A Dog's
Life
by Myra Love
Chapter IV
“What the hell?” I grumbled and looked up at Donald. He shrugged.
“Someone obviously erased the message,” he said. “Probably your Uncle
Jim.”
“But
it was right here when he closed down the computer. I saw it with my own
eyes,” I protested.
“He could have erased it from another computer,” Donald said with a
somewhat condescending smile. “You don’t spend much time online, do you,
Andy?”
I shook my head. “No, my only computer time is on police databases.”
“With web-based email it’s pretty easy to erase something from any
computer, as long as you have the password for an account.”
I shrugged. “Maybe Jim went to the shop. I know there’s a computer
there.” I dialed Jim’s and Mattie’s home phone, and she picked up on the
first ring.
“You again, Andy? I swear, either we don’t see or hear from you for days
on end or else you’re in touch all the time. Have you figured out who
sent that ransom note yet?”
“Not yet, Mattie. I need to talk to Jim. Is he home?”
“Yes, he’s down in the study. I don’t know why, since you took away his
computer.”
“Maybe he has another computer down there.”
“No, I don’t think so. Of course, anything is possible.”
“Has Jim been there the whole time since I left, or did he go out?”
“Oh, he’s been down there the whole time, far as I know. Why all the
questions, Andy? Shall I go get Jim?”
“I’d appreciate it, Mattie.”
Jim’s speech was slurred when he came to the phone. I didn’t tell him
that the message was gone, just that we hadn’t been able to find out
anything at the station and would be taking the computer to the state
police in the morning.
“’Sperfectly awright, Andy,” he replied. “I can do wha’ I ha’ to in the
shop tomorrow. Thanks for lettin’ m’ know. G’night.”
Donald had hoped that telling Jim the computer was going to the state
police might scare him into admitting he’d erased the message, but I
think Jim was too drunk to care. Donald had wanted me to say more to Jim
to tell him that the technician could find erased messages, but I wasn’t
sure that was true.
When the chief arrived, we reported what had happened, and Donald passed
on his suspicion that Jim had deliberately erased the message after
letting me carry off his machine. The chief listened and told Donald he
could very well be right, but there was no proof. “Let the state police
lab fellow do his job. Maybe he can find some trace of the message. In
the meantime, let’s call it a night.” I called the state police
barracks in the morning and learned that the technician I knew was on
vacation. “He’ll be gone for another week, but you can bring the machine
in anyway,” the trooper on the switchboard said. “Somebody at the lab
should be able to help you out.” I thanked him and decided there was no
rush. I’d take the computer in later. First, I wanted to have a chat
with Anita Carswell.
Anita invited me to drop by for lunch. “In fact, you can bring lunch for
both of us, Andy. I haven’t been to the store all week and the cupboard
is a bit bare.”
I found her puzzling over some paperwork, not repairing or writing with
a fountain pen the way she usually was when I came by. “What’s up?” I
asked, putting a couple of sandwiches and a container of soup on her
kitchen counter. “You look perturbed.”
She grunted and put the paperwork aside. “Nothing interesting or
exciting. I mediated a dispute a couple of months ago, and now the
parties are battling again.” She shook her head. “I’m going to let this
go to court. I really don’t like those people and dread having to deal
with them again. She waved her hand in the air as if brushing the
subject away. “What’s for lunch?” Opening the soup container, she
sniffed twice and gave me the thumbs up sign. “Great. Eggplant
sandwiches too.” She winked at me. “I should let you feed me more
often.”
Lately Anita’s diet has taken a distinctly vegetarian turn. I’m a real
carnivore myself. She wouldn’t have minded if I’d brought a roast beef
sandwich for myself. I almost did, but the sauce on the eggplant sub
just smelled too good.
After we’d eaten and she’d put water on for tea, I started to pick her
brain about the dognapping case. I told her about the disappearing email
and Donald’s suspicion that Jim had erased it remotely. “He didn’t leave
the house and he hasn’t another computer at home, so I don’t see how,” I
added as an afterthought.
