By Kevin S. Giles

That dog looked obedient enough, staring at us with shining eyes and nary a whimper until the retired teacher told us Tippy was dead and stuffed and nailed to a board. A black poodle she couldn’t bear to part with when the parting time came. Dead dog on a board decorating the living room in the dead old house.

The house sat on a hillside beneath an umbrella of trees, pretty enough at a glance. Just out the back door, half a dozen steps north, the mountain began its steep climb to somewhere a thousand feet above us. Watch for bears when you hang your clothes outside to dry, she warned us. They come around, right down that mountain, wandering into the yard just as they please. They like it best after dusk.

The old teacher, prim and particular, said she was moving to Missoula to live with the nuns. She would come back to Alberton on weekends to sort stacks of papers in bedrooms at the other end of the old house. The nature of those documents went undisclosed. When we moved in, we found plywood nailed over the doorway to those bedrooms. We never saw her but heard rustling back in those rooms on Saturday nights and hoped it was her.

We had the living room and bathroom and a bedroom and lean-to kitchen. When autumn came for good a chill set into the house. The little stove in the living room burned all night. The only warm place was within four steps of it. We wore boots and stocking caps to bed under heaps of blankets. Before breakfast we chipped ice out of the kitchen sink. Night air howled through the window frames.

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Red Maguire, news crime reporter, investigates a string of odd murders in Montana. ‘Mystery of the Purple Roses’ is the first novel in the Red Maguire series.

Becky fell sick with the flu. Hearing commotion outside, I heaped her with blankets and wandered downtown. It was a homecoming parade, making the best of two blocks. A three-piece band bounced along on a hay trailer, following a procession of skittish horses. The street smelled of burning fir and beer on old linoleum and diesel fuel spilled along the railroad tracks. When the parade turned around, at the precise moment the horses passed the band, a Milwaukee Road freight train roared through town, its horns blaring at the crossing. Horses bucked, the band shrieked its last notes, beer drinkers waved their glasses in tribute. A few dozen people ran for cover. I walked home to the silence of the sad dark house, Becky asleep under those blankets and that poor old dog nailed to a board somewhere beyond the plywood partition.

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Western Montana native Kevin S. Giles wrote the popular prison nonfiction work Jerry’s Riot, the coming-of-age novel Summer of the Black Chevy, and a biography of Montana congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, One Woman Against War, which is an expanded version of his earlier work, “Flight of the Dove.” His new novel, Headline: FIRE! is the third in the Red Maguire series. Masks, Mayhem and Murder is the second. The first is “Mystery of the Purple Roses.” More information is available at https://kevinsgiles.com.