by Susie Gayle
TABLE OF CONTENTS
A WOOF OF MURDER
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
A Woof
of
Murder
A Pet Shop Mystery
Book Eight
By
Susie Gayle
Copyright 2017 Summer Prescott Books
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication nor any of the information herein may be quoted from, nor reproduced, in any form, including but not limited to: printing, scanning, photocopying or any other printed, digital, or audio formats, without prior express written consent of the copyright holder.
**This book is a work of fiction. Any similarities to persons, living or dead, places of business, or situations past or present, is completely unintentional.
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A WOOF OF
MURDER
A Pet Shop Mystery Book Eight
CHAPTER 1
* * *
“Here you go, and thanks for visiting the Pet Shop Stop.” I smile broadly as I hand a little boy, no more than eight, two plastic bags filled with water, each containing a colorful tropical fish. Beside him, his mother hefts the new tank, food, and filtration system.
“What do you say, Jimmy?” his mother asks.
“Can I pet your doggie?” The little boy eyes Rowdy, my grab-bag mixed breed of a pup who accompanies me to the pet shop.
Jimmy’s mother rolls her eyes. “That’s not what we say.”
“Oh. Thank you.”
“You’re very welcome, and yes, you may. He’s friendly.”
The boy gives Rowdy a scratch behind the ears, and then follows his mother out the door. Once they’re gone, Rowdy stares at me and puts a paw in the air as if to say, “I’ve been a good boy and therefore deserve a treat.”
“Okay, fine.” I toss him a cookie from a jar I keep on the counter and he gobbles it down in one bite. Basket, our shop-kitten, teeters nearby, teasing the fish in a big tank against the wall. Basket was born with only three paws, and though he’s learning to get around pretty well, his gait is still a bit wobbly.
I have to say, life is good. Actually, life is really good. I run a fairly successful business in a beautiful town where the people prefer to shop mom-and-pop. I’ve got great friends, well-behaved pets, and the love of a wonderful woman who is also my business manager—even if I’m not sure where in the shop she is at the moment.
It’s been more than a week since my best friend (and barber) Sammy Barstow put an end to a blackmail scheme that was threatening to bankrupt our little coastal town of Seaview Rock. Even though I wasn’t privy to all the details until pretty late in the game, I knew enough to know that it was, or at least could be, damaging to everyone involved. After a misunderstanding in which we thought my ex-wife Karen was dead for a few hours, Sammy called the whole thing off. And now the six of us—me, my girlfriend Sarah, Sammy, Karen, and the two council members who are to blame for all these shenanigans—have a pact between us that we’ll keep it our secret.
And even though we’ve vowed not to let word get out, the fact that it’s over now is like a huge weight lifted off my chest. It’s a liberating feeling, like when someone sheds those extra pounds (or at least I imagine; I don’t diet) or finishes a marathon (though I don’t run, either).
You get the idea. It’s a good feeling.
But, as is wont to happen in life, we often trade one problem for another.
As if to punctuate my thought, I hear a stupendous crash from the rear of the store, followed by the sound of Sarah grumbling incoherently. Rowdy puts a paw over his eyes and lets out a small whine.
“Don’t worry, I’ll check it out.” I give him a scratch on the ear and head back to our small storage room in the back of the store.
“Hey. What, uh… what are you doing?” I ask casually.
Sarah stands in the storage room, amid a couple of toppled boxes of overstocked dog toys that litter the floor. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath.
“I am trying to clean this place up,” she explains. “It’s an unholy mess back here.”
“Well, it is now…”
“No sass, mister.” She points a finger of warning in my direction. “I still need to dust the shelves, clean the kennels, wash our aprons…” She runs her fingers through her auburn hair and sighs. “There’s just not enough time.”
“Hey, you ought to relax.” I step over the mess and give her a hug. I can feel how tense her shoulders are, how rigid she is with the stress. “It’ll be fine.”
Sarah’s normally a pretty easygoing woman. She’s compassionate, smart, and strong-willed. But the last couple of days, she’s been high-strung and stressed out.
“You don’t understand, Will. She sees everything. And then she passive-aggressively nitpicks. It’s like breaking down a wall, brick by brick.”
“Don’t you think that’s a little dramatic?”
She looks up at me, her expression sobering. “No. I don’t.”
See, Sarah’s mother is coming to town today. She dropped the news on us very suddenly a few days ago, and since then Sarah has not been her usual sunny self. I’m sure there’s a reason why we’ve been dating a year and I’ve never met her mother, but it’s hard to believe that she could be as bad as Sarah describes her. I assume that she’s exaggerating so it’ll soften the blow of whatever her mother is really like.
