Trouble at the Animal Shelter: A Cedar Bay Cozy Mystery

by Dianne Harman

  “Sunny, last question. What was the boy’s father’s name?”

  “Jimmy Richards. His son’s name was Allen. Mr. Richards owns a small hardware store near that new development just south of Cedar Bay. I don’t know his wife’s name. Now, I really do need to go, but if you think of anything else you’d like to ask me, just call the school. Thanks again, and I need a bill for lunch.”

  “No charge, Sunny. This one’s on me. That’s the least I can do for monopolizing your lunch hour. Hope to see you soon.”

  “You know you will. For some reason, those salads of Charlie’s always have my name on them.”

  “I’ll let him know, and I’m sure it will make his day. Again, thanks.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Kelly locked up the coffee shop at two that afternoon and went home to pick up Rebel before she headed out to the nursing home. When Kelly had been given Skyy, she and Mike discussed what would happen if the county health inspector ever came to Kelly’s Koffee Shop and found two or three dogs on the premises. Occasionally Mike took one of the older dogs to work with him, but they decided they had to come up with a better plan. Given the fact that Mike was the county sheriff, it wouldn’t look good for him to have a wife who was stretching the law by having dogs in a public place where food was served, even if it was the storeroom.

  The solution came in the form of a doggie door they had built into the garage door that led to the fenced back yard, so the dogs could freely go in and out. Their dog beds were in the garage, and since Mike left the house later than Kelly and she returned earlier than him, the dogs were only on their own for five or six hours.

  When Kelly got home from work she greeted the dogs, let them outside, and then put Lady and Skyy in the garage, motioning for Rebel to follow her. Although he was perfectly trained she decided to take a leash since having him in a nursing home was a new experience for both of them.

  She drove the short distance to the nursing home and parked in the visitor’s lot, snapping the leash on Rebel’s collar when they got out of her minivan. They walked through the door and over to the reception desk.

  “Hi, my name’s Kelly Reynolds, and this is Rebel. We’re here to see the director, Janet Bryce.”

  “Welcome. Mrs. Bryce told me she was expecting you. I’ll call her and let her know you’re here.”

  A few moments later the door to the office behind the reception desk opened, and a smiling grey-haired grandmotherly looking woman walked towards Kelly and Rebel. “Hi, I’m Janet Bryce. Please call me Janet.” She reached down with her hand and patted Rebel on the head.

  “Thank you so much for coming. As I told Roxie, this is a new experience for us, but according to the article I read in the journal, dogs often have a calming effect on patients, and with what some of the people here are going through, I thought it was worth a try. Follow me, and I’ll take you to Nancy Wilson’s room.” She led them down a hall and stopped outside a door with the name “Nancy Wilson” taped on it.

  “Janet, what do you want Rebel to do?” Kelly asked.

  “I really don’t have anything planned. Maybe we could talk to Nancy, and Rebel could sit next to her. I’ll assure her that he’s friendly, and let’s see how she responds.”

  Janet knocked on the door and when a voice said, “Please come in,” the three of them entered a room filled with late afternoon sunlight.

  “Nancy, I mentioned to you this morning that Mrs. Reynolds was going to bring her dog in to see you today. Your friend Roxie works for her, and she’s the one who suggested it. Is it all right with you if he sits down next to your chair?”

  “Yes, I’d like that. When I was growing up we always had dogs, but my husband was allergic to them and after he died, I just never got around to getting another one. What’s his name?”

  “It’s Rebel, Mrs. Wilson. Rebel, come,” Kelly said walking over to where Mrs. Wilson was sitting in a chair. “Sit, Rebel.”

  Rebel sat next to the chair, and Mrs. Wilson reached her hand out and patted his head. Rebel put a paw on her lap and looked up at her as if to say, “Don’t stop petting me.”

  “Janet, I wish you’d read that article a couple of weeks ago. I’d forgotten how good it feels to have a friend that doesn’t require anything more from you than a pat on the head. I’m sorry I don’t have any treats to give him.” She looked down and said, “What a good boy, you are, Rebel.”

