With a curse, I ran around the back of the home, peeking through windows as I went. My heart thundered and sweat dotted my brow despite the cold.
“I have a bad feeling about this,” Daisy muttered.
For some reason, I did as well, even though I had zero proof something was amiss. “Let’s check the barn,” I said. “Maybe he’s still in there mucking stalls or something. Or his phone went dead.”
We tromped through the snow and entered the barn. “Charlie?” I called while Daisy ran in before me.
The building was oddly quiet. That morning, there’d been animal sounds—snorts and grunts. My footsteps were now the loudest noises. “Charlie?” I called again.
“Where are all the animals?” Daisy yelled. “The stalls are open. I can smell them, but where are they?”
As I moved deeper into the barn, my breathing became shallow and the feeling of dread sat heavily on my shoulders.
My mind screamed at me to leave the barn and call the police. But what if Charlie was hurt? I should help him and see what medical attention he needed before calling anyone.
After taking a deep breath, I took another step. The hay and dirt crunching under my boot seemed to reverberate throughout the barn.
“Gina, no one is here,” Daisy called. “The whole barn is empty!”
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.
