Three Dogs in a Row

by Neil S. Plakcy

  The highway sped past us, miles of farmland interspersed with the occasional office building or suburban development. Even though there were almost nine million people crammed into about 200 square miles of the Garden State, there were still big swaths of farmland in the middle of the state where there was little access to the big cities.

  Neither of us spoke much. Lili plugged her iPhone into the car’s speaker system and played Springsteen tunes, and we both rocked out to “Dancing in the Dark” as we sped along. When we finally hit the Delaware, we took the slow road along the river, enjoying the blossoming of nature. We made it to the flea market in Lambertville by mid-afternoon.

  The sun was shining, and the tall sassafras and oak trees along the edges of the parking lot were budding. Senior citizens, families with kids fresh from Sunday School, and forty-something hipsters like Lili and me were browsing the aisles. Lili got her cameras from the back floor and once again slung them over her shoulder. She stopped periodically as we walked, taking pictures of little kids playing – always with their parents’ permission, of course.

  She also took shots of things I thought were weird—a soda can with flies buzzing around it, a rock with a jagged edge, the leaf of a maple tree with a single drop of water on it. “Think of it like stock photography,” she said, when I asked her. “You know what that is?”

  “Kind of.”

  “I merge the images together sometimes. Layer them. Fuzz the edges. Just play around. I never know what will inspire me.” She found a guy selling used camera equipment and bought a couple of lenses for her lab at the college. “You never know what camera kids will come in with,” she said. “I like to have a variety of lenses for them to play around with.”

  It was late afternoon by the time we finished at the flea market, but I knew that the stores at the Oxford Valley Mall would be open until six. “You mind making a brief diversion with me?” I asked, as I pulled out onto the River Road on the Jersey side.

  I told her about Paula Madden and her shoe store. “I’m not really a shoe gal, as you can probably tell,” she said, pointing to her red sneakers. “But I can fake it if you want.”

  She leaned back in her seat. “Running around after stories, you realize you need comfortable shoes. It used to kill me when I had to get dressed up and put on heels.” She turned to me. “Does it bother you, meeting a guy I used to date?”

  I shook my head. “We both had lives before we met. All that matters is what’s ahead.”

  “We’ve only known each other a couple of months. There’s still a lot for us to learn. But any time you have a question about my past you can always ask me.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  “Well, there is one thing.”

  I looked over at her. Her posture was relaxed, but there was something wary in her eyes. “Ask away.”

  “How come you ended up in prison for computer hacking? Isn’t that one of those white-collar crimes they slap you on the wrist for?”

  The question wasn’t much of a surprise. I had told Lili only the barest facts about my unfortunate incarceration, not wanting to scare her off. I guessed it was time for the details.

  “I hacked into three major credit bureau databases. Those companies are very strict about their security and it freaked them out that I could get in. So they all got together and made sure I was prosecuted as fully as I could be.”

  “Three credit bureaus? What did you do?”

  “All I wanted to do was make sure Mary couldn’t run up more bills on our plastic,” I said. “I know, I could have called and cancelled the cards, but I didn’t want her to know what I was doing. And she had a bunch of cards in her own name that I couldn’t have done anything with legally, even though I would have been responsible for her debts.”

  I took a deep breath. “So I got into her records and lowered her credit limits, then set a couple of flags that would make it tougher for her to get new cards.”

  “How did you do that?”

  I let go of the steering wheel for a minute and waved my hands, as if I was typing. “Magic fingers. And luck. I found a back door no one had exploited before. Honestly, they should have thanked me for finding a weakness in their security systems.”

  “But they didn’t see it that way.”

  “Nope. But you know how they say, you do the crime, you do the time. I did mine.”

  “And that’s when you got divorced?”

  “Mary started the proceedings as soon as I was arrested. She didn’t appreciate that I was looking out for her, and frankly, our marriage had been falling apart for a while. The second miscarriage was the end.”

  Lili wrapped her arms around her and I couldn’t help wondering if she had some pregnancy problems in her own past.

