Brute Strength

by Susan Conant

  As we turned onto Appleton, I slowed way down, in part because I suddenly realized that I’d stupidly picked a route that would take us past Vanessa’s house and in part because I found myself dreading our return. Yes, home would be dry and cozy, but there’d probably be messages or calls from Steve and maybe from Buck. Worse, Rita might be alone and in great distress about a failure to reconcile with Quinn, who wasn’t the man I’d have chosen for her – Max was – but who was her choice. Preoccupied though I was with imagining what I’d say to Steve, Buck, and Rita, I nonetheless avoided Vanessa’s side of the street. By now, I told myself, her chicken was out of the oven, and she dining on it while reading Jane Austen or watching Emma Thompson in Sense and Sensibility. With her big fenced yard, she had no need to walk Ulla on this increasingly nasty night.

  The thought had barely crossed my mind when Vanessa came dashing across the street almost as if she’d been waiting for me. Sammy, who was always happy to see almost anyone, shook himself all over, thus sending the water retained by his coat flying all over Kimi, Vanessa, and me. It was then that I realized that Vanessa might, in fact, have been waiting for me: she wore a long, dark waterproof poncho and Wellies.

  ‘I’ve just talked to Pippy Neff,’ she said with no preamble. ‘I called her about getting Ulla’s papers, and she told me about your inquiries.’

  ‘About Buster?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Buster. The puppy she sold to some people named Snell. They called me, and I called Pippy. She told me that the Snells were going to give it another week and that if things still weren’t working, she’d take Buster back. Did she tell you otherwise?’ Knowing Pippy as I did, I considered it entirely possible that in her conversation with me, she’d totally misrepresented what she’d said to the Snells. In any case, it seemed likely that Pippy had offered Buster to Vanessa if the Snells decided not to keep him. The arrangement sounded reasonable. Vanessa already had one malamute of Pippy’s breeding, and Pippy might well have asked whether Vanessa wanted the young male. Reflecting on my experience with Pippy, I asked, ‘Does Pippy want to sell him to you? How much does she want for him?’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘I called Pippy because she’s Buster’s breeder. The Snells said that she’d refused to take him back, and they wanted rescue to take him. That’s why I called her. I asked her about the Snells and Buster.’

  ‘You asked her about Olympia. About Ulla’s first owner. On top of your sudden refusal to eat with me? And your jumpiness. Holly, I am so sorry. I thought we were friends.’ She paused. ‘All I am is an opportunist, you know. Really, I’m just what you are – half malamute.’

  After an artificial little laugh, I said, ‘Of course we’re friends.’ I couldn’t tell whether my false assurance had fooled Vanessa, but it hadn’t fooled my brilliant Kimi, who was now standing at my left side, her head tilted slightly upward, her body pressing against my knee and thigh so firmly that I felt the tension in her muscles. ‘Look, could we discuss this some other time?’ My tone was light. ‘There’s been some misunderstanding, but right now, the dogs and I are soaked. I need to get home and get us dried off.’

  ‘Oh, you are going home. You are going to walk quietly home. But not into the house. Into the yard.’

  I played dumb. ‘It isn’t exactly a great evening for sitting out in the yard, but you’re welcome to come back and have a drink.’

  ‘That’s not quite what I have in mind. Walk!’

  ‘Vanessa, I have no idea what’s up, but—’

  ‘What’s up, as you phrase it, is that I have a revolver in my pocket, and it is pointed at you. Now, walk!’

  ‘There’s been some misunderstanding,’ I said again. But I obeyed. Dog obedience training, I should mention, has a paradoxical effect on the trainers: we are the least blindly obedient people I know. We’re thoughtful, clever, and manipulative, always seeking new perspectives and fresh approaches. But that’s when we don’t have guns pointed at us. I started moving. Did Vanessa actually have a revolver? If so, would she fire it right here on this peaceful block of Appleton Street? As I walked, Kimi leaned into me. In obedience, the fault of heeling much too close to the handler is called ‘crowding’. But Kimi wasn’t crowding; at the moment, it would’ve been impossible for her to get too close for my comfort. And if Kimi took Vanessa’s threat seriously, so did I.

