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  Drop Dead on Recall © 2012 Sheila Webster Boneham

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First e-book edition © 2012

  E-book ISBN: 978-0-7387-3525-2

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  Cover design by Lynne Menturweck

  Cover illustration © Joe & Kathy Heiner/Lindgren & Smith

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  DEDICATION

  For Roger, because living with a writer can be murder,

  and for the real-life Jay, my sweet babboo.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Writing and publishing a novel is a bit like training a dog. It takes time and dedication. It’s fun and it’s messy. It’s a labor of love, and although it sometimes feels like a one-woman show, the end result depends on many people. I can’t begin to thank everyone—the many authors whose work I’ve loved and from whom I hope I’ve learned a little; members of several writing groups; my teachers, my students, my readers. If I haven’t named you here, please know that I appreciate your time and comments. I don’t always do as I’m told, and any errors that remain are mine, all mine.

  Some individuals have, naturally, been more prominent in the development of this book than others—I owe you all! Writer and physician Ronda Wells has been along for this whole ride, and did her best to keep me honest about medical issues. My obedience training friend Linda Wagner read early drafts and made brilliant suggestions. My agent, Josh Getlzer, not only found this series a home, but became a good friend in the process. As a bonus, he’s a very funny guy. Thanks to Terri Bischoff, my editor at Midnight Ink, for having faith in the books, and the rest of the crew for making it happen. Special thanks to author Susan Conant, whose own work inspired me not only to try writing mysteries, but to enter my first obedience trial two decades ago. And last, but never least, my profound thanks to the dogs and cats and other critters who have inspired and informed my work, enriched my life, and keep my feet warm while I write.

  1

  Someone outside the competition ring laughed, but I didn’t think Abigail Dorn was fooling around. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen the woman smile, and from all indications, she thought obedience competition was as serious as a heart attack. Whatever she was doing now, though, had nothing to do with winning.

  Abigail had keeled over at the judge’s signal. Pip, her Border Collie, had come flying when Abigail called, then dropped to the grass twenty feet out on her “Down!” command. According to American Kennel Club rules, Abigail should have called him again when the judge gave the signal. I’m no expert on the finer points of scoring, but I was pretty sure that falling flat on her face was a serious handler error. I mentally smacked myself for my irreverent thoughts, though, as it became more obvious with each crawling second that something was very wrong.

  Ringside chatter had hushed to a low, sporadic hum, and the only other sound I could hear was the soft huff-huff of my own dog panting at my side. I shifted my focus from Abigail’s prone form to Bob Bradley, the judge, who was peering at Abigail over the top of his glasses. Either he was too surprised to move, or he didn’t want to interfere in case Abigail tried to fix her faux pas.

  Greg Dorn, Abigail’s better half, dashed by me and vaulted the collapsible fence that defined the ring. “Abby!” He knelt beside her, rolled her onto her back, slid his left arm under her shoulders, and raised her upper body off the ground. Abigail’s startled gaze fixed on Greg’s face, and her right hand twitched as if it wanted to reach for Greg but couldn’t be bothered. As she began to gag and choke, Abigail’s face slowly darkened to muddy mauve. Greg squeaked, then cleared his throat and yelled, “Help me!” to no one in particular.

  His squawk shook me out of my stupor, and I signaled Jay, my Australian Shepherd, to get into his crate. Abigail appeared to need more help than Greg or anyone else on the show grounds was likely to provide, so I began to fish through my dog-show tote for my cell phone. Then I noticed that The Hunk with the Big Black Dog was already dialing. I caught his eye, pointed toward his phone, and mouthed, “Ambulance?” He nodded, so I left my phone wherever it was hiding among water bottles, freeze-dried liver, cracker crumbs, and other dog-show sundries. No wonder the darned thing didn’t work half the time. I made a mental note to add bag cleaning to my To Do list. If I could find it.

  I turned back to the ring. Greg had unzipped Abigail’s jacket and was going through her pockets, pulling them inside out. Empty. He said something to Bob and one of the ring stewards, a tall blonde whose wrinkled forehead and wringing hands played counterpoint to the grinning Golden Retriever on her sweatshirt. The steward ran to the scoring table, grabbed a white box with a red cross on the lid, and rifled through the contents. I zipped my jacket a little higher and wiped a wind-induced tear from the outer corner of my eye.

  The Hunk appeared at my side and said, “I’m sure she’ll be fine.” I felt the moisture on my fingers and realized he thought I was upset about Abigail, which of course I was, but not to the point of tears. “You’re friends, I take it?”

  “I sort of know her, but not that well.” I didn’t feel pressed to add that Abigail had never shown me any reason to want to know her better, nor would she have been amused by my easygoing approach to obedience trials. Abigail was there to win, and I was there mostly to play with my dog.

