Death at the Dog Wedding Read online

  Death at the Dog Wedding

  A Craft Circle Cozy Mystery

  Stacey Alabaster

  Fairfield Publishing

  Copyright © 2017 Fairfield Publishing

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Except for review quotes, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the written consent of the author.

  This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  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

  Epilogue

  Thank You!

  Chapter 1

  I didn’t know that dogs could get cold feet. Well, it would be cold paws, wouldn’t it? That would be the correct term. Either way, that’s what I was I looking at—a nervous dog who didn’t want to go through with that long walk down the aisle. Ironic, really. Jasper usually loved walks.

  Maybe if I attached his leash to his collar, I could drag him all the way there, I thought. How would the bride react though, to see her groom being dragged to bark “I do”?

  Not that Flora was anywhere to be seen. She was probably getting a last-minute coat-fluffing. Samoyeds can be hard work to groom. At least the bride would be in white.

  With Jasper in black and white, they actually made the perfect-looking wedding couple. Or they would have.

  But dog weddings can be tricky things. And I was about to find out just how tricky they could be, especially when half the guests were canines. The guests were waiting and growing more and more impatient. Jasper’s flightiness was starting to become contagious—the other four-legged guests were starting to get anxious as well, pulling on the owner’s leashes and whimpering. Maybe they were just hungry. We were a half-hour over schedule already and there was no sign that the ceremony was going to start any time soon.

  I had managed to catch Jasper but was struggling to clip the leash to him. At best, I was able to grab onto his collar and try to wrestle him back toward the aisle. Adam, my own ex-husband, was looking gruffly at the decorations he had spent so long on. The white bows around the seats—tied to look like dog bones—were starting to sag. “Come on, George,” he whispered to me, tugging on his bowtie. “This is just getting embarrassing now. What’s going on with the fella?”

  Jasper was dragging in the direction of the forest that circled the park. “Maybe he ate something that hasn’t agreed with him,” I said as I tried to wrangle him back in the right direction. Too late—he got free and ran across the park, dashing into the trees in the woods. “Something that really didn’t agree with him,” I added. “You know we shouldn’t trust those cheap treats you bring home from the grocery store with the artificial colorings!”

  By the time we’d dragged him back to the park, he was a shaking mess. I had to wonder how the bride was faring—no sign of Flora yet. At least it wasn’t only Jasper letting the guests down, even thought that was cold comfort. Flora and Jasper had been dating—do dogs date?—for just over five months, which is about four years in human time, and they’d been engaged for a good deal of that time. It felt as though we’d been planning this wedding for years. Though to be fair, Adam had done most of the planning. He’d been the one pushing for the wedding. And I think I had some idea of why. Adam and I had been married in a park very similar to this one. He’d been trying to win me back ever since he’d arrived in Pottsville. This whole ridiculous dog wedding was all a ruse—he just wanted to remind me of our own wedding day. He’d become friends with Flora’s owner, Felicity, while planning it, but I knew that was only part of his plan to make me jealous as well.

  “You just need to talk to him, calm him down,” Adam said. Like this was the most sensible, pragmatic thing in the world.

  “I don’t think he even understands what is going on here today,” I whispered. “Is this wedding even for him?”

  I’d said the wrong thing. At that moment, Felicity, with her long blonde hair, appeared with a perfectly groomed Flora trotting along beside her.

  “Shh, of course he understands,” Adam replied, making sure that the bride hadn’t overheard. But she was too busy eating treats out of Felicity’s hands to care that her groom was AWOL.

  I finally caved. Hey, maybe Adam was right. I’ve done crazier things than trying to get a dog to walk down the aisle, after all.

  I knelt and had to ignore the fact that my white pantsuit was now ruined from kneeling in the dirt.

  “Flora is a lovely dog, Jasper. You’ll be lucky to be married to someone like her. There isn’t any one else out there better for you. Trust me.”

  I caught Adam raising an eyebrow. I hadn’t meant anything by the comment, but it figured he would read something into it.

  As to how the marriage would work… We hadn’t exactly figured out the finer details there. There had been talk about Flora spending time at our house and Jasper going to spend a night or two at Flora’s house. But that meant giving temporary custody of Jasper over to Felicity. And I had no intention of letting Jasper go and live part-time at another person’s house. I’d adopted Jasper just over a year earlier, you see, and he had only just settled in his new home. I wasn’t going to upset him by letting him think he was being given away or abandoned again. If anything, Flora was just going to have to come and stay at our house. Or it was going to need to be a long-distance marriage.

  If you asked me, I thought the whole thing was ridiculous. Especially the split custody arrangements. “Surely they can just go on a playdate to the park once a week,” I’d said to Felicity when she had suggested the idea a few days earlier.

  “Would you be happy only seeing your husband once a week for a playdate in the park?” she had asked me as she’d flipped her long hair over her shoulder, with Adam standing right beside us, looking uncomfortable with the question. Adam and I had gone ten years without seeing each other before he’d arrived back in my life.

