Sleeping Dogs Lie wfm-1

by Sharon Henegar

  I looked down on what must be Parson’s Lake, though from here it looked more like a river. I could see both a near and a far bank. This must be a cove on the lake’s twisting shoreline. About ten feet this side of the water, Bonnie faced the man we’d seen getting out of his black car by the cabin.

  Her fists were clenched and her blonde hair had taken on a life of its own as it became decorated with twigs and leaves on her passage through the woods. She looked like an avenging Druid goddess bent upon the destruction of Evil.

  My eyes moved from her to him, and settled on the gleam of the gun in his hand. Definitely not a shiny belt buckle.

  “I don’t have the tape!” Bonnie shouted. “And if I did you’d still never get it.”

  He laughed, and the sound made my lip curl. “Bonnie, Bonnie, Bonnie, won't you ever learn I always get what I want?” He sounded amused and indulgent, as though Bonnie were a small child who had stamped her foot at him.

  “What I've learned is that you’re an impotent, thieving son of a bitch who would do anything for a buck. I will see you in hell, you murderer,” she snarled. “Too many people know what you’ve done, and I will be the one you hear laughing when they put you in the gas chamber, you—”

  Her voice was cut off by the blast from the gun. The recoil flung his hand up at the same moment the impact from the bullet spun her around and slammed her to the ground.

  In the extravagant silence that followed, I heard a gasp and a strangled cry. Too late, I realized they had come from me. Carl’s head snapped around as he looked for the source of the sound. I scooted away from the edge, back among the underbrush and out of his sight.

  I sat, shaking, barely able to breathe. This was when I realized that for all our talk of murder, it had only been a story to me. Our cozy discussions over bagels and pizza had been a movie I was acting in. But now I had seen real violence. And I would be next. He was going to kill me too.

  Emily Ann nosed my cheek and I looked at her. Sitting here waiting for him to come and shoot me was embarrassingly feeble. I forced myself to take a deep breath and crawled back into the thicket, trying to find a hiding place. I looked over my shoulder and saw that my path was obvious behind me. Crawling was not going to get me away fast enough.

  I was stabbed with a sudden longing for Bob. He would be as helpless against an armed psychopath as I was, but two of us might have a better chance of taking him by surprise or overpowering him.

  Emily Ann was far better than I at sliding through the brush. Her lean body and short coat gave the brambles nothing to snag. A faint glimmer of hope came to me.

  “Emily Ann,” I whispered, “come here!” She returned to where I crouched, and I took her face between my hands and looked into her wise brown eyes.

  “Emily Ann, go find Bob.” Her ears pricked a little at his name. “Go to Bob.”

  I let go of her. She hesitated for just a moment, touched me once with her nose, and slid away in what I hoped was the direction of the cabin. Her feet made little more noise on the crackling leaves covering the ground than a puff of wind would have done. She’d been out of my sight for less than a minute when I heard the roar of the gun once more.

  Oh my god, my sweet Emily Ann—had he shot my dog? The thought froze me in place. She was my heart. If she was dead…

  A breeze from the direction of the lake shook the leaves around me, and the rustling made me look around. I had to keep moving, I had to get away. I forced myself to my feet and blundered on, pushing blindly through the accursed trees and vines and bushes. Trying to be quiet. Knowing I was doing a lousy job of it. My heart beating in panic kept me moving but my frightened brain seemed barely able to think about where I was heading.

  In perhaps ten minutes I stumbled into a little clearing. I stopped short at the sight of a large man, smiling and pointing a gun at me

  Chapter Thirty

  It was the first time I had seen Carl up close. Neatly cut dark hair with dramatic gray temples over a handsome mask of a face: gray eyes, regular features, nothing out of place. His progress through the woods had left him no more ruffled than a stroll through a city park would have done.

  I bleated as I jerked to a stop. His smile grew larger and more frightening.

  “Ah, here you are.” His voice purred with satisfaction. “The woman who keeps getting in my way. Well, well, this is nice. In fact this is quite satisfactory. I’ll be able to get everything wrapped up this morning after all.” He sounded as though he had to run a few errands, a little shopping trip. His eyes glittered like old ice.

