Paws before dying
Page 20
“Well, he got his revenge,” I said. “I guess the miracle is that he didn’t shoot Edna, too. Anyway, about Leah?”
“She’s relieved that Jeff’s okay. She’s very angry at Willie, of course. She feels betrayed. She doesn’t understand that the nature of that family was such that he had to tell Dale. In that family, the alliances were just as strong as the antagonisms. They were so enmeshed that a threat to one of them was a personal threat to everyone. So when Willie heard you asking about shock collars, and then he heard Leah say something about having the pictures, he put it together and went home to tell Dale. Only, of course, instead of taking off or turning himself in, Dale found out where Leah was. Willie was in that class with Leah and Jeff, and he was there when they left. And I’m sure Dale had no trouble getting that out of him, and Willie knew where Jeff lived. It’s right on that list from your dog club. So all Dale had to do was wait at Jeff’s. Then he followed them.”
“If I’d listened to Steve, I’d’ve—”
“Speaking of whom,” Rita interrupted.
“Yeah. It’s okay now,” I said. “But it did take him an awfully long time to get the police to the Johnsons’, although it wasn’t as long as it seemed then. But they wasted a whole lot of time in the woods.”
“Holly, if you didn’t know where you were going, how was Steve supposed to know where you were?”
“Because he’s a vet,” I said, “which means he’s supposed to know everything. It’s one of the burdens of high priesthood. Anyway, he was right, about stopping at the woods, even though he was wrong about whose idea it was. It was Leah’s, and it never occurred to me, because I thought, well, she knows they can come here! And I knew about the Eliot Woods. I’m even the one who told Steve it was a lovers’ lane. It never crossed my mind that they’d be so stupid. You know, they weren’t even in the car when he smashed the window? He was after the pictures, and I guess that’s where he thought they’d be. And Kimi was with them, not that she would’ve tried to protect the car or anything. And she might’ve done something when he attacked Jeff, but when Jeff went to see what was going on, he made Leah keep Kimi with her. And after that, there was nothing Leah could do, because he slapped that collar on Kimi, so all she did was try to spare Kimi.”
“Speaking of which,” Rita said, “she must’ve got some jolt. Is she all right?”
“Yeah, I think so. Malamutes are tough, and she’s tough even for a malamute. She probably wouldn’t want to walk into that cellar again, but obviously she won’t have to. The dogs’ ears are probably still ringing—mine are—but I think their hearing is okay.”
“So, look,” Rita said. “There’s one other thing. Did he actually plan to kill Rose? How could he have known...?”
“Did he know about the pacemaker? Probably not. But one thing he did know about was electricity, because, it turns out, he took electronics in high school. When I thought about who’d know about electricity, mostly I thought about Dr. Zager, you know, drills and stuff. And it never occurred to me that if he got off on beating the dog, he’d really, really get off on a shock collar. I didn’t put it together until I saw the deer rifle.”
Rita looked puzzled.
“Hunters,” I explained. “Really, obedience people don’t use those things that much. Hunters do. They’re the big market for shock collars. I should’ve known. Right on their coffee table, they had Outdoor Life, for God’s sake. Anyway, I’ve thought a lot about whether he planned to kill her. One thing is, I don’t see how he could’ve known about the pacemaker. But, on the other hand, one thing he’d’ve learned about in school is electrical safety. And hazards. So he’d know about water, that it’s a great conductor, and he’d know that some people can survive gigantic shocks, and that sometimes, a really small shock, like fifty volts, can kill you. In a way, that’s the worst of it.”
“What is?”
“That he didn’t know. I don’t think anyone’s going to end up proving it, but if you ask me, he didn’t know whether she’d just get a bad shock or whether it’d kill her. He thought he’d killed Jeff. If you’d seen Jeff, you’d see why. I thought he’d killed him, too. But with Rose, if you ask me, he just didn’t care. Prob-ably if she’d lived, he’d have threatened to do the same thing to Caprice unless she gave him the pictures and kept her mouth shut. But he didn’t care one way or the other about whether she lived or died. After what his parents did to him? After Buddy? Rita, when they killed his dog, they half killed him. How was he supposed to know the difference?”
