Collared For Murder

by Annie Knox

  “Who knew?”

  I laughed. “I sure didn’t. But the breeder, that woman with the leopard-print jumpsuit, about blew a gasket when the dude in the plaid jacket mentioned it.”

  “The show’s very first catfight?” Rena looked at me with wide-eyed innocence.

  Before I could call her on her terrible joke, a sharp “no” brought all the conversation in the North Woods Hotel Ballroom One to a sudden halt. Every head swiveled to the source of the sound—Pris Olson, standing in front of Phillip Denford, both of them smack in the middle of the ballroom.

  Denford was rocking back on his heels, his hands clasped behind his back and a smug smile on his face. He was the calm in the storm of Pris’s ire. Denford looked every inch the man of leisure, his salt-and-pepper hair perfectly groomed and his loosely knotted tie and perfectly pressed chinos conveying that he was absolutely in charge but that he carried the burden with ease. Phillip Denford was the spectacularly wealthy head of the Midwestern Cat Fanciers’ Organization and the person footing the bill for much of the week’s activities. He’d first made a fortune in business real estate and venture capitalism, and then he’d doubled down by opening the Web’s two most well-known sites for upscale pet products: the Dapper Dog and the Classy Cat. Denford was too important, both because of his money and because of his sway in the world of cat fanciers and canine aficionados, for anyone to call him out for his loathsome ways, but the word “letch” had been carried by a constant flurry of whispers ever since he’d arrived. Even as he and Pris argued, his eyes weren’t exactly glued to her face.

  Pris generally respected wealth and power, and after years of marriage to the Midwest’s RV King, she knew how to deal with men who had wandering eyes and wayward hands. More important, she certainly wanted to stay in Denford’s good graces. Befriending anyone with money and connections offered Pris an opportunity to advance her own interests. But something he’d said or done had pushed her over the edge. I couldn’t begin to imagine what.

  Pris leaned in to give Phillip what for. Even angry, Pris managed to be gorgeous. You could tell she was royally po’d by her expression, but her face didn’t get that mottled red color mine did when I was angry. No, Pris’s cheeks just got a little rosier. I’m not usually one to get hung up on looks, but I’ll admit I resented her unfaltering beauty just a bit.

  After that initial outburst, I couldn’t hear what Pris was saying, but she continued to stab at Phillip’s chest with her finger.

  “Poor Pris,” I muttered.

  Rena Hamilton twitched her nose. “What do you mean ‘Poor Pris’?” Her contempt for Pris Olson dripped like venom from her every word. “Pris doesn’t need your sympathy, Izzy. She’s a rich, beautiful, successful queen bee of the Methodist Ladies’ Auxiliary . . .”

  “. . . hates her husband, has recently lost a major chunk of her fortune, and is now enduring Phillip Denford’s ogling.”

  Rena snorted. “First, it’s Hal Olson’s own fault he lost so much money. He sank way too much cash into the Badger Lake condos.”

  It was true. Hal had purchased a huge plot of land on the shores of Badger Lake and had begun building luxury condos for Merryville’s many vacationers. It was an expensive proposition, but he’d planned to pay off the builders with income from the first few sales. Then, however, he ran afoul of the Department of Natural Resources because his building threatened the habitat of some endangered burrowing owls. As a result, he couldn’t sell the condos yet, and the builders were starting to slap him with mechanics’ liens. If he didn’t reach some settlement with the DNR or start selling other assets, he’d risk his builders foreclosing on the property altogether.

  I hummed my assent. “But it’s not his fault that that new RV lot opened up down near the Cities, cutting into his business. And even if Hal’s financial woes are his own fault, Pris is the one who’s paying for them. She’s been working extra shifts at Prissy’s Pretty Pets. I mean actually working, ruining her manicures with doggy shampoo and getting clawed when the cats object to having their nails trimmed.”

  “Cry me a river.”

  “She’s started selling scented candles and dietary supplements to the other ladies who live out in Quail Run. Dru told me she even had some sort of jewelry party. Mix-and-match charm bracelets of some sort.”

  “And what’s the matter with hustling a little to bring home the bacon?” Rena sniffed as she straightened a display of custom-embroidered collars. Rena had been hustling to feed herself and her alcoholic father since she was fifteen.

