“Sounds to me like she needs therapy more than investigation,” I said, hoping to change the subject. “You must have a therapist to refer her to?” I asked Elias.
Carlo said to me, “You would know how to explain things to Jacquie and help her find information. You know people.”
Lulu thought that was a great idea. “You must call her.”
Mallory, able to see my hesitation, looked amused and said blandly, “Oh yes, Brigid, you must, you absolutely must.”
Elias started, “I don’t know if that’s—”
Whereupon Lulu snapped, “You’re the one who said they threatened a lawsuit.”
Ah, there you go. Not even a clergy wife’s motivation is entirely pure. Unfortunately for the conversation, which was beginning to take an interesting turn, Adrian Franklin showed up at the table with a black Labrador retriever and that grin that made twenty years disappear.
“Look what I got!” he said like a boy with a new puppy.
The dog threw his fifty pounds of glee at Mallory, accidentally hooking the nails of his front paw into her blouse like a canine bodice ripper. Some other time, some other man, she might have used the moment to advantage, but right now did not appear amused.
Carlo was immobilized, Lulu was struck dumb, Elias overturned his chair jumping to help, and Adrian, rather than reaching anywhere near Mallory’s bosom in what might be considered an ungentlemanly way, tried to disengage the dog with “Down, Ebony! Down!” Ebony did not respond. But Mallory’s grabbing the large puppy paws and easing herself out of their clutches seemed to help more than the command.
Ebony was forced to stay, and sat twitching with not totally suppressed joy at Adrian’s feet while Carlo introduced him around just in case and offered one of the chairs the Neilsens had vacated.
“I’m sorry,” Adrian said. “I just came over to say hi because I recognized you and disrupted your whole conversation. I’d thought of getting a dog to keep me company and was going to ask around here. They have a bunch of rescue animals looking for homes if anyone is interested. Ebony is less than a year old. Can you believe someone didn’t want her?”
I observed Ebony’s pound-for-pound destruction potential but didn’t comment.
“But it looks like we’re going to have to have some obedience classes.” He shrugged. “What else is retirement good for?”
“More wine?” Mallory asked, still looking a little distrustful of the dog.
Adrian and Ebony, though quite adorable, had unintentionally made the talk small, and I welcomed my cell phone ringing even as I wondered what it could be about. I dug through my tote bag, pushing aside a water bottle, hand lotion, lip balm, all the usual accoutrements of living in a place where the humidity hovers around six percent.
The phone stopped ringing when I found it. I opened the cover and saw the number was from home. I pressed the number to call back. Gemma-Kate picked it up in half a ring.
“Is everything all right?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “I wasn’t sure I should bother you.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I think one of the dogs is sick.”
“Sick how?”
“It’s throwing up.”
“What do you mean, throwing up? Sometimes they get a little sick, eat weeds, throw up.”
“I know, but this is sort of green and foamy … Aunt Brigid … he’s starting to breathe funny.”
“We’re just up the road and we’re on our way.”
I had pulled the phone away from my ear in preparation for closing it when I heard, “Oh my God, he’s jerking around!”
We said quick good-byes, drove the short distance home, and came into the house to see Gemma-Kate standing helplessly over one of the Pugs lying in a pool of green vomit. Before either of us could react, the dog went rigid and then jerked into a seizure.
“Oh God,” she all but shrieked, “he keeps doing that thing and I don’t know how to stop it!” She rocked with her arms wrapped about her as if she didn’t trust that her hands could do anything useful.
I ran to the kitchen area and looked at an address we had tacked to the side of the fridge.
“La Cañada and River,” I muttered to myself, while Carlo wrapped the sick, now shaking Pug into a towel and handed him to me.
“I’ll drive,” he said.
Gemma-Kate stood watching us, looking like the best she could do was keep from crying until we were out the door, but I couldn’t stop to reassure her just now.
The female dog standing at my side, looking up at me with her buggy eyes like a terrified Elsa Lanchester meeting her new husband, was another matter. “Let her come along,” I said to Carlo. The Pugs did everything together.
