“Hey little guy, what’s wrong?” I asked him, picking him up and putting him on the exam table, taking out my stethoscope as I did my regular pre-surgery examination.
“You’re going to butcher me. You’re going to turn me into a uterus.”
“Do you mean a eunuch?”
“Maybe. I’m a young dog! I’m in my prime! I should be out exploring, getting bitches.” I bit my lip to keep from laughing as Chew-Barka continued. “Instead I’m going to be living like an old dog. I won’t even want to hump my favorite blankie anymore.”
“Do you know what a condom is, Chewie?” I asked him.
“No.”
“Well, humans use it when they have sex, it covers up the naughty bits. That way, the girl doesn’t get pregnant. Unfortunately, no one’s invented condoms for dogs yet, so you have to have your balls remove to stop yourself from getting female dogs pregnant.”
“So?”
“So, if you get a female dog pregnant, that contributes to the pet overpopulation. It’s a lot more responsible to get neutered. Neutering also won’t necessarily make all of your urges go away. You can still go out and get bitches, you just won’t be able to get them pregnant.” Ok, so that part was a bit of a lie. Almost all dogs lost most of their urges when they were neutered. Still, maybe Chewie would be the exception.
“All the other dogs are going to make fun of me.”
“Almost all the dogs in Willow Bay are neutered,” I replied. “And I would know. I did most of them myself. Sophie, the lady who brought you in here, she has a dog and he’s neutered,” I told Chewie, trying to calm him down. He lay down and put his face between his paws. “I know it’s scary. I know you’re not sure about this. But I promise you, it’s for the best.”
“But my balls!”
“I know,” I told him, stroking his fur softly.
“I’ve only had them for a few months, but I’ve become pretty attached to them.”
“You won’t miss them, I promise.”
“I’ll have to find some other part of my body to lick.” I did my best to hide the smile forming on my lips. Poor Chewie was really devastated about this.
“Listen, we have to go get you ready for the surgery, ok? I’ll be giving you anesthetic, so you’ll be asleep for the whole procedure. You won’t feel a thing.”
“I won’t feel anything anymore, ever. I’m going to be numb always after this. I’ll never love again!”
Goodness. Even Bee hadn’t been this dramatic before being spayed. “It’ll be ok, Chewie. I promise.”
A few minutes later Sophie came in and helped me put Chewie under, and I began the surgery. Ten minutes later, we were finished. Sophie and I hung around and waited while Chewie came out from under the anesthetic, then held him for another hour to be sure he didn’t have any lasting side effects. He was extremely drowsy, and just sat in the kennel staring at the wall the whole time, and finally his owner came and picked him up and Sophie and I loaded up the new kittens and took them home, Bee insisting that she ride in the box with them on the car ride back to our place.
My dramatic little cat had become a mom to someone else’s litter of kittens.
* * *
Jason and Taylor both came over to have pizza with the three of us when we got home. I asked Bee where she wanted to be with her kittens, and she told me she wanted me to lock her in my bathroom, where the dog “couldn’t have any influence over my charges”. I did as she asked, then made my way back to the kitchen and got the plates ready for everyone else to arrive.
Fifteen minutes later, when Charlotte finally made it through the door, we were all here and ready.
“Oh man,” Taylor said, sinking into the couch with his plate of pizza and a beer. “After this week, I totally deserve this.”
“Hectic times?” Jason asked, lifting his own beer to Taylor.
“Yeah. It’s the full moon, and we all know what that means.”
“All the crazies come out to play,” Charlotte replied with a grin. “Trust me, I know too.”
“What about the full moon and crazies?” Sophie asked, looking around.
“It’s a myth/superstation/legend/whatever you want to call it among people who work in industries where you care for other people. So medical professionals, cops, social workers, that sort of thing,” Charlotte explained. “People who work in hospitality see it too sometimes. Basically, whenever there’s a full moon, everything gets to be a little bit more insane than usual.”
