Groomed For Murder: A Pet Boutique Mystery

by Annie Knox

  Dru jerked back her head and thinned her lips. “Not necessarily. I go to workshops and conferences all the time, and on average I bet I only know ten percent of the people there.”

  “Okay,” I conceded, “she didn’t have to meet Daniel then, but I think she did.”

  Surprisingly, my mom perked up. “I bet she really met him.”

  Lucy blew a lock of midnight hair from her creamy forehead. “Stop talking in riddles. What do you mean, Mom?”

  “Well, I just remember Ama talking about getting pregnant with Jordan. It was right around Halloween, and she was with a bunch of us putting together decorations for the annual Halloween Howl. Ama cracked a joke that pretty soon she’d look like a jack-o’-lantern. It was the first any of us had heard she was pregnant. We all started clucking like a bunch of brood hens. She made another joke about the timing being perfect because she was due in early June and wouldn’t be all huge during the height of summer.”

  “How on earth do you remember that?” I asked.

  Mom shrugged. “I remember thinking she was a lucky lady. With the three of you girls, I only avoided a pregnant summer once.”

  “With me,” Dru crowed.

  Mom nodded. “Dru’s a June baby.” Mom started passing the ratatouille and the bread, in opposite directions.

  “June fourth,” Dolly said, as she cracked open the bottle of wine.

  “Right. Your dad had taken a sabbatical the fall before Dru was born, spent three months studying the history of the Vikings in Oslo. I did the math, and the only time Dru could have possibly been conceived was Labor Day weekend, right before your dad left for Norway.”

  “Ewwww,” Dru, Lucy, and I all groaned together.

  “Oh, grow up, girls. I’m sure you all know plenty about the birds and the bees by now,” Mom said.

  Of course I knew my mother had had sex. And I’d lived with Casey for years, so she obviously knew I had had sex. But actually acknowledging the fact that we both knew that about each other felt . . . wrong. Just plain wrong.

  “Why are you torturing us with this information?” Dru said. “What does dad’s, uh, sabbatical have to do with Ama’s baby?”

  “June babies and September conceptions,” Mom nudged.

  “That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” Rena chimed in. “She was only at the conference for a few days. She could have easily gotten pregnant before she left or after she returned.”

  Mom shook her head. “She could have, but I don’t think she did. You said that Daniel had written the date June tenth in his notebook. I bet if you do the math there, you’ll find that a baby conceived on September seventeenth—the date of that annual conference—would be due right around June tenth. Just about the time little Jordan is having his third birthday party. I don’t know that Daniel was Jordan’s father, but I’d bet cash money that Daniel thought he was.”

  “Mom, you’re brilliant! And Dolly said that the stack of pictures she found in Daniel’s apartment included a whole bunch of pictures of a cute little boy with dark hair. Jordan Olmstead is a cute little boy with dark hair, supposedly the child of two very blond parents.”

  Lucy looked thoughtful. “So you’re saying that Ama cheated on Steve with Daniel and got pregnant during the fling?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  “That’s a pretty major accusation,” Dru said.

  “It is,” I agreed, “but it’s not as major as murder.”

  “It’s also all circumstantial. It could just be a coincidence. There are lots of boys with dark hair who play in Dakota Park. We have no idea if those pictures were of Jordan or not.”

  I was glad to have Dru there to give me pushback, challenge my reasoning.

  “I’m right there with you. But if it’s all just a bunch of coincidences, why did Ama lie?” Dru opened her mouth to argue, but I raised my hand to cut her off. “Not just about not knowing Daniel, but about her never receiving a call from him. We found her phone number in the back of his journal, but she told us that she’d never spoken with him. Jack slipped up the other night and said that Daniel had placed three calls to Ama’s cell phone.”

  “Whoa,” Lucy said.

  “Wait right there. ‘Jack slipped up the other night.’ What other night? What were you doing with Jack Collins?”

  “Honestly, now is not the time, Mom.”

