Arf

by Spencer Quinn

  Second, down the hall. Mama’s door was closed so I hurried to our room, meaning mine and Birdie’s, where the door stood open. A beautiful room, by the way, walls the color of the summer, with a puffy cloud here and there and even a rainbow, but the point was nothing had changed. Our room was just as we’d left it, bed unmade, clothes all over the floor, pretty much perfect. Had the man and the cat even gone inside? I didn’t think so. Cat scent and limeade scent didn’t extend more than a step or two across the threshold.

  I checked the bathroom, lapped up a quick sip of water from the toilet, and doubled back up the hall, arriving at Mama’s room just as she got there and opened the door.

  “Oh my god,” she said, putting her hand to her chest and stepping back. I pushed in front of her and looked in. Mama’s room was a total wreck, everything upside down, all the drawers pulled out and dumped, papers scattered across the floor, the bed frame up on its side and the mattress sliced right through. All the paintings and photos had been knocked off the wall. The only thing remaining in place was Mama’s hard hat, on a hook by the closet door. As for cat smell and limeade smell: We had plenty of both. Intruders! Intruders had come into our home and made a mess of Mama’s room. I barked again, this time sharp enough to scare the pants off any intruder. But too late! Too late: That made me bark again, the sharpest bark ever. It even scared me a bit.

  Birdie and Grammy pressed in behind us. Birdie caught her breath. Poor kid. I turned and pressed against her. Grammy said, “Someone’s gonna pay.” Mama moved into the room. She bent down and picked up one of the framed photos. Birdie had shown me this particular photo more than once. In it Mama—a slightly smoother-skinned Mama—stood beside a big man in a uniform, their arms around each other and smiles on their faces; not the biggest smiles, but real happy ones. The big man in the uniform was Birdie’s dad, killed a long time ago, the details escaping me. Wait! Here was one: Birdie had a lone single memory of her dad, from when she’d been very little. He’d tied the laces of her shoes—tiny blue shoes with silver stars on them—and said, “No loose ends, Birdie.”

  But back to the photo. I saw that its cardboard backing had been ripped away. Mama was examining that when the frame came apart in her hands. How white her face was! And Birdie’s, too. I barked a bark that shook the house.

  “I hear you,” Grammy said. “Don’t no one touch another darn thing. I’m calling the cops.”

  “Hmm,” said Sheriff Cannon.

  “Well, well,” said Officer Perkins in his deep, rumbly voice.

  They looked down at what had happened to Mama’s room, both of them tall in their khaki uniforms, although Officer Perkins was quite a bit broader. We’d gotten to know Sheriff Cannon and Officer Perkins almost too well, me and Birdie, during a sort of adventure we’d had earlier in the summer. Plus Sheriff Cannon was the father of Birdie’s friend Rory, and the Cannons lived with a very small and very noisy member of my tribe, name of Sugarplum. Surprisingly sharp-toothed. I’ll leave it at that.

  The sheriff and Perkins rocked back and forth in their huge black shoes and Perkins said, “Well, well,” again.

  “Well, well won’t get it done,” Grammy said, standing behind them in the hall.

  The sheriff and Perkins turned to her. From the expression on their faces you might have thought these two big guys with guns on their hips were afraid of Grammy. This was no surprise to me. I knew Grammy.

  “Don’t want to rush in, ma’am,” the sheriff said. “Can’t risk contaminating the evidence.”

  Grammy, so small compared to these men, but with her posture so straight, somehow seemed to take up more space than they did. “Then how about snapping crime scene photos for starters? Get the show on the road.”

  The sheriff’s face, all about hard features—square chin, big nose, bushy eyebrows—got harder. He tried staring down at Grammy. That didn’t seem to have any effect on her. She stared right back, those washed-out blue eyes unblinking. The sheriff sighed and pointed at Perkins. Perkins took out a camera and clicked away. He hummed in a deep, soft voice, like he was enjoying himself. “Framed that one real nice,” he muttered.

  The sheriff turned to Mama. “You all right?”

  Mama nodded.

