Silent Night: A Raine Stockton Dog Mystery (10 page)

I smiled sweetly.  “Oops,” I said.

His eyes twinkled, and for a moment we were all right again.

But I sobered.  “I’m really kind of worried.  If it was that guy I saw in the diner, and if the girl was there when he broke in…”

“Then the neighbors wouldn’t have seen her leaving that afternoon,” Miles reminded me.  He was always so rational about these things.

“I suppose,” I admitted.  “Still, I think I’ll call the office as soon as the day shift gets in.”

“Or,” suggested Miles, “you could wait until someone calls you.  As in, when they need your help.”

I had to bite my tongue.  He really didn’t get the way things worked around here.  And he sounded a little too much, at that moment, like my ex-husband
.

The silence was awkward for a beat or two, and then Miles nodded toward the back yard.  “How’s the construction project?”

I sighed.  “Expensive.  Looks like we’re shut down until I can figure out how to pay for this thing.”

The truth was that I had Miles to thank for the progress that had been made so far. He had sent his top crew down to reconstruct my building, even though it meant pulling them off his own project.  I would have felt even worse about not being able to finish the construction if I hadn’t been sure the crew would still have jobs to go to with Miles. 

“Looks like they’ve got you under roof, anyway.”

“Yeah, but no plumbing, HVAC, or kennel runs.  I’m going to have to come up with something pretty soon or we’ll be out of business.”

“You’re losing money every day you’re closed.”

“Tell me about it.”

I could see the determination forming in his eyes that had laid waste to business opponents across the globe and every muscle in my body tensed. “Raine, I can send down a crew that will have you up and running before Christmas.”

“No.  I told you, I’m out of money. ”

“Consider it a loan.  Low interest, I’ll draw up papers.”

“No.  I’m in more debt than I can afford already.”

“An investment, then. “

“I already have a partner.  Don’t need another one.”

“Damn it, Raine—”

“No.”

“It’s Christmas!  Learn how to accept a gift, won’t you?”

“A gift!”  My outrage rose and it showed in my voice.  “A gift is perfume or jewelry or—or—fruit of the month!  Not a ten thousand dollar construction renovation that I already told you I can’t afford.  You can’t just
buy
people, Miles.  Boundaries, for heaven’s sake!”

We glared at each other for a moment and I could see he was trying as hard as I was not to say what he was thinking.  His nostrils flared with a breath.  My fingers tightened around my coffee cup.  Neither of us would be the first to blink. Finally he muttered, “You are the stubbornest person I have ever met.”

“Said the pot to the kettle.”  But I allowed my shoulders to relax fractionally as I took a sip of my coffee.

My relationship with Miles is complicated, to say the least.  First of all, we are sworn enemies when it comes to his development project; he has decided not to let that fact bother him, and I am coming to an uneasy peace with it, myself.  And there is an awful lot I like about him.  You always know where you stand with Miles; ask him anything and he’ll tell you the truth.  He’s completely comfortable in his own skin.  He makes me laugh.  When he comes to dinner, he not only cooks, but he does the dishes.  He is at home wherever he is.
 
I like his unself-conscious affection, which he extends as easily to me as he does to my dogs—even though I wish he wouldn’t be quite so affectionate in public.  And one cold, rainy night not long ago, he had stayed up till dawn helping me search the woods for a lost dog.  No one asked him to.  He had just done it.  There’s a lot to like about him.

But he can also be controlling, abrupt, determined, stubborn and a little arrogant.  Since I am also most of those things—except arrogant—we have a tendency to butt heads a lot.  To Miles’s credit, he’s usually the first one to make an attempt to smooth things over.

He regarded me silently for another moment.  Then he said, “You know, it would be a lot easier to respect your boundaries if I actually knew what they were.  We’re more than neighbors but not quite friends.  Or maybe more than friends but not quite lovers.  I can’t kiss you in public but can I kiss you in private?”  He shrugged.  “Anybody’s guess.  A few clear signals wouldn’t be unwelcome here.”

