All That Glitters (Raine Stockton Dog Mysteries)

by Donna Ball

  “Well, hello there, Your Majesty,” I said softly, putting my hand on the latch of the gate to the dog’s enclosure. “Do you mind if I come in?”

  The screen door of the house next door slammed, and a woman came down the steps, hugging a pink cardigan to her. “Hello!” she called. “Hello, are you here about the dog?”

  I admitted that I was and she introduced herself. “I hated to call,” she said, “but the family left last week. She said the propane tank was dry and they didn’t have any heat—a sweet young thing with three children under school age, her husband left last month, the no-account so-and-so, and she’s been doing the best she can since then, I guess. She and the children went to her sister’s, but she couldn’t take the dog, so I’ve been feeding it and making sure it had water, but the bag of food she left is almost gone and it’s supposed to get down in the teens tonight. She didn’t leave me a way to call, and I’d just hate to see the poor thing freeze to death. It’s a sweet dog.”

  I assured her that she had done the right thing, and entered the pen with a slice of hot dog in one hand and a slip leash in the other. The collie didn’t fuss as I dropped the leash over her head, and she nibbled on the hot dog I offered her with a delicacy that suggested she was simply being polite.

  “We’ll take her to the vet to make sure she’s up on her shots,” I told the neighbor, “and board her until the owner claims her. But if she isn’t claimed in five days, we put her up for adoption. I’ll leave you one of my cards, and slip another one under the front door so the owner can call when she comes back.”

  The neighbor took my card, but shook her head sadly, hugging the pink sweater closer to her. “She won’t come back. And even if she does, she won’t call you. She can barely take care of those children, much less a dog.”

  I suspected she was right, but it wasn’t my job to say so. The collie hopped into the back of my SUV, and walked nicely into the wire crate I had prepared for her. I was just locking her in when I heard the sound of a big truck coming around the bend. It was a propane tanker, and to my surprise, it pulled into the driveway beside my car. The driver got out and came around to me. “Miz Chambliss?”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m just here to—“

  “She’s not here,” the neighbor said, coming over to us. The engine of the propane truck rumbled in the background and she raised her voice to be heard. “It got too cold when they ran out of gas.”

  “Well, this ought to help.” He went around the side of the truck and started uncoiling the filler hose. “We got an order to fill the tank this morning, along with three hundred dollars in cash to cover it. Somebody left it in the drop box last night, along with this note.” He reached in the pocket of his flannel shirt and pulled out a torn half-sheet of white paper. On it was scrawled, “From your Secret Santa.”

  I lifted an eyebrow, and smiled at the neighbor. “Well, that’s good news. I’ll make sure the dog is taken care of until she gets back, but be sure to tell her to call.”

  “She won’t call,” the woman assured me, puzzling over the paper the driver showed her. “She might come back, but she won’t call.”

  I wanted to leave on a positive note, but I knew she was probably right.

  “Well, if you want my opinion,” announced my friend Maude a couple of days later, “that little collie has already found a good home.”

  I had known Maude for most of my life and she was, in many ways, as much of a mother to me as my own mother had been. When she spoke, I usually listened—in part because she had a clipped British accent that made every word she spoke sound more important than it was, and in part because she had proven to be right about most things over the years. But not about this.

  “I’m not looking for a dog,” I told her firmly. “Besides, that collie is going to be easy to place. Look how nicely she cleaned up. Definitely a purebred. If I can get her picture in the paper this weekend, we’ll have a dozen calls before Christmas.”

  Maude worked with me on the Humane Society, and I had brought her out to the barn to have a look at the collie. I had fixed up one of the stalls in the barn for the dog, although of course I brought her in at night and let her sleep in a crate in the kitchen. Now she was contentedly curled up in a pile of hay, chewing a rubber bone.

