Paws before dying

by Conant, Susan

  “She’s doing great,” I said to her handler. “I saw her today.”

  “Yeah, she’s finally shaping up,” the woman said.

  “She looks great. Did you have some...?”

  “Yeah, she started giving me a hard time, and I had to get out the old electronics. But that took care of that.” She smiled and patted the dog’s head. I wanted to kick her.

  The Bernese mountain dog got first place, of course, but when the judge handed me the second-place ribbon and a drinking glass for the collection, Rowdy knew who’d really won. When people applauded, he woo-wooed, and as the judge kept handing out the ribbons, he kept it up, and some of the spectators started laughing. The Bernese won first place and my sympathy, but Rowdy won the crowd.

  “Happy worker,” commented the handler of the Bernese mountain dog, meaning that Rowdy had never been serious competition. “Congratulations. ”

  “Thanks.” I walked away. “She thinks I’m a sore loser,” I told Rowdy. “Let her.”

  Against some mean competition in Novice B—it looked like a poodle breed ring—Kimi won third place, plus yet another tumbler, and Leah underwent a rapid shift in apparent age from a cool twenty-one to an ecstatic, unguarded twelve. “Isn’t she wonderful? Aren’t you proud of her? She is the most wonderful dog in the world, aren’t you, Kimi? Aren’t you? So now I can register her for a trial, right? The second we get home.”

  As I finished packing up our belongings, the fatigue suddenly hit me hard. “Speaking of home,” I said, thinking disjointedly of PTA presidents, pacemakers, microwaves, and the old electronics, “how would you like to drive? I’m sweltering, and I’m so tired. Oh, there’s Bess. You ought to tell her. Her feelings will be hurt if you don’t.”

  Near the registration table, Bess Stein was surrounded by people and dogs, including, I noticed, Willie Johnson and Righteous. The sides of Willie’s head looked freshly shaved. He had the dog’s lead in one hand and a green qualifying ribbon in the other.

  “Hey, Willie,” Leah said as happily as if our fence had been washed in white instead of fouled in red. “Congratulations! Hi, Righteous. You were a good boy, huh?”

  In back of Willie stood a young man I had no trouble identifying as the third Johnson brother—in other words, the first Mitchell Dale Johnson, Jr. He had the same white-blond hair, thick cheeks, and heavy-boned build as Dale and Willie, but he was thinner than the other two, and his hair was slicked back on the sides and poufed up on the crown of his head. He had on tasseled leather loafers, tan pants with sharp, deliberate creases, and an unfaded black polo shirt. My own white pants were grass-stained and wrinkled, and I hadn’t combed my hair since I’d doused it with water, but I didn’t feel inferior. I had two Alaskan malamutes. The only animal he had was a small embroidered horse over his heart, and someone else was riding it.

  “Nice husky,” he said to me. About one person in a hundred gets it right. He pointed at Rowdy as if he were a flashy car, an object.

  “Close,” I said. “Alaskan malamute. Malamutes are bigger. They all have brown eyes.”

  “Tough, huh?”

  I nodded. “Strong.” Well, they are strong. “You Willie’s brother?”

  “Mitch.” He extended his hand in one of those gestures that salesmen learn somewhere. When he shook my hand, I was aware that my palm was breaded in dog drool, IAMS biscuits, and fur, and that his wasn’t, or it wasn’t before. When he with-; drew his hand, I could tell that he wanted to wipe it on some-1 thing, but instead of scraping it off on his thigh, he reached I toward Rowdy, who did something almost unprecedented. He braced himself on all fours and growled. I tried not to look I stunned. The sound was very deep, almost inaudible, and deadly serious. “Don’t touch me,” it said. “And don’t touch her again, either.”

  But Mitch heard it. “Sorry,” he said, backing off a step. “Tough guy.”

  “He won’t hurt you,” I said. “But probably you shouldn’t pat him, just in case. Rowdy, sit.” He did, but he kept one eye on Mitch and the other on me. “Nice to meet you,” I said to Mitch. “We’ve got to go. I have a fence to work on when I get j home.”

  He looked puzzled.

