Foxes and Fatal Attraction

by Ruby Loren

  “It’s assault - plain and simple,” the woman piped up, fanning herself with her hand. “We’re going to sue you for every penny you’ve got.” Her eyes glittered as she thought of what a pay out that would be!

  I faltered wondering if I was going to regret my moment of madness.

  “Oh, put a sock in it, you silly people!” someone shouted out from the crowd. It was followed by similar sentiments being echoed by those near by. At first, I worried our friendly comic-themed event was about to dissolve into a full-scale riot, but to my surprise, the couple looked embarrassed.

  “If you really liked the comic, you’d know that bullies never win!” the boy whose sister I’d helped called, and that seemed to do it. The angry couple threw me one further angry look before shepherding their children back along the parade walk in the direction of the exit.

  I turned back around and Joe lifted the costume head with a questioning look on his face. It was with grim determination that I nodded and he replaced it on my shoulders. A cheer went up and a spontaneous round of applause broke out. All of my bubbling nerves about the precarious situation I’d got into vanished and instead I felt myself buoyed up to be a better Lucky than ever before.

  Much like the message I liked to promote in the comic, most people were good. There were always a few who let the side down, but the good guys would always prevail. At least - they always did in Monday’s Menagerie. When it came to reality, things could be rather a lot more complicated. The presence of Joe Harvey at the zoo was all the reminder I needed of that.

  The good guys always win, I silently repeated, wondering who, exactly, the good guys were.

  “Have you considered wearing it to the wedding?” Tiff said, arriving just as I was peeling myself out of the costume and looking down in horror at the state my clothes were in.

  My best friend wrinkled her nose. “Maybe it is better if we stick with a conventional bridesmaid dress,” she amended, unwilling to take the joke further.

  “A wise choice,” I told her, regarding the specially-made mascot costume with disgust. I’d decided ten minutes in to wearing it that I didn’t care how much it had cost to make - I would never be wearing it again.

  “How are the plans going?” I asked my friend.

  After an incredibly brief whirlwind romance, Tiff had become engaged to Detective Alex Gregory of the Gigglesfield police force. I didn’t think the couple had nailed down a date for the wedding yet, but Tiff had already picked out the venue, the dress, and the guests she wanted.

  While I was thrilled for my best friend, I still retained some doubts about her hasty engagement - namely doubts about the man she’d become engaged to. Alex Gregory was a newcomer to the local police force and no one knew much about him. Everything I knew about him was courtesy of Tiff, and even filtered through her extremely sunny disposition, I wasn’t sure I liked everything that I’d heard. For the most part, Detective Gregory was fine. In fact, the stories Tiff told made him out to be practically a paragon of virtue. However, there were just a few things here and there that niggled at me.

  The first niggle had come when Tiff had announced the wedding venue. It was a large barn in the local countryside, that was apparently considered a rather fancy venue for a wedding and came complete with a barn dance band when you hired it. She’d then revealed that they were being given the venue at almost no cost to themselves because the owners of the barn owed Detective Gregory some sort of favour. Perhaps it was nosy, but I’d done some research and had quickly realised that the barn was owned by none other than Nigel Wickington - the president of The Lords of the Downs club.

  The Lords of the Downs was an incredibly exclusive club open only to gentlemen - and only wealthy or successful gentlemen at that. When Auryn had been inducted a little over a month ago, I’d been less than thrilled. Only his insistence that his membership would affect the success of both of our zoos had stopped me from protesting - that and my belief that he felt much the same way about the club as I did. As if that weren’t enough, the club had also recently been under suspicion due to the sudden death of one of their members-to-be. Whilst that affair had been wrapped up, I still harboured dark thoughts about the organisation, and it gave me no little cause for alarm that the ‘new in town’ detective seemed to have some kind of history with the leader of the group.

