by Susan Conant
“We didn’t go there,” Zara said. “We went to Holly and Steve’s.”
“Someone needs to make sure he’s all right,” Vicky said. “I will.”
Everyone told Vicky that Uncle Oscar would be fine. We pointed out that she hadn’t finished her meal and that her food would get cold. She refused to listen. Monty, who had a key to the front door, gave it to her. She must have left shortly before eight thirty. When the restaurant’s weather-stripped door closed behind her, I briefly mistook the sighing sound for a collective expression of relief. I almost hoped that she’d find Uncle Oscar in some trivial but time-consuming crisis that would detain her throughout the rest of our dinner.
For a moment, everyone savored the silence. Then all of us talked at once. The Nikon evidently forgotten, Zara satisfied MaryJo’s curiosity about smartphones by showing her photos and demonstrating how location apps worked. Steve and Monty talked about fishing. The topic somehow led Monty to remark that my father, Buck, held solid views on the Second Amendment and was a man who knew his Bible. It’s true that Buck believes in guns, but when he quotes the Bible, it’s invariably in some self-serving way connected to dogs. For instance, Ecclesiastes justified every breeding that Buck thought was a good idea and my mother didn’t: “To every thing there is a season.”
But the content of our dinner-table talk didn’t matter; the conviviality did. It was so delightful to have Vicky gone that no one wondered aloud about what she was doing or whether she was all right. When she finally showed up looking flustered and red in the face, she belatedly began to eat her dinner and had the nerve to complain that her food was cold. Even so, she dragged out the simple business of chewing and swallowing lobster ravioli for a good twenty minutes.
Finally, at five or ten minutes after nine o’clock, we began to order dessert. Monty said that if no one minded, he’d skip it and head on home; he’d had a long day and was worn out. When Vicky had returned the front-door key that she’d borrowed from him, he thanked Rita and Quinn and left. Although my chocolate hazelnut tart was delicious, I could hardly wait to have the dinner end, as it did at sometime after nine thirty. We said our goodnights on the sidewalk outside Vertex. Rita, Quinn, Vicky, and MaryJo went in one direction, Steve and I in another. Zara wanted to take Izzy for a little walk but said that she’d join us soon.
“We’ll be outdoors,” I said. “Just knock on the gate.”
When Steve and I got home, we let the dogs loose in the yard and settled ourselves right next to each other at the picnic table with wine glasses and a bottle of sauvignon blanc. Since I know nothing about wine, I choose on the basis of low price, a canine theme, a funny name, or a cute label. We’d recently had wines called Tasty Bitch, Sweet Bitch, Bitch Bubbly, and Lab. Tonight’s was Dog Point. The label displayed a tree, chosen, I guess, as an attractive alternative to a fire hydrant.
I leaned against Steve, clinked my glass against his, and said, “In dogs we trust.” I took a sip. “I wish to God that they’d just gone to city hall and mailed announcements to the family.”
“The Youngmans are all right. Oscar. Zara. It’s that woman. What’s she doing here so far ahead of time? It’s five days until the wedding.”
“She invited herself. Rita couldn’t stop her. Poor Zara! It’s so stereotyped to blame the mother. I feel guilty. Feminist guilt. Post-feminist guilt. It’s ridiculous, but I feel angry at feminism. Wasn’t feminism supposed to do something about women like that? Liberate them. Transform them.”
“Poison them.”
I laughed. “Seriously, I’m struggling. You know, one of Rita’s clinical specialties is dealing with unlikeable patients, people who have no friends, people whose own families can’t stand them. What Rita says is that she somehow always finds something about those people that she genuinely can like. ‘They all have their stories, too.’ That’s what she says. I’m trying to remember that, and—” I broke off. Zara could arrive any second. I didn’t want her to overhear.
“Steve, we are so lucky. Your uncles who came for our wedding are sweethearts, and Gabrielle is the best stepmother on earth, and when we got married, my father wasn’t even too bad, at least for him. Oh, but, Steve, damn it! Never mind the relatives. Why can’t Rita stay here and have the baby by herself? She’s more than capable of supporting a child, and he’s—”
“He’s not such a bad guy. And Rita wants to get married.”
