Deadly Dog Days, by Jamie M. Blair

of the bigger one filled with families and crying babies from neighboring towns.

My phone bank was tucked into a back corner in the basement.

Old black-and-white linoleum tiles were peeling from the floor, and dark spots of mold shadowed through the white paint on the stone block walls, but we used our secondhand school desks and donated office phones from the eighties and did what we could.

I’d mentioned the idea of marketing for the town by phone to Irene, my mother-in-law, once in passing and it was all downhill from there. She had me assigned to the task and set up in the church basement two days later.

I reached the phone bank and took stock of the scene.

None of the five volunteers who worked for me wanted to be working for me; they were only doing it for the community service hours. Three of them court-ordered. (Nick Valentine: Assault, Roy Lancaster: DUI, and Johnna Fitzgerald: Theft. Johnna was a chronic kleptomaniac who ran Canal Town Treasures. Most of those treasures weren’t hers to sell.) Anna Carmichael and Logan Foust were going to be seniors at Metamora High School in the fall and were getting a jump-start on the volunteer hours needed to graduate.

“How are ticket sales?” I asked, seeing only one of them actually on the phone. Logan. He wouldn’t be able to slack off if his life depended on it. He’d feel too guilty and confess if he did.

“You really want us hawking tickets for Oh Horrors! It’s Murder! when one of our own was just found dead?” Roy asked, rubbing his stubbly chin. He had the perpetually red nose of an alcoholic and droopy eyes of someone who never slept. “Wasn’t Jenn in the musical?

How will the show be put on with a cast member killed?”

“Better yet,” Johnna said, looping her yarn around a knitting needle, not even pretending to be making calls, “who’s going to take her 13