Enright Family Collection (111 page)

“Another one?” Matt laughed from the doorway.

“Yup.” The old man in the wheelchair chuckled. Long a proponent of natural foods for both man and beast, Tim Espey had been experimenting with home-prepared pet foods and holistic forms of treatment for the last twelve or fifteen years. And for the past three of those years, Matt’s rottweiler, Artie, had been his favorite guinea pig.

“What’s in this one?” Matt sat down on the large square ottoman in front of the wheelchair.

“Oatmeal, ground turkey, and some raw vegetables,” Dr. Espey replied. “A little bonemeal for calcium, some vitamin supplements, and some tamari sauce for flavor.”

“Put enough raw carrots in, and Artie will eat just about anything.” Matt grinned. “His breeder says he’s giving rottweilers a bad name. Artie would rather have broccoli than beef any day. And a bowl of salad is his idea of heaven.”

“I think if people knew just how much dogs like vegetables, they’d give them more. Which reminds me—you mentioned that Barry Enders was bringing his shepherd in today. How’s she doing?”

Matt leaned forward, his forearms resting on his thighs. “Well, she’s developed a pretty serious arthritic condition. She doesn’t get around so well anymore.”

Doc Espey nodded. “I whelped that bitch ... and her mother, and
her
mother, back about six generations. Every one of them developed hip dysplasia after they hit about ten or so. What did you give her?”

“I gave her two weeks’ worth of PSGAG and told Barry to give me a call at the end of the week and let me know how’s she’s doing.”

Doc Espey nodded in agreement. “Good choice. But I’d like to see her on fifteen hundred milligrams of vitamin C a day, as well.”

“I’ll give Barry a call first thing in the morning.”

“Tell him to divide the dosage in half and give it twice a day. If she’s no better at the end of two weeks, maybe we should send her to see Line Milner.”

Matt smiled. “How do you think Barry would feel about taking his dog to a chiropractor?”

“If he thought it would help his dog, he’d do it. Did wonders for that collie we sent down to Milner last year.”

“I’ll mention it to him.”

“Dinner’s almost ready, Matt.” Eva poked her head into the doorway. “Are you staying?”

“He’s staying.” Tim turned to her. “He needs a good meal and a few hours out. The boy has no social life to speak of, and can’t make a decent meal for
himself unless it comes frozen, out of a box, and fits into the microwave. Of course he’s staying. Go home and get Artie, Matt, and we’ll let him try Dr. Tim’s new doggie formula. And after dinner I’ll let you read the letter I got today from my old student Hank Stevens. He’s developed a very interesting homeopathic approach to treating behavioral problems in dogs using flower essences....”

It was well after nine
P.M.
when Matt returned to his small rented bungalow just off the main street of Shawsburg, Maryland. He checked the messages on his answering machine—a call from his sister, one from a woman, Beth, he’d met at a party a few weeks earlier and thought he might be interested in seeing again, and a call from one of his old fraternity brothers, wondering where he’d been hiding. He played the messages a second time, debating on whether or not it was too late to call Laura and whether or not he wanted to call Beth at all. He dialed the number of the inn and listened as the recorded greeting began.

“Thank you for calling the Bishop’s Inn. For general information, please press—”

“Hello?” Laura had picked up.

“Your dutiful brother promptly returning your call.”

“Oh, hi, Matt.”

“Is everything all right? Mom? Ally? Laura?”

“We’re all fine, Matt. Mom is the same—”

“Which is not fine,” he interjected.

“No. That’s not fine, but at least she’s still relatively healthy and has some lucid moments and she can still
carry on a conversation,” Laura reminded him. “That’s about as good as it gets at this stage of her disease, Matt.”

“I know that. I just hate it,” Matt told her bluntly.

“I hate it, too. But I can’t change it.” Laura sighed wearily. “I just wanted you to know that I’ll be going up to the farm tomorrow, and I was wondering if there was anything in particular I should be looking at.”

“Check the attic ceiling to make sure that the new roof is holding.” He thought for a minute, then added, “And check the basement to make sure there’s no water down there. We’ve had a lot of rain these past few weeks.”

“Anything else?”

“Nothing else I can think of. How’s Ally?”

“She’s fine.”