“But to him?”
As if issuing a mournful reply, Rowdy planted his rear end of the ground, raised his head to the sky, and let forth a prolonged, melodious howl. The beautiful boy has a voice to match his looks. If grand opera offered parts suitable for Alaskan malamutes, he’d be on the stage at the Met. Sammy, Rowdy’s son, looks remarkably like his sire and sounds like him, too, but it’s always Rowdy who conducts the performance and howls the lead, and Sammy who takes his cue from Rowdy, as he did now. The inspiration for the malamute musicale was, as it often is, the wail of sirens. Our house is on the corner of a quiet side street, Appleton, and a busy thoroughfare, Concord Avenue. Noisy vehicles are so common that I notice them only when the malamutes answer back. Once I’d silenced Rowdy and Sammy, however, I could hear that the vehicular howling was coming from Appleton Street, and I could also hear frantic knocking on our gate and Zara’s voice hollering, “Steve! Holly! Open the gate! Open the gate!”
Before I had a chance to comply, one of Zara’s phones rang. She answered almost immediately and, seconds later, called out, “It’s Rita. Their house has been robbed. Meet me there! Willie’s gone.”
chapter eight
As soon as we’d put the dogs in the house, we hurried to Rita and Quinn’s. One cruiser was parked on the street. Another blocked the driveway. If the house had belonged to strangers, I’d have assumed that they were throwing a big party and that the police were there to control traffic and crowds. Every indoor and outdoor light was on. The gate at the end of the driveway stood open, and from the yard came the sound of voices.
When Rita caught sight of us, she ran up, hugged both of us, and said, “Willie’s not here. We’ve been robbed, but I don’t care. There’s blood all over. Why does Kevin have to be away now?”
Kevin Dennehy lives with his mother in the house next to mine of Appleton Street. A Cambridge police lieutenant, Kevin has a proprietorial and protective attitude toward the entire city and especially to this neighborhood. As Rita knew, he was away now because he and his girlfriend were taking advantage of low summer rates to spend a week in Bermuda.
Sounding uncharacteristically childish, Rita added, “Kevin never goes anywhere. Why did he have to pick this week? These people won’t let us back inside. They even dragged Uncle Oscar out of bed.”
Glancing behind Rita, I saw Uncle Oscar stretched out on one of the teak recliners. MaryJo, Monty, and Vicky were seated in wrought-iron chairs. Zara, with Izzy at her side, was peering in through the window to the playroom.
Quinn moved quietly to Rita’s side. “The police didn’t do that, Rita,” he said gently. “Aunt Vicky did. But the reason we’re all out here is that they want to do a thorough search. That’s reasonable. Rita, for all we know, Willie’s in the house somewhere. Maybe they’ll find him.”
“Or his body!” Rita started sobbing. “I want Willie! I want my dog back!”
Quinn, I have to admit, was wonderful. “I do, too, love. We’ll find him. The wedding presents don’t matter. All that matters is Willie. We’ll find him.”
“For God’s sake, Rita, do you have to have hysterics about a dog?” The speaker—the shrieker—was Vicky. “Uncle Oscar could’ve been murdered in his bed.”
“Vicky, hold your tongue,” Oscar said.
“You could’ve been! It’s no joke.”
When I joined Zara and Izzy, Zara turned away from the window.
“What exactly happened?” I asked softly.
“The burglar broke the window on the far side of the house and got in that way.”
“Good choice. The
re’s nothing there, really but the neighbors’ fence. No gate to the yard. No one ever goes there. What’s this about blood?”
I peered through the window. A uniformed officer stood in the entrance to the kitchen, presumably to prevent her fellow officers from entering and contaminating the scene. Quinn’s boxes of books were still stacked in one corner, and the laptop was still on the table, but almost everything else had been disarranged. The appliances and other large presents had been moved, I thought, and the boxes that had held Quinn’s drug samples had been knocked off the table. The sets of fireplace implements were no longer upright. A brass poker lay on the tile floor, which was splotched with dark liquid. Willie’s crate held nothing except the crate pad.
