All Shots (13 page)

But that’s just Gabrielle. You know what she’s like.

Yes, wonderful. I felt equally certain that my honorary cousin-to-be returned Gabrielle’s affection. For obvious reasons, everyone loved her.

Although Gabrielle’s chatter should have been an effective lullaby and although I had all three malamutes with me, I still felt uneasy at bedtime. To reassure myself, I checked the locks on all the doors and windows in the house, and I reminded myself that Kevin lived right next door. Then I loaded my Smith & Wesson and put it in the drawer of my nightstand. Why? Three reasons: Rowdy, Kimi, and Sammy. The woman who’d been stealing my name for herself had been stealing Kimi’s identity for a malamute. I wouldn’t have slept without the knowledge that I could protect my dogs.

The other Holly Winter is a more private person than I
am. Because of my volunteer work for malamute rescue, my name, address, and phone number are all over the World Wide Web, and when I call people, my name and number show up on caller ID. Why block my identity? When I call someone, the first words out my mouth when someone answers are going to be, “This is Holly Winter,” so if caller ID has already transmitted the information, what do I care? And if someone sees my name on caller ID and decides not to answer? So what! In almost all circumstances, I’d rather get an answering machine or voice mail than force myself on someone who doesn’t want to talk to me or who just feels like being left alone.

The other Holly Winter, however, has arranged never to have anyone’s caller ID display her name and number. Our preferences in this regard reflect deep character differences that are, I believe, intimately tied to our radically divergent perspectives on Life Itself. Capitalized. What I mean by “Life Itself,” capitalized, is…take a guess. Also take the matter of caller ID and Life Itself—or my very own Lives Themselves, so to speak, although not necessarily on the phone. Anyway, if the doggy equivalent of a phone company were to ask Lady, India, Rowdy, Kimi, and Sammy whether they wanted to hide or announce their identities when they were trying to reach people, the dogs would unanimously and vigorously veto the option of ID blocking. Once having agreed about the desirability of revealing their identities, they’d disagree about whether radical changes would be required in existing displays of caller ID. Lady, our timid pointer, would be content with the status quo: her name in plain, unassuming little letters. India, our proud shepherd, would push for the tasteful yet dignified: a gold-framed screen and elaborate Gothic script. The malamutes, however, would insist on neon signs the size of billboards that would flash their identities while simultaneously setting off simulated bursts of fireworks and deafening emissions of loud, brassy music. I can hear it now. Sammy would go for marching-band renditions of John Philip Sousa; Kimi would insist on references to glory, laud, honor, conquering heroes, and the trampling out of vineyards; and Rowdy, my Rowdy, would settle for nothing less than “Hail to the Chief.”

Have I digressed? Anyway, on that same Monday evening, Holly Winter uses her caller-ID-blocked phone to dial a number in California. She gets an answering machine, hangs up, and tries another number, this one in Oregon. A human being answers but has nothing to say that interests Holly Winter. She tries several other numbers from her long list. Her quest is fruitless. So far. She will pursue her inquiries tomorrow.

It may seem as if I never work. Not so! I spent Tuesday
morning finishing a profile of a breed so obscure that I’d never heard of it until Bonnie, my editor at
Dog’s Life
, gave me the assignment. In Bonnie’s view, since the other dog magazines were publishing articles about popular breeds like the Labrador retriever and the cocker spaniel, we should go after readers by filling the niche left open by the competition. Yes, stupid idea. If your magazine has a photo of a Lab on the cover and an accompanying article inside, the issue is going to attract Lab devotees, of whom there are zillions. But why try to increase readership by attracting all six people in the country who have what even I, a born dog lover, felt to be the misfortune to spend their lives with the Breed Not to Be Named? In appearance, the BNTBN, as I shall tactfully call it, reminded me of the famous reference in Sherlock Holmes to the giant rat of Sumatra: BNTBNs had snoutlike muzzles, small, beady eyes, and furtive expressions. The desired coat was short and brownish gray, the tail long and nearly hairless. Worse, instead of having originally served humankind by performing some appealing task such as herding sheep, pulling carts, guarding monasteries, or sitting in laps looking cute, this obscure breed had once specialized in doing a job so disgusting that I spent a half hour trying to come up with a suitable euphemism for it. So, you see? I don’t exactly have a real job, but I certainly do work

