All Shots

by Susan Conant

  As Miss Blue and I began to move again, I glanced across the field and spotted a short woman in a bright yellow jacket who was walking a smooth fox terrier. Smooth. I should perhaps explain that in the parlance of purebred dogs, smooth describes the short coat of the Labrador retriever, the pointer, and lots of other breeds and mixes. The word is used mainly to differentiate between breeds or varieties characterized by distinctive coats. Lassie is a rough collie as opposed to a smooth collie. Nick and Nora’s engaging Asta in the old Thin Man movies is a wire fox terrier rather than a smooth fox terrier like this one. So, my eye went first to the charming dog, who was, I noted with relief, on leash. After that, I noticed the woman’s ever so slightly rolling, shuffling gait, which struck me as unusual in someone walking as quickly as she was. Belatedly, I recognized Mellie, who, of course, did dog walking.

  As I was on the verge of calling out to her, Miss Blue beat me to it by bursting into peals of woo-woo-woo, ah woo, ah woo-woo-woo-woo-woo. Simultaneously, Mellie astonished me by shouting in that hoarse voice of hers while breaking into a run and barreling straight toward me—or, as it turned out, toward Miss Blue.

  “Strike!” Mellie hollered. “Strike!”

  Miss Blue’s manners deserted her. She hit the end of her leash, and I went flying after her.

  My only part in the reunion, as it obviously was, consisted of my leading Mellie’s little client, the fox terrier, out of the way. In ecstasy, Miss Blue flung herself to the grass, rolled over, tucked in her paws, and eyed Mellie with the worshipful gaze that malamutes reserve for their objects of highest adoration, which is to say, anyone and everyone who has ever given them anything to eat. Mellie, for her part, got down on the damp ground, rubbed Miss Blue’s underbelly, stood up, clapped her hands softly together, and, having lured Miss Blue to her feet, took the dog’s big head gently in her hands and said, “I prayed to the Virgin every day for you. All the time, I lit candles. I was so…” Mellie choked up. Tears ran down her face.

  I’m ashamed to admit that one of my first feelings was anger. I’d been looking for a Siberian husky. That’s what I’d been told to look for, and I’d done exactly what I’d been asked to do. Why hadn’t anyone…? Then my anger turned inward. I should have known! All too clearly, I remembered Mellie’s response when she’d first seen Rowdy: she’d said that Strike looked like Rowdy. But different, she’d added. Of course she’d looked different! She was smaller than Rowdy, a female, one with a blue coat and eyes lighter than Rowdy’s near-black. So what? Over and over, I’d had my malamutes admired by people who said, “Beautiful huskies!” When Steve and I hiked with the dogs in Acadia National Park, we made a game of counting the number of times the malamutes were called huskies. But there’d been reasons for what now felt like my stupidity. In the American Kennel Club rankings, the Siberian husky was the twenty-fifth most popular breed, and the Alaskan malamute was the fifty-eighth; there were a lot more Siberians than there were malamutes. What’s more, Siberians were the Houdinis of purebred dogdom, and when they escaped, they ran like crazy, fast and far away. In contrast, the typical malamute who got out of a fenced yard went straight to the nearest door to the house. Typical? What did that mean? Incredible though it seemed to me, there existed picky-eater malamutes and malamutes with almost no interest in food. As to escapism, malamutes did get loose and did get lost, and I’d heard of malamutes who not only tunneled under fences but who climbed chain link. Damn it! Strike had gone under Mellie’s fence. She’d been seen heading for the back of Dr. Ho’s house. I should have guessed.

  I’d like to report that the moment I finally put one dog and one dog together to get one dog, everything else fell neatly into place. It did not. On the contrary, isolated fragments dropped in a jumble. Mellie’s lost husky. The photo of the blue malamute found among the murder victim’s belongings. The traces of dog hair also found there. The “girl,” as Mellie had said, who’d left Strike with her: the murdered woman, the woman who’d put my name, my address, and my phone number on…her own malamute. Or on someone else’s? On this blue malamute, the same dog Mellie had lost, the same one I’d found.

  “Go home with Mellie,” I heard. “Now you get to come home with me.”

  Not a chance.

