I want to say goodbye to Karen at intermission. See you at hotel in a few.
As I turned, I saw a shadow passing the upstairs window. That had to be Felicity. I should probably ask her about the dog bite. It would ease my mind to know that John was telling the truth about why he’d given Flint a tranquilizer.
As I started to climb the stairway to the second floor, I had yet another chill, this one so strong it felt as if I was in a freezer. Two steps later, I was nearly gasping at the heat. This time I knew for certain it wasn’t a draft. Either there really was some sort of ghost that haunted the premises, or there were inexplicable atmospheric conditions in this building that could affect the temperature of small pockets of air.
I entered the sewing room. To my surprise, it was Valerie, not Felicity. She didn’t look happy to see me. Apparently, I’d surprised her, and she had come here to cry in private. She swiped at her cheeks and said, “Yes?”
“Hi, Valerie. I’m sorry to interrupt. I didn’t realize you were here. I saw you in the window and thought you were Felicity.”
“Felicity started sneezing her head off...allergies...and went home. I’ve been sitting here for the last half hour. I was never near the window. ”
“Must have been Annabelle,” I said.
“She’s at it again?” Valerie snorted. “She’s probably looking forward to my company.”
I didn’t know how to take her last statement. “I’ll talk to Felicity tomorrow.” I stayed still, weighing whether I should pretend I hadn’t noticed her tears or if it would be best to show some basic compassion. This was clearly not a good time to discuss my decision to leave a day early. “Are you okay?”
“No, I am not at all okay.” She glared at me. “Love problems, if you must know.”
Apparently I should have opted for silence. “Sorry, Valerie. I didn’t mean to butt into your personal business.”
“Oh, I’m sure.” Her voice was a shade below hostile.
“I hope your day improves, Valerie.” I gestured at the stairs. “I’ll—”
“Nobody realizes how hard my life is. No matter what I do, it’s like I’m always barefoot on the sharp edge of a knife. I thought I could make this play work. Keep everybody happy. You make one stupid mistake when you’re young and in love, and that’s it. You’re just trapped into one awful thing after another.”
I cursed to myself. The words were too reminiscent of what Karen had said about wanting to forgive Greg for what he’d done to his first girlfriend well over a decade ago. Valerie had known that information firsthand. Maybe she had been somehow been complicit in Greg’s committing vehicular homicide. “I’ll let you go,” I muttered. I turned toward the stairs, hoping to make a quick exit.
“Stop, right there,” she said. “Turn around.”
I turned. She was aiming a gun at me and coming toward me.
“What are you doing, Valerie?” My voice was surprisingly calm; I’d somehow half expected her to be holding a gun.
“I’m going to make you pay for ruining my life. Thanks to you, I can’t make any of it go away. Everything is backfiring on me.”
“Look, Valerie. I don’t know what you’re talking about. But whatever it is, it isn’t worth taking a life and going to jail.”
She cackled. “I already took a life, you idiot. I had to, because of John. He dug into my past with Greg. He uncovered my secret, and promised me he wouldn’t share it with Greg...just as long as I helped him turn his damned play into a hit. I found his dirty secret—how he cheated Sam Geller in order to get Flint.”
“I had nothing to do with any of—”
“I was going to get Flint back to Sam, and Sam was going to help bring Greg back to me. But Sam turned on me, thanks to you. You made him think he could earn good money training canine herders. He figured out I was trying to frame him for Sam’s murder. Told me he’d tell Greg my secret!”
“I don’t know your secret, Valerie, and I don’t want to know. I never did anything to hurt you. I was only trying to help Flint.”
She half laughed half cried. “If that’s true, it’s too bad for you. You wound up in the wrong place, at the wrong time. I came up here to shoot myself. All those years ago, I caused Greg to think his girlfriend was cheating on her. I got him drunk, to drown his sorrows. I told him she was waiting for her new lover on the corner. They were just friends. And I’d told her we were going to pick them up there. But Greg wouldn’t give me his keys. Or let me get into the car with him. He spent ten years in jail, because of me. He killed a girl. Because of me. And now I killed a man. So I could stop him from making Greg hate me. Stop having my guilt shoved in my face. All just so that I could have the chance to make it up to Greg. For us to be together.”
