A New Leash on Death (Dog Lover's Mysteries Book 1)

by Susan Conant

  Bobbi's directions took me to a back road. Dunstable doesn't have any major ones. The pines reminded me of Owls Head. When Bobbi said she was breeding corgis, I should have realized that she didn't mean raising a litter or two. When I pulled into the drive, I saw six or eight long runs and a large pen on the left, with one or two dogs in each. On the right, in a rustic log corral, a Morgan horse stared at me and swished his tail. Ahead was a split-level probably built in the fifties, now cedar-shingled and trying to earn the name ranch.

  Ten or twelve dogs constitute an automatic doorbell. Bobbi and two corgis appeared at the side of the house. All of hers were Pembrokes. The easiest way to tell Pembroke and Cardigan Welsh corgis apart is that Pembrokes have their tails docked as short as possible. Cardigans have tails. Pembrokes are also shorter and have pointed ears, and there are a few other differences, too, but they're indiscernible unless you're used to corgis. One of the ones with Bobbi was called Brandy, I remembered, short for some unpronounceable Welsh name that was all w's. Brandy's buddy looked like him, reddish with white feet, almost certainly a son.

  "This place is fantastic! I had no idea," I said.

  "We're getting there," she said. "It's been a lot of work. When we bought it, the house had turquoise siding, and there were actually pink flamingos on the lawn. Can you believe it? The mal looks great. You keeping him? He's a real sweetheart."

  He and Brandy and the other loose corgi were chasing one another around the house, veering and pouncing. The house and kennels were enough to make me think about leaving Cambridge. My second-floor tenant, Rita, says that the inability to leave Cambridge reflects endlessly protracted adolescence. It actually reflects the unwillingness to quit wearing jeans. Maybe Rita's right. Therapists sometimes are, I guess.

  The kitchen had a restaurant-style range, a picture window with bird feeders hanging outside, and blue-and-white-patterned wallpaper. Wallpaper. If Harvard had its way, the Cambridge zoning regulations would prohibit wallpaper inside city limits. Maybe they already do. Bobbi had outgrown Cambridge. After I asked her a lot of questions about corgis and half filled a steno pad with her answers, I got to the point of the visit, Rowdy.

  "Well, he was such a love," she said. "And there was Frank, getting old, eyes going, and I talked to him about a puppy. He was here for a meeting, a big deal, planning the Northern Mass. show. Bronwyn had a litter then, and he liked corgis, but housebreaking was an issue. If it had been some other malamute, I would have thought twice about it. A malamute is really a young person's dog, I always think. So the long and the short of it is that after the meeting, I brought the mal in, and, of course, Rowdy sold himself."

  Rise up a little on your hind legs. Cross your front paws and place them in the victim's hands. Fold your ears against your head. Gaze imploringly. Smile.

  "The big-brown-eyes routine," I said.

  "You got it. So Frank said he'd think it over. Naturally, he called me the next day, and I drove Rowdy in."

  "Where'd the name come from?"

  "Frank. That was his. We just called him King."

  I nearly dropped the blue-and-white teacup.

  "You know," Bobbi said, "Sergeant Preston. Don't you remember? On, King! On, you huskies!"

  The real reason I should leave Cambridge is that I'm not too bright. I'd missed the connection. I knew, of course, that on the old TV show, King was a malamute. There was even a picture in one of the malamute books I'd just been reading, the one by Brearley. Margaret must have known, too. Bobbi and Ronni? What had they really known? Nothing? Calling a stray malamute King is like calling a stray collie Lassie. It doesn't have to mean anything.

  "I remember," I said. "Yukon King, the Wonder Dog. How did you end up with him? Isn't he a little big for a corgi?"

  "Jim Tuttle talked me into boarding him. From the Siberian Rescue League?" She meant Siberian huskies, of course, not Soviet defectors. "You know him?"

  "Sure. He does the sled-dog demonstrations."

  "Right." She pushed her hair out of her face and smiled. "They got him from a guy in Pepperell, some guy who keeps chickens, believe it or not. An incredibly nice guy. Most people would've got a gun and that would've been it. He lost six chickens. Anyway, Rowdy lucked out. He must have been starving, poor baby."

