Home Is Where the Bark Is (32 page)

“
If
she did. Did he say why he never came back for Mack?”

Nick was silent. Serena could hear him take a short, deep breath.

“He told me Mack was his wife’s dog. They’d adopted him together, but as far as he was concerned, Mack belonged to Claire Kessler.”

“That makes sense,” said Serena. “Remember I told you how I thought he must have been owned by a woman the way he acts like such a baby with me?”

“Yeah, the big galoot,” said Nick. His voice was underscored with a real affection for the dog that warmed Serena’s heart.

“But it doesn’t make sense that a woman Mack loved that much doesn’t have her dog with her. She must be heartbroken.”

“Kessler paints the ex-wife in a pretty bad light. Says she took off to live in Carmel, abandoning both him and Mack.”

Once more Serena strained to remember her impressions of Eric Kessler. He’d seemed a pleasant enough kind of guy but so ordinary he’d scarcely registered. “Okay, so they split. That doesn’t explain why he didn’t come back for his dog.”

“Kessler told me he put Mack in Paws-A-While and then told his ex where to go to get her dog. He said he paid a week up front.”

“True. He did. But I’ll swear he never said anything about going to live in San Diego. Or that he had a wife.”

“According to him, he told his wife he couldn’t take Mack to San Diego and she had to come get him and take him to wherever she was living.”

“But she never showed . . .”

“And he never checked to see if she did?”

“I definitely never heard from him again.” Serena paused. “Mack was loved by a woman. Maybe that woman. I find it hard to comprehend she could do that to him.”

“It looks that way. According to Kessler.”

Serena could not help the catch in her voice. “So if he’s to be believed, Mack was abandoned by both of them, the poor baby.”

She was so overcome with sadness on Mack’s behalf, she brushed Freya around her face and behind her ears with extra special attention. The elderly Lab stayed very still, and the expression in her milky old eyes was one of bliss.

“You are the best, best girl,” Serena crooned.

“Did you just call me the best
girl
?” Nick’s gravelly voice, warm with amusement, came through her cell.

“Of course not. You know you’re the best
boy
,” she murmured back. My God, could there ever be a more masculine guy? Little shivers of awareness ran through her, fired just by the sound of his voice. “I’m grooming Freya.”

As she held the phone with one hand and brushed Freya with the other, Serena thought about how loved Freya was by her guardians, Joe and Rosemary. Though it obviously went against the grain for them to accept charity from her, they’d swallowed their pride so their beloved dog got the best care. Whereas poor darling Mack had been abandoned by both his awful owners. And before that by some other unknown jerk, which was why he’d ended up at the shelter where the Kesslers found him.

Mack would never, ever be abandoned again. Not while she had breath in her body—and she felt sure Nick felt the same. She wished she had the resources to help all abandoned dogs. When Paws-A-While was in the black, she vowed to give a good percentage of her profits to animal rescue.

“How is the poor old girl?” asked Nick.

“She’s not a poor old girl; she’s a lucky old girl,” said Serena, giving the Lab a final brushing. The last stage of Freya’s grooming was a wipe-down with a slightly damp cloth and she couldn’t easily do that with one hand.

“Can you please hold for a moment, Nick?” she said. She quickly found Heather and asked her to take over Freya for her.

She scratched behind Freya’s ears, then took her cell to her office and closed the door. Now she felt she could talk to Nick more freely without worrying about being overheard.

“So if Eric Kessler denies knowing anything about the spy camera and says his wife must have put it there, where does that put us? If she didn’t know Eric had booked Mack into Paws-A-While, then the camera might have nothing whatsoever to do with the identity fraud.”

“Unless they’re working together on a scam. That’s a real possibility. I believed him when he said he didn’t put the collar on Mack; that doesn’t mean he didn’t know his ex did. That’s what I’m in Carmel to find out.”

Serena knuckled her hand and brought it to her mouth. “Nick, be careful.”

Nick laughed. “I can look after myself. But I appreciate your concern.”

His voice had that just-about-to-end-the-conversation tone about it.

