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

by Susan Conant

  At first I thought she meant that they'd been waiters, but I caught my mistake. "In World War II?"

  "And the end of the war, and just after. The Navy," she said. Her face usually registered nothing besides arrogance, but the look of sadness softened her eyes. "Your mother knew Frank, didn't she?"

  "Yes." Marissa knew everyone. Margaret said that Marissa had been a better handler than Buck would ever be, and she asked about him.

  "He's fine," I said. "I just saw him. He's still in Owls Head. You go to Maine, too, don't you? Deer Isle?"

  I didn't slip the question in smoothly, but I slipped it in. Margaret didn't seem to notice. Some people never wonder why you're asking about them. They assume you're as interested as they are. Deer Isle was only a hunch.

  "Blue Hill. We've always gone there."

  Deer Isle. Blue Hill. Sailing. Tennis. Episcopalians. And, I admit, golden retrievers. I knew enough to realize that "we" wasn't, for once, the goldens, but three or four generations of her family. We talked about Maine. She reminded me to slip that training collar high on my dog's neck.

  ***

  When I walked into my kitchen and turned on the overhead light, I saw that Rowdy had had fun in my absence. He'd managed to open a cabinet door that I must have left ajar, and he'd torn up and eaten what he found: boxes of cereal, crackers, and raisins. The worst mess was from a box of chocolate cake mix. Raisins and chocolate are bad for dogs. He and I discussed his behavior. I said that this was not my idea of Companion Dog behavior. I shook the packages in his face. I hoped that Rita was home in her apartment on the second floor. She thinks that it's good for people to express their feelings. Rowdy put his tail down and lowered his head. He never stopped watching me, and I think he listened. I was glad Margaret Robichaud wasn't there. I was glad Marissa wasn't there. The only thing worse than having your dog do something outrageous is having someone else find out about it.

  When I'd vacuumed and was letting the floor dry, I sat on a stool and called Buck to ask about animal shelters and rescue places near Blue Hill. He gave me a few names. I also asked him to tell me again about malamutes and the U.S. Navy.

  11

  Anyone who loves dogs must wonder what the world looks like from the dog's point of view. When we wonder how the dog sees the world, we're already wrong because the dog doesn't so much see the world as sniff it and hear it. If dogs wonder about our world, they probably ask how it stinks and sounds to us, but our own first question isn't completely misguided. Dogs and people do see the world differently. For one thing, dogs are lower down than we are, so their perspective is lower than ours. For another, their visual world is mainly black and white and gray with some red. Black, white, and gray like sled dogs on a glacier, red like that bomb exploding.

  Buck hadn't, for once, known more than the books had already told me. In 1935, the American Kennel Club recognized the Alaskan malamute. The foundation stock consisted of the original Kotzebue dogs, and when there were enough of them, the AKC closed the stud book, which means that from then on, all registered malamutes were supposed to be descendants of the original ones. Without World War II and the Antarctic expeditions, the stud book would have stayed closed. In fact, having shown their capacity to do more than their fair share for Admiral Byrd, malamutes were summoned to do more than their fair share in World War II as well. Man's gratitude to dogs is such that it was fairly routine to thank the sled dogs at the end of an expedition by shooting them, blowing them up, or by leaving them behind to starve to death. Shortly before World War II, an Antarctic expedition jointly sponsored by the U.S. Navy and Admiral Byrd had thanked a great many malamutes in one of the speedy ways. In 1947, there were only about thirty surviving registered Alaskan malamutes. Did the AKC train and dispatch commando teams to deliver appropriate thanks on behalf of the dogs? No. It reopened the stud book.

  Did anyone avenge any of those dogs? Had someone waited forty years? Dr. Stanton? Where had he been in the years just before World War II? Obviously, he hadn't been massacring dogs, but had he known something? Recognized someone? Had someone wanted to silence him? Who else was old enough to have been in the Navy at that time? In Antarctica? Ray Metcalf was old enough. Gerry Pitts probably was, too. Wouldn't the armory be managed by an old army man? Or could his military obsession with neatness—no dogs on the lawn—be a vestige of time in the Navy? Who, if anyone, had been in Antarctica? Who had, in fact, been in the Navy? For one, Margaret's brother.

