Authors: Susan Conant
“Would you shut that dog up?” I said nastily.
“Holly, don’t be mad,” he said. “You have two Alaskan malamutes, and your veterinarian loves you.”
“Could I ask you something? Why are you so
happy?”
“I’ve been thinking about something.”
“What?”
“If one of us’d said the wrong thing to him?
Jesus, we’re lucky to be here. And now I get to fire the little bastard and move back to Cambridge and run a one-man practice again. Besides, I’m in bed with a tough woman. But I don’t mind because she has such beautiful breasts.”
Sometime during the next hour, the dogs, who’d been let out and in and given their ample morning rations of nutritionally perfect, vet-recommended premium canine chow, nosed out a package under the tree that I’d assumed to contain a copy of my Aunt Cassie’s husband’s latest tedious academic book. Apparently, though, unless Uncle Arthur had for once managed to produce a colorful work, the present had been a large, flat, tomelike fruitcake, or so I inferred from the waxy-looking red and green bits and the brownish, doughy mass that Kimi regurgitated onto the kitchen floor.
One of the convenient things about breakfasting with your vet is total freedom from the expectation that you’ll lose your appetite if a dog throws up or that you’ll at least quit chewing your English muffin while you scrape up the vomit before the dog decides that, gee, now that it’s already half digested, maybe it’ll stay down
this
time.
“I hate to ruin your good mood,” I said to Steve, “but you can’t fire Lee Miner yet, not unless you’ve got some excuse besides the truth. If you tell him that? You were right, what you said before. He’ll probably jab a needle in your arm, for God’s sake. Though, actually, he probably won’t do anything. Why should he? There’s no evidence.”
Steve was eyeing Kimi. “Probably soaked in brandy,” he said. Then he looked up at me. “I’m going to have a talk with what’s-his-name.” He waved a thumb in the direction of the house next door to
mine. As I’ve mentioned, my friend and neighbor Kevin Dennehy is a Cambridge cop of elevated rank.
“What’s Kevin supposed to charge him with? Not knowing where his wife went when she walked out on him? Those bodies are gone. Patterson’s is long gone. I mean, he disappeared about three weeks ago. And Jackie … Jesus, this makes me sick.” I stopped and took a deep breath. “Groucho died this Tuesday, right? Just after you got back. And Jackie—” I had to stop again. I swallowed, waited, and continued. “Groucho’s body was picked up on Wednesday, so that’s when Jackie’s was, too. And that John Kelly business isn’t evidence. In other words, all we can prove is that nobody can find anybody. Yeah, right. Any. Body.”
“Dennehy’s smarter than he looks,” Steve said.
“Yeah, he’s probably smart enough to go find Cliff Bourque, who’s probably hanging around somewhere semidrunk and sounding paranoid, and then Kevin will tell me how naive I am, and, at a minimum, Cliff Bourque will be hassled, and Cambridge might even have to send him back to New Hampshire. ‘Merry Christmas, Cliff! Sorry about your dog, and, by the way, thanks for almost getting run over to save mine.’ ”
As I’d been talking, I’d been debating the pros and cons of telling Steve about that ridiculous and sinister business of the lilac bush. It now seemed less silly and more menacing than it had, but I felt no sense of personal threat. Cliff Bourque had followed Lee Miner that night; he’d tracked his prey. Maybe Bourque had even been surprised that the trail led to my party, the party he’d decided not to attend. It seemed clear to me that Cliff Bourque meant me no
harm at all, but Steve might not agree. I decided not to mention the episode.
“Could be we’re giving him too much credit,” Steve said.
I was startled. “Cliff Bourque?”
“Miner. He wrapped everything up tight here, yeah, but we can’t be positive there’s nothing in those records, up there.”
“So let’s call and find out. Or at least let’s try. We don’t even know if they’re open today.”
Lorraine, who administers these kinds of things for Steve, had declared the day before Christmas a holiday. Steve was on call, and Miner was due to take over later, in the early evening, when Steve and I were leaving for Owls Head, or that’s what Lorraine had decided.
“No,” I added. “Even if they are, call Geri Driscoll. It’ll be quicker. Tell her in confidence that you found some odd transactions that started after Miner got here. Tell her that you don’t know what’s going on, but would she look at their records? Starting with when Oscar disappeared, three weeks ago, whenever. And Steve? Get her to look at everything, not just cash payments. Make sure she checks to see if anyone’s supposed to have brought in an animal that had already died. Or if another animal died around that time.”
“She won’t—”
“Steve, take it from me. She’ll do anything you ask her. If I call, she won’t even remember who I am.”
