“I didn’t see a living soul,” Lola said, “but the mountain is in back of Mama’s house here. Somebody could shoot down from among the trees and then slip away.”
“It’s probably some crazy mean kid,” I said, “with a new gun. What do you want me to do?”
I said that bit about a kid to ease her mind, but I found myself wondering: Was there someone from that dog’s past who wanted him out of the way? Silly idea, I told myself. But the idea grew: Was there some guilty secret the dog knew? Oh, come on! What imagination! First I’d asked myself if it was my fault that Bonnie died because I wasn’t around to look in. Then I wondered if a little dog knew guilty secrets. But I never entirely dismiss my wild ideas. Some of them turn out. If you have a lousy memory, and I admit to that, sometimes you just know something without remembering the little signs that made you know it. I file my strange ideas under “Way Far Out,” but I don’t erase them.
“People will be coming and going here,” Lola said, “paying respects to Mama. Would you take care of George till I get time to take him to my place?”
“And are you going to keep him for good?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Mama would want him to have a good home, but Victor doesn’t care too much for dogs.”
I didn’t like Lola’s husband, Victor. Why did my wonderful friend Bonnie’s two daughters both marry stinkers?
Unsuccessful stinkers. One from the city, one from the country. Andrea Ann’s Arnold had run a tired trailer park out in the county where he grew up, except he’d finally sold it and put a down payment on a house near Bonnie’s (which is to say, near me) and announced he was going to be a salesman. Now they were neighbors. And Arnold had to shave more often. Funny thing, though, Arnold had always had bedroom eyes even without shaving. Gave every woman he met the once-over like he was checking her out for sex, like his imagination was extra good in that department. Carnal Arnold. From the day I met him, I’d remembered his name that way.
Lola’s husband, Victor, had a craft shop in Asheville. He’d always shaved. In fact, he overdressed. Slick Vic. He wore suits with vests to work. But most of his mountain-type “handmade crafts” came from Korea. He couldn’t understand why, in an area with so many real and beautiful crafts, his shop didn’t do well. Also, Victor was selfish and wanted to be the center of everything. And Lola was, I am sorry to say, a doormat. A mealymouthed doormat. Victor and Lola were made for each other. But not for a little dog with boot-kicks and God knew what else to get over.
“I’d like to have George,” I said. “He has character. I’ll come get him right now.”
“Now, where has that dog gone?” Lola groaned as she let me in the front door. Why on earth had she worn a pink satin blouse to drop by her mother’s in the morning? It went with her teased hairdresser hair and her carefully painted rosebud mouth. On a woman of fifty-plus. No doubt Slick Vic liked it.
We traced George to Bonnie’s room, where the unmade bed looked so forlorn. Doc James must have arranged for the funeral home to come and get the body. Lola seemed too upset to have thought clearly and worked that out. Doc was getting a little senile himself. At least, I didn’t think he’d come to see Bonnie as often as he should. But Bonnie would never change doctors.
George stuck his little black nose out from under the dust ruffle when he heard me and gave the single bark that means hello. “Good dog,” I said to encourage him.
I looked around the room and choked up. The picture of praying hands, as worn as Bonnie’s, hung as always on the wall above the old brass bed. Across from it was the plain bureau with Bonnie’s hairbrush and comb and the old crazed mirror that had belonged to her mother. On the bedside table was a framed picture of the two girls as kids, Lola and Andrea Ann. Pouting in Sunday dresses. Also a glass of water, Bonnie’s bottle of heart pills, and a box of dog biscuits. Everything was just like it had been at my last visit when I’d slipped in early before I left for my plane. I was glad I’d said that good-bye.
I walked over and picked up the pills and sighed. Heart medicine almost killed my father. As-much-as-you-need can save your life. More-than-you-need is deadly poison. “Lanoxin” (Digoxin), the label said, Rite-Aid. “Bonnie changed pharmacies,” I said out loud. “I used to get her pills for her sometimes from Barefoot and Cheetham when I got my thyroid pills.” Who could forget a name that made a picture like Barefoot and Cheetham? The two are actually old mountain names. Several in the phone book.
