What a Dog Knows

by Susan Wilson

  37

  It’s a chatty little message:

  Hi Ruby, so glad you reached out to me. I am your second cousin. I have been collecting family history for many years and this is the first time I’ve been approached by your branch. It sounds like you have some questions about your history, and maybe I can enlighten you a little bit. Having said that, there is a lot we don’t know. I suggest that we communicate via regular email instead of the FHL.”

  It is signed: Your 2nd cousin, Sarah Grace Devereaux (married name Bidwell) with her email address. Ruby immediately taps in a cordial reply and her email address and cell phone number.

  It’s a start.

  Ruby arrives at the front door of her eight-thirty appointment a few minutes early. It hadn’t taken long to find the place, and Ruby realizes that she’s become quite well versed in the highways and byways of little Harmony Farms. This place is on one of the offshoot roads that thread themselves around the lakeside. The house is a tiny renovated lake house, with a six-foot chain link fence surrounding it. She gets a ripple of foreboding. This is the kind of fence you use when you want to keep something very big inside of it. Sure enough, she hears a thunderous bark and a massive Rottweiler bounds out from behind the house and crashes into the fence, upright on its hind legs. Ruby’s first impulse is to jump back into the Westie and book it out of there, but she doesn’t. She waits for the dog’s person to shout at him, grab him by the collar, and haul him away. None of which happens. Maybe this isn’t the right house, but according to the address she has written down, it is. “I’m giving it one minute,” she says under her breath. She also thinks that this is the stupidest arrangement, the way the fence surrounds the house, instead of allowing for access to the front door by UPS drivers and psychics. There is no way to ring the bell. Surely the owner can hear this commotion. Surely this is the reason for the consult in the first place. Ruby has no intention of laying hands on this dog who is now banging his massive forepaws against the chain, biting at it and growling. “Hey, I’m here to help,” she yells. And the dog shuts up. Mischievious puppy? Interesting description. Clearly the owner has understated the issue.

  “I’m so sorry, I was in the bathroom.” A tiny middle-aged woman comes out of the house. Ruby instinctively shuts her eyes against the carnage as the dog bounds up to the woman. “He’s really a peach.”

  “So I see.”

  The dog is rolling around on his back, begging for a belly rub two seconds after he was threatening Ruby with dismemberment.

  “I’m Ruby Heartwood, I’m here to consult with you about your dog.”

  “Yes, I know. Again, sorry for his behavior. He really doesn’t mean anything by it, but it’s making it hard to have anybody over.”

  Ruby waits at the gate as the woman coaxes the dog away from the fence and into the house. “I have to be honest, I don’t really think I can help you.” She makes no move to open the gate, step onto that property.

  “Once you’re in the house, he’s fine.”

  In her mind’s eye, Ruby sees a chorus of Polly, Doug, and Sabine all screaming, “Nooo!”

  “Let’s talk out here for a moment first. How old is he?”

  “Ten months.”

  Ruby begins peppering the owner with all kinds of questions about the dog’s routine, origins, preferences, and when this behavior became apparent. All without going through the gate. She can see the dog’s big head in the picture window. He’s standing on the couch and facing them, a gargoyle of a dog. She detects a string of drool going from his lips to the windowpane. He flips his head and a spray of saliva paints the glass. And suddenly she gets right into the dog’s mind. “He’s bored. He’s in need of a job. He would enjoy meeting other people, but he has all these feelings of superiority. What I think he means is that he’s become a mature dog. He needs to be neutered.”

  “He thinks that?”

  “No, he thinks he needs to mount, that is, dominate, everything and everyone.”

  “I’ve been meaning to get an appointment but…”

  “I know, he’s hard to manage without the fence. Get help.”

  Ruby walks away with her fee in her hand wondering why in the world such a small woman would have such a dominant dog. Companionship or protection? Ruby thinks that she’ll ask Polly to find a trainer for this lady before it’s too late.

