Black Ribbon (6 page)

Cam pointed. “The first one.”

“Oh, I’m next door,” I said.

Cam and Ginny exchanged a look I couldn’t read. As if first having obtained Ginny’s consent, Cam said, “Lucky you.”

“To be right on the lake?”

Their expressions changed.

“Am I missing something?” I asked. “That’s one of the things Eva was complaining about, that her cabin’s in the second row. I mean, it’s practically on the lake, but …”

Cam shook her head without disarranging a single dark hair. “Met your neighbors yet?” she asked pertly.

“Not really. There’s a guy sitting out on the deck, but I didn’t meet him. He was talking on the phone. He had a cellular phone. Am I supposed to know him?”

Ginny finally gave me a straight answer. “Don Abbott. You know Phyllis. Phyllis Abbott.”

It took me a moment to place the name. “Oh, Mrs. Abbott. The judge. That’s right. Maxine mentioned they were next to me. Sure. I’ve shown under Mrs. Abbott. I stewarded for her a couple of years ago. In Utility.” Utility. What is Utility? If you happen to be a Mason, I can explain it easily. It’s Third Degree. Really. Three Craft Degrees, First, Second, and Third, leading respectively to the titles Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft, and Master Mason. Three obedience trial classes: Novice, Open, and Utility; CD, CDX, and UD. UDX? Knights Templar, I suppose. OTCH? Royal Arch. Eerie, isn’t it? The Scottish Rite. The York Rite. The Rite of Canine Obedience. “I liked her,” I continued. “She was very fair. I’d show under her again. What’s wrong with her?”

If a heretofore pleasant and fair obedience judge had turned mean, I wanted to know. I don’t believe in paying entry fees to show under judges who make snide remarks or invent their
own rules. Neither does anyone else. That’s why most obedience judges are terrific. People don’t enter under the bad ones, and clubs don’t rehire judges who draw small entries. It’s a form of natural selection: survival of the fairest.

“Nothing,” Ginny said firmly. “It’s just that Cam—”

Cam cut in: “It’s nothing. Forget I said it. It’s not Phyllis, anyway. It’s just that Max didn’t have to take
everyone
who applied.”

“I, uh, have the impression that she more or less did,” I said. “It’s her first year. I don’t think she could afford to turn people down. And what excuse could she give people? ‘Sorry, but no one likes you’?”

“There could’ve been a rule about aggressive dogs,” Ginny said.

“Are the Abbotts’ dogs …?” I asked.

“No,” Cam said. “And anyway, they’re Poms.” The ideal weight for the Pomeranian is four or five pounds. Toy breeds can be aggressive, but there’s a limit to the harm they can do, and, in any case, Pomeranians are sweethearts. “Actually, Phyllis has very nice dogs. And Phyllis Abbott is a good handler. You have to give her that. Ginny means Eva Spitteler. Ginny, just ignore her. Everyone knows what Eva’s like. No one pays any attention to her.”

“Eva goes around telling everyone awful things about me,” Ginny informed me.

Cam sounded impatient. “But, Ginny, no one listens to Eva Spitteler.”

“Hah! She lures all those pet people in, and she charges them a fortune.
They
listen to her.”

“No one who counts,” Cam said. Then she filled me in. “Eva runs a so-called training center. She does a lot of puppy kindergarten, pet obedience, that kind of thing, and she has
no
credentials—no one really knows who she is—but she gets all these pet people, and they don’t know any better.”

“She’s never so much as put one CD on one dog,” Ginny said indignantly.

“The pet people don’t care,” Cam said. “They just don’t know. Eva tells them that obedience is some big deal, and they believe every word she says, and then when they hear that she’s entered Bingo, they think, ‘Oh, wow, an obedience trial. She must be really something.’ And she sells dog food and all kinds of dog supplies, and she charges like five percent less than the pet shops, and she tells people she’s getting them a special deal on everything. And supposedly she’s starting some kind of mail-order business. That’s her latest.”

“Eva makes a
lot
of money,” Ginny commented.

“But she doesn’t sell puppies,” I said. “She doesn’t run a real pet shop.”

