Ruff Way to Go (30 page)

He was
staring into my eyes, and I felt myself being drawn closer to him. A moment
later, his lips were on mine, his arms around me, and my senses reeled in a
desire that I was not at all ready to give in to, leaving me dizzy.

When our
lips parted, Russell held me for another moment, and I rested my forehead on
his shoulder. “You’re shaking,” he said quietly. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.
It’s been a tough week.” I pulled away, hoping my motion wasn’t too abrupt, but
needing some distance. I found my key and fumbled with the lock until I got it
open.

“Can I call
you soon?”

“Yes. Please
do. Anytime. Goodnight, Russ.”

“Night.”

I quickly
stepped inside and shut the door, leaning, back against it and trying to catch
my breath. It felt as though I were toying with the
L
word here, and
that wasn’t what I wanted.

Why did this
have to happen now, when I really and truly only wanted the chance to
reestablish myself back in Colorado in this new job? I was doing fine on my
own. I didn’t want to get hurt again; didn’t want to hurt someone else.

“I’m scared
of heights,” I whispered to myself. “I don’t want to
fall
in love.”

For a minute
or so, I stood there in silence, trying to get a grip on my feelings, then
realized that I still hadn’t heard Russell’s car engine, or even his footsteps
as he left the porch. Curious, I swung the door open. Russell was standing there,
facing the door, looking only slightly embarrassed at my seeing him there.

“You still
haven’t left the porch.”

“And you
still haven’t turned your lights on.”

“I...like
the dark.”

“And I like
your porch.”

The inanity
of our exchange made me smile. “Just the same, you’ll scare the milkman away if
you stay there too long.”

He chuckled.
“I don’t have a comeback for that. So I guess I’d better go. Are you doing
anything tomorrow, or would that be too soon?”

“No. I mean
yes. I mean, I’m probably not busy, and it’s not too soon.”

He smiled,
stuck his hands in his pockets, and trotted down the steps.

The next
morning I found myself smiling for no reason, happy just to be alive and in
good health. My mother, too, seemed almost giddy before she left to “do some
shopping,” and I wondered if she had been listening to my conversation with
Russell last night. If so, she was too smart to say so or even to ask me about
my date.

I decided to
indulge myself by walking the three dogs— leaving Suds with her puppies,
much to her howling despair, but I had no desire to attempt walking four dogs
at once. We walked down to the park, known to the local teenagers as “stoners’
park,” in reference to the clientele after school hours. The place was peaceful
now, only a mother pushing her two young children on the swings, their
high-pitched chatter the only sounds.

Having the
three dogs on their leashes was a juggling act, despite their good training.
One dog or another was changing pace or being distracted by a scent or a noise,
but the challenge proved a welcome distraction from my worries.

By the time
I managed to quiet my thoughts and relax, it was time to return home. I headed
up our street, past the Haywoods’ and Edith Cunningham’s homes. The rumbling
sounds of a lawn mower came from somewhere in the vicinity of my house, and I
wondered if that could be Susan mowing our yard The brief rainstorm just after
we’d spoken that Saturday had probably delayed her plans to do the job then.

Suddenly the
sight of a recent, familiar-looking muddy paw print on the sidewalk chilled me
to the core. I instructed the dogs to sit, and I knelt to examine the print. My
mind flashed back to the vision of the paw prints in the blood. For the first
time, I fully realized that there had been an unusual aspect to some of the
bloody prints—a merged digit pad in the left front paw, as if the dog’s
middle two toes on that paw were poorly separated. That same unusual pad was
present in these prints, which were heading right up Edith Cunningham’s
walkway.

I glanced at
my watch, realizing that it was already mid-morning. She was unlikely to be
home, her shop having opened by now. In any case, if I’d double-checked those
prints behind the Haywoods’ bushes when my instincts had first told me to do
so, maybe there’d have been one less mystery surrounding the murder. I sure
wasn’t going to let this new opportunity pass me by.