  Had Mellie, too, made the connection between the murder victim and the woman who’d left Strike with her? Mellie did not make connections easily, I thought. Still, she must have made this one. She would simply have to talk to the police. Another fragment: Mellie’s fear of the police. Was it really based on irrational anxiety about minor violations of dog-boarding regulations? Or was she justifiably worried about murder?

  I tried to buy time. “Mellie,” I said, “Strike can’t go home with you right now. Strike looks healthy. And she feels healthy. But she needs to go to the vet. And stay there.”

  Mellie’s face fell.

  “It’s not serious,” I added. “Other dogs can’t catch it. And she’s going to be fine. But I have to take her back to the vet. The good news is that she’s safe. You can take down the flyers now, the posters I gave you.” The terrier chose that opportune time to start bouncing impatiently at the end of his leash. “Besides, you have this dog to take care of. Strike is a big girl. You shouldn’t try to walk both dogs at once.”

  “One at a time,” Mellie said. She seemed to be repeating a rule. “Only one dog at a time. Unless they’re both little.”

  “Exactly. And Strike isn’t little. I’ll take good care of her. I promise. She’ll be fine. You don’t need to worry about her anymore. She’s safe now.”

  “I need to light candles.” Mellie said. “You don’t just ask. Father McArdle says so. You don’t just ask. When you get what you want, you have to say thank you.”

  I nodded.

  When I was driving Strike back to Steve’s clinic, however, I realized that Mellie had applied the principle only to prayer. After all, I’d been the one who’d found the lost dog, hadn’t I? But Mellie had been grateful to the Virgin and hadn’t thanked me at all. Ridiculously, I felt shortchanged. But that’s a dog-show type for you: competitive to the core. And if the competition happens to be the Mother of God? Especially then, you have to be a good sport.

  CHAPTER 25

  When I’d dropped Strike back at the clinic, I returned to my car and called Kevin Dennehy on my cell phone. He absolutely had to talk to Mellie, who lived right near the scene of the murder and who must have known the victim. As a cop, he needed to question her; and as a Cambridge insider, he was in a far better position than I was to find out what should and should not be expected of her. Mellie, who had been taking care of Strike, must know something about the “girl” who’d left the malamute with her. Until now, I’d simply accepted Francie’s statement that Mellie had special needs, and everything I’d observed about Mellie had confirmed Francie’s original statements. Yes, Mellie took things literally. Yes, she seemed conscientious and sweet. She was fearful of authority and deeply religious. And she certainly loved dogs. But what did I really know about her? About her abilities, her strengths, her limitations? About what she would or would not do? Or what she might or might not have done. Someone at dog training had mentioned her parents: Father McArdle had promised Mellie’s parents that he’d look out for her. Mrs. Dennehy had known them, Kevin had told me. Kevin himself would know something about Mellie’s parents or could easily find people who’d known them well. Had Mellie’s parents been people who’d have had a gun in the house?

  After leaving Kevin an urgent message, I drove back to Loaves and Fishes, this time to run in and grab some food, as I should have done before returning Strike. I’d known that I was low on milk and that I’d need something to eat before leaving for the rally match. The weather was cool, so I could safely have left Strike in the car. The inefficiency was unlike me. I felt scattered. If I could just talk to Kevin, I’d have a sense of handing over responsibility. Then I’d spend the evening with Leah and the dogs. My love for my human and canine family would calm me, and the al
most mystical fusion I’d experience in working with Rowdy would restore my focus. Throughout my life, whenever I have had the sense of losing myself, of not being myself or not being entirely who I am, I have become whole again by giving myself up to a dog I love. When I become half Rowdy and he becomes half me, when I am united with this dog I adore, that’s when I am fully myself. My route to that union, and Rowdy’s, too, I think, is teamwork. The obedience exercises, the familiar structure, the attention to tiny details, the concentration visible on Rowdy’s face and audible in my voice, the hard-earned effortlessness with which we move as one, all of it becomes my most powerful version of prayer and my most reliable source of renewed faith and redemption.