My muscles stiffened again.  “Look, Miles…”

He held up a hand.  “It’s okay.  I know you have some things to work out. Patience is one of my many virtues.  But while you’re thinking about it, consider this:  I am going to be in your life. There’s no avoiding that.
 
I can be your enemy, or your friend, or your lover.  You choose.”

There was that strange, silly fluttering in the vicinity of my ribcage again, and the heat that crawled up my throat.  He had fabulous eyes.  Sometimes I just couldn’t stop looking at them.  I said, “You don’t have an opinion?”

“I do,” he conceded gravely.  “But I wouldn’t want to accidentally violate your boundaries by expressing it.”

As hard as I tried, I couldn’t fight the smile that tugged at a corner of my lips.  I tried to hide it by lifting my coffee cup. He smiled back at me.  We were comfortable for a moment.

I searched for a neutral topic.
 
“Melanie seems like a smart girl.”  I probably should have said
nice
or
sweet
but couldn’t quite manage it.

“She is.”  But his expression was troubled again as he looked into his coffee cup.  “She doesn’t like me much.  Hates being here.  Who can blame her?  I’ve seen her maybe three times in two years.  I don’t know anything about her life.  What do nine-year-old girls like, anyway?”

I was appalled.  My collie Majesty had been living with my Aunt Mart for less than a month and if I didn’t see her at least every other day I started to go into withdrawal.  How could a father see his own child only three times in two years?  I tried to keep my opinions to myself.
 
“I don’t know.  I was never a little girl. I was a tomboy.  I liked dogs and mountain bikes.  I was a junior handler at thirteen.  You know, if you spent more time with her you’d probably know exactly what she likes to do.”  Ah well, I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep my opinions to myself very long.  But it was worth a try.

Miles, of course, was unruffled.  He always was.  “You mean,” he corrected, “if she spent more time with me.
 
I make plans to pick her up every weekend of the year and for a month in the summer— she always has something she would rather do.  Her mother has her in this fancy boarding school in New York and she has her friends…”  He shrugged.  “She was supposed to be skiing in Austria this Christmas.
 
Hell of a thing, huh, when spending Christmas with your dad is a punishment?”

I wanted to say something.  I had no idea what.

He took a final sip of coffee and set the cup aside.  “Well, I’d better wake her up so we can get going.”

“What—now?”
 
I looked out the window.  “It’s still dark.  What are you going to do, just make her sit and wait while you work?”

“We’ll go into town for breakfast.  It’ll be light by the time we get back.”

What was wrong with me?  I didn’t like kids; I had no idea what to do with one.
 
I couldn’t believe what I was about to say.  Blame it on Christmas.

I said, “Come on, Miles.  She’s had a hard couple of days. Let her sleep.  I’ll bring her over when she wakes up.”

He looked at me with a kind of amused skepticism.  “Are you sure? She can be kind of a handful.”

I shrugged, suddenly not so sure.  “Okay, I’m not saying I have the greatest maternal instincts, but I think I can handle a nine-year-old for an hour or two.”

About that time I looked down and noticed that Cisco had managed to scoot himself, an inch at a time, across the kitchen floor, until he now lay only a few feet from us, head on paws, just as though he thought he could convince me that was where I had left him. I fixed him with a glare.

  Here is the thing about teaching the “stay”:  you give a dog an inch, and he will take a mile.  Dogs are incredibly precise about these things, and the first time you allow him to get away with moving even a foot or two out of position, you have taught him that he gets to determine
where
he should stay.  It’s almost never a good idea to let dogs start negotiating with humans over territory.

My dogs know when I put them somewhere, they are to stay exactly there until I tell them differently.  And of course they keep trying to find out whether or not I really mean it.

My eyes widened dramatically and Cisco’s ears flattened.  I said, in a very low, quietly menacing tone that was reserved for only the worst training infractions, “Where do you belong?”  I pointed a sharp finger in his direction.  “Shame on you!  Go! Back to your place!  Now!”

