Support Your Local Pug. Lane Stone
Buckingham’s. With the racket from the motor, I could still hear the car. I turned back around when it slowed in less than a block. Was it stalling out? No, it was turning left onto Old Orchard Road, the street running along the side of the grocery store. I briefly considered cutting through the Weis parking lot but decided that since he would then be driving on a road with neither stoplights nor any traffic to speak of, especially at this hour, I had zero chance of getting close enough to see anything.
My phone rang as I got back to the Buckingham’s parking lot. I swiped the screen to answer the call, then dropped the arm holding it to my side. The sight in front of me was such a shock I couldn’t speak. The window of one of the outside doors had been smashed and a piece of driftwood propped that door open. A section of a log, five or six inches tall and wide enough to sit on, held the interior doors apart. We had two sets of doors which gave us a sporting chance when a puppy backed out of his collar and decided running from the groomer would be a fun game, or when a grown dog heard the call of the wild.
“Sue! Can you hear me?” It was our police chief, John Turner, and he was on the phone I had dangling by my side.
I listened for what I hadn’t heard. A siren. The alarm company had called the police before calling me, so where were my public servants?
“I’m here,” I said. “Where are you?”
“Huh? You’re here? I don’t see you. How did you know to come to Anglers?”
“Why aren’t you at Buckingham’s?” I asked.
“Why would I be at the Pet Place?” he asked in return.
“It’s Pet Palace, as you know, and why would I be at Anglers?” I didn’t bother to ask if he meant Anglers Fishing Center or Anglers Marina. I wasn’t at either one, so it didn’t matter.
“Hold on. The dispatcher wants me.” He hung up, leaving me staring at my phone. I guess he didn’t know the meaning of hold on. That was fine with me since I didn’t have time to talk.
I tucked my phone into the waistband of my yoga pants and went in to my pride and joy—my very successful pet spa. I stepped over the driftwood and sidestepped to get in through the right side exterior door. The interior doors were only separated by the width of the log, which no adult could squeeze through, so I pushed one of the doors open. Once I was through my feet crunched on broken glass. Dry dog food was strewn all over the lobby floor, and I crushed and scattered it underfoot as I made my way to disarm the security system.
I turned to see the door to the storage closet in the hall standing wide open.
I went behind the desk and used the intercom to call my employees on the upper level. “Taylor? Laurie? Can you hear me?”
The phone at the reception desk rang and I answered it. “Is he gone?” It was Taylor.
“Yeah, I saw him drive away. Come on down.”
That’s when, at last, I heard the police siren. If I wanted to check out my dog food storage closet before the “don’t touch anything,” yada yada speech, I’d have to move fast.
We had briefly considered installing a lock on the cherry-stained wood door, but felt a deadbolt wasn’t in keeping with the royal, or at least British upper-class, ambiance we were trying to create for our pet parents.
I scanned the shelves. We’d need to inventory what was left to learn the exact amount of our loss, but it didn’t take a CPA to know that several of the large bags of the gourmet dry food were gone. Two shelves were empty. The cases of canned food didn’t seem to have been disturbed.
“Sue! Are you all right?” a baritone voice called from the lobby entrance.
I came out of the storage closet. “I’m fine,” I answered.
Chief John Turner stood in the doorway literally scratching his head, as he took in the debris on the floor, before looking up at me. “Good morning,” he said with what some of my favorite books would refer to as a sardonic grin. “What have you touched in here?” His winter uniform wasn’t really a uniform. He was wearing a white shirt, gray slacks, and a black Lewes Police Department windbreaker.
“Nothing.” I walked to him and held out my hands in case he wanted to test for dog food residue.
“I don’t hear the alarm. You must have touched the keypad.”
“That’s all I touched.”
“You walked through the dog food,” he continued. “We would have liked to check for footprints.”
“Well, yeah. But that’s all. Really.”
“And you moved those doors.” He pointed at the interior set of doors.
“Didn’t you move them, too?”
“I pushed them open in a way that prevented disturbing any fiber evidence.”
“Well, so did I,” I said.
He rolled his eyes. “Did you touch anything else?”
“I’m the owner. I’ve touched everything in here at some time! But, no, I didn’t touch anything else this morning.” I heard the elevator descending and waited for Taylor and Laurie. The doors parted and I hugged one young woman, and then the other.
I turned to Chief Turner. “They did just what they were taught. They shut down the elevator and stayed upstairs.”
“We were so relieved to hear your voice over the intercom,” Laurie said.
Chief Turner closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “You touched the intercom,” he said. That was my cue to change the subject.
“To get here as fast as you did from Anglers you must have— By the way, what were you doing there at this hour? Are you going fishing?”
“No.”
“Why did you think I would be there?” I asked.
“You and I need to head over there as soon as I finish here. I’ll explain on the way.” Then he turned to Taylor and Laurie. “So, you two sheltered in place?” he asked.
“He told us to,” Laurie said.
“He told us to,” Taylor said at the same time. “He yelled up at us to stay where we were and no one would get hurt. Then he banged on the elevator door with a gun.”
“He had a gun?” Chief Turner’s head jerked up at that. “How would you know that? You were upstairs.”
Laurie put her hands up, palms out, and gave Taylor an exasperated look. “It was just something metal.”
“But it was a man’s voice you heard?” Chief Turner asked.
“A man who is into very old movies,” I added.
Simultaneously they saw the state of the lobby floor and the doors.
“Oh, no!” Laurie cried.
“You two are okay, and that’s all that matters,” I assured them. “I don’t care about the burglary.”
Chief Turner had his notepad out and was writing without looking at it, a life skill that could come in handy from time to time. Or maybe making heads or tails of it later was the amazing part. “You weren’t burgled. Since they were threatened,” he said, stopping to point at Taylor and Laurie, “you were robbed.”
“Thanks for clearing that up,” I said.
“I’ll get a crime scene team out here,” Turner said, completely ignoring my first-rate sarcastic remark.
I turned back to Taylor and Laurie. “I tried to chase him. Did you see his car from the window?”
“There was too much pollution coming out of it to see much,” Taylor said, making a face. “We heard it and went to the window to look out.”
“You could