"Burying Oliver," by John M. Floyd, in Mickey Finn, Volume 3, edited by Michael Bracken, Down and Out Books, 2022.
This is the third appearance here by my fellow SleuthSayer.
When our story begins Bucky Harper is digging what seems to be a grave. Sheriff Morton arrives and demands to know what he's doing. Bucky says he is burying his dog Oliver. The lawman doesn't recall any such dog and thinks Bucky might be doing something quite different, and even suggests a motive.
What follows is more or less the opposite of a twist plot. Instead things happen step by step with the inevitability of Greek tragedy. And at the center of the tale is calm, phlegmatic, Bucky, just taking it all one shovel-load at a time.
Clever and satisfying.
