Silent Night: A Raine Stockton Dog Mystery Read online

  Miles said something I didn’t hear, and eventually Melanie disconnected in a huff, flinging herself back against the seat and refusing to look at me, or at the box of puppies in her lap, for the remainder of the trip.

  Cisco started to whine anxiously as soon as we turned into the gravel parking lot, and I couldn’t blame him. He’d been injured in the line of duty not too long ago—the hair still hadn’t completely grown back over his shoulder wound – and the vet’s office was not one of his favorite memories. I told him as I put the car in Park, “It’s okay, boy. You get to stay in the car this time. I’ll bring you a cookie.”

  His ears perked up at that, and he stopped mid-whine.

  Melanie started to fumble with the door handle, and I told her, “Stay there. I’ll come around.”

  She scowled at me. “You’re not going to leave me in the car, too, are you?”

  I considered that for a moment. As a general rule, I am as responsible with my dogs as I would be with a child, so Melanie should have been as safe sitting in the car as Cisco was. The problem was that I trusted Cisco; I didn’t trust Melanie. Also, I didn’t think Miles would approve. So I said, “You can sit in the waiting room and play video games or something.” I got out of the car and opened her door. “Hand me the box.”

  “My coat!” she protested, as I tucked the folds of her coat more securely around the puppies.

  “We’re two steps from the door,” I told her impatiently. “Get over it.”

  She scrambled after me. “This is child abuse!”

  I rolled my eyes.

  I’m pretty well known around my vet’s office, not only because of my own dogs, but because of the work I do with humane society and the golden retriever rescue group. Well, basically Maude and I are the local golden retriever rescue group, which is doubtless how a box of puppies landed beside my mailbox. Ethyl and Crystal, Doc's wife and daughter respectively, greeted me cheerfully from behind the front desk, and then oohed and ahhed over the contents of the box. Melanie, having snatched her coat off the box as soon as we got inside, stood in the center of the room glowering, and I pointed sternly to a chair. “Sit,” I commanded.

  In a moment she flung herself into the chair I’d indicated and powered up her iPad.

  Ethyl she gave me a questioning look, and I responded with a shrug. “Babysitting,” I said. I peered over the counter at Crystal, who was returning the last puppy to the box. “The little female doesn’t look so great,” I said. “I hate to walk in like this but I didn’t want to take a chance.”

  “Not a problem,” replied Crystal. “There are a couple of people ahead of you, but I’ll take these little guys back and see if I can get them cleaned up a little. I’ll call you when Dad is ready.”

  I crossed the room to sit beside Melanie, stopping to speak to Mrs. Dawson, whose bichon yapped noisily from his carrier, on the way. The bichon had been one of our grooming clients before we’d closed for remodeling, and I hoped would be again when we reopened. I asked after her dog’s health, and she assured me he was just in for his shots. She asked when she could bring him in for a shampoo and trim, and I replied brightly, “Just give me a call after Christmas. We’ll work him in.” I was beginning to wonder if I would have to start washing dogs in my kitchen sink.

  Mrs. Dawson lowered her voice confidentially and cut her eyes toward the back room, where Crystal had taken the puppies. “You know who those pups belong to, don’t you?”

  I had my suspicions, but I wanted to hear her say it.

  “Lester Stokes’ mama dog just had a litter a couple of months back. I was over there picking out a pumpkin with the kids and I thought I never would get them back in the car for playing with those puppies. He tried to make me take one home but they were too little to leave their mama, their eyes were barely open.” She snorted. “Like I need another dog. This one is about all I can take care of as it is.”

  Crystal called her in just then, and I went to sit beside Melanie.

  “My dad’s last girlfriend had a house in Cocoa Beach,” she said loudly. “I liked her a lot better.”

  I smiled weakly at the man sitting across from me, who returned a polite nod, and I picked up a six- month-old copy of Dog Fancy. Not only I had already read it, I had donated it to the waiting room. But I pretended to be absorbed, because it was better than having to make conversation with Melanie.

