Released early! ‘Cause who doesn’t want more of the fan-favorite ‘Fancy’?
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-The Palmary Queries of the Effulgent ‘Fancy’, bot-Detective-
by David C. Daoust
It had been a while since Fancy made a house call, especially since her arrival on the small moon, Twin Crown. A moon whose small port town, Grady, was a treasure trove of unsolved cases. The amount of work she had been able to dig up, well, it seemed like, it may never cease.
She’d arrived at the residence of one ‘Guy Ruby’, a man that just so happened to be a suspect in her current case: ‘The Case of the Missing Puppy-dogs’.
Fancy was there to get some answers. Normally she would have her partner there with her, but he was busy elsewhere; something about a hotel for sale…
As it were, she was a bot, loaded into a full mechanical body. In no way did she pass for human. Sometimes, this added to the challenges, depending on who she was interviewing. After a brief introduction, she quickly explained why she was there…
“Well, I suppose it is about time I got the chance to defend myself,” Guy declared, clearly eager to clear things up on his end, “Between all the unspoken accusation and strange looks- I’ll be more than happy to help you along with your investigation! Bot or no!”
“I am glad to hear you are willing to help,” Fancy said, relieved, as she whipped out a small note-pad, pen poised over a blank sheet, “Can you tell me exactly what it is you know about the incident?”
“Well, I can try,” Guy said, taking a moment to formulate it all, he explained, “I really don’t have anything but sneaking suspicions. No one has ever actually talked to me about it…”
“Let’s start from the top,” not everyone was good at recounting events, especially not in a linear fashion. Fancy was used to it, she did what she could to guide him along, “There was some interaction with you and, the family whose dog is missing, the ‘Hoovers’?”
“Yeah, while I was out walking my dogs… Well, my sister’s dogs… I was dog-sitting at the time,” Guy haltingly explained, unhappy with his bumpy start, he delved in with a more detailed account, “See, at the time, I was doing what I could to take care of these two puppies. They weren’t really ‘trained’ very well—”
“Dogs or puppies?” Fancy interrupted as she suddenly stopped writing.
“I’m sorry they were grown dogs…” Guy corrected as he tried to get a look at the note-pad Fancy was suddenly scribbling-out something, in, “I just tend to call all dogs ‘puppies’…”
Fancy nodded and waited for him to continue.
“So, anyway… since they weren’t really ‘house-trained’,” he setup with a nod, “if I wanted to avoid cleaning up messes in the house, which I certainly did, I had to take them out as often as possible. For whatever reason, these dogs would not simply do their business in the yard… The only way I could control when they went, was to take them out for nice long walks about town.”
“Okay, so you first met the Hoovers on one of your walks?” Fancy guessed the connection he was angling at.
“Sure, they live up the street a ways- where I tended to walk,” Guy explained as though he must have missed telling that bit of it, then added, “and they also had a dog… the same kind even.”
“Okay,” Fancy accepted, then supplied, “So there were some similarities that brought you together.”
“We got to talking and I told them, just about, what I just told you,” he explained and then reiterated, “that the puppies were my sisters, they weren’t house-trained, and how I had to walk them so very, very often. Eventually the woman, there, asked where my sister got the animals… and you know I told her the one was from a breeder, but the other was a ‘rescue’. Well, her reaction to me calling the dog a ‘rescue’ was kind of weird —and I think it was what started all the problems…”
Fancy didn’t really correlate the ‘problem’… waited for the man to elaborate.
“Well, see, what I was trying to say was that the dog was rescued from the pound,” Guy, did just that, elaborated, “Meaning my sister adopted it before it could be put down…’cause, you know, unwanted dogs only get about three days to get adopted before they put’em down for good.”
“Okay,” Fancy nodded, scribbling in her note-book, “So, the dog was ‘rescued’ from euthanasia…”
“Right— but I think, that Hoover woman, did not take it that way…” Guy said, but it was clear he was speculating, “I think what she heard was that we took the dog from its rightful owner. I’d say, she thought the dog was stolen from someone that did not deserve it… As in, she decided I was going around taking dogs away from undeserving owners…”
“Well, how could you possibly know that?” Fancy, clearly taken aback with such a leap, asked.
“Well, I don’t, for sure…” Guy admitted, “but ever since I told her that, whenever I would go by their house…”
“The Hoovers?” Fancy clarified whose residence he was speaking of before he went on.
“Yes, the Hoovers house– Whenever I went by, they would start kicking their dogs around…” Guy said as though the act was ludicrous, “One day the husband there, or boyfriend, whatever, well, he even picked the little dog up by his head- palmed it like a basketball! He held the dog up to my face and introduced me to it.”
“And you felt like they were doing this all for your benefit?” Fancy queried.
Nodding the whole way through Guy answered, “I think they were trying to dare me to ‘rescue’ their dog from them…”
“Okay, I think I see what you’re saying…” Fancy accepted it as speculation.
“Yeah, they had some little drama playing out in their head…” Guy explained a bit more loosely now that he felt she was understanding it, “They thought I would try to intervein. Maybe? I don’t know… I can tell you right now, while I did not like seeing those dogs being treated in that way,” Guy tried his best to express what he was feeling, he then snickered and admitted, “All I really thought, was that they had better not try that shit with one of my puppies! I mean that dog is theirs, their property. I suppose some people may try to get involved, try to take it away from them… but, I’m sorry, that’s just not my way. I just kept on walking. ‘Didn’t bother talking to them any more than I had to– from then on. That’s where I left it.”
