Sire and Damn (Dog Lover's Mysteries Book 20)

by Susan Conant

  In spite of the rain, or maybe distracted from it, Rowdy interpreted our plunge into the New England jungle as an adventure and threw himself into it with his usual power and zeal, and without my concern for minimizing the noise we made. Twigs and branches snapped as he bounded past them and as my ungainly boots crushed them underfoot. Six feet ahead of me, at the end of his leash, Rowdy dove beneath a horizontal branch that sprang back and whacked me mid-thigh. Clambering over the branch, impeded by the poncho, I almost fell, and in struggling to regain my balance, I slipped on wet leaves and hit the ground.

  Clinging to Rowdy’s leash, I panted for breath, got to my feet, and whispered a stern, “Easy!”

  In reply, Rowdy threw me that same look of puzzled pity that he gives me when we’re hiking up a nearly vertical hill and I, sissy that I am, insist on following the switchback trail instead of heading directly upward to the summit.

  But at least he studied my face, and when he did, I smiled at him and mouthed a silent, “Good boy! Easy does it.”

  By then, the poncho had trapped so much body heat that I resisted the impulse to yank it off only by reminding myself that its sickly army green blended smoothly into the damp foliage and the moss-ridden trees and fallen limbs around us. Pausing, I saw that Rowdy’s hell-for-leather-leash dash had positioned us a welcome twenty feet or so from my goal, the dead tree with the snapped trunk. The blighted woods and undergrowth were so silent that I was wary of moving, but we’d already made noise by crashing downhill.

  And I wanted to reach that blind, where I’d be close enough to get a good look at the man who retrieved the ransom—if the ransom was still there. Had I missed him?

  Patting my left thigh, I coaxed Rowdy to my side and stepped forward. Attuned to me, he moved more silently than I did as we made our way to the shattered tree, which was even more thickly shrouded in vegetation than I’d seen from the top of the slope. Viewed from up close, the vine I’d noticed revealed itself as a tangled mass of woody stems and lush foliage, a thick web evidently woven by some weirdly vegetative and psychotic spider.

  Huddling down, I lowered my hand in front of Rowdy’s face in the familiar drop signal and then squirmed and yanked at the voluminous poncho until I’d fashioned a waterproof seat for myself. I also managed a small tent that covered most of Rowdy’s body and would prevent him from advertising our presence by waving his flag of a tail.

  Encased in this makeshift tent with my big, damp dog, I sweated and waited, my eyes trained on the broken pieces of the desk and on the slope above it.

  chapter thirty-four

  Soon after Rowdy and I had settled ourselves in the shelter of the vine-infested tree, my eye caught a flash of movement at the top of the slope. Seconds later, a man in dark jeans and a cobalt-blue windbreaker started down through the wet undergrowth and tangled vines so fast and so carelessly that he lost his footing and crashed to the ground.

  Cursing loudly, he scrambled to his feet; brushed himself off; and having learned a lesson, picked his way slowly to the broken desk.

  Because I’d seen photos of the late Frank Sorensen, Little Frankie, I’d irrationally expected Gil Sorensen to be an older version of his hot and handsome brother. Could this weirdly proportioned man possibly be Gil? Except for his blonde hair, he looked nothing like Frankie. On the contrary, he looked like a repulsive clown. He had long, skinny legs; short, skinny arms; and a tiny head perched on a grotesquely thick neck. His forehead took up half his face, his mouth was wide, and his nose miniature.

  When he reached the broken desk, I could see his eyes, which were a vivid and oddly familiar blue, and his pendulous ear lobes, in each of which was a diamond stud earring.

  Bending from the waist, he picked up the white plastic bag. As he stood upright, a woman’s voice called from above: “Gil, you bastard, I knew you were up to something.”

  With more caution than Gil had exercised, the woman followed the route he’d taken. Even on that slippery, vine-choked terrain, she moved with an eerie grace that was all the more remarkable because her long violet-indigo trench coat almost touched the ground. I’d have tripped on that robe-like garment and tumbled downhill, but she seemed almost to float, as if she were an elf princess or a woodland goddess whose powers included levitation and whose principal attribute was extraordinary beauty. She had delicate features and a mass of dark wavy hair. In one respect, however, she resembled Gil: her eyes were that same mysteriously familiar shade of violet-blue.

