Right from the Gecko: A Reigning Cats & Dogs Mystery (Reigning Cats and Dogs Mystery, Band 5) - Softcover

Buch 5 von 9: Reigning Cats and Dogs Mystery

Baxter, Cynthia

 
9780553588446: Right from the Gecko: A Reigning Cats & Dogs Mystery (Reigning Cats and Dogs Mystery, Band 5)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0553588443 ISBN 13: 9780553588446
Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

Surf’s up . . . and so are the stakes when veterinarian and amateur sleuth Jessica Popper escapes to the land of hula, hibiscus, and geckos for a professional conference. The last time she and boyfriend Nick Burby touched down on the island of Hawaii, Nick caused a volcanic eruption when he unexpectedly popped The Question to commitment-phobic Jess. But this trip proves just as dangerous when Jess befriends an ambitious young reporter whose body later washes up on the sand . . . and someone thinks Jess holds the clue to the killer’s motive.

There’s no end of suspects among the exotic flora and fauna, from the victim’s journalistic rivals and a mystery boyfriend to an eccentric beachcomber and a governor’s aide with ties to a controversial biotech firm bringing progress to paradise. One of them is a killer with the chameleon-like ability to stay hidden—and if Jessica doesn’t uncover hula-dunnit in time, she’ll be saying aloha . . . permanently.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Cynthia Baxter is a native of Long Island, New York. She is the author of the Reigning Cats & Dogs mystery series, featuring vet-turned-sleuth Jessie Popper, and the Murder Packs a Suitcase mystery series, featuring travel writer Mallory Marlowe. Baxter currently resides on the North Shore, where she is at work on her next mysteries in both series.

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Chapter One


"When a cat adopts you there is nothing to be done about it except put up with it until the wind changes."—T. S. Eliot


Ladies and gentlemen, the captain has turned on the seat-belt sign. Please return to your seats and fasten your seat belts, as we expect to encounter some turbulence. . . ."

I looped my thumb under my seat belt to double-check it, then glanced over at Nick, who was crammed into the seat beside me. Even the flight attendant's warning hadn't motivated him to look up from his guidebook. Then again, he'd pretty much buried his nose in the fat paperback the moment our plane had taken off from Los Angeles. The only time he'd come up for air had been complimentary beverage time, when he'd ordered pineapple juice after expressing his extreme disappointment that mango juice wasn't on the menu.

"The Penny-Pinching Traveler's Guide to Maui says there's a great snorkeling spot right behind the Royal Banyan Hotel," he announced, passing along his eighteen-hundredth travel tip since we'd boarded the plane four and a half hours earlier. "And you can go on a sunrise bike ride on Haleakala, the volcanic crater, that's a thirty-eight-mile ride downhill–"

"Sir?" the flight attendant interrupted. "Please fasten your seat belt. We're expecting things to get a bit rocky."

"Sorry." Nick pulled his seat belt low and tight across his lap, nestling it between a pair of khaki cargo pants and a black T-shirt he'd assured me would be replaced by the brightest, most outrageous Hawaiian shirt he could find as soon as we landed.

"I'm glad you're so excited about this trip," I commented.

"Are you kidding?" Nick exclaimed. "Ten days in Hawaii is the best possible antidote to law school. After the total nightmare of exam week, I need a few days of snorkeling on some fabulous beach with a mai tai in one hand and a papaya in the other."

I didn't bother to point out that drinking mai tais and snorkeling at the same time probably wouldn't work all that well. Or that, complaining aside, Nick had managed an A in every one of the courses he'd taken during his first semester at the Brookside University School of Law. Not when I was as happy as he was to be embarking on a ten-day vacation on the Hawaiian island of Maui, combining the American Veterinary Medical Association's annual conference with what I hoped would be a romantic getaway.

I was equally pleased that I'd come up with the idea of giving him a plane ticket for Christmas. True, flying nearly six thousand miles from Long Island to Maui was a bit of a luxury, one that not every vet I knew had opted to indulge in. Suzanne Fox, for example, a close friend from vet school whose practice was on the island's East End. Of course, she was still recovering from a brush with the law she'd had a few months earlier. Frankly, I didn't blame her for needing time to get over the trauma of having the police peg her as their number-one suspect in the murder of her ex-husband's fiancee.

