Death by Chocolate Lab (Lucky Paws Petsitting Mystery)

by Bethany Blake

  I was too busy thinking about murders and hammers and roadside memorials to do anything but stand around and think—which was an appropriate activity for a shop that promoted philosophical inquiry and reflection.

  Then I glanced at the one modern convenience in the Philosopher’s Tome.

  Tom’s computer, which really wasn’t that up to date, either.

  With its clunky beige monitor and battered tan keyboard, it probably qualified as vintage technology.

  But it was connected to the Internet.

  I knew because Tom was always online, searching for more stock for his already overstocked enterprise.

  I’d never used the computer, but I doubted that Tom would mind if I logged on to surf around just for a few minutes.

  Still, I checked to make sure that Socrates, who would disapprove, was sleeping before I sat down on Tom’s office chair, which probably dated back to Charles Dickens’s days. Seeing that Socrates was sleeping soundly, I shook the mouse on a pad that looked like an antique Turkish carpet, and brought the monitor to life.

  Then, although I knew I should stop snooping into his life, I called up a search engine and typed in “Jonathan Black.” Knowing from previous inquiries that I’d be inundated with links to the wrong man, I narrowed down the results by adding, “Navy SEAL.”

  Chapter 60

  I’d already seen most of the information that I found on Tom’s computer the first time I’d researched Jonathan online, but I couldn’t stop scrolling through everything again. In particular, I focused on the pictures I found, some of them posted by Jonathan’s friends in the military, some on Navy newsletters, and some in the archives of mainstream media sites.

  Was I impressed or repulsed by images of Jonathan in full combat gear in Afghanistan?

  As a dedicated peacenik who also appreciated my freedom to believe as I wished—a freedom protected by men like Jonathan—I honestly wasn’t sure.

  But I was definitely fascinated by the photos of Jonathan with Herod, the Belgian Malinois who had been his partner in combat. There was even a picture of them skydiving together, the dog wearing nearly as much gear as his human.

  I took a moment to consider the image. Then I clicked on another link, which led to a picture of Jonathan and Herod in a desert setting. Jonathan was sitting on the ground, smiling, and Herod was at his side. They both wore camouflage.

  Was it right to send a dog to war?

  My first instinct was to say, “No.”

  And yet Herod appeared proud. That was the only way I could describe his stance. Alert and proud.

  I recalled Jonathan’s mild rebuke when I’d called Axis Cookie Puss.

  Please call the dog Axis. Retrievers are working dogs, and some of them are warriors. They deserve respect.

  I kept studying the photograph. Clearly, Jonathan had respected—no doubt loved—Herod.

  Surfing away from that image, I followed one more link, to a 2010 article in an online newspaper called Navy Times.

  Injured in the firefight was . . . Jonathan Black . . . killed in action that day . . . Herod . . .

  I treated Socrates, especially, like a person, and the Navy seemed to treat Herod that way, too. His death was recorded just like those of the men who’d perished in what must’ve been an intense, if small, skirmish.

  I still believed that death was merely a portal to somewhere else, but my heart got very heavy, weighed down by losses both recent and a few years in the past. I felt sorry for Steve and Virginia, and I was sad for Herod—and Jonathan, too.

  I would be devastated if Socrates met such a tragic, if valiant, end. Maybe I wouldn’t ever be able to open my heart to another animal.

  Was that why Jonathan seemed to keep his distance from dogs now?

  And what type of injury had he sustained?

  Had he earned his scar that day?

  I left the site and found myself looking at a picture on a tab I hadn’t closed. That image of Jonathan in the desert. The sunlight was bright and conspicuously glinting off a gold ring on his left hand. A wedding band.

  Last but not least, what had happened to Mrs. Jonathan Black?

  That wasn’t my business, and I suddenly felt guilty. I’d pried too much into the life of someone I barely knew.

  Jonathan clearly agreed.

  When I turned around, he was standing just inside the open door, staring at me with his arms crossed and a cold, closed-off look in his eyes that was somehow worse than anger.