“It sounds like the sort of thing that’s not real and we all make up, but I swear it’s true,” Taylor said. “The first night of the full moon was the night before that man was killed by a bear.”
“I think you mean murdered,” I corrected. Taylor looked like he was going to argue with me, but one look from Sophie and he decided against it.
“Well regardless, it was the night before that man was killed. Then the next night we found old Wallace Tomlinson drunk in a dried up creekbed. He told us he was going sailing to Hawaii to go on holidays.”
“We had one of the regular schizophrenics come into the hospital,” Charlotte added. “He’d gone off his medication and was screaming at the nurses in the ER that the CIA was coming to kill him. They eventually got him sedated, but it took three big male nurses and two doctors to do it. Security looked like they wanted to put the hospital in lockdown.”
Taylor grinned at Charlotte. “Yeah, you know what it’s like. Animals are nothing compared to people.”
“Please,” I snorted. “Today I had to explain to a dog called Chew-Barka why he needed to be neutered.”
“It’s easy to explain things to animals when they can’t reply to you or understand what you’re saying. Besides, I had to stop a mob of crazy townspeople trying to get more gossip than their neighbors from breaking down an inn door to look at a body yesterday,” Taylor replied.
“Fine, I guess that’s a bit harder,” I replied with a smile. Taylor obviously wasn’t privy to my witchy abilities. “But the full moon is gone now, right?”
Charlotte nodded. “Yes. Until next month, anyway.”
“Well, even if it’s just a few weeks of peace, I’ll take it,” Taylor said. “We have absolutely zero leads on the death of that guy. All we know is his name is Jack Lundgren, and while he has a California driver’s license on him, it turned out it was fake. So we don’t even know where he’s from. We don’t even know if that’s his real name. His prints haven’t popped in the system.”
At this point, I was barely paying any attention to anything anymore. I let my eyes stare off into the distance as I begun to think. I had a hunch. Yes, it was no more than a hunch, but maybe, just maybe…
“Yo, earth to Angie!” Sophie said, waving her hand in my face.
“What? Sorry, what?” I asked, shaking my head quickly. “No. I don’t have time. I gotta go.”
“Wait, where are you going?” Jason asked, standing up.
“I have to… ask a question,” I replied, throwing on a jacket and grabbing my purse and heading out.
“Well I’m coming with you,” Jason said quickly, slipping on his own shoes and following after me. We got into my car and I drove us straight back to the Willow Bay Inn.
I found Willis Armstrong behind the front desk. As Elizabeth Armstrong’s son, he wasn’t young—nearly seventy years old with greying hair but a bit of a beer belly and a friendly face.
“Hi, Willis,” I greeted him, and he flashed me a smile.
“Hello, Angela! What can I do for you today?”
“I’m wondering if I can ask you a question about a few nights ago, when that man died.”
“Ah, yes,” Willis replied, shaking his head slowly. “In all my years living in Willow Bay, I’ve never heard of a bear attacking a human. You ask me, that’s not the whole story. Something else must have happened.”
I smiled at Willis. Finally, someone else in this town who also believed in the bears. “Yes, exactly! I don’t think it was a bear attack at
all, I think that man had been murdered.
Willis stroked his beard thoughtfully. “And now you’ve come to ask me questions.”
“Yes, I know that the night before, Jeremy Wallace went out in the middle of the night. I’m wondering if anyone else did anything weird that night.”
Willis let out a bit of a wheeze that I think was supposed to be a laugh. “Are you joking? It was the first night of the full moon, lots of weird things happened that night.”
“Like what?” I asked eagerly. “Anything out-of-the-ordinary. Please!”
Willis stroked his beard for a couple minutes, thinking. “Well, there was a bit of a power outage just after ten that night. I got three complaints at the front desk, and one person wanted a refund on the pay-per-view movie he’d been watching.”
“Anything else?”
“I had two people check in around 11 that night. One was a girl from Montana, another a man from Massachusetts. Then, come to think of it, the man from Massachusetts came back out about two minutes after that Jeremy did. He looked like he was in a hurry, almost as though he was following him, but then about three minutes after he left, he came back in.”