  So, I intended to breeze through Loaves and Fishes. Besides milk, I needed roast beef, some for the sandwich I’d have instead of a real dinner, some for Rowdy’s what-a-good-boy treat after the rally event. Loaves and Fishes, I should mention, is not some little gourmet shop but a big, crowded supermarket with departments for fish, meat, and cheese, its own bakery, a deli, and, of course, the sushi bar where Dr. Ho was reputed to have picked up his, ahem, take-out. It was at the deli counter, near the innocent yet, to my mind, infamous sushi bar that I encountered the other Holly Winter. By “encountered,” I do not mean that I sought her out. On the contrary, if I hadn’t been waiting for the pound of sliced roast beef that I’d asked for, I’d have avoided her by walking away. It was she who accosted me. In fact, I thought for a second that she was going to ram me with her cart, but she brought it to halt and said, “Fancy seeing you here.”

  Ridiculous! Loaves and Fishes is a place where you see everyone. I might as well have been in front of the Coop in Harvard Square. Or, now that I think of it, on the sidewalk on Mass. Ave. in front of Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage. But what was her implication? That I belonged in a junk-food warehouse? Or that there was something suspect about my being where she was?

  “Fancy seeing you here, too,” I said.

  “Strange coincidence.”

  “The world is full of coincidences,” I said, without adding anything about my canine-cosmological belief that the apparent meaninglessness of any co-occurrence results from a failure to see what the co-occurring elements actually have in common, namely, dogs. But did I really want to argue with a statistician about probability or correlation? I wouldn’t have minded. My religious beliefs, however, are private. I didn’t feel like sharing them with an infidel.

  “You just so happen to be here, to have my name, and to have found the body of a woman who stole my identity.” Holly Winter, the other one, spoke with the distinctive air of believing herself to possess secret knowledge.

  I was determined not to get in anything even remotely like a shouting match. Almost whispering, I said, “You haven’t been harmed, and I’m tired of your insinuations. I did not steal or try to steal your name or your identity. It happens to be my name, too,” I said. “It’s the one I was born with.”

  As an aside, let me issue a plea: if you give birth to a girl whose last name is going to be Winter, please do not call her Holly. My parents had an excuse: their previous experience in bestowing appellations had consisted exclusively of selecting registered names and call names for golden retrievers.

  “Were you?” I asked Holly Winter. “Born with it?” The effort to keep my voice low was beginning to wear me down.

  “You make it sound like a genetic disease,” she said.

  The comeback made me uncomfortable, sounding as it did like exactly the kind of thing I might have said myself. Glancing at the top of the glass deli counter, I saw that my package of roast beef was ready. The conversation, if you could call it that, was going nowhere. I picked up my package and walked away.

  CHAPTER 26

  Holly Winter dials a number in Arizona and is almost surprised to have someone answer, a man with a rough voice who coughs loudly. Representing herself as an attorney calling from a law firm in Boston, she states, without giving her name or the firm’s name, that she is trying to trace the heir to a substantial amount of money. Had I been making such a call, I’d have invented names for myself and for the fictitious law firm: “Attorney Charlotte Dickens here,” I might have said. “With Black and Lodge.” Or in rebellion against the media-free movement, I might have presented myself as Barbie Thomas of Toynbee and Trainer. But I’m not the one making the call. She is. On the one hand, she displays no imagination. On the other hand, she knows when to keep her mouth shut. In fact, she listens.

  Eventually, she says, “Maine?” She realizes that her tone makes it sound as if she has never before heard of the state of Maine or as if Maine were some exotic place on a distant continent: “Belarus?”

  Having jotted a number down on a scrap of paper, she ends the conversation and immediately dials a number that begins with an area code I dial all the time: 207. Maine. A mechanical voice informs her that she has reached the number she just dialed. She hangs up.

  She then turns to Google.

  Google. The World Wide Web. Fondness for it. We have more in common, she and I, than I like to admit.

  She first does exactly what I’d do—she enters the 207 number—but gets no results. Her next try—Maine meth OR methamphetamine—yields many results, in fact, a plethora. She opens a few Web pages and scans for information. Like me, she is a fast reader, in part because she skims material that she already knows. For instance, she doesn’t need to read every word about Maine’s long border with Canada. She changes her search: dogs meth OR methamphetamine. Here, I cannot refrain from pointing out that using the operator OR between synonyms is unnecessary and, to my eye, clumsy. I’d use a tilde: dogs ~meth. But no one is looking over her shoulder. Specifically, I’m not. In other words, we are not competing. Still, what she discovers is something I could have told her, namely, that drug dealers have been known to smuggle their goods through U.S. Customs in the digestive tracts of dogs. And, as is incidental to her search and to my story, in the innards of human beings, too.