  The collie’s owner had, in fact, actually called me... to surrender her dog. Though she had been beside herself with amazed joy over the mysterious gift of a full propane tank, there had been tears in her voice, too, as she confessed she was no longer able to care for her dog. “I feel bad,” she said, “but I know it’s for the best. You try to give your children everything but…when my four year old sat on Santa’s lap all he wanted for Christmas was to go home and sleep in his own bed.” She took a brave breath. “At least he’s got that. I can only do the best I can.”

  A story like that made me ashamed of feeling sorry for myself, but I managed it anyway. “Besides,” I said, turning to leave the barn, “I’m about to join the ranks of the unemployed. I can’t take on another mouth to feed.”

  “Do you know, my dear,” Maude said thoughtfully, glancing around the vast, dusty interior of the barn, “it would take almost nothing to convert this building into a functioning boarding kennel and training facility. Your father’s horses always did live better than most families in this county… concrete floors, heating and plumbing already in place… the investment would be minimal for you. You already have more people asking you to teach classes than you can accommodate in the summer, and if you had an indoor facility you could do it year around. You have room for twenty boarders, easily, and even at half capacity that would be a reasonable income.”

  I looked at her skeptically. “A boarding kennel is a lot of work.”

  “But there is something to be said for owning one’s own business.”

  “I suppose.” I couldn’t believe I was actually considering it, however briefly. “ And I do like teaching.”

  “You’re quite good at it.”

  I returned a half-smile to the woman who had been training me to train dogs since I was eight years old. “I learned from the best.” And then I shrugged. “But there’s no money in dog training. Besides…” my gaze slid away uncomfortably. “I don’t have a dog.”

  Perhaps I should have mentioned that it had been Maude who had given me my beloved Cassidy, a product of her own championship kennel, Sundance. I suspected that in some ways losing Cassidy had been as hard on Maude as it had been on me, and I still couldn’t mention Cassidy’s name to Maude without tearing up.

  Before that could happen, I added, “Anyway, I’ve got to get going. Aunt Mart talked me into being on the Families First Christmas Baskets committee, and we’re meeting at the church to fill the baskets this afternoon. You’ll put the word out about the collie, right?”

  “I will. And you’ll think about what I said?”

  Because I wasn’t entirely sure whether she was referring to what she had said about the collie, or about the kennel, I was careful to promise nothing except to call her later, and I hurried off to meet my aunt.

  There was a Sheriff’s Department patrol car in front of the church when I pulled in, and I naturally assumed it belonged to my uncle, who had dropped Aunt Mart off for the meeting. I circled around to the basement door and parked beside the other vehicles, tucking my coat and scarf more securely around me as I got out into the cold. A moment later, I was stripping gloves, hat, scarf and coat off as the blast of overheated air from inside the church basement hit me.

  A dozen or so women were gathered in a long concrete-floored room to the left, and I could hear their voices as I approached, “Absolutely scandalous, if you ask me. A man like that, running off with a woman half his age…”

  For some reason, I always felt self-conscious when I heard the words “scandalous”, “man” and “running off with a woman” in a sentence together… as though that sentence might in some way be referring to my failed marriage. So I entered the room hesita
ntly, stuffing my gloves into my coat pocket, only to be greeted by a cheerful, “Oh, hey Raine. We were just talking about that scamp Jess Hanson. Have you ever heard the like?”

  Well, it’s like my daddy always used to say: You wouldn’t worry so much about what other people thought of you if you realized how seldom they did. My ex- husband Buck and I were old news by now; of course I should have realized people had found something more interesting to talk about.

  The room was lined with long tables, upon which were stacked piles of canned goods, packaged breads and cookies, canned hams and straw baskets. The women had set up an assembly line, filling each basket with one item from the pile in front of them, and topping it off with a red bow at the end. There were stacks of cardboard boxes from the food bank placed strategically around the room, and Aunt Mart was unpacking them.

