Silent Night: A Raine Stockton Dog Mystery Read online

  Melanie was thoughtful as we dragged the box of Christmas ornaments out of Mischief’s crate and repacked it. I decided the only really safe place for the box was on the front porch, so I carried it outside while Melanie put on her coat again.

  “You know,” she said when I returned, “if you really wanted to know how she was getting out, you could set up a camera while we’re gone. Like the security camera we have at my house in New York.”

  I raised an eyebrow, impressed. “Good idea,” I said. “Only one problem. I don’t have a camera.”

  She grinned. “I do.”

  It only took a few minutes to set the trap. Melanie engaged the video function on her iPad and I set it up on the mantel opposite the dogs’ crates, high enough to give a pretty good view of most of the room. Mischief and Magic watched with such interest that I actually became a little nervous that Mischief might find a way to escape her crate and turn off the camera—or, more likely, knock the tablet off the mantel and break it. I therefore double-checked the slide bolt on her crate and even secured it with a plastic cable tie. She had chewed through the cable ties before, but it might buy us some time.

  I said, “Don’t get your hopes up. It’s going to take her awhile to figure this one out.”

  “Don’t worry,” Melanie assured me. “It’s just like the magicians on TV—they always double-lock all the chains just to make it look harder to escape than it is. But he always does it anyway.”

  I didn’t know whether to hope she was right, or hope she was wrong.

  With Cisco belted in the back seat and grinning happily to be going on a ride, we started down the road toward Walt Akers Christmas Tree Farm. Of course I missed the old days of hiking through the woods with my dad, a couple of dogs bounding ahead, finding the perfect tree and watching the woods chips fly as he cut it down with an ax, then getting sap all over my hands as I “helped” drag it back home. But the Christmas tree farm was almost as much fun, and probably more environmentally responsible, given the fact that there were a good many more people tramping around in the mountains looking for Christmas trees these days than there used to be. Also, there was something to be said for having a crew wrap your tree in netting and secure it to the top of your vehicle for you.

  Walt had twenty-five acres planted in evergreens, and every year he opened a different “cut your own” section at the top of the mountain. At the bottom of the mountain, he had set up a flat acre of already-cut trees, and there were five or ten people browsing through that area already. The number would triple on the weekend. I stopped by the frame shack that served as the pay station and turned over twenty dollars for the cut-your-own option. I picked up a hand saw from the supply in the bin, and Melanie, Cisco and I drove up the dirt road that was marked by arrows toward the top of the mountain.

  “Are you really going to cut down a tree by yourself?” Melanie asked.

  “Not a big one,” I assured her. “Besides, they have guys up here to help us.”

  She looked skeptical. “It would’ve been easier to get one that’s already cut.”

  “But not as much fun.”

  “My mom always has a tree decorated from the florist delivered to our apartment.”

  Jeez, I thought, how much alimony does Miles pay, anyway?

  “Last year it had peppermint candies and red and white roses on it. The roses turned black before Christmas though, and the candies melted.”

  I gave a noncommittal, “Hmm.” then added, “On my tree I mostly have dog bones and shiny balls. They have a long shelf life.”

  She gave me a look—the kind that said she wasn’t quite sure if I was teasing her or not, but if I was, she wanted to make sure she got it—and then she said, “Do your puppies have names?”

  “They’re not my puppies,” I reminded her. “They’re probably going to go to their new homes tomorrow, so no, I didn’t name them. I think the person who is going to take care of them forever should do that.”

  She thought about that for a moment. “I don’t know how you can be a puppy’s mom for a little while, and then just give it to somebody else.”

  “It’s not easy,” I admitted. “Sometimes I can’t do it. Mischief and Magic were rescue dogs, but I couldn’t give them away, so now they live with me. My collie, Majesty, was a rescue dog, and she lived with me for three years. I let her go live with my Aunt Mart because my aunt needed a dog, and that’s where Majesty wanted to be. But Mystery, the border collie, was a rescue dog too and she never wanted to stay with me—so now she lives with my friend Sonny, which is where she wants to be. The same with Hero, Sonny’s service dog. I would have loved to have kept him, but he had a job to do, so he went to live with someone else. When you do the kind of work I do, you have to believe that there is a person for every dog, and a dog for every person, and that eventually the two will find each other.”

