by J. A. Jance
Ali and Bella made a quick trip of it—down, out, and back. When they returned, several more bleary-eyed adults had been added to the mix—Bob and Edie as well as Chris and Athena. While Bob and Chris dragged in extra chairs from their rooms, B. got on the phone to room service and ordered a sumptuous breakfast: fruit and cheese platters, baskets of breakfast breads, carafes of coffee and pitchers of juice as well as two chocolate milks for the kids. On hearing that, Ali realized B. was taking yet another giant step up the road to being what Colin called an “epic” grandfather, as chocolate milk was something Colin and Colleen were allowed only occasionally as a special treat.
Once the adults were comfortably seated with coffee cups in hand, the kids tore into their stockings. That was followed by an hour-long jumble of Christmas present unwrapping, complete with an appropriate chorus of oohs and aahs. Even Bella got into the act, happily nosing into her gift bag, dragging out her toy, and then instinctively giving the thing a furious shake that would have broken the bear’s little neck had it been a living creature.
The gifts B. had helped the kids choose turned out to be a beautiful leather wallet for Chris and a tiny bottle of name-brand perfume for Athena, neither of which were items that could have been purchased out of their own limited budgets. Two embossed envelopes with Bob’s and Edie’s names on them contained certificates for shipboard credits on the Mediterranean cruise they would be taking in April. At last there were only two gifts left under the tree. Colin picked up the small gift-wrapped box and handed it to Ali. “That’s from Colleen and me,” he said proudly. “We picked it out all by ourselves.
Inside, Ali was surprised to find a bottle of ink—Mont Blanc ink, to be sure—but she was puzzled. Although she hadn’t used a fountain pen in years, she thanked the twins with an enthusiastic hug. At that point Colleen dashed back to retrieve the last package: a gift bag with the distinctive Mont Blanc logo on the outside. “This one’s from B.,” she explained.
There were two boxes hidden inside the tissue-filled bag. One contained a tiny red fountain pen with a single ruby on the clip.
“It’s beautiful,” Ali said. “Thank you.”
B. nodded. “Take a look at the other one.”
The second box contained note cards—Mont Blanc note cards. “I’m not sure if I remember how to use a fountain pen,” Ali said.
“You’ll need to practice, then,” B. suggested. “But in the meantime why don’t you open the box of cards?”
Ali did. Inside the box, just under the layer of protective tissue, was a check, one written on B.’s personal account. The payee was the Amelia Dougherty Scholarship Fund, a charity that Ali had been charged with running for the last several years. The eye-popping amount of the check was enough to fully fund four-year scholarships for at least two students.
“Thank you,” Ali said, leaning over and giving him an appreciative kiss.
“You’re welcome. It’s sort of a combination wedding/Christmas present. I suppose we’ll be doing a lot of that from now on.”
“But I thought we agreed we weren’t giving each other presents,” Ali said.
“Changed my mind.”
“But I didn’t give you anything.”
B. waved his hand in a gesture that encompassed the whole room, including all the people and the litter of opened packages, torn paper, and discarded ribbons. “You gave me all this,” he said. “That’s good enough for me.”
B.’s cell phone rang somewhere in the room, and it took some time to unearth it. “Hey, Stu,” he said when he found it at last. “Merry Christmas.” He went out into the hall to take the call while Athena supervised the kids in a quick cleanup of wrapping debris.
A moment later a grim-faced B. popped his head back into the room and crooked his finger at Ali. “Bring Bella,” he said. “We’re going for a ride. Everybody else, take your time. Just lock the door when you leave.”
“Where to?” Ali asked as she and Bella joined him in the corridor.
“North Las Vegas,” he answered. “The Mount Charleston Nursing Home. Stu tracked down Harriet’s son, Martin Reid—not Marvin. That was his address on the RETURN TO SENDER sticker. Some more digging on Stu’s part turned up calls to the nursing home. I’m guessing that’s where he’s stowed his mother. According to Stu, Martin has also been systematically emptying his mother’s bank accounts.”