  “Actually,” Lucy started.

  “It’s as good a time as any,” Dru finished.

  “Oh, all right. If you must know, Jack and I went on a date last night. It was no big deal.”

  “Details,” Lucy insisted. “Was there kissing?”

  I felt the heat rushing up my face. I didn’t want to be having this conversation at all, let alone in front of my mother. “Yes, there was kissing. That’s all I’m going to say on the subject.” I slapped my hand down on the table. “Let’s get back to the fact that Daniel might have been the father of Ama’s child.”

  Dru hummed softly. “And he was in town. Calling her. Taking pictures of Jordan. He must have known.”

  “Man, if she thought he was going to drag that secret out into the light . . . ,” Rena said.

  “Exactly,” I said. “It would be a big motive for murder.”

  * * *

  As luck would have it, Ama was scheduled to stop by the store after lunch to do some light checks for the photographs she’d be taking of the wedding ceremony the next day. She’d done the same for Ingrid and Harvey’s first wedding, but that had been in the evening with the primary light sources coming from the chandeliers that hung in the store. Tomorrow, the ceremony was set for the afternoon, and Ama needed to see what the afternoon sun coming through Trendy Tails’ large front window would do to the light.

  Packer and Daisy had been enjoying a moment of camaraderie, stretched out in a beam of molten sunlight, both snoring softly. Ama’s entrance didn’t faze Packer at all. He opened one eye, then grumbled before falling right back to sleep. But Daisy got up, gave a little yip, and then pushed her head into Ama’s hand.

  Ama pulled back like she’d been burned. I guessed she wasn’t much of a dog person.

  “Sorry about that,” I said, tugging Daisy’s collar to pull her away from Ama. “I still think she has a little crush on you.”

  Ama’s eyes grew round with surprise, but she didn’t comment. I dragged a reluctant Daisy by her collar and shut her up in my apartment. She whined, and I could see her nose pressing at the gap below my door before I headed back downstairs.

  Ama got set up while I assisted a customer who was buying a pair of fleece boots for his border collie. He didn’t have the dog with him, so we spent a fair amount of time having him guess the size of his collie’s feet and sketch them out on a piece of paper so I could pick the correct size of booties.

  “Thank you, sir. And if you get home and find those boots don’t fit Loki, you can bring both the boots and the dog back, and we’ll get him the right size.”

  He smiled and waved his thanks as he walked out.

  I walked toward the back of the store, where Ama was working. I caught sight of Rena in the barkery, pretending to dust the case but actually keeping a suspicious eye on Ama.

  “Ama,” I said.

  “Huh,” she muttered as she stared into the viewer of her camera and slowly turned the dial of an external lens.

  “Ama, would you like a cookie?”

  She looked up at me, bemused.

  “I wasn’t craving them, but I wouldn’t say no to a cookie. What’s the occasion?”

  “No occasion, really.”

  I led her to the red folk art table, where Rena was quickly setting out a plate of human cookies—her oatmeal toffee chocolate chunks—and a pot of tea she’d brewed in advance.

  “No, really, what’s going on?” she asked as she slowly sank into a chair. “You�
��re both so serious, I get the feeling you’re about to give me bad news.” There was a hint of panic in her voice. “Is it Steve? Did he get hurt working on Ken’s restaurant?”

  “No,” I soothed as I took a seat across from her. “We just . . . we know about your secret.”

  Her demeanor shifted from worried to completely closed in the blink of an eye. “What secret?”

  “We know that Daniel was Jordan’s father.”

  The words just hung in the room like a pall. All the bright colors of Trendy Tails seemed to fade to sepia as I watched the play of emotions on Ama’s face: belligerence, fear, resignation, and just a hint of hope . . . perhaps hope that she could talk us out of our conclusion.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She’d opted for hope.

  “We know you were at the Shot Heard Round the World workshop that Daniel ran at about the time that you conceived Jordan.”

  “So?”

