5 Mischief in Christmas River

by Meg Muldoon

  The way I saw it, maybe there was something I could do to help Billy and the department, beyond just checking in with the Humane Society.

  Chapter 19

  I walked along the path on the BrightStar Trail, a woodsy, winding area that was on the north side of Christmas River. The area was known for its expansive dog park, its twisty biking trails, and its lovely views of the Cascade Mountains on clear days.

  Chadwick trotted out in front of me on the path, his short legs sinking into the powder that had fallen the night before. The mild storm had frosted the forest in a layer of fluffy, buttercream snow. It had also seemed to bring a stillness with it. The birds were silent, and the sound of our footsteps seemed to echo endlessly through the trees.

  The fresh air and pretty scenery all went quite a ways to dispelling my hangover.

  I didn’t know exactly what I expected to find out here, at the place where Shasta and Julianne Redding’s dog, Harley, had disappeared. I guess in some sort of fantasy land, I was half hoping that Shasta would come bounding up from one of the paths, and that the department’s reputation would be saved. But as I walked into the silent woods, it seemed as if that little scenario would stay exactly where it started: in my imagination.

  It had worried me some, the way Daniel had talked about the responsibility of losing Shasta getting laid at his feet. Billy may have lost the dog, but Daniel was the one who was going to take most of the heat for it. I imagined once the news caught wind of the story, they’d go to town on it. Pohly Sheriff’s Office loses $20,000 K-9. It was the kind of thing folks would like to make fun of. And even worse, something that might make some of those tax payers angry. Something that would no doubt be brought up in future Sheriff’s elections.

  I shook my head.

  Billy really should have been paying more attention to Shasta that night.

  Chadwick stopped walking, the way he did when he was about to collapse and stay put. I started tugging on the leash, trying to avoid an all-out battle by stopping him before his legs gave out. But then something caught his attention in the distance, and he stood straight up.

  I followed his gaze.

  Somebody was walking along the path up ahead. I squinted, and it took me a moment to figure out in which direction the person was walking.

  Chadwick started wagging his tail and barking.

  I firmly held onto the leash as the woman came into focus. She was in her mid-forties, and was wearing a green fleece jacket, dark jeans, and rubber boots. She had closely cropped red hair and pale skin. She was carrying a stack of something in one of her arms.

  A few moments later, I recognized who it was.

  “Hi, Julianne,” I said as she approached.

  She was looking down, as if in a state of deep concentration. She didn’t respond or acknowledge me.

  “Hi, Julianne,” I said again, this time louder.

  She glanced up, looking as if she’d just been awoken from a dark dream. She stared at me for a second as if she didn’t know who I was. But then, a look of recognition swept across her face.

  “Oh, hi,” she said, shaking her head. “Jeez, I’m sorry. I was miles away just now.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “These woods have that effect sometimes.”

  She looked down at Chadwick, who I was having a devil of a time keeping from jumping all over her. The pooch didn’t weigh much, but he had a lot of strength and was more hardheaded than a bighorn sheep when he wanted to do something.

  “Cute dog,” Julianne said glumly. “What’s his name?”

  “Chadwick,” I said.

  She smiled sadly.

  I looked at what she was carrying in her hands. It was a stack of flyers that I recognized as being the same missing posters that I’d seen stapled to the telephone pole on Tinsel Street the other day.

  “I’m so sorry to hear about Harley,” I said.

  She nodded, taking in a sharp breath.

  “I’m just beside myself, Cinnamon,” she said. “Beside myself.”

  “How did it happen, if you don’t mind me asking?” I said.

  She sighed.

  “Well, I was walking him out here in these woods about a week ago. I never put Harley on a leash, ‘cuz he’s such a good dog that there’s no reason to. But when we were out here, Harley suddenly stops walking, and his ears prick up. Next thing I know, Harley takes off like a bat out of hell. I went after him, but he was too fast for me. He disappeared somewhere over the hill there, and I started calling after him. And then…”

  She gulped back hard.