  “Someone painted it for me last night,” I said, “but I don’t like the color. It used to be white. Now it’s red.” Then I made a belated introduction: “I’m Holly Winter.” I gestured toward Leah. Bess had an arm around her, and Willie was standing next to her. “That’s my cousin, Leah. Well, nice to meet you.”

  It took me a few minutes to retrieve Leah and Kimi. Bess had to congratulate me and hear our score, and on the way to the parking lot, we ran into some people and spent a few minutes comparing notes and talking about the trials coming up. When we’d finally stashed the dogs and our gear in the back of the Bronco, I collapsed in the passenger seat, and Leah got the engine and the air-conditioning going. As she pulled out of the ' lot, I saw Willie cram his shepherd into the backseat of a red and white Corvette and lower himself in. Mitch, who’d been standing by the car giving people a chance to notice what he drove, climbed into the driver’s seat and shut the door.

  If people noticed the Corvette at all, what registered was probably nothing more than how out of place it looked among all of the full-size station wagons, vans, and roomy 4 X 4s bought to accommodate dogs, crates, grooming tables, coolers, and more dogs. The brothers looked out of place, too, and at a dog show or a match, that’s not easy. Whether you’re five or eighty-five, rich or poor, chunky or svelte, dressed in denim or velvet, the first thing people notice about you isn’t you at all, but your dogs and how you treat them. After that? After that, I suppose it’s a matter of looking at home, which doesn’t necessarily mean having a dog with you, but does mean looking as if you should and, certainly, keeping your eyes on every dog in sight. Or maybe it just means looking happy. “Finally!” our faces say. “Finally! For once! For these few hours, enough fur! Bliss.” In spite of the handsome shepherd and the green ribbon, Willie and Mitch didn’t have that look. But I remembered where they’d come from.

  Chapter 18

  IN the hours I slept after coming home from the match, a heavy rain fell, and cold, beautiful Canada delivered its most valuable export, a sudden temperature drop of about twenty degrees. In the late afternoon, Steve and I drove to Newton to let the dogs run in the woods that stretched behind and far beyond Eliot Park, the beer-lovers’ lane that Rose and Jack had complained about. It wasn’t a place I’d have gone alone at night even with two Akitas instead of two Alaskan welcome wagons, but in the late afternoon with Steve and his two dogs as well as Rowdy and Kimi along, the woods felt safe enough. Besides, they were wild-looking, with unpruned maples, oaks, evergreens, and underbrush. Any sensible dog owner realizes that in an unmaintained park like that, the narrow, rough trails may appear to meander and fork at random, but they don’t. If viewed from on high, God’s perspective, those paths spell out a hidden message: “Great place to violate leash law.”

  “The main thing,” I was saying to Steve, “is that I don’t trust kids at all. I at least understand dogs, but I don’t understand children except that what I do understand is, if you try to house-break them, it screws them up for life, and they chew things, and then they make a lot of noise, and then they leave. So if you want golden-haired babies all that badly, take Leah for the rest of the summer or get another dog. And could we talk about something else?” I snapped.

  “PMS?”

  “Shock collars.”

  “Radical remedy,” said Steve, stopping to encircle my neck with his hands and making a loud zapping noise, “but it’s not such a bad idea.” Then he moved his hands and said softly, “When you took that nap this afternoon, you could’ve called me. Just because you live alone, it doesn’t mean you have to sleep alone.”

  “In case you’ve forgotten, I don’t live alone until Labor Day. Leah and about five other kids were in the kitchen boning up for the SATs.” I nuzzled my face in his once-navy T-shirt. Like| everything he owns, it was faded and
had a faint, lingering odor of chlorine bleach. A streak of adolescent self-consciousness 1 makes him want to avoid smelling like dogs and cats. Actually, he smells like dogs, cats, and chlorine, but only if you’re really close to him.”

  He ran his hands over my face and pulled my hair back, then started to kiss me, but Kimi and Rowdy came zipping down a wooded slope and landed at our feet. They squirmed around, tilted their big heads upward, widened their almond eyes, and began wooing. They weren’t trying to protect me from Steve, of course. They just didn’t want to be left out. When Steve’s dogs—Lady, the pointer, and India, his perfect shepherd bitch—joined the circle, we gave up and resumed our walk.

