Animal Appetite (21 page)
Authors: Susan Conant
Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Women dog owners, #Women Sleuths, #Winter; Holly (Fictitious character), #Dog trainers, #Dogs, #Maine, #Massachusetts, #Indian captivities, #Women journalists
When I finally got Buck off the phone, I called Information. There was no listing in Georgetown for Tracy Littlefield. Armed with Tracy’s last name, I called Janet Switzer, who said, “Oh, Tracy, Littlefield! The groomer! Whatever happened to her?”
“I have no idea. That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
“I used to see her at shows. She lived in Georgetown. She worked at the library.”
“I thought you said she was a groomer.”
“She was. She had goldens.”
“Sound,” I said. “But not typey:” It takes me a day or two to recover from a conversation with my father. “Ignore that. That’s what my father thinks. Actually, I saw a picture of one of her dogs, a head study. Violet Wish did it. He had a very typey head.”
Violet, as you know, is the Bachrach of show dogs. I didn’t have to explain who she was.
“Violet did that head study of Denny,” Janet said. Denali: Rowdy’s late sire. Janet knew that I knew which head study she meant.
“I know.”
“You ought to have Violet do one of Rowdy.”
“And Kimi,” I said. “If I ever have the money, I will.” Let me point out that it was neither my fault nor Janet’s that we’d strayed from the subject of Tracy Littlefield. Dogs possess a magnetic power over the conversation of dog people: No matter how hard we fight to stay on another topic, we get drawn back. Triumphing over the almost overwhelming impulse to discourse at length on the prospect of Violet Wish canine portraits, I said abruptly, before the dogs won out, “So Tracy Littlefield worked at the Georgetown Library?”
“No—Haverhill. The Haverhill Public Library. I used to see her there all the time. She checked books in and out. I don’t think she was a professional librarian. When I needed help with interlibrary loans, I had to ask someone else.” Like a lot of other people with Northern breeds, Janet had undoubtedly been borrowing arcane books about polar expeditions and the native peoples of the Arctic. Corgi fanciers track down books about Wales. If you love your puli or your Kuvasz, you’re bound to get curious about Hungary. Virtually all dog fanciers feel this compulsion to learn about the breed’s origins, and even if we have the money to buy the rare books that we increasingly crave, we sometimes can’t find them. Consequently, we rely on interlibrary loans. “Tracy groomed on the side,” Janet continued.
“She had a shop?”
“No, she just used her own grooming area at home, in her laundry room. She rented a little house in Georgetown, not too far from here. The basement had one of those big old set tubs, and she had a grooming table and her own dryers. It was kind of makeshift, but she did a good job. I used her when I didn’t feel like grooming. I trusted her with the dogs.”
So what’s not to trust about a dog groomer? Most of the time, nothing. Almost all groomers become groomers in the first place because they like dogs. When the owners aren’t around, however, a few groomers handle the dogs roughly.
“The dogs were crazy about Tracy,” Janet added. “She really did love dogs.”
“She was friends with a guy named Jack Andrews,” I said. “They co-owned some goldens. She handled his dogs. Did you ever meet him?”
“Not that I know of. I might’ve seen him. Tracy wasn’t really a friend of mine. She was kind of quiet. Shy. I just used to see her around. But she was a very nice girl. I wonder whatever happened to her.”
“If I find out,” I promised, “I’ll let you know.”
And the next morning, Tuesday, I began to trace the heretofore untraceable Tracy. Even with my extensive network of dog people to tap, even with a last name, the search took a while. Tracy Littlefield did not belong to any of the local dog clubs. When I supplied the name Littlefield, people said, “Oh, yeah! Littlefield! Tracy Littlefield!”
“Tall,” I’d add. “Quiet. Shy. But nice.”
And the person would say, “Yeah! That’s her!”
But Tracy Littlefield did belong to one dog organization. She was a current member of Yankee Golden Retriever Rescue. To avoid any misunderstanding, let me spell it out: The disaster area in breed rescue isn’t an earthquake in some distant city, but a local highway where someone’s stopped briefly to throw out the family pet or a pound where the owner has turned in the dog with all the regret I’d feel in tossing an empty bottle in a bin for someone else to recycle. Anyway, Yankee Golden Retriever Rescue was (and still is) one of the oldest and most efficient breed-rescue organizations in the country. Tracy Littlefield belonged. According to a friend of mine who had the membership list, Tracy lived in Ellsworth, Maine. I also got her phone number.
A woman answered. “Tracy’s Doggone Salon!”
