Groomed For Murder: A Pet Boutique Mystery

PRAISE FOR

PAWS FOR MURDER

“Welcome to Merryville, Minnesota, and Izzy McHale’s Trendy Tails Pet Boutique. Not only will you find the cleverly designed pet togs hard to resist—you’ll soon be yearning for more adventures with Izzy; her best friend, Rena; and pet pals, Packer and Jinx. Annie Knox has created a warm, funny, flawed but completely endearing sleuth in Izzy McHale, and I’m already panting for the next book in the series.”

—Miranda James,
New York Times
bestselling author
of the Cat in the Stacks mysteries

“Five paws up! Annie Knox dazzles with four-legged friends, fashion, and foul play.
Paws for Murder
is tailor- made for the pet and mystery lover.”

—Melissa Bourbon, author of
A Killing Notion

“Everything you could hope for in a good cozy. . . . I spent the duration of the tale dying to know what happens next yet simultaneously wanting to savor every word. The story is swiftly paced, the plot is tightly woven, and the mystery’s a real head-scratcher.”

—
Crimespree Magazine

“A witty whodunit,
Paws for Murder
marks a strong debut, one that fans of corpses and canines, felonies and felines, will lap up.”

—
Richmond Times-Dispatch

“[The] Pet Boutique series debut delivers a delightful mix of well-written characters and a plot that keeps readers hanging on until the very end. Readers will feel as though they are in Merryville playing a part in the mystery that unfolds. This reviewer can’t wait for the next installment from the talented Knox.”

—
RT Book Reviews

“I’m pleased to say that author Annie Knox has crafted a clever mystery that stands out from the crowded field of cozies . . . an impressive start to a new series.”

—MyShelf.com

“Animal lovers who love to pamper their pets will enjoy this mystery.”

—Kings River Life Magazine

“I very much enjoyed
Paws for Murder
, and it kept me hooked. . . . I hope it’s not too long a wait until the sequel.”

—Euro Crime

“Knox brings readers a book that will appeal to both the pet lover and the mystery buff. . . . Readers who think of their pets as one of the family will love this one, as [will] readers who are looking for a favorite heroine this year. Izzy McHale definitely fits the bill!”

—Debbie’s Book Bag

“If you’re a fan of fun mysteries, furry characters, and fashion, this is a debut to get your paws on!”

—Melissa’s Mochas, Mysteries & Meows

“This was a fast-paced, action-filled drama that once I started I could not put down. . . . With a lovable yet quirky cast of characters, witty and engaging dialogue, and a feel-good atmosphere, this book is full of tailor- made charm.”

—Dru’s Book Musings

“The characters you will meet in this book are strong, vibrant ones and you will find yourself there in Merryville, helping to solve the case! This was such a fantastic read! I couldn’t put it down. Annie is great at her craft and you can see it in this book!”

—Shelley’s Book Case

“The mystery weaved through the entire book [keeps] readers guessing until the end . . . [a] great start to a fun series!”

—Socrates’ Book Reviews

“A charming read and an enchanting start to a rich new series.”

—Thoughts in Progress

“If you are a fan of cozies, you will definitely like this one. Animal lover? This is for you. Like both and you’re
in for a treat.
Paws for Murder
by Annie Knox is delightful, with loads of images to brighten each page.”

—BookLoons

The Pet Boutique Mystery Series

Paws for Murder

Published by the Penguin Group

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A Penguin Random House Company

First published by Obsidian, an imprint of New American Library,

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Copyright © Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014

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ISBN 978-1-101-63784-5

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The recipes contained in this book are to be followed exactly as written. The publisher is not responsible for your specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision. The publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the recipes contained in this book.

For my personal constituency, Elizabeth and Bethany

As always, much credit goes to my steadfast agent, Kim Lionetti. She has spent more than her fair share of time holding my hand, nudging me forward, and looking out for my interests. My dear friend Melissa Bourbon Ramirez is a constant source of support and inspiration, but she was particularly helpful in bringing this book to fruition. Thank you, Misa! And I would be remiss if I did not thank my husband for every book I write. He makes it all possible. Love you, baby. Finally, a very special thank-you to Elizabeth Bistrow, creator of Merryville and rockin’ editor. I promise I’ll take good care of Izzy, Packer, Jinx, and the rest of the gang.