  She picks up her phone and calls the police.

  CHAPTER 27

  When I got home, another fragment fell in place. Strike. Mellie had been told that the dog’s name was Strike. She’d also been told, as far as I could tell, that Strike was a husky and that she had been spayed. If I wanted my dogs to respond to names other than their real ones, I’d pick names that sounded at least somewhat similar: India would pose a problem, as would Rowdy, but Lady could become Baby, Kimi could be Ginny, Sammy could be Ranny. Miss Blue. Strike. Streak. Indeed, Blue Streak. Grant’s kennel name? Rhapsody. Her registered name? Rhapsody’s Blue Streak. I’d have put money on it. I’d have lost. I took a quick look at the Alaskan Malamute Registry Pedigree Program and practically hit myself over the head. I should’ve known! I, who considered myself an expert on canine nomenclature, had failed to predict the perfectly predictable, which was that in registering his dogs, his malamutes, the world-class woo-woo-woo-ers of the dog world, he’d substituted—you guessed, huh?—woo for blue. The dogs he’d bought from Minnie Wilcox and Debbie Alonso bore their kennel names, Snosquall and Crevasse: Snosquall Rhapsody in Woo and Crevasse Midnight Woo, as I’d have discovered if I’d searched for owners named Grant instead of for dogs with blue names. How like me to have focused on dogs rather than on people! How stupid! Anyway, the dogs of his own breeding included Rhapsody’s Sky Woo and Rhapsody’s Rhythm N Woos. Rhapsody’s Woo Streak wasn’t in the database, which had information on dogs that had been bred and had thus had their names published in studbooks, and dogs with names published elsewhere. Lots of malamutes weren’t in the database. The absence meant nothing. Streak was Rhapsody’s Woo Streak. I finally knew who she was.

  She’d been bred by Graham Grant. And owned by…? She’d been tagged with my name. At the risk of immodestly expanding on a matter I’ve already touched on, I have to say that in the world of purebred dogs and especially in the world of malamutes, I am someone. I write for Dog’s Life. My articles have appeared there and in o
ther dog magazines. I wrote the text for a book of photographs of the legendary old Morris and Essex dog shows, I’m the author of a book called 101 Ways to Cook Liver that’s mainly about training with food, and Steve and I were the coauthors of a soon-to-be-published dog-diet book called No More Fat Dogs. I showed my dogs, I posted to all of the e-mail lists about malamutes, I did malamute rescue, and in short, I made my presence known. Anyone with malamutes could have known who I was. Graham Grant and I had evidently met at an Alaskan Malamute National Speciality. I didn’t remember him, but even if he’d forgotten meeting me there, he simply had to know my name. When he’d gotten himself in trouble and disappeared, he’d abandoned his dogs. All of his dogs? So it was assumed. It seemed possible that he’d taken one with him, a puppy, an especially promising puppy: Rhapsody’s Woo Streak. Had he sold her to someone? Had someone stolen her from him? The murder victim, the unidentified woman, had been stealing identities; she’d been an identity thief. Had she been a dog thief, too? Exactly what did Mellie know about her? And maybe about her murder? And what did Kevin know about Mellie herself? What could he find out?

  With no success, I again tried to reach Kevin at every number I had. The last number was the one he shared with his mother. A Seventh-Day Adventist, Mrs. Dennehy refused to have meat or alcohol in the house, and she’d always felt a little resentful about my willingness to make room in my refrigerator for Kevin’s hamburger and beer. Also, before Kevin got involved with Jennifer Pasquarelli and before I married Steve, Mrs. Dennehy had harbored the suspicion that her son and I were also sharing space that was more hot than cold. Still, to her credit, she’d always been polite and even pleasant to me, in fact, more pleasant than she was to Jennifer, whom she simply couldn’t stand.