Groomed For Murder: A Pet Boutique Mystery (19 page)

Twenty

M
y sisters, Dru and Lucy, stopped by the shop on their lunch hour, with my mother and Aunt Dolly in tow. Mom carried a covered dish, the luscious scent of her ratatouille already making its way across the showroom, and Dolly had a loaf of bread in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other. At the smell of food, Packer and Daisy May came thundering down the steps. Dru and Lucy blocked the dogs until Mom got the ratatouille safely to the table.

Both of my sisters worked strictly nine-to-five jobs. Dru was a CPA who worked for a firm that handled both private clients and audits of the city treasury, and Lucy was a court reporter. The irony of Lucy working as an officer of the court was not lost on anyone. My baby sister broke every rule in the book, and still managed not to get caught. That ability to get away with everything shy of murder had earned her the nickname Lucky Lucy.
She insisted there was no luck to it at all; she just knew how to manipulate people. When she announced that at the dining room table, my mother nearly passed out.

I got along just fine with both of my sisters. I was Switzerland. But proper, rule-following, i-dotting and t-crossing Dru found Lucy’s wanton ways infuriating. And Lucy thought Dru was just a prude, the cloud over everyone’s party. They often had words with each other, Dru trying to keep her temper in check while Lucy taunted her every which way from Sunday.

Today, though, my night and day sisters appeared to be in cahoots. And they’d brought lunch.

“Guess what we have.” Dru crooned.

“You’ll never guess,” Lucy added.

“Okay, then I’ll skip the pointless guessing and just ask you what you have.”

“Party pooper,” Lucy said before sticking her tongue out at me.

“We,” Dru said with a flourish, “have Daniel Colona’s obituary from the
Madison Standard
.” She pulled a folded piece of printer paper from her purse and handed it to me.

Sure enough, it was Daniel’s obituary, shockingly short considering he’d actually worked for the paper.

“What’s it say?” Rena asked impatiently.

I read aloud:

Reporter Daniel Colona died on Friday, April 4, in the town of Merryville, Minnesota. Police assert that Daniel was a victim of foul play.

The deceased was an active member of a local
animal rights organization and a deacon in his church. He frequently gave back to the journalism community by speaking at conferences and organizing Shot Heard Round the World, a workshop held every year on September 17—the anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution—for small-town reporters on how to find wire-worthy stories in their communities. Colleagues remember him as a quiet but generous man who always had the time to help young reporters.

He is survived by his parents, Tony and Margaret Colona, and a sister, Marilyn. In lieu of flowers, please send donations to the Madison Paws for a Cause Foundation.

“Wow,” Rena said. “Can you imagine? A whole life boiled down to three simple paragraphs.”

My mom, Dolly, and Dru began the age-old dance of putting a meal on a table. Mom set the covered dish on the hot pads she’d used to carry it, a sort of makeshift trivet. Dolly laid out the bread and wine and fetched salt and pepper off a shelf behind the barkery display case.

“And he sounds like a nice guy,” I said. Something about the obituary was tugging at the corner of my mind, but I couldn’t quite place it.

“I know, right?” Lucy said.

“He even loved animals,” Dru added as she returned from the kitchen with a stack of plates and silverware.

“No kids,” Lucy said. “I don’t know if that’s a good
thing or a bad thing. On the one hand, he didn’t have a chance to have a child. On the other, there’s no kid out there crying for his daddy.”

“This is really a bummer,” Rena said. “I know it’s silly, because no one deserves to be murdered, but I’d sorta hoped he was a sleaze.”

“Well,” Dru pointed out, “they usually only put the good stuff in the obituary. They don’t mention that you had chronic road rage or you were cheating on your wife.”

Cheating. The pieces didn’t so much fall into place as drift into place, the conversation around me morphing into a brand-new theory.

“Ama lied,” I said.

“What?” Rena sounded like she had mental whiplash.

“I said, Ama lied. She said she’d never met Daniel. But when I was in her office, I saw a certificate on the wall that said she’d participated in a workshop called Shot Heard Round the World four years ago. She had to have met Daniel then.”

Dru jerked back her head and thinned her lips. “Not necessarily. I go to workshops and conferences all the time, and on average I bet I only know ten percent of the people there.”

