Once Bitten (A Melanie Travis Mystery)

by Berenson, Laurien

  Slipping out into the hallway, I went first to Davey’s room. His door was open; I could see his small form curled beneath the comforter, his head resting on the pillow. His breathing was deep and even.

  I reached out and pulled the bedroom door closed. Behind me, both Poodles were waiting expectantly, ready for whatever might come next. Even better than letting these two big dogs accompany me downstairs, I realized suddenly, I could send them on ahead.

  “Who wants to go out?” I whispered, my tone urgent, inviting. “Come on, let’s go outside!”

  Eve yipped and danced her front feet in the air. This was more exciting than she’d hoped. An outdoors adventure in the dark!

  Together, the Poodles scrambled past me. When I’d only had one dog, the mad dash to the back door had taken place in silence. With two, however, the excitement was multiplied. It had become a competition. Faith and Eve were barking as they ran; the clamor they created seemed to bounce off the walls.

  I knew what they were saying. Each was yelling the canine version of “Me first! Me first!” But as I ran along behind them, I could only hope that someone down below would hear their deep-throated bellowing in the darkness and envision a pair of attack-trained Dobermans bearing down upon them.

  By the time I reached the bottom of the stairs, the Poodles had already skidded around the banister and headed down the hallway toward the kitchen. I caught my breath, reflecting on the fact that the tone of their barking hadn’t changed. That was a good sign. If they’d seen anyone, I would know it by now.

  On the other hand, having sent the pair on a single-minded dash to the back door, I’d left the rest of the small house unscouted. Pausing, I reached around and flipped on lights in the living and dining rooms. Both were blessedly empty, just as I’d left them before going to bed.

  I was telling myself it was just as well that I hadn’t called the police when I reached the kitchen. Eve was standing by the back door, waiting for me to open it. Faith, however, was in the middle of the room peering curiously at the little television set that was a new addition to my kitchen counter.

  The TV was on and its screen cast an eerie glow out into the shadowy room. Shimmering colors reflected off the refrigerator, the sink, the shiny tile floor. The effect was spooky, and at the same time, compelling. Faith stared as though mesmerized.

  An infomercial was playing. The participants were talking to each other about the incredible value of the product they were hawking. Theirs were the voices I’d heard from upstairs.

  “What on earth . . . ?”

  I reached for the wall, finding the switch panel and turning on lights inside and out. Eve whined impatiently by the back door. As well she should: I’d told her I was going to let her out.

  Automatically I went to flip up the dead bolt. Abruptly, my hand froze in mid-air. The lever was already upright. The door wasn’t locked.

  I sucked in a breath and spun around, certain in that instant that I’d felt someone creeping up behind me. There was no one there.

  Of course not.

  This was ridiculous. I snapped off the TV and the room fell silent. Still, my heart was pounding so powerfully it hurt to breathe. I could feel its rhythm pounding in my ears.

  I wasn’t an idiot. I was a grown-up with responsibilities. And I always locked my doors at night.

  At least I thought I did. Unless the argument I’d had with Sam had been a more potent distraction than I’d realized, which appeared to be the case.

  Giving up on the back door, Eve went and slurped a drink from the water bowl. The utter normalcy of her actions began to have a calming effect on my nerves. I crossed the room and opened the basement door. Lights on, I stuck my head down the steps.

  Like the rest of the house, it was empty. Silent. Undisturbed.

  Now that the puppy had had a drink, not to mention this burst of nocturnal excitement, there was no way her bladder was going to hold until morning. I opened the back door and let both Poodles briefly outside.

  There was a possibility, I admitted to myself, that I’d forgotten to lock the dead bolt. But had I left the TV on? No. No way. Hadn’t happened.

  I watched that set in the mornings when I was getting Davey ready for school. And sometimes in the evening while I was cooking dinner. But not last night. Sam had been there and we’d been talking. The set had never been on.

  I hadn’t touched that TV any more than I’d left on all the lights in the house last Sunday. I had no explanation for any of this. What was going on?