  “You—you shot Bonnie,” I blurted. I hated the shake in my voice because I could see how much it pleased him. The corners of the video cassette tucked into my waistband poked my lower back. The video had slipped down as I ran. I hoped my shirt still hung over it but I didn’t want to draw attention to it by checking.

  “I did shoot her,” he agreed pleasantly, “and you’re next. But first I want that tape.”

  “Tape?” I injected all the innocence I could muster into my voice.

  “Yes, the tape. The tape that you grabbed as I looked through the door of that rickety cabin. You left the box for it on the kitchen counter.”

  I forced some air into my lungs. “I don’t have it. I dropped it somewhere in the woods.”

  “Oh, come, come, my good woman, we both know you have it. Give it to me now.”

  My good woman? This was even more patronizing than being called lady. “I tell you I don’t have it,” I insisted. The plastic shell burned a hole in my back.

  He shrugged, waving the gun a bit. “It doesn’t really matter. I'll find it when you’re dead.”

  I scowled at him. I was afraid, but I was also hot and muddy and out of breath and I felt like most of Burnham Wood was entwined in my hair. It made me cross.

  “You know, you can’t keep getting away with murder. The odds are not in your favor,” I said coldly. “People who have been shot are far less plausible as suicides.”

  “You and my lovely sister-in-law will be at the bottom of the lake in a few minutes, and no one will ever know I have been here,” he said. Smugness oozed from him. “Believe me, I will get away with whatever I choose. And if you really did drop the tape, if it's not on you, I shouldn’t have any trouble following your trail through the woods.”

  I looked at him standing there so casually, pointing that evil gun at me and unable to resist a schoolboy taunt. Every hair gleamed in place, the knife-sharp creases in his slacks absolutely pristine. Once I noticed them, those creases really annoyed me. They were ostentatious. The man had no sense of what was appropriate attire for chasing people through woods.

  That thought led my unruly brain back to the picture of Bonnie crashing to the ground, and the imagined one of Emily Ann being shot. I conjured up Bob—this jerk could keep me from ever seeing Bob again, or hearing him laugh, or feeling him kiss me. To have finally found someone warm and vital and sane and to have my new happiness taken away by this—this arrogant stranger was more than I could bear. I gave my head a shake.

  As I did, I had another vision of Carl at his bank denying loans to people who needed them.

  I don’t know where the words came from.

  “I’d like to apply for a small business loan.” I was as surprised by my words as he was.

  The gun wavered as a variety of expressions played across his face. “What?”

  “See, I've always wanted to have my own business.” My voice was earnest in the extreme. “It's been my dream for years. I feel positively evangelical about it. I want to have my own business putting in skylights.”

  Skylights? I'd never given a thought to skylights in my life. And the thought of me climbing around on a roof with tools was worse than ludicrous. I was babbling. But—and this was a definite plus—he hadn’t shot me yet.

  “Skylights,” he repeated. His voice was puzzled. If he wondered where this was going, well, so did I.

  A faint rustle from the bushes caught my attent
ion. The noise was so slight it could have been the breeze, if there had been a breeze. But the air was still. Behind Carl I saw Jack. He was moving stiffly and nearly silently, stalking Carl, his lips pulled back in a snarl, his eyes narrowed in an unblinking gaze of absolute hatred. Sweet, funny Jack with his silky ears and exaggerated body—how could I have known he was hiding a mouth full of carpet knives under his floppy lips?

  Keep talking, one of the voices in my head commanded. “So many people live in dark houses,” I rambled on, forcing my eyes away from Jack and back to Carl’s face. “Light makes such a difference. It changes your whole outlook, not to mention the way it improves your physical health. They’ve done scientific experiments about it. And not just any light. It has to be pure, natural, organic light—”

  “This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life,” Carl said. His gun came up, aimed at my chest. At the sound of his voice, Jack sprang. He launched himself as silently as he had crept up on us and he sank those carpet knives in Carl’s butt. Carl shrieked in surprise and agony, his arm flew up, and the gun went off.

