by Dead
"Oh, yeah? It's near Dennysville," I said. "I've even been to the reversing falls. Twice. But I only saw them reverse once."
He laughed. "Never been there," he said. "I grew up in Machias." His good, solid laugh matched his looks but showed something I wasn't surprised to see in a young guy who'd grown up where he
had: teeth too even and white to be real. He was lucky to have any teeth, even false ones.
Washington County is rugged, wild, and beautiful, with deep woods too thick to walk through and
blueberry barrens that justify the name, a genuine frontier, and it's poor beyond poor. The principal
source of income there must be welfare, supplemented by whatever people can eke out packing
sardines, raking blueberries, and making Christmas wreaths, none of which leaves a lot over for an
orthodontist or even a plain dentist.
Mimi explained about Clyde. After everyone sympathized, Reggie asked a lot of questions about
what Clyde looked like, how he acted, where he might be likely to go. He seemed to be the first
person besides Buck and me who really understood how bad it was to have Clyde gone and who'd
join my effort to find him. Anyone who makes it from Washington County, Maine, to just off Brattle
Street — even to the back of a house just off Brattle — is a survivor, I thought, and a good ally.
Besides, he made a big fuss over Rowdy, who sat up, put his paws in Reggie's hands, and licked his
face.
-11-
Shortly after I returned from Mimi's, De Franco showed up at my door.
"Ho-ho," he said. "Been out a lot? You've been hard to find lately."
"Yeah. Trying to find a lost dog. Come in."
Old reliable, my ferocious guard dog, pushed his way past me, sniffed De Franco's crotch, and
dropped onto the linoleum. Then he rolled onto his back and wiggled his legs in the air.
"He turned up, huh?"
"No. Actually, it's my father's dog that's lost."
"Didn't know he had dogs." I ignored the dig.
"The one he had at the show," I said. "The wolf dog. Clyde. He's a hybrid. Kevin's helping look for him." The reference to Kevin was supposed to suggest legitimacy. "Have a seat."
"Thanks. Probably stolen," De Franco said. Right jolly old elf.
"Big market," he went on.
"Is there?"
"Flashy dog, kid maybe struts around with it, gets sick of it, sells it."
"Where?"
"Labs."
"Labs?" Run that through my mental word processor and what you get first is Labrador retriever,
but I remembered our last board meeting. "Laboratories?"
"Yeah. Aren't you the dog expert? Tell me about scissors for dogs."
"I don't know much about them."
"More than I do."
"They're called grooming shears," I said. "What do you want to know?"
"Who uses them. What kind. What for. Big ones, we're talking about. Eight and a half inches
long."
"Okay," I said. "I don't know a whole lot about grooming, but, for one thing, you're right. That's
big. I'm no expert on grooming, but I'm pretty sure you wouldn't use those except on one of the
long-haired breeds, something with a really long, thick coat."
"So basically, you use these for a haircut? What about on their claws?"
"No."
"Never?"
"Never. For that you use nail clippers. Nobody'd trim nails with a pair of shears. For one thing,
you couldn't, physically. Dogs' nails are too thick. Rowdy, sit. Give your paw."
Giving his paw had always been one of Rowdy's favorite tricks, mostly because it was an excuse to
hold hands. Hold paws. Whichever it is. He plunked himself down between my chair and De
Franco's and lifted his right forepaw. I held it, pressed gently on the pad, and spread the toes.
"See? When you trim the nails, all you take off is the end. His nails don't need trimming now, but
if they did, they'd be long, and you'd see hooks on the ends. You'd want to cut off the hooks, and a
pair of shears would be too big. They'd get in the way, and dogs' nails aren't like human nails,
anyway. They're really hard, more like bone, sort of soft bone." I'm so used to talking about dogs
that it didn't register until I heard myself say it. If those shears hadn't gone through bone, they
must have gone between it, between her ribs, soft bone. "Oh, God. That's what happened to Sissy."
"Yeah. That's why I'm here." He sounded gentle and serious, not like the silly caricature he liked
to make of himself. For the first time, I could see him as a relative of Kevin's.
"I know," I said. "Jesus. Look, let's get this out in the open. My father's a character. He has odd interests. Hobbies. And where he comes from, you know, they aren't all that odd. But, honest to
God, he wouldn't hurt anyone."
"Yeah," De Franco said. "Dennehy says he's an odd duck but he's harmless."
"That's true," I said.
"And a Miss Barlow says she was talking to him when the murder occurred."
"Faith?"
"You know her?"
"Yeah. She was going to show Rowdy for me. She has malamutes. So she was with Buck?"
"Yeah. A couple of people confirm it. The point is, I need information. Mrs. Quigley had dogs
with short hair. She had pointers. Tell me why she would have had those shears. Or who else
would've."
"They weren't hers," I said. "I thought you knew that."
He didn't say anything.
"They originally belonged to Libby," I said. "She handles for Mimi Nichols."
"Libby Knowles."
"Yeah. Look, Libby isn't the only one who's told me this. The story is that Sissy stole things. Or that's what people say. Mostly, from what I've heard, she was — I guess you'd call it light-fingered.
