Paws For Murder

by Annie Knox

  When Sean returned, he’d changed into a pair of jeans and a fisherman’s sweater. His still-damp hair formed clean, precise curls that fell in his face. I don’t know how he resisted the urge to tuck those tendrils behind his ears.

  “Would you like a drink?” he asked, making his way to a small credenza in the dining room onto which the living room opened.

  “Actually, yes.”

  “Scotch okay?” He poured a couple of fingers of deep amber-brown liquor into a tumbler.

  “Sure.” I’d never had Scotch, but I’d heard it was good.

  He poured another glass and brought it to me before flopping down on the far end of the sectional.

  I sniffed the drink and took a tentative sip. I gasped and nearly choked. It was like drinking moldering tree bark, except that it also burned like fire.

  I looked up to find Sean smiling that crooked smile at me. He raised his glass. “Skoal.”

  I breathed out a small laugh, feeling some of the tension in the room drain away.

  “Sean, I’m really sorry about Carla,” I began.

  He held up a hand. “Stop. I know your intentions are good, Izzy, but I don’t want to process my feelings or hug it out or anything. Let me just live with this for a bit. Then you can make those sad eyes at me and tell me it’ll all be okay.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “So,” he continued, “as completely crappy as this day has been, I don’t think we’ve actually succeeded in getting Rena off the hook.”

  “I had that same realization while I was waiting outside Carla’s office. What are we going to do?”

  “We’re going to keep on doing what we’ve been doing. You’re going to run your business, I’m going to represent some clients, and we’ll spend our spare time trying to find some actual evidence of what went down in the alley that night.

  “Now, speaking of your business, don’t you have a costume party to plan?”

  I peeked down at my watch. “Oh dear, yes. We’re basically set, but there are always a few last minute details to take care of. I should probably go.” I paused. “Will I see you there tonight?”

  “I didn’t get Blackstone a costume,” he hedged.

  “I run a pet boutique, Sean. I think I can come up with a costume. In fact, I have just the thing in mind.”

  He shrugged.

  “Come on. I know you don’t want to talk about what happened with Carla, but you can’t wallow in it either. Trust me, wallowing does not help. You should come, mingle, be sociable.”

  He laughed softly. “Between the two of us, we could write a book about bad breakups.” He sighed. “But you’re absolutely right. You bring Blackstone a costume, and I’ll be there.”

  • • •

  Merryville’s Halloween Howl kicked off at dusk, just as the stars began winking coyly in the indigo sky. Dakota Park hummed with excitement as jack-o-lanterns flared to life and the shrieks of sugar-amped children pealed into the night.

  As people meandered through the maze of brick-lined pathways, they could fill up on pasties from the Thistle and Ivy, imbibe mulled wine and cider from the Grateful Grape, enjoy tiny tarts and petit fours from Taffy’s tea shop, and collect candy from dozens of local businesses. Even grumpy Richard Greene had donned his own vintage dress blues and showed up with my aunt Dolly at his side, dressed in a fifties swing dress, saddle shoes, and her hair pulled up in huge barrel curls. They strolled hand in hand, each carrying a bucket of old-fashioned penny candy for the kids: Mary Janes, fireballs, caramel creams, butterscotches, and Neapolitan Coconut Squares.

  As hosts of the pet contest, Pris, Rena, and I didn’t have much time to mingle. We were busy setting up the seats for people to watch the parade of costumed pets, laying out the goody bags for our entrants, and checking the dozens of tiny details that kept any large event afloat.

  Both Pris and I had decided to leave our cats at home, for fear that we wouldn’t be able to keep our eyes on them. Packer, though, was doing his best to help us. Wearing a black widow’s peak cap and a black-and-red satin cape, my dorky little dog made a dashing Dracula. Rena had brought Val, of course, but the ferret—dressed in the brilliant silks of a court jester—was hiding in the inner pocket of Rena’s huge overcoat. Packer, on the other hand, was right under our feet.

  I was pleased to catch a glimpse of Sean. While I’m sure he wasn’t in a particularly festive mood, he’d made the effort. He had brought Blackstone with him, too, and the dog wore the tiny deerstalker cap I’d had Rena deliver from Trendy Tails.

