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  I offered my open hand to the yellow Lab and he snuffled and licked it, searching for more hot dogs. I quickly dug out more treats and let him scarf them up while I gently stroked his ears and murmured to him reassuringly.

  From outside Buck called, “Raine, you okay?”

  I didn’t answer because I didn’t want to startle the dog. Instead I murmured, “Okay, big fellow, let’s see about finding you a real meal, hmm?”

  I stood up slowly, holding a cube of cheese in front of the dog’s nose to lead him toward the door. But instead of following complacently, like the good dog he had proven himself to be at heart, he suddenly turned and bolted toward the back of the house, pulling me with such force that he almost jerked me off my feet. I gave an involuntary cry —“Hey!”—which caused Buck, Roe and Wyn to come rushing through the front door with their hands on their sidearms.

  I concentrated on holding on to the leash as the big Lab flung himself on the closed door of what I instinctively knew to be the bedroom. There were claw marks on the door frame and in the finish of the pine-paneled door, where he had alternately tried to dig and push his way inside to find his mistress. Now he was trying, in the best dog language he knew, to get me to open the door.

  Uncle Roe demanded behind me, “You okay? Got him under control?”

  “Yeah, everything’s fine.” I didn’t turn around, but slipped one arm around the dog’s shoulders while tugging gently on the leash, dislodging his paws from the door. “Come on, sweetie, let’s go.”

  The dog gave a plaintive whine and dropped to all fours, responding reluctantly to my leash tugs as we moved away from the door and the awful truth that lay behind it.

  Uncle Roe said, “Thanks, hon. Get on outside now.”

  “I’m going to take the dog to the vet and have him checked out, okay?”

  “Try not to touch anything on your way out.”

  He was pulling on a pair of gloves, his face filled with reluctance for what he was about to do. Buck and Wyn gave me wide berth as I moved the dog past them, which was not really necessary. The Lab could not stop looking over his shoulder and was far more worried about whether to follow my lead on the leash or to try to make another run for the door than with defending himself against strangers.

  For myself, I was more than anxious to be out of the cabin before the bedroom door was opened. The truth is, I have seen dead bodies before. But they are not something that I go out of my way to encounter.

  In addition to my mostly full-time dog training and boarding business, I do seasonal part-time work for the forest service and am always on call, with my golden retriever, Cisco, for search and rescue work. Our little community is only a few miles away from the Appalachian Trail, in the heart of the Smoky Mountain wilderness, and most of the time the hikers, campers and lost tourists we are called to search for are found scared and hungry, but otherwise fine. Occasionally they are not. Those times when a rescue operation turns into a recovery mission are not the kind of thing you want to think about before going to bed at night. And you never, ever want to repeat the experience if you can possibly help it.

  I did not intend to linger. The last thing I wanted to do was to look back inside that door when Uncle Roe opened it. But, of course, the dog saw Uncle Roe cautiously push the door open. He lunged for it. I lunged for him. And what I saw, even though it was barely a glimpse, would remain frozen in my mind forever. Not because it was so horrific, but because it was so sad.

  My view was of one corner of the room. Broken glass on the floor from the window Wyn had broken. A log-frame bed covered with a polka-dotted quilt. Beside it one of those laurel-wood chairs that are so popular for their rustic appeal, but impossibly uncomfortable to sit in. Someone had chosen to sit in it, though. And she had never gotten up.

  A bloated arm covered in chambray hung over the side of the chair, fingers just visible. Beneath those fingers on the floor lay a large-caliber pistol, the kind that could literally blow a person’s brains out if fired at close range. And that, I realized as I looked again at the quilt, was exactly what it had done.

  I closed my fingers around the scruff of the dog’s neck and pulled him with me as I staggered, senses reeling, toward the front door. He followed without protest, as though he had been rendered as helpless as I had been by the sight.

