by Debbie Burns
Three blocks from his building, he caught a glimpse of movement down a narrow side street. Something was down there, just out of reach of the streetlights, watching him in the darkness. He stopped, his muscles tensing automatically as he scanned the cave-like hole created by the century-old brick warehouses on either side.
He was wearing a kilt and hadn’t tucked anything aside from a single credit card into the leather sporran around his waist. And even had he not been, Halloween night wasn’t the best time to investigate darkened alleys. But Mason had high hopes of what lingered in the darkness, just out of eyesight. He strode into the dark toward it, his night vision kicking in as he left the glow of the streetlights.
The moon wasn’t yet out, and the city lights always dimmed the stars. He stopped a hundred feet in, not wanting to scare off the interloper he felt ahead of him in the darkness.
Odds were, it was a homeless person setting up camp for the night. Or tonight, Halloween night, it could also be a couple pranksters having mostly innocent fun.
But it wasn’t. Mason finally spotted the four long, white legs and the white fur under the dog’s chin. The animal was fifty feet away, facing him. The rest of the dog’s body, the parts covered with black fur, was invisible.
Mason sank onto his heels and whistled low and soft. Maybe tonight’s the night.
The dog made a sound that Mason guessed was half yawn, half whine but didn’t move.
“I didn’t bring you anything, boy, but if you’d just let go of that stubborn streak and follow me home, I’d cook you up something great.”
To Mason’s surprise, the dog burst into a trot straight toward him. Mason waited, holding his breath. The animal stopped as abruptly as he started, leaving a mere fifteen feet between them. This close, Mason could make out the white patches just above the dog’s eyes in the thick, black fur of his face, giving him an intelligent, inquisitive look.
“It’s not the safest of nights to be a stray dog in the city anyway,” he added into the silence. “What do you say you hang up your hat and call it a day?”
The dog’s tail, black with a white tip, stuck out behind his body, neither relaxed nor stiff. He gave it a single flick in answer, then turned abruptly and trotted down the alley.
Mason stayed in place, watching the spectacular animal retreat until the last visible patch of white, the tip of his tail, disappeared into the night.
“I get it, John Ronald. I get it. You don’t answer to anyone. But if you ever change your mind, you’re definitely the dog for me.”
Chapter 2
Before mounting her old Schwinn Varsity road bike the following Thursday afternoon, Tess glanced at her watch. She was forty-five minutes behind schedule. She’d been with Kurt and Kelsey at her volunteer job working with the rescued fighting dogs all morning and had lost track of time. The hours she spent at the private estate working with the dynamic group of rehab dogs were often the best hours of Tess’s week.
Since she was also determined to get her healthy-pet consulting business off the ground, she’d made a personal commitment to spend the second half of every day focused on it. And while she wouldn’t trade the forty-five extra minutes she’d spent with the dogs for being on schedule, Tess needed to getting moving.
She had a meeting with the owner of Pouches and Pooches, a popular and expanding local chain of high-end stores that catered to savvy pet owners with upscale pet products, scarves, and purses. Not only had the owner been open to meeting with Tess, when she’d spoken on the phone with him earlier in the week, but he’d also sounded excited about the services she hoped to offer.
A win today would give Tess a much-needed confidence boost in her business model. From sales calls to drop-in visits at dozens of area stores, she’d not yet had the best of receptions. And Tess’s only paying client to date had resulted in a loss.
In hopes of making up for lost time, Tess pedaled hard in between stoplights. One of these days, she needed to force herself to get to the DMV to renew her expired license. She’d not driven since before she left for Europe. Even though biking and taking public transportation were tedious at times, she experienced tiny waves of panic whenever she gave serious consideration to getting behind the wheel of a car. She’d never been in a car accident, and she wasn’t entirely sure why the thought of driving had become intimidating, even if she’d never been crazy about it.
