Groomed For Murder: A Pet Boutique Mystery

by Annie Knox

  He laughed, his expression softening. “Then Ama got pregnant. At first I thought we’d just gotten lucky, that the stars had aligned and we’d gotten pregnant together. I suppose I knew somewhere in the back of my head that I was lying to myself, that it was another man and not luck that gave us our child. But I didn’t care. Seeing the joy on Ama’s face when the baby kicked, working side by side to create a nursery for our baby. I chose to believe the child was mine.”

  I could empathize. Looking back, I should have known Casey was cheating on me for months before he finally left. But I wanted so much to believe in the dream of our life together, couldn’t bear the thought of it not coming to fruition, that I chose to believe all was well in our relationship. The heart’s desire can blind us to so many ugly realities.

  “What made you stop believing?” I asked.

  He sighed and opened his eyes, but he didn’t meet my gaze. “When Jordan was born. Ama and I have blue eyes and Jordan’s are brown. I only took biology when I was in high school, but I seem to recall that’s a genetic impossibility. Even if it weren’t, he doesn’t look a thing like me or his mother. I just knew.”

  “That must have been hard, to realize you weren’t his father.”

  Steve sucked in a lungful of air through his nose, like you do before the doctor sticks a needle in your arm, anticipating the pain to come.

  “It was hard. I’m not his father. But I am his dad. I’m the one who held him as he took his first breath, the one who rocked him through the night when he was sick, the one whose fingers he grasped as he took his first steps. He’s mine in a way he could never be Daniel Colona’s.”

  “Did you blame Ama?”

  “Sometimes. But I knew in my gut that she’d just had a fling, and I’ll never forget the way she cried for a child. It changed our marriage, but I never hated her for it.”

  “Did you ever confront her?”

  He laughed a short, grim laugh. “Absolutely not. She knew what she’d done, and she felt remorse. Sometimes she’d look at me like she was trying to crawl right inside my head, and she’d say, ‘I love you. You know that, right?’ She wouldn’t break the gaze until I acknowledged her love. What good would it have done to say that I knew about her fling? It would have only made her feel worse.”

  Or, I thought, it might have lifted a terrible weight from her shoulders. Whether he realized it or not, I suspected that Steve held his tongue so his wife had to suffer in silence.

  “Why kill Daniel?”

  “What makes you think I killed Daniel?” he asked, his voice growing dangerously quiet.

  Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have let on that I knew Steve was the murderer, but I was hoping Jack was listening to every word and trying to get to Trendy Tails as fast as he could. For the same reason—buying time—I figured I ought to explain my thinking.

  “Two things, really. First, there was your splinter. I saw the bandage that morning in the park. I recently did the same thing, probably in the exact same spot on the handrail in my back staircase. My first instinct was to stick the splintered finger in my mouth. It didn’t hit me until later, but you were sucking your finger right after Daniel’s death. You stopped the second you saw me, but I caught it.

  “And then there was the alibi. You and Ken both lied about your alibi, saying you’d been having a cigarette with each other in the alley. Ken had a reason to lie, so he could cover up his relationship with Taffy and the extended amount of time he spent with her when he should have been working. But you backed him up. And that made me wonder why you would lie for Ken. The answer, of course, is that you wouldn’t. You weren’t giving Ken an alibi; he had inadvertently given you one.”

  Steve cocked his head. “Clever cookie.”

  “Thanks? But I still don’t understand why you had to murder Daniel.”

  “He was nosing around, taking pictures of Jordan. He’d called her at the house a couple of times. Not that Ama told me. But a few times she’d gotten calls that upset her. I could tell by the way she gripped the phone and the way her lips flattened against her teeth. Then one day her phone rang when she wasn’t around. I picked it up. When I answered, I only got silence. But then I hit redial and I got Daniel Colona’s voice mail.

  “Dee Dee seemed to know who Daniel Colona was and claimed he’d been out by the Badger Lake construction site. So I hoofed it out there a couple of times until I finally saw him for myself. One look and I knew he was Jordan’s father.”