  Kelly reached into her purse, took out a small plastic bag, and handed it to Nancy. “I have three dogs, so I always carry a few treats in my purse. He has a very gentle mouth, so don’t worry about him suddenly grabbing one of the treats away from you.”

  Nancy handed Rebel the treats and Janet smiled. The three of them talked for several minutes, and then Janet looked at her watch. “Nancy, I’m afraid we have to leave. I cleared having Rebel spend some time with you, but your doctor said the one thing we weren’t to do was tire you out.”

  “I’m not the least bit tired. If anything, I feel the best I’ve felt since I came here.” She turned to Kelly and said, “Please bring him again. He makes me happy.”

  “With all the treats you just gave Rebel, I don’t think you’ll have to ask him twice. If it’s all right with you, Janet, we can come back next week.”

  “It’s fine with me. I’m wondering if I should ask a few of the other patients if they’d enjoy being around a dog, say maybe five or so.”

  “Since I’m the test case here, I think I should be allowed to have him all to myself for a few minutes before I share him with any of the others. After all it was my friend who set this up,” Nancy said, laughing

  “We’ll be here next week, and we’ll be happy to see some of the other patients, won’t we, Rebel?” Kelly asked.

  The big dog licked Nancy’s hand, and Kelly could swear she saw a tear in the corner of her eye. “Rebel, come. Say goodbye to Mrs. Wilson.” Rebel licked her hand again and walked to the door with Kelly and Janet. “See you next week,” Kelly said to Nancy.

  CHAPTER 14

  Janet shut the door to Nancy Wilson’s room, and they started walking down the hall to the entrance. “Kelly, Rebel, thank you so much. That was definitely a success. It’s so generous of both of you to share your time with us. If there’s anything I can do for you, please let me know.”

  “Actually, Janet, there is. I believe you have a woman convalescing here by the name of Linda Devine. I wonder if it would be possible for me to talk to her for a few minutes. If you’d prefer, I can put Rebel in my minivan.”

  “Absolutely not. I’m sure Linda would enjoy him as much as Nancy did. She’s down this hall. Let me go in first. Is there something I should tell her?”

  “You can tell her I’m a friend of the woman who was her principal when she was teaching, Sunny Jacobs.”

  A few minutes later Janet opened the door to the room and motioned Kelly and Rebel in. “Linda, I’d like you to meet Kelly Reynolds and her dog, Rebel.”

  Kelly walked over to the woman and shook her hand while Rebel sat next to her, looking up at her. “Please have a seat in that chair. Rebel, you can stay next to me,” she said as she reached down and patted his head. “How is Sunny doing? I haven’t seen her for a while.”

  “She’s fine. I had lunch with her today. Actually, I own Kelly’s Koffee Shop, and she’s a pretty regular customer of ours.”

  “Yes, I remember her talking about it one time. How can I help you?” she asked, continuing to pet Rebel who had put a paw on her lap.

  “I assume you know Maggie Ryan was murdered the day before yesterday,” Kelly said. Linda nodded with a sad look on her face. “My husband is Mike Reynolds, the sheriff of Beaver County. He’s investigating her murder, and I understand she was a friend of yours. I’d appreciate anything you could tell me about her. Mike isn’t having much luck finding motives or suspects. Since you were her friend, I thought I’d see if you could help.”

  Linda was quiet for several moments. “I’ve been afraid for months something like th
is would happen,” she said looking out the window while she folded and refolded her hands.

  “Why do you say that?” Kelly asked.

  “Kelly, Linda, I have a few things I need to do. I’m going to have to excuse myself, if you don’t mind. I’ll be in my office,” Janet said as she walked out the door.