  The steward ran back to center ring empty-handed, and I wondered what she’d been sent to find. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Greg was growing more and more agitated, and Abigail more and more purple. Greg scanned the clusters of people standing around the ring, locked onto me, and appealed for help with wide eyes. Not sure I could offer much, I scurried into the ring, wishing all the way that I’d taken that first aid class I’d been thinking about for the past few years.

  Funny thing, memory. I’ve forgotten for years to sign up for that class until it was half over, but my mental image of the fear in Abigail’s eyes is as clear as yesterday. That look, and the sound coming from her throat, like the long squeal of air escaping the taut mouth of a ball
oon. My heart pounded in my ears like hail on a metal awning, and I had to lean over to hear Greg.

  “Her EpiPen. It has to be here. She always has it with her.” His voice was pitched high and tight, his enunciation precise.

  “What?”

  “Epinephrin. She’s allergic to bee stings. She carries an epinephrin kit.”

  That took a moment to sink in. Then an image slithered from the shadows of my mind, a hazy vision of Abigail and Pip at the gate, beside the steward’s table. The image cleared, and in my mind’s eye I saw Abigail set a small bag on the steward’s table next to her white dumbbell, which the steward would collect when the time came for Pip’s retrieves.

  A cold stab of adrenaline set me in motion, and I reached the steward’s table at a dead run. The bag was there, pale turquoise, with a machine-stitched Border Collie jumping a striped bar over the initials A.D.—Abigail Dorn—on the side.

  I grabbed the bag and turned back toward center ring, ripping the zipper open and pawing through the contents. A baggie stuffed with freeze-dried liver. A narrow leather leash. A plastic cylinder with a syringe inside, “Epinephrin” blazed along the length of the tube in red. My fingers closed around it and I raced back to Greg and offered him the EpiPen.

  “Open it!” He lowered his wife’s head and shoulders gently onto the grass.

  I tossed the bag behind me and gaped stupidly at the thing in my hand. “How?”

  Greg pulled his arm from under Abigail, his face so red and drawn that I thought they might need twin stretchers for the family Dorn. “Twist the top! Pull it out!”

  I pulled the syringe from the cylinder, and Greg snatched it from my hand. The raw panic seemed to leave him and he moved with quick assurance, pulling the cap off the end of the cylinder and tossing it behind him. He positioned the syringe with the business end jutting past the heel of his hand and plunged it into her black-clad thigh with a force that made my eyelids twitch. Greg held it there for what seemed like forever, then lifted the injector to eye level, glanced at the end, tossed it to his side, and looked back at his wife.

  Abigail’s mouth hung slack and a thin ribbon of drool traced a line from the corner of her lower lip across her cheek to her ear. Her eyelids were half-closed, the visible parts of her eyes white. She gave no sign that she felt the blow or the needle, no sign that she felt anything at all.

  2

  A hint of movement tickled my peripheral vision, and I turned toward it. Abigail’s Border Collie, Pip, stood on the spot where he had lain down a heartbeat before Abigail fell. He rocked from one front paw to the other, head thrust down and forward, ears at full alert, and watched the drama unfold around his mistress. He took my eye contact as permission and, shoulders lowered in a Border Collie crouch, ran to Abigail’s side, shoved his nose under her limp arm, and whined. My mind tried to hang on to the hope that, when help arrived, everything would be fine, but my heart knew that hope was in vain when Abigail didn’t respond to her dog.

  I squatted beside Greg, ignoring the crackle of protest from my left knee. “What can I do to help?”

  Greg tipped his head forward and let go of a long breath. He paused, then said, so softly that I almost missed it, “Take Pip.”

  I stood and retreated to the steward’s table, retrieved the leash that lay beside Abigail’s turquoise bag, and softly called to Pip. He looked at me, then at his mistress. Greg touched the dog on his shoulder and spoke to him, and Pip reluctantly stood up. He swiped Abigail’s cheek with his tongue, then trotted to me, sat, cocked his head to the right, and lifted his neatly trimmed left paw. I clipped the leash to his collar and led him out of the ring and over to my chair, weaving through the small crowd that had gathered to watch. He craned his neck toward the ring and whined softly, but came with me.

  The Hunk with the phone joined me outside the ring. We’d never officially met, although we had nodded to one another at dog shows and I’d seen him at one or two obedience training sessions. “The ambulance is on the way. They said five or six minutes, so they should be here any time now.” He held out his hand. “Tom Saunders. You’re Janet MacPhail.” It wasn’t a question.

  “I am.” I was too focused on the warm, firm hand grasping mine to come up with anything more clever, but in any case he had me pegged—Janet MacPhail, admirer of fine dogs and reasonable men. In that order, with possibly a few other things between the two.

