by Paula Munier
Gil shrugged.
“I guess it’s up to Susie Bear. Anything in there we can use as a scent article? A shirt or a pair of socks would be good.”
The ranger disappeared back into the tent, re-emerging momentarily, waving a gray wool beanie. “How about a hat?”
“That’ll do.” Troy reached for the cap. Susie Bear swatted her tail hard against the snow as he held it out for her to smell. She knew the game was afoot.
“Show time.” Gil laughed.
The big black dog buried her snout in the fine merino wool, sniffing and snuffling and snorting. There was nothing subtle about Susie Bear. She snorted again, looking up from the beanie to Troy. Waiting for him to say the magic word.
“Search,” he said.
The Newfie dog jigged, acknowledging her love of her job, and then jogged away through the trees, nose down.
“Allons-y!” said Gil with another laugh.
And they were off.
* * *
AN HOUR LATER, Susie Bear found him. Or what was left of the dead body they assumed was Colby. Troy wasn’t sure if she’d followed the scent of the live Colby to the crime scene or whether she’d been drawn by the smell of the cadaver. Or both.
Either way, Colby was dead. And practically naked, except for his socks. Scavengers had been feasting on his corpse for a while. But enough of the man remained to tell that his death had not been an accident.
Gil pointed to the caved-in side of his head. “Looks like blunt force trauma.”
“Yeah.” Troy looked around the small glen where Colby had set up his camera. The camera was gone, but the tripod had been knocked to the ground in what looked like a scuffle by the faint confusion of marks in the snow. “Whoever killed him took the camera.”
“And his clothes.” Gil shook his head. “I mean, why leave his socks?”
“He must not have needed them.”
“Is that what your Mercy would say?” He pronounced Mercy as if it were the French word merci. He always did this, and it always bothered Troy.
He looked away from the ranger. He did not want to talk about Mercy Carr.
“I get it. She is still not speaking to you. You need to do something about that, man.”
Troy checked his cell. No signal. The state couldn’t afford sat phones, not that they always worked so deep in the forest anyway. They were way off grid up here. “You go on down and call it in. I’ll wait here with Susie Bear. Keep the critters at bay.”
“Leaving me to deal with Harrington.”
Detective Kai Harrington was the head of the Major Crime Unit. He was not a big fan of either Troy or Susie Bear.
“We’re in a national forest. Your jurisdiction, not mine.”
“Yeah, like Harrington will honor that.”
“I’m just a fish cop.” Troy grinned. “Not my problem.”
“In your dreams.” Gil grinned back, tapping his brow in a quick salute. “While I am gone, you can tape up the crime scene. And think about what you can do to get Mercy back. Grand gesture, mon ami. Women love a grand gesture.”
The ranger stomped away, snowshoes clicking. Troy and Susie Bear watched him disappear into the gloom, swallowed up by snow and trees.
“Grand gesture,” he repeated to the Newfie. “Whatever that means.”
She thumped her tail and tilted her big pumpkin head up at him. As if to say that she knew exactly what that meant.
And that he should, too.
CHAPTER THREE
“Who’s this?” Patience greeted Mercy and the dogs at the door of the big Victorian on Route 7, which served double duty as her home and veterinary clinic. She regarded the golden retriever with a compassionate vet’s eye. Mercy knew she cared for a lot of goldens in her practice, and that she was very fond of the breed.
“This is Sunny, Pitts’ dog.”
“Seriously? You stole his dog?” Her grandmother hustled Mercy and the dogs into the house as if she were concealing stolen property.
“I didn’t steal her.”
They followed Patience into the entry and past the living room with its window seat crowded with sleeping rescue cats of every color and size. On into the kitchen, one of Mercy’s very favorite places. Her grandmother was a dedicated amateur chef who’d modeled her warm and welcoming kitchen after those in Provence where she studied the art of cooking for a week every summer. With its large windows and deep yellow walls, gleaming copper pots and pans and colorful pottery, the space made Mercy feel like she was in one of Van Gogh’s sunflower paintings.
