Black Ribbon

by Susan Conant

  Neither crime, I realized, was specifically forbidden by any of the rules, regulations, or guidelines. In that respect, murder and attempted murder were not alone. A dignified body, the American Kennel Club refused to compromise itself, its judges, and the fancy as a whole by acknowledging the existence of the unspeakable. The need for judicial sobriety, for example, went without saying. A few judges—very few—occasionally broke the unwritten rule. The two or three I’d been warned to avoid were conformation judges. Somewhere, sometime, an obedience judge must at least have sipped a little wine before entering the ring. But Phyllis Abbott? Don Abbott was a heavy drinker. Phyllis wasn’t. She didn’t abstain, either. Nothing about her suggested a woman on the wagon. Secret drinking would have worked, especially tipsiness in the ring: It would certainly have been a violation of an unwritten rule. Eva could somehow have found out. Don Abbott had his eye on the presidency of the AKC. His hope didn’t necessarily coincide with reality, of course. How many hopes do? He had the business background. And despite his obvious lack of interest in particular representatives of canis familiaris, Don was undoubtedly in dogs. He’d even written a book on getting started in the fancy. But married to a judge who entered the ring with alcohol on her breath? Damn! It would’ve done just fine. The American Kennel Club is possibly the single stuffiest, stodgiest, most conservative organization in the country. Especially on the grounds of an AKC show, its president’s wife would have to be like Caesar’s, above reproach.

  What the hell could Phyllis have done?

  Frustrated, I leafed through the guidelines for conformation judges and wished that Phyllis Abbott had become one. The guidelines were so tough! So specific, so clear, so rigid! And so rigidly enforced, too! Damn Phyllis! And damn the AKC for allowing obedience judges so much leeway, for leaving so much to their discretion and good taste. Without that freedom, as I well knew, the sport of obedience would lose its judges, almost all of whom worked for expenses, not fees, and who’d quit judging if judging meant abandoning all friendships in the world of dogs. Even so! The ban on travel: “Judges should not travel to or from shows or stay with anyone who is likely to be exhibiting or handling under them.” Conformation judges. The warning about social functions: “Judges should not accept invitations to social functions immediately before a show where the host or guests are likely to be exhibiting under them.” Conformation judges. But obedience judges? “A judge who has a shadow of doubt cast upon any of his decisions has caused his integrity, as well as the integrity of The American Kennel Club and of the Sport, to be compromised.”

  And I suddenly thought I knew, more or less, what Phyllis had done—almost nothing, really—and what Eva Spitteler had known. To firm up the guess, I needed a map of the area around the Passaic show site, a New Jersey map that would let me trace a route. The show site, Leah had told me, was in a place called Millington. I fished through my notes of our conversation. The Abbotts lived in a place called Chester, Cam and John R.B. White in Basking Ridge.

  “Rowdy, wake up! Good boy. Go for a walk?”

  I once had a dog named Rafe who loved to sleep. Day after day, year after year, Rafe slept through twenty-three out of every twenty-four hours. With only sixty noncomatose minutes a day in which to cram such life-sustaining activities as eating and drinking, Rafe was a challenge to train. After a while, I gave up. The only command I really needed, but needed frequently, was: “RAFE, WAKE UP!” Rafe was afraid of everything, especially consciousness. He obeyed reluctantly. I was very patient with Rafe. Therefore, Rowdy. Karma. With one hand locked on his leather lead and the other holding a flashlight, I made my way down the steps of the cabin. The Abbotts’ lights were out. So were everyone else’s.