  “We also know that Daniel was interested in Jordan’s due date, had been taking pictures of him, and had been calling you.”

  “I told you—”

  “Don’t bother to deny it, Ama. I’d rather not name our source, but we have it on good authority that he called you several times.”

  “Again, so what?”

  “What is it they say? ‘The cover-up is always worse than the crime’? We wouldn’t have thought twice about those calls except you were so adamant about denying they happened.”

  “All right. I should have been more truthful, but I swear he just called to ask about using the archive at the Gazette. Completely innocent. Jordan is Steve’s boy.”

  “No, he’s not,” I prodded. “Jordan looks just like Daniel. I understand why you would go to any lengths to protect that secret.”

  “Wait. You’re not suggesting that I killed Daniel, are you?”

  “You have one whale of a motive,” Rena said.

  “And then there’s Daisy,” I said. “We all thought she had a crush on you because she’d bark at the sound of your voice, both in the park and on TV and just now. But it isn’t random. She knows you. You must have been in Daniel’s apartment when she was. And you must have made quite an impression on her.”

  “She’s a dog. You’re accusing me because of a dog?”

  “Well, first of all, dogs are highly sensitive and they remember negative experiences. And second, it’s not just Daisy. It’s all of these little things that pile up to a lot of evidence.”

  Ama sat still for a moment. She even picked up a cookie, took a bite, and chewed thoughtfully. But her hands were trembling the whole time.

  Finally she broke her silence. “If I tell you the truth, will you keep it to yourselves?”

  “We can’t make any promises,” I said. “I promised Jack Collins that I won’t withhold evidence.”

  Her eyes were pooling with tears. “But that’s just it. None of it is evidence of anything. You’re right—Jordan is Daniel’s child. And I never told Daniel that I’d gotten pregnant. It would have killed Steve, and I was so in love with him. I am so in love with him. With Daniel, it was all physical.”

  In my mind, the fact that Casey had cheated on me was a sign that he’d probably never loved me at all. Was it possible for love and infidelity to coexist?

  “Why did you sleep with Daniel if you loved Steve so much?”

  She shrugged, and wiped away a tear with a French-tipped finger. “See, we’d been trying to get pregnant for a long time, and we just couldn’t seem to get there. It was putting an amazing amount of stress on our relationship. Every time we had sex, it felt like we were gearing up to march into battle. I just wanted one completely uncomplicated night with someone. And Daniel Colona was a very tempting man.”

  She uttered a sharp sound, somewhere between laughter and pain. “Wouldn’t you know it? I work for years to have a child with my husband, and no dice. One night of infidelity and suddenly I’m Fertile Myrtle.”

  “But you never told Daniel? Then how did he figure it out?”

  “Oh, he didn’t until he got to town. He came to investigate those ridiculous owls and whether their habitat would be destroyed. He apparently saw me with Jordan in the park and quickly put two and two together.”

  “Did you talk to him about the child?”

  “Yes.” She nodded, tears now streaming down her face. “We spoke three times. The first devolved quickly into an argument, but during the course of the shouting, I admitted Jordan was his. The other two times we spoke, he called and we met in his apartment.”

  I frowned. “I never saw you.”

  “Daniel let me in through the kitchen and up the back stairs. That’s when Daisy probably latched on to my voice. I brought pictures and footprints and macaroni art . . . all the things Daniel had missed.”

  “Did you fight? Is that why Daisy gets so agitated when you’re around?”

  Ama flushed. “Honestly, you can’t let this get out. It wouldn’t help anyone with anything. But both times I visited his apartment, we were, uh, intimate.”

  “Holy cow,” Rena gasped.

  I shot her a quelling look and reached out to take Ama’s hand. “It’s okay, Ama. We all make mistakes.”

  She squeezed my hand. “It was just so sentimental, looking through Jordan’s baby things with the man who had given him to me. I shouldn’t have done it. I broke my vows again. But I got caught up in the moment.”

  “Did Daniel want visitation or custody?”