The best part was the big white marble-topped island, where there was always a freshly baked cake under glass perched on an antique cobalt-blue stand. She pulled a stool up to the island, happy to see that today’s cake was a cinnamon buttermilk coffee cake, known to everyone who’d ever tasted it as The Best Coffee Cake in the World.
“We’ll have tea and cake, and you can tell me how you ended up with that man’s dog.” Patience filled two cerulean bowls with water and placed them on the floor in the corner. She treated both Elvis and Sunny to a pat and a peanut butter doggie biscuit from her ever-present fanny pack full of treats before flipping on the electric teapot.
Mercy grabbed a blue-and-white dessert plate from the open shelves gracing the yellow walls and helped herself to a generous piece of coffee cake. She watched her grandmother as she steeped the tea, the winter sun shining through the windows illuminating her neat silver-blond head. Elvis and Sunny sprawled in their corner, their eyes on Patience, too. Hoping for another cookie. They’d probably get it.
Patience handed her a bright orange mug full of steaming spicy chai. “Let’s hear it.”
“Pitts asked me to take her.”
“Why would he do that? He doesn’t know you.”
“He’s dying, and he doesn’t trust his sister to take care of her. I guess he saw Elvis and decided Sunny was better off with me.” Mercy pinched off another bit of coffee cake and popped into her mouth. Heaven.
“What did the sister say?”
“Said she was allergic to dogs. And would be taking her back to North Carolina to find her a ‘forever home.’” Mercy used her fingers to indicate the quote marks.
“More like ‘forever dead.’” Patience was vehemently opposed to kill shelters, volunteering her services for any animals rescued from them.
“He practically begged me.”
“I’m surprised she came so quietly.” She glanced over at the golden retriever, who’d given up on more treats and curled up for a nap.
“She didn’t.” Mercy told her about the long, noisy ride home with the unhappy dog.
“You did the right thing. I’ll do a quick check on her before you go home.” Her grandmother gave her an amused look. “Getting kind of crowded at your cabin.”
Mercy had taken in a teenage mother and her baby girl last summer when it became clear they had nowhere else to go. There was also the kitten they’d rescued from a crime scene at Elvis’s insistence earlier that year. And now this retriever. “Let’s hope she likes cats.”
“Goldens are usually good with cats,” said Patience. “If she’s not, or if you just think it’s too much to take on, I can ask around. There’s always someone looking to adopt a sweet girl like Sunny.”
“Thanks. But let’s see how it goes first.” Mercy believed that she was somehow meant to have Sunny. Just like she was somehow meant to have her grandfather’s case files.
“Okay. But you know you don’t owe that man a thing.” Patience’s voice took on a sharp edge. “What did he want, anyway?”
“He didn’t say much. He couldn’t say much.” She told her grandmother about the boxes labeled BETH KILGORE, and the dying deputy’s plea that she “find the girl.”
“I should have known. That case haunted him.”
“You remember it?”
“Of course.” Patience sighed, pointing to the coffee cake on the blue stand. “Long story. You might as well have another piece.”
; Mercy grinned and cut a thick slice. The only thing better than one piece of Patience’s cake was two pieces.
“Beth was a very unlucky young woman. Raised—if you could call it that—by her father, mostly, a miserable man named Clem Verdette. He married her off when she was just a teenager to Thomas Kilgore, a loser if there ever was one.”
“She didn’t have to marry him. Why would she agree to do that?”
“Her mother ran off when she was a child, no doubt to save herself. Why she didn’t take Beth along with her is something I’ll never understand. She was a pretty little thing, with dark hair and warm brown eyes. Smart, too.” Patience paused. “Why her own mother would sentence that poor girl to life with the man she herself couldn’t bear to live with anymore … Well, there’s just no understanding some people.”
“No.” Mercy knew that from the war, where understanding was often in short supply on all sides. Patience took another sip of tea. “Clem was a drunkard given to rages. Marriage probably seemed like an escape.”
“Only it wasn’t.”