  If a running mouse could make me levitate onto the sofa last night, a gun going off a few feet away—a gun that had just been pointed at me—had the power to make me fly. I launched myself toward Carl, not away, reaching for the gun. At least I started out to fly, but my foot encountered a rock on takeoff and I tripped. I fell heavily against Carl. My hands clutched for the gun. We crashed to the ground. Jack bounded back and whirled around to come at Carl’s face. Those long doggy teeth snapped on the air inches from Carl’s nose. I gripped his wrist, trying to shake the gun loose, but the bastard wouldn’t drop it.

  He was taller and stronger than me, but I was on top and my weight was an advantage. And he could not possibly have been as angry as I was. He tried to roll over, but Jack was everywhere he turned his face, snapping and growling. We writhed on the ground. I panted, “Drop it, damn it, drop it. Drop it!”

  The tape popped out of my waistband and clattered to the ground. Our struggle paused as we both stared at the tape. Then he began to fight harder. A few more seconds of struggle and he would break loose. He’d shoot me and Jack and grab the tape and he would win. He would dump our bodies in the lake, and go back to his comfortable life. He would find some way to take Bob out of the picture.

  I was not going to let that happen. Perhaps Jack inspired me.

  I bit him.

  The man tasted vile but I savored the savage satisfaction of grinding my teeth into the bones of his wrist. I think I was growling.

  Carl bellowed in pain and rage and the gun fell. I grabbed it and shoved myself back onto my knees and then to my feet. I pointed the evil thing at him. Good. I liked this. A gun was way better than a belt buckle.

  “Jack, watch him,” I commanded. The dog crouched, poised to attack. I reached down and picked up the videocassette, never taking my eyes or the gun off the monster at my feet.

  Carl made a move to get up, and my back stiffened with outrage. “Don’t even think about moving,” I told him. My voice was clear and as steady as the gun in my hand. “I know you killed your wife and Ian, and I saw you kill Bonnie. And if you shot my dog, I'm going to kill you myself, you son of a bitch.”

  My tone must have sounded as convincing to him as it did to me. He subsided onto the ground, and that’s when the Mounties arrived.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  “Then what happened?” Bonnie was enthralled by our tale.

  Kay and Bob and I clustered in her hospital room. Flowers were everywhere. She had spent days in the ICU, surrounded by medical machinery, but after she was out of danger she’d been moved to this tiny box. We replaced each machine with flowers. I recognized roses and daisies and Queen Anne’s lace. Other arrangements included orchids and exotic blooms that could have come from another planet.

  Late afternoon sunlight slanted through a window that looked over the tops of trees turned red and gold by October frosts. The room itself was nondescript, walls of grayed-green, requisite television bolted at a height guaranteed to be dangerous to people as tall as Bob. But all you noticed was the riot of blooms.

  Ten days had passed since an ambulance screamed its way to the nearest hospital in High Cross with Bonnie. They removed a bullet from below the rib it had broken on impact. She had lost a lot of blood, but Carl was as bad a shot as he was a lousy human being, and the bullet had missed any vital organs. It's possible that my crying out when I saw him shoot her saved Bonnie’s life. Instead of making sure she was dead, he’d taken off after me.

  “The clincher for the police was when you regained consciousness and told them who had shot you,” Bob told her.

  “But before that, it was the teeth marks on his hand that kept Louisa out of jail and stopped Carl from disappearing,” my cousin added.

  “I can't believe he said was you who had shot me,” Bonnie told me.

  “That surprised me too,” I admitted.

  “I wish I'd had a chance to bite him.” She sat propped up in bed against a pile of pillows. Her exquisite bed jacket was knitted of red angora, making her as bright as the most exotic of the flowers.

  “He tasted bad, but I admit it was gratifying,” I told her. “And there was never any real doubt which one of us started out with the gun. I'm sure Ed knew I didn’t have one.”

  “So tell me again what happened after you got the gun,” Bonnie demanded. It was her favorite bedtime story.