One

“W
hat do you think of the meatball?” Ingrid Whitfield handed Harvey Nyquist a tiny paper plate bearing a single bite-sized meatball, speared with a toothpick and resting in a small pool of creamy brown gravy.

Harvey shoved his well-used handkerchief into his pocket and reached up from his seat on my sofa, careful not to shift my dog, Packer, who was snoring loudly in his lap. As he grasped the plate in his liver-spotted hand, I detected a faint tremor, and he grabbed at the toothpick with the sort of lunging movement of a person whose fine motor skills are deteriorating.

He chewed the meatball thoughtfully. “Good,” he said. Packer snorted softly and raised his head, his doggy dreams distracted by the rich scent of meat.

“Good? Don’t you think the nutmeg’s a little strong?”

“Maybe.”

Ingrid heaved a long-suffering sigh. “Well, do you want them as is, or do you want less nutmeg?”

“Ya, sure.” He rubbed the end of the toothpick in the leftover gravy and sucked it off, his eyes closed and a contented smile gracing his face. Packer whined and licked his chops. Harvey held out the plate for him to clean, and Packer looked up at Harvey like he was the king of dogs. My little four-legged traitor.

“‘Ya, sure’? What kind of answer is that? Pain-in-the-ass old coot,” Ingrid muttered, but there was no heat to her complaint, and she gave Harvey’s shoulder a flirtatious little shove before she returned to my galley kitchen. No doubt about it, brusque and brash old Ingrid had a soft spot, and its name was Harvey Nyquist.

When the couple had first arrived in Merryville, I couldn’t figure out why Ingrid was so smitten with Harvey. They’d been high school sweethearts, torn apart by his family’s decision to send him to military school, and before Ingrid had flown off to join him in Boca Raton, I’d seen pictures of the lithe, handsome man he had been. Ingrid had rhapsodized about the love notes he would write to her and the numerous times he had serenaded her in front of God and everyone.

But Harvey Nyquist sixty-some years after the serenading stopped? The man didn’t say boo, he had some sort of chronic sinus problem that produced earsplitting sneezes on a regular basis, and he looked like
someone had stuffed a madras sack with sunburned potatoes.

When I met Harvey, I decided Ingrid’s determination to live happily ever after with him was driven by nothing more than the memory of a love long ago.

But during the week since their arrival, I’d watched Harvey as he watched Ingrid bustling about my apartment, rearranging my knickknacks, finding hidden deposits of dust to clean away, and cursing about the little details of their upcoming nuptials. He looked at her as though she were his last mooring to this earth, all the light in his face reflected from her vitality. He didn’t just love Ingrid. He needed her. And having someone need you is a powerful aphrodisiac.

“Well?” I asked, pointing at the meatball-filled tinfoil take-out box on my counter.

“I guess they’ll do,” Ingrid groused.

Ollie Forde, who’d made literally hundreds of thousands of Norwegian meatballs for the residents of Merryville over the years, would be delighted to learn that his spherical masterpieces would “do.”

“That’s good,” I said, struggling to hide my frustration. “The wedding is tomorrow, after all, and we should probably finalize the details today.”

As if to punctuate my pronouncement, Harvey whooped and sneezed. I heard Packer whimper from the bluster of it all, and Jinx—perched on the pass-through between my kitchen and dining nook—swished her tail in annoyance.

In truth, we should have finalized the details the day
Ingrid and Harvey rolled into town, with absolutely no advance notice, and declared they were going to get married in Merryville within the week.

Ingrid had decided at the last minute that she wanted to get married in her hometown of Merryville instead of at the Cherub Chapel of Bliss on the Las Vegas Strip. More specifically, she and Harvey were getting married in my store, Trendy Tails, the space Ingrid had called home. Trendy Tails occupied the first floor of 801 Maple, a house Ingrid had owned for decades. The second floor had been Ingrid’s apartment, and I still lived in the third-floor apartment. Ingrid and Harvey’s announcement had turned the entire house on its head.

The wedding plans got off to a rocky start when Ingrid had discovered that the tenant I’d found for her apartment was still in residence, so she and Harvey would have to bunk with me. “There goes the nooky,” she’d complained.

They’d only gone downhill from there. Soon she was chafing under the froufrou influence of my mom and Aunt Dolly. If Ingrid had had her way, she would have dressed in her best plaid shirt, signed the paperwork, and been married in ten minutes. But Mom and Aunt Dolly had managed to find her a feminine skirt suit with a peplum to give Ingrid some curves, had ordered a huge bouquet of lilacs, and had even stitched a deep purple lace-edged pillow to one of Packer’s harnesses so he could serve as a canine ring-bearer. “It’s just me and Harvey,” she’d muttered, “not the damn royal wedding.”

