Muddy Mouth: A Dog Park Mystery

by Newsome, C. A.

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Looks like you’re more interested in the mourners than the service.”

  “Sarah was my friend. I’m here for her.”

  “And you picked the best seat in the house if you want to take stock of all the involved parties.”

  “We can’t help it if we got here late,” Lia mumbled.

  “Uh huh.” He raised one eyebrow, looking at her steadily.

  “Shhhhhh, Paul is about to start.” She whipped back around to avoid scrutiny.

  Peter moved behind her, keeping a hand on her shoulder, and whispered in her ear. “It’s okay. You can be my cover.”

  Lia snorted. She looked up to see Brent across the tent from her, standing with arms folded, legs planted so the knife-edged creases in his slacks didn’t break. He lifted one hand just enough to send her an abbreviated wave, and winked.

  She had a moment to wonder why he didn’t dress in black more often.

  The service opened with remembrances from friends and colleagues. Duane broke down while sharing how meeting Sarah changed his life. Alice represented Fiber and Snark. Lia couldn’t help reading into her comments, that they were more about the writing cabal than Sarah’s obsession with teddy bear sweaters. Cecilie talked about Sarah’s generous service to the feral cat community. A young black man recognized the many ways she supported neighborhood children through her position at the library. Nobody mentioned that she was the guiding force behind millions in e-book sales.

  Lia sniffled. Tears rolled down her cheeks. It’s not fair. She wanted to scream the words. Fun, funny Sarah was gone. A good person died with so much left to give the world.

  She came out of her private thoughts to observe the mourners. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house, except Citrine, who kept her head bowed in a probable pretense of grief for a woman she barely knew. The front row was a chain of clasped hands and open weeping. Paul’s band, Mayan Ruins, stood outside the tent and sang, wordless and ethereal, the sound drifting on the air.

  Paul stepped forward and intoned:

  Do not stand at my grave and weep.

  I am not there; I do not sleep.

  I am a thousand winds that blow.

  I am the diamond glints on snow.

  I am the sunlight on ripened grain.

  I am the gentle …

  The crowd began to shift and murmur, drowning out Paul’s words. People nudged their companions and lifted chins in Lia’s direction. For a moment she panicked. Then she realized they were looking beyond her.

  Citrine lifted her head, following the gazes. She shrieked, jumping out of her folding chair. Paul halted his recitation and stood, blinking. Citrine ran out of the tent, both arms waving while her sling hung limp around her neck. The front row gaped, horrified. All attention followed her flight up the hill to the tall figure descending the gravel path.

  “Well, I’ll be…” Peter muttered.

  Leroy Eberschlag met Citrine’s out-flung arms with a grimace quickly stifled as he accepted her hug. Peter wondered how many people noticed the quick flash of annoyance and the subtle way he peeled her off, using his tight grip on her hand to move her to the side so that he was dragging her down the hill.

  Way to ruin his entrance, Citrine.

  Citrine was pushed out of the way by Debby and her sister, Dorothy, who fell on him sobbing and crying “Praise the Lord,” over and over. Peter noticed cell phones emerging from pockets and imagined photos of the return of Lucas Cross were already going viral.

  Paul stood patiently as Debby booted someone out of their chair at the end of the second row and dragged it around so that she and her sister could sandwich Leroy between them. The crowd eventually settled and Paul began again. The crowd shifted and stared, but kept the murmuring to a minimum.

  Brent lifted an eyebrow to Peter. Peter’s chin brushed Lia’s hair as he sent a quick shake of his head back.

  “What are you going to do?” Lia whispered to Peter.

  “I’m going to have some respect. He’s not going anywhere. We’ll pick him up before the media gets here. I don’t know how long we’ll be. I’ll call you later and let you know, once we figure out what the hell is going on.”

  “Don’t worry about the time. Just come over if you’re not too tired after you finish up.”

  Paul’s sermon complete, Duane came forward to pick up Sarah’s urn, following Paul to the path up the hillside. The mourners followed, emptying their seats by rows. Peter and Brent cut neatly into the line behind the family. The procession headed up the hillside, winding around to follow the gravel path through the garden, reminding Lia of a time when Paul led a conga line at a party.