I watched and listened while he was on the phone. He got the story out okay. After that, she did most of the talking. He turned unbelievably red.
He hung up and said, “That woman is disgusting.”
“Yeah. She’s also kind of sad, but in sort of an evil way, if you ask me. She says that if Patterson doesn’t show up soon, she’s getting an abortion, just to spite him. It’s so … it’s so coldhearted. If I didn’t …”
“What?”
“You know, Steve, Geri was practically there that night. Their house, hers and Patterson’s, is right near the animal hospital. Also—”
“Yeah?”
“What makes her so sure that Patterson’s alive?”
“Wishful thinking,” Steve said.
“Maybe. Anyway, she’ll look?”
He nodded. “She’ll call back.”
The phone rang a few minutes later, but the call was from Steve’s answering service. After a few words of instruction to be relayed to an owner, he started to bolt out the door, came to a halt, and said, “Holly?”
“Yeah?”
“If Brenner shows up, don’t open the door. Don’t let him in.”
“Steve, he doesn’t even know my real name, never mind where I live.”
“People know you,” he said. “You’re not hard to find. All he’d have to do would be to ask around.”
“I’m not afraid of Brenner,” I said defiantly.
“I know. That’s what scares me. Don’t open the door.”
After Steve left, I felt at loose ends. Regardless of what happened, including whatever I did, it seemed unlikely that Steve would go to Maine with me for Christmas. He obviously couldn’t leave Lee Miner in charge of his practice, and he’d never find
someone else on a few hours’ notice. In other circumstances, the dogs and I would have gone by ourselves, but how could we? Steve and I hadn’t really reached any decision about what to do. We hadn’t heard from Geri Driscoll. Lee Miner was probably eating a late breakfast in Steve’s kitchen over the clinic or walking the muzzled Willie, with Cliff Bourque presumably still tracking him.
If you don’t have a dog, what do you do when you don’t know what to do? To avoid missing Geri Driscoll’s call, I propped open the door to the side yard and went out there to work the dogs. With Kimi, I didn’t do a run-through, but concentrated on getting her sits absolutely straight in front and at heel position, speeding up her drop, and keeping her prancing with me instead of lagging on her about-turns. Those details are where you lose points, of course. Before long, my hands were icy and raw. When I train with food, I want control over exactly when I pop it in the dog’s mouth, and I avoid wearing gloves. A winter-long case of chapped hands is one of only two disadvantages of training with food. The other is the mess you find in your washer and dryer when you forget to empty your pockets.
By the time I began to work Rowdy, the sky had turned such a deep charcoal that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a flurry of cinders mixed with snow. I pulled some white work gloves from my pockets, put on a pair, and used three more for the directed retrieve. In the ring, you have the dog retrieve one of three gloves, whichever one the judge designates. Getting the correct glove is the kind of task that malamutes learn almost effortlessly. Where they fall to pieces is on such challenging exercises as walking by your side. Didn’t Einstein flunk algebra? After
Rowdy had joyfully brought back the gloves a few times, I had him retrieve a metal dumbbell from an old set of scent discrimination articles. Even golden retrievers aren’t naturally wild about the taste and feel of metal. Rowdy had already learned to take and hold metal objects, but he certainly hadn’t learned to like them. I had him bring back the metal dumbbell only once, and when I took it from him, I rubbed his shoulders, told him that he was the greatest obedience dog in the history of the Alaskan malamute, and gave him a hunk of Vermont cheddar.
Finally, the dogs did the group exercises, the long sit and the long down. Afterward, while Rowdy was slavering at the sight of Kimi’s “I’ve still got mine, but you haven’t” routine with her dog biscuit, I worked on my article about the Chinese crested, then finished wrapping my last two presents, a distinctive gray-and-white natural fiber scarf for my father and a very long box containing a set of PVC jumps and hurdles for Steve and India. As I was curling the last loose end of ribbon, Geri Driscoll finally called. When she asked to speak to my big boy, I thought she meant Rowdy, but once I realized that she’d never seen him, I convinced her that Steve was unavailable and persuaded her to leave a message. It was short.
“Tell him I didn’t find a thing,” she said. “Not a thing.” She sounded disappointed, mostly, I suspected, because she’d had to settle for talking to a nonperson.
“So,” I told the dogs when I’d hung up, “if you’re so smart, tell me whose it was? Whose body?”
I said the same thing to Steve as soon as he called. “So which was it? It had to be Oscar’s, right? Because that’s the one he absolutely had to get rid of. Mattie’s I guess he just dumped in the woods somewhere,
because if some hiker comes across a body or a skeleton or whatever, and it turns out to be human? Jesus, every forensic pathologist in the state of New Hampshire probably comes running, and before long, your corpse gets identified. And then someone figures out that he didn’t just die; he’s been put to sleep. If that’s how Miner did it. But if some hiker finds a dead dog?”
