All That Glitters (Raine Stockton Dog Mysteries) Read online

  ALL THAT GLITTERS

  A Raine Stockton Dog Mystery Christmas Short

  By Donna Ball

  Copyright 2012 by Donna Ball, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the author.

  www.donnaball.net

  Published by Blue Merle Publishing

  Drawer H

  Mountain City, Georgia 30562

  www.bluemerlepublishing.com

  This is a work of fiction. All places, characters, events and organizations mentioned in this book are either the product of the author’s imagination, or used fictitiously.

  There are people, I know, who say dogs don’t understand Christmas. These people clearly have never had dogs. These same people say that dogs have little, if any, long term memory and no ability to conceptualize or categorize events. I would very much like those people to explain to me how a field-champion golden retriever can sit by his handler’s side and watch four different birds be shot down and fall in four different places in a marsh six hundred yards away, and then, on command, go directly to each bird and return it to the handler—in the precise order that it fell. And then they can explain why my golden retriever, upon seeing a certain green felt wreath wrapped in plaid ribbon come out of its box for the first time every year, automatically sits and starts licking his chops in anticipation.

  The Dog Bone Wreath is a Christmas tradition that has gone on as long as I have owned dogs. Every year on December fifteenth the wreath comes out and is decorated with colorful frosted bone-shaped dog biscuits and hung in a prominent place in the training room. Each day until Christmas, the dogs get a bone from the wreath, like a doggie Advent calendar. Since the wreath is only up ten days a year, and since a year is a really, really long time for a dog, you’d think they would forget in between Christmases. But they never do.

  Dogs might not understand the concept of Christmas, but they have never misunderstood the concept of treats.

  This year my young friend Melanie—age ten going on thirty—was helping me decorate the kennel for the Dog Daze annual Christmas party. Her puppy, Pepper, was in the back having a shampoo and blow-out for the big event, and the rest of dogs were out in the play yard with one of the kennel staff. But Cisco refused to be distracted from the excitement he could literally smell on the air. He was Cisco, after all, and tracking was his specialty.

  Melanie laughed when the Dog Bone Wreath went up on its hook and Cisco, with the instincts of a born chow-hound, looked up from the cardboard wrapping paper tube he was chewing, spotted the wreath without hesitation, galloped across the room and skidded to a perfect sit beneath it. Even I couldn’t prevent a grin and a respectful round of applause.

  “Can he have a biscuit now, Raine?” Melanie asked. “This is day one, right? I think he should have a biscuit now.”

  It had taken the two of us half an hour to tie the dozens of dog biscuits to the wreath with decorative plaid bows, and we had enjoyed the display for less than a minute, but what kind of Scrooge would I be to say no? I untied a treat and gave Melanie the privilege of dispensing it.

  “Come on,” I said, picking up the box of Christmas ornaments. “Everyone is going to be here at two, and we’ve got to finish decorating the dog tree. Grab that box of Christmas stockings too, will you?”

  Melanie plopped her “Santa’s Helper” elf hat back atop her unruly dark curls, gave me a snappy salute, and picked up the box of miniature felt stockings that we would be stuffing with dog biscuits as party favors. Cisco made a quick detour to grab his half-chewed cardboard wrapping paper tube, and dashed after us.

  In a small town like our Smoky Mountain community of Hansonville, North Carolina, December is filled with parties, tree-lightings, pageants and concerts. I’m happy to say that the Dog Daze Christmas party is among the most prestigious of all the community events—at least with the dog crowd. It had started out as a way for my business partner, Maude, and me to thank our clients for their patronage throughout the year, but had grown to include just about everyone in town with a dog. We had obedience and agility demonstrations, dog games and human games; cookies, cupcakes and punch for the humans and dog biscuits and fresh water for the canines. Everyone brought a wrapped dog toy for the gift exchange, and an item from the local shelter’s wish list which we collected in a big basket by the door and delivered to the shelter after the party. We opened up the play yard and let the dogs run and jump and tumble the way God intended, and, as a happy bonus, we usually signed up a handful of new clients for obedience, grooming or boarding at the end of the day. It really was my favorite party of the year.

