All That Glitters (Raine Stockton Dog Mysteries) Read Free

wasn’t sure I really even knew how to do anything else.
    From my supervisor Rick, who had  graduated two years ahead of me in high school, was a scrawled note on the bottom of the official letter: Raine, call me.  We’ll work something out.   
    Great.  The man  had graduated ninety-sixth out of a class of one hundred two, and now I was depending on him to “work something out” .  Terrific.
    “Merry Christmas to me,” I muttered.  I flung my booted feet atop the kitchen table and dropped my head back onto the chair.  And there was absolute l y no one to tell me not to do it.  That made me even more depressed.
    When the phone rang, I almost didn’t answer it.  Given the way my luck was running, it had to be more bad news.  I answered it curtly, “Raine Stockton.”
    “Hey, Raine,” said the chirpy voice on the other end of the line.  “This is Rose down at dispatch.  We’ve got a call about an abandoned dog out on  Mockingbird Place, and your Uncle wanted to know wouldn’t you mind going out there to check it out.  The boys are just covered up with work down here, and the sheriff said to be sure and tell you he’d really appreciate it.”
    Our small county couldn’t afford an animal control officer, so when a complaint about a dog came in it was usually through the sheriff’s office.  Unless it was a dog bite case, most of those calls were referred to the H umane S ociety.  And since I had been president of the H umane S ociety for the past four years, that meant me.  With a long-suffering sigh,  I copied down the address, pulled on my coat, and went out into the cold to Mockingbird Place.
    The address led me to a row of small square houses a  few blocks from the center of town.  Fifty years ago they had probably been perfectly respectable middle income homes; now they were a couple of notches below that.  Most of them had the not-quite- neglected look of rental property, with shabby lawns and worn shingles.  I pulled into the short dirt driveway of a pale yellow clapboard house with a mud-stained cement block foundation, and I saw the dog immediately.  A sable and white collie of about a year old sat imperiously atop a dog house inside a 10x10 chain link enclosure.   At least I thought it was a collie; her coat was so muddied and matted with neglect that it was difficult to tell.     She didn’t bark when I got out of the car; she didn’t jump down and rush the fence to greet me.  She just sat atop the dog house with all the composure of a royal princess, and watched as I approached.
    “Well, hello there, Your Majesty,” I said softly, putting my hand on the latch of the gate to the dog’s enclosure.  “Do you mind if I come in?”
    The screen door of the house next door slammed, and a woman came down the steps, hugging a pink cardigan to her.  “Hello!” she called.  “Hello, are you here about the dog?”
    I admitted that I was and she introduced herself.  “I hated to call,” she said, “but the family left last week.  She said the propane tank was dry and they didn’t have any heat—a sweet young thing with three children under school age, her husband left last month, the no-ac c ount so-and-so, and she’s been doing the best she can since then , I guess.  She and the children went to her sister’s, but she couldn’t take the dog, so I’ve been feeding it and making sure it had water, but the bag of food she left is almost gone and it’s supposed to get down in the teens tonight.  She didn’t leave me a way to call, and I’d just hate to see the poor thing freeze to death.  It’s a sweet dog.”
    I assured her that she had done the right thing, and entered the pen with a slice of hot dog in one hand and a slip leash in the other.  The collie didn’t fuss as I dropped the  leash over her head, and she nibbled on the hot dog I offered her with a delicacy that suggested she was simply being polite. 
    “We’ll take her to the vet to make sure