Ruffed Up Murder (Pet Shop Cozy Mysteries Book 10) Read online

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  RUFFED-UP MURDER

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  Ruffed-Up

  Murder

  A Pet Shop Cozy Mystery

  Book 10

  By

  Susie Gayle

  Copyright 2017 Summer Prescott Books

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication nor any of the information herein may be quoted from, nor reproduced, in any form, including but not limited to: printing, scanning, photocopying or any other printed, digital, or audio formats, without prior express written consent of the copyright holder.

  **This book is a work of fiction. Any similarities to persons, living or dead, places of business, or situations past or present, is completely unintentional.

  Author’s Note: On the next page, you’ll find out how to access all of my books easily, as well as locate books by best-selling author, Summer Prescott. I’d love to hear your thoughts on my books, the storylines, and anything else that you’d like to comment on – reader feedback is very important to me. Please see the following page for my publisher’s contact information. If you’d like to be on her list of “folks to contact” with updates, release and sales notifications, etc…just shoot her an email and let her know. Thanks for reading!

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  RUFFED-UP

  MURDER

  A Pet Shop Cozy Mystery Book 10

  CHAPTER 1

  * * *

  It’s raining cats and dogs as private detective Bill Mulligan, wrapped in his trademark trench coat with a .38 nestled deep in an inside pocket, heads to his local watering hole, the Downside.

  The owner and bartender, Molly, slides a slug of bourbon across the bar, Bill’s drink of choice.

  Ew. Bourbon? No thanks.

  Before he can bring it to his lips, Bill picks up a scent on the air—a scent he’s all too familiar with. Blood.

  Molly: I’ve seen that look in your eye before, Bill. You on a case?

  Bill: Either someone ordered their steak rare… or I’m about to be.

  With the tenacity of a bloodhound, Bill follows the scent. He throws open a broom closet and peers at the body inside. Cool as ice, he turns to the shocked bartender.

  Bill: I didn’t know you were repainting your closet red, Molly.

  Molly: Oh my god! That’s Reggie Hargreeves, the wealthiest man in town!

  Bill: Well, now it looks like Reggie’s son is the wealthiest man in town.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” Sarah asks casually as she enters the bedroom.

  “Uh, nothing.” I quickly turn my phone over to hide the screen. “Just checking the weather.”

  She smirks. “Of course you are. I’m sure you’re definitely not reading the latest Bill Mulligan comic.” She sets a laundry basket on the bed beside me.

  “No, definitely not.”

  “Then you wouldn’t mind if I told you who killed Hargreeves—”

  “Don’t! I haven’t gotten there yet!”

  “Mm-hmm.” She laughs at me as she folds a t-shirt. “That’s what I thought.”

  “Sarah, I told you a thousand times that you don’t have to do my laundry.”

  She shrugs. “I was doing my laundry. I just grabbed a couple of your things to round out a load.”

  She’s such a liar. We’ve been living together for more than a year now, and I’m no stranger to coexisting in a domestic relationship, but for some reason I’ve never been fully comfortable with someone else cleaning my clothes. Sarah does it anyway, and I really shouldn’t complain—it’s one of the many things that make her great.

  On the one hand, it’s still a little odd for me to be thirty-nine and refer to her as “my girlfriend.” On the other hand, it lends a sort of whimsy to our relationship. What’s that old saying? You’re only as young as you feel.

  But Sarah is a lot more than just a girlfriend and a roommate and a laundry-doer. She’s also the business manager of the Pet Shop Stop, my store—no, actually, it’s our store now, ever since I made her co-owner a while back before I resumed my education to become a private investigator.

  It’s that strange dynamic that inspired Sarah’s younger brother Dennis to write a web comic titled Bill Mulligan: Pet Shop Detective that, if I can toot my own horn, was inspired by yours truly. Fictional Bill Mulligan is a quaint pet shop owner by day and a tough-as-nails noir detective by night—admittedly, a far cry from real life Will Sullivan, who’s a quaint pet shop owner by day and usually asleep by night.

  They say art imitates life, but in this case, art grossly over-exaggerates life. I haven’t been in a fight since eighth grade, while my pulp counterpart is a break-jaws-first, ask-questions-later sort of fellow.

  And I can’t get enough of it. I mean, the guy is based (very, very loosely) on me; I should be able to enjoy it. On more than one occasion Sarah has caught me reading Bill’s adventures, which is a source of unending amusement for her. I made her promise that she wouldn’t tell Dennis just how into it I am; I don’t want him getting a big head about it.

  “So,” Sarah says, folding a pair of (my) blue jeans, “I was thinking that we should start packing up the basement, at least get a little jump on the stuff we don’t use daily.”

  I wave a hand in the air. “We have plenty of time.”

  “You say that, but it’s going to be here before you know it, and the less we have to do later, the better.”

  Just two weeks ago, Sarah and I applied for a mortgage loan on a house. Our rented place on Saltwater Drive just feels too small now with two adults, two dogs and a cat. We were approved, and a closing date was set for thirty days later—fairly quick in today’s market, but we have a good real estate agent… who happens to also be my ex-wife and Sarah’s best friend.