  After a short break from crime solving, stay-at-home mom Melanie Travis has not become boring—no matter what her alarmingly opinionated Aunt Peg says. She still has a nose for sniffing up a good mystery, especially when it involves the life of a legendary dog breeder . . .

  Despite Melanie’s domestic demands—a toddler and a house full of Standard Poodles—helping Edward March pen his life story is an opportunity she can’t pass up. Of course Edward turns out to be a growly old man who wants his book—Puppy Love—to consist mainly of his amorous encounters with women from the dog show community. It’s juicy gossip, but not dangerous . . . until Andrew, Edward’s son, pays Melanie an angry visit to stop her from working on the book.

  When Andrew suddenly turns up very dead, the victim of a seemingly intentional hit-and-run, the police are looking at Edward as Suspect #1. There was lots of bad blood between Andrew and his father, but Melanie is looking at the bigger picture. Would some of Edward’s ex-trysts have gone after Andrew to shut Edward up? How about all of those husbands and boyfriends with bones to pick? And who is that woman whom everyone is avoiding at the funeral?

  Between getting caught up in the bafflingly dysfunctional March family, sorting out two generations of disgruntled ex-lovers, and uncovering a shocking case of secret hoarding, Melanie’s running into dead ends almost as fast as she’s running out of time. The longer the killer stays unleashed, the sooner she may end up in the dog house for good.

  Please turn the page for an exciting sneak peek of

  Laurien Berenson’s next Melanie Travis mystery

  GONE WITH THE WOOF

  coming in September!

  CHAPTER 1

  Life is made up of small moments, most passing by in the blink of an eye, unremarked and unremarkable. But every so often one of those small moments expands and time seems to stop. We’re faced with an occurrence so intense, so monumental, that the rest of life’s cluttered minutiae simply slip away like a passing wisp of breeze.

  What remains is a haze of shock and emptiness, a void that we must somehow learn to negotiate. There’s an elemental shift in worldview and a lesson never forgotten: that nothing in life is as permanent as we once believed.

  That was how I felt when a murderer whom I’d been chasing stood two feet away from me and looked me in the eye, then lifted a gun to his temple and blew his brains out.

  It was an instant when everything changed.

  Maybe clarity of vision is a sign of maturity. If so, I earned mine the hard way. But in that fleeting speck of time when I put my own life at risk and watched another life end, I knew with absolute certainty what was important to me and what was not.

  I had a new baby, an almost new husband, and an eleven-year-old son, whom I loved more than anything. I also had a houseful of dogs and an extended family whose only goal seemed to be to drive me crazy. The thought that I might never have seen any of them again was beyond unbearable.

  And yet in that single moment I had put all of that on the line. What was I thinking? I didn’t know.

  One thing I did know. I needed a break.

  “I just want to say that you’ve become rather dull.”

  “Really?” My tone might have been a bit dry.

  I was sitting across the kitchen table from my aunt Peg, a woman who in her first sixty-five years has stirred up more excitement and controversy than many South American dictators. Come to think of it, she also runs the members of her family like a small, somewhat unruly j
unta. Peg stands six feet tall and has iron-gray hair and sharp, brown eyes. Should a brawl erupt anywhere in the vicinity, my money’s on her.

  “Yes, really. Don’t make me say it twice. I shouldn’t have to say it at all. You used to be interesting. Now . . .” Aunt Peg stood up, walked over to the counter, and poured herself a second cup of Earl Grey tea. Her gaze slid pointedly to the window over the sink.

  It was New Year’s Day, and we’d had six inches of fresh snow overnight. Eighteen months had passed since I’d made the decision to try to realign the balance in my life. I’d wanted to attain some sense of normalcy, and I liked to think that I’d achieved that goal.

  What Aunt Peg saw in the backyard was my husband, Sam, and our older son, Davey, shoveling the new snow off the deck. From the way the pile was shaping up, I suspected there might be a snowman in the offing.

  Younger son, Kevin, twenty-two months old and all but swallowed up by a snowsuit, boots, and mittens, was toddling unsteadily around the yard, accompanied by several big black Standard Poodles. That was what passed for normal at my house.