“Do you remember who that man was? It’s important.”
Willis stroked his beard for a minute. “Yes. He’s still a guest here. Fischer. Andy Fischer. Greasy black hair, super skinny.”
Andrew! It had to have been Andrew.
“Thank you so much!!” I said to Willis. “Is he here? Andy Fischer?”
Willis shook his head. “He went out a while ago. I’m not sure where.”
“Thanks,” I told him, rushing back out of the hotel, Jason hot on my tail.
“What’s going on?” he asked, as I looked up and down Main Street.
“I think Andrew Fischer is our killer!”
18
“Wait, what?” Jason asked. “Slow down. Explain this to me like I’m an idiot, because I have no idea where this is coming from.”
“The person who killed Jeremy Wallace had to be after the diamond. Otherwise why would he be out in the woods? What if someone threatened him, and made him go out there? You with me so far?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, Jeremy went out the night before. That had to be when he hid the diamond. And it sounds like Andrew tried to follow him, but failed since he came back just a couple minutes later. So presumably, Andrew knew that was when he went out to hide the diamond, and the next day he would have threatened Jeremy, made him show him where he hid the diamond, but for some reason he killed him before he found out.”
“Ok,” Jason said slowly. “I guess that maybe makes sense. So what are you going to do now?”
“I need to find Andrew and get him to admit what he did.”
“Seriously?” Jason crossed his arms. “Come on. We’re going back to the car. You do realize a seasoned thief is never going to admit to murdering two people for you, no matter how nicely you ask him.” Jason had a point, I grudgingly had to admit. “Go home, figure out a way to prove it was him, and then you can prove he committed the murder.”
“Fine,” I replied, trying not to sulk too much. What Jason said made sense, but I wanted to do something now. I’d been so frustrated with this case, there was nothing more in the world that I wanted than to find Andrew, tell him I knew he’d killed Jeremy Wallace—and also probably Jack—and have him admit to me the truth so I could tell Chief Gary and have him arrested. But of course, Jason was right. There was no way that was going to happen. I was going to have to be stealthier. I was going to have to find proof.
Fifteen minutes later we were back home, but I let Jason tell Charlotte, Sophie and Taylor what had happened while I went into the bathroom to check on Bee and the kittens and then took a few minutes for myself. I had no idea how I was going to get proof that Andrew Fischer was the murderer. But at least now I was almost completely certain I knew who the murderer was.
* * *
The next morning, I was no closer to figuring out how I was going to prove that Andrew Fischer had killed Jeremy Wallace. We had a two-hour break in the middle of the morning—now that everyone was getting settled the vet clinic’s schedule was filling up pretty quickly once again—and so I settled myself in a chair in the back room with my iPad and began to absent-mindedly look through Jeremy Wallace’s Facebook profile once again.
I thought back to what I’d heard the others say. Jeremy Wallace was arrogant. He thought he was better than everyone else. Kevin had said it would eventually get Jeremy into trouble during a job, that he would eventually get caught because he was so sure of himself.
Scanning through the photos, it was obvious that was true. The man never met a selfie he didn’t post to social media. I had no idea how much of his profile was legitimate and how much of it was simply a front to make it look like he was a real tourist, but nobody showed off their abs that much if they didn’t absolutely mean it.
Rolling my eyes at the photo, I opened the only photo Jeremy had posted while in Willow Bay. It featured him showing off his abs once again, standing at the end of one of the most popular hiking routes in Willow Bay, the Bay View Trail. He was at the end of it, standing next to Old Oakie, one of the Willow Bay landmarks. I realize the irony of an Oak Tree being a landmark in a place like Willow Bay, known for its willow trees, but that was just the way things worked out.
Behind Old Oakie was the reason almost everyone who visited Willow Bay did the short and easy one-mile hike to get there: the absolutely stunning view of Willow Bay. Jeremy’s photo had obviously been taken in the evening; the low sun cast a beautiful yellow glow on the still water. A single paddle-boarder in the background was making his way back toward shore, and a man threw something—maybe a stick? It was hard to tell from so far away—for a dog on the beach.