  “Actually, I do need to know about shock collars,” I said. “You must hear about them, right? In veterinary school? Or you have clients who—?”

  He shook his head. “Those people don’t work with us. I probably don’t know any more about shock collars than you do.” j “You don’t see burns? They do bum, don’t they?”

  “Oh, the old ones burned,” he said sadly, kicking a small log off the path. “But not the new ones, at least not the expensive ones. Not unless they malfunction.”

  “But if they do? Or an old one. There ought to be two burns, right? I’ve seen the ads. And the catalogs. That’s basically all I know, from that propaganda. Anyway, there are these plugs that go in the collar, with contact points, metal spikes. And that’s what delivers the shock.”

  “Stimulation,” he corrected sarcastically.

  “Oh, right. Pardon the slip. Anyway, that’s what would bum, right? The whole collar isn’t electrified. It isn’t a circle of electricity around the neck. It’s two points, spikes, like bullets. They stick out of the inside of the collar and into the dog’s neck. So if it burns, it’d leave two marks.”

  He shrugged.

  “Steve, that’s what they found on Rose’s body. Two burn marks.”

  “On her neck?”

  “No. Her hand.”

  “What would...?”

  “Well, that’s what I’m asking you. But in theory, it’s possible, right?” I pushed my way through some scrubby maple saplings.

  “Hmm. She was opening the gate. She was found next to it. The marks could’ve come from the gate. It’s galvanized. It’s like a dog run. That’s something we do see injuries from. The dog gets its paw caught in the chain link, that kind of thing. Has anyone taken a good look at the gate?”

  “I assume. They must’ve. Anyway, we can look on the way out. But how would that bum? It isn’t as if she’d scratched herself on it or got cut. Obviously, chain link could do that if it was loose. Torn. But Kevin said bums.”

  “If the whole thing was electrified? Say what’s hit by lightning is a tree. Then the ground currents can radiate from the tree, or whatever’s taken a direct hit.”

  “But the point is, there was no direct hit. There are these people who live across the street, right across the street from the entrance, where the tennis courts are. And they are positive. I talked to the woman. They were home. And they swear that lightning did not strike there. It’s possible that it did and they didn’t notice, but this woman sounds reliable.”

  “Then what...?”

  “That’s it. What did? If lightning didn’t strike, what was it? How did Rose die? I didn’t see the autopsy report, obviously. Who’s going to show it to me? But if her pacemaker had just sort of broken, if there’d been something wrong with it, there wouldn’t be an inquest. Why inquire? Look, could it have been a shock collar? It’d leave two burn marks, and that’s what she had, two burn marks. Could that do it? By the way, do you know where we are? I’m lost.”

  Four or five little paths led from the wooded clearing where we found ourselves.

  He shook his head and took my hand. “No idea, but it doesn’t matter. We’ll just follow the dogs.” My soulmate. “Anyway, could it bum? Yes. If it was old. If it was malfunctioning. Or if it’d been tampered with.”

  “Could you do that? How hard is it to tamper with them?”

  “Can you up the voltage? Yeah, up to a point. It’s no high-tech project. Anyone who’s had high school physics or knows a little about electronics could do it. And the expensive, new collars are supposedly a hundred percent waterproof. Hunters want something they can leave on a retriever when he hits the water. So waterproof and water-safe are big selling points. The old ones weren’t, and if the seal’s broken... and in this situation, you’ve got water. Maybe she was standing in it.”

  “We can look,” I said. “On the way out. We can see if there would’ve been a puddle there, in heavy rain. There was a real downpour, at least in Cambridge, and I gather here, too. Anyway, the burn marks are sort of confusing me because the other thing is that across the street, that woman who’s making me the scarf for Buck—Marcia Brawley—has one of those damned electronic fences. Actually, you know what’s the worst thing about it? These people, the Brawleys, have a border collie. Jesus, what kind of person would give electric shocks to a border collie? Border collies are about ten times as intelligent and sensitive as most people.”

  “They vary,” he said. “But, in general, they’re real bright.” He rubbed Lady’s head. “It’s more apt to be these guys.”

  “Pointers?”

  “Bird dogs. Hounds. Hunting dogs all work at a distance.”

