by Nina Wright
Vestige glowed warm and welcoming as we approached. Somebody had turned on the porch light. I recognized Jeb’s new car in the driveway. He had only recently replaced his ancient Nissan Van Wagon with a neat little leased Beamer, thanks to a cash infusion from his canine-crooning career. As Brady applied the brakes, the front door opened, and Jeb stepped out, a lank, grinning figure in the porch halo. Tears sprang to my eyes, and I did my best imitation of leaping from the vehicle. Not even close to graceful, at least I was relatively fast.
Until I tripped over a dog. A small dog that had no business being in my driveway. Brady shone his flashlight on the ugliest canine I had seen since meeting Mooney, a Rottweiler-bloodhound mix owned by our local judge. This dog was a stocky, short-legged model with a Winston Churchill-like face and wide-set very large erect ears.
“Whiskey, my love,” Jeb said, rushing from the porch to help me to my feet. Or so I thought. He paused first to scoop up the pooch and kiss the top of its head; Brady assisted me to a standing position.
“Meet Sandra Bullock,” my ex-husband said, holding out the dog to me.
“Sandra? You know this mutt?”
“Know her? I rescued her. Only she’s not a mutt. She’s a purebred French bulldog.”
Jeb squeezed me to him, but the embrace wasn’t what I had hoped for. He still clutched the dog in one arm.
“Wait. Go back,” I said. “I had a big shock tonight, and I’m not sure I’m tracking this. You’re talking about Sandra Bullock?”
Jeb had lusted after the movie star since seeing her in The Vanishing. Or was it Demolition Man?
“Right,” he said, kissing my forehead—with lips that had just kissed a dog. “I named this little doll after her. Baby, you’re gonna love Sandra as much as I do. And she’s fantastic with kids.”
“I already have a dog,” I reminded him. “And I’ve successfully given away several.”
Jeb whispered, “I heard Abra’s gone again. Of course, I hope she comes back, but if she doesn’t—”
“Abra always comes back,” I said through clenched teeth. “Often with a police escort. What were you thinking? I don’t want another dog. Besides, that one is butt ugly.”
“Oh, come on. Sandra’s a little cutie and a real comedienne, just like her namesake. Give her a chance, Whiskey.”
I stepped back abruptly. “I thought you came home because you wanted to be here for me and the baby.”
“I do.”
“Why on earth would you bring a dog?”
Suddenly Brady cleared his throat and Roscoe made a similar sound. I had forgotten about the police presence in my dark driveway. The two officers stepped forward into the spill of yellow light from my porch.
“Good to see you, Jeb. Glad you’re back,” Brady said, and the two men shook hands. Roscoe introduced himself to Sandra Bullock by rising to his hind feet and performing an agile dance, one that exposed a certain extension.
“What the—” I began. “Brady, I thought Roscoe was fixed.”
“He is,” Brady said. “I’ve never seen that before, either. Wow. She must turn him on.”
Jeb said, “All the boys love Sandra.”
My own slut hound had never had that effect on the canine officer. How could the dumpy dog with the ugly mug succeed where Abra had failed? At least the Affie knew how to flirt.
“She’s not even trying,” I pointed out.
In fact, the French bulldog appeared to have dozed off in Jeb’s arms.
He whispered, “That’s the secret to her success.”
Roscoe, who was still dancing, moaned obscenely. So help me, I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
Brady cleared his throat. “If you’re all right, Whiskey, I’m heading home. Gonna have a little lemon pound cake with my wife.”
Jeb chuckled in a way that made me wonder if “lemon pound cake” was guy code for what Roscoe was doing. Brady led the German shepherd, still walking on two legs, back to the squad car.
8
Jeb wanted Sandra Bullock to share our bed, but I wouldn’t hear of it. While my preference was to leave her on the porch, Jeb insisted she was an indoor dog who required comfort. We compromised. She would spend the night in Abra’s room. The Affie wouldn’t need it tonight. Better yet, the door boasted a double lock, and I had no plans to share the key. Although Abra could escape that space, such a feat required physical skills I was sure no French bulldog possessed.