  In the ring, Greg was holding Abigail again, but he seemed a lot calmer, or maybe he was in shock. I decided I had to take that first aid course the very next time it was offered so I’d have a bit of a clue in the next emergency. I heard the faint cry of a siren somewhere to the south, and when I looked past the obedience ring toward the sound my eyes focused on a parade of freight cars marching across the road just south of the fairgrounds. “That might be a problem,” I said, nodding toward the train.

  Tom followed my gaze and clucked softly. He pulled his cell phone from his belt, dialed 911 again, and told the dispatcher about the train. Then he turned back to me.

  “What were they looking for in there? What did he give her?” Pip leaned against my leg as I told Tom about the epinephrin.

  He turned toward the tableau in the ring. “Hunh. That should have worked by now.”

  “That’s what I thought.” As my brain groped for the memory of something I’d read about epinephrin, Tom shifted topics.

  “We need to find a show official.” He turned and covered the four or five yards back to his crate in about two strides and grabbed his show catalog. “Tony Balthazar is show chair. I’ll find him.” He smiled at me, the sort of knee-liquefying smile I don’t see all that often anymore except in the movies, and in spite of the circumstances I felt a long-forgotten butterfly twitch to life in my belly.

  Tom stopped at the ring. I watched the steward in the Golden Retriever sweatshirt speak into a walkie-talkie, then say something to Tom. He turned and loped toward the big-toppish tent that housed the show officials when they weren’t roaming the grounds. Nice rear assembly, I thought. I felt a mild twinge of guilt, considering Abigail’s plight, but I couldn’t help evaluating Tom’s retreating posterior, and putting it in terms of canine structure was second nature. If I were interested in complicating my life with a man, he’d be one who understood the comparison as a compliment.

  I stroked Pip’s silky head and looked into his black-brown eyes. We set off for the calf barn, a sprawling white building on the edge of the fairgrounds where the Dorns’ equipment was set up. “You’ll have to stay in your crate for a while, Pupper.” Pip glanced over his shoulder at the ring and whined, but then trotted beside me in the opposite direction, panting and grinning and waving his white-tipped tail. His nose lifted and twitched as we stepped into the barn and its faint bovine memory of last summer’s 4-H fair. A siren warbled off to the west, muted but growing louder and more shrill with each wail.

  We passed a cluster of six huge crates, five of them occupied by adult Malamutes, the sixth by a half-grown pup. Two were sitting, three standing, one lying down, but all of them listened intently, heads tilting side to side to locate the sound, ears twitching, a faraway look in all twelve eyes. Thick gray fur poked out between the wires of the crate walls where the big lupine dogs leaned against them.

  Toward the center of the barn I found a collapsible metal crate with Pip’s nameplate on its top-of-the-line white epoxy-coated door—“OTCh MACH CH Paragon’s Pip UDX.” Obedience Trial Champion, Utility Dog Excellent. In other words, a helluva competition dog, with top-level titles in obedience and agility, and a breed champion for good measure. Pip’s also a helluva pleasant dog to be around. You’d think that would be true of all obedience stars, but it isn’t. Like so many human celebrities, some top dogs are nearly perfect in the competition ring and thoroughly obnoxious outside it. Not their fault, of course. Some of their owners are just so caught up in the pursuit of title
s and high scores that they neglect to teach basic canine-to-human etiquette. Whatever I thought of Abigail and her own behavior, I had to admit that her dogs were mannerly and happy.

  “In you go.” I slipped Pip’s collar off and checked the water in the stainless-steel bucket attached to the crate door. I was laying his collar and leash on a green folding canvas chair next to a show catalog with “Dorn” scrawled across the cover when I felt the little warning hairs on the back of my neck stand up, an unwitting response to the distinct sense that I was being watched.

  I glanced around. I saw only one other person in the building, and all I could see of her was the back of her jeans and marigold sweatshirt, and a flash of what I took for a red hat as she disappeared out the other end of the barn. I went back to what I was doing, but the feeling lingered and grew, and unease skittered up and down my skin.

  3

  The creepy sensation that I was being watched stuck with me as I secured the door to Pip’s crate, so I took another look around the calf barn. Across the aisle, a pink plastic pet carrier no bigger than a boot box sat on a grooming table. A pink plastic sign hung on the wire door, “Precious” etched into it in white, and a pink plastic tote bag slouched to one side. Bright black eyes monitored my movements from beneath curvaceous white eyelashes and a topknot adorned with a tiny pink bow. A Maltese. About six pounds sopping wet. He spun in a happy circle when I made eye contact, and I let go of the breath I hadn’t known I was holding. “Hi, Big Guy.” I couldn’t bring myself to call him Precious. “You know you gave me the willies?” The little dog panted happily and I could swear he winked at me.

  I refocused on the Dorns’ area. Strange, I thought. One crate, one dog, one chair. Greg always brings his miniature Poodle, Percy, along, and I couldn’t remember Abigail ever coming alone to a dog show. God forbid she should carry her own equipment. So where were his dog and his stuff?