Black Ribbon

by Susan Conant

  “That’s a dangerous assumption!” Phyllis warned me. “We absolutely must not underestimate the strength of antidog sentiment anywhere in this country!” Still diligently brushing Nigel, she added, “Take what’s just happened here. Now, on the surface, it certainly does appear to be a terrible accident, plain and simple, and nihil nisi bonum and so forth, but an accident that reasonable judgment and basic safety precautions could have prevented. But if the police feel otherwise … We’ll see, I suppose. If that’s the case, I can’t help wondering.…”

  The idea felt totally loopy. I just couldn’t see Rangeley as a hotbed of antidog activists, one or more of whom had snuck into camp and somehow caused the A-frame to crash down on Eva Spitteler. As it turned out, though, I’d initially misunderstood Phyllis. What she had in mind wasn’t an unnamed member of some hypothetical antidog conspiracy. The person she raised questions about was Everett Dow, who, I learned, had a reason to be hypersensitive about the whole subject of dogs. Furthermore, as Phyllis informed me, Everett had built the A-frame.

  “Well, you see,” Phyllis explained, “Maxine has taken him up as a sort of pet project of hers. She’s known him since I don’t know when. His father was the caretaker of her parents’ cottage. And then a couple of years ago, his wife—this one’s wife, not the father’s—was very, very ill—she had ovarian cancer, young woman, too.… Well, so, on some sort of misguided impulse … What happened was that he was in Augusta or Bangor or someplace, and he was walking past a pet shop, and on one of those horrible impulses that get people in so much trouble, he wandered in and bought a little Yorkie puppy. A present, you see—therapy for his wife’s morale. She was bedridden by then, you see. And it worked! For a day or two. I gather that she took one look, and she fell madly in love with the little dog, kept it with her … Well, you can imagine. And then after only a few days, the vomiting and the diarrhea started.”

  “Parvo,” I said. Parvovirus.

  Phyllis nodded. “And at first, they just thought, well, an upset stomach, whatever. But it finally dawned on them that something was very, very wrong, and he got the dog to the vet, and they went through what sounds like a heart-wrenching experience. The puppy’d begin to rally, then the whole thing would start up all over again. But in the end, the puppy didn’t pull through.”

  “The poor people!”

  “Wait! And a week later, the wife died. She’d been very, very ill—but this terrible experience probably did hasten her death. We know what it takes out of you to lose a dog! At any rate, at that point, the poor man fell completely to pieces. If it hadn’t been for Maxine …”

  I found it hard to imagine what anyone could have done to help. “What did Maxine …?”

  Phyllis’s voice became light and brittle. “Well, this Everett started drinking quite heavily.”

  I hadn’t seen Don Abbott take a drink in the daytime, but evenings were another matter.

  Skipping quickly on, Phyllis added, “You can hardly blame him, after what he’d been through, but there you have it. And then he got himself fired from his job. And as if that wasn’t enough, he got drunk one night and drove all the way to this pet shop, wherever it was, and started throwing bricks through the window! Not that they didn’t deserve it for selling him that sick puppy, but someone saw him, and he got arrested. And that’s when Maxine came in like a guardian angel. She got him a lawyer, and she got him into counseling, and she really grabbed him by the bootstraps and hauled him back on his feet!”

  I made the obvious comment: “That was very kind of Maxine.”

  “It was also very ingenious,” Phyllis said. “Who else would’ve thought about getting him hooked up with the agility people? She got him some other work, too, handyman things here and there, work here at the resort, but, you see, he’d been building things his entire life! Docks, picnic tables, benches, all sorts of things like that! And what Maxine realized was that this man could make A-frames and dogwalks and so forth, which really aren’t all that different, at very, very competitive prices.”

  “And Maxine knew the people who’d want them.”

  “Precisely.”

  “But,” I said, “it doesn’t … It doesn’t exactly sound as if Everett has a reason to hate dog people, does it? He could hardly hate Maxine, could he? And agility? If anything, you’d think he’d be all for it.”

  “Yes, of course,” Phyllis conceded. “Even so, it’s something to think about, isn’t it? And you do remember what the dogs thought of him, don’t you?” She stroked Nigel’s head pensively. “They rose against him. They were obviously trying to tell us something. But perhaps it’ll all turn out to be just what it seems. What a terrible, terrible shame.” She shook her head.

