Bite Club by Laurien Berenson

Author:Laurien Berenson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2019-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

Monday afternoon, Aunt Peg and I went to Evan Major’s funeral. Blackwood Funeral Home was a modest mortuary on a side street in downtown Stamford. I’d probably driven past the place dozens of times, but I’d never previously noticed its presence.

The somber brick building had a small parking lot behind it. I wasn’t expecting Evan’s service to draw much of a crowd, but when Aunt Peg and I arrived the lot was already full. We parked on the street and made our way inside.

There was a guest book on a table just inside the front door. Aunt Peg signed both our names, then spent the next several minutes attempting to decipher the remaining signatures in the book. The third time the funeral director tried to wave us through to the chapel, I finally turned around and gave her a sharp poke.

“Come on,” I whispered. “We have to go.”

“But this is interesting,” she hissed back. “There’s quite a list here. Don’t you want to know who the other mourners are?”

“Presumably I’ll see them inside. Maybe some of them will speak.”

A bottleneck had begun to form in the doorway behind us. The funeral director had stopped motioning politely. Now he was giving us the stare of death.

Aunt Peg didn’t notice. She was still rifling through his book. Which meant that I bore the brunt of the man’s displeasure.

I gave Aunt Peg thirty more seconds to snoop. Then I looped a hand through her arm and started walking down the hall. Luckily it only took a step or two before she began to cooperate because I wouldn’t have succeeded in dragging her very far.

“That was rude,” Aunt Peg snapped under her breath.

“Yes, it was,” I snapped back.

I suspected we weren’t talking about the same thing.

Inside the chapel, a small crowd had begun to gather. People were standing in groups of two or three, chatting quietly among themselves. I saw only a few familiar faces. Claire and Alice had come. They were talking to a couple of other neighbors from Flower Estates.

Several men who looked like they were trying to be inconspicuous were observing the activity from the back of the room. I assumed they were police. Detective Sturgill must have sent them there to keep an eye on things.

The chapel had two rows of pews divided by a center aisle. The front of the room featured a slightly raised dais with a podium in the middle. Behind the podium was a rather meager display of flowers. Sadly it looked as though whoever had made the arrangements for Evan’s service had opted to purchase the bargain package.

“There’s Marge Brennan,” Aunt Peg said. “And she’s talking to Toby Cane. I’m glad to see some other Bite Club members made the effort to appear. Let’s go say hello, shall we?”

Marge and I didn’t know each other well, but we’d crossed paths at numerous dog shows. Like Evan, her chosen breed was Bulldogs and she’d bred some very good ones. It occurred to me that if

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