Ruff Way to Go (22 page)

“But this
doesn’t explain how he knew my address.”

“No. It
doesn’t. And I swear to you on the lives of the entire canine population, he
didn’t get that from me. I have no idea where he did get it.”

***

I finally
arranged to have my appointment to watch Shogun with Trevor. Trevor was waiting
out in front of his duplex when I drove up with Shogun. Shogun’s tail began to
wag and he perked up as soon as we neared. He ran over to my lap to get a view
out the window, his little claws digging into the exposed flesh of my leg below
my shorts.

I parked in
Trevor’s driveway, and by that time, Shogun was so excited and anxious to get
out and see his owner again that he piddled on me. Now I was glad to be wearing
shorts, as I could wipe his accident up easily and not have to be wearing
urine, which is one of those things that tends to lower clients’ estimation of
my abilities.

Shogun leapt
out of the car, raced up to Trevor, and then jumped straight into his arms.

“How’s my
big doggie?” Trevor said to him. “That’s a good boy.”

Watching the
two of them, I soon verified what I’d already greatly suspected. Trevor loved
Shogun far more than Edith did. Edith wanted Shogun primarily because she knew
how much it would hurt Trevor to lose him.

All that
remained for me to do was to see if Shogun was also so happy to be at his home
in Berthoud with Edith that it was clear that I’d have to recommend “joint
custody” and let the Cunninghams figure out the implications of that themselves.
What struck me as most puzzling in this matter was, why would Edith be the one
to hire me, when her spouse was so obviously more attached to the dog?

“I missed my
big doggie!” Trevor was saying into the little dog’s pointy muzzle, and Shogun
was yapping back in mirrored excitement.

“Shogun is
obviously delighted to be here with you. Would you mind showing me your home?”

“Course not.
Come on in.”

As he walked
me up the driveway, I saw the curtains part at Fiona’s, his neighbor’s, place.
They quickly shut again, and I was quite certain she’d seen me and wanted
nothing to do with me. “Are things okay between you and your neighbor?”

“Fiona? Oh,
sure. She explained the whole thing to me, and given what my bitch of a
soon-to-be ex said about my treatment of Shogun, I can’t say as I blame her.
Fiona is a gentle soul, just needs to be withdrawn from the world.”

With
memories of all those interviews on news programs about neighbors of serial
killers who said, “He was such a shy, quiet boy,” my mind leapt to the
possibility that Fiona was somehow involved in the murder. “How did you get to
meet her?”

“I came over
to say hi once I’d moved in next door. She’s too shy to have made the
introduction on her own.”

“You never
knew her while you were still living in Berthoud?”

“No. Not
till I moved here a few weeks ago.”

Whew. That
let her out. The woman had been hassled enough already with the embarrassing
ploy I’d used to glean information from her earlier.

Trevor took
me on a tour of his two-bedroom duplex, which was really not my motive for
asking to see the place, but rather to get the opportunity to watch Shogun’s
comfort level. He was content to trot along with us, often leading the way, and
would settle himself in the doorway whenever we stopped to chat.

“Are you
planning to stay here permanently?”

“Nothing’s
permanent for me anymore. I have a six-month lease, though, so it’ll be at
least that long.”

“You’re
planning on staying in the general area, though?”

“Yes, my job’s
going well. I get to pick and choose my own hours. And I like Colorado.”

“And how
would you react if I decide to recommend a joint ownership of Shogun?”

He shook his
head. “That just won’t work. That’s the one thing we agree on. Once this
divorce is finalized, I never want to see that woman as long as I live.”

“You loved
her once.”

“Hard to
believe. I must have been out of my mind. She’ s a witch. Believe me, Allida,
if you decide to give Shogun to her... well, I don’t know what I’d do, but I
guess I’d have to live with it.”

“If I assign
custody to you, what’s to prevent her from breaking in here and stealing him
back?”

“Nothing.
And you’re right. There’s every likelihood that she would do that. That’s why I’m
installing a security system, even though I may only be here for less than a
year. I’m not exaggerating about her. The woman is evil. If I were you, I
wouldn’t trust living so near her. You cross her, and the fangs come out.” He
swept his hair out of his eyes and stared into the distance.

He sighed
and said quietly, “Allida, even though it’s not in my best interest to tell you
this...” His voice faded, then he met my eyes. “If you decide to give me the
dog, you’ll be putting yourself in danger.”

***

I didn’t
have another client until late afternoon, so I drove home. Shogun came with me
willingly, but watched Trevor out the back window as we drove off and spent the
trip lying on the backseat with his chin on his front paws. He perked up again,
though, as we made the turn onto our street. Mom was at work herself.

After I’d
been home long enough to play with the dogs, someone banged on the screen door,
which seemed odd, since we have a doorbell. I went to answer, my dogs beating
me there. It was Paul and Melanie, Paul looking distressed. He was still
wearing the black suit and striped tie he’d had on at the funeral. Melanie,
though, was now wearing overalls and a T-shirt.

“Hi, Allida.
Is your mom here?”

“No, she’s
not.”

He grimaced,
then said, “I need to ask an enormous favor. Can you babysit Melanie for a
couple of hours? Something’s come up at work that I can’t get out of.”

“Sure. You’re...back
at work already?”

“Not
full-time. But I need to establish some normalcy, a normal pattern. I just have
to...Can you watch Melanie till three or so? I should make it back by then at
the very latest.”

“I’d be delighted
to,” I said, though my brain was churning with the panicked thoughts that I had
no experience with children whatsoever, let alone with children who’d recently
been traumatized. But I did have plenty of dogs to help me. “Come on, Melanie.
Would you like to see Suds’s puppies again?”

