Bushwhacked: Maple Syrup Mysteries Book 2

by Emily James

  I clutched the puppy closer, and she rested her head over my shoulder. With Mark out of my life and Erik slotted into the friend zone, that was as close to a hug as I was going to get. “I guess Craig didn’t kill Paul.”

  “Looks that way.” Erik’s gaze shifted to the side, looking out the window toward where the cruisers sat, and then back to me. “You’re the only one who won’t take this the wrong way because a man’s dead. In a way, I’m relieved. It means Paul probably wasn’t doing the things we were worried he was.”

  I did understand, and it was a relief that Craig’s death meant Paul probably wasn’t kidnapping and killing “dangerous” dogs.

  Unfortunately, his death also meant the real killer was still on the loose, and now they’d taken two lives. But why kill Craig as well? All the theories I’d built crumbled if Craig wasn’t the one who killed Paul.

  I focused my attention back on Erik. Some friend I was. He’d been sharing and I hadn’t been paying attention.

  “I couldn’t believe Paul would target certain dogs. He had a Saint Bernard growing up, and when he talked about what he wanted to do after his discharge, he considered becoming a police officer and joining a K9 unit. He hated animal cruelty of any kind.”

  That left us with more questions than answers once again, the biggest one being how Craig’s and Paul’s deaths were related, apart from them both being committed at the shelter.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Despite a few skeptical glances, Erik didn’t question me about taking the Dane puppy home with me. I guess he’d accepted that, with me, it was sometimes better not to know. Then he wouldn’t have to try to stop me.

  The officer I’d been entrusted to turned out to be Quincey Dornbush, and I convinced him to detour by Slugs, Snails, and Puppydog Tails, the local pet store, so I could buy puppy food. I also got her a purple collar and leash because the color looked pretty against her black and white spots. Besides, I had to have something to walk her with until I located her owner.

  Another officer followed us home with my car.

  Once I got her settled, I paced the length of the house. My fingers itched to pick up my phone and call Mark. Up until yesterday, that’s exactly what I would have done. When I wasn’t looking, he’d somehow become my first call whenever anything interesting happened.

  I could call Ahanti or my mom instead, but Ahanti had a tendency to gloat when she was right, and I didn’t need to hear a good-for-you about Mark. It felt anything but good right now. And my mom still believed that everything was negotiable, including marriage vows. It was amazing my parents had been faithfully and happily married for nearly thirty-five years considering their personalities and approach to life. Apart from that, if my mom found out I’d ended up in the middle of another murder investigation, she’d only ask why I couldn’t have done that at home—meaning Virginia.

  Maybe I didn’t want to talk to anyone after all. Maybe what I needed was to be out in the peace of the woods.

  I made sure the puppy would be okay for a couple of hours and called Russ. He assigned me another section of the sap lines to check, told me where the snowmobile keys were, and warned me to take a walkie-talkie with me. My phone might or might not work depending on where I went in the bush, and if I needed help, I’d want to be able to reach Dave back at the rental shop.

  When I went into the shop for snowshoes, Dave flashed me a thousand-watt grin. “I decided on the motive for my mystery. It was a love triangle. It’s always love, money, or revenge, right? Will you read a couple of pages once I’ve got something written?”

  I agreed, tucked the map Russ had left for me into my utility belt, and hauled the rest of what I’d need out to the snowmobile. Russ had let me drive back the last time we went out, and his instructions came back to me easily.

  I checked the tether and hit the ignition switch. Zipping across the fluffy snow, kicking it up in my wake, the drone of the machine, like a giant hornet, acted as white noise for my brain. I pushed the throttle further and the snowmobile responded. I’d never been able to outrun my problems on my bike, but now I had horsepower underneath me.

  Unfortunately, once I stopped at the location marked on my map, they caught up to me.

  I focused on tracing the powder blue sap lines back toward the main grounds. Not having Russ with me meant I had to mark my progress and go back for the snowmobile. The physical exertion felt good, though.