  It hadn't occurred to me to ask Buck about him when we talked on the phone, but since my plans for the early part of the week included a visit to Owls Head, I didn't call back. This idea about the Navy seemed so improbable that I decided to pursue those plans, which called for finding out whether or not Margaret really believed that King had died. On Monday morning, I got out the list of animal shelters in Maine that Buck had dictated to me, and I called to schedule a series of visits. My pretext was, again, an article for Dog's Life. Pretext? I'd already started to draft something about corgis, and Margaret had done everything except put her tips for travel in writing.

  By Monday afternoon, Rowdy and I were working our way up the Maine coast. We arrived in Owls Head at nine thirty that night. Buck was in Vermont to barnstorm for wolves, so we didn't see him. No one was there except Regina Barnes, who must be at least eighty and is half mad. She used to confuse me with my mother even before Marissa died. She didn't like Marissa any more than she likes me. As the neighbors in Owls Head say, she has her cap set on Buck. He shouldn't take advantage of her hopes, but he does. He has a hard time finding people to wolf-sit. When I left in the morning, Regina was in the barn dispensing Science Diet. I called out to her, and I'm not sure who growled back.

  At a shelter not far from Belfast, I nearly adopted a kitten that the guy swore was half Maine coon cat, but I didn't have a cat carrier with me, and the kitten's eyes were oozing some yellow glop. Everywhere I went, I had to turn down dogs. "There's an Irish setter back there," I'd hear, and in the cage would be a red dog with maybe one Irish setter grandparent. "Pointer" meant all spotted dogs except the really little ones. Those were fox terriers. Furry dogs with curly tails were huskies and half-huskies. I got offered one half-malamute. He was a big furry dog with a curly tail. A collie and shepherd mix meant a brown dog. I didn't mind. If a purebred name helped save one of them from those back-road death rows, who was I to get prissy about the AKC?

  I heard a lot of sad stories. Animal rescue shouldn't have to mean gas chambers, but it usually does. If I ran the world, anyone who left a mixed breed bitch unspayed or a mixed breed dog unaltered would be taxed a few thousand dollars a year to help finance real shelters. So would anyone who let a purebred dog run free to help make more unwanted puppies.

  By eight that night, when we checked in at the Ellsworth Holiday Inn, I was tired and depressed. Holiday Inns, by the way, are one of my own tips for travel with a dog. Some Holiday Inns don't let you keep a dog in your room, but lots of them do.

  In the morning, we headed inland to Bangor and then back toward the coast. I'd managed to reach Buck in Vermont, and we'd arranged to have a short lunch at a diner on Route 1 near Union. He was walking Clyde when I pulled up. The dogs, of course, had to stay locked in the cars while we ate. Buck went to Europe once. All that he seems to have noticed is that in France, Italy, and Switzerland, dogs were welcome in restaurants. If hybridizing hadn't sidetracked him, he'd have organized a restaurant reform movement here.

  Over fried clams and apple pie with cheddar cheese, we talked about Margaret. I was surprised. Buck doesn't usually use the words prize bitch metaphorically. I asked about her brother.

  "Bill Lytton," he said, "had a pointer that was about the finest hunting dog you'd ever want to see. Field trial champion. Trained the dog himself. His sis was at every field trial, of course. You know, she antagonized a lot of people."

  "Dear Margaret?"

  "That snide attitude does not become you."

  "Sorry."

  "She wa
sn't so bad before Bill died. People got their backs up hearing her go on about him and Jack, that was all. That was the dog's name—Jack. It was only afterward, she developed this attitude. I heard somebody say about her the other day, her greatest dream is to die wrapped in her own arms."

  Then he told me a lot more about the dog Jack and a few others. I tried to get him to say more about the brother, but either he'd never known much or he'd forgotten. He had, of course, known Frank Stanton, and he hadn't bothered to tell me before that Dr. Stanton had been in the Navy.

  "Antarctica," he said when I raised my new hypothesis. "Just tell me. Why would the Navy send an eye doctor to Antarctica?"

  "Snow blindness?" I answered, but I knew Buck was right. Medical specialization wasn't nearly so common in the 1940s as it is now, and even now, an ophthalmologist would be posted at a research center or a hospital, not shipped out on an icebreaker. Buck did give me one useful lead. He told me about a shelter that wasn't on my list, not a real shelter, just a place run by two brothers. It was nearby, on a dirt road between Union and Warren.

