by Susan Conant
"Rowdy, wake up! Let's go!" I put my good hand under his chin and lifted up his head. In the dim light from the little bulb inside the Bronco, I watched his eyes lift open, then droop. "You have to wake up," I insisted. "I know you don't want to. You have to, anyway. I can't carry you. You're a lot bigger than Kimi, and my hand hurts like hell. You've got to take some of your own weight." Using my good hand as much as I could, I gripped his shoulders and dragged him toward me until I pulled his forepaws out of the car. Perhaps it was the fear of falling that roused him, but when he shoved with his hindquarters and propelled himself all the way out, he nearly landed on his head, and I had to catch him. That hurt, too. But he was on his feet, supporting himself, and as we made our way from the car to the door of the clinic, he didn't try to lie down.
Steve had used a rubber wedge to prop open the swinging door that separates the waiting room from the corridors and back rooms of the clinic. I led Rowdy through the door. "Steve?"
He stuck his head out through another swinging door and glanced at Rowdy.
"He keeps falling asleep," I said.
"Anything else? Salivating? Vomiting?"
"No. Just sleepy."
"Okay. Stay out here. I'll take him."
"Did you make Kimi vomit?"
"She's too sedated," he said.
"So what do you do?"
"Gastric lavage. Come on, Rowdy."
"Him, too?"
"I can induce vomiting."
I paced the waiting room and studied the poster depicting the life cycle of the heartworm and the framed pieces of Steve's mother's embroidery that I'd always disliked, depressingly inaccurate representations of terriers. Noises came from the back rooms of the clinic, and new smells mingled with the usual ones of dogs, cats, disinfectant, odor-control products, and odors the products didn't control. When Steve brought Rowdy back, they both looked more cheerful than they had. Then Steve returned to Kimi, and I talked to Rowdy. I can never shake the sense that if I pitch and tune my voice to some mysteriously therapeutic key, it'll enter an ailing dog's ears, travel through his nervous system, and heal whatever part is diseased. Rita derides this conviction as an instance of something called preoperational thought, which seems to mean wishful thinking, but it's true that Rowdy got better. From upstairs, India barked, and somewhere at the back of the clinic, a couple of dogs took up her challenge. Rowdy and I both listened. He noticed the barking. His eyes brightened, and the hair on his back rose. His hackles were beginning to go up.
Steve finally reappeared.
"She's weak," he said. "But I think she's going to make it."
"I need to see her."
Kimi lay on her side in a big cage, her strong legs extended, her massive, pretty head resting as if the strength to lift it had deserted her. Dark wolf gray and white is the official designation for Kimi's shade of malamute. It means a guard coat of almost-black with tones of silver and fresh Arctic snow over the thick pile of undercoat, a complex, balanced, and symmetric study in what happens to black, white, and gray when they come to life. On a malamute like Kimi, the dark-brown eyes and touches of earth in the coat are somehow unexpected and miraculous, like black-and-white film developed into a color print. When she heard my voice, those dark almond eyes widened, dyspeptically happy.
I opened the cage and stroked her head, smoothing down that cat-soft fur on and around her ears. "So you made it, huh? I get to keep you, after all?"
Vince, our head trainer at Cambridge Dog Training, once said to me, "Holly, if I took a dog into my house, and then all four of his legs fell off, he'd still be my dog." I knew what he meant. The religion in which Buck and Marissa raised me does not recognize divorce. My dog is my dog, till death us do part. Kimi had been mine almost from the second I'd first seen her at Elaine's and wanted a mal just like her. But . . . ? But until Kimi nearly died, Rowdy was more my dog than she was.
Never be afraid to tell your dog the truth. If you don't want to be overheard because you're scared of sounding corny, maudlin, melodramatic, or demented, all you need to do is whisper. Dogs hear better than people do, and they have no fear of elemental truths. I didn't bother to whisper. The only other human being in the room was Steve. "I love you, you old wolf," I told her.
Steve closed the door of her cage and led me back to the waiting room, where we sat on a bench.
"Christ," I said to him. "I never thought they could get to the top of the refrigerator. Rowdy never has. I've always put food there. He's never gone for it."