  My second niggle had begun yesterday when Tiff had announced that - as she and Alex were more in love than ever - they were going to buy their first house together. I’d immediately feared that Tiff’s savings were going to be drained by some scheme to take advantage of her good heart, but she’d assured me that wasn’t the case. Detective Gregory apparently had quite an inheritance of his own squirrelled away, and money wasn’t exactly an object. That had raised several further niggles that I was currently trying very hard not to blurt out in front of my blissfully happy best friend.

  “Everything’s going great,” she told me with a beautiful smile. “By the way, I asked Alex how he knew the Wickingtons. He said it was through his past work before he joined the Gigglesfield force.”

  “Past work doing what?”

  Tiff tilted her head back in exasperation but smiled all the same. “I know you’re just trying to look out for me, Madi, but it’s okay! He said he met them through his family originally - apparently they’re quite rich but also quite estranged-” How convenient, I thought to myself. “-and then he got to know them better when he was working for the Brighton police. He wouldn’t tell me what the case was about, but funnily enough, I trust him all the more for that.” Tiff said with a knowing look.

  I silently acknowledged her hint that being loose lipped wasn’t always a commendable feature. While I appreciated that discretion had its place, I wouldn’t have changed a single word of what I’d confided with Auryn and what he’d in turn confided in Tiff about my past.

  “How are your own wedding plans going?” she asked.

  “Oh, you know… brilliantly,” I lied.

  Tiff snorted. “You’re coming round mine and we’re doing planning together. You’ve got an actual date for your wedding! You’d better start taking it seriously, or it will be a disaster.

  “Is it really that big of a deal?” I felt all at sea when it came to weddings. I was definitely not the kind of girl who loved big pouffy dresses and all of the fuss that sometimes went with marriage. Auryn and I had agreed that we would have the wedding in The Wild Spot, which was a licensed venue for civil wedding ceremonies, and then the restaurant would serve its menu for free to our guests and we’d all have a lovely time. At least - that was the plan as far as it went in my head. Apparently Tiff had a different view.

  “You’ve got to think of how the night will run! The day is easy. You turn up, you get married, everyone eats, people make speeches, and then what? The evening is an empty wasteland.”

  “I thought we’d play some music,” I said, wondering what she was getting at.

  “But everyone does that and it’s boring! Maybe you could hire a band? I think that one of the guys on the reception team is in one. Maybe they’re good?”

  “Maybe,” I said, getting that floundering feeling again. “Maybe I should just hand the whole planning thing over to someone else.” I looked hopefully at Tiff.

  “No way, it’s your wedding! I’ll help you, but it’s about you and Auryn. I am not going to be responsible for messing it up.”

  “No fear, I’m sure I’ll manage to do that all by myself,” I said and then pouted when she didn’t immediately contradict me. Whatever happened to the best friend code of honour?

  “Hi Joe,” Tiff said, smiling brightly at the new arrival to the barn conversion we were currently standing in. Technically, the staff offices at The Lucky Zoo were in the old farmhouse close to the entrance, but when I’d employed my new head of Marketing and PR I’d realised that there simply wasn’t any desk space left in the cottage. Instead, I’d handed over what had once been the spare room in the barn conversion.

  I
t was weird seeing Tiff talk to my new heard of Marketing and PR without having a clue as to his real identity. If it hadn’t been for the heavy hints he himself had dropped, I doubted I’d have been any the wiser either. Jordan Barnes, as I’d known him, had paid for some pretty expensive plastic surgery in order to completely transform himself into his new identity. It was all so that he and the rest of the gang of money launderers he was a part of could evade detection by MI5. ‘Joe Harvey’ had assured me that all of that was in his past, but I was still waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  “How ya doin’ Tiff?” Joe replied.

  Even his accent has changed, I reflected, and wondered how many times he’d pulled the vanishing trick before. I wondered who he really was. Joe’s gaze returned to me immediately, as if sensing my contemplation of him. It gave me a little jolt when he made eye contact. I was so used to men utterly ignoring me when Tiff was in the room that Joe’s attention always came as a surprise - especially when I had no idea what he actually wanted from me. I’d made it abundantly clear that I was with Auryn, so I sincerely hoped he wasn't still barking up that tree.