Another local vet I knew, Marcus Scruggs, wasn't going either. He had the distinction of being Suzanne's boyfriend for a while–an episode in Suzanne's life I still considered incomprehensible. In fact, given the messy way their relationship had ended, I wondered if they'd both decided to skip the conference because they were afraid of running into each other.

But I was convinced that Nick and I deserved to splurge. Taking a real vacation was my way of saying, Let's celebrate the fact that we both made it through your first semester of law school. Of course, his return to studenthood after years of a successful career as a private investigator was in addition to me running my busy veterinary practice, tooling around Long Island in my twenty-six-foot clinic on wheels with the words Reigning Cats and Dogs: Mobile Veterinary Services, Large and Small Animals stenciled on the side.

On top of that, for the past few months I'd been hosting a weekly TV spot on a Long Island cable station, discussing various aspects of pet care and answering callers' questions during a phone-in segment. Then there was Suzanne's brush with the law: I'd helped figure out who really murdered her ex-husband's fiancee and had almost been shoved off a cliff by the killer. So a vacation-for-two was long overdue, and I was absolutely ecstatic about this trip.

Unfortunately, ecstasy wasn't the only emotion I was experiencing.

Deep down in the pit of my stomach–an inch or two below the tingle of ecstasy–lurked a low-level feeling of anxiety. Sure, I was looking forward to our vacation in paradise, everything from gorging on coconut-flavored shave ice to watching tacky hula shows to taking those long walks on the beach that people in search of romance are always talking about.

What I wasn't looking forward to was returning to the scene of the crime.

Not a real crime. More like a crime of the heart. Almost a year and a half earlier, Nick and I had flown to Maui for our first real vacation together. And it was wonderful, until I found out he'd planned an activity I hadn't seen listed in any guidebook: proposing marriage on an isolated stretch of beach as the sun was just about ready to dip below the horizon.

It turned into one of the biggest fiascos of my entire life.

In fact, the results were so devastating that they had torn us apart. It took a murder investigation to bring us back together–but that's another story. Nick and I finally managed to patch up our relationship after spending nearly three months apart, but not until Ms. Commitmentphobe here was able to admit both to him and to myself that I didn't want to live without him.

I'd made major progress since then. He and I had just finished a three-month trial period living together in my tiny cottage in Joshua's Hollow. And I had to admit that having Nick as a roommate and live-in lover went a lot better than I'd expected. Once I got over the initial shock of having another person around all the time–which, it turns out, is very different from living with two crazed yet severely codependent dogs, an aging feline with arthritis, a tiger kitten who thinks she's Marie Antoinette, an ever-silent Jackson's chameleon with amazingly expressive eyes, and a mouthy blue and gold macaw who has the colorful vocabulary of a sailor–I actually enjoyed it.

Still, the anguish caused by what had happened the last time Nick and I went Hawaiian hadn't been forgotten. In fact, it hovered above us as we flew the five and a half hours from New York's JFK Airport to LAX in Los Angeles, then continued on a second five-hour leg to Maui. It was as much a presence as the overhead luggage compartment that Nick banged his head against every time he stood up to let me go to the bathroom.

But we were determined to make the best of it. Or ignore it. Or at least work around it. At any rate, despite whatever worries may have lingered from our last trip, I was looking forward to a long, leisurely break filled with sun, surf, and sand, with a little intellectual stimulation thrown in courtesy of the veterinary conference.

And hopefully as little turbulence as possible.

***

As Nick and I emerged from Kahului Airport, I felt like Dorothy stepping out of Auntie Em's house after the tornado dropped it in the Land of Oz. Gone were the dreary gray skies of the New York winter, the piles of slushy snow sprinkled with black soot, and the icy winds that stung any and all exposed flesh without mercy.

Instead, the landscape was lush and inviting. All around us were palm trees topped with long, spiky fronds and bright pink, red, and yellow flowers with ridiculously huge blossoms. The giant yellow blob of a sun was so wonderfully...

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Verlag
Random House Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2007
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0553588443
ISBN 13 
9780553588446
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
352
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
49078
Deutschland

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