Homicide at Emu Lodge

June Whyte

Description

The week leading up to Christmas should be fun, but when mobile-veterinarians, Dr. Emily Harrison and Dr. Maggie Post encounter an angry arachnid as big as a small dog, they decide it's no fun at all - especially as the eight-legged creepy-crawly is found guarding a dead body.Who hated the bullying agent enough to kill her? Her boss, Edward G. Peters, the best-selling horror author whose Modus Operandi in his latest book is identical to the crime? Or the author's cook who is protecting a shady secret between her boss and the deceased? Or the edgy young cleaner who's living a lie, the TV guy with a hidden agenda, or the scruffy burglar caught breaking into Emu Lodge the day before the murder?Once again, the two amateur sleuths find themselves deep in the middle of another baffling mystery. However, when Maggie's daughter gets caught up in the killer's sights and Fat Santa threatens to blow them away if they don't butt out, both Maggie and Emily wonder if maybe the stakes are too high.That is until Maggie wakes to find herself surrounded by spiders...

Informations

• Publié par: Untreed Reads
• Date de parution: 18 janvier 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780648254294
• Langue: English

Extrait

Table of Contents
Copyright
HOMICIDE AT EMU LODGE
Also by June Whyte
For writing friends, Robyn, Wendy and June K, for my beta reader, Nancy Gazo, and for my many readers. Without you, I’d be knitting scarves for my dog, Yolo, instead of making up exciting adventures for characters who turn into friends. Love you all to the moon and back.
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Dear Readers
Homicide at Emu Lodge: A Vets2U Mystery
By June Whyte
Copyright 2019 June Whyte
Cover Design by Annie Moril, http://anniemoril.com
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. 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 publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogue and events in this book are wholly fictional, and any resemblance to companies and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
HOMICIDE AT EMU LODGE
A Vets2U Mystery
June Whyte
Also by June Whyte
Sex on Tuesdays
VETS2U MYSTERY SERIES
Murder at Kangaroo Downs
Death at Dingo Downs
THE KAT MCKINLEY GREYHOUND MYSTERIES
Chasing Can Be Murder
Muzzled
Hounded
CHIANA RYAN CHILDREN’S MYSTERIES
The Case of the Disappearing Corpse
The Case of the Missing Dinosaur Egg
www.amazon.com/author/junewhytebooks
www.store.untreedreads.com
Author website
www.junewhytebooks.com
For writing friends, Robyn, Wendy and June K, for my beta reader, Nancy Gazo, and for my many readers. Without you, I’d be knitting scarves for my dog, Yolo, instead of making up exciting adventures for characters who turn into friends. Love you all to the moon and back.
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Break-in at Emu Lodge
“And do you know what that moron suggested?”
Dr. Maggie Post grunted. Rivers of sweat, pure honey to the mass of buzzing flies, trickled down her forehead making it near-impossible to answer her colleague, best friend, and sister-in-law, Dr. Emily Harrison’s irate question.
A phone call from Emily’s lawyer five minutes earlier had set her friend off like a match to a petrol-soaked rag. However, Maggie, arm deep inside the warm interior of a Jersey cow, could only half-listen. She had much more important things to worry about than her brother, Peter’s, latest shenanigans. Instead, she pressed her chest hard up against Flossie’s back-end and strained to extend her fingers a fraction further into the cow’s birth canal.
Emily’s indignant voice continued to buzz in Maggie’s ear like the persistent flies she was in no position to swat. “He says he wants us to visit a marriage counsellor before he’ll sign the divorce papers.” Emily gave a high-pitched laugh that ended in a squeak. “A marriage counsellor? My soon-to-be-ex-husband is a lying cheating man-slut, we’ve been separated for almost a year, and now, on the eve of me winning a get-out-of-jail-free card, he wants to patch up our marriage? As. If.”
“Mmm…” Maggie, afraid to open her mouth any further due to the closeness of the cow’s manure-slicked bottom, grunted again. She could never win when Emily got like this. And as for her bone-headed brother, Peter, she was close to disowning him.
Blocking Emily’s voice so she could concentrate, Maggie let her fingers do the exploring. Okay, there was definitely a calf inside, as expected, but she was blowed if she could find the critter’s head-or its feet. And in calving, the front feet should come out first, followed by the head.
Damn. Couldn’t be a normal birth, could it? Oh no, it had to be problematic, a challenge to their veterinary skills-like ninety-five percent of the calls they’d had that day, starting at 4am when an annoyed farmer rang to inform them that the medication given to his valuable breeding ram was sending it loco and to get out there pronto to stop said ram from tearing off its $50,000 assets on the sharp edges of the feed bin it was currently humping.
