Collared For Murder

by Annie Knox

  Marsha’s behavior was the exact opposite. She also shifted her weight from foot to foot, but it appeared she was simply swaying softly. Her eyes were flat and glazed, and she was making strange pouty expressions with her mouth, twisting her lips this way and that. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to lose the man you loved, so I hated to judge, but I’d been to college and I knew what “high” looked like.

  I stood and walked Packer toward them. He seemed to pick up the mood and became uncharacteristically calm. He homed in on Mari, the one in the most apparent distress, and dropped to his haunches at her feet. She knelt down to greet him, burying her face in his bristly fur, and began to keen softly. “I don’t even like dogs,” she muttered as she clutched my boy close.

  “How are you two doing?” I asked Marsha and Pamela.

  Pamela scowled briefly at me before turning her attention back to her phone, her fingers never pausing. Even in the broiling summer heat, she was dressed in unrelieved black, a single pendant—what appeared to be a gold locket, a cat etched on its face—her only nod to femininity.

  Marsha offered a bleary smile. “You’re so kind to ask.” A pale breath of laughter escaped her. “No one else has bothered.”

  That struck me as hard to believe, but Marsha did have a standoffish nature. And, frankly, she didn’t seem particularly upset (though I suspect that had more to do with whatever had shrunken her pupils to pinpricks than with her actual emotional state).

  “I think I’m fine,” she continued. “There’s so little point in being anything else.”

  I didn’t expect such a Zen-like response from Phillip Denford’s pampered wife. She looked every inch the socialite. Her long red hair had been pulled back in a classic French twist; her vibrant red, low-heeled sandals and matching mani-pedi added a playful touch to her cream-and-navy linen dress; and pearls the size of Concord grapes hugged her earlobes. The only thing marring her look was what appeared to be a small hole by the right shoulder of her dress. What’s more, close-up I could see that her eyes tilted up ever so slightly and the skin on her cheekbones was pulled tight as a drum. Marsha couldn’t have been more than forty, but she’d already had her first face-lift.

  “Can I get you anything? Some water or a chair? I’d offer to help you get closer to the investigation, but I’m not sure that’s anything you’d want to see.”

  My words elicited another muffled wail from Mari.

  “I’m just fine, dear. I don’t think we’ve had the pleasure.”

  Over the four months of planning the cat show, we’d met at least a half-dozen times.

  “My name is Izzy McHale. I own Trendy Tails, the pet boutique here in town.”

  “Oh, of course. Where is my head? Izzy. Phillip spoke highly of you.”

  Given my brief interactions with Phillip, he might have spoken highly of my breasts—which he had studied like an appraiser might study a piece of sculpture he was valuing—but he certainly hadn’t spoken highly of my brain. Every suggestion either Pris or I made about the show, from layout to schedule to catering, had been quickly dismissed, and he had clearly thought he could run roughshod over me in a bid to steal my business.

  Speak of the devil and she shall appear. As if my thoughts had summoned her, Pris sidled up. She was a pale woman, her eggshell skin and platinum hair a perfect foil for her Nordic eyes, but at that moment her face was so bloodless it was almost gray. Her right hand clasped the handles of the leather tote she wore over her left shoulder like she was ready to make a run for it. I even thought I detected a faint tremor in her left hand when she raised it to brush an errant hair from her eyes.

  She was still Pris, though, and she looked as polished as new silver in her summer-weight linen pants and blush-colored sleeveless silk blouse, not a drop of sweat showing despite the eighty-five-degree heat outside and her apparent agitation. In her three-inch heels she was able to catch my eye without tilting her head.

  “What a mess,” she muttered. “I blame you, Izzy.”

  “Me?” I had found the body, but I didn’t see how that made it my fault. Besides, I was keeping hush about finding Phillip. I didn’t want to be mobbed with questions.

  “It’s your terrible, rotten luck. Everything you touch turns to murder.”