  “Virginia, we’ll get the contest started in about twenty minutes,” Pris said.

  We’d left Carla at her office that afternoon, the threat of criminal charges hanging over her head, but apparently she had yet to break the news of her imminent downfall to her mother. I couldn’t imagine Virginia showing up if she knew that we’d confronted her child that very day.

  “Can I get you anything before we start?” I asked carefully, on the off chance Virginia was actually seething inside and just a master of hiding her emotions.

  “No, dear,” she said with a smile, and I exhaled hard in relief. She chuckled. “You look as tense as I feel,” she chided.

  Indeed, Virginia did look tense. Not angry or distraught, just wound a little tighter than usual. It definitely wasn’t the reaction of someone who’d gotten news that her daughter would lose her livelihood, be utterly disgraced, and might possibly go to jail. Still, something was off kilter with her.

  Before I could give it much more thought, my sister Lucy and her wacky border collie bounded over to the band shell. Wiley wore a pointed and pom-pommed clown hat and a bright yellow ruff around his neck, while Lucy had managed to pull together some sort of sexy circus ringleader outfit, complete with top hat, gold braid, and—holy cats—a whip.

  “What’s up, buttercup?” she said. Lucy loved a good party, and Lucy loved candy. Put the two together, and she was in heaven. I had no idea how many handfuls of candy corn she’d downed to produce her current sugar high. “I’m still miffed Wiley can’t enter the contest, by the way.”

  “It wouldn’t look right. Especially if you won.” Some of the animals wandering the park with their owners wore adorable costumes: a cat dressed as a doctor in tiny surgical scrubs; a pug dressed like a pumpkin with a green stem hat, leaves curling on glittering tendrils (that outfit was my own handiwork); even a rabbit dressed up like a French parlor maid. But Wiley’s clown suit ranked right up there on the cuteness scale.

  “Why don’t you take Wiley and Packer for a quick run around the park, let them burn off a little energy?” I thought the run might settle Lucy down, too.

  “Sure thing.” Lucy took Packer’s leash from my hand and clicked her tongue against her teeth to try to get the dogs moving.

  Wiley took the hint and began bounding, straining at the leash, raring to go. But my sweet boy was distracted by something rustling in the dark beneath a molting shrub. He waddled his way over and began snuffling around in the fallen leaves.

  “Careful,” Virginia said. “Don’t let that dog play in those leaves.”

  Lucy, never one to simply do as she was bade, narrowed her eyes at Virginia. “Why not? He’s not hurting anything.”

  Virginia sighed. “I’m not worried about the plant, I’m worried about him. That’s a deciduous azalea. The leaves are toxic to dogs.”

  Lucy tugged Packer’s leash, and scuffed her toe sheepishly. “I didn’t know.”

  “Me either,” I said. “That’s good information to have. Packer and I take walks in this park all the time.”

  Virginia shrugged one shoulder. “We had a lady from the Extension office come out to speak to the garden club. She was advising us about pet-friendly landscaping.”

  “Well, if she comes back, let me know. Sounds like it was a useful lecture.”

  “Listen,” she said, “do I have time for a smoke before we get started?”

  I checked my watch. “Sure. Plenty of time.”


  Virginia stepped away from the band shell, retreating into a cluster of small oak trees, so she could smoke without bothering the rest of us.

  I watched the tip of Virginia’s cigarette, its glow pulsing in the twilight dark like a firefly. It was almost hypnotic, and as I watched it—unable to tear my eyes away—I began letting thoughts drift through my head.

  What if Carla didn’t kill Sherry?

  Carla had motive to kill Sherry, and she was certainly smart enough to pull off a poisoning. Only two possible killers had motive to take Sherry’s phone from the scene of the crime: Hal and Carla. We knew Hal was innocent because he wasn’t at Sherry’s funeral when Valrhona found the phone. All that pointed to Carla’s guilt. And I didn’t find her alibi particularly convincing.

