Dead Dogs and Englishmen Read Online Free Page B

here?” she demanded.
    â€œTraverse City, I guess. I want to get the story in.”
    â€œOkay. Never mind. It wasn’t nothing anyway.”
    â€œWhy don’t you come on out to my house later? We could talk …”
    â€œYeah, sure.” She nodded but it didn’t sound likely. “Maybe later. Or maybe not. Just something I got in my head …”
    I knew better than to push her. If she was in some kind of trouble, if she hated living with her grandmother and wanted help getting her out of the house, if she had a disease—I’d have to wait until she was ready. Dolly was as stubborn as a bulldog and moved at about the same pace.
    I put my hands in the air and stomped off, yelling over my shoulder,
    â€œFine. Just … well … I thought we were kind of … you know … like friends.”
    â€œYeah, sure.” She pulled in a couple of deep breaths and steamed past me. “Like you’d ever be my real friend. Think you’re so smart, all that college …”
    Dolly, grousing along ahead of me, still avoided the drag path. I watched her back going up and down, big boots tripping in the grasses. Something different about her sloping shoulders, about that oddly shaped rear, and that head under her official hat. Something gone from Dolly. A certain sharp edge that had always been her protection. She was snappish—as usual—but the snap was blunted, turned half on herself. I’d never seen anyone who needed help more than Dolly at that moment. I knew that if Leetsville people, like Eugenia at EATS and all her customers, caught on to this Dolly problem they’d be forming support groups and rescue groups and driving Dolly crazy. At that moment, watching the tight little blue-shirted back ahead of me, I wished them well.

First came a late lunch and a kind of reconnoitering on the Dolly problem. That meant EATS, Leetsville’s finest restaurant. I had a few questions for Eugenia Fuller, the large, blond, contentious owner, or Gloria, her sweet little waitress. If anyone knew anything going on in Leetsville, it was that pair. They were the unofficial presidents of every civic association and every social service—psychologists to the masses. Before anyone officially knew that Doctor Henley, at the small clinic between Leetsville and Mancelona, had delivered bad news to a patient, word went around EATS. Planning how best to help began; figuring what could be done for a woman fighting breast cancer, how her kids could be taken care, meals planned, deliveries set up, and a caravan of rides to Munson Medical Center in Traverse City put down on paper. Every municipal government in the United States could learn logistics from the women at EATS. It was simple, cost little, and came from giving hearts.
    If Eugenia didn’t know what was going on, I would get over to Dolly’s house and call on her grandmother, Cate, who’d been living with her for a couple of months. The old woman had to have noticed something if everyone in town was already talking.
    EATS was clearing out when I got there. I nodded to the people I saw going in. I seemed to know them all. A few years ago, when I first walked into the foggy restaurant filled with smokers, complete silence had fallen. Curious eyes turned my way. Puzzled glances were exchanged. Lips hovered over the stained edges of coffee mugs a little too long. I’d looked around then, nodded if I caught someone staring, and settled into one of Eugenia’s red plastic booths with a sigh—me and the red plastic.
    Little by little I’d been accepted. Dolly paved the way, bringing me into her investigations because she’d figured she had a better chance of holding on to a case, not having it go over to Gaylord, if she had help. The chief of police, Lucky Barnard, had his hands full of the day-to-day police work in a small town: those pesky marijuana growers, a kid with a new BB gun shooting out