  “I wish I’d been kinder to Eva,” I confessed. “All I can think of now is how desperately unhappy—”

  “—how unhappy she made everyone in her vicinity!” Striding up from the direction of the main lodge, Don Abbott finished my sentence for me.

  “Donald, really!” Phyllis protested.

  Conflict interests Rowdy. In fact, he’s a connoisseur. Within seconds, he was on his feet. Although Phyllis was the last one who’d spoken, Rowdy stared at Don, who said, “The damned shame of it is what this is going to do to Maxine.” Lowering his voice, he added, “The truth is, this is nothing short of disaster for her. The economic consequences of this are going to be something even Maxine just can’t get herself out of.” Eyeing both Phyllis and me, he said sourly, “But that’s going to be the last thing to cross the feminine mind.”

  The blood rose to my face. I live in Cambridge; I’m spoiled. Cambridge is a place where an African-American Jewish lesbian octogenarian encounters no discrimination at all—provided, of course, that she speaks in an educated voice and unfailingly remembers to renew her subscription to The New York Review of Books. You think I’m joking? I’m serious. I love Cambridge. It’s a place where we try hard not to go around making the blood rise to other people’s faces. The surprise I felt was a great luxury.

  Jabbing a well-manicured hand in the direction of the lodge, Don said, “There’s a hullabaloo up there about some pins.”

  “Pins?” I asked. “Oh, hinge pins.” The feminine mind at work. A man, of course, would immediately have thought of sewing pins. “They secure the hinges,” I told Don. “They’re sort of thick, heavy pins that go through the hinges.” He still looked bewildered. “At the top of the A-frame.”

  “Well, these agility women are all agitated about it,” Don said. “They got taken out of there for some reason or other, and there’s some question about where they found these pins—whether they would’ve slipped out when this thing collapsed on her.”

  “Or?” I asked.

  “Well, what it boils down to,” Don said, “is basically that. Did they fall out? Or—”

  “Or,” I said, “were they pushed?”

  AFTER EVA SPITTELER’S DEATH, my sense of time became a luckless accordion squeezed and stretched by the protesting hands of some phantom child whose parents believed he had talent and who was determined to prove otherwise. The same grubby little fists that stretched minutes into empty hours would suddenly slam together, wrenching discordant seconds out of lengthy intervals.

  I assume that the grooming session, my therapy hour, lasted the usual length: fifty minutes. By lunchtime I longed for the resumption of regularly scheduled activities, which, by Maxine’s decree, had been canceled for the morning “out of respect for Eva” and would resume in the afternoon—here I again quote—“because Eva would have wanted it that way.” Hypocrisy? Not exactly. Respect for Eva hadn’t taken a posthumous upward zoom; what drew genuine awe was death itself. As for Eva’s presumed wishes, it seemed to me that if she’d been in a position to survey the situation, her primary concern would have been her own demise; all else would have felt trivial.

  When lunchtime finally arrived, the dining room presented a depressing scene. The walls and ceilings that had previously absorbed sound now sent it b
ouncing and jingling throughout the room so that everyone seemed to be either whispering or screaming. When Ginny bustled past me, her face grim, I pondered the husbands and, for the first time, took the matter seriously. Cam, who’d been Ginny’s almost inseparable companion throughout camp, was nowhere in sight. My old friends weren’t there, my new friends seemed like strangers, and the real strangers felt like people I didn’t want to know. Banded together in what sounded like law-school study groups, people with tense shoulders and low voices mumbled about contracts, refunds, and waivers of liability. An independent student, I’d already consulted the camp contract, most of which consisted of waivers and releases so all-encompassing that in signing the document, we’d practically granted Maxine complete impunity to go around bludgeoning campers and dogs or to toss all of us in the middle of the lake. Absent from the formal contract was any mention of Maxine’s obligations. Having spent long hours grinding away at the University of American Motion Pictures and Television School of Legal Studies, I concluded that the combination of campers’ canceled checks and the written promises Maxine had made in the brochure and elsewhere probably added up to a contract. So if people packed up and departed, were they entitled to partial refunds? At a guess, no. If camp ended early? A moot point. No matter what, Maxine wouldn’t send people home, because canceling camp this year would, in effect, mean permanently abandoning the enterprise. If this year’s campers had paid mightily for a few days of camp followed by a fiasco and an early dismissal, who’d sign up for next year? Another moot point, perhaps. Alive, Eva had seemed like an especially crabby rotten apple. Equally rotten, however, was Maxine’s ability to run the camp. In saying so, Eva had been dead accurate.

