‘I’m off, then,’ said Jimmy, trotting back in with Herc, and scooping up his house keys. ‘You might want to find something else to feed the dog. He’s still hungry – I had to pull him off that kibble you spilt near the front gate.’
I paused, remote in hand. ‘What are you talking about? I haven’t spilt anything. And I never feed him out front –’
Jimmy jiggled the keys, obviously keen to leave. ‘Well, someone has. Herc would have hoovered it all up if I’d let him.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I have to get going. Keep him inside with you until I get home.’ He kissed the top of my head. ‘Be good. And if you can’t be good –’
‘Be good-looking,’ I finished for him, and gave him a fist bump.
It was the most pleasant exchange we’d had all week.
I settled down to a dull night in. The television was hard enough to concentrate on without the added distraction of Herc, who was skittering about on the floor. He was unusually amped, capering around in front of me, dribbling and twitching.
I sat forward, frowning. This wasn’t normal. Herc, if anything, was lethargy on legs. Especially after all that activity down at the creek.
‘What is it, boy? Are you okay?’
A tremor rippled through his body and he started panting.
Something was wrong.
I placed my hand on his neck and felt juddering quakes through his body. I drew back, frightened. I didn’t know what to do, but Jimmy couldn’t have gotten far. I grabbed my phone and tapped his number. He’d just have to turn round and come straight home to see what was the matter with Herc.
Just as his number connected, Herc threw up on the rug in front of the TV.
At the same time, a phone rang in the kitchen. I was halfway there by the time I realised that it was Jimmy’s. He’d left his mobile on the bench. Now I had no way of contacting him. I didn’t even know where he was playing tonight . . .
A strangled coughing behind me sent my heart into my throat. The salmon skin had come up in a mess of wet pellets, but Herc continued to hurl. I raced into the kitchen and grabbed a handful of paper towels.
Through the open window I could see Edwina next door working at her desk. I hesitated, not knowing if I should call out to her. I’d only been a dog owner for less than a week. I had no idea what had made Herc sick or how to make him better.
I turned back to see him frothing at the mouth. Then his bladder emptied in a foul-smelling rush. His body spasmed, every muscle corded and rock-hard. Then he went limp.
And that’s when I screamed.
Twenty-Five
Edwina came running, just like the unquiet and accusing corner of my mind told me she would.
She found me on my hands and knees in the lounge room, with Herc convulsing on the floor in front of me.
‘How long has he been like this?’
‘A couple of minutes. Just after Jimmy left.’
‘We have to get him to a vet.’ She grabbed the corners of the rug and rolled Herc onto it. ‘Has Jimmy been laying any Ratsak round the place? Or poisoning anything in the garden?’
I shook my head, then remembered Jimmy’s strange comments about the loose kibble. ‘He took Herc for a walk before he went to work and said he’d eaten some spilt dog food out front. But I haven’t spilt anything – maybe that’s what’s making him sick.’
She’d made a sling out of the rug and braced herself. ‘We need to get a sample to show the vet. Bring whatever you used to clean up the vomit, and see if you can also find whatever that kibble was he ate.’
Edwina gritted her teeth and hefted Herc, spasms racking his body. He weighed more than twenty-five kilos, but somehow she managed to carry him out to her car while I grabbed the vomit-filled paper towels and searched for Jimmy’s mysterious pellets in the front yard.
I found them scattered across the grass just inside the fence, and scooped as many as I could into a fresh bag. Then a horn bipped, and I ran out blindly into the darkness.
The vet was unlocking the surgery when we pulled up right in front of his door.
‘Thanks, Danny,’ called Edwina through the open window. ‘Sorry to do this to you, but you’re so close and I didn’t know who else to call.’
He pulled open the car’s rear door and leaned in, gathering a trembling Herc off my lap and into his arms. ‘It’s fine, Edie. The quicker we help him, the better. Let’s get him inside and see what we can do.’
I trailed in after them, clutching the two bags of evidence. The vet laid Herc out on an examination table, his large hands gentling him through another convulsion.