  “Glass of water?”

  “I’m fine.”

  The sheriff gave her a longish look and finally nodded. “Anything missing?” he said.

  “Nothing so far,” Mama said. “I haven’t had time to really look.”

  “What about valuables?”

  “There’s just my jewelry.”

  The sheriff gazed into the room. “See any of it?”

  Mama scanned the mess from one side to the other. “There,” she said. “By the mattress.”

  The sheriff snapped on thin plastic gloves, went into the room, returned with a small black pouch, just plain leather, nothing fancy. He opened it and Mama checked inside. She shook her head. “All here,” she said.

  “Do you keep any cash in the room?” the sheriff said.

  “No.”

  He glanced around, motioned to what looked like a big gold coin lying in the fold of a curtain that had been ripped off its rod. “What’s that?”

  Mama moved into the room. Perkins stopped humming and extended his arm to block her, but Mama didn’t seem to notice and brushed right by him. She crouched down and folded up the big gold coin in both hands. Very quietly, Birdie said, “That’s the medal of honor the New Orleans police department gave my dad after … after.”

  “Ah,” said the sheriff, also very quietly.

  Mama started to rise, then paused. She reached into a fold in the fallen curtain, picked up a shred of what looked like blue velvet, then another, and another. “They—they sliced up the box,” she said, in the kind of low tone humans sometimes use when talking to themselves.

  “The box?” said the sheriff.

  Mama turned to him and blinked. “The presentation box the medal came in. It’s cut to ribbons. But they didn’t take the medal.”

  “Was anything else in there?” the sheriff said. “Tucked in the lining, maybe?”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Something valuable.”

  Mama shook her head.

  “Why would they slice up the box?” the sheriff said.

  “Why any of this?” said Mama.

  Birdie reached out and took Mama’s hand. I pressed up against Birdie again, perhaps a little too hard, although Mama caught her before she fell. So, things could have been worse, in my opinion. They would have been even better if we lost the cat smell and the limeade smell, but they were everywhere in Mama’s room. I waited for someone to mention it. No one did.

  “Get someone up here to canvass the neighbors while you dust for prints,” the sheriff said.

  “Ten-four,” said Perkins.

  Not long after that we had yellow tape barring the way into Mama’s bedroom—in our own house!—and were sitting with the sheriff under the umbrella in our little backyard, the humans in our mismatched collection of plastic chairs and me on the ground. I could hear Perkins humming inside the house, and also a faraway boat horn. Normally that sound would have put me in the mood for a boat ride—nothing like a boat ride, and we had a couple of nice boats down at Gaux Family Fish and Bait. But now I wasn’t in the mood for a boat ride. I could tell by how my tail was just lying there on the ground, like a sad old thing. Who was in charge of security at 19 Gentilly Lane? Me.

  The sheriff took out a notebook. “Do you have any enemies you know of?” he asked Mama.

  Mama shook her head. She had two faint vertical lines on her forehead, not so faint today.

  “I got enemies,” Grammy said. “By the boatload.”

  Boatload? Had I heard right? I moved closer to Grammy, maybe my best chance when it came to a boat ride anytime soon.

  The sheriff turned to her. “Maybe we’ll get to that,” he said. “But your part of the house wasn’t even entered. All the damage happened in your daughter-in
-law’s room.”

  “So?” said Grammy. “Ever heard of thinking outside the box?”

  “In my experience, ma’am, most criminals never get outside the box.”

  Grammy thought about that. I expected her to say “Hrrmf.” She did not. That made me a bit uneasy. Don’t know about you, but when I’m uneasy, tearing up a patch of grass with my paws tends to do wonders for my mood. I hadn’t even gotten started, not properly, before I felt Birdie’s hand on my collar, not gripping hard, just there.

  The sheriff turned back to Mama. “I understand you recently returned from a job?”

  Mama nodded.

  “In the oil business, if I remember,” the sheriff said.

  “I’m an engineer with Marine Drilling, out of Houston. We were doing some retooling on a rig off Angola.”

  “That’s in Africa?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sounds kind of adventurous.”