  The other chickens lucked out, too, I thought. Only six. A loose dog, especially a malamute, can kill hundreds in no time. (By the way, don't think that shipping your wild-acting dog to a farm is going to solve any problems. In the city, there aren't any deer, sheep, or cows to run down. There aren't any chickens, geese, or ducks to kill. There aren't any farmers with guns to protect their livestock. If your dog acts wild, don't deport him. Train him.)

  "More tea?" Bobbi asked.

  "Sure," I said. "So the guy thought he was a Siberian."

  "Right. So the Siberian people took one look and saw what he was. You know there's finally a malamute protection league starting?"

  "I heard about it."

  "It's new. Anyway, Jim called me and asked if I could board a malamute for a while, and you know what I'm like." I did—softhearted. "And they advertised, but who knows? For one thing, he could've come from anywhere. A few hundred miles is nothing to a dog like that."

  Who knew? I did, or I thought I did. I wasn't about to say so.

  'Tell me something," I said. "Did you give him a bath?"

  "Did you?" She laughed.

  "Yes. I have the scars."

  "Good for you. Ronni tried, and we ended up tying him up outdoors and turning the hose on him. Then we just let him loose in the big pen to dry off. I'd bathe and groom twenty corgis before I'd try that again. I knew some malamutes were like that, but I'd never seen it before."

  "Speaking of malamutes," I said, trying to sound normal, "whatever happened to the one Margaret Robichaud had? Do you know about that?"

  "Do I ever know about that. Did I ever hear about that. Did she ever talk about that. We worked on something together just after it happened. She was really broken up, and when Margaret's broken up about something, she talks."

  "So what was the story?"

  "Well, she took him to Maine, and he bolted somehow, right at the end of her vacation. They always know. So she did everything, ads in the papers, called everyone, and finally she got hold of some shelter in Maine that had picked him up. He'd been hit by a car."

  "A car?"

  "I think so. Anyway, he was in bad shape, and he didn't make it. It must have been awful for her."

  "Terrible," I said. I felt like a hypocrite. Maybe it had been terrible.

  "I had nightmares after she told me about it," Bobbi said. "Brandy's body was stretched out on a slab in a sort of morgue with white tiles, and these ghoulish people were around, and they kept asking me, 'Is this your dog?'"

  "Did Margaret actually see him?"

  "I don't think so," Bobbi said. "I'm not sure. I think somebody gave her some gruesome description of his body. I think that's what gave me the dreams."

  Before I left, I slipped in a question about whether Bobbi had ever seen Margaret's King. She said no, and I believed her.

  Massachusetts does not look its best in November in the rain. Everything turns a dead, sodden brown-gray. All the way home I kept thinking about Margaret and feeling guilty. If she'd known that her dog was still alive, would she have talked to Bobbi like that? Wouldn't she have said nothing? I know what it's like to lose a dog. One of the ways people console themselves is to talk to anyone who'll listen. Kevin's dog died years ago, and he still does it. From Bobbi's account, Margaret had sounded like someone whose dog has died, or at least like someone who thinks that her dog has died.

  It seemed to me that Bobbi hadn't seen that tattoo, and I didn't think that Ronni had, either. The name King bothered me, but it didn't bother me a lot, and they weren't the only people who could have made the connection between Rowdy and Margaret. Old Newfie Roger was still a possibility, for a start, and so was old Dr. Draper, whatever Steve might think. Much as I'd always l
iked Ron Coughlin, I wondered about the trip to the men's room, too, the way Kevin did. I also wondered about the tattoo, and I wondered whether it was the only way to connect Rowdy to Snowcloud Kotzebue Thunderking.

  10

  I missed Marissa something fierce. I could imagine picking up the phone and telling her what any reasonable mother wants to hear: "Mom, he finished the last leg. I've got a Utility malamute." It wasn't that Buck wouldn't care. He'd announce it to everyone. He'd glow. But he's not my mother.

  But I was a long way from Utility—in fact, a C.D., a C.D.X., the three legs of a U.D., and one set of registration papers away—and I still had no idea of what was going on. I took a deep breath, pretended I was Rowdy having a hypodermic shoved up my nose, and called Margaret Robichaud.