  Although no one but me was looking, Rowdy lifted his leg on every tree we passed and, in the parking lot, had to be reminded that tires were off limits. The parking lot at the Passaic show was the final scene in the narrative I was constructing. At Passaic, Eva Spitteler had entered Bingo in Novice A under Judge Phyllis Abbott. Eva had been there; she’d said so. Bingo hadn’t qualified; if he’d earned a leg, Eva would definitely have bragged about it. Consequently, Eva, who’d always groused about everything, had been disgruntled. Later, Eva had watched Cam and Nicky in Phyllis’s Open B ring; she’d said so. Eva had probably seen Phyllis hand Cam the blue first-place ribbon. At camp, Eva had intruded on the personal time of instructors. It would have been just like her to hang around the show until she found the opportunity to interrogate a judge about her dog’s score. Dutiful obedience judge that she was, Phyllis would have been willing to discuss her scoring, but she’d have avoided participating in the kind of argument that Eva would have tried to start. To avoid creating even the appearance of a dispute, she’d have skillfully cut Eva off by denying her the opportunity to cause trouble. And if Phyllis had said she was busy, she’d have been telling the truth. She’d judged Novice A and Open B; and she’d undoubtedly had friends to see and social obligations to fulfill. Her husband had been there. Don had had politicking to do. He’d been seen with John R.B. White, a young Turk at the AKC, Cam’s husband. And when Don was done with politics? He and Phyllis would have gone home together, of course. But that was the point: Don Abbott was never really done with politics. I didn’t know how Phyllis Abbott had arrived at the show. But I was willing to bet that she’d gone home with her husband, Don, and that the two had traveled with John R.B. White. And with his wife, of course, with Cam, whose dog had just gone High in Trial out of Open B.

  The U.S. atlas of road maps turned out to be wedged under the front passenger seat of my car. I pulled it out, opened to the map of New Jersey, and in the bright light of the flashlight beam, found Millington, site of the Passaic show. Basking Ridge, where Cam and John R.B. lived, was right nearby, a little north and west. Northwest of Basking Ridge was Chester, where the Abbotts lived. So who had ridden home with whom? I wasn’t sure, but my best guess was that Don and Phyllis had gone with Cam and John R.B. White, mainly because of the four people, Cam had been the only one with a dog entered at Passaic. Cam and Nicky could have traveled with someone else, but I thought that she’d probably driven her big, beautifully organized van. To reach the Abbotts’, Cam and John R.B. would’ve had to go out of their way, of course, past Basking Ridge to Chester, then back home. But the details didn’t matter. The map answered my question: Leaving the Passaic site, the Whites and the Abbotts had to head in the same direction.

  An obedience judge leaving a trial with an exhibitor to whom she’d just given a good score? Hey, no big deal. Among other things, conformation judges give opinions, but in obedience, scores are earned, not just handed out; and if an obedience judge awards an unearned point, the vigilant, outraged spectators write to Front and Finish, to the judge, and to the AKC; and the judge gets a call from On High asking what went on. Judges’ decisions are final, and the AKC really supports judges. Even so, the judge in the obedience ring knows that she’s under close scrutiny, and she scores accordingly. Consequently, riding home with someone who’d earned a good score in her ring was a situation that an obedience judge would prefer to avoid, certainly not a situation that an obedience judge would like to see bruited about, but in almost all circumstances, it was no big deal.

  Almost all. There is at least one exception. Obedience fanatic, are you? If not, just take the following for what it was, a sentence spoken to me in a dream that night, a dream in which Rowdy and Kimi were dashing wildly around in a grassy field. But if you think you know your obedience, here’s a challenge. That’s the first hint. The second is what the voice said to me in the dream, a simple piece of advice, a broad hint. Here it is: “Tie your dogs so they don’t run off.”

  I repeat. A challenge: “Tie your dogs so they don’t run off.” And therein lies the exception.

  WHEN THE SUN ROSE on Wednesday morning, I knew almost everything and could prove absolutely nothing. Eva had followed Phyllis to the parking lot at the Passaic show and watched her drive off with Cam White. Eva had kn
own why the ordinarily innocuous act of riding with Cam constituted a serious indiscretion, but she hadn’t known just how serious. Phyllis’s shaky marriage, her husband’s ambitions, and her sense of who she was depended on her position as a respected AKC obedience judge. And Eva’s ambitions for Bingo had been like Don Abbott’s for himself: high and intense. Realistic? Realistically, were Rowdy and I ready to go up against Tundra and Anna Morelli at the national specialty? Realistically, was Rowdy prepared to limit his performance in the ring to the execution of the specified exercises and to delete from his repertoire such embellishments as the Drop on Back and Wiggle Feet, the Zoom out of Ring, the Slam into Handler, and that climactic crowd-pleaser, the infamous Kiss the Judge? Let’s get it straight: We’re talking dogs and hopes. Reality has nothing to do with it. At the forthcoming Long Trail Kennel Club trial in Vermont, Eva Spitteler had been expecting Bingo to earn every point. In threatening Judge Phyllis Abbott, Eva had wanted only to make sure that Bingo got the score he deserved.

