Buck stopped me as I reached for the phone. “Don’t be calling the man at six o’clock in the morning on a Sunday. It can wait until this afternoon.”
I had to agree: six a.m. was an inconsiderate hour at which to make a call, especially when dealing with a doctor or a vet, who might well have been up all night anyway. “Maybe I can pick him up after church,” I said, returning the receiver to its stand. “I’ll give them a call after I get the kennel dogs fed.” I took a quick gulp of coffee. “Did everyone in here eat?”
“Yeah, and don’t let them tell you otherwise.” He clasped the back of my neck briefly with a warm hand and brushed a kiss across my nose. “I’ve got to get home and change. See you later.”
“At church?”
“Can’t. I’m on duty.”
“I’m going to Aunt Mart’s for dinner. I’ll bring home some leftovers if you want to stop by later.”
“Sounds like an offer I can’t refuse.” He lingered, hands lightly clasping my shoulders, a rueful smile in his eyes. “This is a little crazy, you know.”
I slid my gaze away uncomfortably.
“I’m here more than I’m at home. My house is starting to feel like a big closet.”
I said, “Maybe we’re spending too much time together.”
“Maybe we’re not spending enough.”
“It’s not even light outside,” I said. “I haven’t had my first cup of coffee. This is not a good time to have this conversation.”
I couldn’t help noticing that his eyes were no longer smiling. “Soon, okay?”
I nodded because, really, what else could I do?
I walked him to the door, cradling my coffee. “Oh,” I said, suddenly remembering. “Did Dolly Amstead call you?”
“From the bank?” He looked surprised. “About what?”
“About helping to set up the Pet Fair booth at the Fall Festival next weekend. We need your truck to transport some of the agility equipment and a strong pair of arms to set up the puppy playground.”
“Why didn’t you just ask me?”
I smiled sweetly. “Because I am not in charge.”
“Ah,” he said, nodding. We both knew Dolly had control issues. “Well, tell her she’d better not waste any time getting in touch with me. My social calendar fills up pretty quickly these days. Who knows when I might get a better offer?”
I slid an arm around his waist, holding the coffee cup out to the side as I tilted my face up to his. “Does it, now? You got a girlfriend or something?”
He accepted my invitation for a kiss, and when I opened my eyes, his were once again smiling. “Or something.” He touched my chin with an index finger. “Save me some leftovers.”
He opened the door on the cold dark morning, and I shivered and closed it behind him again quickly. In another moment headlights flashed on the windowpane, and I could hear the muffled barking of every dog in the kennel. I sighed and finished my coffee quickly. My day had begun.
In small communities like mine, going to church is more than a matter of religious expression; it’s also something of a cross between a town hall meeting and a block party, a chance to mingle with your neighbors and catch up on the goings-on. We sing a little “Abide with Me,” listen to a sermon on how to be better neighbors and spend the rest of the time finding out who’s in the hospital, who has a new baby, what time the spaghetti supper for the volunteer fire department starts and so on. Dolly Amstead got up and made a lengthy announcement about the Pet Fair that would be held in conjunction with this year’s Hansonville Fall Festival in order to raise money for a badly needed animal shelter, and directed people to get in touch with me if they wanted to volunteer to help with the booth, buy tickets for any of the events or sign up for the pet parade. I waggled my fingers from the middle pew where I sat with Aunt Mart and Uncle Roe when heads turned to find me. You really do have to admire Dolly’s managerial style: She has a wonderful way of delegating all the work while still managing to hold on to both the control
and
the credit.
I had managed to catch Ethel Withers at home just before I left for church. She told me that the dog I had decided to call Hero was off the IV and was on a bland diet of chicken broth and rice. They were on their way to Hickory to spend the day with her mother, but if I wanted to pick the dog up after church she would leave him in the back kennel run. I thanked her and promised to pick him up in a couple of hours.
I knew that Hero was perfectly safe in the shady kennel run at the veterinary hospital. There was a padlock on the gate to which I had been given the combination; the nine-foot-tall run was curved inward to discourage jumping or climbing escapees; he had plenty of water and shelter in case of rain, of which there was not the slightest sign. Nonetheless I was anxious about leaving him there unsupervised.
