Drop Dead on Recall (4 page)

10

I whacked the snooze
button on my alarm clock a few too many times Monday morning and had to hustle my bustle to feed Jay and Pip and Leo, my cat, load my equipment, and get to my 8:30 appointment. I wasn’t sure what to expect other than one litter of Cocker Spaniel puppies and another litter of “people puppies”—not a litter, just twins, and really, I like kids, but at this point in my life I’m glad I don’t have to deal with diapers. The backyard and litterbox offer poop aplenty, thank you very much.

The news was playing on NIPR—Northeast Indiana Public Radio—and I listened through three lights as I waited to turn left onto Coliseum from North Anthony. “Abigail Dorn, 37, heir to the Aunt Ellie bakeries, died Saturday. She was competing in a dog show at the Allen County Fairgrounds when she collapsed. Cause of death has not been determined.”

I sipped my V8 Splash and thought about that.
How could a healthy young woman who was, as I recalled, a bit of a health and fitness nut, simply drop dead? On the other hand, who would kill Abigail, and why? I know she wasn’t exactly warm and fuzzy, but
… A honk from the SUV threatening to caress my rear bumper brought me back to earth and I turned the radio off so I could think and drive. The human passions aroused by canine competition could inspire murderous fantasies, but had someone really followed through? Or was I watching too many
Law and Order
reruns?

Sylvia Eckhorn and her buff and white Cocker Spaniel, Tippy, answered their door. Sylvia was barefoot, decked out in gray leggings with a hole in the left knee and a once-pink sweatshirt, food and what I hoped was just baby slobber arrayed across the front. She obviously hadn’t found a comb before she captured the bulk of her frizzy blonde hair in a clip. Tippy was in better shape, grinning and wriggling her well-groomed fanny at me. From the back of the house I could hear a shrieking kid and barking puppies, and a human male asking if his lunch was packed. “Janet!” Sylvia grinned at me. “You’re on time! I should’ve known you would be.”

First the dog show, now the photo shoot—two days in a row, and look where punctuality got me. I decided not to read that time management book that lurked somewhere in the pile on my coffee table. Better to just take it back to the library and pay the fine. “How ’bout I unload my equipment and you take care of what you need to do?” Sylvia looked relieved at my suggestion. “Just show me where we’re going to do this.”

“Oh, you’re the best! Thanks! Right in there.” She waved a damp hand toward a room to the right of the front foyer and disappeared down the hall to the kitchen.

A couple of trips later I had my camera, lights, and a few props unloaded. My cell phone vibrated in my pocket, but I didn’t answer. I checked the light in various parts of the room and decided on a spot opposite the front window. Sylvia’s grooming table was set up there, so I moved it to the side of the room where several crates were stacked. In a normal person’s home, this would be the living room. For Sylvia, it was the dog room. Half the people I know decorate this way—Modern Canine.

Tippy checked everything I carried in, then trotted back to the kitchen. I took advantage of the lull to pull my phone out and check the message. “Ms. MacPhail, this is Detective Jo Stevens. Call me.” I felt a twinge of concern as Abigail’s totebag and food container popped into my head again, but quickly decided the call had to be about releasing Pip to Greg, and that my return call could wait until I finished with Sylvia’s crew.

I settled into a well-worn armchair, the room’s only furniture meant for people other than a bookcase stuffed with dog books and magazines. I picked up an old copy of
Dogs in Review
from a pile by the chair and leafed through it, my photographer’s eye taking in the stunning photos of top-ranked dogs and rising stars while my conscious thoughts frolicked elsewhere. Abigail couldn’t really have been murdered, could she? Now that the thought had taken root, it wrapped its tendrils around my mind. But I saw Abigail go down, and no one was anywhere near her. She warmed her dog up before the class, and then was in the ring … How? And why? And most of all,
who would do such a thing
? There had to be another explanation.

Sylvia bounced into the room, bounce bounce bouncing a tiny replica of herself on each hip and singing a ditty about love and family and kisses. She was altogether too cheerful for this time of morning.

All three Eckhorn women had round faces with polished-apple cheeks, cheery baby blues, slightly too-high foreheads, and kewpie-doll mouths, all framed by swirling layers of frizzy curls that gathered the morning light into golden halos. They bounced to a stop, and all three started to laugh. I couldn’t help but join them.