Cisco scrambled back to his place with the other two dogs, and Miles laughed.  “Okay, maybe you can.  I’ll probably be back before she wakes up anyway, but she’s got her cell phone if she needs to call me. Thanks, Raine.”  He put his coffee mug in the sink and caressed my cheek lightly—in lieu of a kiss, I guessed—on the way out.
 

I smiled and waved to him and then released the dogs to their breakfasts, feeling a little better about things between us.  Then I took my coffee to the study where my computer was set up and called up Google.

I was still scrolling through the myriad web pages relating to Miles Young, his various enterprises, his various holding companies, his various charitable activities, his various newspaper appearances, his various lawsuits—both as complainant and defendant—his various feature magazine articles, his various supermodel-type girlfriends and even his Wikipedia entry  when Sonny called.  “Have you heard anything more about the abandoned baby?” she wanted to know.

“Only what I knew when I left last night.  I’m going to give Rita a call in a few minutes and see if anything turned up.”  Rita was the day dispatcher, and if she wasn’t too busy she could often save me the trouble—and awkwardness—of going to Buck or one of his deputies for the information I needed.  And, being a woman, she was on my side about the divorce.
 
“I doubt it’s a very high priority right now, though.”  Briefly, I told her about Earl Lewis’s murder.  “And the worst part is,” I added, “I might have been standing behind the man who did it in the diner.  Apparently Earl was involved in some kind of burglary ring and Buck thinks this guy might have been a partner who thought Earl was cheating him or something.”

“I don’t know why these kinds of things always seem worse at Christmas,” she said sadly.  “As though we expect even the bad guys to be held to a higher standard this time of year.”

“They think he might have been killed at home, then moved to the back of his truck.  The truck was driven into a gully in the woods.  The guys were still looking for his teenage daughter last night when I left.”

“Somehow, the day looked a lot cheerier to me before I called you.”

“Sorry.”  I reached for my coffee cup. “So how did the rest of the night go at the living Nativity?  How was Mystery?”

“Perfect,” Sonny said, and she did sound a little more cheerful at the mention of her dog’s name.  “But she’s been pacing the floor all morning wanting to get back to them.  I don’t know how I can put up with this for the next two weeks. ”

“Put her out with the rest of the flock,” I advised.  “All she wants is to be doing her job.”

“I know.  That’s what she keeps saying.  But I’m half afraid she’ll try to run into town and herd the other sheep home.  She’s very stubborn about some things.”

Sonny had been known to give her animals too much credit, but in Mystery’s case I wasn’t so quick to dismiss her concerns.  Sonny had come to own Mystery in the first place because Mystery had recognized Sonny’s newly-purchased flock of sheep as the one she had used to herd. 

I said, changing the subject, “Did you know Miles Young has a Wikipedia entry?”

“No, but it doesn’t surprise me. He used to own that hockey team, you know.”

“I do now.”  My voice sounded a little morose.  “He showed up here last night.  With his daughter.”  I waited to see if that would surprise her, but she said nothing.  “He didn’t have any heat in his house.  I let them stay over.”

“That was nice of you.”  She was carefully neutral on the subject of Miles Young, as well she should be.  She was the lawyer for the citizen’s action group—of which I was a member—that was aligned against him and his development project.  She also knew that my relationship with the opposition, namely Miles, had gotten complicated over the past couple of months, and on that subject she generally did more listening than talking.
 

“Not really,” I said, clicking another page.  “I was kind of cranky about it.”

I thought she smothered a chuckle.  “Listen, Raine, what I called about was to tell you that I’m going to have to bow out of Christmas dinner with your aunt.  I’ll call her this afternoon and apologize.  My sister cancelled her trip to Europe so I’ll be going to Charleston to spend the holidays with her after all.  I may even stay through January.  She has a guest house so I can bring the dogs, and Winston Jones and his wife said they could house-sit and look after the farm animals.”