  He laughed, a half-desperate sound.

  “He’d figured out he had a kid, and his interest in Jordan could only mean one thing: that he was planning to try to take my boy away from me.”

  “The courts never would have granted him full custody. Just visitation,” I said. “He’d still be your boy.”

  “But everyone would know. They’d know that I’d been a patsy, they’d know that Ama had had an affair, and they’d know that Jordan was illegitimate. It would have haunted all three of us, completely changed the way the people in this community viewed us. My business would suffer, and Ama might even lose her job.”

  It seemed to me that Steve was overestimating the extent to which people in Merryville would care about their marriage. Sure, there’d be all sorts of speculation and gossip for the first few weeks, maybe even months. But then things would die down. People wouldn’t necessarily forget, but there wouldn’t be anything new to say about the subject. Why, look at Jane Porter’s torrid fling with Ingrid’s first husband. I’d managed to spend over thirty years in the orbit of Ingrid and my gossipy aunt Dolly before I heard even a peep about that affair.

  On the other hand, I suppose when you live with a secret the way Steve had been living with this, it just keeps growing in your mind until it’s this massive rock dangling by a thread over you. The merest whisper of the secret and you’ll be destroyed.

  “I didn’t plan to kill him. I wasn’t even sure if he was in his apartment the night of the wedding. I went to get a glass of water, saw Ken leaving, and thought I’d take a chance that maybe he was at home. I just wanted to ask him to leave us alone. He hadn’t even met Jordan, so why would he care if he got a chance to? Why not just pretend it had never happened?”

  That seemed to be Steve’s MO. He saw the imperfections in his life, like his wife’s infidelity. He wasn’t blind to it, but he chose to pretend it wasn’t there. He must have imagined that Daniel could do the same.

  I glanced over Steve’s shoulder. By now both Sean and Jack were late for their five o’clock drop-ins.

  “So what happened?”

  Steve shook his head as though he were settling down a bit, giving up, but then he slipped the gun from his pocket.

  “We were just talking, you know? I told him that if he’d just leave town, I’d be able to come to terms with Ama, repair our marriage, and that I still loved Jordan like my own. He laughed at me. Laughed! He said that he and Ama had met a couple of times since the conference. I thought she was in the Twin Cities to attend workshops at the U, but she was meeting him. Sleeping with him. He said our marriage was obviously pretty shaky.

  “I could have let that slide, but then he said that now that he knew about Jordan, he would sue for visitation. I said something about how I’d kill him before I let him destroy my family, and he must have thought I meant right then and there. He’s the one who grabbed the gun safe and opened it. He’s the one who pulled the gun. I told him to stop, lunged for it, and it went off.”

  “See, it was just an accident,” I soothed. “You didn’t mean to hurt him.”

  “But I did. And I meant what I said. At that moment it was an accident, but I would have killed him before I let him take my boy away. I was dead serious about that.”

  The gun was out now, hanging loose at his side. I didn’t know what he was planning, whether he was even aware that the weapon was in his hand.

  I w
as paying so much attention to the gun in Steve’s hand that I hadn’t noticed anyone approach the door. I was as startled as Steve when Sean stepped into the room.

  Steve spun around, raising the gun as he did so. I gasped, but managed to hold back my scream, as Sean threw up one hand in surrender while the other held the pan of magic bars.

  “What the . . . ?” Steve yelled.

  “Easy, man. I didn’t mean to startle you. I’m just here to drop off some cookies.”

  He glanced in my direction, meeting my eyes, and I could see the question in them. I nodded that I was okay.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Steve said, his voice filled with panic now. He raised the gun, and both Sean and I froze. His hands trembling, Steve swung the gun toward me, then toward Sean, and finally he raised it to his own head.

  “Steve,” I said softly. “You don’t want to make Ama cry, do you? If you hurt yourself, she’ll never stop crying.”

