “Hercules does have a mind of his own, but he’s been through the basics and knows what to do if motivated to do so. May I?” She held out her hand, and I passed her Hercules’s leash. She took a small treat out of her fanny pack, making sure the dog saw it. She then told him to heel and started walking, holding the treat just out of his reach. After they’d traveled across the room, she paused, told the dog to sit, and gave him the treat.

“Ah, so that’s what those little pieces of meat are for.”

“Didn’t Naomi show you what to do?” the woman asked.

“She was going to, but then she got a call about one of the goats being stuck in the fence and had to leave to deal with that. She told me to wait for her, but Hercules and I got tired of waiting, so we decided to get started. I thought I knew what to do. I was wrong.” I glanced down at the dog. “You know he is evil? I could tell he knew exactly what to do but refused to do it anyway.”

“You let Hercules think he was the alpha in this situation. Jasper and I are going to work on sit/stay and recall. Why don’t you and Hercules work with us today? That way, I can help you if you forget what to do.”

“That would be great,” I said with relief. “I’m Callie.”

“I’m Willa. Is this your first day?”

I nodded. “I guess that is obvious. I thought I understood what to do, but I guess I was wrong about that as well.”

“Don’t worry. Hercules is a smart dog. Once he understands that you are the boss, he’ll cooperate.”

Willa showed me how to hold the treat just over the dog’s head to prompt sitting behavior when Hercules refused to do it. The tiny bites of meat seemed to work wonders in terms of getting him to do what I wanted him to do, but I had to wonder if the dog’s new owner was going to have to walk around with treats in his pocket all the time.

“No, the dogs are weaned off the treats once they learn the behavior,” Willa explained after I asked that question. “Initially, the dogs are put through short training sessions and rewarded every time. Once they seem to understand the behavior we are asking them to demonstrate, we ask them to demonstrate the behavior twice before they get a treat. Eventually, we require more and more demonstrations of the behavior before a treat is presented until eventually, they will happily do as you ask without the treats being offered. In fact, many of the dogs enjoy a few minutes of play or a hearty neck scruff as a reward even more than a treat. After you work with the dogs for a while, you’ll begin to have a feel for which dogs prefer to play, which want hugs and kisses, and which are little piggies like Hercules, here, and prefer food over anything else.”

“Aren’t you afraid he’ll get fat?”

“Naomi monitors all the dogs’ weights. The treats are high quality and are taken into account when calculating their daily food allotment.”

I glanced at Hercules, who was sitting next to Jasper, waiting for his recall command like some sort of sweet little angel. I glared at him to let him know I was on to him, but he just smiled at me with his sweet little pug eyes, letting me know that he had my number and the battle between us was far from over.

Hercules’s part of the session came to an end seemingly as soon as it got started. Willa and I traded out dogs, and next, I was paired with a sweet golden retriever who looked at me with love and adoration and tried very hard to anticipate all my needs. Now, this was the dog for me, I decided. Docile and sweet and willing to please.

The two-hour session seemed to fly by, and before I knew it, I was saying goodbye to Willa and hello to Cass, who had shown up for his volunteer time. This shift was focused on play rather than training, so I let Cass select the dogs and outline the plan, while I went along for the ride. With all the rain, we decided on an indoor session and, as we had before, gathered ropes and balls and headed to the large play area.

“So how was your first one-on-one training session?” Cass asked after we’d organized the dogs we’d chosen to spend time with.

“It started off rocky when I was paired with a pug with an attitude but one of the other trainers, Willa, helped me out and things went fine from there.”

“Willa has been volunteering for a long time. She is a good one to go to for help if Naomi isn’t around. Where is Naomi anyway? She usually pops in to say hi.”

“She had a goat emergency. One of them got stuck in a fence.”

Cass frowned. “That doesn’t sound good.”

I frowned as well. “Naomi has been gone for a long time. Do you think we should check on her? I just assumed she had everything under control.”

