Head Over Paws Read online

  Also by Debbie Burns

  Rescue Me

  A New Leash on Love

  Sit, Stay, Love

  My Forever Home

  Love at First Bark

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  Books. Change. Lives.

  Copyright © 2020 by Debbie Burns

  Cover and internal design © 2020 by Sourcebooks

  Cover design by Dawn Adams/Sourcebooks

  Cover image © Birte Moller/EyeEm/Getty Images; Predragimages/Getty Images

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  sourcebooks.com

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  For you, Mom,

  and for all the support along the way

  “The bond with a true dog is as lasting as the ties of this earth will ever be.”

  —Konrad Lorenz, Man Meets Dog

  Chapter 1

  Olivia Graham flicked on her blinker and locked her hands around the steering wheel of her ten-year-old Chevy Cruze. Nervous excitement pressed against her ribs.

  While waiting for a break in traffic on the Great River Road, she stared through the fat drops of rain at the choppy waves of the swollen river. Thanks to an unusually wet spring, the muddy Mississippi reminded her of a peacock puffing out its chest and fluffing its feathers. With any luck, the rains would end earlier than predicted, and the river would stay confined within its sturdy banks.

  She pulled out onto the Great River Road, the Cruze’s engine whirring and knocking in protest as she kicked it up to highway speed. She gave the dashboard a quick pat. “Come on, girl. You’ve got this.” All the miles she’d spent commuting the last few months had the engine sounding like its own percussion band until it warmed up.

  Behind her, within a handful of seconds, the little town of Elsah, Illinois, was swallowed by the towering bluffs on either side. The river flanked her side as she drove, the wipers keeping rhythm with the rain. Until recently, Elsah had been no more than a name on a map where a semi-estranged aunt lived. But in a twist of fate, Olivia had taken a temporary teaching job in downtown St. Louis. She’d accepted an invitation to stay in one room of her aunt’s hundred-and-thirty-year-old clapboard home while she determined if she would be able to turn the temporary position into a permanent one. Elsah was an enchanting town, full of enchanting people. If it weren’t for the agonizing rush-hour commute, Olivia would be happy to stay much longer.

  The irony still struck her how, at twenty-five, she’d lived in three states but had never been more than a stone’s throw from the muddy Mississippi. As fate would have it, today’s three-and-a-half-hour drive wouldn’t take her any further away from the river than she was now.

  When she’d signed up to be a volunteer animal rescue transporter and had agreed to drive up to five hours in a transport chain to get some misplaced dogs into shelters, she’d hoped her first call would be a pickup in Kansas City or Chicago. Instead, her first assignment had her headed to the Missouri Bootheel where she’d grown up and where most of her family still lived.

  The river was threatening here, but three and a half hours further south, heavier bands of rains had the Mississippi and its tributaries spilling over their banks, pushing people and animals out of homes, and that was where help was needed.

  Olivia didn’t need a map to get where she was going today. As a kid, she’d gone with her grandpa every Saturday to buy supplies from the feed store just outside the New Madrid town center, which was where the misplaced animals were being held until they could be returned to their owners or shipped to different shelters.

  Using the Bluetooth system she’d gifted to herself to help pass the time in traffic, Olivia chose one of her favorite playlists on Spotify and settled into the drive. The metal door on one of the two empty dog crates in the back seat was loose and vibrated a squeak of its own to the music. She’d bypassed St. Louis on Interstate 270 and had traveled about twenty miles down Interstate 55 when her phone rang. The distinctive chirpy tone she’d programmed just for Ava, her older sister by one year, rang out.

  “Hey. What’s up?”

  “Are you in the car?” Ava sounded even more nasal than when they’d spoken yesterday.

  “Yep.”

  “But it’s Saturday. Where’re you going?”

  “You make it seem like I never go places on Saturday. And your cold sounds like it’s getting worse.”

  Ava sniffed determinedly. “Ever since you moved up here, every time I ask you to do something on a weekend, you tell me you don’t want to get in the car. When are you going to be home? I was going to come over.”

  Olivia made a face. “To Elsah? Is that cold making you feverish by chance?” Quaint and historic and tucked-away, sleepy village weren’t words she’d ever associate with her sister. Ava had visited their aunt’s house when Olivia first arrived in January. Looking around, her sister had done the classic folded-arms, rocking-heel, and raised-eyebrow “Quaint, isn’t it?” and had never been back. Whenever they hung out, it was either at Ava’s favorite coffeehouse or her luxury condo in downtown Kirkwood, one of St. Louis’s popular suburbs.

  “Very funny. And you didn’t answer. How soon will you be home? Should I start driving? I don’t want to be alone with Aunt Becky. She’s weird.”

