Poodle Versus the Assassin by Anne Shillolo

Author:Anne Shillolo [Shillolo, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

19

It wasn’t long before Arni was at the door, and I told Barbara to take him back to the meeting room.

I could hear them talking in an undertone, but I sat out front at her desk in case we had any visitors. And I sincerely hoped we did not. As I expected, it was only a few minutes until Barbara returned. She whispered, “Sorry. He wants to talk to you now.”

“You did the right thing. Don’t apologize.”

I went and sat down opposite Arni. He was all business, and said, “Have you ever seen this gun before?”

I stopped myself from rolling my eyes and said, “No. I’ve never seen it. And I don’t own any firearms.”

He then had me go over my statement from the night of the fire. We even went out onto the back deck and then upstairs to my apartment balcony so he could verify the lines of sight I was trying to describe. Because my privacy fence was so high, it was impossible to see anything in the laneway from downstairs, and very little from upstairs. Again, I bit my tongue. That was the whole point of the fence.

The person who had thrown the Molotov cocktails had only caught my attention with a flash of light. Not because I had seen them. And only then because Rocco had been barking.

The seriousness of the situation was broken up by my pet’s antics. He threw his orange ball at Arni. He threw his kong at Arni. Getting no response, he batted the ball under the sofa and then crouched and barked at it because it was out of reach. Loudly.

To distract him, I let him go downstairs with me. He made a beeline for Barbara, and she looked very happy to have a fuzzy beige poodle to cuddle.

Arni and I returned to the meeting room, and I said bluntly, “I need to know how your investigation is going. I can assure you I did not murder the mayor or burn up all my clothes. You have to catch this person before my business is destroyed. I have no idea who is leaving you anonymous tips, but if you look in this week’s paper, you’ll probably see their pictures.”

I didn’t say anything out loud but I reflected that, for too long, I’d sort of had a cavalier attitude about running the paper. Week after week, reporting on all and sundry, plastering their photos around online and in print. I certainly prided myself on being sensitive to the values of a small town, and I considered each article carefully before it was published. But it seemed like the tables had turned. Someone was using the crisis of the unsolved murder to slander me in a way I had never even contemplated doing in the newspaper.

Arni stood up without answering. “I’ll be in touch,” he said.

I followed him towards the front door and paused as Olivia passed him on the way in. Holding the door for her was Tyler Aston. He nodded at Arni and sauntered into the reception area.

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