  But the legalities were no concern of mine. I had no reason to sue Maxine; and having paid nothing, I clearly couldn’t ask for a refund. Furthermore, even if every other camper decided to go home, Bonnie might expect me to demonstrate loyalty to her old friend Maxine by sticking around for the entire week. And at the end? When I finally got back to Cambridge, I’d have to sit down and write about the nightmarish days alone with Maxine as if camp really had been dog heaven with no bad dreams. If everyone else really left? Actually, I had a plan. Broke and disheartened, in no condition to care for a dog, Maxine would go away, leaving me in charge of her peaceful and charming young mastiff, Cash, whom a miraculously transformed Rowdy would immediately accept as a valued member of our little pack; and with the lodge, cabins, and lake to ourselves, the dogs and I would have such a great time that I’d only have to inject a few fictional human campers to make my article the literal truth.

  Fantasy, yes. Reality: Yesterday morning, I’d sat at a table in this same dining room to watch swift dogs course after lures. If I sat at the same table today, I’d have a view across the field toward the parking lot, where an ominous-looking blue van had joined the cruiser. So, instead of filling a plate from the spread on the buffet table, I quickly assembled a sandwich, wrapped it in a napkin, left the lodge, wandered down to the dock in front of my cabin, and made my way past Heather and Sara. They were lying flat on the dock as if they’d intended to sunbathe, but had forgotten to undress first. Heather, lean and fit, now looked thin and pinched. The effect of the bright sun and the lake’s glare on Sara’s face reminded me of one of those wildly unflattering photographs of what people look like before cosmetic surgery. At the end of the dock, I removed my shoes and socks, sat down, soaked my feet in the lake, and ate food I couldn’t taste. Also, I eavesdropped. I’d previously heard Heather and Sara hold a few minor debates about matters related to agility, for instance, whether a dog was or wasn’t ready to try something new. Otherwise, they’d spoken with one voice, Sara’s soft and warm, Heather’s a little sharp, perhaps, but one voice nonetheless. Now, however, they were engaged in disjointed argument.

  Heather’s voice had lost its occasional edge to become steadily acerbic. “Look, Sara, face reality!” she demanded. “It was a booby trap, okay? Nobody goes out in the middle of the night to work a dog; you don’t, I don’t, and Eva Spitteler didn’t, either. What she was out there doing was trying to rig the A-frame so it’d collapse under the first dog—or the first big dog, anyway. She hated me, she was jealous of both of us, and she wanted to make us look bad.”

  “But nothing would have happened,” Sara insisted. “The fact is that the first thing we would’ve done would’ve been to check the obstacles. One of us would’ve found out! Okay, so maybe there’s a remote possibility that it might have collapsed on, or more likely under, one of us, if we hadn’t actually looked at the hinges. But there wasn’t a chance that a dog would’ve been hurt. Not a chance!” she finished breathlessly.

  “You’re missing the point. We know a dog wouldn’t’ve gotten hurt. But Eva didn’t know that! And what if we’d—”

  “We wouldn’t have. We always check.”

  “Sara, yesterday, after the Canine Good Citizen test, we started moving things, and it’s just remotely possible, you know, that this morning we would’ve said, ‘Well, the A-frame’s okay, because we just checked it yesterday afternoon.’ ”

  “You know what, Heather? I don’t know! All I really know is that those pins didn’t just jump out of the hinges! They didn’t slip out, fall out, drop out; they were in tight. How they ended up on the ground is one thing. But how one of them ended up under her … But if she was stupid enough to go under the A-frame and undo the chains, maybe she was stupid enough to—”

  Heather snapped, “Remove the pins from the hinges and then go under it? And then stand with all that weight over your head and undo the chains and try and move it? Nobody’s that stupid. But maybe …” Her voice trailed off.