Cam and Ginny looked suitably shocked. “No,” Cam said, “Eva wouldn’t do that. As a matter of fact, she keeps people out of the pet shops. That’s one
good
thing she does.”

Ginny held firm. “The only one.”

“Eva does try,” Cam said. “Mainly, she’s obnoxious. She just isn’t cut out to be an instructor. She doesn’t have any credentials, but she does try. She goes to workshops and things. It doesn’t do any good, but she does go. She just doesn’t learn anything. If you ask me, the real problem is her personality. And, Ginny, that’s the thing about Bingo. Everyone knows that. Considering what Eva’s like, Bingo could be a lot worse.”

“There ought to be a rule about flex leads,” I said. “I don’t mind so much if Bingo is dog-aggressive, but, if he is, he ought to be under control. He should be on a short lead. What happened was that Bingo went flying at Rowdy, and Eva couldn’t stop him. If he’d attacked Rowdy, well, Bingo is a big dog, but there wouldn’t be anything left of him.”

At the sound of his name, Rowdy quit fooling around with Wiz, Ginny’s kissy-face Lab, and emitted an elaborate series of northern-breed vocalizations that culminated in a strong
suggestion politely intoned as a question:
Ah-roo, woo-woo-woo, woo-woo-woo, roo-roo?
Translation:
Can we get the hell out of here?

Even without the translation, Cam and Ginny looked startled.

“He needs to finish his walk,” I said, “and I have to call home before this meeting. I need to check on my bitch.” Real dog people like Ginny and Cam required no explanation, but I couldn’t think of a good reason to withhold the real one. “Ginny, the card you got? About Merlin. There was a sympathy card in my cabin, too.”

Their faces fell. “Holly, you should’ve—” Ginny started to say.

“Nothing’s happened. That’s what’s so weird. The last dog I lost was Vinnie, and that was a month before I got Rowdy. Ginny, could I ask you, the card you got, did it have a sort of watercolor scene? With a couple of trees? And something like, ‘With Sympathy on the Loss of Your Pet.’ In a kind of pale tan envelope.”

Ginny nodded.

I said, “I got the same card. I assumed it was some kind of mistake. It probably is. It has to be. Mine wasn’t signed, either.”

Cam and Ginny both understood: I still had to call home.

THE WOMAN in front of me in line for the pay phone wore a blue T-shirt with a picture of a beret-wearing poodle and the proclamation:
J’embrasse mon chien sur la bouche.
But the dog at her feet was a feisty-looking basenji, and she wasn’t kissing him on the mouth, either. She was complaining. “One phone for the whole place isn’t
my
idea of luxury. Wouldn’t you think they’d have them in the rooms? All these dog people? Everyone’s going to need to call home all the time.”

The big lobby of the lodge had had its log walls scrubbed and its floor refinished. The furniture had been arranged with such professional skill that the red-upholstered couches and chairs appeared engaged in happy conversation with the consciously rustic end tables, coffee tables, and magazine racks. The sepia-tinted, blown-up photographs on the walls showed grubby, grinning fishermen holding impressive strings of trout. It seemed just as well that the anglers and their catch were now confined behind glass. Sweat, bug dope, and dead fish would have fought the saccharine reek of floral incense, scented candles, and gift-shop potpourri. A mammoth brown
trout mounted on a wooden plaque above the stone fireplace paid odorless tribute to varnish and taxidermy. There wasn’t a fly rod in sight.

But the renovators had left the original phone booth, a wooden cabinet tucked under the staircase to the second floor. Superman lives. At the moment, though, the hinged door was folded open.

“Just shove it down his throat and clamp his jaws shut,” a woman was saying, “and then blow on his nose until he sticks his tongue out, and give him a cookie and tell him what a good boy he is.” After she finished, a man in a Big Dog T-shirt interrogated some unfortunate veterinarian about a puddle of perfectly ordinary-sounding vomitus. “Bright yellow and slimy,” the man insisted. “You practically wanted to scramble it.” Then the mouth-kissing basenji woman reminded someone that under no circumstances was Arax ever to be allowed off leash. My turn finally arrived. Rowdy, of course, did not fit in the phone booth. He had to sit just outside. It didn’t matter. I’m not the kind of person who makes the dog say hello.