  The next appointment is a cake walk in comparison and comes with a nice cup of tea offered by the poodle’s owner. They sit chatting long after Ruby has translated the little dog’s reason for recent anxiety: the owner’s new boyfriend is a cat person. Détente is possible if the boyfriend will bring special treats when he comes to visit. She’s thinking of Doug when she recommends this; he always has something special for the Hitchhiker whenever he’s around. Last night, in the end, Ruby hadn’t gone back to Harmony Farms to sleep in her van in Bull’s yard but had again stayed the night with Doug. It has become awfully easy to do. Ruby thinks that there is some danger in this, but Doug makes no call on her to stay put. He never asks why she insists that she needs to move on. He never tries to argue her out of it. Even if she is experiencing some difficulty in actually leaving, he never says anything—like it must mean she isn’t really ready to go.

  Well, tonight she’ll get a room at the Dew Drop Inn. Tomorrow she has the barn call and then one more house call. After that she is hoping to book herself into another Renaissance Faire. There’s a good one opening up this weekend on the South Shore that she’d done a few years ago. First, though, Ruby needs to make another repair to the rip in the tent, it’s migrated north in the fragile fabric. That and she noticed on Saturday that her little pennant is horribly faded and should be replaced. It’s always something, she thinks. Always something.

  When Ruby pulls into the parking lot of the Dew Drop Inn, Robert W. Atkins is escorting a couple of men dressed in the uber casual style of slackers, although they seem a tad too old for droopy black pants and hoodies, horn rimmed glasses, and stubble. Investors, Ruby decides without guessing. Harmony Farms is laden with such folks, people who telecommute to jobs with inexplicable descriptions and eat kale. Earn more money in a week than she does in a year. She sighs. What will be will be. Que sera sera. She envisions the Dew Drop demolished and rebuilt to include all the amenities of a resort. Concierge service and a spa menu. Something entirely out of her price range. Ruby parks the van and hustles into the office, the Hitchhiker on her heels. Ravi has taken to keeping biscuits in his office for the growing number of dogs staying at the Dew Drop and she knows where he keeps them.

  “I notice that your real estate man is here.” Ruby signs the registration sheet. “I wouldn’t be deceived by the look of the pair he’s got with him.”

  “Oh, I’m not. I’m quite encouraged.” He makes the Hitchhiker sit before giving her a treat. “The scruffier they are, the more money they tend to have. It’s a cultivated look.” Ravi fishes out another treat for the dog. “This place is crying out for an infusion of capital.”

  Ruby has to admire his optimism, and then she thinks that maybe it’s a brand of hope, that he will either benefit from the new ownership or be forced to move on.

  As Ruby slips the key into the lock to her usual room, Robert Atkins and his companions come around the corner of the building. “Hey, it’s Ruby, isn’t it?”

  “Indeed it is.”

  “I’m here showing the property to these two gentlemen,” Atkins says, stating the obvious, but Ruby is too polite to mock him.

  “It’s a nice place, I’m very comfortable here. The management is quite good.” Plug Ravi where she can. “Very nice place.” They’ve been in every room but her little crooked one, so she hopes she’s not overselling.

  “I’m sure.” Bob turns to guide his clients in the direction of the laundry room, then pauses. “You know what? I just thought of that name you were looking for the other day.”

  “Oh?” Knees begin to weaken, and Ruby collects herself. It means nothing. It’s just a name. Of a w
oman in her line of business. Bet it’s someone she already knows. The thoughts stream through her mind in a rush. “What is it?”

  “Probably made up, but she called herself Aurora.”

  “Just Aurora?”

  “That’s all I can recall.”

  It must have been the late sixties, early seventies. Hippies and free love. Names as made up as her own. Was Aurora self-inventing or hiding? Drifting through life as an itinerant soothsayer or focused on earning enough of a living to settle down?

  “Now that you remember her name, do you happen to recall what she looked like?”

  Robert W. Atkins, once of the skinny hippy longhair leaping gnome stage, now stout and bald and successful in business, blushes a teensy bit. “Actually, now that my memory is jogged, I recall that she was gorgeous, in the way of girls in that era. Thin, long red blond hair, ethereal. Floated into my shop for a few weeks and then floated away. Couldn’t catch her. Couldn’t pin her down.”

  He is describing Guinevere drawing pentagrams, as in the old Crosby, Stills & Nash song.