I told the
dogs to stay, dropped their leashes, and went alone up Edith’s porch, studying
the pattern of the prints. It looked as though the dog had come as far as the
top step, circled, and then jumped off the porch. Rarely do dogs run up
uninvited onto strangers’ porches, unless there’s another dog inside. On the
other hand, some dogs have an I’m-lovable-so-you’ll-want-to-pet-me attitude
that wouldn’t preclude their doing this, plus Shogun’s scents would still have
been strong to a canine’s nose. I’d learned nothing. A little discouraged, I
collected my dogs’ leashes, and we crossed the street.

Susan was,
indeed, halfway through mowing my front lawn. She was wearing cutoffs and a
black tank top and had been moving at such a clip that her frizzy hair was damp
with perspiration. I waved to her and she called over the engine’s loud whir, “Started
raining the other day and I didn’t get to this till now. I’ve got Boris in your
backyard. Hope you don’t mind.”

I gave her
the okay sign and went inside. It
was
completely okay with me, but the
dogs begged to differ. My three canines immediately joined Suds and puppies by
the glass door and barked their heads off.

I went out
alone. Boris greeted me eagerly, and it was easy to imagine him wagging his
nonexistent tail. It was nice to see him,

Boris’s paws
were all muddy. Maybe those prints at Edith’s were his. This was so obvious
that I should have instantly picked up on it.

I checked
his left front paw. Where most dogs have two middle digit pads, Boris had one
figure-eight-shaped pad.

I walked
along the fence, checking for clear prints and curious to find the source of
the mud. Boris trotted alongside me, while Susan’s mower was still sputtering
along in the front yard. To my annoyance, the source was a new tunnel, right
next to the old one, which Boris had been digging.

“So you’re a
champion digger, hey, Boris?” Taking into consideration the length of time the
dogs and I had been on our walk, he could only have been working at this new
tunnel for half an hour or less, and he was nearly all the way through.

Seeing the
two tunnels side by side demonstrated something else that was so obvious, it
was inane of me not to have noticed before. My mind, however, had been
elsewhere then. The loose soil from this tunnel was inside our fence, because
that’s the direction Boris had been digging from. In the older tunnel that Fez
had likely passed through to escape our yard yesterday, the loose dirt was
outside of the fence. The dog that had originally dug that tunnel had been
breaking into our yard.

A couple of
the indentations in the dirt bore a familiar distinguishing pattern. I ran
around the fence to check the paw prints on the other side. Though the prints
here were mostly obscured, I was relatively certain that they, too, were Boris’s.

By now Susan
was mowing the adjacent corner of the fence. Curious, she cut the motor and
came over to me.

She
immediately focused on the loose soil. “Oh, man, I’m sorry about the hole.
Boris is a real digger.”

“It looks as
though he tunneled under our fence to get in the other day. That’s pretty
unusual.”

She grimaced
and nodded. “That’s Boris for you. He’s pretty social. When he sees a dog he
wants to play with, he just tunnels under the dog’s fence.” Her eyes widened
with alarm just for an instant, as if she’d realized she’d let something slip,
then her customary haughty expression returned. “Guess I should have had you
work on that problem when I had the chance.”

“Was he
friends with Shogun?”

“Nope. Not
at all,” she answered quickly. She shrugged. “You think he might have been in
the Randons’ yard when Cassandra was murdered?”

“Yes.”

“I doubt it.”
She started to walk away toward her mower. “I’d better get back to—”

“How did you
know the name of the Cunninghams’ dog? Are you and Edith friends?”

She froze
for just a moment then glared at me. “No. My parents have mentioned it
repeatedly. They’ve lived next door to Shogun ever since the Cunninghams bought
him.”

That was
plausible, but didn’t explain the signals I was getting from her regarding how
upsetting she found the possibility of her dog having been in Edith’s yard at
the time of the murder. “Think back,” I said, letting my impatience show. “Did
Boris disappear on you for a while the day of Cassandra’s murder?”