Instead of blurting out questions about Jack Andrews, I calmly asked whether I was speaking to Tracy. When the woman said yes, I made a quick decision. I also made an appointment. Tracy could fit Kimi in the next afternoon. Ellsworth, Maine, is where Down East really begins. It’s the coastal town where you turn off Route 1 to get to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park. Ellsworth is about 250 miles from Cambridge. That’s a long way to go to get a dog groomed. The distance seemed like nothing. I had the creepy sense that in meeting Tracy, I’d find myself at long last face to face with Jack Andrews.
CHAPTER 24
Owls Head, Maine, boasts two principal tourist attractions—the Owls Head lighthouse and the Museum of Transportation—and, in the person of my father, a one-man tourist repellent. When my mother was alive, summer visitors used to pull to the side of the road to take snapshots of her perennial garden. Every once in a while, an out-of-stater would march up to our freshly painted front door, rap the polished brass knocker, and issue a brazen offer to buy the place. My father always responded by making a prompt counteroffer on the bidder’s spouse or children. These days when the cars slow down, my father misinterprets the dropped jaws, and when a bargain-hunter condescends to inquire about taking the place off his hands, he continues to propose the kinds of wife-for-barn and child-for-house swaps that weren’t funny to begin with and now, I fear, strike the tourists as serious and scary. My own visits home have gradually become less and less frequent. Steve, the most mellow of men, balks at accompanying me.
After I dropped Steve at the airport early on Wednesday morning to catch a flight to Minneapolis for a belated Thanksgiving with his mother, I reminded myself of the many reasons I’d refused to go with him. Let me just report that on my last visit, Steve’s mother served green slime with miniature marshmallows and fake mayonnaise at every meal except breakfast for three days in a row. On individual plates. No cheating. At lunch on the fourth day—this is the truth—she left the room and, in desperation, I fed The Blob to her cocker, who waited until his mistress came back to return my gift, which had turned to a slimy semiliquid that looked like pond scum swarming with monster-size maggots and obviously hadn’t been safe to ingest to begin with. The rug was white. Originally. Mine was the only clean plate on the table. When a dog betrays me, I know I’m someplace I don’t belong.
I headed north, picked up 95, and, staying far west of Owls Head, took the highway to Bangor before cutting over to the coast. In case your image of Maine comes from television and the movies, I should mention that Ellsworth possesses a downtown with small shops, a little river, a bridge, an old-fashioned movie theater, and the mandatory historic house. The de facto center of Ellsworth, however, is a wide strip of heavily mall-lined road that ends where Route 1 makes a sharp left and sprints north toward Washington County and away from the tourists instead of continuing straight ahead on Route 3, which leads through Trenton to Mount Desert Island, and thus to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park. Acadia, I might mention, in a transparent effort to drum up tourist business for my poverty-stricken home state, not only offers all those justly famous mountains-meet-the-sea vistas best enjoyed while consuming incredible quantities of Maine lobster, but is one national park that really does welcome dogs.
The only scenery visible from the parking lot of the motel where I’d made a reservation consisted of a drive-through fast-drink gourmet-coffee stand, two gigantic supermarkets, dozens of storefronts that glared competitively at one another across Route 1, and, in the distance, the alluring view of the L.L. Bean outlet. Like the park, however, the motel welcomed dogs. When I checked in, the young woman behind the desk merely glanced at Rowdy and Kimi, smiled blandly, and said, “Oh, and you have pets.” As applied to my obsession, the word
pet
always strikes me as ludicrous. Then she asked the routine Maine question about malamutes: “What percent?”
pet
always strikes me as ludicrous. Then she asked the routine Maine question about malamutes: “What percent?”
I told the truth. “None. They’re Alaskan malamutes.”
Her brother-in-law, she replied, had one just like that, only bigger. His was eighty-eight percent. “There’s a guy in Owls Head who breeds them,” she added.
Hybrids. Wolf hybrids.
“He doesn’t actually breed them anymore,” I informed her, without admitting that the guy was my father. As you’ll have gathered, his hybrids are a topic I prefer to avoid. “As a matter of fact, he’s getting back into golden retrievers.”
