“Bullshit,” Rita said bluntly. “Well, not total bullshit. But, look, nothing could be more characteristic of paranoid people than this bizarre portioning out of the resources that are available. Alice was existing on cornflakes, and at the same time she was buying all those electronic gadgets, and they couldn’t have been cheap.” I’d been correct in supposing that the ultrasound device used to torment Ruffly had come from a mail order house. I’d just been wrong about what kind. As it turns out, just as dog fancy has its catalogs, so does paranoia. Phobia? Whichever. The police found the catalogs in Alice Savery’s house, and Kevin Dennehy told me about them. The catalogs had sad, misleading names that sounded like brands of over-the-counter sleeping pills and lines of feminine hygiene products: Rest Assured. Security Plus. They had been the source of the test kits and monitoring devices I’d seen, and of the emergency escape ladder as well. They’d also supplied Alice Savery with three ultrasound devices, one for each floor of the house. Weirdly enough, some of the protective gadgetry was useless to someone with a major hearing loss and no assistance dog. The front door alarm Ivan had triggered was meant for travelers to hang on the inside knobs of hotel room doors. Alice Savery probably couldn’t have heard it unless she was standing next to it. Besides, she never went anywhere. Instead, she stayed home and watched. Here and there throughout the house were little observation posts, chairs positioned to face windows.
The post in the kitchen was where the police found the most powerful of Alice Savery’s ultrasound devices. The Bark Quell emitted 140-decibel bursts pitched above the range of human hearing. Although the Bark Quell-had an automatic, yap-activated mode, Alice Savery had evidently preferred to operate it manually. My hunch about why she pushed the button herself is that she wasn’t trying to quell barking at all. Why silence a dog she couldn’t hear? I suspect that she was trying to drive Ruffly and especially his viruses away from the open windows of Morris’s house that faced the open windows of her own. It’s possible that Alice imagined that ultrasound could repel not only dogs but their supposed germs, too. Maybe ultrasound really does scare away viruses. Matthew Benson might know. I don’t. The squirming and wiggling of microorganisms doesn’t interest me at all. Why settle for mere pseudopodia—false feet—when you can have real paws?
“She bought those gadgets,” Rita said. “But that’s comparatively trivial. Years ago she could’ve sold that carriage house or fixed it up and rented it. She had plenty of options.”
“That’s not how she felt. Like the carriage house. You know, Rita, if she’d lived to collect the insurance money for that, she wouldn’t have realized at all that what she’d done was tantamount to burning it down herself. I don’t know whether she was responsible, but she didn’t feel responsible.”
“You certainly are determined to let her off the hook,” Rita observed.
“Not really. No, I’m not. Alice Savery murdered Morris. She did it in a sneaky way so that she could tell herself that she wasn’t responsible, but she did murder him. And when she made Avon Hill warn the kids not to go into her carriage house to sneak cigarettes, she deliberately lured Ivan there. She set him up. She was the one who poured gas around in there, and when Ivan did what he was bound to do, she locked the door and trapped him inside. She opened the valve on Stephanie’s gas grill. No one made her do it, and she knew that Stephanie smoked out on the deck. But if you look at what Alice Savery did, then evading responsibility was the whole point, wasn’t it? If Stephanie didn’t smoke, if Ivan hadn’t—”
“And Morris Lamb?”
“If Morris hadn’t been the way he was, if he hadn’t been Morris, maybe, but... We’ve been over it and over it, but I’d still like to know exactly how she did it. You know, my best guess is that Morris didn’t just go around sort of randomly picking things. Morris was, uh, exuberant, but he wasn’t stupid. For what it’s worth, I think that he stayed strictly with the stuff in the raised bed, and I think that Alice Savery planted things there knowing that they’d at least make him sick. There’s no shortage of ordinary plants that’ll do it. In fact, I’m working on a new column about that, and it’s worse than I remembered. It’s practically enough to make you scared to take your dog outside. Lantana, foxgloves, lupine, aconite, laurel, rhododendrons, flowering tobacco, larkspur, and, of course, delphiniums, and Doug had already planted some fairly weird stuff that is safe—some special kind of marigolds and violas and a whole variety of greens for mesclun—so it isn’t as if she’d stuck one big hemlock plant in the middle of a bed of lettuce. The other thing is, even though the plants were in a plastic tunnel, it was still pretty early in the spring, so the plants must’ve been immature and not necessarily all that poisonous, except... except, of course, that she believed Morris had AIDS. I mean, when I heard he died, I stupidly thought he had AIDS, too, and so did everyone else. Of course, that was after the fact. But it’s still no excuse, really. Anyway, I think that Alice watched Morris pick the stuff from the raised bed, and I think that she saw the light stay on in his bathroom—it’s on her side of the house— and I think that she went out and did some selective weeding in his garden. And after that, I think it was like selling the lot next to her house; as soon as she’d done it, she talked herself into believing that she just was not responsible. Her land was stolen; Morris poisoned him-self; she’d never even told Doug that raised beds existed, never planted the idea to begin with. And I am positive that if she’d survived that fall, she’d have put the blame for it all on Rowdy. And on me, too.”