  That was probably a little too philosophical for a nine-year-old, but then again, what do I know about kids? Melanie seemed to accept it, and was quiet until we reached the parking area at the top of the mountain. And then she said, looking around, “Wow. That’s a lot of trees.”

  I said, “Walt ships trees all over the state, and even down to Georgia and South Carolina. But if you really want top choice, you have to come up here and cut it yourself.”

  Spruce, fir, and white pine were planted in neat rows as far as the eye could see, ranging in size from four to ten feet tall. A person could spend days wandering through the grove, looking for the perfect tree, and there were certainly worse ways to pass the time. However, with only an hour or two before dark, I hoped we would find the perfect tree in a considerably shorter amount of time.

  There were a few other vehicles in parked in front of the metal-roofed pavilion where the tree netter was, and a few more had driven down some of the wide lanes between rows. An attendant in a plaid jacket and an ear-flap hat was manning the pavilion, and other employees in orange vests were moving up and down the rows, helping people cut their trees. I decided to confine our search to the rows nearest the parking area. I dropped my cell phone in my coat pocket—I wasn’t taking any chances on missing a call from Miles this time in the unlikely event that he tried to reach me—and got the saw from the back seat.

  “Okay,” I told Melanie, snapping on Cisco’s leash. “We’re looking for a tree twice as tall as you are, and about three times as wide.”

  “There are a lot of trees that size,” Melanie pointed out, glancing around.

  “Good, then it should be easy to find one.” I released Cisco from the car and told him to sit while I zipped up my jacket against the cold wind that blew across the mountain. I wished I’d brought a hat.

  “Do they allow dogs up here?” Melanie wanted to know.

  “Sure, as long as they’re on leash.” I released Cisco from his sit and he immediately started sniffing the ground, excited to trace down every nuance of the scent of every man, woman, child, dog, rabbit, squirrel and deer who had trod the ground in the past week. The mountaintop probably resembled a tracking training field to him, and as I looked around, I wondered if Walt would let the tracking club use this area in off-season for practice. We were always looking for unfamiliar places to set up new challenges for our dogs, and they weren’t all that easy to find, even in the mountains.

  I called Cisco to heel, and though he seemed a little confused by the command—he clearly thought he had come here to track—he trotted along happily enough beside us as we started down the rows. When we came alongside the netting station the man in the plaid jacket straightened up and watched us with a hard look. He had a cigarette dangling from his lip and there was something uncomfortably familiar about him, but I couldn’t quite place it. The way he kept staring at Cisco, I thought he probably had something to say about having dogs on the premises, and sure enough, he did. But it wasn’t what I expected.

  “Hey,” he said. The cigarette bobbled when he talked. “You’re that woman with the drug dog, ain’t you?”


  It took me a moment, but I recognized him from the trailer park, when everyone was milling around to pet Cisco while we waited for Buck to clear us to leave. I stopped, and Cisco, after a moment’s thought, remembered his manners and sat by my side. I said, “Cisco is not a drug dog.”

  “Yeah?” He took the cigarette out of his mouth and his eyes narrowed as he looked at it. “I hear tell they got these drug dogs that can smell when something has just been touched by somebody that handled drugs. They’ll go straight to it, every time.”

  I instinctively edged in front of Melanie; I’m not sure why. Maybe it was just to keep her from joining in the conversation. I said, “I wouldn’t know. I don’t train drug dogs.”

  “Hey, Dusty! Give me a hand with this twine, will you?”

  He looked around at one of the men who was trying to secure a Christmas tree to the top of an SUV. He looked back at me and spat on the ground. “You gotta keep that dog on a leash up here.”

  “I will,” I said.