She suspected her hesitation had something to do with not fully getting over her dad forcing her to learn to drive using a stick, coupled with the fact that he’d coaxed her into turning down a busy street at rush hour her second time behind the wheel. She still remembered the angry looks on some of the other drivers’ faces as she stalled out time and again.
Tess’s dad was a good-hearted man but also a very black-and-white one. He was the kind of father who’d scoffed at training wheels and tossed her into the pool before she was a confident swimmer. Maybe this was why Tess had chosen to stay with her grandmother ever since she’d gotten back from Europe a month ago. Tess’s parents had worked so much when she was growing up, her grandparents had all but raised her. Tess’s other siblings, one brother and one sister, were twelve and thirteen years older and had left home when she was little.
Another reason Tess hadn’t moved in with her parents after returning from Europe was that, a year after Tess’s high school graduation, they had moved away from the Hill, the Italian American St. Louis neighborhood, a tourist attraction and hub for a wealth of independently owned Italian restaurants packed into a single square mile. The Hill was also where Tess had lived all her life until she’d left for college. Tess’s parents now lived, as Nonna put it, a “difficult” twenty-minute drive away in South County.
At her parents’ new house, Tess had a bedroom that she’d never spent enough time in for it to feel like hers. Still, it had a newer, more comfortable bed than the worn-out spring mattress at Nonna’s, as well as a full-size closet that could be just for her.
But Tess suspected that even if her father had been a more nurturing man than he was, she’d still live with Nonna. If she added up all the weekends and holidays and summers she’d slept over at Nonna’s ever since she’d been born, it was no wonder the thousand-square-foot, century-old house felt like the natural place to be. Her grandfather not being around anymore was still taking some getting used to though. He was the real reason she’d come home from Europe as abruptly as she did.
Just a month ago, back in early October, Tess had been finishing transient work with a grape harvest on a small farm in Switzerland. She’d had a considerable stash of Swiss francs saved from a summer spent working in terraced fields overlooking Lake Geneva, the Alps in the distance.
Before she’d gotten the call about Nonno’s heart attack, she’d been making plans to backpack into Belgium. A friend, a Spanish girl she’d worked with earlier in the year, promised a few months of work in one of the most picturesque towns in the world—Bruges, Belgium. As one of Europe’s best-preserved medieval towns, Bruges received floods of winter tourists and promised backpackers like her an opportunity for temporary work in a new and remarkable corner of the world.
As she cycled into the outskirts of the Hill, Tess remembered back to a few hours before she got the news about her grandfather. Nonno had been in critical condition but was awake and alert. It was time to get home, her dad had said. Using nearly every franc she’d earned over a long, hot summer, Tess packed up her belongings and flew out of Geneva International Airport on the first open flight. He died when she was somewhere over the Atlantic.
Her dad met her at the airport in St. Louis, smelling of cigarette smoke and looking thinner and older than her sixteen months away warranted.
“He was glad you were coming home,” her dad had said.
Now that Tess was home to stay, she was determined to make a success of the business she’d dropped out of vet school for two years ago. Tess didn�
��t need to become a skilled surgeon to help animals the way she wanted to help them. Holistic animal therapy was an emerging and exciting field. From therapeutic massage to essential oils to natural foods and products, Tess had become a believer in natural healing for pets. Not finishing vet school didn’t make her a failure.
If only her track record for not sticking with things wasn’t so long. Or something her big, loud, and vivacious extended family had a knack of reminding her about. Like the fact that she’d quit ballet in preschool or gymnastics in kindergarten. Soccer was a second-grade failure; scouting, a fourth-grade one. She’d dropped out of yearbook in the tenth grade. She ended it with her first serious—too serious—boyfriend during junior year and her second one as a senior. She’d left the Catholic Church in undergrad. Tess was pretty sure grumblings over that one had been heard in Argentina. Most recently, she’d walked out of vet school her second year.
That had been the breaking point. Right after that, she quit the biggest, most important thing of all—her family—and took off for Europe.