  Her hair. Her eyes. Her extraordinary beauty. Something Steve had said? Yes. When all of us had gathered for dinner at our house, we’d been talking about the burglary, and someone had asked whether we’d noticed any strangers in the neighborhood. Steve had replied that he’d seen a woman who looked like the young Elizabeth Taylor.

  I’d assumed that he was joking about noticing no one except a gorgeous woman. It now seemed obvious that he actually had seen such a woman: this woman, a dark-haired woman with violet eyes, a woman who bore a strong resemblance not to the harridan of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and not to Elizabeth Taylor’s hard, jaded Cleopatra, but to the fresh and incredibly lovely star of National Velvet. Steve hadn’t been joking: He’d seen this woman in our neighborhood.

  But he couldn’t have heard her. That voice! She had the rusty-gate croak of a grackle. Vicky’s voice was high, loud, and irritating. This woman’s was harsh, nasal, and guttural, and by guttural, I don’t just mean throaty; I mean that she sounded like something out the gutter. Sluttural? Is that a word?

  “Gimme the goddamned bag, Gil!”

  Gil did nothing: he held onto the bag and remained silent.

  “Gimme that bag now, or there’ll be no more goodies from Nurse Cathy.”

  Cathy. Cathy Brown. John’s ex-wife. Tabitha’s puppy buyer.

  “Your goodies did my brother a wicked lot of good,” he told her.

  “It wasn’t me that hit him. It was you.”

  “It wasn’t. I swear to God, Cathy, I keep telling you, I found Frankie that way. I shoulda never trusted you.”

  “All’s I did was try and shut him up.”

  “I shoulda taken him to the hospital.”

  “So’s he could go back to jail? They’d’ve seen he was using. And none of it would’ve happened if you’d stuck to the plan, you and Frankie.”

  “I did, goddamn it! I waited in the car, but Frankie didn’t come out, so I had to go find him, didn’t I? And there he was, all covered in blood, with a poker laying on the floor, and he wasn’t making sense, and that’s why I ended up with the wrong dog.”

  “Gil, any moron can tell the difference between a Lab and that ankle-biter.”

  “It was a black dog, and it was the only dog there.”

  “Bullshit! Gil, I watched that house, and there was no Scottie there. I watched, and I planned, and that crazy cousin of John’s put everything online, photos included. I had this fucking thing planned to the second. I mapped the neighborhood and whole layout of the house, and all you and Frankie had to do was wait for my call to tell you they were at the restaurant. Then you break the window, Frankie goes in, he gets my dog and gets out. It was so fucking simple! Go in. Get my dog. Get out.”

  Rowdy stirred. I rested a hand on his big forepaws and met his gaze. He wasn’t, I thought, reacting to the word dog. Rather, Cathy’s enraged croak distressed him—and probably hurt his sensitive ears.

  Cathy returned her attention to the bag in Gil’s hand. “What the hell is that? Let me see it.” As she took a step toward him, her hand darted out.

  He stepped back. “Cathy, don’t play games with me, or I’ll have a little talk with your old folks’ home about where the pain meds are really going.”

  This time, she moved quickly and snatched at the bag, but Gil reached out and shoved her, not hard enough to knock her off her feet but enough to make her scramble to stay upright. Once she regained her balance, she twisted her mouth, spat at Gil, and got him right in the face.

  As Gil ro
ared and lunged, the pathetic fallacy kicked in: thunder pealed, and the drizzle turned to heavy rain. In response to the violence or the downpour, Rowdy stirred again, and I decided that instead of waiting to find out whether he’d voice his discontent, I’d take advantage of the shouting and fighting to slip away. Rita and Zara would be worried about us, and I had no fear of missing anything. Gil obviously wasn’t going to reveal Izzy’s whereabouts; the dognapping was a private scheme, an independent enterprise that he’d kept secret from Cathy, as secret as he and the late Frankie had kept the theft of Rita and Quinn’s wedding presents.

  I gathered Rowdy’s leash in my hand. Gil and Cathy were preoccupied with each other, and the thunder and hard rain offered auditory camouflage. Still, I moved as smoothly as the terrain allowed and used my body and Steve’s poncho to block the sight of Rowdy’s giveaway tail. The steep climb up the sodden slope was easier than the descent had been. In what felt like only a minute or two, we emerged from the trashy woods.

