In Dog We Trust (Golden Retriever Mysteries) (18 page)

Our life in Silicon Valley was full of fireworks, too, though not the good kind we’d experienced in Central Park. I taught as adjunct for two semesters, making pocket change and complaining about student papers, before I found the gig at Mastodon, and Mary wasn’t happy with her new job, either. But we’d made that big move, and we had to make the best of it. Eventually she got a job she liked, and my temp job at Mastodon turned permanent, and we started trying to make babies.

Looking back, it seemed like our lives had been on a trajectory, one that began in Central Park that night, and which ended right back there—only this time I was on my own. I followed the blonde in the ball cap for a little while, thinking, and then realized that I’d lost her when I wasn’t paying attention.

I looked around. I was surrounded by trees, dappling the ground around me with sparkles of daylight. I sighed, and started to find my way out of the woods.

The next morning I woke early—but had no dog to walk. Instead, I went down to the hotel’s business center and checked my email. There were three responses to my bids for work—all no. Had they discovered my background? Had someone else been just better for the job?  What would Santiago Santos say? Why was I wasting my time, and money, spending a weekend in New York when I needed to be back in Stewart’s Crossing, job-hunting and watching my pennies?

Back up in my room, I put on my sneakers, my sweat pants and a sweatshirt, and headed out for a brisk walk around Manhattan. I went south on Fifth Avenue all the way to 14
^th
Street, then headed east to the river. The area seemed a lot safer in the daylight, but I still shivered when I remembered the drunken guys I’d run from on Friday night.

As I walked, I was reminded of how expensive it was to live in Manhattan—doorman buildings, high-performance cars on the street, expensive clothes and other merchandise in shop windows.  Where did people get the money? What would I do if my plans for a technical writing business fell apart?

My bank balance kept shrinking; the twice-monthly paycheck from Eastern wasn’t quite enough to pay my bills, so I continued to dip into the little money my father had left me.  What if I got sick? What if Rochester got sick? I’d seen how fast the bills piled up when my mother was hospitalized. What would I do in May, when the Eastern paychecks stopped coming in?

I worried my way back up First Avenue, crossing over to the hotel just in time to take a quick shower and head out to brunch with Karina Warr.

We’d agreed to meet at a little café on the Upper East Side, just around the corner from her apartment. “Fabulous breakfasts,” she had emailed. “Their Eggs Benedict are just to die for.” It was a charming place, decorated like an Italian country inn, with rough stone walls, tendrils of flowers dangling over the bar, and waiters in white shirts, black pants and spotless white aprons.

There was no single woman in the dining room when I arrived, so I waited on the curb for her. Ten minutes passed, then fifteen, then twenty. I was just starting to worry that I’d been stood up when a cab pulled up and a breathless blonde jumped out.

“Steve?”

“Karina?”

She embraced me in a big hug, kissing my cheek. “I’m just so devastated about Caroline,” she said.

She looked anything but devastated. Her wavy blonde hair was carefully styled, and her skin glowed as if she’d just stepped out of a beauty ad. She wore a pink strapless dress with a flouncy skirt, and a black linen jacket over her shoulders. “Sorry I’m late,” she said, pulling back. “It was a bear getting a cab.”

“I thought you lived in the neighborhood,” I said.

“I do. But it’s six blocks. Can you imagine six blocks in these shoes?”

I looked down at her feet, and realized she was quite a bit shorter than I’d thought. The strappy black sandals she wore had at least a two-inch heel. “I can’t imagine walking from here to the restaurant in those shoes,” I said.

“You men,” she said, playfully slapping my shoulder. “Come on, I’m ravenous.”

I’d known women like Karina Warr when I lived in New York. Hell, I’d married a woman like her. She had Mary’s taste in footwear, and I remembered that when we were dating Mary had the same flirtatious tone. Of course, after we married we said little more to each other than, “Can you stop and buy toilet paper on your way home from work?” But that’s the way true romance turns out.