“No!” She
ran and grabbed her father’s legs.

“Suds? You
have Suds here?”

“No, the
original owner took Suds, but I still have her puppies.”

To my
complete dismay, Paul was livid. His hands were fisted and he looked as though
he wanted to punch me. His daughter was still clinging to a leg, but he seemed
to have forgotten her presence. “How could you do that without asking me?”

“Without
asking you
what
Paul? I’m sorry if this has... rubbed salt in your
wounds, but let’s get a little perspective here. All I did was to foster-adopt
a dog and her puppies that you had tried to foster, but couldn’t due to tragic
circumstances. It never occurred to me that you’d be upset.”

He clenched
his jaw and stared up and past me, at the roof eaves, if he was even aware of
what was in his vision.

“I truly am
sorry, Paul.”

“Yeah, well,
I guess...I guess there was no reason for me to blow up. You just...have no
idea how hard...”

He broke off
and stroked his daughter’s hair. Watching him now, I felt like an idiot for
just blurting out to little Melanie about the puppies. She probably could only
associate those puppies with her mother’s death.

“Melanie?”
Paul asked in a tender voice. “Is it all right if you stay here for a couple of
hours while Daddy’s at a meeting?”

She nodded,
said sadly, “I guess so,” but let go of her grip on her father and approached
me as if she were walking into the doctor’s office for immunization shots.

“I won’t be
late.”

“Good,
because I do need to leave for an appointment with a client by four o’clock.”

“I’ll be
back long before then.”

He waved and
rushed down the stairs. I turned to my new charge. “Could I introduce you to my
other dogs? I know you’ve already met them through living across the street,
but this is the first time you’ve been in their home, right?”

She shrank
back, wrapping her sleeveless arms around her chest. “I hate dogs.”

“Okay. Let’s
do something else then. And I’ll go put all of the dogs outside.”

This killed
me. I felt that I’d lost a potential dog lover because of a horrible trauma
that had nothing to do with dogs in general. I knew that I was wrong to think
all people should love dogs. They were sometimes smelly, noisy, and
messy—the dogs, that is, though the same can be said for people—and
there were probably other flaws that I couldn’t come up
with on my
own. But, by my experience, I wasn’t sure how I could have coped with the loss
of my father at Melanie’s age if I hadn’t had my family’s golden retrievers to
commiserate with.

She was
staring at Shogun, who’d run up to greet her. “This dog belongs in that blue
house next to me. How come he’s here?”

“I’m just
keeping him for a couple of days, then I’ll give him to one of the Cunninghams.”

“How come?”

I hesitated,
not sure how wise this was of me to be sharing personal information with a
little girl. “How come what? How come I’m giving Shogun to one of them?”

“Uh huh.”
She gave me a big nod and stared straight into my eyes.

When I was a
child, I hated the fact that people were always trying to keep “secrets” from
me, and that I usually already knew them. “They’re getting a divorce, so they
won’t both be able to keep him.”

She nodded
solemnly, in an adorable affectation of someone much older. “My parents were
getting a divorce.”

Melanie’s
poor enunciation must have gotten the better of me. Or else she’d misunderstood
or was simply trying her best to make adult conversation. I’d been with
Cassandra just a couple of hours before her murder, and she’d spoken about how
she was fostering the dogs solely because Paul was a dog person. There was no
chance that she was on the verge of divorcing her husband.

I realized,
too, that this was going to cause Paul nothing but pain if his daughter was
blurting out to people that he and his late wife had been getting a divorce. I
had to set her straight. For emphasis, I knelt and got down to eye level with
her, just as I might when establishing a bond with a good-sized dog.

“Melanie,
honey, a divorce is when a marriage ends and...a mommy and a daddy don’t live
together anymore. Your parents weren’t ending their marriage.”

She looked
directly into my eyes. “Oh, yes, they were. I heard them say so. That’s why my
daddy came home so early. He had to pack his suitcases. He was going to live
someplace else.”

My reaction
was a mixture of shock and almost horror, yet I immediately reminded myself
that this was just a little girl. She might have concocted a scene in her head
about her daddy packing up that day, or had gotten confused when he’d only come
home to pack up for a business trip.

“Shogun is a
nice little dog, isn’t he?” I muttered to Melanie, desperate for a quick change
in subject matter.

“Yes. I like
little dogs. I just don’t like big dogs.”

“How ‘bout
we play with just Shogun and Doppler for a while, then?”

She thought
about that for a moment, then nodded, her short dark hair bobbing. “Okay.”

I brought
Doppler inside, leaving Sage and Pavlov on the back deck. It was difficult for
me to keep a calm exterior while my thoughts were in a whirlwind. I tried to
decide if I should call Sergeant Millay later this afternoon when Melanie had
gone and tell him what she’d said about the possible status of the marriage
immediately before Cassandra was killed.

I had an
image of the sergeant interrogating Paul Randon based on his daughter’s one
statement to me, and the scenario turned my stomach. I couldn’t do that to him.
It was just too likely that Melanie had fabricated the story. She was coping
with the sudden death of her mother. She didn’t need me or anyone else to put
too much stock in her perceptions of her parents’ marriage right now.

Surely Paul
wouldn’t have chosen to bring her over to my place if what Melanie had blurted
was the truth. He’d have known that there was a possibility she would divulge
such a potentially incriminating piece of information and would have found
another sitter—some teenager who wasn’t likely to report it.

We played a
game of hide-and-seek, with the dogs as the seekers and Melanie as the hider.
She laughed infectiously each time the dogs found her.

My big dogs
watched us through the glass door with such obvious jealousy that their furry
faces could have been green.