  “Yes, well, I’m not a dog,” I’d had to point out.

  The rules were different. But I’d always treated Jasper as more of a human than a dog, so I supposed I was reaping the consequences now as I tried to get him to behave like one and commit to one person (dog) for the rest of his life. No wonder he was rebelling.

  Suddenly, one very large German Shepard jumped up from his spot on the ground and started barking violently at something in the woods.

  “What is it?” Adam asked as he shielded his eyes and looked up.

  I could see a formation of blackbirds racing through the sky.

  I sighed and shook my head. “He’s just barking at some birds. It’s nothing.”

  But the barking had been contagious, and as soon as one dog started barking, they all joined in. And as soon as one dog got loose, the rest starting running. It was chaos. The noise was deafening.

  “Can someone quiet these dogs down!” I shouted, putting my hands over my ears. I was mostly pointing the question toward Adam. You got us into this, you get us out of it.

  “Right. Is every dog here and fully accounted for?” I asked, once they had finally settled down. Where were Felicity and Flora? I spun around. I couldn’t spot Adam either. I may have been against the wedding, sure, but my priority was still the safety of every last dog that had come to the ceremony and making sure they were all with their owners. I didn’t want any of them ending up at the pound.

  Once a head count had been done and I was reassured that all the dogs were safe, I brushed the
dirt off my white suit and took a deep breath. “Come on, Jasper. Be a good boy and marry Flora before anything else happens. What do you say?”

  I glanced around and finally located Adam and Felicity, who were gathered together at the head of the aisle.

  They seemed to be sharing a bit of a flirty giggle. Strange. As was the feeling in my stomach when I saw it. I shook my head and tried to shrug it off. They were in-laws now. Practically related. That was all it was. You have to make nice with the in-laws. Did he have to touch her arm like that, though?

  I wasn’t sure how I felt about being related to Felicity.

  Jasper was finally calm. Looked as though those cold paws had finally defrosted. “Well, I guess here goes nothing,” I said, taking Jasper by the leash as I led him to the correct spot. Felicity had taken Flora to the end of the aisle so that she could do the traditional walk down to meet her groom.

  “Good boy,” I said reaching down to pet him.

  Jasper was sitting patiently, awaiting his bride-to-be, who was trotting along, sniffing the air, looking as though she didn’t have a clue what was going on that day either.

  Flora got to the end of the aisle, took one look at Jasper, and sniffed the air like she had gotten a whiff of something better—maybe the German Shepard—then pulled so hard on her leash that Felicity dropped it and shouted “ow!” as though her shoulder had actually been hurt by the force.

  Felicity just stared at me in horror, like it was my fault, as Flora bolted to the woods.

  “Well, don’t just stare at me,” I cried out. “Go after her!”

  Felicity, Adam, and I dashed into the woods, trying to catch Flora, who was nowhere in sight by the time we arrived, breathless, with Felicity screaming Flora’s name.

  Great. So we had lost a dog that day after all. And she just happened to be the bride.

  I’d told all the guests to sit tight and wait until we returned. “The wedding will still go ahead!” But they had already waited so long and now it was just getting ridiculous with the setting sun. Still no sign of Flora. How far could she have possibly gotten?

  “It’s getting dark,” Adam whispered to me. “I think we should give up the fight for tonight.” He meant looking for Flora. Surely that meant giving up on the wedding as well. I wasn’t willing to give up on either.

  I looked at him in disbelief. “Would you give up like this if it was Jasper who’d run away?” I certainly hoped not.

  He sighed. “Maybe she doesn’t want to be found,” he said glumly. “Maybe this was all too much for her.” The pressure of being a bride, he meant.

  I shook my head. He’d really swallowed the whole dog wedding pill. To him, it was real. “Flora had no idea what was going on today,” I said. “She may as well have been going for a casual stroll in the park for all she knew.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t want to be found. At least for tonight.” Adam looked like he was ready to turn around.

  “You can go home if you want,” I said. “But I am going to keep looking for her.”

  Felicity was still a few hundred feet ahead of us, calling Flora’s name. Was it too late to keep trying?

  We all heard the barking at the same time. “Flora!” Felicity cried out in relief.

  But it wasn’t Flora that we found. It was a perky-looking Collie that looked like the Lassie dog that was on TV when I was just a baby.

  “Who is this?” I asked, shining a light first at the dog and then directly into Felicity’s face.

  Felicity squinted and then frowned. “She belongs to one of the guests. Maxine. Her name is Massie.” She leaned down and patted Massie, who seemed distressed. “Hey there, girl. Where is your owner, hey?”

  Then we heard a different barking. This time, it was higher pitched and sounded more like Flora.

  Felicity ran in the direction of the barks and I heard an even higher pitched squeal. If there were still any birds left in the forest, they all flew away right then. Adam ran up to see what had made Felicity scream and then keel over onto the forest floor.