  I kept the training room comfortably cool for the dogs, but as we left it for the gaily decorated entry foyer a rush of warm air, holiday music, and the scent of a very expensive cinnamon and clove kennel deodorizer greeted us. Dog-bone studded garland wrapped in twinkling lights wreathed the room, and a fragrant spruce tree, also twinkling with lights, sat on an elevated table in a corner of the room. Where dogs are involved, it’s never a good idea to put the Christmas tree on the floor.

  Two long folding tables, decorated with plastic red-and-white paw print tablecloths, were laden with platters of dog biscuits and human cookies, all clearly labeled to avoid misunderstanding. Gingerbread cookies shaped like dog biscuits are a great addition to any dog-themed Christmas party… except when the dog biscuits are also decorated to look like gingerbread men. There was a basket of festive holiday bandannas for our canine guests and a bowl of fruit punch for our human guests, and the centerpiece was a miniature plastic Christmas tree decorated with photographs of all our obedience school graduates for the year. After the party, the proud parents would take their pup’s picture home as a memento.

  I held the door open with my hip for Cisco, who looked stylish in his own bright green “Santa’s Helper” bandanna. Naturally, he was stopped short when the two ends of the long cardboard tube he carried in his mouth wouldn’t fit through the door, but he solved the problem by neatly snapping the tube in two with his teeth, picking up both pieces, and prancing through the door with his golden tail waving proudly.

  “Hey, look at all this cool dog stuff,” Melanie said as I set the ornament box on the floor. She held up a box of silver paw print ornaments, and giggled when she found a golden retriever with a pair of wings and a halo. “Is this Cisco?”

  “Hardly.” I relieved Cisco of the cardboard tube and stuffed it in the trash. Before I could turn around he had snatched a cookie from the tray on the table, swallowed it, and was sitting innocently by Melanie’s side with nothing but a few multi-colored sugar sprinkles on his muzzle to testify to his crime. It’s pointless to correct a dog for his misbehavior after he’s consumed the evidence, particularly when there aren’t even any witnesses to the crime— so all I could do was scowl meaningfully at Cisco and push the cookie tray away from the edge of the table. “Is there one with horns and a pointy tail?”

  “Cisco is a good dog,” Melanie corrected me pompously, giving Cisco a scratch behind the ears before stretching to hang the golden retriever angel on the tree. “You just don’t appreciate him. Right, Cisco?”

  It was Christmas, and I was in a good mood, so I did not remind Melanie that this morning alone Cisco had overturned the Christmas tree while dashing to the door to greet her when she arrived, left muddy paw prints on her dad’s cashmere coat, jumped on the kitchen counter and consumed half a bowl of frosting before I could stop him, and hopelessly shredded the brand new roll of wrapping paper that used to be on the cardboard tube he had just finished mangling. Granted, that last one was my fault: I should
have been watching him.

  “I appreciate him plenty,” I told Melanie. “But I can appreciate him just as much while he’s having a nice time-out in the kennel.”

  Cisco gave a little woof of protest and dug into the ornament box, coming up with a hand-knitted sheep given to me by my aunt. Melanie laughed.

  “See?” she said. “He’s trying to help. What would you do without him?”

  I gently pried the delicate work of art out of his mouth, blotted off the saliva and hung it on the tree next to a matching knitted collie, well out of his reach. Cisco dived into the box to see what else he could find and, naturally, turned the box over. He backed up quickly as all the ornaments spilled out around his feet, looking up at me in such consternation that I had to grin. “Life would definitely be a lot less interesting,” I admitted, scooping the spilled ornaments back into the box before they were crushed by clumsy paws. “But, you know, if it had been up to me, I never would have gotten him.”

  Melanie looked surprised. “Really? You didn’t want Cisco?”