  “Now I’m happy,” I said.

  “So you think,” Aunt Peg sniffed. “You’re what? Thirty-five years old?”

  I nodded warily. Not because her assessment of my age was wrong, but because Aunt Peg never begins a lecture without a purpose in mind, usually one that involves work for me.

  “You need to get back in the game.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “For one thing, you need to figure out what you’re going to do with the rest of your life now that you no longer have a job.”

  Aunt Peg was referring to the fact that after Kevin was born, I had taken a leave of absence from my position as special needs tutor at a private school in Greenwich, Connecticut. A single semester away had now stretched to three.

  When Davey was little, I’d been a single mother. I’d had to work. This time around I had a choice. And the thought of leaving Kevin with a nanny or an au pair didn’t appeal at all. Even if my son’s current favorite word—from an admittedly limited vocabulary—was an emphatic and defiant no.

  “I have a job,” I said calmly. “I’m a mother.”

  “Oh, please. Hillary Clinton is a mother. It didn’t stop her from becoming secretary of state.”

  “You want me to go into politics?”

  Okay, that was immature. The verbal equivalent of sticking out my tongue. But give Aunt Peg the slightest bit of encouragement, and she tends to run roughshod over anyone in the vicinity. Speaking as the person most likely to be trampled, what can I say? Sometimes I sink to my kids’ level.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I want you to use your brain. I want you to think. I have an idea.”

  “Wonderful,” I muttered.

  The back door came flying inward, bringing with it a blast of cold air, five scrambling, sodden Standard Poodles, and three rosy-cheeked, snow-covered men of varying sizes. Davey had his gloved hands cupped together. He was holding a snowball the size of a small globe.

  Sam was just behind him, carrying Kevin. Even in chunky boots and a puffy down jacket, with a red nose and snow-tipped eyelashes, Sam looked like the kind of man most women would want to take straight to bed. Even after six years together, I’m no exception.

  Sam lowered the toddler into my arms and, having heard my last pronouncement, said, “What’s the matter?”

  “Aunt Peg has an idea.”

  “Good day for it,” Sam said mildly. He and Aunt Peg are the best of friends. Sometimes that irks me, but mostly I try to rise above it. “New Year’s resolutions and all.”

  Davey, who had pulled open a low cabinet and was rummaging around inside, stood up and spun around. “Are we going to make resolutions?”

  “Sure, if you want to. Put that snowball in the sink, okay?”

  “I can’t. I’m going to report on it for science class.”

  Davey’s tall for his age. He takes after his father, my ex-husband, Bob. They’re both long limbed and graceful. But my son’s personality is all me. He could argue the spots off a Dalmatian.

  Davey turned back to the cabinet and withdrew a large mixing bowl. “How long do you think it will take to melt?”

  “It’s started already,” I mentioned. Between the five Poodles, the three sets of boots, and the water dripping from his hands, the floor was awash with melted snow.

  Sam reached over, plucked the snowball out of Davey’s hands, and plopped it in the bowl on the counter. Aunt Peg grabbed a towel from the stack near the back door and went to work drying Poodle legs. That left me to get Kevin undressed.

  “Who wants hot chocolate?” I asked.

  “No!” cried Kevin. I’d unzipped the front of his snowsuit and peeled the top off his shoulders. He yanked his arms free and waved his small hands in the air.

  “Gotta love a kid who knows what he wants,” Sam said.

  “I think he takes after Aunt Peg.” I lifted Kevin up and freed his legs. His red rubber boots kicked off and landed in a puddle on the floor beneath my chair.

  “And isn’t it nice that someone finally does,” said Peg.

  It took another twenty minutes to get everyone warm, dry, and organized. Amazingly, the floor even got mopped. Once it was dry, the Poodles lay down around us, forming a canine obstacle course for unwary walkers or—if you were Kevin’s size—a fluffy stool on which to perch.

