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    The Mattress Affair (Flint and Steele Mysteries, #1)
    The Mattress Affair (Flint and Steele Mysteries, #1)
    The Mattress Affair (Flint and Steele Mysteries, #1)
    Ebook92 pages1 hour

    The Mattress Affair (Flint and Steele Mysteries, #1)

    By Cheryl Landmark

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    About this ebook

    Flint has all the earmarks of a good detective--intelligence, curiosity, a great nose for sniffing out clues and criminals, and an intense passion for protecting the innocent. The only difference between him and Mickey Spillane is that Flint is a dog--a cute Labrador retriever with a penchant for solving crimes and mysteries. Together with his human partner, Meredith Steele, he sets out to rid his beloved hamlet of Gros Cap of nefarious criminals.
    Flint’s first major case involves a neighbor, her nephew and a nasty goon.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCheryl Landmark
    Release dateJan 13, 2014
    ISBN9781310777523
    The Mattress Affair (Flint and Steele Mysteries, #1)
    Author

    Cheryl Landmark

    I live in a small hamlet called Gros Cap just west of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada on the magnificent shore of Lake Superior. I've always been a voracious reader, even as a child, and that has inspired me to create my own fantasy worlds. There's nothing quite like seeing your imagination transformed into a published novel. When I'm not writing, I'm reading, doing challenging jigsaw puzzles, or enjoying the great outdoors with my hubby and my furry child.

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      Book preview

      The Mattress Affair (Flint and Steele Mysteries, #1) - Cheryl Landmark

      The Mattress Affair

      Published by Cheryl Landmark at Smashwords

      Copyright 2014 Cheryl Landmark

      Prologue

      My name is Flint, a.k.a. The Nose. And I’m a detective; a pretty doggone good detective, too, if I do say so myself. And I can say so because I really am a dog—a four-year-old black Labrador retriever, to be exact. My partner is a very nice human named Meredith Steele. Yeah, you guessed it. Our detective agency is called Flint and Steele. Pretty clever, wouldn’t you say? Meredith couldn’t resist giving me my unusual name when I came to her as a chubby eight-week-old pup. She thought it was catchy and made us a great sounding team, and she was right.

      We live in a picturesque little place called Gros Cap, just west of the city of Sault Ste. Marie in Northern Ontario, which is in Canada. Our quaint log bungalow is built at the end of a long narrow gravel road on the shore of the St. Mary’s River where it empties out into Whitefish Bay and Lake Superior. When some of those howling Northern Ontario winter blizzards sweep across the lake into the bay, there are times when it can seem like we’re stuck in the middle of the Arctic tundra. But we don’t really mind. Meredith just stokes up the airtight woodstove until it’s crackling with cheery flames and we watch in cozy, warm comfort from the living room windows as the snowstorms block out the sight of the shipping channel and Little Dog Island.

      Our nearest neighbor, whose house is also on the same road as ours but out of sight, is a feisty old lady named Abigail Tunner, who claims she’s sixty years old, but I’m pretty sure she’s closer to seventy-five. Even so, she’s a tough old bird, that Abigail, and still pretty spry for her age. Cuts her own firewood, does all the maintenance work around her house and yard, plants a vegetable garden every spring and makes her own preserves, jams and jellies.

      Abigail claims to be descended from the Ojibwa natives who used to live around this area back in the early 1800s, and I believe her. She certainly seems to have an affinity for nature and the land that the First Nations people have always had. As for her assertion that she can sometimes talk with the spirits of the land and the water, I’m not too sure about that, although it wouldn’t surprise me in the least.

      Her granddaddy, Albert Tunner, built the log house in Gros Cap nearly eighty years ago. It started out originally as a simple one-room cabin, but over the years, it grew into a sturdy, two-story house with plenty of rustic charm and character. Abigail’s parents used it as a summer cottage, preferring to live the rest of the year in the city of Sault Ste. Marie instead of out in the wilderness. But when Abigail inherited the place thirty years ago, she moved out to Gros Cap permanently. She never married—Meredith says she’s just too stubborn and ornery for any man to put up with for long—and has always lived alone in the big log house. I remember Abigail once saying she would sooner talk to the trees, the rocks and the wolves than some of the people she encounters. As for me, I like humans most of the time and Meredith all of the time, but I think I can understand Abigail’s feelings toward some of the, shall we say, less desirable examples of humankind.

      Despite Abigail’s apparent aversion to the company of others, for some reason she’s decided that Meredith and I don’t fall into that category and honors us with a visit every now and then or an invitation to her house. Occasionally, she’ll even give us some of her freshly baked bread or homemade blueberry jam. But of course, she never admits these are social visits. That would ruin her image as the resident cantankerous hermit of Gros Cap.

      Meredith seems to like the old lady and takes little offense at her diatribes. My human is pretty perceptive and I think she, like me, can see right through Abigail’s testy attitude. Whenever she thinks Meredith isn’t looking, the old lady scratches my ears and slips me tasty bits of dried beef jerky she makes herself. Now that, to me, is proof-positive there lurks a nice human being under that crusty exterior!

      The bungalow my partner and I live in is a bit smaller than Abigail’s house, but no less charming and rustic. The floor in the living room is oak hardwood with a couple of nice leaf-motif area rugs scattered here and there. My favorite one lies right in front of the woodstove where I can stretch out for a pleasant nap on cold winter evenings or on the long, lazy dog days of summer. The house faces the bay and huge windows afford magnificent views of it. Meredith has thoughtfully provided me with a comfortable chair right in front of one of them, so I can keep a lookout for squirrels and bunny rabbits in the yard. The kitchen is small but cozy and boasts lovely pine cupboards and counters and cheery yellow curtains at the windows.

      Okay, enough background information. You’re probably asking yourself why a dog calls himself a detective. Well, ever since last summer, I’ve discovered that I have a natural aptitude for the job, as well as a keen interest in solving mysteries.

      You see, what happened last August was that three-year old Kylie Morrison went missing. She just disappeared from the yard when her mother went into the house to get some lemonade. Greg and Judy Morrison live a couple of houses down the shoreline from where Meredith and I do. A frantic search for the child ensued, with several neighbors joining in. Yours truly was among the search party, and as you can probably guess, I found Kylie about two hours after the search began. She had wandered off chasing colorful butterflies and had somehow ended up inside a ravine with numerous deadfalls and tangled brush blocking it. My sensitive hearing picked up her frightened whimpers from the bottom of the ravine and I slipped down the bank where I found her standing by a fallen log, tears streaming down her dirt-streaked face. At first, my sudden appearance frightened her, but when she realized I was a dog and not some wild animal about to attack her, a smile struggled through the tears and her eyes lit up.

      Doggie! she cried, running over to hug my neck tightly.

      She appeared to be uninjured but thoroughly frightened, and I was able to bring her up and out of the ravine with her clinging tightly to my collar.

      I was hailed a hero and given ear scratches and

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