“Jim may have erased it from his handheld thingy,” she said. “Or else
one of his confederates did it.”
“What handheld thingy?” I demanded. “And what confederates?”
“Jim has one of those devices. I know you’ve seen them. A cross between
a cell phone and a mini-computer.”
“You mean a PDA?” I asked. “How do you know he has one?”
She looked mysterious. “I make it my business to know things.”
“You mean you’re nosey!”
She shook her head. “No, but people tell me things because I act
interested in what they have to say. In this case, however, no one had
to tell me. I was a couple of places behind him in line when he paid for
it.”
I scratched my head. “Where?”
“That big box electronics store that opened up off the highway out by
the hospital.”
I had no idea what Anita was doing in an electronics store, but I
figured that if I asked, the conversation would get off track. “Why?”
She frowned. “Why what?”
“Why did Jim erase the message—if he erased it?”
She sighed in exasperation. “So it couldn’t be traced back to him or his
confederates.”
I held up my hands. “Whoa! What confederates?”
She sighed again, and I felt like I was a very slow student in one of
her math classes. “The ones who helped him.”
“Helped him what?” I demanded, trying to keep the annoyance out of my
voice.
“Why, take and hide the dog, of course.”
I’d started to stand up when the teakettle began to whistle, but I sat
down again. Anita turned off the kettle and poured the water into her
teapot. “I spoke with the next door neighbor,” she said. “He didn’t hear
or see a thing.”
“Well, of course not. It was the middle of the night.”
“Jay Timmins is an insomniac,” she replied.
“So he didn’t hear or see anything, so what?”
She brought the teapot and two mugs over to the table and sat down.
“There were other neighbors up at the time. Did you interview any of
them?”
“No,” I replied, feeling defensive. “I’ve been off talking to possible
suspects.”
“Possible confederates, you mean,” she grumbled, checking the tea. “That
will need a little while longer, I suppose.”
“What are you talking about, Anita? What’s going on?”
“Talk to the neighbors,” she replied. “And if you can, get a warrant to
check the interiors of Willard’s and Walsh’s cars for dog hair. I won’t
tell you to check Clausen’s because he probably used one from the lot if
he was involved. And I probably don’t need to tell you that you don’t
have to bother with Marcus’ car. He had nothing to do with any of this.”
As she poured tea in to my mug, she smirked. “Eat up. You have a lot of
police work ahead of you.”
“Sometimes I wish that old woman would just mind her own damned
business,” the chief grumbled. “Of course we interviewed the neighbors.
In fact, I did it personally. What does she think we are, a bunch
of amateurs?”
I didn’t say anything. The chief already knew I’d gone to Anita to ask
for her advice, so there was no need to remind him that she hadn’t
butted in. Besides, he’d gone to her first.
“She’s not an investigator,” he continued, “she’s a mediator. She ought
to leave the investigating to us.” He banged his coffee mug on his desk.
“Damn it! Of course, no one heard anything. It was the middle of the
night.”
I hesitated, then cleared my throat. “Jay Timmins, the guy next door is
an insomniac.”
“So he’s an insomniac, so what?” the chief growled. “The street is right
off the main road. Traffic goes by all the time. And the glass in the
window wouldn’t have made all that much noise when it cracked.
Especially since the sound was muted with flannel. We found fibers in
with the shards.”
I nodded. When the chief was in this kind of mood, he brooked no
argument.
Suddenly he grinned. “Sorry, Andy. I’m not angry at you. It’s just that
Anita Carswell has gotten kind of strange lately, and I don’t want her
messing up our investigation.”
“Strange?” I repeated the word and then wished I hadn’t.
The chief nodded. “Yeah, strange. Or maybe I should say even stranger
than is usual for her. I’ve been wondering if her age isn’t catching up
to her. The woman must be eighty if she’s a day.”
I knew she was older than eighty. Eighty-two, to be precise. But I
hadn’t seen any signs of strangeness, except maybe for the change in her
diet, and I spent a lot more time with Anita than the chief did. “I
thought you liked Anita,” I protested.
