Sheltered Hearts (A Hidden Hearts Novel Book 2)

by Mary Crawford

  He raises an eyebrow at me and says, “At this point it’s anybody’s guess; it could be ‘run away’. It appears everything in this dog’s vocabulary resembles ‘Opposite Day’.”

  Fortunately, my fears are unfounded because much like she did before, Hope follows me with military precision. That is, she does until she sees the exam table in the little room that Mitch leads us into. When she sees the stainless steel exam table, she collapses on the floor and starts to whine. Of course, the sounds coming from her are highly distorted because of the tape on her muzzle.

  Alarmed, I look to Mitch for reassurance. I feel tons better when I see a look of heartbreak and devastation on his face as he studies Hope. This is not something he does just to get brownie points in the community. He feels her pain as much as I do.

  Mitch pets what’s left of her velvet soft ears and murmurs softly to her, “Hope, you have to let me help you. I’ll help you feel better, Baby. It’s gonna hurt for a little bit, but in the long run, you’ll feel way better, I promise.” Her body relaxes and her tail gives a feeble wag when she hears his low soothing voice.

  Fortunately, Hope collapsed on a pile of blankets, so Stuart and Mitch are able to grab the edges of the blanket and lift her onto the exam table.

  Mitch grabs another pair of medical scissors with a blunt point and starts to cut away the duct tape while Stuart takes pictures. I notice that his hands are shaking and it looks like he has tears in the corners of his eyes. “Nervous?” I ask softly.

  Mitch looks up at me with a startled expression as he replies through clenched teeth, “Nervous? Oh hell no. I’m angry beyond words. There are shelters all over this city. If they didn’t want this angel, all they had to do was turn her in some where. That’s it. It’s not hard. Why do this?”

  “I don’t know. How could someone look into those brown eyes and do anything like that? She’s so sweet even though she’s in incredible pain,” I empathize, as I lay a soothing hand on Hope’s hip and stroke her.

  After Mitch manages to remove all of the duct tape on Hope’s muzzle, he makes another discovery. There is a laceration on her mouth that needs to be stitched up.

  “Can you do that here or do I need to find a vet?” I query with a worried voice.

  “I can’t, but Stuart here can because he’s going to school to become a vet. He’s so close to being done he practically is one. I’m just basically a fancy gopher in this organization.”

  Stuart’s eyes widen at Mitch’s self-description. “Mitch! You can’t go around telling people stuff like that. I can get in trouble for misrepresenting myself,” he explains. “What he’s not telling you is that our little organization wouldn’t exist without his efforts. He can train the untrainable dogs and he’s pretty handy at the fundraising efforts, too. Don’t let ‘Mr. Aw-Shucks’ over here fool you. He’s pretty indispensable.”

  Mitch looks over at me and says, “Jessica, can you come over and talk to her? She seems to calm down a lot when you do. Maybe if she’s focused on you, she’ll pay less attention to what Stuart and I are doing.”

  I slide off the stool that I’ve been sitting on. I try to forget the fact that blood makes me a little queasy. I need to be there for Hope. This is bigger than my little phobias. I pull on the strength of my inner nomad. The girl that survived a year in New York. The one that’s not afraid of big rats and cockroaches. If I can handle New York, I can survive anything. I’m a farm girl, I’ve seen everything, right?

  I kneel down on a little stool in front of Hope’s head so she can see me. “Am I out of the way here?” I ask.

  Mitch nods as he responds, “You should be fine.”

  “Hope, they’re going to make you feel so much better,” I soothe quietly. “After you’re all better, we’ll go get you a giant chew bone. How does that sound?”

  I’m trying desperately hard to ignore what’s going on in front of me and just concentrate on helping Hope feel better. I’m doing a reasonable job of conquering my phobias — until Stuart makes a whistling noise under his breath and remarks to Mitch, “I’ve been doing this a while now, but this is the first time I’ve ever had to remove a piece of Skoal can from a dog’s face. I wonder if they were using it as a muzzle?”

