Silent Night: A Raine Stockton Dog Mystery (9 page)

I heard the sound of paws hitting the floor and Mischief and Magic came trotting out of the living room, grinning happily, and were met in the hallway by Miles Young, who came from the kitchen with a glass of wine in his hand.  My mouth fell open in astonishment. 

“Before you say anything,” he said and seemed surprised that I didn’t interrupt him.  He went on, “I must have called you six times.  Is your phone broken?  And we waited almost an hour in the car.  Your door was open so….”

“You did not.”  I found my voice at last, and my outrage bubbled up.  “You did
not
just walk into my house and make yourself at home!  This is over the line, Miles, and I mean it.  I can’t believe you would do such a thing.”

“I told you she would be mad,” sang girl’s voice from the living room.

“She’s not mad, honey, she’s just surprised,” Miles called back.  To me he said, with deliberate emphasis, “I told her people did things differently in the country.  I told her they were more neighborly.”

I thought my eyes would pop out of my head with things I couldn’t say in front of a child.

The Aussies wriggled and pressed up against me and I petted them absently.  Cisco sat hopefully in front of Miles and he produced a dog biscuit from his pocket.  It was easy to see how he wouldn’t have had any trouble getting past my faithful guard dogs.  He never made an appearance without a pocketful of dog biscuits and he had trained them well.

He pressed the glass of wine in my hand.  “I hope you like white,” he said.  “It’s all I had left.  I figured you’d need it after the night you’ve had. Come on in the kitchen,” he urged.  “I made a fire.  Let me explain.”

Unfortunately for him, I was not quite so well trained.  I stared at him with clenched jaw.

“She’s mad,” Melanie called over the sound of the television.

“No, she’s not.”

“Yes, she is,” I muttered, low enough so that hopefully only he could hear.

He said, “I brought pie.  Meg had another one in the back.”

Damn him, anyway. 

I followed him down the hall to the kitchen, past the living room where Melanie had made herself at home on the sofa with a bag of chips and a cola and was watching some vampire show on TV.  The dogs hesitated when they saw the little girl and the chips, but they calculated the odds and decided their best bet was the kitchen, with us.  Or perhaps they understood the word “pie”.

My kitchen is one of the big old-fashioned types, with a wood burning stove on the center wall, and a door that can close it off from the rest of the house.  I smelled coffee and wood smoke, and it was pleasantly cozy, which infuriated me.  I closed the door and turned to Miles, fuming.

“Five seconds,” I said.

“No heat, frozen pipes, carbon monoxide poisoning,” he replied, deadpan.  “I tried every motel in town.  The nearest vacancy is Asheville. It’s ten o’clock, the overpasses are icy, I thought you’d be home.  I left six messages.”

I exploded in a hiss, “Are you kidding me?  You’re in charge of multi-billion dollar building projects and you can’t even defrost a frozen water pipe?”

His eyes grew cool.  “Darlin’,” he said, “I can re-plumb that entire house with garden hose and silicone caulk if I have to, but I’d prefer not to do it while my daughter’s lips are turning blue.”

I spun away, drew a breath, and took a sip of the wine.  It tasted expensive.  Damn him, anyway.

He crossed the room and poured a cup of coffee.  The dogs’ claws clicked on the wood floors as they hopefully searched for treats.  I felt like a cad. 

But I had also been a dog trainer for fifteen years and I knew the importance of boundaries.  And I knew when mine had been violated.  I said, “You shouldn’t have come in here without permission.”

He turned, leaning against the counter with one of my coffee mugs cupped in his hand.  “I understand.  But if it had been Maude or Buck or Sonny who was in trouble and needed shelter, would you still be mad?”

I said, sputtering a little, “That’s different.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re –” I knew how that sentence ended and stopped it before I could embarrass myself further.

He supplied for me, “Friends.”  He sipped his coffee, watching me.  “I thought we were past that.  Guess not.”

He put the coffee cup on the counter and started for the living room.

“Where are you going?”