“Until that very same dog went missing?” Fancy threw at him.
“Yeah! Trouble was, that little fictional story they were telling themselves turned into a real problem once that puppy run-off,” Guy acknowledged the escalation, then threw in, “Not hard to fathom why, in my opinion!”
After a silence, he explained how it affected him, “I feel like, they decided, I took them up on their ‘dare’, and actually stole their dog! They been spreading gossip about me ever since. I got neighbors watching me… people trying to find out if I am hiding dogs in the house… they’re all so weird! I don’t even have my sister’s dogs anymore. I honestly never took anybody’s dog. That’s really all I should have to say on the matter! But, you know, there were no actual accusations. I guess they knew they could not prove it… or they were waiting until they could…”
“And of your sneaking suspicions?” Fancy pressed for more.
“Besides just suspecting I was a ‘suspect’,” tried to emphasize the unfairness of it all, then pressed, “because no one has ever actually talked to me about any of this before today…” Guy then offered up more information, “I think one day it was mentioned in passing that the dog went missing… Only reason I even know about it.”
“Anything else stand out?” Fancy felt like there was something more, she then tacked on, “Speculation is fine at this stage…”
“Well,” Guy folded a little, “they have this neighbor I got stuck talking to a couple times… I’ll tell you this, something about that guy, tipped off my ‘something-is-not-right-about-this-guy’ sense…”
“Okay, a…” Fancy felt like he knew who he was talking about, trailed off as she flipped back in her note-book a few pages before confirming, “…Mr. Kelly Jaxon?”
“That sounds right,” Guy nodded.
“What about him?” Fancy asked.
“I’d say the first time I met him… and we got to talking… See, he was a published author… While I was just trying my hand at writing. But for whatever reason this guy asked me… he asks me, straight out, if I am a writer… and I thought it was weird, because, like, how the hell did this guy know that? I don’t know. I don’t really talk to people in the community. But, like I mentioned, I got a sister. So I figure maybe she mentioned what I like to do… so I answered him, I told him, ‘yeah, I like writing’. No sooner do I answer, then he starts reciting his writing to me…” Guy rolled his eyes in the air, “So, there I am, standing there, with my untrained dogs, and this guy rambling on with some memorized passage from his own book…”
“What does this have to do with anything?” Fancy was not seeing a connection.
“Oh, right… well…” Guy, flustered, stopped to reorganize his thoughts, tried to start again, “this is after he had asked if I was a writer…” he set up, then waved it away as he plunged in, “Anyway a few weeks after that, he asked me the same question. He asked me if I was a writer, AGAIN, see! So, I figured ‘uht-oh, this is going to trigger him reciting his writing to me, all over again!’ Yeah, so, this time I said ‘No, I’m not a writer! Not me!’ and I got the hell out of there. At the time I figured since he was asking me the exact same question- he forgot that we already had that conversation… cuz well, some people have really short memories… But by the look on his face, after I denied it this time– I knew he’d caught me in a lie. I’d have to say he did remember we had that conversation already and, honestly, I remember thinking I was going to have problems with him… I didn’t care enough to try and fix it at the time. Like I said, I got the hell out of there…”
“So, you think he started the problems with his neighbors…?” Fancy supplied, trying to figure out where he was going with any of it.
“I think he got them thinking I was not honest, maybe I was up to no good…” Guy confessed.
“And they already thought you were a dog-napper…” Fancy threw in the pot.
“Yeah, and considering I did lie to the man…” Guy confessed some more before adding, “but honestly, I just did not want to hear him recite his own writing at me, like, ever again! Honestly, who does that?”
Fancy took a moment to finish up her notes, then shrugged when she realized he was expecting an answer.
“At this point though,” Guy stated with a nod, and a just-don’t-care-attitude, “after being silently hounded by these stupid people,” he then accused, “I think he probably took that dog.”
“Kelly Jaxon took the dog in question?” Fancy clarified.
“Yep,” Guy nodded, smugly.
“You know his dog has since, also, gone missing?” Fancy asked, studying his reaction.
“Really?” Guy was surprised.
“Yes,” Fancy, once again, flipped back a few pages of her note-book, “As of… a couple months now.”
“Well, I don’t know anything about that,” Guy looked like he just got hit with more bullshit, without missing a beat, deflected with, “I still think that Jaxon guy probably did it! All of it, even his own dog! Seriously, what he recited from his book– sounded like he was half-delusional to begin with,” Guy Ruby declared, before speculating, “Maybe he needed material for his next book or something!”
And that was it.
After a brief look into the freshly published work of one, Mr. Kelly Jaxon, Fancy found the corpses of said animals in a creepy shrine in the author’s basement… cause that guy was fucking weird and so were his weirdo fucking neighbors!
Guy Ruby went on to be a real cool guy that never got harassed about anything ever again, cuz sometimes fiction is way better than reality…
‘scept for the creepy dog shrine in the basement thing.
That part is awful even in fiction.
—-
April fools!
Hope you have a great week!
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