  As I stopped the snowmobile at the second eighth of my allotted segment. Something about the snow to the left looked odd. I lifted my sunglasses and squinted against the glare of the sun off the snow. If Russ saw me doing it, he’d give me a lecture on snow blindness, but I didn’t plan to leave them off long. I just wanted to see if the shadows played tricks on me.

  I tramped in the direction of the spot. It was a depression like I’d seen the first time out, only much wider. Much too wide, in my opinion, to be a predator catching its prey, but I’d also never spent time in a bush before this week. The fresh snowfall covered the ground in a thick enough layer that any details of blood or footprints had long been covered over.

  I hadn’t shown Russ the original spot. This time I’d take a picture and check with him. Likely it was something natural and innocent, but he’d also said they’d had trouble in the past with teenagers breaking into the old sugar shack and fooling around. If this was more of the same, we’d need to decide whether it was a problem or not and what to do about it.

  I stuffed my mittens in my pocket and dug out my phone. I snapped a photo and moved around the ring for a different angle. The phone rang in my hands.

  I must be in one of the small pockets where I had a signal. Best not to move too far in either direction.

  I flipped the phone around. The number looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

  “This is Nicole Fitzhenry-Dawes.” Now that I wasn’t a lawyer anymore, I could probably answer with my first name only, but old habits and all that.

  “Is this the Nicole from Fair Haven Animal Shelter?” a woman’s voice asked.

  Little lightbulbs went on. This must be the puppy’s owner. My chest tightened. I guess I wouldn’t be keeping her after all. Hopefully her owner liked purple. “That’s right. Are you calling about the Great Dane puppy?”

  “I am, and I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to return your call. My husband and I have been away on vacation.”

  I kicked at a clump of snow with my snowshoe, nearly lost my balance, and grabbed a tree branch. I couldn’t even suggest they were negligent owners now. They had a legitimate reason for not returning my call. She might have even escaped from someone else while they were away.

  “That’s alright. We’re closed today…for maintenance.” A little white lie, but Craig’s death hadn’t been made public yet. I wasn’t about to say there were police combing the shelter for evidence of a murder. And I didn’t have the necessary paperwork to return her to them from my house. “I could meet you there tomorrow if you’d like.”

  “Well,” the woman’s voice suddenly sounded hesitant, “here’s the thing. She disappeared almost a month ago now, and we thought she was gone for good. So we got another dog.”

  I frowned. The puppy only came in the day Paul died. Otherwise Craig would have seen her and logged her into the system. But that was just over a week ago. She was too young to survive on her own outside in the winter for the missing weeks. Despite her size, she was very much still a baby.

  “We really can’t have two dogs.” Her voice sounded embarrassed now, like she’d misinterpreted my silence as censure.

  Quite the opposite. The puppy could be mine now. “Don’t worry. We’ll find her a good and loving home.” I could guarantee that. The timeline discrepancy still niggled at my mind like a sliver, though. “If you don’t mind me asking, how did you lose her?”

  “We didn’t. Someone broke into our house. The police said the thief must have recognized her value and took her to re-sell. That’s why we gave up and moved
on almost immediately.”

  Maybe the dog-napper couldn’t find someone to sell her to and set her loose instead, but Great Danes sold for over $1500. If it were me, I’d have waited longer than a couple of weeks to find a buyer for that kind of money.

  “Thanks for returning my call,” I said.

  We disconnected, and I punched in Mark’s number. He might have a fresh angle on this that I hadn’t thought of.

  I realized what I was doing before I tapped the button to dial. I canceled the call. He probably wouldn’t have answered anyway.

  My cell ringing woke me at 7:30 the next morning. I rolled over and grabbed the phone. My puppy—my puppy—grunted at me. I probably shouldn’t let her keep sleeping in the bed with me. It was cute now while she weighed less than fifty pounds, but once she passed a hundred, it’d be like having a second person with me. A second person with doggie breath.

  “Sorry to call so early,” Erik said. “We’ll be releasing the scene around noon and we’ve run into a problem.”