Grateful to have the information, Ali didn’t ask how Stu had happened to unearth that information. She was better off not knowing.
The nursing home, once they found it, was a grubby one-story building in a blighted section of town. Looking at the sad landscaping and the trash-littered front yard, Ali had a bad feeling about what the quality of care might be as they walked through the sliding front doors. She was relieved to find that inside, the place was clean and bright. The red-haired woman seated at the reception desk greeted them cheerfully.
“Good morning,” she said. “How may I help you?”
“We’re here to see Harriet Reid,” Ali said.
The woman typed a few letters into her computer. “She’s in room two twenty-two. That’ll be down the hall and to your left. You’ll both need to sign in, but just so you know, we don’t allow dogs in here.”
“Bella is Harriet’s dog,” Ali said firmly while B. dealt with the sign-in sheet. “She’s been lost. We found her on the street, where she was about to get run over. We wanted Harriet to know that we found her and that she’s all right.”
The clerk thought about that for a moment and then made up her mind. “After all, it’s Christmas, isn’t it?” she said. “What can a few minutes hurt? If the head nurse gives me any grief about it, I’ll tell her you snuck the dog past the front desk without my seeing her. She’s so little, it would be easy to miss her.”
B. and Ali started down the hall. They had taken only a few steps when Bella began pulling on the leash, her tiny feet scrabbling on the polished tile floor. Realizing that the dog must have caught Harriet’s scent, Ali simply let go. Bella skidded out of sight and into room 222 before Ali and B. made it as far as the doorway.
Inside the room, an elderly woman, slouching crookedly and belted into a wheelchair, dozed in front of a single window that opened onto the street. With a sharp yip, Bella launched herself into the air from the middle of the room. In one impossible leap, she landed in the sleeping woman’s lap.
Harriet awakened with a start. Then, realizing Bella was really there, the undamaged half of her face broke into a smile of pure joy. She pulled the dog into a tight one-armed embrace. As tears poured down Harriet’s one good cheek, the squirming dog, whimpering and wagging, licked them away.
For several moments, Harriet had eyes only for Bella. When she finally looked up and saw Ali and B., she shook her head. She pointed first at Bella and then at them before managing a garbled one-word question: “How?”
Remembering that a stroke had affected the woman’s ability to speak, Ali answered what she supposed had been asked.
“We found her in the street,” she said.
Harriet ran her hands over the dog’s still-prominent ribs. She shook her head and then made a gesture of raising a spoon to her mouth.
“Yes,” Ali said. “I think she has been hungry. But we’re feeding her. She’s getting plenty of food now.”
The woman nodded. For a time she struggled to force another word from her lips. At last it came out. “Son,” she said, then pointed at Bella.
“Your son was supposed to take care of Bella?” Ali asked.
Harriet nodded. The half smile disappeared from her face, and she resumed her desperate struggle to speak. “Bad,” she uttered with difficulty. “Bad boy.”
“That’s one of the things we wanted to talk to you about,” B. said, joining the conversation for the first time. “We have reason to believe that Martin may have been stealing your money. He’s stopped making
payments on your condo, and he’s been emptying your bank accounts.”
Harriet turned her gaze to B.’s face and gave him a long stare. She struggled to get out the next word, but finally she managed it. “Police?” she asked?
“No,” Ali said quickly. “We’re not police. But would you like us to report him to the police? We could do it anonymously, through an elder abuse hotline. They could look into the situation and, if necessary, appoint a guardian—a trustee, most likely, to look after your financial situation.”
After several moments of thinking the situation over, Harriet nodded her assent. “Yes,” she murmured, with some effort. “Yes, please.”
For another moment the room was silent. Bella had settled down and was curled into a contented ball in Harriet’s lap. Absently, Harriet ran her hand over the dog’s body, then looked up at Ali again.
“Son . . . mean . . . to Bella,” she managed.
Ali nodded. “We believe that, too,” she said. “We think he has been.”
“You take?” Harriet asked, pointing first at the dog and then at Ali. It was an eloquent if brief plea, and there was no mistaking it. There was a large old-fashioned electric clock on the wall. In the silence that followed, they all heard it ticking.