“Rite-Aid is a chain, so it costs less,” Lola said primly. She stood near the bed nervously, watching me. Twitching like she wanted me to hurry up.
George edged out from under the bed. His small straight tail began to wag. He fastened his bright little black eyes on me.
“Bonnie really counted on George,” I reminisced. “He even helped her remember her pill.” Silence. Lola didn’t like to admit that before the dog came, her mother sometimes forgot to take her heart pill at all. Which was dangerous. So I had come to the rescue.
I take pride in the fact that my friends count on me for memory tricks. In fact, I’m writing a book called How to Survive without a Memory. My only problem is that sometimes I forget to take my own advice. But the dog-pill trick really works. A dog’s stomach can tell time as well as an alarm clock. Give him a treat at the same time two or three days running, and he’ll come ask for it on the button after that. Especially if he’s a hungry type. And before George showed up on Bonnie’s doorstep, goodness knows how long he’d been hungry.
George nudged my leg to be patted. I stroked his velvet head.
“Yes,” Lola admitted, “George was a help, although my Victor was always afraid the dog was going to give us fleas.”
Fleas! I’d taken on the job of seeing that George never had any. Bonnie’s daughters never took time for that. Lola was always off at Victor’s beck and call.
Andrea Ann, who was a trained nurse, did look in more often. She kept an eye on her mother, now that they’d made up a long-standing fight. You see, Andrea Ann had thought her mother had ruined her marriage by not lending her money. A dumb idea, but Andrea Ann had spells of dumb. And she had a talent for getting mad. Angrier Ann. She had evidently forgiven her mother, but she wasn’t about to take on dog care.
Sometimes I wondered if Andrea Ann had any warm feelings—even for people, much less dogs. She’d told me that when she was a child she’d dissected small animals—mice, chipmunks, and once (to my horror) a squirrel—because she wanted to know what was inside. Which maybe made her a better surgical nurse, especially since her patients were anesthetized while she was with them. Human interaction was not required.
I don’t think Andrea Ann knew how to show love. And Lola wasn’t much better. George was the one who quivered with love whenever Bonnie came near. Who jumped with joy when she fed him. George knew she’d taken him in and saved his life. Fleas, indeed!
“Why, George told your mother by his bark whether a friend or a stranger was at the front door. He went crazy over strangers.”
“And she felt safer that way, Peaches,” Lola admitted, shrugging those satin shoulders.
“And George may be small and scared of strangers,” I added, “but he can be fierce. He used to come steal my cat’s supper. Now I put it on a high shelf.”
“Mama called him a feist.” Lola eyed his bowed legs, white chest, and funny little black body. “But he looks like a mongrel to me.”
Out in the country, feists are kind of a breed. Not all exactly alike, but all small and fierce when they need to be. That’s where the word feisty comes from. The dictionary says so.
“It’s our mountain thriftiness, I guess,” I said. “To breed a fierce watchdog in a small size that won’t need much to eat.”
George came out from under the bed and began to bark. Someone at the door? Andrea Ann should certainly be here by now. We went to look. No one was there. George raced back into the bedroom. He stood by the bed and barked. All of him quivered, and he pranced up and dow
n, stamping first one front paw, then the other.
“Oh! It’s time for your mother’s pill!” I could have cried. He was barking, as always, because it was time for the treat that Bonnie gave him each time she took a pill. George wanted his dog biscuit. I gave him one for old times’ sake. I looked at the pills. Take one at 10:00 A.M., the label said. And sure enough, the clock said ten. George was going to have to be deprogrammed so he didn’t bark every day at ten o’clock.
I picked him up, and he wriggled with delight and licked my nose.
“Where’s Andrea Ann?” I asked. Now she and Arnold lived just a few houses down the street, and Lola said she’d called her sister before she called me. Andrea should have arrived.
“She said she had to get dressed,” Lola said. “She and Arnold.” Arnold the new salesman. Shallow and insincere. He’d kept trying to talk Bonnie into selling the large tract of land with a lake and a little cabin on it, out at the edge of town. Bonnie’d never gotten there the last few years. But she was attached to that place. Carnal Arnold was too thickheaded to understand that. Or maybe he and Andrea Ann had wanted to borrow the money that Bonnie could get by selling the land. They tended to gamble. They’d been on vacation to Acapulco and Atlantic City and I forget where else.