The one saving grace, in Sarah’s mind, is that her mother is bringing along Sarah’s younger brother Denny—who I’ve also never met, despite that they live in Scarborough, barely more than two hours away. There’s a pretty big age gap between them (Sarah’s got a little more than a decade on her twenty-four-year-old brother), so regardless of how old he gets, he’s still her “baby brother.” Denny still lives at home, which isn’t uncommon for his age, but according to Sarah it’s also because their mother has quite the grip on him.
“Let me clean this up,” I tell her. “Why don’t you go help customers for a while and try to unwind a bit?”
“I can’t relax, it’s almost ten o’clock.”
“Sarah, it’s half past ten.”
She gasps. “Oh god. I have to go!” She scurries out of the storage room, practically bowling me over in the process. “Their train is coming in twenty minutes!”
“Train? I thought they were driving?”
Sarah unknots her green apron as she hurries to the counter. “Mom doesn’t drive anywhere that takes longer than thirty minutes to get
to. And Denny doesn’t drive at all.”
I balk. “He’s twenty-four and he doesn’t drive?”
As she pulls on her jacket, she says, “Long story. When he was a kid, he sort of… stole a car.” She waves a hand in the air dismissively. “It wasn’t that big a deal.”
“Grand theft auto is not a big deal?”
“It was downgraded to larceny, and he was a minor. He got probation and some fines, and he’s not allowed to get a license until he’s twenty-five.”
“Okay,” I say slowly. Sure, not a big deal. Suddenly I’m not so confident about getting myself into all this.
“Don’t worry. He’s a good kid.” She looks up at me and, as if reading my expression, she asks, “Will you still love me after you find out my family is completely nuts?”
“Yes.” I shrug. “Probably.”
“Good enough. Gotta run!” She heads out the door quickly.
I shake my head and sigh. “It’s just for a couple days,” I tell Rowdy. “What’s the worst that could happen?” I head toward the rear of the store to clean up the toppled boxes when I hear the door open and a young guy enter the shop.
“Oh, hi, Ham,” I greet him. Hammond Dobes is around nineteen, boyish—a little dopey, to be honest, but a nice kid.
“Hi, Mr. Sullivan,” Ham says quietly, as he glances around the shop.
“Ham, you can call me Will.” I have to chuckle a little. “It’s kind of weird seeing you here; normally I see you everywhere except my shop.” Ham took some time off after high school to save money for college, and he has at least three jobs that I know of, the latest of which is as a runner and busboy at the Runside Bar & Grill.
“Yeah.” He chuckles halfheartedly, still glancing around nervously. I furrow my brow as I realize how hard he’s trying not to look directly at me. “So… what’s up, Ham? Something I can help you find?”
“No, no,” he says. “I, um, just wanted to…” He clears his throat. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry, and…”
“Sorry for what?” I ask, thoroughly confused.
“And… and that I swear, I didn’t mention your name at all.”
“Ham, what are you talking about?”
“You don’t know yet?”
Okay, now I’m getting impatient. “Obviously I don’t. So would you just tell me what it is I don’t know so I can tell whether or not I should accept your apology?”
“I… did something…”
The door behind him swings open, hard, and Sammy enters briskly, waving a newspaper. “Will, we need to talk. Now.”
CHAPTER 2
* * *
“Hang on a second, Sammy.” I turn back to Ham, but he’s already scurrying quickly out the door. “Ham, wait!” I call after him. Too late. He’s gone.
I turn to Sammy. I can immediately tell something is very wrong; he’s red in the face and his normally smoothed-back black hair is ruffled, tufts jutting up here and there.
“You look like a madman,” I remark with a smile. “What’s up?”
He doesn’t return my smirk; instead he slaps the newspaper down on the counter. “That’s up.”
I lean over and read the top headline. “There are miners trapped in Utah? That’s terrible, Sammy, but what’s it got to do with us?”
“Not that!” He flips the paper over so the bottom half of the front page is showing. “That one!”
I suck in a breath. “Oh, no.”
The headline of the smaller article in the lower-left corner reads, ALLEGATIONS OF AFFAIR MAY EXPLAIN RECENT COUNCIL BEHAVIOR.
I snatch the paper up and read. “An anonymous tip to the Seaview Rock Gazette alleges that local businessman and town councilman Tom Savage has been engaged in an extramarital affair with fellow councilperson Rachel Stein…” I lower the paper. “This is conjecture! It’s practically libel!”
Sammy rolls his eyes. “It would be, except we both know it’s true. Keep reading.”
“Though both Savage and Stein refused to comment, a relationship between the two could shed light on recent revitalization proposals pushed through the Seaview Rock town council, which for the last few months have seen Stein and Savage pitted against fellow councilmen Ezekiel Birnbaum and the late Mario Estes…” I lower the paper again and shake my head. “Why did they refuse to comment? People are going to assume they’re guilty.”
“Again, they are guilty,” Sammy reminds me. “I didn’t even see the paper this morning; I heard about it in the barber shop when someone told me that Savage’s wife already threw him out.”
