Ruff Way to Go

by Leslie O'Kane

  Cassandra and I might well have become friends someday, brought together by her puppies. Now I regretted not having made more of an effort.

  The prints were already gone, the blood mixing with the water. Had the paw prints been Shogun’s? Another dog’s? Either way, the dog would have to have been here after or during Cassandra’s murder.

  Trying to visualize the paw prints, I knelt, chilly rain running off of my hair and down my back. The prints had been roughly the size of the circle I could make with the tip of my thumb against the tip of my index finger. They might have been too big for Shogun’s paws, but it was impossible to say for certain. My proof had washed away like so much water.

  Maybe they’d come from one of the puppies next door, or even from a medium-sized dog, such as a cocker spaniel. Cassandra could have brought one or more of the puppies over here with her. A loose or stray dog could have come through the open gate as I did when I’d first arrived, Shogun being small enough that another dog might not hesitate to violate his territorial boundaries.

  Shielding my eyes from the rain, I looked in the direction of Cassandra’s property, still deathly afraid that I might spot a petrified Melanie standing there. The length of fence was deserted.

  Through the drumming of the rain, a pair of sirens wailed and drew louder. I told myself that it didn’t matter that the paw prints were gone. The police wouldn’t need this evidence. For all I knew, Edith had become so enraged at something Cassandra had said, she had killed her and run off with Shogun. Or one of the puppies could have been here with Cassandra, then raced off in a panic and was now back next door with the others.

  Except...where were the puppies? Inside the Randons’ house? They weren’t in the yard when I arrived at Edith’s. So, if a puppy had been here with Cassandra, how could he have gotten back inside with the others? Whoever let the puppy in would have to have noticed either his absence or his bloody paws.

  In the rapidly darkening conditions, someone wearing a policeman’s uniform under a black rain poncho came through the gate. Maybe this was the local sergeant. Mom knew him fairly well, on a personal level. It wasn’t as though we had a lot of crime in Berthoud. The town was all of five or six blocks in either direction.

  “You Allida Babcock?” the man called over the sound of the pounding rain as he approached. His right arm was bent at the elbow, as if he were set to pull his gun on me if I gave the wrong answer.

  “Yes.” I stood frozen in place and found myself staring at his cap, visible beneath the poncho. He had a clear plastic cover on it that resembled the cheap shower caps from motel room giveaways. “Cassandra Randon lives next door. I’m worried about her five-year-old daughter. I also don’t know where the owner of this house is.”

  “Come with me, ma’am. You need to get out of the rain.” He was using condescending tones, thinking I was too stupid to come in out of the rain on my own. It was just that I didn’t want to leave her out here in the rain, I wanted to explain, but suddenly couldn’t find the words.

  I looked at him in confusion, wondering why I should come back that way, around the outside of the house, instead of inside. “But...” I waggled my thumb in the direction of Edith’s house.

  “We need to secure the scene, miss. Let’s go to my car. You can get into some warm clothes and give your statement at my office.”

  He ushered me back out through the gate. There were two white-with-blue-markings Colorado police cruisers out front, which likely comprised the entire department of our little bedroom community. Edith’s front door was now wide open, her note to me no longer visible. Other officers must have been inside, “securing the scene.”

  I yearned for the safety and familiarity of my own home. I was shivering with the cold rain, though its intensity was starting to abate. “Can’t we just go to my house? I can give you my statement mere and make sure my dogs and my mom are okay.”

  Before the officer could answer, Edith Cunningham drove up in her black Lexus. She tried to pull into her driveway, which was blocked by one of the officers’ cruisers.

  She parked her vehicle at a cockeyed angle and got out as if propelled. “What’s going on?” she cried to no one in particular, her face pale and her eyes wide. “This is my house! What’s going on?” She spotted me then and ran toward me, a second officer stepping forward to intervene.

  “Ma’am, there’s been an incident at your home,” the officer said solemnly.

  “What do you mean, ‘an incident’?” She stepped sideways to speak to me over his shoulder. “Allida. Is it Shogun? Has something happened to him?”