Despite her obvious familiarity with the restaurant and each and every waiter, Karina agonized over her menu selection. I’d already decided to go with her recommendation on the Eggs Benedict, but she was worried about her cholesterol, and the French toast was
loaded
with sugar, and pancakes just
laid
in her stomach all day.

She settled on an egg-white omelet with mushrooms and green peppers and just the merest hint of cheese. “I mean it,” she said to the waiter. “You tell the chef just to wave the cheese over the top—just to let the aroma float into the omelet.”

“Certainly, Signora,” the waiter said, in an Italian accent that had detoured through Croatia.

“Signorina,” she corrected him as he collected the menus.

“Certainly, Signorina,” he said, as he beat a grateful retreat.

“Now, Caroline,” Karina said as he left, grasping my hand. It felt nice, though she was as much of a drama queen, if not more, than Reynaldo the law firm proofreader. “You must just be devastated. I know I am.”

I nodded. I realized that I hadn’t held hands with a woman for a long time, and I liked it. Some long-dormant part of me started to wake up and take notice of the little blush on Karina’s cheeks, the scent of her perfume, the way her foot nestled against my leg.

 It didn’t take much prompting from me; Karina had a lot to say. “I just adored Caroline when we went to school together,” she said. “She was a few years older than I was, and I looked up to her so much.” I heard a lot about how life on a military base was just dismal, especially when you moved around every couple of years as your father got transferred. “When you met up with a kindred spirit, like Caroline, you just
treasured
the time.”

She shifted in her seat, and her foot rubbed against my ankle. My body started reacting to her, and I had to shift around a little on my chair to adjust myself. For a moment or two as she talked, I got lost in a little fantasy of moving back to the city and dating Karina Warr. What would she be like in bed? Mary and I had clicked sexually from the first time we slept together. Would Karina and I have that same connection?

With difficulty, I brought myself back to the present, figuring out from what Karina was saying that despite everything, she and Caroline had not been close for a while. “When she lived in the city, we were like
sisters
,” Karina said. “I mean we went
everywhere
together. But then she moved out to Dismal, PA and we just sort of lost touch.”

She finally listened to herself and turned a bit pink. “I’m sorry, you were her
neighbor
,” she said. “I never actually
visited
your lovely little town, but I’m sure it wasn’t as bad as I expected. Living in New York you do get a little spoiled.”

“I lived in the city myself for years,” I said. “I can tell you there’s a point when you welcome the chance to live someplace quiet and peaceful, without graffiti on the corner, the smell of urine everywhere, and a drunk sleeping on your stoop.”

The waiter brought our food, and Caroline poked at her omelet, as if she was going to find a wheel of Jarlsberg lurking under the eggy shell. It seemed to meet with her approval, though, and she sighed happily. “This is the most wonderful restaurant,” she said. “They know how to take care of their customers.”

“I met up with Chris McCutcheon yesterday,” I said, as we ate. “He mentioned he lived in Korea with you and Caroline.”

“Oh,
Chris
,” she said. She leaned in close to me, and once again the scent of roses washed over me. “Tell me, didn’t you think there was something—not quite right—about him?”

“What do you mean?” I figured that to her “not quite right” meant “not interested in her.”

“He was the oddest boy in Korea,” she said. “Very secretive. He was just enough older than Caroline and I were to be dangerous. He loved to flick his cigarette lighter, and he was always threatening to set our hair on fire.”

“That is a little odd.”

“Did he happen to mention her little dog?” Karina asked.

“He did say she had a dog.”

Again, she leaned in toward me. Damn. If she didn’t stop doing that I was going to lose track of the conversation altogether. “And did he say what happened to it?”

I had to think for a minute, remembering our conversation and trying to ignore the stirrings in my groin that worsened every time Karina got close to me. “Did it run away?”

“That’s what everyone said.” Karina put down her fork. “I don’t think so.”