As he laid Sandra down, I saw tenderness in Jeb’s face that should have been reserved for our first child. Sure, he had always been nice to animals, but I’d never known him to be a “dog person.” Why start now? Once we were out in the hall, I tested the latch with more force than necessary.
“Easy, baby,” Jeb whispered.
“Since when do you rescue dogs?” I demanded.
Belatedly he folded me against him the way I had wanted him to do outside. Only now I was too annoyed to melt at his touch. I softened a little…okay, a lot. But it took a minute. He did smell wonderful, and he did remember how to hold me. I inhaled the faintly woodsy fragrance that was uniquely Jeb and tried to pretend there were no dogs in the world, let alone in my house. He tenderly kissed my hair, then my forehead, my eyes, my cheeks, and finally my mouth. We were linked again, at last. I had almost fallen all the way into the moment when he paused to answer my question.
“You can’t expect me to make a living crooning for canines and not care about them, can you?”
I had to think about that one.
“Jeb, caring about your job is one thing. Bringing it home is something else altogether.”
He sighed and pulled me closer.
“I’m sorry, babe. But I had to save Sandra. I nearly ran her over.”
I groaned. “Please don’t tell me this is about karma.”
“Isn’t everything about karma?”
“In Magnet Springs, yes, which is why I’m proud to live in denial.”
It galled me that we were wasting precious moments talking when we should have been kissing and cuddling. Talking about dogs and karma was completely unacceptable.
“We can talk later,” I said, pulling Jeb toward my bedroom. “Though not about this. Never about this. Tonight we are done talking. Tonight we—”
Jeb took his cue, turning my unfinished sentence into a long sweet kiss, which quickly gave way to groping and other good things. Moments later we were two warm nonverbal bodies pressed together under my quilt. Connection complete.
The real world intruded far too early, poisoning my dreams. I was riding Blitzen along the Rail Trail, alone, when I spotted Jeb riding toward me on a shiny blue bicycle. He wore yellow and white Spandex, exactly like the headmaster. Only Jeb looked goofy in Spandex, and he knew it. He was making a silly face.
I laughed out loud as I waved at him.
Without warning, Jeb did exactly what the headmaster had done. He raised his hands as if to wave back and toppled off his bicycle, an arrow protruding from his back.
My laughter morphed into a scream, but it was so hard to make sound come out. The louder I tried to scream, the less noise I could make. Jeb shook me awake.
“Babe. Wake up. You’re having a bad dream.”
I was so relieved to find him in my bed next to me, wearing neither Spandex nor an arrow, that I didn’t half mind when the phone rang minutes later. Jeb passed it to me.
“Abra’s at it again,” our tireless police chief began. “I got a report last night of a missing poodle, a champion, very valuable. A family member saw him run off with a long-haired goat. This morning two folks saw a goat and a poodle in Vanderzee Park, doing what animals from two different species aren’t meant to do.”
“Maybe it really is a goat,” I mumbled. “A kinky goat.”
“Name one goat in Lanagan County,” Jenx said.
“Maybe it’s Satan, in the form of a goat.”
“It’s Satan, all right, in the form of your dog.”
I rolled onto my back and tried to f
ocus on the ceiling. My bedroom was still semi-dark.
“What do you want from me, Jenx?”
“I got quite a list. Are you awake enough to listen, or should I tell Jeb, and he can tell you?”
Jeb’s grinning face, topped by tousled hair, filled my field of vision once again. Jenx’s voice had been loud enough for him to hear, so I passed the phone back to him. Propped up on one elbow, he proceeded to make all those noises that signal agreement. I could only hope he was agreeing to handle everything without involving me.
“I’ll get Whiskey up and at it,” he concluded and hung up the phone.
“No,” I cried, squeezing my eyes shut. “No, no, no.”
“Come on,” he cajoled. “You know you want to help Chester.”
“Chester? What happened to Chester?” I was wide awake now.