  “Do you know about how old she might have been?” It is important that this creature of his memory and of Cynthia’s be the right age. Ruby has thought a lot about this. If her mother had been in some kind of home for unwed mothers, then she would have been a teenager when Ruby was born. If she appeared in Harmony Farms in the early seventies, then she might have been at most in her early thirties. If this woman in Cynthia’s memory and Bob’s is too old, well, then it can’t have been Ruby’s mother. Likewise, too young wouldn’t work.

  “Gosh, I’m no judge of a woman’s age, but definitely on the good side of thirty.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Atkins. That helps.”

  Ruby lets herself and the dog into the motel room, flops onto the bed, and stares up at the ceiling, which has a spider on it. The dog jumps up beside her and circles, happy to have a quick nap if that’s what Ruby is suggesting. “Aurora. What a great name. Wish I’d thought of it for myself.” Ruby starts to laugh. “Wait, maybe I did.” That long-ago fake family tree. Hadn’t they made up the name of a putative grandmother, Aurora Boreallian?

  The dog has no reply, tucks her nose beneath her hind leg and lets her eyes close slowly into pure relaxation.

  Ruby, however, cannot relax. She gets up, disturbing the dog, who, after making sure going back outside isn’t on offer, just closes her eyes again. Ruby looks at her phone, sees that she has a couple of email messages, but prefers to check them on her computer. Booting up seems to take forever, so she peeks at the phone to see who they are from. If she was a superstitious person, she would cross her fingers, hoping that her new cousin Sarah Grace has sent her some information. Confirmation that somewhere in the family history is a hippy chick named Aurora. She wants a message from Sarah Grace so badly that she is shocked when she actually has one. No, two. Both email messages are from Sarah.

  The first is another chatty message with lots of names that don’t seem to add up to anything remotely useful. Second cousins and third cousins once removed, twice removed. Seemingly all human beings who arrived on these shores from the British Isles appear to be related.

  The second gets down to brass tacks. Females prevail in this family. Grandmothers have sisters and mothers have daughters. The last paragraph of the rather long, complicated email is the one she should have started with.

  “I believe that you may descend from my great aunt Lidia’s second daughter’s second daughter, who supposedly ran off. I don’t know much about that part of the family, so let me do a little rooting around, make some calls. However, I’m off on our long anticipated Alaskan cruise, so if you don’t hear from me right away, don’t lose hope.”

  38

  It is too hard to wrap her mind around the various generations and how they may fit against the framework of the last fifty-five years. Was this missing daughter lost in 1964 or 1934? Is the allusion to females “prevailing” in this family a coded message on a particularly female tendency toward fortune-telling? Ruby taps in a quick thank-you and a promise to be patient. “So many questions!” she writes, again including her cell phone number in the reply.

  The Hitchhiker rests her chin on Ruby’s knee as Ruby sits and ponders the imponderable. The dog sighs. Yawns. Wriggles her chin deeper against Ruby’s leg, exerting an attention-getting pressure. Woof. “It’s time for dinner. Feed me.”

  “You think that it’s always time for dinner.”

  “It is.”

  “No, it is not.” Ruby has to be firm with this little muncher. “Maybe time for a cookie.”

  “Okay. Many.”

  “One.”

  “More than one.”

  “Two.”

  The dog agrees in principle and moves to allow Ruby to get up and fetch the box of Milk-Bones. Ruby’s wooden box holding the deck of tarot cards is beside the box of dog biscuits. She feels a strong need to consult them on her own behalf, although she is never quite sure if her self-interpretations are of any use. She should get someone else to do it for her, but there is a critical shortage of psychics in town. Instead, she thumbs through her contacts list. Maybe Lily Parmenter or Sylvia Truelove would be willing to do her a favor. Ruby has never been a fan of remote readings, but any port in a storm, as they say. Lily answers on the first ring, “Ruby Heartwood! As I live and breathe, I just knew you were about to call.”

  “Right. And the same back to you, you old fraud.”