  But why then? Why in that alleyway in the middle of the night? How did Carla even know that Sherry was back there? By all accounts, Carla had had dinner with Virginia and Sean at La Ming, had a glass of wine at the Grateful Grape, and then gone home . . . with Sean watching her enter the house.

  Virginia took another drag on her cigarette, and the scattered thoughts coalesced in my mind. The splinter of a thought that had been worrying me all day finally surfaced.

  The night we’d taken Xander to the Grateful Grape, Diane Jenkins had mentioned that Carla and Virginia didn’t leave together the night of Sherry’s death. Virginia had stuck around after Sean had taken Carla home so she could share a toast with her staff after the bar closed.

  Carla’s alibi was definitely a lie. But she wasn’t lying to protect herself. She was lying to protect Virginia.

  Virginia, who took regular smoke breaks in the alleyway and might have seen Sherry out there the night of the party. Virginia, who had led Sherry herself on nature walks through the marshy shoreline of Badger Lake, where water hemlock grew wild. Virginia, whose only child was threatened by Sherry Harper’s threats to go public about the misappropriation of funds. After all, we knew about the text Sherry had sent to Carla, but how many phone calls had she made . . . calls perhaps not just to Carla’s cell phone, but also to the home phone Carla and Virginia shared? Or perhaps Carla had confided in her mother once Sherry’s demands had become too insistent.

  I waved Sean over, and filled him in on my thought process.

  “I suppose it makes sense,” Sean said. “But I can’t imagine Virginia killing anyone.”

  I tipped my head to the side. “Today you were willing to believe Carla capable of murder. Surely you realize everyone has a breaking point. Even Virginia.”

  “Actually,” Sean said, “I could have believed anyone in this town except for Virginia. I’ve never met a gentler, more nurturing soul.”

  “Well, there’s only one way to find out if she’s a killer.”

  Sean raised a questioning eyebrow.

  “We ask her.”

  • • •

  Before we talked to Virginia, I wanted to have a quick tête-à-tête with Pris.

  “My, don’t you look intense,” Pris said. “Is there some scandal afoot? You know how I love a good scandal.”

  “I actually just have a question and a favor to ask of you.”

  “Go on. I’m intrigued.”

  “Virginia said someone from the Extension office gave a talk to the gardening club about pet-friendly landscaping.”

  “Ugh. Yes. What a snooze.”

  “Do you remember the woman talking about hemlock?”

  “Hmmm. Yes, actually. It caught my attention because I’d always thought it was Queen Anne’s lace.”

  I shared a quick glance with Sean. I could see the resignation in his eyes.

  I laid a hand on Pris’s arm. “Thanks. And now, the favor.”

  • • •

  Sean and I made our way to Virginia’s side, just as she snubbed out her cigarette.

  “Hi, Virginia,” Sean said. “Could we have a word with you?”

  Her lips twisted in a small smile, her expression caught somewhere between sadness and regret.

  “Of course,” she said.

  Sean cleared his throat.

  “I guess you heard about Hal Olson buying the Soaring Eagles camp at auction yesterday.”

  “Yes. Small town. Word travels fast.”

  “How do you feel about that?” Sean asked gently.

  “Sad,” she said. She lifted the tail end of her crimson scarf and wrapped it round her hand. “I hate to see the land developed. The best memories of my marriage and family are all out at that house, many of them the hours I spent with Sherry and Carla.”

  “So you don’t support the development of the lake?”

  “Of course I don’t support the development at the lake. If Hal Olson does what he says he’s going to do, builds condos and high-end shopping centers along the waterfront, then the tranquility of the Harper lake house is gone forever.”

  “Did you know Sherry was thinking about buying the campground herself?”

  Virginia stared off into the distance as she answered. “Yes, she’d mentioned it. But she couldn’t have stopped the development. Sherry has no head for business. Eventually she would have ended up right where the Andersons did, and Hal would have bought the place anyway. There’s something to that old saying: If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”

  “But that’s the thing. Sherry wasn’t ready to join because she didn’t think she’d been beat. She thought she could finally use her share of the trust to buy the Soaring Eagles camp and stop the development in its tracks,” I said. “She’d been reading up on wetlands conservation, too, ready to use the law to stop the development if she had to.

