Drool Baby (A Dog Park Mystery) (Lia Anderson Dog Park Mysteries) by Carol Ann Newsome, C.A. Newsome Read Free Book Online Page B

saw in Carnac looked like so many erect penises," Renee began.
    Lia sputtered. "Really? How evocative."
    "Precisely. I'm imagining this enormous phallic shadow reaching across the lawn, all dressed up, so to speak, and the poor thing has nowhere to go. So I
    remembered how the Hindu have their lingam stones, and how they pair them with a yoni stone. Are you familiar with that?"
    "No, afraid not."
    "I have a set inside. I can show you. Anyway, it's a pairing of male and female. I'd like this to also be a pairing of male and female, but abstract, of
    course. Sheriff Si Leis is retiring. We wouldn't want him coming back to ban us. The poor man's wasted enough of his life fighting pornography and adult
    entertainment. We absolutely must leave him in peace."
    Lia couldn't help laughing. She, too, had found the sheriff's moralizing tedious.
    "I'd like this to be subtle, so it can be my private bit of symbolism. Is that enough to get you started?"
    "Sure, I'll put some drawings together."
    "Excellent. Come inside and I'll show you my lingam stone. Oh, and I mustn't forget to pay you. Is two thousand enough to get you started?"
     
    Lia smiled at the memory. This project was going to be fun. Too bad Bailey's not here, she would enjoy Renee , she mused. The lapse shocked her out of her
    reverie. What was she thinking? What was she doing missing someone who tried to kill her? Peter was right. Once somebody hurt you that badly, you had to
    cut them off.
    She scowled, angry at herself. She got up from the floor, stretched, and went to the kitchen for a glass of water. She sat down on the sofa. Honey put her
    head in Lia's lap and Chewy snuggled up against her on the other side. She pet each in turn. "You would never try to shoot me, would you?" she asked them.
    "Of course not," she answered herself. "You couldn't get your paws through the trigger guard. Okay, I need a change of scenery. Who wants a walk?"
    An hour later, Lia was at her drawing table, reviewing her sketches. The brisk walk had cleared her mind and returned her to good spirits. She'd sketched
    out a variety of ideas for the markers that would indicate the equinox and solstice. She'd started with the obvious, then simplifying to create the
    abstraction. The first one was a "Venus of Willendorf" type fertility figure, an enormous belly overlapped by two ponderous breasts. No . . . It wouldn't
    do. It looked too much like Mickey Mouse ears.
    Next was a chalice and blade, symbols mentioned in The Da Vinci Code. These were signified by overlapping reversed triangles. This formed a Star of David.
    While Renee was Jewish, she didn't think Renee would go for this bit of misdirection, so she removed the baselines of the triangles to form interlocking,
    reversed V's. Then she removed the upward pointing triangle and just left a "V" shape. Perhaps if she pointed the top of the pillar, and everything lined
    up just right, the shadow would create the 'blade' and interlock with the 'chalice.' She'd show it to Renee, though she thought it too stark for the lusty
    woman lurking beneath the society wife veneer.
    She'd done another sketch of a pair of spread legs. Very obvious. She'd played with it for a while, but found no way to abstract it. It just looked dumb.
    None of this was earthy enough, pagan enough, subtle enough.
    Suddenly, she flashed back to her college days, when everything she painted reminded some professor of a vagina. That was the problem with flowers.
    Everyone compared her to Georgia O'Keefe, and talked about how sensual her flowers were. And she'd constantly said, "Georgia O'Keefe found such comparisons
    boring, and so do I."
    A flower wouldn't be quite right. But hadn't that one adjunct teacher compared her bay leaves to vulvas? A nice, big leaf split by a vein, symbolizing the
    earth and fertility. And the pillar representing the sun, which is necessary to make things grow. The sun which is the male principle. She could wrap the
    pillar in flames, hot yellows,