  The five of them were Sam’s and my blended canine family. Faith and Eve were a mother-and-daughter duo, originally Davey’s and mine. Faith had been bred by Aunt Peg and gifted to me six years earlier, either as a reward or an assignment. I’d never been entirely sure which. Raven and Casey were two champion Poodles from Sam’s breeding program that he’d brought with him when he moved east from Michigan to Connecticut.

  The remaining Poodle was Tar, the only male in the group. Also bred by Aunt Peg, he had been Sam’s specials dog: a champion whom Sam had campaigned to numerous Group and Best in Show wins at venues up and down the East Coast. Now retired, he, like the others, wore the close-cropped, easy-to-care-for sporting trim. With two children keeping us busy, both Sam and I were happy to be taking a break from having to “do hair.”

  “Finally,” said Aunt Peg when we were seated around the table once more. “Can we now get back to the business at hand?”

  “Certainly,” said Sam. “Who wants to begin?”

  “Me,” cried Davey.

  “Excellent. Someone with initiative.” Aunt Peg stared at me pointedly over the top of her mug. Peg’s sweet tooth is legendary, and her hot chocolate was coated with a layer of mini-marshmallows. “Unlike certain of my other relatives.”

  “I resolve to eat fewer lima beans,” Davey said firmly. “And not to lose my homework. And not to call Kimberly Winterbottom stupid, even when she is.”

  “Good job,” I said. “I don’t like lima beans, either.”

  “Kimberly Winterbottom?” asked Sam.

  “She thinks she knows everything.” In sixth grade now, Davey was in his first year at Hart Middle School in North Stamford. The move from elementary school made him feel very grown up. “And she doesn’t. Not even close.”

  “Fair enough,” said Peg. “Sam, would you like to go next?”

  “Not me,” Sam said, demurring. He knew better than to get in Peg’s way. “I’m not ready yet. Why don’t you take my turn?”

  “I’ll be happy to.”

  No surprise there. Aunt Peg had been waiting for this opening since she’d arrived an hour earlier. Now she swiveled her seat around to face me.

  “You’ve become boring,” she said.

  You know, just in case I’d missed that insult the first time.

  “There you go,” I replied cheerfully. “That can be my resolution. Be less boring.”

  New Year’s resolutions have never been my thing. I just don’t see the point of vowing on the first day of the year to read more books, lose ten pounds, or run a marathon. Because if I didn’t want to do that stuff before,
what are the chances that a change of date is going to make me want to do it now?

  “You’re stuck in a rut,” Aunt Peg persisted. My easy acquiescence didn’t even slow her down. “I can help with that.”

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “Here comes the idea.”

  “As well it should. Somebody has to shake things up around here.”

  Kevin punctuated that thought with a loud bang. Settled on the floor, next to the cabinet Davey had opened earlier, he was engaged in one of his favorite occupations, stacking pots and pans. The leaning tower he’d been erecting had just lost its battle with gravity. Judging by the building skills he’d displayed thus far, Sam and I were guessing that a career in architecture was not in his future.

  Aunt Peg didn’t even lose a beat. “Edward March,” she said.

  Sam looked up. “What about him?”

  “He’s turning in his judge’s license.”

  “Wow,” said Sam. “I wouldn’t have thought he’d ever retire. March seems like the type of judge who’d hope to croak in the Best in Show ring at Westminster, as he pointed out the winning dog.”

  “Don’t we all,” Aunt Peg remarked. “And Edward does like his dramatic moments. Nevertheless, I believe health issues have gotten in the way. He’s taken very few assignments in the last several years, and now he seems to think that it’s time to bow out gracefully and on his own terms.”

  “Who is Edward March?” I asked.

  Aunt Peg and Sam have both been a part of the dog show world for so long that occasionally they forget that I don’t have their wealth of experience and insider information to draw upon. Aunt Peg’s Cedar Crest Kennel, founded decades earlier with her late husband, Max, had produced some of the top winning Standard Poodles in dog show history. Once a successful owner-handler who’d competed in dozens of shows a year, Aunt Peg still kept up the same hectic schedule, now serving as a much-in-demand dog show judge.