“Not at all. Kilgore had a temper even worse than her father’s. Your grandfather saved her more than once from being beaten to death.”
“Why didn’t she leave, get a divorce?”
“She was too frightened. And so young. Just seventeen when she married him. She always refused to press charges. Not much your grandfather could do. Times were different back then—and not in a good way.”
“But then she disappeared?”
“They both did. People said they moved to California. Her husband was always talking about moving to San Diego. But your grandfather was convinced that he killed her and then took off.”
“No body?”
“No body.”
Proving murder without a body was very difficult. But her grandfather must have had something to go on. Maybe she’d find it in those files. “What happened?”
“Clem came to visit your grandfather. Said his daughter never showed up to make him supper. Apparently, the old goat still bullied her into doing his housework and cooking for him even after she got married and moved out. So, your grandfather went up to their double-wide in Marvin. Tiny village up near Belvidere Mountain.”
“Where the old asbestos mine is.”
“Yes, that’s right.” Patience tossed each dog another biscuit. Sunny was calm now, as happy to be at Patience’s feet as Elvis and every other canine who’d had the pleasure of her company. “They finally shut it down in 1993, but it remains a toxic waste nightmare. We’re still fighting to get it cleaned up properly.”
Mercy knew that her grandmother’s efforts to protect the flora and fauna of the beautiful state of Vermont were tireless and never-ending.
“A desolate place, then as now.”
“What did Grandpa Red find up there?”
“Nothing. No sign of foul play at all. No sign of anything but despair.”
“But he kept on investigating.”
“Yes. Her father filed a missing persons report on Beth.”
“What about her husband?”
“His family—if you could call it a family—believed that they’d moved to California for good. Supposedly he owed them money—them and everyone else in the county. Good riddance seemed to be their attitude.”
“But Grandpa Red didn’t believe that.”
“No. Clem agreed with him. Once his daughter disappeared, he became the world’s most attentive father. He pestered Red about the investigation all the time. And then Clem died. Lung cancer.” Patience looked past Mercy into a memory only she could see. “I think that’s why your grandfather was so obsessed with finding Beth. Her own father, such as he was, was gone. Beth was an orphan. Red would have been father to all the orphans of the world if he could have.”
Mercy gave her grandmother a moment. When Patience focused those bright blue eyes back on her, marking her return to the present, she asked another question. “Beth had no other family?”
“No.” Patience retrieved her Brown Betty teapot from the kitchen counter and topped off Mercy’s cup of tea, and then her own. “Beth was a good kid. Did well at school until she dropped out to marry Kilgore. Stayed out of trouble. Spent whatever free time she had reading books from the library.” She looked at Mercy. “That’s where she was last seen. At the library.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Mercy sat at the old farm table that separated her kitchen from the great room of her cabin, sorting through the first box of the Beth Kilgore cold case files. She’d been at it for about an hour, but she hadn’t found anything remarkable yet. Just the usual reports and statements, interviews and records.
Amy and her boyfriend, Brodie, had gone off to Boston for a steampunk convention, baby Helena in tow. It was just Mercy and Elvis and Sunny and Muse. The little cat was curled up on one of the dining room chairs, while the dogs kept watch at Mercy’s feet, ever vigilant.
Elvis sat up suddenly and barked, just once. His signal bark, alerting Mercy to someone coming up the drive. The golden Sunny raised her silky head, but she didn’t move or bark, letting the shepherd take the lead in his own home.
Mercy looked out the window, but she didn’t recognize the red Toyota truck pulling alongside the cabin. Or the wiry guy in jeans and brown barn coat loping up the gravel path to the house. She figured from the erect way he carried himself that he was military, and when he paused to salute the American flag that fluttered from a tall pole in the middle of the garden, she knew she was right.
The flag flew in honor of Sergeant Juan Miguel Pedro Martinez. Her fiancé, and Elvis’s handler. He was killed in action in Afghanistan, in the same battle that left Mercy wounded and Elvis traumatized. They missed him still. They always would.