  “No. I thought he was with you.”

  “He isn’t. Did somebody kidnap him? Is that why the police are here?”

  I didn’t know how to answer that, and my head was filled with my own questions. Could someone have been so intent on stealing the dog that they killed Cassandra when she happened onto the scene?

  I noticed then that Edith hadn’t changed clothes since I’d last seen her. Nobody would have worn white pants while gardening. So who had worn the gardening gloves in Edith’s kitchen?

  Frustrated with not getting an answer from me, Edith focused again on the officer. “You need to ask Cassandra Randon, next door, if she saw Shogun. She called me at the store an hour or two ago and asked if she could borrow some gardening supplies. She has a copy of my house keys. I told her to help herself. Maybe she took Shogun home with her.”

  At Edith’s mention of Cassandra, it now hit me that Cassandra had changed into jeans and a sweatshirt. Earlier she’d been wearing a skirt and blouse.

  “I’m afraid Ms. Randon had an accident, ma’am,” the officer said.

  “Accident?”

  More worried about the welfare of Cassandra’s daughter than anything else, I asked Edith, “Do you know where Melanie is?”

  “No. I’ve been away at my shop. She must be home. With her dad. Someplace.” She was totally flustered and gesturing wildly as she spoke. Her face was starting to turn as red as her hair. “I don’t understand anything you people are telling me! What kind of an accident are you talking about? Why aren’t you letting me into my own house?”

  The officer put a hand on her elbow and tried to lead her toward his cruiser. “Come with me, ma’am, and I’ll—”

  She whipped her arm free and her eyes flew wide. “Trevor! That bastard! I’ll bet he stole my dog,” she muttered incongruously.

  The officer with me gestured at the second officer, who ushered Edith back into the passenger seat of her own car. He sat behind the wheel and talked with her. Edith started crying almost immediately and tried to use a cellular phone, which the officer pulled from her grasp.

  Yet another officer was on the front porch of the ranch style brick home on the other side of Edith’s. This housed a couple in their late fifties or early sixties who were the only remaining people from my childhood in the neighborhood. Harvey and Betsy Haywood. They had always been so grumpy toward me and my family that I’d called them Mr. and Mrs. Hatesdogs. Not exactly the crudest of names, but it had struck me as such at age six. Their two daughters had been teenagers then. My mom had hired the eldest as a babysitter, and the four of us minors had a mutual lack-of-admiration society going. The Haywoods’ daughters should be in their early forties now. I wondered if we’d all still dislike one another.

  Harvey and Betsy had stepped out onto the sheltered area of their porch to speak to the officer. Harvey, wearing the old man uniform of knee-length shorts, black socks, and a sleeveless undershirt, rocked on his heels. Betsy was wearing what looked to be the same housecoat she’d worn virtually every day twenty years earlier. In a gesture that seemed uncharacteristic of the garrulous woman I remembered, she brought her hands to her lips as the officer spoke.

  Wait a minute! They lived right next to Edith’s property, on the opposite side of the Cunninghams’. Why hadn’t they heard me calling for help?

  My mother approached in her white and blue King Cab pickup truck. No one cou
ld ever mistake us for anything other than mother and daughter, though at five-six she’s considerably taller than I am. She often wore her long brown hair—which she’d only recently begun to dye—in a braid. I watched her expression change in an instant from curiosity to concern to fear as she spotted me with the officers. Just as her face registered panic, she threw open the car door and was out of her car running toward me.

  “Allida! Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I said as calmly as I could, though the sight of my mother when I was already this traumatized made me have to battle tears. “It’s Cassandra Randon. She was killed.”

  “Oh, my God. Where’s Melanie?”

  “Nobody seems to know.”

  The officer beside me cleared his throat and stepped between us. “Ma’am? Why don’t you get some dry clothes for your daughter? She has to come with us.”

  Mom gasped and looked at me.

  “I have to go make a statement, Mom. I found Cassandra when I went over to see Edith Cunningham.”