It was five days before Christmas and both Maggie and Emily had been enjoying the lead-up to a day spent eating and wrapping Christmas presents. Maggie’s twelve-year-old daughter, Judy, was home from boarding school chock-full of plans that involved shopping for last-minute presents, tree-hunting, singing carols and decorating the houseboat they currently lived on with Emily. A full month of fun and relaxation to look forward to before their next Vets2U assignment.
And then the local large animal vet, gnarled old Dr. Vincent, had gone and broken his leg. Something to do with his granddaughter trying to teach him to ski.
Of course, they couldn’t refuse to help out for a few days-just until his replacement arrived from further up the river. But what they hadn’t figured on was half the cows in the district going into labor and all having complications while calving.
To the accompaniment of a loud squashy-sounding slurp, Maggie withdrew her arm from the inner recesses of the cow and stood, hands on knees, attempting to get her breath back.
“More trouble?” Emily asked, her body language instantly switching from frustrated ex-wife back into professional veterinary mode. The thing with both Maggie and Emily was that sick animals always came first.
“ Yeah, looks like it,” Maggie’s voice scratched at her throat like sandpaper on the skin of a newborn. The 38-degree summer sun shone overhead with the intensity of a skin-eating alien monster. It glared down on them from a cloudless sky and Maggie figured if they didn’t get this calf out of Flossie and find some shade soon, she’d end up as a puddle of goo in the middle of the sunburnt paddock.
She swigged a glug of what tasted like warm pond-scum from the water bottle Emily passed across and then shook her head. “Don’t know why farmers can’t erect a tent in the paddock during summer for their poor longsuffering veterinarians to work under.”
“With maybe a couple of battery-operated fans switched on high.”
“And a giant thermos of something alcoholic, with lots of ice added.”
Maggie caught Emily’s eye and they both let out a laugh. Actually, most farmers brought their stock into a shed or barn for birthing, but the last time they’d spotted their farmer was half an hour ago when he marched across the paddock in front of them. He’d pointed to the distraught cow restrained in a makeshift crush made out of spare bits of wood and iron and then stumped off in the direction of the house to repair the tractor. Probably with binder-twine and wire.
Maggie sighed as she dropped the now empty water bottle on the cracked ground and gave the agitated cow a reassuring pat on the rump. “Sorry, Mama, but all I can feel in there is the tail, so it looks like your baby’s intent on coming out bum first.” She shook sweat from her eyes and turned back to Emily with a sigh. “I have to go back in and find those legs so we can get a tie on them.”
“Righto.” Emily, completely in sync, selected a syringe from the leather vet bag and filled it with a local anesthetic, in readiness for an epidural.
The cow was growing even more restless in the crush. The whites of her eyes rolling, she pawed the ground, mooing plaintively, as if to say, ‘Hey, let me outta here! I’ve totally changed my mind about becoming a mother!’
“I know how you feel,” Maggie told the stressed-out cow as she took the sixteen-gauge needle from Emily. “Too late now though, sweetie. Should have thought of that before fluttering your eye-lashes at that handsome bull.” Maggie lifted the cow’s tail and ran her hand up its base, feeling for the articulations of the vertebrae where the tail met the body. “Here we go.” She directed the needle with its deadening anesthetic into the space around the spinal cord and when the tail went floppy and the cow settled, knew she’d hit the mark.
“Want me to finish off, now?” Emily asked, stepping forward. “You look beat.”
“Nah, I’ll survive.” Maggie shook her head and then glanced across at her best friend. Emily’s eyes were rimmed with red, her hair slick with sweat, and even her shoulders appeared ready to curl up and go to sleep. “You don’t look up to doing a tap-dance routine yourself.”
It had been a long day. After sorting out the testosterone over-loaded bull at sunrise, they’d gone on to perform a caesarian on a young heifer, treated several sick pigs, a horse caught on a barbed wire fence, a prized ram who’d broken his leg when he fell into a ditch and helped with the birthing of two lambs, four calves, a foal and a litter of piglets. Plus, there was the two hours all-up they’d spent traveling from farm to farm.
“You’re right. I can barely lift my arms to scratch myself.” Emily leant forward and gently wiped the sweat from Maggie’s face with a rag.
“Don’t tell me that’s the same rag I used to wipe Flossie’s rear end five minutes ago?” Maggie closed her eyes and screwed up her nose. She knew it was and tried not to gag at the rank smell of manure, dirt and blood that clogged her nostrils.
“Okay, I won’t tell you.” Emily poured half a bottle of iodine into a bucket of water and tossed her hair from her eyes. “Anyway, stop bellyaching and get on with it. It’s not getting any cooler out here.”
“Okay, okay! I’m on it!” Maggie passed Emily the empty syringe before dipping her arms into the bucket of dark y