“You can see the blood there, near the poker,” Zara said. “And on it. There’s more in the kitchen. The burglar seems to have left through the kitchen door, the door to the driveway. What’s missing is mostly small stuff, like the spoons that were on the table. Flatware. Serving pieces. The big things, like the boxes of crystal and china, are still here. And the drug samples are gone. Obviously.”
MaryJo joined us and said, to my surprise, “Monty and I think that someone cased the joint. Isn’t that what it’s called? It is in old movies. We think that some crook saw all the wedding presents being delivered and decided to help himself.”
“You’re probably right,” Zara told her.
Looking away from Zara and MaryJo, I saw Rita and Quinn near the gate, where they were conferring with two men in suits. Quinn continued talking to them, but Rita came to me and said, “Detectives. Willie’s not in the house. The crime-scene people are here. We’re allowed to go inside, but just to the living room and the little bathroom.”
I was careful to say nothing about the poker and the blood. “The burglar could just have let Willie loose. He could be right here in the neighborhood. I’m going to look for him. Steve will, too.”
“I left his leash on top of his crate,” Rita said. “It’s gone.”
“We’ll look for him anyway.”
Steve and I made a quick trip home for flashlights and, in my case, Rowdy. To maximize the area we covered, Steve and I had agreed to divide the task of searching for Willie, and I had no intention of wandering around Cambridge alone at night. Besides, Rowdy was more likely to detect Willie’s presence than I was. By comparison with dogs, human beings are hard of hearing and have no sense of smell. Rowdy knew Willie. My main task, I told myself, was to read my dog.
Rowdy and I began our search at home, which had been Willie’s home until recently and might be the home to which he’d return. Calling Willie’s name, I made my way around the perimeter of our property and checked under the cars in the driveway.
“Damn Rita for not teaching Willie a reliable recall,” I told Rowdy as we turned onto Concord Avenue. Steve and I had agreed that he’d check Huron Avenue and the streets north of Appleton and that I’d cover Concord Avenue and the area immediately to our south. “Willie, come! Willie, here!” I have a dog trainer’s voice, which is to say, a voice that conveys the genuine expectation of attention and cooperation. The key word is genuine. “Willie, come!”
Even to my own ears, my calls sounded phony. I didn’t expect Willie to come running me; I expected to find his body lying in the street. I was tempted to put my hands on Rowdy, to cling to him, but I wanted his attention on his surroundings and not on me. We crossed Concord, made our way to the intersection with Huron, crossed the street again, walked by Imperial Cleaners and the Hi-Rise bakery, and turned onto Royal Avenue, which runs parallel to our block of Appleton. All the while, Rowdy strutted steadily along, pausing in his usual fashion to sniff tires and to lift his leg on utility poles. Although I know the handsome boy so well that I can practically see him in the dark, I played the flashlight on him. He neither sped up nor slowed down. His ears remained erect. His plumy white tail sailed over his back. “Not a thing, huh?” I said to him. “Nothing at all.” We were then about halfway down Royal, and as I spoke to Rowdy, I heard the despair in my voice and realized that our search for Willie was a waste of time except to the extent that it boosted Rita’s morale. Willie could be lying wounded or dead in any of the dark yards we were passing.
I was pointing my flashlight under a parked car when my cell rang.
“Holly,” Steve said, “meet me at Rita’s. Willie’s been found.”
“Alive?”
“Yes. Some woman found him and called Rita.”
I waited for him to continue. He didn’t. “And?”
“He’s in Watertown.”
“What?”
“Near the Waltham line.”
“That’s, I don’t know, five miles from here? Is he all right?”
“The woman told Rita that he was timid, so that’s got her worried, but it sounds like he’s okay. I said that you and I would go get him. Rita wants me to take a look at him, and she’s supposed to stay here and talk to the police.”
“Willie’s not bleeding?”
“No.”
“Then whose blood is it? Whose blood is all over the floor?”
chapter nine
“My own little doggie-wog crossed the Rainbow Bridge on Memorial Day,” said Enid Garabedian, “so when this darling little Scottie dog showed up, I thought, Well, God has sent him to me, or maybe my very own Edgar Pooh has sent him to me, so after I gave the little Scottie dog a drinkie of water, I said a prayer, and you know what?” Enid’s face fell. There was a lot of it to fall: she was at least two hundred pounds overweight.
