feat of strength and adrenaline, Sarah trudged toward the driveway. “You have to have a bath and there’s no time left. It’s off to the groomers for you!” Sarah pulled on Beau’s collar again, but the dog had relented to his fate and now walked, head forlornly hung, next to his master and supposed superior creature.
Sarah ordered Beauregard to sit on the driveway next to her Envoy as she went to the garage, got an old plastic tarp and draped it across the passenger’s seat. She stood aside as Beauregard jumped into the SUV.
“The tarp will hopefully keep my car clean, but believe me, it’s going to take professional fumigation to get your dirty dog smell out of here!” Sarah slammed the car door.
She went back to the kitchen, grabbed her purse, portfolio and lunch and locked the house.
As she walked around the flagstone path to the front yard, she saw Mrs. Beabots standing on the front sidewalk, hand up to her forehead to shade her eyes from the brilliant morning sun. “Showed him whose boss, din’t cha?” Mrs. Beabots asked.
Sarah had lived on Maple Avenue all her life, and for as long as she could remember, Mrs. Beabots had not only lived next door, but she had also felt that whatever was happening in the Jensen household was her prerogative to know. Mrs. Beabots was not a gossip, and blessedly, she didn’t share the information. She simply believed she could not help the ones she loved if she didn’t know their business.
Unfortunately, Mrs. Beabots never understood that Sarah despised being late to work—or late to anything, for that matter. Mrs. Beabots loved to talk. Talking helped whittle away the hours of her very lonely life.
“I have to get Beau down to Puppies and Paws and then I have to be at work...”
“I know, dearie. I know. You gotta run.”
“I do,” Sarah said, sliding into the car.
“When you get home tonight, I can help you fill that hole back up. Perfect place for a start of my peonies,” Mrs. Beabots offered.
“I just don’t know what possessed him to dig like that,” Sarah said. “Beau has never been a digger.”
Mrs. Beabots turned her thin face toward Sarah’s backyard. “Could have been the fact that last night when Beau came home with that dead squirrel, you tossed it over the fence into the old Samuels’ yard.”
Sarah shuddered as she remembered when she’d let Beau out just before her bedtime. She had been preoccupied with her presentation and last-minute adjustments to her drawings, and hadn’t realized Beau was taking an abnormal amount of time outside. As always, she’d left the kitchen door half-open, and when he came in and pushed it open all the way with his snout, Sarah had turned around in time to see a dead squirrel, stiff with rigor mortis, clamped between Beau’s jaws. Off her chair in a shot, she whisked a kitchen towel off the countertop, threw it over Beauregard’s face and wrenched the squirrel from the dog. She shrouded the dead animal in the towel and immediately went out to the backyard. It was a new moon, black-as-pitch night, but Sarah knew exactly how many paces it was to the north side of her yard, where a six-foot high, white-wood fence separated her property from the Samuels’ estate. With one mighty swing of her right arm, she heaved the dead squirrel over the fence.
Turning around, she found Beau standing directly behind her. If she hadn’t heard his loud panting first, she would have fallen over him.
“Don’t ever do that again, Beauregard Jensen,” she warned with a wag of her finger and a steep arch to her eyebrow. Not that he could see her expression in the dark.
Sarah grabbed his collar and yanked him toward the house. She remembered now that on the way back, Beauregard had paused and looked back at the fence. It wasn’t until she shouted his name and gave his collar another tug that he followed her obediently.
Sarah knew now that Beauregard had started plotting his strategy for retrieval at that very moment. She wondered if he’d thought about it all night.
Sarah looked back at Mrs. Beabots, who was patiently holding her arms at her sides, the skirt of her black-and-white-polka-dot dress fluttering around her legs. “That house has been vacant for two years. I didn’t think anyone would mind,” Sarah said glumly.
“You shoulda buried the squirrel out of Beau’s sight.”
“Why?” Sara asked.
“Because, pumpkin. That critter was his prize. Dog’s always gonna go for his prize. He’s a retriever.” Mrs. Beabots smiled her thin smile and nodded.
Sarah watched after the little bird of a woman who’d always been not only observant but wise, and somehow invariably managed to make certain she had the last word.
* * *
LUKE BOSWORTH WAS lost in thought as he drove his children—Annie, his eight-year-old, freckle-faced, redheaded daughter, and his six-year-old son, Timmy, with the bright blue eyes—to school.
“Can we go all the way down Maple Avenue, Dad?” Annie asked.
“Why?”
Annie looked out the window and gazed at the majestic, hundred-year-old sugar maples for which the street was named. “I love it. It’s so beautiful this time of year, with all the tulips blossoming. My favorites are the pink ones.”
Timmy gave her a dismissive wave of his hand. “Aw, Annie. All the tulips on Maple Avenue are pink.”
“I know.”
“It’s okay,” Timmy said, sitting up straighter as they turned off Main Street and onto Maple. “I like all the big houses. I bet the people who live here are really rich.”
Luke heard his children’s chatter as if their words were being spoken under water. They were playing one of their favorite games, where they picked out the “happiest” house.
He barely glanced at the tall “Painted Ladies,” the historic Victorian houses painted in pinks, purples, yellows and bright greens. These houses were painted in bright colors during the era when heavy smoke billowed out of the factories in Chicago and steel mills in Gary. The prevailing winds coated the huge homes in Indian Lake with soot, and the bright colors became subtle from grime and pollution.
He frowned and rubbed his aching forehead as they drove past a three-story Italian stucco house with French doors and huge windows.
“That’s my favorite,” Annie said, pointing at the windows. “Do you like it, Dad?
Luke wasn’t exactly paying attention, so he grumbled, “Hmm.” He continued diving deeper into the sea of thoughts about his wife, Jenny.
It had been two years, three months and six days since Jenny died, and Luke felt as if he’d died with her.
The autumn when he and Jenny had first discovered Indian Lake on a weekend trip from their home near Chicago, Jenny had walked up and down Maple Avenue pretending she was house shopping. She chose over half a dozen houses that she liked. She would have loved to raise their children in one of these fine, old homes.
But that was then, Luke thought as he glanced back at the Italian stucco house. Whoever these people are, they’re better off than I am.
Luke worked as a construction supervisor at a midsize company in town. For four years, since their move to Indian Lake, Luke had been making good money. Because Luke was a former Navy SEAL, with more than one decoration for valor in combat in Iraq, Jenny had urged him to apply for the GI Bill loan to go after an architect’s degree at Indiana University-Purdue in Fort Wayne. All their plans were dashed in a single day when Jenny got sick. Very sick.
The doctors told Luke and Jenny that the tumor in her brain was malignant. Inoperable. Terminal. The words still sounded like shotgun blasts. Each time he thought about that day, those words, Luke’s head jerked back from the onslaught.
The doctors gave Jenny four months to live. Neither he nor Jenny believed them. They fought back with chemotherapy. They enrolled in an experimental program