In Dog We Trust (Golden Retriever Mysteries) (6 page)

My pulse started to race. I’d had my prints taken in California, of course, which meant that when Rick entered them in his system, my record would pop up. I thought about telling Rick about my incarceration and parole—but it wasn’t the time. 

It had never been the time. All those nights at The Drunken Hessian, the times we ran into each other at The Chocolate Ear or at the grocery, I’d kept from mentioning it. I was lonely, and Rick was my only friend in town, and I thought that he wouldn’t want to hang out with me if he knew about my record.

So I kept quiet. I did say, “You know I was there yesterday. I went back again this afternoon.”

Rick raised an eyebrow. “Just can’t stay away, can you?”

I explained about the crate, and that I’d gone through the house, looking for Rochester’s toys. I didn’t mention looking through her closet or her books—I didn’t think he’d understand.  I was glad that I hadn’t touched her computer. I could just see Santiago Santos raising his bushy eyebrows as he asked me to explain what I was doing with my neighbor’s computer, when the conditions of my parole restricted me to a single laptop with an audit trail.

That alone might be enough to violate my parole and send me back to California as a guest of the state.

While Rick and the male officer performed a complete search of the townhouse, I stood outside with Rochester, making small talk with Officer Reinhardt. “We see this kind of thing now and then,” she said. “Somebody dies, and it gets in the paper, and some jerkwad takes that as an open invitation to rip the dead guy off.”

It didn’t seem like that kind of burglary to me. A jerkwad like she was describing would want to get in, steal whatever was handy, and get out. But I kept my mouth shut.

It was close to four-thirty that morning before I took Rochester back to my own house. “You’re a good watch dog,” I said, leaning down to stroke his head. “You heard somebody and you warned me. That’s a good dog.”

As I sat on the floor, stroking his golden fur, I felt all the nervous energy and adrenaline of the last few hours catch up with me, and I yawned. And then I started to think. It was clear this wasn’t the kind of obituary-motivated robbery Officer Reinhardt thought it was. After all, the
Courier-Times
hadn’t even identified her. Somebody was looking for something in Caroline’s house—that’s why they had ripped open the pillows and the couch and dumped the contents of the drawers.

Was the burglar the same person who’d killed Caroline? If so, what had he been looking for? Had he found it? What if he hadn’t—would he be back?

What if it was Rochester he was looking for? Or what if he thought I had whatever it was—would he come after me next? I couldn’t confess these feelings to Rick; it just wasn’t a guy thing to do. So I sat and told Rochester instead. I worried, and petted the dog, and the acid feeling in my stomach dissipated a little—but not that much.

The next morning I was on auto-pilot. I took Rochester out for a walk, then sat in the living room with him watching mindless morning TV shows. My mystery fiction class doesn’t meet until 12:30 on Tuesday and Thursday, and I use those mornings for grading papers or working on client projects. But I was exhausted, and my brain was still having trouble wrapping around everything that had happened.

At eleven-thirty, I motivated myself to get dressed for work. When I was ready to head out, I stood by Rochester’s crate and asked him nicely to go inside.

Surprisingly, he did.

I felt better about leaving him alone, but my brain was still fuzzy from lack of sleep, so I stumbled through my mystery fiction course and hurried back home as soon as I could, stopping at the cell store for a new phone on my way. They were able to move the SIM card from the old phone to the new, so I didn’t lose any numbers. I went right back to bed after taking Rochester out for a quick pee, and he joined me up there for a mid-afternoon nap.

When I awoke, I was too restless to stay in the house. It was sunny and crisp outside, and I thought maybe a good long walk would help clear my head. I got Rochester’s leash, and he began jumping around the living room floor in a repeat of the previous night’s performance. This time, though, I refused to chase him. I sat in a kitchen chair and waited for him to come to me.

“I guess you do want to go for a walk, too, don’t you?” I asked when he did. However, as soon as I tried to clip the leash onto his collar, he ducked his head between his paws.