The guy in the brown barn coat did a neat quarter turn and continued up the walkway to the porch. Elvis did not bark again. Friend, not foe. Weird, because Mercy did not know this guy. He was no friend of hers.
She moved toward the entryway, and Elvis trotted beside her. Sunny followed them at a discreet distance, hanging back as they approached the door.
Mercy looked down at the shepherd. “Who is he?”
Elvis cocked his handsome head, perked his triangular ears, and wagged his curlicue tail. The stranger on the other side of her front door knocked. Three quick raps. Like the S in SOS in Morse code. Mercy stood perfectly still, apprehension holding her in place. Three more raps, more slowly this time, or maybe that was just her imagination.
Elvis was still wagging his tail. This proud dog was not an indiscriminate wagger.
It was not Mercy’s imagination. He knew this stranger and he liked him.
She could just wait until the guy gave up and went away. The shepherd nudged the back of her knee with his nose. His way of telling her to get on with it.
“Okay, but I’d better not regret this,” she told him, even though her gut told her that for once she was right and Elvis was wrong.
She took a deep breath. Held it for a moment. Blew it out.
Flung open the door.
Elvis leapt forward to greet the man in the brown barn coat. The man fell back, laughing. He steadied himself, then bent forward to hug the shepherd.
Mercy stepped out onto the porch, Sunny at her heels.
Elvis leaned into the man, licking his cheeks, which Mercy could see were wet with tears. She wasn’t sure which surprised her most, the licking—Elvis was not a licker—or the tears. This man did not strike her as the kind of guy who cried easily. Few soldiers were.
“Who are you?” she asked, more to herself than to the stranger.
“Sorry.” He straightened up and slapped his hip with his palm. Elvis dropped into a sit at his side.
Whoa, thought Mercy. It wasn’t like Elvis to obey just anyone. Her sixth sense was in overdrive now. She fought the urge to throw this guy off her porch.
“Wesley Hallett.” He held out his hand for her to shake.
Up close he was very good-looking in that soldier-next-do
or kind of way. Sandy hair, hazel eyes, cleft in his chin. Not as tall as Troy Warner, but he was cut from the same cloth. Another reason not to trust him.
“Mercy Carr.” She shook his hand perfunctorily.
“Pleasure to meet you.”
Mercy was not so sure. She was not feeling very friendly towards him in return, no matter how friendly he seemed or how much Elvis seemed to like him. She was feeling very wary. She did not ask him inside, even though it was a cold and windy, if bright and sunny afternoon and she was only wearing a light sweatshirt over her usual Henley and cargo pants. She shut the door behind her, as if to fend off evil spirits from her home. “How do you know Elvis?”
Hallett laughed. “He’s my dog.”
“I don’t think so.”
The severe tone of her voice seemed to catch him up short.
“Look, I know you don’t know me from Adam. But Elvis and I have history.” He opened his arms wide. “It’s a long story.” He glanced at the rocking chairs on the porch, the ones her grandmother had bequeathed to her when she bought the cabin. “Maybe we could sit down for a minute?”
The wind picked up, sweeping across the porch in successive blasts of frigid air. She shivered. No point in catching pneumonia, as her mother would say. And whatever this guy’s story, he was obviously fellow military personnel, one of her own. “Come on in.”
She opened the door and led the interloper and the dogs into the great room, waving a hand at the sofa by the fireplace. “Have a seat.”
“Thank you.” He settled onto her butter-colored leather sofa as if he’d been dropping by her place for years. Her side of her sofa.
Elvis jumped up on his side at the other end, alert as ever, dark eyes moving back and forth from Hallett to Mercy as if he were watching a tennis match. Maybe he was. She wondered if the shepherd knew that he was the ball.
Sunny curled up on the dog bed at the other side of the room, the one Elvis never used. Away from the drama unfolding in her living room. Smart dog. The kitty, Muse, slept on, not stirring, on the dining room chair.
Hallett sat with his knees wide apart, his elbows balanced on his thighs, strong hands folded, in a stillness that spoke of patience. Like all good soldiers, he was good at waiting.