Scent of the Missing

by Susannah

  Hoss has always been kind to Puzzle. The few times she has been too obnoxious, hop-hopping at his side or pawing at his muzzle, Hoss has simply put a weighty paw over her shoulders and pressed her down to the ground in a decisive statement of authority. She's learned to accept this correction at the moment it is made, though I sometimes wonder if the lesson will ever carry and if she will, in time, stop all the puppy stuff that requires dog-to-dog discipline in the first place.

  Today she is a little bewildered that he's five feet above her. Trotting idly away from the rehab area, Puzzle stands beneath the truck and looks up to Hoss as he looks down at her. At the sight of him, she play bows in petition for a game, then stands looking at him bemusedly, apparently aware that he cannot come down from the truck to play, no matter how much both of them might like to. I watch the two dogs study each other.

  Then Hoss disappears for a moment inside the truck, returning quickly with his ball in his mouth. He puts his head over the side, gazes at Puzzle briefly, and with a flip of his muzzle, drops the ball, where it bounces across the parking lot. Puz is off like a shot to fetch it, bringing it back to the truck and, on command, releasing the ball to me. I hand it to Hoss, who tosses the ball again for Puzzle to fetch. I can't quite believe what I'm seeing, and the three of us collaborate on the game for a few rounds before I call in a low voice to Terry, and say, "Don't move, but look at this." Terry stands still and watches his dog throw the ball for my pup, who brings it back for Hoss to throw again. "I'll ... be ... damned," Terry says, and signals to a couple of teammates to watch the game in progress.

  Hoss and Puzzle are inexhaustible. Over and over, Hoss throws the ball from the bed of the truck, Puzzle brings it back and hands it to me. I give it to Hoss, who throws it again. Hoss has always been a ball dog, but he has always been the one on the receiving end of the throw. He has also always been a smart dog and, clearly analytic, he recognizes now that though he's in no position to fetch, he can still play ball just fine, thank you very much. Puzzle is glad to play with Hoss. If she didn't have so great a stretch to reach him, I get the sense that neither of them would need me there at all.

  Perhaps every team has its smart dog stories. I've heard plenty of them and witnessed a few. These high-drive dogs, given a job very young, quickly learn they are valued for the ability to interpret a situation and make a decision about it. They use these skills in the field, but they are equally likely to use them off-duty. Underestimate a search dog at your peril.

  Shadow has never been fond of leads. Her loyalty to Jerry and her confidence combine to suggest that she's going to stay near him wherever he needs her to be, but no way does she need to be tied to the man. In fact, she intensely resents it. She's a pack-oriented creature with her own agenda, who accepts being tied with limited patience. During the years of her training, when she was learning to work on a long, braided length of webbing, she systematically chewed through it a handful of times when left to her own devices. Jerry patiently spliced and knotted the lead each time, which gave it a beaded appearance from a distance.

  One cool Saturday morning at the fire academy, the handlers all temporarily tied their dogs to the A-frame, a rooflike structure designed to teach firefighters how to chop and vent a house fire. The handlers left their dogs sitting happily in shady grass, heading inside the academy for a quick class before returning to scenario training again. About halfway through the class, a security guard knocked on the classroom door, asking the group "if they knew the dogs were outside and wanting to come in." He gestured over his shoulder, pointing to the building door. The handlers left what they were doing and saw five dogs with faces pressed to the glass. All of them dragged the remains of tattered webbing. The security guard reported that Shadow had been the first to chew through her lead, and then she moved from dog to dog apparently instructing or assisting them as they chewed through their own. When all were free, they moved as a pack to the door of the building, where they stood now. Some were grinning and wagging. Shadow's expression was conversely haughty: we do not take kindly to being left outside, thank you. When Jerry walked out the door, she gave him an earful in fully articulated Husky. An "equal-opportunity release artist," some of the team old-timers call Shadow. And they never leave her alone with a dog secured on a lead.

  Hoss the Border Collie is another famous opportunist. One summer day during the debriefing after a search, Hoss, who had been beside his handler, suddenly disappeared. It was not like him to stray or to leave Terry for any extended length of time. When the group noticed he was missing, the dog had completely vanished: he was not with the search dogs, not with the other handlers, not with any of the law enforcement officers he might have schmoozed to throw a ball.