  When we reached my driveway, I saw Rita’s car and mine, but Quinn’s car was no longer there. In the futile hope that Kevin had decided to visit his mother, I scanned the driveway next to ours, but only Mrs Dennehy’s car was parked in it and not Kevin’s. Had Quinn left without Rita? Or was she at home? I couldn’t tell. There were lights in the third-floor windows, but Rita paid her own electric bills and was sometimes careless about wasting energy. I wished that before setting out, I’d been profligate. Frugal and energy-conscious, I had turned on the light over the back door and had left all of the other outside lights off. My cell phone was, of course, inside the house, where I’d deliberately decided to leave it.

  I automatically headed for the back steps, but Vanessa stopped me. ‘Open the gate,’ she said.

  ‘It’s locked.’

  ‘You have the key,’ she said. ‘Use it.’

  It seemed pointless to stall for time by lying. I’d lost track of the time, but it had to be at least nine o’clock, maybe later, too late for Kevin to pop in on his mother. I fished in my pocket, found the key ring, unlocked the gate, returned the keys to my pocket, and led the dogs in. Vanessa followed. What in God’s name was she going to do? She couldn’t intend to shoot me! Not here, anyway, not in my own yard in our thickly settled neighborhood. Yes, cars and trucks occasionally backfired on Concord Avenue. Even so, the sound of a gunshot would attract immediate attention. By now, it was all too obvious that she did, in fact, have a revolver, and there was enough light for me to see that she really was pointing it at me. Or trying, anyway. She held it awkwardly in one hand, as if her lessons in firearms had consisted of watching old movies.

  ‘Pull the gate closed,’ she said. ‘Don’t lock it.’

  I complied.

  ‘Take the leashes off the dogs.’

  I obeyed. Since she’d given no orders about what to do with the leather leads, I clung to them; they were as close to a potential means of self-defense as I had. Sammy, innocence personified, sniffed around and then ambled to the steps to the house. Kimi remained where she’d been, glued to my left side.

  ‘The ladder,’ Vanessa said. ‘Those gutters and downspouts need work, don’t they? It’s just like you to climb up and play do-it-yourselfer in heavy rain.’

  ‘No, it is not like me. I am fanatical about ladder safety.’

  ‘Good. Put the ladder up. Make it go as high as it can. All the way.’

  As I dragged the ladder away from the foundation, raised it, positioned it, and used the ropes to extend it, I pondered its potential as a weapon. But what could I do with it? It was big and unwieldy. I’d have been much better off with a two-by-four.

  ‘Hurry up,’ she said.

  ‘With all this mud, I’d never use a high ladder. It could slip.’

  Vanessa laughed. ‘Yes, it could, couldn’t it? Up you go!’

  ‘At a minimum, I’d use shims.’

  ‘Up!’

  I took my first step upward. The combination of the rubber soles of my Wellies and the wet aluminum rungs made for slippery, treacherous footing. Reluctantly, I let the leather leads drop to the ground. Although my hands were freezing, I gripped the ladder firmly. Remembering to keep my knees and shoulders relaxed, I slowly ascended another four or fives rungs. My balance felt good, and the ladder seemed less precarious than I’d expected. Glancing down, I saw Kimi standing where she’d been, at the foot of the ladder. Was there no way for her to help me? She was so accomplished and so intelligent! Was there nothing in her great repertoire that could be put to use? She could heel like an angel, clear broad jumps and high jumps, zip
through tunnels, retrieve dumb-bells and gloves, drop on command, and make her way neatly and speedily up, over, and down the obstacles in the sport aptly known as agility. As to her brains, I thought of how she’d play-bowed to Sammy to get him to vacate the prime spot at my side. It was some consolation to realize that Kimi was too bright to climb the ladder after me.

  ‘Get going!’ Vanessa ordered.

  I complied. Focusing on every little move, I made my way upward until I was just above the second-floor windows.

  ‘Move!’ Vanessa said impatiently.

  It may have been the nervousness in her voice that made me look down. It was certainly Vanessa’s nerves that made her raise the arm that held the revolver. With her hand outstretched above her head, she pointed the revolver more or less at me, as if she were pointing a finger, but she couldn’t possibly have aimed, fired, and hit her target. No one who knew anything about firearms would’ve done such a stupid thing. In fact, it seemed to me that she might even discharge the weapon by mistake.

