Three Dogs in a Row

by Neil S. Plakcy

  I felt deflated. There just didn’t seem to be any good alternatives.

  “Consider a lawsuit your last resort,” Santos said. “Do you want to work for somebody when you have to sue to get the job?” He looked at his watch. “I’ve got to get going,” he said. “I’m meeting my girlfriend at the nature preserve around the corner from here.”

  Mention of the preserve flashed a memory of finding Caroline’s body next to it. I don’t know what my face said to Santos, but he hurried to continue. “My girlfriend and I, we’ve started bird watching. You know, something to do together.” He had a sheepish grin on his face. “She’s a tour guide at Independence Hall, and she started noticing all the birds around, so she bought a book. Now she’s got me hooked. You know they post alerts on the Internet, migrating birds?”

  He laughed. “Guess I don’t have to tell you what’s out there online,” he said, standing up. “Anyway, keep your chin up. You’re going to find something. Just keep plugging away.”

  I thanked him for the advice, though I didn’t feel better after our meeting. He hadn’t threatened to send me back to California, which was a good thing, but I didn’t see myself in a hairnet slicing beef at the Genuardi’s either. He was right, you didn’t see many blue-collar workers in River Bend. Most of my neighbors’ cars cost more than a receiving clerk or forklift operator made in a year.

  I couldn’t think about dating until I had my economic house in order. I could just imagine hanging out with Rick on a Saturday night at The Drunken Hessian, picking up women. A hardware store clerk with a felony conviction wasn’t going to score the kind of women I was attracted to.

  That evening, after I’d walked and fed Rochester and watched mindless TV to take my mind off my troubles, my cell phone started beeping its low battery alert. When I picked it up to plug it in, I noticed Melissa Macaretti’s phone number in my call log from Monday night. I was about to delete it, but there was something familiar about that number, something dancing on the edge of my conscious brain.

  I was holding the phone open when I saw the photocopies of the paperwork used to open the fake account for Edith at the bank in Easton. At first I thought the number on the paperwork was just similar to Melissa’s cell—but it was the same.

  I remembered seeing Melissa at her work-study job, at Eastern’s music department. She knew Edith. I peered at the grainy driver’s license photo on the page; it could be Melissa, with a different hair style and different makeup. Or it could be someone else.

  I plugged the phone into the charger and called Rick, worried that he’d yell at me again. But hey, I wasn’t snooping in Caroline’s murder, just making a connection that might solve Edith’s problems. Before he could launch into any arguments, I explained what I had found. “Give me the girl’s name,” he said. I spelled it for him. “You have an address other than that PO box?”

  “I might be able to get it,” I said. “Let me call you back.”

  I logged into Eastern’s mainframe and pulled up my class roster. As I’d remembered, each student’s name was a hyperlink, opening a new window with social security number, date of birth, and address, among other things. I called Rick back and read him the information. “She lives in the freshman dorm called Birthday Hall. So it’s reasonable that she would have a post office box.”

  “I’ll run her through the system tomorrow and see what comes up,” he said. “In the meantime, remember what I said. No detective work on your own.”

  “I was out of line yesterday,” I said. “You were right. I shouldn’t have said anything to Chris or Karina.”

  “And don’t say anything to this girl, either,” he said. “You don’t want to spook her. If she’s still got any of Edith’s money on her, we want to catch her with it. If you let her know we’re on to her, she’s likely to hide it or spend it, and that’s no good for Edith.”

  I sighed. “I understand. I won’t say anything to her.”

  23 – A Walk Along the River

  On Monday, the tech writing class continued giving their presentations. I was curious to see what Layton Zee was going to do, since he’d never handed in a research paper. He was scheduled to give his presentation that day, and not surprisingly, he wasn’t prepared.

  He was wearing a t-shirt that read, “On the other hand, you have different fingers,” and beltless jeans that threatened to slip off his hips.

  “Come out into the hallway with me,” I said.

