“Hello, Bonnie,” Shelia said, standing between us and the lake. She had been a neighbor of ours until last year when Bonnie tried to poison Shelia’s husband.
Bonnie glared back and didn’t say a word. Bonnie’s daughter, Diane, had been killed in a terrible hit-and-run accident twenty years before. Then last year, I discovered the car that hit her was a Corvette owned by Shelia’s husband. Only after the attempted poisoning did I find out the driver who killed Diane was Shelia.
Fred came out of the water, dropped his stick at my feet and started shaking like an unbalanced washing machine on the spin cycle. He started with a roll of his head and then really got into it with water flying off his neck and torso until every hair on his body was spraying Shelia and her friend like an untethered garden hose.
“Get that frigging mutt away from me!” Her friend yelled, before picking up the stick and raising it to hit Fred.
That was when I realized why people murder one another. I literally wanted to kill this jerk before he had a chance to kill my dog. I wasn’t close enough to block the blow and found myself looking for another stick, or rock, to throw at the jerk who was about to kill my best friend. But then Fred’s retriever instincts saved his life, or at the very least, a bruised rib. He was in the water and swimming toward where he thought the stick would land before the guy could hit him with it. Jerk lost his balance and fell into the lake when his downward thrust failed to connect with Fred.
Shelia screamed while I broke out laughing. It was better than the perfect murder. Even if he couldn’t drown in the shallow water at this end of the lake, I still had my revenge without the threat of life in prison. The water temperature was barely above freezing, ideal for a Golden Retriever, but hypothermic for us less hairy mammals.
My laughter was cut too short when Bonnie broke her silence, pointing her cigarette at Shelia’s face. “What are you doing here? I told you before I’d see you in hell if you ever show your ugly face up here!”
Shelia didn’t back away, nor did she bother to help her friend climb out of the chilly water. “It was an accident, Bonnie. I told you before, I’m sorry. Why can’t you let it go?”
Bonnie’s eyes filled with tears. “She was only sixteen. She had her whole life in front of her.”
I was captivated by a vision of a burning poker piercing Shelia’s eyeball until a gathering audience woke me from my trance. A couple of joggers had stopped to watch the commotion, so I thought it would be best to put Fred back on his leash. Not because of the joggers, but because he might get it in his mind to help the person who had tried to kill him.
Jerk finally made it to dry land, shivering from his ice-cold bath, and walked over to us with a raised fist. “That mutt is dead meat! I’ll get him and you for this!”
Shelia grabbed his shaking hand and pulled him away before I could answer. I was still thinking of a comeback when Bonnie beat me to it. “You harm one hair on his head, and I’ll see you both in hell!”
Shelia didn’t wait for her friend to answer, and dragged him away without another word. Bonnie turned her attention to the joggers and apparently surprised them enough with her knowledge of anatomical places to put one’s finger that they decided to leave, too. Sailors and construction workers could learn a lot from her when she was upset.
***
Bonnie was still upset when we made it to the bookstore, so I kept on driving and parked outside the Little Bear bar a few blocks down the street.
“Why are you parking here?” She had been too busy fiddling with her purse to notice until I shut off the engine.
“Those things never get started on time, and even if it does, we won’t miss much. How about we go sit on the patio where you can calm down with a cigarette and a drink?”
Bright sunlight shined through the windshield exposing every wrinkle in her tired face. She looked up at me with bloodshot eyes, holding the pack of cigarettes she had been looking for. “Thank you, Jake. That’s a splendid idea. And then I can refresh my makeup in the little girl’s room before we walk over to the bookstore.”
By the time Bonnie recovered and redid her makeup, she was gabbing away about how she could spend the money if we could decode the location of the treasure the author wrote about. It wasn’t until we entered the bookstore that her excitement ceased and she went quiet. The place was packed tighter than a revival tent in Mississippi. Using powers of deduction that would make Hercule Poirot envious, I quickly reasoned that the guy reading at the front of the audience with a poster next to his table that read, Twain’s Enigma by Paul Wilson, was the author. He didn’t bother to look up when we took a seat toward the back with my wet dog.
I already knew, without using any gray cells, that the book was about the somewhere near Breckinridge. Bonnie had told me all that beforehand, and the press had played it up because a similar book that sold a million copies recently made national headlines. Paul Wilson looked like a copycat to me.
The bookstore was small compared to the big-name stores in shopping malls scattered in and around Denver, but that was thirty miles and twenty-five hundred feet down the hill from our little town of Evergreen. I thought the place was quite cozy, even if it was cramped. There was only one chair left, so I let Bonnie have it and stood behind her, holding Fred on a short leash. He had dried off sufficiently, but not enough to ease the odor of wet dog. I suppose I was used to it, and didn’t notice until a couple next to Bonnie got up and left. Fred looked up at me and smiled when I took a seat. I bent down to pat him on the head to let him know how lucky I was to have him when I felt an elbow in my ribs.
“It’s him, Jake,” Bonnie said, before poking me again. “It’s that creep from the lake. And look who’s sitting next to him.”
I stopped massaging my side in time to see Shelia turn around and stare at us. Maybe she didn’t know it was a pet-friendly bookstore, and Fred was a regular, or maybe she was simply surprised that Fred would be interested in literature. I expected her friend, the guy I only knew as Jerk, to turn around too, but he seemed far too mesmerized by what the author was saying. “Shh, Bon,” I whispered, holding a finger to my lips.
Shelia snickered, then turned back to listen, too.
“But that’s impossible,” Bonnie whispered. “He was soaking wet only an hour ago. How’d he dry out so soon?”
Several people from the row in front of us turned and gave the universal sign for her to be quiet. It seemed to work and everyone went back to listening to the author.
“‘Andrew Jackson Drakulich, or Drake as his niece, Penny, called him, removed the last pack from his frozen mule and stumbled to retrace his steps back toward the shelter of the abandoned mine. It was less than twenty yards, yet he could no longer see the path he had made just a few minutes earlier. Sixty mile an hour winds hid every trace of his return with several feet of new snow. Drake swore at the cold wind biting his face and continued toward where he thought the mine should be.
“‘Once back inside, Drake struggled to close the splintered aspen door against the gale-force wind, and cursed again when the wind violently caught the door and tore it out of his hands like a kite from a child. Then just as viciously as it had been torn from his grip, the door slammed back as though connected to a coiled spring, and hit Drake full force on his outstretched fingers.
“‘Drake had seen men's fingers crushed by misdirected sledge hammers before, a common occurrence among novice miners, and he could have accepted that, but nothing in his sixty-two years had prepared him for what the equivalent of a twenty-pound sledge could do in subfreezing weather. In that brief moment between realization and pain, he stared at his fingerless glove with all the astonishment of a gold strike. Then, before the pain completely hit him, and before the wind could blow the door open again, he dropped the latch beam in place with his good hand and screamed every obscenity he knew.’”