Raining Cats & Dogs (A Melanie Travis Mystery) (22 page)

I sat still, hands demurely folded in my lap. “If you wouldn’t mind telling me.”

“I took Boss outside. He can be a bit of a handful, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. He was trying to bully me, and I didn’t want to correct him the way he needed to be corrected with the patients and staff sitting right there. There’d already been one complaint lodged against him. I didn’t want to draw any more attention our way than I had to. The doors were right there, so we stepped outside.”

“Where was Kelly?”

Steve looked surprised. “Pardon me?”

“How come you were holding Boss? Why didn’t she have him?”

“She’d gone to visit the ladies’ room. For obvious reasons, Kelly didn’t want to drag the dog all through the building with her. Or be dragged by him, as the case may be. I told her I’d watch him for a minute.”

I watched the play of expressions across Steve’s face. He was speaking slowly, thinking about his words before he said them. Mark Terry might have asked where the trainer had been, but clearly he hadn’t asked the follow-up question.

Maybe Steve hadn’t even thought about it himself. But he was now, and he was already formulating excuses. “She was only gone a minute or two,” he said. “No time at all, really.”

Two minutes might have been enough, I thought, with everyone else’s attention diverted elsewhere.

“Did you happen to notice whether anyone else left the room?”

Steve shrugged. “People were coming and going all the time. Stacey might have disappeared for a bit. And Paul did, too, I believe. But nothing about anyone’s activity seemed particularly ominous to me. Including yours.”

“Mine?”

“You were the only newcomer to the group. The only thing that was different on that visit was your presence. It’s hard not to wonder…”

“What?” I asked, though I could already guess where he was heading.

“Whether the fox is investigating the chickens, so to speak.”

The best defense was a good offense. Clearly, Steve had figured that out.

“So you have nothing to hide?”

“I wouldn’t say that exactly,” Steve countered. “But murder Mary Livingston? Not me. Why would I? I have no motive.”

“Nor, seemingly, does anyone else,” I said. “That’s the problem.”

Steve stood up to show me out. “Your problem,” he said silkily. “Not mine.”

I
t was only a short drive from New Canaan back to North Stamford. I took the back roads rather than the parkway and was home in no time. To my surprise, as I drove up in front of my house I saw that a hand-lettered sign had been taped to the front door.

I parked the Volvo in the driveway and got out. Sam must have written the note with a thick black marker because I could read it from where I stood. DON’T COME IN, it said.

Well, that sounded ominous.

I was standing there wondering what to do next, when Sam came strolling around the side of the house. I noted with relief that he looked calm and composed. His hands were slipped nonchalantly into the pockets of his shorts. He looked as though he might simply be out for a walk on a sunny Saturday afternoon.

What he didn’t appear was unduly alarmed or half crazed—like I might have looked if I had had a good reason to be barring people from their own home.

“I thought I heard a car drive up,” he said. “Did you have a nice morning?”

“I had a fine morning.” My gaze slid over to the sign on the door. “Until now.”

“Problem?” Sam asked innocently.

Davey had been known to give me exactly the same look when he knew he was in trouble. Bob, too, come to think of it. Maybe it was a male thing—that wide-eyed, who me?, I-haven’t-done-anything-wrong look that had the immediate effect of putting every woman in the vicinity on her guard.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me?”

“Everything’s under control here.”

Sam linked an arm through mine and began walking again, heading back around the house toward the fenced yard. I was towed smoothly in his wake like a tugboat escorting a barge to the harbor.

“Sam?” I said sweetly.

“Hmm?”

“Why aren’t we going into the house?”

“There’s been a minor complication.”

“Minor?”

“Exactly.” His stride never faltered.

“Involving the
whole
house?”

We were approaching the gate, which Sam had shut and locked behind him. That meant that the Poodles were within the enclosed yard—so they weren’t in the house either. I’d only been gone two hours. What could have gone so wrong in the meantime?

“You know how it is,” said Sam. “Sometimes even a little problem has to be treated in a forceful way. Nipped in the bud, so to speak, before it can escalate into something bigger.”

What escalation? I thought. Complications were bad enough. Now we were worried about escalation?

Sam held the gate open, and I slipped through in front of him. The Poodles gathered en masse around my legs, a sea of wriggling bodies and wagging tails.

“Exactly what little problem are we working on?” I asked.

Sam said something under his breath. Or maybe he just coughed. It was hard to tell, and either way I was none the wiser. He looked at me brightly, as though he were happy to have cleared things up. Which, of course, he hadn’t done at all.

“Pardon me?” I said.

Sam mumbled again. It sounded as though he might have said, “Please,” which made no sense. Please what? Please stop asking? Please go away? Please get a grip…? And then it hit me.

“Oh, crap,” I said out loud. “Fleas.”

