Keeping Katie

by Stella Quinn

  She gave her boss a wave as the elevator doors closed and shut him out. After working in the refuge’s fundraising stall at the Summer Festival last weekend, she was looking forward to a quiet weekend at home. Andy meant well but being happily married himself for near-on forty years made him something of an optimist when it came to matters of the human heart.

  Katie rested her head against the cold steel of the elevator wall. Optimism was a quality she’d learned to live without.

  Chapter 4

  Anton balanced his takeout coffee on his laptop case as he opened the door to the local newspaper office. The Cove to Coast Herald occupied the ground floor of a historic, red-brick building, and dust motes spun as sunlight came through the door with him into the dim interior.

  “You there, Danny? Jules?”

  A thud from the back room preceded a mop of gray hair above grass-green reading glasses popping around the inner doorframe. “Anton. Just the person we need. Bring your handsome manly arms this way, would you, pet? We’ve got a crisis unfolding back here.”

  Just the word crisis was enough to get his heartbeat accelerating into an unsteady canter. He took a breath. For a guy who used to make a living off crises and disasters, he should be better at coping by now. “You’re joking, right, Jules?”

  “Sorry, pet, I should have chosen my words better. Just a minor kerfuffle is all…we’ve locked ourselves out of the safe. Wait, is that a cut on your face, Anton Price?”

  “It’s nothing, just a scratch. A brick leapt out at me when I was running last Sunday, and I keep nicking it with my razor. Tell me about the safe.”

  “Oh, well, it’s not too keen to open this morning. Danny’s sure the combination’s written in one of his old diaries, but we’re too short to reach the archive boxes.”

  Anton set his gear down on the desk he used on his weekly excursions to the newspaper office, then headed into the storage room after Julie. An office chair on caster wheels was wedged up against the bank of ancient mahogany box shelves lining the room. Atop the chair was the three-legged stool that was normally tucked into the utility kitchen, and atop that, flailing his arms like a wind turbine, was Danny Pargeter, proprietor and editor of Redwood Cove’s oldest independent newspaper.

  “What in heck are you doing up there, Danny? Step down already; didn’t you turn seventy-five just last month?”

  “Don’t sass me, young feller. There’s folks running for president of this country that are older than me; no one’s telling them to step down.”

  Anton grinned. “We can save political debates for another day, Danny. Here, let me help you get down.” He took a grip on the old man’s arm and helped him make his way back to the floor.

  “Got a few years in me yet, Anton, my boy.”

  “More than a few unless you break your neck doing circus tricks back here.”

  Julie giggled behind him. “I wanted to say that, but I was afraid he’d sack me.”

  “Still might,” grumbled Danny.

  Anton winked at Julie. They both knew Danny would do no such thing. Julie was as much a part of the office as Danny and the dust motes and the ancient Cove to Coast Herald sign hanging above the front door of the building.

  He pulled the stool off the chair and made a mental note to toss it in the dumpster on his way home. Offices which employed senior citizens had no business keeping death traps on the premises. “Okay. What are we looking for? An old diary?”

  He pulled the office chair out of the way and tested the strength of the shelves. Solid as the hundred-year-old mahogany trees they were made from. He climbed up a couple and peered into the upper reaches of the cupboard. Dust as thick as felt covered the surface, an ancient typewriter that a collector would give away their firstborn to acquire, and stacks—literally, stacks—of diaries. Black marker decorated the spines with dates: 2019, 2016…1997…he looked across the row and found 1982, 1967…was that 1956?

  “I wrote the combination in the front page the year I got the safe, isn’t that right, Julie?”

  “Yes, pet. So as we’d have it safe.”

  Anton hung from the shelving. “Any clues as to what year that was? You’ve got more diaries up here than the local library has books, Danny. I can’t believe you’ve kept them all.”

  Danny’s chest puffed out like a bantam’s. “For my memoirs.”

  “Really?” He chuckled. Danny was such an old sweetheart; Anton couldn’t imagine his memoirs having any of the drama and scandal modern memoirs seemed to require.

