The Case of the Disappearing Dogs

by David Lewman

  Mr. Webster was quiet for a minute. Then he said, “Okay, you got me.”

  Ben asked, “So you didn’t find Molly by Jackson’s Pond?”

  “No,” he said.

  Hannah felt a flash of anger. If there had been a window in the office, tact would have flown right out of it.

  “You lied to us!” she cried. “Did you steal my dog?”

  Mr. Webster looked shocked at Hannah’s accusation. “No!” he said vehemently. “I would never steal anything! I found your dog, remembered who she belonged to, and returned her to you, safe and sound.”

  “Then why did you lie about where you found her?” Hannah pressed.

  Mr. Webster sighed and looked embarrassed. “Fine,” he said. “I didn’t tell you where I found your dog, because I really shouldn’t have been there.”

  “Where did you find Molly?” Ben asked.

  “Pine Field,” he said.

  “Pine Field?” Corey repeated, puzzled. “I used to play soccer there when I was a kid. Why shouldn’t you have been there?”

  Mr. Webster puffed out his cheeks and then blew air through his lips. Finally, he said, “Because I was spying.”

  “Spying?” Hannah asked. “On whom?”

  “Look,” he said. “I love my daughter. And my daughter loves soccer. So I went down to Pine Field to spy on the team my daughter’s team is going to be playing this weekend. I thought maybe I could gather some information that would be useful to her. And then I spotted your dog. Well, naturally I wanted to return Molly to her owner, but I was embarrassed about being at Pine Field to spy on a rival soccer team. It sounds silly. I’m embarrassed saying it now. So I just changed the location of where I found her. There aren’t any soccer practices at Jackson’s Pond. I didn’t think a little white lie would hurt anybody.”

  The Club CSI members felt a little embarrassed themselves. They’d insisted on getting the truth from this man, but the truth didn’t have anything to do with Molly’s kidnapping.

  “Thanks for telling us the truth, Mr. Webster,” Ben said.

  “Yeah, we’re sorry we embarrassed you,” Hannah chimed in. “I just really want to know what happened to Molly.”

  “And you don’t have to feel ashamed about spying on a rival team,” Corey said. “I’ve played on lots of teams, and the coaches are always checking out the other teams, trying to figure out their plays.”

  Mr. Webster stood up and led the three friends back through the kitchen to the front door of the restaurant. “Actually,” he said, “I feel better. I’m glad you kids got me to tell the truth.”

  “In that case,” Corey said, “I’m sure you won’t mind answering one more question. What size shoe do you wear?”

  Mr. Webster looked confused. “Eleven and a half. Why do you ask?”

  “No reason,” Corey said. “See you next time!”

  As they walked out of Webster’s restaurant, Ben asked Corey, “Didn’t you believe Mr. Webster’s story?”

  “Oh, yeah, absolutely,” Corey said. “He seemed totally believable.”

  “Then why did you ask him his shoe size?” Hannah asked.

  Corey grinned. “Because it never hurts to be superthorough.”

  Chapter 15

  As long as we’re being superthorough, maybe we should go over to Pine Field,” Ben suggested.

  “What for?” Corey asked. “To spy on a soccer team?”

  “I bet I know why,” Hannah said as they waited for the stoplight to turn green. “To pick up a soil sample.”

  “Right,” Ben said. “If the soil at Pine Field matches the soil from Molly’s muddy paws, that’ll support Mr. Webster’s story.”

  The light changed. The three friends crossed the street.

  “Okay,” Corey said. “But I’m sure he was telling the truth this time. It embarrassed him to admit he’d been spying on a soccer team. Also, I’d just like to mention that it’s a long walk from here to Pine Field.”

  Hannah laughed. “So that’s the real reason you don’t want to be superthorough this time—the long walk.”

  “But I thought your basketball coach wanted you to get lots of conditioning,” Ben pointed out.

  “Yeah, well, Coach wants me to cut back on sugar, too, but that’s not happening either,” Corey said. “Besides, walking isn’t conditioning. Running is conditioning.”

  “Do you want to run?” Hannah asked.

  “All the way to Pine Field?” Corey asked. “No way!”

