Black Ribbon (33 page)

WHEN THE SUN ROSE on Wednesday morning, I knew almost everything and could prove absolutely nothing. Eva had followed Phyllis to the parking lot at the Passaic show and watched her drive off with Cam White. Eva had known why the ordinarily innocuous act of riding with Cam constituted a serious indiscretion, but she hadn’t known just how serious. Phyllis’s shaky marriage, her husband’s ambitions, and her sense of who she was depended on her position as a respected AKC obedience judge. And Eva’s ambitions for Bingo had been like Don Abbott’s for himself: high and intense. Realistic? Realistically, were Rowdy and I ready to go up against Tundra and Anna Morelli at the national specialty? Realistically, was Rowdy prepared to limit his performance in the ring to the execution of the specified exercises and to delete from his repertoire such embellishments as the Drop on Back and Wiggle Feet, the Zoom out of Ring, the Slam into Handler, and that climactic crowd-pleaser, the infamous Kiss the Judge? Let’s get it straight: We’re talking dogs and hopes. Reality has nothing to do with it. At the forthcoming Long
Trail Kennel Club trial in Vermont, Eva Spitteler had been expecting Bingo to earn every point. In threatening Judge Phyllis Abbott, Eva had wanted only to make sure that Bingo got the score he deserved.

I’d slept restlessly. To protect the resort’s plush, posh red velour blankets from Rowdy’s fast-falling fur, I’d covered the bed with the sheet I’d brought from home. I wanted him next to me—and loose, too, not locked in a crate he’d have had to destroy if I needed protection. I got up three or four times during the night to go to the bathroom, to brush my teeth, to stare out at the lake. When the first light appeared, I gave up on sleep. I took a wake-up shower, got dressed, and fed Rowdy. A little later in the day, when I’d had some coffee, while I packed up the car, I’d be able to face Phyllis Abbott. I’d be able to lie to her, bluff, apologize for my silly misunderstanding. She wouldn’t believe me; she wouldn’t need to. Maybe she’d accept my groveling for what it would be: the assurance that I intended to do nothing. Maybe I’d drive the short distance to Bethel, Maine, to visit my grandmother. Maybe I’d go directly back to Cambridge. I’d make excuses to my editor and write whatever she wanted to see about Maxine McGuire’s dog heaven. But it’s hard to think creatively or to lie credibly before breakfast. I hesitated at the door and opened it only to prevent Rowdy from scarring it with impatient paws.

The lake was as flat as it had been the night before, but brilliant, a glass that reflected the clear sky, the morning light, and the pines along the shore. In the shallow water near the dock, fish jumped. Like droplets from a miniature cloudburst, tiny circles appeared on the surface. Straight out from the dock, a big fish jumped, a predator, maybe, in search of minnows. A door slammed shut. I leaped like one of the fish and jerked my head toward the Abbotts’ side of the deck. Their door was closed, their blinds drawn.

A man whistled softly and called, “Elsa! Elsa!”

Rowdy caught sight of the Chesapeake before I did and, finding me slow to fly after her, hit the end of his leather lead and bounded down the stairs dragging me after him.

“Easy!” I told him. “Easy!” Serious obedience people don’t believe in wasting all the work we’ve spent training our dogs on the inconsequential situations presented by real life. We reserve commands like “Heel,” “Down,” and “Come” for the context in which the dog’s behavior actually matters: competition. But train your dog, anyway! When I’m bouncing down a flight of steps behind Rowdy, at least it’s by choice. “Easy!”

Flashing his eyes in Elsa’s direction in the futile hope that the sight of a macho male malamute anointing a tree would check her urge to hit the water, Rowdy paused at a pine and lifted his leg so high that he almost lost his balance.

“Dream on,” I told him.

As Rowdy was lowering his leg, a bleary-eyed Eric appeared and greeted me. He wore tan swimming trunks and a souvenir sweatshirt from last year’s Chesapeake Bay Retriever National Specialty, and carried Elsa’s blue-and-white rubber toy. Pausing momentarily, Elsa turned her head, caught Eric’s eye, and threw him a hopeful glance of defiance, as if all she needed to complete her joy was his disapproval. He laughed and said, “Elsa always likes to think she’s getting away with something, even when she isn’t.” Beaming at Elsa, he held up the toy and clambered down the slope toward the dock. Rowdy and I followed. Another fish jumped, and without waiting for Eric to toss her toy, Elsa tore down the length of the dock, hit the lake, and vanished beneath the surface in apparent pursuit.