“Nick, don’t let her take Mack back; he’s”—she was about to say “ours” but stopped herself just in time—“yours now. I hope there’s a very hot place in hell reserved for people like the Kesslers who abandon their pets.”

“No way will she have ever anything to do with Mack,” said Nick, grim determination in his voice. “She’ll have to fight me for him.”

Serena loved that protectiveness in his voice. She realized how wrong she had been to judge him on her past experiences with cops. He was strong, but he was not a bully. He would fight for his dog. He would fight for his woman. More than anything, she wanted to be that woman.

 

 

In
his career as an FBI special agent and now as a PI, Nick had one weakness he had to struggle to overcome.

He’d been brought up—by his strong, feisty mom and his father, who adored her—to respect women and be a gentleman. That made it difficult to interrogate and come down tough on a female suspected perp. Especially one like Claire Kessler, who on paper gave every appearance of being a decent, respectable person. What in this case would make his job easier was that—according to her ex-husband—she had so cruelly abandoned her dog.

Though he strove to be impartial until he had ascertained the facts for himself, his personal connection to Mack brought him to the quaint town of Carmel-by-the-Sea already prejudiced against her.

Carmel had an idiosyncrasy in that the houses were not numbered. However, he and Adam, following advice from Eric Kessler, had tracked her down to the small restaurant where she worked.

It was tucked away down a laneway between an art gallery and a gift store. The laneway was punctuated with tubs of cheerful flowers. A flowering vine scrambled over an archway that led to a sunny courtyard filled with round tables and wrought-iron chairs. To the left of the archway was a wall-mounted dog water fountain, very like the one Serena had, and a bowl of dog biscuits obviously meant for customers’ dogs.

The sweet scent of the vine’s flowers mingled with something delicious. Beef? Onions? Garlic? Whatever, Nick’s mouth watered. He’d grabbed a coffee and a muffin at the San Francisco airport before picking up his car and driving the two hours to Carmel. To his stomach that seemed a long time ago now.

There were just a few people sitting around the inner bunch of tables enjoying coffee and late-morning snacks. He was suddenly so hungry he felt like grabbing the piece of cheesecake from the plate of the woman sitting at the table nearest to him.

A young, casually dressed waiter approached and asked could he show him and Adam to a table.

“We’re not here to eat,” said Adam, his abrupt tone fuelled, Nick felt sure, by the same hunger he was feeling. Whatever was cooking in that kitchen sure smelled good—nearly as good as Serena’s lasagna, the taste of which had haunted him since that Saturday at her apartment.

He had to force his mind back on the job. This time there was no dog around to blame for any embarrassing tummy grumbles.

“We need to see Claire Kessler,” he said to the waiter.

“She’s in the kitchen,” said the waiter, eyeing them with undisguised curiosity. “Can I take her a message?”

“Tell her we’re here to talk to her about her dog, Mack,” said Nick. He couldn’t keep the edge of disgust from his voice. If her husband was to be believed, this was the woman who had abandoned Mack at Paws-A-While, leaving her dog to a fate that, if it were not for Serena’s generosity, could have been grim.

Mrs. Kessler must have left the kitchen as soon as the waiter gave her the message, for within minutes a woman was heading toward him. She was younger than he had expected and attractive, around Serena’s age probably, slim, medium height with light brown hair pulled off of her face. Her face was flushed and she wiped her hands on the front of a white chef’s apron.

She didn’t give him and Adam a chance to introduce themselves. “Are you cops? You’re here about Mack? You’ve found the bastard who did it?”

Nick was disconcerted to see her brown eyes glinted with anger and pain and accusation. He exchanged a quick glance with Adam, who looked as bemused as he felt.

“Did what, ma’am?” Nick asked.

Her expression became wary. “Don’t you know?” Her hands went to her hips as she looked from Nick to Adam and back to Nick. “Just who are you guys?”

Nick took a step toward her. “Nick Whalen from S&W Investigations.” He indicated Adam. “Adam Shore, my business partner. We’re working on behalf of the Paws-A-While doggy day-care center in San Francisco.”

Her eyes went very wide, without even a blink of recognition at the name of Serena’s business. “Huh?” she said. Then she frowned. “Did a certain ex-husband by the name of Eric Kessler send you?”