  Yeah, my life is kind of weird sometimes.

  “Okay,” I concede, “we’ll pack up all the winter stuff and anything we won’t need for the next two weeks. But only if you promise to stop doing my laundry.”

  “Deal,” she agrees. Then she tosses a few unfolded shirts at me. “I’ll stop right now.”

  “Well, I meant you can stop doing my laundry like five minutes from now…”

  “Ha, funny. Finish up here for me, I’m going to let the boys out.” She calls for Rowdy and Spark, our two pups, both of which leap from their doggie beds next to ours and scramble for the back door. Spark is the newest addition to our strange little family, a puggle—that’s half-pug, half-beagle, if you didn’t know—that we adopted just recently. He’s settling in well. In fact, he and Rowdy, another former shelter dog whose mix is oddly indiscernible without a DNA test, are practically inseparable.

  I figure I’ve got a few minutes before Sarah comes back in and finds the laundry thoroughly not-folded, so
I go back to Bill Mulligan to find out who murdered Reggie Hargreeves. I bet it was the shady fry cook with the eye patch. If fiction has taught me anything, it’s that you just can’t trust someone with an eye patch.

  CHAPTER 2

  * * *

  I knock on the door of a beige, cottage-style home on the eastern side of Seaview Rock. The woman that answers looks like she’s pushing eighty, maybe more, with a white shawl over her shoulders and bifocals dangling from a gold chain around her neck.

  She wrinkles her nose as she squints at me from behind a screen door. “Can I help you, young man?”

  Young man. I like her.

  “Hi, Mrs. Blumberg? I’m Will Sullivan. I own the Pet Shop Stop downtown. Is this your poster?” I hold up a sheet of paper torn from a telephone pole downtown. On it is a grainy black-and-white photo of a blasé Persian cat, with the banner “MISSING!” above the picture and “Answers to Duke” below it with a phone number. (Though in my experience, cats don’t answer to anything, their name or otherwise.)

  Mrs. Blumberg affixes the bifocals to the bridge of her nose and squints again before saying, “Why yes, it is. Have you found him?”

  “No, I’m sorry, I haven’t. I’m just following up on missing pets in the area. Can I ask you a few questions?”

  “Certainly, if it will help find Duke.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Two nights ago,” she tells me. “Normally he comes running at the sound of the can opener, but yesterday morning I opened the can and he was nowhere to be found. I looked all over the house, but there was no Duke. I have no idea how he could have gotten out.”

  “Is Duke an indoor cat?” I ask her.

  “Oh, yes. He never went outside.”

  “I see… do you mind if I take a quick peek in your yard?”

  “By all means. Please, come in.” She opens the screen door and leads me across the small cottage—a lovely little house with a ubiquitous scent of mothballs—and out the back to a small yard with a garden and a tiny shed.

  “Mrs. Blumberg, who cuts your grass?” I ask her. The lawn looks like it was mowed recently.

  “My grandson does. He also helped me make those posters and hung them around town for me.”

  I peer around the small garden. “What are you growing here, ma’am? Carrots?”

  “I grow all my own carrots, yes,” she answers. Despite it being late June, she pulls the shawl tighter around her shoulders. “Also potatoes and cucumbers. I do my own pickling.”

  I kneel to inspect the vegetables closer. “Do you have a mice problem, Mrs. Blumberg?”

  “Not that I know of. I haven’t seen any.”

  “Something’s been nibbling on your plants here. And I’m guessing that your grandson last cut your grass two days ago?”

  “Yes… how do you know that?”

  As an indoor cat, Duke wouldn’t want to go outside unless there was something he was after—likely the mice in the garden. When her grandson opened the back door, Duke probably darted out. In his guilt, he made up her signs and hung them around for her, but didn’t tell her that he let Duke out.

  Of course, I don’t tell her any of that; I might be wrong, and I don’t want to incriminate the guy unnecessarily. All that being said, I’m betting Duke didn’t go very far.

  I turn on the flashlight app on my phone and shine the light under the small back porch. Sure enough, a pair of yellow eyes stares back at me.

  “Mrs. Blumberg, Duke is under your porch.”

  “Really? My goodness, I was so worried! Let me get the can opener. He’ll come right out.”

  A few minutes later Duke is safely returned to the security of the great indoors, Mrs. Blumberg squeezing him and asserting that he needs a thorough washing.

  “I can’t thank you enough. Please, let me give you something for your troubles—”

  “That’s really not necessary,” I tell her.

  “Oh, I insist. Do you like pickles? I make them myself.”

  “I… yes. I do like pickles.”

  As she roots through the refrigerator for a jar, she asks, “I’m terribly sorry, what did you say your name was again?”

  “Will Sullivan. I own the Pet Shop Stop downtown.” She’s been in my shop no fewer than a dozen times to buy cat food and litter, but I’m not going to be rude to an old woman.

