Paws For Murder

by Annie Knox

  “We used to be. When the girls were young, we used to spend nearly every weekend at the family house out on Badger Lake. Carla, my brilliant little scholar, always had her nose in a book, but Sherry would go for long walks with me. It seemed like there was no limit to her energy. Sometimes we’d walk all the way to Soaring Eagles, just looking for plants and birds.”

  She gazed out the window, perhaps seeing a young Sherry dashing down a wooded path with a handful of wildflowers.

  “Then, of course, she grew up and visits to the lake house grew less and less frequent as we all seemed to get busier. The rift between her and the rest of the family made it difficult to remain close. But she’d stop by here some mornings. I’d brew us some coffee and she’d tell me what she was up to.”

  “Jolly Nielson mentioned that you took her out to the lake house and ran into Sherry there.”

  Virginia looked momentarily startled, but then waved her hand in a dismissive gesture. “It was just a misunderstanding. Sherry was very protective of the lake house property.”

  “So I’ve heard,” I said. But silently I wondered why Sherry would perceive Virginia as a threat to the property. After all, they both loved it dearly.

  She looked me in the eyes, her own pooled with unshed tears. “No matter what anyone says about her crazy causes, you have to know it came from a good place. She was Dona Quixote, tilting at windmills.”

  Other than Nick Haas, Virginia was the first person I’d heard speak fondly of Sherry Harper. Those long walks must have been special, indeed.

  Virginia inhaled deeply and sat up a little straighter. “Enough of this maudlin talk. How are you doing with your new business?”

  I shrugged. “So far, so good. We’ve had a steady stream of customers, but I know some of that is just the novelty of a new business, and it will wear off. I’m counting on the Halloween Howl to keep people’s interest and maybe get some of my Halloween customers back in for Christmas shopping, maybe even lure in a few new faces . . . and then it’s a question of luring in tourists.”

  “Merryville is becoming such a pet-friendly place, I bet that won’t be a problem. The Dogwood Cabins down by the Mississippi allow pets, and I heard that the new manager of the Birchwood Inn has changed their policy to allow pets with a deposit. And heaven knows there are enough dog- and cat-mad people living here in town, myself included.” She uncrossed and recrossed her legs. “I’m sorry I didn’t make it to your grand opening.”

  “Oh, that’s okay. Sean said it was your birthday. Happy belated birthday, by the way.”

  She smiled, but the light didn’t reach her eyes. “Thank you, dear. In all seriousness, I promise to be a regular patron. When I was there the other day, I saw half a dozen things I want to get for Sir Francis. Besides, I know what it’s like to start a new business, so I want to show a little solidarity, too.”

  “Well, thank you. I confess I’m nervous about how we’ll do. So many people are counting on me. Ingrid’s leaving me in charge of her building for the next six months, and I have to make sure to pay her rent on time. Rena’s invested her whole life in the barkery. And my aunt Dolly has invested a sizable chunk of cash. I don’t want to let any of them down.”

  “It’s a big weight to carry, feeling like you owe your friends and family.” She reached across the table to grasp my hand tightly. “I know it motivates you, spurs you to work harder than you thought possible. But that pressure can consume you, too. Don’t let that happen, dear. Promise me.”

  CHAPTER

  Nineteen

  With the autopsy finally complete and the toxicity reports finally generated, the city released Sherry to her family. The town of Merryville laid Sherry Harper to rest on a bitterly cold Monday as storm clouds gathered on the horizon, heralding the first hard snow of the season.

  Aunt Dolly accompanied Rena and me to the service. Dolly and I flanked Rena, ready to catch her if her slight frame collapsed beneath the combined weight of her ankle-length black wool coat and her grief. Yet by the time we reached the church, it was clear she wouldn’t need our support. She stood just inside the massive nave of Trinity Lutheran, shaking her head at the young man offering cups of hot chocolate, her hands thrust in her pockets and boot-clad feet braced apart. With her bright purple hair standing at attention and the brooding look on her gamine features, she looked like an anime hero ready to do battle.