  He took a knife from the case on his belt and went to cut the twine. I released Cisco from his sit and he bounded happily into position beside me as we turned toward the row of trees that would take us the farthest away from the netting stand. I think he was still under the illusion that this was a tracking exercise. Whenever we stopped to examine a tree he would get his fill of sniffing the grass around it, and I didn’t bother to correct him. The point was to make sure that everyone had a good time.

  We found three or four trees that, in my opinion, would have served just fine. But the day was bright with late afternoon sun, the wind wasn’t so bad in the shelter of the trees, and I enjoyed the walk. Melanie seemed to be having almost as much fun as Cisco was, wandering through the sweet smelling evergreens and turning a critical eye on every tree I pointed out and declaring it a “no way”, a “maybe”, or a “top three”. Inevitably, we trekked much further away from the car than I had intended.

  “Okay,” I announced finally, “we need to make a decision now and start back home. We have to let the puppies out pretty soon.”

  The mention of the puppies was all it took to galvanize her, and she quickly chose the last tree we’d considered—which also happened to be the one that was farthest from the car. “You’re sure?” I prompted.

  “Positive.”

  “Because once I start cutting, it’s ours.”

  “That’s the one,” she assured me importantly.

  I handed her Cisco’s leash and pulled on my gloves. “Okay, you keep an eye out for one of the guys in an orange vest to help us get it back to the car.”

  “Will do.”

  I positioned the hand saw and had started cutting before I realized she and Cisco were halfway down the row.

  “Hey!” I called after her, straightening up.

  “There’s a guy over here,” she called back, “on the next row. I’ll go get him.”

  I saw it happen a split second before it actually did, and too late to prevent it. Cisco’s ears went up, his nose went down, his tail swung excitedly, I cried, “Watch the”—and Cisco sprang away from Melanie before I could finish, “—leash!” He took off at a leaping bound, trailing the leash behind him.

  Melanie cried, “Cisco!” I dropped the saw and started running, and so did she.

  If I could ever have gotten a run like that out of Cisco on the agility course, I would have been a proud blue ribbon owner. He ducked and dashed in and out of the evergreens as though he was taking the weave poles at full speed. He sailed over stumps without breaking stride. Occasionally I would catch a glimpse of the cotton-tailed bunny that started the race, and I knew Cisco had about as much chance of catching it as we did of catching him. And the whole time my heart was in my throat because if he caught his leash on anything at that speed he would break his neck.

  Generally I do not advise chasing a runaway dog, because the pursuit will only make him more excited about the keep-away game. In this case, however, as with every other time Cisco had gotten away from me on the tracking course, my goal was just to keep him in sight. He had no idea where he was, and when he finally did slow down, I wanted him to be able to find me.

  Eventually we moved out of the cultivated rows and into the edge of a scrub brush and pine sapling tangle. There was a rusted-out silver Airstream trailer two or three hundred yards away, and Cisco was eagerly sniffing the ground in front of it. My guess was that the rabbit had gone under the trailer. I came to a stop and rested my hands on my knees, struggling to catch my breath. Melanie came up behind me a moment later.

  “I thought,” she gasped, “he was a trained dog.”

  I glanced at her. Her cheeks were bright red with exertion and her hair was wind-tangled and sweaty, just like mine. “He is,” I answered, and added darkly, “Kind of.” There was no denying the issue any longer: Maude was right. Cisco's lack of impulse control was a disaster waiting to happen. But maybe Sonny was right, too. Here he was in a place that looked exactly like a tracking course, and who could blame him for tracking? His skills were being under-used. I had no one to blame but myself.

  I took one last deep breath and straightened up. “Okay,” I said. “This is what I want you to do. Start walking up to him. When he looks at you, turn around and run back to me.”

  She looked at me uncertainly. “Why don’t I just go get him?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Melanie gave me one more of her skeptical little looks then started plowing through the undergrowth toward the trailer. She probably thought that I sent her because I didn’t want to get all covered with burrs, and she was partially right. The truth was that from that distance Cisco probably would have come when I called, but I saw no reason not to take the opportunity to share another lesson in dog training with her.