She cleared
her throat. “I guess so. I had to call him a couple of times. But believe me,
he didn’t come in with bloody paws or anything. I would have called the police.”

“So you’re
saying it’s possible that Boris was in the Cunninghams’ yard right around the
time that Cassandra was killed there.”

“Anything’s
possible,” she snapped at me, “but who cares? If he was there, I didn’t see
him. Nobody did.”

Nobody did?
How could she speak for anyone else? Was she protecting her parents? “I need to
cut through your parents’
yard to take a look at the Cunninghams’ fence.
Do you want to come with me?”

“No. I’m
going to finish up here and take off.”

I nodded,
but she’d already turned her back to me.

I dashed
across the street and onto the Haywoods’ lawn, relieved that for once they didn’t
seem to be watching me from behind a curtain. I examined the length of fencing
between their property and Edith’s.

There was no
tunnel underneath the fence, but there was loose soil on the Haywoods’ side of
the fence that made it all too clear that this had been patched back over. I
knelt by the tunnel and looked through the chain-link fence. I had an unimpeded
view of Edith’s deck, where Cassandra had been murdered. The patch job of Boris’s
tunnel had been fairly recent; no grass or other plants had had the chance to
reclaim the soil.

Someone knew
that a dog had burrowed under the fence. It could be that Edith had discovered
this, but she hadn’t had Shogun in her yard since the murder. She might not
have had reason to even suspect that the tunnel existed.

More likely
this was the work of one of the Haywoods or Susan, who’d been out here
dutifully covering up all signs that Boris had even been in their yard that
day. The paw prints behind their bushes, too, had been swept away, and that
could only have been the work of one of them.

To my mind,
this meant that Susan or one or both of her parents had, at the very least,
witnessed the murder. But if that was the extent of their role, why sweep the
prints away?

Just then,
Betsy came out and gave me the evil eye. “Whatcha doing trespassing on my
property?”

“I’m looking
at a tunnel a dog dug under Edith’s fence.”

Her frowned
deepened, though I wouldn’t have thought that possible. “You got no business
over here, young lady. You don’t go poking into my daughter’s—Haven’t you
messed things up for my family enough?”

“Susan’s dog
was in Edith’s yard when Cassandra was killed, wasn’t he?”

“No!”

“Did you see
the murder, Mrs. Haywood?”

“No, and I
don’t like your impudence! If you was my daughter, I’d have you shot!”

I raised my
eyebrows and caught my breath at the severity of her statement. “Nothing has
ever made me more appreciative of my own mother made that particular remark.”

Harvey came
outside and stood beside his wife, a look of confusion and impatience on his
pale face. “What all are you carryin’ on about, Betsy?” he demanded. When his
wife didn’t answer right away, he turned his eyes to me. He ran his palm over
his bald pate. “You’re that Babcock girl. What are you doing over here?”

“I was just
leaving, Mr. Haywood.”

“The faster,
the better,” Betsy growled, and slammed the screen door behind her.

Susan had
been rolling her mower back across the street to her parents’ garage, but
stopped as she witnessed our exchange, her eyes wide with alarm.

Harvey
smiled at the sight of her. “This is my daughter Susan,” he said to me, his
voice phlegmy. “Susan,” he called, “This is Marilyn’s daughter from across the
street. Have you two ever met?”

“Yes, we’ve
met, Daddy.” She shot me a look that, I thought, was protective of her father. “Go
back inside,” she told him. “I’ll be right there.”

We waited a
moment till he was out of earshot. “I’m sorry about your father, Susan,” I
said.

Her grimace was
my only acknowledgment as she dragged the mower to the garage.

I went home
and called Sergeant Millay and relayed the information to him that I’d located
the dog who’d left those prints, and that the dog belonged to Susan Nelson.