Carlo picked up the dog and we left, the well Pug whining in the backseat, me in the passenger seat holding the limp Pug in my lap while so much drool ran out of his mouth, through the towel and onto my dress, that it seemed he had to be vomiting it. I passed my finger over the oh-so-soft spot between his eyes and thought the words
Hurry, Carlo, he’s dying,
but I didn’t say those words. Maybe I said something like “It’s okay, Mr. Puggly Wuggly, you’ll be okay.” I know, it still embarrasses me, too, when I think about it.
The ride took forever and it seemed as if each mile was marked by a further slowing of the dog’s breaths. Carlo went at least fifteen miles over the speed limit down Oracle, while I was in charge of cursing at the red lights and hoping if we got pulled over I would know the cop personally. By the time we pulled into the parking lot of the emergency veterinary center I was counting maybe one breath a minute and the dog’s body felt boneless, it was so limp.
We ran through automatic sliding doors into a lobby any human hospital would be proud of. The receptionist glanced at the dog, picked up a phone, and shouted, “Triage!” While Carlo signed paperwork, an assistant rushed me into a back room where a vet didn’t bother to introduce herself but completed a two-second inspection and said, “Toad. How long ago?”
“I’m not sure.”
She had already grabbed the dog and was moving out of the room with me following close behind as she asked, “More than a half hour ago?”
“I don’t know.”
“How big was it?”
“I didn’t see it.”
“Did you flush him?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Activated charcoal probably useless,” she muttered, and I felt as if she could as easily have been referring to me. We had entered a small room with a sink next to which she placed the dog. She turned on a faucet with a hose attached and stuck it in the side of the dog’s mouth. I almost shouted
no
in horror, but controlled myself and watched the stream pump in one side and out the other. Some no doubt went into his stomach and just a little into his lungs as he coughed and retched and threw up some more.
When she was finished waterboarding my dog she took him into another room and, after shaving a tiny patch on his leg, hooked him up to an IV that the assistant had ready. She got the needle into him without his reacting, watched him for too long as he stabilized, and only then explained what was happening.
“Colorado River toad,” she said, as we both finally breathed. “They’re deadly, and with all the rain we had over the winter I’ve seen a few cases, even though it’s not quite the season for them yet.” The dog was as unresponsive as it had been in the car, the only indication that it was alive a light movement of its rib cage as it took an occasional breath. But it wasn’t drooling or seizing anymore. Whatever was in the IV seemed to be working. The vet raised one of the Pug’s heavy velvet chops and showed me his gums. “See how pale they are? He’s dehydrated from the vomiting.”
“Will he be all right?” I said with a wobbly voice that wasn’t mine.
“Hopefully between the vomiting and the flushing I gave him we got a lot of the poison out of his system.”
“What are his chances?” I whispered, lifting one of his paws and finding no resistance.
The vet put her arm around me and gave me a brief hug like I’ve never known from a physician. “Excellent chances. Tell you what. Leave him here and we’ll continue to give him intravenous fluids to decrease his dehydration.”
“There’s no antidote?”
“Nothing. If we caught it right after ingestion we could have flushed him with a solution of activated charcoal that absorbs the toxins before they get into the bloodstream. But he’ll be okay.”
The assistant had shown Carlo into the room while we were talking, and he stood there with the healthy Pug draped over his arm and his other arm draped lightly around my waist.
“He won’t die,” I told Carlo. I felt like those words made me God and gave me the control that was necessary to do the job I used to do. You can’t save everybody, but “This dog won’t die.”
Gemma-Kate turned on the computer in Brigid’s office, keyed in Peter’s number. When he answered she didn’t ask if he’d been asleep. “Go to your Skype, Peter.”
Peter yawned. “Why?”
“I need to see your face while I’m talking to you. It’s serious.” She waited, then whispered, “Good. I can’t sleep. I think I’m in trouble, Peter.”
“What happened?”
“Their dog got poisoned.”
“Is it dead?”
“I don’t think so. They left him at the vet’s.”
“So why are you in trouble? Did you poison their dog?”
“Not exactly.”
“What d’you mean not exactly?”