“Now, now.” Sam’s tone was soothing. “It’s not that bad. I’m almost finished dealing with the situation.”

Contrary to what Mr. Sunshine said, it
was
that bad, and we both knew it.

Fleas are the bane of a Poodle owner’s existence. Dogs “in hair,” those that are ready to be shown, are never allowed to scratch. Scratching made mats and holes in the coat. It played havoc with the all-important mane hair. It could keep a Poodle out of the show ring for weeks.

And if a dog wasn’t allowed to scratch, then it followed that his owner must never allow him to become itchy. So fleas were definitely out. One of Aunt Peg’s favorite lectures had to do with how two small fleas, left untreated, could quickly lead to a whole infestation. And once a battalion of fleas got inside your house, there was nothing left to do but…

“You bombed the house,” I said.

Sam nodded. “About an hour ago. I had to run out and get some stuff or I’d have started sooner. I treated the Poodles, too.”

Several years earlier, that would have meant dipping or powdering each dog. Both processes were deadly to show coats, unless the flea preparations were immediately washed out, rinsed clear, and the hair blown dry; and that often meant that the products weren’t as effective against the fleas as they needed to be. Now, thankfully, there were products on the market that could do the same job while only causing minimal havoc.

Still, it was a big job, and an annoying one, and a totally unnecessary one if precautions were taken against letting the dogs be exposed to fleas in the first place. Which I thought I’d been doing. So where had I gone wrong?

Sam’s Poodles were newly in residence, but he wouldn’t have brought me fleas. Tar was as much at risk from the pesky intruders as Eve was. Besides, Sam had been the one to discover the problem. If his dogs had had fleas before moving in, presumably he’d have found them earlier and dealt with them.

Still simmering with annoyance, I looked around the small backyard. To be certain of wiping out the infestation, we’d need to treat that area, too. My gaze skimmed upward to the top of the cedar fence. Considering my frame of mind, it was probably a good thing that no cats were perched up there at the moment, waiting to heckle us. Maybe with all the Poodles out in the yard, they hadn’t liked the odds…

Sam was watching me closely and following my train of thought. He knew the moment I figured out what had happened.

“Damn!” I spun around and headed back toward the gate.

“Wait.” Sam grabbed my hand, and I slid to a precipitous halt. “Where are you going?”

As if he didn’t know.

I simply stared. He got the point.

“It wasn’t Amber’s fault,” he said.

“Her cats have fleas.”

“Apparently so.”

I crossed my arms over my chest. “Whose fault is that?”

“She didn’t know.”

Like that helped. “Then she didn’t care.”

“She’s not the one who let her cats into our house,” Sam pointed out.

Right. That had been Davey. I’d deal with him when he got home. In the meantime, I was itching to go and blow off some steam at the new neighbor. In fact, now that I knew we had fleas in our house, I was itching all over.

“Besides,” said Sam, “I already talked to her about it.”

“And?”

“She didn’t realize there was a problem. Now she does. She’s going to treat all the cats and get rid of the fleas.”

“And maybe try keeping them home once in a while?”

Sam shook his head sadly, as if he were dealing with someone who was a little slow on the uptake. “I don’t think she’ll go that far.”

“Her cats are trespassing.”

“I don’t believe there’s a law against that.”

“There are leash laws for dogs.”

“Cats are different,” said Sam.

“Tell me about it,” I snapped, but my anger was beginning to fade.

In my absence, Sam had not only found the problem, he’d dealt with it. Maybe that was why I was so anxious to complain, I hadn’t had to do any of the work. I ought to be grateful, not snapping at him.

“Thank you,” I said belatedly.

“You’re welcome.”

“And she’s really going to treat those cats so this doesn’t happen again?”

“Already done,” said Sam. “I picked up some products for her when I got ours.”

I gazed up at him. My smile was luminous. “My hero.”

“Don’t you forget it,” said Sam.

As if.

Sunday afternoon I loaded Faith in the car and headed down to Greenwich for the weekly visit to Winston Pumpernill.

It was a beautiful spring afternoon; I had the car windows open and the radio volume cranked up for the drive. Any responsible person will tell you that it’s not safe for a dog to ride with its head sticking out of a car. Faith and I both knew that as well as anybody. But she was having so much fun—her mouth open, tongue lolling, black-fringed ears flapping in the breeze—that I didn’t have the heart to stop her. In fact, if I hadn’t had to steer, I might have been tempted to join her.

Now that two weeks had passed since Mary Livingston’s death, things seemed to have quieted down once again at the facility. Loss was not, after all, an entirely unexpected occurrence there. And if the circumstances surrounding Mary’s demise had been somewhat unusual, it looked as though the staff and administration would just as soon forget all about that small aberration and move on.

