Ruff Way to Go (27 page)

“What did
you decide? Which of us gets the dog, me or Trevor?”

That was not
a question I felt like answering yet. I stood up and met the intense gaze from
her gray eyes. “It would probably be best if I waited to discuss this until the
two of you could be present. Why don’t we set up an appointment at my house
this evening? I’ll call Trevor and see if there’s a good time for him to come
over tonight.”

Her jaw
dropped. “Why, you little...fool! You’ve chosen Trevor, haven’t you?”

I tried to
head past her toward the door, cutting a wide arc around her. Despite his owner’s
angry demeanor, Shogun followed in perfect heel position. My neck and throat
still ached from my run-in with Carver. I so desperately didn’t want to have a
second confrontation the same day. “I didn’t say that, though you’re not
helping your case any.”

“It’s
obvious by the way you’re behaving.” She stomped her foot and put her hands on
her hips. “You can’t be serious. You seemed intelligent to me, but I totally
overestimated you. You’re planning to give my dog to a murderer!”

“The police
will solve Cassandra’s murder case, Edith. If Trevor is guilty, he won’t have
Shogun for long.” I opened the door as I spoke. “The job you hired me to do was
to determine which of you should keep your dog. While Shogun is happy here and
you do a fine job with him, there is not a doubt in my mind that he is even
happier with Trevor. So, yes, that’s what I’m recommending.”

I stepped
out onto the porch, feeling as though I were running in front of a train, by
the way she stormed after me.

“If you
think that’s the end of this, you’ve got another thing coming!”

She slammed
the door behind me, barely giving Shogun time to get through it.

Shogun was
badly frightened at nearly getting crushed by the door. Now wanting to go back
inside and give Edith a piece of my mind, I knelt and reassured the sweet dog.
Where did she get off hiring me and then treating me like dirt? Had she ever
seriously believed that I would find in her favor?

The warm air
carried the fragrance of newly cut grass. From my crouched position on Edith’s
porch, I watched Susan mowing the Haywoods’ front lawn, a scowl deeply set on
her face. I rose and waved and tried unsuccessfully to catch her eye. She was
deliberately ignoring me.
While she took another pass across the lawn and
moved toward the back, I coaxed Shogun to come with me. The little dog, whose
fur was not unlike an overgrown lawn, was wary of the mower, but trotted along
the moment Susan turned away from us. I truly did want to avoid confrontations
for the rest of the day, seeing as how forever was decidedly unlikely. Yet I
really did want to clear the air between Susan and me, once and for all. If
such a thing was possible.

I waited by
the junipers for her to make another pass with the mower and come toward me,
Shogun sniffing the ground with avid enthusiasm, tracking a squirrel, perhaps.

I waved at
Susan as she neared. Her expression didn’t change at the sight of me.
Considering how tense things had been when we’d last spoken, this was a good
sign. It wouldn’t have been all that far out of character for her to spit at
me.

Shogun was
tugging against my grip and I crouched down to see what had caught his
interest. A patch of pink immediately caught my eye. My heart raced. I’d
checked this area fairly thoroughly the day after the murder. How could I have
missed this?

I grabbed
the now-faded piece of paper, which looked as though it had been soaked with
rain or sprinkler water. The paper was soiled and the ink had run so badly that
the writing could no longer be deciphered, but as with the note on Edith’s door
the day of the murder, it had been written with a black felt-tip pen. This
could only be the missing note!

“I found the
note!” I cried over the sound of the motor to Susan as she reached me.

“What note?”

“The note
from Edith’s door.” I didn’t need, or want, to give any additional explanation.

She rolled
her eyes. “Again with the stupid magenta paper? Like I said before, someone
else must’ve left the notepad at my parents’ house.”

I nodded,
frustrated. Why did this note disappear and then reappear? Was this some kind
of a sick game to someone?

“I was thinking
of going over and working on your yard
after I finish up here. Would that
be all right with you and your mom?”

I was
surprised by her demeanor. She wasn’t acting hostile or standoffish. It was as
though neither her husband nor the police had filled her in about the fact that
her secret drug addiction had been divulged. “Sure. That’s fine. But there’s
something I wanted to talk to you about. Got a minute?”

The mower,
though she’d reduced engine power, was still rumbling such that we were forced
to raise our voices over the noise. There was no way I wanted to be at a half
shout as I brought up the subject of money and her husband’s theory about why
she was hoarding cash.

She nodded
and called, “Just let me finish this one section.”

While we
waited for Susan, Shogun settled into a shady patch of cool sand beneath the
bushes. Seeing him there reminded me that I’d never followed through on my
desire to restudy those paw prints and see what it was about them that struck
me as so familiar. I rounded the juniper hedge and stared at the sandy soil.

Now there
were no footprints—canine or otherwise—here. The impressions from
my own shoes the day after the murder were gone, as were the paw prints. What
was left in the sand were streaks, as if a broom had been dragged across it,
wiping out all prints.

There was no
way these markings could have occurred naturally. Someone had deliberately
wiped out the tracks that were there the other day. Why? Was it possibly to
cover up the dog tracks that had perhaps matched those that I’d seen in the
blood? And yet, the only people who might have known about the tracks behind
the bushes were the Haywoods…and Susan.

“What’s up?”
she said to me, raising an eyebrow as she watched me scramble back to my feet. “Looking
for an entire stationery supply back there?”

“No, just...trying
to figure out how the note could have been blown over there, and how I missed
it the first time I looked.”

“Huh. So you
said you wanted to talk to me about something?”

“Susan, I
don’t like to get involved in a squabble between a husband and a wife, but I
also don’t like being a silent partner in a lie. What did you tell your husband
about our financial agreement?”