“No, ma’am,” said Adam.

“Then what the heck is going on? You’re talking to me about some place I’ve never heard of when I thought you were cops come to tell me you’d found out who . . . who killed my dog, Mack.” Her bottom lip began to tremble and tears glistened in her eyes.

“What?” Nick and Adam exploded with the word at precisely the same moment.

Claire Kessler sniffed back her tears. “You mean you didn’t know? I don’t get this.”

“Neither do we,” said Nick. “Please, I’m so sorry to hear about your dog. Can you tell me what happened? It may have some bearing on our investigation.”

Again she looked from one to the other, frowned, but seemed to decide to hear him out. She took a few steps away from the occupied tables. Nick, followed by Adam, stepped back so the three of them moved out of earshot of the customers.

“I . . . I . . . don’t really know. My ex told me Mack was hit by a car and left . . . and left dead at the side of the road.” Her eyes teared up again, and it was obvious she had to make a real effort to speak. “He told me he was trying to find who’d done it. When you said you wanted to talk to me about . . . about Mack, I thought . . .”

Nick didn’t handle female tears very well. Claire Kessler looked so upset it was all he could do not to rush into comforting words. If she was telling the truth, her ex was the worst kind of cruel bastard. But his training told him he needed the facts before he could make a decision on which member of this estranged couple was lying about Mack. Or their connection to the identity fraud.

He gentled his voice. “I know this is upsetting for you, but I need to establish we’re talking about the same dog here.”

“Mack?” She wrung her hands together. “He was . . . the dearest animal. Big and dopey but as sweet as sugar. When we got him he wasn’t six months old, this huge, galumphing creature with the most enormous paws who thought he could snuggle onto my lap like a tiny puppy.”

Nick cleared his throat. “What color is . . . was he?”

The answer came without hesitation. “Black, with a white tip to his tail and one white paw. I used to say that . . . that it looked like he’d dipped his paw in the cream jug.”

There was no doubt as to the emotion that shone through her tear-brightened eyes
. Love.

Nick swallowed hard. Face-to-face with Claire Kessler, Eric Kessler’s story did not make sense. A part of him hoped that she was talking about a different animal. Because his gut told him this woman would not have abandoned her dog.

Nick asked the clincher question. “Why did you call your dog Mack?”

“We got him from a shelter. The people there called him that when they discovered he was addicted to—”

“Fast food,” said Nick heavily.

“Why, yes,” she said. “He was such a quirky dog like that. Even his ears were a bit off. He had one ear that stood up and the other flopped down. It looked so cute on a dog his size.”

Nick checked to make sure there was a chair nearby. In a moment, Claire Kessler might need to sit down.

He looked to Adam, who almost imperceptibly raised one eyebrow. “Mrs. Kessler,” Nick started.

“Claire,” she interrupted. “I don’t ever again want to be called by his name.”

“Claire,” he said. There was no easy way to say this. “Your dog, Mack, isn’t dead.”

She snatched her hand to her throat, her eyes blazed. “How could you say that? My ex
did
send you, didn’t he? Only he would play such a cruel trick.”

Pity for the woman surged through Nick. “This isn’t a trick. There couldn’t be two dogs that match your description. Mack is alive. Trust me.”

The color drained from her face and she went deathly pale. She clutched onto the back of the nearby chair for support. “Mack? Not dead? I . . . I don’t believe you,” she whispered. “Though I . . . I want to believe you.”

“Five weeks ago, Eric Kessler booked Mack into Paws-A-While, paid a week in advance, and then never came back.”

Claire Kessler took a quick intake of breath but seemed incapable of saying anything.

Nick continued. “After some time, our client retained us to track your ex-husband down.”

For a cover story, it had holes in it. As if Serena would hire two expensive PIs like him and Adam to hunt down a dog’s owner in search of a few weeks’ fees. But he figured Claire Kessler was too shocked to even think about the plausibility of his story.

“You found Eric in San Diego?”

“Yes,” said Adam.

“And what lie did he come up with to explain why he didn’t come back?” Her mouth twisted with bitterness.