“Is this a game? I try and hook you up and you hide from me? You know, even if you can’t see me, I can still see you.” I was able to wrestle him enough to get his leash on, and I grabbed a jacket and a couple of plastic bags.

It took a lot longer than usual to walk up to The Chocolate Ear. Rochester believed it was his duty to sniff out every detail of every other animal who had passed by, and he was strong and stubborn when I tried to drag him along. It was a beautiful afternoon, the sun sitting high in a bright blue, cloudless sky, and though the air was chilly there was no breeze and it felt warm out in the sun.

Every bush, every tree trunk, every fire hydrant needed to be investigated. He peed over and over again, making me wonder how much liquid he had stored up in his bladder. “Can Rochester come in?” I asked when we reached the café, sticking my head in the door.

Gail, her grandmother Irene, and Edith were all sitting at a big round table, along with Gail’s high school friend Ginny, a stay-at-home mom and part-time real estate agent who also helped out at the café as needed. I remembered that I had meant to call Edith and tell her about Caroline, make sure that her financial troubles had been figured out. But I’d just forgotten.

“Of course,” Gail said, jumping up. “But what are you doing with him? I have some pumpkin biscuits in the back just for him.”

I told them about Caroline when Gail returned a moment later with a biscuit, and Rochester settled on the floor. Since the
Courier-Times
hadn’t identified Caroline the day before, they didn’t know what had happened. “I read that a woman was killed by the nature preserve,” Irene said. “But I had no idea it was Caroline. The poor, poor girl.” She touched her iron-gray hair, which was always shellacked into a big globe around her head.

As we all fretted about Caroline’s terrible fate, Gail made me a café mocha with a couple of pumps of raspberry syrup, and brought me a slice of lemon cake to go with it. She wore a man’s white shirt with the sleeves rolled up over a pink tank top and jeans. “You need something sweet,” she said. “You’ve been through a lot.”

 “I just can’t believe it,” Ginny said, shaking her head. “It’s so tragic.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” I said. “Last night, somebody broke into her townhouse. Rochester woke me up barking.”

There was a collective gasp around the table, and I described the events of the previous evening. “You must be exhausted, dear,” Edith said, reaching over to pat my hand. Her fingers were long and pale, twisted from arthritis, and her hand was cool to the touch.

“What a terrible thing,” Ginny said. “Do you think it was someone who knew Caroline? It just seems so random. Any of us could be shot any time.” She crossed her arms over her cream-colored sweater.

“And I always thought Stewart’s Crossing was so safe,” Gail said.  She and Ginny had grown up in Levittown, a big suburb on the other side of the railroad tracks from Stewart’s Crossing. Burglaries and even the occasional shooting were much more common over there.

“No place is safe,” Irene said. “When it’s your time, it’s your time, and no doubt about it.”

“I’m with Gail and Ginny,” I said. “Especially after last night.  It’s spooky just to go outside after dark.  If I didn’t have to walk Rochester, I’d stay in the house as soon as the sun went down.”

“That’s what Caroline was doing, walking Rochester,” Ginny said.

“Enough,” Irene said. “Ginny, you should ask Rick if he knows Caroline’s next-of-kin. Maybe you can get the listing on her townhouse.”

“Grandma!” Gail said, in a scandalized tone.

“The world goes on,” Irene said. “When you get to be my age you’ll realize that. It’s a terrible thing that poor girl is dead, but somebody’s got to sell her house, and it might as well be Ginny.”

We talked about Caroline, but none of us had any insight into who might have killed her or why someone had trashed her house. “Stewart’s Crossing isn’t the same place it was,” Edith said, shaking her head. “Every week you read in the newspaper about a house broken into, a car stolen. Last week a boy I taught to play Chopin was stabbed at the junior high by a boy from another class.”

“Rick told me that Caroline’s murder was the first since the shooting at The Drunken Hessian,” I said.  “That didn’t make me feel any better.”

