Raining Cats & Dogs (A Melanie Travis Mystery) by Laurien Berenson Read Free Book Online Page B

to meet the real estate agent. Maybe the sight of all five big black Poodles running loose on his side of the door would be enough to make Felix realize that he ought to find another house to visit.
    Sam’s thoughts must have mirrored mine, because he looked down at his watch. “Mel, Davey, we’d better get going.”
    “Sounds good to me,” I said. “Nice meeting you, Amber. Welcome to the neighborhood.”
    “Thank you,” she cooed. “This is such a cute little street. Much better than the apartment we had before. The kitties are going to love having their freedom here.”
    Sam still had my hand. He used that hold to spin me around before I had a chance to reply. Next thing I knew, we were striding back toward our house.
    “That went well,” he said. “Don’t you think?”
    I muttered my answer under my breath and shut the gate behind us.

5
    S o we went house hunting. Again.
    All right, so we really hadn’t been looking for that long—less than three weeks, and mostly on the weekends. But it felt like longer. I mean, how long should it take to find the perfect home?
    I know, I know. Don’t answer that.
    So far, we’d managed to look at nearly thirty houses. We wanted to stay in North Stamford if possible, to keep Davey in the same school district and close to his friends. Not much was available in the surrounding neighborhoods, however, and the few places we’d seen had each been unsuitable for one reason or another.
    So we widened our search. Greenwich, where Aunt Peg lived and I worked, was lovely, and also incredibly expensive. Old Greenwich was a possibility, but there was hardly anything on the market. The houses we had seen in Riverside and Cos Cob didn’t have enough land for the Poodles. New Canaan and Darien were nice; still, we had yet to walk into a house and know, with certainty, that that was where we wanted to live.
    And so we kept looking. The end of Saturday’s search found us in northern New Canaan and Wilton, where my brother, Frank, lived with his wife, Bertie, and their new baby daughter. But to get to Howard Academy from Wilton would take a good chunk of time during rush hour. Plus, Davey would have to make all new friends. Sam already owned a house in Redding that was bigger than mine. He’d been planning to put it on the market. If we were going to live in Wilton, we realized belatedly, we might as well live in Redding. It wasn’t all that much farther away.
    Luckily, Marilyn was a patient woman. When we parted company at her office just before five, she promised to check the new listings every day that week and comb again through the existing offerings to see if there was anything we might have missed seeing. Davey, to my surprise, was jubilant in the car on the way home.
    “What’s up?” I said, turning around in my seat to look at him. “I thought you were looking forward to moving to a bigger house.”
    “Yeah.” My son’s gaze slid sideways out the window. You didn’t have to be a teacher to recognize that kind of evasion.
    “But?” I prompted.
    “But I thought we’d be moving somewhere close to home. You know, so I could stay in the same school and everything.”
    “That’s what we’re hoping,” said Sam. “That’s definitely our first choice. But we need more room for the dogs.”
    “What we need,” I said, thinking out loud, “is a house like Bob’s.”
    Bob was my ex-husband and Davey’s father. After going AWOL from our lives when Davey was just an infant, he’d reappeared unexpectedly several years earlier. Though he’d been living in Texas at the time, our reunion had been such a success that Bob had ended up purchasing a house in Stamford. Now he lived in a large colonial on a couple of acres of land only a mile or two from our own.
    Davey brightened. “Do you think Dad would let us move in with him?”
    “Uh…” I sputtered. Sam made a choking noise that sounded suspiciously like laughter. “That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind. More