Page 47 of The Vet from Snowy River
‘Someone put their name to this bullshit? Who?’
‘He wouldn’t tell me.’
‘Well, hell. It must have been someone pretty close by if they can work out there’s no phone number on Jane Doe’s collar.’
‘It’s just so … mean-spirited. Who would do this?’
He let out a breath. ‘No idea. Wait, you don’t think …’
‘What? Who?’
‘Remember Kelly Fox? She brought her kid’s guinea pig in the day Poppy came to town, and it didn’t go so well.’
‘I don’t know, Josh. Kelly’s a gossip, but she’s not evil. Besides, we’d already received the chicken complaint before you ran her out of here.’
‘Well, someone’s messing with us. I don’t like it.’
‘Neither do I,’ Hannah said. ‘What will we do?’
‘I’ll go see this Barry O’Malley guy first thing Monday morning and resolve the chicken problem. Maybe we get a bulk order of collars made so when you or me or the vet nurses are toddling a dog around the park for a post-operative walk, we don’t get another of these idiotic complaints. I’ll give him a copy of our collar order, take up our records so he can see we haven’t got some bizarre secret income stream from harbouring chickens onsite.’
‘Good idea,’ she said. ‘Better print everything up and take copies. We should probably start a file if we’re going to tackle this like adults.’
He groaned. ‘I hate paperwork.’
‘Well, sure, we can find out who’s trying to bully us by throwing eggs at everyone who comes too close to the dogs in the park, but is that really going to work?’
‘Okay, point taken. I can be an adult. I’ll print and file everything.’
‘Okay then.’
‘Okay,’ he said.
His sister didn’t budge from her position on the bottom step.
‘You got something else you want to talk about?’ he said.
She sighed. ‘Not really.’
‘Nothing about … Tom Krauss, for instance?’
She stood up abruptly. ‘Definitely nothing about him. On that note, I’m going for a bath. Don’t forget you’re on call tonight.’
He held up his mobile phone. ‘The devil’s instrument is glued to my hand. You going to be here in the building in case I’m gone during the night? I don’t want Poppy to be alone.’
‘Of course I’ll be here. It’s not like I ever go out.’
He yelled after her as she walked up two flights of stairs to her flat. ‘The world wouldn’t stop spinning if you did!’
He looked at his phone and decided it was way too early to be hoping Poppy would have finished her shift at the café. He headed into the office to find an online shop that might fulfil bulk orders of dog collars.
He was ten collars richer and a hundred bucks poorer when he had a brainstorm. If he was heading into council offices on Monday anyway, that would be the perfect time to check on his development application for the heritage work he intended to do on the outside of the building. Splicing new timber into the unsound verandah posts, repair work to the masonry window trims and the big one—the roof—was going to take some careful thought. The most important part for the renovation, however, would be restoring the downstairs entry to its original state, rather than keeping the cheap but functional shopfront his grandparents must have had built before opening the haberdashery store.
Expensive, time-intensive, and tricky work … but he’d enjoy doing it.
He printed off a copy of his application, so he’d have it handy for his Monday visit, and was just losing himself in some online research into tuckpointing mortar, when the phone out in the reception room rang.
His mobile finally caught the call diversion and trilled in his pocket. Please god it wasn’t some farmer from down on the flats needing help with a difficult calving.
