Mutts & Murder: A Dog Town USA Cozy Mystery (16 page)

I took in a deep breath and grabbed the antique clock.

“This is quite nice,” I said, going up to her.

She nodded stiffly.  

“It’s German,” she said.

She crossed her arms, and I suddenly felt as if Geraldine had seen through my ploy to casually size her up. After all, I hadn’t ever been in her shop before. And frankly, it was probably a rare day when someone in their late 20s came wandering down her aisles.

I cleared my throat, placing the clock on the cash register.

“I notice you don’t let dogs in here,” I said, changing the subject. “I’d think in a town like this that would hurt business.”

She shrugged.

“Maybe,” she said. “But you see, that’s where Richard and I differ. I never cared for dogs. And to have them in my antique shop would be
disastrous
.”

I raised an eyebrow.

That was quite the revelation. Richard spent his days caring for dogs. Meanwhile, his wife seemed to loathe them.

She stared hard at me for a moment.

“I know you’ve been talking to Richard,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “For the articles I’ve been writing about Myra.”

She sighed and suddenly looked very tired.  

“You don’t seem like a stupid girl, Winifred,” she said. “I’m sure you figured out that my husband was having an affair with Myra.”

My jaw almost hit the ground at that remark.

Maybe it was because I hadn’t expected her to know. Or maybe it was because of the way she freely admitted it. Or maybe it was the way in which she said it – without feeling. As if she was telling me the time of day.

“I didn’t know for sure, but—” I started saying.

“Well, I’ve known for a long time now,” she said, sighing.

“Then how come you’re still…?”

She shrugged.

“I love him,” she said. “He stepped up and gave my son a father when his died. Richard’s been good to us. And I’m too old to start all over again.”

She shook her head.

“It’s not glamorous,” she said. “But I love him. So I stay.”

The way she spoke was so honest and upfront, I was almost speechless. Here I was used to having to pry information out of people by almost any means necessary, and Geraldine had just offered up her story on a silver platter.

“Did…” I said, finding my voice shaky. “Did you want Myra dead?”

Geraldine smiled, a little too creepily for my liking.

“You mean did
I
murder her?”

I nodded.

“I saw you at
The Barkery
that day she was poisoned,” I said.

She smiled again.

“I was in
The Barkery
that day because I’m addicted to your sister’s Apple Custard cupcakes,” she said. “Not because I wanted to murder Myra.”

She rubbed her face.

“Now if you were to ask whether I was happy she was dead, then the answer to that would be entirely different.”

“But you didn’t do it?” I said.

She shook her head.

“What about your husband?” I said. “Could he have—?”

“You saw him at the funeral, Winifred,” she said, cutting me off. “Did that sobbing, cave-in of a man seem like a murderer to you?”

Mrs. Kline had a way about her that put me on edge, but inspired some sort of admiration in me as well.

Most women in her shoes wouldn’t have carried the burden that she did with such grace. Let alone with such honest frankness.

“Well, I’m sorry I had to ask you these questions, Geraldine,” I said.

“Don’t be,” she said. “Besides, I saw you coming a mile away.”

“How?” I asked.

I wasn’t great at deception, but over the years I’d developed decent screening skills. Most of the people I interviewed didn’t see what I was after until it was too late.

“A cop was in here earlier,” she said. “Asking those same questions.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“What’d he look like?”

“Dark hair, tan skin.Hawaiian maybe.”

So the lieutenant wasn’t just sitting around reading the paper this Sunday morning either.

“Well, thanks for your time, Geraldine,” I said, heading for the door.

“Uh, Winifred?”

I stopped.

“Yes?”

“You haven’t paid for this clock yet.”

She looked at me with both eyebrows raised. As if she was reminding a forgetful, senile customer that they had forgotten the item they set about getting.

I could have continued on my way and pretended like I hadn’t heard her. But hell. I had come in here on a Sunday morning, accusing the poor woman of murder.

Maybe I owed her a purchase.