“Asheville.”

“But the overpasses are icy.”

“Right.”

“Wait.”

I couldn’t believe I was saying it, and I had absolutely no choice.  He turned to me and I looked at him, angry and frustrated and helpless and resigned. There is no worse feeling in the world than knowing you have things to talk about, but not knowing how to say them.  All I could manage was, “You don’t just get to have everything you want, Miles.  You’ve got to respect people’s boundaries.”

He said nothing. He just waited. 

After a moment I said, grudgingly, “I only have one guest room.  You’ll have to sleep on the couch.”

“Thank you.”  And he smiled.  He was incredibly charming when he smiled, and my willpower was not what it used to be.
 
“May I kiss you now?”

“No.”

Of course I was hoping he would try to change my mind, and he wouldn’t have had to try very hard.  But he just gave a little shrug, winked at me, and left the room.
 

Damn  him, anyway.

__________

EIGHT

I
slept restlessly and woke before dawn, creeping around so as not to disturb my guests.  I hate having strangers sleep over in my house.  I’d had to lock all three dogs in my bedroom with me, and Mischief and Magic had taken turns trying to see who could jump on my bed and land lightly enough at my feet that I wouldn’t notice.  This of course insulted Cisco, who knew perfectly well dogs were not allowed on my bed, and he felt it his sworn duty to make sure I knew whenever an infraction occurred.  We played this game for almost an hour before Mischief and Magic were finally convinced they could not get away with anything.  When I awoke in the morning, who should be curled up on either side of my feet but two Australian shepherds. Cisco, with his head on his paws, was eyeing me reproachfully from his bed in the corner. 

I chased the dogs off the bed and scolded them in a whisper, which is hardly an effective way to scold a dog at all, but I couldn’t risk waking up our company.  I also could not go downstairs without brushing my teeth and running a comb through my curly brown hair, which had grown longer than I liked over the past few months.
 
I spent far too long looking for the bathrobe without a stain on it.  I really hate having strangers in my house.

The dogs came clattering down the stairs despite my shushing, and when I glanced into the living room I saw the blankets had been folded and neatly stacked with the pillow.  I smelled coffee from the kitchen. 

My yellow kitchen was cozy and warm with the flames from the glass doors of the wood stove reflected on the glossy sealed surface of the pine floors and dancing off the copper pots that hung from the rack over the stove.  It was still pitch-black outside, and the one hanging lamp over the breakfast table that Miles had turned on gave the room a hushed, intimate feel.  It reminded me of the mornings when I used to get up before dawn to ride up the mountain with my daddy to cut a Christmas tree, bouncing over the rutted dirt logging roads in a beat-up pickup truck he kept only for farm work.  We would spend all morning searching for just the perfect tree, then haul it back home to arrive just as Mother was taking a pan of sticky buns out of the oven.  I was filled unexpectedly with a warm glow of nostalgia, and when Miles turned he saw me smiling.

“Well, that’s nice,” he said, lifting his cup to me.  “After last night I wasn’t sure you’d ever smile at me again.”

I shrugged and followed the dogs into the kitchen, finding it hard to remember to be annoyed with him at this hour.  “I was just thinking about Christmas.  I’ve got to get a tree.”

The dogs milled about his feet briefly, saw that he didn’t have any treats, and then raced to the door.  I let them out into the back yard, and a wave of cold lingered when I shut the door again.  Miles handed me a cup of coffee.

“Do you really do the whole Christmas thing, with a tree and lights and stockings over the fireplace?”

“Sure.”  I was surprised.  “Don’t you?”

He shrugged.  “I don’t really celebrate Christmas.”

I stared at him, warming my hands around the coffee mug.  “Why not? I mean—are you Jewish or something?”

He looked amused.  “No.  Would it make a difference if I were?”

I was thoroughly embarrassed and felt it to the tips of my toes.  “No.”  Great.  It wasn’t even seven o’clock in the morning and already we were off to a bad start.  “It’s just that –you’ve got a daughter, a mother with a beach house, three ex-wives, and a condo in Aspen,” I blurted.  “I’m just wondering what else I don’t know about you.”

