The Comfy Canine Murder Case

by Adele M Cooper

  “Alright, you’ve convinced me,” Paige said with a laugh. “Where does he live?”

  “In Newport,” River said. “Is that a problem?”

  “No,” Paige said, taking out her phone. “I just need to ask my parents to look after Barkley for a little longer.”

  “Thanks, Paige,” River said, relaxing. “I really appreciate it. I know we haven’t known each other long, but you’re the only one I can trust, that I know likely didn’t have anything to do with any of this.”

  Alice had said much the same thing. For once, Paige’s disappearance from Otter Rock for so long was working in her favor. Since the thefts were going on since before Paige returned, there was little way she could be involved, especially since it was only recently that she got her own dog and became involved in the school.

  “Alright, let me get my coat, and then we’ll go,” Paige said.

  She didn’t know what they would find at Jonathan’s apartment. But she hoped it was enough to help Jack crack the case.

  Jonathan lived in a small apartment. He obviously lived alone, but there were signs that Alice came to visit him often; a second mug on the sink, a dress that was draped over the back of a chair and a pair of earrings on the table.

  “How long were Jonathan and Alice together?” Paige asked.

  “About a year,” River said, thinking. “I think they celebrated their anniversary a few weeks ago. It was a long time coming, but they both wanted to focus on building up their business first.”

  “I see,” Paige said. “Alright, you’re the expert; where do we look first?”

  “Just take a look around, look in anything that seems suspicious,” River said. “The place isn’t big, so it won’t take us long to search.”

  Paige nodded and headed toward a set of shelves. Her nose wrinkled at the dust; it was obvious that no one had been here since Jonathan died and the police had finished their own search. Somewhere behind her, she heard River sneeze.

  Jonathan was a man of few possessions. The shelves had a handful of books, and then a small collection of small cars, ornaments and trophies. Paige tried to look behind the shelves, but it was too heavy to move.

  With nowhere else to look in the room, Paige headed to one of the other rooms. It looked like it had been set up as a study, though it only had another set of shelves, this one full of books, and a large desk in it.

  “Jonathan liked to keep things clean,” she called to River.

  “Yeah, he didn’t like leaving things out,” River said, poking her head into the study. “When we were younger, he always used to scold me for leaving my toys on the floor.” She smiled sadly. “He didn’t really change much as an adult.”

  “Why don’t we look around the desk,” Paige offered, hoping to distract her.

  River nodded and came further into the room. The desk had several drawers in it, each with different things placed in them. There was a drawer of notebooks, one of stationery and another with different files. The top left drawer, however, was odd. All it had in it were a few pens that rolled around when they opened it, an eraser and a sharpener.

  “I guess he hadn’t decided what to put in there, yet,” Paige said.

  She tried to jerk the drawer closed, shaking it because it seemed to be caught on something, but paused as something shifted. Whatever it was, it sounded a lot larger than the pens and pencils that were in there. But there was nothing else in there.

  “I heard that, too,” River said, opening the drawer fully again.

  She shook the drawer, much like Paige had done, making the pens rattle around. Something larger thumped against the bottom of the drawer, and the two women exchanged a startled look.

  “A false bottom?” River said, amazed. “I thought you only ever saw those in movies.”

  “Well, it looks like we have one here,” Paige said. “Let’s try and pull it out.”

  They ran their hands around the inside and found a well-worn groove that they could use to pull the thin piece of timber out. Underneath it was a thin, green book.

  “That’s his journal!” River said.

  “It’s not as big as I thought it would be, since you said he was always writing in it,” Paige said doubtfully.

  “That’s just his latest journal,” River said, shaking her head. “He has old ones, but he gave those to Alice a while ago, for safekeeping. He started writing in this one about two weeks before he was killed.”

  “Does Alice get to see what he writes?” Paige asked, curious.

  “Usually,” River said. She frowned. “But he wouldn’t show her this one, for some reason. She was really confused about why.”

  “Jonathan didn’t like to say much, apparently,” Paige said. She found a pair of plastic gloves in her pocket, which she had dug out just for this reason, and put them on. Then she picked up the journal and flicked through it. “He only wrote a handful of entries in this one. And...” She blinked. “They’re all in code. Is this normal?”

  “I’ve never seen him write in code before,” River admitted.

  She leaned over Paige’s shoulder to look. There wasn’t much on each page, just a few bullet points. But the notes he had written were a jumble of letters that didn’t make sense.

  “I think we need to take this to the police,” Paige said. “They can crack the code and figure it out. Jonathan obviously started this journal at the same time he had suspicions about someone, which was why he wrote it like this and hid it away.”

  “But Alice was the only one who ever read his journals,” River said, looking up at Paige with anxious eyes. “Why did he hide everything away from her?”

  It was a good question, but it wasn’t one Paige had the answer to. She wanted to, though. She wanted so badly to know what was in this journal.

  “Paige…” She looked up at River’s hesitant voice. “I’m really worried about what that journal will reveal. Do you think we could…look at it first?”