  “I can’t believe I let you talk me into this,” she muttered.

  “You need to grieve.”

  “Not surrounded by hundreds of people.”

  “Why not?” I questioned. “People need people. That’s why we have funerals in the first place. So we can share our grief with each other and start to heal.”

  She glared up at me through her dark, spiky lashes. “‘People need people’? You drag me here into this crowd of people, most of whom wouldn’t spit on me if I were on fire, and you tell me that ‘people need people.’ That’s about as helpful as ‘hang in there, baby!’”

  I tamped down my annoyance. “Clichés become cliché for a reason. People really do need the company of other people on occasion. Especially when they’re grieving.”

  “And what makes you think I’m grieving?”

  “That sulk you’ve been wearing since Sherry died. That, and the fact that I’ve known you for thirty years. You have a good soul, Rena Hamilton, and Sherry was important to you at a critical time in your life. The fact that she died before you had the chance to right what was wrong between you, that’s got to be eating at you. You need this chance to say goodbye.”

  She shrugged her shoulders and looked like she was hunkering in for a good fight when I was distracted by a strange wriggle around her midsection. At first I thought I was seeing things, but then her coat shimmied again.

  “Rena, you didn’t,” I gasped.

  “What?” she asked, all innocence.

  “What?” Dolly asked, an edge of worry in her voice.

  “Did you bring Val with you?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “No!” Dolly and I moaned in unison.

  “She won’t hurt anything. And I think Sherry would have approved.”

  Rena had a point there. Sherry didn’t go anywhere without poor Gandhi, who was still missing in action, lost somewhere in the Greene Brigade. She would have been tickled to have Val attend her funeral.

  We made our way to the pews, where Rena insisted we sit toward the back.

  Just as we got ourselves settled, Nick Haas walked in with his mother, Nadya. She was a tiny husk of a woman, her square teeth and her square black-framed spectacles both too large for her long, narrow face. The heavy powder on her cheek barely concealed a bruise the faint purple of a twilight sky spreading across her jawline.

  They paused in the aisle, both blinking owlishly, looking around as though they were surprised to find themselves in the middle of a church.

  “Pssst.” Rena snagged Nadya’s attention, and the two slid into the pew next to us. Nadya grabbed Rena’s hand and gave it a sturdy squeeze. Even with two people separating us, I could smell the insipidly sweet scent of whiskey wafting from Nick’s pores. He cleared his throat with a phlegmy hack and shifted uneasily in his seat.

  As the organist plodded out the notes of some dirgelike hymn, I studied the people filing in. You can learn a lot about people by watching them at a funeral. Grief tends to tear down our inhibitions as surely as alcohol, and bring our true feelings into razor-sharp focus.

  Richard Greene arrived in a neatly pressed single-button black suit, a skinny black tie, and a stark white dress shirt, so somber and unassuming he could have passed for the undertaker. He moved without a word to a pew halfway down the aisle where he sat ramrod straight, staring directly ahead. Even by Richard Greene standards, his comportment was rigid. I suspected the military bearing hid a deep well of emotion. He may have had little use for Sherry, but out of respect for her father, who had been a good friend, he’d shown up to give his respects in the best way he
knew how. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he saluted before the funeral ended.

  Beside me, Rena wriggled out of her heavy wool coat, and I felt Val shimmy down into the armhole, finding a warm, safe spot to ride out the funeral.

  I sighed.

  At that moment, the family filed into the church, a parade of pale, freckled people with patrician features and hair in varying shades of red, from sunny strawberry to the deepest black cherry. I recognized the last two Harper cousins, Teal and Tarleton, twin ginger-haired young men who had attended nearby Soaring Eagles Adventure Camp when I was a counselor there. The two had stolen Jenny Steiner’s training bra and run it up the flagpole one morning. I did not remember them fondly.

