Okay, that made me feel a little better. I walked past one empty stall, then another. Had Charlie let the animals out? Where had he gone? Did he have another vehicle I wasn’t aware of?

“If I don’t find him here, I’m going to break into his house,” I announced to the empty barn. I couldn’t shake the feeling of utter dread. The urge to run outside almost won out over my need to search the barn.

Daisy rounded the corner and came bounding toward me, her tongue hanging out the side of her mouth. “I’m telling you, there’s no one in here,” she said. “Let’s go.”

I continued my slow journey into the barn. I noted that some of the stalls had name tags, something I hadn’t seen before.

Did I believe my dog that the barn was empty? Maybe. “Just checking everything for myself,” I whispered, glancing into the stall to my left and noting the droppings. Charlie hadn’t mucked out the stalls as he’d said he was going to do.

In the last stall, where he’d found the puppies earlier in the morning, I discovered Charlie lying face down.

“I thought you said no one was here!” I yelled as I raced toward the farmer.

“Oops,” Daisy replied. “Is he dead?”

After dropping to my knees, I felt his neck for a pulse while noting the dried blood on the back of his head. “Please be alive,” I muttered. “Please be alive.”

I caught the rhythm of his blood pulsing in his neck under my fingers. With a sigh of relief, I sat back, pulled out my phone and dialed emergency. I was assured an ambulance was on the way.

Charlie groaned, reaching for his head as he rolled over.

“Don’t move,” I said, placing my hand over his arm. “The ambulance is on the way.”

“Gina?” he asked, his voice weak. “What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to ask you some questions. When you didn’t answer my phone, or the knock on the door… well, I became worried and decided to snoop around a bit. I’m glad I did.”

He squinted up at the ceiling as if he was trying to recall what had happened.

“You came by this morning to collect the couple of pups,” he said.

“There’s eleven!” Daisy yelled. “E-lev-en! That’s nowhere close to a couple, dingbat!”

I reached over and stroked her head. “That’s right,” I said to Charlie. “Then I left.”

He turned his gaze to me. “What did you want to ask me?”

Ugh. It would be so much easier if the deer were in the barn as they’d been earlier. “Well, I noticed when I came to get the puppies that you had deer in the barn,” I ventured.

“Yes. I’m keeping them for the Christmas Festival’s petting zoo.”

“So, they were going to be Santa’s reindeer?”

He nodded as sirens blared in the distance.

“When I counted them this morning, there were eight,” I said, hoping my lie sounded somewhat reasonable. Who went around counting deer in a barn? “Shouldn’t there have been nine of them?”

He stared at me a long moment.

“Dasher, Dancer, Prancer and Vixen,” I said, holding up a finger for each name. “Comet, Cupid, Donner and Blitzen. That’s eight.”

“And Rudolph would make nine,” Charlie mumbled.

“And there were only eight this morning,” I said.

“You’re sure?”

“Yes,” I replied firmly, even though I hadn’t noticed the name tags on the stalls earlier. I certainly couldn’t say a bunch of puppies had shared the information with my talking dog.

He sat up as I heard the crunching of tires outside. A moment later, Deputy Trevor Hutchinson walked into the stall. Tall with blond hair and a piercing green gaze, his brow furrowed as he took in the scene.

“Gina,” he greeted me. “What’s going on?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, standing. “All the animals are missing, and someone must have knocked Charlie unconscious.”

“What do you mean all my animals are missing?!” Charlie said, staggering to his feet. He fell forward and stumbled. Thankfully, Trevor was there to catch him.

“You’ll need to get to the Emergency Clinic, Charlie,” Trevor said, holding onto the older man. “The ambulance will be here soon.”

“And what about my animals?” Charlie asked.

“I came in from the other direction,” Trevor replied. “Not from town. I saw a bunch of miniature goats and cows, along with some deer, on the field about a half-mile away. I’ll call for backup, and we’ll bring them back into the barn.”

The ambulance arrived and loaded Charlie on the stretcher. After they took him away, I turned to Trevor. I could lie to him since he had no idea how much I hadn’t been paying attention during my early morning trek to the farm.

“What’s going on here, Gina?” he asked, crossing his arms over his chest.

I took a deep breath, lining up my lie with the truth. “Charlie called me this morning,” I said. “There was a litter of puppies in the barn he wanted me to take.”

“He said there were a couple of puppies in the barn,” Daisy said. “A couple.”

Ignoring her, I continued. “When I got here, I noticed that the stall labeled Rudolph was empty, but I didn’t think much about it because I was worried about the puppies.”

Trevor walked down the aisle and studied the stalls. “So Rudolph was missing. What about the other animals?”

“They were all here,” I said. “I saw the miniature goats and cows. Just Rudolph’s stall was empty.”

With a sigh, the deputy rubbed his face. “So… someone came in, stole Rudolph, then came back, hit Charlie over the head and… released the rest of his animals out into the back pasture?”

Well, when he put it that way, it sounded crazy. However, the puppies had said their mother had gone after whoever stole Rudolph. That seemed like the place we needed to start.

“We need to find out who took Rudolph,” I said.

Chapter 4

Daisy and I rode out to the pasture with Trevor in his sheriff’s truck.