  “Nothing. Nothing at all. Except I hear no one is buying. All those so-called friends of hers are letting her go through her whole spiel about enhanced metabolism or the importance of aromatherapy or whatever, and then they smile, say no, and show her the door. It must be so embarrassing for her.”

  Unmoved, Rena brushed a smudge of powdered sugar off her sleeve. Apparently, she’d had doughnuts for breakfast. “Why do you care? Pris is generally horrible to you. Maybe this is just a little karma.”

  I shrugged. “I just feel sorry for her.”

  “You know that she would kill you if you said that to her.” Rena laughed.

  I chuckled. “Oh yes. I know.”

  We turned back to see whether Denford and Pris were still bickering. Sure enough, Pris had managed to inch forward until her face was so close to Denford’s that they almost seemed intimate.

  I glanced around the room. Off by the sixth judging ring, Phillip’s wife stood next to a slouchy, surly young man and watched the drama unfold. Marsha was a lovely woman, with long auburn hair, luscious curves, and eyes as blue as a winter sky, but she was wifty. Her voice trailed off at the end of every sentence, as though her thoughts were as ephemeral as dandelion fluff. She watched Phillip and Pris with her perpetual half smile on her face. Whatever transpired between her husband and the gorgeous blonde, Marsha remained unruffled.

  “Who’s the guy next to Marsha Denford? She’s practically falling on top of him,” I asked Rena.

  She craned her head to see over all the kennels and snorted. “Marsha may be slightly inebriated. I think she’d hang on to anyone in her orbit, but that happens to be the younger Denford, Phillip’s son by his first wife. His name is Peter.”

  “What’s his story? Why on earth is he here?”

  “He’s an artist,” Rena scoffed—a strange reaction since Rena’s girlfriend, Jolly, was a jeweler and I, too, considered myself something of an artist when I designed my clothes for critters.

  I gave Peter a closer look: a paper cup of coffee that probably cost him four dollars, a collarless linen shirt, well-worn cargo pants, Teva-like sandals, a fringed scarf looped around his neck, and a shock of red-gold hair with that messy look that can be achieved only with an array of expensive styling products.

  So he was that kind of artist. The kind of artist who sneered a lot.

  Sure enough, that’s exactly what he was doing as he watched Pris and his dad squabble: he was sneering.

  “As to why he’s here,” Rena continued, “I understand that he doesn’t have many resources of his own. If you want to eat from the gravy train, you apparently have to follow it all around the Upper Midwest.”

  “Quite a family,” I muttered.

  “Which family?” The familiar deep voice behind me made me go a little gooey inside. “Yours? What have they been up to now?” Jack Collins, my boyfriend, was the only child of conventional parents. He understood crazy—he was a cop. But the affable sniping of the McHale sisters, my mother’s stoic effort to act like we were all angels, and my aunt Dolly’s complete lack of self-control bemused him.

  “Actually, the Denfords,” I said as I turned to greet him. He was holding a giant bouquet of balloons in his giant fist, all bright green and baby blue—the Trendy Tails colors. I gasped.

  He tilted his close-cropped blond head, his eyes alight with smug self-satisfac
tion, and offered the ribbons to me. “I thought they’d give your table some height, make sure people can see you from clear across the room.”

  “Brilliant! They’re perfect.” I dipped my chin and looked up at him through my lashes. “And so are you,” I said softly, for his ears alone.

  “Most girls would hold out for diamonds before they dished out that kind of praise. If I’d known a handful of balloons would do the trick, I would have been bringing them to your doorstep every day.”

  As I took the balloons, I realized they were actually separated into two bouquets, each attached to a solid weight that would keep them on our table. I handed one of them off to Rena for the far end of the table and placed mine right in the middle of a display of silk-flower hair accessories.

  I wrapped my arms around Jack in an impulsive hug, and he leaned in to brush a kiss across my cheek. We both pulled back with blushes starting to creep up our faces. We’d been dating for several months, but we were taking it slowly. My ill-fated engagement to my high school sweetheart had left me love-shy, and Jack honored that. Perhaps even more important, public displays of affection meant that, if the relationship went south, it would do so publicly, and after my debacle with Casey Alter, another public breakup was the last thing I wanted.