“Good grief.”
“You know what this means, right?” Sammy asks, fidgeting. “There’s nothing keeping them from pointing fingers at us.”
“That’s not entirely true.” I scan the article again. “There’s nothing in here about Stein cooking the treasury books and siphoning money from other projects to cover their proposals. An affair will ruin their personal lives, for sure, but at least they won’t go to jail for it.”
“Will, whoever wrote this obviously knows at least a little. Look what happened with you, and with Karen—it’s not going to take much thread-pulling to unravel it, if they think there’s more to it.”
I sigh and rub my temples. “This is supposed to be over! Why is this happening now?”
“And more importantly,” Sammy asks, “who squealed? Only six of us know about it.”
“Clearly it wasn’t Stein or Savage,” I say, “because they have the most to lose. We know it wasn’t you or me. Sarah would never…” I trail off, because the only other person who knew about the scheme would be Karen Bear, my ex-wife. And despite the fact that we’ve reached a place of being friends now, I’ll be the first to admit she has kind of a big mouth.
“But that doesn’t make sense,” I continue. “She has nothing to gain from it.” Why would Karen squeal? “She wouldn’t… Oh.”
“Oh? What’s ‘oh’?”
“Hammond Dobes,” I mutter.
“Ham? The goofy kid that was in here just now?”
“Yeah. Right before you burst in, he said he wanted to apologize to me, and that he ‘didn’t mention my name.’” I shake my head. “He knows. That’s gotta be it.”
“And how would the kid know, William?” Sammy asks, a bit too accusingly for my liking.
“Well, Samuel, because he works at the Runside, remember? We went there for our little victory lap, and he waited on our table. He must have overheard us.”
“Sheesh.” Sammy pinches the bridge of his nose. “I can’t even recall mentioning it out loud. Do you? How much did we say?”
“I don’t remember, either. But we’ll have to find out.”
“Okay. You talk to the kid. And while you’re at it, talk to the reporter that wrote the article.”
“Me? Why do I have to do all the running around?”
“Because,” Sammy tells me, “while you’re doing that, I’ll be on damage control. I’m going to talk to Savage and Stein and make sure they know it wasn’t any of our little clique that let it slip.”
“Oh. Okay.” Given a choice, I’d much rather talk to Ham and a reporter than those two. I glance down at the paper again. “Beverly Quigley. Doesn’t ring a bell; do you know her?”
“Eh, she’s new in town. Been around a year or two.” That might sound odd, but in Seaview Rock—where most of us were born and raised—you could live here five years and we’d still call you “new in town.”
“Okay. I’ll talk to Ham and this Beverly, and call you later with details—oh, wait. I can’t right now. Sarah is picking up her mom and brother from the train station; they’ll be back within an hour.”
Sammy stares at me blankly. “Will, this is just a little more important than meeting the future in-laws, don’t you think?”
“Apparently, Sarah’s mother is some sort of terrible monster that, I don’t know, eats children or something.”
Sammy smirks a little. “Fine. Sometime today, th
ough?”
I nod. “Sometime today for sure. I’ll call you.” He heads for the door. “Wait, what do I tell the reporter?”
“Tell her that you’re a business owner and that her story has you concerned about how it might affect you, or something,” Sammy replies. “Try to sound desperate. If she knows anything more, she might spill it.”
“Got it. Good luck with those two.”
“Thanks.” Sammy heads out.
CHAPTER 3
* * *
Hindsight really is twenty-twenty. If I would’ve known that it would be another hour and a half until Sarah returned to the shop, I would’ve made a run for it and at least talked to the reporter first.
Foresight may not be as keen, but it doesn’t take perfect vision to see by the expression on Sarah’s face as she enters the shop—which I can only describe as “tight”—that I shouldn’t say a word about how long it took her to fetch her family.
Instead I smile. “Hey, glad you’re back.” She forces a smile, too, but her eyes seem to plead with me like someone with a gun to their back might.
Behind her enters another woman, in a sharp skirt-blazer ensemble with a string of pearls at her throat. For being in her early sixties, Sarah’s mother looks surprisingly young; her hair is still the same auburn shade as her daughter’s, and the only creases in her face are the crow’s feet around her eyes that deepen as she squints around at the Pet Shop Stop.
Bringing up the rear is a young man wearing a black skullcap pulled tight over his head, dressed in a black shirt and jeans. Denny is nearly as tall as me, but skinny—too skinny, if you ask me. He keeps his hands in his pockets, with his shoulders slumped, and stares at the floor.
“Hello,” I greet them warmly. “I’m Will Sullivan. It’s very nice to finally meet you, Mrs. Cummings.”
Sarah winces. Her mother turns her scrutinizing glance on me. “It’s Miss Walsh,” she corrects with a wan smile. “I dropped my ex-husband’s name.”