  The two women fell silent. One of them sighed. In muted tones, they began to discuss their plans for next summer. Sara pointed out, correctly, I thought, that in agility, a reputation for unsafe equipment was a disaster. No matter how much people respected or liked the instructors, no one would take a chance with obstacles that might injure a dog.

  After that, I caught only the occasional stressed word: safety, reputation, liability. And again and again, competition.

  In the hope of finding the calm and solace that nature is reputed to offer, I studied the lake, but found nothing soothing. Two approaching Jet Skis buzzed like chain saws. From a tree at the edge of the lake, a belted kingfisher swooped out and dove at the water, its flight jerky, its rattling call dry and cruel. Making my way past Sara and Heather, I left the dock and went to my cabin, wherein lay nature’s true source of peace and comfort. What’s wrong with mountains, lakes, trees, kingfishers, and all those other supposedly restorative elements of the wilderness—or for that matter, of the cosmos—is that no matter how intensely you stare at them, admire them, venerate them—no matter how much you love them, they’ll never love you back. But a dog? A really good dog? It’s like the Miracle of the Draught of Fishes. You’re Simon, the fisherman, and you spend all day casting your net into the water without catching so much as a minnow. And then along comes Jesus and tells you that you’ve got to try again, and you do: You catch such a multitude that your net breaks. In other words, hanging around in nature’s vicinity is a waste of time until love and faith come along. And when they do, you get back more than you can handle: draughts of fishes, Alaskan malamutes.

  And that’s how I spent the next hour: handling Rowdy. Or trying. In obedience, almost all of us handle our dogs ourselves; it’s an amateur-dominated sport and none the worse for it, because, except among the top handlers, it’s as competitive or noncompetitive as you choose to make it. Conformation, however, is the hardball of the dog show game. That’s why I hire a professional handler to show Rowdy in breed. If the dog-eat-dog breed competition depended strictly on the merits of the animals, I’d be spared the expense; but as it is, Rowdy deserves a better breed handler than I’ll ever be.

  That Rowdy and I ended up in Eric Grimaldi’s breed handling class is thus testimony to my respect for the authority of AKC judges: Eric gave
me an order, and I obeyed. Eric didn’t phrase it as an order. What he said was that Maxine McGuire was the best of the best, and that if Maxine wanted him to do a breed handling class, he was happy to oblige. Like all other activities scheduled for the morning, breed handling had, of course, been canceled. For reasons unconnected to Eva’s death, however, the afternoon schedule contained numerous gaps. The carting workshop was off; according to rumor, Maxine had had some sort of financial dispute with the instructor. The people running the Temperament Testing had phoned to report that their van had broken down on the Maine Turnpike. The last-minute cancellations seemed to me to confirm Eva Spitteler’s analysis of Maxine’s deficiencies as camp director.

  “We can’t let Maxine down,” Eric told me. “What we all need to do is pitch in and try to salvage what we can. You’re not doing anyone any good hanging around here with a long face, are you?” I admitted that I wasn’t. “Come on!” he said. “I was counting on you to be a good sport, Holly. And you’ll like it. It’ll be fun.”

  The class took place in the same big field we’d used for lure coursing and obedience, but at the end near the main lodge, as distant as possible from the police van and the cruisers clustered near the little road that led to the agility area. Because of Eric’s determination to recruit participants and thus to create a semblance of normal camp activity, he ended up with about twenty people, five or ten more than he probably wanted. Although conformation is, by definition, open only to purebreds, a few campers showed up with what I think I’m now supposed to call random-bred dogs, mixes, crosses, and anybody’s guesses owned by people who wanted to find out what breed handling was, I suppose, or by people who just wanted something to do. Jacob, the long-coated Akita, couldn’t be shown in breed, but Michael brought him, anyway, for the socialization, I suppose. Maybe Joy and Craig brought Lucky for the same reason. I certainly hoped that they didn’t ask Eric’s opinion of the little dog’s merits. To support Eric, I think, Phyllis Abbott showed up with Nigel, who really was a show dog, as were quite a few of the others gathered near the two baby-gated rings that Everett Dow was setting up. Today, the dogs ignored the handyman. At the last minute, Cam and Ginny turned up, Cam with Nicky, and Ginny, to my amazement, with a highly subdued Bingo.