Murder on Charles Street - Leighann Dobbs Page 0,1
and the breath in her lungs as she followed her neighbor into the main sitting room.
She’d never seen much of the house aside from these two rooms. They were cozy rooms, well lived-in, and gave off the subtle indications of frequent visitors. The sofa was mottled with faded stains from the paws of the patients he treated. Katherine perched on the edge and waited for him to conduct his examination of her pet.
He set Emma down in the middle of an armchair and bent over a sheaf of papers spilling out over the low table between them. He was usually jovial, meeting Katherine with a smile and asking after Harriet, her maid and the sole other person living at Number Two Charles Street at the moment. Today, Dr. Gammon pressed his lips together and kept mum. The way he gathered the papers, haphazardly pulling them into a pile and then depositing them out of sight in the corner, made her frown.
“Did I interrupt you?”
For several awful minutes, she’d been afraid he wasn’t home and that nothing could be done for Emma. She hadn’t stopped to think that he might have more important matters to which to attend.
“No, of course not. I’m an old man alone with my thoughts, nothing more.”
Katherine frowned, her investigative instincts resurfacing. “Do those thoughts have anything to do with the papers you put in the corner?”
He met her gaze with his usual smile as he lowered himself into the armchair, displacing Emma onto his lap in the process. “You’re too astute for your own good. But I promise you, it is of no matter. I had the vain thought that I made a mistake with one of my past patients. I was trying to look through my notes to confirm it or set my mind at ease.”
Dr. Gammon took meticulous notes, even for his non-human patients. In the month since she had moved to the neighborhood, he must have written ten pages about Emma. The pug was constantly getting into places where she ought not to be. She had an uncanny knack for taking what wasn’t hers, and half the time, the stolen goods went down her gullet. But even so, she rarely seemed so out of sorts as this.
“Would you like another set of eyes to go over the issue?” It might give her something to think about while he finished his examination of her dog.
He shook his head, his jowls wobbling. “Don’t worry about it. It isn’t any concern of yours. Now, what have you eaten this time?” That last part he directed toward the dog, not Katherine.
She picked at the wool of her skirt, twisting it between her thumb and forefinger. Wisps of her brown hair, hastily tied back, dropped into her eyes. She dug her fingernails into her cuticles, trying to look anywhere in the room but at Dr. Gammon.
The wallpaper was a fashionable green, matching the deep-emerald rug and dark paneling of the mantel. A small fire chuckled in the hearth, chasing away the edges of her chills. Scattered books lay about, evidence of his love of knowledge. It was that love—and perhaps the peculiarity of finding him attending to his garden in the middle of winter—that had drawn Katherine to him to begin with.
A few weeks ago, she’d taken Emma for a walk along the path running parallel to Charles Street along her garden gate. As she’d reached Number Four, Dr. Gammon’s address, the old man had been scraping the ice off the patch of dirt and wilted plants that were his herb garden in the summer. Despite the cold the past couple years, he’d managed to nurse his plants through last year’s brisk winter and keep them alive, but he feared the weight of so much snow would do them ill. The winter had already gone on far too long for Katherine’s tastes, so she couldn’t begrudge him the worry.
He felt around Emma’s stomach, presumably searching for sore spots. Her dog didn’t react to any of them. Katherine’s teeth chattered just as much from worry as from the receding cold. When she couldn’t take his good-natured mutterings toward her dog any longer, she burst. “Are you certain you shouldn’t take on more patients?”
His aged fingers stilled on Emma’s belly. He didn’t look at Katherine, but took a deep breath before continuing his quest. “No, I’m long past my practicing days. I do a bit here and there, helping friends.”
Katherine gnawed on her lower lip. This wasn’t the first time