"There are dogs that walk fences. They can climb ladders."
"I know about chocolate. I've warned people about it. How could I have been so stupid?"
He shook his head gently. "Forget it. I don't know what this is, but I've been through what's left and the, uh, stomach contents." He shrugged. "It's not like they'd raided a box of candy. The books say that eight four-ounce bars of milk chocolate can kill a thirty-pound dog. From cardiac arrest."
"She got to it first, I think. She must have. She must have got on the counter. That's not one of his tricks. And I got to him first. I made him drop what he had in his mouth. I tried to shake what I could out of her mouth, but she swallowed more than he did."
"Not enough. And he's feeling it. There's not a chance they got enough to do this, and the clinical picture's all wrong. The first thing you expect is a nervous, restless dog."
"And they're sleepy."
"Yeah, the opposite. Theobromine's a CNS stimulant, like caffeine. Maybe with a massive amount, you'd see a dog collapse fast, but . . ."
I could hear Kelly Baker's words. I've had these in the freezer for you, she'd said. I saved these for you.
Kelly? Kelly had watched me eat four of the things. I'm not really greedy. It's just that small portions leave me hungry. I'd had to wonder about the size of the package. After she'd seen me devour four croissants and clean up the crumbs, generous Kelly, who enjoyed feeding people, had given me two or three. Because I wouldn't leave a trace?
Or maybe not Kelly. I could see the doors of the restaurant-size refrigerator and freezer, with their neat, ordered lists. When she put that package in the freezer a week ago, maybe it had my name on it, and she probably added it to the inventory, too. One package of petits pains au chocolat. That's what they really were, I remembered—I speak a little French, but not aloud—and that's what she'd have printed carefully on the list on the door. For Holly Winter. Joel would have seen it, or maybe he'd noticed the package itself. My name might have been on that, too. He wouldn't have had time to tamper with it on my last visit. He'd have to have planned it in advance.
But then, it had been Kelly who warned me about the chocolate, who warned me to keep it away from the dogs. She loved dogs. She'd never hurt one. Neither would Joel. And both of them knew me well enough to feel certain I'd never give chocolate to my dogs.
Kelly? Kelly was the cook. She had chosen to use chocolate; in other words, chosen to give me something I'd never feed my dogs. But maybe she'd simply remembered that I'd liked those petits pains. She could have mentioned it to Joel. I felt like murdering one of them. Or both? Or only one. But not the wrong one.
I wanted to talk it over with Steve, but he refused to listen. He insisted that he was going to give Rowdy the thorough exam that he'd delayed because of Kimi, and he managed to talk me into going to the Mt. Auburn emergency room, a place I hate.
"It's feeling better already," I said.
"You're lying. The blood's seeping through the bandage."
"I can't stand hospitals."
"They won't keep you overnight."
"Absolutely. Because I won't stay."
"All they'll do is stitch it up."
"It doesn't need it."
He sounded casual. "Of course, if there's a tendon involved or something, you could lose the use of that hand." He was stroking Rowdy's head and looking at him. "Could be permanent. If it gets infected, you'll know, because it'll swell up. And you might not be able to use it for a couple of month
s. And it'll hurt like hell when anything brushes against it." He kept patting Rowdy.
"I get the point." If you don't get it, borrow two malamutes and walk them on leash sometime.
"Of course, you don't have to go," he said. "No one is making you. It's your choice."
23
For a study in love and terror, go to the emergency room at Angell Memorial or any other big animal hospital. You'll see owners holding cats and dogs, stroking them, and murmuring nonstop. You'll see people who aren't ashamed to sit alone on the wooden benches and let tears wash down their faces.
On the other hand, most of the people waiting at the Mt. Auburn emergency room were reading grubby copies of tabloids, dozing off with half-closed eyes, or just sitting, impassive, almost inanimate. It was hard to tell the patients from the accompanying friends or relatives. A man and woman in their twenties hovered around a little girl and took turns talking to her and feeling her forehead, but the other adults might have been strangers who happened to find themselves on the same crowded subway car. In case anyone needs proof, emergency rooms demonstrate that people care more about their animals than they do about themselves and other adults.