  The line of mourners snaked along the path, until they reached the boulder of red granite and the tiny grave in front of it. Mayan Ruins sang while Duane lowered the urn into the grave and sprinkled a handful of dirt on it. A select number of family and friends stepped forward to sprinkle more dirt into the grave, then stood by with bowed heads as the band finished their tribute.

  Mourners clogged the paths, making it impossible for Paul and Duane to return down the hill the way they came. There were a few minutes of jockeying until it became apparent that the line should now proceed forward to pay respects to Duane by the graveside.

  Peter and Brent stayed several feet behind Leroy until he shared his condolences, then moved forward to interrupt the Eberschlag family reunion.

  Leroy and Dorothy gave the detectives quizzical looks. Debby just sighed in resignation.

  “You taking him?” she asked.

  “We need to ask Mr. Eberschlag a few questions, if you don’t mind,” Peter said.

  “What is this?” Leroy asked.

  “I’m Detective Dourson with the Cincinnati Police, and this is my partner, Detective Davis. I’m sure you know a lot of people have been looking for you. It would be best if we got out of here before the reporters show up.”

  “I don’t mind reporters,” Leroy said.

  “We do,” Brent said.

  “Where are you taking him?” Dorothy cried, hanging onto Leroy’s arm. “I just got him back!”

  “Ma, don’t make a scene,” Leroy said.

  “District Five. We’ll have someone bring him home when we’re done,” Peter said.

  “No,” Dorothy said. “I’ll follow you, and I’ll wait.”

  “Ma, you don’t need to do that.”

  “Yes, I do, and you’d know that if you’d bothered to grow up and have children of your own.”

  “Ma’am,” Brent said, tipping his head, “this could take a long time. It would be better for you to go home.”

  “You going now?” Debby asked.

  “Yes ma’am,” Brent said.

  “Hold up a minute.” She took two steps to get within hugging distance of Leroy, then smacked him on the back of his head. “That’s for worrying your ma and me to death.”

  Peter stared at a half-sheepish, half-smirking Leroy sitting across from him in the interview room. Leroy was a tall man, and slouched in his chair in a way that suggested it was too small for him. He had longish dark hair in disordered waves and strong white teeth that a crooked incisor saved from looking fake. Mother nature gave him a dazzling smile. Even when he was smirking, it came off as good-natured.

  Brent leaned against the brick wall. Peter knew he could see behind the table from his position, and was taking note of any nervous gestures Leroy made.

  “You expect us to believe that Kat Dennings kidnapped you at AustinCon and kept you prisoner for four weeks?” Peter asked, eyebrows raised to their upper limit.

  “Hey, man, I’m not that dumb. I said she looked like Kat Dennings, and told me to call her Kat, probably, you know, because she looked like her. And I wasn’t exactly trying to escape, if you know what I mean.”

  “Who’s Kat Dennings?” Brent asked.

  “The girl on the TV show, the waitresses who bake cupcakes,” Leroy said.

  “You watch that?” Brent
asked, incredulous.

  “No, man. My ma does. Never misses it. But the chick is hot, like die happy hot. Dark, wavy hair, a rack out to here—” Leroy paused to demonstrate with his hands. “—and these smoky grey eyes with a look in them like she knows she could teach you a thing or two. She does this thing with her eyebrow, it kills me. Then there’s that mouth.”

  “See, what we don’t understand, is how, if you were chained up in an RV a thousand miles away, you managed to transport yourself to Cincinnati to leave a message on Alice Emmons’ phone,” Peter explained.

  Leroy jumped out of his chair. “What the hell are you talking about? I haven’t spoken to anyone for a month.”

  “Is Alice Emmons a liar?” Brent asked.

  “Alice? She’s a good lady,” Leroy said.

  “Alice states she found a message from you on her phone one morning,” Brent said. “In it, you told her that you were in Belize—”

  “WHAT?”

  “—And that you faked your disappearance so that you would not be revealed as a charlatan, and to boost sales of your books. We traced the number and found it was a pre-paid cell phone purchased and activated in Austin and pinging along highways all the way to Cincinnati, where it’s been pinging on the west side of town ever since.”