“What do you mean?”

“Chris would catch bugs and then twist off their wings,” she said. “He used to brag about it. And he didn’t like Caroline’s dog at all. He was always saying what he’d do to it if it ever came near him.”

I thought of Rochester. “But he came to Stewart’s Crossing to visit Caroline. He must have been OK with Rochester.”

“He must have grown out of it,” Karina said. “But don’t you think it’s strange that he hated that little dog so much, and then one day it just disappeared?”

“Wasn’t there any investigation?”

“Caroline’s father didn’t like the dog. He said she was overreacting. But I’ll bet you Chris had something to do with it.”

The thought gave me the creeps. Chris McCutcheon presented such a confident face to the world—was that all a façade? Had he been responsible for hurting Caroline’s dog all those years before?

“So tell me about you,” Karina said, reaching out to touch my hand again. “You lived in the city?”

My skin tingled where she touched me, sending those messages to my groin again. Mary and I had stopped having sex when she got pregnant the last time, and there hadn’t been anyone since. I realized how much I’d missed that intimacy. Taking care of yourself just doesn’t have the same impact.

We talked through the rest of our meal, and through cappuccinos. But the more Karina talked, the more she reminded me of Mary—and that was a turn-off. I had loved Mary once, found her sexy, loved taking her to bed—but things had changed a lot since the days of our Manhattan courtship. By the time Karina and I finished our coffee, all I wanted to do was go back home. Maybe I wasn’t quite as ready to start dating as my body hoped.

“Would you like to come over to my place?” she said, after the waiter had taken my credit card away. “It’s not far, and we could continue—getting to know each other.”

“You’re so kind to offer,” I said, taking her hand and squeezing it lightly. “But you know, I took in Rochester after Caroline died. I have a friend looking after him for the weekend, but I’m worried about him. I don’t want him to think I’ve abandoned him so soon after Caroline’s death.”

Karina frowned, but then she smiled, as if she was worried about what the frown lines would do to her perfect complexion. “Well, then, I may just have to come down to what is it—Steven’s Crossing—myself.”

“Stewart’s Crossing,” I said. “You’ll have to let me know if you do.”

She kissed both my cheeks as we stood outside the café, and squeezed my hand. I ignored the pressure in my groin. “Feel free to call me again,” she said. “It’s so good to talk about the things that upset us.”

It had gotten colder outside, a brisk wind whipping down the street from the East River, and I shivered in my windbreaker. Like a dumb college kid, I’d been seduced by the early spring sunshine.

“Thank you,” I said. A cab came by, and with a shrill whistle she flagged it down.

I felt a tremendous sense of relief as the cab passed out of sight.

I called Rick from the train and arranged to meet him for dinner at The Drunken Hessian. Then I sat back to consider everything I had learned. I had a much better understanding of identity theft after my conversation with Tor, and I knew that I had to collect more information from Edith before I could consider contacting anyone to try and recover some of the money that had been stolen from her.

I didn’t know quite as much as I would have liked about Chris McCutcheon, Karina Warr, and what had happened between them and Caroline Kelly in Korea when they were teenagers. I would have to do a lot more research—but I knew that there was something there.

Had Chris hurt Caroline’s dog? Had she suspected him? How could she have remained friends with him if she had? I’d only had Rochester living with me for a few weeks, but I knew I would be pretty angry if anyone hurt him.

As the countryside sped past, I was worried that Rochester might have forgotten me, that he’d have settled into life at Annie’s as easily as he’d settled in with me. And that bothered me. As soon as the train reached Trenton, I ransomed my car from the station garage and headed back to Annie’s house.

I needn’t have worried. When Annie opened the front door, all three dogs rushed at me, yipping and barking and jumping around like performing seals.

“Maslow! Lacan! Come here,” Annie called, and her dogs rushed up to her, tails wagging. “Can you tell my husband is a therapist?” she asked.