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took his face between her hands and kissed his nose.
    “What kind of cookies?” Jackie asked.
    “No chocolate. Just regular sugar cookies with macadamia nuts.”
    Jackie drew in a sharp breath. “Macadamia nuts are toxic to dogs.”
    “They are?” Mrs. Chen’s eyes widened.
    “Yes. How many nuts would you say he had?”
    “I don’t know.” Mrs. Chen looked alarmed. “One cookie’s worth.”
    Jackie told Mrs. Chen she’d keep Mr. Wiggles for observation for the rest of the day, to make sure he didn’t show any signs of nervous system disorders.
    “Don’t worry,” Jackie said. “He’ll be fine. It just has to work itself out of his system.”
    Mrs. Chen went away in tears, understandably distraught that she, not her neighbor, had been the agent of harm to her dog.
    “Let’s find you a quiet spot to rest,” Jackie said to Mr. Wiggles, tucking his compact body under her arm. “It’s that cute little mug of yours, isn’t it? Who could resist giving you a treat?”
    By three o’clock, Mr. Wiggles was much livelier, running around the back room playing with a ball. His temperature had returned to normal. Jackie gave him a little food, which he kept down.
    “I’m going to take Mr. Wiggles home,” she told Niko around four. “We can lock up a little early today.”
    “Do you have plans?” he asked.
    “Nothing special. Maybe I’ll take the kayak out. You can leave whenever you’re done.”
    “Thanks. But before you go, there’s something super important I have to tell you.”
    About to leave the room, Jackie stopped and faced Niko. “Oh? What?”
    “A dog wearing a cowboy hat, spurs and chaps limps into a vet’s office with his leg wrapped in bandages. He sidles up to the counter and says, ‘I’m lookin’ for the man that shot my paw.’”

CHAPTER FIVE
     
     
    Remembering the woman and golden retriever from a few days earlier, Jackie headed to Duggan Creek after taking Mr. Wiggles home, this time by herself, paddling down the center of the waterway under a late afternoon sun. She didn’t expect to see the woman again, but had been thinking about her, wondering who she was.
    As she approached the spot she’d first seen the dog, she could hear a steady banging, like someone hammering on wood. She stopped paddling and listened. The noise was coming from some distance back from the creek. She paddled over to the edge and stepped out of the kayak into shallow water. She pulled her boat up on shore, then scrambled up the bank and emerged in what was clearly a cow pasture, evidenced by a heavy pattern of hoofprints in dried mud. There were no cows in sight, just a field of straw-colored grass with a barbed wire fence marking a boundary to the north. Beyond that, a couple of horses grazed in the neighboring field.
    She walked to the top of the rise toward the hammering noise. As the view opened up and the noise got louder, she saw something she would never have anticipated: a houseboat. She stopped walking and stared. Definitely a houseboat. It was a rectangular white box with pale blue trim, a flat, railed-in viewing deck up top and two torpedo-shaped pontoons underneath. It had a flat deck that extended a couple feet on either side of the main cabin and several feet fore and aft, altogether about forty feet long. The fore deck was covered with a permanent metal awning and had two folding chairs on it. The boat looked old, beat up, in need of a good paint job and probably a lot more. It sat atop heavy wooden blocks, the pontoons clearing the ground by several inches. There was no one in sight.
    The hammering stopped.
    Overcoming her surprise, Jackie started moving again, walking toward the vessel as the buzz of a power tool ensued. As she neared the boat, she noticed there was a road nearby, a small country lane, and an unpaved driveway leading right up to the boat like any driveway to any house. Parked in the driveway was a silver and black motorcycle.
    As she cleared the bow, the power tool