Narrowly missing the overturned trash can as she pedaled into Nonna’s driveway, Tess reminded herself that what she was doing now was different from all those other things.
She was good with dogs. Dog training was the one thing she’d been introduced to as a kid that had stuck with her. And she’d been more than good at it. Her mentor, Rob, had told her so often enough.
Tess had been ten when she’d been allowed to shadow him for a day—several years younger than Rob was comfortable taking on, but he’d made an exception when he’d heard how dog crazy she was. According to her mom, Tess’s first word after mom had been daw for dog, and her first animal sound had been ruff.
Over several years of shadowing him whenever she could and trying out what she’d learned on her extended family’s pets, Tess had become a skilled trainer. She’d learned how to read most dogs simply by studying them. It was a language that was hard to put into words, but she picked up on their movements, their body stance, the energy in their eyes and in their bodies, the position of their tails and the way they held their heads and ears. It all melded together into a dynamic picture, and she was usually good at communicating back.
The suitcase Tess took along on the business calls she’d been making the last couple of weeks had a binder full of her training success stories: dogs who’d been hard-core counter surfers and dogs who’d all but refused to potty train until Tess had figured out how to reach them. These sort of training behaviors tended to be relatively easy successes for her.
Figuring out why dogs were scratching off the hair behind their ears, why they didn’t sleep comfortably through the night, or why they were biting incessantly at their feet were harder questions to answer but didn’t always require the costly services associated with vet visits. And deciphering these sorts of problems had become Tess’s passion.
Remembering a few of the amazing dogs she’d worked with over the years helped Tess’s start-up doubts slip away. She parked her bike and hung up her helmet, ready to head back out soon, catch the bus, and make a success of her biggest business opportunity to date.
* * *
Two and a half hours later, Tess stepped out of the old brick warehouse that was a couple of blocks from the Red Birds’s stadium in downtown St. Louis and tugged her jacket closed. The thick, dark blanket of clouds overhead was growing more ominous by the minute. She had several blocks to walk to reach the bus stop that served the line with the most direct route back to the Hill.
There was no hurrying either. Not when she was lugging her loaded-down spinner suitcase. She’d also brought along her old, heavy laptop and was carrying it in her backpack. She was thoroughly exhausted, and with any luck, the rain would hold off until she was on the bus.
To Tess’s disappointment, her meeting with the owner of Pouches and Pooches had been nothing less than chaotic and full of interruptions. They met in what was to be the newest location in downtown St. Louis, just blocks from Ballpark Village and in view of St. Louis’s best-known landmark, the Arch. What was sure to be a trendy and popular shop in a bustling downtown area was still a chaotic thousand-foot construction zone. The owner’s attention had been divided between Tess’s presentation and nonstop flooring and wiring questions by the construction crew.
She made it through her still-being-fine-tuned spiel and was attempting to show him some of her products and demonstrate their effectiveness with real-life success stories when he’d held up a hand, stopping her. He was sold. He’d recommend her services to the customers on his mailing list. And he had twelve thousand customers on it.
She’d been ecstatic before finding out that he wanted a 35 percent cut of any business she earned from his referrals. Considering that was Tess’s margin, it seemed all but impossible.
Tess was debating how to counter his offer and wishing she had more business savvy when a bigger emergency called him to one of his other stores. He gave her his card and told her to contact him once she’d had time to think about it.
A familiar wave of insecurity rocked her as she headed toward the bus stop. She’d visited almost every independent pet store in St. Louis and several veterinarians too. Why was the concept of truly healthy dogs and cats such a hard sell?
Noticing that the sidewalk ahead was torn up in several places, and that she was about to be forced onto the street, she hoisted her suitcase off the ground. It felt fifty pounds heavier than it had at the beginning of the day. Fat, cold drops began pelting her from the dark gray clouds, which didn’t help it feel any lighter.