  They laugh. Lily was always fun to be around. Not a true psychic, Lily is a wizard tarot interpreter. She can weave a fortune like nobody’s business based solely on what the cards reveal. Ruby and Lily bring each other up to date enough on their lives to allow Ruby to get to the point of her call. “I’m looking for someone. I need to know…”

  “Uh-huh. Don’t give me ideas. Do you have FaceTime?”

  In a moment, Ruby and Lily are virtually face to face. Lily shuffles her cards, a nice set that looks fairly new. Ruby compliments them. “Got them from a retiree. Barely used them.”

  “Only on Sunday, that kind of thing?”

  “Sort of. Hey, I think you knew her, way back.”

  Ruby can watch Lily lay out the cards. “Who?”

  “Celeste Fox. Went by Madame Celestine back in the day.”

  “Yeah. I knew her.” Ruby hopes that Lily is too busy with her cards to see the look of surprise on Ruby’s face at the mention of her erstwhile mentor, but Lily is too good at her job not to make sure she looks up at exactly the right moment.

  “History?”

  “You could say that.” Ruby has never told anyone the circumstances of Sabine’s conception, only that she had learned the trade from Madame Celestine (who knew that her real name was Celeste Fox?). But now Ruby is riven by curiosity. What had become of Buck, he who she had cursed so potently?

  Lily’s eyes on the tiny screen bore into Ruby’s. “What do you want to know?”

  “Tell me about her.”

  Lily describes an elderly woman with a bad dye job, dressed in a velour track suit that might have come from the eighties. “A little lady. Not over five feet tall, I bet, although most of that was hunch.”

  In Ruby’s memory, Madame Celestine towered.

  “She handed me the box of cards and I handed her the money. She was clearly lonely and wanted me to stay for a cup of coffee, but I had to go.”

  “Did she mention her son?”

  “In passing. I felt bad about leaving her alone, but she said that she was expecting her son to visit, that he came every Saturday. But, Ruby, I had the feeling that this was a lie.”

  “How so?”

  “The screen door needed fixing, the grass in the yard was in dire need of cutting. Little things a devoted son would take care of. You know what I mean?”

  “I do.” Ruby then thinks to ask, “When was this?”

  “Oh, gosh. Maybe a year ago.”

  “Where?”

  “Providence.”

  Ruby can’t believe that. The
last place she pictured Celestine was in New England, much less an hour or so away. Celestine seemed much more the type to end up in Florida.

  “At any rate, how can I help you, Ruby?”

  “You know what, give me Celestine’s address if you remember it and let’s forget the reading.”

  “Okay.” If Lily thinks this odd, she doesn’t show it.

  Ruby is never going to trust a deck of tarot cards that once belonged to Buck’s mother.

  * * *

  She forgot my other cookie. She doesn’t think that I can count, but I can count when I haven’t gotten more than one. Those little boxes that people cling to are so distracting, much like finding a new scent on a blade of grass when you are on a walk. Suddenly that scent grabs your nose and you can’t think of anything else until … squirrel! At any rate, Ruby is so distracted by the little thing that she must be reminded of my missing treat with a sharp yappy bark. I accept her apology.

  * * *

  Polly called to let Ruby know that Cooper has brought Bull home, that the old guy is doing pretty well, and taking his medicine and keeping away from the cigarettes and Mountain Dew. Ruby says she’ll drop in on him after her appointments. Déjà vu again. Leaving Harmony Farms Part II, or III or whatever it is. Stop at Bull’s and keep going. That was the plan a week ago, that is the plan today. She’s settled up with Ravi, wished him luck with the sale of the motel, called Sabine to let her know that she’s heading to the South Shore to the Ren Faire near Plymouth. Doug says he’d kind of like to join her there, spend the upcoming weekend. He’s even offered to find a nice hotel, what he laughingly said might be a step up from the Dew Drop. At first Ruby balked at the idea of company. She’s working, not sightseeing. But even before she objected, Ruby realized that the idea of having someone to eat with, to talk to about the day and the foibles of the gullible masses would be kind of fun. When Sabine was her constant companion, even during her cranky adolescence, it was nice to sit down to a meal and tell stories. Having another person across from her made her life seem close to normal. So she’s told Doug, sure. They won’t get a ton of time together, what with a ten-hour day in the tent, but some.