  Jack cleared his throat as he put a few more inches of distance between us. “The Denfords, huh? From what little I’ve seen, they’re proof that money can’t ward off the crazies. Got a call down to the Silent Woman last night that that Peter kid was causing a ruckus. Kept calling himself a poor little rich boy and wouldn’t pay his tab. Since the patrol guys were all out on more urgent calls, I decided to handle the call myself.”

  “Did you arrest him?”

  “No.”

  “Really? That seems so unlike you.” Jack had little patience for drunken foolishness, and I would have expected him to haul young Peter out by the ear and toss him in the drunk tank.

  He shrugged. “By the time I got there, he’d called his dad’s assistant to bail him out, pay his tab, and give him a ride home.”

  “Still doesn’t sound like you, Mr. Law and Order,” I teased. “Wouldn’t expect you to let a rabble-rouser walk just because he had a ride home.”

  He looked down and stubbed his toe into the low-pile carpet. “It was a personal favor.”

  I couldn’t imagine that Jack Collins and Peter Denford had ever crossed paths, so Jack’s favor must have been for the rescuer, Phillip Denford’s assistant. Curious.

  A resounding “You!” from the center of the ballroom signaled that Phillip and Pris were still going at it. “That,” I said, jerking my head in their direction, “is what got us talking about the Denfords.”

  “What’s the fight about?” Jack asked.

  “Don’t know,” Rena answered.

  As we rubbernecked, a tiny wisp of a woman darted into the center of the fight. She had an abundance of curly blond hair piled on top of her head in a messy bun and a cherub’s face. She wore a T-shirt with the Midwestern Cat Fanciers’ Organization logo across the front and a pair of low-slung skinny jeans.

  She rested a hand on Phillip’s arm and the other on Pris’s arm, looking back and forth between the two with an earnest expression.

  “Who’s that?” Rena asked.

  “Marigold Aames,” Jack and I said simultaneously.

  I shot him a surprised look, but he just shrugged.

  “And she is . . . ?” Rena continued.

  “She’s Phillip’s assistant. Pamela Rawlins is technically in charge of this shindig, but Marigold has done most of the heavy lifting. Pamela is in charge of the cat show, but Marigold has handled the extravaganza: the closing-night masquerade, the flowers and luncheons, the vendor space.”

  We all watched as Marigold shifted both hands to Pris’s arm and guided her toward the door—toward us. At first Marigold’s head nodded softly as Pris continued to gesticulate. Finally, Marigold said something, and Pris pulled her arm away. As Pris stalked toward us, Marigold took two skipping steps to every one of Pris’s strides. It looked like Marigold was still trying to smooth the waters, but Pris’s face was set in rigid determination. Just as the two got to our table, Marigold stopped, her shoulders slumped, while Pris continued out the door without a word.

  Marigold ran a hand over her face and visibly shook off the tension of the moment. Then she caught sight of our little gaggle, and an enormous smile wreathed her face. “Jack!”

  “Hi, Mari,” he responded with a big grin.

  She launched herself at him, and he caught her up in a big bear hug. Rena and I exchanged questioning looks.

  “Izzy, Rena, this is Mari Aames. We went to college together at UMD.”

  “We were . . . great friends,” Mari added, a faint splash of color on her cheeks.

  My mind was whirling. Marigold had all but announced that she and Jack had been romantically involved. I knew that Jack had dated a girl named Jenny in college. They’d actually been engaged for a while. But it had never occurred to me that he might have had other significant relationships. He’d never mentioned Mari. Why had he never mentioned Mari?

  And Mari must have been the person who fetched Peter at the Silent Woman, on whose behalf Jack dropped his by-the-book persona to let Peter off with a warning. A gnawing sense of jealousy began clawing its way through my gut. I know it was mostly my fault, but when Jack and I had hugged just a few minutes before, it was self-conscious and hesitant, but he hugged Mari in front of God and everyone, swinging her up off the floor in his exuberance.

  It didn’t help that, if you squinted, Marigold Aames looked an awful lot like Rachel, the perky nutritionist my longtime fiancé had run off with.

