Doggone Disaster by Margaret Lashley

Author:Margaret Lashley [Lashley, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zazzy Ideas, Inc.
Published: 2018-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

I STARED IN HORROR at the bone in Buster’s jaws. The house next door had been vacant for two decades. The son had gotten twenty years in prison. It was all too much of a coincidence to be...well...a coincidence.

OMG! Do I have a murderer living next door?

I reached for the handle on the sliding glass door to let Buster in. Suddenly, his ears perked up. He dropped the bone and ran off to the right, toward the once-abandoned house. Is that where he’d found the bone? I jerked open the door and ran after him.

“Leave that alone, Buster!” I screeched.

“I can do what I want. It’s a free country,” a man’s voice yelled back at me.

Shock and surprise double-teamed me and caused me to trip over my own bare feet. I recovered without eating a dirt sandwich, then stood on tiptoe and peeked around like a meerkat, trying to ascertain the source of the voice. Living on the water, noises bounced and echoed, making it hard to be sure. It sounded as if the voice had come from the house next door. Was that possible? After decades of neglect, the yard was so overgrown, I couldn’t make out anything beyond the unkempt bushes bulging through the sagging, chain-link fence.

I looked down at Buster and squealed. He was trying to wriggle his swollen belly through the hole he’d excavated under the chain link fence. I dove to my knees and grabbed him by his hind legs and pulled him back into my yard.

“Naughty boy!” I scolded. I reached over and grabbed a potted plant with my free hand. I dropped it like a plug into the hole. Buster took the opportunity to lick my face with the same tongue that might have just been chewing someone’s final, boney remains.

“Aargh! You’re disgusting, you know that?”

“What did I do?” the same man’s voice asked.

It had come from next door. I yelled back through the hedges, “Sorry. I wasn’t talking to you.”

As I scrambled to my feet with Buster squirming in my arms, the tangled jungle of overgrown bushes began rustling like something out of Jurassic Park. Suddenly, they separated, and a creature peered at me with eyes as black as the hair covering most of its face. I gasped. The guy could’ve been mistaken for the missing link if it weren’t for three things. One, he was carrying a shovel. Two, he was wearing a red Speedo. And three, he had a three-foot-long iguana draped around his neck like a Neanderthal kerchief.

My mouth fell open and I blinked hard. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It wasn’t the shovel or the Speedo or the lizard that knocked me for a loop. It was something else entirely. We stared at each other for a moment. No. It couldn’t be...could it?

It was the jerk from Davie’s Donuts.

“Oh. It’s you,” I said, bristling. “I didn’t recognize you without the hound dog.”

He laughed dryly. “I didn’t recognize you without the custard facial.”

So that’s how it’s gonna be, huh? I shot him a dirty look.

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