“What?” I asked.
“God said that the little Scottie dog was somebody else’s pet and that I had no business saying thanks for something that wasn’t a gift and wasn’t mine at all.”
God, I thought, had shown great common sense.
Steve and I were seated on chintz-covered chairs in the tchotchke-packed living room of Enid Garabedian’s house, a single-family ranch a few blocks from Pleasant Street in Watertown. Enid lived on the memorably named Pecker Drive, where I’d never been before, but I knew the area well. Just over the line into Waltham was a gigantic deep-discount big-box store where I periodically bargain-hunted for whole tenderloins, paper products sold by the multidozen, restaurant-sized jugs of olive oil, and near-lifetime supplies of everything from aspirin to Zyrtec. After stocking up on household goods, I always crossed back into Watertown to stop at Pignola’s, a sort of farm stand on steroids that offered hundreds, if not thousands, of varieties of familiar and exotic fruits and vegetables, domestic and imported cheeses, fresh and dry pasta, baked goods, houseplants and seedlings, and, since Watertown, Massachusetts is the American capital of Armenia, utterly delectable Armenian specialty foods. When the weather was cool enough to take dogs along, I then drove along Pleasant Street to Watertown Square, parked in the lot for the Charles River Reservation, and walked a dog or two along a section of the paved trail that begins at Boston Harbor and follows the Charles River for more than twenty miles.
Enid Garabedian probably shopped at Pignola’s, too. Steve and I had a hard time persuading her that we’d just eaten and couldn’t manage the hummus, baba ghanoush, Syrian bread, and melted kasseri that she generously offered. No baklava, either, thanks. Not even a taste? No, really. Thank you. Although Enid lived in walking distance of Pignola’s, she couldn’t possibly have gone there on foot, but as the cliché about obese women would have it, such a pretty face! She had springy white curls, too, and beautiful violet-blue eyes. Her caftan was blue, and she filled a blue armchair that was meant to be oversized but wasn’t. I liked her a lot.
Willie obviously did, too. The barking we’d heard when we’d rung Enid’s doorbell wasn’t up to Willie’s typically robust standard, but he’d felt at home enough to bark; and to my relief, he looked astonishingly well for a dog who’d evidently been dognapped and then lost and then found, all the while recovering from a hospital stay.
Once we’d introduced ourselves to Enid, Steve had immediately examined Willie
and found no cause for concern. In particular, Willie had no injuries that could account for the blood on Rita and Quinn’s floor. The normally sparkling Willie was, however, weak and subdued. He lay at Steve’s feet with his eyes on Enid.
“Thank you so much for calling,” I said. “Willie really is someone’s beloved dog. Aren’t you, Willie? His owner was frantic.”
“I knew when I saw his pretty little collar with the Scottie dogs on it and the tag with three phone numbers. And his poor little shaved legs. I said to myself, Somebody loves this sweet little boy. Somebody paid a big vet bill. Somebody bought him his pretty collar and bothered to put all those phone numbers on his tag. It just wouldn’t have been right to keep him.”
“I’m curious,” I said. “How did you happen to find Willie?”
Enid blinked. “Why, he just showed up on my doorstep. That’s why I thought he was a gift, you see. He was right at the door, like he’d been delivered by UPS.”
“He wasn’t wearing a leash?”
She shook her head.
Steve asked, “Has he had anything to eat? Have you fed him?”
“No. After my Edgar Pooh passed on, I gave all his little cans of dinner away. I didn’t want to have to keep seeing them. That’s his picture over there.”
Every surface in the room was crammed with framed photos, ceramic kittens, figurines of medieval ladies, heavily decorated china plates, and geegaws and knickknacks of all sorts. The table to which she directed our attention held a lamp encrusted with gilded ivy, a framed snapshot of two little blond boys at a beach, and a large professional photo of a Yorkshire terrier with a long silky coat. The dog had a violet bow on his head. I picked up the photo and examined it.
“He was beautiful,” I said. “Most pet owners trim their Yorkies. They don’t want to bother taking care of a coat like this.”
“I didn’t mind.”
Returning the picture to the table, I said, “What handsome little boys!”