  “There is no explanation for why there should be a chewing tobacco can embedded in the face of a dog which is deep and ingrown. It’s several days, if not weeks old. Even if the dog accidentally got into it, they should’ve taken her to the vet,” Mitch reasons with a scowl.

  I can’t help but gasp, “Who would do such a thing? She had to be in terrible pain!” Just the thought of it makes me dizzy and I start to sway. It’s a good thing that Stuart has finished suturing up her laceration because as soon as Hope sees me become unsteady, she barks to alert Mitch that I’m in trouble — or, at least it looks that way to my untrained eye.

  Mitch reaches out to catch me and then turns to Stuart and comments, “Hope has some good instincts. It almost seems like she has some training. Did you check to see if she’s got a chip?”

  Stuart shakes his head, “Oh man, I completely forgot. I got distracted by the duct tape. I’m not sure if I hope she has a chip or hope she doesn’t. It’d be nice if she had a chip so that we can hold somebody accountable for the horrific stuff that’s happened to her. At this point, I hope she doesn’t have a chip so that we don’t have to argue with somebody about her treatment.”

  Mitch pulls a device out of the cupboard that looks like one of the laser tag toys that the kids used to play with at the arcade I used to work at in New York. His expression turns grim when the machine beeps. He walks over to an ancient looking computer and waits for it to warm up. When he punches the code into the computer, he draws in a sharp breath of surprise. He opens up another program, muttering under his breath the whole time. After a few moments, he exclaims in utter disbelief, “Stu, remember those three puppies that were stolen from the city shelter about a year ago?”

  “Yeah, I thought they recovered those—” Stuart replies.

  “They did, all except one — meet the one that got left behind,” Mitch clarifies.

  Mitch and Stuart both look at me and shrewdly ask, “How did you say you came across this dog again?”

  “Are we really back to this?” I answer with a huff. “Do you guys know what I went through to get her here? I was afraid she might go into shock and die on the way here or something. When I saw Hope, I was out feeding hummingbirds at the crack-o-dawn because that’s when my slightly batty landlord begs me to do it and I don’t want to upset their routine. I actually crawled through a sewer pipe to rescue my cat, Midnight when he was a kitten. He was smaller than a hot-dog bun. Do I sound like a crazy sociopathic animal abuser to you? Truth be told, I much prefer them to people.” I am out of breath when I finish. This man is enough to chap my booty! What a jerk!

  Stuart steps forward and extends his hand in a gesture of placation. “Jessica, look… we’re sorry. We have to ask these kinds of questions of everyone and confirm our answers. It’s more a matter of formality than anything else. We have to make sure we cover our bases to protect the animals.”

  “I guess I understand that. Still, does it make you feel any better to treat me like a criminal when I was just trying to help Hope? I honestly didn’t do anything to her except try to help her. I wouldn’t knowingly hurt another creature, ever. I don’t even order fish on the menu for that very reason. Even though I know that there are ways to harvest them ethically, I still can’t get over holding them and skinning them. I would not make a very good craftsperson who had to deal with animal skins all day long,” I answer randomly.

  “Just for record-keeping, can we confirm with your roommate, Ivy that you didn’t own Hope before today?” Mitch asks.

  I shrug as I answer, “Sure, you can ask Ivy if I’ve ever owned a dog, but she’s not my roommate anymore. She just met and fell in love with this guy named Marcus and she and her twin sister Rogue are going to a different school than me now. Ivy and Rogue a
re identical twins. She never knew she had a twin before they found each other. Oh, wait you already know this. You helped them find each other; I forgot about that for a second. Basically, this story shouldn’t come as much of a shock to you.”

  “Okay, if Hope is not your dog, what can you tell me about the car that you saw drive away?” Stuart asks as he strips off his protective clothing.

  “It probably comes as no surprise to either one of you that I am not a real sports car person. Now, put me in front of a Jeep or a John Deere and I could probably tell you the model year, how many seasons it’s been run and the last time it had a decent maintenance job, but since my Grandpa firmly believed that his ’52 Nash Rambler was a good family car and never needed updating, my knowledge of cars is virtually nonexistent. I do know that the car in question is gray and has an obnoxiously loud stereo system. Whoever does own this car should’ve probably put less money in the stereo system and more money in a decent muffler and exhaust system. I don’t know a lot about cars, but there is something mechanically wrong with that one. It’s ridiculously loud and not in a low, sexy ‘I-want-more-horsepower’ kind of way. This is more of a ‘I-may-not-make-it-home’ kind of noise.”