  Instead of retracing our steps past the picnic area, the benches, and the pavilion, we headed to the parking lot that Zara had been told to use. This route struck me as faster than our original one, if only by a minute or two. We’d been gone longer than I’d intended; I’d meant only to get a good look at the man as he collected the ransom.

  If Zara and Rita were angry with me, it would be for good reason.

  The parking lot was long and wide, with a strip of weedy grass and a few skinny Norway maples in the middle and a double row of parking spaces on either side. Eight or ten cars and a few pickup trucks were parked at the far end. Since I no longer needed to avoid attracting attention, I was free to run—or as free as the Wellies allowed.

  Eager to get out of the rain, Rowdy bounded across the asphalt with me and then, to my annoyance, came to an abrupt halt. Worse, he adopted a stance that I knew all too well. By stiffening all four legs and holding his head and tail perfectly still, he announced, in effect, that he was no longer composed of living tissue, bone, and blood, but had suddenly and miraculously become a concrete dog, a stone dog, or possibly, in a fashion reminiscent of Lot’s wife, a canine pillar of salt.

  “Rowdy,” I said, “this is no time to pull that mala-mule act. Let’s go!” I patted my thigh, smacked my lips, and took a step forward.

  Rowdy moved not one millimeter.

  “What is this?” I demanded. “You hate rain.” I tried sweet talk: “Don’t you want to get out the rain? Get nice and dry? Come on! Let’s go!” Reaching under the poncho, I dug some desiccated treats out of the right-hand pocket of my jeans. “Here you go, pup!”

  Rowdy refused the food.

  “This is ridiculous,” I said. “What’s going on?” The question wasn’t one. It was a complaint. Then the impossible registered on me: Rowdy? My Rowdy? Refusing food?

  Curiosity replaced irritation. “Rowdy, what is it? Show me what it is.”

  chapter thirty-five

  The second the words left my mouth, I was chagrined to realize that I sounded as if I were talking to Lassie: What is it, girl? What is it? If Rowdy had taken my sleeve in his mouth and led me off to rescue a child who’d tumbled into a well, I’d have been as embarrassed for him as I already was for myself, but he spared us the cliché.

  Only when I turned my attention to where it should have been all along—on Rowdy, of course—did I notice that he’d slammed on our collective brakes at the rear of a battered blue station wagon, the kind of big American model that you almost never see anymore, and that his eyes were fixed on that rusty rattletrap. Research on canine social cognition, as it’s called, demonstrates that dog are adept at following the human gaze: dogs look where we look. What’s equally true is that we dog people follow the canine gaze: we look where dogs look. In other words, dogs and people share a gaze-based system of synchronizing attention, a system based on mutual respect: each species respects the other’s judgment about what’s worth watching.

  At first glance, though, the blue station wagon wasn’t much to look at. It had ordinary Massachusetts plates, a dented rear fender, and bald tires. No one was seated in it.

  Now that Rowdy had directed my attention to the battered vehicle, he was no longer a stiff-legged mala-mule. He rose up, planted his front paws on the rear fender, and made a plaintive sound midway between a whine and a yip, a vocalization outside his usual repertoire.

  I’d heard that cry of concern once before, not from Rowdy, but from Kimi. The occasion was unforgettable because Kimi’s distress had been my fault: Stupidly, thoughtlessly, unforgivably, I’d played a recording of wolf cubs in Kimi’s presence. Her response had been immediate and frantic. She’d dashed around making that heart-wrenching cry and had eventually zeroed in on the speaker from which the voices of the cubs emanated. Then, for once in her self-confident life, she’d had no idea what to do. Belatedly catching on, I’d pushed the off switch. The little wolves, recorded in their den, had reacted to the intrusion of the recording equipment by screaming for help, and Kimi had been hell-bent on rescuing them. I’d assumed that Kimi’s vocal response had been maternal: strictly female. I’d been wrong.

  Peering through the back window of the station wagon, I saw that the rear seat was down. Piled on the flat surface were cheap synthetic blankets so grubby that it was impossible to tell whether they’d originally been pale yellow, baby blue, cream, or maybe even white. In the middle of the pile was a big lump.

  I rapped on the window. “Izzy! Izzy!”

  The lump stirred.