‘How much has he vomited?’ Danny asked.
I put down the bags and made a circle with shaking hands to show the size of the pool on the rug.
‘That’s good. Better out than in.’ He pointed at the bags. ‘Is that a sample of his vomit?’
I nodded. ‘And a sample of something Herc ate in the front yard. Someone must have put it there. On purpose.’ My eyes burned as I choked on my next words. ‘I think someone tried to poison my dog.’
The vet grabbed the bag containing the pellets and upended it into a bowl. His face tightened as he pushed a couple of pieces around with a pencil. ‘I’m afraid you might be right. See these? They’re snail pellets. A few spoonfuls could kill a dog this size in less than four hours. We occasionally get accidental poisonings when dogs go into someone else’s garden and eat what they think looks like dog food.’
He moved his pencil to point out some liver-coloured pieces. ‘But see these bits here? That’s dog food. Someone’s mixed the two together and left them for Herc to find. That’s no accidental poisoning. We’ll have to report it to the police. Looks like you have a dog baiter in your neighbourhood.’
While Danny worked on Herc, he explained that he’d have to inject him with something called diazepam, a muscle relaxant that would control the twitches and help bring down his temperature.
‘I’ll also force-feed him some activated charcoal to absorb the toxicity, so we may not need to pump out his stomach.’ He glanced down at me and tried to sound reassuring. ‘In cases like this, every minute counts, so it was lucky for him that you got here so quickly.’
The vet’s calmness gave me the courage to put my worst fears into words. ‘Someone broke into our house last week. Then I got a crank call from the same guy. I yelled at him and Herc barked like a mad thing down the phone line.’ My voice cracked. ‘Maybe this was his way of getting rid of Herc.’
Edwina’s hand closed around mine. ‘If you think that prowler poisoned Herc, we need to tell the police.’
I had Bill’s number in my mobile, but a choking noise from Herc drove the thought from my mind. I looked around wildly. ‘Can’t you give him anything to get rid of the poison? Isn’t there an antidote or something?’
He shook his head. ‘Not for metaldehyde poisoning. That’s the active ingredient in snail pellets. All we can do is try to get it out of his system as quickly as possible.’
Edwina placed a hand on my shoulder. ‘Kat, Danny knows what he’s doing. Let me take you home while –’
‘NO! I’m not leaving Herc here. Not till I know he’s going to be all right.’
I put my arms around my dog, holding him close, whispering over and over that he was a good boy, until the vet gripped my shoulders.
‘I’ll need you to step back, Kat. The poison shouldn’t have reached his intestine yet, but I want to put him on IV fluids to flush out any residues. Just to be on the safe side.’
My hands shook as I cupped Herc’s massive jaws and rested my forehead against his. His eyes were closed, his breathing shallow.
‘He’s not going to . . .’ I swallowed, unable to bring myself to say the dreaded word. ‘He’s going to be all right, isn’t he?’
The lengthy pause dragged like a heavy weight on my heart. When I l
ooked up, Danny’s face was grim.
‘Kat, I’m not going to lie to you,’ he said. ‘We’ll do our best, but it’s always touch and go with this type of poisoning. We don’t know how much he’s eaten, but as little as one teaspoon per four-and-a-half kilos of bodyweight can kill a dog. Unfortunately, half the time that is what happens.’
I swayed, the blood draining from my face. Edwina grabbed me and steered me into a chair, rubbing my shoulders while Danny worked on Herc. ‘That means the other half of the time, they live. Right, Danny?’ she said, her voice sharp and challenging. ‘Herc has a good chance of surviving this, doesn’t he?’
He shrugged. ‘Herc has a few things in his favour, so he might beat the odds. He’s a solid unit, so it would take a fair bit of poison to knock him. It sounds as though he didn’t get a chance to eat all the pellets, so that’s good too. He vomited straightaway, and you came right in; you didn’t wait till the poison worked its way through his system. With a bit of luck he won’t have absorbed too much of the metaldehyde. I’ll keep him in and monitor him over the next few days.’