  They walked another block. Then Hannah had an idea.

  “Let’s stop off at my house and get Molly,” she said. “Maybe she’ll pick up a scent or lead us to something.”

  “Your house is kind of out of the way,” Corey protested.

  “We could drop off our backpacks,” Hannah suggested. “And maybe grab a snack . . .”

  “Your house it is,” Corey agreed.

  Pine Field was more than just a field with pine trees around it. Maybe that’s what it had started out as, but now it was a big park with a soccer field, a baseball diamond, and tennis courts.

  Molly tugged on her leash when she saw the park. She wanted to run—to jump over obstacles, dash through tunnels, and weave around poles.

  Hannah knew what Molly wanted. And secretly, Hannah wanted that too. She would’ve loved to do some agility training with her dog in the park. But that’s not why they were there.

  “Sorry, Molly,” Hannah apologized. “No training today. But if you’d like to show us how you ended up here, that’d be great.”

  “Instead of just understanding two hundred words, it’d be real helpful if Molly could say two hundred words,” Corey said.

  “Let’s get that soil sample,” Ben replied.

  “Where should we get it?” Hannah asked. “It’s a pretty big park.”

  “Well, Mr. Webster said he was watching a soccer team. . . .” Ben recalled.

  “Spying on a soccer team,” Corey corrected.

  “So, why don’t we collect the soil sample near the soccer field?” Ben suggested.

  “Good idea,” Hannah agreed. “Come on, Molly. Let’s run.”

  As soon as she heard the word “run,” Molly took off, dragging Hannah behind her. Hannah had to sprint to keep up, and she couldn’t sprint forever. Luckily, the soccer field was nearby.

  Corey and Ben trotted to the soccer field. “Guess I’m getting that conditioning after all,” Corey said.

  Ben knelt down and scooped a few spoonfuls of dirt into a small jar. Since they’d formed Club CSI, he’d started carrying plastic bags, gloves, spoons, and small glass jars in his backpack at all times. He never knew when he might encounter important evidence. (Which was why he hadn’t dropped off his backpack at Hannah’s house, though he’d unloaded a couple of his heaviest textbooks.)

  Ben dug through his backpack and pulled out two jars of dirt. He read their labels and stuck one back into the pack. The jar he kept was full of the mud Hannah had collected from Molly’s paws.

  Ben held up the two jars to the sunlight, comparing their color. Hannah and Corey looked too. Molly sniffed the ground.

  “The color seems to match,” Ben said. “When we get back to the forensic lab, we could do another density gradient tube analysis. But just based on appearance, it looks as though the dirt from Molly’s paws matches the dirt here at Pine Field.”

  “So Mr. Webster was telling the truth,” Hannah said.

  “Told you so,” Corey said smugly.

  “You were the one who asked him his shoe size!” Ben exclaimed.

  “Superthorough,” Corey replied with a smile.

  They decided to let Molly lead them around, to see if she had anything to show them. But she just wandered the soccer field, happily sniffing the ground.

  Eventually, Molly took them away from the soccer field, toward the bathrooms and water fountains. There was also a kiosk where you could put up signs and posters.

  “Isn’t that Ryan?” Corey asked.

  Ryan was a r
ed-haired guy in their grade at Woodlands Junior High School. He was putting up a hand-lettered poster. As they got closer, they could see what the poster said: MISSING DOG.

  That seemed like a pretty big coincidence.

  Club CSI hurried over to the kiosk. “Hi, Ryan!” Corey said, waving.

  Ryan turned around. He recognized his three schoolmates. “Hi,” he said. Then he pointed to the poster. “You haven’t seen my dog, Pepper, have you?”

  They shook their heads. “I’m sorry your dog’s missing,” Hannah said.

  “Thanks,” Ryan said. “I really miss him.”

  “I know how you feel,” she replied. “Molly here just disappeared too.”

  Molly sat at Ryan’s feet. He patted her head. “How’d you get her back? The pound?”

  “No, a neighbor of ours found her at Pine Field and brought her to our house,” Hannah explained. “But we think someone else dognapped her.”

