Gun Shy Read online

  “Sounds like an offer I can’t refuse.” He lingered, hands lightly clasping my shoulders, a rueful smile in his eyes. “This is a little crazy, you know.”

  I slid my gaze away uncomfortably.

  “I’m here more than I’m at home. My house is starting to feel like a big closet.”

  I said, “Maybe we’re spending too much time together.”

  “Maybe we’re not spending enough.”

  “It’s not even light outside,” I said. “I haven’t had my first cup of coffee. This is not a good time to have this conversation.”

  I couldn’t help noticing that his eyes were no longer smiling. “Soon, okay?”

  I nodded because, really, what else could I do?

  I walked him to the door, cradling my coffee. “Oh,” I said, suddenly remembering. “Did Dolly Amstead call you?”

  “From the bank?” He looked surprised. “About what?”

  “About helping to set up the Pet Fair booth at the Fall Festival next weekend. We need your truck to transport some of the agility equipment and a strong pair of arms to set up the puppy playground.”

  “Why didn’t you just ask me?”

  I smiled sweetly. “Because I am not in charge.”

  “Ah,” he said, nodding. We both knew Dolly had control issues. “Well, tell her she’d better not waste any time getting in touch with me. My social calendar fills up pretty quickly these days. Who knows when I might get a better offer?”

  I slid an arm around his waist, holding the coffee cup out to the side as I tilted my face up to his. “Does it, now? You got a girlfriend or something?”

  He accepted my invitation for a kiss, and when I opened my eyes, his were once again smiling. “Or something.” He touched my chin with an index finger. “Save me some leftovers.”

  He opened the door on the cold dark morning, and I shivered and closed it behind him again quickly. In another moment headlights flashed on the windowpane, and I could hear the muffled barking of every dog in the kennel. I sighed and finished my coffee quickly. My day had begun.

  In small communities like mine, going to church is more than a matter of religious expression; it’s also something of a cross between a town hall meeting and a block party, a chance to mingle with your neighbors and catch up on the goings-on. We sing a little “Abide with Me,” listen to a sermon on how to be better neighbors and spend the rest of the time finding out who’s in the hospital, who has a new baby, what time the spaghetti supper for the volunteer fire department starts and so on. Dolly Amstead got up and made a lengthy announcement about the Pet Fair that would be held in conjunction with this year’s Hansonville Fall Festival in order to raise money for a badly needed animal shelter, and directed people to get in touch with me if they wanted to volunteer to help with the booth, buy tickets for any of the events or sign up for the pet parade. I waggled my fingers from the middle pew where I sat with Aunt Mart and Uncle Roe when heads turned to find me. You really do have to admire Dolly’s managerial style: She has a wonderful way of delegating all the work while still managing to hold on to both the control and the credit.

  I had managed to catch Ethel Withers at home just before I left for church. She told me that the dog I had decided to call Hero was off the IV and was on a bland diet of chicken broth and rice. They were on their way to Hickory to spend the day with her mother, but if I wanted to pick the dog up after church she would leave him in the back kennel run. I thanked her and promised to pick him up in a couple of hours.

  I knew that Hero was perfectly safe in the shady kennel run at the veterinary hospital. There was a padlock on the gate to which I had been given the combination; the nine-foot-tall run was curved inward to discourage jumping or climbing escapees; he had plenty of water and shelter in case of rain, of which there was not the slightest sign. Nonetheless I was anxious about leaving him there unsupervised.

  I gave my Aunt Mart’s plump shoulders a quick hug as soon as the benediction was pronounced. “I’ll be over as soon as I get the dog settled in at home,” I promised. I had explained to both my aunt and Uncle Roe about the situation with the dog as soon as I had seen them that morning. “It shouldn’t take me more than an hour.”

  “Oh, honey, there’s no point in you driving from one end of the county to the other. Bring the dog over to our place with you. He’ll be okay for a few hours while we visit.”