  He followed me. “You haven’t handed any papers in this semester, Lay,” I said. “Did you think I would pass you just based on your attendance?”

  He shrugged. “I did the in-class work.”

  “Not enough. Right now, something like eighty-five percent of your grade is an F. You don’t have to make a presentation—at this point it doesn’t matter. You don’t even have to come back for the rest of the semester.”

  “Can’t you cut me a break, Prof?” he asked. “I mean, showing up every day’s got to count for something.”

  “Yeah, ten percent of your grade. It’s all spelled out on the syllabus, Lay.”

  “You’re an asshole, you know that?” he said. He stood up straight, as if that would give him some kind of height advantage on me, but I’m just over six feet so we were pretty much at eye level.

  “You want to call me names? Call me whatever you want—in front of the academic dean, so it’ll go on your record.”

  “I can’t believe this shit,” he said. For a minute it looked like he wanted to hit me, but then he turned away, heading down the hallway muttering.

  I’d heard about students who got violent from other professors, but this was the first time I’d experienced it myself. While the class pretty boy, Ira K. Lindo (who went by the nickname I.K.) was giving his presentation, I wrote down everything I could remember of the conversation.

  I went from there to freshman comp, where I returned the rough drafts of their research papers. We went over MLA style citations again, and I repeated, for what was probably the fiftieth time, “If you use someone else’s exact words, you MUST use quotation marks, and you MUST identify who said those words, and why I should trust them. To do anything else is theft.”

  I caught myself. I didn’t mean to be sending any coded messages to Melissa Macaretti. “I mean plagiarism, which is a kind of theft, after all.”

  Jeremy Eisenberg didn’t get the whole citing your sources thing, and so I went over it again. And then again. By the time the hour and a quarter had passed, I thought maybe I’d gotten it through their heads. But only the final drafts would prove if I had.

  I resisted saying anything to Melissa about Edith’s stolen identity. I was pretty shaken from my encounter with Lay Zee, and Rick was right; I wasn’t the cop. It was up to him to see if he could catch her with Edith’s money. I’d already done what I could for Edith; I had driven her to Easton and set the wheels in motion for her with the bank and with Rick.

  After class I went up to the English department and used one of the computers in the adjunct area to type my confrontation with Lay Zee into an email to Lucas Roosevelt. I’d just finished when Jackie came by on her way to make copies.

  “You won’t believe what happened to me today,” I said.

  “If it involves a smart, well-behaved student, then I probably won’t,” she said. “Otherwise I’d believe anything, especially at this point in the semester.”

  I told her about Lay Zee, and how he’d threatened me. “It makes me a little nervous to go out to my car,” I admitted. “I mean, suppose he wanted to run me over?”

  “Our students may be slow and lazy, but I doubt they’re homicidal,” Jackie said. She knocked on wood. “Though you never know.”

  “It’s not homicide, but you won’t believe what I figured out while I was helping my old piano teacher.”

  “Helping her how? Tuning her instrument?” She waggled an imaginary cigar, á la Groucho Marx.

  I ignored the humor. “She’s an adjunct in the music department, and one o
f my students has a work-study job there. The student stole my friend’s identity and started intercepting her mail and moving money out of her bank accounts. I’m still trying to figure out how it all comes together.”

  “In little old Stewart’s Crossing? Where nothing ever happens except the stop light changes from green to red and back again?”

  “Even there.”

  I knew that Jackie knew Menno, so I didn’t mention any names, but she was still suitably horrified. “I know some of our students behave badly, but it’s hard to believe they’d stoop to something like that,” she said.

  “I’m still pretty shaken up,” I said. “I think I need to go home and take Rochester for a long walk, just to calm down.”

  “You live in Stewart’s Crossing, don’t you?” she asked. “River Road is so pretty over there.”

  “It is. Maybe I’ll take Rochester down there.”