As the rain dampened her clothes, Tess became uncharacteristically disheartened. When she’d left vet school two years ago, she’d had a vision. Maybe getting her idea off the ground would be easier if she’d taken business classes while getting her undergrad degree. Only, back then, she’d been dead-set on becoming a vet and figured the business end of it would come later.
As Tess neared Market Street and her bus stop, she saw she’d almost reached the end of the sidewalk construction. The muscles in her arm and shoulder were exhausted from carrying her heavy suitcase, and walking on the edge of the city street wasn’t the safest of actions. Just as she’d reached the spot where the sidewalk was no longer blocked off, a truck passed by, splashing a wave of cold, filthy water onto her leather boots and leggings. And with the rain picking up, she was starting to full-body shiver. She couldn’t reach the shelter of the bus stop quickly enough. Or her grandma’s small, cozy home where, after a hot shower, she’d slip into comfy clothes and sip on a mug of hot tea.
Three people were crowded under the bus stop shelter, two seated and one standing. The standing one, a lanky man in a dark suit, stepped over to make room under the cover. He gave her drenched clothes a sympathetic glance before becoming absorbed in his phone again.
Tess thanked him and attempted to tuck both her body and her suitcase under the thin slip of remaining roof and out of the rain. Her laptop was dry at least. Not only was it in a water-resistant case, but her long-used backpack still had waterproofing sealer on it as well.
The other two people crowded in the small space made no acknowledgment of her arrival. A woman took up most of the space on the bench, or at least her bags did. On the fraction of the bench remaining was an older man with a newspaper open on his lap. Rather than reading it, he was staring across the five-lane street and mumbling in disappointment about the Red Birds, St. Louis’s much-loved major league baseball team, and their disappointing end to what had apparently been their best season in nearly a decade. Not that Tess had any idea. To her baseball-crazy family’s disapproval, she’d largely stopped following the sport in college, then entirely when she’d left for Europe.
The intensity of the man’s stare had Tess following his gaze. On the opposite side of the street was Citygarden, the small but picturesque three-acre fountain and the sculpture park that opened to a view of the old courthous
e and the Arch. In the wind and rain, the popular park was all but deserted. The only person visible, not far from the giant sculpture of Pinocchio, was a guy wearing an arm sling, balling up an empty leash and kicking at the grass in frustration.
When there’s smoke, Tess thought. She searched for signs of an escaped dog. She spotted it dashing through the bushes and sculptures at the edge of the park. The dog was small, stocky, and white. From this far away, her best guess was a Westie. She flinched as the yapping animal dashed into the street, causing an approaching sedan to slam its brakes. The dog wheeled to face it, barking as ferociously at the grill as its small stature allowed. After completing a round of rapid-fire barking that stopped traffic in all lanes, it dashed back into the grassy park.
Once again, the dog was watching the guy who was trying to catch it and made sure to keep well clear of him. The man’s attempts to make it stay put were only causing it to retreat farther away.
Barely conscious she’d made the decision to do so, Tess hoisted her suitcase and dove back into the cold rain. She had to jog across five lanes and dodge traffic to get to the park. Her suitcase thumped against one calf as she ran, likely creating a few bruises she’d discover later.
Once she closed the distance to a bit less than twenty feet, Tess heard the guy curse as he headed toward the western edge of the park in pursuit of the dog.
“Hey, you!” She was determined to stop him before his frustration drove the dog into the street again. “Stop! Just stop, will you?”
It still wasn’t all-out pouring, but the cold drops were soaking her thin jacket. The guy, his left arm immobilized, had thankfully heard her and was turning around to see who’d called out. As soon as he stopped walking, the Westie, thirty feet ahead of him, stopped and cocked its head curiously toward Tess.
“Stop please! Just stop moving! You’re too imposing!” Tess dropped her suitcase and backpack under a bush that had lost most of its leaves but still offered a bit of protection from the rain. She double-checked the small pocket of her jacket to make sure she had a few of the treats she carried with her for emergencies like this one. “You’ll never get him back this way.”