  “I told him he was toast if he’d killed my dog. I don’t even think I'd have needed a gun,” I said. “Then Jack barked, and Emily Ann led a parade into the clearing. Kay, and Bob, and Ed, and a highway patrolman I'd never seen before, and Ambrose.”

  “Emily Ann took us straight through the woods to Louisa. It would have taken hours to find our way without her,” Bob said.

  “I never realized before that Lassie was really a greyhound in collie makeup, and that Emily Ann is a direct descendent,” Kay added.

  We all laughed, though this sounded quite plausible to me.

  “Go back to the patrolman,” Bonnie said. “How did he get into the picture? Bob and Ambrose went to buy coffee and picked up a side of highway patrolman?”

  “It was a miracle,” Kay stated firmly. “I saw Ambrose’s car by the side of the road. A highway patrolman stopped them for speeding.”

  Ed had told me he was the one who noticed them, since Kay was trying to get a speeding ticket of her own.

  “We took too long buying provisions. Ambrose kept meeting people he knew,” Bob said. “He spent a lot of time at the cabin with his uncle as a kid.”

  “It doesn’t matter where you go,” Kay said, “Ambrose always finds people he knows. Anyway, I did a u-turn and pulled over behind them.”

  “Then Ed got out and saw that the patrolman was someone he knew,” Bob added.

  “So I started explaining (“Babbling,” Bob said in an aside to me) about bringing Bonnie out to the cabin to see the tape, because I figured if we could get both Ed and George involved, someone would have the jurisdiction and the balls to arrest this son of a bitch.”

  “Ed finally got everyone into their cars and we all went back to Ambrose’s cabin,” Bob said.

  “And when we got there, Emily Ann came streaking up and Jack took off and we followed Emily Ann to where Louisa had Carl on the ground begging for mercy,” Kay finished.

  “Not begging for mercy,” I corrected. “More like having a wounded panther at my feet ready to tear me apart.”

  The gun had been steady in my hand as Jack and I stood over Carl. When Jack looked around and barked, I recognized Emily Ann’s bark in return. My knees went a little weak at the realization she was alive. I heard large rustling noises and voices coming nearer.

  “We’re over here,” I yelled, careful to keep my attention on Carl.

  Emily Ann slid into view, closely followed by Kay and Bob. They ran to me. Kay threw her arms around me while Bob took the gun from my hand and turned to point it at Carl.
He wore an expression I had never seen before. Carl quailed at his feet.

  “Oh my god, he could have killed you,” Kay sobbed. She nearly strangled me with the strength of her hug. I embraced her with relief before I fell to my knees to hug Emily Ann.

  “You did it, Emily Ann,” I whispered so only she could hear me. “You won the race. You are a good, good girl.”

  Kay was babbling at me. “Oh, Louisa. How the hell did he get here?”

  “He must have followed you,” I said.

  ‘I swear I kept an eye out the whole time,” she sniffled. “I don’t know how he did it.”

  “It's okay,” I said, climbing back to my feet. “He’s way sneakier than we are.”

  Both dogs pricked up their ears. More crashing from the underbrush. Ed stumbled out of the thicket of brush, followed by a uniformed highway patrolman. Finally Ambrose slid into the clearing.

  “I love a parade,” I said, wondering who else would arrive.

  Carl didn’t waste a second when he saw the uniformed patrolman. He started to rise. “Officer, thank god you’re here. This woman shot my sister-in-law and then attacked me.”

  “What!” I glared at him.

  “I thought she was going to kill me. She must be insane.” The indignation in his voice was perfect.

  Jack took a couple of stiff-legged steps in his direction and growled at him. He froze in position on his knees. I stared in amazement, but Bob and Kay both turned on him. Bob leaned closer, his knuckles whitening on the gun. Jack began to bark and Kay snarled, “Louisa never! You leave her alone!” Her arms wrapped around me protectively.

  The officer, whose name badge read ‘G. Smith’, raised his hands and commanded, “Stop!”

  We all froze.

  “He’s lying,” I said. “He shot Bonnie and he came after me, and Jack jumped him and I got the gun away.”