Pipers Piping and Puppies
Carly Winter
Cover by CoveredbyMelinda.com
Editor Divas At Work Editing
Copyright © 2024 by Carly Winter
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Unless otherwise indicated, all the names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this book are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Cover by: CoveredbyMelinda.com
Contents
About the Book
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Epilogue
Also by Carly Winter
About the Author
About the Book
Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer has gone missing. Can a woman and her talking dog sniff him out?
When Rudolph goes missing days before the Heywood Christmas Festival, Gina Dunner and her talking dog, Daisy, put their noses to the ground to find him.
As the investigation progresses, they not only find themselves saddled with a litter of puppies, but embroiled in the mystery of where the mother has gone.
Will Gina and Daisy be able to return the puppies to their mother and find Rudolph in time to save the Christmas Festival?
Chapter 1
Receiving a phone call in the early morning hours before daybreak never meant good news. I peeled open one eye and stared at the vibrating device sitting on my nightstand, my heart thundering. I didn’t want to answer. No news was good news, right? Especially when I was curled up in bed enjoying the last minutes of beautiful sleep before beginning my day, which was going to be a busy, cold one. With just a week before Christmas, I still had some shopping and baking to do, and living up in the mountains of Arizona, we’d received another foot of snow yesterday. Shoveling would be in order.
Yet, with an elderly father and my kid coming home from college, not to mention a brother who made questionable choices and often ended up in jail, I reluctantly picked up the phone.
“Hello?” I asked, shutting my eyes and preparing for the worst.
“Gina?”
“Yes?” I didn’t recognize the voice and my anxiety skyrocketed as the worst crossed my mind. Hospital worker? Police? Morgue?
“It’s Charlie Tupper.”
Thank goodness. I sighed with relief. Only a farmer who lived on the other side of town.
If he was calling me, I was hopeful no one in my family was dead. I sat up as my dog, Daisy, who laid beside me, protested with a grunt.
“What’s going on, Charlie?” I asked.
“Well, I kept hearing weird sounds coming from my barn this morning and finally found the source. It’s a couple of puppies.”
I then understood why he was calling the local dog rescuer—namely, me¾before sunup. “Any sign of the mother?”
“None,” he said. “And all of my dogs are fixed, so they definitely aren’t mine.”
Bless him. If more people fixed their canines, we wouldn’t have an overpopulation. “How old are the puppies?” I asked.
“That I don’t know,” Charlie said. “They’re cute as heck though. Little brown, white and black things. They are cold, and I put down some wet food, which they ate up. But I can’t keep them, Gina.”
I sighed and rubbed my forehead. “Okay. Let me get some coffee and I’ll be over to take them.”
“Perfect. Thanks.”
After hanging up, I stroked Daisy’s head. I’d rescued her about a year ago and decided to keep her. A hound / Jack Russell Terrier mix, she and I shared a special bond. Namely, I could hear her speaking to me.
