Extra Credit

by Maggie Barbieri

  Yes, I saw every facet of that thought process in his unconcerned face. Call it my special gift.

  I looked over at Crawford, who was studying what looked like a bullet hole in the banquette; I prayed to God that it wasn’t. I guessed it was up to me to respond. I gave it all I had. “That would be great, Christine,” I said, much to the bemusement of Max, who had the special gift of being able to read my mind, just like I could read Tim’s.

  Satisfied with that answer, Christine mellowed a bit and finally seemed to enjoy herself. The evening went off without a further hitch, with me deciding to put a lid on the cheap booze or face the dreaded cottonmouth in the morning, and Max deciding that there were worse things than eating good barbecue in a dive joint she would never visit voluntarily.

  In the parking lot, poorly lit and not the kind of place that I like to be in by myself, we said good night and went our separate ways. When she hugged me, Max whispered that she would see me the next day at the birthday party and that under no circumstances was I to bring a gift, which is code for “I really liked that bag I sent you the link to,” which is exactly what I had gotten her as soon as I’d opened her e-mail.

  Once we were in the car, I looked over at Crawford. “We don’t have to do that again, do we?”

  He pulled out onto the street. “Why? You don’t like spending time with my ex-wife and her new husband?” he asked, trying to sound serious but cracking himself up before he got out the last word.

  “Seriously,” I said. “What is this about? Why does she feel the need to get so close? It’s not like she did any due diligence before taking off with Tim for London and leaving us here with the girls.”

  “Good point,” he said. “I don’t know. Her own family is just so…” He searched for the right word.

  “Bizarre?” I suggested helpfully.

  “Dysfunctional,” he said. “Gabe is the most normal of all of them, and as you can see, he escaped a long time ago.”

  “Savannah.”

  “Yep.” He stopped at a light and looked out his window. “I told you what it was like for her growing up with them. Her mother died young, leaving her father with a bunch of kids he had no business raising himself. That any of them turned out okay is a miracle.”

  “That happens sometimes,” I said. “I see it with my students all the time. It’s something that has to be inside you. To make you want to get out and make a normal life for yourself. To succeed.”

  He was quiet, mulling that over. “Do you think she’s happy?”

  “Who, Christine?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I guess,” I said, not really having given the idea any thought. What I really wanted to ask him was “Do you care?” but I stopped myself. I worked through it in my mind. Of course he did. She was the mother of his daughters. He would want her to be happy for a variety of reasons but most likely so his girls could have two happy parents.

  By the time we got home, I was beyond exhausted, but Trixie had been neglected for most of the day and needed a walk at least around the block so that we could all get some sleep without hearing her tail thumping energetically on the floor throughout the night.

  We entered through the back door, into the kitchen, and waited for Trixie to run to us from whatever corner of the house she had appropriated. We were met with silence. I looked at Crawford, who began calling the dog’s name.

  Nothing.

  I went into the dining room and looked under the table, but she wasn’t there. Nor was she on her bed in a corner of the living room, stretched out and snoozing contentedly. I raced upstairs and into the guest room, her other favorite spot because of the sun that streamed in the window overlooking the backyard, but she wasn’t there either.

  The last place to look was our bedroom, and that’s where I found her, prone and panting next to the adjacent bathroom. I crouched down and looked in her eyes, glassy and unfocused, and shouted for Crawford.

  The dog could barely lift her head, and I could feel a sob building in my gut. I murmured her name over and over, looking for signs of the dog we’d left behind when we had gone to dinner. Something was seriously wrong, a fact that Crawford could see immediately when he arrived in the bedroom.

  “We have to take her to the emergency clinic,” I said.

  “Where is it?” he asked.

  “Ossining,” I said. “Can you lift her?”

  He could, but barely. She weighed about eighty pounds, and she was dead weight. I held her back legs as he maneuvered her off the floor and into his arms. Somehow he managed to get down the stairs without dropping her.

  When we got outside, he asked me to put down the backseat of his wagon, and he lifted her into the space through the hatchback. Never was I so grateful for his dorky, sensible station wagon. I crawled in after her, holding her paw and stroking her head as he sped up Route 9 to the animal hospital, at least ten miles from our house on a road that had a number of stoplights, several of which he blew through once he determined that no one was in the road.

  The dog closed her eyes just as we got to the hospital, and I feared the worst, letting out the sob that I had been holding in.

  “Is she gone?” he asked, looking at me in the rearview mirror.

  “I don’t know,” I said, gasping as I put my face to her nose. I felt her wet breath coming out in ragged bursts. “No,” I said.

  He pulled up to the front door of the hospital and ran out to get help. A white-coated vet tech raced out with a stretcher and helped Crawford lift the dog onto it, pushing the stretcher into the hospital and leaving us in the lobby to fill out a bunch of paperwork about Trixie’s history. There was a lot I didn’t know; she had been left on my doorstep by a neighbor a few years earlier, and I had taken her in, having loved her from afar for many years before that. I filled the forms out as best I could and hoped that there wasn’t something I didn’t know that could help them save her.