“He’s fine. He’s on his way over. Jenx says his school is holding an assembly this morning to announce the headmaster’s death. She’s going to be there to address parents and students, and she thinks you should be there with Chester.”
Before I could comment, the phone rang again. Jeb passed it to me. I heard heavy breathing.
“It’s a little early for a crank call,” I snarled at the receiver.
“Whiskey, it’s me,” Chester panted. “Prince Harry and I are jogging to Vestige.”
“Uh, I think that assignment is over,” I said as delicately as I could. “No more homework at your school.”
“I’m going to keep it up, anyway,” Chester vowed, “as an homage to Mr. Vreelander.”
“Okay, but don’t tell your classmates or their moms.”
“No problem, Whiskey. They don’t know what ‘homage’ means.”
In vain I tried to convince Chester that jogging to my house would only make him sweaty. He countered that I had three available showers, and Prince Harry was carrying his school clothes.
“Aha,” I said, inspired. “That’s another issue. What are we going to do with Prince Harry? He can’t go to school with you, and he can’t stay here.”
“Sure he can. He can play with Sandra Bullock all day.”
“How do you know about Sandra Bullock?”
I glared at Jeb, who shrugged.
Chester said, “I talk to Jenx. She tells me everything.”
Boy and dog were at my door before the sun was all the way up. Fortunately, Jeb was up and making coffee in my kitchen. In a perfect world, he would have been up to something else in my bedroom, something sexy and fun. But we didn’t live in a perfect world. We lived in Magnet Springs, a town steeped in karma. And dogs.
Speaking of dogs, I didn’t hear a peep from Jeb’s, even when Chester rang the doorbell. Granted, I hadn’t known a lot of canines, but every single one I’d ever met went gonzo when there was someone at the door. What was up with this French bulldog? If the doorbell rang, and Abra didn’t make a sound, I knew she was gone. Wait a damn minute. Could I have been wrong about Sandra Bullock’s ability to escape a locked room?
Wrapping my robe around me—and noticing that I no longer had enough sash to make my preferred double-knot—I peered down the hall. The door to Abra’s room was still shut tight. I hadn’t heard Jeb open it when he shuffled off to start the coffee. From downstairs came his voice mixed with Chester’s and the occasional happy yip of Prince Harry. Still no sound from Sandra.
Then I heard it, the distinct roar of snoring emanating from that room. Not soft snoring like you might expect from a creature who weighed less than twenty-five pounds. This snoring was loud enough to come from a teenage boy, a really large teenage boy, like the fullback on our local high school football team.
I moved to the door, listening in morbid fascination.
“Whiskey!” Jeb stage-whispered from the foot of the stairs.
“What?”
In response he pressed his index finger to his lips. Chester appeared alongside him, making the same sign. I wanted to protest that no amount of beauty sleep could help the dog on the other side of that door until I realized that as long as Sandra Bullock was unconscious, I wouldn’t have to deal with her. I gave the okay sign and dashed to the bathroom before Chester could use all the hot water.
Sex with Jeb would have been better, but the steamy leisure of my Roman shower was seductive. I took my sweet time, letting the hot mists envelop me and erase thoughts of a hectic world waiting out there for my contributions. I didn’t hear him enter my bathroom, probably because I was running the water at full force. Finally Jeb’s melodic voice reached me, singing a silly Barenaked Ladies tune from way back when.
“That would have been more fun with you in it,” I said after turning off the shower.
He handed me an oversized towel, first, and a mug of hot coffee, second.
“Wish I could have joined you, babe, but somebody had to make breakfast.”
“Chester is really good at that,” I pointed out.
“Right. But he has a tough day ahead of him, and school starts at eight. He’s counting on you to walk in with him, so you need to hurry. I laid out your clothes on the bed.”
It wasn’t like Jeb to be well-organized. I wanted cuddly disorganized Jeb, and I wanted him to fawn all over me. Now.
“I’ve had a trauma, too, you know,” I whined.
“I know, but you’re a big girl—”
Defensively I folded my arms over my belly.
“A big beautiful girl,” Jeb amended, “with a beautiful baby in there.”