  Union might sound familiar because of the fair. The Union Fair has horse pulling, tractor pulling, rides, beano, thick-sliced onion rings, and french fries served with vinegar. It hosts the Maine Blueberry Festival. The empty fairgrounds weren't very festive on that dark November afternoon. I took a right turn not far past them.

  Without Buck's directions, I'd never have found the place, a collection of dog pens and rusted kitchen appliances and, behind a fence of burned-out trucks, shacks that in the thirties had been overnight cabins. In these surroundings, the Bronco looked like a Rolls. I left Rowdy in it. This was no place for a classy dog.

  My clothing budget is limited. A first-rate parka goes on my defense budget. I was wearing a new navy-blue Gore-Tex Maine warden's parka, $I79.95 from L.L. Bean and worth it, especially in the gusts that slapped me as I made my way through the weeds from the Bronco to the closest shack. In front of the shack was an old Ford sedan, lime green when it left Detroit, now pitted and spotted brown like a child's stuffed dog about to lose its innards. Maine snow falls as white as snow anywhere else, maybe whiter, but it must corrode metal and flesh. The guy who answered my knock on the sagging door had taken a blizzard in the face.

  "Hi," I said. "My name is Holly Winter. I'm Buck Winter's daughter. I'm looking for Roy or Bud."

  Something told me that Roy and Bud didn't subscribe to Dog's Life. This scene looked more like Dog's Death.

  "Roy Rogers," he said, holding out a hand that was overdue for a manicure. He was somewhere between thirty and eighty, and he wore some tan pieces of cloth that had once, I thought, been an army uniform. His brown-speckled face crinkled all over. His teeth matched his face.

  "I shook hands with Roy Rogers when I was seven years old," I said. That's true. I put a glove on that hand and refused to take it off for a week. "I didn't know I'd have a second chance."

  I shook hands with this Roy Rogers, and he opened the door wide to let me in. An old wood stove was burning. It wasn't the kind you buy down the street from my house at Cambridge Alternative Power. Roy had no alternative. There were two wooden chairs with peeling yellow paint. Everything else in the room was covered with cans of food, ragged blankets, old newspapers, iron frying pans, and bags and bags and bags of dog food. Roy sat on one of the chairs, and I got the place of honor, one end of a blanket-covered cot.

  "So, the wolf man's daughter," he said.

  I'd heard that about as many times as he'd been asked where Trigger was.

  "That's right," I said. "He sent me here. Said that you and your brother take in a lot of dogs."

  "A few," he said.

  He gave me some instant coffee and, without mentioning any malamutes, told me about thirty or forty of the dogs, and then he took me out to see the ones he had then. The pens were a little crowded, but I could see that they'd been shoveled and swept recently, and only a few dogs had their ribs showing. One, I would swear, was a purebred Dalmatian. Roy talked the whole time. The image of the taciturn Yankee is something invented in New York City or Hollywood. The word aye-yuh is not.

  "You ever get any Alaskan malamutes?" I asked when we'd resettled ourselves in the house.

  "That crazy woman send you?" The crinkles reappeared.

  "Who?"

  "Lady drove me nearly crazy. A year ago it was, more. After an Al-ass-can mah-lah-mute." Margaret is not hard to imitate. "Called, then she showed up, but the dog was dead by then."

  "A big, tall woman? Hair swirled up?"

  "Aye-yuh."

  As Roy told it, it was a long story. The dog had been hit by a car. Maine is, as the license plates say, Vacationland. People take their pets on vacation, and when the month's up, the pets that aren't standing by the door of the family station wagon get left on what the kids are told is a permanent vacation. "Fluffy had such a nice time that he didn't want to go home," Mommy and Daddy say. Sometimes Fluffy really has taken off for the woods. Sometimes Rover just pays a high price for not coming when he's called. For whatever reasons, when the tourists leave, too many Fluffys and Rovers stay. The lucky Rovers end up with Roy and Bud, who, it turns out, don't gas or shoot or drown them. Roy and Bud saw enough of that in Vietnam. They feed all the dogs and find homes for as many as they can.

  As I listened to Roy, I felt ashamed of having thought the place wasn't classy enough for Rowdy. Instead of paint, shingles, and fence posts, these guys bought dog food. It may sound nuts, but I'll tell you anyway. I started to think that those rust spots on Roy's face were God's fingerprints.