  I made my away across the small yard to my SUV, oblivious to the uniformed officers and the looks they gave me, oblivious to the flurry of activity as Buck stood on the front porch and began to relay orders, oblivious to the flashing lights and crackling radios and to everything, in fact, except the now-complacent, brokenhearted creature on the other end of the leash. I opened the back of the SUV, where I kept a wire dog crate in order to safely transport my own and other people’s dogs when I had to. When I opened the door of the crate, the yellow Lab jumped in, just as though he had been doing it all his life.

  At the time, I barely noticed.

  I secured the crate, closed the door of the SUV and got behind the driver’s seat. I even turned on the engine and adjusted the vents so that the dog would have plenty of fresh air. And then I just folded my arms over the top of the steering wheel and sat there, trying to breathe deeply. It was a long time before I felt steady enough to drive.

  Chapter Two

  My name is Raine Stockton, and I have been around law enforcement all my life. Most people still think of me as “Judge Stockton’s daughter,” since my father was a district court judge here in Hanover County for the last thirty years of his life. My mother’s brother, Uncle Roe, has been unopposed for the post of sheriff since he first took office back in the seventies, and everyone seems to like it that way. I married Deputy Buck Lawson not once but twice, and though we currently live apart—and I keep my maiden name—we still can’t quite make up our minds whether we are better off with or without each other. When I put on my forest service uniform, people often call me “Officer,” and I don’t always correct them. I have a deep and natural respect for the work that law officers do. And after what I had witnessed today, I was more convinced than ever than I wanted no part of it.

  Which is why, I suppose, I found the persistent questions of people who always assume I know more about police matters than I actually do more annoying today than usual.

  To be fair, it was not Ken Withers, our local vet, who bombarded me with questions, although he was the one who probably had the most right to do so. After all, I had burst into his office without an appointment or even a phone call, dragging a strange dog and blurting out an even stranger story about his having been locked inside a cabin for days with a dead body. Doc Withers, in fact, didn’t even raise an eyebrow. He was what you might call a man of few words, who preferred to gather his information through the tools of his trade: the stethoscope, the microscope, his own expert touch and powers of observation.

  His wife, Ethel, ran the front office and acted as assistant when necessary, and their daughter, Crystal, now a senior in high school, acted as vet tech on the afternoons and weekends. It was they who, big eyed with shock and curiosity, couldn’t ask me questions fast enough.

  “Good Lord,” exclaimed Ethel, coming quickly from behind the reception desk. She was a rather large woman with a fondness for flowered work smocks and gray pin curls, which bobbed when she was excited. The curls were bobbing now. “Who was she? Anyone we know?”

  I shook my head, following the Labrador as Doc Withers calmly took his leash and led him into the examining room. “I don’t think they have an ID yet.”

  “Whose cabin was it?” Crystal wanted to know, bringing up the rear of the procession that crowded into the small examining room. “I bet it was some of those peoplefrom the coast. I heard they have some wild parties up there at the lake, lots of drugs.”

  Her mother looked at her sharply. “Where would you hear a thing like that?”

  Crystal shrugged a typical teenager’s shrug.

  Ethel said, “Was it a gun, did you say? I heard on one of those TV shows that
women don’t use guns to kill themselves. Too messy.”

  I thought that was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. If you were going to kill yourself, male or female, the last thing you’d worry about was the mess you’d leave behind. After all, if one thing was certain, it was that you wouldn’t be the one who had to clean it up.

  But I said, “This one did.” Then I hurried quickly to help Doc Withers lift the quivering dog onto the table. “I don’t think he’s hurt,” I said, “just scared and starving. I wanted you to check him out, though.”

  “Shots?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “He seems kind of well mannered. He might have been pretty well taken care of. But there’s no way of knowing.”

  He grunted. I knew he would innoculate the dog, with no charge to me, against all contagious diseases before he released him to come home to my dogs. And he would never say a word about the cost. He was just that way.