I gave my Aunt Mart’s plump shoulders a quick hug as soon as the benediction was pronounced. “I’ll be over as soon as I get the dog settled in at home,” I promised. I had explained to both my aunt and Uncle Roe about the situation with the dog as soon as I had seen them that morning. “It shouldn’t take me more than an hour.”
“Oh, honey, there’s no point in you driving from one end of the county to the other. Bring the dog over to our place with you. He’ll be okay for a few hours while we visit.”
“Are you sure?” Despite my aunt’s unabashed adoration of Majesty, my pretty collie, she was not exactly a dog person, and her knickknack-filled house and immaculate lawn were definitely not dog friendly.
“We can put him in the barn,” she assured me.
I smiled. “That’s okay. I’ve got a crate in the truck, and I can leave the back open. As long as he doesn’t bark.”
“What’s a little barking? He’ll be fine. You run on, now.”
Uncle Roe, who was, after all, a politician, was busy shaking hands and chatting with his neighbors, so I just waved to him in passing as I squeezed through the crowd. I left a stack of fliers about the Pet Fair on the vestibule table next to a sign-up list for Meals on Wheels drivers and some brochures about an after-school Bible study program. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Dolly waving to catch my attention from the back of the crowd, but I managed to slide out into the crisp autumn sunshine before she could catch me. There I found myself face to face with Reese Pickens.
When talking about our little corner of the mountains to outsiders, residents will often conclude with, “And ninety-nine percent of the people who live here are good, decent, hardworking folks.” In the back of most people’s minds when they think about the one percent would be someone named Pickens.
Earlier in the year, Reese’s son, Luke—known for his violent temper and flagrant drug and alcohol abuse—had been murdered and dumped on the side of the road. Some people thought Reese himself might have had a hand in that, and I was one of them. But my dispute with Reese went deeper than that. In March, he had sold Hawk Mountain, whose shadow had sheltered my family home for generations, to a developer with some outrageous idea of turning it into a fly-in resort for the super-rich. What once had been one of the most serene vistas in the county was now crisscrossed with the ugly scar of access roads and utility right-of-ways, the wildlife which had once called the mountain home had been displaced—mostly into people’s backyards—and I was slowly being forced to face the fact that the only life I had ever known here in Hanover County was about to undergo some major changes.
My inclination was to walk past him without speaking, but as luck would have it, we were standing only a few feet away from the preacher, who was greeting parishioners as they left the church full of compliments on the timeliness of his message about loving thy neighbor. So I said, as politely as I could, “Good morning, Mr. Pickens.”
He was a big, silver-haired man with a penchant for expensive Stetson hats. He tipped his hat to me now— this one with a sterling eagle’s head at the crown—and replied, “Miss Raine. How’s every little thing going over at your place?”
I regarded him cooly. “Well enough. You wouldn’t happen to know who’s been hunting over on Hawk Mountain the past few days, would you?”
“That’s private property,” he reminded me, and he looked far too pleased with himself to suit me. “How do you figure I’d know what’s going on out there?”
“They’re getting awfully close to the
edge
of private property,” I told him, unsmiling. “And unless they want to wind up on the wrong side of the law, somebody ought to remind them about a few of the rules of gun safety.”
He chuckled. “Miss Raine, you are a sight. Always huffing and puffing about rules and regulations and what’s right and what’s wrong. One of these days you’re going to finally kick that deputy lawman of yours to the curb, and your uncle’s going to retire and nobody’s going to give a fancy rat’s behind who your daddy used to be. Who’s going to stop and listen to what you’ve got to say then, huh?”
I refused to let him goad me. “How’s Cindy doing these days?”
Cindy Winston and her daughter, Angel—or I should say,
their
daughter, since Reese was, according to Cindy, the child’s father—had both been part of the tangled scandal that surrounded Luke Pickens’s death in the spring. It was not a pretty story, and it still bothered me that Reese Pickens should have any sort of guardianship over the little girl, Angel, even if it did mean that she would be financially secure for the rest of her life.
