Hush Puppy

by Laurien Berenson

  Aunt Peg kept scowling at me. Jane couldn’t seem to stop giggling. Sheila, meanwhile, was the perfect guest. She complimented Aunt Peg on the food, the decor, and, most importantly, the Cedar Crest Poodles.

  It was clear from the depth of her knowledge about the dogs that Sheila had done her homework. Peg was, I could tell, simultaneously surprised and flattered. The way to her heart is through her Poodles. In no time, she and Sheila were well on their way to becoming buddies.

  Aunt Peg’s usually pretty sharp. I’d trust her judgment in almost any situation. Now, however, Sheila had her completely hoodwinked. The woman sitting across from me was a totally different person from the one I’d met outside, and Peg was falling for the entire, nauseating performance.

  The way I saw it, Sheila Vaughn was either a hypocrite or schizophrenic. I was hoping for mental illness myself.

  Dessert is the most important part of any meal at Aunt Peg’s, so I didn’t dare make an escape until after it had been served. Mocha cake from the St. Moritz bakery is my favorite. It would hardly have been gracious of me not to eat a piece. Or two.

  When my plate had been cleaned for the second time, I laid down my fork, and said to Jane, “You wanted to see the other Poodles. Why don’t I take you out to the kennel and we’ll have a look?”

  “Don’t be silly.” Peg rose from her seat. “Jane and I will go. You and Sheila can use the time to get to know one another better.”

  If what I knew so far was an indication, getting to know Sheila any better was going to completely ruin my day.

  Aunt Peg never gave me a chance to disagree, however. She simply left the dishes on the table, scooped Jane up, and off they went. The silence after their exit was like a vacuum.

  I stood and began to clear the dishes. Sheila got up to help.

  “Please sit,” I said. “This won’t take long.”

  Sheila wasn’t the only one who could lie through her teeth. If I had my way, I’d be in the kitchen until it was time to leave.

  The sink was already full. I left the dessert plates on the counter and put the cake in the refrigerator. When I turned around, Sheila was in the doorway. She’d crouched down beside Faith and was scratching beneath her chin. Grudgingly, I noted that she wasn’t disturbing the Poodle’s precious show coat.

  “I guess you don’t like me very much,” she said.

  I shrugged, turned on the hot water, and began rinsing plates.

  Sheila stood up. She had to raise her voice to be heard above the running water. “You see me as a threat.”

  “No, you see yourself as a threat. I think you’re more of an inconvenience.”

  I glanced back over my shoulder to see her reaction. The barb had hit home. Sheila looked seriously peeved.

  “Don’t underestimate me,” she said, crossing the kitchen to stand by the counter. “Sam loved me once. I think he loves me still.”

  “He may love you, but he’s not in love with you.”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “He didn’t have to. If he were in love with you, he wouldn’t be engaged to me. Sam’s a good man, better than anyone I’ve ever met. You should have realized that sooner, though I can’t say I’m sorry you didn’t.”

  “I was young, I made a mistake. Now I know enough to want to undo it.”

  I slipped the stack of plates into their slots in the dishwasher. “It’s too late.”

  “We’ll see about that, won’t we?”

  If that had been my line, I might have thought it made a fine parting shot and stormed out of the room. Not Sheila. Since I was filling the dishwasher, she took my place at the sink and started rinsing glasses. As if helping out was the most natural thing to do.

  I hate it when people refuse to be consistent.

  “That’s a pretty Standard,” she said, inclining her head toward Faith. “Did you breed her?”

  I’d been thinking of Sheila as a Pug person. Now it occurred to me that, having lived with Sam and his Poodles, she was, of course, entitled to have an opinion. “No, she’s one of Peg’s.”

  “It figures. Her dogs are gorgeous. Do you show her yourself?”

  It’s hard to remain prickly when someone wants to talk about your dog. “Yes, with Peg’s help. Faith has ten points, including a major. I was hoping to finish her next month, but now she’s lost a big hunk of hair, so I guess it’ll have to wait.”