  “She’s not weird. You just need to get to know her better.” Olivia hadn’t told her sister she’d signed up as a rescue driver for a reason. Ava had taken off from their Bootheel home a month after high school graduation and hadn’t looked back at life in rural s
outhern Missouri. And she’d been in no hurry to add an animal to her life either.

  While she’d never had a lit firecracker under her butt like her sister, Olivia understood. She’d dreamed of leaving too. Back home, life moved at a different pace, which could be good and could be bad. It bothered her more that everyone knew everyone else’s business. Or at least they assumed they did. And sometimes they were as quick to hand out judgments as they were a helping hand.

  The difference between Olivia and her sister was that since leaving three months ago, Olivia had had more than a few waves of homesickness. One of the things she missed most was having a dog or cat underfoot. On her grandpa’s farm, there’d always been a few of each. Her favorite, a golden retriever named Sassy, had passed away a year ago, breaking Olivia’s heart.

  But even if she was finally ready to bring another dog into her world, her aunt was a vegan and borderline hermit who made a living as a potter. Her only pet was a dog-fearing cockatoo. When Olivia had heard about a fellow teacher at her school who did rescue driving on weekends, she’d thought it might be just the thing to get her through until she had a place of her own.

  “I’m gonna be gone all day,” Olivia added. “How ’bout tomorrow?”

  “All day? But you don’t even know anyone up here yet.” Ava paused to blow her nose. “What’s going on?”

  “I know people, thank you.” Olivia pulled in a breath as if she were about to blow out a hefty number of candles. There was no getting past telling her sister now. “I’m on a mission, actually. I’ve signed up to be a volunteer rescue transporter. I’m picking up two dogs and a cat and taking them to a shelter in O’Fallon.”

  “Huh.” Ava was quiet a second. “I didn’t even know that was a thing, but something tells me you’re not kidding.”

  “I’m not. Honestly, I didn’t know much about it, either, but it turns out homeless animals are hauled all over the place by drivers working in tandem. There’s this whole world of coordination behind it. Usually it’s to get them into a shelter or a foster home.” Knowing full well what her sister would say, Olivia owned up to the rest. “You’ll never guess where I’m headed to pick them up.”

  “When you say it like that, I’m not sure I want to. Death row, I’m guessing?”

  “Heavens. I don’t even want to think about that. These guys were caught in the floods.” Her shoulders had nearly tucked up against her ears before she noticed it, and she shoved them down again. Determinedly, she shook her head, sending her long, wavy red hair bouncing back and forth. “New Madrid, believe it or not. They’re holed up in Milton’s Feed Store.”

  “Shut. Up. Did you tell Mom and Dad?”

  “Heck no. I’m hoping to get in and out before anyone’s the wiser.”

  “Fat chance in that town, Livy. Why on earth did you agree to that?”

  Olivia chewed her lip. Why did she agree to this particular drive? As much as she missed some things about her home, she wasn’t ready to go back. Not even close. It would probably take a couple of years before she could go home without feeling a blanket of shame draped across her shoulders over the way things had played out last fall.

  But this had been the first opportunity since she’d been approved as a driver, and she’d been excited to start. When she’d checked her email this morning, she’d swallowed back her reservation and jumped on the mission before she’d been able to talk herself out of it. “It just sort of happened.”

  “What about Trevor?”

  “What about him?” She’d been thinking about him all morning, had even come close to texting him. She’d gotten past it by reminding herself they were on different journeys now. “It’s been almost six months. With any luck, he’s dating someone by now.”

  “Oh, please. Not unless it’s a someone who was trapped in the path of his combine or fell into his lap while he was sitting on the couch reaching for a beer.”

  Olivia choked back a giggle. “He was quite the catch back in high school.”

  “Crabs were pretty catchy back in high school, too, weren’t they?”

  Olivia shuddered. “You know, no, I don’t think they were. I’ve never heard of anyone I know actually having crabs.”

  “It was a figure of speech.” Ava let out a sigh. “If someone spots you, don’t let them guilt you into meeting up with him. Swear?”

  “Pinkie swear.” Breaking off their engagement just over three weeks before the wedding hadn’t come easily. But it had been the right thing to do, even if Trevor hadn’t understood her reasoning.

  “Good. That’d be a step backward you don’t need to take.” Ava let out an exasperated sigh. “I guess I need to find another way to drown out my sorrows with you gone today.”

  Olivia straightened in her bucket seat. “What do you mean? What sorrows? Ava Graham and sorrows are oil and water, aren’t they?”

  Her sister sniffed again but didn’t say anything.