“I’ll call her cell.” Cass took out his phone and punched in a number.

I couldn’t hear everything that was being said from her end, but it sounded like Naomi was with the vet, who was trying to patch up the animal, who’d suffered some fairly significant injuries during his encounter with the fence.

Cass hung up and looked at me. “Naomi will be held up for a while yet. I told her we’d see to the feeding and end-of-day tucking in when we are done here. Or at least I will if you have to go.”

“I can stay. What do we do?”

“Naomi has instructions for each animal in terms of the type and amount of food to be presented at each meal pinned to the board in her office. We’ll just need to distribute the food, check everyone’s water supply, clean up any messes we come across along the way and make sure everyone is tucked in and locked up for the night. It will take a couple hours, less with two of us working, but it isn’t hard. Maybe we can grab a pizza after.”

I bent down to hug a terrier who’d come over to say hello. “That sounds wonderful. I’m not sure I’ve had pizza since I left home.”

“They don’t have pizza in New York?”

“Of course they do. Really good pizza from what I understand. But I lived a busy life after I left here, so I usually just grabbed a sandwich or a piece of fruit. Something I could eat while I drove from one place to the next.”

“No wonder you are so skinny. Pizza is the elixir of life. I make sure to have one at least once a week.”

I was about to warn Cass that he was going to get fat, but one look at his flat stomach and broad chest informed me that he was far from overweight. I supposed that if one got enough exercise, a pizza a week wouldn’t kill you.

I bent down and picked up a ball and tossed it. Five dogs took off after it. “I meant to ask if you’ve made any progress on Tracy Porter’s murder.”

“I can’t say I’ve made significant progress, but I have been working on it,” Cass replied. “I received the timesheets for all three suspects from the substitute pool, and it looks like Veronica Jones, at least, is off the hook. While she was at the middle school when Tracy disappeared, her teaching assignments did not line up with either Stella’s or Hillary’s disappearances. Harvey Underwood, however, was at all three schools at the time the girls disappeared, so he has moved up on my list.”

“And the creepy janitor?”

“He was assigned to the middle school here in town when both Stella and Tracy went missing, but he was not working in Rivers Bend when Hillary disappeared. In fact, he was assigned to Foxtail Lake High School at that time. If we are operating on the assumption that the same person killed all three girls, it couldn’t have been him.”

“So what does that leave you with? Have you pared down your list outside of the three subs?”

“I will admit that my list is thin. Very thin. If I look at Tracy’s murder in isolation, I can come up with a fistful of suspects, but most of the people who would be on that list didn’t even live here twenty years ago. While I understand that it appears as if these three girls were killed by the same person, I think I’m going to need to widen my parameters if I am going to track down Tracy’s killer.”

“But you are still looking at Underwood?”

“Very much so.”

“And the homeless guy? Buck Darwin. What is going on with him?”

“He is in custody awaiting trial. As I said before, he hasn’t done a thing to clear himself, but he hasn’t pled guilty either. He seems to be in some sort of a holding pattern. I almost feel that by pleading no contest, he is waiting for something to happen.”

“Like what?”

“I wish I knew. It just seems that he is working really hard to stay in the neutral zone between declaring either guilt or innocence. The whole thing is rather odd.”

“Okay, so at this point you have a man in custody who neither of us thinks is guilty yet hasn’t done a thing to prove his innocence, and a substitute teacher with opportunity but no apparent motive. Is that really it?”

“So far.”

“What about the creepy man Paisley told me about?”

“Craig Grainger. He is still on my list, but I don’t see how he could have strangled Tracy and then buried her in the grave with only one functional hand.”

I guess Cass had a point. It would be hard to strangle a person or dig a grave with only one hand. I know I had a hard time doing many of the simple chores I once had. “So unless this Harvey Underwood did kill Stella, Hillary, and Tracy, you have no viable suspects because I am going to assume Buck Darwin was not around Foxtail Lake when Stella died.”