Chapter 30
MITCHELL Dale Johnson, Jr., you’ll recall, having calmly watched his brother Dale shoot their father, lost his temper only when he realized that Dale was stealing his Corvette. After that noble demonstration of his firm sense of priorities, Mitch was awarded the guardianship of his mother, Edna, but I suppose that the court didn’t have much choice. Dale would hardly have been suitable, and Willie was a bit young for the task. At any rate, Mitch rather quickly sold the house next to Jack Engle-man’s and took advantage of the depressed market to buy a three-bedroom condo near Kendall Square in Cambridge. One of the extra bedrooms is for Edna, who is supposed to move in with Mitch as soon as she’s discharged from the psychiatric hospital. The other bedroom is not, as you might suppose, for Willie, but for Dale, in case he gets a furlough or an early release, I guess. Willie, you see, has broken the family rule. He’s been accepted at a junior college with a canine science program. He’ll spend two years learning to groom and handle dogs. I wonder whether he’ll come home for Christmas.
Speaking of Christmas, I never wrote that article about Marcia Brawley, but she finished the scarf for Buck, and I paid her for it. It’s still here, packed in mothballs. I’ll have to decide whether to give it to him. If I do, I won’t tell him what else she puts around people’s necks... or, more precisely, around dogs’ necks.
Dr. Charlotte Zager’s fluoride treatments have done wonders for my teeth, and contrary to Buck’s predictions, haven’t affected my politics at all. Her son moved into his new offices, and when Steve told Rita that there was nothing more he could do for Groucho, she started taking Groucho to Dr. Don Zager for acupuncture treatments. Groucho is as stiff and lame as ever, and his yellow-tinged eyes stare more and more deeply into nowhere, but Rita is convinced that his energy is improving, and she likes Dr. Zager a lot. In fact, she and Don Zager have had dinner together twice, but I am not optimistic about their future. Some interfaith relationships work fine, but theirs is a doomed combination: She is devout Cambridge, and he’s born-again California.
Jim O’Brian adopted Tina’s rescue dog, the malamute bitch. He named her Rose. It seemed a peculiar choice to me, but Jack didn’t mind. He told me that it’s a Jewish custom not to name your children after the living and that Rose would’ve been flattered.
In late August, Kimi completed her C.D. in three straight trials and with good scores, too. Leah handled her. Not long afterward, on the morning Leah left, the phone rang about two dozen times. Not one of the calls was for me. Leah went out to visit Kevin Dennehy’s mother and a lot of other neighbors. After that, Miriam, Ian, Seth, and some more people came over to say good-bye to her. They played a lot of loud music. Miriam somehow ended up wearing a sweatshirt that I recognized as mine, but I didn’t say anything about it. Jeff brought a single red rose, and I dragged the dogs away so he and Leah could have some time alone in the living room.
Rowdy and Kimi, of course, knew that she was leaving. Even the stupidest obedience-school flunk-out knows when someone’s going away, but the ancestral memory of Alaskan malamutes reminds them that no one hangs around on a fast-disintegrating ice floe to whistle for a stray pup. Eyes bright, muscles tense, ears pricked up, new fall coats gleaming, they sniffed Leah’s luggage, barricaded the door, pranced from room to room, and tried their best to look too cute to leave behind.
When Leah and Jeff finally emerged, they were both crying so contagiously that I started in, too, and hugged them both. The dogs, of c
ourse, barged in, and all of us clung to Leah as if we’d never hear from her again. Then I drove her to the airport, where we met Arthur and Cassie’s plane. I hated to turn her over to them. I tried to remember that it was for only one more year.
When I got home, the house was weirdly quiet. Miriam had left my sweatshirt, and no one had borrowed anything else. The phone didn’t ring. I vacuumed. I scrubbed the bathroom. No one undid my work. The dogs kept nosing around.
“Don’t look at me,” I told them. “I didn’t throw her out. She had to leave. She had to go home.”
Then the three of us went to Leah’s empty room. I sat on her bed and patted the mattress to tell Rowdy and Kimi that it was okay for them to join me. They did. I wasn’t really alone. No one with two Alaskan malamutes is ever alone. Or lonely. It’s just that we felt that way.