  “You can work around that, you know. People do it all the time.”

  “You mean switches?”

  Some people call them wiglets. They’re made from actual Poodle hair, taken from dogs that have finished their championships and had their coats cut down. The long hair is banded or sewn together at the base; then that knot is secured to the existing shorter hair with more rubber bands. Some dogs wear switches for length; others, to give their coats more fullness.

  Usually they’re attached to a Poodle’s topknot, but putting them in neck hair is not uncommon. Of course, the A.K.C. frowns on their use. Properly applied, however, only one judge in fifty will even know they’re there.

  Sheila nodded. “Especially with a coat as good as hers is, nobody would even suspect.”

  “I’d know,” I said quietly.

  “Don’t tell me you’re one of those moral types.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with following the rules.”

  “Except that it hardly ever gets you where you want to go.”

  The back door opened. “See?” Aunt Peg said, beaming at the two of us. “I knew you’d find something to talk about. Jane and I had a fine time outside. Now we’re ready to consider having another piece of cake.”

  This must be what it feels like to die in slow motion, I thought.

  Luckily, Sheila begged off, claiming that she had to get home to her dogs. It was the sort of excuse Peg could understand, so for once, she didn’t argue. After another sliver of cake apiece, Jane and I said good-bye, too.

  Aunt Peg walked out with us. “So now you’ve met Sheila. What do you think?”

  “I think I’ll make Sam a better wife than she did.”

  “Good for you.”

  “The two of you seemed to get along pretty well,” I mentioned.

  “I was the hostess. That made it my job to get along. Besides . . .” Her eyes glinted wickedly. “Haven’t you ever heard that old saying, ‘Know thine enemy’?”

  Good old Aunt Peg. She hadn’t disappointed me after all.

  “Thank you for everything,” Jane said to Peg. “I’ll think about what you said.”

  I glanced at Aunt Peg, but she shook her head. “That’s between Jane and me, right?”

  “Right,” the girl said firmly. She climbed into the car and called Faith up onto her lap, like she’d been doing it all her life.

  “That girl needs a puppy of her own,” Peg said as I closed the door after them.

  “Don’t start. You can’t fix the entire world.”

  “Says who?”

  Far be it from me to argue with a force of nature. It was time to make a graceful retreat, so I did.

  Twenty-one

  Jane was quiet in the car on the way back to her house.

  “Is everything all right?” I finally asked.

  “Yeah.” Her head turned deliberately away from me, she stared out the window.

  “Your grandmother’s not going to be mad at you for coming with me today, is she?”

  “Nah, she won’t care.”

  I drove in silence for a few more minutes, watching in the rearview mirror as Jane’s hand methodically stroked the length of Faith’s body from neck to tail. Clearly something was bothering the girl. I wondered if it had anything to do with the secret she was keeping with Aunt Peg.

  “The other day when you came to my classroom, you said there was something you wanted to tell me,” I said. “But then you never got the chance. Feel like talking about it now?”

  “I guess.”

  “Was it something important?” I prompted when she didn’t continue
.

  “Maybe. I don’t know. It was about Krebbs.”

  This time I let the silence grow until Jane felt ready to end it. I knew how much the whole situation had upset her, and I wasn’t about to push. After a few minutes, Jane made eye contact in the mirror.

  “Remember last Monday when we met in the basement at Howard Academy? The reason I was down there was because I was following Krebbs.”

  “Following him? Why?”

  “I don’t know. At first, it was just a game. You know, something to do. And Krebbs blew his top whenever he saw me, so I had to be smart about it, and sneaky, too. It was kind of like being a spy . . .”

  Her voice trailed away, then came back stronger. “Anyway, Krebbs wasn’t going down to the basement because of anything he had to do for his job. He was looking for something. He’d been going down there a lot recently, and he was searching the place.”

  “For what?”

  “How should I know? It’s not as if I was going to ask him.”