  “I’ve got stories you wouldn’t believe, son.”

  Anton’s smile faded. He would have loved to have heard those stories once…maybe even have used them for inspiration for one of his thriller novels.

  Not anymore. The day the world’s news headlines started resembling the plot of one of his bestselling books was the day stories died. For him, anyway.

  He felt his biceps starting to burn. “Give me a hint which decade you think it was, and I can start passing some of these down.”

  Danny and Julie conferred below him. “The nineties,” said Julie.

  “As recently as that?” said Danny.

  “The nineties weren’t recent,” said Anton. “The twenty-twenties won’t be recent soon, either, if you don’t decide real quick. Come on, even my handsome manly arms can’t keep me perched here forever.”

  “Youngsters today,” grumbled Danny. “So impatient.”

  He grinned. “I’m not that young.” Long past the big three-zero, but four-zero wasn’t quite around the corner…but who was counting? Years didn’t matter anymore, the same way deadlines didn’t and writing books didn’t. “Okay, I’m passing down the diaries from the nineties, then I’m climbing down. I’ll bring a ladder from home if we need to get the rest of these, okay?”

  “Pass ‘em down, son.”

  He pulled a few books out of the stack, feeling the decades-old dust tickle his nose, and dropped them down.

  “Any luck?” he said to Danny and Julie, who spread them open across the table and engrossed themselves in the entries.

  They muttered something unintelligible, so he decided to listen to his shrieking biceps and climb down. “Let me know if you want me to bring my ladder. I’m heading out front to typeset next week’s Page Seventeen into the digital file.”

  “Oh, look there,” Julie was saying, snuggled into Danny’s shoulder. “May 1996. We did the feature on that juvenile humpback whale who beached himself, and all the residents helped push him out to sea.”

  Anton contemplated looking over their shoulders and joining them on their trip down memory lane, but hesitated. He had the crossword to set and his other columns to finish. Memory lane could wait.

  “Here’s an old one,” he heard Danny murmur. “Look at that picture…has to be a young Carol Graves. This’ll be the story we ran when she nearly drowned. That was an issue to remember.”

  “Saved by a dog,” Julia said.

  He made his way back out front to his desk, opened his laptop, and logged into the design software. A dog hadn’t been around when he’d needed saving from panic attacks, but crosswords had. And peace and quiet, and his therapist. He only hoped that had been enough. He took a swig from his coffee and grimaced. Eesh. He’d spent so long swinging from the shelves in the back room that it had grown cold.

  No matter. He could microwave it later. It wasn’t as though he had anything else to do.

  Chapter 5

  Katie glanced at her watch as she pulled into the timber cottage she and her sister had grown up in. She had time for a quick change into her training gear, and then she would be on her way.

  Geraniums bloomed on either side of the gravel drive, so red they ought to be little pots of cheerfulness, but all they did was remind her how much she missed her uncle.

  His geraniums bloomed, his whimsical wind chime swung from the redwood by the gate, made from shells and driftwood he’d collected from the nearby beach.

  She sighed. A year he’d
been gone, and she still thought of the house as his.

  A deep woof reached her ears as she opened the door of her rusty old hatchback. Okay, that was not Uncle Roly’s. He had been strictly a cat guy.

  “Rosie girl,” she called.

  She didn’t have long to wait. The massive retriever galloped around the corner of the house from the back yard where she liked to spend her alone time digging this-is-what-happens-when-you-leave-me holes beneath the hibiscus hedge.

  “There’s my favorite friend ever,” Katie said, as Rose cleared the low front fence in a graceful leap. She’d tried to train her out of leaping fences in a single bound, she really had, but Rosie loved jumping. If she’d had longer legs and a mane, Katie could have entered her in the local pony show jumping competition.

  Besides, Rose only ever jumped the front fence to welcome her home, and she didn’t have the heart to deny herself the little rush of being so, so welcomed. At least Rose’s other habits weren’t so problematic: collecting the letters from the mailbox and taking Katie’s socks out of her sneakers and lining them up like pastel snails in front of the washing machine. Rose loved helping almost as much as she loved jumping.