  "Something reminded me of you the other day," I said. "Actually, it was something on Sesame Street."

  "You must be joking."

  "No. Really," I said.

  After that, she was more polite, more gracious than I would have been under the circumstances. The reason was not good manners, of course, or a liking for me. I told her I wanted to interview her for Dog's Life. There's nothing I won't do for a dog. I hadn't yet dreamed up a topic for the interview. Anything would do. A winner's tips on handling. Grooming secrets. She wouldn't care. She didn't even ask. Since she had a show on Saturday, I had until late Sunday afternoon to concoct something.

  Steve and I had a romantic weekend together. On Saturday, we went to a Celtics game. Dogs are not my only interest. One of Steve's patients, or, should I say, the owners of one of his patients, had been so grateful to Steve for making a house call—difficult labor, mother dachshund and pups now resting comfortably—that they gave him two tickets for the game. You practically can't buy Celtics tickets. To get them at all, you need season tickets, and season tickets are like the crown jewels. You inherit them or marry for them, but you don't just buy them.

  "Did you know they had season tickets when you made that house call?" I asked him as we sat in the Garden waiting for the pregame.

  "Of course not," he said.

  Larry Bird was out for surgery to remove bone spurs from both heels. The Celtics lost, but after the game we went to the Union Oyster House and fed each other cherrystones, and Sunday morning was so rainy that the dogs didn't start scratching on my bedroom door until ten. The rain had stopped by the time we finished our eggs and coffee. We drove to the Middlesex Fells and ambled through the damp woods with the dogs.

  Margaret had always made me nervous, so when Steve dropped me off at home, I put on a navy corduroy Laura Ashley jumper and a lace blouse. I wore tights and blue flats. I knew that Margaret would make me feel like a little girl, so I dressed for the part.

  Here and there in Cambridge are old houses that look as if they were once farms. Quite a few are on Avon Hill, just north of what used to be the Radcliffe dorms, now Harvard houses, only a ten-minute walk from where I live. In an ordinary city, Avon Hill would be an ordinary neighborhood. In Cambridge, it's almost Brattle Street. Margaret's was one of the farmhouses, soft yellow with a bay window and, on one side, a white porch. I knew she lived alone. Her husband had died years ago. I rang the bell and heard dogs, but when Margaret opened the door, two goldens were lying quietly on the floor, not jumping or barking. I hadn't seen either of them before. They were beauties, with lovely heads and pale, shiny coats.

  "Holly," she said. "I heard you lost your little golden. Cancer?"

  Vinnie stood twenty-two inches at the withers and weighed sixty-five pounds, which is an ideal size for a golden retriever bitch. There was nothing little about her.

  "Yes," I said, and changed the subject. "These young ladies are new, aren't they?"

  "Cara and Missy. Missy's thirteen months, and she's got two majors. Cara went Best of Opposite in Worcester yesterday, and does she know it."

  Braggart.

  "They look beautiful," I said truthfully.

  Margaret did not and never had. She'd looked almost exactly the same for as long as I'd known her, tall and graceless with large bones and what dermatologists around here call Yankee skin, pale with scaly red patches of sun damage. She'd probably had her hair done recently. It was a slightly copper brown swirled into some kind of chignon and pinned down tightly. She was wearing the same kind of outfit she'd always worn, a cream blouse that tied at the neck and a green-and-blue tweed suit probably intended to bring out the strange blue-green of her cat eyes.

  "You're looking well yourself," I added brightly.

  She thanked me and offered tea or coffee, which I refused. Steve had made me promise. We didn't sit in her living room but in a small study with a golden-yellow carpet on which no fur showed, long matching curtains, bookcases filled with dog books and trophies, a handsome oak rolltop desk, two easy chairs elaborately upholstered in leaf-patterned chintz, and, on the off-white walls, displays of ribbons and framed photos taken at shows. The room was attractive but not opulent, and its only new contents were some of the ribbons, trophies, and photos. Margaret had released the dogs and permitted them to follow us, but as soon we entered the room, she downed them again.