“For the hundredth time, it really was not your fault.”
“I shouldn’t have taken Rowdy with me. It’s just... I didn’t want to go in that house alone, and I had no idea that anyone could be that afraid of dogs.”
“Loose dogs,” Rita said. “Unleashed. Unbridled impulse.”
“Whatever. I still shouldn’t have—”
“Holly, look. One of the tragedies of paranoia is that, so often, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sometimes these people behave in ways that really do force other people to conspire against them, in the sense of making secret plans to manage them. But it’s perfectly characteristic of someone like Alice Savery to take all those elaborate precautions to ward off imaginary dangers while failing to take ordinary measures to protect against real hazards. It’s virtually diagnostic.”
“Rita, Rowdy did move toward her.”
“He and Ruffly also saved Ivan’s life. Speaking of whom—”
We’d almost reached the entrance to the little Sunday school playground that lay in back of St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church. Approaching from the opposite direction were Ivan and Bernadette, with one of the smallest Alaskan malamutes in existence and definitely the smallest malamute who’d been available for adoption anywhere in the United States. She’d arrived at Logan Airport a week earlier on a flight from Houston. Bernadette, Ivan, Leah, and I had gone together to pick her up. Ivan knew that she came from Alaskan Malamute Rescue of South Texas, and I’d expected him to give her some kind of cowgirl name. But the one he’d chosen without the slightest hesitation was Shakespearean and thus perfectly Cantabrigian. Helena, Ivan had patiently informed me, was a character in All’s Well That Ends Well. Ivan’s Helena, who had a sweet, gentle temperament, weighed only fifty-eight pounds, small for any mal, tiny for a Texas mal. But she was the right size for Ivan, and, of course, fifty-eight pounds less for the Houston landfill that year.
“Now, Rita, keep Willie hugged in right next to you,” I ordered. “Rowdy, watch me! If Willie tears into another—”
But Rita didn’t hear the rest of the warning. Neither did I. At the sight of another Scottie, Willie had gone into a frenzy of yapping that ended only when Leah handed Kimi’s leash to Matthew Benson, loomed over Willie, and commanded him to cut it out. Matthew kept a grip on Kimi, but he locked his eyes on Leah’s breasts. I reminded myself to pray for the safe return of Jeff and of Lance, the Border collie.
“This was a big mistake,” Rita told me. “Why did I let
you talk me into this?”
The playground was, I’ll admit, becoming a little crowded and rather zoolike.
“Relax,” I said. “Just think. If I hadn’t talked you into going to the audiologist, you might’ve ended up paranoid, just like Alice Savery.”
“Holly, for Christ’s—”
“Rita!”
“Sorry. But... You know, we really don’t belong here. We aren’t even Episcopalian, and the dogs—”
“Well, who knows,” I said. “There really is no such thing as an Episcopalian dog, is there? And there’s a little kid over there with a chameleon, and there’s definitely no such thing as an Episcopalian chameleon.”
“No, but the owners of the other animals—”
“It’s a Blessing of the Animals,” I pointed out, “not a Blessing of the Owners.” I lowered my voice and spoke directly into Rita’s aided ear. “And, believe me, one thing about Stephanie is that if she didn’t want us to be here, we wouldn’t be here.”
“You still don’t get it, do you?” Rita demanded. “You still cling to that same unexamined attitude.”
“I admire Stephanie,” I whispered. “It’s just that I don’t really—”
“Of course you don’t,” Rita interrupted. “Bright, controlling woman, unusual career, very competitive, with an absolutely marvelous dog. So how could you possibly—?”
“All right!”
“There’s no need to be defensive,” Rita informed me. “There’s no way to assimilate reality without distorting it. Most of the interesting things in life don’t happen way out there somewhere, you know; they happen right in here.” She raised her hand to her temple.