  Crystal called me into the exam room twenty minutes later. I told Melanie to stay put and went inside. “Thanks for seeing me, Doc,” I said. One of the puppies was on the steel examining table; the other two were in a wire crate in a corner. “Someone dumped them off this morning or late last night. I don’t know how long they were out in the cold.”

  Doc Withers was a tall man with slightly stooped shoulders, steel-gray hair, and wire-rimmed glasses. The pawprint-patterned scrubs he wore did not detract from his dignity in the least; in fact they only enhanced it. He had been taking care of my dogs, Maude’s dogs, and everyone else’s dogs in the county for as long as I could remember, and there was no one else I would trust with my pets.

  He held the squirming little pup up to face level and said, “Well, now, little fellow, you’ve had yourself quite an adventure, haven’t you?” He glanced at me, bouncing the puppy experimentally in one hand. “Six pounds, three ounces.”

  Crystal put the puppy on a baby scale and reported, “Six pounds, three ounces.”

  I grinned. “How long has it been since you missed one, Doc?”

  “Oh, it’s got to be going on eight years now.”

  “Missed it by one ounce,” Crystal said.

  “Yeah, but that was before it peed all over the table.”

  We all laughed and while Doc examined the first two pups with easy efficiency, Crystal and I chatted about—what else?—dogs. Doc pronounced them to be golden/lab mixes, between six and seven weeks old, and in pretty good health, considering. He gave the two boys their shots and put them back in the great, but when he set the little female on the table, her legs splayed out from under her and she collapsed, too weak to stand, her chin banging the table top. Doc’s face went grave, and Crystal and I were silent while he completed his examination.

  “What do you think?” I asked quietly.

  “Well, she’s dehydrated,” Doc said, “and running a little fever. I’d like to start her on antibiotics and I.V. fluids. We’ll have to wait and see.”

  “Is she going to die?”

  The voice that spoke at my side startled me, and I spoke more sharply than I had intended. “Melanie, I told you to wait outside.”

  Melanie shrugged, looked at the shivering little puppy cradled in Crystal’s arms. Doc smiled at her. “We’re going to try not to let that happen,” he said.

  I said unhappily, “It isn’t—you don’t think it could be parvo, do you?”

  Parvovirus is an extremely dangerous, often fatal, and highly contagious disease in dogs that can live in the ground where an infected dog has been for up to a year. Most puppies have immunity from their mother’s milk for the first eight weeks or so, and then they are inoculated. But sometimes, when the mother is not inoculated, there is no immunity to pass down.

  Doc said, “That would be unusual this time of year. We see most of our Parvo in the spring.”

  “Could be canine flu,” Melanie volunteered. “That’s pretty bad.”

  I stared at her and she said, “I looked it up on the internet.”

  Doc said, “I’d like to keep the other two overnight just to see if they start showing symptoms, just in case. Why don’t you check back with me tomorrow afternoon?”

  I said, “Okay, thanks.” I hesitated. “I don’t suppose you have any idea where the puppies might have come from do you?”

  “I have an idea,” he said.

  “Lester Stokes’ bitch?” I suggested.

  Melanie’s eyes went wide behind her glasses. “My dad doesn’t allow people to swear in front of me.”

  “It’s not swearing when the
word is used in its proper context,” I told her impatiently. “A female dog is called a bitch. Look it up.”

  Doc tried to hide his amusement. “This is her second litter this year. Every puppy in the first one had demodex; people were bringing them in from all over the county.”

  “How old is she, anyway?”

  “Eight or nine. Pretty little Golden. But too old to be bred that often.”

  I said, “Listen, if I can talk him into getting her spayed, would you give me a break on the surgery?”

  Doc smiled. We had done this kind of thing before. “I’ll do it for the cost of anesthesia. But good luck getting her in here. He makes money on those puppies when they’re purebred.”

  “Thanks, Doc. I’ll check with you tomorrow.”

  “Merry Christmas, Raine.”