  “Well now, all I know is that Jess Hanson was a fine member of this community and an absolutely perfect Santa Claus for over sixty years,” asserted Aunt Mart, and paused with her arms full of jellied cranberry sauce to offer her cheek for a kiss, which I obliged, “and if he wants to spend his sunset years in Jupiter Beach with that redhead, more power to him. Hello Raine, dear. At least we were lucky enough to find someone to replace him.”

  I had been a little self-involved the past few months and wasn’t entirely up on all the gossip, but I gathered that Jess Hanson, who had been the town Santa for as long as I could remember, had moved on to warmer pursuits. “So who’s playing Santa now?” I asked, hanging up my coat and pushing up my sleeves. Since I was probably the youngest person there, I figured my job would be the heavy lifting, so I headed for the cardboard boxes. “I was just by Hanson’s Department Store and there was some guy in a red suit sitting in the window display with a line of children out the door.”

  “Some fellow from up Raleigh way,” answered Donella Gray, mother of three. “He just moved here last month. Retired carpenter, I think somebody told me. To tell the truth, I like him a lot better than Jess as Santa. That beard of his is real, and the kids know the difference, let me tell you.”

  “He’s been really nice about taking over all of Jess’s obligations, even the unpaid ones—the school parties, the church pageant, and of course he’ll play Santa at the town Christmas party.”

  “I still think that Jess Hanson had a nerve.”

  The women worked and gossiped with equal energy, never missing a beat as they passed the baskets down the line to be filled. “Wow,” I said, setting a heavy box of canned hams on the table, “this sure is a lot of stuff.”

  “Seventy five baskets,” replied Aunt Mart sadly, “and that doesn’t even meet the need. It just breaks my heart, right here at Christmas time, to know all the families that are hurting. We’re each going to take on delivering ten baskets. I was wondering, Raine, if you’d mind driving me in your car, since it’s so much bigger? ”

  I said, “Sure, but isn’t that why Uncle Roe is here? I saw his patrol car out front.”

  She looked surprised. “That’s not Roe. He’s got a lunch meeting with the mayor and you know those things always go on all afternoon.” Then she glanced across the table and said, “Wait, Sara Lyn , first the creamed corn, then the green peas. You’ve got two cans of peas there.”

  Sara Lyn pointed out that she was out of creamed corn, and after a search through the boxes Aunt Mart sent me upstairs to make sure that all the cartons had been brought down from the church office. That was when I met my ex-husband coming out of the administrative wing.

  I should have mentioned that my ex is a deputy sheriff, and he had worked for my uncle even longer than he had been married to me. To say we now found ourselves in an awkward situation would be an understatement, and I wasn’t just talking about meeting each other in the corridor of a church on a Wednesday afternoon.

  Buck Lawson had the kind of lazy good looks that women found hard to resist—rumpled curly hair, kind hazel eyes, an easy smile and a genuine interest in folks. Unfortunately, Buck found the admiration of women equally difficult to resist, which was where all his problems began, at least as far as I was concerned. We each came to a dead stop in the hallway about ten feet apart and stared at each other like a couple of deer in the headlights until I, determined to be the bigger person, cleared my throat a little and said, almost casually, “Hi Buck. What are you doing here?”

  He hesitated a moment, as though he wasn’t quite sure of the answer to that, gave a little half- glance over his shoulder toward the office to orient himself, and answered, “Oh, we got a call. The love offering from the Christmas cantata was robbed, can you believe that? Four hundred and eighty five dollars. The damnedest thing is, there was only five hundred and two dollars in the plate.” He gave a small shake of his head. “I don’t know what the world is coming to.”

  “Well, times are hard, I guess,” I offered awkwardly.

  “Syms Sporting Goods has been hit twice this month alone,” he said. “It’s got to where they don’t even leave any cash in the register anymore. Of course Lou Syms is such an old skinflint it’s hard to feel sorry for him. But stealing from a church is something else.”

  We stood there for another uncomfortable moment, out of small talk, and then I blurted, “I just came up for corn.”

  And he said at the same time, “Raine, I need to talk to you about something.”

