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He clicked the conversation off.
Coffee. That was the thing. He’d make some coffee. Then maybe he could think straight. He walked towardthekitchen,hopinghecouldfindeveninstant coffee, a mug, and something to boil water in.
He’d thought he was prepared for disaster as he walked into the kitchen. He wasn’t. This wasn’t just the chaos of moving anymore.
Maybe if he closed one eye … No. It didn’t help a bit to see only half of it at a time.
The puppies frolicked among the boxes in the kitchen. Van looked farther afield, toward the doorways into the hall and the dining room. Debris created a path of destruction marching off as far as the eye could see.
Van pulled his focus in, narrowing it so he saw only straight ahead. A man, after all, could stand only so much horror all at once.
Empty, flattened boxes tottered in stacks against the kitchen counter. They’d probably been neat and tidywhenthemoverszoomedinandout.Van’sheart sank so far in his chest it threatened to take over the room reserved for his stomach, which gave a lurch of protest.
He could see what had happened. The puppies had decided the flattened boxes were great things to growl at, chew on, play hide and seek in, and climb under, around, and through.
Now, the boxes formed a drunken step stool perfect for climbing onto the other boxes still packed and stacked against the kitchen counter. More than half of those boxes were no longer stacked against the kitchen counter. They had crashed to the floor, some bursting open.
Van wished, for the first time since Mary had started baking for him, that she weren’t such a genius with cakes, cookies, and pies. To keep the sweet stuff coming the way she did, you needed a lot of flour, sugar, and other assorted powdery materials, ranging from dark cocoa powder to the lighter brown of demerara sugar. He wouldn’t have recognized any of them in his previous life, but now he knew exactly what all of them looked like.
Vast quantities of those things had been packed in some of the boxes originally stacked against the kitchen counter. Hadbeen packed. Originallystacked. These items were no longer packed. They weren’t stacked, either.
The white powders, dark powders, and powders of every hue in between were strewn from the stove and the fridge, both of which would have to be moved to even start cleaning up this mess, to the doorways and down the halls and beyond.
Van and Mary had already discovered slobber was as much of a problem with some of the puppies as it was with their mother. Now he knew how much havoc a horde of slobbering puppies could create when they played with flour, baking soda, and sugar. The flour especially was already hardening into something a lot like cement.
Nor had he ever imagined what a home could look like after a litter of slobbering puppies chewed up a giant, economy, twenty-four-roll package of toilet paper and ground half-melted pieces of tissue into wet flour, baking soda, and sugar.
Vansteppedtothedoorwaythatledintothedining room. Maybe he was a masochist. He shouldn’t have looked unless he wanted to be punished.
The dining room, and the living room beyond, had fudge-brown carpeting, his favorite color.
Correction. The dining room, and the living room beyond, used to have fudge-brown carpeting. The puppies had taken some of their balls of goo on a trip. Van didn’t want to look any more closely at the carpet. He didn’t want to look any more closely at the kitchen, either, but he supposed he had to look somewhere.
He focused his attention on the kitchen counter. Then he wished he hadn’t. The counter had been covered in dishes, glassware, and cutlery. He’d rescued Mary’s precious Royal Doulton china and tucked it safely away, but everything else was still there. Sort of.
Two out of every three items were breakable. No, make that broken. Most of the jagged pieces had stayed on the kitchen counter. Some, though, were scattered in shards on the floor.
They were decorated with patches of powder clumped into glue. Van picked up one shard with distaste. It glooped in his fingers.
Wait. What was that? Something reddish. Could it be blood?
Van had been ready to kill the puppies, if he could figure out which ones to murder for this mess, and the order in which to annihilate them. But curse it all, he didn’t want them to be hurt. He didn’t want them to be bleeding.
He picked up another suspicious, gooey clump. It had another smear of rusty brownish red.
“Guinevere!” he hollered.
She reported on the double, with Lancelot trotting along behind. “Where are the kids?” Van shouted. They had to be all right. “Go find the kids. Go find Pepe,” he added on second thought.
Pepe was the runt of the litter, or at least he had been. They’d given him the name in the hope it would help give him a little boost. Boy, was that a mistake. By now, he had all the oomph he needed to bound right into the middle of any trouble brewing within a ten-mile radius.
Van thought of grasping Guinevere’s collar. If he asked her to lead him, as she had done on the trail of jewelry purloined by the prince, it might help demonstratehewantedhertofindsomething,inthis case her children.
Guinevere didn’t need any more instruction, though. At least, he hoped not. She bounded out of the kitchen and down the hallway to the front door. Lancelotgallopedafterher,hislittlerlegsflashingas he valiantly tried to keep up.
The door was open a crack. How had that happened?
Guinevere and Lancelot stopped outside, dancing in impatience until Van caught up with them. They streaked off.