Yesterday, we’d hit a new snag. Ingrid, who was
usually perfectly happy with a bowl of canned soup and some soda crackers, suddenly became hypercritical about all the food options we had (which were scarce, given our short timeline). “Not as good as mine,” she’d griped about every single dish we proffered. For someone who claimed not to want a fussy wedding, she had become quite a demanding bride.

Now she looked at me with narrowed eyes. “You know I love you, Isabel McHale, but I don’t appreciate the sarcasm. Ollie Forde makes a good meatball, but you have to admit the man can be a little heavy-handed with the nutmeg. We’ll have the wedding tomorrow with or without meatballs, but I’m not paying through the nose for a plate of crapola.”

I narrowed my eyes right back. “You know I love you, Ingrid Whitfield, but you’ve become an irascible old biddy.”

Ingrid’s frown melted away, and she threw back her head in laughter. “‘Become’? I’ve been an irascible old biddy since the day my mother birthed me. That’s precisely why you love me.”

I snickered. “True enough. But you know what they say about too much of a good thing.”

“Well, if it wasn’t for that interloper on the second floor . . .”

“Hey. No fair. You asked me to rent out the apartment, and when Daniel asked for an extra couple of weeks, I had no idea his stay would interfere with your wedding. You weren’t due back for another month. A little notice would have helped,” I added pointedly.

Ingrid plucked another meatball from the small tray. “So what’s up with this Daniel Colona guy?” she asked before popping the morsel in her mouth.

“Honestly? I don’t really know. He pretty much keeps to himself. He comes down to the shop pretty regularly to buy Rena’s treats for his Weimaraner, Daisy May, but he doesn’t talk about himself much at all.”

“You said he’s a writer?”

From the other room, Harvey sneezed again. I waited until he was done trumpeting into his hankie before answering.

“That’s what he said when he called about the apartment, but he’s never given so much as a hint about what he’s writing.”

“I can’t believe the crew around here hasn’t figured out all his deepest secrets by now. You and your friends are pretty nibby.”

“Oh, believe me, it’s not for lack of trying. We’ve had some long conversations about Mr. Colona over dinners, drinks, card games—you name it. I think he’s a novelist, maybe a J. D. Salinger kind of guy, and he’s hiding out while some sort of sex scandal blows over.”

“Really? Why do you say that?”

“I don’t know. He’s got these dark, haunted eyes and long black hair. He could play Heathcliff in a remake of
Wuthering Heights
if he grew just a few more inches. He’s got to have a troubled past and a broken love story.”

“You get all that from his hair? I think you’re being overly romantic.”

“That’s what Rena says.” My best friend and business partner had been teasing me mercilessly about having a crush on my tenant . . . which I definitely did not. I had a couple of light crushes going, but neither of them were on Daniel Colona.

A week after Harvey and Ingrid’s wedding, Trendy Tails was playing host to a doggy wedding . . . pupptials, if you will. The dogs in question were Hetty Tucker’s retired greyhound, Romeo, and Louise Collins’s pudgy beagle, Pearl. Hetty and Louise had always been close, so they hadn’t been difficult to work with. But their sons . . .

Neither Hetty nor Louise could drive, so each depended on her son to get her to our planning sessions. Sean Tucker and Jack Collins were night and day. Sean was intellectual, reserved, a true romantic. In a past life he might have written lots of poetry about sheep or painted women frolicking through the woods in diaphanous gowns. Jack Collins was a cop. A man’s man. In a past life, he was a cop. At our meetings, the two men danced around each other like alley cats with their backs up, hissing and spitting at each other at every opportunity. They were different, sure, but I’m not sure where the animosity came from. I honestly didn’t know what to do with either one of them. But I definitely thought they were both pretty cute.

“Anyway,” I continued, “Rena thinks he’s a retired crime boss who’s writing a tell-all book. She says that once you get past his polished shoes and perfectly pressed dress shirts, he looks a little rough around the edges, like maybe he’s broken a few knees in his time.
Meanwhile, Lucy and Xander both think he’s an investigative journalist doing an exposé on . . . well, they don’t exactly know what he plans to expose. And of course Sean and Dru, the practical members of our little gang, think we’re all crazy and we ought to let the man have his privacy.”