  Because we needed another problem. I shifted up to a sitting position and ran my tongue over my teeth. “What’s that?”

  “The shelter’s now short-staffed and all the other workers are volunteers. Until the council’s able to hire replacements…”

  I moved my sleepy puppy to the floor and slid my feet into my slippers. “You need me to keep working there.”

  “Do you mind? It’d only be for another week at most.”

  I suppose I owed him for letting me poke into his murder investigation. “No problem. I’ll take Craig’s shift today, and then I’ll look at the schedule and see if anyone else can come in a little extra.”

  I swung back by the pet store for toys, dishes, and a dog bed and was at the shelter by 2:30, giving the police extra time before I showed up. The police cars were gone and the yellow crime scene tape had been removed from the door.

  I spent the next hour making calls to the volunteers and trying to fill the slots for the following week, then I pulled out a copy of the adoption form to fill in for my puppy.

  The front door chime sounded. I brushed fur off my shirt, stepped over the puppy’s sleeping body, and headed for the front.

  The man in the waiting room looked up from his phone, and a jolt shot through my body.

  It was the same man Craig had turned the aggressive dog over to.

  Chapter Sixteen

  My heart beat so hard in my ears that I almost couldn’t hear anything else. What was he doing here, coming through the front door? Given the clandestine nature of what he and Craig had been involved in, it didn’t seem believable that they met openly, especially here. But maybe he didn’t realize Craig was dead and he’d been trying to reach him.

  I had to get a grip. This might be innocent. If it wasn’t, I didn’t want to broadcast more than I already had that I suspected anything.

  You need to learn to control your emotions better, Nicole, my dad’s taunting voice replayed in my head. You let your opposition read you, and you’ll lose.

  I plastered a smile on my face. I didn’t have a Harry Potter Time-Turner, so the best I could do was cover.

  “You surprised me,” I said. “I thought you were my boyfriend. He was supposed to bring me a coffee, and he’s late.” I rolled my eyes. “He probably forgot again.”

  The man’s return smile was buttery smooth and reminded me a bit of a professional poker player—definitely not an artsy type the way I’d originally thought, though a colorful tattoo did peek out from under his collar and up his neck.

  He slid his phone back into his pocket. “I wouldn’t hold it against him. Most of us don’t do it on purpose.”

  My red-alert responses downgraded to yellow. Craig’s death didn’t mean he’d lied to me about why he’d been giving this man aggressive dogs. Craig’s death also didn’t mean that this man was dangerous or involved in the murders in any way. He might be a nice guy trying to do what he could to help animals in need of reconditioning. When I’d worked as a defense attorney, we poked holes in more than one case based on the prosecution presenting things as facts that could be coincidences. Jumping to unfounded conclusions would only give me an ulcer and lead me down rabbit trails that wouldn’t solve this case.

  “How can I help you?” I asked.

  “I lost my dog, and I’m going around to shelters seeing if someone brought her in.”

  Still not condemning evidence, but that answer did feel a bit like trying to force together two puzzle pieces that didn’t quite match. Would this man have a dog of his own apart from the dogs Craig passed along to him?

  I’d handle this and then call Erik to tell him about it as a precaution. “What does your dog look like?”

  “She’s black and white. About forty-five, fifty pounds.”

  Heat rushed into my cheeks at the same time as my hands went hypothermia cold. Only one dog here fit that description. If he meant my puppy, then he’d either bought her from the thief or he was the thief.

  And I was now all out of benefit of the doubt. “I’m not sure—”

  “Why don’t I take a look?” He stepped around me, his phone out again. “That’ll be the quickest and I’m in a hurry. Lots more shelters to visit if she’s not here.”

  I glanced back over my shoulder and craned my neck. If I could get his license plate number for Erik, he’d be easier to track down.

  The front plate holder was empty. Stupid Michigan laws that required only one plate. Who thought that was a good idea anyway?