I moseyed back over to the counter and pulled out my credit card. She swiped it and started wrapping the ugly clock in tissue paper.

“You’re lucky it’s just the clock,” she said. “The lieutenant had to buy a table lamp for his troubles.”

I smiled.

That gave me some satisfaction at least.

Chapter 42

When I got back to the house later that afternoon, Lou was sitting at the kitchen table. She was red in the cheeks and her face was wet with tears.

The sight of that struck a chill so deep inside my heart, I almost didn’t notice how stifling it was inside the house.

Lou was always the tough one. When our mother died, she’d been the one who immediately went about organizing the funeral and the memorial service. When she went through her divorce, she still maintained a cheerful demeanor, even though I knew she was hurting bad.

She rarely cried, and when she did, she usually went for a drive or locked herself in her room until the tears passed.

So to see her flat-out bawling the way she was terrified me.

“Did the cops come back?” I said in a trembling voice.

If they threatened her again, I was going to go down to the police station myself and—

But Lou shook her head before I could finish the thought.

“No,” she said. “I haven’t heard from them.”

“Then what’s going on?”

I swallowed hard as she dabbed at her eyes.

“It’s Buddy,” she said. “One of our stupid neighbors set off a couple of fireworks this morning. It scared Buddy so bad, he busted through the loose screen in the front window.”

She sniveled some.

“I don’t know where he is,” she said.

She looked like a woman who was being driven to her breaking point.  

“It’s okay, Lou,” I said. “I’m sure he’ll come back. He always does.”

But she just shook her head.

“No. I’ve been looking for him all morning and haven’t seen him. I mean, what if he got hit by a…”

She trailed off.

Buddy was an outdoor cat who could roam as free as he wanted. Though in his older years, he’d mostly just settled for sitting out on the porch in the sun, swishing his tail. He didn’t often go much farther than a couple houses down.

He had never run away before, and the thought that something had happened to him put a pit the size of Alaska in my stomach.

Because both Lou and I knew that Buddy was much more than just a cat. He’d been a friend who had seen us through thick and thin. A member of our family.

And the prospect of losing another family member so soon after our mother’s passing scared the daylights out of me.

“It’s okay,” I said again as another round of tears rolled down her cheeks.

I said the words, but I didn’t know if I even believed them.

Buddy was missing. Mom’s rose bed was practically destroyed. Lou was on a shortlist of murder suspects. And I was no closer to finding Myra’s killer.

Things were not
okay
by any measure of the word.

Chapter 43

I woke up that Fourth of July morning with a terrible sinking feeling of doom.

It was partially because of Lou’s predicament, partially because Buddy was still missing, and partially because I was at square one again after talking to Geraldine Kline.

But there was also another reason for that feeling:

It was the Fourth of July. Which meant that today was Dog Mountain’s annual Pooch Parade. The most foolish event to take place this side of the Rocky Mountains.

Today, the streets of Dog Mountain would be filled with bulldogs, pugs, huskies, hounds, poodles, and just about every variety of mutt imaginable. Most of them would be dressed in Uncle Sam-style top hats, red white and blue bowties, multicolored tutus, and probably several other costumes never even seen before. It was an embarrassing spectacle to see a whole army of dogs in costumes parade down the street with their owners.

But Kobritz was expecting me to cover it. And besides, a story like the Pooch Parade wouldn’t take all that long to report and write up. All I needed was a few event participants to talk about their dogs and tell me what a fun time they were having. That wouldn’t be so hard. Then I could go back to
The Chronicle
, write it up quickly, and get back to figuring out who killed Myra.

I glanced at the alarm clock. Then I sat up, letting out a sigh as a horrible pang of sadness erupted at the base of my chest.

Usually at this time, Buddy would be stepping all over my legs, nudging me awake.

Buddy still wasn’t home. And I was worried. Lou and I had spent the afternoon and evening before walking up and down the sidewalks of our neighborhood looking for the orange cat. I knew because of his size and age, he couldn’t have gotten that far. But all of our searching and asking neighbors had been to no avail.