“Sean and Dru are probably right.” Ingrid leaned forward and called into the living room. “Don’t you think so, Harvey?”

“Ya, sure.”

Ingrid chuckled. “It’s nice to be right all the time,” she said.

“I know we shouldn’t be such busybodies, but honestly, our speculation is perfectly tame compared to Aunt Dolly. She’s come up with far more harebrained theories than the rest of us. She’s completely obsessed with the man.”

“Your aunt Dolly is a nut job,” Ingrid huffed.

I shrugged. “Yeah, well, she’s our nut job. She fancies herself quite the sleuth after the hubbub last Halloween.”

Last fall, my friends and I found ourselves in the middle of a murder investigation, trying to keep Rena from being hauled to the hoosegow. Ever since we’d sussed out the killer, Aunt Dolly had taken to watching and taking notes on true crime shows. She’d even suggested she might try to get her private investigator’s license.

“She’s dragging me right behind her, straight to the loony bin,” Ingrid complained. “All this stuff with the wedding: favors and veils and nonsense.”

I gave Ingrid a sidelong glance. “Come on. I know you’re not a girly girl, but you must be enjoying all the attention just a little.”

Ingrid grinned at me around a gravy-stained toothpick. “Maybe just a little,” she said with a wink.

Lord, help me,
I thought.
Between Ingrid blowing hot and cold, Dolly blowing plain old crazy, and Harvey endlessly blowing his nose, this wedding might be the death of me.

*   *   *

That afternoon, I set to work making favors for the wedding, listening to Rena humming out of tune while she worked on cookies for Ingrid and Harvey’s reception. I sucked in a big lungful of vanilla-and-sugar-scented air.

At the tinkling of the bell above our doorway, I looked up to find Aunt Dolly using her rear end to bump open Trendy Tails’ door. She managed to maneuver herself into the shop with her arms filled with boxes of white tissue wedding decorations. Thankfully, I’d already ordered decorations for Pearl and Romeo’s doggy wedding. We could give the decorations a dress rehearsal, using them to perk up Trendy Tails for Ingrid and Harvey.

“How’s the blushing bride today?” Dolly asked, her voice brimming with high spirits and good cheer.

I set down the last little packet of Jordan almonds, bundled neatly in a circle of white tulle, and raised a finger to my lips. “She’s upstairs,” I mouthed.

“Gotcha,” Dolly mouthed back.

I stretched my back and answered her in a voice that
wouldn’t carry up to my apartment on the third floor, where Ingrid Whitfield had gone to sulk. “Take your pick,” I said. “Irritable, grumpy, annoyed, occasionally hostile. She’s spent a lot of time storming up and down the stairs muttering that she and Harvey should have just gone to Vegas like they originally planned. At one point she bellowed at Harvey that they should call off all this ‘stuff and nonsense’ and just keep on living in sin.”

Rena sauntered out of the kitchen to join us during my explanation. “We’ve been having a great time,” she deadpanned. “Maybe we should get Ingrid on that show about bridezillas. I bet she’d be their first postmenopausal bride.”

Dolly snorted a laugh as she carefully lowered her load onto the giant red worktable in what used to be the dining room of the gingerbread Victorian house. She shoved aside the tangle of ribbons and fabric swatches that littered the table, the detritus of my early morning efforts to create “cat’s pajamas.” The unfinished results hung on a wooden cat-shaped form I’d had specially made by a carpenter in Bemidji. Eventually, I would try the jammies on Jinx, but she was too feisty to serve as a model during development.

“I guess we shouldn’t be surprised,” Dolly whispered. “Ingrid’s always been a pill, and a bride must be an awkward hat for her to wear.”

Dolly made a good point. Our octogenarian friend would pick corduroy over cashmere any day of the week.

Still, I thought Ingrid’s irritability went deeper than
that. She seemed uncharacteristically vulnerable. I had a sneaking suspicion why.

Ingrid had spent most of her adult life running the Merryville Gift Haus in the space now occupied by my store, Trendy Tails. She’d supported me in starting up the business right before she left for Boca, but it must still have been difficult to come back and see no trace of her own well-loved shop left. What’s more, the second-floor apartment in which Ingrid had lived for over four decades was now occupied by a stranger, a renter she’d never even met. It’s hard to deal with the fact that life in your hometown could continue on without you.