In Dog We Trust (Golden Retriever Mysteries) Read Online Free

wasn’t quite sure what to do with such a huge creature, but I figured he had to be hungry.
    “You eat yet?” I asked, when Rochester came to sit on his haunches and stare at me. “Probably not. How much of this do you get?”
    I peered at the bag, which was printed in both English and French. I established that he was indeed a “ chien de grande race ,” or large breed dog, and followed the instructions. I poured half a cup of the dry chunks into one metal bowl and filled the other from the tap. I put both down on the floor by the sliding glass doors that led out to my patio, and he attacked the food with gusto.
    I stood and watched him for a minute. In the space of a few hours I’d seen my neighbor murdered and inherited custody of a seventy-pound dog with a voracious appetite. All in all, not a typical day. And I still had papers to grade. I didn’t have much appetite for dinner myself, so I opened my backpack and spread my work out on the kitchen table. With a big sigh, Rochester sprawled out at my feet, and while I alternated grading papers with worrying about Caroline and wondering what had happened to her, he slept.

Chapter 3 – Romantic Hero
     
     
    I gave up on grading around nine o’clock, and went upstairs to my bedroom. When he moved into the townhouse, my dad had sold all the furniture I grew up with and bought everything new, including a queen-sized pillow-top mattress on top of an elevated sleigh bed. It’s pretty high, but like him, I’m tall and have long legs so it never bothered me. Rochester hopped his front paws up to the edge of the mattress but couldn’t seem to leverage his whole body up. That was fine with me.
    “Your bed is downstairs,” I said. “This one’s mine.”
    He looked at me. As I started pulling off my shirt, he went down to all fours again, and padded out of the room. “Good boy.”
    Then I heard him running. He came hurtling back into the bedroom, and with a flying leap ended up on the bed, where he settled down and stared at me. “Did you sleep in your mother’s bed?”
    He did not respond, but he kept his eyes on me. “Oh, well, it’s only for a day or two.” I stripped down to my shorts and got into bed, pushing him over to one side. “You can stay, but you’ve got to share.” He seemed to agree.
    Lying there, thinking of Caroline, I remembered the only time I’d been in her townhouse before that night. I’d gotten the job at Eastern, and on my way home from teaching, I often stopped at my favorite spot in town, The Chocolate Ear café, for a raspberry mocha—a reward for reading and grading my students’ ungrammatical papers. The owner, a pastry chef from New York named Gail Dukowski, used the best quality beans, Guittard chocolate syrup, and home-made whipped cream, and despite my coffee snobbery I’d been seduced by the sweet drink. The fact that she was pretty and liked to flirt was a plus.
    A lot had changed in Stewart’s Crossing during the years I’d been away. The feed store had been replaced by a real estate office, the local bank names had been painted over with national ones, and doctors had taken over several of the old Victorians. America’s three obsessions: property, money and health, all sandwiched together in a downtown area that still has one traffic light, though a steady stream of Land Rovers, BMWs, and Volvos are always circling, competing for the few available parking spaces.
    One of the best changes was the opening of The Chocolate Ear. In the 1960s, the old stone building on Main Street was a hardware store where my father bought the odd nail or high-intensity flashlight, and then when it closed it sat derelict for a long time until Gail, who had grown up in neighboring Levittown, returned to Bucks County and opened the café. She painted the interior a pale yellow, which made the room seem sunny even in winter, and decorated the walls with vintage posters advertising chocolate products, many of them in French. The white wire