“Look, girls! Auntie Janet has come to take your pictures! Won’t that be fun?” One of the girls smiled at me and giggled. The other blew spit bubbles.

“Man, Sylvia, it seems like only yesterday that you were showing Tippy with that big belly in front of you. How old are they now?”

“Ten months on Saturday. Amazing, huh?” She grinned. “Okay, then, I’ll get them dressed for the photos. Do you want to play with the puppies while I do that? They’re in the kitchen.”

Now I ask you, who in her right mind would not want to play with seven-week-old puppies?

Sylvia’s husband, whose name escaped me, waved a slice of toast at me as he ducked out the service door into the garage. A television on the counter explained how I could have mildew-free bath tiles with practically no effort on my part and a greasy plate by the sink alluded to the mapley bacon scent that lingered in the kitchen.

The Eckhorn’s breakfast nook was temporarily modified into a puppy nursery, and five of the cutest pups ever whelped wagged their nubby little tails at me while Tippy sat beside the pen, grinning and panting with maternal satisfaction.

“Nice job, Tippy!” I scratched behind the happy spaniel’s ear, and reached for one of the pups, a buff and white with a lozenge, or dot, smack between the ears. I peeked underneath. “What a handsome little man!” Tippy put her front paws on my knees and sniffed her son’s behind. I nudged her off before she made him pee or worse, then pressed my nose against the side of the puppy’s head and inhaled the rich, warm, clean-puppy scent of musky love with a trace of milk. I held him a few inches from my face and we gazed into each other’s eyes, his big round brown ones bringing to mind an ancient Joan Baez song about a stranger whose “dark eyes melted my soul down.”

I was settling him back into the puppy pen when the news came on. The lead story was Abigail’s death. A photo of Abigail that had to be twenty years old filled the screen as the announcer gave essentially the same story I’d heard on the radio earlier. Except for the punch line, delivered by an oh-so-sincere young reporter who spoke on camera in front of the Fort Wayne City-County Building. “Police decline to comment on the cause of Ms. Dorn’s death, but a source in the department confirms that detectives are investigating a person of interest.”

Detective Stevens’ message echoed in my head as a summons, and the presence of Abigail’s tote bag in my house took on gargantuan proportions. I had removed evidence from the scene of a crime and washed it away in my dishwasher. An irrational but ominous chill curled around my heart.

11

Sylvia saved me from
my thoughts. She bounced back into the room with the girls, bedecked now in frilly pink dresses, white lacy anklets, and shiny black Mary Janes. Big floppy pink satin hair bows completed the look. It was time to do some work, and anyway, I hadn’t done anything wrong. At least not on purpose. I shoved my fears to the back of my mind.

Sylvia wanted portraits of each of the girls and of the two together as well as pictures of puppies and of puppies and kids. She wisely suggested we start with the girls one at a time, since the more players we put in the picture, the more we set ourselves up for chaos and mess.

“Hang on, I have a prop that’s perfect!” Sylvia plopped the girls onto the carpet and ducked into a room down the hall. She re-emerged, a white wicker chair with a rose-chintz seat cushion in one hand and a white Boyd’s bear with a pink hat in the other. I set up the chair and my lights and grabbed my camera. As I tell my photo class students, when photographing kids and pets, be ready and be quick.

“We’ll do Margaret first.” Sylvia settled the first baby into the chair and placed the bear in her arms. “Meggie, what’re you doing?” she chirped, just as baby number two howled in outrage. I let Sylvia deal with the screeching child on the floor and started shooting the one in the chair. Meggie gave me a perfectly timed series of sweet-baby poses, smiling at me, smiling at the bear, smiling at her mom and unhappy sibling, kissing the bear’s nose, patting the bear’s cheek with her dimpled pink hand, hugging the bear.

“Sylvia, this kid has a future in modeling.”

Sylvia dodged a baby fist. “Meg’s a good baby. She always seems to know what to do to please us.” She cooed at her sweet daughter as she twisted her bottom lip free of the other one’s grasping little fingers. “Did you hear about Abigail Dorn?”

I told her what I knew.

“Oh, you were there.” She gazed at me in wide-eyed sympathy. “Suzette called me last night. She said Fly is in the lead now—number one Border Collie in obedience. Fly and Pip have been neck-and-neck all year, you know.”

“I knew they were close.”