  “You think you would have gotten divorced even if you hadn’t been arrested?”

  “I think so. But my head was screwed up then. I mean, those were my kids, too, but there isn’t the support for fathers that there is for mothers in those situations.”

  Lili was quiet as we drove south, past the stone quarry and the now-deserted ski area. I didn’t often think of myself as a father; after all, I had no children, just Rochester. But Mary and I had conceived two babies together, even if neither lived to be born. I guess that made me a father in some way.

  “I had an abortion,” Lili said, as we crossed the narrow bridge in Washington’s Crossing. “My marriage to Adriano was over, and I knew I had to leave Italy and come back to the States and finish my degree. My period was late, but it was irregular back then and I didn’t think anything of it. Then I got terribly sick on the plane home, and I was nauseous every day for a week.”

  I didn’t say anything, didn’t even look over at her. I had no qualms with abortion; I believed it was every woman’s right to decide if she wanted to bear a child, and that every child deserved to be born to loving parents. But every time I heard about an unwanted child, I couldn’t help but think of the two Mary and I had wanted so badly.

  Lili’s voice was quiet. “I had no resources to take care of a child, and I knew Adriano didn’t want a baby, either. And frankly, I didn’t want anything more to do with him. I went to the Student Health clinic and got a referral to a women’s health center.”

  She turned to me, and her voice was stronger. “It was the right decision at the time. My mother was dead and my father was remarried and living in Thailand. I was on financial aid and I didn’t have anyone else to rely on. I would have had to drop out of school and I had no skills to get a job.”

  “Everyone has to make choices,” I said.

  She took a deep breath. “I dove into my work. My photographs became my children. It wasn’t until my marriage to Phillip was ending that I woke up and went into therapy.” She smiled. “It’s funny how things work out. My students accuse me of being too motherly sometimes. Everything comes around in a circle, you know?”

  “I know.” I signaled for the turn into the mall, and then reached over and took her hand.

  20 – Lush Life

  Lili checked her phone and found that Madd About Shoes was next door to Macy’s, and I parked over there. “You know, for years I wouldn’t go in this entrance of the mall,” I said, as we walked up.

  “Why not?”

  “A girl I went to high school with was killed in the parking lot here. Really tragic—and very mysterious. They never found out who killed her, or why.”

  “What happened?”

  “It was early winter, I think, and I remember she had been in the mall buying stuff. Someone shot her, though they didn’t steal her wallet or anything she’d bought. Apparently she dragged herself back through the parking lot until someone found her on the curb. They called an ambulance but she didn’t make it. I keep thinking someday someone will figure it all out.”

  “That’s terrible. And that was when you were in high school?”

  I nodded. “Senior year. We had a big class, you know, and a lot of people died.”

  She s
topped at the entrance to the department store. “Died? How?”

  I started ticking them off. One boy had hung himself, and another had shot himself with his father’s rifle. A third had been in a car with his girlfriend, stopped at a grade crossing as a train approached. They had argued, and he jumped out of the car and stood on the tracks. “He said he would stay there until she said she was sorry,” I said. “She didn’t say it fast enough.”

  “My god—how awful!”

  I pushed the door open and continued my list. Another girl had suffered a brain aneurysm at a speech tournament in Pittsburgh. “Then there was this girl named Kim, who was one of the first in our group to drive,” I said. “She liked to pull this trick on people. She’d start to drive away without you, and you had to jump on her car hood to get her to stop and let you in.”

  “That’s dangerous.”

  “You bet. Another girl pulled that on Kim, and she slipped off the hood and hit her head on the pavement.”

  “And this was all in Stewart’s Crossing?” Lili asked, as we walked through the store. “It’s so sweet and pleasant.”

  I shrugged. “At the time, we took all that death for granted. Though when I got to college and told people I had been a pallbearer at four different funerals they were kind of surprised.”

  “No wonder you have this morbid interest in dead bodies and crimes,” Lili said. “Oh, look, there’s the shoe store.”