  “Nice to meet you,” Rena said, breaking the awkward silence. “And thanks for breaking up whatever was going on over there.”

  Eyebrows raised, Rena couldn’t have been any more transparent in her effort to fish some information from Mari.

  “Oh, that,” Mari responded with a dismissive wave. “Things are always tense right before a show starts. Now, I hate to be rude, but I have to skedaddle. There’s still so much to do before tomorrow morning. But you,” she said, pointing a waggling finger in Jack’s direction, “you have to let me buy you lunch or dinner before I leave town.”

  Jack shot me a sidelong glance. “Sure. Absolutely.”

  As Marigold scampered off, my excitement for the cat show diminished considerably. Nothing good could come from this, I thought. Nothing good.

  CHAPTER

  Two

  Knowing how busy I would be for the rest of the week, I decided to have dinner with my sisters, Lucy and Dru, that night. We met at the Koi Pond, a surprisingly authentic Chinese restaurant within walking distance of my house.

  When we’re together, the McHale sisters are quite a sight, so close in age and appearance, our mother calls us her Irish triplets. We’re all tall, but not equally so. Lucy, the baby, is five foot nine, I’m five foot ten, and Dru, the eldest, is five foot eleven. Perfect stair steps, each with long black hair and eyes the color of new spring leaves.

  But despite our physical similarities, our temperaments couldn’t be further apart. Growing up, we called Dru “Dru the Shrew.” She’s not really a shrew at all, but she was the tattletale in the family, always strictly abiding by the rules and crying foul when one of us strayed from the straight and narrow. She’d grown into a tense woman, still scrupulously following rules as an accountant and still refusing to sugarcoat anything.

  My younger sister, Lucy, earned the moniker “Lucky Lucy.” Everything she did ultimately turned in her favor. She never got caught sneaking out to go to postcurfew parties, and she always managed to convince our parents that the degenerate losers she chose to date were, in fact, good and honest boys. As an adult, she’d calmed her wild ways and started dating more respectable boys. Specifically, she’d been dati
ng Xander Stephens—an entrepreneur and all-around good guy. Xander’s thin frame towered above Lucy, and he was silent in the face of Lucy’s nonstop sarcastic color commentary. They seemed to fit perfectly, her yin to his yang. But, still, Lucy’s high spirits were not completely gone: she’d confessed to skinny-dipping in Lake Superior on a recent girls’ trip to Duluth, the only one of her circle of friends willing to take the actual plunge.

  “How are you holding up?” Dru asked as we slid into the booth. “You’re going to be spread pretty thin these next few days.”

  “I’m okay. Wanda”—our teenaged assistant—“will hold down the store, and Rena’s covering the booth at the show. I’m a floater, and I’ll be walking around the show passing out cards and making connections.”

  Lucy laughed. “I never thought I’d see the day when Dizzy Izzy McHale would be the face of a company.” Kids at school had started calling me Dizzy Izzy after I spun around too many times on the playground and upchucked on Sean Tucker, but my family had picked up the nickname and used it to tease me about being a little flaky.

  “I’m not Dizzy Izzy anymore, Lucy. Now I’m Busy Izzy. Trendy Tails is in the black, even after Rena and I take a small salary for ourselves. We’re not rolling in dough, but getting the word out about our store through this cat show will raise our profile considerably.”

  “I don’t know,” Dru said, her pessimistic side showing. She set her napkin in her lap and picked up her fork, turning it over and over in her hand the way some people roll coins to soothe themselves. “If you start getting too many orders, how will you fulfill them? You can only sew for so many hours in a day.”

  I raised my hands in surrender. “Enough. My business is fine, and it’s my business. You two are just going to have to trust me that I can handle this. Aunt Dolly does.”

  “For a while Aunt Dolly believed the checkout girl at the Rainbow was an alien,” Lucy quipped.

  I sighed. “That was only because she heard the girl speaking Hungarian on the phone, and she realized her mistake almost right away. I know that Aunt Dolly is eccentric and sometimes a bit naive, but she’s got a good head on her shoulders. She believed in me enough to invest in the company, and you know how frugal she is.”