“Well, tell her that her favorite guy is on the phone and wants to talk to her.” The thought of his little niece brought a smile to Matt’s face. He loved Ally dearly and spoiled her every chance he got.

“Well, right now Georgia is reading her a story—”

“Georgia?”

“Georgia Enright,” Laura told him.

“Oh.”

“Oh, Matt—meet her, would you please, before you form a judgment?” Laura sighed with exasperation. “You would love Georgia, Matt, she’s just the sweetest person.”

“I’m sure she is,” he replied dryly.

“Matt, for someone as smart and clever and kind as you are, this blind spot you have—”

“I’ve heard this one before, Laura. Look, it’s been a
very, very long day. Have a nice visit with your sister. Give Ally a kiss for me. And keep in touch.” He lowered the phone to its base and exhaled loudly. More annoyed with himself than he wanted to admit, he went into the kitchen and poured a glass of water, trying to understand just why he saw red every time he heard the name
Enright.
It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t rational, he admitted, but it was fact. He swished the water around in the glass, then blew another long stream of air from his lungs.

He knew that Laura was disappointed by his reaction to her finding her birth mother. He knew that she wanted him to get to know her new family. He also knew that something unexplainable came over him every time he thought about it—something that caused him to break into a sweat and brought the slightest tremor to his hands.

Maybe, Matt thought, he should get Dr. Espey’s former student to prescribe some of those flower essences—the ones that were said to improve one’s mental state and emotional well-being—for
him.

He poured the rest of the water from his glass into the sink and opened the back door. Stepping outside, he scanned the night landscape for something moving across the yard. Artie, black as the very night, could be seen only as a streak of horizontal movement across the vertical background of trees. Matt whistled, then listened to the crunch of dried branches as Artie fled through a nearby thicket from the neighbor’s yard.

“What have you been up to?” Matt asked as Artie tried to slink past his master into the kitchen. “Not so fast, Arthur. Sit.”

Tom between escape and obedience, Artie sat.

“What is this stuff all over your face?” Matt frowned, hoping that the red liquid was something other than blood.

The phone rang.

“Yes, Mrs. Dobson? Oh, he did, did he?” Matt turned a stern face to the dog, who chose that moment to casually turn his back. “I’m so sorry. I’ll be right over to clean it up. No, it won’t happen again. I’ll see you in a minute.”

Matt hung up the phone and stood with his hands on his hips.

“So, Mrs. Dobson tells me you stopped by for a late-night snack.”

The dog licked at his front paws, as if pretending not to hear.

“And that you raided her trash can to get it. Leftover lasagna, was it?” Matt pulled several sheets of paper towels from the roll on the counter, wet them from the faucet, and knelt down to wash the dog’s face and paws. “Artie, you’ve got to stop knocking over people’s trash cans and helping yourself. It’s ‘no, no, bad dog’ stuff, understand?”

Matt looked down into the big, warm brown eyes of the rottweiler. The dog looked up. A large pink tongue—now devoid of tomato sauce—slurped across Matt’s face contritely.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. We’ve had this discussion before.” Matt stood up and tossed the paper towels into the trash. “And don’t even think about going after
them;
I’m taking the trash bag out with me. You can just wait right here till I get back. Stay, Artie....”

Artie sat, his tail thumping tentatively on the kitchen floor.

“You just sit right there and think about what you’ve done,” Matt muttered as he closed the door behind him and set off to clean up the scattered remains of Mrs. Dobson’s garbage, three doors down.

Later, the apologies made once again and the cleanup completed, Matt settled into his favorite chair with a favorite book,
The Sign of Four,
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. As he opened to the first page, he recalled the phone calls he had not returned that night. He would call his fraternity brother over the weekend. The woman—Beth, from someplace around Havre de Grace, he recalled—he probably would not call at all. Between taking care of Doc Espey’s clinic and worrying about both the good doctor and his own mother, Matt had little energy left for anything else.

He leaned over to switch on the lamp and in doing so, knocked a photograph from the small table onto the floor. He picked it up, and as he replaced it his eyes dropped to the picture within the brass frame. Laura and their mother stood on the back porch of the Bishop’s Inn amid hanging waves of wisteria, smiling generously for Matt, who had taken the picture with a camera he’d received for his seventeenth birthday.

