Play Dead by Leslie O'Kane

plate. Our
eyes met as I took a bite. “Are you sure you’re going to be able to eat all that?”
    I chuckled, smiled affectionately at my
mother and lifted my wineglass. “Here’s to you, Mom. Cheers.”
    “Cheers,” my mother said while we clinked
glasses. “Doesn’t wine give you a headache? I only poured you a glass because I
didn’t want to be rude.”
    I laughed merrily, having to dab at my
eyes. Pavlov and Doppler now stood by the back door, Doppler scratching at the
glass. I smiled as I got up to let the dogs out into the yard. I wondered if
this wasn’t a major function of the family, in general—to allow its
members to be crazy within the sanctity of its walls, so that we can present
ourselves as normal to the world outside.
    “I heard the rest of your broadcast this
afternoon,” Mom said. “Are you really working with Hannah Jones’s former dog?”
    “Did you know her?” I asked hopefully,
quickly reclaiming my chair.
    She nodded, taking a sip of burgundy. “She
took flying lessons from me.”
    Yes! Though a loner, my mother is an exceptional confidante,
and thereby had an uncanny ability to know a surprising amount about people
within a hundred-mile radius. During the course of flying lessons, my mother
managed to extract the entire personal histories of her students, without fail.
“Tell me everything you know about her.”
    “She owned and operated a vegetarian
cooking school and a vegetarian restaurant. She amassed a huge fortune when she
sold her business, but she had no heirs. She’d been determined to spend the
bulk of her fortune before she died, and was doing a good job at that, which is
where my flying lessons came in. What a great tipper. Financially, that is. She
kept the wings fairly level.” Mom laughed, then noticed that I was not joining
her and added, under her breath, “Pilot humor.”
    “I heard she was kind of eccentric,” I
prompted.
    She shrugged. “That’s what all elderly
women with spunk get called. Unless they’re poor, that is. Then they’re termed ‘bag
ladies.’”
    “Do you think Hannah Jones might have been
the sort to train her dog to dislike meat products?”
    “What makes you ask?”
    “Just a theory,” I said, not wanting to
allow Mom to turn this conversation around to make me the subject.
    Mom looked thoughtful for a moment. “I
suppose that’s possible. She was a strict enough vegetarian that feeding her
dog meat might have been repulsive to her.”
    Outside, both Pavlov and Doppler were
barking. I rose and looked out in time to see a white sedan drive away from the
street along the side of Mom’s property.
    That’s when it hit me—the memory
that had been nagging at me for hours now.
    I’d noticed a white car pull out from the
curb just as we left Beth’s house. I’d lost sight of it in the traffic on 28th
Street, and Pine was a busy road, so there had been no reason to think twice
about someone leaving at the same time we were.
    Now that I thought about it, I was sure I’d
seen a very similar car enter the parking lot at PetsMart.

Chapter 5
    Kaitlyn had been asleep last night when
Doppler and I returned from my mother’s house. This morning Kaitlyn
had—watch me do my happy dance—given me the silent treatment.
    I put Doppler in the backseat to ride with
me to the O’Farrell-Adams residence where I expected to observe a fox terrier
named Mugsy who considered herself top dog. Last night, I had kept an eye out
for suspicious white sedans and spotted none. By now, I had almost succeeded in
convincing myself that I had not been followed yesterday afternoon. The
operative word was “almost.” If I had convinced myself, I wouldn’t have
been looking for white sedans in my rearview mirror, as I now was.
    It had snowed a little during the night,
just enough to make the roads sloppy. The temperature now was well above
freezing—mid-forties, perhaps. I balanced my thoughts between how to
jockey for position among the cars on Folsom