  Linda turned to Kelly and said, “I used to visit Maggie weekly. Actually, I was the one who took most of her groceries to her. She also had several deliveries a week from Meals on Wheels. Over the last few years, she changed. She told me two years ago that she’d started getting a lot of telephone calls, but when she answered the phone no one was there. I could tell it was concerning her. About that time, she started to adopt dogs from different dog adoption agencies, some as far away as Portland. She told them she would pay for their time and gas if they would deliver the dogs to her along with a large bag of dog food.”

  “I wondered how she could get that many dogs, and no one in Cedar Bay seemed to know about it,” Kelly said. “That explains it.”

  “She never told me outright, but I think she became spooked by the telephone calls and got the dogs as protection. I really don’t know what else it could have been. When she was teaching, she used to have a weekly share-a- pet day where the children brought in pictures of their pet to pin on the classroom bulletin board. She once told me she could never understand how some families could have more than one pet, but it seemed like every time I went to her home, she’d gotten another dog. I know she hired someone from one of the adoption agencies to come out to her home and clean up her yard twice a week. She told me she paid them well.”

  “Given what I’ve been told about her health, I wondered how she cared for them,” Kelly said. “That explains that part, and it would make sense if she was frightened for her personal safety to protect herself with lots of dogs.”

  “Yes,” Linda said, “but obviously, it didn’t work. What I don’t understand is how anyone got in her house and murdered her. I would have thought the dogs would scare away whoever it was. I saw on the television news that the dogs were taken to the Cedar Bay Animal Shelter.”

  “Yes, I helped the director take the dogs over there. She’s trying to get people to adopt them or at least foster them, because this is a big drain on the shelter’s finances.”

  “I wonder if she knows that Maggie left her estate to them.”

  “How did you know that, Linda? I don’t think her will has been filed for probate yet.”

  “Maggie told me several months ago she’d changed her will and left everything to them, because she knew when something happened to her that the dogs would probably be taken there, and she felt she needed to do something to help them.”

  “She certainly was thinking ahead, and that was a very generous thing for her to do.”

  “I agree. She told me she’d made a prior will and left everything to Reverend Barnes. Evidently he’d asked her to leave it to him, so he could make the decisions about where it would best be spent at the church. She said he didn’t want to be bogged down by any of the church committees haggling over how the money should be used. She also mentioned he had kind of strong-armed her to do that.”

  “In what fashion? That hardly sounds like something the minister of a church would do.”

  “I agree, and I asked her the same question. She told me that while she’d always been religious, as she’d gotten older she’d become more concerned about whether or not she’d go to heaven. He told her the only way someone could be certain they’d go to heaven was if they left their estate to a church. He even told her if she did that, he’d come to her house twice a week and they would pray for her to go to heaven when she died. Reverend Barnes gave her the names of quite a few famous people who had done just that, left their estate to the minister of their church. That’s when she made her will out and named him as her beneficiary.”

  “Linda, I can’t thank you enough for telling all of this to me. I know we’re wearing out our welcome here, but I do have one other question I’d like to ask you.”

  “Certainly, and you’ve brought so much joy to my day by bringing Rebel with you. Will he be coming back?”

  “Yes, we’ll be here next week. What can you tell me about a student of Maggie’s named Allen Richards and his father?”

  Linda was quiet for several moments and then told her essentially what Sunny had said earlier that day. “I think in her heart of hearts, Maggie lived in fear that he somehow blamed her for Allen making a mess of his life, although that was ridiculous. Maggie was a wonderful teacher, and her students’ best interests were always at the forefront of whatever she did. She honestly felt it was in Allen’s best interest to be held back a year. She told me once she was just sorry that his kindergarten or first grade teacher hadn’t held him back. It would have made the following years for him much easier.”

  “When I heard about the incident, I wondered the same thing. Why do you think he wasn’t held back earlier?”

  “Teachers are under a lot of pressure to have their students matriculate to the next grade, both by the school system and the parents. Teachers are made to feel like failures if children are held back, like they didn’t do their job properly. Even though it would be far better in many cases, it’s rarely done. In this case, I think the child was just a bad apple to start with.