  We both broke off expectantly, and he looked embarrassed. “Look,” he said, “your uncle invited me to Christmas dinner, just like always. I’m sure he wasn’t thinking but I told him no, of course. I just wanted you to know it wasn’t because—well, because I was with someone else. I just didn’t think it was right, that’s all.”

  I swallowed hard. I had not yet been able to imagine what it would be like at the holiday table this year. None of my dad’s corny jokes. No golden retriever hiding under the table waiting to filch pieces of turkey and homemade biscuits. No quiet shared smiles between me and the person who was supposed to have loved me for the rest of my life. I said, “Yeah. Okay.”

  “I volunteered to work on Christmas. You know, give the family guys a day off.”

  “That’s good.” My tone was stiff.

  He looked bleak. “Raine, I don’t think I can stand for you to hate me.”

  I thrust my hands into my pockets and managed to mutter, “I don’t hate you.” I wasn’t entirely sure whether that was true.

  He took a step toward me, his eyes softening in a way that made me wish I had not just told him I didn’t hate him. “Raine I am so sorry,” he said. “I don’t expect you to forgive me, but I just want you to know I understand what I’ve done to you, and if I could take it back I would. You deserve so much better. I’m just… so damn sorry.”

  The thing is, I knew he meant it. Every word. And listening to him just made me tired.

  I said, “I’m glad you’re sorry. I know you think that’s supposed to make everything better. I trusted you, and you lied to me. You promised to be there for the rest of my life and now I’m all alone in that big house at Christmas. We said we’d take care of each other, and now I’m taking care of myself. But I’m glad you’re sorry.”

  He dropped his gaze. “I don’t suppose… do you ever see a time when we might be friends again?”

  I said simply, “No.” And I turned and walked back toward the basement. Let somebody else worry about the corn.

  And that was when I heard a scream.

  Buck had been a high school football hero—naturally—and he hadn’t lost any speed over the years. He outran me to the vestibule, but not by much. That had been my aunt’s voice I’d heard.

  “Stop, thief! Stop!” she cried.

  I arrived just as Buck was tackling a denim-jacketed man who was halfway out the door. “Tackle” might have been too strong a word: Buck’s modus operandi has always been on the mild side, so it was more like he caught the guy casually by the elbow and the collar, turned him back into the room and said, “Whoa, dude, what’s your hurry?”

 
Meanwhile I rushed to Aunt Mart, who had grabbed an umbrella from the stand in the vestibule and held it like a baseball bat, her chest heaving with indignation and her eyes flashing at the perpetrator. My aunt was every bit the southern lady, but she had been around law enforcement too long not to rise to the occasion when it counted.

  “Aunt Mart, are you all right?” I put my hands around the umbrella and tried to gently take it from her, but she was having none of it.

  “I’m fine,” she returned shortly, tightening her grip on the umbrella. “But it’s a good thing Buck got here when he did or that young man would not have been, I can assure you of that!” With a final warning look at the suspect in custody, she turned to me. “ I came up to tell you we found the other cartons of corn, and I heard somebody creeping around up front, and I thought it might be one of the volunteers who was lost so I peeked around the corner and what should I see but this—this miscreant trying to break into the tithe box!”

  “I wasn’t breaking in!” returned the miscreant in question angrily. The scattered bills all over the marble floor and the broken hinge on the tithe box would seem to belie his story, not to mention the wad of cash that was still clearly clutched in one hand.

  Aunt Mart turned on him with eyes blazing and her chest heaving with righteous indignation, raising the umbrella another couple of threatening inches, “How dare you steal from the Lord in His own house! All that glitters is not gold, you know! Vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord! And woe to that man who betrays the Son of Man! It would be better for him if he had not been born!”

  By this time the pastor had arrived with his secretary, and between the three of us we were able to persuade Aunt Mart to relinquish the umbrella. She did so with a dusting of her hands and a single tug at the hem of her jacket, and if Buck’s grip had failed to hold the villain, her glare certainly would have.