  Chapter 61

  “What . . . what are you doing here?” I asked Jonathan.

  I was clicking the mouse frantically, for some reason unable to find the x that would let me close down the picture of him. I was also fervently and futilely wishing that Tom hadn’t decided to position his monitor so anyone walking in the door could see the screen.

  Who did that?

  Of course, I knew the answer.

  People who didn’t spy on other people!

  Jonathan stepped farther into the shop, and Socrates opened his eyes and raised his head, awakened by the friction in the room.

  “Are you snooping into my past?” Jonathan asked just as I managed to close the image.

  “Not so much snooping as trying to learn more about you . . .”

  I was splitting hairs, and Jonathan knew it, too.

  “I think that’s the definition of snooping,” he said. His tone was even, and he’d reinforced those walls he sometimes put up in his eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, with a glance at Socrates, who was rubbing his paws over his muzzle and shaking his head, as if to say, “You’ve done it now, Daphne!” I turned to Jonathan again. “I was just curious. You don’t say much about yourself. . . .”

  “Did you ever think there might be a reason for that?” An edge crept into his voice. “That I might like my privacy?”

  I considered telling him that privacy was a luxury relegated to the past, before cell phone photos and Facebook posts. I also wanted to point out that friends didn’t keep everything about themselves secret. Especially not the big things, like the fact that they’d been married, and part of an elite fighting force, and suffered heartbreaking losses.

  Friends shared things like that.

  But I wasn’t sure we’d ever really been friends.

  I was the type of person who accepted everyone into her life, and I might’ve imagined that Jonathan and I had come to share some sort of rapport.

  “I’m really sorry,” I repeated, hanging my head. “It won’t happen again.”

  Jonathan didn’t feel the need to respond to my promise. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “I thought you were a pet sitter, not a bookstore clerk.”

  I stood up and nervously wiped my hands on my jeans. “I was talking with Tom,” I admitted. “About the murders.”

  Jonathan was trying to keep his temper in check, but I saw a glimmer of anger in his eyes. “So you continue to meddle in the investigation, too, although I’ve warned you not to do that.”

  All at once, I got mad at him. “You can ask me to stay out of your personal business, but you can’t tell me what to do with every aspect of my life. Two people I know were killed, my sister is a suspect, and I have every right to ask questions. I’m not doing anything wrong.”

  Jonathan didn’t argue with me. He just stared at me.

  “Why are you here?” I asked him, mainly to break a charged, tense silence.

  “I was walking by the store, and I saw you,” he said quietly. “I thought I’d stop in and let you know that the hammer was the murder weapon. Lab tests turned up trace amounts of Beamus’s blood. I wanted to tell you, as a favor, since this further implicates Piper.”

  My throat got tight. “Were there prints?”

  “Only yours. The handle had been wiped clean before you touched it.”

  My heart thumped in my chest. “Am I . . . ?”

  “No,” Jonathan said. “I still don’t really consider you a suspect. Although you are on Detective Doeb
ler’s radar.”

  I lowered my head, ashamed to have pried into Jonathan’s life and sorry that I’d snapped at him—although I still believed everything I’d said was true. I had every right to conduct my private investigation. “Thank you for letting me know all that.”

  “The information about the hammer will be public knowledge soon,” he said gruffly. “I was just giving you a heads-up.”

  Because we were becoming friends.

  However, thanks to me, that was in the past, just like all the other things Jonathan had buried.

  He turned and left the store without another word, closing the door behind himself.

  I stood there, stuck in place for a long time, trying to figure out how so much had gone so wrong so quickly. I couldn’t even look at Socrates, for fear of seeing the blame and disappointment in his brown eyes.

  Around me, the store grew incredibly silent. I usually liked the Philosopher’s Tome’s peaceful atmosphere, but I began to feel suffocated, closed in by the many rows of tall bookcases.

  Suddenly, though, the silence was broken by the trill of a cell phone.

  A soft sound, coming from my jeans.