  On my way out to the parking lot, keeping an eye out for Lay Zee, I called Edith to let her know about Melissa, but there was no answer. I called The Chocolate Ear and found that Edith wasn’t there, but Irene said she came by almost every afternoon.

  “I’m on my way there,” I said. “If she shows up, tell her to wait for me.”

  I found Edith sitting at one of the white wrought-iron tables in the corner of the café, right under a poster for a French chocolate bar, drinking tea. “But she’s such a sweet girl,” she said, when I told her about the matching phone numbers.

  I shrugged. “Appearances can be deceiving. You know that, Edith.” I sipped my raspberry mocha, watching her.

  “Poor Menno,” she said.

  “Menno?”

  “Her boyfriend, Menno. He’ll be just shocked to know what she’s done.”

  “Menno. You mean Menno Zook?”

  “You know him?”

  “He’s in my freshman comp class, along with Melissa. I didn’t know they were going out. They never sit together.”

  “Oh, yes, they’ve been dating since the fall,” Edith said. “Melissa’s the one who recommended Menno to be my handyman.”

  The revelation hit Edith the same time it hit me; I could see it play across her face. “You don’t think…” she began.

  “Did Menno ever come to your house when you weren’t home?”

  She nodded. “At Thanksgiving, I had him paint my bedroom while I went to visit my cousin. When I went to Charleston he came over to recaulk my tub.”

  “I think the first one of your statements was missing from December,” I said.

  Edith began to cry. “I was such a silly old woman.”

  I took her hand and squeezed. “Don’t say that, Edith. You trusted a nice girl and her boyfriend. Anyone would have.”

  Irene saw Edith crying and came over to see what was wrong. I explained what we’d figured out. “At least now you know who’s behind all this,” Irene said, in her no-nonsense way. “You’ll see, Rick will get it all wrapped up for you. Probably get most of your money back, too.”

  “Just in case you see or hear from Melissa or Menno, don’t let either of them know that we’ve been talking,” I said. “And if Menno wants to come over and work on something for you, make an excuse to keep him away for now.”

  Edith nodded, and then thanked me again for my help. I left Edith and Irene at the café and drove back to River Bend. As usual, Rochester was delighted to see me. I decided to take Jackie’s advice and go out with him for a good, long walk. But it was a little far to the River Road, so I hooked up his leash and we headed to the canal. Except for the kitschy mule-barge rides up in New Hope, there’s no longer any commerce on the canal, though way back when, before there were highways, those old barges used to transport coal from the mines upriver down to the deep water port at Bristol.

  The canal was abloom with wildflowers, and the towpath was roofed with fiddlehead ferns and spotted with daisies, black-eyed Susans and the tiny pansies we called Johnny Jump-ups. Fish splashed in showy leaps, and cattails grew in the marshy shores. The smell of wildflowers mingled with the aroma of stagnant canal water. Rochester surprised a pair of nesting birds, and despite the presence of the town just a few hundred yards away, the area was quiet and peaceful.

  I’d often come down to the canal as a kid. My parents’ house was on the other side of Stewart’s Crossing, in one of the first suburban developments to take over the farmlands that once blanketed Bucks County. I’d ride my bike into town, stopping at the five and dime for candy, buying my mother a single carnation at the florist, browsing for greeting cards at the drugstore in the shopping center in the heart of town. I loved the gingerbread Victorians with their peaked roofs and front porches, and the old stone houses that dated back to the Revolutionary War.

  My grandparents would tell me stories of escaping from the Czar’s army, of wriggling on their bellies across battlefields, and then I’d go downtown and feel secure, like no one could ever chase me away from my home in Stewart’s Crossing. Maybe that’s why I came back.

  I let Rochester off the leash and he ran back and forth along the towpath, sniffing the new flowers, chasing butterflies, and making his mark on trees and stones. When we came to one of the locks, I sat on a bench and thought about Edith.