  Crawford paced nervously while I sat in a chair, praying. I didn’t think Trixie was that old, maybe six at the most, and I thought that the life expectancy of golden retrievers was a bit higher than that. I fed her the same food every day and didn’t let her eat things outside, try as she might, for fear that they would upset her stomach or make her sick. I went over the last several days in my head, trying to reconstruct our time together and figure out if she had ingested something she shouldn’t. I couldn’t come up with anything. I asked Crawford, but he couldn’t either.

  “Did you let her out in the back to play without you?” I asked.

  He looked at me. “I’m barely home,” he reminded me, “and when I am, I take her for her walks and come right back. You know that.”

  I did know that. I also knew that it was peculiar that a dog that had been perfectly healthy when we left for dinner now looked like she was near death.

  After an eternity, the veterinarian came out and introduced herself. “Hi, I’m Dr. Eldard,” she said, her calm demeanor a welcome sight.

  “Is Trixie okay?” I asked, holding my breath while I waited for her answer.

  “She will be,” she said. “You got her here just in the nick of time.”

  I resisted the urge to throw up.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Crawford asked, putting his arm around me. Whether he was trying to steady himself or keep me on my feet was up for debate.

  She looked at both of us, an odd expression crossing her face, as if she didn’t quite know how to present the information. “Your dog has been poisoned.”

  Twelve

  We left Trixie at the animal hospital for observation. Dr. Eldard assured us that with some intravenous fluids and medications to counteract the effects of the poison, Trixie would be as good as new the next afternoon. When we got in the car, the tears started anew.

  “Who would do that?” I asked between sobs. The question joined the lingering one that Crawford had expressed immediately following the doctor’s news: “How and why would someone do that?” We drove home, not quite as qui
ckly as we had driven to the hospital but not at a leisurely pace either, arriving within a half hour. Before entering the house, Crawford told me to wait on the patio. He leaned down and took the gun from his ankle holster and held it by his side, unlocking the back door and stepping in quietly and gingerly, doing a canvass of the whole house before allowing me to come in.

  I sat down heavily in a chair at the kitchen table and put my head in my hands. I had that hollowed-out feeling you get after a prolonged crying jag. Crawford pulled open the refrigerator door and took out a beer, sucking down half of it in one swallow. “Want something?” he asked.

  I shook my head. The buzz from the cheap white wine had worn off, and a headache was making its presence known at my temples. “Find anything?” I asked.

  “Not a thing,” he said, “but someone had to be in here. That dog is by our sides all the time. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Should we call the police?” I asked.

  “That was my next step,” he said and dialed 911.

  I’d love to say that our local police department doesn’t have any clue as to who I am or where I live, but that would be a lie. I’ve been involved in more untoward activity than most almost-middle-aged college professors, and sometimes, the way I get looked at by our local cops, I think that they have a dartboard with my face plastered on it. Having Crawford make the call—professional courtesy and all—would lessen the annoyance of having to come out to the Bergeron homestead again. He hung up, his face still sad.

  “She’s going to be okay,” I said. We had taken turns comforting each other the whole car ride home. If I needed any evidence that he loved that dog as much as I did, here it was.

  “I know,” he said. “Listen. Stay here. Don’t touch anything. I want to look around.”

  He kept some extra work stuff stashed in a high cabinet in the kitchen that only he could reach. I had no interest in what was in there, but he didn’t want anyone else to come across it while looking for a glass or a plate. He opened the door and took out his collection of crime scene stuff: gloves, bags, and a few other odds and ends. Pulling on the gloves, he headed for the bedrooms upstairs.

  Someone had been in our house, had broken in to poison our dog. The thought hit me, icy tendrils of fear creeping up my back so real that I shivered. It added up to a very creepy scenario, one that was almost impossible to believe. Who would want to break into our house? Harm our dog? Had either one of us, or even one of the girls, talked about once having a large sum of money in the house, something that would have sparked the curiosity of a criminal? The house seemed to be in exactly the same shape as when we left it, despite the sick dog. Someone had planned this; someone who knew we had a dog. But who? And why?

  Crawford came back downstairs just in time for the village police to ring our front doorbell. He let them in, explaining our situation, and let them go to work. There were four cops, all in uniform, and one detective, whom I had never met. For that, I was grateful; hopefully, he wouldn’t have any preconceived notions about me, but you never know. His colleagues, Detectives Hardin and Madden, particularly Madden, didn’t find me charming or interesting at all. As a matter of fact, they didn’t really like me, prone as I was to poking around where I shouldn’t. Cops were funny like that; they liked their civilians to stay out of their business, even if said civilians thought they were mucking things up royally.

  To kill time, and because she had said I could, I called Dr. Eldard to make sure that Trixie was still doing as well as she had hoped after some fluids and medicine. After I spoke to the vet tech, the vet got on the phone herself.

  “She’s doing great, Mrs. Crawford,” she said. “We ran some more tests and did a full CT scan. The dog ate some tainted food, but fortunately not enough to kill her. It was, however, enough to make her very sick.”

  “But she’ll be okay, right?”

  “She’ll be fine,” the vet said. She sounded pretty confident, and that made me feel better. “She’s resting now, but her vitals are better than when you brought her in. It’s looking good for Trixie getting out of here tomorrow. Call me in the morning. I leave at eight.”