  “Then there was just silence. Just a dreadful silence.”

  She placed a leather-clad hand up to her face, and shook her head.

  “I’ve plastered the whole town with missing posters, but nobody’s seen Harley. I’ve come here to this trail every day since then, looking for him. But it’s as if he just vanished into the woods.”

  I bit my lip.

  Her story sounded awfully familiar.

  “I’m really sorry, Julianne,” I said.

  She sighed, then handed me one of the flyers.

  “Just let me know if you see my baby,” she said. “He’s a nice dog. If you whistle three times, he’ll come.”

  I nodded.

  “See you at the Junction?” I asked.

  “The what?” she said, confused.

  “The Gingerbread Junction,” I said. “You’re still judging this year, aren’t you?”

  “Oh, of course,” she said, pressing her hand up to her forehead. “I’ll be there, as always.”

  She took one last look at Chadwick, sighed, and then went on her way, dragging a whole train of gloom behind her.

  I looked at the poster in my hands again, peering at Harley’s sweet face.

  Then I glanced around.

  The woods were as still as ever.

  A chill ran down my spine.

  I didn’t kid myself: I wasn’t any kind of detective.

  But this… this all seemed too much of a coincidence to me.

  Something fishy was going on. And I suddenly suspected that Shasta’s disappearance had less to do with Billy’s careless ways than it did with something more sinister.

  Three dogs disappearing without a trace, within one week of each other, just wasn’t the kind of thing that happened in a town as small as Christmas River.

  Chapter 20

  I held my breath, doing everything I could to hold back the onslaught of Hurricane Cinnamon.

  But just as it had been useless in the previous five sneezes, it was no use trying to hold back this one either.

  I tried to turn away, but the damage was already done.

  Glitter, dried orange peel, and wood shavings went flying across the table in response to my wild and out of control sneeze. When I opened my eyes again, I realized that both Kara and her friend Brad were staring at me.

  “Gazuntite,” Brad finally said, pulling yet another Kleenex from the box on the opposite end of the crafting table and handing it to me.

  I nodded gratefully.

  I didn’t know if it was the essence of vanilla, the orange peel, the cardamom, the cloves, or the wood chips, but something about the potpourri gift bags we were making for Kara’s wedding guests was having a severe disagreement with my nasal passages.

  “Do you want to step outside and get some fresh air, Cin?” Kara asked, looking up at me.

  “No way. I said I’d help you make these, and that’s what I’m going to do.”

  I went back to tossing the wood shavings, essential oils, dried orange peels, juniper berries, and pine cones together in a large bowl.

  I was so eager to help Kara with all her wedding preparations, especially since she’d been so helpful with my own wedding the year before. But, as was true with the other wedding activities, even making potpourri proved to be a hurdle for me.

  Brad, who had more crafting abilities in one pinky than I did in my entire being, had been a much bigger help in that department.


  “Cin, if the smells are bugging you, you don’t have to be doing this,” Kara said. “Brad and I have it under control.”

  I waved my hand at her.

  “What kind of maid of honor would I be if I didn’t help the bride make potpourri for the gift bags?”

  Kara shrugged.

  “One that wasn’t showering the table every few minutes,” she said.

  “I’m fine,” I said, wiping at my nose with the Kleenex. “Really.”

  We sat there in silence for a while, mixing up batches of the potpourri. It was around 6 p.m. and I’d just closed the shop for the day, jaunting across the street to Kara’s ornament store to help her make these gift bags. If I was being honest, I would have preferred to work on my Dr. Zhivago ice palace gingerbread house this evening rather than tossing together wood chips. But I felt like I’d been a subpar maid of honor thus far, and I knew that I had to do a better job of prioritizing the wedding duties.