I finished the profile, e-mailed it to my editor, and went to Steve’s clinic to check up on Miss Blue. The staff would reliably take excellent care of her, but I wanted to get to know her, in part to see whether her behavior had anything to tell me about her otherwise unknown owner and in part to help me think about the kind of home that would be best if she ended up as a rescue dog in need of an adopter. By two thirty, Miss Blue and I were in the park behind Loaves and Fishes, an area where the owners of dog-aggressive dogs sometimes cause problems by deciding that the therapy their dogs need is “socialization,” meaning the chance to bound around off leash while perfecting their prowess in attacking other dogs. The advantage of the park behind Loaves and Fishes is that it’s open, so you can at least watch for potential troublemakers instead of getting taken by surprise. Fortunately, the fields were uncrowded that afternoon, which was overcast and chilly, so I felt hopeful that I wouldn’t need the aerosol boat horn and the citronella spray I was carrying in case I had to defend Miss Blue.

So far, she’d ignored a golden retriever running at his owner’s side and a wonderfully assorted trio of terrier mixes all trotting together in front of an elderly woman who had the brisk gait of a teenager. In the middle of a field, I repeated my previous experiment of baiting Miss Blue and got the same result I’d had the previous day: she had no idea what I wanted. When I said, “Miss Blue, sit!” in my most thrilling dog-trainer tones—well, dogs are thrilled, anyway—she looked utterly delighted with herself as she slowly lowered her hindquarters to the grass and then immediately stood up again. My “Down!” did nothing except make her look vaguely puzzled. Translation: “But I wasn’t up on anything! Why are you telling me to get down?” Obedience trainers use
down
exclusively to tell the dog to lie down. If the dog is countersurfing or, doG forbid, jumping on someone, we use
off
or some other command that doesn’t confuse the dog.
Heel?
To her ears, the word came from a foreign language she didn’t speak. So, as I expected, Miss Blue hadn’t been trained for the show ring or the obedience ring.

But was she ever a great pet! When she made eye contact, as she did all the time, her eyes sparkled. Affectionate? She rubbed against me without shoving, and she had the delightful habit of raising her paw as if asking to hold hands. As she’d done the previous day, she dropped to the ground and rolled over to present her white tummy for rubbing. And someone had taught her to walk on leash without mistaking the activity for a weight-pull competition and without trying to dislocate the shoulder of the person at the other end of the leash. Feeling like a monster, I checked for hand shyness: I raised my hand and jerked it sharply toward her hindquarters and then toward her head. It goes without saying, I hope, that I hit nothing but air. Miss Blue didn’t flinch. Steve’s staff had seen no indication of what’s called “resource guarding,” in other words, growling and otherwise turning possessive in response to an effort to take away toys or treats. In a formal temperament test, the evaluator would’ve pushed Miss Blue hard to assess resource guarding. I’m not trained to do temperament tests, and I saw no reason to stress her. If she’d suddenly become my dog, I’d have played it safe by assuming that she’d guard her food and toys; I’d have taught her that an approaching hand meant food; and I’d have taught her to trade toys for treats. She wasn’t going to become my dog, of course, and I’d been finding homes for homeless malamutes for too long to confuse my rescue dogs with my personal dogs. What enabled me to love the rescue dogs yet let them go was the joy they brought to the people who adopted them and the happiness the dogs felt in being home at last.

As Miss Blue and I began to move again, I glanced across the field and spotted a short woman in a bright yellow jacket who was walking a smooth fox terrier.
Smooth.
I should perhaps explain that in the parlance of purebred dogs,
smooth
describes the short coat of the Labrador retriever, the pointer, and lots of other breeds and mixes. The word is used mainly to differentiate between breeds or varieties characterized by distinctive coats. Lassie is a
rough
collie as opposed to a
smooth
collie. Nick and Nora’s engaging Asta in the old
Thin Man
movies is a
wire
fox terrier rather than a
smooth
fox terrier like this one. So, my eye went first to the charming dog, who was, I noted with relief, on leash. After that, I noticed the woman’s ever so slightly rolling, shuffling gait, which struck me as unusual in someone walking as quickly as she was. Belatedly, I recognized Mellie, who, of course, did dog walking.

As I was on the verge of calling out to her, Miss Blue beat me to it by bursting into peals of
woo-woo-woo, ah woo, ah woo-woo-woo-woo-woo
. Simultaneously, Mellie astonished me by shouting in that hoarse voice of hers while breaking into a run and barreling straight toward me—or, as it turned out, toward Miss Blue.

“Strike!” Mellie hollered. “Strike!”

Miss Blue’s manners deserted her. She hit the end of her leash, and I went flying after her.