  That made no sense, because my phone’s ringer had been dead for several days, and I knitted my brows as I pulled the device from my back pocket, only to realize that I was holding someone else’s cell.

  The phone rang again, and I hesitated, then answered.

  “Hello?”

  There was a millisecond gap before the caller spoke to me, but in that moment, I figured out whose phone I’d accidentally taken—from a murder site.

  Virginia Lockhart’s.

  I must’ve slipped it into my pocket after calling 911, and since I’d fallen asleep in my clothes and not bothered to change after waking up so late, I still had it.

  “Hello?” I ventured again.

  The person who’d called also sounded uncertain. “Er . . . Mother? Is that you?”

  I froze in place, my brain struggling to identify the somewhat familiar voice.

  Who among my acquaintances spoke in a tentative, put-upon, yet self-righteous whine?

  Who could convey years’ worth of pent-up pain and frustration with the single word Mother?

  Only one person I knew.

  As my heart nearly pounded out of my chest and my palms started to sweat again, I asked, with barely controlled excitement, “Bryce? Bryce Beamus? Is that you?”

  Chapter 62

  “I can’t believe Virginia and Steve had a child together—and that child is Bryce,” Piper said. I was glad that she didn’t seem overly upset by the news. I got the sense she was starting to see her ex-boyfriend more clearly in hindsight. “You are talking about the kid who confessed to poisoning Steve, right?”

  “Yes,” I said, taking a sip of lemonade. “My best guess is that Virginia was away at college or in law school, so she was able to hide the pregnancy from everybody in Sylvan Creek. Then she and Steve gave Bryce up for adoption—which was devastating for her.” I thought about how Bryce had accused Virginia of dodging him for years and added, “At least, it was devastating at first.”

  “How do you know all that?” my mother inquired, pushing her Fendi sunglasses up into her dark, bobbed hair, the better to peer at me. We were all sitting around the table on the patio at the farmhouse, enjoying a late-afternoon snack of iced tea and lemonade with fresh sprigs of mint from the garden, accompanied by some old-fashioned thumbprint cookies with apricot jam filling. Socrates, Artie, and the rottweilers were licking bowls full of mashed strawberries in yogurt, which I’d frozen to make dog-friendly ice cream. “How do you know Virginia was devastated?” Mom added. “Surely, you two weren’t so close that she would confide in you, her dog walker!”

  I ignored what felt like a jab at my admittedly humble, but beloved, career. “I read an inscription she wrote in a book she gave Steve. It was all about a tragic event that might hopefully someday ‘yield fruit that is more sweet than bitter. I’m pretty sure the tragedy was an unplanned pregnancy, and the ‘fruit,’ pretty literally, was . . . is . . . Bryce.”

  Piper grimaced, and not because her lemonade was too sour. “Oh, ugh. That is so sappy.”

  “How did you see this book?” Mom asked. “It sounds rather private.”

  I slouched down in my wicker chair. “That’s a long story. One that I don’t feel like telling right now.”

  All day long, I’d kept reliving my confrontation with Jonathan, and I wasn’t in the mood to recount one of our happier exploits. At least I’d found aspects of our mutual sleuthing enjoyable. In retrospect, I was pretty sure he’d been genuinely frustrated with me the whole time.

  My mother, who probably hadn’t really wanted to hear the tale, anyhow, sighed wistfully. “You girls are so lucky to have a mother who is completely devoted to you.”

  I nearly snorted out my lemonade, while Piper rolled her eyes.

  Our mother had spent the better part of our childhoods building her mini real estate empire. That was partly out of necessity after our father left, but it was primarily due to Maeve Templeton’s relentless ambition to be Sylvan Creek’s foremost Realtor, with a capital R.

  Fortunately, our “completely devoted” mother didn’t notice how Piper and I had reacted to her comment. She was pointing the toe of a navy-blue pump at the rottweilers, as if she didn’t want to get her fingers too close to the “terrifying creatures,” as she’d called them when she first saw them at the house.