  “Murder?” Pamela said, her fingers finally going still. “Who said anything about murder? Was Phillip murdered?” she asked, turning to face me head-on.

  Everyone in the room knew that Phillip had been found dead behind the prize table, but Jack had sworn me to secrecy regarding the cause of death.

  I raised my hands to indicate I had no idea.

  “Phillip had a bad heart,” Marsha said softly.

  “I’m sure his heart was rotten to the core. But with this one”—Pris waved her hand in my direction—“hanging about, it’s almost assuredly murder.”

  Mari finally stood up, her tear-streaked face the very picture of grief. “He can’t have been murdered,” she whispered. “Everyone admired him.”

  Even drugged-out Marsha looked at Mari like the girl was crazy. “Admired and liked are not the same thing, Mari. Phillip was a hard man. I’m sure he had enemies. But,” she added, raising a hand to forestall any comment Mari might make, “he also had a bad heart. I think we should wait for the police to tell us what’s what.”

  “Well,” Pamela said, “whatever killed him, we have to decide what to do about the show. If it were just a single-day event, we’d obviously cancel.”

  It seemed obvious to me that the M-CFO would cancel the show no matter how long the event was scheduled to run. You didn’t just pick up and carry on after something like this.

  “But we’ve got hundreds of contestants in both the agility competition and the more traditional portion of the show. People have booked out every hotel in Merryville for the next four nights. I’ve been in touch with everyone else on the board and they agree: we need to proceed.”

  Marsha, Mari, and Pris all nodded. Apparently, I was the only one who thought the death of the director warranted canceling the event. Before I could voice my suggestion that the whole shindig be canceled, Peter Denford made his way toward our little group. He was walking over from the empty judging ring I’d seen him in earlier, coffee still in tow.

  Once again, he was dressed casually in linen and denim. He looked morose, his brooding scowl apparently his default expression, but far from heartbroken. In fact, he lifted the cup of coffee that seemed permanently attached to the end of his arm and took a long swallow before giving us a little wave.

  Mari turned and threw herself into his arms. “Oh, Peter. It’s horrible. Just horrible. I am so, so sorry for your loss,” she wailed, her composure crumbling again.

  Peter stood there, towering over Mari, one hand hanging loose at his side, the other held carefully away from his white linen shirt to prevent a fashion disaster from a coffee spill. He looked to his stepmother for guidance, but she just shrugged and offered him a tiny smile.

  “Good heavens, Mari,” Pamela snapped. “Get yourself together. You’re making a scene.”

  “Please give her some slack, Pamela,” Marsha said. “She hasn’t been feeling well. She even called this morning to say she’d be late because of a bad stomach, and you know Mari is not one to shirk from work. I think we can all stand to show her some compassion.”

  Compassionate or not, Peter was not willing to be the shoulder Mari cried upon. Peter wrested himself away from her, managing to extricate himself from the tangle of her arms without spilling a drop. When he was free, he handed her his coffee and pulled his stepmother into a warm embrace. “I’m sorry, Marsha. You know I am.”

  “I know, darling. Some things just can’t be helped.”

  The two of them turned away from us for a moment, heads bent close in conversation. Peter clasped Marsha’s hands, holding them so tightly that I could see the white outline of his knuckles
from several feet away.

  When he stepped away, Marsha pivoted and collapsed on Pris’s shoulder. Pris hesitated a moment, a look of uncertainty on her face, then gently raised her hands to pat Marsha on the back. Marsha clasped Pris to her for several minutes, and all I could think about was how Pris would react to having Marsha’s dark eye makeup smeared all over her blush-colored silk shell.

  Indeed, when Marsha lifted her head, I caught Pris glancing down at her shoulder, which remained mercifully clean. She caught my eyes as she looked back up, and we exchanged a small knowing smile. We might not be the best of friends, but we’d come to know each other thoroughly since we’d become something like competitors in the Merryville pet-care world.