  “Dognapped her?” Ryan repeated. “That’s terrible.” Then he looked more closely at Molly. “Hey, wait a minute. I recognize this dog. You won O’Brien’s contest last weekend!”

  “How do you know that?” Hannah asked.

  “I was in the contest too. I mean, Pepper was. We didn’t win, but he did great.”

  So, Ryan’s missing dog was in the contest too. That was way too big of a coincidence.

  “Pepper played a little bit with your dog,” Ryan said, remembering. “But there was another dog he really liked—a little terrier. I think I heard her owner call her Princess.”

  Hannah looked at the picture of Pepper on Ryan’s poster. He was kind of a plain-looking brown dog. She didn’t remember him, but during the contest, she was too busy concentrating on Molly to notice all the contestants.

  “Pepper’s brown all over?” Hannah asked.

  “Except for his chest,” Ryan said. “He’s got a white patch in the shape of a pepper shaker. That’s why we named him Pepper.”

  Corey looked puzzled. “Isn’t a pepper shaker the same shape as a salt shaker?”

  “Yeah,” Ryan agreed. “But it’d be weird to call your dog Salt.”

  “True,” Corey said. He tried it out, calling, “Here, Salt! Come, Salt! That’s a good boy, Salt!”

  Ben wanted to get back to the specifics of the case at hand. “What were the circumstances of Pepper’s disappearance?” he asked.

  Corey thought Ben sounded a little too formal, like he was a police detective or a lawyer in a courtroom. But Ryan didn’t seem to mind at all. He wanted to talk about his dog’s disappearance.

  “Yesterday afternoon, I let Pepper out into the backyard to do his business,” Ryan said.

  “Your dog has his own business?” Corey asked. “Oh, wait. I get it.”

  “He likes to be outside, so I went upstairs to my room to play video games.”

  “Which game?” Corey asked.

  “Last Combat.”

  “Awesome game,” Corey said, nodding.

  “How long was Pepper out in the backyard?” Hannah asked, steering the conversation back on track.

  “Only about half an hour,” Ryan said. “There’s a bell by our back door that Pepper can jump up and ring when he wants to come back in. He’s really smart.”

  Hannah smiled and nodded.

  “When I didn’t hear the bell ring after half an hour, I decided to go down and check on him,” he continued. “I went out into the backyard, and he was gone. I went all around the neighborhood calling his name, but I never found him. I don’t know how he ran so far in such a short time. He is fast, though.”

  “Maybe he didn’t run,” Hannah murmured.

  “What do you mean?” Ryan asked, frowning.

  “Would you mind if we took a look at your backyard?” Ben wondered.

  “Not at all,” Ryan said.

  “Right now?” Corey asked.

  “Sure,” Ryan said. “Let’s go.”

  Chapter 16

  It turned out that Ryan lived close to Hannah, so they dropped off Molly at home on their way to Ryan’s house.

  Ryan’s family lived in a small, white, two-story house. As the four middle schoolers made their way up the front walkway, Hannah noticed one of the A Dog Lives Here stickers from the contest in the window.

  They hurried through the house and out the back door into the yard. There was a high wooden fence around the backyard.

  “Could Pepper have jumped over the fence?” Ben asked.

  “Or dug under it?” Corey added.

  Ryan shook his head. “No way,” he said. “Pepper’s a good jumper, but he can’t jump that high. And I looked all around the fence to see if he’d tunneled under it, but he hadn’t. See for yourself.”

  Corey, Ben, and Hannah walked along the fence looking for holes in the ground or gaps between the boards. There weren’t any. The fence was in good shape.

  “When I came out to look for Pepper, the back gate was open,” Ryan said.

  The four of them went to examine the gate carefully.

  “And you’re sure the gate was closed when you let Pepper out into the backyard?” Ben asked.

  “Positive,” Ryan said firmly. “I’m real careful about that.”

  Hannah couldn’t help but be reminded of when her family had asked her if perhaps she had accidentally left their back gate open. “Was the gate locked?” she asked gently.

  “No,” Ryan said. “We don’t have a lock on the gate. Maybe we should. I’m thinking of asking my parents to get one, so we can lock Pepper in from now on. After he comes back. If he comes back.” As he said the last sentence, Ryan’s face clouded over.