He said, without change of expression, “Why, I can’t say I rightly know. Last I heard, she up and moved to Fort Lauderdale.”
I had heard that too. I had just wanted to see his expression when I asked. I said, “I’m not a bit surprised.”
I turned to the preacher and extended my hand, “Enjoyed the sermon, Pastor,” and Reese Pickens moved on.
True to her word, Crystal had bathed the yellow Lab, who was waiting for me in the back kennel run of the veterinary hospital. He smelled like vanilla and looked slightly less emaciated than he had the day before, but he did not even raise his head from the sun-dappled concrete pad on which he lay when I approached the gate. He made no sign of protest when I slipped the leash around his neck, and when I clucked my tongue and encouraged, “Come on, boy, let’s go,” he got to his feet and plodded beside me to the car. Once again he jumped into the crate when I opened it, then lay down with his head on his paws and didn’t move or look up again.
I had never seen a more dispirited dog, and it just broke my heart.
Aunt Mart discouraged “shop talk” around the dinner table, but this apparently didn’t apply to the pre-dinner table, because the events of yesterday were all she could talk about as we dished up peas, corn and mashed potatoes in the kitchen. “I don’t think Roe slept a wink,” she confided, opening the oven door a crack to check on the biscuits. “Things like this bother him more than they used to.”
“Things like this would bother anyone.” I opened the refrigerator and took out the covered butter dish.
“And you, honey, I don’t know how you do it. Such a gruesome line of work. No, don’t put the real butter on the table. Roe just slathers it all over everything. Get that stuff in the tub. High cholesterol, you know.”
I traded the butter for the tub of something nondairy and nontasty. I said, “Well, I didn’t know my line of work was going to be gruesome when I got into it. I thought it was going to be about fish hatcheries and preventing forest fires. And later, about teaching dogs to sit up and lie down. Dead bodies definitely did not figure into my career plan.”
Aunt Mart glanced out the window to where my SUV was parked in the shade of an orange-red sweet gum tree, the back hatch open for ventilation. Hero had not made a sound, or even stirred, since lying down in the crate in the back.
“What are you going to do with the poor thing?” she worried. “I certainly hope you’re not planning to keep him. You already have your hands full.”
I had to agree with that. Keeping him was not even on the list of possibilities. “Hopefully, when Uncle Roe finds out who his owner was, some relative will take responsibility. Otherwise I’ll try to get him into a foster home in one of the rescue groups I know.”
“What this county needs is an animal shelter.”
“Well, that’s what we’re working on.” I took the bowl of three-bean salad she placed in my hands and started toward the dining room with it just as Uncle Roe appeared at the kitchen door. He was frowning a little.
“Well, so much for that,” he said, inclining his head back toward the living room, where, only a moment ago, he had been talking on the phone. “That was the head of security at Letty Cranston’s Hilton Head condo community, who finally got around to returning my call while we were at church. Seems she’s out of the country for the winter. No itinerary, no contact info, at least not with them.”
I said, “I never knew anybody that rich ever lived here.”
“She moved away while you were still in high school,” Aunt Mart explained. “I guess she kept the lake cabin for sentimental reasons.”
I placed the salad on the table and returned for the corn. “Buck said the cabin was empty—no luggage, no purse, nothing like that. What about dog food?”
My uncle looked at me. “No,” he said thoughtfully. “No people food either. No milk, no sodas, not even coffee.”Then he added, “Of course, if she came up here to do herself in, she probably wouldn’t have stopped for groceries on the way.”
“But she should have had dog food,” I argued. “When you travel with a dog, you make sure you have dog food.”
Uncle Roe said, “I’ll be back in a minute. I want to make some phone calls.”
Aunt Mart turned from the stove in exasperation. “Roe, not on the Lord’s day!”
“The Lord would approve,” he assured her over his shoulder as he hurried down the hall to his den.
“We’re sitting down in ten minutes with or without you!”
Ten minutes later there was enough food on the table to feed several families of three, which meant I would be dining happily on leftovers for the next few days, even after sharing with Buck. Aunt Mart was muttering to herself as she turned golden-topped biscuits into a napkin-lined basket and marched it to the table.