A Shot in the Bark: A Dog Park Mystery

Saturday, May 7

"How did I get mixed up with such a loser, Anna?" Lia's question somehow managed to be simultaneously earnest and rhetorical. The lithe, thirty-ish artist posed this question as she and her friend perched on top of a picnic table at the Mount Airy Dog Park, watching their furry children at play.

Anna, wise in the ways of the heart, kept silent. Like all good cops and therapists, she knew a void invited unburdening. She was a sturdy, middle-aged woman of medium height, with a square face and thin lips. Dark brows hovered over intense eyes of an indeterminate color. Nature had gifted her with hair that went pale gold instead of grey, and it waved softly just above her shoulders. It was her one beauty. Like everything in her life, its display was understated.

Lia sighed and ruffled the ears of Chewy, her silver Miniature Schnauzer. Satisfied, Chewy took off for another tour of the park perimeter. Lia tracked his jaunty trot with fretful green eyes while she gathered her thoughts. "I know better. Mom went through the same damn thing with her second husband. Handsome, talented, and just needed a little help to manifest his brilliant potential. Ha!" She bent her head forward while she gave a pat to a passing lab. Summer-streaked chestnut hair poured over her shoulders, curtaining her expressive eyes. She chewed on her bottom lip and picked at the fringe on her paint-splattered cut-offs.

Anna gently posed her question. "You've been seeing him for, what, almost a year now? What's upsetting you today?"

"Nothing's upsetting me. That is, nothing's changed. Nothing's improved, nothing's different. He always acts like I'm this big muse, and he says he's writing like crazy but he's just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic." She gusted a sigh while rolling her eyes. "I take that back. He's not rearranging them, he's tossing them into a big pile and pouring gasoline on them. It's a funeral pyre on a sinking ship."

"So what brought this on today?" Anna asked.

"I read his latest revisions yesterday. Thinking about it kept me up most of the night. The manuscript was nearly finished when I met him a year ago. It's no closer to being finished now than it was then." Lia paused. "Really, it's further away. His revisions are chopping it up so it's disjointed and unpublishable. He says he needs to cut pages, but he'll need to add another 50 pages to pull together all the new material he's added. He's killed the pace and it's lost its freshness. He's overworked the good parts until they just lay there, dead and stinking to high heaven." Lia ended her rant and sat back, arms folded.

"That's quite an image."

"Anna, it's pure road kill. I told him, 'You can't sell something if you never finish it. You can't finish it if you keep adding new elements that mean you have to rewrite the whole damn thing. You're not curing cancer here, you're just trying to entertain people.'"

"Good thing he's a writer, not a painter. He can go back to an earlier version of the manuscript when he comes to his senses."

"That's just it," Lia's voice took on a disgusted edge. "He's been overwriting the file all along. I set up his computer and showed him how to save different versions of the book as he made changes, and he blew it off. He said it was too much trouble."

Anna considered this. "There's software that can retrieve it, isn't there?"

"There isn't if Paul offers to defrag your computer while you're having beers. It's gone. For good. Honey! Stop digging! Right! Now!" Lia's anger made this reprimand sharper than it should have been.

Honey usually deserved her name. Today she was busily enlarging a hole created by an earlier dog park visitor and quickly losing her sweetheart status. Chewy found this very amusing and sniffed the dirt pile, emerging with dirty paws and a clump of sod on his pert nose.