  I felt a ridiculous urge to cover Cisco’s ears when she said that, but in typical golden retriever fashion he had already lost interest in the Christmas tree and was once again eyeing the buffet table. I gave him a warning, “Ank!” and he quickly returned his attention to me, tail waving innocently. “I didn’t know he was Cisco then,” I explained to Melanie. “I just didn’t think I was ready for a puppy.”

  “Wow,” she said, carefully hanging a row of border collies in tartan plaid bows around the circumference of the tree. “What if you hadn’t gotten Cisco? It would be just like that old black and white movie Dad made me watch the other night.”

  For a moment I was baffled, and then I said, “It’s a Wonderful Life?”

  Melanie nodded enthusiastically. “Just think how many people he’s rescued,” Melanie said, “tracking them down out there in the wilderness. And the bad guys he’s put in jail. And what about all the old people he visits in the nursing home, and kids in the hospital?”

  “Cisco knows what a great dog he is,” I said, rescuing a bone-shaped ornament from Cisco’s mouth and giving him a little nudge with my knee. “He doesn’t need a press agent.”

  “How many lives do you think he’s saved, anyway?”

  When Cisco was relaxing at home, as now, it might be hard to convince a stranger that he was a valuable working dog. But when Melanie put it like that, I felt a surge of pride and affection that momentarily overcame my impulse to put Cisco in a permanent down-stay. “A lot,” I admitted.

  “More than ten?”

  “Sure.”

  “More than twenty?”

  I paused to give my guy a scratch under the chin, smiling at him. He reciprocated with a happy swipe of his tongue aimed at my face. “Probably,” I agreed, and I thought that in some ways, the most important life he had saved was my own.

  “Of course,” Melanie observed confidently, “that’s nothing to what my Pepper is going to do when she grows up.”

  I reached for another ornament. “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”

  “We’re going to join the FBI and chase down terrorists and spies all over the world. Istanbul, Dubai, Hong Kong, Milan, Paris…”

  “The FBI can only chase down terrorists and spies on U.S. soil,” I pointed out, suppressing a grin. Her recitation of exotic locales was more suggestive of a series of fashion shows than an international terrorism ring, but I supposed anything was possible.

  “Plenty of time for that to change before we join the force,” she assured me airily. “The point is, we’re going to be real crime-solving heroes, just like you and Cisco.”

  Of course it was flattering to be thought of as a hero by anyone, but I made a face, keeping a wary eye on my dog as he strolled casually toward the buffet table once again. “There’ve been a lot of days when ‘hero’ is not the first word I thought of to describe Cisco.” Then, sharply, “Cisco, here.”

  Cisco turned guiltily and came back to me, breaking into a heart-melting grin halfway across the room. But I refused to be melted. “Go to your place,” I told him sternly, pointing to a yellow mat by the door. His tail dropped a few inches at the words, and he looked over his shoulder toward the mat. Then he spotted the chew bone he had left there and bounded over to it happily, plopping down on the mat and taking up his bone.

  “Say, is this Cisco’s baby picture?” Melanie held up a Christmas ornament with a photograph of a golden-retriever puppy in a red jingle-bell collar sitting on Santa’s knee. I couldn’t prevent a sentimental smile as I reached for it.

  “Yes, it is,” I said. “He was eight weeks old. I’d only had Cisco for a few minutes when this was taken. And right after that…” I stretched as high as I could, placing the ornament on a safe, sturdy branch, “Cisco solved his first crime.”

  “Really?” Her eyes lit with the avid interest of someone who watched far too many cop shows on television, in my opinion. “Who’d he nab? A kidnapper? Gangbanger? A cold-blooded serial killer? Maybe he busted up a whole drug cartel!”