  Hannah touched Ryan’s arm. “Don’t worry,” she said. “He’ll be back.”

  Ben had opened the gate and was looking at the other side of it, the side facing the alley. He examined the whole gate. The last part he checked was the edge with the latch on it. He started at the top and then worked his way toward the bottom.

  He spotted something.

  There was a tiny piece of red fabric stuck to the gate. Ben pulled on his rubber gloves, pried the red scrap off the wood, and put it into a plastic evidence bag.

  He proudly held up the bag to show the others. “Look at this,” he said.

  Hannah, Corey, and Ryan gathered around.

  “What is it?” Ryan asked.

  “Looks like a little piece of red cloth,” Corey said. “Pepper wasn’t wearing anything when he disappeared, was he?”

  “Just his collar,” Ryan answered. “And it was black leather, not red cloth.”

  Ben peered through the plastic bag at the evidence. “One edge of the cloth is jagged. It looks as though maybe the gate ripped this fabric from a piece of red clothing as someone rushed through the gate.”

  Hannah suddenly remembered something and snapped her fingers. “Lauren,” she said. “She’s always wearing her red high-school sweatshirt.”

  “Yes,” Ben said slowly. “But lots of people wear red.”

  “True, but she was already a suspect,” Hannah said. “Remember how nasty she was about Molly?”

  “Suspect?” Ryan said. “Suspect of what?”

  “Dognapping,” Corey said.

  “You mean you think this Lauren is stealing dogs?” Ryan said, getting angry. “My dog? Who is she? I want to talk to her.”

  Ben felt as though Club CSI was losing control of their own investigation. “Hold on,” he said. “We don’t know for sure Lauren’s done anything wrong at all. We need to investigate more.”

  “I just want my dog back,” Ryan said. “The sooner the better.”

  “We know,” Hannah said reassuringly. “And the minute we find out anything about where your dog is, we’ll let you know.”

  Ryan thanked them and gave them his phone number. As they walked away from his house, the three friends discussed what to do next.

  “I’m just not sure we have enough evidence that we can confront Lauren,” Ben said.

  “Where do they sell those sweatshir
ts for the high school?” Corey asked.

  “I think they have them at Werner’s,” Hannah said. Werner’s was the oldest clothing store in town. “Why?”

  “I was just thinking we could compare the color of the fabric piece to the color of one of those sweatshirts,” Corey said.

  “Again with the color,” Ben said, smiling.

  “I think that’s a really good idea,” Hannah said. “You’d be surprised how many shades of red there are in clothing.”

  “Really?” Ben said. “I thought red was red.”

  “No,” Hannah said. “If we can perfectly match the scrap of fabric to one of those sweatshirts, that’ll be an important piece of forensic evidence.”

  They turned a corner, heading toward Werner’s.

  At Werner’s a smartly dressed young woman asked, “May I help you?”

  “Do you have Woodlands High School’s hooded sweatshirts?” Hannah asked.

  “We certainly do,” the saleswoman said cheerfully. “In that far corner. Follow me.”

  As they made their way past displays of shirts, pants, and dresses, Ben asked, “Does the clothing manufacturer ever change the shade of red the sweatshirts come in?”

  “Oh no,” the saleswoman said. “They’re very consistent, because the color of the sweatshirts has to match the school’s colors exactly.”

  They arrived at a display of Woodlands High School apparel for girls. Several styles of sweatshirts hung on racks—all the same shade of red.

  “Here we are,” the saleswoman announced brightly. “May I help you find a particular size?”

  “No, thank you,” Hannah said politely. “We’ll browse around a bit and look for you if we need you.”

  “That’s fine,” she said, smiling. “I should be right over there.” She pointed to a counter with a cash register.

  The woman walked away. As soon as she was gone, Ben pulled the plastic bag with the red fabric sample out of his backpack.

  He held it up against a hooded sweatshirt, like the one they’d seen Lauren wearing both times they’d run into her with Princess.

  “I’d say that’s a definite match,” Corey said. “But I’m no expert on shades of red. I defer to Hannah’s superior sense of color.”