His disappearance weighed heavily on my mind.

But I would have to figure out a way to set it aside for the time being and focus on the day ahead.

I took a shower, got ready, and then left the house.

Even though it was still relatively early, the day felt like it had all the makings of a real scorcher.

Chapter 44

I stood on the downtown sidewalk, watching as a float in the shape of a beagle rolled down the street. It was carrying a pack of beagles and their owners, all of who were decked out in red, white and blue costumes that made me sweat just looking at them.

But it wasn’t just the costumes. It was brutal out here in the crowd, under the hot July sun. Humid heat radiated from the concrete, and I could feel it through my flats. Beads of sweat rolled down the sides of my face. The pen and notepad in my hand felt slick and slippery. Sweat kept pooling on my upper lip.

I meandered through the crowd as
God Bless America
blared from the speakers, watching the parade go by. Craig Milton, one of our summer photography interns, was snapping away from across the street. I’d already spoken to the parade organizers and a few participants. One middle-aged man I spoke with had been dressed in full-on Uncle Sam wear: the top hat, beard, striped pants, jacket and all. He’d dressed his bloodhound, Flossie, in a dog version of the costume too. Both of them looked as though they would pass out at any second from the heat.

When asked why he’d decided to come out and dress up his dog this hot Fourth of July, he told me it was “To support the community of Dog Mountain. And of course, to support the United States of America too.”

I kept my eyes on the parade goers, looking for anyone else dressed in stand-out costumes who might offer a better quote than Uncle Sam had. I was so busy watching the parade that I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going, and I suddenly ran smack dab into a woman wearing an American flag t-shirt and eating a red, white and blue cupcake.

The cupcake went flying out of her hands, hitting the ground upside down. The frosting bled all over the concrete.

“Hey!” she shouted, turning toward me, a stampeding bull look in her eyes.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t—”

“Yeah, I know you wasn’t,” she said in a bumpkin accent. “Now look what you’ve done to my cupcake. You know I wait all year for the Red, White and Blueberry cupcake?
The Barkery
only offers it for two weeks around the Fourth of July.”

I looked down at it again. Nothing could be done to salvage the fallen treat.

“Well, I’m real sorr—”

But then I stopped midsentence as something occurred to me that hadn’t before.

The woman peered at me like I was losing it, but I hardly saw her.

The cupcake flavor…

I pushed past her suddenly, fighting my way through the crowd. I rounded the corner of a building, heading in the direction of my Hyundai, which I had parked on a side street halfway between my house and the downtown area to avoid the traffic.

I pulled out my phone and hit speed dial. It rang a couple of times before she answered. My nerves hung on every ring.

“It’s a great day at
The Barkery
. What can we do for you?”

“You don’t make the Apple Custard cupcakes anymore, do you?” I said in an unsteady voice.

There was a pause on the other end of the line.

My legs were pumping so hard against the hot concrete, I thought my feet might burst into flames at any minute.

“Freddie? Is that you?”

“Yeah, it’s me,” I said. “You stopped making those cupcakes last fall, didn’t you?”

Lou paused again.

“I don’t understand what—”

“Just… tell me. It’s important.”

“Yeah, we stopped making them,” she said. “The custard took a lot of time to make, so we decided to make that flavor a fall seasonal special instead. We only make it in October and November now.”

My heart thudded hard in my chest.

“Why?” she said. “I can’t think what that has to do with a single thing.”

“Geraldine Kline said she was in
The Barkery
the day that Myra was poisoned because she’s addicted to your Apple Custard cupcakes,” I said.

“Geraldine said that?” Lou said.

“Yes.”

“But that doesn’t even make any sense,” Lou said. “She’s gluten intolerant. She only orders the gluten-free items on the menu when she comes in. Which the Apple Custard Cupcake was never part of, even when we did offer it.”

Good old Lou and her elephant-like memory for customer orders.