But I wasn't depressed. As I waited on a hard wooden chair with the other commuters, my good hand was in a tight fist, and my jaw was locked. I kept envisioning the pay phone down the corridor. Because I was actually bleeding—in fact, dripping through the bandage—my turn was supposed to come soon. I was trying to decide whether I had time to make the call. I'd begin to stand up. Then I'd decide that I didn't want to be interrupted on the phone or miss my turn, and I'd sit down again.
When my turn finally came, the doctor asked a lot of obnoxious and insulting questions about my dog and wouldn't believe that the bite wasn't her fault. He referred to my gorgeous Alaskan malamute bitch as "your husky." He told me about his allergies and didn't know that dog bites are much less likely to get infected than are cat bites. I was glad he hadn't tried to go to veterinary school. I let him stitch up my hand, anyway. When he finished bandaging it and quit polluting my ears with his ignorant antidog drivel, I could hardly wait to get out of Mt. Auburn, but I stopped at the pay phone, anyway.
Thanks to Rita, I am an expert on telephoning psychotherapists. As I've already mentioned, in the daytime, you call five or ten minutes before the hour, when there's a chance that the therapist is between clients. Any other time, expect to get an answering machine, but don't despair: leaving a message on it isn't a waste of time because therapists are always monitoring their messages. They don't want to be interrupted every second, and they think it's neurotic to make themselves available whenever anyone has a breakthrough dream at three a.m., but they don't want to miss real emergencies, either. Rita checks her messages constantly to make sure that none of her clients is in big trouble. Joel Baker probably did, too.
Information gave me two numbers for Joel Baker and none for Kelly. If one woman marries another, doesn't she still need to be a telephonic person in her own right? Anyway, the first number, of course, got me a machine, and Joel's voice said to call the other number in an emergency. I did. I'd have thought that Kelly might at least have left her voice on the second machine, but she hadn't. Furthermore, lots of hard-core dog people (and women who understand what knocks the wind out of a breather) record choruses of barking or howling along with their own voices, but Joel's taped voice was a cappella. He gave his name and said to wait for the beep and leave as long a message as I wanted.
I took a big lungful of air. The machine squealed. "This is Holly Winter. I didn't enjoy the chocolate croissants at all." I paused. "In fact, I didn't even taste them. My dogs stole the package. After a while, they fell asleep, and I couldn't wake them up."
I hung up. Let her suffer. Him? They both loved dogs. They both knew mine. Kelly or Joel, one of the two, would feel worse about killing my dogs than about killing two people.
Driving my solid, chunky car through the narrow streets back to Steve's, I thought about calling Kevin Dennehy. The only thing that restrained me was what Joel had been through already. Donna Zalewski and Elaine Walsh had both accused him of something he hadn't done. To defend himself, he'd have had to reveal the great secret of his life, and the revelation would have ruined everything for him, not only his career but his whole place in the world. If people had known, he wouldn't have been Joel Baker anymore. And, of course, Kelly wouldn't have been Kelly. In the eyes of most people, even in Cambridge, liberal heaven, where lesbian couples can live about as openly as they can anywhere, he'd have been a freak, a woman passing herself off as a man. And what would Kelly have been? If the word existed, I'd never heard it. And their marriage? Plainly enough, they wouldn't be married anymore. I thought about some of the lesbian couples I knew. Joel and Kelly weren't one. They weren't and didn't want to be, I thought. They wanted to be man and wife. That's what they were. I'd never thought of them in any other way.
Safe once again in a real medical setting, I found Steve asleep on a fold-out bed in the back corridor. He was lying on his stomach with one arm hanging over the side of the cot and his hand wrapped around one of Rowdy's paws. In some atavistic search for a cave, Rowdy had crawled under the cot, but when I walked in, he removed his paw from Steve's hand, wiggled out, and shook himself awake. Then he deposited his ninety pounds hard on the floor, rolled belly-up, and tucked in his snowshoe paws. If you look like a particularly handsome wolf that bulks up with free weights, it must be hard to put on a convincing pussycat act, and it deserves a reward. I knelt down and ran my good hand over his chest. Then I made my way around the cot, pushed open a door, and found Kimi asleep in her cage. The area over her ribs was rising and falling slowly and regularly. The black mask around her closed eyes gave her a serious, purposeful expression. She didn't look doped or sick, but intent on working at sleep. One of her back feet twitched, then one ear. What awakened her was not, I think, my presence, but Rowdy's. He mashed his big black nose against the mesh and gave a noisy sniff. Before she even opened her eyes, she lifted her head.