  Tears began to slip down the big man’s face. I could read the confusion in his eyes. He couldn’t see a way out.

  Just as he started to lower the gun at me again, I heard the cock of a gun somewhere just behind me. Jack. He must have heard the conversation through the phone and come in through the back door.

  “Put the gun down, Steve,” Jack said, his voice steady but commanding.

  “I . . . I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can, Steve,” Jack continued, putting special emphasis on Steve’s name. “We can work this out, Steve, but if you don’t put the gun down now, someone will get hurt. And I know you don’t want that, Steve.”

  Steve choked back a sob and jerked, and for an instant I thought all was lost. Either he would pull the trigger himself or Jack would shoot him. But, instead, Sean, standing behind Steve at that point, lobbed the pan of magic bars at Steve and the gun went flying out of his hands and skittering across the floor.

  That’s when I began to shake. In a matter of breaths, Sean had rushed to my side and pulled me into a rough embrace, trying to calm me with whispered nonsense words. Over his shoulder, I watched Jack grab Steve in a lock grip and quickly pin him to the floor. He was Mirandizing Steve and slapping cuffs on him before I fully comprehended that we were all still alive.

  I looked up at Sean and then at Jack, two men who were each trying to protect me in their own way. And then I looked at Steve. He, too, was a protector, but it had led him down a far darker path. Despite his best efforts, I knew Ama would be crying tonight.

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-three

  Ingrid and Harvey offered to put off their wedding yet again, thinking I needed some time to collect myself, but I assured them that keeping busy and reaffirming life and love were exactly what I needed.

  Saturday morning broke bright and brilliant, a perfect Minnesota spring day with skies such a piercing blue you could barely stand to look at them. I was already enjoying a quiet cup of coffee at my dining table—Packer across my feet, Jinx across my lap, and Daisy taking up the entire sofa—when Ingrid came out to join me.

  “Are you ready?” I asked.

  “More than ever,” she replied as she took a chair opposite me and poured her own cup of coffee. Packer wiggled off my feet and made his way to her side. She did not disappoint: Packer let slip a whimper, and Ingrid immediately dropped her hand to begin stroking his silky ears.

  I shook my head. “Your faith in love is astounding. This week has been incredible. We’ve seen what love can lead to: betrayal, lies, even murder. Under the circumstances, I’m not sure I’m ready to jump right into a romance.”

  Ingrid chuckled, the sound like gravel shaken in a tin can. “It has, indeed, been an incredible week. But not just because of Daniel’s murder and the fallout from all that. Jane reminded me of something Steve Olmstead should have known. Love may open you to betrayal, but, if it’s deep enough, love can survive betrayal. And then you—”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you. This week you’ve reminded me of love’s payoff. You made me so proud when you gave me that down payment on this building. You went on and on about how much I did for you, but all I really did was love you. And now you’ve given me such joy and pride.”

  “Oh, Ingrid . . .”

  She raised her hand and laughed. “No crying allowed, young lady. You also reminded me that love has to find a way. After all those years mourning for your relationship with Casey, you’re finally getting back out there.”

  I opened my mouth to protest.

  “Uh, uh, uh. I’ve seen the way those two boys look at you.”

  “Two?” I squeaked.

  “Don’t play coy. You went on a date with that hunky cop Jack, but Sean . . . he still has feelings for you. I can tell you’re both confused about them, but they’re there nonetheless.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Oh hush. The point of all this is that I’ve witnessed love in many forms this last week. And while some of it is tragic, most of it is joyous, and I want to be a part of that mad happiness.”

  “You’re quite a woman, Ingrid Whitfield.”

  “I know. And you might as well get used to calling me Ingrid Nyquist.”

  I laughed. “Yes, ma’am. Now, if you’ll excuse me, soon-to-be Mrs. Nyquist, I need to walk these dogs before the last-minute crush of preparing for the weddings.”