  “Heavens,” Pamela said. “Suddenly everyone’s best buddies.” She sighed before continuing. “Today’s a wash, so we’ll have to move agility to tomorrow morning. We wanted to have the judging in all the rings spread out so visitors could watch everything, but we’ll simply have to double up here and there to make up for lost time. The closing masquerade ball will be held right on schedule.”

  Holy cats, I thought. Body or no body, the show must go on.

  * * *

  Jack stood in the middle of a wide ring of Midwest Cat Fanciers, as though a force field were keeping the milling crowd at bay. By the time Phillip Denford’s body had been removed by emergency personnel, everyone involved in the show had heard the news and gathered in the big ballroom despite police efforts to cordon off the scene. Even after a second officer had been dedicated to crime-scene security, guarding the door in Pris’s corner of the room, there were just too many back hallways and service entrances to keep would-be rubberneckers out. Still, the burgeoning crowd didn’t press in on Jack. The cat-show attendees all wanted to be close enough to him to get the scoop on what was happening, but there was some sort of invisible barrier they didn’t want to cross. As though death were catching.

  As a result, Jack turned in awkward circles, voice raised, trying to calm everyone down while a couple of county crime-scene techs kept people from backing into the actual taped-off crime scene.

  “Did Phillip die during the blackout?” someone asked.

  “I really can’t comment on the time of death.”

  I understood where Jack was coming from, but I was pretty sure Phillip’s body had been under the table long before the blackout. The blood beneath his body had been dark and sticky-looking, and he wasn’t actually bleeding when I saw him.

  “But if it was during the blackout, someone should sue the hotel.”

  “That’s really not a question for the police. And it’s certainly not something that needs to be resolved right now.”

  “Was Phillip murdered?” This question came from the opposite side of the circle as the first, and Jack spun around quickly. I don’t know if he was just responding to the question or if he was trying to see which of the dozens of middle-aged women in cat-themed sweatshirts had done the asking.

  “Well, it . . .” He trailed off and ran his fingers through his short blond hair. “As I said,” he continued, “it would be premature to speculate about the cause and manner of death.”

  “He had scissors in his neck,” said a diminutive woman with hair the color of dryer lint and a pair of gold wire-rimmed glasses. She stood in the front row of the circle and met Jack’s gaze dead-on while everyone around her gasped in horror.

  “No comment,” Jack replied.

  That triggered a flurry of smothered cries and whispers. Scissors, murder, dead, the crowd breathed. Poor Jack had completely lost control of the situation.

  “Can we leave?” someone from the back of the crowd chimed in.

  Jack’s jaw muscles bunched. “Half of you just showed up, and now you want to leave?” he snapped. He took a deep breath, blowing it out slowly. “I apologize. But the answer is no, you cannot leave. Not until the police have gotten statements from each of you.”

  “But if there’s a murderer in the room, are we even safe?”

  “Yes.” Jack sighed. “The lights are on and the police are here. You should all be perfectly safe.”

  Pris Olson stepped inside the fairy ring of onlookers, her beauty-queen features pulled tight in an expression of righteous indignation. “This is ridiculous. You know who we are and where you can find us. Why do we have to wait until everyone has been questioned?”

  Jack had little patience for Pris’s overblown sense of self-importance. He was a simple man and got a little prickly when others put on airs. “Mrs. Olson,” he responded formally, “I am not going to stand here and debate with you about police procedure during an official investigation. But you were planning to spend the day in this room anyway, right?”

  “Working,” Pris sniped. “I was planning to be here running my booth and earning a living. With the show on hold, we’re all just going to be twiddling our thumbs.”

  “I’ve got a cribbage board,” the bespectacled woman offered helpfully.

  Pris’s eyelids fluttered. “How nice for you. But I honestly have better . . .” She trailed off, apparently realizing she was about to insult the company of the very cat enthusiasts whose business she wanted to attract.