  Kimi leaped. The fastest of our dogs at stealing food, she was speed itself as she soared upward and hurled herself against Vanessa’s upraised arm, catching her completely off guard. The revolver flew from Vanessa’s hand. And fired.

  Kimi yelped. And fell to the ground.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Except for a fragmentary recollection of slipping and regaining my balance, I barely remember descending the ladder, but I know that the second my boots touched the ground, I brushed past Sammy, hurled myself at Vanessa, and delivered a body slam that knocked her off her feet. Even at the time, when I was out of my mind with fury and fear, her response struck me as peculiar and inexplicable. I knew every inch of that yard and knew that she’d landed on muddy earth and definitely not on some hard object. Nonetheless, she began to scream in what sounded like excruciating pain, and instead of rising, she remained curled up on her side.

  I felt no sympathy. Cursing the softness of the rubber boots, I was about to kick her hard in the head when I spotted the revolver, snatched it up, and shouted, ‘I am going to kill you! My dogs are my life, and I am going to kill you!’

  Vanessa’s screams turned to moans.

  From where she lay in the mud, Kimi, my fearless, brave Kimi, made a soft whimper. It is probably what saved Vanessa’s life.

  ‘Help!’ I shouted. ‘Help!’ And again, in desperation, ‘Help!’

  ‘I didn’t mean to!’ Vanessa pleaded. ‘I didn’t mean to! It was supposed to be an accident. And I’m hurt! Something is broken!’ Squirming toward my wounded Kimi, she reached out a hand.

  ‘Don’t you touch her! Get away from her!’ I ordered. ‘Help!’ I screamed again. ‘Someone help me!’ Softly, I said, ‘Kimi, I’m here. Kimi? Kimi, I’m right here, and I’m not going away. Kimi, stay with me! Stay with me!’ Frightened beyond reason, I somehow knew that I faced a choice between saving Kimi and venting my rage on Vanessa. ‘Kimi, stay with me! Don’t leave! Sammy?’

  My heart almost broke as I watched our overgrown puppy bend his great head down over his beloved Kimi, who had always bossed him around, manipulated him, mothered him, and adored him, and who now lay at his feet bleeding to death. Kimi had to come first! All that mattered was running for my cell phone and for blankets and towels for Kimi, anything to keep her stable until help arrived.

  As it suddenly did. The gate to the driveway burst open, and in marched a heavily shrouded figure with tremendous amounts of long, streaming white hair. Overwhelmed with fear for Kimi and with rage at Vanessa, I had the fleeting and entirely mad thought that our improbable savior was none other than Gandalf the Grey, miraculously sprung from the pages of Tolkien. In one hand, however, the startling personage bore an exceptionally long flashlight with a powerful beam, a device that was clearly of this earth rather than of Middle Earth and, moreover, one that I recognized as belonging to Kevin Dennehy.

  ‘What’s all this about?’ asked his mother, who, I now realized, was wearing a long waterproof coat of Kevin’s over her own floor-length nightgown.

  ‘Mrs Dennehy! Kimi has been shot. Get an ambulance! Get help!’

  ‘I’ve called,’ she said without bothering to specify whom. ‘I know a gunshot when I hear one. “Thou shalt not kill!” Holly, put that terrible thing down, and take care of your dog.’

  She trained the light on Kimi, and for the first time, I saw the nature of Kimi’s injury: she had taken a bullet in her thigh. Worse, I saw the copious flow of blood. Oblivious to almost everything except Kimi, I nonetheless called to Sammy, who followed me up the steps to the side door, where, with frozen hands, I fumbled with the keys, found the right one, and let us in. Rowdy, who was loose in the house, came dashing to me, but I hollered, ‘Rowdy, move! Sammy, crate!’ In no time, I had Sammy crated in the kitchen and Rowdy crated upstairs in our bedroom. Frantic, I ripped the king-size down comforter off our bed, flew to the bathroom, seized as many towels as I could carry, and ran back downstairs. In the kitchen, I snatched up my purse, tossed my cell phone into it, and took a second to turn on all of the many outside lights that Steve had installed. Steve! Dear God, if only he were here! He would know exactly what to do. Calmly and capably, he’d . . . how would he stop the bleeding? I felt desperate and helpless. I had to get Kimi to . . . I suddenly knew that Steve would get Kimi to Boston’s legendary Angell Animal Medical Center. And I’d get her there, too. Plans flashed through my mind: use the down comforter as a stretcher, lift Kimi onto it, drag her to my car, and . . .