Our group assembled out front as usual. Lynn, the Director of Volunteers, greeted us at the door. Any reservations she might have harbored the previous week about our group’s visit had since been set aside. She thanked us for coming, walked us through the wide corridors to the sunroom, and left us at the door.

Jay, the orderly who’d been manning the entrance during our last visit, was inside the room this time. He was chatting with Sandy Sandstrum and several other patients whom I hadn’t yet met. Our group dispersed and headed in different directions. I spied Mrs. Ellis sitting in the sun that slanted in through the long windows, just as she’d been during Faith and my first visit.

Windows
and
French doors, I thought. Faith and I headed that way.

Mrs. Ellis had been staring out the window, but she turned slightly as we approached. Most of the patients smiled when they saw Faith coming their way. The big Poodle certainly did her part to look appealing; she wagged her tail and tipped her head winningly to one side.

The effect was lost on Mrs. Ellis, however. Her stern expression didn’t change when I pulled up a chair and sat down. Faith’s offer of a front paw was pointedly ignored. Being a big believer in positive reinforcement, I shook the paw myself, then placed it back on the ground and patted the Poodle for making the effort.

“Well?” Mrs. Ellis barked.

“Well what?” Not the best comeback I’d ever delivered, but she’d caught me by surprise.

“Why are you back?”

“The group comes every Sunday.” I tried not to sound defensive. “Most of the residents seem to enjoy it.”

“That’s their business. Maybe you should go entertain them.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, starting to rise.

“Quitter.” Her lip curled. “Pansy.”

“Pardon me?”

“For starters, you can stop being sorry for every damn thing.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Her brow lifted, but she didn’t comment. Instead, after a minute, she said, instead, “Sit.”

I sat. Faith did, too. Mrs. Ellis looked pleased by our obedience.

“You’re Melanie,” she said, pointing a gnarled finger, “and that’s Faith.”

“That’s right,” I agreed, then shut up. It seemed safer to let her lead the conversation.

“Most people learn their lesson on the first try. Nobody ever comes back to see me a second time. Yet here you are again. So, which are you, brave or stupid?”

“I guess I’d have to say I’ve been known to be both.”

“Hopefully the former more than the latter.” Mrs. Ellis stared down at Faith. “I still don’t like dogs, you know. At least yours isn’t all touchy-feely. There’s nothing worse than a dog that wants to lick your face.”

Faith was a pretty accomplished face licker. But she knew better than to press unwanted attention upon strangers. Sitting upright beside my knee, she was the very model of Poodle decorum. How anyone could prefer a cat to that, I had no idea.

“You want to talk about Mary Livingston,” Mrs. Ellis said.

She was right, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to admit it. “What makes you say that?”

“I’ve got eyes and ears, don’t I? What do you think? When you youngsters go home we old folks go into limbo until your return? Well, guess again. We sit around and talk about you. It’s not as if we have a million other things to do.”

I supposed not.

“Sandy told me what you were up to last week. Asking questions about Mary and that long-lost son of hers. You aren’t some sort of police detective, are you?”

“No.”

“Didn’t think so.” Mrs. Ellis thumped the arm of her chair with satisfaction. “The staff’s been pretty careful about keeping them out. Though you might have slipped through anyway, seeing as how you look pretty innocent.”

“I do?”

The older woman nodded. “Like butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth. Trust me, you can use a look like that to fool a lot of people. I sure did in my day. So what have you got to tell me about Mary’s murder?”

This wasn’t a conversation; it was more like a runaway train. And I was no more than an unwitting passenger clinging to the side of a careening car.

“I thought I was going to be the one asking the questions,” I said.

“You thought wrong.”

Case closed.

“There’s a reason why the administration has been trying to keep information from you. Nobody wants the residents here to be unduly alarmed.”

The thought made Mrs. Ellis sneer. Or maybe she was smiling. It was hard to tell. “Do I look like the kind of person who’s apt to become unduly alarmed?” she demanded. “Well?”

“No.”

“At my age, what have I got left to be frightened of? Death? It’s already staring me right in the face. It may be coming, but it hasn’t gotten here yet. And until that happens, I fully intend to use what little time I have left. Now go on ahead and tell me what happened to Mary.”

“She was smothered by a pillow while she was asleep in her room.”

Mrs. Ellis waved a hand in the air. “That’s old news. Grapevine around here has had
that
for ten days. Tell me what else you know.”

So I did. I laid out the facts as I knew them and watched Mrs. Ellis puzzle over each new revelation. At the end, I said, “I was hoping that since you were sitting over here by the doors that day, you might have noticed if anyone went in and out.”

“You mean sneaked in and out?” She didn’t miss much.

“Precisely.”

“There’s a problem with that.”

“What is it?”

“The reason I sit over here when your group shows up is that I don’t want to be involved. I don’t
want
to pay attention to the silly antics and goings-on. So I don’t. Plus…”