  “How long will these extra animals reside with you?” she inquired. “When is Mitchell coming to claim them?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “I tried calling him once—with Virginia’s phone, which I accidentally have—but it went to voice mail. I suppose he’s overwhelmed right now.”

  Neither my mother nor Piper bothered to ask why I was in possession of Virginia Lockhart’s phone.

  “Poor Mitchell,” Mom muttered, getting a distant look in her eyes.

  I had a feeling she was both sympathizing with Senator Mitch and wondering if he’d soon be putting a mansion on the market. The house was too big for one person.

  As if to prove my hunch right, Mom opened up the laptop that was never far from her fingertips. “I must make a note to contact him after a suitable period of time has passed.” Then she leaned closer to the screen and tapped a few keys. “And what have we here . . . ?”

  Piper and I exchanged looks and mutual shrugs. We were used to our mother checking her messages and making deals during social visits.

  We each ate a cookie while Mom typed in her quick, efficient way—just like Piper typed.

  I glanced at my sister, who hadn’t fallen far from the tree, while I’d rolled down a hill, across a road, and into a proverbial river to the sea.

  Or did I take after my father, who became more indistinct in memory with each passing day?

  Abruptly pushing away the laptop, Mom sat back and sighed again with exasperation. “I don’t know what else to show him.” She tossed up her hands. “He’s turned down another house. I honestly don’t know what he wants!”

  Piper leaned over and used a napkin to wipe up a sweat ring my drink had left on the table. She slid a coaster under my glass. “Who is ‘he’?”

  “Jonathan Black,” Mom informed us. “I’ve shown him a dozen suitable houses, but he is remarkably particular, bordering on vexing.”

  I’d been avoiding the topic of Jonathan, but I had to know more about my mother’s dealings with a client who refused to be steamrollered. “What, exactly, are you showing him?”

  Mom began to list properties on her fingers. “The pink Victorian on Poplar Street. The white cottage on Abbott Lane. Three lovely new houses in the Avalon Acres development. And several large condos at the development by the Rolling Green Golf Club. He could walk right onto the course.”

  “The pink Victorian is way too girly,” I said. “And the cottage is a mess. I walk dogs past it all the time. The roof is falling down!”

  My m
other raised her nose and sniffed. “For your information, I primarily showed him those properties so he’d realize that a new build or a condo is best for a single man.”

  “Avalon Acres is bland,” I countered. “Every house looks exactly the same. And Jonathan’s way too private for a condo. I don’t think he’d like having neighbors right on top of him.” I pictured Jonathan jumping out of a plane with a combat-ready dog and rolling into battle, then tried to imagine him wearing plaid pants on a putting green, chasing a small white ball. “I doubt he’s into golf, either.”

  “How do you know so much about Jonathan?” Piper asked. “Seriously, what is going on with you two?”

  “And what do you know about real estate?” my mother added.

  “Nothing, and nothing,” I mumbled, sinking lower and pulling Mom’s laptop closer to myself. I opened her browser and found a bookmark to an MLS, or “multiple listing service,” Web site.

  “It’s my job to find a suitable home for him,” Mom reminded me. “One that will meet his needs—whether he’s aware of them or not.”

  I tuned her out. I was busy checking a brand-new listing. A very intriguing one.

  “Who is that coming up the hill?” Piper asked, rising slightly out of her chair and craning her neck. “Are either of you expecting someone?”

  “No,” I said, shutting the laptop and moving so I could see the road, too. “I don’t think I recognize the car.”

  “Oh, I do,” Mom said, smiling as a black, sporty convertible crested the rise. “I believe Senator Mitchell Lockhart is here to claim his dogs.”

  I really hoped she didn’t intend to offer a grieving widower a business card.

  And as I stood to greet our visitor, I also hoped Senator Mitch had a plan for cramming three rottweilers into a car with only two seats.

  Chapter 63

  I didn’t know how to address Mitch Lockhart—“Senator Lockhart” seemed too formal, while “Mitch” was awfully familiar for a man I barely knew—so I avoided the issue by going straight to condolences.