  I crept toward them and my heart missed a beat when I saw the shape of a body on the ground.

  “Stay back, George,” Adam said. “I don’t think you’re going to want to see this.”

  Chapter 2

  “Who would do something like this, at a wedding?” Adam asked, as though that was the most disturbing thing—the fact that the wedding had been disrupted. Not the fact that someone had their life taken from them.

  “Adam. The most disturbing thing was that there has been a murder.”

  He ran a hand through his long, dark curly hair that still made him look boyish at forty years old. He looked shaken. One shot was all it had taken to kill Maxine. But who had taken that shot?

  And now Massie was without an owner. She was going wild, spinning around, chasing her own tail. I didn’t blame her. I felt like spinning around and chasing my own tail too.

  We had arrived back at the park to find a lot of commotion, with guests packing up their picnic blankets and dog blankets and heading toward their cars.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, spinning around.

  “Well, I don’t think anyone exactly feels like sticking around for the cutting of the cake now,” Adam said, exasperated. “I think most of the guests have lost their appetites.”

  Oh, no way—not on my watch.

  “No,” I called out when people tried to move to their cars. “No one is going anywhere!” Any one of them could have killed Maxine and I didn’t want any of them escaping. Not until they had all been properly questioned.

  But I could hear an engine starting in the background. It was dark so I couldn’t see exactly who the car belonged to. “Oh, heck no,” I said, chasing after whoever it was that was trying to escape.

  It was a little red sporty car that I recognized from earlier. The same car that the bride had stepped out of. “Hang on, is that…Felicity’s car?” I asked, my jaw wide open as I watched her speed away. I looked at Adam for answers. “Where is she going?” My hands were on my hips accusingly.

  “Maybe she is going to the police station,” Adam said. “She can be helpful like that, you know.” Why on earth was he defending her? She was fleeing the scene of the crime, by the looks of it!

  I couldn’t believe this. She was the mother of the bride, at a wedding where one of the guests had been shot dead, and she was running away?

  I looked down at Jasper. “Well, I guess the wedding is definitely off now. Looks like you got lucky, boy.”

  But he was just about the only one who’d gotten lucky that day. Poor Maxine had been one very unlucky lady. And I had a feeling I was the one who was going to have to stand up and find justice for her.

  I was going to have to find her killer.

  “No one else leaves this park!”

  There was a young, good-looking guy, about thirty years or so, wearing a bowtie, with a close-cropped beard and brown hair coming toward us. He was wearing shades even though the sun had long set. The only lights in the park were from the street lights and the few people who were still trying to escape. Massie ran up to him like he was an old friend.

  “Oh,” I said, recognizing him from earlier. He had been the owner of the German Shepard, though at the time, I’d only seen the back of him. He was far better looking from the front, especially when he pulled his shades up. I saw that his eyes were a little bloodshot. “Did you know Maxine?”

  “She’s a very good friend of mine,” he said, sounding distraught. He leaned down and hugged Massie, who stayed for a few seconds and then ran away again.

  “I’m terribly sorry for your loss,” I said. I had Jasper sitting in front of me with my hands gripping the leash tightly.

  “Thanks,” he muttered. “My name’s Elliot, by the way.”

  Huh. George and Elliot.

  He was wiping tears away, but trying to hide it. “Come here, girl,” he said, calling a frantic Massie toward him.

  But his distress seemed to upset
Massie even more, and from there on, it was like a chain reaction. She started yelping, then the next dog started barking, and within a few minutes, there were a dozen dogs there, howling at the moon. I didn’t like my chances of keeping everyone contained in one spot after that. Everyone just wanted to leave the park and get as far away from the dead body as possible. The police hadn’t even arrived yet, though it wasn’t long before we heard sirens and saw blue flashing lights.

  It was Ryan who pulled up first.

  “Oh great,” Adam said. “Of course it’s him.”

  “Well, it’s a small town, Adam,” I pointed out. “Who else was going to be first on the scene?” Besides, his problem with Ryan was rooted entirely in jealousy. Adam wanted me back—he’d made it clear that his feelings for me had not disappeared in the ten years we had been apart. But Ryan was younger, 27, very cute, and he was always there when I needed him. That was the kind of person he was—responsible. A good quality to have in a police officer. He climbed out of the car, and he and Adam shared an awkward nod between them.

  “What’s going on here?” Ryan asked, pulling me aside. “Did you see what happened?” I was glad he trusted me. His hand on my arm gave me a few butterflies. I wondered if Adam was watching, but he seemed preoccupied with his phone. Who was he trying to call?

  I shook my head. “No, but it must have happened while we were getting ready for the ceremony,” I said. “I was a little distracted. Jasper didn’t want to walk down the aisle.”

  “Sorry I couldn’t make it by the way,” Ryan said, looking a little sheepish. I’d invited him, but he’d RSVP’d no.

  “Don’t give it a second thought,” I said. “You were working. I guess I just never expected that you would be working here.”