My only part in the reunion, as it obviously was, consisted of my leading Mellie’s little client, the fox terrier, out of the way. In ecstasy, Miss Blue flung herself to the grass, rolled over, tucked in her paws, and eyed Mellie with the worshipful gaze that malamutes reserve for their objects of highest adoration, which is to say, anyone and everyone who has ever given them anything to eat. Mellie, for her part, got down on the damp ground, rubbed Miss Blue’s underbelly, stood up, clapped her hands softly together, and, having lured Miss Blue to her feet, took the dog’s big head gently in her hands and said, “I prayed to the Virgin every day for you. All the time, I lit candles. I was so…” Mellie choked up. Tears ran down her face.

I’m ashamed to admit that one of my first feelings was anger. I’d been looking for a Siberian husky. That’s what I’d been told to look for, and I’d done exactly what I’d been asked to do. Why hadn’t anyone…? Then my anger turned inward. I should have known! All too clearly, I remembered Mellie’s response when she’d first seen Rowdy: she’d said that Strike looked like Rowdy. But different, she’d added. Of course she’d looked different! She was smaller than Rowdy, a female, one with a blue coat and eyes lighter than Rowdy’s near-black. So what? Over and over, I’d had my malamutes admired by people who said, “Beautiful huskies!” When Steve and I hiked with the dogs in Acadia National Park, we made a game of counting the number of times the malamutes were called huskies. But there’d been reasons for what now felt like my stupidity. In the American Kennel Club rankings, the Siberian husky was the twenty-fifth most popular breed, and the Alaskan malamute was the fifty-eighth; there were a lot more Siberians than there were malamutes. What’s more, Siberians were the Houdinis of purebred dogdom, and when they escaped, they ran like crazy, fast and far away. In contrast, the typical malamute who got out of a fenced yard went straight to the nearest door to the house. Typical? What did that mean? Incredible though it seemed to me, there existed picky-eater malamutes and malamutes with almost no interest in food. As to escapism, malamutes did get loose and did get lost, and I’d heard of malamutes who not only tunneled under fences but who climbed chain link. Damn it! Strike had gone under Mellie’s fence. She’d been seen heading for the back of Dr. Ho’s house. I should have guessed.

I’d like to report that the moment I finally put one dog and one dog together to get one dog, everything else fell neatly into place. It did not. On the contrary, isolated fragments dropped in a jumble. Mellie’s lost husky. The photo of the blue malamute found among the murder victim’s belongings. The traces of dog hair also found there. The “girl,” as Mellie had said, who’d left Strike with her: the murdered woman, the woman who’d put my name, my address, and my phone number on…her own malamute. Or on someone else’s? On this blue malamute, the same dog Mellie had lost, the same one I’d found.

“Go home with Mellie,” I heard. “Now you get to come home with me.”

Not a chance.

Had Mellie, too, made the connection between the murder victim and the woman who’d left Strike with her? Mellie did not make connections easily, I thought. Still, she must have made this one. She would simply have to talk to the police. Another fragment: Mellie’s fear of the police. Was it really based on irrational anxiety about minor violations of dog-boarding regulations? Or was she justifiably worried about murder?

I tried to buy time. “Mellie,” I said, “Strike can’t go home with you right now. Strike looks healthy. And she feels healthy. But she needs to go to the vet. And stay there.”

Mellie’s face fell.

“It’s not serious,” I added. “Other dogs can’t catch it. And she’s going to be fine. But I have to take her back to the vet. The good news is that she’s safe. You can take down the flyers now, the posters I gave you.” The terrier chose that opportune time to start bouncing impatiently at the end of his leash. “Besides, you have this dog to take care of. Strike is a big girl. You shouldn’t try to walk both dogs at once.”

“One at a time,” Mellie said. She seemed to be repeating a rule. “Only one dog at a time. Unless they’re both little.”

“Exactly. And Strike isn’t little. I’ll take good care of her. I promise. She’ll be fine. You don’t need to worry about her anymore. She’s safe now.”

“I need to light candles.” Mellie said. “You don’t just ask. Father McArdle says so. You don’t just ask. When you get what you want, you have to say thank you.”

I nodded.

When I was driving Strike back to Steve’s clinic, however, I realized that Mellie had applied the principle only to prayer. After all, I’d been the one who’d found the lost dog, hadn’t I? But Mellie had been grateful to the Virgin and hadn’t thanked me at all. Ridiculously, I felt shortchanged. But that’s a dog-show type for you: competitive to the core. And if the competition happens to be the Mother of God? Especially then, you have to be a good sport.