An hour later, at three-thirty, I parked my Bronco on a narrow, mainly residential side street off Route 1 around the corner from a shop that, according to a fading sign, had once sold fresh-cut flowers and fresh-caught fish. By then, the juxtaposition didn’t seem strange. I was beginning to reorient myself to life in Maine. Here, economic survival depends on the kind of diversity evident in roadside signs that offer guns, ammo, live lobsters, worms, crawlers, ceramics, acupuncture, lawn ornaments, pick-your-own organic raspberries in season, and specials on permanent waves—all at the same establishment. In a copy of
The Ellsworth American
that I’d bought in the motel lobby, I’d noticed that on the following Saturday, a local club was sponsoring an event advertised as a “family fun shoot.” (“Sorry, Junior,” announces Dad, loading his target pistol, “I’m afraid you drew the short straw today, son.”) If you didn’t feel like practicing a radical and shockingly delayed form of family planning, you could attend what was billed as a “fire-walking seminar” at what was rather outrageously described as an “alternative wellness facility.” Truly! I quote: “. . . a fire-walking seminar on Saturday from 1:00 to 6:30 P.M. The seminar will facilitate a positive relationship with terror. Active participation in walking on coals is strictly voluntary.” The fee was fifty dollars. Pre-registration was encouraged—why, I couldn’t imagine. You’d think it would have been better not to leave time for second thoughts. I prayed to Almighty Dog that Kevin Dennehy’s ashram in the Berkshires didn’t supply hot coals. Fire-walking was the kind of macho challenge that Kevin would never be able to resist.
The Ellsworth American
that I’d bought in the motel lobby, I’d noticed that on the following Saturday, a local club was sponsoring an event advertised as a “family fun shoot.” (“Sorry, Junior,” announces Dad, loading his target pistol, “I’m afraid you drew the short straw today, son.”) If you didn’t feel like practicing a radical and shockingly delayed form of family planning, you could attend what was billed as a “fire-walking seminar” at what was rather outrageously described as an “alternative wellness facility.” Truly! I quote: “. . . a fire-walking seminar on Saturday from 1:00 to 6:30 P.M. The seminar will facilitate a positive relationship with terror. Active participation in walking on coals is strictly voluntary.” The fee was fifty dollars. Pre-registration was encouraged—why, I couldn’t imagine. You’d think it would have been better not to leave time for second thoughts. I prayed to Almighty Dog that Kevin Dennehy’s ashram in the Berkshires didn’t supply hot coals. Fire-walking was the kind of macho challenge that Kevin would never be able to resist.
Anyway, Tracy’s Doggone Salon was housed in a converted single-car garage attached to a small, neat lime-green bungalow. On the dormant grass in front of the house, the December wind inflated the bodies of two artificial Canada geese and sent a wooden Sylvester chasing after a fleeing Tweety. Tracy’s sign swung from a little wrought-iron post. Parked in the driveway was a dark van with white letters on the side that read JAMES W. LITTLEFIELD. PLUMBING & HEATING. Stacked against the side of the converted garage were a few dozen lobster traps. Leaving Rowdy crated in the Bronco, I got Kimi out. As I led her up the path to the door of the shop, a gust fresh from the pile of lobster traps washed me in the rank, salty reek of rotten fish. From Manhattan, are you? Well, remarkably enough, these cutesy coffee tables
are,
now and then, also used to catch lobsters. Hence the bait.
are,
now and then, also used to catch lobsters. Hence the bait.
“And now,” I said brightly to Kimi, “you get to have a lovely bath.” I’d chosen her because Rowdy’s pad cut was temporarily sparing him what he perceives as his frequent ordeals-by-water.
My plan, such as it was, fell apart the second I opened the shop door. The plan was this: Catching sight of Tracy, I was to appear momentarily puzzled. “You look familiar,” I was supposed to remark. “Didn’t I used to see you at shows with Jack Andrews?”
But I’ve leaped ahead of myself. The interior of the shop, I should first note, contained more equipment than I’d expected: a pair of waist-high tubs with wall-mounted force dryers nearby, two grooming tables equipped with arms and grooming nooses, three or four tall stand dryers, a row of empty wire-mesh crates, a crate dryer, a fat trash barrel overflowing with dog hair, scads of brushes. The setup was professional. The tubs had been built into the tiled wall, the grooming tables were hydraulic, and lined up on the floor were the same gallon-size brown plastic bottles of Eqyss Bio-Tek shampoo and grooming spray that I swear by and special-order myself. Near the door was a little waiting area for human clients: two plastic-covered chairs and a low Formica-topped table that held a coffee maker, mugs, sugar, powdered creamer, and a stack of dog magazines, including, I was happy to see, the latest issue of
Dog’s Life
.
Dog’s Life
.
Her back to me, a tall, thin woman with short brown hair—Tracy, at last!—stood at one of the grooming tables and vigorously brushed the coat of a handsome little short-haired dog that, at a guess, was half Jack Russell terrier. Energetically sweeping up from the floor what looked like the shorn coat of a black standard poodle was a young man who wore jeans and a University of Maine sweatshirt. What immediately wrecked my plan was the kid’s uncanny resemblance to the affable face I’d studied in Jack Andrews’s college graduation photo: the cleft chin, the pleasant expression, even the oddly expectant suggestion of features on which character hadn’t yet been written.
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