  Ethel insisted, “Maybe it wasn’t suicide at all. Do you think it was? Is that what the sheriff thinks? Are they calling in the state boys?”

  Way too much television, I thought. I said anxiously to her husband, “He probably hasn’t had anything to drink in three or four days either.”

  Doc Withers pinched a fold of the dog’s skin between his fingers and grunted. Even I could see that the lack of elasticity indicated definite dehydration. He peeled back the dog’s lips and checked his gums.

  Crystal said, “Was Deputy Lawson there? I bet he was. I bet he was on the job, in charge of everything.”

  Crystal, like most other females who had ever encountered him, had a shameless crush on my husband. Frankly, I don’t understand it. Buck is cute enough: tall, well built, gorgeous hair. But he’s no Brad Pitt. Maybe it’s the uniform.

  In my younger days, I used to get furious with Buck for his unaccountable appeal to the opposite sex, as though he was deliberately putting out a sex pheromone designed to attract other women. Now I barely noticed— except when he acted on it, which, unfortunately, was far too often for a so-called married man. And that, in a nut-shell, was why we no longer lived together as husband and wife.

  Ethel said, “When do you think they’ll have an ID? Are they collecting DNA evidence?”

  Her husband, meantime, was running a microchip scanner over the dog. I took his grunt to mean a negative finding.

  More and more pet owners these days are having their vets implant microchips in their dogs with their personal information and a link to a lost-and-found service, in case of emergencies just like this. When a dog runs away during a thunderstorm, gets lost on vacation, is separated from its owner during a car accident, house fire, or natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina—there is absolutely, hands down, no better chance of recovering a lost pet than a microchip. Almost all veterinarians, animal shelters and rescue groups routinely scan every new dog they see for the presence of an identifying chip.

  With the lack of a microchip, I lost my best hope of identifying the woman who by now was probably being zipped into a body bag and transported via slow-moving ambulance to Sutter’s Funeral Home, official headquarters of our county coroner.

  Crystal said, “I bet they call out the whole force for a thing like this. Do you think they’ll do a roadblock?”

  Said her father, “Like to keep him overnight, give him some IV fluids. Should be fine.”

  “Thank you.” My gratitude was heartfelt. “I’ll pick him up first thing in the morning.”

  Crystal said, “Do you want us to give him a bath? He kind of, well, you know—smells.”

  I turned to her and I smiled. “Crystal,” I said, “that would be wonderful.”

  I, on the other hand, knew I could stand under the shower for days but would never get the smell of that cabin out of my hair.

  “I’ll be back for you, big guy,” I promised as I left the examining room. “You’re going to be fine.”

  “Wait.” Ethel focused on her job as I reached the reception room. “We need to make a file. Do you have a name?”

  I stared at her blankly. “What?”

  “For the dog,” she explained with an exaggerated show of patience. “We need a name for the dog. For the file.”

  I glanced back toward the exam room, where the quivering mass of yellow Labrador was still huddled on the table. I started to tell her that, in the absence of psychic powers, I had no earthly way of knowing the dog’s name, and that, given the fact that I had just spent twenty minutes rescuing him from the kind of hell no dog— much less a human—should ever have to set foot in, I thought my good deeds for the day were up to quota. She could think of a name.

  But then I remembered the dog barking himself hoarse, day and night, until someone finally noticed. I remembered the claw marks on the door. I remembered how, even when he finally had his chance to be free, he had run back to find his mistress. And I remembered the alertness in his eyes when I called him a hero. I said quietly, “Yeah. I’ve got a name.”

  I looked back at her. “Hero,” I said. “His name is Hero.”

  The story has it that my early ancestors, refugees from Scotland after that unfortunate business with Bonnie Prince Charlie, settled deep in the hills of North Carolina and began to build a life for themselves. They befriended the Cherokee, remained neutral during the War for Independence, and kept out of sight when the Blue Coats and the Gray Coats started squabbling. This was a pretty common story for those who chose to make their lives in what we like to think of as God’s vest pocket. This close to paradise, why would anyone want more? And when you’ve already got pretty much everything a person could ask for, what’s the point in fighting? Peace-loving became something of a habit over the years, and so did staying put and minding your own business.