“Okay,” I conceded, “she didn’t have to meet Daniel then, but I think she did.”

Surprisingly, my mom perked up. “I bet she
really
met him.”

Lucy blew a lock of midnight hair from her creamy
forehead. “Stop talking in riddles. What do you mean, Mom?”

“Well, I just remember Ama talking about getting pregnant with Jordan. It was right around Halloween, and she was with a bunch of us putting together decorations for the annual Halloween Howl. Ama cracked a joke that pretty soon she’d look like a jack-o’-lantern. It was the first any of us had heard she was pregnant. We all started clucking like a bunch of brood hens. She made another joke about the timing being perfect because she was due in early June and wouldn’t be all huge during the height of summer.”

“How on earth do you remember that?” I asked.

Mom shrugged. “I remember thinking she was a lucky lady. With the three of you girls, I only avoided a pregnant summer once.”

“With me,” Dru crowed.

Mom nodded. “Dru’s a June baby.” Mom started passing the ratatouille and the bread, in opposite directions.

“June fourth,” Dolly said, as she cracked open the bottle of wine.

“Right. Your dad had taken a sabbatical the fall before Dru was born, spent three months studying the history of the Vikings in Oslo. I did the math, and the only time Dru could have possibly been conceived was Labor Day weekend, right before your dad left for Norway.”

“Ewwww,” Dru, Lucy, and I all groaned together.

“Oh, grow up, girls. I’m sure you all know plenty about the birds and the bees by now,” Mom said.

Of course I knew my mother had had sex. And I’d lived with Casey for years, so she obviously knew I had had sex. But actually acknowledging the fact that we both knew that about each other felt . . . wrong. Just plain wrong.

“Why are you torturing us with this information?” Dru said. “What does dad’s, uh, sabbatical have to do with Ama’s baby?”

“June babies and September conceptions,” Mom nudged.

“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” Rena chimed in. “She was only at the conference for a few days. She could have easily gotten pregnant before she left or after she returned.”

Mom shook her head. “She could have, but I don’t think she did. You said that Daniel had written the date June tenth in his notebook. I bet if you do the math there, you’ll find that a baby conceived on September seventeenth—the date of that annual conference—would be due right around June tenth. Just about the time little Jordan is having his third birthday party. I don’t know that Daniel was Jordan’s father, but I’d bet cash money that Daniel thought he was.”

“Mom, you’re brilliant! And Dolly said that the stack of pictures she found in Daniel’s apartment included a whole bunch of pictures of a cute little boy with
dark hair
. Jordan Olmstead is a cute little boy with dark hair, supposedly the child of two very blond parents.”

Lucy looked thoughtful. “So you’re saying that Ama cheated on Steve with Daniel and got pregnant during the fling?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“That’s a pretty major accusation,” Dru said.

“It is,” I agreed, “but it’s not as major as murder.”

“It’s also all circumstantial. It could just be a coincidence. There are lots of boys with dark hair who play in Dakota Park. We have no idea if those pictures were of Jordan or not.”

I was glad to have Dru there to give me pushback, challenge my reasoning.

“I’m right there with you. But if it’s all just a bunch of coincidences, why did Ama lie?” Dru opened her mouth to argue, but I raised my hand to cut her off. “Not just about not knowing Daniel, but about her never receiving a call from him. We found her phone number in the back of his journal, but she told us that she’d never spoken with him. Jack slipped up the other night and said that Daniel had placed three calls to Ama’s cell phone.”

“Whoa,” Lucy said.

“Wait right there. ‘Jack slipped up the other night.’ What other night? What were you doing with Jack Collins?”

“Honestly, now is not the time, Mom.”

“Actually,” Lucy started.

“It’s as good a time as any,” Dru finished.

“Oh, all right. If you must know, Jack and I went on a date last night. It was no big deal.”

“Details,” Lucy insisted. “Was there kissing?”

I felt the heat rushing up my face. I didn’t want to be having this conversation at all, let alone in front of my mother. “Yes, there was kissing. That’s all I’m going to
say on the subject.” I slapped my hand down on the table. “Let’s get back to the fact that Daniel might have been the father of Ama’s child.”

Dru hummed softly. “And he was in town. Calling her. Taking pictures of Jordan. He must have known.”