  “Now, wait a minute—”

  “Hold your horses, Hoss,” Brent said. “Settle down. We want to keep this friendly for the nice camera.” Brent nodded at the video cam mounted near the ceiling.

  “Aw, c’mon! Do I look that dumb?” Leroy said. “That’s like leaving breadcrumbs.”

  “We’ll let you in on a little secret,” Brent said. “Nobody you know is nominating you for the Nobel Prize.”

  Leroy slumped back in his chair and huffed. “I don’t freaking believe this. Where is this message? I want to hear it.”

  “The message was deleted and could not be recovered,” Peter said.

  “Oh, that’s handy,” Leroy scoffed.

  “Tell us again where you’ve been staying, Leroy,” Peter said. “Those pings put you in the right place on the days someone attempted to kill two of your—” Here Peter hooked his fingers to make air quotes. “—ghostwriters.”

  “Then there was July 3rd, when someone attacked Sarah and left her for dead,” Brent added.

  “Now that’s downright stupid. Someone is trying to frame me!”

  “From where I’m sitting,” Brent drawled. “They’re succeeding.”

  “Tell us again from the beginning,” Peter said.

  “Look, I was signing books, and this chick walks up and leans over my table, right in front of me, and I can see all the way to China, where she has this little tattoo. She says she has a present for me, and she does that thing with her eyebrow, like Kat Dennings. She leaves me this bag, and it has an Arab robe-thing in it and a bunch of instructions. It sounded kinky, so I went for it, and met her down in the basement that night like she asked. She pulled a gun on me and made me get in the back of a van and handcuffed me.”

  “And she kept you tied up in an RV and forced you to rewrite one of your characters?”

  “Chained up. Handcuff on my left hand.” Leroy rubbed that wrist unconsciously. “The other end of the handcuff ran through a link on a chain that was bolted to the floor. She said she hated how I did Koi, said I didn’t get some feminist bullshit about female rage, and I was going to write a new Koi book. If she liked what I wrote, she would reward me, and if she didn’t like what I wrote, she was going to punish me. Only she was wearing this leather shit, and sometimes she made me wear a ball gag so I couldn’t yell for help. The rest of the time we were somewhere flat, where there wasn’t anything for miles around, West Texas or Arizona maybe. Some desert. She said I could scream my head off if I wanted. I expected some kink, but this was out there.”

  “I remember that movie. Stephen King, wasn’t it, Brent?”

  “Yeah…I think so…only it was Kathy Bates, and there was no leather involved. I’ve never seen a movie where a beautiful woman takes a writer captive and exchanges sexual favors for writing.” Brent cocked his head and examined Leroy’s legs. “I don’t see casts on his ankles. You see casts on his ankles?”

  “He did say he wasn’t trying too hard to escape. James Caan tried to escape.”

  “Who wouldn’t try to escape from Kathy Bates? She was nuts. I don’t think she did anything cute with her eyebrow, either.”

  Peter crossed his arms and shook his head, sighing. “I don’t think it happened. What do you think, Brent?”

  “No, no, man. It happened just like I said,” Leroy pleaded.

  “There’s a problem with your story,” Peter said, “and it isn’t your sit-com fantasy girl. We know you don’t write your books. So how can you spend a month writing in an RV when everyone says you’re one step up from illiterate?”

  Leroy looked embarrassed. “Look, nobody knows this, but I’ve been studying up. After running around pretending to be a writer, I got to thinking I could really do it. I got story ideas and everything. There’s this guy, James Patterson. You ever hear of him?”

  Peter and Brent gave him blank looks of incredulity.

  “Really! He’s this writer and he has this Master Class online. He says he’ll teach you everything he knows about writing best sellers for $90. The dude’s had nineteen number one best sellers in a row! Boom, boom, boom!” He chopped his hand in the air to punctuate each ‘boom.’ “Like that. You can check it out. So I’ve been studying.”

  “This is so very sad,” Brent said.

  “Hey, victim here!” Leroy yelled.

