She nodded. “Yes. I buy them from the butcher to make broth. Then I give Brewster the bone.”
Harry grinned. “Does he by any chance bury them?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I have never seen him digging and I have not seen any holes in the backyard.”
‘Do you have any flower beds back there?”
“No, just a few trees and a patch of rhubarb in one corner.”
“May we take a look back there?” Harry asked.
“Of course. There’s a gate back here at the end of the driveway.” She led the way.
“Nice spot,” said Bruce.
“Who mows the grass?” Harry asked.
“A high school student has been doing it for the past three years. But I don’t think he knows anything.”
Harry shook his head. “No, I simply meant that if the dog had been digging holes out here, anyone mowing the grass would have noticed.”
“I see, yes. But even if Brewster was burying bones out here, that still doesn’t explain where the shoes are coming from,” she said.
As he talked, Harry had been walking slowly along the fence. Suddenly he bent down. “I think I’ve solved part of the puzzle. See this?” He pointed to a dip in the ground near the end of the rhubarb patch. “I would say this little opening provides just enough space for a small dog to squeeze through. What’s on the other side?”
“A walking park, mostly for seniors,” she said. “Many of them also help out with the mowing, tending the flower beds and raking the leaves in fall.”
“Dogs don’t generally go too far from home to bury their bones and it looks to me like Brewster has the perfect spot right next door to his own backyard,” Bruce commented.
Harry nodded. “Right. We’ll come back tomorrow and watch what he does when he gets the bone. What time will that be?”
“Around two-thirty,” she replied.
“We’ll be in the park shortly before that,” Harry said as they walked towards the gate.
“Interesting,” Bruce said when they were in the car. “She gives him a bone and he brings her back a shoe.”
“Payment for the bone, perhaps,” Harry replied with a shrug.
The next day Harry and Bruce found a park bench from which they could observe the gap beneath Mrs. Thorne’s fence and sat down to watch for Brewster the dog. It wasn’t long before they spotted him wriggling under the fence, soup bone firmly gripped in his jaws. He ran straight to a bed of flowering shrubs and within seconds the dirt was flying.
“Man, I should have had him around last month when I was digging post holes for the fence,” Bruce said.
“He’s a digger, all right.” Harry laughed. “No question about that.”
Bruce suddenly sat up straight and spoke quietly. “Did you see that? Did he just hook something out of the hole?”
“I saw it,” Harry said. “Now let’s see what he does with it.”
As they watched, Brewster picked up his bone, dropped it into the hole and pushed the dirt back over it. Then he picked up the object he had dug out of the hole, ran towards the fence and squeezed under it into his own backyard again.
