Show Me (Thomas Prescott 4), Nick Pirog [classic children's novels .TXT] 📗

a pig. A full-grown pig, pinkish white with black markings. I only saw the piglet for a moment, but it had the same coloring.

I gave the pig a slight shake.

She was dead.

After a decade of solving murders, tracking serial killers, and reinvestigating cold cases, my brain was wired to seek answers. You see a dead body and you backtrack. How did it get there? And why?

The pig must have wandered over from one of the neighboring farms. Maybe she left on purpose, maybe by accident. She was pregnant, her motherly instinct told her to seek shelter. She found entrance to the barn through some opening. Somehow, she made it up to the loft. Then she gave birth to a piglet. I only saw the piglet for a moment, but it didn’t appear to have just been born. It was a baby, but not an infant. It was about the size of my sister’s pug Baxter when he was six months old. So five, maybe six pounds.

As for the mother pig, I tried to narrow down her time of death. She wasn’t bloated, which meant the putrefaction process was yet to start. That’s when the bacteria and enzymes still alive in a body began to break it down. The bacteria were what caused the awful smelling gas people attributed to death. That usually started around the end of the second day, ergo, Miss Piggy had been dead less than forty-eight hours. How much less, I couldn’t be certain, though the little piglet was a good indication. A baby piglet couldn’t survive too long without food. Certainly not much longer than a day.

The case solved, I turned on my heel.

“Hey, little piglet,” I called out. “I know you’re hungry.”

I got down on all fours, moving my hands through the hay.

“I know you haven’t eaten in a while. And I bet you’re thirsty.”

I crawled another couple steps.

There was a rustling.

A head popped up.

“There you are,” I said, grinning. Then my face fell. The piglet that surprised me was pink with black markings. This piglet was tan with black markings.

“There are two of you!”

As if on cue, five feet away, the other piglet popped its head out.

It took me five minutes of crawling through the hay before I caught both of them.

“Okay, are there any more of you? Because I’m running out of hands.”

If there were more, I was going to have to come back for them.

I made it to town in ten minutes.

Pink, who was anatomically a little girl, sat on my lap, while Tan, who anatomically had a tiny little piglet pecker, thrashed about in the backseat.

I drove past the vet clinic the previous day, and I screeched into one of the parking spots out front. I grabbed the two piglets and pushed through the door. There was an empty reception desk with a vase of flowers and a small bell. My hands full with the piglets, I hit the bell three times with my elbow.

“Just a second!” a woman shouted.

A moment later, she emerged. She was petite with blond hair. She was wearing a blue shirt, jeans, and a white lab coat. I put her in her late twenties, early thirties. She was straight out of central casting: Attractive Country Veterinarian. For a moment, I nearly forgot I was holding two little pigs.

“Look at you guys,” she said, her eyes lighting up.

“I found them in the loft of my barn.”

She ignored me and felt both piglets’ noses, then looked into their eyes. Only then did she appear to realize there was a fourth mammal in the room.

“The loft?” she asked, glancing up. Her eyes were the color of honey. “How did they get up into the loft?”

“Their mother was up there. I think she must have given birth to them up there?”

“How did she get up there?”

“I have no idea.”

“Where is the sow now?”

“Sow?”

She sighed. “The mom.”

“Oh. She’s dead.”

“No wonder they’re so dehydrated.”

She took Tan from my arms and said, “Follow me.”

I followed her through a hall and into an examination room. She set Tan on a small metal table, grabbed a stethoscope, and gave him a quick examination. Then she stuck a thermometer up his rump, which he didn’t like one bit—SQUEAL!—and I was reminded I was due for my first prostate exam.

She went through the same rigmarole with Pink, who was remarkably unfazed by the piece of glass in her rear.

“They’re different colors,” I said.

The vet raised her eyebrows and said, “You picked up on that, did you?”

Her sarcasm took me by surprise.

“I did.”

She fought down a smile.

I said, “The girl is the same color as the mom, but the boy is totally different.”

She glanced at me for a long second. “Sorry, sometimes I forget not everyone is from here.”

“I forgive you.”

She rolled her eyes, then explained that a pig’s litter can have piglets with all sorts of different colorings and markings. The sow (female pig) and boar (male pig) are usually different breeds, and the piglets may look like one or both parents. “Odds are the boar was an Oxford Sandy and Black.”

“A what?”

“Oxford Sandy and Black. A breed of pig.”

“Like a German shepherd?”

“If that helps you,” she said, a dimple surfacing for a breath before disappearing back to the depths.

Gina who?

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s get these kiddos some food.”

She disappeared into the back and left me with the piglets. Both sat on the table staring at me with their large brown eyes.

“What?”

They didn’t answer.

The vet returned with two bottles. She handed one to me.

“I never got your name,” I said.

“Sarah.”

She nodded at the bottle and said, “Just gently—”

Without prompting, Pink sucked the nipple into her mouth and begin suckling.

Sarah said, “You’re a natural.”

“I nursed until I was nine.”

She cut her eyes at me, then finally cracked a smile.

A second dimple surfaced.

Here we go again.

“Good girl,” I coaxed, turning my attention back to Pink. She suckled away, her little jaw moving up and down.

“That’s a good boy,” Sarah cooed to Tan.

The two piglets sucked the bottles