  The search had generated a crowd of bystanders, and some grew concerned that perhaps Hoss had been dog-napped. There had been precedents; high-profile search dogs sometimes attract unwanted attention. And Hoss is a friendly, sociable boy, trained to walk on a lead beside strangers in emergency situations. He would not have snapped at someone who led him away. The search for him grew tense and hurried before someone noticed that one of the handlers, whose car was running in order to cool her own dog in the back of the vehicle, had left its front door slightly ajar. It had been ajar before too, when Hoss had prized the door open with a paw and leapt inside to stretch out across a seat, his belly positioned to the air conditioning vents. He pirated a candy bar and relaxed. When discovered, Hoss seemed oblivious to the worry he'd caused, a smart dog unto himself who saw an opportunity for comfort while his people rushed around in the 100-degree heat, waving their hands and yapping.

  12. THE FAMILY STORY

  EVEN JUST STANDING on the front lawn before we head out to sectors, it's difficult to find the missing woman at the center of this family argument. Her daughter Nora says Miss Celeste has always loved leaving. Nora's voice makes a hard little wobble when she raises it to talk over her father, who tells us all there's an open jar of peanut butter in the kitchen, and she struggles to be heard over two neighbors debating the year Miss Celeste moved into her daughter's house. Nora's so tired it appears the gray skin of her face hangs from the bones. She left work early, has been out looking for her mother all day, and now it is dusk going dark, and she is discouraged, frightened, and, she admits this, shot through with anger toward the living ghost of her mother that has no place to rest. Nora cannot blame her father, who is also frail and worried about the peanut butter and thought he'd locked the door. She cannot blame her thirteen-year-old son, who was already at school when his grandmother took it into her head to go. ("I didn't do it!" says the boy to anyone who will listen, "I didn't let her out.") Miss Celeste's daughter is afraid that in the heat of the afternoon, her disoriented mother dropped down dead in some space she couldn't get out of, lost in the tangle of old memory and new neighborhood and lacking all sense of time or orientation to save herself. Miss Celeste was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease four years ago.

  She is five foot two, 115 pounds, and only a little arthritic, a former dancer (a Rockette we hear from one bystander, a Vegas showgirl, says another). She still carries herself well: shoulders back, a slight turnout remaining in her walk. Salt-and-pepper hair she sets in rollers nightly—the same style she has worn for years. She knows her name, and though she could not recall meeting you an hour ago, she will recount the full detail of a trying day forty years before, when she had to leave a dress rehearsal because her first-grade daughter had forgotten her lunch and could not be consoled. Miss Celeste had boarded two buses wearing spangles and tights. It's the famous family story. Nora has heard it all her life. She repeats it to us, repeats that she's tired as a sort of apology. It's ironic, she says, that now she's the one leaving work to chase her mother down. Nora has produced photographs and a plastic bag with a nightgown folded inside it: a scent article for the dogs, the only thing of Celeste's not straight out of the wash.

  A pair of house painters across the street told the police they saw Miss Celest
e go, and they wondered a little about the elderly woman out alone on a hot day in her long coat—but they didn't wonder enough to approach her or call for help. Just a little after ten this morning, she went right down the sidewalk in her dress and coat and Mary Jane walking shoes, carrying a purse and brown paper bag in her hand. She went east around the curve of the sidewalk and from there, both witnesses say, passed right out of view.

  Two dogs have already scented the nightgown and have gone out with their partners to confirm Celeste's direction of travel. Once we have word from them, search management will assign sectors for each dog team. We double-check our gear for extra water and first aid supplies relevant to Celeste's possible falls, dehydration, and hyperthermia.

  Neighbors and family circulate among us, a crowd of twenty or more. One brings a stack of paper cups, a campsite Thermos of lemonade and coffee in a carafe. There are a lot of what-ifs and if-onlys said to one another and to us— If only I had mowed the lawn today instead of yesterday, I would have seen her. If only she'd gone the other way, she would have passed right by me reading the paper on the porch. Normally I'm in the front room that time of the morning, but this time I was on the phone... You hear sometimes about bystanders co-opting a family's emergency, wanting to share the drama, but there's a sense among these neighbors of failed responsibility. They replay the morning as though they could intervene and stop Miss Celeste before she disappeared.