  I hurried after the man. Had I left the office door open, or had I closed it behind me?

  He stopped in front of the office. “That’s her.”

  I reached the doorway at the same time as he strode toward my puppy. She growled low in her throat and backed under the desk.

  She knew him. And the experience she’d had left her frightened of him. What the heck was I supposed to do now? I could not let him take her. I also couldn’t let him know I thought he was a criminal. Who knew what he’d do then. Craig’s story about giving this guy aggressive dogs to rehabilitate had grown more holes than ancient Swiss cheese.

  The man chuckled and knelt down beside the desk. “She likes to play this game at home too.”

  My lungs felt too sizes too small for my body. “Wait, sir. We have to do release paperwork.”

  Smart, Nicole. That’d buy you about five minutes.

  “But I’m new here, and I’m not sure of exactly what needs to be done. My…” Crap. I couldn’t say manager. If he’d been the one to kill Paul and Craig, he’d know there wasn’t a manager and that I was making this all up. “A senior employee will be in tomorrow. Would you like me to make an appointment for you to come back and get your puppy then?”

  His mouth turned down as the corners. “My fiancée’s been crying every night since she disappeared, and I’m the one who forgot to lock the gate, so she’s not speaking to me. Can you make an exception?”

  Had I not already spoken to the puppy’s real owners, and had I not been the daughter of two master manipulators, I would have fallen for it. My heart would have melted at his desperate need to make it right with his fiancée, and I would have broken the rules to help him.

  But, for better or for worse, I was my father’s daughter and my mother’s. When most kids were watching cartoons, I’d been studying cons. This man had listened to what I’d said before about the boyfriend who forgot my coffee and he knew what angle to take.

  Now we were locked in a chess game. “I’m really sorry, but I’ll lose my job if anyone finds out.”

  He pressed his hands together like he was praying. “What if I take her home just for tonight and bring her back tomorrow to fill in the paperwork? Then you wouldn’t have to get in trouble, and I could make my fiancée happy.”

  Savvy, making it sound like a win-win compromise. I rolled my lips together. “How about I call someone and ask if that’d be okay? For CYA purposes.” I’d actually call Erik and then hope he understood from my
disconnected conversation that I needed him.

  “No, no. That’d be a ton of hassle for you.” He climbed to his feet and swiped at his knees. “I’ll tell her that the puppy’s safe, and I’ll be back to pick the dog up tomorrow.”

  The smile I gave him felt as fake as if I’d painted it on with clown make-up. “I’ll make sure the paperwork is ready for you.”

  He actually waved at me on his way out.

  I watched his car go. My surreptitious attempt to see the back license plate failed as well.

  I locked the door and slumped back against the wall. The end to my time “under cover” couldn’t come too soon. Most people didn’t value their boring lives enough. I’d trade half the money I’d inherited from Uncle Stan for boring right about now.

  I headed back for the office and knelt down next to the desk. My puppy still hunched as far as she could get into the corner, tail wrapped between her legs and ears tucked back against her head.

  I dialed Erik’s number. It went to voice mail. “Give me a call back when you get this. A man came in to the shelter today, and I think he might be involved with Craig and Paul’s murders.”

  None of this made any sense, but my puppy must be part of the key.

  I queued up my caller list and stared at Mark’s number. Wouldn’t it be prudent to brainstorm with someone else? Mark had been my partner in crime-solving last time.

  I tossed my phone into the chair. The farther away it was, the less tempted I’d be. I blew out a puff of air. No more thinking about Mark.

  I peeked under the desk again. The puppy’s tail and ears were no longer crushed to her body, but she showed no signs of coming out. “It’s up to you and me. You want to come out and help me?”

  Her tail gave two tiny thumps and she laid her head down on her front paws.

  “Guess I’m on my own.”

  I stayed where she could see me and tugged my briefcase over. The papers in Paul’s large-dog folder would fall apart if I flipped through them much more, but I couldn’t help thinking that they mattered. Paul set them apart rather than cataloguing them like the others.