“You don’t have to kill yourself or me. You need help, Valerie. This is too much for anyone to handle. Let me—”
“No. I’m done. But, I’m going to kill you first.”
In a last-ditch effort, I gasped, pretending something behind her had arrived to save me. “Pavlov, sic her!” I cried, pointing at Valerie.
She turned to look back, and I lunged at her with all of my force, tackling her in her midsection.
We fell to the floor. I knew by the “Oof” sound she’d muttered that I’d knocked out her breath. I grabbed her arm that held the gun. Using all of my weight, I pinned her forearm to the floor. She grabbed a fistful of my hair with her free hand and yanked my head back.
She was larger and stronger than I was. I was overmatched. She was strong enough to bludgeon a man; strong enough to crush me.
Despite the excruciating pain in my scalp, I continued to squeeze her arm and force it away from me.
I felt more than heard a swift-approaching canine race up the stairs toward me. Then there was a growl and a blur of motion as Pavlov leapt over our sprawled legs.
Valerie screamed in pain. She released her grip on my hair, as well as the gun. I lurched forward and grabbed the gun, then swung around onto my knees, aiming at her.
Pavlov had chomped onto her arm. Valerie was making guttural noises of pain. She was struggling to get up while Pavlov tried to pull her away from me.
“Pavlov, release!” I yelled, aiming the gun at Valerie’s head.
She continued to growl and ignored me.
“Leave it, Pavlov! Now!”
She obeyed me and backed away.
On her knees, Valerie cradled her arm, gripping it below the injury.
“Allie?” I heard Baxter cry from downstairs.
“Up here,” I yelled. “Call nine-one-one. Now!”
Baxter pounded up the stairs and was momentarily by my side. “Oh, my God. Allie! Are you okay?”
I kept my eyes riveted on Valerie. I could see hear him drop his cellphone and scramble to pick it up. “You removed the bolts from the light fixture. Why? Just to freak out John?”
She was sneering at me, her face hideously distorted. “I thought you’d see what a bad dog owner John was. But you were clueless. You did nothing about the chocolate in the kibble. And you were the goddamned genius who realized Sally’s bouquet could be poisonous, and saved that monster’s life by telling everyone. The poison was injected straight into his blood stream. John would have died! Which is what he deserved! Sam would have gone to jail for his murder. Karen would be out of the picture. And Greg would still be in love with me.”
“This is Baxter McClelland,” Baxter said into his phone. “Sheriff Caulfield is here in the audience. He needs to come to the second floor of the Creede Playhouse. Valerie Devereux has confessed to killing Sam Geller. She tried to shoot Allie Babcock. Allie got the gun away from her. We need her to be arrested immediately.” He paused. “Yes. Baxter McClelland. Hurry. I have to tie her up.”
I wondered if the dispatcher would believe Baxter. It all sounded so bizarre.
“She poisoned John,” I told Baxter. “She would have killed Karen, too, if she hadn’t tasted the poison despite the lemon juice.”
“Karen
stole Greg from me! I’ve waited and plotted for years and years to get Greg back into my life! Greg gave her flowers!”
She glared at Baxter while rocking herself in pain. “All of you miserable, stupid people with your miserable stupid dogs!” Her words were coming out in shrieks. “It’s all you think about. You and your vicious pets! You can all go to hell!”
I felt numb. Valerie’s mind was so twisted, I could only feel sorry for her. Yet she’d destroyed Greg’s life, killed Sam, and, yes, had done one awful thing after another. It was overwhelming just to know that there was this much misery in the world.
