Silent Night: A Raine Stockton Dog Mystery (22 page)

“Aren’t you worried the dogs will eat those?” Melanie asked.  She was hanging miniature ceramic dog bones tied with red ribbons on the tree branches.

“They wouldn’t dare.”  I unwrapped the delicately painted porcelain manger and placed it toward the front of the scene I was building.  “Besides, I have fence that goes around the tree, just like the one that goes around the wood stove.”

I had learned the value of that years ago, when I came home after a party to find all my Christmas presents shredded and one tired puppy asleep on a chewed-up cashmere sweater.
 
The fence might not be the most attractive Christmas decoration, but it was definitely better than the alternative.

I unwrapped two sheep and placed them behind the manger and found the shepherd next.  When I unwrapped the next items—my own addition of a ceramic collie, two Aussies, and a golden retriever—Melanie giggled.  “Those don’t belong there.”

“Who says?”

“There weren’t any dogs in Bethlehem.”

“I’ll bet you a dozen dog biscuits Bethlehem was swarming with dogs.  And even if it wasn’t, no self-respecting shepherd would have tried to move his sheep to Bethlehem without a good herding dog.”

“Oh, yeah?”  Melanie’s familiar skepticism was back.  “And what about the golden retriever? I bet they didn’t even have them back then.”

“Well,” I admitted, “you’re probably right about that.”  I arranged the four dogs worshipfully at the foot of the manger.  “But if there had been golden retrievers back then, they would have been among the first on the scene—probably helping the wise men carry their frankincense and myrrh.”

I couldn’t help being reminded of our town’s living Nativity as I placed the camels and the donkey and the holy family: Mary, Joseph, and finally the cherub-faced Christ child.  As I started to set the figurine in the manger I hesitated, thinking about Nick and the stolen baby Jesuses, and then I frowned a little, struck by something else.

“Okay, that’s the last one,” Melanie announced, stepping back to admire her work on the tree.  “Can we let the puppies out now?”

“Sure,” I replied absently.  I followed her into the kitchen, and while she herded the puppies out into the back yard, I looked around until I found the ceramic doll head Cisco had picked up at the Christmas tree farm.  The resemblance between the angelic face on the expensive, hand-painted figurine that belonged in my manger and the face on the cheap ceramic imitation was striking. 

“Odd,” I murmured out loud, but just then the back door opened and a stream of puppies came bounding in, while at the same moment three big dogs decided they wanted to go out.

I orchestrated the exchange, and Melanie asked, “Can I show the puppies the Christmas tree?”

As a general rule puppies and Christmas trees do not mix, and neither do puppies and fireplaces, which is why I had confined these three to the kitchen.  But I was feeling festive, and how many more opportunities would Melanie have to enjoy the puppies
or
a Christmas tree?  So I secured the fence around the Christmas tree and barricaded the fireplace with ring gating, supplied Melanie with a clicker and a handful of treats and decided to use this as a training opportunity.  We formed teams of big dogs vs. puppies and played games of “fastest sit” and “fastest come”.  The puppies won almost every round (well, okay, sometimes I gave them a head start)—with the exception of the female, who was a little shyer and slower than her brothers, and who was so intent on trying to cuddle up next to Melanie that she often missed the command.  We played until the puppies fell asleep on the floor from exhaustion and my ribs hurt from laughing.  Cisco, Mischief, and Magic wanted the games to go on all night, but I knew when enough was enough.
 

“Okay, it’s past these guys’ bedtime,” I told Melanie, scooping up one puppy under each arm. “Mine, too.  We’ve all got a big day tomorrow.”

Melanie picked up the female puppy and cuddled her under her chin.  “If I had a puppy like this, you know what I would name her?”

“Noelle?” I suggested. “Holly?”

She shook her head.

“Christmas? Angel? Star? Prancer? Dancer?”

“Nope.
 