  “So you say,” Peter said. “And she let you go to Sarah’s funeral, what, out of the goodness of her heart? Time off for good behavior?”

  “I think, after she read Leroy’s stuff, she chewed his arm off so he could get away,” Brent said.

  “She did! I mean, she didn’t chew my arm off. You can see I still have it. Them. I still have both of them.” Leroy raised his arms to demonstrate. “She let me go. Look, she was following all that stuff on the internet whenever we hit town, you know, the police search and what people were saying, and how my book sales were going through the roof.” Leroy got a disgusted look on his face. “And if I ever see that Citrine chick again, I’m getting a restraining order. Kat used to read all these sappy things Citrine claimed I did and said, and she’d fall over laughing. I only bounced on that chick a couple times, and now she’s all Fatal Attraction.”

  “Now we’re back with the movies.” Peter leaned forward with his hands on his knees, crowding Leroy. “How did you wind up at the cemetery?”

  “I’m getting to that. A couple times a week, she’d drive into some truck stop—”

  “How did you know it was a truck stop if you were chained up in a room with the windows covered?”

  “It was just off the highway, and I could hear the rigs pulling in.” Leroy gave Brent a “duh” look. “She’d hook into the wifi and download a ton of stuff while she got us food to go—she’d say she wanted something besides the microwave junk we had in the RV—mine was always cold because she wouldn’t take the ball gag out until we were out in nowhere again.

  “She read about Sarah online. You know, about falling out of the float in the parade, and she’s laughing at how crazy it was until I tell her she’s my aunt’s best friend. She got this funny look on her face and says she’s making an executive decision. She starts driving and I don’t know where the hell we are because the windows in my room are blacked out, but she’s driving, like 12 hours a day.

  “Today she tells me to clean up, and she’s washed my clothes, and a couple hours later, she dumps me at the back gate of the cemetery with a map she printed out with an “X” for Sarah’s funeral, and just drives off.” He pulled a folded piece of paper out of his pocket and laid it on the little table.

  “Dammit,” Brent slammed his palm on the side table. “She’s had a two hour head start by now. What kind of RV was it? We’ll get a BOLO out.”
>
  “Won’t do you any good. She said she was ditching it and you’d never find her.”

  “What do you think?” Brent asked, looking at Peter.

  “So you believe me now?” Leroy asked, hope etched on his face.

  “Tell us about the RV,” Peter said. “And the tattoo.”

  “She wasn’t a bad chick.” Leroy snorted, a sad, self-derisive snort, and looked at his hands. “I’m gonna miss her, you know?”

  “That’s so sweet,” Brent said. “We’re going through your story again, but this time you’re going to do it backwards.”

  Peter rubbed his jaw, the harsh rasp of stubble telling him they’d been at it too long. Dammit. I never called Lia. He looked at the clock. They’d had Eberschlag in the box for more than six hours. He supposed he should be grateful Lia took it in stride when work interfered with their plans, but part of him wished she didn’t get along so well without him.

  “Leroy, where do you want to go tonight? Home or your mother’s?” he asked.

  “I’d better go to Ma’s. After a month of thinking I might be dead, she’d kill me herself if I didn’t go see her first. And knowing her, she’s been cooking. I’m sick of microwave dinners.”

  The sight of TV news vans camped outside Dorothy Eberschlag’s house had Leroy rethinking his plan to see his mother. He ducked down in Peter’s Explorer as they drove past the mob of reporters. Peter drove around the corner, took a quick left and went down two blocks to Debby’s house. The house was dark.

  “It’s okay,” Leroy said. “I bet they’re all at Ma’s. I know where the spare key is. I’ll call everyone when I’m inside. Then I’m taking the world’s longest shower.”

  “What do you think?” Brent asked Peter, as they watched Leroy disappear into Debby’s house.

  Peter started up his Explorer and pulled out of the drive. “I think it’s funny Ms. X said she was making an executive decision. People usually say that when there’s someone else in charge and they’ve decided to take things into their own hands. Leroy isn’t subtle enough to make that detail up if it was part of his story. Instead, he’d tell us she was talking to someone on the phone, or texting her boss.”