She lifted unimportant stuff. And maybe she didn't know what those shears were worth. She
probably just thought they were ordinary grooming shears. They were out of her price range. Libby
says they cost close to three hundred dollars."
"To cut a dog's hair?" He sounded incredulous.
"I know. It seems outrageous to me, too, but remember who Libby works for."
"Yeah," he said.
If solid gold were hard enough to make good shears, Mimi Nichols would have been able to afford
it, of course. As it was, she could have paid for Geib shears more easily than Libby could have, even
working for her. Maybe the shears had actually been Mimi's. But that made no sense. Groomers
and handlers provide their own equipment. And why would anyone — Mimi, Libby — have bought
giant shears like that to groom a pointer? At most, you'd need a pair of smallish, curved, blunt-end
scissors, I thought, to trim the whiskers or the hair on the feet. It made no sense at all. But Mimi
Nichols wasn't, after all, Libby's first or only client.
"They must have been in Sissy's tack box," I said. "You know what that is? It's what you keep
grooming equipment in. You must've seen it. It'd have brushes, combs, nail clippers, spray bottles,
chalk white, a whole lot of stuff like that."
"Disposable gloves."
"Oh. Yeah, maybe."
"Not standard equipment?"
"Not really. Maybe for Sissy, though, because of her allergies. She told me she was allergic to
dogs, and lots of people react to the sprays and grooming powders, too. But at shows, maybe you
should know, one thing professional handlers do is dress up. And amateurs showing their own dogs
in breed do, too. You know what that means? In breed? Not in obedience?"
"Yeah."
"People who are showing in obe
dience don't usually get all dressed up, but if you're showing in
breed, you do. Men wear suits, most of the time, and the women practically all wear dresses or
skirts, and some of them get really dressed up. Naturally, if you groom a dog, you'll be covered with
fur and grooming spray and stuff, so the men don't put on their suit jackets until just before they go
into the ring, and some of the women wear smocks or something. Anyway, one thing the gloves
would do is protect your hands, so you don't spoil your nails."
"Her fingernails were plastic. She sold cosmetics."
"She used a lot. Obviously, she wanted to look young."
"I know," he said.
"She didn't, though. She just looked sad."
As soon as De Franco left, I paid a visit to Quigley Drugs, mostly to assuage Buck. On the street in
front of the store, Pete Quigley, Sissy's infant-faced son, was just getting into the old green station
wagon. I walked up to the car.
"Pete? I'm Holly Winter."
He didn't seem to recognize me, and it seemed awkward to remind him of where and when we'd
met.
"You need something done?" he asked. I didn't know what he meant.
"I wanted to say I'm sorry about your mother. I knew her a little."
"Oh," he said. "Yeah." He sounded as if he'd either forgotten her or forgotten that she'd died. He finished stepping into the car, slammed the door, and drove away.
Austin Quigley, who stood behind the counter at the back of the store, didn't look as if he'd
forgotten, and looked pretty sad, worse than sad, but his pharmacist's coat was white and starched.
From the inside, Quigley Drugs was better than I'd expected, not like Huron, but clean, except for
the front windows. The Quigleys had made a recent effort to modernize. The linoleum, beige with
mud-colored flowers, was new, and so were the plastic counters and the rows of cheap, half-empty
metal-edged shelves, but everything was displayed too far apart in a failing effort to create the
impression of ample stock. To fill my hands, I picked up a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, which is
good for cleaning dogs' ears.
"May I help you?" he asked in a monotone.
Sure. My father wants to know whether you stole his wolf.
"My name is Holly Winter. We've met before." At your wife's murder. Did you do it? "I train
dogs."
His face showed what I assumed was recognition.
"I'm so sorry about Sissy," I said.
He looked hurt. "I can't close the store. I have to stay open. People rely on us," he said.
"Of course."
"You don't want cosmetics, do you?"
"No. Not today."
"Because she did all that. I don't know what I'm going to do. My wife was a trained cosmetician,
you know. I don't know anything about it. Foundation, blush, all of it?" For a second, he sounded
almost frivolous, or maybe just on the edge of hysteria. "I don't know how I'm going to manage, and
the register, too, she did that, and the books. And she was very good with customers, always asking
people how they were, being friendly, all that."
"I'm really sorry," I said.
"And Pete's useless. A useless good-for-nothing. In the store, he's useless. Two weeks of
pharmacy school, and he was back home, and now he's taken up painting and wouldn't even give
his mother a hand behind the register."
"Painting?"
"Houses." The image of Pete at an easel must have tickled him. He started to giggle. What was the
right thing to do for hysteria? Slap him? Run outside for the sprinkler again?
"I need some toothpaste, too," I said. It was the first thing I spotted. Could anyone have hysterics
while selling Colgate? "And this bottle of peroxide."
Suddenly, he turned coy. He smirked and cocked his head. "I'll bet you use that for your dog's
ears, don't you?" he said as if he were being clever and charming.
"Yes," I said. "Speaking of dogs, my father's dog got lost near here sometime Sunday night. Or
early Monday morning. A big dog. He looks like a wolf."