  The group on the lawn parts suddenly, like little fish scattering in advance of a big one. Daughter Nora steers her father aside by the elbow. Celeste's twin sister, Aunt Charm, has arrived to assist the family crisis. She looks like Celeste caught in the soft bend of a funhouse mirror. Her first words to me are about herself: she has Bell's palsy, contracted years ago when she put her face too long against the cold of an airplane window. Aunt Charm is a psychic with a husky tenor voice who graduated from a table in New Orleans's Jackson Square to more private consultations in a velvet- and sequin-draped room not far from Bourbon Street. And from there she had retired. Retired well, she tells me, there apparently being a good living in clairvoyance. She has charisma despite the comedy/tragedy conflict in the muscles of her face. Her glasses droop on the affected side, giving her a somewhat rakish expression, and her voice suggests both a smoking habit and a wise connection to unseen things. At the precise moment Celeste went missing, Aunt Charm says she felt her go—a little rift in the soul while she stood in the shower. As she bowed her head to rinse her hair, she felt Celeste too slipping quietly down a long, dark hole.

  That doesn't sound so good to me, but Aunt Charm seems unworried by the image.

  Celeste is always looking to escape, she says, present tense.

  Even before she got sick, she was never really with us, explains Nora, as though she lost her mother long before this morning.

  Aunt Charm adds an insight about her sister: Celeste will never speak in a voice above a whisper, if she speaks at all, and when she walks, she bends forward and rocks slightly on the balls of her feet as though to tiptoe. Bullshit, mutters Nora about the whispering, which Aunt Charm ignores. Aunt Charm describes their troubled childhood bound to a shattered father who never recovered from his experiences as a prisoner of war. He had refused to buy a television, had ripped the phone free of the wall. All their play had been some variation of the Quiet Game. She says it made his daughters good and sneaky.

  Nora tells us that the elderly Celeste has wandered before, returned home by the mailman once, by the neighbors twice more. She came home each time flushed and unhappy, unable to describe her plans but clearly frustrated by the interference of others—and eyeing the door for next time.

  I have heard Miss Celeste's description repeated so often that as we take additional information from the briefing, I seem to see her at the edge of every shadow. I've read of searches where the vague lost person stood among her rescuers unnoticed, and though Celeste isn't here, I see her standing in the yard nonetheless, considering, turning left as she headed from the house this morning. An estimated 80 percent of people who still retain directional skills will turn right when they are lost, but the Alzheimer's patient does not, necessarily. Celeste's condition has rapidly deteriorated. She has no more directional skills, no more right and left, even, no spatial orientation, no ability to recognize landmarks she has passed. She is all urge to go, but Celeste does not know she's lost.

  Would she have taken help from someone she didn't know? Her daughter and Aunt Charm deliberate. Nora says yes. Celeste's sister closes her eyes and says no. Aunt Charm's voice has acquired a shortness, an edge, as though she senses old skepticism about her psychic gifts. The two of them spar a little at the edge of an argument. Forestalling an unspoken "prove it," Aunt Charm says Celeste gleams like a lost thing at the bottom of a drain. Nora pushes her lips forward and looks away.

  The first two search dogs have confirmed Celeste's direction of travel. She's been gone more than nine hours, and while a strong woman her age could have walked one to two miles per hour and made some serious distance in that time, heat and Celeste's condition make it likely that if she had remained afoot, she'd be found closer to home. It's time for us to head out to the most immediate sectors. We wear gloves as we handle the plastic bag with her nightgown, and we do not touch it at all, but the dogs do, their curious noses snuffling over the cloth for a moment, memorizing her signature scent before they turn away.

  "Find that," say four handlers to their dogs. Collie, German Shepherd, and two Labs spring forward in their separate directions, and the sector searching has begun. We hear a scatter of applause from the crowd on the lawn—the kindly, spirited presence of the dogs always injects a little hope. The windless air is thick with mosquitoes. As I jog away behind Johnny and Buster in the twilight, I can still hear Nora and Aunt Charm proving to each other which one knew the missing woman best.