  Ingrid patted her leg, and Packer stood up on his hind legs, and strained his neck, licking his chops, looking for a little sugar. Ingrid grabbed both of his ears and scratched them vigorously. “You be a good dog for your mama, sweet boy.”

  I leashed up the dogs and headed downstairs and out toward Dakota Park. Packer still wasn’t thrilled about sharing the limelight with gawky Daisy May, but the two had managed to work out a system so they could walk together without entangling their leashes or tripping all over each other. The two dogs seemed to slalom in wide curving S figures, noses to the ground, until we reached the park.

  Suddenly, they were both straining at the leash, wheezing and panting trying to break free. They had a common goal: Jordan Olmstead, playing in the sandbox.

  Ama sat on a bench near him, her head tipped up to the blinding sky.

  I let out the dogs’ leads and joined Ama on the bench. I wasn’t sure if she’d be happy to see me, but I figured it was never too early to begin healing.

  “Did you know?” I asked.

  She shook her head without meeting my eyes. “I suspected, but I didn’t know. It only made sense for Steve to kill Daniel if he knew about the affair, but Steve acted perfectly normal at home. So I had my suspicions, but Steve’s own behavior made them seem ridiculous. After all, if he was angry enough to kill Daniel, why didn’t he kill me? Or at least scream at me?”

  “Because he loves you.”

  “But I betrayed him.”

  “The mix of love and betrayal is unpredictable. It’s potentially explosive, but you never know which way the path of destruction will go.”

  I thought about Ingrid. The affair between Arnold and Jane had been complicated: Ingrid had been gone for months, Arnold was lonely, Jane was unhappy in her marriage. . . . At a minimum, Arnold should have borne the brunt of some of Ingrid’s bitterness. But she’d saved it all for Jane. As the story unfolded to me, she never mentioned Arnold’s betrayal, just Jane’s. I suppose you have to do that, to avoid your whole life crashing down around your ears.

  If Steve had let the full weight of his wife’s affair fall where it may, it would have ruined his marriage, put a strain on his relationship with Jordan, and left him a husk of a man. Directing all his anger at Daniel allowed him to have his rage, to express his rage, without giving up the rest of his life.

  “It’s amazing how people can compartmentalize their feelings. Be angry about a complicated situation, yet turn that anger laserlike against a single person.”

  “I suppose. I just wi
sh . . .”

  I nodded. I imagined Ama was wishing a lot of things at that moment.

  “What are we going to do?” she asked, turning to watch her son holding a patient Daisy May in a headlock while Packer licked his ankles.

  “You’re a wonderful mother, Ama. And Steve is a wonderful father. You’ll both figure out how to keep raising a happy child, even under these new circumstances.”

  “We’ve got that big house I can’t afford. We bought it back when construction was booming, but Steve has been struggling to find contractor jobs for nearly a year. We were barely making ends meet with Steve’s income, and I make way less than he does. Did.”

  “Obviously, our first effort to rent out the second floor of 801 Maple didn’t end well, but the idea was strong. You could move your office inside and take in a renter for the mother-in-law apartment. I know it would mean giving up your adult space, but it would be worth it to take some of the pressure off your finances.”

  Ama sucked in a deep breath. It looked like something settled in her mind, like she had slipped into a new groove with some of the panic dissipating.

  “That’s a great idea,” she said.

  “And we’re here to help you. This whole community loves you, Ama. You have a soft spot to land, I promise.”

  “Thank you, Izzy. I can’t believe how kind you’re being after me and my problems caused you so much pain. I know that I’ll get through this, but I’m worried about Jordan. It’s going to be hard for such a little boy to understand why Daddy doesn’t live with us anymore.”

  I watched Jordan playing with the dogs.

  “Tell you what,” I said. “It’s a little thing, but maybe it will help. Why don’t you and Jordan take Daisy May? She needs a home, and I can’t keep her forever. She seems to like you both, and Jordan obviously loves her. She might be a good friend for him in the weeks to come. What do you say?”