  I added a few drops of orange essence to the batch of potpourri in front of me. My nose began tickling, and I started breathing in deeply, feeling yet another sneeze coming on. But I was able to stifle it before it got any farther. Kara shot a glance over at Brad.

  I smiled sheepishly.

  “False alarm,” I said.

  “So, Cinnamon,” Brad said, adjusting his hipster, black-rimmed glasses. “I heard a rumor I wanted to ask you about.”

  “Oh yeah?” I said.

  He nodded.

  I didn’t know Brad all that well. But the little I did know of him, I liked. He and Kara had dated for a summer back when they were in their early 20s, before he realized he was gay. He’d been living in Portland for about 12 years before recently moving back home to Christmas River. He owned his own interior design business with his partner, Will.

  Earlier in the year, I’d gotten some pretty crazy ideas about Brad and his intentions when it came to Kara. But now that we had hung out a few times, I saw that I had been completely wrong about him. Brad was warm, funny, and had a bright personality that lit up the room. He’d been a good friend to Kara, and he’d been a tremendous help with her wedding so far. He’d helped me plan her surprise wedding shower coming up this weekend, and had even offered to pick Kara’s mom up from the airport, who was flying in from Florida as a surprise.

  “You’re killing me with the suspense,” I said. “What’s this rumor, then?”

  “Well,” he said, pausing for a moment. “I’m redesigning Marilyn Jasper’s foyer this week. The woman won’t let me get a moment’s peace while I’m working. She just talks and gossips and talks and gossips. Yesterday she was telling me about her son, Billy, you know, one of the Pohly County Sheriff’s deputies?”

  I felt my stomach tighten.

  As of now, the lid had still been kept shut on the Sheriff’s Department’s missing K-9. But I had a feeling that keeping a secret that big in a town this small would be a difficult task.

  “Really?” I said, playing dumb, like I didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “Yeah,” Brad said. “Mrs. Jasper told me, and I quote, ‘That foolish son of mine went and lost himself that 20-grand dog.’”

  Brad made open and close quotation marks in the air with his fingers as he said it. I tried to keep my face as expressionless as possible.

  “Wow,” I said. “Really? I don’t know anything about th—”

  “C’mon Cin,” Kara said, giving me a deadpan expression. “We’re all friends here. And don’t tell me that you and the sheriff don’t talk about these things.”

  I held my breath in for a moment, looking back and forth between them.

  Kara knew me too well. She always could see right through my B.S.

  “Fine,” I said in a low voice. “But what I tell you can’t go beyond this room, or some good people are going to be in trouble. Got it?”

  Brad stared at me with large eyes.

  “I won’t say a thing,” he said.

  “Of course, Cin,” Kara said, putting down the bottle of vanilla essence she was holding and leaning forward.

  I let out a ragged breath, and then told them what Billy had told me about how he’d lost Shasta. About how much trouble it would cause if it got out that the Pohly County Sheriff’s Department just lost a $20,000 investment. About the other dogs that had gone missing in the last week.

  About how I thought it was all a bit too strange to be a coincidence.

  Brad kept a serious expression on his face, listening intently to every word I said.

  “I know it all sounds a little farfetched,” I said. “But I have to think that if these dogs did indeed actually run away, then at least one of them would have been found by now. Either they’d have been hit by a car or turned up at the Humane Society. Even if a wolf got them, you’d have to think there’d be remains of some sort. But there’s been nothing on any of them. Nothing at all.”

  Brad scratched his chin for a moment.

  “You know, it reminds me of something,” he said. “Something that happened to Will once.”

  “Really?” Kara said.

  He nodded.

  “This was about six years ago, a while before we started dating. But when he was living in Portland, Will had this miniature bull dog. Reginald was its name.”

  Brad shook his head.

  “I still don’t know who names a dog Reginald anyway.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Well, Will told me he was walking Reginald in Laurelhurst Park. There’s this off-leash area in the park, so Will let Reginald roam free for a little bit. But the dog wandered off, and then Will couldn’t find him. He looked all over, but it was like Reginald had just disappeared.