"Would you get him out of there?" Steve looked rumpled. "Let her rest."
"She's okay," I said. "Isn't she?"
He nodded. "They're both fine. She just needs some rest. How's your hand?"
"You have no idea how much M.D.'s don't know," I said. "But I'm okay, anyway. Look, are you awake? I need to talk about something."
Back in the corridor, he folded up the cot and stowed the metal frame in a closet. He and Rowdy and I sat on the mattress on the floor. Rowdy took up most of it.
"I'm trying to decide what to do," I said. "I'm positive that one of the Bakers killed Elaine Walsh and Donna Zalewski. I'm just not absolutely sure which one, and I don't want to turn in the wrong one."
"Both?"
"Oh, both of them knew. I'm sure. That's not the issue. Can I talk it out?"
"Can I stop you?"
Rowdy had his head resting on his forepaws, and he was staring up at Steve, who was running a finger up and down the furrow that malamutes have between their eyes.
"Do you want to?"
"No." Steve has sad eyes.
"Okay. Here's what I think. Donna makes this accusation to Elaine. And you know what? Donna's done this stuff before, and what's happened? Basically, nobody's taken her seriously. Her roommates didn't. And I'll bet nobody else did, either. But this time, it's different. First of all, Elaine is her therapist, and it's her job to take things seriously. Mostly, though, she's telling Elaine exactly what Elaine loves to hear, and that's that she's been abused by a man. If the story she told Elaine had been about something else, Elaine might have realized it wasn't true. Well, Rita would probably say it was, anyway. Emotionally true. That it wasn't historical reality, that's what Rita would say."
"Don't believe everything Rita says."
"She's usually right. In her own way. Anyhow, Elaine was ready to believe it. That's one reason I decided it couldn't have been Ben Moss. It crossed my mind that he could really have seduced Donna,
and she could've told Elaine, but that's impossible, because Elaine wouldn't have kept seeing him, and she did. Right to the end. Kevin told me. And about Joel, she didn't want to find out whether it was true. She wanted to believe it. And then she wanted to act. So she writes that letter. Joel reads it. What's he going to do next? Obviously, he has to show it to Kelly, and not just because it threatens her, too, but because he doesn't have anyone else he can tell about it."
"He has to tell someone?"
"He's a therapist. That's how they're wired. No matter what happens, they've got to talk about it. They think privacy is bad for your mental health or something. Anyway, then they both know. And here's what I think happens next. I think that in a way, Kelly responded just the way Elaine did, or sort of. She was the one who wanted to do something. And she was the one who knew something Joel didn't necessarily know, which was about Pleasant Valley. Not only does she walk the Ridgebacks every day, but she walks them probably more than anyone else in Cambridge walks dogs. It can be five below, and you see her out walking them. Everywhere. But especially on Lakeview, of course, because that's where she lives. So naturally, she went by Donna Zalewski's house, which was on Lakeview, too, on the other side of Huron from the Bakers'. And her obvious route over to Brattle Street and the river."
"Wait a minute. How was she supposed to know that's where she lived?"
"More or less the same way I found out. I looked in Rita's Rolodex. She looked in Joel's, only not just in his Rolodex, I bet. In his files, too, I bet. His office is right in their house. I'm sure he doesn't lock her out. She's probably the one who cleans it, or at least takes care of the plants. So she knows where Donna lives, and when she goes by there, she notices the milk box. There isn't one now, but when Donna lived there, it must have been right on the porch. And she could tell it was Pleasant Valley because they all have that picture of the cow on them. And that's how the idea came to her: put something in Donna's milk. Or whatever it was. Maybe it was cottage cheese that time, too. Ice cream. Whatever. And how does she decide what to use?"