  Mitch just shakes his head and remarks, “As unique as that clue may seem, it’s really not all that helpful, kids these days drive those sorts of cars all the time. They use them for street racing. They’re pretty much interchangeable, even though the kids don’t think so. It’s possible the noise being made is from some sort of specialized engine kit. You don’t even know if she actually came from that car. That’s pretty much a guess on your part; it’s unlikely that the police department will actually even do anything about that. So we’re pretty much at square one.”

  As I’m standing there silently stroking Hope’s head, she nuzzles my hand and licks it. “Actually, I think that Hope would disagree with you. I think she would tell you that she is in a much better place than where she started this morning. Now, we just have to track down the guys that did this to Hope and decide a reasonable way to make them feel the kind of pain they put her through.”

  Stuart looks at me and then over at Mitch as he declares, “I don’t know about you, but I like the way this one thinks.”

  I STOP IN FRONT OF the refrigerator, open the door and stare blankly inside. Finally, I remember what I’m doing. “Stuart, do you want a Coke or a beer?” I ask, tossing the question over my shoulder.

  I hear Stuart groan as he lifts his backpack, “It’s been a killer day, but I better stick with Coke, I’ve got to take a test on infectious diseases and the nervous system. Remember the good old days when I only needed to know the human nervous system? Now, I need to know about twenty of them. It’s tricky too because even though the test is on the nervous system, the skeletal system of each animal impacts how the nerves run. Basically I just need to know it all.”

  “You’re making my statistics and theoretical mathematics classes sound like a walk in the park,” I respond with a shudder.

  “Shut up. You are an amazing student. You don’t have anything to worry about. You could’ve done that all in your sleep. Are you ever planning to go back? It’s such a waste that you ever left school. I’ll never in a million years understand why you left school with only a term and half to go,” Stuart halfheartedly scolds, as he walks around me to dig out some half eaten pizza from the refrigerator.

  I glare at him as I answer, “You know why I left; that was a stupid thing to say. You almost left your program too,” I counter.

  “Well, it would have made sense for me to have taken a leave of absence from my program. She was my fiancé, but you guys were just friends from high school,” Stuart argues, his voice choking with emotion.

  “Yeah, we were friends. The three of us were best friends. We were pretty much the Three Musketeers all the way through elementary school and junior high school before Nora became interested in boys and started dating you. She’s the reason I was interested in search and rescue. Her passion for it was infectious. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to wrap my brain around the fact that of all of us, she was the one that died in the field. She had the most experience and the most passion for it. She did it full time while you and I were only weekend warriors. I’ll never be able to sort out the injustice of it all.”

  “Me either,” Stuart answers with a heavy sigh. “I loved her so much. But, Nora had her faults too. She liked the adrenaline of living on the edge. It’s what made her fearless in her job. We’ll never know if she was too fearless on the day she died. The only way that I can stay sane is to know that she died doing something she loved, you know what I mean?”

  “Yeah, I know,” I concede. “There wasn’t anything she liked better than to be dropped in the middle of a crisis situation like the earthquake she died in. She loved her job like nobody I’ve ever seen before or since. She gave the word passion new meaning, that’s for sure.”

  “Speaking of passion, what do you think of the little wildfire that we met today?” Stuart probes.

  “Honestly, I don’t know what to make of her. Part of me really hopes that she’s telling the truth. I get the sense that she probably is, but there’s something about her that isn’t as it seems. She gives the appearance of being flaky and flighty, but I think that there’s a whole lot more to Jessica Walker than meets the eye. I’m just really curious to find out what’s going on underneath all those different layers of personality. She seems to hide a lot.”