  Lester Stokes had a little truck farm not three miles from the vet’s office, and it would have been foolish not to stop by when I was this close—and also while I was still filled with enough righteous indignation to argue him down. So I grabbed a handful of dog biscuits from the jar by on the counter, bundled Melanie back into the car, and tossed Cisco his promised cookie as we took off for the Stokes’ place. The rest of the dog biscuits I stuffed into my coat pocket, which did not make Cisco happy at all. He kept sniffing the air and stretching his head over toward the driver’s side of the car, trying to see what I had done with them. You know that old joke: if you think your dog can’t count, try putting three dog biscuits in your pocket and only giving him two. I see living proof of that every day.

  “We’re just going to make one quick stop,” I told Melanie as I slowed the car and signaled a right turn at a battered rural mailbox.

  Melanie said, “I don’t understand why somebody would throw away a box of sick puppies.”

  I was surprised when I glanced at her and discovered she was not wired to her iPad. I sighed. “I don’t either, honey.”

  The driveway wasn’t very long, and it was lined on either side with the remnants of last year’s garden: dried cornstalks, withered tomato plants, piles of rotting pumpkins. In the off-season Lester made his living doing odd jobs and selling firewood, and the approach to the small wood-frame house at the end of the drive was marred by a big pile of split firewood in the front yard. Beside it was a police car.

  I couldn’t hide my surprise as I pulled in behind the police car, and Cisco could not hide his excitement. He began to pant and paw the window as soon as he caught sight of the blue bubble light. I may have mentioned Buck Lawson is probably his favorite person in the world. “Stay here,” I told Melanie. “Let me see what’s going on.”

  The sound of a barking dog greeted me as I got out of the car, and I saw a white-faced golden retriever, her sagging teats evidence of a newly-weaned litter, lumber over to the gate of a small chain-link dog enclosure. Her barks were desultory and her tail wagged lowly and dispiritedly, and I was torn between rushing to comfort her and greeting the two people who stood beside the wood pile, one of them being my ex-husband. For once, I ignored my instincts—and the dog—and went over to Buck.

  “Hey, Buck,” I said.

  He returned briefly, “Raine.” He did not look happy to see me. “You mind holding on a minute while I talk to Nick?”

  The person he referred to was a teenage boy in a sawdust-sprinkled sweatshirt and work gloves. There was a gas-powered log splitter beside him, and when I walked up he turned to load another log into it. “I already told you, I haven’t seen Ashleigh in a week. I’m sorry about her old man, but everybody knows it was bound to happen sooner or later.”

  Nick. Ashleigh. Something stirred in the back of my brain, but an awful lot had happened in the past few days, and I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  Buck said, “Why do you think that?”

  The boy shrugged without looking at Buck. “He was a mean drunk. He pissed off the wrong person this time.” And there was a note of bitterness in his voice as he pulled the starter cord. The engine sputtered and died. “Somebody that could fight back.”

  I lifted an eyebrow at Buck, and Buck said, “Did he hit Ashleigh, Nick?”

  He shrugged and pulled the starter cord again. “None of my business.”

  Buck said, “I thought you were her boyfriend.”

  Nick pulled the starter cord one more time, ignoring Buck, and suddenly I remembered where I had seen the girl in the photograph in Earl Lewis’s kitchen before. She was the one who had been sobbing in the girl’s bathroom at school yesterday when I went in to change. You’ve got to come get me, Nick, something terrible has happened.

  I said, “Didn’t you talk to her yesterday afternoon?”

  Buck looked at me, and so did Nick.

  I went on, “Didn’t she call you after school and ask you to pick her up? She sounded pretty upset.”

  Nick straightened up, wiped his hands on his dusty jeans, and licked his lips. Buck waited silently.

  “Look,” Nick said, “we hung out a few times, that’s all. She didn’t have much else going on for her, and she was a good enough kid. So she called me to pick her up from school, but I told her I couldn’t. That’s it. I don’t know where she is.” He hesitated. “I hope she’s okay.”

  “So do we,” Buck said. “Look, Nick, four different people said they saw her leave her house late yesterday in a green car. It wasn’t yours?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t have a car. Sometimes I borrow my dad’s truck, but he was out delivering firewood yesterday.”

  Buck said, “Is that where he is now?”

  “Yeah, we got two more loads to get out today. And he’s going to be plenty mad if I don’t get this one split by the time he gets back.”

