Doreen walked back inside her home through the kitchen door and dropped her notepad on the kitchen table, feeling the surge of excitement that kept her feet racing all the way home. Getting Richie and Nan to understand that they couldn’t get too involved but could dig for any information that they could from people in the know was one thing, but she couldn’t afford to have them on the same case.
Only as she sat here, replaying those words, did she realize just how much she sounded like Mack. She winced. “Sorry, guys. It’s too dangerous.”
And, of course, Mack would have immediately said that same thing to her. And he was right to a certain extent, but not in any way that she wanted to listen to or to abide by. Which was exactly what Nan and Richie would say too. She sighed and looked down at Mugs and Goliath. “How about we go out exploring?”
Goliath wove between her legs, as Mugs jumped up and down on his back legs, almost like a dancing bear.
She laughed at his antics. “I’ll take that as a yes.” She studied the names on her notepad that she had in front of her. She really should do some of the work on the internet first. It would help to get the lay of the land and to see what the general area looked like, from the perspective of the Rutland grocery store, where this guy worked, the one who had died recently.
The woman who had died at Rosemoor earlier this year, now that was an entirely different story. Doreen knew she could rely on Nan and Richie to get that information or at least to get a start on it. Doreen would do the rest as soon as she got home again. And, with that action planned, she and her animals walked out to her car, hopped into the seat, securing all the animals, and then reversed down her driveway. She would much rather have a place where she could turn around without coming down the driveway, but the cul-de-sac here was a pretty empty area as far as traffic went, so, in theory, it was all good.
As she drove past her neighbor Richard’s place, she thought she saw the curtain twitch. She honked the horn just in case. That would be enough to probably drive Richard crazy, but, hey, just something about him was odd and made her want to poke at him. Which wasn’t very nice of her, she admitted. Yet, at the same time, something was off with Richard.
She didn’t know whether he lived with a partner in that house or had murdered her and was keeping a social security check or some other godforsaken thing. It was hard to know. She’d certainly heard a weird voice every once in a while, which could be the supposed partner, yet Richard seemed to be a little bit friendlier now. Well, no, not really, not since their street ended up on the Japanese tour bus route. She had to admit that was pretty funny at the time, but now it was just irritating.
Having solved yet another case, Doreen’s notoriety was getting to be pretty silly. And hiding wasn’t the priority in her world. Some people would have said that she should have just moved, and then nobody could find her, but this was her home. This was Nan’s home. This was the home that Doreen had been given to start all over again, and she couldn’t just walk away from it.
And the river was absolutely special. She loved being here in Kelowna, with her totally different lifestyle living here. Just so many good things could be said about her move here.
She pulled into traffic and headed toward Springfield Road and then on toward Rutland. As she got up to the little mall, where the grocery store was, she parked, got out, looked at the animals, and froze. Not too brilliant to bring them with her here.
If she had left them at home, she could have gone into the store and could have taken her time talking to the employees and the customers. Now that she had them with her, and she couldn’t take them inside, so she was relegated to just walking around the area outside. With Mugs on a leash—even Goliath with a leash on again, something he was giving her a lot of dirty looks over—Doreen decided to just wander the area and to get a feel for the place. Not that that would help necessarily, but it seemed like the thing to do since she was here already. Or rather it was the thing nudging at her to do this now.
Maybe there was something to this thing called instinct. She didn’t know. It felt like an odd scenario, but, hey, she was working with it. With the animals on leashes and Thaddeus on her shoulder, she wandered around the small parking lot, looking into the grocery store, and then headed up and around several blocks. By the time she slowly meandered her way back to the mall parking lot, she hadn’t seen anything suspicious or anything to make her eyes go wide in any way.
Some of the streets had interesting names. Some of the names were odd, but that’s okay. She was interested in all of them. Apparently the river wasn’t very far away. If she looked on her map, Peck Road led to the Greenway, which was one of the big walking paths that went up and down Mission Creek. Other roads in that area didn’t make a whole lot of sense, like Hollywood Road North and Hollywood Road South.
She shrugged at that. Why wouldn’t you just have Hollywood for one and go with something else for the other? But, in her world, city planners never seemed to make a whole lot of sense. The fact that these guys got paid to name stuff just blew her away. She figured something else had to be involved in their job—there had to be because they did such a terrible job at the naming part.
This city had actual streets that were one name on one side of an intersection and a different name on another side. How confusing was that? Had they really not expected the city to grow? Would new streets need a new name, when really just the continuation of an existing street? It just didn’t make any sense to her.
But as she stood here and looked around at the parking lot, an old lady walked up to her. “Oh my, isn’t that a beautiful dog?” Then she looked at the cat, and her eyes widened. “Oh my,” she cried out, “you have a cat on a leash too.”
“This is Goliath,” Doreen said, with a smile. “He likes to come out for walks, and this way I don’t have to worry about losing him.”
The old lady asked, “May I pet him?” She bent a hand down to Mugs, who acted up for his adoring audience. The old lady was seriously charmed. She looked over at Doreen. “Do you live here, dearie?”
“No, I just came up to visit.” Doreen smiled. “I’ve never been to Rutland. I’m relatively new to the area, so I’m still trying to get my bearings on places and what happens in each place.”
“Ah, not a whole lot happens up here—well, at least nothing nice. It’s one of the lesser fun places to live,” she explained. “I always wanted to live down by the beach.”
“I think that would be lovely too. My grandmother’s got a house on the river,” she hedged. “And that’s pretty nice.”
“The water would be lovely,” she agreed, “but I’d always be afraid of flooding there.”
“I suppose,” she muttered. “I heard some guy up here died just a few days ago.”
The old lady nodded. “Oh, yes, that was so sad. And he was well loved. Had a great sense of humor and so kind. He will be missed.”
Doreen looked at her. “Oh my, the poor family. They must be devastated. Was he married?”
“Right. I mean, it’s hard enough to find anybody in this world but then to turn around and lose him like that? That’s just terrible. He was divorced. Married quite a while ago. I used to tease him about being single all the time.”