  “Are you sure?” Despite my aunt’s unabashed adoration of Majesty, my pretty collie, she was not exactly a dog person, and her knickknack-filled house and immaculate lawn were definitely not dog friendly.

  “We can put him in the barn,” she assured me.

  I smiled. “That’s okay. I’ve got a crate in the truck, and I can leave the back open. As long as he doesn’t bark.”

  “What’s a little barking? He’ll be fine. You run on, now.”

  Uncle Roe, who was, after all, a politician, was busy shaking hands and chatting with his neighbors, so I just waved to him in passing as I squeezed through the crowd. I left a stack of fliers about the Pet Fair on the vestibule table next to a sign-up list for Meals on Wheels drivers and some brochures about an after-school Bible study program. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Dolly waving to catch my attention from the back of the crowd, but I managed to slide out into the crisp autumn sunshine before she could catch me. There I found myself face to face with Reese Pickens.

  When talking about our little corner of the mountains to outsiders, residents will often conclude with, “And ninety-nine percent of the people who live here are good, decent, hardworking folks.” In the back of most people’s minds when they think about the one percent would be someone named Pickens.

  Earlier in the year, Reese’s son, Luke—known for his violent temper and flagrant drug and alcohol abuse—had been murdered and dumped on the side of the road. Some people thought Reese himself might have had a hand in that, and I was one of them. But my dispute with Reese went deeper than that. In March, he had sold Hawk Mountain, whose shadow had sheltered my family home for generations, to a developer with some outrageous idea of turning it into a fly-in resort for the super-rich. What once had been one of the most serene vistas in the county was now crisscrossed with the ugly scar of access roads and utility right-of-ways, the wildlife which had once called the mountain home had been displaced—mostly into people’s backyards—and I was slowly being forced to face the fact that the only life I had ever known here in Hanover County was about to undergo some major changes.

  My inclination was to walk past him without speaking, but as luck would have it, we were standing only a few feet away from the preacher, who was greeting parishioners as they left the church full of compliments on the timeliness of his message about loving thy neighbor. So I said, as politely as I could, “Good morning, Mr. Pickens.”

  He was a big, silver-haired man with a penchant for expensive Stetson hats. He tipped his hat to me now— this one with a sterling eagle’s head at the crown—and replied, “Miss Raine. How’s every little thing going over at your place?”

  I regarded him cooly. “Well enough. You wouldn’t happen to know who’s been hunting over on Hawk Mountain the past few days, would you?”

  “That’s private property,” he reminded me, and he looked far too pleased with himself to suit me. “How do you figure I’d know what’s going on out there?”

  “They’re getting awfully close to the edge of private property,” I told him, unsmiling. “And unless they want to wind up on the wrong side of the law, somebody ought to remind them about a few of the rules of gun safety.”

  He chuckled. “Miss Raine, you are a sight. Always huffing and puffing about rules and regulations and what’s right and what’s wrong. One of these days you’re going to finally kick that deputy lawman of yours to the curb, and your uncle’s going to retire and nobody’s going to give a fancy rat’s behind who your daddy used to be. Who’s going to stop and listen to what you’ve got to say then, huh?”

  I refused to let
him goad me. “How’s Cindy doing these days?”

  Cindy Winston and her daughter, Angel—or I should say, their daughter, since Reese was, according to Cindy, the child’s father—had both been part of the tangled scandal that surrounded Luke Pickens’s death in the spring. It was not a pretty story, and it still bothered me that Reese Pickens should have any sort of guardianship over the little girl, Angel, even if it did mean that she would be financially secure for the rest of her life.

  He said, without change of expression, “Why, I can’t say I rightly know. Last I heard, she up and moved to Fort Lauderdale.”

  I had heard that too. I had just wanted to see his expression when I asked. I said, “I’m not a bit surprised.”

  I turned to the preacher and extended my hand, “Enjoyed the sermon, Pastor,” and Reese Pickens moved on.