  “But all of that—trying to purchase the camp out from under Hal Olson, waging a court battle to stop the development—all of that cost money. And the money—Sherry’s money—is all but gone.”

  “Virginia,” Sean said, “we know about Carla. We know she stole money from Sherry’s accounts and funneled it into your business.”

  She winced as though she’d been struck. But she did not look surprised.

  “You knew what she had done,” I said, my words a statement, not a question.

  “Not at first,” Virginia said. “Not until it was too late.”

  “Too late?”

  “I never should have taken a dime from my child, but I wanted the business so badly. And she offered the money with a smile, every time I so much as hinted at needing it. My beautiful, talented daughter kept writing checks for my new business. New furnace, no problem. New roof, no problem. A fully stocked wine cellar, no problem. A perfect, temperature-controlled vault for the wine, sure thing. I was so used to the trust being this bottomless well of money like it was when I was still married to Carla’s father, but gradually I began to worry that Carla was draining her share too quickly. And then, one day, my young Jeff made a comment about how Carla would be turning thirty soon, and he’d be the only one without access to the trust. That’s when I realized that none of the money she’d been giving me was hers. She was in deep.

  “The only way we were going to be able to pay Sherry back was to get the Grateful Grape turning a profit. But so far, we haven’t had the traffic we need. Deer season didn’t bring in the wine bar crowd. Maybe if we’d been able to hold on for the holidays, when the real tourists come back. . . .”

  “But Sherry created a ticking clock.”

  Virginia laughed softly. “More like a ticking time bomb. I don’t even know how she first learned about the campground going to auction. Must have been through one of her conservation groups. But once she got it in her head to stop that development, nothing would stand in her way. At first, she just asked Carla for money. But when Carla had to start saying no, Sherry got belligerent, demanding. Finally, she asked to see her taxes. I have no idea how she ever thought to ask.”

  Probably another pearl of business wisdom she picked up from her fling with Hal Olson.

  “Carla didn’t think there was any harm in giving her the forms, because, by themselves, they didn’t mean anyth
ing. But Sherry somehow figured out that she was missing a whole lot of money. And that’s when the threats started.”

  “Threats?”

  “To go to the police, to go to the papers. Heck, Sherry threatened to go to the governor . . . as if he would care.”

  Virginia shrugged. “She was going to hurt Carla, and all Carla had done was try to help me.”

  “What Carla did was wrong,” Sean said.

  She lifted a hand to cup his cheek. “Oh, Sean. Carla always said you had an overdeveloped sense of morality. Black and white, right and wrong. What Carla did was certainly illegal, but it came from a good place. So was it really wrong?”

  While I didn’t think Carla should be let off the hook, I had to admit that I’d done a few shady things to help my friend. Nothing truly illegal, but arguably unethical. I’d taken advantage of Nick Haas’s perpetual inebriation, I’d exposed Hal’s affair to Pris, and Sean and I had both held on to Sherry’s phone when we found it. I could sort of see Virginia’s point.

  “Is that when you decided to kill her? When she started making the threats?”

  Virginia tapped another cigarette from her pack and lit it. “This is where I’m supposed to deny everything, right?”

  “You could. But it’s just us here, so why bother?”

  Virginia heaved a sigh. I remembered how sad she’d seemed when I visited her at the Grateful Grape. She’d been close to Sherry and her actions weighed heavily on her soul.

  “I suppose you’re right. I knew Sherry would never give up. I’d always admired her persistence, you know, but once she turned on Carla . . . I’d always known about water hemlock and knew it grew wild down by Badger Lake, but the lady who spoke to the garden club reminded me. I figured Sherry ate so much of that nasty dried ginseng root, I could find a way to slip the hemlock to her. I’d been carrying around a bag of the poison for a week, trying to find the right time, trying to find my nerve. And then, the night of my birthday, I was waiting for the staff to cash out the last of our customers when I went out to have a smoke. And there she was. Fighting with that awful boyfriend of hers. He left, and she was alone, and it was like a signal from the universe.”