You might think I don’t like anybody the way I talk about Bonnie’s girls and their men. I like most everybody. But something had gone wrong with those girls. I never knew their father. He was gone by the time I moved in next to Bonnie. Maybe he was the bad apple. Bonnie refused to talk about him.
“Do you think your father is still alive?” I asked Lola. “Do you need to let him know?”
She glared at me. “That,” she said, “is not your business.” At the same moment Andrea Ann walked in the door. No pink satin for her. Nurse’s white and laced shoes. Andrea was the practical type. Dumb spells and all. Her mother said she never wasted a thing. Even saved odd bits of string. She glared at me too.
So I took a hint and went home, carrying little George against my shoulder.
I put my old barn coat on the floor for him to lie on. Silk, my cat, who used to belong to my mother, came through the cat door. My father didn’t really want Silk, and I seem to inherit animals. Silk and George were friends from outdoors. No problem. I poured myself some cornflakes, added milk. I did some wash. I answered two letters. George was restless. He knew something was wrong. He kept going to the door and asking to get out. He didn’t know how to use the cat door. “You’ve been out,” I said, remembering the gunshot, “and it nearly killed you.” I looked out the window. I saw Lola talking to Carnal Arnold on her mother’s front porch. Even from a distance I could see her preen and him leer. A car drove up and out got Victor. A traffic jam. About time that joker got there; it was early afternoon.
All of a sudden George began to bark again. It wasn’t quite his stranger-at-the-door bark. But insistent. He didn’t go to the door and hop up and down to get out. Still, I glanced outside. Nobody. I looked at the clock. Two o’clock. Not the right time for the pill routine. What on earth was he trying to tell me? I gave him a dog biscuit. He stopped barking.
Then I heard a thump on the side of the house, over toward the bedroom—the side away from Bonnie’s house. I went in the bedroom to investigate. Both animals followed me. I looked out the bedroom window, past the stained-glass cardinal fastened to the glass. Nobody in sight on that side of the house. Though there was a hedge. Someone could have slipped behind that. Nothing seemed to have fallen in the bedroom. The picture of an old man playing a mountain dulcimer hung securely in place. So did the picture of the barn owl. No explanation for the noise. Only then did it occur to me that that thump was designed to get me out of the kitchen. That someone actually banged the side of the house.
I hurried back into the kitchen, and George began to run toward the cat door. I saw what he was after—a big piece of juicy raw hamburger. I ran so fast, I grabbed it before he did. I wiped the floor with my sleeve before either animal could lick any juice. I put the meat in a square freezer box and called the police department.
I was lucky to reach an old friend, Lieutenant John Wilson—whom I call Mustache, for obvious reasons. “I hate to hear from you,” he said, “in case somebody else has been murdered.” He said it like a joke. But of course, it wasn’t. I’ve been mixed up in several murders. Not, thank God, on the wrong side.
“You’re right. My next-door neighbor, Bonnie Amons, has been murdered,” I said. “If you’ll get right over here, I can tell you how to prove it, even though she was eighty-three and everybody thinks she died of natural causes. Or,” I said, “I can give you the proof if you come at 5:30.”
“I can’t come now,” he said. “I can’t even talk long now. I’d have to send somebody else. I’ll come at 5:30 or quarter of six.”
“Nothing is going to change before then,” I said. “But don’t be late.”
You can bet I took good care of George for the rest of the afternoon, and Mustache arrived as promised, about 5:35.
“Okay,” he said, “tell me your theory. I bet it’s something that nobody but me would ever believe. But I’ve had practice.” He sighed. I know he wishes I wouldn’t get mixed up in strange deaths. Like finding my poor Aunt Nancy in the goldfish pond or stumbling on the fact that a serial killer was coming up I-40 our way and had my father on a list. Mustache wishes I wouldn’t throw him curves. He has an orderly side that wants the world to make sense. You can tell by his crisp blue suit. No wrinkles. And by his straight firm mouth and intelligent eyes.