He regarded me mildly as he sipped his coffee. “They have something to fix that these days.  It’s called Google.”

I was momentarily nonplussed. What kind of world did he live in, where people Googled potential boyfriends?  I frowned a little into my coffee and muttered, “Well, you know us mountain folk.  We don’t put much faith in that new-fangled technology.”

By the way he looked at me, I could tell he wasn’t sure if I was kidding.  I was, by the way.  Mostly.

But Google?  Seriously?

He said, “Christmas is for kids, and when you grow up with an alcoholic father you don't have a lot of childhood memories you want to re-create.  Besides, my ex always has Melanie for Christmas, and I never had anyone to celebrate with.”

I tried again, determined to hold on to some semblance of the Christmas spirit.  “I’m sorry I was a grouch last night.” 

“That’s okay.  I overstepped.”  That smile again.  Damn, what he could do to me with that smile. 

And then the smile faded. “No excuse, but it’s been kind of a stressful week.  This whole thing with Mel took me by surprise.  I shouldn’t have made it your problem.  But we’ll be out of your hair in no time.  I’m going to go over to the house and see if I can figure out what went wrong with the heat pump, and get a plumber out there at first light.”

While his designer home was being built on the top of my mountain, Miles was temporarily living in a luxury-model mobile home with granite countertops, a wrap around deck, hot tub, and two bathrooms, each one bigger than my bedroom.
 
His temporary quarters were situated at the entry gate of his resort community, which made it very convenient for supervising the construction.  It also was almost within walking distance of my house.

Sipping my coffee, I said, “I’ll tell you what went wrong with the heat pump.  It iced over.  We’ve had nights in the teens since you’ve been gone.  You should have winterized.”

His brows drew together sharply and he swore softly under his breath. “You’re probably right,” he admitted in a moment.  “I didn’t plan to be gone so long, but then this business came up with Mel. . . Who knew it would get that cold this early, anyway?”

“It doesn’t usually,” I admitted.  “If you had let me know, I could have checked on it for you.”

He unknotted his brow with a visible effort.  “Thanks, hon, but I have people who were supposed to be doing that.”

Right.  His people. 

I heard a scrabbling at the door and went to let the dogs in.  They flowed around us, butts wiggling, faces grinning.  Miles obligingly reached down to scratch ears and chins.  “Sorry, guys,” he said, “all out of treats.  Hit me later.”

“Dogs,” I commanded sharply, because they were starting to be pests.  “Settle.”  I pointed to the corner of the kitchen, and one by one, with unhappy looks, they filed over to their places.  When Cisco looked as though he thought he might be the exception to the rule, I raised an eyebrow and made a “Nuh!” sound in the back of my throat.  Reluctantly, he flopped down with his head on his paws.

All right, then.  Rarely did I get a chance to show off what a good dog trainer I was.  Usually, I just got to show off my expertise at rescuing myself from some disaster my dogs had created.  The morning was looking up.

Miles was making an effort too. He said, “So tell me about your case.  Who did you and Cisco rescue last night?”

Cisco’s ears lifted hopefully at the sound of his name, then lowered when no command was forthcoming.  I said, “No one, actually.  It was kind of a false alarm, but interesting.”  It was nice of him to ask, but as I summarized the events of the night before I couldn’t help feeling anxious about the missing girl.  I wondered whether Buck had found her by now and what kind of life would be waiting for her now that her father was gone.  I was abruptly depressed again.

When I was finished, Miles said, “Do you mind if I make an observation?”  Apparently it didn’t matter whether I did or not, because he went on, “Last month you were dealing with a serial killer and a skeleton in your back yard.  The month before that you were tied up and left to burn to death in your own building by a psychopath. Now you walk in on a murder scene and don’t even blink an eye.  I’m starting to think this little corner of the Smoky Mountains is not quite the paradise I was led to believe.”