  "So she never actually the dog," I said.

  "Dog was already dead. Gone. Lived two days and died. God almighty, did she get after me." He filled his cheeks with air and emptied them. "Did it have a white spot on its back? It did. How many dogs you see out there with white spots?" Actually, the dog in my Bronco had a hint of one, an almost imperceptible withers spot, a patch of white on the withers, the highest part of a dog's back, above the forelegs. "And did it have a tattoo on its leg? We always check for a tattoo, you know. Ears and belly. I says to Bud, 'That big husky have anything on its leg?' 'Sure,' he says. 'Seen it myself.'"

  "And? Did it?"

  His face rolled itself up.

  "You had a lot of dogs then," I said, smiling. "Do you really remember that one?"

  His face unrolled. I hadn't meant to insult him.

  "Pretty dog," he said. "Like a little wolf. A pretty blue-eyed wolf."

  "You don't see that too often," I said. "A blue-eyed dog."

  "Well, I seen it then," he said.

  "Did the woman ask you about that? About the dog's eyes?"

  "Asked me about the white mark. The tattoo."

  "Did you tell her? About the eyes?"

  "You can't tell that one nothing," he said.

  He made me think of that corny Cambridge joke. You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can't tell him much.

  As I drove back out toward Union, then past the fairgrounds, I thought about Margaret and the dog. Roy's woman had clearly been Margaret. It would have been just like her not to ask about the dog's eyes. "Alaskan malamute," she would have repeated, as if anyone would know exactly what that meant. She would have condescended and belittled, and she would have asked about the hint of a withers spot and the tattoo. Not all malamutes have a withers spot, and few have any tattoo at all. It would have been just like her not to bother asking about something that all malamutes share: brown eyes.

  It made sense. King—or Rowdy—took off in Blue Hill. Someone's Siberian was hit by a car and taken in by Roy and Bud in Union. The Siberian died before Margaret saw him, and she almost certainly believed that King had died. King, meanwhile, made his way from Maine to Massachusetts. Malamutes aren't really sled dogs, but sledge dogs, bred to pull heavy loads for long distances. A dog like that with nothing to haul strolls effortlessly from Blue Hill, Maine, to Pepperell, Massachusetts. Why had he gone south? By chance? Maybe not. At that time of year
, most of the traffic would have been from summer people heading south. One of the things I'd noticed about Rowdy was his tendency to follow anyone or anything moving fast. A malamute, like a wolf, wants to go where the rest of the pack is going, and at that time of year, the human pack was going south. He reached Pepperell, and while he was fixing a chicken dinner, a kindly guy interrupted him. The Siberian Rescue League picked him up and delivered him to Bobbi. She and Ronni gave him a shower and fed him well, and Bobbi didn't have to work too hard to talk Dr. Stanton into taking him. His instincts had taken him south, luck had got him to Bobbi, and once she had him, Dr. Stanton's love for dogs had taken him within half a mile of Margaret's house. It was a strange coincidence, but nothing more.

  We didn't get to Cambridge until ten that night. Rowdy hadn't had much exercise for the past few days. Neither had I. In the morning, I put on my running shoes, and we set out down Concord Avenue toward Fresh Pond. November is too late for Indian summer and too early for a January thaw. November doesn't have enough warm days strung together for anyone to have taken the trouble to name them. But it has a few, and this was one. In the bus shelter by the playground sat Hal Pace, eyes closed, not waiting for a bus. Just waiting. On the sidewalk in front of the armory, Gerry Pitts was raking up leaves, ice-cream wrappers, and discarded homework papers and depositing the debris in green plastic lawn-and-leaf bags. We said hello to each other. He was in his shirtsleeves. On his right forearm was a four-inch tattoo of a rococo anchor.

  12

  Gerry and that anchor on his arm, the Navy, Margaret's dead brother, Margaret herself, Antarctica, Valium, Rowdy and his papers—I did a lot of thinking on that run. I decided I might be getting paranoid about the Navy and that I needed a healthy dose of reality. I also realized that if there was one person who should have recognized Dr. Stanton's Rowdy as Margaret's King, tattoo or no tattoo, it was Janet Switzer, his breeder. I had to meet her.