On the other hand, if he stuck to the tried-and-true way, he probably wouldn’t have that scar next to his eye. He probably wouldn’t have that wry manner—that was kind of nice. “Why do you believe that your neighbor, Bonnie Amons, was murdered?”
I introduced him to George. “This little dog belonged to Bonnie Amons, and he was trained to bark for a dog biscuit at ten o’clock every morning,” I said. “That reminded her to take her heart pill.”
George eyed Mustache’s feet. No boots. George stood his ground.
“Now, someone has trained this dog to bark for a dog biscuit more times a day than Bonnie was supposed to take pills. Today he’s barked at ten and two, and I’ll bet he’ll bark at six. That would make a regular pattern.” Even my friend Mustache looked doubtful. Mustache looked at the kitchen clock. Quarter of six.
“And then, if you want to be sure of the whole pattern, let your police gal who works with the drug-sniffing dog keep George for a day and see,” I said. “If she gives him a dog biscuit after he barks for it, he’ll keep on barking at regular intervals, and you can use that for evidence.”
“I might laugh at that evidence,” Mustache sighed, “except I know you. But we need more. That dog-alarm-clock stuff could be laughed out of court.”
“Well, I’m willing to bet an autopsy on Bonnie Amons will show she’s been taking more Lanoxin than she should, maybe three times as much,” I said. “The amount will match the number of times a day that George barks in a certain way. I showed Bonnie how to train this little dog to bark when she was due to take her medicine, but now her daughter, Andrea Ann, has trained the dog to bark more often. And I believe the overdose killed my friend.”
“Well, you know about heart medicine, all right,” he sighed, pulling at his mustache, “since the attempt last year to kill your father with it. So you think this Andrea Ann killed her own mother?”
“Sure,” I said. “Andrea Ann had a fight with her mother because Bonnie wouldn’t lend her money. Then Andrea Ann made up and helped nurse her mother. Maybe just in order to kill her. Andrea Ann is a little strange. But very determined. She didn’t like to live in a trailer park.”
“But how could anyone prove Andrea Ann was the poisoner, even if the autopsy and the dog check out? And we can’t even ask for an autopsy without some proof that something is wrong.” He chewed the end of his mustache. “I hate to let you down,” he said kindly, “but this one may be too preposterous if a
ll you have is the dog and speculation.”
“Luckily,” I said, “Andrea Ann thought the dog could incriminate her by barking too often. She thought I’d figure out what happened. She had one of her dumb spells. So she gave me proof.
“Here,” I said, “is some hamburger laced with poison. I’m sure of it. If you look in Andrea Ann’s refrigerator, I think you’ll find un-poisoned hamburger that matches it. Andrea Ann never could bring herself to waste anything. She may possibly have thrown out the poison, but she can’t have thrown it far. She needed to be over at her mother’s house with her sister, looking innocent. She could slip out while her sister was busy flirting with her husband and drop the poisoned meat into my kitchen, the louse. But she didn’t have time to go far away. And she didn’t expect to have to use poison. Earlier she had shot at George, but she missed. Then she probably poisoned this meat with what she had handy—some household pesticide. You’ll find the evidence. I have faith.”
But Mustache was staring at the clock. The hands said six. George was lying quietly on the floor by my feet. I sighed. So okay, my imagination led me astray. But I didn’t believe that. George yawned.
And then he stood up and began to bark. He jumped up and down and ran back and forth. He stamped his feet.
I handed Mustache a dog biscuit. “Here, you give it to him,” I suggested. He did, and George wagged his tail and stopped barking.
I am happy to say that when Mustache got himself a hurry-up search warrant, there was hamburger in Andrea Ann’s fridge, and it matched. Modern science can spot those things. The rat-poison box was still in her garage. She was overconfident. So sure that once the dog was dead, nobody could spot those extra pill-barkings. So sure she could prevent us from discovering the secret of the dog.
Mustache found one thing I missed. Andrea Ann was going to three different pharmacies to get Lanoxin, using stolen and forged prescription forms she got from her nursing job.
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