  “Yes.” She nodded miserably. “And he deserved it. It wasn’t right of me to keep Jordan a secret for so long. I was trying to figure out how to tell Steve, but then Daniel died, and suddenly the problem was gone.”

  Rena cleared her throat. “That’s precisely the problem, Ama. Daniel’s death solved a huge problem for you. That’s what we call ‘motive.’”

  Ama became animated again. “But I’m telling you, I didn’t kill him. He was the father of my child. Besides, I couldn’t have killed him. I was taking pictures of the wedding the whole time.”

  I remembered that she’d been quick to get to the front of the room to take pictures of Daniel’s body. Her distress at the time made more sense since she knew the victim. But she was out of breath when she started taking those crime scene photos.

  “You were panting,” I said. “When you got up to the altar to take pictures of Daniel’s body, you were breathing hard like you’d just run down a flight of stairs.”

  “I was breathing hard because I had to force my way through the crowd with all my equipment. Steve had gone out for some air just before Daniel tumbled down the stairs. He’d left me with all of my camera gear, which is a lot of weight for someone my size to carry.

  “Look, here are the photos I took. You can see I didn’t miss a moment.”

  She pulled a tablet computer out of a pocket in one of her bags, opened up a file labeled “Ing_Harv_Wedding,” and began scrolling through the photos. There was Harvey standing by the altar, one of me talking with Pris, a photo of my sisters whispering to each other, one of Hetty and Sean Tucker sitting next to Louise and Jack Collins, the two men exchanging hard glares. Finally, there was a string of pictures that ran from Ingrid’s taupe pumps appearing on the staircase to the chaos and confusion when the body fell down the stairs. There was a short break, when, presumably, Ama was forcing her way to the front of the crowd, and then pictures of me and Jack kneeling by Daniel’s dead body.

  It was pretty compelling evidence. Ama couldn’t have done it.

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-one

  When Ama left, both Rena and I sank into a funk. Not only had we once again failed to find the real killer, but we’d made poor Ama cry for nothing. When Dolly had told us about Ingrid and her first husband, Arnold’s, problem, when he’d cheated on her with Jane Porter, I thought that must have been the most horrible burde
n to bear through their long marriage. But at least the truth was out between the two of them. Ama carried her secret on her own, hiding something so big from the man she loved. I couldn’t help but feel for her.

  The door had barely closed behind Ama when Richard Greene made his way into the store. I stopped midway through the process of moving a rack of spangled leashes to the back of the barkery, where they’d be out of the way for the next day’s ceremony. I stifled a sigh, just waiting for the next gambit to close down Trendy Tails.

  “Miss McHale. Miss Hamilton.” He nodded his gentlemanly greeting.

  “Hi, Richard. What can I do for you today?”

  He thrust his chin out as though steeling himself for a blow.

  “I am here to . . .” He coughed and shuffled his feet. “I am here to apologize.”

  “Apologize? Whatever for?”

  “For being so hard on you ladies when it comes to your business here. I was speaking with Dorothy the other night, while we had a bite to eat. . . .”

  For a moment, I completely tuned out what he was saying, trying to wrap my brain around the fact that Aunt Dolly had gone on a date with Richard Greene. And that she’d managed to keep it a secret from the rest of us. When I finally processed that little bit of information, Richard was halfway through his speech.

  “. . . I have to admit she was correct. I’ve been too hard on you young women. At least you’re trying to bring business to the community, and you’re not just sitting around waiting for someone to take care of you.”

  “Thank you, Richard,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Rena mumbled, clearly in shock, “thank you.”

  “I still insist on you obeying the law, but Dorothy says you’ve already been in touch with the Department of Agriculture and are working on coming up to code. I expect you to have your food properly licensed and labeled by July, but I won’t report you before then.”

  Not the warmest apology I’d ever received, but definitely one of the most unexpected.

  “We promise we’ll work with the MDA until everything is resolved. I think July is completely fair,” I said.