  I said, “What about your brother? What kind of car does he drive?”

  Again Buck glanced at me and Nick answered impatiently, “A Ford Explorer, red. And he’s not even in town. His wife and he went to her folks in Michigan for Christmas. I told Ashleigh that.”

  Nick’s brother, Keith, worked in the service department of the Ford dealership out on the highway, and his wife was a teller at the bank. I knew that because they had brought their six-month-old Golden to Dog Daze for training classes during the summer, and they had to take turns bringing him depending on who could get off work early. I admired them for their dedication.

  “Some officers stopped by here last night about ten o’clock, looking to talk to you. No one was home.”

  “I went over to Mobley with some guys after the parade to see a movie.”

  “Oh yeah? What’d you see?”

  “That new spaceship comedy. It was pretty good. The aliens were kind of hokey, though.”

  Buck smiled. “I’ll have to check it out. Where were your folks?”

  He shrugged. “My mom’s doing double shifts at the Wal-Mart in Mobley from now till Christmas. Who knows where my dad was?”

  He licked his lips again, looking uneasy. “Look, I’ve got to get this wood split. I’d help you if I could. I don’t want anything bad to happen to Ashleigh.”

  Buck took a card from his pocket and handed it to Nick. “If you think of anybody she might have gone to stay with, or if you hear from her, you call me, okay?”

  Nick took the card and glanced at it. “Yeah, okay, whatever. But–hey!”

  I barely had time to glance around in the direction of his startled gaze before a golden blur came barreling by, almost knocked me off my feet with his speed and flung himself on Buck. “Cisco!” I cried, and lunged for his collar. Buck managed to catch Cisco’s forepaws in mid-leap before they splattered his jacket with paw prints, and I commanded furiously, “Off!”

  Cisco dropped to all fours, but only because Buck was rubbing his ears companionably. “Don’t reward him for that,” I snapped, and caught Cisco’s collar. He was still wearing his seatbelt harness, and when I looked around, sure enough, the culprit who had freed him came sauntering up with her hands in her coat pockets.

  “He wanted to get out,” she explained
matter-of-factly.

  If Melanie had been one of my dogs, the look I gave her would have sent her slinking to her crate. She was, of course, oblivious.

  “Cisco,” I told her in a tone only slightly less sharp than the one had I used with Buck, “doesn’t always have to get what he wants. I told you to stay in the car.”

  “Your phone was ringing.”

  Oh, great. I had completely forgotten to call Miles, and worse, I’d left the phone in the car so that he couldn’t reach me. “It was probably your father. Go call him back and tell him we’re on our way.”

  As usual, she ignored me, gazing at Buck with interest. “Are you a real cop?”

  He smiled at her. “Yes, ma’am. Are you a real princess?”

  She looked confused and wary. “I’m not a princess.”

  “Really? You sure look like one to me. And I’m a real cop.”

  That legendary charm of his even got Melanie to smile. She said, “Is this a crime scene? I’ve never been to a crime scene before.”

  “You still haven’t,” I told her. And to Buck, “This is Melanie, Miles’s daughter. She’s supposed to be waiting in the car.” The last was added with a meaningful glare at Melanie, which she ignored. That seemed to amuse Buck.

  “Pleased to meet you, Melanie,” he said. “I’m Sheriff Buck Lawson.”

  In the background, the poor female Golden behind the chain link started to bark at Cisco, and he pricked up his ears in acknowledgement, reminding me why I had come here. I started to speak to Nick, but he was eyeing Cisco nervously. “Is that a drug dog?” he asked.

  Odd. That was the second time in twenty-four hours I had been asked that question. I drew a breath to reply but Buck turned back to Nick and spoke over me smoothly.

  “How come, Nick? You got drugs around here you’re worried about?”

  He frowned. “No. I just don’t like strange dogs around, that’s all.”

  “Oh, Cisco is a highly trained search dog,” Buck assured him, and I couldn’t help noticing he did not specify what Cisco was trained to search for. He reached down and patted Cisco’s shoulder. Cisco grinned in agreement. “He’s done a lot of work for the department.”