“Has she ever actually caught a fish?” I asked. I was eager to believe Elsa capable of almost everything. It’s a view shared by all admirers of the Chesapeake, every sensible person who has ever known one.

Eric shook his head. “No, but she’ll go under after rocks. If she’s in a cooperative mood, she’ll go after one for me, retrieve the one I throw.”

As I was trying to imagine Elsa in a cooperative mood, her head bobbed up and disappeared. Rowdy stirred and made a high-pitched noise of impatience or, perhaps, of apprehension.

“How deep does she go?” I asked.

With a modest shrug, Eric said, “Well, not like a Portuguese Water Dog. I don’t know, most of the time, not more than five or six feet. But a while ago, she … uh, I was visiting some people who had a pool, and I tried keeping her out, but she went down to the bottom of pool, at the deep end, and that must’ve been ten or twelve feet. They had her retrieving things from there. She knew she had a crowd, and she was showing off. Most of the time, it’s not that deep. You can usually see the tip of her tail sticking out.”

When I’d last seen Elsa’s head, she’d been close to the area where Phyllis had attacked me, in what I guessed was seven or eight feet of water, certainly at a depth well over my head. “Not—” I started to say.

“What the …?”

Elsa had surfaced with a shiny object in her mouth and was swimming toward the dock. What the morning sun had caught, what Elsa may even have seen as a sluggish perch or a languid trout, was a metal object that it took me a second to identify. At first, I wasn’t sure, but as Elsa approached the dock, I moved out ahead of Rowdy, went striding down the wooden boards, came to a halt at the end, and got a good look. Clamped in Elsa’s mouth was a piece of an agility obstacle, one of the smallest, heaviest parts of any obstacle: one of the iron legs of the pause table. Having glimpsed an interesting object underwater, Elsa had done what Chesapeakes do: She’d retrieved it. And what Elsa had retrieved was Phyllis Abbott’s backup plan for me, the one she’d dropped when I’d fallen for the drowning-swimmer ruse.

Simply curious, Eric asked, “What’s that you got there, Elsa?” He sounded pleased.

In response, Elsa—being Elsa—veered around and swam in the opposite direction, toward the middle of the lake.

“It’s …” I stammered. “It’s … Eric, it’s important! I know what she has, and it’s … Is there any way to get her to bring it in?”

Eric just laughed. I felt exasperated. Every once in a while, despite Rowdy and Kimi, I revert to my old rigid belief that, damn it all, dogs ought to do what they’re told. I had no idea whether a night in the lake would have removed Phyllis’s fingerprints from the table leg. A phrase came to me from a TV commercial for some kind of household cleaner: greasy finger marks. But what did it mean? That all finger marks were greasy, therefore hard to remove? Or that the product worked even on tough, hard-to-remove marks—greasy ones? And what did TV know about fingerprints, anyway? But I thought there was a chance that the leg of the pause table held a trace of evidence, and I damn well wanted Elsa to bring in that dab of proof.

Digging in my pockets for the bits of old dog treats they usually contain, I demanded, “Eric, will she work for food?”

Eric smiled. “You’re welcome to try.”

“Elsa, come!” I called cheerfully.

She ignored me, of course. No longer swimming toward the opposite side of lake, the Chesapeake had changed direction and was moving parallel to the shore, but away from us.

“Elsa!” I called in my best obedience voice, the one that expects to be obeyed.

Taking pity on my naïveté, Eric began a real effort to summon her. “Elsa! Elsa, come on! Come on, let’s go!”

Suddenly inspired, I said, “Eric! Here, this’ll work. Or it’s worth a try.”

“Elsa! Elsa, come!” he persisted.

I ran back down the dock to the shore. “Eric, come on! This really is worth a try. All you have to do is …”

Highly subject to contagious excitement and determined
not to be left out, Rowdy was adding his voice and producing long strings of the typiest syllable in the extensive malamute vocabulary:
“Woooooo! Woo-woo-woo!”

My tone of expectation worked better on Eric than it had on Elsa. Looking puzzled, he joined me on the pebble beach. “Lie down!” I instructed him.

“You’re joking,” he said, or I think that’s what he said. Rowdy was making a tremendous noise, and from the cabins and the woods, three or four dogs were answering his call.

“Rowdy, be quiet! Eric, really,
lie down!
Lie down and wave your arms or something. You have to do something she’s not used to, something that’ll get her attention and get her a little worried. It’s worth a try.”