My head shot up. ‘No, he has to come home with me. I can look after him. He’ll hate being here on his own. He’ll be miserable –’
‘Herc needs to be sedated till the convulsions are under control,’ said Danny. ‘He has to stay on a drip so that we can treat him aggressively with fluids.’
Danny’s face softened as Edwina handed me a tissue. I looked at it stupidly, not knowing what it was for, then realised that my nose and eyes were running.
I never cried. Not ever. Not since the terrible months before my mum died, when I had virtually lived at Edie’s house. Back then, I’d used up all my tears. Not just those at or near the surface, but the subterranean supplies as well. I’d stayed a desiccated husk ever since. But now they were welling up out of nowhere. I didn’t know where they were coming from, or how they could keep on coming. Seeing Herc hurt had punched holes in my armour-plated hide and I couldn’t stop the tears from leaking.
Big hands wrapped round mine and squeezed. The vet’s eyes were level with mine. ‘I’ll take Herc home with me. I promise I’ll keep a good eye on him till he’s out of the woods. I’ll call you in the morning and you can come visit him then, okay?’
I had no choice but to agree. Edwina helped me up out of the chair and led me across the room. I kissed Herc on his big squished-up face and promised him I’d see him tomorrow. He barely acknowledged me and I turned away before more traitorous tears fell.
The car trip home was a silent one.
For once, Edwina made no attempts at small talk. I stared out the window, swamped by a rising tide of exhaustion. I only just managed to rouse myself when Edwina turned into our street and hit the remote control on her gate.
‘It’s okay, you can let me out here.’
She ignored me, and swung into the driveway.
‘What are you doing? I have to go home.’
She drove into her garage and cut the engine. ‘You’re not going anywhere. If that prowler has developed some sort of weird fixation on you. If he –’ She took a steadying breath. ‘If he poisoned Herc, then I’m not taking any chances. You are staying with me. You are not spending one more night on your own till we get this sorted.’
Edwina clearly expected me to argue, but the anger that had sustained me for so long had fizzled out under the deluge of tears. It took all my strength to summon the faintest spark of my old combative self.
‘Well, you’d better leave a note for Jimmy then,’ I said with an effort, swinging the car door open. ‘He’ll totally freak out if he comes home and finds both me and Herc missing.’ I climbed out and trudged inside her house, heading on autopilot for the bed that had once been mine.
Twenty-Six
It was like stepping back in time.
She hadn’t changed a thing. The lime-green paint job and hot-pink feature wall were still as outrageous as when I’d chosen them as a ten-year-old. The glossy window frames, doors, skirting boards and architraves glistened, a brilliant and inspired contrast in white.
I’d loved this room, with its French doors opening onto an enclosed patio covered in purple wisteria during late winter and spring, and a pungent extravaganza of jasmine blossoms cascading over the fence in summer. It was my fairytale castle, where I used to retreat into fantasy, spinning the dross of my life into gold.
I leaned back against the door and surveyed the room through aching eyes.
She was a witch for bringing me back and taunting me with the broken dreams of my childhood.
It was all here . . . the dollhouse that had ended its days wallpapered with magazine clippings and spray-painted with graffiti . . . the drum kit that Jimmy wouldn’t let me have at home, still with a tantrum-sized foot-hole in the bass drum.
‘Drummers aren’t musicians,’ he’d yelled at me when I point-blank refused to learn any other musical instrument. ‘Neither am I,’ I’d shouted back. And I’d been right. The drum kit was fun in the beginning, a whipping boy during the bad times, and a hatstand by the end.
The whitewashed bookcase still held all my treasures. The whale’s tooth that Edwina had brought back from a Busselton family holiday when she was nine and had then given to me when I turned the same age. Photographs of my previous life. Gummy baby-smiles; me, a little black-eyed pea between my fair-haired parents. Gap-toothed grins with my primary-school friends. Birthday surprises; pink poodle cakes decorated with marshmallow curls and gangly licorice-twist legs. Me, Mum and Jimmy on a red-and-white chequered rug at Ballymore. And the ever-present but never-seen hand holding the camera that had captured each and every momentous event.
