We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We gratefully acknowledge also the support of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative.

      Napoleon Publishing/Rendezvous Press

      Toronto, Ontario, Canada

      07 06 05 04 03 5 4 3 2 1

      National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      Allin, Lou, date

      Bush poodles are murder / by Lou Allin.

      (A Belle Palmer mystery)

      ISBN 978-1-894917-04-9

      I. Title. II. Series.

      PS8551.L5564B88 2003 C813’.6 C2003-902837-2

      PR9199.3.A3963B88 2003

      Dedicated to Thérèse Hélène DesRosiers (1912-1987). Thanks for renting the conga drum, bribing me to learn how to type, and baking the best cherry pie in Cleveland. May you be a six-foot rose every summer.

       Prologue

      Darkness. The pungent herbal smell of leaf mould in a den with an earthen floor. A certain slant of grey light peeked through a crack in the snow cover, soon fading shut as a howling wind drifted white lattice across it. Then black. A cold, dry womb. She shivered, twitched as a web of roots over her head pulled at her soft felt hat.

      Hunger. No lunch or dinner for the first time in recorded memory. But food was banished to an idle corner. Beyond panic, thoughts keened by the cold, she tried to recall the last weather report. -15°C, barometer falling, accounting for the snow. But after the predicted foot dump, skies would clear by morning, ushering in an Arctic front, a mid-February deepfreeze, minus thirty degrees Celsius all day. And Monday? She’d hardly been listening. Hadn’t the forecaster said “single digits,” a balmy minus nine or better?

      In her more fashion-conscious youth, she’d cross-country skied in that temperature wearing only a shapely nylon racing suit, pumping her arms to work up a sweat, cooling her brow with snow when she stopped at the top of a hill to catch her breath. But she hadn’t been running for her life. The glow-watch read 7:00 p.m. Thirty-six hours. She could leave before dawn. Were those five miles another lie? And what about the system? She cursed her laziness for not trying it out. Five or six hours, the brochure had said, depending on temperature and exercise levels. Her toes flexed in the clumsy felt-pack boots. Moosehide mitts kept her hands from freezing. Wrapped in a featherlight silvery space blanket, the extremities were protected, but her down parka was blowing in the wind, Dylan.

      Something round and hard poked her back as she rolled onto her side. A rock or . . . ? From close by came the soft burble of contentment.

       One

      The hunchback of Notre Dame with a Rastafarian haircut. “Cute,” Belle Palmer observed as a six-pound bundle of coppery fur with a woolly chest squirrelled past, leaped to pose standing on thin, shaved legs on a rocky outcrop, and then sprang off to clamp onto Freya’s nodding German shepherd tail until long hairs dangled from its tiny jaws. An insult to the dog kingdom, she thought, a seven hundred dollar rodent.

      “Strudel’s her name. She’s good enough to eat,” Miriam MacDonald said, at fifty-five Belle’s elder by a slight decade.

      “Let’s hope Freya isn’t hungry,” Belle said with a grin. She’d suggested that their recent Christmas pounds might be pared by a long snowshoe. Gentle on the knees and hips, like walking on pillows, this exercise the aging boomers had adopted quickly. Their high-tech aluminum and neoprene models with the price tag of her old college VW glided over the narrow trail. Half an hour later, they were approaching a swamp she’d named after the conservationist Gene Stratton-Porter’s 1909 novel Girl of the Limberlost. A fan of classic films as well, Belle had enjoyed the film version, but mourned the former Indiana wilderness lost to resource exploration and agriculture.

      “I never imagined you as a dog owner. But now that Rosanne’s living in North Bay . . .” Miriam’s daughter was getting her teaching certificate, a career choice Belle didn’t envy, given her own checkered experiences before a chalkboard.

      “A thoughtful Christmas gift from dear Mel. The sweetie sensed that I was lonely and drove all the way to Kingston to buy her. Apricot mini-poodle pups are hard to find, especially off-season.” A perturbed look passed over her face. “One problem, though.” She called the dog, turned its face to Belle and spread its lips.

      Belle squinted at the minute display, toy teeth next to Freya’s noble fangs. “Hmmmm. An underbite. Still, you aren’t going to breed or show her, are you?”

      “No, but this mess has to be corrected, Shana says. She’s pulling the front ones tomorrow, a small fortune, and the anaesthetic is risky. The adult set will probably be normal once there’s room. It wasn’t Mel’s fault. The breeder said that the parents are champions. Makes you wonder.”

      “When am I going to meet this answer to a maiden’s prayers?” She’d been listening to Miriam describe Mel’s virtues for over two months.

      Rounding a turn, brushing against soft white pines, Belle eased down the bank sideways by forcing the metal grips into the snow and pulling on a willow bush for balance. The poodle was running circles around Freya, who pleaded soundlessly at her owner for moral support, soft brown eyes communicating that she hadn’t bargained for motherhood at the ripe age of eight, Mr. Red Chile Pepper toys aside.

      Miriam dropped to her ample posterior, sliding the last two feet with a laugh. “Thank God, it’s not like skiing. I’d be lining up for a hip replacement. Six months’ wait under our pathetic health care system.” She blew her nose on a tissue, then clicked her snowshoes together like Dorothy in Oz, Redfeather models replacing ruby slippers, speedy but not built for the bullwork of trail-breaking like Belle’s Atlas tanks. “May I borrow these? Rosanne used the trails near Shield University’s Conservation Area. They sound a bit tamer than this.”

      “Keep them until the lilacs bloom on Victoria Day. They’re better suited to townie paths anyway.” Discreetly she assessed her friend, glad that the crisp air, a mild minus ten Celsius, was putting bloom back into her cheeks. Miriam’s scare with a breast exam had worried her for several weeks before the biopsy had come back negative. “I’ve never known a Melibee. How could his parents do that to a child? Chaucer’s most tedious storyteller, as I recall—with considerable rue—from trying to introduce English lit to teenagers hooked on Goosebumps. They might have related to the “Wife of Bath’s Tale” with the bum kissing, but our version was expurgated.”

      Miriam gave her a sharp look and perched on a large cedar stump. A light wind was rising across the expanses of the icy Limberlost, a frosty postcard of grey, leaning cedar spars, a few topped with five-feet-wide great blue heron nests. Leathery Labrador tea scrub rustled beside cattails leaking stuffing like exploding cigars. The dogs snuffled along a marten path and clambered to the white dome of a beaver house. “Takes a strong man to carry it off. The Elphinstones were titled back in Scotland. Lairds, or some such. The Isle of Bute. Some legendary Marjorie buried alive.”

      Belle