  “It’s really not,” Mama said.

  One of my habits is to keep an eye out for Birdie, which was how come I didn’t miss the look on her face while she watched Mama explaining what was or wasn’t adventurous, rather confusing from where I sat. That look, kind of shining, said Mama was just aces in her book.

  “What about your coworkers?” Sheriff Cannon said.

  “What about them?”

  “Any problems? Rivalries, maybe? You getting a promotion someone else was angling for? Just some ordinary personal conflict, what with working at such close quarters and all?”

  “Nothing like that,” Mama said. “These are good jobs, Sheriff, and we all know it. No one wants to jeopardize that paycheck.”

  “Makes sense.” The sheriff wrote in his notebook, flipped to a new page. A blank page, which I could see from where I was, but he kept gazing at it when he said, “I heard your husband lecture once at the police academy. All about the importance of having a theory of the case. I never forgot it.” He looked up. Mama’s eyes glistened. Grammy’s were hard and dry. Birdie’s, glued to the sheriff’s face, were just plain watchful. A heavy sort of silence lowered itself on our backyard. The boat horn blew again, farther away now, almost out of my hearing.

  “What did he say?” Birdie said.

  “Too much to go into now,” the sheriff said. “But you might want to drop in on Rory. He’s down in the dumps.”

  “Baseball?” Birdie said.

  “Oh-for-fifty-three, although why coaches keep batting averages for eleven-year-old kids is beyond me.” He gave his head a quick shake. I do something similar with my whole body. Hey! The sheriff and I were buddies! “But,” he went on, “here’s something else your … your dad said that day: ‘You warm up cold cases by caring about the survivors.’ ”

  “The survivors?” Birdie said, her voice suddenly a bit faint.

  “I think he was talking about murder, specifically,” the sheriff said. “The survivors are those left behind—the families, loved ones, friends of the victim.”

  Birdie nodded, just a slight little nod.

  “Didn’t realize it at the time,” the sheriff went on, “but that was when I first got a handle on what I was actually supposed to do in this career.”

  “Words,” Grammy said. “Just words.”

  The sheriff’s face got red. “What are you saying?” he said, his voice sharpening.

  Grammy’s voice sharpened, too. “I’m saying they’ll never find out who killed my boy. I call down to New Orleans every year on the anniversary, and what do I get? Words.” She made a fist, actually shook it at the sheriff. “Action! They teach you anything about action at that academy of yours? You all have forgotten how to get things done.”

  The sheriff got even redder, opened his mouth like he was about to say something real angry, but just then Perkins appeared on the breezeway and came toward us, a phone in his hand. Perkins seemed to have spilled some sort of white powder all over himself, which I found kind of scary, so I’m not sure if I caught all the details of what came next.

  “Anything from the neighbors?” the sheriff said.

  “Nobody saw nor heard nothin’,” said Perkins. “And I’m all done inside. But, Boss? Report coming in of a break-in that sounds a lot like this one, over on Huey Street—number two hundred three.”

  The sheriff rose. “Who lives there?”

  “Family name of Richelieu,” Perkins said.

  The sheriff nodded. “Didn’t they sell some resort down in Biloxi, move here a couple years ago?” He turned to Mama. “Know the Richelieus on Huey Street?”

  “Never heard of them,” Mama said. “Does this mean … ?”

  “Too soon to say anything on that score,” said the sheriff. And a moment or two later he and Perkins were gone. I heard their cruiser peeling away out front. They hit the siren.

  “Just words,” said Grammy.

  WE GOT TO WORK CLEANING UP Mama’s room. I helped out a lot in the beginning, but the beginning didn’t last very long for some reason, and soon after that Birdie and I got sent down to check on things at the store. I kept my eye out for strangers the whole way, but saw none. What if the intruders came back? They would pay, as Grammy had said. Whoa! Did I have something in common with Grammy? I got rid of that thought immediately.