  Had Melissa and Menno been able to prey on her because she was old and alone? She had no children or grandchildren to help her manage her money, to fix her leaky faucet or clean the leaves out of her gutter. Needing help from others had made her vulnerable.

  Would I end up that way? I was forty-two, divorced and childless. I might marry again, but I doubted at this stage in life I would ever be a new father. Perhaps there would be step-children involved—but what if I never married? Or had no one to look after me when I got old? I was an only child, like Caroline Kelly. If I died, who would survive me? I had a few cousins, a few friends.

  Who would take care of Rochester if anything happened to me? I couldn’t trust to chance, the way Caroline had. I had seen death up close.

  I was so engrossed in my own morbid speculations that I hardly noticed dusk falling. It had gotten cold, too. And where was Rochester? One minute he’d been lying at my feet, and then he’d gone off to explore again.

  “Rochester! Here boy!” I stood up, rubbing my hands to restore their circulation, and called the dog again. I heard a woof! in the fields that ran to the river, and I started making my way through the new green growth, calling his name.

  I caught up with him almost at the River Road. “Bad dog,” I said, grabbing his collar. “You come when Daddy calls.”

  He jumped up and I knocked him down. “Come on, we’ve got to get home.”

  We started walking up River Road toward Ferry Street, which would take us back over the canal toward River Bend. It was pitch dark by then, and only the river side of the road had a shoulder, so we walked up that way, cars coming up fast behind us and then zooming ahead into the night.

  I never saw the car that hit me. I heard it, felt its headlights getting closer, but when I looked back I saw it on the roadbed. Rochester was nosing ahead of me, and I must have let go of his leash when I was launched into the air, sailing through the underbrush toward the fast-moving Delaware, just a few feet away.

  24 – Recovery

  Rick told me I was very lucky. A woman returning home from her shift at the exotic ice cream store in New Hope saw me go flying, and saw the car that hit me keep going. She pulled over and dialed 911.

  She caught Rochester to keep him from running in the road. With a flashlight and his help, she found me lying in the underbrush at the water’s edge, though she didn’t touch me, just waited for the ambulance to arrive. The parallels between her finding me, and my finding Caroline, were spooky, and I was grateful my story hadn’t ended the way Caroline’s had.

  I hadn’t been carrying any ID, but Rick heard the description of a Caucasian male and a wild Golden Retriever on the police radio, and he drove out to investigate.

  I had a concussion, and a couple of fractured ribs, but other
than that I got away pretty lucky. They kept me knocked out for about twenty-four hours, but on Tuesday evening Rick was at my bedside ready to ask me some questions, and though my head hurt like crazy I managed to sit up.

  “Where’s Rochester?” I asked.

  “Annie Abogato has him,” Rick said. “Don’t worry about Rochester. What happened to you?”

  All I remembered was walking Rochester by the canal, night falling, and then walking back along the River Road. “That’s a dangerous stretch,” Rick said. “People go way too fast. Accidents happen all the time.”

  “What if it wasn’t an accident?” I asked.

  Rick looked up at me from the chair next to the bed. “Somebody got a grudge against you?”

  “You got a pen and a piece of paper?” I asked. “Make a list.”

  Tops on the list was Layton Zee. “You told the kid he was failing?” Rick asked.

  “And he got violent. Started cursing, and I thought he was going to hit me.”

  While Rick wrote the information down, I looked around. Hospital rooms had gotten nicer since the last time I was in one, with Mary. It was painted a soothing light green, with a lot of complicated electronics around, including a computer on the table next to the bed. Rick was sitting in an upholstered recliner, and two nice local landscapes hung on the wall. It still smelled like a hospital, though.

  “I didn’t say anything to Melissa Macaretti in class,” I said, when he’d finished writing. “But she saw me taking Edith to the bank on Thursday, and maybe she or her boyfriend wanted to keep me away from Edith.”

  I explained about Melissa’s work-study job. “So that’s how she’s connected to Edith,” he said. “You neglected to mention that when we talked on Sunday.”