  Just as I expected, Cisco looked up alertly as soon as he heard her approach. I called, “Remember, don’t chase him. Make him chase you!”

  Melanie took another couple of steps toward him, and Cisco play-bowed and yipped happily at her. She turned and started running toward me, just as she had been instructed. That was when Cisco double-crossed me. He spun around, play-bowed again, ducked to snatch something up from the ground, and then, finally, he raced after Melanie. I caught his leash as he reached her, and just before he jumped up on her in his signature “tag!” greeting.

  “There aren’t very many dogs who won’t chase a running child,” I explained to Melanie, reaching down to extract what appeared to be a dirt-smeared golf ball from Cisco’s mouth. “So if you meet a strange dog and you don’t want to be chased, what do you do?”

  “Don’t run,” Melanie pronounced matter-of-factly. “What’s that?”

  I opened my hand and we both looked at the object Cisco had retrieved, which was not a golf ball at all, but the decapitated head of a cherubic-looking ceramic doll. Puzzled, I glanced back toward the trailer, which did not look like the kind of place a family with children might ever have lived, and then I stared more closely, startled. I could have sworn the door opened a crack, then closed as I watched.

  The sun chose that moment to drop behind a mountain peak, and I felt a chill that was from more than the cold. I dropped Cisco’s find into my coat pocket and touched Melanie’s shoulder. “Come on,” I said with sudden urgency. “Let’s go.”

  ________

  FOURTEEN

  The sun was just beginning its spectacular painted-clouds show over the purple-shadowed mountains when we arrived home. Melanie and I wrestled the tree, still carefully wrapped in its protective netting, onto the front porch so that we wouldn’t have to do it in the dark, then hurried inside. A chorus of puppy yipping greeted us, and both Melanie and Cisco rushed to the kitchen to attend to it. The house, however, looked suspiciously as we had left it, and Mischief and Magic were resting in their crates with heads on paws, looking far too innocent for my comfort. My eyes darted this way and that, looking for signs of mayhem, as I went to let them out. The first thing I noticed was that the cable tie had b
een chewed through on Mischief’s crate, and that both bolt locks were disengaged. The doors to both crates, however, had been pulled closed.

  I stood before Mischief’s crate with my arms folded, completely unimpressed. “Really?” I said, and she pretended to ignore me.

  I released them both and they took off like twin shots. There was the usual pre-dinnertime chaos as I turned the bigger dogs out into the play yard and the puppies into a smaller, outdoor pen close to the house. Melanie of course wanted to go with them, and I told her, “Okay, but let’s call your dad first. I told him we’d check in before dinner.”

  I reached in my coat pocket for my phone but came up only with a ceramic doll head. I tried the other pocket, and my jeans pockets. I groaned out loud. “I must have dropped my phone at the Christmas tree farm.”

  “Oh, well, guess we’ll have to call him later,” Melanie said happily, and let herself into the pen with the puppies.

  Well, at least I’d found a way to take her mind off her dad.

  The phone call was delayed while I fed the dogs, showed Melanie how to prepare the puppies’ food, cleaned up the puddles inside the ex-pen and sanitized the rubber liner I used to protect my wood floors, then took the puppies out once more for their after-dinner bathroom break.

  “It sure is a lot of work taking care of puppies,” Melanie observed as we carried the puppies back inside.

  “You got that right.”

  “I guess that’s why my mom won’t let me have one.”

  If there is one thing I’ve learned it is never, ever, try to influence a parent’s policy on pet-keeping. The only way a dog, or a family, will ever be happy living together is if everyone involved is one hundred percent in favor of the arrangement. Otherwise…well, that’s why we have animal shelters.

  It was a shame, though. Melanie was one of those kids who really could have benefitted from having a dog in her life.

  I said noncommittally, “Moms are usually right about these things. But,” I added, watching the way she nuzzled the female puppy against her face before setting it down in the ex-pen, “you can always come visit my dogs. I have plenty.”