I’d name her Peppermint, and call her Pepper for short.  Because peppermints look sweet on the outside, but they’re spicy when you taste them.  And just because this puppy looks quiet on the outside doesn’t mean she’s not spicy on the inside.  It would be nice if she had a name to remind her of that.”
 

I looked at Melanie with newfound respect as I placed the two boys on their fleece mat inside the ex-pen.  They immediately curled up together and fell asleep again.  “You know,” I said, “I think you’re exactly right.  That’s a great name.”

Melanie handed the puppy over to me.  “Maybe we could tell people that tomorrow,” she suggested.  “Whoever adopts her, I mean.”

“Okay,” I agreed.  “We’ll do that.”
 
I placed the pup beside her brothers.  She yawned hugely, circled once, and then collapsed bonelessly atop one of the boys, sound asleep.  Melanie and I laughed, and we spent a few more minutes just standing there in companionable silence, watching them sleep.
 
There’s something about kids and puppies that can transform even the gloomiest holiday into something special.  And all in all, this wasn’t shaping up to be such a bad Christmas after all.

__________

FIFTEEN

T
he telephone rang at 7:15 the next morning. It was barely dawn, and the grayish light that crept into my room was enough for me to see Cisco rise from his bed, stretch elaborately, shake out his fur, and trot over to my bed with an expectant look on his face.  He knew that phone calls in the dark, more often than not, meant that he would be putting on his Search and Rescue vest and going to work.  I really hoped that wasn’t the case on this cold December morning, less than two weeks before Christmas.

I picked up the phone on the second ring and tried not to sound too groggy. The voice on the other end was not the one I expected.

“Is this the woman who always rises at the crack the dawn?”

“Miles?”  I blinked, rubbed a hand over my face, and squinted at the clock again.  “For your information, dawn hasn’t cracked yet.  Not in this part of the world anyway.  Is everything okay?”

“Now it is,” he assured me.  “I’m on my way home—with medical permission, by the way.  I just wanted to let you know you don’t have to pick me up.”

“Thanks for waking me up to tell me that.  How are you getting home?”

“I found a driver.”

Of course he did.  People like Miles never had to worry about the inconveniences ordinary people face.  Then I was ashamed of myself for the uncharitable thought, particularly when he asked with more than a touch of anxiety in his tone, “How’s Mel?”  He was just a dad who didn’t want to waste any time getting back to his little girl.

“Still asleep.  You weren’t planning to pick her up now, were you?”

“Why not?”

“Well, we’re doing puppy interviews this morning and I promised she could help.  I think she was kind of looking forward to it.”

“Oh.” He sounded disappointed.

“I could ask her when she wakes up,” I volunteered.

“No, that’s okay.  I just felt a little guilty about ruining her ski trip, but as long as she’s having a good time, that’s okay with me.”

“Do you want to come for breakfast? I’m making pancakes.”

He chuckled.  “Thanks, I’ll pass.  I know your cooking, remember?”

“Your loss. For your information, pancakes are the one thing I actually know how to make.”

“Well then, I might just have to take a rain check.  Give me a call when Mel is ready to come home, okay?”
 
By the time we hung up I could hear the puppies whining downstairs, and only seconds after that, Melanie’s feet were padding down the stairs.  It was a quite a difference from the last time she had stayed over, and I couldn’t help smiling as I watched her bossily usher the puppies outside.

Six dogs, one kid, and me: the odds were against it, but somehow dogs were fed and exercised, the puppies’ pen was cleaned and sanitized, pancakes were made and Melanie and I sat down to eat them within the hour.  The pancakes were excellent, by the way.  I hoped Melanie remembered to tell her father.

“Don’t you think the puppies need a bath before their people get here?”  Melanie said, spearing another forkful of pancakes.  “First impressions are everything, you know.”

Cisco watched intently as I transferred another pancake from the platter to my plate and drizzled it with syrup.  “They just had a bath at the vet’s,” I reminded her.  “And it’s pretty cold to be running around with damp fur.”