  True to her word, Crystal had bathed the yellow Lab, who was waiting for me in the back kennel run of the veterinary hospital. He smelled like vanilla and looked slightly less emaciated than he had the day before, but he did not even raise his head from the sun-dappled concrete pad on which he lay when I approached the gate. He made no sign of protest when I slipped the leash around his neck, and when I clucked my tongue and encouraged, “Come on, boy, let’s go,” he got to his feet and plodded beside me to the car. Once again he jumped into the crate when I opened it, then lay down with his head on his paws and didn’t move or look up again.

  I had never seen a more dispirited dog, and it just broke my heart.

  Aunt Mart discouraged “shop talk” around the dinner table, but this apparently didn’t apply to the pre-dinner table, because the events of yesterday were all she could talk about as we dished up peas, corn and mashed potatoes in the kitchen. “I don’t think Roe slept a wink,” she confided, opening the oven door a crack to check on the biscuits. “Things like this bother him more than they used to.”

  “Things like this would bother anyone.” I opened the refrigerator and took out the covered butter dish.

  “And you, honey, I don’t know how you do it. Such a gruesome line of work. No, don’t put the real butter on the table. Roe just slathers it all over everything. Get that stuff in the tub. High cholesterol, you know.”

  I traded the butter for the tub of something nondairy and nontasty. I said, “Well, I didn’t know my line of work was going to be gruesome when I got into it. I thought it was going to be about fish hatcheries and preventing forest fires. And later, about teaching dogs to sit up and lie down. Dead bodies definitely did not figure into my career plan.”

  Aunt Mart glanced out the window to where my SUV was parked in the shade of an orange-red sweet gum tree, the back hatch open for ventilation. Hero had not made a sound, or even stirred, since lying down in the crate in the back.

  “What are you going to do with the poor thing?” she worried. “I certainly hope you’re not planning to keep him. You already have your hands full.”

  I had to agree with that. Keeping him was not even on the list of possibilities. “Hopefully, when Uncle Roe finds out who his owner was, some relative will take responsibility. Otherwise I’ll try to get him into a foster home in one of the rescue groups I know.”

  “What this county needs is an animal shelter.”

  “Well, that’s what we’re working on.” I took the bowl of three-bean salad she placed in my hands and started toward the dining room with it just as Uncle Roe appeared at the kitchen door. He was frowning a little.

  “Well, so much for that,” he said, inclining his head back toward the living room, where, only a moment ago, he had been talking on the phone. “That was the head of security at Letty Cranston’s Hilton Head condo community, who finally got around to returning my call while we were at church. Seems she’s out of the country for the winter. No itinerary, no contact info, at least not with them.”

  I said, “I never knew anybody that rich ever lived here.”

  “She moved away while you were still in high school,” Aunt Mart explained. “I guess she kept the lake cabin for sentimental reasons.”

  I placed the salad on the table and returned for the corn. “Buck said the cabin was empty—no luggage, no purse, nothing like that. What about dog food?”

  My uncle looked at me. “No,” he said thoughtfully. “No people food either. No milk, no sodas, not even coffee.”Then he added, “Of course, if she came up here to do herself in, she probably wouldn’t have stopped for groceries on the way.”

  “But she should have had dog food,” I argued. “When you travel with a dog, you make sure you have dog food.”

  Uncle Roe said, “I’ll be back in a minute. I want to make some phone calls.”

  Aunt Mart turned from the stove in exasperation. “Roe, not on the Lord’s day!”

  “The Lord would approve,” he assured her over his shoulder as he hurried down the hall to his den.

  “We’re sitting down in ten minutes with or without you!”

  Ten minutes later there was enough food on the table to feed several families of three, which meant I would be dining happily on leftovers for the next few days, even after sharing with Buck. Aunt Mart was muttering to herself as she turned golden-topped biscuits into a napkin-lined basket and marched it to the table.

  “Well, he can just eat his cold,” she declared. “Come on in here, honey, and let’s sit down. It’s not like we all get to eat together every day. You think he’d show a little consideration.”