  If I hadn’t already known that Paula Madden was mad about her little dachshund, I’d have guessed it as I walked up to the store. The window was full of the same kind of pictures I’d seen on her website, only life-sized. Lush was the star of the show, and looking inside I saw the real dog sitting on his tiny haunches next to a woman who was being fitted for what Mary called “do me pumps,” glittering red high heels that forced the woman wearing them into a seductive walk.

  “Don’t even think about getting me in shoes like that,” Lili whispered as we walked inside. Instead, she went right to a display of ballet flats painted with splashes of color.

  The sales clerk stood up, and I saw she was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a dachshund on it and the words “I Know a little German” on the back. Her name tag read “Paula.”

  The little dog came over to us and sniffed. He didn’t want to leave me alone; he must have smelled Rochester on me, and he kept nosing against my pants and my shoes. Lili browsed until Paula had finished with the customer and rung her up. “Sorry, I just got back from a buying trip yesterday, and I discovered that one of my salespeople quit while I was gone, so I’m short staffed,” Paula said, coming over to her. “How can I help you?”

  “Do you have these in a seven?” she asked. I gave up on ignoring Lush and sat down on the floor, so the little dog could climb into my lap.

  “You must be a dog lover,” Paula said to me.

  “Guilty as charged,” I said. I tickled Lush behind his ears, and he stretched his tiny legs and yawned.

  Paula went into the back and returned with a box, and Lili sat down in one of the upholstered armchairs. “We both love dogs, but I like doxies in particular,” Lili said to Paula. “I’ve been thinking of getting one myself. Do you know a good breeder?”

  I realized that if Paula had been out of town, she probably didn’t know that Rita was dead. Lili kicked off her sneakers and offered her right foot to Paula, who slipped the ballet flat on. “All I can say is don’t get your dog from the woman who sold me my little Lush,” Paula said. “She’s an awful witch.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Her name is Rita Gaines. She bred Lush—but you should have heard her criticize him when I took him in for training!”

  Lush turned on his back and I rubbed his belly. Rochester was going to be very jealous when I got home.

  “That must have made you mad,” I said. “I hate it when anyone criticizes my dog.”

  “I was livid. I swear, I could have killed her.” Paula slipped the other shoe on Lili’s foot and asked, “How do they feel?”

  Lili stood up. “I love them. There’s foam in the sole, isn’t there?”

  “Yes, they’re made in Argentina, and I’m the only local distributor.”

  Lili walked a few feet then turned to face us. Then, hand on hip, she stalked back as if she was on a runway. I couldn’t help laughing.

  “I’ll take them,” Lili said. “So this woman, Rita. Stay away from her?”

  “You bet. And if you buy a dog somewhere else, don’t even think about going to Rita for training. Not only is she a bitch, but the dog owners who train with her? They’re as nasty as she is. You couldn’t pay me to set foot on her farm again. And if I tried, she’d probably chase me away. We didn’t end on the best of terms.”

  I considered telling Paula that Rita was dead as she rang up the shoes, but at that point I thought it was too late to spring that on her without seeming dishonest.

  “So what do you think, Sherlock?” Lili asked as we walked back out of the mall. “Guilty or innocent?”

  “Well, Dr. Watson, she said Rita wouldn’t let her back on the farm,” I said. “Whoever killed Rita had to get close enough to her to drop the Rohypnol in her iced tea. I’m going to put her in the innocent column, at least for now.”

  We drove back to Stewart’s Crossing, stopping at Genuardi’s to stock my freezer. Rochester greeted me as if I’d left him on his own for days—first jumping around my legs and barking, then slumping in the corner and ignoring me except when I called him over with a treat.

  Lili and I made a stir-fry with chicken breasts and the vegetables from Hugo Furst’s farm, and then took Rochester on a long walk down by the canal in the lavender twilight. Back in the early nineteenth century, mule-drawn barges used to transport coal from the mines upriver down to the deep water port at Bristol on the Delaware Canal, but now the towpath is a park and the only commerce on it is the kitschy mule-barge rides in New Hope.