He planted a kiss on my still-damp tummy. Blame it on hormones, but suddenly I went all weak and weepy.
“What’s the matter?” Jeb looked confused.
“What happened on the Rail Trail yesterday really happened,” I insisted. “You can’t pretend that it didn’t.”
“I’m not pretending anything,” Jeb said. “I was just trying to make you feel better.”
“By being more concerned about Chester than you are about me?”
“Time out.”
Jeb laid his hands on my shoulders and peered directly in my eyes.
“This morning we’re helping Chester. When you get home, we’ll focus on you. Promise. That’s why I’m here, Whiskey. I came home to be with you and our baby. Last night you didn’t want to talk—”
“I didn’t want to talk about dogs last night, especially that dog down the hall. Tonight we’ll talk about what happened and about what’s going to happen with us.”
I let the sentence hang there in the warm moist air until Jeb put a period on it with a kiss. It might have turned into a really nice kiss if Chester hadn’t interrupted it with a knock.
“Ready for school when you are, Whiskey. Here’s a suggestion. The PTO likes people who look good, so you might want to comb your hair.”
9
It’s not that I failed to make a habit of combing my hair. It’s just that my hair didn’t look combed. Or stay combed. I had radically recalcitrant hair—thick, coarse and curly. My hair was a triple threat to cosmetologists everywhere, and a daily source of chagrin to me.
Nonetheless, out of respect for Chester, I spent a few extra minutes wrestling with my mane before we left for The Brentwood School. He gave me an “E” for effort, adding that most of the mothers would probably be too worked up about the headmaster to give me more than a passing glance. I could only hope. Waving good-bye to Jeb and Prince Harry, I wondered how Abra’s son would get along with the new rescue dog. Silly question. Prince Harry was half-Golden, and Goldens love everybody.
The Bentwood School was situated on an impressive piece of real estate, the kind that nobody with any business sense wants to see wasted on academics. Although I respected education as much as the next citizen, the seasoned Realtor in me couldn’t resist estimating the commercial value of the property as Chester and I cruised down its long tree-fringed driveway. Granted, real estate was temporarily in the toilet. Even so, the school’s twenty acres of playing fields, woods, meadows, parking lots and tasteful Victorian-style buildings had to be wor
th three million. In recent better days, they could have commanded five.
Chester pointed to the main building, a sprawling gothic mansion that still boasted a widow’s walk with a clear view of Lake Michigan. I knew that no member of the Bentwood family had ever plied the waves for anything other than pleasure. They made their considerable fortune building and running the local railroad.
“Well, the private school biz must be good,” I said. “The parking lots are beyond full.”
Traffic had ground to a standstill, giving Chester ample time to fill me in on The Bentwood School’s history.
“The original railroad tycoon had only one child,” he began, as if reciting an oft-told tale. “At a tender age, that son was sent off to Exeter Academy and from there, to Yale University. After graduation, he returned home with a Vassar-educated wife. Catherine Ormond Bentwood bore him three sons, but she was appalled by the lack of private education available in West Michigan.”
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “She sent their sons to Exeter and Yale.”
“Right,” Chester said. “But when Catherine’s husband died, she devoted herself to founding the kind of academy she had wished were available for their children.”
“Sweet,” I said. “Do all your fellow students know that story?”
Chester shrugged. “Most of them don’t know much.”
I watched a uniformed security guard as he directed drivers, one by one, to park their vehicles in overflow locations on the school lawn. He seemed to recognize most folks, acknowledging them with a friendly nod.
“Enrollment is high,” Chester said, “but the parking lots weren’t built to accommodate all the parents at once. Usually, they drop off their kids and drive on. Today everybody’s coming in to hear Mr. Bentwood’s announcement.”
“How do they know about it? Was it on the news?”
“Social media,” Chester replied.
“Social what?”
Distracted, I inched my car forward, impatient for the rent-a-cop to show me where I should park.
“Social media,” Chester repeated. “You know—sites where people post photos and updates about every single thing they think or do.”