“I do like her. But that doesn’t mean I don’t see her flaws,” the chief
replied. “My cousin June is having a hard time with her. She and that
fool Bill went to Anita… Oh, never mind. You just go ahead and take that
computer to the state police lab, Andy, and we’ll see what they can come
up with,” the chief ordered.
When I turned to go, he clapped me on the shoulder briefly. “Good work
Andy. We’ll get this mess sorted out soon enough. Without any help from
meddlesome old women.”
I wanted to believe the chief was right, but I knew Anita too well to
disregard her advice. So, after I came back from the state police
barracks I knocked on Mr. Timmins’ door.
Jay Timmins looked and acted old, though he was younger than Anita. He
didn’t want to invite me in, so we talked out on his front porch. “If I
was ever able to sleep,” he whined, “the night that break-in happened
would have been the perfect night for it. Those damned dogs weren’t
barking up a storm the way they usually do. I’ve called the police too
many times to count,” he added with a vicious glare at me, “to complain
about the noise, but you people didn’t do a thing about it. When ten
o’clock came around and the barking didn’t start, I thought maybe you
folks had actually done something to earn your inflated salaries for
once.”
I pressed him to be sure that the night of the dognapping was, in fact,
the night the dogs didn’t bark. He accused me of calling him a liar and
taking him for a ‘senile old coot’. “Of course I know which night the
dogs didn’t bark. It was quiet for once, at least until your chief made
a racket pretending to investigate around four or five in the morning.”
I didn’t ask why he thought the chief was investigating or pretending to
investigate. I just thanked him and left. When I rang the doorbells of
the other neighbors near Jim’s and Mattie’s house, no one answered. No
surprise there. It was the middle of the day and I supposed most of them
were at work.
I started back to the station, wondering all the while what it meant
that the dogs hadn’t barked. It seemed unlikely to me that a bunch of
dogs that barked every night would choose the night of a break-in to
fall silent. I was sure this was the detail that had turned Anita’s mind
to thoughts of conspiracy and collusion. What if she was right and there
was no break-in at all? I wanted to ask the chief to brainstorm the
implications of that with me, but I sensed that he wasn’t about to give
credence to anything Anita had to say.
If the dogs didn’t bark it meant they were drugged. That was the only
thing I could come up with off the top of my head. Or maybe they weren’t
even in the house. Maybe those confederates Anita hinted at had taken
them earlier in the day and then returned them. No, that didn’t make
sense. I shook my head to clear it. They must have been drugged. Maybe
the intruder fed them meat with… No, wait a minute. If Anita was right,
there wasn’t really an intruder. Maybe Jim had drugged them so there
would be no noise. No, that didn’t make sense either. I sighed. I didn’t
really want to go to Anita for more advice if the chief was against it,
but I just couldn’t figure out what to do next.
By the time I got back to the station I’d convinced myself that I needed
to ask the chief for a meeting to consider the possibilities. Only he
wasn’t there. Lisa was, and my day immediately got a whole lot better. I
hugged her, after looking around to make sure that her brother wasn’t
watching us. He tended to hoot and holler whenever he saw us acting
affectionate. He meant no harm, but it was annoying.
“Am I ever glad to see you!” I said once we’d stopped hugging. “This
investigation is driving me nuts.” If Donald had been listening in, this
would have been where he piped up with, “It doesn’t have to drive you
‘cause you’re close enough to walk.” Lisa didn’t make cracks like that,
thank heaven.
“Have you talked with Anita?” she asked.
I felt stomach acid come up into my throat and go back down again as I
swallowed hard. “Yeah, that’s the problem. She has it in her head that
there was no dognapping. It was a set-up. The chief does not agree.”
Lisa nodded. “I see.”
I took a deep breath. “I don’t know what to think. Seems like he has it
in for Anita these days, but he’s the boss.”
Lisa didn’t say anything for a few seconds. “Anita is usually right,”
she finally mumbled. “But that doesn’t really help you, does it?”
I shook my head. “Wish I knew why he’s so down on her. He started to say
something about his cousin June, but then he clammed up.”