  Katie took a step back as Rosie thrust her long golden muzzle into the pocket of her Redwood Cove Airport jacket. “Sorry, Rose Petal, there’s no liver treats in there. But give me ten minutes to change, and we’ll go on an adventure, all right?”

  Rosie scampered about her like a spring lamb, so she had to assume that, yes, anything she suggested would be totally all right.

  Rosie was that kind of a dog: chill, enthusiastic, and always ready to go.

  Which was why, Katie thought as Rose pulled the mail from the letterbox and followed her up the wide plank steps onto the porch, she made the perfect therapy dog for the inmates of Heartbreak Row at the Gold Coast Dog Refuge.

  She pushed her key into the lock and opened the door, standing back so Rosie could rocket in ahead of her. The ghost of sixty years of Uncle Roly’s cat ownership must linger in some way obvious only to dogs, because, as always, Rosie dumped the mail on the sofa and then gave the polished floorboards and colorful rugs a thorough sniff.

  She sifted through the envelopes while Rose finished her cat patrol. Utilities bill, ugh, that could be opened later. Ditto for the property taxes. Who knew inheriting half a house could prove to be so expensive? She flipped through to the final envelope in her hands and smiled.

  Aha. The one she’d been waiting for, pale blue with a messy scrawl looping through her name and address on the front. Her sister worked as a loans officer for SantaCal Bank, but in her spare time—because, hey, over-achiever—Veronica flipped houses for a living. Her weekends were usually spent ripping out drywall or painting newel posts, which left little time for driving ninety minutes to visit her sister in Redwood Cove.

  The letters were Vee’s way of staying connected, and, because Vee was Vee, she liked to turn them into a competition. School sports? Veronica was always on the A team, Katie on the B team. Charades at Thanksgiving? Veronica was entertaining the crowd with a flawless mime of every character in Shrek, while Katie was still deciding how many fingers she needed to wave in the air for her two-syllable movie title.

  A decade and a half later, crosswords were the latest form of competitive torture Vee had chosen to inflict on her, a game about as much fun as thumbscrews for the laterally challenged, as Katie was. Where Vee was all impulse and creativity, Katie was the sensible one. The one who relied on routine and logic.

  She looked down at Rosie before cracking the seal on the envelope. “I suck at games.”

  Rosie woofed agreeably.

  “Thanks for the support, my sweet.”

  Katie pulled the letter from the envelope and the ripped-out Page Seventeen from the local paper that her sister expected her to entertain herself with. Ha! The puzzle page? She had no interest in that at all, but the weekly old-school letter from Vee, filled with gossip and chitchat? That, she loved.

  She dropped the newspaper page to the counter along with the other junk mail and scanned the letter.

  Hey there, sis! Here’s your Page Seventeen for the week. This week’s clue is a tricky anagram. You’ll crack this one, I know you will. Five across…you know what to do!

  Hmm. Optimistic thinking, but still. Maybe this week she would crack it.

  She looked at the grid of black and white newsprint. “Let’s see, five across,” she muttered, scanning the list of clues next to the crossword box. Aha.

  “Listen to this, Rosie. Five across, eight letters: Bring flowers to the migraine sufferer? Almost. That mean anything at all to you?”

  Rosie was standing by the coat stand at the front door where her lead and harness were dangling from an ornate brass hook. Her expression clearly indicated she had no such time for tomfoolery, let’s get outside already.

  Katie grinned at her dog. “Saved me again, Rose. Great idea, we can torture ourselves later. Let’s get going.”

  She tossed her sister’s letter and newspaper page onto the counter with her airport I.D. lanyard. She had all evening to read it…all weekend, even...because there was no chance she was following Andy’s advice and heading out for some hipster spritzer and opening herself up to another bout of heartbreak. No chance at all.

  The road out to the refuge where she and Rosie volunteered each week led away from the coast. As the tidy houses and prettily hedged sidewalks of Redwood Cove thinned behind them, the industrial precinct took over. Cinder block warehouses towered over dusty lots filled with long-haul trucks and busy workers on forklifts. The animal refuge ran on a budget so small, it was struggling to find a decent place to operate from.