  I’d slept restlessly. To protect the resort’s plush, posh red velour blankets from Rowdy’s fast-falling fur, I’d covered the bed with the sheet I’d brought from home. I wanted him next to me—and loose, too, not locked in a crate he’d have had to destroy if I needed protection. I got up three or four times during the night to go to the bathroom, to brush my teeth, to stare out at the lake. When the first light appeared, I gave up on sleep. I took a wake-up shower, got dressed, and fed Rowdy. A little later in the day, when I’d had some coffee, while I packed up the car, I’d be able to face Phyllis Abbott. I’d be able to lie to her, bluff, apologize for my silly misunderstanding. She wouldn’t believe me; she wouldn’t need to. Maybe she’d accept my groveling for what it would be: the assurance that I intended to do nothing. Maybe I’d drive the short distance to Bethel, Maine, to visit my grandmother. Maybe I’d go directly back to Cambridge. I’d make excuses to my editor and write whatever she wanted to see about Maxine McGuire’s dog heaven. But it’s hard to think creatively or to lie credibly before breakfast. I hesitated at the door and opened it only to prevent Rowdy from scarring it with impatient paws.

  The lake was as flat as it had been the night before, but brilliant, a glass that reflected the clear sky, the morning light, and the pines along the shore. In the shallow water near the dock, fish jumped. Like droplets from a miniature cloudburst, tiny circles appeared on the surface. Straight out from the dock, a big fish jumped, a predator, maybe, in search of minnows. A door slammed shut. I leaped like one of the fish and jerked my head toward the Abbotts’ side of the deck. Their door was closed, their blinds drawn.

  A man whistled softly and called, “Elsa! Elsa!”

  Rowdy caught sight of the Chesapeake before I did and, finding me slow to fly after her, hit the end of his leather lead and bounded down the stairs dragging me after him.

  “Easy!” I told him. “Easy!” Serious obedience people don’t believe in wasting all the work we’ve spent training our dogs on the inconsequential situations presented by real life. We reserve commands like “Heel,” “Down,” and “Come” for the context in which the dog’s behavior actually matters: competition. But train your dog, anyway! When I’m bouncing down a flight of steps behind Rowdy, at least it’s by choice. “Easy!”

  Flashing his eyes in Elsa’s direction in the futile hope that the sight of a macho male malamute anointing a tree would check her urge to hit the water, Rowdy paused at a pine and lifted his leg so high that he almost lost his balance.

  “Dream on,” I told him.

  As Rowdy was lowering his leg, a bleary-eyed Eric appeared and greeted me. He wore tan swimming trunks and a souvenir sweatshirt from last year’s Chesapeake Bay Retriever National Specialty, and carried Elsa’s blue-and-white rubber toy. Pausing momentarily, Elsa turned her head, caught Eric’s eye, and threw him a hopeful glance of defiance, as if all she needed to complete her joy was his disapproval. He laughed and said, “Elsa always likes to think she’s getting away with something, even when she isn’t.” Beaming at Elsa, he held up the toy and clambered down the slope toward the dock. Rowdy and I followed. Another fish jumped, and without waiting for Eric to toss her toy, Elsa tore down the length of the dock, hit the lake, and vanished beneath the surface in apparent pursuit.

  “Has she ever actually caught a fish?” I asked. I was eager to believe Elsa capable of almost everything. It’s a view shared by all admirers of the Chesapeake, every sensible person who has ever known one.

  Eric shook his head. “No, but she’ll go under after rocks. If she’s in a cooperative mood, she’ll go after one for me, retrieve the one I throw.”

  As I was trying to imagine Elsa in a cooperative mood, her head bobbed up and disappeared. Rowdy stirred and made a high-pitched noise of impatience or, perhaps, of apprehension.

  “How deep does she go?” I asked.

  With a modest shrug, Eric said, “Well, not like a Portuguese Water Dog. I don’t know, most of the time, not more than five or six feet. But a while ago, she … uh, I was visiting some people who had a pool, and I tried keeping her out, but she went down to the bottom of pool, at the deep end, and that must’ve been ten or twelve feet. They had her retrieving things from there. She knew she had a crowd, and she was showing off. Most of the time, it’s not that deep. You can usually see the tip of her tail sticking out.”

  When I’d last seen Elsa’s head, she’d been close to the area where Phyllis had attacked me, in what I guessed was seven or eight feet of water, certainly at a depth well over my head. “Not—” I started to say.

  “What the …?”