  Gaux Family Fish and Bait backs right onto the bayou, where we’ve got a dock for tying up our boats—Bayou Girl for fishing, and the flat-bottomed aluminum pirogue for swamp tours. The store is low and yellow, with a wraparound porch where buoys and nets hang from one end to the other. The best thing is the sign on the roof. It’s in the shape of a big fish! “Sends a message,” Grammy says, and I knew if I just paid attention that one day I’d find out what it was.

  We went inside. Snoozy LaChance was in charge. Hey! He was awake, and not only that, he had a customer.

  “… I got a sixth sense for where the fish are holin’ up,” he was telling her. “Nothin’ to be vain about. Call it a gift, kinda like Einstein and math.”

  The woman, on the youngish side, had hair cut short on one side and long on the other, the short side being dark and the long side green. She also wore a lot of rings in her ears. That always made my own ears kind of buzzy, hard to explain why. I gave them a sideways swipe or two with my paws, felt better. Meanwhile, the woman was pointing at Snoozy’s arm. He wore a sleeveless T-shirt, revealing lots of tattoos.

  “All your tats are fish?” the woman said.

  “Just part of the package,” said Snoozy. “Check it out—all the local varieties and then some, like a walkin’ guidebook. Right arm is freshwater. Here’s carp, catfish, bream, largemouth, striped, and over on the left we got saltwater: ’cuda, marlin, swordfish, tunny. You name it, I got it. Back of the elbow’s red snapper. Kind of hard to see.” Snoozy twisted his arm around in a way that looked painful.

  “Cool,” said the woman.

  “So how’s about I book you for a full day on Bayou Girl?” Snoozy said.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “There’s always the half day. Costs half.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “For half the time of your first think?” said Snoozy. He burst out laughing, like something really funny had just happened. A small—although far from tiny—particle of food flew out of his mouth, landed on the floor not far from me. I scarfed it up. Sausage. I have all the luck in the world.

  When I got done with that I saw that the customer was on her way out of the store, moving quite quickly—although she darted one glance back at Snoozy’s mouth. Around then was when Snoozy, still chuckling softly to himself, noticed us.

  “Oh, hi, Birdie.”

  I’m sure he noticed me, too, just forgot to mention it. Snoozy was one of the best forgetters you’d ever want to meet.

  “Hey, Snoozy. How’s it goin’?”

  “Cookin’ with gas. You can tell your grammy I got one on the line.”

  Gas? We’d had problems with Snoozy and gas in the past, flames erupting right on the surface of the bayou being a sight
that’s hard to forget. But I smelled no gas, and that’s not the kind of thing I miss.

  “What are you talking about?” Birdie said, a sure sign that she and I were pretty much thinking as one. What a team! With her beauty and my brains, unless I was mixing that up somehow—and also my beauty, too, what with people always saying what a handsome dude I was and giving me nice pats—there was no stopping us.

  Snoozy pointed with his chin at the door. “Deep pockets.”

  “Huh?”

  “Customer who just left. Comes from money, clear as day.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Snoozy rubbed the side of his nose. Right away I wanted to do the very same thing. Don’t tell me I was also thinking as one with Snoozy!

  “What’s wrong with your nose?” Birdie said.

  “My nose? Nada. Unless there’s a booger I’m not aware of. Happens to the best of us.” He stuck his finger in his nose, explored around. That was the first time in my life I’ve ever wished for a finger of my own! “Nope,” said Snoozy. “All clear.”

  Birdie was watching him with eyes that somehow reminded me of Grammy’s, even though Grammy’s eyes are all washed out and Birdie’s are so bright and full of color. I wouldn’t want that look turned on me, even though it was Birdie.

  “Did you get her name?” she said.

  “Who you referencin’?” said Snoozy. And then he yawned, a huge yawn that seemed to come out of nowhere, taking him by surprise. “My goodness,” he said, glancing at an old couch out on the porch, an old couch where Grammy had told him she’d better not find him ever again.

  “The woman with the deep pockets.” Birdie gestured out the window to the parking lot, where the woman was hopping onto a dusty and dented motorcycle.

  “Nope,” said Snoozy. “But she got ours, so we’re hunky-dory.”