The guilty
look on her face gave her away. “Our financial agreement? But I thought we were
doing this on trade.”

“That’s what
I thought, too, but your husband seems to be under the impression that I’m
still working with Boris, and that I’ve been charging you fifty dollars a
visit.”

“He is?”

“He
certainly is. I’m surprised he didn’t bring this up with you last night.”

“Oh, yeah.
I... I was saving up to buy him a birthday present, and that’s the only way I
could think of tricking him into giving me the money for it.”

“And you
thought it would be all right to possibly damage my reputation by not even having
me
work
with Boris, yet to fool your husband into believing I was
charging you.”

“I guess I
didn’t think it through.”

“Come on,
Susan. Do you really think you’re fooling me?”

She knelt
and picked up Shogun. “This dog always reminds me of Toto from
The Wizard of
Oz,”
she murmured.

“Fred seems
to be worried that you’re using the money for drugs.”

“Drug money?
That’s stupid.” She spoke with confidence, but still seemed to be actively
searching for anyplace to look other than directly in my eyes. She let Shogun
leap down from her arms.

“I hope so.
I’d hate to think of anyone getting messed up on drugs.”

“I did have
a problem with it, starting when I was in high school.”

High school?
That would be the drug dependency problem her parents felt I’d brought about with
my gluing her shoes to their porch.

“I got off
the stuff a long time ago. That isn’t what I’m using the money for.”

“A birthday
present?” I asked derisively.

She shook
her head. “The money is...going toward bailing my parents out of a jam they’re
in. My father did some damage at Edith’s store one night. He used to own a
business there, you know, and he...thinks he still does sometimes.”

My interest
was piqued, but she had a ways to go to convince me that this time she was
telling the truth.

She glanced
at the window of her parents’ house and lowered her voice. “My dad’s not always
lucid. He broke some windows to get in and ruined some of Edith’s merchandise,
and we’re trying to keep it quiet. We’re paying her for the damage under the
table. You can ask Edith, if you don’t believe me. I’m surprised she’s kept it
quiet this long.”

“Is it
Alzheimer’s?”

She nodded,
her expression grim. “You might as well know the whole thing. See, I don’t know
for certain...Dad could’ve picked up that pad from someone’s house. He’s taken
to wandering into places and grabbing stuff lately. A couple months ago,
Cassandra had to call Mom to get him when he was insisting he lived at her
house. When we brought him home, Mom found Cassandra’s saltshaker in his
pocket.”

“Why didn’t you
tell your husband the truth?”

“I didn’t
tell Fred because he’d just use it against me. He thinks we should commit my
dad, put him in some kind of an institution, but my mom thinks...” She paused
and then sighed. “She’s just not ready.”

“I’d like to
believe you, Susan, but you seem to have a problem with the truth. Why did you
lie to me about your relationship with Cassandra?”

“Allida, I
told you. I barely knew the woman.”

“That’s not
what your husband told me.”

Her eyes
widened in alarm. “You talked to him about that? Why?”

“He told me
that you and she used to have a monogramming business together.”

In a flash,
her demeanor turned stone cold. “Damn you, Allida. You really haven’t wised up
at all in all these years, have you?”

“What do you
mean?” I asked, startled by her sudden outburst.

“What I mean
is you’re trespassing! You are sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong! And
if you don’t watch out, you’re going to wind up—”She stopped as suddenly
as she’d started, then turned her back on me.

“You think I’m
going to wind up as a second murder victim, Susan?”

She didn’t
answer, but returned to her mower and started up the engine with one furious
yank of the cord. Though I stayed for another minute hoping she’d cool down
enough to talk to me again, she was not even willing to look at me.

The curtains
parted, and Harvey Haywood peered at me. I expected him to frown and perhaps
even yell at me to get off his property, but he threw the window open and gave
me a close resemblance of a smile. “Ellen, you go tell your sister to come on
in now. You two have been out there for hours. You’re going to make yourself
sick, being out in the sun this long.”

I didn’t
know what else to say, so I gave him a friendly wave and said, “All right I’ll
tell Susan what you said.”

A moment
later, Betsy’s angry face appeared beside her husband’s. She shut the window
with a vengeance and gestured at me with two flicks of the wrist to go away, as
if she were shooing a fly.

I walked off
with Shogun, and once again he did fine on leash until we reached the Randons’
walkway. There Shogun trotted up the path as if that was where we were surely
going. It dawned on me then that it was probably Melanie he was expecting to
visit and that, since Edith wasn’t the one to bring him there, Trevor must have
been.

To test my
theory, I let Shogun go ahead and lead the way, and I rang the doorbell. Shogun’s
tail began to wag as we
waited. Not knowing whether or not anyone was even home, I found
myself immediately hoping that the little guy wasn’t about to be disappointed.

Paul swung
the door open. He was unshaven and wearing a grubby sweat suit, his dark hair
uncombed. “Allida, hi. What’s up?”

I picked up
the waggy-tailed little dog. “Actually, we’re here to visit with Melanie for
just a minute. Is she home?”

Before Paul
could answer, she popped into view, then bolted through the door. “Shogun! It’s
Shogun, Daddy!”

“I can see
that.”

She held out
her arms for him, and seeing no unspoken objection on her father’s part, I let
her take him and give him a hug. Shogun licked her lace and she giggled.

“As you
apparently guessed, they’re old friends,” Paul said, indicating his daughter
and his next-door neighbor’s dog.

“Yes, he
kept pulling on the leash to come over here, and I finally figured out that the
Cunninghams must have brought him over here to see Melanie.”