  The canal banks were blossoming with wildflowers, fiddlehead ferns and daisies, black-eyed Susans and the tiny pansies we called Johnny Jump-ups. Rochester loved the wide range of smells, darting from the base of a pine tree to cattails at the water’s edge to a patch of four-leaf clovers.

  I let Rochester off his leash, and he bounded ahead. Lili and I held hands and walked along quietly together, both of us smiling. I was reminded of what an amazing thing a life was, and I felt sorry for Rita Gaines, whose life had been tossed away like a bag of dog poop.

  Lili spent the night, and the next morning I dropped her at her house on my way to work, then drove through Leighville up to the employee parking lot on the side of the hill.

  As Rochester and I crossed the lot, heading towards Fields Hall, I caught sight of Dustin De Bree. “Hey, Dustin!” I called. “Wait up.”

  He stopped, but I could tell he was in a hurry from the way he shifted from foot to foot. Considering he was the one who needed my help, I figured he could wait a minute. “You know a guy named Oscar Lavista?” I asked. Rochester pulled on his leash, eager to sniff something, and I had to rein him in.

  “Oscar? Sure. He’s Mrs. Parshall’s assistant.”

  “I’d like to talk to him. You think you could introduce me?”

  He shook his head. “No way. I don’t want him asking me how I know you. Because if anybody finds out I saw that check I’ll get fired and I really need to keep my job.”

  “But Dustin, if you want me to help you…”

  “He doesn’t even leave the office much. And you wouldn’t want to talk to him there.”

  The shifting increased, and I wondered if he was that nervous—or just had to go the bathroom.

  “Hey, wait. He’s got a meeting later today, with Dr. Shelton in Harrison Hall. I heard Mrs. Parshall say that Oscar would have to go because she thought Dr. Shelton was an ass and she wouldn’t talk to him.”

  “Cool. Thanks, Dustin.”

  I let Rochester go sniff what he wanted to, and Dustin hurried off. When I got to my office I turned my c
omputer on, and while I was waiting for it to boot up, I unpacked my briefcase. I had brought in all the paperwork I had collected on Saturday at the dog show, and I hoped I’d get some time that day to look into it.

  The computer was still booting when I finished that, so I called Jim Shelton. “I’ve been looking into the problems with Freezer Burn,” I said. “I think this guy named Oscar Lavista might have some information.”

  “Interesting. I got fed up with going to the help desk with a computer problem I’ve been having for weeks, and I called President Babson’s office. An hour later I got a call from this Oscar guy and he made an appointment to come to my office at eleven to fix things.”

  “You mind if I come over then? I’d like to talk to him and apparently he doesn’t get out much.”

  He told me I was welcome, as long as I didn’t distract Oscar so much that he didn’t fix Jim’s computer. Mine was finally booted up by then, so I logged into my email account to check for messages.

  Instead of the program opening, though, I got an alert that my account had been corrupted and the program needed to restart. For a moment I panicked that someone in IT had discovered I’d been hacking on Friday afternoon—but then, almost by magic, the message disappeared and the email program started normally.

  Another Freezer Burn screw-up. I answered some email queries from reporters about graduation and played with Rochester for a few minutes, and at a few minutes after eleven I walked over to Harrison Hall. When I got to Jim Shelton’s office, a portly guy with slicked-back dark hair was sitting at Jim’s computer. Jim was leaning against a wall of shelves mixed with old hard-cover texts with dusty bindings and brightly-colored newer ones.

  “Hey, Steve, come on in,” Jim said. “Oscar here’s trying to fix my computer.”

  “The problem is with your printer driver,” Oscar said. “The system keeps trying to update the driver, but Freezer Burn won’t let it, and so things freeze up.”

  “Can you fix it?” Jim asked.

  “I have a way around Freezer Burn, but don’t tell Mrs. Parshall.” He bent over the computer and started typing.