  “Steve, I saw this dog, and what he does is, when he gets near the edge of the lawn, he acts really strange. He stops and backs up. But also, it’s hard to describe, but he has an odd look. Their eyes are always eerie, but he looks abnormal, not like a border collie. Anyway, his collar is definitely not a regular collar. It’s light-colored, flat, with a sort of box. Obviously, it’s a shock collar. So I assumed it’s one of those damned electronic systems, with wire buried around the perimeter of the yard. I know they work on radio waves. That’s what triggers the shock. When the dog gets in range of the wire, the collar picks up the radio waves, and the collar gets a signal to give a shock. Right? So what I thought was, maybe the system got screwed up, and the radio signals got to Rose’s pacemaker. But that can’t be right, because it wouldn’t bum. It would make the pacemaker go berserk, but it wouldn’t burn her hand.”

  “So why...?”

  “Why. Yeah. I just put this together today, at the match. Look, the school where Rose taught, Case, sounds like a real neighborhood school. And it’s small. There’s only one kindergarten, and that’s what Rose taught. At Jack’s, just after she died, I heard that maybe four years ago, she had a kid in her class, and she thought he was being abused. Physically. And she filed this charge or something against the parents, a 51 A. Someone there sort of blurted out that the parents were real Newton types, the last people you’d expect. He said they were Mr. and Mrs. Newton. Among other things, they were the presidents of the PTA. And what I put together today is that it was the Brawleys, the same people. Someone was talking about how Marcia Brawley did all this stuff, and one of the things was being president of the PTA, and Marcia Brawley’s kid is the right age. So at first I thought, well, maybe there was a weird accident, right? Electric storm, radio waves, Rose’s pacemaker, and the signal accidentally gets to her. But if the signal comes from these people, that’s just too much of a coincidence. She accuses them of child abuse, she files this 51 A, and it just so happens to be their electronic fence. And since they lived right across the street from the tennis courts, and they knew her, they’d know she’d be there. They’d’ve seen her training there. So they had this grudge against her, and they had this damned fence. But it just doesn’t compute, not with the burn marks.”

  “When was it this happened? Four years ago?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Why would they wait four years?”

  “I don’t know. But I agree. Either they would’ve done something then, or you’d think they’d mostly want to forget it. And what would they get out of it? There are some kinds of hurts that can smolder for a long time, and if people want revenge, they don’t
care when. But this? And while we’re on the subject, I’ve been thinking about this judge Rose reported to the AKC. Sam Martori. Rose could be pretty tough. She reported him for ethical violations. It was in the Gazette and everything, and it wasn’t all that long ago. But this thing with the Brawleys isn’t something like that. It just doesn’t fit. Anyway, that fence wouldn’t leave burn marks, not on her. Even if the radio waves somehow got sent in her direction, they might screw up the pacemaker, but they wouldn’t burn her hand.”

  “Are you sure it’s that kind of system?”

  “What other kind is there?”

  “A plain old shock collar. With a transmitter.”

  “Right. That’s possible. You hire a guy to come to the house and train the dog not to cross the boundary. Or you do it your, self. But I don’t think it works all that well, at least not the way those fences do. I’ll tell you, whatever’s been done to this dog is something that works. But it is possible.”

  “Holly, how sure are you that these are even the same people?”

  “Pretty sure. How many PTA presidents are there? And don’t forget, these are people who’ve done something god-awful to a border collie. A border collie! That part all fits. But am I totally sure? No. Even if they have a regular shock collar, what’s bothering me is that... It isn’t so much that they didn’t have anything to gain. It’s that a lot of other people did.”

  “Like?”

  “Heather Ross. You know who she is? You’ve seen her at shows, in Open and Utility. Silver-haired woman with a silver standard poodle, fabulous obedience dog.”

  He nodded. “A robot.”

  Maybe you know that that’s a backhanded compliment. A robot is a dog that works precisely but mechanically, without dash and spirit.

  “Not really,” I said. “And he’s kind of a monster out of the ring. Anyway, she and Rose go way back, probably thirty or forty years, for all I know, a long time. And I think they were major rivals all along. You know what those poodle people are like.”