  It seemed we’d all made our way through Soaring Eagles in one capacity or another. Such an ordinary place, one we all took for granted, but it united all the children of Merryville. It had been the great equalizer, bringing Rena Hamilton and Carla Harper, Nick Haas and Sean Tucker, all into the same orbit before the gravity of social status drove them apart again. The fact that it had been derelict for years now, sinking into the landscape, leaving hardly a trace of its existence, struck me as particularly sad.

  As soon as the family settled, the service began. It seemed to last only a few fleeting minutes. The minister read the requisite biblical verses and made quiet noises about death being but a passage. Beside me, Rena shook with muffled sobs. I wrapped an arm around her shoulders and looked down to see Nadya Haas wrap Rena’s delicate hand in her own knotty grip. Then suddenly it was over . . . no eulogy, nothing personal at all.

  The congregation began shifting as they realized that the deed was done, softly rustling as though rousing after a short nap. Mourners gathered scarves and hats, drew coats closer against anticipated cold. The family got up first and formed a sort of receiving line by the door so they could thank people for attending and the attendees could offer a few words of condolence.

  “Oh crap,” Rena muttered.

  “What?”

  “Val. She’s gone.”

  “What?” I hissed. “How did you not notice her crawling out of your coat?”

  “I was grieving,” she snapped.

  “She’s almost as big as a newborn baby,” I pointed out.

  “I felt her wriggling around,” she conceded, “but it never occurred to me that she would bolt. I thought she was just trying to get comfortable.”

  As if Gandhi the Rogue Guinea Pig weren’t enough, now we had to track down a ferret somewhere in the middle of a crowd of mourners.

  Like salmon swimming upstream against the current, we began moving toward the front of the church, away from the crowd, looking under every pew and in every hymnal holder.

  I was on my hands and knees, butt in the air, when I heard Pris Olson’s sweeter-than-sugar voice behind me. “Izzy, dear, did you lose something?”

  I sat up, blowing a lock of hair out of my face. Pris smiled down on me, her flawless ivory face framed by the portrait collar on her deep navy suit.

  “Um, yes. Well, Rena did.” She lost her ferret and her mind, not necessarily in that order. “Uh, her cell phone. It must have fallen out of her pocket during the service.”

  “Well then, wouldn’t it be under the pew where you were sitting?”

  “You’d think so.” Unless you knew we were really looking for a critter with four legs and a mind of its own. “But it’s not there. We thought maybe it got kicked around somewhere under here.

  “Where’s Hal?” I asked, trying to get the attention off our misadventure.

  “Oh, he wanted to be here so much. He’s been close to the Harper family for years, you know.”

  Whether he’d been friends with the Harpers in the past or not, if Hal was making a run for mayor he would need the family’s goodwill and to be seen at events like this.

  “Unfortunately,” Pris continued, “there was an emergency out at the RV dealership. One of the new sales guys messed up the financing paperwork for a very important customer. Hal felt he needed to address the problem himself.”

  “Running Olson’s Odyssey RV must take a tremendous amount of Hal’s time.”

  Pris lifted one elegant shoulder. “Actually, as the business has grown, Hal’s gotten more of his life back. When we first got married, he worked fourteen hour days. Now, he’s got a huge staff to handle the actual sales, and so much of the paperwork is really computer work now. He still goes out to the lot every day and takes care of these sorts of snafus himself, but he’s got time for other pursuits now.”

  “Like running for office.”

  “Among other things,” Pris said, her lips tilting in the faintest smile, her tone a bit on the dry side.

  “Listen,” she said, “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about the Halloween Howl. I’ve been thinking that Hal should be one of the judges of the costume contest. He’s got a lot of clout in this community.”

  She was right, but that didn’t stop me from seeing her request for what it was: a media opportunity for Hal and his mayoral campaign. Besides, we’d already secured the panel of judges, and it included Paul Tinker, the current mayor and Hal’s opponent in the spring election.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Pris. The Howl is less than a week away, and if we added Hal to the roster of judges we’d have an even number. I don’t know how we could find yet another person to make it odd again in such a short amount of time.”

