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“Dear me, no. Snuffy is all I can handle.”
“Sorry, Mrs. Stallworth, a neighbor has called in a complaint about excessive dog barking from your property.”
“I assume you mean Mr. Grouchy next door. Isn’t he the nastiest man? Such a sour disposition. Snuffy hardly barks at all, and he’s in the house almost all the time. That man has come and pounded on my door when Snuffy only barked a couple of times—I was late giving him his afternoon treat. He loves chocolate. I know you aren’t supposed to give chocolate to dogs, but I only give him half of a candy kiss each day. I don’t think it’ll do any harm, do you?”
“I’m sure it’s okay,” Greta said faintly. “Now, back to the barking. Just checking again. This . . . uh . . . Snuffy . . . . is your only dog, and you say he doesn’t bark often. Is that correct?”
“That’s right, Greta. I’ve always liked the name Greta. Was it a grandmother’s or aunt’s name?”
“No. I never actually asked where my parents got it from.”
“Well. It’s very nice. A good strong name for a nice-looking, strong girl like you.”
Assured that the arch-villain Gracie wouldn’t go on the lam, Greta told her thanks and took her leave. Mr. Grouchy still stood in front of his house. Greta walked to the next house on that side of the street and knocked. No one home. She crossed the street and tried another house.
A young woman holding a baby answered. When questioned about the barking, the woman gave her a blank look. “What barking?”
The next two houses yielded one or more residents who either had never noticed barking or asserted it was occasional, faint, and quieter than cars passing within the neighborhood. Then back to the house on the other side of the complainant. A barefoot sixtyish man with a major pot belly and a red nose didn’t need Greta to start questioning him before he volunteered that her visit must be because of the asshole next door, a.k.a. Mr. Grouchy. A couple of minutes of vituperations and anecdotes confirmed Greta’s conclusions. She returned to the starting house, where a fuming complainant awaited vindication. She saw no reason to waste more time. She had missing cows, speeding tickets, and mystery receipts to worry about.
“Mr. Sloats, I can find no evidence of any problem with excessive barking.”
Sloats got red, and she cut him off before he could say anything else. “Filing false complaints can be serious. After questioning Mrs. Stallworth and several neighbors, the only problem I can see is your attitude toward the people around you. If I have to come here again and once more find no cause for a complaint, you’ll be held financially responsible for my wasted time.”
She turned and walked away.
Is there any such provision for the county being reimbursed for wasted time? she wondered. Probably not. Another case solved and ace sleuth, tough beat cop Greta Havorsford moves on to the next crisis.
She consulted the open activities sent out to all patrols each day via cell phone. A report of an abandoned vehicle at Salt Lake Park was her next move.
In addition to such serious matters, she visited three of the businesses left on her list. Two were easy. Neither kept digital records or paper copies more than a month old. If the receipt was from one of them, it couldn’t be proved. The third, a corner grocery, was still possible because the owner kept each day’s receipts after tallying. He used a rubber band to hold them together and threw the lot into a drawer. When the drawer filled up, the owner tossed them out. With the owner’s permission, she went through the drawer and pulled out packs with dates within a week of Toompas’s murder. She would look through them later that night. The owner said she could keep the receipts.
A steady rain beat against the house that evening, as she sat in front of the fire with a salad, toasted sourdough with butter, a Willamette pinot grigio, and a video she had compiled from recordings of several seasons of Dancing with the Stars. None of the cutesy chitchat, only selected dancing of tall women, whether “stars” or professionals, giving it their all. She had three DVDs she’d made from all the TV show’s seasons and often put one of them on as background while working or reading. She loved to see tall women looking elegant, although they were all slender, which she would never be, and graceful, which she didn’t associate with herself.
A tall, dark-haired woman whose name Greta didn’t recall started her samba routine. Greta dumped the wads of receipts on the floor and began going through them. By the time the DVD ended, the salad and the bread were history, and she stopped herself when the level of wine in the bottle reached the halfway mark. No receipt totaled $15.31. She stuffed them all in a plastic grocery store bag and set them by the fireplace. They would serve to start future fires.
The next morning was a workout day. When “Oklahoma” came on at 5:30 a.m., she lay in bed, kvetching. She wasn’t in the mood. At first, she listened for raindrops on the skylights. If the rain was heavy enough, she would justify skipping today or at least consider it. She couldn’t hear anything.
A cramp made her wince. She looked at the calendar on the wall. Shit. It’s my period. That time of the month.
Her periods were usually not severe—moderate cramps, moderately down moods, and the inconvenience of dealing with tampons. More an annoyance, to her eternal gratitude, because she’d experienced living with an older sister who went ballistic every month.
She also appreciated having something to blame for her reluctance to work out. It didn’t change anything, although now it turned into something tangible to overcome. She got up, padded to the bathroom, and took an Advil. Her other self-medication was exercise. By the time she’d started menstruating, she played enough basketball to ameliorate the monthly discomfort. In the following years, the role of sports became more important in her life. She only realized the full benefits when she was sedentary one summer and suffered her worst periods ever. She had learned that lesson well, and it motivated her to exercise.
The kit she kept in her deputy vehicle both amused and embarrassed her: two styles of bras, extra panties, tampons, an extra pair of pants just in case, Advil, a comb, and a brush.
She wondered whether the men carried their own version? What would be in those bags?
Her next move was now inevitable. Running. She dressed, starting at the bottom with socks, tampon, running panties, a sports bra, yellow fleece athletic pants, and a matching hooded pullover top. Her shoes, size 12 EE, were thick leather and waterproofed to keep her feet as dry as possible.
Fully clothed, she finished equipping her pullover’s pouch and pants pockets with the house key (on a ring with a three-inch plastic yellow oval to keep her from losing it), a tiny flashlight because it was still dark, a wallet insert with her deputy ID, her official cellphone, and her .32 Beretta.
Only once had she been too far into a run to respond to a call on the phone. An accident on 101 a few miles north of the junction from Pacific City needed traffic control. She was three miles down the beach. It would have taken her too long to get back and out to the accident site, so the patrol deputy from the next northerly district responded. In turn, she covered for him on occasions.
On this day, she opened her back door and got her first real look at the weather.
Nope. No luck. No rain. Not even a mist. Fog obscured her vision at ground level, and the stars filled the night sky. The first hint of the Earth’s rotation toward the sun barely brightened the eastern horizon. It was one of those occasional mornings where instead of a high fog layer, it hugged the ground, no more than twenty feet thick, forming and coming directly off the ocean, pushed inland by a breeze. A half-moon joined the stars in illuminating fog swirls, and she could see well enough not to need the flashlight, so she left it inside.
She walked down the deserted street to the path toward the ocean and out the wooden boardwalk to the top of the dunes. Then she slogged through loose sand until she hit more solid footing where waves had reached sometime in the previous hours, the sand holding enough water to be firm. She jogged at a steady lope that ate the miles. She lost herself in the rumble of the waves, the slap of her feet hitting the sand, and an occasional surprised squawk of a seagull dozing on the higher sand mounds. As her eyes fully adjusted to the dark, the existing light gave a glow to the enveloping fog. She could still see the Milky Way, its faint swath running across two-thirds of the sky above the low fog.
