A Shot in the Bark: A Dog Park Mystery

Wednesday, June 1

This time the pot sitting outside her studio door held a cactus with a single coral bloom. She sat it on her table, pulled up a stool and sat down. She glowered at the spiny plant, jerked out her phone. Peter answered on the fourth ring.

"Are you suggesting I'm prickly?"

"Hello to you, too. How are you?"

"I'm wondering what it means when a guy gives you a cactus."

"You don't like it?"

"I don't know yet."

"I thought it was pretty cool when Alma told me how rare it is when they bloom."

"Hmmm."

"She also told me about that plant at Krohn Conservatory that blooms every hundred years and stinks like rotting meat, but I didn't think you'd go for that one."

"It wouldn't fit in my studio, anyway. They had to pull out part of the roof last time it bloomed."

"If you don't like the cactus, I'm sure Alma wouldn't mind taking it back. She has a big heart for rejected strays."

Lia gently brushed the tips of the spines with her finger. "Are you an Indian giver now?"

"I can't win, can I?"

"Probably not."

"Will you paint this one, too?"

"Maybe."

"If I buy you lunch, will you tell me what's wrong?"

Lia sighed. "I really like you, Peter."

"But?"

"I keep freaking out about Luthor being murdered. I hate what I'm finding out about him and what that says about me. And I can't take looking at all my friends and wondering who's going to pull out a knife. Everything is really squirrelly, you know? It makes it hard for me to think about dating."

"I wish I could make it go away. I'm almost sorry I told you about Luthor. But I couldn't stand to see you blame yourself."

"What about your investigation?"

Now it was Peter's turn to sigh. "It's going nowhere. I've been told to stop spending time on it, since there's no physical evidence at the scene to link to a suspect. We've got nothing unless your phone shows up. And if he was as smart as I think, he pulled the SIM card and tossed it."

"Will he do it again?"

"I don't know. I wish I could say it isn't likely, but since we don't know the motive, we can't speculate when, where or even if he'll strike again. It would be a very good idea to never agree to meet someone alone in an isolated area, especially if the invite came by text message."

The painting, when it was done, had an edgy feeling to it. Delicate tissue petals set against vicious spikes. A Jeckyll and Hyde kind of thing. Translucent reds and oranges against dull, dense greens. A study in contrasts. Lia thought it summed up how she felt, the tension of jagged edges of pain and mistrust against fluttery warmth.

Time made things no clearer to her. She felt awkward about Peter, about having jumped him on impulse and now having to deal with him. He wasn't hard to deal with, exactly. She just didn't know him and wasn't sure what his expectations were, or what she wanted. It had been a mistake, that afternoon in the studio. He was cute, but not exactly her type. He seemed to be a picket fence kind of guy. What did they have in common? After everything she found out about Luthor, maybe she shouldn't be with her type anyway. But what did it say about her that she hadn't been aware of the things Luthor had been up to? That she had been attracted to Luthor in the first place? Maybe she had no business being with anybody.