  “I know Maggie always felt a sense of failure over the way Allen ended up, but I think the fact he went on to a different school system and the next grade and still had so many problems illustrated clearly that what she had tried to do for him was the right thing. Unfortunately, his father refused to accept that there might be something wrong with his son. He chose to believe it was just Maggie wanting to hold him back. I understand that after all these years, he still resents it.”

  “Even though Maggie Ryan was my teacher and my children’s teacher, I hadn’t seen her for years, but it sounds like her later years were not particularly happy ones,” Kelly said.

  “I’d have to agree with you. I don’t know if any of this will help your husband solve the case, but I certainly hope so. She may have been a bit odd in her later years, but no one deserves to die like she did. I don’t think that woman had a cruel or mean bone in her body.”

  “Thank you so much. Rebel, come. Linda, we’ll see you next week and hopefully, Mike will have found her murderer by then. Again, thanks for your help.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Kelly left the nursing home with her mind buzzing. Rebel had definitely been a hit, but she never doubted that he wouldn’t be. She was anxious to tell Mike what she’d found out about the reverend and also about Jimmy Richards. Nancy Wilson’s account of the Richards incident several years ago certainly dovetailed with what Sunny had told her earlier in the day.

  On her way home, she remembered she needed to buy some coffee and fresh fruit at the market. Mike had read that granola with fruit was a very healthy way to start the day, so he’d started making his own granola mixing together rolled oats, crushed cashews, raisins, and an organic granola he’d purchased online. To that he added yogurt and fresh fruit. He’d told Kelly on numerous occasions that he had far more energy and felt much better since he’d started beginning his days with it.

  After she’d parked her minivan in the parking lot of the market she turned in her seat and said, “Rebel, stay. I’ll be back in a few minutes.” She partly rolled down the windows, and as soon as she’d closed her door, Rebel got in the passenger seat, letting everyone who passed by the minivan know that it was well guarded.

  When Kelly was checking her cart to make sure she’d gotten all the fruits Mike wanted, she heard someone say, “Kelly, it’s good to see you. Actually, I was going to give you a call. Do you have a few minutes to talk?”

  Kelly looked up and said, “Hi, Mary. Of course I have time for you. Let’s get a cup of coffee and sit down. I’ll meet you at the coffee shop in the rear of the store.”

  Mary was the secretary at the Church of Loving Grace, the R
everend Barnes’ church, and they’d become friends over the years. Mary was a frequent lunchtime customer at the coffee shop.

  A few minutes later they sat down with a hot cup of coffee. When Kelly looked closely at Mary, she noticed the deep worry lines etched on her face, and said, “What’s wrong, Mary?”

  Mary was quiet for several moments as she looked down at her coffee and then she said, “Kelly, I don’t know where to begin, but I have a very bad feeling about something, and I just can’t keep it to myself any longer.”

  “I have a big ear, so why don’t you start at the beginning?”

  “All right,” Mary said. She took a sip of her coffee and began to speak. “Kelly, you know I’m the secretary at the Church of Loving Grace. I’ve been there for almost ten years, and I not only like the interaction with the parishioners, I really like Reverend Barnes.”

  “I don’t see any problem there,” Kelly said. “From the way you’re blushing, I’m wondering if perhaps you have some romantic feelings towards him.”

  Mary was quiet for several moments. “Let’s just say we’ve spent a lot of time together, particularly recently. He likes my cooking, and he’s indicated maybe it’s time he found a wife. You know my husband died at a pretty young age, and I’m tired of being a widow. I definitely have developed feelings for him, but I’m concerned about a few things.”

  “Like what?” Kelly asked.

  “Well, even before we became, how should I say this, better friends, he and I had always gotten along very well. We’ve never kept secrets from one another. By that I mean he was always free to help himself to the candy I keep in my desk drawer or look at my computer to see what I was working on, and I pretty much did the same. When he went to lunch, I’d critique the sermons he composed on his computer, you know, that type of openness.”