  To make matters worse, Auryn himself walked into the barn, probably bearing witness to Joe’s attentions.

  “Oh. Hi,” he said, in a far less friendly way than he usually would have done.

  Auryn and I did our best to not keep secrets from one another, so when ‘Joe’ had come looking for a job, I’d told Auryn immediately about his true identity and the strange warning he’d appeared to give. Although Auryn had shared my immediate gut reaction to get rid of him, he’d then come round to the same realisation I had - it was better to keep your potential enemies right where you could see them. He’d also pointed out that even if we did go to MI5, we had no way of knowing who, or even where, the rest of the money launderers were - and if some of them walked free, you could bet money on who they’d go after first for ratting out one of their own. Even though he agreed it was the best decision I could make under the circumstances, he’d concluded that it didn’t mean they had to be friends with one another, or even particularly polite.

  “Great to see you, man. I hope you’ll agree the day’s going really well? I’d be over to help Avery out in a heartbeat, if you ever felt you needed help.” Joe had this wide grin on his face that almost seemed to be asking to be punched.

  Tiff (who wasn’t party to this information as her newfound connection to law enforcement had led us to gloss over Joe’s true identity) looked delighted by the idea. “We can always use help, can’t we Auryn? Weren’t you saying just the other day at the staff meeting that we should hire an internal marketing team, rather than just outsourcing and using the HR team?”

  Auryn coughed and looked uncomfortable. I silently raised my eyebrows. Auryn had kept something from me after all - he was jealous of what Joe Harvey had managed to achieve. “I wouldn’t want to take anything away from Madi. Thank you,” he forced himself to add at the end.

  “I wouldn’t let you have him anyway. I might lose my bet!” I said in my best joking tones, hoping to lighten the mood.

  Fortunately, Tiff remembered she was supposed to be reviewing the stock levels of all comic book items, as one of her staff had mentioned that there’d been a run on Lucky toys. Joe swanned off to his office a moment later, saying something about setting The Wild Spot up to take online bookings and offer wedding packages. If it hadn’t been for my worries about Auryn’s opinion and whatever the real reason that Joe was working at the zoo might be, I’d have been thrilled and amazed by how above and beyond Joe was going in his job. He was surely worth far more than what I was paying him. But because of those unknowns, his success and hard-work made me more nervous than ever.

  When Joe was finally gone, Auryn turned to me with a troubled expression. “How much do you trust him?”

  I frowned back. “Not very much at all. You know that.” I looked up the stairs in the direction of Joe’s new office. “He is doing a good job though.”

  “He has quite a talent for all of this.” Auryn made it sound more like an accusation than a compliment. “We have the power, right?” my fiancé said after a moment’s pause. “If he does anything we can just go to the authorities.”

  “Yeah, of course,” I told him, hoping I sounded reassuring. In truth, I had a strong feeling that somehow we were being taken in. I just didn’t know how, or even who might be behind it all. And that was driving me crazy.

  I was doing the early morning round at The Lucky Zoo the next week when I saw Auryn walking along the path past the tiger enclosure towards me. He was carrying a large stack of paper.

  “Glad I caught you! I wonder if you can do me a favour? Annabelle came in this morning with these and told me that Napoleon’s disappeared. I’m sorry to say they think he’s been stolen.” Auryn raised one of the posters, showing me the image of the dark brown and white flecked German Shorthaired Pointer.

  “How awful for them! I’ll be happy to put the posters up around the zoo.” I looked again at the picture of the sweet-faced dog. I’d briefly met Napoleon when I’d visited Annabelle’s husband, Andy Wright.

  “Why would someone want to steal him? Is he valuable… or?”

  “He did cost a fair bit to buy, and he could even be used as an illegal stud. Annabelle mentioned that the breeder who sold them Napoleon offered to sell them a permit for that, but they decided against it. It can affect the dog’s personality if they’re allowed to mate.”