  “With all due respect, Buddy, I would’ve held a whole lot back from you too. You scared the living daylights out of her today. I hardly blame her for being a little less than forthcoming with you. I don’t know what you thought you were doing with her, but it wasn’t a very effective strategy for a nice friendly, get-to-know-you session. You acted like she was an enemy of the state — not a friendly, helpful Good Samaritan bringing in a dog for a little first aid. I thought that you were a little better at reading people than that. I don’t know what’s going on with you that’s making you act all phycho. If you’re going to deal with customers, you need to get over this little ‘issue’ of yours or we’re going to lose our community funding. We operate on a shoestring budget as it is, we can’t afford to lose a single dime. One of these days, you’re going to tick off the wrong person,” Stuart cautions.

  I roll my shoulders trying to work the tension out as I begrudgingly agree. I knew, the minute the words came flying out of my mouth, I was going to regret them. Unfortunately, that never seems to stop me from spouting off like a steam engine. “I know; I was out of line. I owe her an apology. There was really no excuse for me losing it like that. I should’ve gotten the facts first.”

  “Seems to me that you need to be telling her this, not me,” Stuart counsels.

  “Sure, I’ll just march right over to her house and hand her an apology, that won’t creep her out or anything,” I reply sarcastically.

  “Or, you could just return her student I.D. lanyard and let her know how Hope is doing. I’m not trying to tell you what to do here, but that’s just the approach I’d take. Of course, yelling at her some more might prove effective, who knows?” Stuart suggests with a smirk.

  I study the grainy surveillance video again. Of course, I’ve seen some of these clips in the news, but I’ve never seen the whole tape. I’m hoping to see something that I haven’t already seen on television. Sadly, I can’t see anything that I couldn’t see on my flat-screen at home. In fact, the view is worse here. I turn to the director of the Central Shores Shelter and ask, “Venetia, were the police able to capture any screenshots that showed the thieves’ faces?”

  Venetia looks at me with complete shock and then amusement as she responds, “Oh Darling, don’t ever pick up a side career as a criminal; you’d never make it.”

  I glance at her with confusion on my face. “What? It was a legitimate question.”

  “They had oversized sunglasses, bandannas and baseball caps on, there was precious little to identify them
with. We could hardly even distinguish a skin tone one way or other.”

  I scrub my hand down my face in frustration. I can’t believe that we actually caught them on camera but it’s not going to do any good. What good is Big Brother if all of those stupid cameras don’t yield any usable information? “You’re telling me there’s no way to identify these punks?” I ask, incredulously, unable to process what I’m hearing. “They didn’t sign in or anything? I thought that all visitors had to sign in.”

  Venetia sighs deeply as she replies, “That’s how it’s supposed to work, but they managed to sneak in during a really busy adoption fair. It was crazy that day. We had so many people here that you could barely find room for your own shadow. A bunch of our staff was out sick with the flu so people weren’t supervised as closely as they usually are. It was just a catastrophe waiting to happen and it did. As nearly as we can tell, it must’ve been a ring of them — because they got away with three puppies. It breaks my heart to find out what happened to this little one. She was the runt of the litter to start with; she was always more legs and paws than anything else. Here at the shelter, we named her Lucy because she was never very coordinated and she reminded us of Lucille Ball. You be sure to thank that young lady for finding her, you hear?” Venetia insists.

  “It’s funny you should say that, because that’s exactly where I’m headed. Thank you for your time today. I was hoping we would be able to find out more information about who did this, but it looks like maybe I’ve hit a dead end here, too. Maybe that information that Jessica has about the car will help the police narrow the list of suspects a little. I don’t know, it’s not much to go on — but it’s something,” I hope as I grab my coat and head out the door. I reach down and untangle Lexicon’s leash from his legs. He’s a new dog we’ve just started working with for search and rescue. His owner surrendered him to us after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer because he figured he wouldn’t be able to deal with an active German Shepherd puppy. Right now, the jury is still out about whether he is going to have what it takes to be a search and rescue dog. On the upside, he’s really curious about what’s going on in the world, but it’s hard to hold his focus for very long. Apparently, he hasn’t been walked on a lead very much either. Some dogs instinctively know how to untangle themselves if they get stuck on a leash. Lexicon is not one of those dogs. He’s baffled every time it happens.