Lisa looked perplexed. “What good would it do to know?”
“None probably, but I’d still like to.”
She grinned and tousled my hair. “Oh right, how could I forget? You like
to know just because you like to know.”
I felt a little embarrassed because she was right. I do like to know
what’s going on and why. I shrugged. “Well, maybe if I knew, I could
figure out how to do something about it.”
It was Lisa’s turn to shake her head. “I don’t think that follows,
Andy.”
“I said maybe, didn’t I?” I retorted a little more sharply than I
intended.
“When you say maybe, that’s like a green light. Or like waving a red
cape in front of a bull.”
“What do you mean?” I demanded. “I’m perfectly reasonable.”
“Andy Searle, you are totally convinced that there are solutions to
every problem, if only you have enough information. But some problems
aren’t problems because of a lack of information. Human beings just are
not that rational.”
“Well they should be,” I grumbled.
Lisa knew better than to argue with my “shoulds” as she called them.
“I’m on my way out to the farm. I promised I’d help Mom with the big
clean-up. I’ll call you from there this evening, okay?”
“Yeah, fine,” I replied. “You coming back tomorrow?”
She nodded. “You’ll hardly have a chance to miss me.”
“Of course I’ll miss you. I miss you when we don’t have dinner together,
even when we’re both here in town.”
“That’s sweet, Andy, so sweet that I’ll consider marrying you.”
“And taking my last name?” I added, unable to resist.
“Don’t push your luck.”
After I went off duty I really wanted to interview the neighbors who
hadn’t been home earlier in the day, to see if any of them could
corroborate what Jay Timmins had told me. But the chief said he’d
already talked to them, and I didn’t want it getting back to him that
I’d gone behind his back. I knew that if I called and told him what I
wanted to do, he’d tell me not to waste my time. So instead, I went home
and ate most of the half-gallon of ice cream that was in the freezer. It
was vanilla fudge, Lisa’s favorite but a flavor I don’t particularly
like. Still I finished it off and made a note to buy more in the morning
before she came back.
After that indulgence, I really couldn’t sit still and think, so I went
out for a walk. My walk led me towards Jim’s and Mattie’s neighborhood.
I was halfway surprised when I found myself standing in front of their
house. The windows on the first floor were dark, but there was a light
upstairs and one in the basement. I figured that Mattie was watching TV
with the dogs all around her, but I wondered what Jim was doing. Did he
have another computer down there or was he drinking? I never showed up
unannounced at their house. In other circumstances, it would have seemed
rude. But this time I walked up the stairs and rang the bell.
The barking started immediately. In fact, my finger was still on its way
to the bell when I heard the first sounds. It took almost five minutes
before I saw Mattie looking at me through the window. I waved, and she
came over and opened the door, a frown on her face. “What are you doing
here, Andy?”
The dogs pushed past her and gave me a thorough sniffing, Judge Judy got
up on her, I mean his hind legs and put his front paws on my shoulders,
almost knocking me over.
“No you don’t, Your Honor,” I said, pushing him down onto all fours.
“May I come in, Mattie? I’d like to talk with you and Jim.”
“Jim’s not home,” Mattie said and started to close the door on me. I
pushed back with my foot, and she glared at me.
“The light is on in the basement,” I said gently. “Are you sure he’s not
home?”
“He went out after dinner,” she said, her mouth forming a stubborn line
once the words were out. “You can’t come in now, Andy. It’s not
convenient.”
I tried to look into her eyes, but she averted her head. “Okay, Mattie,”
I said. “You know though that this won’t look too good when I tell the
chief, don’t you?”
She pouted. “I don’t care. Jim isn’t home, and I don’t feel like talking
to you. That’s not a crime. I won’t be bullied by my own nephew.”
I sighed and turned around, letting her close the door behind me. After
I’d heard her footsteps going up the stairs, I walked over to the
basement window, knelt down, and peered in. Jim sat playing with a
small, handheld electronic device. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure what
it was, but it looked a lot like a PDA.
© 2015 Myra Love - All Rights
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