Baxter grabbed a shirt off a hanger. He sat her down in chair and bound her waist to the chair. She was still gripping her wounded arm.
“People like you don’t deserve pets, Valerie,” Baxter said.
Epilogue
Three weeks later, Baxter and I had mostly recovered from our trauma. Pavlov seemed to have recovered, too. The very last thing I had ever wanted for her was to have to attack someone. I was still having bad dreams, however, despite having been safe in my own home and waking in Baxter’s arms. In time, though, those dreams would fade.
The Creede Repertory Theatre was now opening a new show at the Ruth Theater. Judging from several online reviews, Good Dog, Blue! was still going strong, gleaning rave reviews and an extension to what would be a twelve-week run, a two-week extension to their entire season. The mounds of publicity from the release of the director and the arrest of the theater manager had indeed helped the theater’s sales.
John had sent me two bouquets (red roses) and apologized via email at least a half-dozen times. I would undoubtedly have to testify at some point in the murder trial. I’d learned through John that Felicity had been temporarily promoted to theatre manager, and all the other actors had carried on their roles, with both Flint and Pippa making excellent Blues as the need arose.
Karen had called me just to chat. We had vowed to get together in Boulder, after she’d completed her work in Creede. She told me that Sally had permanently dumped John, and that Felicity had also made it clear that she would never get back into anything beyond a business relationship with him. Felicity had told Karen that she was truly looking forward to the play’s run ending, which would lead to John leaving town for “brighter spotlights.”
In his most-recent email, John wrote that he had finally realized he had been treating Flint like a commodity, but the events of late had awakened him to understand what a privilege it really is to earn the love of a good dog. He promised me that he would measure up and deserve Flint’s loyalty from here on out.
He also wrote that he was getting requests for productions of his play from five different western and southwestern states. He assured us that he would love to let bygones be bygones and to cut us into the action as a dog-training team. I want to atone for my terrible transgressions, he wrote.
We turned him down.
Note from Allie Babcock
Leslie O’Kane is a dog lover, a certified decorator, a tennis player (though she has a caustic relationship with the net), and a hula-hoop dancer (but keeps bruising herself).
Although Leslie has been a published author for more than 20 years, she has issues with self-promotion and is in a 12-step program to overcome her fear of newsletters, blogs, and publicizing her books through social media.
Please help me push Leslie onto the next step by visiting LeslieOKane.com and signing up for her New Book Alert or sending her an email at [email protected], and, if you are so inclined, “like” her Facebook page, Leslie O’Kane Books. She also is attempting to start an interactive blog on her website about dogs and book clubs.
Lastly, if you enjoyed this book, please write a review; apparently such things help authors to sell books and encourage them to write more. If you send a copy of your review to her email she will send you a deeply felt personal thank you.
At the time of this writing, the next book in the series is not anticipated until late 2018, all five of Leslie’s women’s books feature dogs. In fact, the dog named Red in Leslie’s latest women’s novel is instrumental in the story of How My Book Club Got Arrested. Her Life’s Second Chances books are a series only in the sense that they feature similarly strong female characters, romance, action, humor, and a dog. They are all stand-alone novels with unique settings and casts of characters. You can find these books at book retailers of your choice, or at my website, LeslieOKane.com. As a bonus, the first chapter of How My Book Club Got Arrested follows.
Foreword
Important Note from the Author
Please Read This
(Speaking for myself, I tend to skip forewords.)
Getting a book published has been my lifelong dream. Several years ago, I attended a bookstore signing at which the author was late to arrive, so the store owner led the audience in a group discussion by asking: “What do you most want to see in a book?” My answer was: “My name as its author on the cover.” Although publishing HOW MY BOOK CLUB GOT ARRESTED was the realization of my dream, having my name on the cover has proved to be problematic.