  “Ah, yes! The pet shop. Of course. Sorry, my memory is a bit foggy sometimes. You work with that lovely young woman on the town council.”

  “Sarah, yes. I work with her.”

  Mrs. Blumberg pushes the jar of pickles into my hands. “I go to the meetings every month. I must say, she has such a strong presence and some good ideas. I think she could do wonders for this town.” The old woman smiles sweetly and adds, “She should be very careful.”

  “I’m sorry?” I ask, a little thrown by the combination of genial demeanor and odd warning. “Why should she be careful?”

  “Oh, you know how people are.”

  “I’m not sure I do.”

  “I just mean that there are those that can be quite… resistant to new ideas. I’d hate to see anything happen to her.”

  “…What?”

  Mrs. Blumberg scrunches up her nose again over her smile. “Thank you again, Mr. Sullivan. You have a wonderful day.”

  ***

  A few minutes later I get back into my SUV with a heavy sigh and a jar of homemade pickles. Then I call Georgia Strauss.

  “Hi, it’s Will…”

  “Yes, I’m aware,” she says curtly. “Cell phones have this magical feature called ‘caller ID.’”

  Funny. I didn’t think Strauss was capable of making a joke. “The cat was a dead-end. It was under her porch the whole time.”

  “I see. Thank you for letting me know.” She promptly hangs up.

  Georgia Strauss is a county judge that lives in Seaview Rock. A couple of weeks ago, her prized Yorkie, Muffy, went missing, the victim of a dog-napper who intended to sell her to a breeder for a couple grand. Strauss hired me; I found Muffy, but the dog-napper got away.

  Ever since then, Strauss has been asking me to run down every possible lead on missing pets in the Seaview Rock area. So far not a single one has panned out; it’s almost always a dog that got out of its yard and ran away or a cat that wandered off to find other cats (as they’re wont to do).

  The upside is that I get to return pets to their homes and grateful owners. Strauss also pays me pretty well for my time. On the other hand, though, I’m not yet sure what Strauss’s motivations are. Bringing someone to justice is one thing, but I can’t help but feel that it’s some sort of revenge on the person that took her precious Muffy.

  But hey. At least I got pickles out of it.

  CHAPTER 3

  * * *

  After my morning meeting with Mrs. Blumberg, I head back to the Pet Shop Stop, located on Center Street downtown. Despite being born and raised here, I never get tired of driving through Seaview Rock. If you look up “idyllic coastal Maine town” on the internet, we’re bound to pop up. The town has remained veritably unchanged since the mid-nineteenth century, through careful planning and determination.

  Sure, there was a little, tiny hiccup about a year and a half ago when Seaview Rock almost went bankrupt. Long story short, my best friend and barber Sammy Barstow discovered that a couple of town council members were having an affair and used that to blackmail them into pushing revitalization projects that cost a lot more money than they were letting on, which then prompted them to try to siphon funds from other necessary town outlets like the police department and zoning enforcement and the public library.

  You know, in hindsight, it’s not really a short story at all.

  The point is, Seaview Rock is well on its way to bouncing back, and that’s largely thanks to our new town council—on which sits Sarah. She was appointed after the last-minute decision to run in a snap election, and she’s t
aken to it with zeal. Between her and the other council members, they passed a thirty-two-point proposal that enabled the town to recover without costing taxpayers an arm and a leg.

  She’s kind of a hero, but I think we’re saving the parade for after we’re definitively out of the woods.

  I arrive at the Pet Shop Stop to find Dennis manning the counter, wearing a green apron and the black beanie that almost never leaves his head. In addition to writing Bill Mulligan, Dennis puts in a few part-time shifts here and there at the pet store—or at least that’s how it started. Lately he seems to be here a lot. I don’t think he needs the money; I just think he likes the company.

  Rowdy and Spark both bound over to me, their tails swishing vigorously. We almost always bring the pups to the shop with us so they’re not sitting at home alone. After greeting them, Basket the shop-cat rams himself against my shins, indicating it’s his turn for affection. We found Basket on the doorstep of the shop one morning when he was just a tiny kitten with only three paws. These days he’s a full-grown cat with only three paws, the product of an unfortunate birth defect that makes him all the more unique.

  “Hey,” Dennis greets me, rubbing his hands together eagerly. “Did you find the cat? Was it our dog-napper?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “Huh?”

  “Yes, I found the cat. No, it wasn’t our guy.” Dennis was with me when we found Strauss’s Muffy—when the dog-napper got away. It was kind of sort of Dennis’s fault, but I’m not going to bring that up because the guy beats himself up over it enough. We did get a good look at the criminal, and ever since then, I’ve been on the lookout for a tall, thin guy with a ponytail—whom I’ve dubbed Ponytail Guy for lack of a better name.

  “If you’re fishing for a Bill Mulligan story,” I tell Dennis, “you’re going to be disappointed. The cat was under a porch.”

  “Oh.” He frowns. “Well… what if it was a body under a porch, and the cat was the killer?”