‘Do you want pyjamas? These should still fit.’ Edwina stood in the doorway, as if summoned by my thoughts, holding out a pair of retro Betty Boop PJs still in their wrapping. ‘I kept them after you tossed them back over the fence for your last birthday. Thought they might come in handy eventually.’
‘Thanks.’
Heat prickled my inner lids. I must be tired. All I wanted was to crawl into those Betty Boops, wrap myself in the candy-striped sheets and surrender to unconsciousness. But there were more important things to do.
‘I have to phone Bill –’
‘I can do that,’ she said calmly, handing me the pyjamas. ‘I’ve known him for years. His girls used to walk Marco for me when you were little. Katie and Lucy. Remember them?’
‘Vaguely,’ I murmured, my gaze swinging back to the treasure shelf. There he was, framed in love hearts. The Houdini of beagles. Escapologist extraordinaire, able to chew through any lead. Slip from any collar. Vault any barrier. He’d once pushed a pile of cardboard boxes up against a fence and used them as a staircase to freedom.
Marco. The reason for the two-house compound, the two-metre steel fence with those nasty pointy bits on top, and the flash remote-operated gate on the driveway. I remembered his silky ears, the soft wrinkled excess of flesh under his throat. I used to pull it out like elastic and ask if we could make bubby beagles out of the spare skin. I remembered Edie’s tears, and mine, when she had him put down, blind and riddled with cancer, at age sixteen. I was eleven years old and swore I’d never forgive her. We buried him in the backyard, the site marked with a rock bearing his sweet paw print. Less than a year later, we buried my mum.
The two deaths had run together in my mind. Everything I ever loved was doomed to die, so why take the risk? My chest ached for all that I’d lost, and for Herc, lying unconscious in Danny’s surgery.
Returning to this room had unlocked memories that I had pushed into the recesses of my mind. It had caught me wrong-footed in space and time. I didn’t know how to respond to the Edwina standing before me, when the Edie from my childhood was crowding forward, arms open, in my mind.
‘I’ll ring Bill now,’ she said. ‘You go to sleep.’
I sank gratefully onto the
single bed. ‘Just don’t say anything about Jimmy working nights, okay?’
She pursed her lips, her voice tart. ‘Far be it from me to put Jimmy in the frame for never being here. Heaven forbid anyone ever calls him on that.’
I flopped back onto the mattress. ‘Tell Bill I’ll talk to him tomorrow.’
She left me to my Betty Boops and candy-striped sheets. Exhausted but too hyped to sleep, I tossed and turned for what seemed like hours, then gave up and grabbed my mobile.
Someone poisoned Herc. Snail bait mixed with dog pellets. Watch out for Sequoia.
Al’s reply came within seconds.
NO! Is he OK? Want me 2 come over?
My thumbs answered of their own accord.
Come round back. I’m next door with E
A gentle tap on the door startled me and I quickly hit Send.
‘Kat, are you awake?’ Edwina cracked open the door and saw me sitting up in bed with my mobile. ‘Hope you warned your friend to keep an eye on his dog,’ she said dryly. She didn’t wait for a reply; there wasn’t much to say in the face of her mind-reading powers. ‘Bill’s at a burglary – he’ll get here when he can. You don’t need to stay up, but he wants to talk to you tomorrow about that crank call. And about what happened to Herc.’
‘What will they do if they catch the prowler?’
Her lips tightened into a grim line. ‘Throw the book at him. Poisoning a dog is a serious offence – aggravated cruelty according to Bill – with fines up to one hundred thousand dollars and two years in jail.’
‘Good.’ It wasn’t enough, but it was something. ‘I hope he rots in there.’
She nodded; with me on this one. ‘A tech is on his way over to collect evidence. I told Bill that we’d left samples at the vet’s, but he said he wanted to make sure the chain of evidence is preserved so that it stands up in court.’ She paused. ‘He agrees that you should stay here until we get everything sorted.’
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