  Sometime after the Civil War, an English school-teacher by the name of Elias Stockton came along and married the prettiest girl on the ridge, or so my grand-mother used to tell it. He built her a fine painted house on a gently sloping knoll at the foot of Hawk Mountain with tall glass windows that came all the way from Charleston. I’ve often wondered how he afforded such luxury on a schoolteacher’s salary. Trust fund? Or moon-shine?

  But it was a fine house, with impressive white columns, heart pine floors and sturdy outbuildings constructed of native chestnut. For generations it was both a landmark and a status symbol, until the county road was built in 1956 and travelers no longer had to pass the “big white house with the columns” on their way to just about everywhere. What must have seemed a blow to the pride of Grandma and Grandpa Stockton turned out to be a boon for everyone who lived in the house after them, though. What had once been a well-traveled dirt road is now a private drive leading straight to the house, and today you can sit on the front porch and see nothing but rolling mountains, hear nothing but birds.

  Well, sometimes you hear a few barking dogs.

  The house was so finely built that it has survived almost 150 years of children, marital disputes, taxes and natural and man-made disasters—and so have most of the outbuildings. A fellow stopped by some years ago and offered me enough per linear foot for the boards of my barn that I could have built an entirely new house on the profit. The only catch was that I would have had to tear down the barn. I decided instead to turn it into a dog kennel.

  It was not that training and boarding dogs was my first choice of career. When I graduated from the University of North Carolina with a wildlife services degree, my options were wide open. What I chose to do was to marry Buck Lawson and to stay right here in Hanover County. The first choice I regretted almost immediately; the second, never.

  When the funding for my “real” job with the Department of the Environment and Natural Resources ran out, I was left with three assets: a little bit of talent for training dogs, an even smaller amount of cash and one incredible golden retriever named Cassidy. Cassidy and I had made something of a name for ourselves as a search and rescue team while working for the DNR and had gone on to win awards in popular dog sports and
therapy dog pursuits. She not only taught me everything I know about dogs; she taught me most of what I know about life. Sharing some of the knowledge with other people seemed like a logical next step.

  My part-time work for the forest service is mostly during the peak tourist seasons of the summer and fall, and without Dog Daze Boarding and Training Center we’d all get pretty hungry waiting for summer to roll around. By “we” I mean me and the four dogs who now share the big white-columned house with me, leave claw marks on the heart pine floors and nose smudges on the Charleston windows and lounge shamelessly on my mother’s brocade sofa when they think I’m not looking.

  Unfortunately, Cassidy is no longer among the canine residents of the house, but is enjoying what I believe to be the abundance of the eternal reward reserved for dogs of her caliber. The golden retriever who came barreling out of the dog door and into the fenced back enclosure to greet me as I pulled into the circular drive was Cassidy’s spitting image, though—as well he should be, since Cisco was her grandson. He flung himself onto the black chain-link in an ecstacy of welcome, barking the story of his day and clawing the wire to hurry my exit from the car. When I didn’t open the door fast enough to suit him, he threw himself to the ground, rolled over twice, jumped up and took a lightning lap around the yard, then hurled himself onto the fence again, clenching a rubber bone between his teeth as though trying to bribe me with his cuteness. I couldn’t help smiling. That’s the thing about golden retrievers: No matter how rotten your day, they can always find a way to make you smile.

  I said, “Cisco, down,” as I got out of the car. Obediently, my big golden boy dropped to his belly, tail swishing in the dried leaves, still grinning around a mouthful of rubber bone. I unlocked the gate and stepped inside, closed the gate securely behind me, then held my arms open wide, “Okay, good boy!”