“Man, if she thought he was going to drag that secret out into the light . . . ,” Rena said.

“Exactly,” I said. “It would be a big motive for murder.”

*   *   *

As luck would have it, Ama was scheduled to stop by the store after lunch to do some light checks for the photographs she’d be taking of the wedding ceremony the next day. She’d done the same for Ingrid and Harvey’s first wedding, but that had been in the evening with the primary light sources coming from the chandeliers that hung in the store. Tomorrow, the ceremony was set for the afternoon, and Ama needed to see what the afternoon sun coming through Trendy Tails’ large front window would do to the light.

Packer and Daisy had been enjoying a moment of camaraderie, stretched out in a beam of molten sunlight, both snoring softly. Ama’s entrance didn’t faze Packer at all. He opened one eye, then grumbled before falling right back to sleep. But Daisy got up, gave a little yip, and then pushed her head into Ama’s hand.

Ama pulled back like she’d been burned. I guessed she wasn’t much of a dog person.

“Sorry about that,” I said, tugging Daisy’s collar to pull her away from Ama. “I still think she has a little crush on you.”

Ama’s eyes grew round with surprise, but she didn’t comment. I dragged a reluctant Daisy by her collar and shut her up in my apartment. She whined, and I could see her nose pressing at the gap below my door before I headed back downstairs.

Ama got set up while I assisted a customer who was buying a pair of fleece boots for his border collie. He didn’t have the dog with him, so we spent a fair amount of time having him guess the size of his collie’s feet and sketch them out on a piece of paper so I could pick the correct size of booties.

“Thank you, sir. And if you get home and find those boots don’t fit Loki, you can bring both the boots and the dog back, and we’ll get him the right size.”

He smiled and waved his thanks as he walked out.

I walked toward the back of the store, where Ama was working. I caught sight of Rena in the barkery, pretending to dust the case but actually keeping a suspicious eye on Ama.

“Ama,” I said.

“Huh,” she muttered as she stared into the viewer of her camera and slowly turned the dial of an external lens.

“Ama, would you like a cookie?”

She looked up at me, bemused.

“I wasn’t craving them, but I wouldn’t say no to a cookie. What’s the occasion?”

“No occasion, really.”

I led her to the red folk art table, where Rena was quickly setting out a plate of human cookies—her oatmeal toffee chocolate chunks—and a pot of tea she’d brewed in advance.

“No, really, what’s going on?” she asked as she slowly sank into a chair. “You’re both so serious, I get the feeling you’re about to give me bad news.” There was a hint of panic in her voice. “Is it Steve? Did he get hurt working on Ken’s restaurant?”

“No,” I soothed as I took a seat across from her. “We just . . . we know about your secret.”

Her demeanor shifted from worried to completely closed in the blink of an eye. “What secret?”

“We know that Daniel was Jordan’s father.”

The words just hung in the room like a pall. All the bright colors of Trendy Tails seemed to fade to sepia as I watched the play of emotions on Ama’s face: belligerence, fear, resignation, and just a hint of hope . . . perhaps hope that she could talk us out of our conclusion.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She’d opted for hope.

“We know you were at the Shot Heard Round the World workshop that Daniel ran at about the time that you conceived Jordan.”

“So?”

“We also know that Daniel was interested in Jordan’s due date, had been taking pictures of him, and had been calling you.”

“I told you—”

“Don’t bother to deny it, Ama. I’d rather not name our source, but we have it on good authority that he called you several times.”

“Again, so what?”

“What is it they say? ‘The cover-up is always worse than the crime’? We wouldn’t have thought twice about
those calls except you were so adamant about denying they happened.”

“All right. I should have been more truthful, but I swear he just called to ask about using the archive at the
Gazette
. Completely innocent. Jordan is Steve’s boy.”

“No, he’s not,” I prodded. “Jordan looks just like Daniel. I understand why you would go to any lengths to protect that secret.”

“Wait. You’re not suggesting that I killed Daniel, are you?”

“You have one whale of a motive,” Rena said.

“And then there’s Daisy,” I said. “We all thought she had a crush on you because she’d bark at the sound of your voice, both in the park and on TV and just now. But it isn’t random. She knows you. You must have been in Daniel’s apartment when she was. And you must have made quite an impression on her.”