Due to my book-club members not wanting to get hauled into court yet again, all of the names herein have been changed, including my own. All of the events, on the other hand, occurred as written and were witnessed/perpetrated by one or more of us. Most of our conversations were recorded by a prototype voice-to-text app (which, btw, my computer-whiz son designed; {my publisher didn’t want me to include the name of this software program, but if you ask a computer expert to recommend the best voice-to-text app on the market today—with such first-rate voice recognition that it can identify up to eight different speakers—that will be my son’s}) :). (Okay, yes, that’s a happy face, which is amateurish. I was having fun with punctuation.)
It is an understatement to say that, in my telling of this story, feathers were ruffled. Feathers were plucked and jabbed into sensitive places where no feathers belong. Countless times none of us book-clubbers wanted to believe that we actually said the things the app recorded. This led to a sentence-by-sentence dismantling of initial drafts of this book, even though the text and the software application that produced the text were thoroughly vetted and have been declared accurate by no less than the entire freaking State of Missouri! (I’m a bit touchy on this particular subject.)
Many book clubs are basically wine and cheese parties named after a different book each month. That sounds fun. Cheers! My merry band of book lovers, however, can criticize the daylights out of a book. To date, we’ve discussed some 128 titles and have yet to find a single book that we all held in precisely the same regard.
Imagine, if you will, how things played out when I asked them to critique a book about them—my beloved-but-opinionated friends who were traumatized by the very events described within said book. Are you picturing something along the lines of me as a metaphoric sirloin patty that’s been dropped into a tank of hungry piranhas? If so, that’s not quite right. Out of a complex need to protect one another’s feelings and yet assuage our own guilty consciences, it was more along the lines of five underfed piranhas—myself included—trying to simultaneous eat themselves plus one another, along with the aforementioned metaphoric sirloin patty.
The only thing that presented an even greater challenge was when I gave my manuscript to the sixth member of the book club—my adult daughter. Fortunately, she handled the matter with grace and maturity. (Because I’ve bragged about my son’s software application and I don’t play favorites {which neither of them believe}, I’m joyously announcing that my daughter’s singing, dancing, and acting skills have recently led to her being cast in a musical on Broadway! Yet another reason that pseudonyms were required for all concerned.)
Even though it’s fair to say that the state of Missouri agrees with the narrative herein, it is also fair to say that an average of two points of significant contention regarding accuracy arose on every single page of this book from one or more of my fellow Boobs. (And, no, the word Boobs is not a t
ypo. An explanation can be found in Chapter 1.) Even so, we talked everything through, and the book club remains intact.
A couple of months have passed since everyone in the group was given the opportunity to read and comment on my eighth draft. There will not be a ninth, because one of the members, whose real and fake names shall remain anonymous, threatened to strangle me—and honest to God, at this point, I’d be more than happy to provide a hemp-based (see Chapter 2) rope.
At the onset of the road trip from Boulder, Colorado, to Branson, Missouri, I had envisioned this book as a travelogue. In my capacity as a beta tester for the voice-to-text software, I requested and was granted everyone’s verbal permission to record them. I kept the app running on my mini-iPad in my purse, except while recharging it at night, and my purse was usually with me. What none of us knew at the time was that these recordings would be key evidence in a trial.
And so, dear readers (assuming more than one person buys this book), here is what actually (sort of) happened. :) (My last happy face. I promise.)
Chapter 1
Having a Ball...
“Move the catsup bottle, and scoot your chairs closer together,” Susan, our book club leader, instructed from the iPad screen at the far end of our restaurant table. “I can’t see Abby.”
“I’ll just lean in front of Leslie whenever I have anything to say,” Abby Preston suggested, rising enough to do exactly that and waving at Susan’s screen image. I took a deep breath and blew on her wispy, sandy-brown hair. Laughing, Abby said, “Cut that out,” and sat back down. After a few moments of adjusting our chairs, the computer, and the catsup, Susan said, “Let’s begin.”
“You sound like we’re commencing a deposition,” Jane Henderson teased. (Jane’s a lawyer.)
Dog Drama Page 21