  I couldn’t have been in the house for more than two minutes, but I opened the door to the yard to discover a small crowd: Rita, Kevin Dennehy, four uniformed officers, and two EMTs who were ministering to Vanessa. Kneeling in the mud at Kimi’s side was the heretofore none-too-dog-friendly Quinn Youngman, who spotted me and said, ‘Let’s get her to my car. Tell me where to drive. Rita, get my keys out of my pocket and start the car. Holly, give me those towels.’

  Kevin Dennehy intervened. In the bright light, I was stunned to see tears in his eyes. ‘I got a second emergency medical vehicle on the way.’

  ‘They won’t take a dog,’ I said. ‘Quinn—’

  ‘This one will,’ Kevin said. ‘Angell?’

  ‘Yes. Kevin, call them! Call Angell! Tell them I’m Steve’s wife.’

  Having grown up in Cambridge and having served on the police force his entire adult life, Kevin had a proprietary attitude toward the city: he viewed all of Cambridge as his personal responsibility and saw all of the city’s resources as his to commandeer. As far as I could tell, he got away with his tsarist assumptions mainly because he was on a first-name basis with half the population and was good at making people happy to do him personal favors. As it turned out, the second pair of EMTs might’ve helped anyway, since one of them was a guy named Hal Gurevich whom I knew slightly because he bred and showed Siberian huskies and did some recreational mushing. For whatever reason – compassion? – it took almost no time for Hal, his partner, and Quinn Youngman to get Kimi on a proper stretcher and into one of those gigantic medical vans. Quinn, who was pressing a towel to her wound, stayed with her. I had the impression that he considered her to be his patient and that it never occurred to him to leave her side. Anyway, we were no sooner in the gigantic vehicle than it took off with its siren wailing.

  ‘South Huntington Avenue,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ Hal told me. ‘Angell.’

  Then I turned all of my attention to Kimi. Weirdly, although everything I had done had been directed toward saving her, I had the sense of having neglected her, probably because I hadn’t been right next to her. Now that I was, I rested one hand on her neck and used the other to stroke her face, and as I traced the bar down her nose, the cap on her head, and the goggles around her eyes, I looked into the dark depths of those eyes and whispered, ‘I’m right here, Kimi. I’m right here with you, and you need to stay here, too.’ She was hideously, terrifyingly still, so motionless, so completely unlike herself, that I could almost feel he
r spirit leaving and had the sickening sense that I was studying her face with my eyes and fingertips as a way to commit it forever to memory. As if I’d forget her! ‘Kimi, I’m here,’ I repeated. ‘And so are you. We’re in this together. Stay with me, good girl. Good, good girl.’

  During the trip, I lost all sense of time. It seemed to take an eternity to get to Angell, but when we arrived, I felt as if we’d left home only minutes earlier. Once we pulled in, however, the action was non-stop. Kimi was immediately in the hands of the people known as Angell’s angels, and I was saying, ‘A gunshot wound. She has lost a lot of blood. Do you have enough? I have two big, healthy dogs at home, and I can get them here. Holly Winter. This is Kimi. She’s in your computer. My husband is Steve Delaney.’ Then I shamelessly dropped the names of veterinarian friends of Steve’s who worked at Angell, and everyone was incredibly kind and kept saying, ‘Yes, we know,’ and then all of a sudden, Kimi had been whisked away, and I was sitting on a bench in the big, beautiful waiting room with Quinn Youngman at my side. And without Kimi.

  I fell completely to pieces. My sobs were violent and loud, and tears flowed down my face as if they were drops of Kimi’s blood. Quinn said nothing, but he removed my raincoat, wrapped his arms around me, patted my back, and kept supplying tissues from a box that someone had given him, and the sight of all those tissues made everything worse than ever, proving as they did that this was a place where animals died and where people like me were expected to collapse in grief.