If Rita is correct, the Blessing of the Animals occurred not amid the greenery of the play yard behind St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church on a warm summer evening, but within the minds and souls of the Reverend Stephanie Benson, who conducted the service, and the people who joined her. Stephanie wore clerical garb, a long white gown with loose sleeves. Around her neck was draped a wide multicolored shawl that probably has an ecclesiastical name that I don’t know. Doug Winer wore white, to match Morris’s Bedlingtons, I assumed. Doug didn’t belong to St. Margaret’s, either, but Morris had, so maybe Doug disagreed with me about the existence of Episcopalian dogs. Besides, if canine breeds got assigned to human religious denominations, the Church of England and its U.S. affiliate would certainly have first claim on the Bedlington. Nelson and Jennie were as perfectly groomed as Morris always kept them. I hoped he was admiring them. In fact, I hoped that Morris never took his eyes off his dogs. Doug held Jennie’s lead, but I wasn’t sure that Morris would be pleased to see that the human end of Nelson’s lead rested in the hand of the waiter, Fyodor, whose striking eyes focused lovingly on Doug. Doug’s parents were not there. They were alien to the part of Doug’s life that had included Morris and now apparently embraced Fyodor.
Ivan Flynn-Isaacson didn’t go to St. Margaret’s, and neither did Steve Delaney, who is a devout member of the veterinary profession and regularly attends the services of the American Kennel Club, as does his shepherd, India, who was at Steve’s left at the far side of Lady, Steve’s timid pointer. Leah had been reared to believe primarily in Harvard and only secondarily in God, but her parents perceived no difference between the two, so at any Cambridge assembly, she fit right in.
Most of the other people there seemed to know one another. They were, of course, Stephanie’s parishioners, and they’d brought with them an astounding variety of creatures great and small, the great on leash, the small in carriers, cages, and containers of water: two gerbils, a lop-eared rabbit, several noisy guinea pigs with long black coats, a Siamese fighting fish, a bowl of goldfish, a parakeet, a small snake, a newt, a Burmese cat, two kittens that were part Abyssinian, a handsome tabby, a Great Pyrenees, a show-quality German shorthaired pointer, two beagles, the Scottie who’d provoked Willie, a golden retriever, and four or five dogs for which the politically correct term used to be mixed-breed but is now random-bred, meaning God only knows what, and She does, too, and loves them eternally.
Stephanie called us together. She had us gather in the kind of circle of people and animals that was perfectly familiar to me from the rites of the Cambridge Dog Training Club, except, of course, that Roz seldom has us bow our heads.
I expected a vague ecumenical blessing. Stephanie’s was not. She spoke formally. “O merciful Creator, Your hand is open wide to satisfy the needs of every living creature: Make us always thankful for Your loving providence; and grant that we, remembering the account that we must one day give, may be faithful stewards of Your good gifts; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with You and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.”
For the children, I think, Stephanie translated the prayer into simple English. Then, with Ruffly prancing at her side, his miraculous ears still scanning heaven and earth, Stephanie made her way slowly from animal to animal, blessing all with equal dignity, newts and snakes and all. When Stephanie and Ruffly reached us, I was astounded to see that she had not merely been resting her hand on the bowls and on the cages and on the animals themselves as she murmured her prayers. Gently placing her fingers on the crown of Rowdy’s head, she drew in his dark, furry cap what was unmistakably the sign of the cross.
I felt shocked and guilty, but if gerbils, newts, and snakes could be blessed, so could we: Stephanie Benson, Alice Savery, Doug Winer, Morris Lamb, Fyodor, Ivan, Bernadette, Steve, Rita, Leah, and even the godless Matthew. As for Holly, Rowdy, Kimi, and the sign of the cross? Instead of dispatching hideous little gray aliens to abduct me and stick needles in my innards, the firmament had sent beautiful wolf-gray companions to steal nothing but my heart. There might well be Christian breeds, I thought, but the Alaskan malamute was not one of them. Malamutes believe in food, sex, and social hierarchies. So do I. I also believe in the Alaskan malamute and in all dogs, which is to say, in all-forgiving love. I felt heathen. I felt absolved.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Susan Conant, the 1991 and 1992 recipient of the Dog Writers’ Association of America’s Maxwell Award for Fiction Writing, lives in Massachusetts with her husband, two cats, and two Alaskan malamutes. Her work has been published in Pure-bred Dogs/American Kennel Gazette and DOGworld. She is a member of the Alaskan Malamute Club of America, The American Crime Writers League, the Authors Guild, the Dog Writers’ Association of America, Mystery Writers of America, and Sisters in Crime; and is the state coordinator of the Alaskan Malamute Protection League.
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