If you want anything, you can have it.
After tomorrow, it’s gone.
Hope the mutt’s okay.
Nikki wasn’t interested in Arlo’s things, aside from the vet records. But she wouldn’t mind going through Billy Huber’s place again. Before it was destroyed. And she was surprised that Janelle had even contacted her and said something kind about the dog.
Maybe she was mellowing.
But, thinking about Billy’s only child, Nikki decided that Janelle’s change of heart was unlikely.
At that moment, the door to the patio burst open.
Laughing and giggling, Chloe chasing Phee, the girls ran inside. Arlo sped after them, Mikado taking his time. “Shut the door!” Lily ordered, then added, “Please!” as Arlo began zooming around the room, circling in one spot, then making mad dashes from one end of the room to the other.
Phee closed the door with a bang.
Arlo sped around the coffee table, his tail whipping as fast as a striking snake. It hit Lily’s glass, sending it flying.
“Stop!” she shrieked as wine sloshed from the glass to spill over the magazines and remote control. “Oh, God! Stop!”
Nikki retrieved the kitchen towel and tossed it to her sister as the dog streaked into the foyer and up the stairs.
“Get him out of here!” Lily was dabbing at the table, wiping up the spill. “Take him for a walk or, better yet, a run!” she said. “Oh, God!”
Arlo zipped back into the room.
“Open the door! Let him out!” Lily yelled.
Phee’s fingers were still on the handle. “But you said to close—”
“I know! I changed my mind!”
“Okay. Geez, Mom, don’t have a fit!” Phee opened the door, and Arlo shot through.
“Fine, I’ll take him to the dog park for exercise,” Nikki said, which was stretching the truth more than a little. She had no intention of going to the park and instead planned to return to Billy Huber’s property at Janelle McGowan’s invitation.
“Good!” Lily was frantically blotting up the dark liquid and shaking out the remote.
“I come, too!” Chloe had taken in all of the excitement.
“Not this time,” Nikki said, picking up her daughter. “It’s beddy-bye for you now.”
“No!” Chloe stuck out her lower lip. “You’re mean!”
Lily, her frantic fury expunged, actually laughed. “This from the most privileged princess in Savannah.” She drank the few remaining drops of wine from her glass, then tossed the stained towel into the sink. “I’ll take her,” she said to Nikki and left her empty glass on the table to retrieve her niece. Sending a sidelong glance to the glass door, where Arlo was now whining and scratching, she added, “You deal with the devil dog.”
Nikki drove directly to Billy Huber’s place.
As Janelle had promised, all of Arlo’s dog paraphernalia was on the porch, piled surprisingly neatly on a small table. The rest of the property, with its piles of junk, appeared the same as it had weeks before when Nikki had first viewed it.
While Arlo nosed around the place where he’d last lived, Nikki surveyed the place. She eyed the barn, where Billy had, it seemed, been repairing a gutter, and the area below it, where he’d met hismaker, compliments of a killer still at large. The tiller that had been used to crush his skull had been removed, but pieces of old carnival rides were still piled near a shed, and vines still grew over the face of a clown with a light bulb for a nose. Furniture was broken and rotting, some with stuffing exposed and probably home for rats and other rodents. The rusting arm and carriage from an old octopus ride was rusting near the fence.
She studied the forested area that separated Billy’s property from that of Duke Wheelan, and as dusk settled over the land, she thought she saw movement in the thickets. Someone or something watching.
A deer?
Stray cow?