  The rain was starting to pick up again, but Mom turned and stood glaring at the policeman as if she intended to pick a fight on my behalf. Never one to back away from a confrontation, Mom would not have surprised me if she clobbered him.

  Just then, a middle-aged man in uniform left Edith’s house, walking with a confidence in his step that gave off the aura of authority. “Andy,” Mom called to him. She gestured at me. “This is my daughter.”

  “I know, Marilyn. But right now she’s also the primary witness in a suspicious death. ‘Fraid we’ve got to take her in for questioning.”

  “Then I’m coming with you.”

  ***

  “Did your mom see you earlier this afternoon? Or was anyone with you at your office?” Sergeant Millay asked me. We were seated in a tiny room within the small brick building in downtown Berthoud that housed the police department. The walls were plain white, a fluorescent ceiling fixture the only light source, a table and four chairs the only furnishings. My mother, I knew, was seated on the bench just outside this room, when she wasn’t pacing in front of the door and its little window.

  This line of questioning instantly got my heart going. I tried to reassure myself that, because I’d found the body, I had to account for my whereabouts during Cassandra’s death. But the concept of the police acting as though I were a possible suspect in a murder case frightened me to the bone.

  “Yes, there was my client, as I already described, followed by Trevor Cunningham, Edith’s...”—I hesitated at adding the word “estranged,” knowing the police would already suspect him and not wanting to make it obvious that I did as well—“husband. He left at about three-thirty.”

  “How long did it take you to drive between your office and the house?”

  “Forty minutes.”

  I could see by his expression that he was doing the mental calculations.

  “Did you see or speak to anyone else in between those times?”

  “No.”

  “And you say you went to the Cunninghams’ residence to interview Mrs. Cunningham’s dog?”

  I opened my mouth to make a snide remark about how difficult it was for dogs to fill out my questionnaire, but decided that was the wrong tack. “In a manner of speaking.”

  “Could these paw prints you say you saw have been from a cat?”

  “No, there are very noticeable differences between the two types of prints. A dog’s digit pads are much bigger than a cat’s. Plus cats have retractable claws, yet I remember seeing some toenail prints.”

  “And you also don’t think the prints were from Shogun?”

  “Right, although I can’t say for sure. With a silky terrier, we’re talking about a very small dog. My impression, though, was that the paw prints were left by a somewhat larger dog.”

  Sergeant Millay held my gaze with his hooded eyes for a long moment, as if appraising my credibility. He finally looked down at his notes. “Okay. You last spoke to Cassandra Randon at...what time did you say?”

  “Roughly quarter after twelve, when I left her place and went home.”

  “And you found her body at what time?”

  “Five-thirty. I got to Edith’s house right on time for my appointment.” I didn’t know why he was asking me about the times again; Edith had to have spoken to Cassandra hours after I had. Why wasn’t he asking her about the times?

  “Do you have a lot of stray dogs in the neighborhood? Or folks that don’t keep their dogs on a leash or in their yards?”

  “Not that I’ve noticed, but I’m not really familiar with the neighborhood anymore. I’ve been living in a different state for about a dozen years, and I’ve only been living in my mom’s house for a couple of weeks now. You’d have to talk to my mother.”

  “Sounds as though we got us a stray dog now, though, with Mrs. Cunningham’s dog being missing.”

  “It looks that way, yet if that’s the case, it really surprises me. This happened in Shogun’s yard, his territory, which dogs typically try to defend from intruders. It would be far more typical for Shogun to stay and bark incessantly. He wouldn’t have understood what was going on with Cassandra’s struggle, but it would have upset him. For Shogun to run away and leave his territory unprotected, he’d almost have to have been chased off. And in that case, typical canine behavior would have been for him to not go far, then return after the intruder had left the property and start barking...at Cassandra’s body.”

  “I see,” he answered, though I got the distinct impression that he was mentally lumping me into the same category as psychics and tarot card readers.

  “You’re not a dog owner, are you, Sergeant?”

  “Me? No. Got a couple of cats, though.”