Suddenly, though, my eyes moved away from the beach and back to Old Oakie. I gasped as I looked at the tree. One of the biggest features of the tree was the natural hole about six feet high; it was known as Oakie’s Eye. About six inches in diameter, the hole was natural, perfectly round and frequently visited by squirrels, Stellar’s Jays and other small woodland animals. I’d obviously never thought of it this way, but it was also the perfect place to hide a fifty-million-dollar diamond.
After all, Jeremy Wallace was an arrogant man, and a risk taker. That much I’d gathered from his associates. Maybe posting a picture of the place where he would go to hide the diamond on his social media was his way of arrogantly flaunting what he’d done. Maybe he didn’t know that was where he was going to hide the diamond. But that had to be where it was!
Noticing that my heart was beating around three times as fast as normal, I forced myself to take a deep breath and calm down. After all, there was no proof the diamond was in Oakie’s Eye. It was just conjecture on my part. Still, this was the closest I’d come to getting a clue in this case for quite a while, and it excited me enough that I was definitely not going to wait until the end of the work day to see it through. After all, what if one of the others figured out what I did first?
“I’m going out,” I told Sophie. “I think I know where the diamond is.”
“Oh, like you’re going to go get it alone,” Sophie replied. “I’m coming with you.”
We drove to the Bay View trailhead and parked in the little twenty-car dirt parking lot by the entrance. With it being September and the low tourist season in the middle of the week, we were the only car parked in the lot. I’d explained my reasoning to Sophie on the way, who agreed that this was definitely worth a look. Suddenly, I remembered what Betty had said at the Café.
“Wait, isn’t this trail supposed to be closed?” I asked Sophie.
“I think I heard it was going to re-open this morning,” she replied. There were no signs indicating the trail was closed, but the deep tire tracks in the mud showed that there had been heavy machinery here recently. I was pleased; it meant we wouldn’t need any magic to get past anybody working on a closed trail.
The Ba
y View trail was only a mile long, a single-track dirt path meandering through the forest, surrounded by beautiful Pacific coast forest trees, ferns and wildlife. A rabbit hopped off the trail as we made our way past, and the shrill cry of Stellar’s Jays rose through the trees above us along with the chirps of robins preparing for either a migration south for the winter or braving the upcoming winter. I let myself take a deep breath of the fresh forest air. The crisp, clean air and the connection with nature was one of my favorite things about Willow Bay. Sophie and I walked in silence. I knew I was a bundle of nervous energy right now, and idle conversation wasn’t exactly going to help, and I figured Sophie was probably in the same situation herself.
The mile-long walk toward the Bay View lookout point seemed to take hours, even though it was more like fifteen minutes. I was horrendously out of shape, but the desire to know whether or not the diamond was where I thought it might be overpowered my complete inability to do anything remotely resembling cardio.
When we hit the lookout point I was breathing somewhat heavily. “I swear,” I told Sophie as I made my way toward Old Oakie, “I say this every single time I do anything remotely strenuous, but I really need to start going to the gym more.”
“I’m so glad you said that and it’s not just me,” Sophie replied. “You were walking so fast I was wondering if I was literally the least fit person on the planet.”
I laughed as we both made our way toward Old Oakie. “You reach in,” Sophie told me. “You’re taller, and this was your idea.”
I looked at the hole in the middle of Old Oakie. “If there’s anything in there that could possibly bite my hand,” I told the tree, “please don’t. I’m just checking for something lost.” What? You could never be 100% sure in the outdoors. I tried to quell my excitement by telling myself the diamond almost certainly wasn’t in there as I reached my hand into the hole. I didn’t even know how deep the hole was; for all I knew it was going to be impossible to get anything out of there.
A Grizzly Discovery (A Paranormal Cozy Mystery) (Willow Bay Witches Book 5) Page 11