  Pris opened her mouth to argue, but just then Rena clattered up the aisle to our side.

  “Hey, Pris. Izzy, we can go now.”

  “So you found it?” Pris asked.

  Rena’s brow furrowed, but she kept her cool. “Yes, I found . . . it.”

  “That’s good,” I improvised. “I don’t know what you’d do without your cell phone.”

  The light dawned in Rena’s eyes. “Right. Wouldn’t want to lose my phone.”

  Pris looked back and forth between the two of us, clearly trying to suss out the subtext of our stilted conversation. “Well,” she said finally, “I’ll be off. But do consider my suggestion, Izzy.”

  As soon as Pris had gone a reasonable distance, Rena opened her coat like a flasher to reveal Val nestled in an inside pocket of the giant overcoat, nothing but her sleek chestnut-colored head showing above.

  “Where was she?” I asked.

  Rena smiled with apparent pride. “She’d managed to make it all the way to the altar. She was hiding behind the banner hanging from the lectern.”

  Rena helped me to my feet, and I bundled into my own outerwear.

  “Nice cover with Pris.”

  “I couldn’t very well tell her what we were really looking for, and a cell phone was the first thing that popped into my mind.”

  “Speaking of cell phones,” Rena said, sotto voce, reaching into a front pocket of her coat, “I think Val picked another pocket, because I found her with this.”

  She held out a black flip phone with a pink anarchy sticker on the back and tiny tooth marks on the corners.

  It was the sticker that gave it away. Val had found Sherry Harper’s missing cell phone.

  CHAPTER

  Twenty

  Rena, Sean, and I sat around the dining table in my apartment, watching the phone in the middle of the table as though it might jump up and start dancing at any moment. Instead, it sat quietly and charged.

  Packer and Jinx must have picked up on the tension in the room. Jinx sat on the oak floor, regal as ever, but made no move to snuggle anyone. Packer, too, was more reserved than usual. He found my feet under the table and draped himself across them. He didn’t make a sound, but I could occasionally feel him shift his weight.

  When Rena had shown me the phone, my first temptation had been to flip it open and scroll through the contacts, but its battery had been dead. Rena used her own phone to summon Sean while I made a pit stop at an electronics store out near the highway to find a charger that was compatible with the device.

  And then we gathered arou
nd my kitchen table and waited.

  “Would anyone like a cup of tea?” I offered.

  They glared at me in response.

  Finally, after a good five minutes, Sean picked up the phone and flipped it open. He began keying buttons.

  “Nothing in the contacts. She must have never bothered programming anyone in,” he muttered. “And all the calls in and out are to the same number.”

  Then, “Aha.”

  “What?” Rena asked, her voice tight with the same anxiety and anticipation I was feeling.

  “Text messages. Not many, but”—he counted softly to himself—“seven. Seven text messages all from the same number, the number in the call log.”

  “What do they say?”

  “Um, let’s see . . .” He whistled softly. “That is not exactly PG-13. Wow. These are definitely from a, um, boyfriend.”

  Whatever the texts said, it must have been mighty racy, because Sean actually blushed as he read them.

  “Okay,” I said, “that’s not getting us anywhere. What about outgoing texts.”

  “Just two,” he said. “I’d want to double-check, but I think this first one is Carla’s number, from about a week before Sherry died. It says ‘This is Sherry, I need the money.’” He looked up from the phone. “That makes sense. Carla handled all of Sherry’s finances, so if Sherry needed additional cash, she’d contact Carla.”

  He made a humming sound in the back of his throat. “Now this second one is a bit more interesting. It’s addressed to the mystery man’s number, and it’s dated the night she died, eleven oh nine at night . . . so after she gave up her protest.”

  “What does it say?” I asked.

  “‘Come get me.’”

  We sat in stunned silence for a second.

  “So whoever her mystery man was,” I said, “she asked him to come get her the night she died. That means she definitely had the phone that night. And the phone, the one thing connecting the mystery man to Sherry, went missing between the time she texted him and the time I found her dead.”