  She sighed. “Lovely. I haven’t played cribbage in years.” She offered a thin-lipped smile and began taking a step backward into the crowd. As she did so, however, she caught her spiked heel on one of the metal electrical casings that crisscrossed the ballroom floor. For a moment her arms pinwheeled and she tottered first to the left, then to the right. In the end, though, she couldn’t save herself: Pris Olson, once the queen bee of all of Merryville, Minnesota, fell flat on her face in front of an entire roomful of cat lovers.

  The crowd gasped, one giant collective inhalation.

  As her knees hit the ground, she reached out her arms to break her fall and, in doing so, lost control over her spacious Coach shoulder bag. The purse slid down her arm, spilling its contents as it, too, struck the ground. Papers and lipstick tubes and even a compact hair iron skittered across the floor. And then . . .

  As we all watched in wonder, a shiny silver ball emerged from the recesses of the Coach bag and rolled—wobbling on the delicate wires that composed its surface—straight toward Jack Collins, stopping when it hit his foot.

  As one, the crowd exhaled a mighty “oooohhh” and then grew deathly silent.

  It was the platinum collar dangle, its diamond and emerald glittering in the bright overhead light, making soft tinkling noises as the dangle got knocked around inside its wire cage and eventually came loose of its mooring to the cage. It was the platinum collar dangle that had gone missing during the blackout, and it had been in Pris Olson’s purse.

  CHAPTER

  Six

  “Over my dead body.” Jack shifted in his chair, began tipping it back onto its two back legs, but then caught my mother’s eye and let the chair fall on all fours.

  “Nice turn of phrase,” Rena quipped.

  Rena, Dolly, Jack, and I were clustered around the table that dominated the Trendy Tails barkery, a space that had once been a dining room, back when the grand old Victorian at 801 Maple had been a single-family residence. The table—a simple pine table painted a glossy cherry red and decorated with hand-painted birds and flowers—had been in this room for as long as I could remember. When Ingrid Whitfield had run the Merryville Gift Haus out of the space, the table had held mountains of hand-knit sweaters, scarves, and mittens. Now it served many purposes: I used it when I was cutting patterns for my hand-tailored pet apparel, Rena occasionally used it to display her homemade organic pet treats, but it was primarily used as a gathering spot for friends and family when the doors to Trendy Tails were locked to the public.

  That evening, the four of us sat at the table discussing the day’s events while my mother dished out servings of her famous creamy mushroom hotdish. Basically, it was mushroom stroganoff: earthy
mushrooms and egg noodles in a hearty herbed cream sauce. My mother, however, would have protested slapping such a highfalutin name on her homespun casserole. She took pride in creating simple home-style fare, and she would assume she was being accused of putting on airs if you’d called her hotdish something so fancy. And, to be fair, Mom parted ways with a traditional stroganoff by making the dish vegetarian, adding green peas and carrots for color, and smothering the top with buttered bread crumbs. I was happy to let her call it whatever she wanted to, because it was one of my favorites, and I didn’t want anything to slow the frequency with which she made it. Sticklers might argue that it wasn’t a proper dish for a summer supper, but the gusto with which we were all scooping dinner onto our plates made it clear there were no sticklers at the table.

  “I’m not kidding, Izzy,” Jack said. “You’re staying out of this.”

  I sighed and gave Jinx a gentle nudge to encourage her to jump off my lap. I didn’t mind the animals being in the room while we ate, but I didn’t want to drip hot mushroom sauce on my cat. “I don’t know why you’re in such a state, Jack. I’m not about to put on a deerstalker and go looking for clues with a magnifying glass. But I can find out stuff you can’t. People clam up when you’re around, but it seems they’ll say just about anything in front of me. I promise I’m just going to keep my ear to the ground.”

  Jack glowered at me. Given my past behavior, my promise may have lacked credibility.

  “It can’t hurt,” Dolly added as she ground a generous amount of black pepper over her hotdish. “Jack, you have to admit that we have a pretty good track record in the field of criminal investigation.”