Finally Ali nodded. “Yes,” she said at last. “We’ll take her.”
Struggling with one hand, Harriet lifted Bella up out of her lap and held her out to Ali.
“Thank . . . you,” she said, patting the dog’s head once as Ali took hold of her. By then, unbridled tears were streaming down Harriet’s weathered cheek.
“Go,” she commanded urgently. “Go now.”
With Bella whimpering and struggling to squirm out of her grasp, Ali turned and did as she’d been told. Walking down the corridor, they heard the sounds of a woman sobbing brokenly in the room behind them.
“At least she got to say goodbye,” Ali whispered through her own sobs.
“Yes,” B. said with a nod. “They both did.”
“Well, Merry Christmas, buddy,” she added. “It looks like we just got ourselves a dog.”
Author’s Note
Dogs have always been an important part of my real life and my fictional life as well. According to family legend and at least one photo, I learned to walk by clinging to the back of an immense farm dog named Nicky. As a first grader in Bisbee’s Greenway School, I found a stray puppy, an ugly little mixed-breed mutt, on the street after school. I took it home, telling my mother that the dog had “followed” me there. The truth is I carried it for much of the way. My mother looked at the dog and said, “No. Absolutely not! We are not keeping it.”
It happened that my mother’s parents, Grandpa and Grandma Anderson, were visiting at the time and staying in our downstairs apartment. The next morning, at breakfast, I noticed that Grandma was taking bits of bacon off her plate and holding them under her very loose green sweater. My mother may have said no, but Grandma Anderson overruled her. That’s how Daisy came into our lives and stayed for the next dozen years.
As newlyweds living in a barrio in Tucson and later out on the reservation, my first husband and I had several dogs. One was a border collie named Sunny who couldn’t be trusted not to steal the neighbors tamales when they were delivered on Friday afternoons. Another was a bluetick hound named Huck, who was a great dog but not particularly smart. He was always sticking his nose into places where it didn’t belong; as a consequence he was bitten by a rattlesnake once and came home with a nose full of porcupine quills twice. At the same time, we fostered Smokey, an Australian shepherd, for a year or two until his family got settled in their new home in Oregon and he could join them.
After Smokey, we ended up with a black and tan hound named Zeke. A year or so later, all three of the dogs—Huck, Sunny, and Zeke—died in a pickup truck rollover accident when the guy at the wheel, one of my husband’s students, suffered a seizure.
After that, we found a pair of reservation dogs. Scratch was a German shepherd mix of some kind, and Azalea was most likely part sheltie and part dachshund. Azalea was run over on the highway before we ever left the reservation. Scratch made the move from Arizona to Washington and from Washington back to Arizona in the cargo holds of airplanes. I was coming back to Arizona at the time, too, but my parents were the ones who actually picked Scratch up at the airport. He rode in the backseat of their car from Tucson to Bisbee without ever lifting his chin off my mother’s shoulder. He was glad to see me when I showed up, but he made it clear that from the moment my mother rescued him from that airplane, he was her dog, not mine.
Bootsy was a gangly puppy who came into our lives a few years later in Phoenix. Of all the dogs that have come through my life, she was by far the dimmest. No amount of training worked on her, and she did her best to empty the fishpond of goldfish. She’s the one dog in my life with whom I never really bonded.
Barney, a black Lab who “followed” my daughter home, was a stray who was wearing a collar. His owner lived miles away from us, across I-17. We returned Barney to him twice, and each time he found his way back to us. The third time we kept him. For both my kids and me, giving up Boots and Barney was one of the toughest parts of leaving Phoenix, but it was what had to be done in order to embark on our new lives in a condo in downtown Seattle.
When Bill and I married, we thought having a pair of puppies in our lives might help smooth over the rough edges of having a “blended” family. That’s how Nikki and Tess (named after Nikola Tesla) came into our lives. They were cute eight-week-old red-dog golden retrievers who chewed on everything in sight, including the new carpeting in the family room. Once they grew up, Tess was known for flopping down on the floor, while Nikki entertained herself for hours by taking tennis balls to the top of the stairs, dropping them, watching them bounce down, retrieving them, and then carrying them back up. Nikki and Tess made their literary debut in Taking the Fifth when J. P. Beaumont, lost in Bellevue, is forced to ask a lady walking two golden retrievers for directions.