Their faces were both so dear to him. Charity Bishop had been a beautiful woman, right up until the time her illness had started to drain the life from her eyes. Matt could barely stand it that, more often than not, she did not know him when he visited. Every week he made the trip from Shawsburg to the
convalescent home, midway between Bishop’s Cove and Pumpkin Hill, hoping that
that
day would be a good day; that she would remember who he was, maybe even greet him with a smile and a cheery “Hi, Matty.” Those days were coming less and less frequently now as her disease progressed, and it broke his heart. He knew that the day would soon come that he would have to accept that there would be no more recognition of anyone who had once been so dear to her.

Anger welled up in him once again as he studied the features of the woman who had been mother and savior to him, then those of his sister. Laura had been his champion and his best friend. She had allowed him to sleep on the end of her bed when, as a four-year-old frightened by the newness of the Bishop home and all the mysterious things it held, he would awaken in the night and cry out all the fears he lacked the verbal skills to express. It had been Laura who had patiently taken him by the hand and taught him the words he did not know. She had read to him, played with him, taught him songs and stories, and walked with him on the beach. While the social workers had held little hope that the neglected toddler rescued from a drug house would ever develop normally, Matt had astounded all of them when he started school a mere one year later, his verbal skills almost on grade level. Charity had been determined that her boy would learn and excel, and he had. Much of his success, Matt knew, he owed to Laura’s diligence.

And I need to be as diligent for her sake as she has been for mine,
he told himself.

“No one is going to hurt Laura,” he whispered, and Artie looked up at the sound. Matt dropped a hand down and scratched behind the dog’s ears. Satisfied that he had identified the reason behind his Enright-phobia, he reopened his book and began to read the careful exchange between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson regarding the great detective’s use of cocaine, his defense of his habit, and the good doctor’s earnest protests thereof.

chapter five

Is this it?” Georgia eased her right foot onto the brake and tilted her head to look out the front window, asking, “Is this where I turn?”

“Yes,” Laura pointed ahead to the gravel driveway that ran past an old farmhouse the color of faded sunshine. “Turn in here and just pull straight on back.”

Straight on back led past the house to a wide expanse of farmyard, with an old weathered barn on the left, a somewhat smaller barn—the clapboard of which had lost much of its white paint to the elements—almost straight ahead, and another structure, smaller still and surrounded by a wire fence, stood off to her right.

“Welcome to Pumpkin Hill.” Laura smiled and jumped out of the passenger door and began to look through her pocketbook for the thick ring that held all the keys she would need here.

Georgia leaned across the steering wheel and briefly surveyed her surroundings. The old farmhouse
stood on the right side of the drive opposite the barn. Behind the house was a fenced-in area. Some gnarled apple trees in desperate need of pruning ran between the back of the fence and the smallest of the three outbuildings, and, behind all, deep fields stretched back to a wooded area far behind. Georgia turned off the ignition and hopped out.

“Ah, I love the smell of this place, even in the throes of winter.” Laura inhaled deeply.

Georgia thought to remind her sister that March was hardly the throes of winter, but decided to let it go. The air did smell wonderful; pine mixed with something else that was earthy and elemental.

“We used to spend a lot of time here in the summer when we were kids,” Laura told her. “Mom and Dad were always so busy at the inn during the summer months that we never got to go away on vacations as a family, so they used to send us out here for a few weeks at a time. We always had such fun, Georgia. Aunt Hope was such a character.” Laura shook her head, remembering. “Funny and tough. She was the farmer in the family. She kept up the house and plowed the fields and planted crops and gardened and canned and preserved. Poor Jody can’t bear the thought that she’ll have to rely on other sources for her tomatoes and zucchini and herbs this year. Aunt Hope supplied us—and several other local restaurants—with all of our fresh produce in the summer.”

“I’m impressed.”

“You should be. She kept up with all this until she died last September at the ripe old age of seventy-seven. Still worked the fields, though she had cut
back on the number of acres she planted over the past few years. But she still cared for the property by herself. Oh, once in a while one of the neighbors would stop by to check on her, and Matt came back every few weeks and would stay for a few days.” Laura turned and pointed to the big red barn. “For years, Matt has kept an apartment there, in half of the second floor of the barn—he still comes back on a pretty regular basis. But for the most part, Aunt Hope was on her own. She always said she liked it that way.”