“Yeah. The average hiker’s going to make a wide detour, and that’s it. Except you’d think that while they were searching for Patterson … But maybe not.”
“Steve, is Miner around? Upstairs? Have you seen him?”
“Not yet, but he’s got to be around Cambridge somewhere. Willie’s here.”
“Upstairs?”
“Down here.”
“Well, I hope he’s behind wire mesh,” I said.
Steve laughed. “The worst he does is nip. It isn’t even a nip. It’s a little pinch. I like him. He’s a spunky little guy.”
“Apparently Miner does, too. Most husbands whose wives have dogs like that would’ve … I mean, as long as he was at it anyway …” It’s the part of the job that every good vet hates most. I changed the subject. “So how’s your emergency?”
“False alarm,” he said. “They thought something’d got stuck in the dog’s throat, and it turned out they were right. Needle from the Christmas tree. Scotch pine.”
“But you …?”
“The dog’s a real big mixed breed, and he’s an easy ten pounds overweight. He’s a real chow hound, and they’re nice people, but they’re not too careful.
So when I heard he was retching … Like I told you, you always have to rule out G.D.V.”
“Steve, at the Bourques’?” I said. “Jesus, there are pines all around the house. It’s called Pine Tree Kennels, for God’s sake, and their other businesses are all Pine Tree, too. Jesus, maybe that’s all that was wrong with Mattie.”
“That’ll do it. Any small object, if it’s in the back of the throat, if it’s near the pharynx or the larynx. Then you’ll get retching but no vomiting. But—”
“And Mattie wouldn’t have looked all that sick.” I was thinking out loud. “There wouldn’t have been anything else wrong with her. Anneliese said that Cliff said that, that Mattie didn’t look all that sick. And even Anneliese wasn’t positive that her abdomen was swollen. And she
was
sure that Mattie hadn’t got into a bag of food or anything. Jesus. So Cliff was right again, Steve.”
“We don’t know that. And that’s a real dangerous assumption for an owner to make.”
“But just in theory … Look, suppose that’s what it was, okay? Mattie gets a pine needle stuck in her throat, she starts gagging, and Cliff takes her in so Lee can examine her. Cliff leaves. And Patterson walks in. He knows exactly what you’ve been saying, okay? You have to assume it’s bloat. But even so, he walks in and finds Miner there in the middle of the night, and the big emergency turns out to be a pine needle?”
“Any veterinarian—”
“Yes, but the people who live around there aren’t veterinarians. What do they know? You didn’t laugh at that story about the manure pile—basically, you thought it was Miner’s fault and sort of an occupational hazard—but
they
thought it was hilarious.
Probably they wouldn’t have thought this was quite that funny, but I’ll bet they’d have found it sort of funny, especially if Patterson embellished the story a little.”
“It’s possible,” Steve said. “But it’s the scenario we already worked out.”
“No, it isn’t,” I said. “Not really. It’s still possible that Miner muzzled her. But there’s one big difference.”
“If her problem was a pine needle at the back of her throat,” Steve said, “she didn’t die of G.D.V. syndrome.”
“And if she didn’t,” I said, “then Miner wasn’t left with two bodies after all.”
Obedience competition involves only two group exercises, the long sit and the long down. In the midafternoon of the day before Christmas, I introduced Rowdy and Kimi to a third: the long shot. Instead of tossing my duffel bags of clothes, kibble, water bowls, leashes, and presents into the back of the Bronco, I packed in nothing but an empty crate and my dogs, who were taking advance credit for the impending snow. How could I tell? By the white arctic glint in their warm brown eyes.
Just as I backed the Bronco out of the driveway and into Appleton Street, the first snowflakes began to fall. To avoid the worst of the early Christmas Eve traffic on 93, I intended to pick up Route 2 by Fresh Pond, but as I drove by the armory on Concord Avenue, I decided to make a short detour. I never meant to find Cliff Bourque and take him with me. He’d lost Mattie once. It would’ve been heartless to offer him the slight and probably false hope that she might still be alive. Even so, the impulse to tell him nagged at me. If I told Cliff Bourque everything? Regardless of Mattie’s fate, he might quit stalking his prey and get on to the kill. And if so? Well, Bourque might get caught. Rightly or wrongly, I didn’t care what happened
to Lee Miner. I wouldn’t tell Cliff Bourque, then. I’d just take a few minutes to try to find out where he was. With luck, I’d discover him in a safe stupor beneath someone else’s dormant shrubbery.