  The corners of my lips twitched as I glanced across the room at Cisco, who held the bone between his two front paws and was contentedly munching away. “Much bigger than that,” I assured her. “As a matter of fact,” I added, and I felt a twinkle come into my eyes as I pulled out another handful of ornaments and looked back at her, “it’s really kind of an interesting story…”

  It had not been a good year for me, nor for the majority of the county. The textile plant that had provided jobs for almost half of the families in the county had closed down, which drastically affected the economy of our small, isolated mountain town. Shops and businesses were starting to cut back their hours, which is never a good sign, and according to Aunt Mart, who was in charge of just about every charitable organization in town, donations to the Charity Drive were down while requests for charity had never been higher. According to Uncle Roe, who was married to Aunt Mart and who also happened to be the sheriff of Hanover County, crime was also up. That surprised no one but Aunt Mart, who liked to see the best in everyone.

  I probably should have been more concerned about the unemployment rate, the rising crime and the general state of need surrounding me, but as I said, I had not had a good year, either. This would be my first Christmas without my father, who had died of a stroke earlier that year. I was recently separated – for the second time–from the man to whom I had been married for ten years, and who had been my best friend since high school. I was still at the stage where I kept expecting to hear his footsteps in the hallway, and I picked up the phone to call him several times a day before I remembered we didn’t do that anymore. That sucked.

  And, perhaps most devastatingly, my golden retriever Cassidy had died at age 13 that summer. She was the one who taught me everything I know about dogs. She was the first certified search and rescue dog in Hanover County, and her find rate was 98%. She made me look like a superstar. She had more awards than a Nobel laureate and more letters after her name than an Oxford professor. But at the end of the day, she was the one who curled up on the sofa beside me and shared the popcorn on movie night, who was waiting at the door every time I picked up my car keys, who laid her head upon my knee when I was sad and who danced with excitement when I was happy. She made me who I was. Now she was gone, and I was alone.

  And, almost as though to add insult to injury, it now appeared as though I would lose my job, too. I stared in disbelief at the letter that had arrived in the morning mail. Due to cutbacks in federal funding, we have been forced to downsize…

  I had worked for the Forest Service here in the Smoky Mountains since college. It was all I’d ever wanted to do. I wasn’t sure I really even knew how to do anything else.

  From my supervisor Rick, who had graduated two years ahead of me in high school, was a scrawled note on the bottom of the official letter: Raine, call me. We’ll work something out.

  Great. The man had graduated ninety-sixth out of a class of one
hundred two, and now I was depending on him to “work something out”. Terrific.

  “Merry Christmas to me,” I muttered. I flung my booted feet atop the kitchen table and dropped my head back onto the chair. And there was absolutely no one to tell me not to do it. That made me even more depressed.

  When the phone rang, I almost didn’t answer it. Given the way my luck was running, it had to be more bad news. I answered it curtly, “Raine Stockton.”

  “Hey, Raine,” said the chirpy voice on the other end of the line. “This is Rose down at dispatch. We’ve got a call about an abandoned dog out on Mockingbird Place, and your Uncle wanted to know wouldn’t you mind going out there to check it out. The boys are just covered up with work down here, and the sheriff said to be sure and tell you he’d really appreciate it.”

  Our small county couldn’t afford an animal control officer, so when a complaint about a dog came in it was usually through the sheriff’s office. Unless it was a dog bite case, most of those calls were referred to the Humane Society. And since I had been president of the Humane Society for the past four years, that meant me. With a long-suffering sigh, I copied down the address, pulled on my coat, and went out into the cold to Mockingbird Place.

  The address led me to a row of small square houses a few blocks from the center of town. Fifty years ago they had probably been perfectly respectable middle income homes; now they were a couple of notches below that. Most of them had the not-quite- neglected look of rental property, with shabby lawns and worn shingles. I pulled into the short dirt driveway of a pale yellow clapboard house with a mud-stained cement block foundation, and I saw the dog immediately. A sable and white collie of about a year old sat imperiously atop a dog house inside a 10x10 chain link enclosure. At least I thought it was a collie; her coat was so muddied and matted with neglect that it was difficult to tell. She didn’t bark when I got out of the car; she didn’t jump down and rush the fence to greet me. She just sat atop the dog house with all the composure of a royal princess, and watched as I approached.