  I'd decided to avoid the topic of obedience in the interview, but I hadn't picked a substitute. I wasn't worried. I knew something would come up. The trophies and ribbons were from everywhere, so I asked about tips for traveling. How do you transport your dogs to shows? What problems do you encounter? Margaret was so used to being interviewed that I didn't have to do much except listen to her and scribble in a steno pad. I asked about motion sickness and medication. She said she'd never had any trouble and didn't believe in doping dogs. She talked about crates and airlines and motels. She knew her subject well. It seemed to me that in the past year, she'd hit every major show in the country and some in Canada. Unlike most show people, she hated RVs. For distant shows, she flew and then rented a station wagon. She interviewed herself, and I was a little chagrined to realize that her monologue would write up well.

  After forty-five minutes, I asked about her other dogs, and she led me through an unrefurbished kitchen to the backyard. Although I'd heard her called horsy, she walked like a camel. The yard and kennels were superb. If I ever took up blackmail or extortion, I'd spend my gains duplicating that setup, except that I wouldn't have room. Margaret turned on floodlights that illuminated a yard about ten times the size of mine. On the left, against the wooden fence—the whole yard was enclosed—was a new building the size of a garage, with four concrete runs. On the lawn sat regulation-size jumps and hurdles, not just a high jump and the four hurdles for the broad jump, but also a barrier jump, a long jump, and a window jump. Margaret strode over to the little building and led me in. I'd always thought that Marissa's bathing and grooming area in the barn in Owls Head was ideal, but that was before I saw this one. The whole room was tiled in blue and white, but there was an area carpeted with matting that obviously gave her a place to train the dogs in bad weather. A heater and an air conditioner had been built into the wall. Everything was new. Kevin must not have seen this. The sunken tub was something you'd expect to find at the LaCoste Spa. If Margaret had tried to sell me a membership, I would have joined. This place gave the word doghouse a new meaning.

  In two of the four pens along one wall were Margaret's two other goldens: Libby, the one I remembered, and a new one, a male, both barking and jumping in excitement.

  "This is spectacular," I told her. I'd never before felt such simple covetousness. "It's fantastic."

  What it wasn't was dog heaven. Rowdy would have been disappointed when he tried to dig through the concrete, and he would have found the total absence of odor a bore. It was, in fact, a doghouse for people, not dogs. I was jealous anyway.

  Back in the study, she finally asked whether I had a new dog.

  "I've got a malamute," I said.

  "Oh, my dear," she gushed. "Let me give you some advice. You take that training collar, and you slip it high up on his neck. You don't have a bitch, do you?"

/>   I said I didn't.

  "You slip that collar high on his neck, and when he forges, you correct him for all you're worth. Goldens don't need it, but it's the only way, believe me." Dispensing advice, she sounded even more than usual like a malevolent Julia Child. I expected her to wish me bon appétit, as if I intended to fork into malamute stew, but she actually wished me good luck with him and added, "You remember my mal, don't you? He was a lovely boy."

  "I saw pictures," I said. "I was really sorry to hear."

  "I was heartbroken," she said as she sat forward in the upholstered chair and pointed at me. "Devastated. All that work. I didn't have the heart to go through it again."

  She reminded me of Kevin except that he was mourning his dog and she was mourning her own work.

  To my surprise, she heaved herself even farther forward and confided, "You know, I've started to think that it might have been a judgment on me for that silly controversy with Frank. I feel terrible about him. Did you know he was coming to apologize?"

  "I didn't know," I said. "I'm glad to hear it."

  "He wrote to me," she said forcefully, as if I'd contradicted her. "Just before it happened. This is becoming a terribly violent society, isn't it?"

  Who could disagree? If the purpose of my visit had been different from what it was, I might have pointed out that violence wasn't totally baffling when you considered that her dogs lived in most people's idea of a palace. I'm glad I didn't say it, especially because my dogs have always eaten better than most children do.

  Without waiting for me to agree or disagree, she went on. "I knew Frank from girlhood. You didn't know that, did you? I had a brother, Bill. They were classmates." The unspoken phrase was at Harvard. "They served together."