  I thought about that as we reached the traffic circle at the bottom of Lake Avenue, continued up past the library, then turned left at the light and headed east on the Post Road. What could Krebbs have been searching for? And why now, when he’d been at Howard Academy for decades? I wondered if his behavior had anything to do with the marijuana the police had found in the shed.

  “Are you sure he was looking for something?” I asked. “Maybe he was looking for a place to hide something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Drugs . . . ?” I let the thought dangle.

  “Krebbs? You’ve gotta be kidding.”

  Obviously the girl didn’t read the newspaper.

  “Was he searching anywhere else?” I asked. “Or just in the basement?”

  “That’s the only place I saw him, but I wasn’t around all the time. He was interested in that storeroom that had all the records. Krebbs didn’t bother reading them like you did. He just pawed through the boxes.”

  No wonder the records had been such a jumbled mess by the time I’d gotten to them. “Do you think he found what he was looking for?”

  “Nah. Right up until the day he died, he was still going down there.”

  Abruptly, I realized what Jane wasn’t saying; what she’d wanted me to know all along. I turned onto a side street, pulled the Volvo over to the curb, and turned in my seat to face her. “That’s why you were the one who found Krebbs after he’d been stabbed. You were looking for him, weren’t you? You were going to follow him again.”

  “Yeah.” A small, silent tear rolled down her cheek. “It was just a stupid game. I didn’t think anyone would get hurt.”

  “Oh, honey.” I reached over the seat and gathered the small girl into my arms. “Krebbs didn’t get hurt because of you, or your game. None of this is your fault.”

  Jane sniffled. “That’s not what Brad says.”

  “What?” I drew back. “What does Brad say?”

  “That I never should have gone over to Howard Academy in the first place. That I should have minded my own business. When I found Krebbs, I should have just left him there rather than shooting my mouth off about what I’d seen. He says now we’re both going to end up in big trouble, and it’s all my fault.”

  “You’re not going to get in any trouble,” I promised.

  “Try telling that to my grandmother. Before she thought I was doing okay. Now she’s really pissed about all the school I’ve been missing.”

  “You didn’t honestly think you were going to be able to keep that charade up forever, did you?”

  Jane shrugged.

  “A full semester of mono?”

  She jutted out her chin. “I might have developed complications.”

  I fought the urge to smile. “And then what?”

  “Who knows? I’d have figured something out.”

  I eased back into the front seat and turned on the car. “You know Brad’s wrong, don’t you? You didn’t do anything you shouldn’t have done. Well, except cutting school.”

  “Gran’s fixed that now. I have to go on Monday. She’s going to drive me to Central Middle School and walk me to the classroom.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. It will be good for you to start going to classes. You’ll make some new friends, too.”

  “It’ll be boring.” Jane sounded sulky; but also, thank goodness, resigned. Hopefully that meant she wasn’t planning to find another dodge.

  We pulled up in front of her house and parked beside the driveway. She took her time unfastening her seat belt, and stopped to give Faith a long hug good-bye.

  “Do you want me to go in with you? I’d be happy to explain to your grandmother where you were.”

  “No, it’ll be okay.” She climbed slowly out of the car and shut the door behind her.

  “Now that you’ll be busy with school, I guess we won’t be seeing each other as much.”

  Jane shrugged as if she didn’t care, but it wasn’t hard to read the expression in her eyes. Like the other people who’d come and gone in her life, she thought I was abandoning her.

  “Wait,” I said. I fished in my purse for a piece of paper and a pen. “Here’s my phone number. If you need anything, call me. Or even if you just feel like talking, okay?”

  Jane folded the paper carefully and put it in the pocket of her jeans. I hoped she remembered it was there before the pants went through the laundry.

  Faith pressed her nose against the window and watched the small, slender girl walk down the driveway toward the back door. The Poodle looked as bereft as I felt. You can’t fix the whole world—hadn’t I just told Aunt Peg that?