“Suzette’s thrilled, of course. She and Fly have worked their tails off, and having Abigail and Pip to compete with all the time was tough.” Her eyes widened. “Oh! I don’t mean she’s thrilled that Abigail is dead!”

“No, of course not.”
Ha!
Janet Demon elbowed my left ear.

“No, really, she’s very upset.”
But not too upset to relish her dog’s rise in the rankings.
“Abigail wasn’t well liked, though.” Sylvia sucked her lower lip into her mouth and a tiny wrinkle formed between her eyebrows. “Lots of people couldn’t stand her.”

“She didn’t offer a lot to like, did she?”

“Oh, I think she was kind of insecure. People who demean the good things in other people’s lives usually are.” I waited while she seemed to consider something. “Abigail made all sorts of nasty comments to me when I got pregnant.”

“Really?”

“Really. But I understood.”

“You did?”

“Oh, sure. You know, she and Greg tried for years to get pregnant. Spent a fortune on doctors and tests. You probably didn’t know them then, but they lived next door to my folks, and Abigail talked to my mom all the time.” She pushed a rebellious curl back behind her ear and shifted topics. “She was a great dog trainer, but not very humble. A bad winner, you know what I mean?”

“She did have a way of ticking people off.”

“Worse, she hurt people, and sometimes it seemed like she did it on purpose.” Sylvia hesitated before saying softly, as if to herself, “But that doesn’t mean …” She let the thought trail away. “I’m sorry. Better to remember the good.”

“Well, her dog is certainly well behaved.” I couldn’t think of anything else that endeared Abigail to me.

“Oh, yes, she was devoted to her dogs. And she donated a lot of time and money to Border Collie rescue and health research.”

“Oh?”

Sylvia nodded. “She didn’t talk about it. But several BC rescuers have told me about her donations. She was very generous.” She settled a sky-blue gaze on me. “She was also very kind to me when my parents died. I was off at nursing school when my dad crashed his plane.”

“Oh, God, I’m so sorry. How awful.” I didn’t know what else to say, and felt my eyes go hot and moist with that all-encompassing sense of loss I’d felt when Abigail was taken away in the ambulance. “I guess there’s a lot most of us don’t know about each other, even after years and years.”

Sylvia broke the silence that followed. “Ready for Elizabeth?”

Somehow, it came out more like a warning than a question, and my well-honed photographer and dog-trainer instincts screamed
uh-oh
in my head. I lifted Meg from the chair, put her on the floor, and gave her a keep-the-baby-busy gadget with knobs and flaps and noisemakers.

Unlike her sister, Elizabeth evidently was not interested in modeling. She bawled and stiffened her little legs as Sylvia tried to position her in the chair. She flailed her arms, catching Sylvia a good one in the eye. When her little fanny finally hit the chair cushion, she glared at Sylvia, then at me, then at her happy sister on the floor. Sylvia tried to use the lull to our advantage, placing the bear in the kid’s arms and cooing, “Oh, Lizzie, look at the nice lady bear!” Lizzie
glared at the bear, grabbed its ear in one chubby little mitt, and heaved it straight up. The term “evil twin” was becoming more
meaningful by the second.

We spent another ten minutes trying to get the little darling to cooperate, but by the time she started to wind down her face was blotchy and streaked with tears and snot, and the pink bow hung limp and lopsided from her wildly willful yellow mop.

“Maybe you could buy several poses of Meg and pretend some of them are Elizabeth?” I wished out loud.

“That’ll work.” Sylvia scooped the girls up and disappeared down the hallway, calling over her shoulder, “There’s coffee if you want some. I’ll be back in a minute.” I poured myself a wonderfully hazelnutty cup of coffee, gazed at the snoozing puppies, and wondered if Sylvia was crating that kid with a chew bone to gnaw on.

The puppies behaved themselves, probably because they had just stuffed their tummies and were ready for naps. I got individual and group shots, and a few more of the puppies with Tippy, whose nub never stopped wagging. Sylvia retrieved good twin Meg, who giggled with delight as she held each puppy in turn on her lap for some lethally cute kid-and-puppy pictures. She was starting to nod off by the time Sylvia snuggled her into the chair with Tippy for the final shots.

By ten o’clock I had packed all my equipment and pointed my van toward home, thinking that in the future when I have regrets about not having kids, I could always spend a half-hour with Lizzie for therapy.