  We move quickly along the streets of our sector, dog, handler, field assistant, and a young police officer beside us who has never worked beside a search dog before. We are urgent with the sense of lost time and the extreme vulnerability of an Alzheimer's patient who may have gone all day without water. We look to Buster for some sign that he's caught any scent of Miss Celeste. We call her name hoping that she might call back to us. (Yes she would, says her daughter. No, says her sister, but she might wave a little.)

  Miss Celeste seems to wander with intent, sometimes called "goal-directed" wandering, but she has also demonstrated the aimless path-following, or "critical wandering," that caused her to once get stuck in the tight space between a neighbor's garage and fence line. Today she could have begun with an agenda in mind and then lost it, following a travel aid—a sidewalk, road, or path through the grass worn flat by passing schoolchildren—until unable to go farther and unable to turn around and go back. In such cases, a search dog is an invaluable asset, charged only to find her scent without the constraints of human logic. And Alzheimer's wanderers often operate outside the margins. Any space a human searcher might reject is a possible find space to a search dog. If Miss Celeste lies huddled behind a row of garbage cans or is squeezed in the crawlspace beneath a playground slide or has stumbled from a park path into a ravine, the dogs will find her.

  Intent. The coat, the purse, the brown paper bag all speak to me that Celeste had some kind of plan, at least for the first few steps down the sidewalk, but it's anyone's guess. I think of my own neighbor of twenty years ago, a neighbor who, at ninety-one, would sometimes walk out of her house in her good dress, pearls, and apron—dressed as though she were hosting a church social—and begin to rake the gravel in the alley behind us. She would rake with great determination deep along the alley, sometimes for blocks, until her son would drive down it and pick her up to bring her home, happy to have done so thorough a job all day.

  We press on, moving fast, dripping muck sweat and attracting a lot of attention. Doors open and residents lean out to openly watch us. Others pretend not to watch us while they do something else. Some l
ocals trot forward to ask if we're looking for the "lady they saw on the news." We are, we say at a jog while they move along the fence line in pace with us, and have you seen her? They have not. They promise to keep their eyes open.

  At one point, I turn around and see an assortment of children following us half a block behind, their eyes locked on Buster, waiting for whatever magical thing it might be that a search dog will do. And Buster looks magical. It's dark now, and to the delight of the children we have clicked on our hazard lights: lights on us, lights on the dog. Some pulse red, others flash an alternating blue and white, some glow neon green. "Don't shoot me lights," I call them. They are meant to caution passing drivers, but I wonder how a frightened, lost woman might view us at night, glowing and blinking and descending upon her like aliens.

  Miss Celeste's story has been well broadcast, and the farther we get from her home, the more neighborhood energy seems to shift from personal loss to a general excitement. Celeste, we call. It's time to go home now. Down the street the children's treble echo: Celeste. Celeste. Celeste.

  We hear no answering call—and with every cry, Celeste seems a little more lost.

  It's a busy night at the neighborhood park. There's a game going in the softball diamond, a pack of young men thumping and scudding across the basketball court, families in the brightly lit playground area, a party of some kind at the pavilion end of the green. The park is part of our sector, and Buster diligently sweeps across it in broad, generous strokes. He is uninterested in the hundreds of human scents available to him here, new scent, older, and oldest, his head up and down as he works the air for any trace of Miss Celeste. Buster works his way across the park, all concentration, and perhaps it's because of the crowd or perhaps it's because we are intent on his focus among all these people, but none of us quickly sees the charge of a large, off-leash dog who barrels through the crowd, teeth bared for Buster. He's a young, strong mixed-breed, and he clearly means business, but as he springs Johnny reflexively falls over his dog to protect him and grabs the attacking dog in midair, flipping him onto his back on the turf as though he were roping a calf. The dog makes a startled huh? sound and goes immediately passive where he lands, regressing to almost a puppyish wiggle beneath the flat of Johnny's hand on his belly. Muscular Buster, who in other contexts might have taken on the attacker, has stayed put where Johnny pushed him.