Sign of Seven Book 2

Hawkins Hollow

June 1994

ON A BRIGHT SUMMER MORNING, A TEACUP poodle drowned in the Bestlers’ backyard swimming pool. At first Lynne Bestler, who’d gone out to sneak in a solitary swim before her kids woke, thought it was a dead squirrel. Which would’ve been bad enough. But when she steeled herself to scoop out the tangle of fur with the net, she recognized her neighbor’s beloved Marcell.

Squirrels generally didn’t wear rhinestone collars.

Her shouts, and the splash as Lynne tossed the hapless dog, net and all, back into the pool, brought Lynne’s husband rushing out in his boxers. Their mother’s sobs, and their father’s curses as he jumped in to grab the pole and tow the body to the side, woke the Bestler twins, who stood screaming in their matching My Little Pony nightgowns. Within moments, the backyard hysteria had neighbors hurrying to fences just as Bestler dragged himself and his burden out of the water. As, like many men, Bestler had developed an attachment to ancient underwear, the weight of the water was too much for the worn elastic.

So Bestler came out of his pool with a dead dog, and no boxers.

The bright summer morning in the little town of Hawkins Hollow began with shock, grief, farce, and drama.

Fox learned of Marcell’s untimely death minutes after he stepped into Ma’s Pantry to pick up a sixteen-ounce bottle of Coke and a couple of Slim Jims.