That was another sad story. Johnny Menotto, a guy who’d been a few years ahead of us at Pennsbury High, had come back from the first Gulf War with a lot of problems. He freaked out at loud noises and sudden movements, and imagined persecution all around him. He’d lost his job and his marriage—just like me—only he’d ended up hanging out at The Drunken Hessian, a bar slash tourist trap in the center of town. A plaque outside said that an inn of some kind had been on that spot since the Revolutionary War, and the décor hadn’t much changed, except for the introduction of indoor plumbing.  The sign depicted one of the Hessian soldiers whom Washington had surprised at Trenton on Christmas day, looking like he’d had quite a few too many.

It was the kind of dive that looked innocent on the outside, sucking in the clueless tourists with quaint charm and delivering flat beer and overcooked burgers served in plastic baskets shaped like Stewart’s ferry boat. Johnny had gotten to be a pest, bugging the tourists for change and harassing them about Republican politics. The night bartender, a high school science teacher picking up extra cash because he and his wife had a baby on the way, had asked Johnny to leave a couple of times.

One night Johnny returned an hour after leaving, with a sawed-off shotgun, which he used to blow the poor bartender away. The tragedy had rocked Stewart’s Crossing, and my father had relished the chance to tell me all the gory details.

“It’s still a terrible world,” Edith said. “It makes me glad I never had children.”

“I feel just the opposite,” Irene said placidly. “It’s a terrible world, so I’m glad I had children and grandchildren who can do their part to make it better.”

I didn’t know how I felt. The door hadn’t closed yet on my fatherhood possibilities, though I suspected my ex-wife had been right when she said I was too self-centered for fatherhood. Look at how much just taking care of Rochester had changed my life—and that was only for a few days.

The dog in question rolled over on the floor below me, resting his head on my foot. I chatted with the women for a while longer, and just before I left Gail gave me a half-dozen of the pumpkin biscuits in a plastic bag, all of them shaped like her signature ear. Then Rochester and I made our way back to River Bend—slowly, as usual.

In the newspaper the next morning, there was a brief follow-up article, which identified Caroline and said that the police were still following leads in her murder. There was an obituary, too; she was being shipped to upstate New York, where her parents were buried and her great-aunt lived, but there was going to be a memorial service at a church near her Center City office in two weeks.

All that day, when I tried to sit at the kitchen table to grade papers, Rochester draped himself over my feet. If I sat at the computer, he lay behind me and curled his legs around the chair so that I couldn’t move. Throughout the weekend, when I came home after being away—even if I’d just run to the grocery for a single item—it was as if I’d abandoned him and then come back just as he was about to lose all hope.

Sometimes I felt like he was sucking up all the oxygen in the house. It was always all about him—feed him, walk him, pay attention to him. He was worse than Mary had ever been—at least she had her own career, her own clique of girlfriends who believed every mean thing she said about me and who sympathized with her in a way I couldn’t seem to. All Rochester had was me.

On Sunday afternoon, after three days of calling at random times, I got hold of Rick Stemper again. “That dog has chewed up my cell phone, a pair of glasses, a stuffed bear, and a pair of socks,” I said. “Find some place for him before he chews me out of all my belongings.”

 “Sorry, nobody seems to know what she wanted to do with him, and nobody I talked to wants him,” he said. “You’ll just have to take him to the pound.”

“Did you find out who killed her yet?”

He sounded distracted, like he was listening to another conversation in the background. “We’re still pursuing leads,” he said. The background noise disappeared, and Rick was there again. “Hey, would you do me a favor?”

“What?”

“Caroline’s mailbox key is on her kitchen table. Could you pick up the mail for the next few days? Just until the great aunt can get her act together?”

“Sure.”

I lost him again, I could tell. “Great. Listen, I’m following another case right now, but I will let you know if anything new comes up.”

I thanked him and hung up the phone. “I guess we’ll never know what happened to your mom,” I said to Rochester, who was lying at my feet. “But now, what do I do with you?”

He looked up at me with his brown doggy eyes. His mouth was open and his tongue hung out, and it looked about as close to a smile as a dog can get. Maybe I’m reading into it, but it looked like he was asking if he could stay with me.