He shook his head. I paid him, and he put the toothpaste and peroxide in a white bag that didn't
even have Quigley Drugs printed on it.
"If you happen to see a dog like that, could you let me know? It's possible he's around here
somewhere. I live at the comer of Appleton and Concord, in the red house. I'm on the first floor."
"My wife was the dog person," he said. "I was never any good with them. Oh, I tried, all that heel, stay — but I never could get them to listen to me."
The past tense set my nerves on edge. "You've still got them, don’t you. I asked.
"Oh, Max is still out there," he said.
"Lady?"
"Bit me yesterday. Got my calf. She sank her teeth right in. I had to take her right to the vet."
"Was she hurt?"
He gave me a big smile.
"Had to put a needle to her," he said cheerfully. "Bit me. Like I told you, right on the calf. I didn't have any choice, did I?"
Love hungry and frightened, Lady might have bitten him out of fear, but she'd been a good
pointer, just a needy one, not a physical and neurotic wreck like Mimi's poor pampered Zip, and for
some reason, I'd liked her. No, not Steve, I thought. Let it be some other vet who did it. Any other
vet. Not Steve.
"What vet do you use?" I asked. I had to know.
"That young one who took over from Dr. Draper. Dr. Delaney."
Delaney. Steve Delaney. The conscientious vet. The murdering bastard.
When I got home, my machine had a message from Steve. I called his home number, got his
machine, and left a message of my own. As soon as I hung up, the phone rang.
-12-
“Holly? Al Barne.”
Some elderly and not-so-elderly residents of Owls Head, Maine, holler into the phone, but Al
doesn’t. Al’s sister, Regina, is Buck’s usual house- and dog-sitter. She doesn’t like me any better
than she liked my mother. I don’t even think she knows the difference; when she speaks to me at
all, she calls me Marissa. But Al has always been a friend of the family’s. he’s at least ten years
younger than his sister, in his early seventies, and sharp. He’s an old fishing and hunting buddy of
Buck’s.
“Hi, Al.”
“Holly, I thought you ought to know. I’m kind of worried about your father.” Not much worries
Al.
“What’s the problem?”
“Well, I think he ain’t slept since he got back. I hate to say it, but I think he ain’t right in the
head.” This from a man who gives every indication of thinking that Regina is right in the head.
“He’s worried about Clyde,” I said. “You know Clyde’s lost? And he’s probably sitting up with
Millie, waiting for her to go into labor.”
“Holly, he’s in the barn, crying like a baby, and he won’t let me in. I been out every chance I get,
and I pound on the door, but he won’t open it.”
Buck had sounded bad on the phone, but not that bad.
“Damn,” I said. “I’d leave this minute, but he’ll have a fit if I show up there. There’s no guarantee he’d let me in, anyway. I promised him I’d find Clyde, and as soon as I do, he’ll be all right. And,
look, I think once Millie’s labor starts, he’ll pull himself together.”
Al keeps going by driving the school bus, digging clams, pumping gas, taking care of people’s
summer cottages, and doing at least a dozen other jobs, all of them legal. Those summer places that
/>
stand empty from Labor Day to Memorial day offer certain tempting employment opportunities
that not everyone resists, but Al’s an honest guy. I believed him when he assured me he’d do his
best to keep checking on Buck, but I knew he didn’t have a lot of free time. Furthermore, he
couldn’t solve Buck’s problems. Only Clyde’s return and Millie’s labor could do that.
On the chance that someone had mistaken Clyde for a funny-looking malamute. I called Faith
Barlow. Some breeders don’t want anything to do with rescue work. For one thing, the average
breeder has too many dogs already and doesn’t necessarily have room for more, especially dogs that
could bring fleas, mange, and diseases into the kennel. Also, the dogs turned over to shelters and
humane societies tend to be pet shop dogs, not prime specimens of the breed, and they may have
had nasty temperaments to begin with or lives that would make any dog turn mean. Once in a
while, though, Faith will take one in, but only a malamute, of course.
I got her answering machine. The tape started with woo-wooing malamutes. Then Faith’s voice
said, “Hi, this is Faith. Sorry, no one’s home but the dogs, and we haven’t had time to train them to
answer the phone yet, but if you’ll leave your name and number, we’ll call back as soon as possible.”
Some mals woo-wooed again, and after the beep, I left a message telling her about Clyde and asking
her to call. Then I called Buck and got his machine. “This is Buck Winter. Leave a message and one
of us will call you,” his voice said. A recording of Clyde’s beautiful, clear howl sounded. I
remembered him standing upright in his giant-rabbit pose, waiting for that doughnut. I didn’t leave
a message. I couldn’t say anything.
By then, late Tuesday afternoon, I’d almost given up the hope that Clyde would wander back to
my door or that I’d find him trotting through the neighborhood, but the walking and whistling and
calling at least gave me the illusion that I was doing something to locate him, and Rowdy was happy
to tag along. When we got out the back door, Kevin was standing on the sidewalk. He had on baggy
gray sweatpants and a Cambridge YMCA T-shirt. He waas talking to Shane, who had wild Irish
Windy at the end of a lead.
“Holly,” Kevin called. “How ya doing?”