  “I don’t want to go messing with evidence,” Paige said. “If we don’t take it in straight away, we could accidentally corrupt the evidence.”

  River’s shoulders slumped.

  “But…” Paige knew she shouldn’t be doing this. But River looked so dejected, and she was so insanely curious. “We could take some pictures of the journal and have a look at those, instead.”

  Admittedly, that was crossing a line she was pretty sure she shouldn’t be crossing. But Paige was the one who had found the journal. She doubted she would ever get another look at it; after the police were done deciphering it, it would go in the evidence locker.

  What would it hurt, just to have a small look?

  “I’ll go find a plastic bag for us to put it in,” River said, her face brightening. “You take the pictures and I’ll be right back!”

  She rushed out of the room. Paige looked at the journal. Now was the moment for her to decide to tell River that she couldn’t do what she had said, that it wasn’t right.

  Instead, she took out her phone. She was handing the journal over to the police anyway, so they would get their own chance to look it over. All she wanted was to know what it said.

  As she took the pictures, she really hoped that Jack never found out about this.

  Chapter 17: The Coded Journal

  17: The Coded Journal

  Jack was not having a very good day, at all. No matter where he looked, he seemed to have come to a standstill. They had had to let River Townsend go, and there was no new evidence. They hadn’t even found the damn crime scene yet.

  With every passing day, the trail grew colder. But there was nothing he could do. Only River had the opportunity to commit the murder, and she had no motive. Nor was there any evidence against her. Just like the dogs that went missing, the trail was swiftly disappearing into thin air before his very eyes.

  Suddenly, his door banged open, and he jumped, straightening in his chair. He blinked as he took in the two women that had just rushed into his office, looking excited.

>   “Paige,” he said blankly. “And…River?”

  He hadn’t expected to see the two of them together. It made dread curdle in his stomach to see both his partner and their prime suspect together. He hadn’t had a chance to speak to Paige yet, but she had said that she understood why he was asking her to stay off the case. So what was she doing?

  He forced himself to remain calm, though. He wasn’t going to jump down her throat just because she was with River, who she knew from the dog training school.

  “Jack, sorry to just barge in, but we have something to show you,” Paige said, waving around something in a plastic bag.

  “Alice asked me to go through Jonathan’s things,” River said. “But I didn’t want to do it on my own, so I asked Paige to come with me.”

  “She thought we might be able to find Jonathan’s journal, which she said was missing,” Paige added.

  “So we had a look around,” River said, her eyes bright with excitement. “And we found it!”

  Jack’s eyes widened. That journal had been something of a headache for himself since River had first mentioned it. It was just something else that hadn’t made sense on this case.

  Now Paige and River were saying they had found it?

  “He’d hidden it under a false bottom in a drawer in his desk,” Paige explained, handing the plastic bag over. He opened it and peered inside to see a thin, green book. “It doesn’t look like much, but River said this was the book he was writing in.”

  “Did either of you touch this?” Jack asked, looking at them.

  “Not with our bare hands,” Paige assured him. “We put it in the bag and brought it straight here.”

  Jack frowned, furrowing his brow. Paige hadn’t looked at him when she said that. She only ever avoided his gaze like that when she was lying to him.

  More than likely she had looked through the journal before she handed it over, he decided with a wry smile. Still, he wouldn’t fault her for it this one time. After all, this journal could be the break he needed.

  “We’ll go through it,” he promised them. “Thank you for bringing it to me. Is there anything I need to know about it?”

  The two women looked at each other. Then Paige sighed.

  “We did peek at it,” she grumbled. “But it’s all in some sort of code.”

  Jack rolled his eyes at her. “It’s okay. I’ll just give it to Jackson; he loves this stuff.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Paige said, curious.

  “Yeah; riddles, puzzles, codes… He loves them,” Jack said, putting the bag on his desk. “He’ll be thrilled to look at this. He isn’t here right now, since it’s his day off, so I’ll have him look at it tomorrow.”

  “Great,” Paige said. “Well, we better get going; I left my car in town, and I need to pick up Barkley.”

  “Right,” Jack said. “Thanks again, both of you.”

  The two women waved and almost ran out of his office. Jack wondered what that was all about, but decided he didn’t want to know. Paige would tell him what was going on when she wanted to.

  Right now, he had more important things to think about. If he was lucky, this journal would be exactly what he needed to figure this case out.

  Paige hoped that they didn’t look suspicious as they rushed out the door.

  “Just follow me,” she said to River. “I’ll take you to my place.”

  “You’re not picking up Barkley first?” River asked.

  “I don’t think that’s really a good idea,” Paige pointed out. “He’ll be fine with my parents for now.”

  River waited until Paige had gotten in her car, and then the two of them drove to Paige’s apartment. It wasn’t long before Paige was unlocking the door and letting the other woman in.

  “Cozy,” River said with a smile. “Is this where you’ve been since you returned to Otter Rock?”

  “Yeah,” Paige said with a nod. “It has a few problems, but it functions. Do you want a tea or a coffee?”

  “I’ll make it,” River said. “You go print those pages out.”