  “So Will did what any dog owner would: he put up missing posters all over the park, promising a nice reward to anybody who brought the dog back. After a few days, he still had no luck. He started thinking that maybe he’d never see little Reggie again. But then he gets this phone call from this woman, saying that she thinks she might have come across his dog. Well, Will was ecstatic, so he gives her his address, and she comes over, and lo and behold, it is Reginald. I guess she had found the pooch wandering alone in the woods close to the park while she was on a run with her PSU cross-country team. Will is so happy, he gives this young woman an extra hundred dollars on top of the reward.”

  Brad shook his head.

  “But after a few days of having Reggie home, Will started thinking that something was off about the whole thing. He started thinking that if the dog had really been in those woods for a few days, he would have been all muddy and dirty when he got back. But he was as clean as the day Will lost him when he was returned.

  “Then Will said the more he thought about it, the more familiar the girl who found him looked. Will thought that he must have seen her the day Reggie went missing. He went so far as to call Portland State University to see if there was a girl by her name on the cross country team there. Turns out, there wasn’t.”

  “So it was a scam?” I said.

  He nodded.

  “Pretty sure, anyway. In a town like Portland, where folks love their dogs so much, I bet a dog kidnapper can make a pretty penny all right. So long as they don’t get caught.”

  I furrowed my brow.

  “Do you think that’s what could be going on here?”

  He shrugged.

  “I’m not saying that, necessarily,” he said. “But I bet the Sheriff’s Office would offer a nice reward for anybody who finds that K-9.”

  “How does a dog get to be worth $20,000 anyway?” Kara asked.

  “I guess there’s a lot of training involved,” I said. “Billy was down in California for two weeks in the fall getting trained with the dog. It’s highly specialized, I guess. Then they had to outfit Billy’s patrol car for Shasta. Then there are other expenses too for the dog’s care.”

  “His mom told me all about that too,” Brad said. “Said Billy slipped, tripped and fell in love with some dog trainer lady do
wn there, and that he wasn’t paying as close attention in training as he should have been.”

  I let out a short sigh.

  Not that Billy didn’t deserve some scolding for losing the dog, but his mother seemed like a real piece of work. I was sure that that accounted, at least in some small part, for the way the young deputy got down on himself about things.

  “Well, if you all do come across that dog, would you let Daniel know right away?” I said. “‘Cuz I’m afraid that all of the blame for this is going to fall on his shoulders if that K-9 isn’t found soon.”

  Kara looked at me with a concerned expression.

  “Is it serious?” she asked.

  I shrugged.

  “I don’t really know,” I said.

  A silence fell over the crafting studio. It lasted for a few awkward moments.

  “I’m sure everything’s going to be just fine,” Kara said, going back to tossing woodchips together. “These things usually work themselves out.”

  “Yeah,” Brad said. “In the meantime, I’ll keep my eyes peeled for that dog.”

  “Me too,” Kara said.

  She peered at me for just a little bit too long, then went back to her crafting.

  I bit my lip, and then tried to focus on being a good maid of honor.

  Trying not to think too much about what would happen to Daniel should Shasta never turn up.

  Chapter 21

  It was going to be a late, late night at the pie shop, and it had nothing to do with baking pies.

  I peered at the image on my laptop of the ice palace from Dr. Zhivago, trying to shape the sweeping domes and towering spires out of gingerbread cookie dough. It was a precarious business, trying to bake cookie dough like this. Much of the time, under the heat of the oven, the dough would lose its shape, and you’d be left with an unrecognizable blob.

  Still, despite the difficulty of this particular gingerbread house, I didn’t regret having chosen the subject matter. I had always loved the movie, in particular, the sweeping and beautiful love story between Yuri and Lara. Dr. Zhivago always held a special place in my heart, ever since Warren took me to see it at the Christmas River Movie House when I was a teenager.