“It ate a Colorado River toad.”
“You fed their dog a Colorado River toad?
Gemma-Kate studied his face. “Okay, yeah. I fucking poisoned their dog. Okay?”
“Because they wouldn’t let me come over while they were gone?” He almost looked flattered. “That’s extreme.”
“It wasn’t like that.” Gemma-Kate paused, staring at him. She could tell he was trying to tell if she had a bra on underneath her sleep shirt. She was sorry she told him.
“Don’t you tell anybody,” she said.
The next morning when I got up shortly before sunrise I found the other Pug lying with her back pressed up against the door leading to the garage, paws jerking a bit, making little
moofmoof
sounds in her sleep. I woke her from what sounded like a bad dream, and she followed me into the kitchen.
Carlo had left the invoice from the vet on the counter. It specified that the charge of three hundred and twenty-five dollars was for initial treatment and projected costs for three days in the hospital with nursing care. The form listed the Pug’s name as Al.
After firing up the first pot of coffee, I grabbed my cell phone off the kitchen counter, and the Pug and I sat together on the back porch watching the sun come up and listening to the coyotes’ high-pitched keening in the arroyos behind our property. Two cups later Carlo followed suit. Like any normal teenager, Gemma-Kate slept in. That allowed Carlo and me to have privately a little of the postmortem that only mates can have, a conversation that feels like lazy lobs on a tennis court where no one needs to score points.
“I called the vet,” I told Carlo.
“So early?”
“They say they’re twenty-four hours, so I took them at their word. They told me he’s stable.” I petted the female a bit. “She misses him. I’ve come to like these guys.”
“I like them, too.” Carlo gestured at the invoice on the table between us. “At these rates it’s a good thing.”
“You told them his name is Al?”
“The girl asked, and I was too embarrassed to say we hadn’t named him. While you were in having the other guy treated, the girl asked the female’s name.”
“I can’t stand the suspense,” I said.
Carlo glanced away with a smile as if he was half embarrassed and half kind of proud of himself. “Peggy.”
“Peg the Pug. Al and Peg.”
“Well, it’s not like they’re going to file for Social Security someday. We can always change them. Are you going to call Jacquie Neilsen?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Why not?”
“Because she’s crazy.”
“She’s not crazy, she’s in pain.”
“There you go doing that priest-and-the-stray-pup thing.”
He made a whining sound.
“Okay, okay, you know I can’t stand it when you whimper. I’ll call her, I just want to do a little homework before I go over there.”
A little while later Gemma-Kate shuffled out in her drawstring pajama bottoms and T-shirt and asked about breakfast.
“What, no crepes?” I asked. If not an apology, seemed like there would be at least that for letting the Pug eat a toad on her watch. Now she just rooted around in the pantry for cereal without speaking, looking more guarded, as if she feared blame would descend without warning.
The Neilsen homework consisted of calling Dr. George Manriquez, a lovely individual first and medical examiner second, who treated the dead as if they were his patients. He told me once that they, or more precisely their flesh, spoke to him more intimately than any of us, the living, are capable of. We were kind of close because we both came from Florida. Florida is a different kind of place.
The eye bank was there removing some corneas for reuse, and it took a while for George to return my call, but when he did he was as helpful as ever. We exchanged a few pleasantries, whether I was okay after a particularly heinous crisis six months before, and what was going on with Laura Coleman. I told him she was staying with her brother in the North Carolina mountains, healing psychologically and physically after working that case with me. She kept in e-mail contact, so I knew she didn’t hold me responsible even if that was how I held myself. I asked if he had seen Max Coyote lately, whether he was suffering any residual effects. I didn’t ask whether Max had ever submitted that DNA swab he got from me, and Manriquez didn’t say. Then I got to the point.
“I’m doing a little work on the death of a fourteen-year-old named Joseph Neilsen, drowning,” I said. I filled him in on a few more of the details to bring him up to speed. “What have you got?”
Computers have made things a lot easier. He didn’t have to get up to go to a file cabinet.
“Not much here,” he said after a few minutes. “I got a death certificate.”
“You sign off?”