  I pulled out my chair just as Uncle Roe came into the room, rubbing his hands together and looking pleased with himself. He surprised me by dropping a kiss on my head before he took his own chair. “You,” he said, “are a smart girl. I’ve got calls in to the mini-mart and the grocery store, just on the off chance somebody might remember something helpful. Then it occurred to me that maybe some city tourist with a nice purebred Lab like that wouldn’t buy their dog food at a grocery store. They’d be like you, and get it at some high-priced pet store. And since the Feed and Seed is the closest thing we’ve got to a pet store, I just called Jeff to ask if he remembered any tourists coming in to buy dog food. Turns out somebody did come in, asking for a brand he didn’t even carry. Jeff remembers because the fellow was driving a PT Cruiser, silver colored, with South Carolina plates, and they’re funny-looking cars. You don’t see a lot of them around here. That was on Wednesday, the day before the dog started barking enough to bother the neighbors. Fellow said he and his wife were renting a lake cabin, and they had forgotten dog food. You know Jeff, dog lover that he is. He asked what kind of dog the man had, and he said it was a yellow Lab.”

  I had been in the process of passing him the bread basket, but I stopped with the basket in midair. “No kidding. And you think it might be the same dog?”

  Uncle Roe nodded, taking the basket from my hand. “That’s exactly what I think. This woman, whoever she turns out to be, did not come up here alone. She had a husband, and we’re mighty interested in finding out what became of him.”

  Chapter Four

  When you live alone, you don’t often get to sit down to a meal of roast chicken and dressing, real mashed potatoes, three kinds of vegetables and hot biscuits. Most of my meals, in fact, consist of something wrapped in a piece of bread or poured from a can, and are eaten while catching up on paperwork or returning phone calls. It takes a lot to turn my attention away from one of Aunt Mart’s home-cooked meals, but this development actually caused me to abandon the spoon with which I had been about to help myself to a huge serving of crowder peas.

  “Do you think maybe they had a fight and that’s why she killed herself? That he left her after they got up here? How can you be sure it’s the same couple?”

  “ ‘I don’t know’ is the answer to all of those questions,” replied Uncle Roe, holding out his hand for the bowl of peas. After a moment to refocus my thoughts, I quickly took a serving for myself and passed the bowl.

  “I mean, this county is crawling with tourists, and the yellow Lab is the most popula
r breed in the country,” I pointed out.

  “Absolutely right. You going to take any of those potatoes, hon?”

  I did, and he added, “I’ve got Buck and Wyn and half the force working on finding some answers, so don’t expect him for supper tonight.”

  Something about the way he just assumed that Buck and I were having supper together made me a little uncomfortable, even though it was the truth. I lathered artificial butter on my biscuit. “What kind of jerk goes off and leaves his wife in a remote mountain cabin without a car or dog food?”

  “Well, that’s exactly what we need to find out, don’t we?”

  “I wonder if Jeff—”

  My aunt set her fork down on her plate with a clink. Her plump, perfectly powdered face was stern and her eyes like flint, but nothing could have been sweeter than her voice as she remarked, “Haven’t the poplars put on a show for us this season?”

  Chastised, I murmured, “Sorry, Aunt Mart.” And for the rest of the meal we talked about what an outstanding leaf season it had been thus far, in terms of both natural beauty and tourism, and about the trip to Myrtle Beach my aunt and uncle were planning in the spring. There were some rules for which there simply were no exceptions.

  After I helped clear the table and do the dishes, I excused myself to walk the dog. He left the crate calmly when I slipped the leash around his neck, obligingly lifted his leg on a stump at the edge of the lawn when I took him there, and lapped in a desultory fashion at the water I poured into a collapsible travel bowl for him. The yard was filled with chattering squirrels, quail darting upward from the brush, chipmunks wiggling through the log pile and even a couple of insolent striped cats, but Hero wasn’t interested in any of them.

  He didn’t look at the cats, or the birds, or the golden leaves twisting in the sun as they showered down around us. Worst of all, he didn’t look at me. He just stood there at the end of the leash, his head bowed and his back to me, until I decided to try an experiment.