Cassie sent me a perfunctory thank-you letter, and over the next few months, Leah called now and then, mostly to ask about the dogs. I made Rowdy and Kimi woo-woo into the phone and kept her up-to-date on their training. She said she was busy studying, taking all those tests, and doing her college applications.
Then one day in November, the phone rang. At first, I didn’t recognize Arthur’s voice. I thought I’d got an obscene phone call.
“You have completely blown her chances! Do you realize that?” The voice was enraged.
“Arthur?” I asked incredulously.
“I knew it was all a terrible mistake. I knew it, I knew it. The plane fare would’ve been cheap at this price. Her whole life! It’s her whole life she’s ruining!”
“Arthur, slow down. Sit down. Take a deep breath, and then blow it out.”
“Blow it out! Blow it out!”
“Arthur, this is Holly Winter,” I said. “Cassie’s niece? Maybe you dialed my number by mistake.”
He may actually have taken my advice about the deep breath, but the ensuing exhalation was no act of wordless, mind-clearing stress reduction. If he gasped in a lungful of air, all he did was spend a few seconds oxygenating his fury before he propelled it out, over the phone wires, and into my innocent left ear. Three words were clear: Leah, Harvard, and dogs. Then he started to groan and cry. During Leah’s stay with me, I had, of course, begun to reconsider and reevaluate my parents’ view of Arthur. Could such a mental and moral weakling have sired Leah? But this pathetic ranting made me realize that my parents may have been right, after all. The maternal stock must have been prepotent; Arthur’s get showed the traits of her mother’s line, none of Arthur’s.
Cassie finally got on the phone. Her distress equaled Arthur’s, it seemed to me, but she held herself together enough to inform me of its cause. Until today, Leah had seemed to her parents to be submissively following the family plan of completing a successful application to that place down the street from my house. I should add that Leah was, in fact, complying with the application requirements. She had not only taken but had excelled on numerous acronymic tests of language and mathematical ability and other tests of achievement in English, math, chemistry, and, of all things, Latin. Her grades were high, her recommendations sensational, her extracurricular activities diverse. In other words, she was such a perfect specimen of the breed, virtually the standard incarnate, that the judges were sure to put her up. Or so it had seemed. Until now. And it was all my fault.
Gaining admission to Harvard, it seems, is not exactly like getting a place in the ribbons at a dog show. In the breed ring, the dog has to trot around, hold a pose, and look happy while a stranger stares and pokes; and in obedience, he has to demonstrate a mastery of the exercises and complete attention to the commands of the handler. But to win? In either ring, he also has to show off, strut his stuff, hold his head up, put some energy into his step, and announce to the judge that he’s the obvious, unmistakable number one. Leah, it seemed to me, had done all of that, but, as I’ve said, there is one surprising difference between the requirements of Harvard and those of the American Kennel Club: Dogs are never expected to speak for themselves. Leah, though, had to submit a series of essays, and, at least in her parents’ view, she’d stubbornly and deliberately NQ’d—not qualified—by failing that last exercise.
I knew precisely how they felt. It’s happened to me. In Novice and Open, of course, the last exercise is the long down. You get through everything else with a 200, step confidently toward the dog with five seconds to go until that perfect score, and then watch helplessly as he rises to a sit and your heart sinks. He might as well have lagged, forged, sat crooked, failed the recall, and dropped his dumbbell. You might as well never have trained at all. You might as well have stayed home. Or, in Leah’s case, she might as well have gone to public kindergarten instead of Montessori, read the complete works of Robert Ludlum instead of Jane Austen, and scored minus 800 on all the tests. Most of all, she should have stayed home. She should have stayed with her parents, not with me. Why is that?
Cassie read me the NQ’ing essay. Her voice sounded nothing like my mother’s. I felt sorry for Arthur and Cassie, but I knew that there was no cause for alarm. Leah’s statement was succinct and truthful. Why did she want to go to Harvard? Well, Harvard is located conveniently near the Nonantum and Cambridge dog training clubs. Harvard Square is an ideal place to train because, damn it, it really is a lot like a dog show. Veritas, you know. Truth. That’s Harvard’s motto.
“So what’s the problem?” I asked Cassie. “She’s a shoo-in. She’ll be back in Cambridge next fall. The dogs will be thrilled.” Cassie hung up.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30