  “Cats are independent, territorial animals. Dogs are pack animals. Very different personalities. Dogs see no reason to ever separate from the pack, and they consider their owners their pack. As puppies or young dogs, they like to go out and explore. But by the time most dogs are Shogun’s age, they’ve lost their wanderlust. They tend to consider their role to be to guard the pack’s territory while they wait for their pack to return, no matter what happens in the interim.”

  He gave me a smile that hinted, at best, of grudging tolerance of my having voiced my opinion, then consulted his notes. “The gate on the west side of the house was open, you say. Did it strike you as unusual for Mrs. Cunningham to have left a gate open like that?”

  “That’s unusual for any attentive dog owner. It rather defeats the purpose of having a fence.” Uh oh. I was losing patience and getting snippy in spite of myself. The last thing on my agenda was to make enemies in law enforcement “It’s possible that Edith knew the dog would stick right beside her while she was in the yard and so never paid attention to the gate, but it’s more likely that whoever killed Cassandra left the gate open.”

  Sergeant Millay rested his elbows on the small rectangular table between us and drew his face closer to mine. “Yet you just got through saying how Shogun wouldn’t have run off anyway.”

  “True, but that’s not to say he wouldn’t ever run into the street, for example.”

  “Thing is, Officer Sweitzer said the gate was closed when he arrived. You must’ve closed the gate behind you when you came into the yard. Why?”

  My pulse started to race at Sergeant Millay’s insinuation that he considered my closing Edith’s gate suspicious. I already regretted my action. At the very least, I’d probably overlaid any fingerprints on the gate latch with my own.

  “It was just...force of habit. I’d read the note that Edith left, telling me she and the dog were in the back, and since I was there to observe the dog, it was only natural for me to have shut the gate so the dog wouldn’t run off in the process.”

  “That’s another thing.” He paused and slowly read over his notes, dropping his chin in the process. I could see a bald spot on the top of his head. “You said before that you left the note exactly where it was, in plain sight on the front door. Did
n’t as much as touch it.”

  “That’s right.”

  He stared at me, his expression blank. “When we arrived at the Cunningham residence, Miss Babcock, there was no note.”

  This was a shock. “There wasn’t?” I had to stop myself from demanding whether or not he was sure about this. “It must have ...blown off the door in a wind gust,” I said, growing tense and detecting a desperate tone creeping into my voice.

  “I considered that possibility myself, Miss Babcock.” The gray irises beneath the hooded eyes seemed to be looking straight through me.

  He leaned even closer, and I could smell onions on his breath. “So I called Officer Sweitzer a couple minutes ago and had him ask Mrs. Cunningham. She says she never wrote you a note.”

  Chapter 3

  I gave myself a moment for Sergeant Millay’s chilling words to set in, my mind reeling at the incomprehensibility of this. The thought that the sergeant didn’t believe me, might even suspect me of being the murderer, put me into a panic.

  What could this mean? Could Edith have killed Cassandra, then, by lying about the note, sought to set me up somehow? No, because she arrived after the police did, so she couldn’t have retrieved the note.

  “But Edith had to have written the note. Unless...unless whoever killed her wrote that note to lure me into the backyard, then took it down after I read it. Maybe to keep you from being able to analyze the handwriting or get fingerprints off of the notepaper.”

  Sergeant Millay said nothing, his face as motionless as the rest of him as he sat and watched me. I, however, seemed incapable of controlling my nervous gestures as I combed the fingers of both hands through my short hair, only succeeding in making it stand on end with static electricity.

  “Wait,’’ I said, realizing that I might have made an incorrect assumption about the note. I couldn’t remember the exact wording and tried to picture the note in my mind’s eye. “The note wasn’t signed and wasn’t addressed specifically to me.” My thoughts raced ahead of my words. The note might never have been intended for me. Trevor could well have full access to his former residence. He might have called Cassandra and asked her to come over. “Maybe the killer wrote that note to Cassandra, in order to coax her into the backyard, where she was ambushed.”