  Yes, but I could sure as hell work on my one small portion of it. I’d be seeing Jane again, I was sure of it.

  When I got home, it looked like half the neighborhood was at my house. Lights were on, the front door wasn’t quite closed, and several cars, including Sam’s, were parked in the driveway. After my recent experiences at Howard Academy, my first thought was that some sort of disaster had occurred.

  I parked by the curb and hurried across the yard with Faith. As I reached the front steps, the door opened. Alice Brickman stood in the doorway, looking mortified. Behind her, I saw my next-door neighbor, Mrs. Silano, pass through the hall. She waved to me gaily and continued toward the living room. Loud music was coming from that direction.

  “I am so sorry,” said Alice.

  I raced up the steps. By the time I reached the top, we were eye to eye. Alice has strawberry blond hair, pale, luminous skin, and a wonderful smile. Unfortunately, she takes those assets for granted and spends too much time worrying about the fifteen pounds she never lost after her daughter, Carly, was born three years earlier.

  “What’s happened?” I asked, trying to fit past her. “Is Davey okay?”

  “Sure.” Alice blinked. “He’s fine. At least he was a few minutes ago, the last time I saw him.”

  Mothers of little boys learn that tactic early: never make promises unless the child in question is within view.

  “He and Joey are playing Nintendo,” said Alice. “I’m afraid that’s how this whole thing got started.”

  “What whole thing?” I had to raise my voice; someone had turned up the volume on the CD player. Two men I’d never seen before were manning the controls.

  “This gathering. Whatever. This afternoon I ran out of things for the boys to do. Carly was having a play date, and they were bored. You know how it goes.”

  I could imagine. One bored six-year-old boy could make a nuisance of himself; two could drive a mother to distraction.

  “So Davey got this idea that everything would be all right if they could come over here and play Nintendo, which annoyed the crap out of me because you know perfectly well that Joey has a Nintendo set of his own, except that Joe is an idiot.”

  Joe was Alice’s husband, an attorney with one of the big firms in Greenwich. He’d recently decided that playing video games would stunt his children’s intellectual and emotion
al growth. Consequently, he’d unplugged the Nintendo system and consigned it to the attic.

  As we were speaking, the idiot in question strolled down the hallway from the kitchen, beer in hand. For no reason that I could see, he was wearing tennis whites. Sam, who was also holding a cold bottle of Bud, was right behind him. He was grinning broadly.

  “Most men are idiots,” I said sweetly. “It’s to be expected. Then what happened?”

  “Well, you know how you gave me a key in case of emergencies? I figured this was sort of close, except I didn’t want the boys to be here all by themselves so Tina and Carly and April and I came with them . . .”

  Tina and April, I surmised, were the mother-daughter combination that formed the other half of Carly’s play date.

  “. . . and then Sam showed up because he was looking for you and seemed to think you had this long-standing agreement that the two of you would get together on Saturday nights even though he hadn’t called to confirm or anything, and there was no reason he should expect you to be here . . .”

  There we were, right back to that idiot thing again.

  “. . . then Joe got home from playing doubles. Apparently he’d invited the other three guys back to the house for a beer, but we didn’t have any, so he saw my note saying where I was and came over here to yell about the beer thing, except that you had plenty once Sam showed him where the spare case was in the garage. And you know how men are, they had to make a big production of putting some in the fridge and some in the freezer and by the time they got that all figured out, Joe had forgotten what he was mad about in the first place . . .”

  By now, my eyes were beginning to glaze over. If Alice didn’t stop and take a breath soon, she was going to pass out on the floor.

  “Mrs. Silano?” I asked weakly.

  “Who?”

  “Edna Silano? My neighbor?”

  “Oh, right. I guess we were causing somewhat of a commotion and she seemed to know you weren’t here.” Alice shielded her mouth with her hand, and whispered, “I think she watches from behind her front curtain.”

  She did. I was surprised Alice hadn’t realized that sooner. Some days I think we entertained her better than television.