In the half day since I’d left Cambridge, my cousin Leah had replaced the message on my answering machine with the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth followed by a cacophony in which Kimi’s
woo-wooing
vied with the loud barks of her friend Jeff’s Border collie. The noise abruptly quit, and Leah’s recorded voice informed me that I had three minutes in which to record my innermost thoughts. As I was about to do so in rather violent language, Leah came on live.

“Leah, is Kimi all right?” I demanded.

“You don’t trust me!”

“I leave you with my bitch in season, and—? Leah, let me tell you, greater trust hath no woman. She
is
all right?”

Although I’m the one who initiated Leah into dogs, she is nonetheless the kind of person who …

Although growling and roaring carry poorly over telephone
lines, I hung up reassured about Kimi’s vigor, yet in some peculiar way, newly angry about the unsigned sympathy card.

The welcome-to-camp meeting was due to begin in fifteen minutes, and the area between the lodge and the lake, half grass and half pine needles, was already crowded with people and dogs. As Rowdy and I made our way down the stairs to join the group, Maxine McGuire appeared around the side of the building, and I hailed her. Ambling peacefully at her side was the young mastiff I’d noticed earlier, a fawn-colored male the size of a three-car garage and still growing. Max’s yellow-gray curls had turned to corkscrews, and her pale face was flushed.

“Maxine, could I have a word with you?” I asked. “Do you have a second?”

“One.” She glanced at her watch. “No, two.” She raised the hem of her camp T-shirt, pulled out a ragged hand towel caught in the waistband of her shorts, and mopped off the dog’s mouth. “If you can’t stand drool, don’t get a mastiff. Good boy, Cash.” She moored the towel back in place. With the giant puppy at her side, Max seemed to have shed some of her earlier nervousness. “What can I do for you?”

“Beautiful dog. Cash?”

“Stud fee,” Max explained. “I didn’t name him; the breeder did. The deal was that if she kept the pick puppy, she owed the stud fee in cash, and her husband kept telling her, ‘Never mind the dog! Keep the cash!’ ” Maxine let the point sink in. “But she ended up selling him to me. I just got him a month ago. He’s only a year. Forty or fifty pounds to go.”

Cash stood patiently at Max’s side. His ears and tail were motionless, his eyes gentle. By comparison with Cash, Rowdy looked the size of a Pomeranian. He must have thought so, too. The hair on his back began to rise. “Puppy,” I told him. Rowdy knew the word, but, for obvious reasons, didn’t believe me. Cash stared placidly into space.

“Don’t worry about it,” Maxine said cheerfully. “Cash doesn’t mind.”

Confronted with the overwhelming evidence of Cash’s total lack of interest—Cash completely ignored him—Rowdy slowly began to lower his hackles. Rowdy is more hierarchical than he is aggressive; if Cash didn’t want to play King of the Mountain, neither did Rowdy. Even so, especially because of the subject I wanted to raise with Max, I felt embarrassed. I cleared my throat. “I wondered if there might be some rule or whatever about dogs on long flex leads. People do it at shows, and it can be a problem there—they let the dog out the full twenty-six feet. A while ago, a dog shot out of nowhere and went for Rowdy. Nothing happened. But it made me a little uncomfortable. And I wondered.”

Max scowled. “Whose dog?”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s the general—”

“Eva Spitteler. You ever run into her before?”

“No. Just today.”

Maxine drew close. Her breath smelled like candy. “Did Eva bite your head off?”

I live with two Alaskan malamutes, and I’m still here
, I wanted to say. I contented myself with a simple no.

“There’s a little problem there,” Max confided.

“If that big Lab of hers takes on the wrong dog, the problem won’t be so little.” My eyes darted to the peaceful mastiff. “Even Cash would defend himself.”

Max dismissed the possibility. “A Lab’d just bounce right off him. If Eva bothers you, just ignore her. The truth is, I didn’t find out about her until she’d already signed up, and by the time I got warned about what a pill she was, it was too late. I put her by herself in one of the cabin units, and all she paid for was a shared double in the bunkhouse, so that ought to put her in a good mood, and no one’s stuck rooming with her. That’s the best I can do. Sorry, but there’s a rotten apple in every barrel.”