  Elsa had surfaced with a shiny object in her mouth and was swimming toward the dock. What the morning sun had caught, what Elsa may even have seen as a sluggish perch or a languid trout, was a metal object that it took me a second to identify. At first, I wasn’t sure, but as Elsa approached the dock, I moved out ahead of Rowdy, went striding down the wooden boards, came to a halt at the end, and got a good look. Clamped in Elsa’s mouth was a piece of an agility obstacle, one of the smallest, heaviest parts of any obstacle: one of the iron legs of the pause table. Having glimpsed an interesting object underwater, Elsa had done what Chesapeakes do: She’d retrieved it. And what Elsa had retrieved was Phyllis Abbott’s backup plan for me, the one she’d dropped when I’d fallen for the drowning-swimmer ruse.

  Simply curious, Eric asked, “What’s that you got there, Elsa?” He sounded pleased.

  In response, Elsa—being Elsa—veered around and swam in the opposite direction, toward the middle of the lake.

  “It’s …” I stammered. “It’s … Eric, it’s important! I know what she has, and it’s … Is there any way to get her to bring it in?”

  Eric just laughed. I felt exasperated. Every once in a while, despite Rowdy and Kimi, I revert to my old rigid belief that, damn it all, dogs ought to do what they’re told. I had no idea whether a night in the lake would have removed Phyllis’s fingerprints from the table leg. A phrase came to me from a TV commercial for some kind of household cleaner: greasy finger marks. But what did it mean? That all finger marks were greasy, therefore hard to remove? Or that the product worked even on tough, hard-to-remove marks—greasy ones? And what did TV know about fingerprints, anyway? But I thought there was a chance that the leg of the pause table held a trace of evidence, and I damn well wanted Elsa to bring in that dab of proof.

  Digging in my pockets for the bits of old dog treats they usually contain, I demanded, “Eric, will she work for food?”

  Eric smiled. “You’re welcome to try.”

  “Elsa, come!” I called cheerfully.

  She ignored me, of course. No longer swimming toward the opposite side of lake, the Chesapeake had changed direction and was moving parallel to the shore, but away from us.

  “Elsa!” I called in my best obedience voice, the one that expects to be obeyed.

  Taking pity on my naïveté, Eric began a real effort to summon her. “Elsa! Elsa, come on! Come on, let’s
go!”

  Suddenly inspired, I said, “Eric! Here, this’ll work. Or it’s worth a try.”

  “Elsa! Elsa, come!” he persisted.

  I ran back down the dock to the shore. “Eric, come on! This really is worth a try. All you have to do is …”

  Highly subject to contagious excitement and determined not to be left out, Rowdy was adding his voice and producing long strings of the typiest syllable in the extensive malamute vocabulary: “Woooooo! Woo-woo-woo!”

  My tone of expectation worked better on Eric than it had on Elsa. Looking puzzled, he joined me on the pebble beach. “Lie down!” I instructed him.

  “You’re joking,” he said, or I think that’s what he said. Rowdy was making a tremendous noise, and from the cabins and the woods, three or four dogs were answering his call.

  “Rowdy, be quiet! Eric, really, lie down! Lie down and wave your arms or something. You have to do something she’s not used to, something that’ll get her attention and get her a little worried. It’s worth a try.”

  Shaking his head and giving me a you-don’t-know-Elsa smile, Eric ran his eyes over the sharp rocks, moved back to the dock, and spread himself out on it.

  “Now call her!” I ordered. “Wave your arms around! Kick your feet!”

  And once Eric caught Elsa’s attention, the ploy did work. Awakened by the din we’d been making and curious to see what the fuss was about, campers began to appear, among them, Phyllis Abbott. Her soft-red hair looked freshly brushed and styled, but she wore nightclothes, a blue-and-white striped kimono over white pajamas with long legs, and a pair of fuzzy blue slippers.

  Elsa was really close now, only three or four yards from where I stood on the pebble beach at the water’s edge. “Good girl, Elsa!” I murmured. “Eric, can you get this from her?”

  I should have done what Phyllis Abbott did, I suppose: I should have waded in. Without even removing her slippers, Phyllis beat me to it. Through the clear water, I could see that the wet pajama bottoms were clinging to her legs. When she was in up to her knees, she bent over and almost whispered, “What a good girl Elsa is! What’s that you’ve got there, sweetie? Bring it to me! Good girl! Come on!” Phyllis stretched out a hand.