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Mr. Brown shook his head. “Nope. Is that all?”

“Are you aware that the Paws for the Cause Holiday Gala is coming up this coming weekend?”

The man looked back at him. “I am very aware, and we’ve already made plans to be out of town so we don’t have to deal with the parking mess.”

“You didn’t have to deal with it last year, yet you still felt the need to express your anger in an email.”

Mr. Brown sighed and leaned against the cart. “Listen to me, Mr. whatever your name was. My wife felt the need to write that after she spoke to Margaret the day after the event. I did not write it. But if I had been here, I would have been as mad as Margaret was. Anything else?”

Rowdy shook his head. “No, sir. Enjoy your tee time.”

Mr. Brown didn’t even acknowledge when he left.

Rowdy jotted a few notes down on the notepad, then shifted into reverse. He pulled into the next drive and keyed an intercom button at the gate. A voice came on the line and he explained what he was doing. After a pause, the gates slid open and he drove up the tree-lined pavement. He scanned the area, looking for any evidence of the dog, but he didn’t see anything.

A woman met him at the door of the big, beautiful house. He showed her his investigator badge, and explained what he was there for.

The woman was Jill Ngyuen, a stay-at-home mom with two small kids. Rowdy smiled as the kids crowded behind their mother’s legs, one boy, one girl, peering out at him through dark hair.

“Are they twins?”

Mrs. Ngyuen gave a single dip of her head, a proud smile spreading across her mouth as she rested her hands on her children. “They are.”

“Congratulations. A dragon and phoenix pair is very rare.”

The woman beamed, nodding politely, and waited for him to state his purpose.

“Are you aware that Mrs. Dodd’s dog Cookie is missing?”

The smile slipped away from Mrs. Ngyuen’s face. “Oh, no. He’s such a cute little dog. And he saved us from the wildfire.”

Rowdy wasn’t surprised she believed the Cookie savior story.

“You haven’t seen him?”

The woman shook her head, then spoke softly to the children. They shook their heads in unison and Rowdy couldn’t help but smile. They were cute little critters.

He handed Mrs. Ngyuen a card. “I have to ask you about the email you sent to Mrs. Dodd last year.”

Mrs. Ngyuen blinked and clasped her hands in front of herself. “We went out that night and it was difficult to get home to the children. I’m glad my mother had come for a visit, because they would have been too much for a sitter for that long. I always put them to bed and they were not happy I wasn’t here to do that.”

Rowdy nodded. “I get that. And the email?”

The woman shrugged. “My husband was upset and he talked to Mrs. Wanton-Klapper about it. They decided to let Mrs. Dodd know how aggravated they were.”

“This year they’ve hired a new company to park the cars.”

Mrs. Ngyuen shrugged again, smiling politely. “I will not be leaving the house, this Saturday.”

Rowdy could see how she hovered over the children. She seemed the type to be a little overprotective.

But then, in Chinese culture, the boy-girl twin pairing meant good luck and fortune, and he had no doubt that the children would be cared for like royalty.

Rowdy pulled out a current picture of Cookie and handed it over. “If you wouldn’t mind keeping an eye out and calling me if you see anything.”

Nodding, Mrs. Ngyuen took the photo. “I will.”

Rowdy wasn’t surprised he was striking out. Finding a lost dog was about like looking for a needle in a haystack. He’d seen on some news channel the other day that there was a company in England that did drone searches for lost dogs and they had a very high success rate. They’d been on the news because they’d found an older, blind black lab that had been lost for a few days.