  I hung up but remained in the kitchen, trying to stay clear of the cops who had invaded my house. I let Crawford answer their questions and show them where everything was. They weren’t going to find anything. Whoever had done this had been prepared and obviously had known what they were doing. This was a professional job, through and through.

  I hoped that whoever it was who had found it necessary to break into my house had fled and was far, far away. Because if I caught up to him, I would kill him. Or her.

  Nobody messes with my dog.

  Thirteen

  Crawford was right. Not one thing was out of place in the house. There wasn’t a fingerprint, a hair, or any kind of evidence that anyone had been on the premises, aside from the sick dog (and don’t think I wasn’t still in a rage about her). Crawford’s a pretty good investigator but he mostly thinks about the dead; the thought did cross my mind that he might have missed something, and I felt immediately chagrined that I doubted him.

  We discussed Max’s birthday. We decided that I would go alone, as soon as we had picked up the dog and I was confident that she was well enough for me to leave, if Crawford stayed home. Although we now shared custody, she was my dog all the way, the one living being I had brought into the marriage. I e-mailed Max to let her know what had happened and tell her not to be alarmed if I was late to the party; I would get there as soon as I could. Max’s response? “You’d better not be late.”

  Or what? I wanted to ask. It wouldn’t be the first time I was on the receiving end of Max’s ire, nor would it be the last. I decided to take my chances.

  We picked Trixie up at one thirty, as soon as the doctor called and said it was acceptable to come get her. She was almost as good as new, despite the bandage wound around her front paw where the IV had been. She didn’t exactly bound down the hall of the animal hospital toward us, more a slow lope, but the vet assured us that she would be back to normal in a few days. If she wasn’t for some reason, we were supposed to call and make an appointment for follow-up. Dr. Eldard didn’t think that would be necessary, and that made me feel better. What also made me feel better was the hug she gave me before we left. This was a woman who knew what our animal meant to us and had taken good care to make sure that not only would she survive, she would be just like her old mischievous, rambunctious self.

  I was reluctant to go to the party, knowing that the dog was still a little wobbly, but I knew Max would never forgive me if I opted to stay home with an animal rather than go to a party in her honor. She wasn’t an “animal person,” as she always pointed out, a statement that Trixie, if she could talk, could explain better. The dog loves everyone but my best friend, and nobody is sure why, although we think that maybe Max gives off a vibe that says she’s not an animal person and Trixie can sense it. Who knows? All I know is that when Max comes over, Trixie runs for the hills, something she would never do when anyone else entered the premises.

  Max’s parents live in a town about twenty minutes north of me in a gorgeous contemporary with views of the Hudson River. I hadn’t been to the house in years, usually seeing Marty and Gigi Rayfield in the city or at a big family function that required a catering hall to fit everyone. I always felt at home, though; I had spent a lot of time in this house over the years and with them, and they truly had become my surrogate family in the wake of my parents’ untimely deaths.

  I drove up the long hill that led to the house and parked in the circular driveway, trying to find a space that would allow whoever else was there to leave, but also let me make a quick getaway if necessary. I grabbed the big bag next to me that held the pocketbook that Max had requested and went to the front door.

  Having never had siblings or children of my own, I’m always surprised by gatherings that are loud and boisterous and include a cast of characters; hence, my loss of emotional equilibrium at
the twins’ birthday party, a day that seemed like a lifetime ago. From inside Marty and Gigi’s spectacular manse I could hear the sounds of Max’s brothers—four in all—and their various broods engaged in some kind of game. Through the windows on either side of the door I could see that the children were all in stocking feet sliding from one end of the marble-covered floor to the other, stopping short as they approached the sliding glass doors that fronted the balcony that had the views. As I waited, one of the little ones slid straight into the door, but from what I could gather, that was part of the fun.

  Until someone put an eye out. Maybe it was thoughts like that, often verbalized, that led Max to christen me the “Ultimate Party Pooper.”

  Marty finally heard the doorbell and let me in, wrapping his arms around me in a bear hug. At five foot six, he was several inches shorter than me, but that never stopped him from trying to lift me off the ground while embracing me. Now that he was eighty, I got nervous as he attempted to do it again, managing to get my shoes off the floor by about an eighth of an inch. “Alison! It’s been too long,” he said. “Gigi! It’s Alison! I told you she’d get here!”

  Max’s father was spry and still sported the red hair that he was born with, tinged with only a little gray, which gave him the look of a weathered, wizened elf. Max had inherited her diminutive stature from him; her mother was a statuesque, glamorous woman who claimed to have “dated”—a.k.a. “slept with”—Cliff Robertson while she was a featured player at some Hollywood studio back in the day. Marty and Gigi were an oddly matched couple, not unlike Max and Fred, but devoted to each other and still, at their advanced ages, the life of any party.

  Gigi sashayed across the floor, all blond bouffant and massive diamonds, and grabbed my hand in hers. “So good to see you, darling.” She air-kissed both my cheeks, something I never did, but which she seemed to think was de rigueur in deference to my French heritage.