  As frantic as Kimi had been when she’d heard those distraught cubs, I yanked at the tailgate latch and then checked all four doors. The doors were locked. The rear windows were closed, but the two front windows were cracked open maybe half an inch. If the day had been ten degrees warmer, there’d have been no movement under the pile of blankets.

  According to that famously reliable news source, Facebook, a sign sometimes displayed in front of dog-loving churches reads IF YOU SEE A DOG IN A HOT CAR, YOU HAVE GOD’S PERMISSION TO BREAK A WINDOW. With my bare hands? The trash strewn around the parking lot didn’t include bricks, and there wasn’t a rock in sight. If you see a dog in a hot car, I guess that God gives you permission to steal whatever you need to break a window. Rowdy reluctantly ran with me to the vehicles parked at the far end of the lot.

  One of the pickups had a truck cap, and the bed of a second pickup was empty, but in the third I found what felt like a godsend: a rusty iron bar. I snatched it and dashed back to the station wagon.

  Keeping Rowdy behind me, I raised the iron rod and slammed it into the window by the driver’s seat. Around the hole left by the rod, hundreds of miniature cracks appeared and spread like a dreadful rash. When I dealt the glass another blow, chunks and shards tumbled onto the driver’s seat.

  For a second, I half expected to hear the shouts of some justifiably irate stranger to whom I’d say—what? “I’m so sorry, sir, but my dog insisted—”

  “Sure, lady. Did he eat your homework, too?”

  But Rowdy had insisted. And as I stuck my hand in the car, unlocked the front door, opened it, and then unlocked and opened the rear door, the blankets moved. I pulled off the top blanket and a second one to reveal Izzy, who lay frighteningly still, her eyes closed. Under my open hand, her rib cage was hot to the touch, and the only beat I felt was the pounding of my own heart.

  She opened her eyes.

  “Down,” I told Rowdy.

  Just as I was leaning in, slipping my hands and forearms under Izzy, and bracing myself to lift her, Zara’s unmistakable car pulled in behind the station wagon. In seconds, she was beside me.

  “Izzy’s alive,” I said. “I think she’s dehydrated. Maybe drugged. This doesn’t look like heatstroke. We need to get her to your car, and then you drive to Steve’s clinic. Never mind a crate. Just get one of the back doors open. I’ll explain everything later.”

  When Zara had done as I asked, we used one of the filthy blankets as a stretcher to transport the almo
st comatose Izzy. I retrieved my purse from the front of Zara’s car. “I’ll call Steve, but if he isn’t at the clinic, someone else will be. Where’s Rita?”

  “She wasn’t at Pignola’s. I thought she was with you.”

  “Never mind. I’ll find her. We’ll take a taxi. Go!”

  As soon as Zara drove off, I released Rowdy from his admirably solid down-stay and hustled him away from the battered and now badly damaged station wagon. Since Izzy was no longer my responsibility, I wanted to distance myself from Gil as quickly as possible. Avoiding the exposed parking lot, I headed to the tennis courts and then toward Pignola’s before pausing to call Steve. Our conversation was brief.

  “Zara’s on her way to your clinic with Izzy,” I said. “Could you get there as soon as possible? And let them know to expect Izzy. She looks drugged, but that’s just a guess, and I think she’s dehydrated, I’ll explain later. Can you leave now?”

  “I’m on my way,” he said.

  The call ended. That’s when Rita screamed for help.

  chapter thirty-six

  For the record, I am contributing to what is primarily Holly’s narrative only at her insistence. In using the word insistence, I am grossly understating her pestilential and pestilentially cheerful persistence. There is no question in my mind that Holly herself would attribute both her unrelenting perseverance and the irrationally happy attitude that accompanied it to her experience in training dogs. If confronted, she would laugh and then find a way to work in the word doggedness. If you know Holly, it goes without saying that she attributes everything about herself to her life with dogs, so why make an exception?

  Oh, my, it’s clear that in blaming Holly for extracting from me the promise to provide a statement of my actions and observations after she left Pignola’s, I am avoiding doing precisely that. The role in which I am most comfortable involves persuading others to construct meaningful narrations of their lives. The narrative of my own life is something I prefer to keep strictly between my analyst and me; it is not for public consumption. Consumption: an oddly oral lexical choice, one to be taken up with one’s analyst, perhaps? Analyst, analysis: oddly anal?