  Paige showed River where the cups were and then headed to her room, where her laptop and printer were. Her printer wasn’t capable of printing from her phone, but it was easy enough to load the pictures onto her computer and print them from there. There were six pages in all, and she tapped her finger on the bedspread impatiently as she watched them slide out of the machine.

  When it was done, it beeped at her, and she snatched the pages off so she could hurry back to the living room. River was setting two cups of coffee on the table, along with a packet of cookies that she had scrounged up from the cupboard.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “But neither of us have had dinner, and I figure that a snack is better than nothing.”

  “It’s fine,” Paige assured her. “Alright, let’s look at this.”

  She felt a pang of guilt; she hadn’t told Jack about these, and he didn’t even suspect that she had taken pictures of important evidence. But then River leaned forward and Paige put it out of her mind.

  “Any clue what the code is?” she asked River.

  “Well, Jonathan never really liked riddles, so I don’t think it will be very complicated,” River said, looking it over. “Look, there’s a small word here; ‘kp’.”

  “Another one which I see a few times is ‘vjg’,” Paige said. “Then there’s this large word that happens a lot ‘Cnkeg’. So there is a pattern, here.”

  “That five letter word has a capital letter, so it might be a name,” River said.

  Paige put a notebook on the table and tore out a few pages so they could each work on it. If she was honest with herself, she had never been big on puzzles like this either, but it helped to know that at least one of the words was a name. She scribbled down as many names as she knew, helped by River, who knew who her cousin associated with.

  Of them all, though, there were only a handful of five-letter names.

  “So we’re left with Alice, Jacob and me,” River mused aloud. “Now we just need to figure out which one fits the code.”

  “Actually…” Paige said slowly, scribbling furiously. “I think I had it. I think Jonathan was writing ‘Alice’… it’s the only one that’s consistent with what I just thought. Look; it looks like Jonathan just used a letter that was two letters down in the alphabet from the letter it was supposed to be. So, ‘A’ becomes ‘C’, ‘l’ becomes ‘n’ and so on.”

  “Right, I see it!” River said. “So, now that we have five letters, we can use those to figure out the rest of the code, right?”

  “It helps that we have two vowels,” Paige agreed. “So, whatever Jonathan was talking about, he was writing about Alice.”

  Dread was rising in her stomach. Suddenly, she didn’t want to know what Jonathan had written anymore. She looked up at River, whose lips were pressed into a thin line.

  “Let’s keep going,” River said.

  Painstakingly, they worked through the pages. Now that they had a few letters, as well as the code, it was much easier to work out each word. Paige took three pages and River took the other three, and they copied each one out onto a piece of notebook paper.

  As Jonathan’s fears and suspicions spilled out onto the paper in front of her, the dread in Paige’s stomach grew larger and larger until she thought she was going to throw up the few cookies she had eaten. When she was done, she sat back and looked with disbelieving eyes at what she was seeing.

  “I don’t…believe it,” River said haltingly. “This can’t be true.”

  Paige numbly picked up the first page, which River had been translating.

  “-Alice is acting odd

  -Dogs still missing

  -Could a dog whistle be responsible?”

  “So…Jonathan thought that a trainer with a whistle was responsible for the kidnappings,” Paige said quietly. “And he suspected Alice?”

  “Here,” River said, handing her the second page.

  “-Alice lost he
r whistle

  -Otter Crest Loop is where the dogs keep going missing

  -Found a whistle there. I’ll hold onto it for now

  -Alice can summon all the dogs in the school with her whistle

  -It could be why the dogs vanish, if she is calling them. They would obey because they were taught to”

  “I can kind of see why he suspected Alice,” Paige said slowly. “I noticed that she could use her whistle to tell the dogs what to do. Even Barkley started responding to the whistle in the last lesson.”

  “Do you think she really did it, then?” River asked, her face pale.

  “I don’t know,” Paige said, eyes narrowed. “The next two pages are about him following Alice around for a week. He says that she has lots of notes on all the dogs in the class, including the ones that went missing.”

  “But that could just be because she’s keeping track of her students,” River argued.

  “There isn’t any real evidence,” Paige agreed. “But it was enough to make Jonathan really suspicious. Look at this one, though. It’s dated four days before the murder.”

  She held up the fifth page.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s it?” River asked, startled. “Who is he apologizing to?”

  “I wish I knew,” Paige sighed. “So far, this just has more questions than answers. But there is one more page.”

  She handed over the final page. It was different to the other pages. This one was written in actual sentences, and the letters were crooked and rushed, as though Jonathan had hurried to write it all down.

  “This one is dated the day of the murder,” River gasped.

  “I found it. Gunner is being targeted. I need to go down to Otter Crest Loop. I can stop this.”

  “Found ‘it’?” River asked. “What did he find?”

  “Evidence?” Paige asked with a shrug. “He doesn’t explain much. But…we have a location. And it proves Jack’s theory right; he suspected Otter Crest Loop as the place where the dogs were going missing, but he didn’t find any evidence there.”