“You’ve got a lot of blow driers.”

“That’s true, but remember the little one is still on antibiotics.  We don’t want to take a chance with her getting sick again.”

She chewed silently, obviously reconsidering.  “Maybe we’ll just brush them and put bows on them.”

Bows on puppies hardly ever work, for obvious reasons.  But it’s the thought that counts, and I didn’t want to take the fun out of it for Melanie.  “I have a grooming spray that will make their fur shiny,” I offered.  “All you have to do is spray it on while you’re brushing them.  And it smells good, too.”

Melanie gulped down the rest of her orange juice.  “I’d better get started.  I want to take a picture of them and send it to my dad.”

I set Melanie up with a soft-bristle brush, some grooming spray, and yes, a spool of red ribbon, and while she concentrated on her task I cleaned the kitchen and checked my e-mail.  There were a couple of training questions from former clients, some advertisements from local merchants disguised as  Happy Holidays messages, and the few pieces of spam that always managed to get through the filters.  Aunt Mart had e-mailed me the photos from the parade and the Christmas party, and I took a minute to scroll through them.

The first photograph that came up was the family photo of Aunt Mart, Uncle Roe, Buck and me, and I spent much too long looking at it with a sad, hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach.
 
Then, with a surge of impatience that was directed mostly toward myself—I was not going to let Buck ruin a perfectly good morning, after all—I clicked back through until I reached the photographs of the Christmas parade. There must have been a dozen pictures of Majesty, and if ever I had doubts about whether I had done the right thing by letting my girl go, moments like this dispelled them. There was Majesty posing with Aunt Mart, Majesty posing with an unknown number of children, Majesty in front of the sheep trailer, Majesty getting her hair done, Majesty doing her “Lassie wave” for the camera with the Nativity scene in the background, Majesty with her twinkle lights on, Majesty waving to the camera with the Christmas tree in the background… I backed up a couple of shots, frowning as I looked more closely and then got cautiously excited.  It was hard to tell, but I was almost certain that the hunched-over, downtrodden figure in the background was Ashleigh Lewis.

  She had a duffle bag over her shoulder and held it protectively against her body, and the more I looked at it, the more I became convinced the picture was of Ashleigh, and it must have been taken shortly after she had hitched a ride into town with Camo Man. The ladders were still up around the Christmas tree, and there was enough light to shoot without a flash, so I guessed it had to have been close to five o’clock in the afternoon. She had never given any explanation at all for why she had left the safety of her hideout to go downtown on Friday afternoon. What kind of girl runs away from home and then goes to watch the Christmas parade? 

I went through the remaining photographs more carefully, and a couple of shots later—because one can never have too many photographs of Majesty preening for the camera—I spotted Ashleigh again, almost out of frame but definitely the same girl.  There was something different about her this time, though.  Where was the duffel bag?  Even in a town this isolated from most of the ugliness of the outside world, an abandoned duffel bag at a crowded event would not have gone unnoticed, so I didn’t think she could have simply left it behind.  She must have given it to someone.  But to whom?  And why?

The phone rang, and I called out, “Melanie, will you get that?  It’s probably your dad.”

I didn’t have time to analyze the photos again this morning, so I opened up a new window and, after a brief moment’s hesitation, addressed a message to Buck at the office. I wrote,
Is that Ashleigh in the background?
Then, for clarification, added,
Aunt Mart’s Christmas parade photos.

Melanie called, “It’s for you.  Some estate person.”

All three dogs raced through the house, barking excitedly, and I knew Maude must have arrived.  I called back, “Tell him I’m not interested!”

“Okay!”

Quickly, I selected the two photographs to attach and hit Send.  I hurried to the door. “Mischief, Magic, Cisco!  Sit!”  They sat, two tailless butts wriggling, one golden tail swishing, all three panting with excitement.  I gave them a stern look.  “What’s the matter with you?  It’s just Maude.”