Shaking his head and giving me a you-don’t-know-Elsa smile, Eric ran his eyes over the sharp rocks, moved back to the dock, and spread himself out on it.

“Now call her!” I ordered. “Wave your arms around! Kick your feet!”

And once Eric caught Elsa’s attention, the ploy did work. Awakened by the din we’d been making and curious to see what the fuss was about, campers began to appear, among them, Phyllis Abbott. Her soft-red hair looked freshly brushed and styled, but she wore nightclothes, a blue-and-white striped kimono over white pajamas with long legs, and a pair of fuzzy blue slippers.

Elsa was really close now, only three or four yards from where I stood on the pebble beach at the water’s edge. “Good girl, Elsa!” I murmured. “Eric, can you get this from her?”

I should have done what Phyllis Abbott did, I suppose: I should have waded in. Without even removing her slippers, Phyllis beat me to it. Through the clear water, I could see that the wet pajama bottoms were clinging to her legs. When she was in up to her knees, she bent over and almost whispered, “What a good girl Elsa is! What’s
that
you’ve got there,
sweetie? Bring it to me! Good girl! Come on!” Phyllis stretched out a hand.

With rage, I realized that Phyllis didn’t even need to get that metal leg out of Elsa’s mouth to accomplish her purpose. To explain the presence of her fingerprints, all she needed to do was touch it.

“ ‘A judge,’ ” I quoted loudly, “ ‘a title that implies dignity and position.’ ”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Eric get up off the dock. He must have assumed that I was making fun of Phyllis.

I went on: “ ‘The manner in which judges exercise their authority has a direct impact on the sport.’ ”

“Holly,” said Eric, no longer amused, “just what—?”

I spoke only to Phyllis. No, that’s not quite right. I addressed only her conscience: “ ‘An individual’s success as a judge rests on the basic attributes of good character and knowledge.’ ”

Attracted by the hubbub and probably by some sense of oddity in the air, Cam, Ginny, Maxine, Don Abbott, and six or eight other people had made their way down to the little pebble beach. Phyllis still faced away from us, toward Elsa and toward the lake.

“Mrs. Abbott,” I continued, “I have always had the highest respect for you as an obedience judge. I have always found you to be one of the most knowledgeable, impartial, fair, responsible, and otherwise altogether estimable judges ever to enter an obedience ring. And, you know, when AKC says that judges represent the entire sport? I take that seriously. And I want to know something. Judges are allowed to discuss the regulations, right? It’s part of your responsibility: to help people learn. So, is this mess really how you want to represent what we’re about? Is this really it? Because if it is—”

Don Abbott’s deep voice boomed over mine. “Phyllis,” he told his wife, “turn around and get out of the water!
You
are contributing to a scene!”

“Mrs. Abbott can speak for herself,” I said.

“She can’t, you know.” The voice was Cam’s, as calm and controlled as ever.

“She certainly can,” Don Abbott proclaimed, “and she can get out of that lake this minute. Phyllis, you are making a fool of yourself! Get out of there!”

“Leave her alone!” Cam told him. “The whole thing is your fault! Left to her own devices, Phyllis would never in this world have put me or herself or anyone else in anything even remotely resembling a compromising position! Phyllis didn’t
ask
to judge that runoff! She was appointed!
You
were the one who had to go and make sure that you got John’s ear and that once you had, you held it.
You
were the one who schemed and finagled and made damn well sure that John had no choice but to invite you home. I wish I’d never entered Passaic! You know, I
deserved
that trophy! I
earned
it! And now I wish that Sandy Battista had taken it home, after all.”

Lost? I was, too. Turning to me, his face stubborn and ugly, Don said, “I don’t remember you!”

“My name is Holly Winter. I’m in the other unit in your—”

Cam, who’d understood him, said, “Don, Holly wasn’t even
at
Passaic.” She paused. “Were you?”

“No,” I said.

“Well,” Cam said, “count your blessings. The rest of us should’ve stayed home, too. I don’t know how you got involved in this, but the whole mess was Don’s fault. We earned that one ninety-nine! How was Phyllis supposed to know that we’d end up tied for High in Trial? If she’d planned it, she’d have had a hard time pulling it off!”

“That’s what the trophy was for,” I said. “High in Trial.” Cam looked surprised, as if I should already have known. I went on. “You had two legs. Did Sandy?”

“Yes. With her old dog. The one she’s showing now is just getting started, Ogden. He’s good. Obviously. Tied for High
in Trial out of Novice B? One ninety-nine. Sandy was surprised.”