Mandy showed up in our lives when Nikki and Tess were five years old. We didn’t really want another dog, especially since we had an unfenced yard, but her family was moving into a condo where dogs were not allowed and they had to get rid of her, so we took her in. Mandy was a ten-year-old platinum-colored golden retriever. Up to then, we’d had to walk Nikki and Tess on leashes. When it came time to “get busy,” Mandy refused to do anything at all as long as she was on a leash. In the war of wills that followed, Mandy eventually won. She also taught Nikki and Tess that they didn’t need leashes, either.
Mandy was filthy when we first got her. She had clumps of tangled fur on her hindquarters. It took us weeks to get all of those tangles combed and clipped off her. She spooked easily and was terrified of anyone with a broom in her hands, but she settled in, dutifully making the long slow climb up the stairs to sleep contentedly on the floor of our bedroom. Six months after she came to live with us, her retirement ended abruptly when we learned that what we’d been told was a “touch of arthritis” actually turned out to be bone cancer. We had to put her down. She’d only been with us for a short time, but losing her hurt like hell.
Weeks later, when I was writing Payment in Kind (Beaumont #9), it was hardly surprising to have a dog named Mandy show up in that book. The fictional version of Mandy belonged to Beau’s long-estranged grandfather, and she lived on in my books for the next several years.
Shortly after we lost Mandy, another rescue came into our lives. Boney started out as a tiny five-pound rescue from the Pullman, Washington, pound. At the time I was housebreaking him and carrying him up and down the stairs one-handed, there was no way to tell that he was part German shepherd and part Irish wolfhound. Which is to say that, over time, he grew like crazy.
When Bone was about six months old, he collided with a brass and glass table while chasing after a tennis ball. As a result, he broke a tooth. Our vet referred
us to a doggy dental specialist. When he tried to start the root canal procedure before Bone was properly anesthetized, the dog ended up putting a hole in the dentist’s hand. (Having grown up with a dentist who didn’t believe in novocaine, I have to say Bone and I were on the same page there!)
Boney’s dentist, however, was furious. He told us that he was an extremely vicious dog who needed to be put down IMMEDIATELY! We went back to our original vet—the one who didn’t do dentistry. He suggested we send Boney to the Academy for Canine Behavior in Woodinville. Six weeks of academy boot camp training turned Boney into a complete gentleman!
By then, Nikki and Tess were aging. Tess was the first to go. We lost her at age twelve, and Nikki a few months later at age thirteen. With his companion dogs gone, Boney went into deep mourning. In order to bring him out of it, we came home with two more puppies, red-dog goldens again. This pair we named Aggie and Daphne after Agatha Christie and Daphne du Maurier.
As far as Boney was concerned, Daphne was perfect and could do no wrong. He allowed her to chew on his ears and pull his tongue and tail without ever saying a cross word. Aggie, however, Boney regarded as the devil’s spawn. She couldn’t come anywhere near him without him baring his teeth and growling at her.
We lost Mr. Bone to a fast-moving tumor on his heart at age eleven, but not before he had wormed his way into a book or two. He shows up as David Ladd’s Oho (“oho” is Tohono O’odham for bone) in Hour of the Hunter. By the way, both the real dog and his fictional counterpart would eat unwanted broccoli if someone slipped it to them under the table.
We lost Aggie to a raging case of valley fever when she was only eight. When Daphne came down with the same symptoms a month or so later, we coughed up a king’s ransom in vet bills in an effort to save her. For two and a half months she was too sick to do anything but lie on the kitchen floor and moan. In all that time she didn’t bark once. And then, one March afternoon in Tucson, about the time she was starting to feel better, Bill added up the amount that we had spent on her and was shocked to discover that the total came to a whopping $15,000.