“As far as I know, he wasn’t, but like I said, he isn’t talking. He isn’t from around here, but I suppose a drifter could move in and out of a particular area over time, so it is possible he was in Colorado both ten and twenty years ago.”

As soon as playtime was over, we headed to Naomi’s office to check the menu for each animal and begin preparing the meals. We fed the dogs, cats, puppies, and kittens first, and then moved on to the larger animals. Cass seemed to be on a first-name basis with every animal living at the facility. I wasn’t sure why, but I found that endearing.

Once everyone was fed and tucked in, Cass and I headed toward our favorite pizza place.

“I’ve been wanting a Froggy’s Pizza ever since I’ve been home,” I said as we slipped into a booth in the back.

“Best pizza in town,” Cass agreed. “Are you still a cheese-only purist?”

“I think I am. But if you want toppings, we can do half and half.”

“Actually,” Cass answered, “I like cheese. Beer? Wine?”

“I wouldn’t mind a glass of wine.”

“Red or white?”

“Red. Cabernet or whatever the house special is.”

Cass got up to place our order, and I sat back and took in the ambience. As many of the businesses in town had, Froggy’s had gone all out with Halloween decorations. Spiders hung from fake cobwebs attached to the ceiling, fake jack-o’-lanterns with built-in lights had been placed randomly around the room, and a giant Frankenstein greeted customers as they walked in the front door. When I’d lived here years ago, a man named Fred Parker had owned the place. I wondered if he still did. Fred had seemed old fourteen years ago. I figured by now he must be at least sixty-five, or maybe even seventy.

I looked up as Cass approached with a beer for him and glass of wine for me. He set them on the table and then slid into the booth. “They’ll bring the pizza out when it’s ready.”

“I’ve been admiring the decorations.”

“Fred always does the holidays up big.”

“So he still owns the place?”

Cass nodded. “His grandson, Trevor, runs the place day-to-day, but Fred is very much still around, lurking in the background, keeping an eye on things.”

“So it didn’t work out with his son taking over?”

Cass shook his head. “Brian had other plans and moved away shortly after you did. Trevor is only twenty-one, but he seems to really want to take over the business and has worked hard to prove that he’s up for it. Fred hovered over his shoulder to a degree that would make me want to shoot him during the first couple of years, but he seems to have mellowed a bit now. He still pops in, but usually only to make his presence felt, and then he leaves.”

“Is Brian’s sister, Jessica, still around?”

“She is,” Cass answered, and then frowned.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

“It just occurred to me that Jessica is someone I should talk to about Tracy’s disappearance. I’m not sure why her name hasn’t come up before.”

“Jessica knew Tracy?”

He nodded. “Jessica used to work at the hair salon with Tracy’s mom. She quit a few years ago, finished her degree, and took a job as a guidance counselor. She works two days a week at the middle school and three days a week at the high school. I hadn’t thought about it, but she was working at the high school when I interviewed the middle school staff, so I never did talk to her. As a counselor and a friend of the family, she might very well have useful insights into what was going on in Tracy’s life when she disappeared.” He smiled at me. “Thanks for the prompt.”

“My pleasure,” I answered, even though I hadn’t done anything. “Are you thinking the attack on Tracy was personal rather than random?”

Cass pursed his lips. “I’m not sure. But I am sure that if I am going to solve this case, I am going to need to turn over every rock I can, and interviewing Jessica is a rock I should have turned over a while ago.”

It seemed to me that Cass was being overly hard on himself, but he had always been that way. I think the fact that we both shared a certain intensity is what had gotten us to be friends in the first place. There were other ways Cass and I were alike too. He was a bit more of an extrovert than I was, but we both worked hard and took our responsibilities seriously. That night, as we chatted and laughed, I found myself wondering why he’d never married. He seemed like exactly the sort of husband most women would want: kind, dependable, and oh so good-looking. The fact that he hadn’t settled down and started a family suddenly struck me as very odd indeed.