  “So it wasn’t because they realised that there are too many rescue dogs and not enough homes?” I asked, just wanting to show I still found the idea of dog breeding for profit a peeving one. Our own dog, Rameses, was a purebred Pharaoh Hound, but I liked to think of him as a rescue. We had, after all, rescued him from a woman who didn’t really want him.

  “Sometimes you’ve got to go with a breed you know and trust,” Auryn gently chided. “I think the Wrights go game shooting occasionally. They wanted a gun-dog to help them with that.”

  I nodded, willing to acknowledge that much. “So you don’t think he might have been taken for another reason?”

  “Not for bait, no. He’s hardly a tough-looking dog, or on the flip-side, one that would make a good victim. Anyway, those thefts tend to be opportunism. This was apparently such a smooth break-in, it was almost impossible to tell someone had broken in at all. That was why they originally thought he’d run out.”

  “What makes them think he was definitely stolen?”

  Auryn looked grim. “He’s not the first pet to be taken. There’s been a recent spree taking place. I only hope that the dogs and horses can be returned to their owners - where they belong. Whether they were working animals or house pets, I know that they are all very much missed.”

  “Should we be worried about Rameses?” I asked.

  Auryn shook his head. “Although he fits the profile for the dogs who’ve disappeared, he’s never on his own for long, is he? Someone would have to get him out of the zoo and away from all of his loving carers for that.” He smiled when he said it.

  Rameses went to Avery Zoo with Auryn, whilst I tended to bring my cat, Lucky, to The Lucky Zoo, on days when he was feeling frisky. The cat and dog had maintained the peace they’d formed not long after Rameses had arrived at the house, and I was starting to believe that they might even be starting to like one another. Lucky was a cat who got on with most animals (small, furry rodents excepted). He’d taken the addition of the dog in his stride. It had been Rameses who’d struggled, and at first, he’d had the war wounds to show it.

  When Auryn wasn’t in the office, I knew there was no shortage of offers for walking him around the zoo. I’d introduced Rameses as an upcoming character of my published comics, and my publisher had even released some exclusive teaser strips featuring the Pharaoh Hound. He’d been well-received, even though he’d had a few villainous qualities at first, and visitors loved to see him around.

  Normally, dogs weren’t permitted at the zoo, and at first, Auryn had
worried that he might try to attack the animals - especially as his instincts as a hunting dog might push him to do so. However, Auryn had reported that Rameses had been fairly well-trained and, even better, was completely disinterested in all animals - with the exception of Lucky. As a Pharaoh Hound, he was a complete failure, but as a zoo dog, he was perfect.

  Most importantly to me, both he and Auryn seemed delighted with each other.

  I took the next day off to go house hunting. Tiff had announced on Sunday that she and Alex had decided to have their wedding even sooner than anticipated. It would be held at the start of September. I assumed that a date at their chosen venue must have unexpectedly opened up. When I’d asked her how it affected her rather elaborate wedding plans she’d spoken about only a couple of days previously, she’d brushed them off, saying that it was going to be a nice lowkey affair. I’d inwardly raised my eyebrows at her change of attitude and had wondered for the umpteenth time whether or not Alex Gregory was a good influence, or a bad one. Surely he must have had something to do with the sudden change?

  The speedy wedding announcement had been accompanied by a request for me to join Tiff house-hunting. I’d known that she and Alex were considering it, but I’d once more been startled by how imminent their plans were. I knew that Tiff had been squirrelling away all of the money she earned selling her fantasy maps on Etsy, and she’d informed me that Alex had money of his own to contribute. Apparently it was enough for a sizeable deposit, and their jobs were enough to ensure the rest could be put on a mortgage. When Tiff had shyly confided the budget, I’d definitely been surprised. It wasn’t too far off what Auryn and I might have to spend if we looked for a new place - and we’d have to sell Auryn’s family home to get it.

  When we drove down a quaint private lane, and then onto a vast gravel parking area, Tiff told me that we were going to be shown around by the owner of the estate agency themselves. Apparently top money got you top brass giving you the tour when it came to house buying.