  A wave of shock rolled over Olivia. “Are you crying?”

  The silence extending from the speakers seemed to physically slow the Cruze down even more. Olivia searched for an exit ramp, but there was nothing in sight, just the steel-gray sky, highway, billboards, and the bright yellow-green fields of spring. She let up on the gas, and the engine knocked in protest.

  “Ava, what’s going on?”

  “I think Wes is leaving me. Actually, I don’t think; I know.”

  Olivia drove in stunned silence for a quarter mile before words would come. Guys didn’t leave Ava. Ava left them. And even so, this was entirely different. Ava and Wes had been married just over a year. “I’m turning around at the next exit. Where are you?”

  “No, don’t. I’m okay. It was going to be a short visit today anyway. One of my clients wants to see property downtown at three. Maybe we can meet up tonight when you’re driving home.”

  That was so Ava. Her marriage was falling apart, but she wouldn’t let it get in the way of work. “Yeah sure, of course. If you’re positive you’re okay?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “You said things haven’t been great the last few months, but I had no idea you meant this not great.”

  “Turns out they were a bit less great than I thought they were.” A shaky sigh resounded from Olivia’s speakers. “But whatever. It’s not the end of the world.”

  “Avey…don’t.” That was Ava. Whenever something got painful, she closed a lid on her feelings as if it had never mattered at all. “Don’t shut down. This is your marriage you’re talking about. What the heck’s gotten into Wes? You guys are great together.”

  The bumps in the highway seemed to keep time with her sister’s silence. Finally, Ava said, “Look, talking out our problems is you, not me. I just want to hang out with my sister tonight and watch a movie and maybe eat my own carton of Ben & Jerry’s…after you spend six or seven hours in the car saving the world.”

  Olivia drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. Maybe this was Ava keeping herself together to get through the day. She didn’t care if it took two tubs of Ben & Jerry’s, she wasn’t leaving her sister tonight until she had a better understanding of what was going on.

  They hung on the phone another few minutes, but Ava made it clear through her choice of conversation she didn’t want to talk about Wes any longer. Instead, she talked about some of the favorite properties she’d seen in the last week. When they hung up, Olivia was left to contemplate what might have gone wrong. Wes and Ava had been a fairy-tale couple, beautiful and successful and vibrant.

  She thought of something Aunt Becky had said when Olivia was watching her work at the potter’s wheel. “If you rely only on your eyes to tell you the story, you’ll never know it. If you want to create something sturdy, you’ve got to get your hands dirty. Gotta feel the weaknesses against your fingertips and work them out.”

  When it came to creating pottery, Olivia was no artis
t, at least not yet, but she understood what her aunt was talking about. And she suspected this was her sister’s problem more than anything. At one point or another, Ava had stopped wanting to get her hands dirty.

  Olivia drove another hour and a half, adjusting her wipers up and down as she drove through patches of light and heavy rain without ever leaving it behind. Sometimes the world felt so soggy, it seemed as if it would never dry out. With her bladder about to get the best of her and her tank down to less than a quarter, she took the first exit with a decent-looking gas station.

  Under a covered roof, she filled up her tank and stretched, listening to the dance of the rain on the metal awning ten feet above her. If the sun didn’t come out soon, she was going to need a megalodon-size coffee to get her through the drive home. Wait. What’re you thinking? No, you won’t. The two dogs and cat who’d be her travel companions home would energize her more than any cup of coffee ever would.

  She finished up, made a quick trip inside, and was driving out the side entrance of the gas station when her engine knocked loud enough that the steering wheel shook her hands. She hardly had time to react before the Cruze jolted forward, then died, rolling to a stop.

  “Oh no. Please no.”

  Every possible light on her dashboard seemed to be lit up. A dozen thoughts raced through her mind, at least half of which were of the self-deprecating I-told-you-so sort.

  She flipped the gearshift into neutral, attempting to use the last momentum to get over to the side. By the time she rolled to a stop, the smell pouring out of the vents was burning her nostrils.

  Her shoulders dropped, and her heart sank into her toes. Not only was this likely to be a heavy hit to her bank account that she didn’t need, but she could also keep three animals from getting where they needed to go today. Pulling her phone from her purse, Olivia frowned. She was still forty-five minutes from New Madrid, but Sikeston was only ten or fifteen minutes ahead of her and a big enough town that she’d be able to find a mechanic.

  Maybe, just maybe, luck would be on her side and this would be a quick fix so she’d have nothing but a bit of a delay holding her back. Holding this hope at the front of her thoughts, she pulled up the internet to search for a repair shop in Sikeston that was open past noon on a Saturday.