  For months now, it had been tucked into the back of a distribution warehouse for Dorma Valley Winery, who had loaned them the space for free. These poor pups didn’t have prairie grass to roll on or sea breeze to move through their fur.

  They were living on borrowed time, and even the hard work of the refuge volunteers couldn’t quite snuff out the air of desperation.

  And nowhere at the refuge was quite as desperate as the row of kennels set within a double fence line of six-foot chain mesh. Heartbreak Row, Katie called it. And that was where she and Rosie were headed.

  Ramon waved her in through the gate, and she marveled again at how lucky the refuge was to have him on the team. He might look like he’d given up a career in pro-wrestling to become a volunteer, but he was a public relations dynamo who had done wonders for the refuge out of the old trailer they used as headquarters.

  “Wassup, Katie?” he said. “Rose, my girl, high five.”

  Rosie sat up in the passenger seat of Katie’s hatchback as high as her travel harness would allow. High five was a trick she’d mastered as a pup, and it never failed to extract a liver treat from Ramon.

  “We’re working with Prince again today, Ramon.”

  “No problem. You need me to come give you a hand, hit the alarm button, same as always.”

  “Will do.”

  She let out the clutch, and her ancient muffler belched as she took off through the cement and kennel maze to the visitor’s parking lot. Ramon spent a lot of time out here, way more than her. She wondered if his friends called him unsociable, too.

  Parking, she let Rose out of the car and headed deeper into the refuge grounds. Prince was a two-year-old spaniel-Labrador cross who had been abandoned by his owners. After a re-homing trial that had ended in an elderly lady being dragged off her feet when he lunged on the lead to attack another dog, Prince had been brought to the refuge and housed in the row of isolation kennels they used for the dogs suffering from fear aggression.

  That’s where Katie and Rose came in. If they could socialize Prince to overcome his instinctual fight response, he’d have a future. If they failed?

  Katie blew out a breath. She didn’t like to think about what happened on the rare times they failed. Some dogs were beyond her skill set to train. Even cute-as-pie fluffy black heartbreaker
s like Prince.

  Before they reached Heartbreak Row, she unclipped Rose’s lead and tucked it into her backpack. Rose always did as she was told in training sessions, and Prince didn’t respond well to leads. “Time for work, Rose,” she said to her dog, who knew the difference between being on-duty and off.

  On-duty meant being calm, and still, and waiting for hand signals.

  Off-duty meant leaping over front fences and digging fun holes in Uncle Roly’s back garden.

  Prince started barking like a maniac and throwing himself at the gate of his kennel as soon he set eyes on Rose, which was his standard response to any four-legged threat.

  “Hey, there, buddy,” she said, in the calm, low voice she used for dog training.

  Prince took his eyes off Rose for a second, long enough to accept a liver treat from her hand and be rewarded for being a good boy, then his hackles were back up and he was barking again.

  “We’re here to do some work, Prince. It’ll be fun, just wait and see.”

  She turned to Rose and directed her to enter the large training enclosure, where they could work with Prince without worrying about other dogs coming in or Prince getting out. She waited until Rose had assumed her position at the far end of the yard, then she slipped into Prince’s kennel and clipped his lead to his collar.

  “Okay, Prince,” she said.

  He was happy to see her, of that there was no doubt. He loved being petted, and he sniffed her knees and hands and wagged his tail. She led him into the training yard, and the second he laid eyes on Rose, the frantic barking started up again, accompanied by him throwing himself about at the end of his lead like a marlin on the end of a fishing line.

  “I know, buddy. But we’re going to walk past her and around her again and again and again until you’ve worked out she’s not a threat.”

  She clicked at him under her tongue and began walking at a fast clip around the yard. Every time he looked up at her, she slipped him a liver treat, every time he was quiet, she slipped him a liver treat…and finally, after a dozen laps or more, his frantic tugging settled down and his eyes stopped rolling in his head.