Excerpt:

Back in the jeans and shirt she’d started the day in, Marie left through the front door. Duffer had taken Will and the puppy to the pond. He wasn’t limping so chances were good that she’d done nothing more than hurt his feelings. She scanned the pond.

“Oh no!” She ran down the steps to the side of the pond. One duck. Two ducks. No third duck.

“What’s the matter?” Will asked.

“That fox killed another one of my ducks.” Marie chewed the inside of her lip.

“You have a problem with a fox?”

“After it got the last one, I had that house built for them so they could go directly from shelter into the water, but they didn’t learn.” She pointed to the little yellow and white trimmed house that extended over the water and had a fenced in area along the shore at the back.

My brother lives down the street from the town vet in the tiny town I was born in. She built her house on land that used to be the town airport. Don’t ask me why my tiny hometown needed an airport. I never could figure out how they landed anything with more horsepower than a lawn mower on that strip anyway. But, when the vet came to town she bought approximately one acre plot and built a house on it with a pond (and a paddock for her horse.) It didn’t go well for the ducks.